baggage

There’s something about bags that gets me. It might be that I have an addiction or fetish, but I think it’s really just that I like to carry stuff, and I’m fascinated with all the different modes and manners in which this can be done. In almost any context, it’s a good bet that I’ll be carrying something on my back or over my shoulder, so I suppose it’s no wonder that I’m excited by containers and compartments, straps and buckles.

Just this weekend I received my new favorite-bag-ever. I just spent an hour loading it with more than I should be carrying, arranging the pens into the back pockets and the laptop into the padded sleeve. The magnetic closures give a delightful clap as the tweed cover drapes the main opening and the two parallel compartments that hold my journal on one side, odds and ends in the other. It stands upright on a squared footprint. Mesh pockets on either side are big enough for my coffee thermos or, as it’s now displaying for me, the collection of plastic test tubes and pipettes that I need to bring back to the classroom. The strap lengthens and tightens with the pull of fob right at my chest. It’s made in a little shop in San Francisco, built to order.

As I write even this much, I realize that I don’t really have the way I’d hoped to express my love for these things. “Look, it has pockets!” I tell you. And you’d rightly point out to me that this feature is just like any of my other bags. The leather satchel I carry around campus; the black lumbar pack* I take on take hikes or skiing; the form fitting backpack I’ll take on longer outings or occasionally to school; the other messenger bags I’ve had over the years; the lightweight backpack for shorter trips or carrying extra gear; the expedition backpack that fits like a glove, even with 60 pounds of food and gear. And there are others I’m forgetting or simply not counting. And even then I’ll still walk through the aisles at a favorite gear store and inspect this year’s new models of daypacks, briefcases, and the like. When we wondered whether to have children I’m not sure that I didn’t factor into the decision the idea that I’d need a new way to carry gear — and I was especially delighted about the backpack that carried the kids themselves. I loved that thing, dearly, and kids could go along on long walks, hikes, and snowshoe outings, secured to my shoulders and hips.

The therapist might find this all to be groundbreaking information. This could all be a peek into my innermost psyche. Why the need to carry so much? Why does he need to delight in finding the right compartments for the odds and ends? What’s the story with all the bags for all the different occasions — couldn’t he use the daypack in lieu of either a messenger bag, briefcase, or smaller lumbar pack? I wish I could tell you that any of this meant something. Perhaps I like the control, the ability to keep things close at hand and securely contained. Maybe I like to displace psychological weight with physical weight. Or, maybe I just love to be able to be so mobile, or to have a different bag for each different identity, or to feel prepared for every possible scenario. Maybe none of these or all of them. Probably, though, I just like bags in the way that someone else likes shoes or yarn or those little pewter things that sit in need of dusting on your shelves. We all have these fetishes. It just so happens that I can carry all of yours within mine.

_____

* “Lumbar pack” is the appropriate name for it. You might call it a “fanny pack,” but this would be entirely inappropriate. Of course, that’s what the rest of my family calls it, even as I carry their snacks and first aide.

models and metaphor

I have a class of science students who, like most science students, have never done any science. This is in spite of the fact that they are in their junior year of a program that is preparing them to teach science to young science students. And so it’s my privileged position to be able to say “let’s do some science.” That is, they get to figure out how to poke at nature a bit and figure out what’s inside. They have to figure out which sticks to do the poking with and upon which bits to do the poking. Today they were presenting their first results, having paired up and found ways to measure various aspects (of their choice) of how little paper copters flutter to the ground.

These mini-projects were outstanding. I made them all name badges and associated them with made up institutions (St. Arnold’s Institute of Fluid Dynamics; Cal State Folsom Prison Campus; East Carolina State University; and other unbelievable locales) and they presented slides with data and graphs and statistics. They even asked each other questions, unwittingly imitating “real” researchers: “I’m not sure if this is so much a question as a comment,” and “You might want to try ____ because in my research ….” I was so proud of how quickly they could pick up not only the methods, but the idiosyncratic tendencies of more seasoned researchers.

It’s struck me, though, that they still see all of this as ways to collect and assemble large collections of data. They find patterns, but they’re still one step away from realizing that their real purpose in all this is to find models. They ultimately should be looking for deeper mechanisms in nature. These are things that are really there, assembled as sets of forces or conservations of energies or minimizations of some other property. In all of the messes of all of the phenomena and all of the data, the “job” of science is to figure out what is underneath it all. We know it’s there, and once we get to that level of understanding we say we can describe the science. The models become the descriptions of what is, and all of the other phenomena of times and positions, flutterings and fallings, are simply the ancillary examples.

