A Weblog

Alex visited yesterday and today while en route to New Jersey while en route to Costa Rica. He arrived just in time for me to’ve recovered from my high school reunion, and he came with, of all things, beer, wine, and trail mix.

Teymour completed his summer role as resident den mother — cooked us dinner, and got silly drunk. To Star Wars Episode VI, of course. It’s just not a Saturday if I’m not having a home-cooked meal and drinks to Star Wars at the Business School, after all. The BBQ pork sandwich was fantastic.

After lapsing into French, and demanding that Tey “�tait certainement ivre,” we headed outside to Weeks bridge with some charcoal, newsprint, and matches. It was windy and we ran out of matches. Soon thereafter we sprinted from, what I believe was, a taxi cab.

This morning, and well into the afternoon, Alex and I helped Teymour pack up and move out. When I returned home, I noticed that Alex had left a boogey board in my room. This may give me sufficient impetus to return to Chatham some weekend to catch the surf.

But this weekend I’m off to western Massachusetts with the family to marvel at the fast planes or whatever it is they have at an air show.

I write, however, not really to mention any of this. Instead, I’d like to speak briefly on cranberries. You see, the trail mix Alex left with me contains lots of cranberries. That’s great. Massachusetts is the cranberry center of the world. Its juice is our state drink [at least according to Ian from Wednesday; but he's a local and locals never lie, at least not to other locals, and certainly not about important matters such as cranberries.]

If only it were Thanksgiving or Christmas, I’d make a mean cranberry chutney right here and now. Until then, I’ll finish off the trail mix before going to the movies with Michelle and Tracy in an attempt to avoid this heat and my math.

I just came back from my high school reunion. And, while the cruise was intolerably bad, the bar we went to afterward was reasonably good. Tim and Tim and Ryan and Ryan were there.

TJ told me he works at Grendel’s and has recognized me. I should go back on Wednesdays and Saturdays. [That's tomorrow!]

Joe Piccardi nearly fought strangers. After that, I ran into squash all-stars Ryan and Blumberg. Felix drove me home and was a saint about it.

Lindsey and I danced and it was weird and satisfying. Kaplan danced with everyone else and it was funny and awesome.

Joanna and I are going to be better friends; she works to keep the Harvard endowment big. Her boyfriend is nice and works at Legal’s, though I’m sure he doesn’t know Abby or Tracy.

Allie J. emailed to offer me an iron before all this; Senovio, too. I made fun of su novio, and electronically cuddled Allie, misspelling her name and telling her about Ryan “Trini[dad]” and Blumberg, whom I called Dumbledorff, though I’ve never read Harry Potter.

Earlier, I found a mistake in the MTEL example exam for field 09, mathematics and wrote the State and Susannah and Michelle to alert them.

Just now I found some Lay’s potato chips. In all, life is good. I’ll try to ellucidate in the morning. Slack should be back from Nantucket by then, and we’ll drink some and he’ll give me food. Everyone takes care of me. Tim bought me drinks and Kaplan was going to cover my cover, if there was a cover, but there’s not.

And Sarah called from Sydney. And Stevie from Cambridge.

I’m mad at Liz for not coming, but it was her birthday, and I wouldn’t come either.

But still, Lay’s potato chips. Come. On.

This morning I met with Sullivan, a rising fourth grader and son to one of the staff members of Leverett. His mother is worried that Sullivan’s understanding of fractions isn’t strong enough. It’s not suprising. Fractions are hard. I didn’t learn fractions until I was already in the fourth grade. And here he is, the summer before — well, he’s practically a third grader still. And it’d be surprising if a third grader fully understood fourth grade concepts. In fact, it’d be unnatural, preternatural, some-natural but not plain old vanilla natural.

Anyway, I agreed to meet with him for an hour today in the library at 11 am. By 11:30 he could add and subtract fractions with the same denominator symbolically and give a geometric explanation as to what those symbols actually mean. It was interesting to watch him. Every once in a while, he inverted numerator and denominator, which formally is just as good as the convention everyone else uses. Sullivan would get the same answers that we would, just upside down. This was great! I knew he understood what was going on. He just knew it upside-down. But that’s completely unimportant. The orientation is human invention, an artifact of the notation. But rather than let this habbit go much further, I suggested he comply with convention [for his good. I'm not sure his teachers would appreciate his throrough mastery for what it was if it were in an unfamiliar form].

