The Diaper Theorem
Date Published: May 28, 2020, 6:32pm
Written By: PullupsHeather
Hi. I’m new here. I don’t know how far I’ll take this idea, but if I get a response, I’m likely to continue with it. I’d like to improve as a writer, so suggestions and criticism are more than welcome. Also, I’m not sure how to unbold pasted text, so apologies for that.
Monday, week 1:
I am writing this in crayon, on printer paper. Professor Klimowich has kindly allowed me to use as much as I’d like, but I’m still not used to writing journal entries this way. I feel extremely silly using so much paper to write so little. But, I suppose, since I’m sitting here in a diaper and a onesie at the foot of an oversized crib which is to be my bed, the idea that anything I do WOULDN’T feel extremely silly has practically gone out the window.
I’m trying to write this as much like a typical journal entry as possible. I’m cognizant of the fact that I may lose some of my mental faculties over the course of my time here, so I have resolved to record as much as I can.It may be that if I stay too long, my personal career in mathematics will be over. But if I record everything, if I’m meticulous enough, I just may contribute to mathematics as a whole.
My name is Katherine Fuller, and I am a graduate student in mathematics at Little Brook State University in Little Brook, California. My research is primarily in abstract algebra. It is my ultimate goal to prove the Bass-Quillen Conjecture but, well, I don’t know if I’ll come anywhere near that.
Supposedly, a former professor at Little Brook State, Professor Aleksandra Klimowich, has come closer to proving it than anyone else in the world. But after coming into a large inheritance seven years ago, she retired from teaching at the age of 34. No one besides her has been able to master the techniques she has developed. While she has retired from teaching, she does allow dedicated students to take private lessons with her, under certain conditions.
And, well, those conditions can be something of a barrier to potential students. She requires that students live with her at least five days a week, and allow her to dress and treat them like babies. And I mean that in the most literal possible way. As I have already stated, I am writing this in crayon while wearing a onesie and a diaper.
In future entries, I intend to go into further detail about the lifestyle she imposes on students. Maybe I’ll be better able to adequately describe it after a longer time of living it. For now, though, I would like to make a note of an aspect of this situation that is, to my mind, far more disturbing.
Students who stay with her for long periods of time begin to experience strange psychological effects. Chloe Adebayo, her most recent student excluding myself, left after only six weeks. She told me it had taken her the better part of a year to, through intensive potty training, regain basic daytime bladder and bowel control. She has further told me that she believes she will always have to wear diapers to bed.
The only other student to study under Klimowich, Andrew Nguyen, was not so lucky. He stayed with her for two and a half years, and after that, he went to stay with a “friend” of the Professor’s. When he was interviewed about any mathematics she may have taught him, he simply said “Aleksandra is sooo smart! She knows lots and lots about math, especially those plussy timesy things where you do the switcheroos! She knows lots about those!”
It is my understanding that the comment was in reference to Klimowich’s work on commutative ring theory, but in terms of mathematical substance, this is about all that could be gleaned from Nguyen’s comments. He had been considered one of the brightest young mathematicians in the world prior to his time with the Professor, and he could lecture with complete confidence in both English and (I’m told) Vietnamese. And while his mathematical ability, as demonstrated on multiple-choice tests, had not diminished, his language skills in both of his native languages had diminished to that of a small child, and he showed almost no understanding of social mores, interrupting an interview at one point to declare that he had a “poopie diapie.”
From my own experience, it seems surprising that his mathematical skills had not diminished. Today’s “math lesson” consisted of counting to five and identifying circles, squares, and triangles. I would write more, but I’ve already had to beg the Professor to postpone beddie-byes twice in the course of writing this. So I will conclude for now
-K
Tuesday, week 1:
I’ll be the first to admit my priorities in terms of surviving this endeavor may be slightly skewed. The most important thing ought to be retaining an adult vocabulary and the ability to express mathematical concepts using the standard terms. If, at the end of this, I succeed at that, even if I need diapers for the rest of my life, I will be able to save my career. There’s nothing overtly impossible about an incontinent professor. I could teach classes in adult diapers, and students would just have to deal with the occasional unpleasant smell. On the other hand, someone who talks like a child, someone who can’t express herself, would be unable to so much as write a Master’s thesis, let alone succeed in academia.
