october, 2002

Tue Oct 1 17:29:45 EDT 2002

beep-beep ... beep ... beep

Mark enters the Robot Lab, where I'm reading Kernighan & Ritchie for good measure, and where Sean and Yoshi are geeking, bearing a case of Yuengling for Yoshi. It's broken into and four bottles are spirited away to the fridge downstairs to chill for 15 minutes.

Yesterday I took Abby up on her standing offer of a nap on her extra bed in her Wharton single. A very Alyssa-like aesthetic, purple velvet on the extra bed and pictures on the spare walls, I fell asleep and dreamed vividly of November. Woke up warm and as sleepy as I am now to DJ Shadow and came refreshed back to the robot lab.

Sleep doesn't seem to matter at nine in the morning, drinking a randomly perfect cup of Lady Grey while perusing the paper with Claire in Kohlberg. Andrew and I were evolving dinosaur ecosystems until two last night, at which point I called Keith, who took me out to Tom Jones for the carrot cake I'd been craving for the past four hours. Up again at eight, my hair falling down all around my hips (I looked in the mirror and was surprised at how long it's gotten), I showered and went up to the coffee bar for the morning ritual. Grey skies and geese flying overhead, the dewdamp lasting for the whole morning and early afternoon, it is a oversize-sweater day, perfect for my current heavy state of my eyelids.

I have an inordinate number of midterms coming up Thursday, but it doesn't actually matter, because I'll be prepared. Misery poker annoys me more and more each day -- we all have work; we all like it; that's why we're here -- and I enjoy spending my time in the robot lab (where they're buying me ergonomic keyboards!), coding until halfway to dawn, and then eating cake through the other half. I'm very happy that I decided not to beat myself over the head with the Watson and Fulbright push -- Amelia's prof refused to write her a recommendation to the former, calling the whole thing glorified dilettantism. Especially if this Zürcher translation school is only a few hundred per semester, I'm there.

Fri Oct 4 13:45:56 EDT 2002

Yesterday I took Abby up on her standing offer of a nap on her extra bed in her Wharton single. A very Alyssa-like aesthetic, purple velvet on extra bed and pictures on the spare walls, I fell asleep and dreamed vividly of November. Woke up warm and as sleepy as I am now to DJ Shadow and came refreshed back to the robot lab.

Sleep doesn't seem to matter at nine in the morning, drinking a randomly perfect cup of Lady Grey while perusing the paper with Claire in Kohlberg. Andrew and I were evolving dinosaur ecosystems until two last night, at which point I called Keith, who took me out to Tom Jones for the carrot cake I'd been craving for the past four hours. Up again at eight, my hair falling down all around my hips (I looked in the mirror and was surprised at how long it's gotten), I showered and went up to the coffee bar for the morning ritual. Grey skies and geese flying overhead, the dewdamp lasting for the whole morning and early afternoon, it is a oversize-sweater day, perfect for my current heavy state of my eyelids.

I have an inordinate number of midterms coming up Thursday, but it doesn't actually matter, because I'll be prepared. Misery poker annoys me more and more each day -- we all have work; we all like it; that's why we're here -- and I enjoy spending my time in the robot lab (where they're buying me ergonomic keyboards!), coding until halfway to dawn, and then eating cake through the other half. I'm very happy that I decided not to beat myself over the head with the Watson and Fulbright push -- Amelia's prof refused to write her a recommendation to the former, calling the whole thing glorified dilettantism. Especially if this Zürcher translation school is only a few hundred per semester, I'm there.

Lunch, time crunched as usual between the jaws of syntax and java, wouldn't have been half as exciting if Abram (F) hadn't given me part of a pomegranate his mother sent him for his 21st birthday. He and the table of guys who line their rooms with aluminum foil to protect their brainwaves from the aliens were at a window-lit booth, the detritus of the meal littered with red translucent seeds. It didn't matter what Sharples was or wasn't serving, or how many midterms I have impending on Thursday (three), because I ate enough seeds to keep it winter for years.

Perfect timing, in a Persephonian way, as October has finally become cold enough for me to wear my leather MaNGo jacket.

