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Hitting the reset button and finding new sources of inspiration
Excerpts from "Conquering Your Quarterlife Crisis: Advice from Twentysomethings Who Have Been There and Survived", by Alexandra Robbins
After speaking to thousands of twentysomethings in the past few years, I've found that the people who get through their Quarterlife Crisis quickly and relatively painlessly all have one thing in common: their attitude. They haven't placed some matrix of age-related deadlines over their lives. Instead, they view their 20s like a journey. These are the people who, instead of saying, "I'm going to be a lawyer by the time I'm 26," will take a step back from their lives, maybe to work in another country or take a nonchallenging job while they think things through, really just taking some time off from the fast-track path that too many of us are intent on catapulting toward immediately after school. These are the people who understand that there's no rush. (Robbins pp. 44-45)
No experience is a waste, unless you refuse to learn something from it. Learning what you don't want to do at least narrows down the multitude of endless options that can seem so daunting. Figuring out what you don't like is just as important as figuring out what you do. (Robbins p. 126)
"You know you should go to graduate school when you have a plan for exactly what you want to get out of it and what you want to do after you finish. Going into graduate school without a five- to ten-year agenda is like rafting the Colorado River without a paddle." (Trey Sampson, quoted on p. 126)
Take-home lessons from the conference on Thin Film and Crystal Growth Mechanisms
The conference at Mount Holyoke introduced me to an amazingly diverse group of scientists working with ordered structures. Their investigations take place under several distinct contexts and with a variety of applications motivating their work. Despite the discrepancies among their methods, the multiple communities represented at the conference managed to share their ongoing research so that even non-specialists could benefit from the majority of the talks and posters.
One of the major divisions among the conference participants is reflected in the conference name itself (which came up for review during Thursday's business meeting, but survived the popular vote when competing with two other suggested names). This conference attracts people from two broad research areas: the thin film community, for whom the interesting crystals have a layered structure; and the crystal growth community, which focuses on the formation of fully three-dimensional crystals in solution. This year's conference chair, Peter Vekilov, arranged for the first session of talks to reach out to both communities, with a broad overview of nanotechnology presented by Ellen Williams, and a discussion of current debates among crystal growth researchers presented by Alexander Chernov. Subsequent sessions focused more narrowly on either thin films or formation of three-dimensional crystals.
Within the community of crystal growth researchers, the focus of investigation is further narrowed according to the motivating application area, or the preferred analytical techniques. My first acquaintance at the conference, Dragan Nikic, works with solutions of protein crystals and therefore had to wait several days before the session topics aligned more closely with his background. I did not have to wait nearly as long to attend talks very closely related to my work on evolution of crystal surfaces. The session on Monday morning ended with two excellent talks on that topic, with rigorous results and concise explanations of the relevant mathematical techniques.
As an example of this rigorous approach to crystal surface evolution, Vesselin Tonchev described an innovative method for determining the approximate behavior of step-step interaction equations, using experimentally observable quantities and scaling laws. I found this discussion interesting, especially since the step-step interaction equation used in recent work has not yet been given adequate justification. Tonchev's method, however, does not seem to provide more than the leading-order term in the expression for forces between steps, so it can confirm our currently postulated relation but cannot offer improvements to include weaker physical interactions. I would be interested in seeing if similar scaling law arguments could shed light on the nature of long-range interactions among steps, or whether the dominance of nearest-neighbor interactions prohibits any such conclusions from experimentally observable quantities.
Some crystal growth researchers did not appreciate the usefulness of continuum methods, especially when their computing capabilities enable them to simulate surface evolution by keeping track of every molecule. Kristin Fichthorn and her group, for example, routinely employ molecular dynamics simulations to supplement their experimental work, and they shy away from taking continuum limits out of concern that interactions at the atomic level might be lost in the process. Biased as I already am in favor of continuum methods and the qualitative predictions they facilitate, I would like to understand more fully the objections of the molecular dynamics people and see whether their doubts are justified.
Subsequent sessions began to feature fewer theorists and greater emphasis on experimental work, and the thin film community finally saw more of their research discussed in the talks. Giovanni Constantini of the Max Planck Institut (Stuttgart) explained lucidly the appearance of quantum dots during strained epitaxial growth, in which a substrate and a deposition material with different lattice parameters are grown in layers, transitioning between several regular patterns throughout the deposition process. John Venables continued this theme with his talk on visualization of deposition and annealing processes, and from the subsequent discussion I learned to distinguish between the elastic strain of heteroepitaxy and the strain induced by surface defects (which includes the step system in my current project).