Nonetheless, having to strip naked and allow the Professor to put me in a diaper and plastic pants was one of the most striking things to happen to me since coming here, especially since both have such childish designs, being covered in rainbows, butterflies, and unicorns. And given what Chloe told me and the fact that I’m not allowed to use the toilet, I’ve been very much concerned with making sure I at least retain control of my bladder.
Even though I can’t use the bathroom, I’ve made a mental note of where it is and what it looks like. Whenever I need to go, I make a concerted effort to visualize standing up and walking to the bathroom. I try to think of how the walk would feel on my feet, how it would sound. I try to imagine, as vividly as possible, closing and locking the door, lifting the toilet lid up, unzipping my pink onesie, taking my diaper off, and sitting down on the toilet.
Peeing in a diaper feels different than peeing on a toilet. Indeed, it was difficult for me at first, even knowing I had no other option. While I imagine feeling the cool air of the bathroom and effortlessly letting go, immediately feeling the stream flow out and hit the toilet water beneath, in reality, I’m still wearing my hot, sweaty diaper. At first, instead of pee flowing easily, there was a long period of anticipation, of trying to let my guard down and relax and believing I had relaxed enough to let it out, only to realize I hadn’t, and would need to relax still more before anything happened. Once I was actually managing to pee, it took a couple moments to register that I was. The slight reverberation when urine silently, almost instantly, hits the inside of the diaper, and the growing warm, wet feeling around my crotch were utterly foreign to me until yesterday.
And yet, after only a day, I’ve gotten used to them. What’s starting to worry is how faint and blurred the memory of sitting on a toilet and peeing is becoming. It’s something I’ve done as long as I can remember, and something I’ve been consciously trying to keep remembering every time I’ve used my diaper, and yet every time I try to remember it, the memory becomes confused with the current sensation. I try to think about the sound of pee hitting the water of the toilet, and yet all that comes to mind is the feeling of pee being absorbed in my diaper. I try to imagine flushing, but what I hear in my mind is only the idea of a flushing toilet, no longer a crystal clear mental sound. It’s only been two days of this.
Yesterday, I was pretty reluctant to use my diaper for number two. That was a mistake I paid for today. In the middle of our “math lesson”, which, aside from the fact that we were now doing numbers up to six, was pretty much identical to the one from yesterday, I decided I could no longer take it. As embarrassing as it is to admit, I just stepped into the middle of the room, squatted down, and started grunting.
While my mental blocks didn’t cause me as much trouble once I finally decided to do the deed, since I guess tensing muscles is easier under pressure than relaxing them, I still ended up with a stool too large to get all the way out while the diaper was still on.When I told Aleksandra I would need to finish pooping in the middle of a diaper change, she just laughed. I’m not entirely sure if it was with me or at me, or if there is any distinction anymore.
Diaper changes are a tremendous relief for me. Aside from my nightly bath, they’re the only time my butt and crotch get to air out at all which, given that the combination of a diaper and plastic pants underneath a onesie is something of a thermal prison, is a breath of fresh air. But there’s something more to it as well. The gentleness with which she cleans and powders me, and the tenderness with which she puts on a new diaper every time, have done a lot to endear Aleksandra to me.
This despite the fact that she only changes me when SHE decides to. But in a way, that’s kind of nice too. I don’t have to worry about judging whether I’m wet enough to need a change, since it’s totally out of my hands. And there’s some inexplicably sweet feeling I get when I feel like she’s caring for me. I don’t know what it is. Maybe I’m just tired right now.
Hopefully this next entry helps to clarify Katherine’s motivation to some degree. As to the Professor, she’s meant to be enigmatic at this point in the story.
Wednesday, week 1:
I haven’t really had much control over how I spend my time these past few days. Almost every moment has been accounted for, as though nothing escapes the Professor’s watchful eyes. And I don’t think there’s any way I could excuse myself at any point in time. If I need to get some water, Aleksandra gets it for me in a sippy cup. If I need to use the bathroom, that’s what the diaper is for. If I need a breath of fresh air, Aleksandra will take me out onto the balcony, but she won’t take her eyes off of me.
