My current roommate, Alex, is a short, stocky Russian mathematical genius who 
lived in Russia until he was 10.  We talk about life, the universe and such all the time.  
Let me relate to you one time that we were doing just that:
	I stated what I was thinking as clearly as I could: 'It seems like... each dimension, 
at least up to space-time, is created out of an infinite number of each lower dimension.  A 
line is an infinite number of points, a plane is an infinite number of lines...etcetera...and 
time is an infinite number of unmoving 3rd dimensional...zones.'  Alex was silent, 
thinking and sorting and fitting.  He liked the idea and he was smiling.  Meanwhile I was 
thinking of how you got from each dimension to the next highest, and I was thinking 
about spinning: the infinite line, spun on a point, makes a plane, which spun, makes...I 
stared at the barbell in my hand and looked at the flat cylinder of the weight to help me 
think.  Alex was starting a new set of repetitions behind me, still thinking.  All of the 
sudden I saw it and started laughing.  Alex gave me a look like I was nuts, and that made 
it funnier.  Here we were, Hans and Franz, discussing dimensions and grunting.  When I 
managed between guffaws to tell Alex what I was thinking he was laughing too, and 
when we started imitating Hans and Franz from Saturday Night Live, we had to be told 
by a passing faculty to shut up before we hyperventilated.  Then finally I told him about 
the spin idea and we spun onto a few more ideas before we both had a class to go to.
	The moral of the story is: I can't turn my head off.  Even in my most brutish 
moments, like when lifting weights, thoughts are buzzing around.  I have tried to turn this 
off, at one point in order to be hypnotized and at another to concentrate on a lacrosse 
game.  The hypnosis was unsuccessful and I got leveled in the lacrosse game because I 
couldn't stop thinking about something that had occurred to me ( I forget just what it 
was ).  Sometimes I have trouble falling asleep because I keep getting those little rushes 
that come with really interesting ideas.
	All this has led to a recent hypothesis that I think best when I am being 
superficially entertained.  That really sounds like an excuse to watch TV, but it seems to 
be an effective way to let something I've been working on be solved by my subconscious, 
or even to let new ideas surface.  The problem with this is that I keep slipping into this 
state when doing something that I need to pay attention to, like homework.  
	This is what makes my perhaps premature declaration of joining the quest for the 
meaning of life not really premature at all.  Let's say one day I thought that maybe it 
would be a better life to just look for happiness, and so I went off to drink beers and 
cavort.  If this kind of thing could even happen in the first place it wouldn't last.  My 
buzzing thoughts and hopeless curiosity would get me right back on track, if not sooner, 
then later.