The deceptive similarity between terrace diffusion and the island deposition described by Venables kept me busy in the days after his talk, trying to fit an incompatible theory of elastic strain into the system of step-flow equations. In an attempt to salvage this effort, I suggested that we apply shell theory as a model of the steps that would permit easier calculation of the elastic strain, but it turns out that shells would behave quite differently from steps, and only the latter system has been verified against experimental results. Because the underlying physics is completely different in a stacked-disk model, shell theory would fail to reveal any useful information about the evolution of crystal surfaces. Nevertheless, there might be an interesting experimental system that does correspond to a stack of disks with time-dependent radii, and I would like to pursue the analogy further before dismissing it entirely. Illustrating the danger of dismissing a model because of non-physical assumptions, the zero-range processes that were mentioned during lunch have been found to capture the behavior of certain step systems, even though their starting assumptions make no mention of step-step interactions or even the geometry of the crystal surface. I would therefore like to study zero-range processes and understand under which experimental regimes they provide useful predictions.
Yesterday I met up with my dad for the second time during his week-long visit to the D.C. area. Last Sunday night we were only able to have a late dinner and then crash in his hotel room, but yesterday we had the luxury of spending an entire afternoon hanging out downtown. I looked up showtimes for the Bourne Ultimatum, finding one late enough that my dad wouldn't have to rush from his meetings, and early enough that he would still make it to the airport on time. After the movie we walked through the National Portrait Gallery to work up an appetite for dinner. Although reluctant to follow my recommendation at first, my dad left the museum with a greater appreciation of the value of portraits as a medium for conveying historical perspective.
For dinner we ate at a restaurant in Chinatown. We were seated near the window with a good view of a street vendor advertising his paintings. The artist packed up and moved on during our meal, but as we exited the restaurant we noticed him attracting customers in a new location.
At the Gallery Place/Chinatown Metro station, we waited together on the platform for our respective trains. The southbound train to the airport came first, so I said goodbye and remained on the platform for the next Green Line train. I rode only as far as West Hyattsville, taking advantage of the remaining daylight to enjoy a leisurely walk back to campus. I stopped briefly at the public library to drop off a book that I had just finished.
A number of tasks were now forced to fit into the half-day between my return from D.C. and the farewell party for Dave Bourne today at 11:00. Chalking the sidewalks to advertise the Maryland Food Co-op would have to wait for daylight. The bucket of sidewalk chalk, however, would either need to come home with me, or at least be transferred from its temporary home in the CSS building to a more convenient place. In the meantime, my bike still remained locked at the Greenbelt Metro station, and I wasn't sure how safe it would be to leave it there overnight. I decided to move the sidewalk chalk to a new temporary home in the math building, leaving in its company my backpack and other items of which I would rather not be robbed as I walked back to Fox Street.
Starting my day early with hardly enough sleep, I fetched my bike from the Metro station and then rode to the math building to pick up the sidewalk chalk and other articles left behind overnight. I walked around McKeldin Mall and South Campus to find suitable locations for a co-op advertising campaign. Returning students and their parents sometimes paused to read the chalk messages, but for the most part I attracted little attention from the trickle of pedestrians who passed by. When I thought the advertisements looked adequately distributed, I brought back the bucket of chalk to the co-op and biked to the Paint Branch Community Park, where preparations for Dave Bourne's farewell party were already underway.
Apparently if you want to hold a barbecue lunch in the Paint Branch Community Park during the summer, you ought to get there at the crack of dawn to claim a space for your group. The organizers of this little math party made sure to arrive early, but not in time to grab one of the most popular barbecue spots. Without the shade provided by dense trees and a sprawling tent, we tried as best we could to stay cool on one of the hottest days this summer. Everyone contributed so much food that we had to fill two cars with leftovers at the end of our half-day in the park. Unfortunately we lacked enough water to keep ourselves hydrated during the meal, so one of the drivers volunteered to buy some gallons of water from the nearest convenience store. Even that additional water didn't seem to be enough, as we exhausted ourselves playing tennis and volleyball in the blazing heat of mid-day.
Too tired and too stuffed even to consider biking back to Fox Street, I got a ride home with Dave. I took a shower to wash off the sweat and sand from the exercise in the park. Lastly, an hour-long nap starting at 16:00 helped offset the sleep debt I had accumulated over the past two days. Although it was still light out when I woke up from the nap, I decided to postpone until tomorrow the long walk to the park to pick up my bike.