Eventually I asked him what “three out of four plus two out of four” is. He very quickly told me that it was “five out of four” without much thought. He had applied the rules, and what the consequence of his answer hadn’t quite struck him. Then the follow-up, what does it mean to have five things out of four? He thought a while, and lo! Sullivan developed a theory of mixed numbers for me, guided by the principle that four things out of four things is one whole thing itself. By 11:53 am — I checked — he could convert improper fractions to mixed numbers based on an algorithm he had developed himself. Again, there was a little trouble with notation. He always got the integer part correct. And he always found the correct numerator, though sometimes he put it in the denominator, he something came up with an incorrect denominator, which he very consistently put on the numerator when he made this mistake. He very naturally, I think, carried the numerator from the improper fraction to the numerator of the fractional part of his mixed number. Again, I believe this is a weakness of the notation — not Sullivan. Because of the information he supplied, and correctly 19 times out of 20 — 8+6=14, not 12 — it was clear that he understands the rules.

More to that. For fractions like, 10/2 he gave an answer of “5 and 0/2.” Most impressive, at least to me, was that he did this instinctively. His inclusion of 0/2 shows me that he carried the entire algorithm to its conclusion each time, which means he was using an algorithm, which means that Sullivan is a metacognitve genius. I was very excited to explain all this to his mother, but we discussed radiation poisoning with Sullivan instead.

The algorithmic, symbolic nature of arithmetic makes it a very unnatural, abstract, and terrible introduction to math; mostly because it isn’t math. It’s computer science.

But Sullivan triumphed all that. “He’s a good man, and thorough.”

Last night Liz and I went jewelry shopping. Yes, it is a big step. But the necklace wasn’t for either of us. It was for her work-mom Carole as a you’re-going-to-another-part-of-the-hospital gift. Carole isn’t sick; she took another job. After scouring Quincy Market, we went back to the MFA to buy the pearl pendant necklace we had picked out the first time around.

After that we went to the Union Oyster House for, what else, drambouie. Oysters and chowder, too. Liz had ordered a shot of tequila, to mourn, but I confused the waitress and we both got drambouie. Then Liz and I confused ourselves, taking the waitress’s lead, and shot it like tequila despite its being served in snifters. To be fair, drambouie, being in the whiskey family, is usually served in large shot glasses.

We wandered around a bit more until we happened upon Kitty O’Shea’s, which was lucky. I didn’t know it at the time, but what I needed was a good corned beef and cabbage dinner. We were drawn in by the large number of large screens playing Scottish soccer. Verena called during dinner to check in from her particle party in Craigville and confirmed that Aberdeen versus the Rangers was a good game, indeed. Neither Liz nor I could definitively say which team was which and we waffled back and forth as dinner went on.

After dinner, it was time to go shopping for pants, which, to some, is just as serious as shopping for jewelry. But as before, they were a gift. Liz’s live-in boyfriend has one pair of functional pants. Consequently, he wears them to work daily. This, I am told, is disgusting. So, it was off to the GAP to hunt down a pair of 31 by 30 men’s slacks — which, mind you, is no easy task. Inspired by the bad suit coats there, I dragged Liz downstairs to the Banana Republic, where I tried on each of their suitcoats, some several times, and, again, thought that a job at D.E. Shaw might support my business casual habbits.

Since the stores were closing, and I didn’t want to read math, I asked Liz back to Cambridge for some ice cream, courtesy the Summer School, and beer, leftover weeks ago from Caitlin’s twenty-first. Because we were buzzed, and because deep-down inside we both might just be teachers, we decided to take the English and History MTEL practice exams. We scored a 90% on each, but we decided to call them 95% because we had convinced each other that the right answer was wrong even though he initial chose right. So that counts for half. And we wouldn’t teach under the influence. Promise.

Tonight is the high school reunion harbor cruise. I can only hope that it’s as fun as the MTEL.

[I wrote this Wednesday, August 17, but only just remembered to post it to the home page.]

Teymour and our summer friend Sarah finished the last of their finals today. To celebrate we went to — no, I did not suggest that we go to — Grendel’s for dinner and drinks. About an earlier, I ran into Sarah in the courtyard before heading to dinner myself. It was nice to run into her again, even if it was planned this time.

Before stepping into Bertucci’s for my first dinner, I overheard the following conversation on Brattle Street:

Boy 1: “Is water a polar molecule?”
Boy 2: “Yeah.”
Girl: [taunting] [Something repetitive although I don't remember what.]

It made me smile.