This morning was a rare exception. Last night, I had felt a slight need to use the bathroom, but I knew there wasn’t going to be a diaper change any time soon. Spending my entire journal entry talking about the experience of using a diaper probably didn’t help matters. Nonetheless, I didn’t want to go to bed in a wet diaper. Chloe had mentioned that she felt she “gave in” to using diapers too quickly, so my hope is that by having little rules for myself like “don’t go to bed in a wet diaper” or “try to stay dry for at least an hour after every change”, I’ll be able to stay in control. Perhaps this is a vain hope, but it’s at least worth a try.
As I tossed and turned in bed, what felt like a slightly full bladder became a very full one, and it’s something of a miracle I managed to fall asleep dry. I had a dream that I was in a public restroom, in a stall, but I still couldn’t take my diaper off to use the toilet no matter how hard I tried. Meanwhile, the whole bathroom began to fill with water. I had the vague sense that some pipe somewhere was leaking, though no one had told me this. When I woke up, I was very worried that I had wet the bed. Groping at my crotch, I was relieved to find I was still dry.
Grateful that I had made it, as I was going through my mental bathroom ritual before pretty much soaking my diaper, I noticed the color of the sky through the window on the far side of the nursery, and saw that it was still the gentle gray-blue of twilight. Previous mornings, Aleksandra had woken me up. This morning, however, had woken up of my own accord, and I reckoned I had at least an hour and a half before the Professor woke up. The panic over my potential nighttime accident had jolted me wide awake, and I decided it was best to try and make the best of the extra time I had this morning, rather than trying to go back to sleep, even though I knew it would make me tired the rest of the day. Going back to sleep, after all, might technically have broken my rule about going to bed wet.
The crib creaked a little as I stood up, and I was worried that I might wake the Professor, even though I tried to be as quiet as possible when climbing over the guardrail. I managed to tiptoe to the living room, and I had a rare opportunity to look around unimpeded. I noticed several notebooks on the bookshelf, and I decided to look through them. One seemed to be an account of her day to day life. I skimmed the first few entries. It seemed to date back only a few months. The first few entries seemed pretty mundane, and the last few entries essentially recounted what she had been doing with me the past few days.
After opening a few more journals which seemed to be of a more personal nature, I finally found what I was looking for, a journal full of commutative diagrams and sentences like “let A be a Noetherian local ring with maximal ideal m and let P be in the spectrum of A”. Some of the vocabulary and notation she used was unfamiliar to me was unfamiliar to me, like the idea that every module over certain types of rings had a unique “naughty submodule”.
When Andrew Nguyen had said “If you brush the puppy’s hair really, really good, all the naughty hairs come off and it’s just the nice ones left” was he referring to taking the quotient of a module by its “naughty” submodule? Although his acquired language difficulties were harrowing, I had always suspected that at least some of his seemingly inane and childish statements were references to ideas beyond the current scope of mathematics.
While Aleksandra always takes away the printer paper and crayons at bed time, I get to keep all of the notes I’ve written under my crib. I crept back into the nursery and grabbed a few of the pages I had left one-sided for use as scratch-paper. Finding a writing utensil was going to be more difficult. After going through several of the drawers in the living room, I found a yellow highlighter. I tried to use it to copy as much relevant information from the notebook full of math as I could, in the hopes of decoding it over the weekend.
As I copied, I began to wonder if my story would go down in history as one of the great tragedies of mathematics. Evariste Galois gave us group theory, but was killed in a duel at the age of 20. Georg Cantor laid the foundations of set theory, but was plagued in his final years by a depression which sapped much of his passion for mathematics. And Fuller, they’ll say, suffered bizarre torments in order to share the insights that revolutionized algebra with the world, perhaps having her mind permanently warped into that of a sort of half-adult, half-child in the process.
Amidst my copying and daydreaming, I lost track of time. Aleksandra, still in her pyjamas and en route to the shower, noticed me sitting at the coffee table and writing and asked what I was doing awake so early. Before I could respond, she saw what I was copying, took the highlighter away, and scolded me for being impatient, assuring me we would get to this stuff in due time.
She said that I deserved a spanking for being out of bed so early. I told her that I had agreed to let her take care of me, not to submit to corporal punishment. She replied that if I agreed to a spanking, our mathematics lessons would go faster. So I agreed.
