The place where lost socks go...

Nothing terribly important to write about today, but I am trying to get back into the habit of posting on a daily basis. So, gentle readers, brace yourself for what may make the top ten list of "Most Boring Entries In Nomad's Journal"[*]. That said, here are some utterly unconnected thoughts floating through me head today:

• While writing that scintillating opening paragraph, I received an e-mail from the co-presidents of my high school class. They're the guys who tracked me down a couple of years ago to give a "Where are they now?" interview. This e-mail was to let people know that one of my classmates will be performing with his band at the Mercury Lounge in Manhattan next week. I almost didn't read the e-mail to the end, but I am glad that I did... because the last line cracked me up: "Bring whoever you want...except Matt Malek, who is not invited."[**] For some reason, that just cracked me up.
  
  
• While driving to Waddesdon yesterday, I noticed that diesel fuel is now commonly selling for £1.07⁹ per litre and petrol (gasoline to you yanks) is £1.03⁹. At yesterday's exchange rate of $2.0642/£1, that makes the price of auto fuel $8.46 per gallon for diesel and $8.15 for petrol -- the most that I have ever seen! My eleven year old Volkswagen does get about 45 miles to the gallon[***], but that still means I pay about 19 cents per mile to drive anywhere. I realize that I have annoyed some of my North American friends by being less than sympathetic when people complain about paying $3/gallon for gasoline... but that really is quite cheap! I would love to pay three dollars for a gallon of fuel!
  
  
• November is ending in a few hours and I have not flown anywhere this month. No wonder I am starting to feel antsy. I have never had a full calendar year where I have flown in all twelve months (though I have flown in eleven out of twelve in more than one year), but a month without an airplane is still unusual for me. Two more weeks until I fly back to the States.
  
  
• The award for 5000^th comment in this journal was given today to... erm... me, for this reply to kenshardik.
  
  
• I have not taken any postbox pictures since last November. Maybe I should do something about that this weekend. Assuming the weather gets better, that is.

Bored yet? I did warn that nothing terribly exciting is going on right about now. I'll try to fix that by tomorrow's entry -- promise!

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[*] If such a list existed, that is.

[**] Don't ever try calling me Matt. Seriously. I went as Matt from age twelve to eighteen, but not since. Although Matt was fundamentally a good person -- and did some wild and crazy stunts -- he was generally depressed and angry; I have evolved significantly from when that person was me.

[***] This is better than the mileage that a Prius will get brand new. And yet the auto industry continues to fight against regulations for better fuel economy.

It is half past one in the morning and I am blissfully tired. I should get off the couch and go to bed. Busy day at work tomorrow, followed by a busy weekend! However, there is a cat sleeping on top of my foot (not the one featured in the icon, though that one is also sleeping here on the couch), so it would appear that I am stuck for a bit. May as well write another LJ entry. If it seems only semi-coherent, now you know why...

Tonight, I received an e-mail invitation to my 15^th high school reunion, which is next weekend. Attached to that e-mail was -- at last! -- the short write up about me assembled from the interview that I did with my class organizers about a year and a half ago. For archival purposes, that write up can be found here.

I've been thinking about high school a fair bit lately. I make no secret of the fact that I spent a decade being depressed, from age eleven through twenty. Somewhere along the line, I got the idea into my head that I was a loser in high school. True, my sexual prowess was... non-existent[*]. I was the epitome of the student who "does not live up to potential" -- my grades were somewhat less than spectacular, as I actually made a game of avoiding as much work as possible. I had nearly no friends in school; most of the friends that I did have (including the exceedingly awesome -- but internet challenged -- JW) lived elsewhere. Back in those days, getting out to southern New Jersey or Long Island was a respectable task... so I was often alone.

So, yes, the memory of depression and loneliness and continuous fighting with my biofam somehow became a recollection of being a loser. Well, between reading through the missive from my classmates and whatnot, I have concluded that this was a false impression. All the details in the last paragraph are quite true... but I was not a loser in high school -- I was a legend!

( The Legend of Nomad the Kid )

Not all of these things were known to my classmates, of course. For instance, my possession of the tower relied on secrecy at the time. But enough of these things were known to create a legend that lived on for years after I left the school[******] and, judging by my recently received e-mail, seems to live on even now in the minds of my former classmates, too.

I have reason to re-think high school lately... and I now think that I have done myself a disservice. Was I happy? Certainly not! Did I have the joys that one normally expects from those adolescent years? Hell no! But I wasn't a loser, either... and I did have my share of joys unusual and unique.

