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Sprinting to the finish line of my doctoral program
Whether out of nervousness or excitement, I woke up abruptly at 3:45 this morning, ready to face an abundance of plans on this last day before the start of the spring semester. The unexpected interruption of a good night's sleep even allowed me to enjoy an unplanned viewing of the Australian Open men's final, as it unfolded on the other side of the globe. The unseeded French player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga took the first set from Djokovic, and I settled down to follow a match that clearly wouldn't be over in three sets. As the match wore on and both players began to look more exhausted, I boosted my own energy reserves with a breakfast of leftover lentil and potato curry. Meanwhile, Djokovic seemed to have found his groove, winning the championship in a four-set match.
Getting ready for this afternoon's coupon redemption adventure with Raj shouldn't have needed more than a few minutes of packing. Reasoning in this way, I overlooked the fact that my cell phone had very little charge left in its battery. By the time I had parked my bike on campus to unload my supplies in case I ended up crashing in my office tonight, the cell phone charger in my house was essentially irretrievable. With the remaining charge, I jotted down on paper the necessary contact information of the two parties I would meet today, and then left a few frantic voicemails informing them of my predicament.
After a quick lunch in the CSS building, I biked to the West Hyattsville Metro station. I saw the announcement that a train to Branch Avenue would be arriving in one minute, so I dashed up the stairs to the platform. A pleasant ride to the end of the Orange line brought me to Vienna/Fairfax only ten minutes later than the estimated 13:00 arrival time that I relayed to Raj in my voicemail message. As it turned out, he hadn't even checked his voicemail all morning, thanks to a cell phone glitch of his own. Luckily my own phone still carried a slight charge, and we were able to find each other at the Metro station without any further technical trouble.
I took the passenger seat in the front of Raj's car, and we drove to the Fairfax Micro Center. Raj brought along, for return or exchange, the replacement case fan that didn't quite fit his old Dell case. I brought the two coupons for free USB flash drives, without which we might never have decided to undertake this trip together. We entered the store with no specific schedule in mind, but the sight of the long lines on a Sunday afternoon suggested that we might be there for quite a while. Obviously not everyone was there to redeem coupons for free merchandise, but there certainly were a few such people in line when we were ready to check out.
Raj and I browsed the various sections of the store, checking out case fans, video cables and adapters, bargain bin software, and computer books. Micro Center also had a short aisle of movies and music, nowhere near as extensive as that of Best Buy. Nevertheless, Raj was prompted to ask which movies I had seen lately. With so many students away during the winter term, the Hoff theatre had sensibly cut back on its offerings, so movie nights at my house featured DVDs on the computer, VHS tapes on the basement TV, or OnDemand movies through the house subscription to Comcast. Raj's question, however, brought none of those memories to mind, and I began to think about how lucky it was that the semester would soon be starting, and the campus would soon be overflowing with plenty of entertainment options.
Passing the video game display, Raj and I lamented how out-of-practice we had gotten in the years since we played games like Quake, DOOM, and Unreal Tournament more frequently. Even the skills we learned from those relics of an earlier era seemed hopelessly unsuited to the immensely more complex games that other patrons were playing in the store's display. We quickly moved on to the rooms with more serious merchandise, such as laptop bags and programming books.
After searching the aisles of books in vain for a study guide geared toward the Sun Java certification, Raj and I called it quits and got in line to redeem our coupons. Just ahead of us was another pair of shoppers who also had coupons for free USB flash drives. The marketing blitz obviously brought plenty of new and returning customers into the store, but thankfully the supply of flash drives hadn't dried up by the time we got to the register. Raj and I exited into the windy outdoors, each of us richer by one flash drive and at least an hour's worth of conversation.
My father and sister would be arriving in Rosslyn later this evening, so Raj and I still had another hour to spend together in Vienna/Fairfax. I suggested finding a park where we could walk around. Raj remembered one just a few minutes' drive from the shopping center. We were so eager to make the most of our short time together that we got started on the walk before Raj realized that his mom might want to know about the detour we were taking. Once we allayed her concerns with a brief phone conversation, Raj and I began our tour of the park.
Snow and ice covered parts of the trails we took, giving us reason to navigate the terrain more cautiously. A solitary jogger, meanwhile, seemed to have no trouble racing through the ice and snow. He disappeared from sight after passing us and turning round the corner. Raj and I noticed only a few other people throughout the rest of our walk, although none as daring as the solitary jogger.
Although I still had plenty of time before my father and sister would arrive in Rosslyn, the end of our walk through the park provided a natural stopping point for my afternoon reunion with Raj. In total, we had spent about three hours of the day together, recalling shared memories, reflecting on our current endeavors, and enjoying the pleasant winter scenery. Raj dropped me off at the Vienna/Fairfax Metro station, where I waited for the next outbound train to take me to Rosslyn.
