Archive for September, 2008
My brother Jason’s here, complaining that our sofa isn’t comfortable. We went to Santarpio’s and it was indeed delicious pizza.
Rare event happened yesterday; I was exhausted. Just tremblingly full of tiredness. Heavy eyes, lead body, couldn’t run. Still thinking fast and clear, but only barely. I don’t know why, but I enjoyed it, because I could. I didn’t have to turn my hyper-spigot on to ruin it because there was nothing I absolutely needed to be super-revved-up to get done.
Woke up this morning – normal, amp turned up to 11. Could not continue to lie down. Assembled furniture and cleaned my room and cooked 5 different things for breakfast before it was 8am. Yay! Now to do a whirlwind of last-round shopping and get my keyboard, and feed Jason.
Hm. Writing in more rhythmic sentence fragments lately. Need longer phrases. Should read older writers. Or textbooks with a sense of humor. Will see what I can find tonight.
Thursday, September 4th, 2008 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
After leaving the Jaduds’ and stopping at a little bakery to pile ourselves (well, Tank’s car) with 4 loaves of magnificently fragrant bread, we drove through New York and split up at the MA/NY border; Tank, Nikki, and myself would stay in the Berkshires for the night, and Chris would continue on to Boston for his job interview the next morning. So we redistributed the things in our vehicles so 3 people could fit in one and a lot of stuff could fit in the other and Chris sped off and I was left with two people who sat down on our hotel beds and looked at me and declared that they did not want to see the inside of a car again and Brain Turn Off Now.
I was pretty darn tired myself; I’d just pulled a triple shift driving (we were supposed to take 2-hour shifts so each driver got 2 hours out of every 6 to rest, but I wanted Chris to be fresh for his solo drive and Tank was starting to look a little worn around the edges, so I had them spell each other off and I kept on going myself) and my shoulders were starting to whisper “pain, pain, pain.” But they weren’t doing it too loudly and I had some wanderlust left in me yet and there was hunger to be dealt with so I got back in the van, cranked up a Muse CD, and hit the road in search of edibility.
Do you know how hard it is to find a place in the Berkshires that sells cheap, non-fast-food food you can take away with you? (Hint: It’s hard.) It was over an hour before I stumbled back into the hotel room with a big brown bag, but the hunting had been good; we pulled apart one of the Bread Loaves of Ridiculousness and piled roast beef and turkey and sharp cheddar into sandwiches, and melted muenster atop wheat crackers and had raspberry sherbet we were unable to finish, and Orangina. So I did not do too badly in my role of provider that time.
We slept. It took some time for me to fall asleep. I spent a while just sitting and staring at the room’s tiny crummy little window, leaning back against Nikki’s bed with my feet scrunched up against Tank’s (the room had two queen beds and cushy carpet in between them, and I had a sleeping bag).
I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking (or whether I’d call it thinking) but part of it, put in words, would go something like this: We all have lives in Boston waiting for us to pick them up again. I think we like those lives, or at least I know I’m going to love mine. And all the same, I wish it were as simple as this always; that I could drive an hour with sore shoulders to get shrink-wrapped deli food, and that would be enough to make them happy, and that would be all I had to do.
And all the same, I would not freeze time for a single moment because I want to see what lies ahead.
The next day we took a leisurely tour through western Mass which was interrupted by a very large brunch at Cracker Barrel. Then I dropped off Nikki at Mauna Loa and Tank rode with me ’till we got lost downtown and decided to take the T (Chris had parked her car at Alewife) and then I went alone to my apartment and then to New Hampshire to hop through Chandra’s to Eric’s and then you know the rest.
I grow more introspective, possibly melodramatic, in these posts. It’s partly tiredness and partly forcing myself to take some time to think, and in large part because if I stop writing I’ll have to stand up and continue to unpack (and I am tired). There are boxes; I don’t want to think about them. I spent far too much on a garbage can. I don’t know where I packed my towel. And I desperately need shelves for books.
We had lunch at my aunt’s today. Audrey still knows Tank and Nikki; when we walked in the door she greeted us with an “I remember about the scurvy!” (Nikki had, before we left Boston, gotten Audrey to eat her vegetables by warning her about scurvy.) We got about half the stuff from her basement this trip. The rest of it belongs to me and Chris.
Tank just parked her car at Alewife and the two of them are on their way to my apartment to unpack a little more and crash the night; they move back to the dorms on Tuesday, so tonight and then tomorrow and then gone. I suppose I should unpack some more, and look for Halloween plane tickets out to Nashville. And I wonder just how short a haircut I can get away with…
Off to work.