And, on that note, cat and foot have now been separated... so it is time for me to get some sleep!

( Footnotes )

First, death to the evilness that is the Oxford Instruments Kelvinox-400! Nuff said...

Second, we are having a heat wave. Temperatures in the nineties, and threatening to break one hundred. Wake up, England, and join the twenty-first century. Air conditioners are not new technology!

Third, whist conversing with one of our secretaries (who somehow does have an air conditioned room), the conversation turned to the Royal Shakespeare Company, who is currently performing the complete works. She mentioned that she is going to see Anthony & Cleopatra on Friday. I mentioned that I want to get to see that one, too, as Patrick Stewart is starring in it (and I loved seeing him do The Tempest in Manhattan years ago). She said she knew... because Patrick is her cousin-in-law (and thus they get free seats). That's my surprise moment for the day.

Fourth, though it is not new, I should announce that I have a grad student. When I was a grad student, I benefited greatly from being partnered up with one of the Stony Brook post-docs. However, as a Fermilab post-doc, there were no grad students for me to mentor. Now, however, our Oxford group has three grad students and I have begun working with the youngest one. This is beneficial in many ways: I enjoy being a mentor, for one thing, and I had way too much on my work 'to-do' list... so passing part of the work off on him is a big relief!

Fifth, and finally, I mentioned last October that I had been tracked down by a couple of my old high school classmates because they wanted an interview. I gave the interview and only last week received a draft of the write-up. It was mostly okay, except for the ( last paragraph )

Now I know that this is supposed to be a "feel good" exercise to accompany a request for money... but that last paragraph could not possibly be about me! And that quotation is nothing that I actually said (though the crush was certainly true). But I am one of the people who answered the high school poll by saying that those were the worst days of my life! Hoy vey... Anyway, I offered to help them edit the last bit, or advised them to take it out. I'm not trying to be troublesome (for once), but "happy with his time at Poly" cannot describe the guy who nearly made an attempt on his own life while there.

Anyway, I suppose today would count as a relatively good day if I actually had time to process such things...

Not really sure if this counts as a meme, since it isn't circulating (yet??) anywhere. But this is the culmination of some ruminating that I was doing recently and it sure seems meme-like, at least in form.

#1) Take your age, in years, and divide by eight.
#2) Round up or down, as appropriate.
#3) Name the top X list of things you are proudest of about yourself, where X is the result from step two. What you are proudest of can be anything: something that you have accomplished, your race, being related to somebody famous, your country... anything! For bonus points, explain why you are proud of each item in the list.

Here is my list:

The Four Thing of Which I am Proudest, by Nomad
#1) My Ph.D. Seemingly simple, this one encompasses a lot. I am proud of having survived the intensity of my first year in graduate school, when all I did was eat, breathe, and sleep physics. I am proud of passing my comprehensive exams with distinction, when I feared I could never pass them at all. I am proud to have worked as a member of the Super-Kamiokande collaboration, including -- but certainly not limited to -- basking in the reflected glory of my collaborator, Koshiba-sensei, when he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics. I am proud to have been first author, out of a collaboration of ~125, on a paper published in Physical Review Letters, the most august journal of our field. And I am proud to have won the 2003 Lee Wilcox Prize for the best experimental dissertation.

#2) My relationship with cheshcat. I am thirty-one years old. In one month and one day, cheshcat and I will celebrate our twelfth anniversary. We have been together for the entirety of my adult life. I know a few other people who have been together from as early an age into their thirties and beyond... but not many. And the things we have endured together in those twelve years! Yet here we are, and still going strong. Less than a month now, too, until she comes back to England to stay.

#3) Being an Anarchist. Shouldn't be too surprising to hear -- it's in my username, right? I am proud to be an Anarchist because I am so disgusted by the current status quo. Everything wrong with the way the world is now... but mirrored about. That's Anarchy. But, even moreso, I am proud to be an Anarchist by the way that I arrived there. When I was as young as eleven, I remember reading the encyclopedia -- which I did regularly as a kid -- and thinking about how to merge the "political freedom" of democracy with the "social equality" of communism. I remember being a misguided twelve year old right-Libertarian, fervently arguing in class debates against government control of business. I didn't know the term "Libertarian" (and certainly not "right-Libertarian") at the time... and neither did my eighth grade history teacher, who saw me as the budding Republican in the class. And it would still be a few more years before I understood that corporate domination is different than government domination... but just as evil. My evolution continued until, in college, I needed a word to describe what I believed... and I chose "Anarchy." At the time, I still suffered from the common delusion equating Anarchists and Nihlists, yet the term also seemed to fit the philosophy that I had worked out for myself. Finally, at the age of twenty-one, angryjim told me: "You're not really an Anarchist; that's just a term you made up." True, but I told him neither of us had ever looked at Anarchist philosophy, so neither of us knew for sure what an Anarchist was. I figured his definition was correct, but I bought a book on Anarchist thought anyway... and was startled to learn that I was actually right. So, yeah, I am proud to have independently re-invented Anarchy.