Even though the train dropped me off in Rosslyn almost an hour before my father and sister would arrive, I foolishly worked up an appetite by racing up the escalator to street level. In the waning daylight I hoped to be able to locate a decent restaurant where the three of us could eat, but the closest options seemed to be in Georgetown across the Key Bridge. My cell phone had enough of a charge left to let me access my voicemail, which gave me a more precise estimate of how soon my father and sister would get to the hotel. In the remaining time before they showed up, I made my way to Georgetown and took a preliminary look at the restaurants along M Street.
I accompanied my father and sister to their hotel room after they checked in, hoping to borrow a cell phone charger to replenish the battery. After unpacking a few items from our bags, we walked across the bridge to have dinner in Georgetown. Restricting our attention only to the restaurants on M Street, we eventually settled on the Japanese steak house called Benihana. The grilled vegetables, meat, and noodles were pretty tasty, as we expected when ordering meals with names like pollo picante. Our chef put on a good show at the grill, too, providing food and entertainment at the same price that Leopold's would have charged just for the food.
Because I want to help the opening shift at the co-op tomorrow morning, I decided not to spend the night in the hotel. Instead, I rode home on the Metro and slept in my office, on the eve of the first day of spring semester classes.
The hectic pace of the last few days illustrates the way this crazy semester refuses to release its grip and let us transition slowly into the summer months. Last Wednesday I took the train to Philadelphia for a SIAM conference. I woke up before the crack of dawn and biked to the Greenbelt Metro station, from whence I would ride to Union Station and meet the northbound Amtrak train. The conference itself offered stimulating talks and lunchtime conversations, but if an eight-hour round-trip commute is the only way to boost my enthusiasm for the research topic I chose, then I might have gotten into a field where the big contributors and research centers are too decentralized for my liking.
On the train ride home I was getting bored of my Amtrak surroundings, so I hopped off early at New Carrollton, hoping to find a bus that would take me straight to Greenbelt Station. Only a few such buses passed through New Carrollton, and I narrowly missed the one that took a more direct route. I ended up taking a very scenic ride on the T17, which ended its run early and left me stranded at Greenbelt Center. From there I walked to Greenbelt Station, retrieving my bike and riding straight to the co-op for my first bite to eat after an almost five hour return trip.
I spent the next three days on campus, tied up with meetings, exam proctoring, grading, and co-op work. Saturday found me free enough to celebrate Jamie's birthday party at the punk house named Treeswing. Vakil gave me the address and the directions, and I left campus early enough to grade a few stacks of exam papers in the waning daylight hours, by the side of the railroad tracks in Riverdale. At the party, Jamie's friends taught me how to play the board game Carcassonne, which helped us pass the time while waiting for the other dinner guests. When more people arrived, the party spilled over into the living room. Lively conversation and gaming on the Nintendo Wii kept us entertained late into the evening.
Today I'm going to reassemble the exams of my students and finish up the administrative work of my spring semester TA assignment. In the afternoon I'm meeting with Dr. Nochetto to discuss my final project in his finite element class. Then there's a co-op meeting at 18:30, after which I'll try to get a good night's sleep for the first time in almost a week.
Greenpeace has recently slammed Apple for its poor environmental track record. Other computer manufacturers have similarly bad practices, but they aren't as bold as Apple to claim "green production" in their advertising campaigns.
Can we take Greenpeace seriously given the uncompromising extremist positions they advocate? Even some of the founding members have drifted away from the movement as it pushes very unrealistic agenda.
Yet the Greenpeace position might be similar to that espoused by Daniel Quinn in his Ishmael series of didactic fiction. What we call unrealistic is in fact a much older way of viewing our relationship with the world. To label this worldview unrealistic is to fall into the trap of blindly accepting the stories of Mother Culture, which places humans in an antagonistic rather than cooperative relationship with the physical environment. A truly cooperative perspective would recognize that no single species (even our own) should be allowed to let its desires subordinate the needs of other cohabitants of the planet. We may compete to the full extent of our abilities, but to take from the planet more than we need to survive is to establish an unstable relationship with the resources that sustain us.
The capitalist dictum "grow or die" can only emerge from a mindset that views the world as the rightful property of humankind, intended for us to shape and exploit as we see fit.
As was the case last semester, the pace of work and meetings seemed only to quicken as the winter break drew nearer. Luckily I had built up a reserve of positive memories by filling the Thanksgiving break with as much relaxation and productivity as I could manage, starting with a movie night in my office on Wednesday, November 26. I camped out in the co-op on Wednesday night, so that the following morning I could pack my bag with just enough fresh groceries to cook some vegan stuffing at my house, using up the jalapeno cornbread that wasn't flying off the shelves as quickly as I had hoped. Thursday and Friday I celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday by myself, even though Whitney had invited me to a dinner party at her group house in D.C. I watched the first two Peter Jackson film versions of the Lord of the Rings those two nights, postponing the final installment until just before Christmas. The rest of the Thanksgiving break I spent alternating between co-op work and thesis writing.
