happiness is complex

I realized I want a porch on my house, with a sidewalk. (Rory shared a related article.)

I got to thinking and imagined a visitor to my porch challenging my porch lifestyle (on my porch! the nerve): something about missing out on all the history, culture, and other things happening out there. Then I envisioned my response – more as an abstract, fuzzy bag of words than something I feel like serializing here. The visitor responds, "You're not a 'happy person' are you?"

I'm writing about my answer to that question.

Math is a comfort zone for me, but imaginary numbers are just weird. Applications of complex numbers (the sum of a real number and an imaginary number) do, however, abound in engineering. I got quite familiar with them in electromagnetics. They do have a fun history and are an important part of my favorite formula (snort snort heh), an instance of Euler's.

-1 = e^{i π}

Just look at all the pieces!

The Ol' WP says Descartes called them imaginary in a derisive manner, which returns us to the porch. I use it derisively here as well. I am happy. I am finishing up my second 16 hour car ride this week and I've been cheerful throughout! It's the big picture, fluffy, abstact stuff that weighs me down. I feel happy about the day-to-day and struggle with the imaginary, speculative, ethical stuff.

I started off trying to say that my happiness was a number like day-to-day.speculative for emphasizing that the day-to-day is more important, but the whole radix system didn't work on any more levels. Then I remembered complex numbers.

So my happiness is a complex number (OMG, right?). The real part is a hefty positive number for my day-to-day happiness. My negativity is in the imaginary part. And here comes the clever, optimistic part. Multiplying conjugate complex numbers eliminates the imaginary part: perhaps pair bonding relieves some of the negativity associated with an muddled future. So, if two people are a good match (conjugal even), i²=-1 kicks in and the negativity of the product of their happinesses is eliminated. (The details fall apart on this model if you push too hard...)

/me bows. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you.