#4) Surviving my Adolescence. Nearly a decade of depression. Everpresent loneliness and rejection. Trapped in a school that I hated. Inferiority complex. Thrown out of the house more times than I can remember now. Running away from home time and again. Having my mother call the police on me. Being hit by my father -- not often, but still. How I managed to survive without even a serious suicide attempt is beyond me. In retrospect, the number of good times -- and there were plenty, but all isolated islands of fun in a sea of misery -- is a testament to my inherently positive nature. Certainly the darkest period in my life. It coloured my self-outlook for so long that I still thought of myself as being depressed and unstable into my mid-to-late 20s. Until cheshcat mentioned to me one day that I was one of the most mentally balanced people that she knew. That comment startled me as being starkly different than how I thought of myself. So I had to sit back and think about it... and I realized that she was right. At that point, I had been neither depressed nor unstable for quite a number of years... only the labels in my self-impression had remained.

If I had more things to list, there are several runners-up that I would count, like my family-by-choice, my graduation from Hampshire College, my transition from being a carnivore to being a vegetarian, et cetera. But fair's fair -- four is all I get, for now.

Being a physicist, of course, I am trained to think of symmetries and anti-symmetries. So I have also asked myself the question: What four things am I least proud of? I am not going to list the answers here... but I will say that they were all things that happened in a short period of time, generally with no forethought. In contrast, all the things of which I am most proud have taken place over an extended period of years, required large amounts of effort. I think this exemplifies the sort of thing that makes me proud: Accomplishments that I have made by my own choices and efforts over an extended period of time. I am not proud of my gender, my race, my nationality (heck no!), or my relations... or any other quality that I was simply born into.

Anyway, if anybody else chooses to adopt this not-really-a-meme, I would be interested in seeing what y'all decide to brag about. If not, well it wasn't really a meme anyway... just something that I was musing about the other day, looking back on my thirty-one years of life.

...or at least it is in my home time-zone of Chicago. Here, in Malargue, it is nearly midnight.

There isn't all that much to talk about from today, actually. It was a pretty mellow day of rest between the end of the Auger Celebration (yesterday) and the start of the Auger Collaboration meeting (tomorrow). I slept in, I caught up on e-mail, I started reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Things like that. I sat outside for awhile this evening with the book, enjoying the outdoor Springtime air. That was rather nice.

The big news of the day was that I received my first job offer for my next position. Since my current job at Fermilab ends next September, I started job hunting last month. I'm in no rush -- I have over ten months left -- so I have only been applying for jobs that hold a particular interest to me. So far, I have applied for ten positions. Three have requested interviews, which will happen next month. One seems likely to request an interview soon. Three more have not gotten back to me yet; they were for highly competitive prestigious fellowships (at Harvard, Princeton, and Berkeley lab), so I won't be terribly surprised if they never get back to me. Two more -- at the University of Chicago -- were just sent out yesterday, so of course I have not heard from them yet. And one of the applications has become a job offer... without even a request for an interview.

This offer, from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, is from one of my Auger collaborators. His current post-doc is leaving New Mexico to take a tenure-track position at the University of Utah. Since I know the professor who is hiring -- and I know he likes both me and my work -- I had figured that I was highly likely to be offered this job. However, I was expecting to go through the usual process of interviewing for it first. Getting offered the job outright was a bit of a surprise. The New Mexico position is appealing, for several reasons. It would allow me to continue working on the Auger Observatory, where I feel that my work is not nearly done, and it would mean a move back to the SouthWest, which I love. On the other hand, I do not feel ready to leave Chicago yet... especially since cheshcat just moved here in July! So it remains to be seen whether I will take this position. I need a little time to see what other offers I get, cheshcat needs to visit Albuquerque with me, and she and I need to discuss this in detail... both with each other and with anyone else in our extended clan who might consider moving with us. But now that I do have an offer, it means that I can start to ease off on sending out new applications. I had another fourteen job openings that I was planning to apply for; now I will only send out a handful more applications and then stop. Which, in a way, is a relief. The damn things take a long time and are not particularly interesting to put together.