When I was bent over her lap, with my onesie and half-untaped diaper around my ankles, being slapped repeatedly, I cared less about the pain than I did about the relief of having that clammy thing off of me. I thought about how illegal this all must be, and I started to worry that Aleksandra might get in trouble. I thought about how much I didn’t want that to happen. If she went to jail, her ideas would be stuck in there with her, and they would be lost to the wider mathematical community. This way, at least there was a chance that I could bring back… something.
I’ve barely mentioned events that occurred before 8:30 this morning, and it’s already bedtime. Good night, future people reading this.
-K
I have no idea what happened to the formatting here or how to fix it. It seems like the new forum software responds weirdly to line breaks.
EDIT: okay, apparently you just have to add html tags every time you want a line break.
Thursday, week 1:
Already, I’m failing myself. Last night, while half asleep, I used my diaper without properly going through my whole mental ritual. It was only a little dribble, but I’m making a note of it for future reference. It was in the middle of the night, and I went back to sleep almost immediately after. I had sort of hoped I would wake up early again, but alas, I slept like a baby. Well, figuratively speaking. Maybe I shouldn’t have used that expression, given that, with the way this place is, it’s quite possible that one night, I’ll wake up crying every few hours for no discernable reason, but I’m not going to change the wording because crayons don’t have erasers. In any case, I didn’t wake up until Aleksandra came in and woke me.This was something of a disappointment.
First, it meant that I didn’t get any opportunity to explore the house on my own in the wee hours of the morning, although I’m not sure I would have done so if the opportunity had arisen. After all, after yesterday, I doubt she would leave her math notes within reach this time, and I would have had to weigh the risks of getting caught again. The spanking seems to be more of a more symbolic punishment, but I get the sense that it’s accompanied by more substantial consequences, even if I don’t always have a clear understanding of what those consequences are. Perhaps a speeding up or slowing down of the math curriculum, perhaps more or less allowance for “big kid privileges”, or perhaps even just a sense that the Professor is disappointed in me. I’m starting to become more and more emotionally invested in her opinion.
Second, being woken up after having even a tiny accident during the night meant that I would get a change first thing in the morning. And given my personal rule about waiting an hour after a change before using the restroom again, this meant that I would have to hold it in for at least an hour after getting up. At least I wasn’t the only one holding it. The past couple of days, I’ve noticed she’s been a lot less cavalier with leaving me unattended, even to use the restroom. She seems to practically only do so when I’m already on the high chair for a meal, locked in place and unable to move.
I’ve sort of gotten to wondering about that lately. Like, okay, adult diapers are one thing; the incontinence aisle is right next to the aisle with tampons and pads in a drugstore, so they aren’t exactly difficult to get. But this woman has an adult-sized crib, an adult-sized high chair, and adult-sized baby clothes. She has to get those from somewhere, and pretty much the only demographic that consumes those kinds of things besides her is adult baby fetishists. Even the diapers look too babyish to be the kind marketed towards regular people who happen to suffer from incompetence. So this all raises the question: what is this to her?
Most of the general public seems pretty certain they know the answer. She was a great mathematician once, she developed a reputation, and now she’s using that reputation to lure graduate students in in order to play out her depraved fantasies, possibly as a result of some deep-seated mental illness or possibly just for the sick pleasure of it all.
Another, much smaller camp saw her some kind of misunderstood visionary. They’d point out that Alexander Grothendieck, arguably the most brilliant mathematician of the second half of the twentieth century, had himself said “discovery is a child’s privilege”, and that therefore, it would make sense that some sort of psychological age regression could be a useful pedagogical tool for esoteric and complex ideas that may be difficult to arrive at from standard mathematical axioms. Before I started this experiment, I was firmly in this camp, in part because many mathematicians in my department felt as though this was the correct analysis of the situation. But after being here for four days, I have to admit my faith is beginning to waver.
But at the same time, I get the sense that there’s more to what I’ve been learning than meets the eye, even in terms of counting and shapes. There’s a certain music, a melody to the way I’m learning to count. Today, I was asked “What comes after four?” and I answered “three” without even thinking. But it wasn’t because I’ve become less intelligent or my number sense has deteriorated. Rather, it’s because of the tone of her voice when she asked the question. And I believe the various melodies I’m learning to count with have a deeper mathematical significance, even though I can’t yet rigorously define what that significance is or how it’s relevant to ring theory.
