For the past year, I have lived in Somervile MA, just north of Cambridge, with two high school buddies, Sheung and Jeremy, and a friend from college, James. This summer Jeremy returned home to San Diego to work at Sea World (or as Jeremy refers to it, Slave World) as a lighting technician for their summer "Sea World at Night" show. He subleted his room to his current girlfriend, Julia. Julia gets along well with the rest of us and puts up with our various bachelorisms.
Now, this morning (at the ungodly hour of 7:30 am) while eating my daily dose of Frosted Flakes, I observed Sheung stumble out of Julia's room wearing Julia's robe. I was mildly perturbed since (a) this could obviously put a bit of a strain on apartment- mate relations and (b) Julia's robe was plaid, and Sheung looks really bad in plaid. On the other hand, I'm the sort of guy who doesn't fully process any sensory input until well after my morning hour-long shower, so it didn't make that much of an impact.
I woke up early this morning because I had a bus to catch to Northampton, where I will be staying for the month of July and attending the Regional Geometry Institute (RGI) at Smith College. A RGI basically consists of throwing a bunch of high school teachers, undergraduates, grad students and professors, all of whom are somehow interested in geometry, liberally sprinkling with NSF funding, and hoping that something interesting happens. Since people who like geometry are sort of odd to begin with, something interesting usually does happen. Add to this the location of Northampton MA, birthplace of Calvin Coolidge and the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles, and possesor of the highest concentration of lesbians per capita in the U.S., and I figure I'm working with prime talk.bizarre material here.
Anyway, while I was packing, Julia comes into my room and tries to convince me that the Sheung stumbling out of her room act was merely a ruse to see what my reaction would be. I'm not sure whether I believe her. On the pro side, Julia's a basically truthful person, and Sheung is sufficiently conservative (we're talking NRA member, ex-ROTC, Buchanan voting right fringe here) so as to cast doubt on whether he would do something so personally immoral. On the con side, they have been spending a lot of time together, and they should both know better than to expect a reaction out of me before 10 am for anything less than the second coming of Christ.
So it turns out that my entire day was filed with this sort of uneasy anticlimax. I arrive at the Northampton Peter Pan bus depot (which was otherwise indistinguishable from an ordinary parking lot) and take a taxi to Smith College, which turns out to be three blocks away, but costs me $2.20, $3.00 with tip (a tip which I might add was a hard fought compromise between the elements of stinginess and guilt in my Catholic upbringing). I spend the afternoon unpacking and reading about the history of Northampton (the source of my Calvin Coolidge and Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles info was a Chamber of Commerce brochure; the lesbian factoid is curtesy of Newsweak), but when I later wandered about, it seemed like the prototypical normal scenic northeast college town, complete with antique stores and a city hall.
Or as Jeremy would always say while driving around Vermont, "Look! New England charm!"
I always enjoy traveling, mostly because of the pain. I always pack heavily (books, stereo, clothes, more books ...) and end up walking considerable distances by foot with two large suitcases, a shoulder bag and a backpack. After a couple of blocks of walking like this, I end up in a pattern of walking twenty feet, pause for thirty seconds, walk another twenty feet, but every step is still pretty much agony. It isn't the masochism I enjoy so much as the memory. For some reason, every time I experience intense pain I remember every previous time I experienced intense pain, and I find these flashbacks intensely satisfying. I normally have a pretty lousy memory, so the perceived clarity of these flashbacks induces a sense of focus and continuity to the rest of them. Also, the remembered moments are mostly of other times that I have traveled with way too much luggage, and for that reason are memories of happy moments, the remembrance of which is in itself an enjoyable experience. I recall that Daniel Dennett, in one of his _Brainstorms_ essays, "Why You Can't Make A Computer To Feel Pain" [more or less a cognitive analysis of pain, the conclusion of which was that the "folk notion" of pain had several self-contradictory aspects, so that strictly speaking, it is not possible to truely speak of a human feeling pain, let alone a computer], discusses the phenomena of the "badness" of pain (but not it's intensity or many of it's negative feedback properties) being reducable under meditation, hypnosis, or various other ritual behaviours. That seems to be the case here.
Haven't really got to meet many of the other participants at the RGI yet, but I did talk to John Sullivan, a post-doc who I continually run into at these summer geometry things (last summer we were both at the Geometry Center in Minnesota, and the year before that we were both briefly at the Mt. Holoyke undergraduate research program. If you want some more small world wierdness, contemplate the fact that Julia is from Minnesota and was living in the same dorm as I was at the Universoty of Minnesota last summer. Most of passed each other hundreds of times coming in and out of the building, but not once did we meet.)
Anyway, John and I got to talking about the internet, with me doing the standard nostalgia act for back when signal-to-noise was high cause only people who really knew how to use computers were on the net. So John started telling me about how he recently came across an old file of his containing a posting to, get this, net.math. That's right, net.math, before they broke everything up into the comp., sci., alt., and soc. hierarchies. I remarked that in ten years or so "I posted to net.math" will be a regular punch card story, and we both laughed.
-Thomas C correspondant at large