The following weekend I had a bunch of exams to grade (not yet the final, just the fourth in-class exam), for which I was grateful to have someone covering my Friday closing shift at the co-op. To celebrate the rapid progress with which the exam grading seemed to be going, I went birthday bar-hopping on Saturday night with Zach, Vanessa, Franz, and Rayhan, all of whom I met through the co-op. One of the strangest scenes from that night was of me sitting in a dimly-lit room full of drinking and billiards, trying to grade yet another stack of papers from Friday's exam. I eventually got too drained by the atmosphere to continue with the subsequent birthday adventures, so I said goodbye and rode back on the Metro alone, arriving at the Greenbelt station around 1 a.m.
I would have one week reprieve before the stress of final exam proctoring and grading, so I tried to make it as enjoyable as I could. Rather than hold extra office hours on Tuesday afternoon, I rode the bus to Greenbelt and checked out some CDs and a craft book. That weekend I bought some felt at Jo-Ann fabrics, which I then used to make a fabric menorah as my holiday present to Joseph, the co-op worker whose name I picked randomly for the "Secret Seitan" gift exchange.
Monday, December 15, was the date of the final exam. I ended up spending a total of three hours in the exam room, arriving early by one hour to allow some DSS students their extended time. The subsequent meeting to distribute papers and grading rubrics took shorter than expected, so I was able to meet with Dio that afternoon to share some calculations and get advice on how to proceed. Between the co-op meeting Monday night and the reassembly of final exam papers Wednesday morning, I graded one of the lengthiest problems on the exam. To accompany this time-consuming task, I fed some baking yeast with flour and water, under the assumption that fermentation of bread dough was as slow a process as grading exams. That assumption turned out to be correct; I finished grading the last of the exams just as the risen dough was about to go into the oven, around 3 a.m.
Since that first experiment with a new recipe, I've gone back to practice that bread recipe twice now. The results are so tasty that two loaves don't even last a full week; I'm typically down to my last few slices by the fifth day. Of course, if I had a full selection of tasty vegan food to choose from (as I do when the co-op is open for regular hours), I might not consume the home-made bread so quickly.
Ricardo's former post-doc Andrea was in town for two weeks, starting on the first day of final exams. Dio and I met with them several times once the final exams were done, and we finally worked out a mutually acceptable version of the paper we've been talking about submitting for over a year now. The results are pretty unprecedented; I hope this paper manages to satisfy the curiosity of the people we've been talking to about our work.
I kicked off the winter break with another string of movie nights, starting with Milk, which I saw on Saturday, December 20, with Vakil at E Street Cinema. We originally wanted to catch the 21:30 screening, but it sold out before Vakil and I arrived. So we hung out at Barnes & Noble for an hour, returning to watch the 22:40 screening. I wasn't too tired to stay awake and enjoy the film, having been out late the night before at Jimmy Cooney and Lily Hamburger's "Bing in the New Year" party. I would have preferred to get home to bed earlier, but now that the regular semester schedule was behind us, I was willing to put off bedtime and enjoy a nice documentary about recent history.
The following nights I watched Finding Neverland, No Country For Old Men, and Return of the King. During the days I spent some time on campus, some time on long walks, and some time just resting from all the excitement of being free to explore what has practically turned into a ghost town.
For Christmas dinner I joined Vakil at his parents' house in White Oak. I brought cornbread and a bottle of sparkling cider; Vakil brought a quinoa salad made with coarsely chopped vegetables. I bet if he hadn't lost track of time, the vegetables would have been chopped more finely. It was still a tasty side dish, light and nutritious to complement the rich lasagna and savory Thai soup. We had a pleasant conversation about some things spiritual, some things political, and some things related to alternative energy. Vakil's dad drove us and our bikes back to the Silver Spring Metro station, helping us avoid whatever accidents we might have invited upon ourselves by biking after dark on one of the nights most infamous for heavy drinking.
Two days later, I had just finished baking another batch of bread in the co-op oven when I went outside and realized what a beautiful day it had become. I got on the phone and invited Vakil to play tennis, even offering to bike to his place in D.C. We met just after 15:00 at the tennis courts behind the Brookland Elementary School. Less than an hour of exercise was good enough for both of us; his ankle was starting to show signs of stress again, and my own legs were tired from having biked to the District with a heavy backpack weighing down on my shoulders. To lighten some of the load, I invited Vakil to share a few slices of the fresh-baked bread. We had a small supper at his apartment, with bread and hummus complemented by home fries straight from his oven.
Yesterday I returned to the co-op to clean up some of the mess I had left in my hurry to meet Vakil while there was still enough daylight for tennis. I also brought home some of the refrigerated items that couldn't have come with me to D.C. on Saturday. I spent the afternoon and evening racing through the closing chapters of Richard Patterson's crime novel, The Final Judgment. My reading adventure was interrupted only by lunch and dinner, a nap around 15:00 to rest my eyes, an aborted attempt to watch a DVD whose unflattering appearance on a small laptop screen couldn't sustain my interest, a minor burst of spontaneous furniture rearrangement, and brief pauses at the computer to check email and change the background music.
On this date n years ago: