I Haven’t Posted in a While

Six months ago, I lost my father, the person who loved me the most in the whole world.

He was a kind man. Even after his retirement, he worked very hard to support me and my brother. He dug wells, worked in construction, and did manual labor in general. He was always tired when he came home. He would sit in the kitchen, eat his dinner, and watch TV until he got sleepy.

I kept some of his clothes as memories. They are full of cement stains and cigarette holes, but I wear them because they are a sign of all the hard work he did for us. To me, they are a sign of his love. I do not know how I am ever going to repay him. I think I cannot; it is too late. The only thing I can think of is taking good care of my mom and my little brother.

I am currently enrolled in a university out of town. Every morning before he went to work, I would call him, and we would talk for two minutes each day. Just simple things: “How are you? Is everything all right? Do you need money?” and so on.

Whenever I came home from out of town, he would gather my mom, my brothers, and me, and take us to have a barbecue in the woods. He would take me to the mall, to the mountains, and to other places. I will always cherish the memories I have with him.

I was applying for PhD positions in foreign countries, and he was really excited. But he was also a little stressed because of finances. My uncle told me that he died because of me, because he was too stressed because of me. That comment hurt me deeply.

I got accepted into a PhD program, and finances are not an issue anymore. But I am not as happy as I thought I would be. I do not have my dad here to share my joy with. Since the day he died, I have felt like everything will always be incomplete.

When he first suffered a heart attack, my mom did not tell me about it until he was fine. When she finally told me and I talked with my dad, I wanted to go to the hospital and see him, but he said he was fine and that he did not want me to come, so I did not. He died on the day he was discharged from the hospital, and I was not there. I will regret not going to see him for the rest of my life.

About a month after his death, I went back to school, as if nothing had happened. Everyone was going on with their lives, as they should, of course, but at that time it made me angry. Still, I also had good friends who supported me and stayed by my side. They neglected their own work to support me. I will never forget their help. It is nice to have good people around you.

Two months later, an old female friend of mine opened up to me, and we started dating. This was three months after my dad’s death. I felt like writing this because, whenever I think about it, I feel like the main character in Camus’ The Stranger. Two or three weeks, maybe a month, into the relationship, she told me that she had a boyfriend of three years and that she was cheating on him with me. She was even living with him. I told her that we had to break up, and I advised her to break up with her boyfriend.

About two weeks after this incident, she came to me and said that she had broken up with her boyfriend, moved out, and wanted us to get back together.

I would have said no if I had not been in an emotional void. Well, I would like to believe so, anyway. I said yes, and I was ready to forget about that unfortunate incident because I really loved her. She was an old friend, and she was not an evil person.

Anyway, about two months into the relationship, she told me something that disturbed me deeply. She told me that she had histrionic personality disorder and that she had cheated on all of her romantic partners so far. I did not trust her after the first incident, but I was starting to trust her again. After hearing that, however, all my trust ended there, and I broke up with her on the spot. I do not want to be in a relationship where I have to question my partner’s loyalty every moment I am awake. I really loved her, but after breaking up with her, I felt relieved. I was not sad at all.

Right now, I am not up to much. I am sharing my notes about condensed matter physics. They are not extraordinary lectures or anything like that. You can find pretty much everything in them in the books I used as references: Solid State Physics by Ashcroft and Mermin, Introduction to Solid State Physics by Kittel, and The Oxford Solid State Basics. They are basically notes I compiled from these books while studying for the course. I really like my notes, and I find them easy to understand.

I also want to share my notes on quantum information, but converting my handwritten notes into LaTeX is a real pain and takes a lot of time. Still, I want to share them.

I also want to share some interesting problems I have solved. Again, they are problems that have already been solved before, but I want to share them anyway. For example, in our statistical mechanics course, there was a question on Olbers’ paradox. I found it very interesting and fun to solve.

For now, I will keep adding my notes to the articles section.

I also added an admin page for my guestbook because, well, I could not delete my test posts through SSH, so I did it using PHP.

That is all. I wrote whatever came to my mind, so this post is a bit messy.

As a final not, I want to say that everything is not okay but as always I will try to keep forward, because that's the best I can do.

See you, I hope you come to see me again.