This all reminds me that I’m overdue on a chapter I’m supposed to be writing on the topic of “Matter and Energy.” This is another marble on my wood floor.

I was trying to explain how my day went to Karyn when I came up with this “marbles on a wood floor” metaphor. Let it be known to all that this semester is magnitudes more reasonable and manageable than the previous one. But I still have all these things that I made minimal progress on, set aside, or otherwise buried a few months ago. And now they’re still there. They’re all good things, and they aren’t impossible things, but they are scattered all over the place. I wish I could make sense of them and even explain what they’re like. The reality of them is in each individual task, literally scattered across campus in different contexts and embedded in different projects. But that’s too hard to describe, so it was a relief just to be able to describe the non-reality that held the right imagery. There are all these marbles on the wood floor, and while they aren’t actively being spilled anymore, I still have to pick them up, one by one. I kick them around, trip over a few, but mostly just wander around across this wide gym floor as they slowly roll in different directions.

And so, while it wasn’t one of the marbles I am in need of picking up and putting away, I’ve tripped over a nice way to distinguish science from poetry. The reality of science is in the model we can boil it all down to. Other realities are in the multiple details, but they’re easier to explain with the metaphor. Now that I’ve found one, I’m feeling a little better about the tasks at hand. My scientific training suggests a model for which there can only be a finite number of marbles.

the devil

I can’t remember anymore how it came up in the first place, but in the ebb and flow of lab work, one of my students told me that there was talk that I was “the devil.” I wasn’t sure at first how to take this. (Actually, I’m still not sure.) I inquired further.

Since this student was taking her second semester of coursework with me, I at first thought she was referring to her own and her peers’ take on me. This would have been only slightly surprising. After all, I make them do a variety of hell-inspiring things. At that moment, I was making them cut out strips of paper in such a manner so that they could be made to twirl and slightly hover as they fell from the sky. This was supposed to part of a scientific study, and they were further tortured with a vague assortment of string, rulers, and stopwatches.

But she wasn’t talking about her own perspective. She told me that this was the view of another faculty member in my own college. This particularly wrinkled my brow, since I’d just been thinking that I wasn’t aware of anyone on the faculty who is or even should be angry with me. I’d thought of putting this fact on my annual report. Maybe I still can, because she went on to explain that this other anonymous faculty member thinks of me as “the devil” because of an actual fear of me and what I’m up to.

Dear reader, if you don’t know me personally, you should know this: I don’t believe there is anyone on this good Earth who is actually afraid or even intimidated by me. I’m fairly oblivious to my own public persona, but it seems to be a consistent observation that students talk to me freely, skeptical two-year-olds grab onto my leg, and even now as I approach my fortieth birthday I can still be mistaken for a student (at least from a certain distance). My daughters’ cat, the being on this earth which seems to be the most annoyed with me, squints her eyes and tells me to fuck off when I try to pet her — the intimidation is in the opposite direction from what you’d expect of someone who is the antichrist.

According to this student’s account (which I’ll admit could have its own twist, strange interpretation, or losses in translation), the fearful faculty member seems to think I do things that reach beyond the natural world and its limitations. He believes I have more than my share of power, and that I have an aim to take over the college. His statement that I’m “the devil” is not one of anger or of annoyance with me, but of a fear of something that could sweep across the campus with a fiery rage of power. Or something like this. I’m still trying to fill in the blanks and figure it all out.

This would all be fine, but there was another statement relayed to me that really hurt my feelings: this fearful faculty member thought that I was aiming to become the Dean. Honestly, I’d rather be janitor. (After all, that’s the guy with the most power around here.)

mittens

When I was a first grader I wore a light blue coat, three yellow strips on each arm, with blue mittens. The majority of the time I didn’t actually need anything on my hands, but the mittens were permanent fixtures upon each cuff. The safety pins courtesy of my mother kept them there. It’s only now that that I realize the full insult of this, thinking back on the fact that safety pins came into existence and into the house in order to pin diapers, and these had probably been used on me for that very purpose six years prior. As it was, I was distracted enough by my annoyance that the mittens generally just flapped around as extra, useless appendages. My mother forbid me to remove the pins for fear that I’d lose the mittens.