Excerpts from "Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning" by George Monbiot
[A]sking wealthy people in the rich nations to act to prevent climate change means asking them to give up many of the things they value - their high-performance cars, their flights to Tuscany and Thailand and Florida - for the benefit of other people.
The problem is compounded by the fact that the connection between cause and effect seems so improbable. By turning on the lights, filling the kettle, taking the children to school, driving to the shops, we are condemning other people to death. We never chose to do this. We do not see ourselves as killers. We perform these acts without passion or intent.
Many of those things we have understood to be good - even morally necessary - must also now be seen as bad. Perhaps the most intractable cause of global warming is 'love miles': the distance you must travel to visit friends and partners and relatives on the other side of the planet. The world could be destroyed by love. (p. 22)
[P]olitical parties in most rich nations ... know that we want tough targets, but that we also want those targets to be missed. They know that we will grumble about their failure to curb climate change, but that we will not take to the streets. They know that nobody ever rioted for austerity. (pp. 41--42)
NASCO Institute 2007
On Thursday evening, eleven members of the Maryland Food Collective piled into two minivans and set out on a road trip to Ann Arbor, Michigan. For many of them it would be their first time attending the NASCO Institute. The co-op veterans who had made the trip in previous years had some idea of what to expect. Even with the benefit of their experience, however, we all had plenty of learning and networking opportunities this weekend. There would hardly be a dull moment from the time we left until the time we came back, even throughout the excruciatingly long interstate car rides.
After nine hours on the highway, we pulled up to the pair of co-op houses that would host us for the next few days. The driveway had space for only one of our minivans, so the other one had to be parked about a block away. We entered through the unlocked front door and set up camp in the spacious basement lounge. (It didn't seem so spacious once every last square inch of the floor was covered with sleeping bags.) Even those of us who slept in the minivans still appreciated the additional sleep afforded by our warm basement room.
Friday registration wouldn't start until 11:00, so we had plenty of time to sleep in if we wanted to. A few of us, though, couldn't wait to start soaking up all the cooperative vibes of the community. These early birds went next door to eat breakfast with our hosts from the pair of houses called Mich and Minnie's. Although we had been warned by Institute veterans about NASCO's emphasis on housing co-ops, it was the encounter with the kitchen and living room next door that gave some of us our first contact with the world of a housing co-op. My first reaction when entering the kitchen was awkwardness at being near food preparation without a hat. Then I remembered that I rarely wore a hat in my own house kitchen. Apart from the scale of the Michigan House kitchen (which featured industrial-size appliances of the sort you never see in private residences), the location of our breakfast was functionally the same as any other house kitchen, and the rules about food preparation were correspondingly loose, from a health-code point of view.
Despite its spartan appearance, the kitchen clearly followed cohesive organizing principles, which failed to emerge spontaneously in even the most amicable of shared housing arrangements I had previously observed in person. The labels on the shelves of bulk foods, the signs on the dish rack and refrigerator, even the relative cleanliness of the stove, all bore witness to a consistent effort on the part of the housing co-op members to maintain order in the common spaces. I hope that bringing such practices back to my home in Maryland won't meet with too much resistance from my laid-back housemates. In the meantime, it's satisfying to note that community spirit and respect for public spaces are motivators just as strong as the business factors that compel our collective to run an efficient and clean kitchen.
Nick cooked us some oatmeal for breakfast, and we also had the option of toast with various spreads and toppings. We sat around in the living room and introduced ourselves to some of the Michigan House residents. Later we moved outside to hear Nick play his banjo on the porch.
When a critical mass of people was ready to trek to the registration table, we left the ICC houses and walked into university-owned territory, specifically the Michigan Union. I was rather impressed by the stately architecture of the university buildings. Even the student union looked dignified and historic, in contrast to the continually-renovated building that currently licenses its space to the Maryland Food Collective. Inside the Michigan Union we picked up our Institute folders, with a complete schedule of courses, maps of the town, and a guide to local restaurants.
Having registered for this weekend's Institute, we went out to explore the town. Some of us spent the afternoon browsing through record stores, while others walked to the People's Food Co-op to check out their selection of groceries and hot specials. Thanks to modern cell phone technology, we were all able to reconvene at the People's Food Co-op and share with each other our first impressions of the town.
