A Compass for Today’s Seas:  The EU is a big collection of states that pretend to get along and share stuff and sometimes really share stuff by following a complicated set of equations mostly made by Germany.  Yugoslavia is not was not in the EU and also doesn’t exist anymore.  It was a state made up of smaller states held together by a Charismatic Personality also known as Tito.  Every year, Tito had a birthday party but they told him he couldn’t call it that so they called it Youth Day instead, something Tito was increasingly less of.  After he died, things started to decompose and borders got softer.  Yugoslavia decayed back into nation states ethnic rivalries and wars that got to join the EU at different times. the term Yugoslovian: some people still identify with it directly others not at all and some are not sure who belongs there anymore or how much.  especially Macedonia** seems to have a complicated identity.  As a Sailor not even sailing to be precise it is hard and probably impossible to understand the complexity of the relations between the Balkan states, and Sailor should resist Sailor’s urge to draw reductionist maps based off of Sailor’s first impressions.  Euler was a guy who did math and stuff from Switzerland which is another valley country like Slovenia but much less wartorn and with more gold in the basement.  Math is a way of torturing teenagers who want to drum their pencil on the head of the girl/boy they have a crush on, but it’s also poetry and some teenagers like it.  Mr. Boley was a math teacher at McLean Middle School who liked to pretend that he hated teaching hated stupid kids hated waking up early for the four or so academic teams that he was by choice the leader of.  But really he loved it and that’s probably why he put whiskey in his coffee cup or wanted us to think that he did.  Mr. Boley Yugoslovia Euler and my Chances of Being a Mathematician are all dead in a formalist way.  A eulogy is a way of being sad and happy even arbitrary about things that are not there anymore as they were which is very common on the Adriatic which is both boring, south by southeast, and fluctuating.  All of these things make for the boat that Sailor is today presently using, but maybe Sailor will build a new one for the performance piece later out of cardboard and shadows.

 

**:  Macedonia still sort of exists in the ways that one drink of alcohol in the morning doesn’t count or in the way that Sophie Call falls in love with the idea of being unanswered.