This all flashed back to me while on a run on the snowy trail, decades after my days of standing at a bus stop on a country road. The temperature was well below freezing and the mittens felt necessary as I made my way out the door, but after about a mile I’m ready to let my fingers be free in the cold, dry air. Now a semi-responsible adult, putting my own mittens in my pocket I wonder about the best way to stow them. I don’t have safety pins to keep them secure, but I have an individual pocket on each thigh. The mittens also come with a clip on their back so that they can be attached to one another as a pair. Together, the mittens don’t fit especially well in a single pocket. But I can’t stand the notion of losing one mitten. A single mitten leaves the other hand out in the cold; no one sells a mitten by itself; I can’t stand the notion of underutilizing the clip or any other feature of outdoor gear. Mostly, it is just that mittens, in a pair, are useful. A singular one is as useful as no mittens at all. So I secure them together, hand in hand, and let them squeeze into my right pocket and hold on for the ride.

8th grade rap

I’m not an eighth grade teacher in any regularly scheduled kind of way. I make guest appearances, but the kinds of issues I need to consider with these visits are much different than those of the dedicated junior high school teacher. So, I feel a bit of a fraud when I’m teaching those future teachers or working with those who are already in the classroom. Even though I think I’m doing the right things for these teachers, I disclose freely what my strengths and shortcomings are, and I trust that colleagues are filling in for the gaps in their other courses.

Yesterday I hosted a lab for five different classes of eighth graders. Not the most peaceful epilogue to a semester of classes, but I like doing sound experiments with kids, and I like to have these additional experiences to see if the kinds of things I may preach and teach have any merit at all. I come from a philosophical foundation that “management” of a classroom should be done via the curriculum and getting the students themselves to be engaged with it — rather than creating strict rules that must form the structure of the course first, later making sure the curriculum fits within. I’ve seen Karyn do this successfully, and certainly the classrooms that are the most successful in my estimation have this inherent focus on the students and their responsibility and desire to engage in the material. Surely, there are many many ways that this has been done poorly, too, and so I’m both eager and trepidatious in seeing how well this actually works when I’m the teacher. (There are lots of other variables in any of these cases, so again each one of my experiences is some part of a grant meta analysis of my own practice.)

The visiting group of inner city 13- and 14-year-olds was engaged in different things, most of which had to do with sound and seeing the waveforms of sound show up on a computer screen when they did different things with a microphone. Some of these kids were more interested in beating on each other with meter sticks, and some were interested in seeing how different pieces of equipment could be manipulated to make giant phallic symbols. For the most part, though, they were actually interested and engaged, and I got to enjoy walking around, talking to people about what they were doing, what they were thinking, and only occasionally fixing something that had broken.

One group was particularly enthusiastic, partly in what kinds of waveforms they could make on the screen, and partly on just being themselves. In perfect combination, they started seeing what their rap beats — the spitting and the thumping to simulate the bass and the snare — would do for these waveforms. And then one thing led to another and as I came by they asked, emphatically, “Do you rap?”

“What?”

“Do you rap? You know …” and they launched into laying down a beat.

I don’t remember exactly how I responded, but I somehow said something that was in concert with their backing. But I stopped short, interested in what they were doing with the physics equipment. They protested, asked me to keep going, and as they begged, I made them a deal: “If you can produce this waveform,” pointing to a sample wave I’d drawn on the board, one that would require some weird harmonic that I could only imagine, “then I’ll bust a rap.” I wasn’t really sure what I was saying, nor what I was committing to.

And so the challenge was on. I kept walking by, seeing what they were doing, and each time I was surprised to see that they were still on this mission to create this impossible sound wave. Each time they thought they were close, they asked if it was good enough; and each time I told them that it had to be perfect if it was going to get me to rap. And so they continued.

Imagine my surprise and delight when they did it, and I had to admit that they had done the very thing I challenged them to do, and that I would, in fact, rap. And so it went like this, more or less, as best as I can remember, with appropriate rhythm and syncopation. My art, I should say, transcends the visual medium and is best experienced in the moment. Too bad you weren’t there:

Yo! I am
a scientist
You don’t want
to mess wi’ dis.
With eighth grade
I study sound
We like to
keep it round.