Tue Oct 15 17:52:31 EDT 2002

Martin's been quoting enough Oscar Wilde at me recently that I've been all but obligated to take The Picture of Dorian Gray out of McCabe and curl up with it in my newly cozified, bepostered, and berugged red and purple nook of a bed corner, pillows sprouting all over its head and Bach tacked up at its foot. Darjeeling (the sugar cubes return, two lumps per -- Claire's influence, I think, as recent asceticism or something had cut my sugar intake down to one) and cream; NPR and music alternately on the clock radio on my new nightstand (née WaWa crates and purple lapa). It's exactly what I had been wanting, this witty English prose between two hard covers and on top of a big purple one -- that and that which Madhur Jaffrey yesterday told me was called salabat, ginger-infused tea, to cure my cold -- so much so that last night I almost asked to borrow Peter's copy of Pride and Prejudice, when I was over in Wallingford making vegetarian-epicurean carrot soup and chocolate mousse with pomegranate seeds. I must have eaten too many of the latter, mixed in with the thick chocolate soup, as the temperatures have plummeted just a little too severely, the skies grayed a few degrees too much. October is overcorrecting for its weak entrance ... either that or I need to lay off the pomegranates.

Thu Oct 17 21:45:37 EDT 2002

I hate having time to think. These endless, structureless days are bearable if I wake up in the mornings, but sleeping in to sleep off a cold makes me feel like I waste half my day. Minimal coding might be accomplished (konane!), and the paper read and tea drunk, or more Oscar Wilde -- all of which are lovely, but which also afford so much free brain space. I still have duedates, deadlines, and projects that should be occupying my brain and to which I should be allotting my free time, but the classless days are a wash of boredom, entertainment where I can get it, and way, way too much thought.

None of this is to imply that I'm not amusing myself thoroughly this break. Fanjul, Chuck, and Wayne abducted me for an afternoon and evening of gustatoric satisfaction on Sunday; Lisa had me and Oliver over last night to her place in Philly, where she fed us not only a great dinner, but homemade Sachetorte to rival the real thing (I need the Kaffeehaus Cookbook!). I swooned and made many loud noises and pretended I was back in posh Viennese hotel cafés eating cake and drinking melanges after the opera.

And it is just that which is occupying my thoughts, and consequently my brain, right now -- next year. While still thirsting after chef school in Paris, wanting to apprentice myself to a luthier yadda yadda, I actually now have a plan. None of this fellowship application crunch I was feeling a month and some ago (or this summer, for that matter) -- none of this pre-programmed, going through American universities bullshit. No, like Martin's been telling me for years I should do (and turns out that, on this as on so many other things I didn't give him credit for at the time, he was right all along), I'm going straight through my own devices. Moving to Zürich, enrolling for four years to translate languages, and taking things into my own hands.

I have too many questions about it right now, though ... I am still unsure of living costs, how I can work in Switzerland, the apartment situation (ahem), what kind of degree they offer, and the exact degree of proficiency that they require for admission. Some of these will be answered in November, in just over two weeks. I can't stop thinking about it, and that's half because I have so much time to think, which (have I mentioned yet?), I hate. The others will be answered through research, visa applications, persistence, tenacity, and a little belligerence. I believe I can make this happen, but it will take so much willpower on so many fronts. And I want Swat to start back up again, to fill my head with sentence trees, papers, Hawaiian-checkers-playing agents, and teaching robots to walk, so I can just sit out the remaining time until November.

Sat Oct 19 22:38:15 EDT 2002

Nigella Lawson seems to imply I can have it all. I'm not so sure she's right. Her kind of omnipotence is precisely that which I love, and that which drives me to do way more than I should. Be a domestic goddess, she urges, and even writes a how-to on the subject. Domestic, not in the sense that you must stay home barefoot in the kitchen, but merely relating to the domicile; goddess, in that you can not only look like her posing on the back cover, cook like her (and hey, write for the New York Times, too?), but that you need not fa solomente casalinga to do this, stay in as the Hausfrau, but can lead your normal life and dazzle your friends with your culinary wizardry.

This immediately sounds like dangerous thinking. Who is this woman implying all these things with just one book-title and mascaraed dustjacket shot? The kind of girl I was raised to be does not stand full-lippedly pouting in the kitchen, spouting insidious untruths!

... but in fact, I think she does. Today I made scones, offering up hot pastry and tea to Claire and Alyssa for breakfast. I went to the robot lab, and discussed and coded particle filters with a whole slew of robot boys, writing ultimately not so much code but agreeing upon useful abstractions. I then procured a pastry brush, went to the CRC for Paul's middle-eastern dinner, and spent the next three hours clarifying butter, chopping walnuts, layering phyllo dough, and melting sugar and rose water into the most heavenly baqlawa I (or anyone else there) had ever eaten. Scones and baqlawa in one day -- I think that's pretty damn domestically divine; what with the particle filters, I'm feeling well-rounded.