Finally, on a completely unrelated note, I posted a poll in my journal last month, asking about people's high school experiences. Thirty-one people responded to the poll, and I just decided to do a quick numerical analysis of the data. I assigned a number to each of the possible answers to the poll, as follows:

+2 = "Best years of my life!"
+1 = "They were pretty good."
0 = "I got through them okay."
-1 = "They were pretty difficult; I was glad when it was over."
-2 = "Worst years of my life!!!"

0 = "I didn't go to high school"

The numbers were assigned so that a positive number corresponds to a positive high school experience, while a negative number corresponds to a negative experience. Using this scheme, I worked out the mean and the standard deviation for the answers that I received.

The average high school experience of my friends who answered the poll is: -0.74 +/- 1.01.

Not surprisingly, the standard deviation is high because the number of people who responded is small. However, the mean indicates that, by and large, most of the people I know had a negative experience of high school. Actually, this just verified what I already expected. And, for what it is worth, both the mode and the median answer was -1, or "They were pretty difficult; I was glad when it was over." Any statistics geeks in the audience are now free to make sneering remarks about when it is ever appropriate to use the mode...

Coincidentally, just days after my high school blast from the past, cassiopia was showing me some of her high school yearbooks today. I was struck by what a normal and pleasant experience she had had: Clubs and plays and a boyfriend. It all seemed so normal. Quite the contrast from the hell that high school was for me, what with running away from home (twice) and being kicked out of the house (many times!) and having my mother call the police on me and punching a hole in my bedroom wall and being almost continuously depressed and lonely... y'know, things like that.

I was undoubtedly the most colourful character in my high school, but I was certainly not very happy back then. I don't regret it per se, as those experiences shaped me into who I am now. Not in some abstract way, either, but in very direct ways that are obvious to me. Nonetheless, when I was a depressed teenager, I heard many people tell me to cheer up because those were going to be "the best days of my life." What a thing to tell a depressed person! Luckily, I had not believed them -- if I had, I probably would have truly been suicidal with nothing better to look forward to! However, my conversation with cassiopia made me wonder about other people's high school experiences. Which leads to my first LJ poll:

[Poll #591991]

I'll be curious to see the results on this. I have a prediction already (which I won't reveal, to keep the analysis somewhat unbiased) and I am curious to see how closely it resembles the truth.

As noted on my UserInfo page, in the "Schools" field, I attended high school at the Polytechnic Preparatory Country Day School in Brooklyn, New York. Since the title is a mouthful, we generally called it Poly Prep -- or just Poly -- for short. Growing up with a wealthy parent, it should be no surprise that this was a very traditional and conservative college prep school. It should also be no surprise to anyone that knows me that I am not very traditional, very conservatory, or very preppy. As a result, despite being frequently advised that high school would be the best four years of my life, it turns out that -- so far -- high school was probably the worst four years of my life. Okay, to be fair, there were other factors that contributed to my adolescent depression... but a strong dislike of my high school certainly was a contributing factor.

Since graduation, back in 1992, I have been continually bombarded with requests for donations. Hah, fat chance. I regularly donate to Hampshire College, but I have never once sent money to Poly Prep. For awhile, in fact, I used to send back the postage-paid envelopes to them, just to cost them the price of a stamp. Yeah, it's petty, but it was funny and it was a long time ago.

Anyway, each year at Poly Prep, every class would elect its own class president. The president of the senior class would continue as the class president ad infinitum... which basically means that he (or she, though our class prez was a he) gets to lead the effort to cajole money out of his classmates forever and ever, Amen. I did run for class president -- even came my closest ever to committing suicide (not that close, though) when I lost -- but, in retrospect, why the heck would I want such a job?? Last year, I heard that our class president had finally stepped down, after a decade, when his child was born. Two of my other classmates then stepped up to jointly fill the role.

As our new class presidents, they decided to get creative about fundraising. Last year -- their first on the job -- they raided the old photo albums in the yearbook office to find obscure pictures of us all. They enclosed a picture of each of us with the request for money. So, basically, about a year ago I got a letter at my Arizona address (which I had never given to my high school) with a twelve year old picture of me enclosed -- clear from the expression on my face that I did not know I was being photographed at the time -- and a request for money. Sure sounded damn similar to a blackmail letter to me. I kept the picture and also kept my policy of not sending money. And then the entire event faded from memory until last week......