Backing me up, keeping it real, was a table of inner city eighth grade boys, spitting and thumping out the accompaniment. The rest of the physics lab quieted as we got going and gave a rousing round of applause to close out the session. I wasn’t thrilled with the “keep it round” part, and I am sure I don’t even know what that could mean. But I was pleased about my “mess wi’ dis” rhyme with “scientist.” And, I was pleased that in this strange intersection of space and time, I was getting a group of eighth grade boys to do some physics, on their own, the way they wanted to shape it; and my white-boy-self got a chance to rap in the lab. And it was good, in its own, curious, weird way.

And now today I need to fix an invoice and reconcile an account and edit a flier and schedule an event. You can’t be a rapper everyday, I guess. However, just to remind me that this really did happen, I got the following email from the teacher of these physicists, who happened to be a former student of mine. She says:

The whole bus ride home i had students begging me to rap as well as my professor. You are definitely their favorite. Too bad I missed it thanks for all you do

I’m just doing what I do. Keepin’ it round, yo.

gratitude: friends

I have come to realize that I don’t generally have a lot of patience for people. They often make me tired. They talk too much; they’re self involved; they listen to the wrong music; they use too many semicolons; they’re self involved; and they’re redundant. There are very very few I talk to on the phone, and only a few that I converse or write to with any kind of frequency. It’s not that I’m antisocial, it’s just that my energy wanes. I’ve made connections to a few people — the ones I’d backpack or travel with — and I hold onto these relationships dearly.

There are worse things that could have happened to me than a couple of extra commitments during the semester. The greatest of these was an extra class that met fives days a week at 7:30 AM that I was supposed to be just substituting for. This turned into an all-semester commitment. It was better than major surgery, but it wasn’t in my plans, and it took a toll on me. I knew this, but I especially realized it after I’d given the final a week ago and since have spent my mornings greeting my family and seeing them off to school before I left the house.

Today, at lunch with great friends, I was handed an envelope and a conspicuously cylindrical gift wrapped in paper sporting integrals, derivatives, and a few transcendental functions. In one was a gift certificate for a total of 240 minutes of massage; in the other was some of the finest single malt Scotch I’ve ever had the pleasure to sip. I’m touched by the generosity, but even more so by the thought put into this. Not only this, but I suppose I am not always as good at covering frustration and fatigue as well I’d like to think, and it would be easy for others to just look the other way, ignore the grumpy guy in the corner. But instead they give me the best gifts imaginable: carefully aged alcohol and the services of someone to ease tensions.

I’d like to be more articulate about this, but the Scotch is perhaps kicking in a little too well.

On my calendar for tomorrow is an appointment to talk to someone at another university about a position they would like me to consider. I’ve never taken this too seriously — it’s not a good fit for me, I don’t think. More importantly, I haven’t seen any startup packages, even at the senior level, that come with single malt and massages. Nor do other places have the people behind such thoughtfulness.

small, medium, and large

My mom called me Sunday morning to ruin Christmas, per annual tradition. Perhaps that’s overstating it, but it’s more fun than simply describing the fact that she now insists on not just getting ideas from us for gift giving, but specific brands, colors, and sizes. I’d suggested earlier, in an email, that there were a few different jackets I’d like. Here are examples of a couple, complete with links to online catalogs, I’d told her, because she insists on being told exactly what she should get me. I fight it by trying to suggest at least a couple of options, to at least feign a bit of suspense in the whole process. “I like the one with the full zipper,” she told me. Yes, that one is great, I confirmed. But what color, she wanted to know. And what size. I told her I’d be a small. Then there was a pause and the inaudible but clear troubled thought on the other end of the line.

“But the pants I got you are a ‘medium’.” She was perplexed. This isn’t an infrequent event.

In this case, I have to admit that my sizing is perplexing. I have the physique of a slightly elongated dwarf. It turns out that this gene is dominant and in both of my family lines. And so, my inseam and my waist are the same measurement, barely. I buy jeans that are 32×32 and let the slightly too long pants trip me on my heels when I’m not wearing shoes with sufficient height. Just the other day I had Karyn measure my chest (so that I could tell my mother what size jacket I’d like), and when she started to reach under my shirt to make the measurement, I told her that was unnecessary. Besides her hands being cold I thought it wouldn’t hurt to round up on the measurement. And yet, my chest measurement was still roughly the equivalent of a 10-year-old girl’s, slowly tapering towards my narrow, hunched shoulders, useful for twisting my way out of all of those foxholes and crawlspaces I [never] find myself within.