Dinner on Friday was provided by our hosts in Michigan House. They cooked us a delicious meal with plenty of vegan options. We enjoyed good conversation with our neighbors at the table, telling them where we came from and what we hoped to learn more about as the weekend proceeded.
We returned to the Michigan Union after dinner, eagerly anticipating the vegan cake that would accompany the NASCO welcome and anniversary celebration. Sitting around in the coffee house for this welcoming event, we got a chance to mingle with Institute attendees from other co-ops. A few of us were adventurous enough to find out what was going on at the Anarchists' Caucus, during one of the three caucus blocks that purported to offer an official outlet for the voices of underrepresented groups at NASCO. Other Maryland Food co-opers stayed in the coffee house to socialize and savor the free desserts.
At 21:00 the Documentary Film Festival drew a few of us upstairs to the Kuenzel Room, where we were treated to the story of a recently established housing co-op in the Nickel City neighborhood of Buffalo. The exuberant tone of success and good luck didn't sit well with movie-goers who appreciate a multi-faceted narrative and good character development. Even an inspirational documentary ought to make some attempt to hook the viewer's attention with some semblance of conflict and hardship. Franz and I ended up leaving less than twenty minutes into the film.
I crashed into bed early on Friday night, but nearly everyone else went out to a dance party at another ICC co-op. Word has it that the dance party was a lot of fun. With all the interesting people here in Ann Arbor, I bet their social gatherings offer a bit more variety than the uninspired frat parties we see in College Park.
Saturday's schedule allowed most Institute participants a leisurely morning to rest up after a late night of partying. The representatives for the Annual General Meeting (AGM) had no such luxury. Since I was well-rested and eager to start my first full day at Institute, I offered to join Susan at the AGM. The discussion introduced everyone to NASCO and its services, along with the people who could help deliver those resources. Most prominent among those services are the financial support mechanisms that help start fledgling co-ops, both through property acquisition and skills development. Then the current Active Member Representative (AMR) talked about her soon-to-be-vacated position, which would be up for grabs to anyone who got nominated before the evening banquet. The latter part of the meeting gave AGM reps a chance to make suggestions on the direction that NASCO would take in the near future. I decided to bail out before the AGM concluded, in order to secure a seat at the first course block.
This course attracted a broad cross-section of socially-conscious folks, some of whom also had the opportunity to go on Friday's tour of Detroit. The guests of honor were grassroots organizers from Detroit itself, but they came slightly late due to traffic. While waiting for them, we tried to reconstruct from collective memory the past several decades of Detroit history. With this rough outline posted on the wall to frame the subsequent discussion, we continued with a slide show of several community-building efforts in the city, including a collectively-owned bike shop, an alternative public school for pregnant teens and mothers, and a hang-out for local youth that offers activities more constructive than joining gangs and dealing drugs. There wasn't enough time to have a decent group discussion on any of the questions that these vignettes raised. At least we got a look at the positive side of a city that news reports often depict as a lost cause.
Author and social activist Andrea Smith gave this year's keynote address to an energized audience in the Michigan Union Ballroom. She shared an inspiring vision of self-reliant social justice movements, raising resources and capital from the target communities rather than government grants channeled through nonprofit organizations. She peppered her speech with liberal doses of humor and hyperbole, which kept even the most sleep-deprived members of the audience on the edge of their seat in rapt attention.
In this course I hoped to gain perspectives that would be useful in my work at the Maryland Food Collective. The focus of the course and the lessons I took home from it, however, could hardly be more different. Many of the people attending the course had specific goals in mind, along the lines of starting a cooperatively-run business. The course facilitator, Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo, used those ideas as a starting point for her general advice about business plans and recruiting co-workers. Then we split up into small groups, roughly corresponding to field of interest. Each small group brain-stormed to come up with concrete ideas about the worker-owned business that its members were interested in developing. At the end of the brain-storming session, we shared the results of our discussions with the larger group.
What struck me about the subsequent discussion was the variety of business ventures represented by such a small class. I heard ideas about a cooperative endeavor for providing health-care, an artist collective where housing and supplies would be shared in common, a worker-owned bike shop, a school owned and run by the teachers, and an urban farming community. The obstacles in starting any of these businesses would be immense, but the energy in the room was palpable and more than ready to tackle the logistical challenges. I imagine that such an enthusiasm must have guided the founders of our own collective. We at the Maryland Food Collective ought to be thankful for the opportunity to reap the benefits of their labors, which spared us at least some of the growing pains associated with starting a co-op from scratch. We can't reap as easily the benefits of personal growth that such a trailblazing effort would have fostered, but we can still try to honor their memory with a firm commitment to the ideals embodied by our socially-conscious, health-minded food store.