I was told that if I ask to go to bed before Aleksandra asks me to wrap up my journaling, I would be allowed to hold my own spoon during breakfast tomorrow, rather than having her feed me. So I’m going to wrap up and go to bed now.
(I’d say I’m sorry for the long hiatus but there will probably be many more, soooo…)
Friday, week 1:
Tomorrow, I’ll get to go home, sleep in my own bed, and wear my own underwear. I’m nervous and excited. I miss the feeling of big girl panties; how easy it was to forget what was between my legs, how light the material was, and how grown-up and independent I felt wearing them. I’d never thought of any of that before this week. Before this week, I can honestly say I didn’t feel any particular way about my underwear, unless I was wearing something special for a guy. I guess you never really appreciate the perks of adulthood until you lose them.
I’ve tried to stay out of trouble today, especially with Aleksandra watching me like a hawk. I’ve been smiling and saying “yes, ma’am” more often, which I think she appreciates, and she seemed to really enjoy the story I acted out with my rubber duckies in the bath. Previous days, at her suggestion, I had also produced little plays with my bath toys, but she had chastised me for using “too many SAT words”. I wonder if that may have had something to do with the deterioration of Andrew’s vocabulary. Did it start out with subtly conditioning him to avoid advanced words? If so, I hope these journal entries are enough to offset that process in me.
I had better start deliberately using more sophisticated vocabulary and diction over the weekend to avoid sliding into baby talk. I need to brainstorm some strategies to do that. If someone is talking and I’m trying to think of my response, should I ask myself if the words I’m about to use have more hifalutin synonyms? Or would that be too distracting? Would it be better to just spend a little bit of time reading the thesaurus each day? How do you just casually read a thesaurus? I’ll need to workshop it for sure.
I can’t spend too much time thinking it over, though. The key question, the one that’s been weighing on my mind all day, is whether I’ll come back next week. I mean, there’s no legally enforceable contract here, nothing that guarantees I won’t ghost Aleksandra once she lets me go. And considering the risks and how out of reach the potential rewards seem, that would seem like a very sensible option. There’s a side of me that finds the mere idea of giving up on this shocking and almost inconceivable. Some of it, I’m sure, is my natural stubbornness, my need to see anything I’ve started through to the end. But there’s something else. It’s like she’s cast a spell on me that has already made me grow attached to her and to the way I’m living.
Maybe part of the effect of that “spell” is that I’m becoming more obedient. Not that opportunities for mischief present themselves particularly often here, but the first few days I was at least looking for them, remaining watchful at all times in case I had some chance to explore the space more or poke around in the Professor’s research. Today, though, whether it was through whatever weird hypnosis is going on or just the fear of corporal punishment, I’ve just been observing with no mind for doing anything.
And normally for me, being so passive and so helpless is part and parcel with depression. But now, there’s something comforting and safe in this feeling of helplessness. Being gifted at math has made my life so far an endless pile of work, having to first get into the best colleges and then get into the best graduate program and then stay on track to present my thesis. There’s always been something to do. But now, there’s nothing that I have to do, no work that I have to put in. I can just be.
And now that I’m able to stop thinking so much and start experiencing, I’m noticing things I never could have noticed before. There’s a certain musicality, a rhythm and melody, to everything Aleksandra does, from speaking to writing to tapping her spoon against the edge of her teacup. And it’s intentional. It carries meaning. There’s a special beat that I always hear right before mealtimes which makes me suddenly feel hungry. There’s a little half-song that I always hear a little before bed that makes me sleepy. And there’s a melody that I always hear a few minutes before a change that makes me need to go really badly.
I’m reminded of the Pavlov’s dog experiment, where Pavlov rang a bell when he fed his dogs and the dogs started salivating at the sound of the bell. I think a similar thing might be going on with me, where I’ve learned to associate sounds with specific daily rituals without even being consciously aware of it. Armed with this knowledge, with the understanding that my brain is being expertly rewired on a subconscious level, I should leave, right? I know where this process leads.