So my pants are a “medium,” my jacket is a “small.” I taper from wide to narrow as you move up my body, but then there’s the issue of my neck and head. You might say I have an hourglass figure, except the neck of said hourglass is not at my waist, but my upper torso, flaring out to the bulbous head that rests comfortably atop my thick neck. Today, I wore a thin sweater, accentuating my thin torso, and, without any collar, also emphasizing the improbable Charlie Brown sized sphere topping off my physique.

I’m sure the new jacket, sized small, and naturally form fitting for running, will make it all the more comical with the combination of size medium pants and size large hat. “Mommy, look at the little man running in the mountains! Is that a real Hobbit?” My private aspiration is that they may make a new category for me in future trail races.

my HP 28S with RPN

I don’t get too terribly attached nor nostalgic about most technology. It’s true that, now having owned an iPhone for a month or so, I can’t see life without it. And, I love the smell of a new computer as it’s unpackaged and the clear plastic is peeled from its perfect plane of glass screen. But I know these items will come and go. Bright and shiny, innovative and invigorating, but in a couple of years some other technology will replace them as I grow weary of what they cannot do, what speeds they cannot attain, what connections they will not make.

But my calculator is altogether different. I bought it, used, in 1990, for $100. It was then, and still is, a bargain. It’s an HP 28S sporting two keypads, four lines on its display, an ability to graph and program. These are all much more than I need; in fact my phone can do much more numerical crunching than this calculator, much faster and with much more to offer in terms of the display. But this calculator offers two things that I can’t upgrade with a newer device. The first is what we call “RPN,” otherwise known as “reverse Polish notation.” If you know what this is, then you care deeply about the feature. If you don’t, then you don’t. Essentially, it means that you punch in the numbers and operations in the reverse order that you’re used to. So, to add 3 to 2 you’d enter 3, then 2, then command the calculator to add. Numbers are retained in the “stack,” the list of numbers that will scroll upwards on the screen as I enter them. You’d never guess it, but this actually makes calculations easier. I resent all other calculators without this feature, but more and more this is nearly impossible to find.

It turns out that you can get a fine RPN calculator for a couple of dollars that will work on the iPhone or another device. I use these regularly, but they still miss the really vital feature of this calculator. It’s the keys themselves. They depress with a very specific and perfect feel, clicking just so. It’s a relatively heavy depression — much more substantial than most computer keyboards and far more than most calculators that I come across. There’s a feel to the calculator, as though you’re doing something substantial. Not burdensome, but not trivial, either. It’s like biting into the perfect fruit. As I finish grading a 5 page exam and need to add the scores of the 5 pages I look forward to pulling out this grand machine so that I can tap in the numbers with that satisfying feel. 25. Enter. 32. Plus. 35. Plus. 14. Plus. 28. Plus. “134” reveals the screen, having summed each number to the compilation already remembered with each “plus”.

Because most things that I do with a calculator nowadays are fairly minor — a cosine here, a sum of some numbers there — I only use a fraction of the abilities of this device. It calculates as fast as I can enter in numbers, and it gives me firm results and response. It’s dependable but obscure. No one will steal it unless they’re looking for an antique or, more likely, they’re looking specifically for an HP 28S. (The price these demand now are the same as what they were 30 years ago.) My students look at it as though it should be hand cranked, or perhaps spit out a roll of paper with a typed transcript of operations. And yet I imagine that I’ll hang on to this device for the duration of my career. I don’t think I can say the same of any other piece of technology.

twelve

Today is Anna’s twelfth birthday.

I don’t know exactly what to do with this. It goes without saying that you only turn twelve once, and this being the case Anna gets all the attention today. We started with bacon and blueberry pancakes to go along with presents. This afternoon we head to the Big City with her violin teacher to pick out the violin that she’s now grown into. We finish with fondue at the restaurant downtown with valet parking and dimmed lighting.

