# Memories of a British Boarding School #2.5

After reading my last set of memories, a friend said that there was a theme of rule-breaking that he wanted me to bring out more. I said I wasn't sure what he meant. Then I read it back, and every single memory included either a student getting expelled, a teacher getting fired, me committing a crime, or some other rule being broken.

So, to continue the theme, here are two more that I forgot.

* * *

A girlfriend of mine would sing with the opera singers. She would also smoke cigarettes and weed literally every day. I'd go out into the city with her where she'd smoke with her fellow singers. They'd be in a back alley smoking, talking shit about people they didn't like. Once in a while, one of them would recall a song they liked, and start singing. Then all of them would break out into song, perfectly harmonized with each other, until the cigarettes would kick in, and they'd all end up coughing.

The register of her voice dropped over the years, due to singing.

She was kind of crazy and lied to me all the time about lots of crazy stories. She told me she'd had a stillbirth child. She told me she'd had sex with a guy with two penises. She told me that her father knew a lot of semi-famous pedophiles. She told me she had terminal cancer, and had me touch a bump on her head that she said was the cancer. I found this all a somewhat disorienting experience. Somehow I was not traumatized by this? It just, all sounded like the genre of "crazy things she'd say"? Importantly she was never especially upset about this. She was just plainly telling me stuff that happened to her. She wasn't freaking out, so I didn't either.

We eventually broke up when it wasn't as fun any more; I felt that I wanted to break up with her, and then she broke up with me, and then I felt like I'd not honored myself in being confident and done it first.

But it was really fun while it lasted.

* * *

One of my friends introduced me to LessWrong. In the cafeteria, he handed me the math problem at the top of [An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTXWPQSEgoMkAupKt/an-intuitive-explanation-of-bayes-s-theorem), for I was known to be Good At Math.

I got it wrong.

This was quite annoying, and so I proceeded to read the whole essay. Later on I downloaded [an ePub of all of Eliezer's blogposts in chronological order](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZYtwnKwXmEAWhm8dT/an-epub-of-eliezer-s-blog-posts), which I read every night for a few months (skipping the quantum mechanics and meta-ethics sequence).

Anyway, there's more to that, but I mostly want to cut to when he found Gwern's site. We read about [his self-blinded trial of modalert](https://gwern.net/nootropic/nootropics#modalert-blind-day-trial), and decided to buy some ourselves when we were 17. We had it delivered, and we took one during an early day of the new school year. We both felt pretty good and more alert/awake, nothing super far beyond what placebo could've explained, but decided to keep going.

Anyway, at some point in this period my mum, *for some reason*, decided to read my texts, and found out about this. She was not okay with this. She said that very stupid and foolish kids did drugs, and that she'd known kids who'd died from taking various pills and drugs. That morning I was an hour or two late for school as she sat me down. She explained she'd contacted my friends' parents to inform them too. We weren't allowed to hang out together for a few months after that.

...in recent years, she's had long-covid, which makes her very tired during the day. I gave her some modafinil, and she's used it to reclaim many days of her life. The other day she asked me what a good daily dosage is, and I pointed her to the exact same Gwern post; whereas once it brought her great anger, now she is grateful for its existence and advice :)