One week ago today, ( I received this letter in my InBox )

I had a couple of reactions to this e-mail. I was amused, to be sure. I was unsurprised that I would be selected as the first profile and that people were universally asking what I was up to. After all, there is no doubt that I was the most colourful character in my high school class... indeed, in the entire school. However, I was still somewhat ego-stroked at the comment. Also, after last year's solicitation -- which mimicked blackmail -- I couldn't help but find them tracking me down and calling me at work to bear some similarity to stalkers. In any case, I knew it was all harmless and wrote back, agreeing to be interviewed.

The interview happened tonight and, wow, was it lots of fun! polymorphism hung out in the office with me and listened as I talked to my two former classmates. We started off dry, with me telling them about my career as a physicist -- going from undergrad to grad school to post-doc, and discussing the 2002 Nobel Prize, the 2003 Lee Wilcox Prize, and more. As an inevitable connection to my career, we talked about my travel, too. Then, somewhere in the conversation, I said something about "my primary partner." That caught their attention. I was asked what I meant and the conversation turned into a discussion about polyamory. I was having great fun explaining this to my old classmates and watching them try to wrap their brains around the concept. Then they asked me about hobbies, giving me the chance to point out that I skydive (occasionally), SCUBA dive (much more regularly), still collect superhero comics, and more. In fact, they asked me to send an "action shot" of me SCUBA or sky diving. We talked about some of the old days at Poly Prep. They asked about some of my memories there and I decided to make public that I had possessed a set of keys to the school's clock tower back in our senior year... and used it as a private clubhouse. Not surprisingly, that impressed them, too -- heck, to some extent, pulling that off still impresses me. But, as I said, I was pretty much the most notable personality in our school back then.

After awhile, the conversation started to wind down and one of my classmates said something along the lines of: "We all figured you would either be some prize winning physicist or would end up making bombs as an Anarchist." polymorphism just about lost it laughing when she heard that. Of course, I had to point out that most Anarchists do not throw bombs, then segue into informing them that I am both Anarchist and physicist. The conversation flared back up, moving onto the topic of politics, as I explained to them what Anarchism is and filled them in on my experiences as an activist in the past few years. Then CM asked if I had ever been arrested, leading to the tale of my experiences at the Republican National Convention last year. Again, I could hear my old classmates hearing about a life very different than that of the typical Poly Prep graduate, and I enjoyed the tone of their reactions.

Finally, we began to wind down for good. They asked me if I could change three things about Poly Prep, what would they be. First, I said I would allow the children of teachers to attend the school tuition-free. It has long bothered me to know that our teachers could not afford to send their own children to get the same education that they were providing. Next, I told them that I would get rid of the grade system, replacing it with one of written evaluations (a la the Montessori elementary school that I attended, as well as Hampshire College). Finally, I couldn't think of anything else off the cuff... so I told them what I knew they wanted to hear: I would abolish the dress code. Back in my day, I was known as a crusader against the dress code, interpreting it in the ridiculous extreme and semi-stripping on stage when I ran for class president. I could tell that they had wanted to hear me say something about the code and, indeed, when I was done, they confirmed it. The last question they had for me was who I had had a secret crush on, way back when. I mentioned Valerie, senior year, though I correctly guessed that this was no great secret. Thinking back further -- since most of my high school romantic interests did not go to Poly Prep -- I came up with Vikki, back in ninth grade. Apparently, I was not alone in this. It seems that virtually all the males in my class had either had a crush on Vikki or Liz at some point. In Vikki's case, there were ongoing discussions about her anatomy as certain parts grew larger and smaller through our years there... with fans of both modes. Being very removed from the main social scene, I had known none of this. However, polymorphism and I were both amused to learn that -- in one regard -- I guess I had been somewhat of a conformist, albeit unknowingly so, in high school.

So, yeah, that's my first real contact with classmates from high school in many, many years. And it went well. I think it was enjoyed on both sides... and I have to admit that it was a big ego-boost. Besides being called "the most brilliant person in our class" (which never hurts), it reminded me that I really do lead an interesting life. Given the cross section of people that I hang out with -- folks far removed from the norm -- I can sometimes forget that, as I am surrounded by people for whom continent hopping (or Nobel prize-winning experiments, or Anarchist demonstrations, or polyamory, or Paganism) is just an ordinary way of life...