Even before our dinner encounters I ran into Sarah in the courtyard. She and I both stopped to double-take the boy playing what I think is a didgeridoo — one of those long, wooden tubes that makes a characteristically aboriginal droning. That made me smile, too.

Fast forward to Grendel’s. Teymour and Sarah had invited their summer school friend Ian who is not to be confused with our term-time friend, Teymour’s roommate, Ian. This one lives on Brattle Street. He told me that I smack of New England; he even called me “perfectly Cambridge,” but that I had justified myself — I was explaining that New York, Boston-Cambridge, and London were approximately the same; that Paris was distinctly different in its feel, that it was more relaxed; and that I preferred Boston-Cambridge to them all — in a way he hadn’t heard before and that I liked it. It was perfectly Cambridge. I told him that I had six years to practice.

He also made me feel better about applying to Duke. Ian is about to start his fourth year there and promises that it’s not Southern, but that I could find a BBQ place if I looked for it.

I just read the admissions statistics for Yale’s Math department for the class entering 2004. Of the 139 applicants, only five were accepted into the program. That’s an admission rate of less than four percent.

Gasp.

Time for an update. On Sunday, Marion, Yan, and I trucked down to the Tweeter Center to see the Backstreet Boys on the Never Gone tour. As I’ve been telling people who’ve asked, I felt either too old or not old enough. Due to the weather, they closed the lawn and pushed everyone underneath the canopy. It was difficult, but I manage not to graze arms with the fourteen year old girls to my side. My neck and back were slightly strained as a result but are better now.

The crowd cheered, loudly, at unpredictable moments. Two patterns did emerge, however. Each time AJ sang, the crowd screamed, perhaps to continuously congratulate his laying off the coke for the past three and a half years. They acted similarly whenever Nick sang, perhaps because he was drunk. For being twenty-five he looks old. Also, he had accumulated enough sweat to warrant what the kids on the street call “swass” by the end of the first song. Oh, Nick, for shame.

Being with Marion and Yan at a Backstreet Boys concert was surreal. Even the car ride down was something of a trip. These are the sorts who, upon learning that Brian and Kevin were to be married (not to each other), they were excused from class to the library to cry. (This is anecdotal Yan, not Marion, though her dedication is equally complete.)

I spent Monday recovering at Paul’s, playing with his daughter Grace and chatting with Ellen. John Ardry and I headed over for lunch and stayed through dinner. I usually take Rte. 1. As Paul usually takes 93, I tried my hand at it, too. Neither John nor I knew the way, and as Paul had conveniently washed his cell phone with the laundry earlier that day, we had no real way of asking for directions. An hour later, we found the place.

The eats were good. Nothing less should be expected. Paul and Ellen pride themselves on their food. Well, perhaps that isn’t so. I pride them on their food. And I’m very appreciative for their hospitality. I left with a plate of meat and a bag of baked goods. Remind me to divie them up with John. [I left everything in my car last night in order to get to seminar less late; I was really late nonetheless. Sorry, Ian.]

Meanwhile, Sunday, before the concert, Verena was back in Cambridge after her European tour just in time to go on a particle physcists’ from the Northeast retreat on the Cape. She just called after day two. I’m glad I’m applying to math graduate school and not physics. We don’t program too much, so at least we won’t have to compete based on that.

I would like to go to the Cape, though. Instead I’m heading over to Jamaica Plain with Michelle. Maybe I’ll hijack her to Eastham afterward.

Yesterday the heat was unbearable. Reading was an athletic event, otherwise why would I be sweating so much? Rather than battle the heat, I decided to do what anyone in my position would do: run and hide. So I called up Teymour and asked very flatly, “Can I use you for your air conditioning? I want to come over, set up camp, do math, and not talk to you.”

He remarked that there were worse ways to be used, and that, conveniently he was leaving to study somewhere else, so the appartment would be mine. I rushed over with two backpacks stuffed full with books and a laptop. Ian and Caitlin both answered the door. She was on her way out, but only to fetch her laptop and to return. She didn’t have air conditioning, either.

Teymour left, as promised. Ian and Caitlin kept me company, however. The three of us working on our indvidiual pursuits, periodically breaking the silence to play some Polish rap or sign up for the GREs. Eventually, we gave up long enough to make dinner.

Caitlin oversees what’s being made and by whom. So I sit on the couch and write emails while Ian preheats the over and Caitlin strongly urges me to take a glass of wine. How could I refuse?