The registration fee entitled all participants to two catered meals this weekend, including Saturday's banquet in the Michigan Union Ballroom. I shared a table with Vakil, Joel, and some co-opers whom Joel had known before moving to D.C. The meal comprised two courses: a mixed green salad, which was ready at the table almost as soon as we found a seat, and our choice between vegan acorn squash and chicken with sage and lemon sauce. While waiting for the hot course to be served, we listened to the speeches of the AMR nominees. Some of the better-represented co-ops had enough members to form a cheering section for their candidate. The volume of the cheering section was not always correlated with the quality of the candidate's ideas. I had a hard time deciding which candidate would make the best AMR, considering how eerily similar many of their statements sounded. I trusted Susan to make a well-informed choice at the Sunday AGM, so I ended up paying more attention to the delicious food than to the candidates' speeches.
Continuing the theme of worker-owned businesses, I attended Jimmy and Joseph's course on Sunday morning. The other co-ops represented by the course participants included Earth Foods, a student-run restaurant at Amherst, MA, and a housing co-op from Austin, TX. After introducing ourselves briefly, we listened to the story of the Maryland Food Collective, as told by Jimmy and Joseph. Questions that arose during the narrative sparked lines of discussion on issues of political monoculture, respect for differing worldviews within a diverse campus community, and collective liability for individual actions. In small groups we shared more details about our respective co-ops. The Earth Foods ex-worker provided a good example of another food service-oriented business model. We listened attentively as she explained the operation of the restaurant, especially the smooth transition between shifts despite the accommodations that must be made for students' schedules.
I wasn't initially planning to attend this course, but the overcrowding at the course on cooperative learning led me and Nick to leave that room and join the course on trans allyship. I felt a bit awkward as one of the few participants in the room with little exposure to life outside the traditional gender roles. The discomfort never really passed, but it got easier to handle once we formed small groups and addressed specific case studies. A list of hypothetical scenarios got us started on a fruitful discussion of overt gender discrimination, both in the workplace and in shared living quarters. After hearing the trans perspective and that of other marginalized groups, I felt a bit overwhelmed. I think a suitable analogy would be the process of adjusting to a new pair of glasses, in which the world seems out of joint even though focus has improved.
For my final course, I decided to hear Vakil's presentation on archiving co-op records. The classroom was pretty packed, with representatives from various co-ops across the country. Vakil shared some general advice about starting an archival project, and then he opened the floor for participants' questions. During the first half of the presentation, I learned about the hostile environments and chemical reactions that gradually destroy written and photographic records. Vakil offered suggestions for slowing down or halting this gradual decay, such as transferring written records to acid-free paper, and storing photos in a dark, dry environment. He also gave a practical overview of the labeling and categorization tasks that every archivist has to face.
One of the participants raised a question about digital storage during the second half of the presentation. Vakil echoed the prevailing wisdom that proprietary file formats endanger the recovery of digitally-stored data, and the best options for long-term storage are the traditional analog media, either archive-grade paper or microfilm.
Institute came to a close on Sunday afternoon. Vakil's course finished early enough for us to walk back to Minnie's and start loading our stuff into the van. We parked the van closer to the Michigan Union and then joined the rest of the Maryland group in the coffee house. There we savored the emotions of a protracted farewell to our new friends and acquaintances.
Most of us were eager to partake in the long-delayed meal we had planned to eat at the local Indian restaurant known as the Earthen Jar. Unfortunately, none of us had bothered to check that it would in fact be open on Sunday night. As it turned out, we were forced to abandon our plan for Indian food, because Earthen Jar was closed, and the nearest other Indian restaurant had too long a wait for a party of ten. After a painful process of negotiation, we eventually ate at the Jerusalem Garden. Comparison of their cooking with our version of Middle-Eastern foods showed us how much we could improve. The service was excellent as well, especially since a botched order provided us with a free pita sandwich. Perhaps the most enlightening part of this last meal in Ann Arbor was the demonstration that productive conversation among co-op members could take place in a more casual environment than the floor of our store. We shared our reflections on the Institute and used our collective brainpower to sort through the jungle of ideas that the weekend had forced us to navigate.