Thursday, September 4th, 2008 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 3 Comments »
At the end of our first day on the road, we stopped by the Jadud domicile. Matt Jadud was a visiting professor at Olin last year while Lynn Stein was on sabbatical; he does CS and education (and robotics and concurrency and a bajillion other things) and he is wonderful.
In Pennsylvania, they have Real Food. The Jaduds have an apple tree in their backyard. Apparently Real Apples are small and lumpy. They’re also very tart. Also featured in The House Of Jadud are Real Pears and Real Blueberries. We went in to a meal of spaghetti with sauce made with Real Vegetables and Real Cheese (it comes not-in-a-green-can!) and then we went to the county fair.
They deep-fry everything at the county fair. We had deep-fried Oreos and split an elephant ear (dough stretched into a gigantic pancake, fried, brushed with butter, and dredged with cinnamon sugar) and then cried uncle while Matt and his friend from grad school went on to demolish impossibly towering ice cream cones. Tank discovered she was allergic to cows. I was astonished by the Very Large Geese. Everyone was terribly amused by a 4H poster on “How To Research Turtles.” In primary colored marker printed with painstaking neatness on a sheet of posterboard:
1. Go to google.com (or any search engine)
2. Type in “TURTLES” (do not forget the quotation marks)
3. <insert things about ‘finding reliable sources’ and using the ‘+’ sign for multiple words and clicking ‘back’ in your browser to try another webpage>
The best part was the final step in the lower right hand corner, in brightly concluding blue letters:
…then, COPY INFO!
It won first prize.
Then we stayed up late talking and I ended up creeping into the guest room at wee-o-clock in the morning (apparently Nikki was still awake when I crept into my sleeping bag) and having my head swim with thoughts of changing the world – slowly and quietly and with more patience than I believe I currently possess, but changing it nonetheless. (Yes, with engineering education. I still think it is the best hope for my greatest contribution.)
If growing up can mean becoming like Matt Jadud, I really don’t think I’ll mind it all that much.
Thursday, September 4th, 2008 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Finally transferred notes from my XO to this laptop for formatting & posting. Old blog posts, go! This one is about a week old, right before we dropped off Tank and Nikki for Olin move-in.
It’s probably fitting that I spend my first night in my new apartment reading in the bathroom because I’m once again unable to sleep. I’m also terrifically allergic to New England again, something that happens every time I relocate to a new place (I don’t know if traveling puts my immune system down, or I happen to travel during allergen season every time, or… whatever it is, whenever I move, I sniffle for about a week and then I’m fine thereafter).
Ah, yes. Chris and I have an apartment. It’s in East Boston, near the Maverick stop; gorgeous kitchen, wood floors (except for the kitchen and my bedroom), an actual bathtub, access to a roof deck… I’m in love with the neighborhood. Then again, I fall in love easily, and the fact that I’m finally settling into a place that’s in some way “mine” – that’s something I’ve been looking forward to for many years. In fact, once Tank and Nikki (currently occupying spare couches and mattresses and helping me unpack until Chris returns from Montreal) go back to Olin, I won’t need to read in the bathroom. I’ll have a living room with a couch and a lamp. Next to my bookcases. I’m going to have bookcases.
There’s a park nearby with sailing lessons, and a bike trail, and a lot of good restaurants (including Santarpio’s Pizza down the street, which my brother Jason has wanted to go to for years – he’ll be pleased when he visits in September) and a gorgeous view of the skyline. The train runs right downtown by the library and the Haymarket and the people in the neighborhood – oh man! I’m going to like it here. I’ll need to make sure I occasionally make it out of the office in order to enjoy this place a little.
Enough happy rambling about my apartment (and how Chris and I have a projector and a blank wall, and how he’s growing herbs, and how I’m getting a digital piano, and… er. yes.) I was up in NH this morning – crashed on VanWyk’s extra mattress last night after a quick dinner with Chandra in Nashua – and Adam taught me how to ride a motorcycle. I could only go (very slowly) up and down the length of a parking lot in a straight line. (Also, helmets and riding jackets are heavy.) I liked it, though; it combines what I like about cars (you can go fast on them without dripping sweat and wheezing) and what I like about bikes (everything else). He then took me on a ride (on his motorycle) through Manchester. We stopped to watch a Shriners parade, which involved little old men with funny red hats driving go-karts up and down a truck. (We were confused as well. They were also, in some cases, in clown makeup.)
Resolved: that I will not let people walk over me. As much. (This is not a high bar to pass. I occasionally make myself a human doormat.) The only problem is I don’t know how to do this; I’m never sure how much I should concede and how much I should push for, and I always err on the side of yielding. How do you get calibration for this?