I suggested last night to Anna that it was the last night that I’d be reading stories, since such a practice should end at age twelve. Reading before bed is a tradition that’s been more consistent and enduring for Anna and Grace than it was for me. I don’t know exactly why this is, except for the possible explanation that Karyn and I are simply better parents than my own parents. And yet, I had to be the asshole who facetiously suggested to my dear daughter that her childhood was about to end unless Peter Pan could save her.

To her credit, she didn’t believe me for a moment.

So the lanky, beautiful kid with braces and a training bra still loves to hear a story read out loud, gives her father a hug when she leaves for school, hides the same doll that she’s had since she was an infant under her bedsheets. She loves music and math, dance and literature; she loathes boys (except her younger cousins). I’m fine with all this. I’d lament that this birthday marks the crossing over to an age where all this could change, except this doesn’t seem so evident. We’ll see, next year, when there’s junior high.

For now, Anna’s turning twelve is not about her, but about me. I remember being at age twelve — not just “being twelve,” but the memory of my being at that age. I remember my crushes and jealousies and frustrations and celebrations. And now I’m looking at turning forty in a few months, and I can remember being the kid Anna’s age who witnessed his dad turning forty. And that’s all very weird.

It’s easy to write about the weirdness and the nostalgia in all this. (But more painful to read, no doubt.) It’s harder to express the more important lesson. It’s not the reticence to be getting older, but the comfort I have at least for the moment. Anna has braces, and I have hair growing out of my ears. She’ll get pimples, but I already have wrinkles. Neither of us recognizes the person we see in ourselves, but we recognize the other. In my eyes, she’s both the newborn with strawberry blonde strands of hair, eyes closed, wrapped in a bundle of the taut, crisp hospital blanket. And, she’s the slightly taller and confident woman that’s she’s becoming, that she doesn’t even see yet. To her eyes, I’m the wrinkled, tired, grey haired man, the guy that suggests that childhood must end. And she’s the one she sees right through, facetiousness and callousness and all. She’s happy to listen to me read Peter Pan, practically sitting on the windowsill myself. She’s there to say “I love you” as she leaves for school. I’m glad that she’s one of a few people who can see through me, and that she’s open to me to be seen herself, at age twelve and beyond.

voices of pianos

I just read that my dear friend just had a piano delivered to his door. I picture rain and pads, clouds and ramps, a big truck and scratching of heads about where to put such a thing, how to maneuver it, what else to move. There’s discussion and energy, and all the while the strings of the large wooden box would tend to vibrate, sympathetic both in physics and spirit.

The main chord this struck with me, though, is not the moving of the piano or the newfound social distinction that such ownership affords. Rather, it was my fondness for the sound of an old piano. No, I guess it’s my fondness for the sound of any piano, as well as its feel under fingers. The sound can be sharp and bright, or subtle and muted. It can clang or it can settle in a room like a fog. The keys can bounce or they can sink. Seeing a piano is to me the immediate equivalent of wanting to play it, not just to make a loud sound like a four-year-old might as he walks by, but to get to know another set of keys and strings. For me, the first few notes tell me what the piano wants to play, and we get to know each other.

I don’t mean to be hyperbolic about this, overly anthropomorphic, or even sappy. Let’s be clear: I know that the piano is a box with strings, tightened with wrenches and pounded with mechanical wooden hammers.

But it’s not.

My friend who’s recently picked up her oboe and started playing again probably doesn’t get to grab other people’s oboes and start playing on them. (Or maybe you do? I confess ignorance; I just couldn’t imagine it.) Oboes aren’t just sitting there in the parlor or living room, waiting to be picked up and blown into by any passerby. And thank God that it isn’t. I imagine, though, that if that woodwind were such a public instrument, one would get to experience the differences in sound and feel of each one. On Friday, Anna will get upgraded to a full size violin for her full size person, and in the process she gets to play all the violins on the shelf, to both hear and feel them. Remarkably, they all have a different feel and sound — each their own unique voice. But, again, you only get to here these differences on those rare occasions when there are half a dozen violins sitting on a table in front of you, another dozen on the shelf behind.

Pianos all over the world are waiting, in public, open to be played, strings undamped. I’m happy to hear of one more in New England, and I wonder what it has to say. And now, since I’ve procrastinated a few extra minutes to reflect on this, I think I’ll spare a few more moments to move from this keyboard to another, and converse with the piano sitting here.