And yet, there’s more information than just daily routines hiding in the pitch of the Professor’s voice when she speaks. The tone of her voice during our little “math lessons”conveys important information about the numbers. Just by listening closely to the way she’s counting, you can factorize whatever number she’s counting to. And there’s a beautiful logic to it, such that it’s obvious that seven times three comes after two times two times five.
Of course factoring relatively small integers isn’t graduate level work, but the underlying mathematical framework, which I’m still not quite able to formalize, hints at endless possibilities. Any sensible person would recommend I call it quits here, but in the end, I know I can’t. It’s like I was deaf before, and now I’m hearing something for the first time. A murmur muffled by distance, a pin dropping in a quiet room, the indistinct sound of music. I have heard, in a faint and fleeting way, the music of the primes.
Saturday, Week 1 (audio transcript):
K: Alright, we’re recording.
M: Right now?
K: Yeah, is that- should we stop?
M: No, I was just making sure. So uhh, right. Introductions. I’m Monica. I’m a psych major, I’m taking a gap year after undergrad because, haha, no grad schools accepted me. I guess this is an audio format so for the record I just did finger guns.
K: And I’m Katherine. I’m a math major. Pure math. And I’m a second year grad student or, I guess I’m taking a sabbatical from grad school for research purposes.
M: And since this is our first recording I should, like, ask you what that research is exactly.
K: For sure. Uhh, so there’s this professor, Aleksandra Klimowich, who did a bunch of brilliant things in algebra that hinted at some deeper research she was going to explain later-
M: Algebra? Like solve for x?
K: Well, more like the theory of abstract structures with operations that act like addition and multiplication. Algebra at a graduate level can get really disconnected from, like, polynomials and the stuff you learn in high school.
M: Interesting. Continue
K: Okay so she’s writing all these papers that suggest this big program, then she retires early out of nowhere and the mathematical community is really itching to see some of her unpublished research. Then, in retirement, she starts taking on grad students, but her pedagogy is super weird and involves, like, age regression.
M: Age regression as in?
K: As in she treats students like babies. And I don’t mean she’s patronizing, I mean literally she brushes their teeth, puts them in diapers, puts them in cribs, the works. All for the promise of learning her mathematical secrets. So, uh, yeah, I’m the latest grad student to take her up on the offer.
M: So are you wearing a diaper right now?
K: No, not at the moment. It’s only Monday-Friday, thankfully although what’s happened to the other students is that somehow they psychologically regress. Lose their potty training, lose their social skills, start talking in baby talk, et cetera. So like, if that happens to me,which I’m desperately trying to avoid, I’ll probably end up having to wear a diaper on my days off. But again, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
M: So have the other students brought back enough pearls of mathematical wisdom to make up for the psychological damage done to them?
K: Sort of? Maybe? Not really.
M: But you still think you’re going to?
K: I can only hope. I mean, a lot of mathematicians tried proving Fermat’s last theorem before Wiles did, right?
M: And how many of them became medically incontinent in the process?
K: Well, I’m hoping that won’t happen either. I’m taking steps to resist the process, and I have you here to help me. You know psychology, after all.
M: I mean, uh, resisting adult baby magic isn’t exactly something psych students are taught very much about. Or, really, anything about. Like I’m glad you trusted me to help you with this and I don’t mean to like, be so negative on tape, but like, I’m as inexperienced in this area as you are.
K: Well, then hopefully at least two heads are better than one.
M: Hopefully. If not, I’m going to be the one on the hook for re-adulting you.
K: And thank you so much for offering to do that, by the way. I really appreciate it.
M: I mean, yeah, for sure. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Have you felt any different since coming back the first week?
K: I mean, I got used to the baby clothes surprisingly quickly, and now adult clothes feel a little strange? Especially the underwear. And I, like, feel a little bit of an urge to suck on a pacifier sometimes, to the point where I’ve sucked my thumb a couple times today just absentmindedly. But overall I still feel pretty normal. I haven’t really noticed much change in bladder control, which is an important one to keep an eye on.
M: Well that’s good to hear. But, uh, speaking as your roommate, I can’t help but notice you slept with a teddy bear last night.
K: It’s not THAT weird for an adult to have a stuffed animal, is it?
M: I suppose it’s not, but I still think it’s something we should include on the tapes.
K: Have you noticed any other changes in my behavior?
M: Not really.
K: Alright, that’s probably good for today’s recording then.