We sat at the kitchen table to eat, as the entire living room was still hosting our computers and my library of books. And it happened. We had skirted around it before. But last night someone said it. I can’t remember who. It could’ve been any of us, really. But the point is someone said it.

“We should all pick a grad school and go there together.”

Someone was bound to say it. We had been warming up to the idea all day. We each threw around comments like, “This is so nice. I feel so academic.” “This is what grad school must feel like.” You get the idea.

I opted for UChicago. They wanted Berkeley or Stanford. I want snow. None of us really has any say in any of this, any how.

We finished dinner with some port from Portugal aged five years, which Ian had given to Caitlin for her recent birthday. Even though my birthday isn’t until December, Ian said it was still close enough to hers for me to have a glass. So I did.

We sipped to Star Wars Episode 6. I finished up a section of my thesis and sent in what I have of the chapter as my tutorial paper at just about the same time as the Rebel forces overcame the Empire.

Maybe there’s something to that.

Yesterday I stopped by the office after my morning swim — I’m taking today off. My left arm needs some time to rest; the usually 500 yard crawl warm-up has been replaced by a full 1000 yards, and that leaves me sleepy-tired. Naturally, Paul was there, and when he heard me rustling through the mail, he called me up to the office. “What are you up to today?” I stared at him a full second for effect. “Math.”

“Can you do math here?” This caught me a little off guard. Next, I figured he’d ask to cuddle. But he didn’t. Instead, he asked and I agreed to watch the office a while, while he stayed. He had intentions, though. Gym intentions. It was nice out, and the office is a slow place with good air conditioning. It only made sense that I should stay there while he went on the treadmill for a few minutes.

But before he left, Paul has bet me, or his brother, or someone — the matter isn’t entirely resolved — to lose twenty pounds before his October 13 birthday.

“How much do you think I weigh?” he asked. Always a dangerous question. I was immediately reminded of that time at cross country practice when my coach asked how old he was. I still tense up just thinking about it. “Uh, I don’t know, 220?”

Paul is a tall man. His old roommate called him big bird. His blond hair and montrous stature do not belie the nickname. “Two twenty,” he said, almost disgusted. He looked down at the scale and then turn to me. “How much do you weigh?”

Since I compulsively weigh myself after each swim, and since I had just swum, I could rattle of my stats stat. “One fifty-five.” “What does that scale say?” Yes, we keep a scale in the office. I’m not sure where it came from. I’m not sure anyone’s sure. But it’s there and Paul was standing on it.

“Two fifty-two.” So I was off, but then again, I’m no good at these things. I didn’t mention just how tall I think Paul is, because I know I’d be wrong. In my mind, he’s just under giant. So that puts him between six-two and nine feet. “Do you think so? No. Read it again.”

It was a game, glad we both understand the rules. “I’m pretty sure it says two hundred fifty-two.”

“No, how about now. Stand directly over it.” So he was going to win. That’s fine. I’m not a sore loser.

“Okay, it says two fifty-four.” “Right,” he asnwer satisfied at having won. “I don’t want to lose twenty pounds and have you claim that I only lost sixteen.” He’s smart. He’s right. Now I can’t do it. But why would I, anyway? I’m still not convinced we’re even betting.

Yesterday I left my perch over the Charles to meet Michelle at Downtown Crossing to do one of my more favorite things. While she searched for bed linen, I modelled suitcoats. After swimming I was sure to switch from my Caltech tee into a club-appropriate CK white oxford. My taste, even at Filene’s Basement, is just slightly beyond my financial reach. The coats I selected were $400 and up.

Perhaps I should respond to those D.E. Shaw Group emails with subject headings “From the D.E. Shaw group on the recommendation of your peers.” Again, I’d like to thank Minhua for his recommendation. Then I could afford the suitcoats. I’d probably even be obliged to wear them. But then there’s that pesky living in New York and working for a living thing and not getting a PhD.

While this happened a while, I never found an opportunity to mention it. Abbe doesn’t want a diamond engagement ring. She says she doesn’t want to contribute to “the market of the concept of the diamond” because the stone has led to so much bloodshed in Africa. Now, if you’re my mother, you only read “Abbe” and “engagement” and you might even be crying right now. In fact, it took me a while to decide whether to repeat the words. And as they’re set apart in quotes, you’re even more likely to pick those out and ignore the rest. So, I’d like to take this space to make certain that Abbe and I are not engaged. Nor will we be. I’m sorry mom, and possibly Abbe’s mom. She’s moving to New York to work. Wait a second, maybe she could buy me suitcoats.