This is exactly the kind of thinking that gets me into trouble regularly. My friends know me as a good cook and a geek, and I like to cultivate those perceptions. One thing they have not known me as recently, however, is a violist. Not playing this semester, I've realized how much time it's freed up, and how good it is to be able to focus on my academics, to do Swarthmore as a student, and not triple- and quadruple-layered, bits of walnut and syrup falling off as I try to hold the whole pastry together and simultaneously bite it. But what fun is a single-layer dessert, a Swattie with only one life, and no additional passions? As much as I've been on top of my work, and feeling like I belong here academically in ways that I yet hadn't, I miss not only music, but being known as the violist. It's whole bits of my usual identity I'm missing, and I feel like that makes me less of a person because of it.

I'm still working this out. It's difficult, as I want to continue this good, comfortable academic streak (and major in something useful while I'm at it), but I don't want to give up who I've thought I was to do it. I also don't want to lose the music, just because it's becoming readily apparent that to do it here and now is biting off more than anyone can realistically chew. (Eddie Izzard presentes the conundrum pretty clearly: Cake or death?) We will see where this goes ... I'm not relinquishing anything yet, but I might be persuaded to settle for one piece of cake at a time.

Sun Oct 27 12:29:42 EST 2002

It's a beautiful day out, and even though my new shoes haven't come yet (Claire and I drove down to Dansko outlet last weekend, but it was closed, so I did what I should have done to begin with and looked on ebay), I've spent the past few days chilling with friends, Andrea dropping by from Oberlin; Claire breaking out the red wine at Sharples, arranging to have an existential crisis over dinner with Tony about music in two weeks, dancing at a Paces party (bad, undanceable music, but good friends and fun) despite and unhappy foot -- I can now walk! or at least I can without the boot, and so am overdoing it by going out and dancing -- running into Fanjul and Greg down from New York, a six-pack in hand, and introducing them to Mark and Sean and the lovely pachyderm, and then watching Chris climb up my walls; then in the morning, gloriously stuffing myself at Java Joe's, fresh squeezed orange juice, with a coffee table hefted up the stairs, delivered straight to my door as I stepped out of the shower, having woken up to morning sunlight and an extra hour to play with on Sunday. The leaves are orange finally, my red shoes will be here tomorrow, and the yellow-clad boy comes on Saturday.

Tue Oct 29 16:15:43 EST 2002

Despite biting my lip all through class this morning as the prof in Econ 1 described Micro$oft as as monopoly ("no close substitutes"), parts were interesting -- namely, the brief mention of game theory. I have no particular love for the asinine examples the book cites, nor their tone (Lieberman & Hall's audience is apparently retarded fourth-grade monkeys), but I can't help but smile when topics in my classes overlap. Granted, the prisoner's dilemma is not particularly high-level game theory, but we've been using algorithms based on that idea to inform our konane-playing agents in AI these past few weeks.

Syntax and Java, too, much as the latter is infuriatingly haphazard and much as I hate the language, have similarly superficial overlaps, this time in the form of binary trees. Representing sentences or nodes in a data structure, the same formal system is at work. The confluences are still there, as they were between Math 9 and CS22, Semantics and CS21, Morphology and music theory, and many pairs of my classes over these past three or four years.

Which is infuriating. Despite how interesting it all is, I'm more and more frustrated with the growing realization that this is, in fact, a general liberal arts education. In June 2003, with a Swarthmore B.A. in my hand, I will know a little about a lot -- a certified dilettante. And that's the worst kind ("Drink deep or taste not the Pieriean spring ...").

I'm frustrated, in part, that I couldn't have gotten my shit together sooner, and put together a cross-disciplinary triple-major in one. But I'm fully cognizant that that couldn't have happened. Having all but given up on math during the first few weeks of my freshman year, I could have only gotten interested anew in the algorithms of CS after having met Martin and running Linux -- it was all in the timing, and that is now water under the bridge.

But what makes it all the more frustrating is the knowledge that that might not have been possible at undergrad, anyhow. I will come out of here versed breadthwise, not depthwise. I will know enough about many things in order to be able to get a very decent job in any one of them, or many other completely non-related things, for that matter. But I haven't taken the time to specialize (like some of the CS majors I know); I haven't gone honors in any one discipline and learned more than just the requirements for the major; I won't really know anything.

If I want this, I well might have to do grad school ... and the ultimate frustration is, I don't know what I would want to study.

(This is, of course, Motivation Number One behind taking a year or multiple years off between now and whatever academic happens next. Time to be away from Swat, as Tony noted in response to the existential crisis I was having during Olivia's recital, will be a huge boon. I'm forcing myself to wait another four days to begin thinking about next year, however, and that's its own can of worms.)