Also resolved: I will not put my computer desk in my room. Keyboard, perhaps. Drafting table (or less ambitiously, desk) – sure. But I should read, and study, and sleep, and do these things away from a keyboard and a screen. Cook, too.
I find myself getting increasingly ready not to miss things. Part of the trick of being happy is wanting what you’re going to get and learning to not want the things that are going to go away, and I can do that well; I can be happy waiting for a long, long (indefinitely long, in fact) time. Waiting and at the same time being restless and agitating for it to come and happen now. There’s now and then there’s not-now and I’m far happier living in the former; it’s more interesting and it’s happening and it’s real and it’s all that I can shape at the moment.
So I will soon no longer have my “year off” wanderer status, and I will soon not have my compatriots from Olin to live and work with (indeed, Andrew has gone home already, and while I’m living with Chris he’ll have his job and his own hobbies and friends and a relationship), and I will soon have an office to be at (though it’s a crazy office and I love it) and I’ll settle into another round of habits and traditions and I hope those traditions will continue to include the remaking and rebuilding of everything in my life as I learn how to change them for (what I think is) the better.
And that’s all going to happen, and that’s okay. It’s going to happen, so I might as well be happy about it, and so I am. (I like being able to do that. It’s like having a happy-spigot. Like I have an internal energy source that I can tap nearly any time I need it.)
Now if I could just wrestle my brain’s flywheel into submission for the night – it’s clattering all over the place, I’m trying to grab it and grind it down so I can sleep…
Thursday, September 4th, 2008 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
One benefit of living on your own: the food. For brunch today I made a 2-egg omelet with mixed greens (mostly spinach) and some leftover chunks of habanero cheese fondue, and had some applesauce with sliced banana and a dollop of raspberry preserve – cheap, quick, healthy (…okay, look, eggs have protein) and satisfying on both a “this is delicious” and “oh boy, I made it!” level. I am so glad that we invested in good cookware and ingredients.
I overuse my weaknesses as shields against mattering, which is a phobia that I ought not to have. If I don’t want people to think the things I do are unobtainable magic (read: non-intimidation clause) – which I do – I need a better solution than crippling myself back through many subtle means so that the things I do are easy. I should do hard things and then do the harder work of making hard things easy, or helping people struggle past the hardness for themselves.
Made a decision today. Will see how it works out. I may live to regret it. (Well, I’ll live. I may regret it.)
My cousin Mark, who goes to Babson, lives in the Map Hill dorm (we moved him in the other day). He now lives closer to Olin’s classrooms than actual Olin students do, and has a lovely view of the area between East Hall and West Hall. In other news,I have been on or near the Olin campus almost every day for the past 5 days, and have seen a lot of Olin people (Sunset with DJ, Kelcy, David, and Sam tonight) over the past week, too. This will likely drop off dramatically with my return to Boston sans motor vehicle (can’t yet afford a motorcycle…) and the start of full-time work, so I’m appreciating it while it lasts. It’s nice to have the luxury of this gradual weaning, and it’s also harder in some ways than going cold turkey as I’ve had to in the past.
We have a bookshelf, and my doorway is too narrow for a chin-up bar. Blenders are way freaking expensive. Seth Woodworth was on our couch tonight and will soon teach me how to use a sword. Adam Holt is back from the OLPC Book Sprint. I went with Chandra and DJ to see Gallimore out by the cape – he has a tiny yellow house with bookshelf walls and a sliding ladder to get up to aforementioned bookshelves and a sleeping loft. We ate; I didn’t believe my ice cream was chocolate at first, it was so velvety and rich.
Then we went out to the beach and ran down at low tide; the sand had packed in ripples with splashes of dark iodine seaweed splayed out in it, and shells, and leather-colored boulders warming in the sun. Chandra found a crab, and tiny fish swam in between our feet, and we went out deep and floated in saltwater past the sandbar and talked about electron orbitals and GTK and sci-fi authors and USB input devices and how Eric got a couch. A sunset was involved. I’ve missed these people – I only miss people when I’m with them, either right before they leave or when I see them after they have gone – but I missed them there, and it was good to be with them again.
Also, Galli’s place has stars.
My little brother Jason gets in late tonight. I’m taking him on a food tour of Boston in exchange for labor (building furniture, possibly painting my room, assembling closet, help cleaning up the place, etc. etc. So by Saturday when J and I drive Moby Dick (the white van) back to IL, Chris and I should have a fully functional apartment and be really and truly moved in.
Only 3 meetings today – light schedule, yay! Perhaps I’ll have time to build a bookshelf this afternoon so I can get the pile off my desk.
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »