To San Francisco, Part 2

It was pouring rain by the time I made the short trek down to the American falls. It felt good to do a little bit of walking around, after the sedentary past few days. I took a few pictures, then reluctantly hopped back into the car again. I stopped and chatted with a gas station clerk on my way out of town. She was in her mid-thirties, and had that tough-as-leather outdoorsy look, but was pretty enough for all that. She assured me that it was not usually this cold or this rainy up here.

"My first time up here," I confided in her, as if my nearly incandescent aura of 'tourist' was not already blinding her. I asked her if she liked living here.

She smiled. "Well, I feel like I've got the best of both worlds," she told me. She spoke with a touch of the northern Minnesooouta accent, but it was very subtle. "I live in the city and camp in the country."

I told her I had just come up from the Falls, and she told me all about the really cool things you can do at the Falls that I'd had no idea about: they shine lights on them at night, which is supposedly pretty incredible, and you can take a little ship down to the base of the falls, and it seems like you're brushing right up against the edge of the water.

"Well, I'm headed out today, so I guess I won't have the chance to do that," I said.

She smiled again. "Maybe next time you come by."

Well, who knows? Maybe someday.

The drive across the border into Canada was hassle-free (I celebrated July 4th by leaving the country...I'm so patriotic!), and I made good time along the QEW (which, I'm told, stands for Queen Elizabeth Way...the Canadian equivalent of the Interstate) across lower Ontario. It was grey and rainy outside, and I hadn't planned to do anything in Canada except cut across it, so the only time I stopped was for a brief snack at a very lonely convenience store about halfway across. I bought a sandwich, a small bottle of maple syrup for my brother, and possibly the best yogurt I've ever had. It was fresh, and had nuts and fruit in it. It tasted like heaven.



I got stopped by customs at the border. The border guard looked at my car, packed full of all my belongings, with a suspicious eye. He stared at my passport for a while. He was a thick-set, thick-witted man with close-set, squinty eyes.

He peered at me, frowning. "You Greek?" he demanded.

"Um..." I wasn't sure what to make of his question. "I'm a quarter Greek. My grandpa was Greek."

He scowled. "Oh."

After another couple of minutes of hostile squinting directed alternately at my car and my passport, during which I wondered why U.S. customs was so much slower and more irritating than their Canadian counterparts, he told me they'd need to inspect my car. "Just a random check," he assured me, unhelpfully, and I stopped my car and went inside the inspection post. The customs official who ended up looking through my car was a good-natured older guy from Mobile, Alabama, and he seemed delighted when he discovered I was from Georgia. He left to rummage through my belongings.

When he came back, he handed me my keys with a smirk. "Nice machete," he remarked, grinning.

I left, and made it the rest of the way to Detroit without further incident. I noticed that there are 'INJURE OR KILL A HIGHWAY WORKER - $7500 FINE AND 15 YEARS' signs posted all over the Michigan freeways, which seems a little draconian. I wonder if that even applies if it's just an accident. After a bit of confusion with the strange road numbering system there (am I on 12 mile road? or 13 mile road?), I pulled up to James's tall, skinny townhouse in Novi, a boring, upper-middle-class-ish suburb of Detroit.

Brats, burgers, and miscellaneous grilling sundries in hand, me, James, and James's roommate Jason drove over to the park to grill out for July 4th. We were hauling out all the stuff when James announced that we'd forgotten no less than 10 different things. When we got back, we all stood awkwardly around the grill and it dawned on us that none of us knew what in the hell we were doing.

"I've been having some trouble keeping the coals lit," Jason was saying, poking at the weakly smouldering coals.

Neither of us knew what to do about that, so Jason continued, "But I did use to be sort of a pyro, so..." He smiled and sprayed lighter fluid all over the coals, grinning a manic grin as they burst into flames.

James looked skeptical. "Are you supposed to use that much lighter fluid?"

"I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to," I volunteered, watching with concern as Jason continued to drench the coals in lighter fluid with a big, vaguely disturbing smile on his face.

In the end, James and I swallowed our pride and went over to ask nearby July 4th revelers how to keep the fire going. A highly competent old Russian man who spoke almost no English deftly got our coals going and showed us how to do it. Afterward, we went over to the lake to watch the fireworks. I don't think I've ever a body of water that size that calm before, or fireworks that lame before. We decided we'd either missed the big show (which didn't make sense), or that Novi just had really low standards for fireworks.



James had the whole week of July 4th off, so the three of us spent the next five (I think it was five) days pretty much just lazing around. I got very familiar with James's (wonderful) couch, and took many a nap. We ate. We chilled. We went over to Ann Arbor and saw Transformers with James's friend Paris. We watched 10,000 episodes of Man vs Wild (Bear Grylls is my new hero, incidentally). I actually went running, twice! After so much time sitting around in the car, this was a real godsend. One night, we went Irish pubbing at a local place. I had a blast watching a woman who was at least 55 years old ruthlessly hit on Jason. James, of course, had 1 drink and turned bright red right away.



I stayed in Novi at least a couple days longer than I'd intended to. I kept figuring I'd leave the next day, and, after all, when was I going to get to hang out with my little brother again, anyway? San Francisco's a long way from Atlanta.

On Sunday, I pushed off for Aunt Ellen's place in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I had mixed feelings about the day I was planning to spend there. I was looking forward to seeing my cousins again, but, on the other hand, this was my last 'stop-and-see-somebody' excursion before heading out to the outdoors portion of my trip. I got caught in a massive traffic jam on I-80, near Chicago, and didn't end up getting to Eau Claire until about 3 in the morning.

En route, about 10 different times, I was just a hair's breadth away from stopping and getting a motel for the night. But I kept figuring, it's not THAT much farther, I really don't want to stay at a motel, etc. etc., so I'd stock up on caffeine and sugar and set off into the pitch black again. One great way to keep yourself awake, I discovered, is to open your window, play your music really really loud, and just sort of scream along with it at the top of your lungs. I did this for a good two hours or so before I finally got to Ellen's place.



In Eau Claire, I got to see my cousins Brian and David for the first time in 12 years. They were both completely different (of course) than I remembered them, and I discovered, happily, that I had quite a bit in common with them both. Brian, a pale-skinned, long-haired guy who was so thin he looked skeletal, was getting ready to begin work on his Chemistry PhD, so we had a good time chatting about (extremely) nerdy subjects. (I met his girlfriend, Leah, the next day. She was a pale-skinned, long-haired girl who was so thin she...you get the picture. Also about to start her Chem PhD.) I met David the next morning. He's thin, like his older brother, but otherwise the two are as different as night and day. I'd heard David ran competitively for his high school, so when he mentioned that he was about to go running, I jumped on the opportunity to join him. We both pigged out on bacon right before we left. Bacon + running = win.

I am proud to report that I am able to keep pace with an 18-year old cross country/track runner! Yes, that's right, I'm awesome.

I went out for Coldstone with Brian and Leah after we got back. I had broken out the camera by that point, and annoyed everyone by taking pictures constantly. The fact that almost none of these pictures turned out well only compounded the stupidity. That evening, my uncle Ron took me for a guided tour around Eau Claire. There wasn't a whole lot to see, but we did get to go for a couple of short walks through the woods, which was nice.



I left the next morning, finally off to really see the countryside. I made good time, and zoned out at the wheel, watching the world fly past. The low hills flattened, and the forest turned to grasslands, the rich prairie of Minnesota and east South Dakota, and the landscape was farm after farm after farm. I set up camp on the east bank of the Missouri River, near a small South Dakota town called Chamberlain. If this wasn't the perfect spot to camp, it came pretty damn close:



After setting up camp, I climbed down the rocks to the shore. I found a nice flat-topped boulder by the water's edge, took a few pictures, then sat there for maybe an hour, watching the sun set over the low hills on the river's west bank. The bugs started to bite at dusk, so I climbed back over the rocks to my campsite, and lay down on a picnic table by my tent. A couple hours later, the sun had fallen completely below the horizon, and I watched the faint silver-white traces of the Milky Way slowly reveal themselves.

The morning dawned bright and clear. I took my time breaking camp, and it was almost 11 by the time I had loaded up the car and pulled out. I made the short drive over to the Acta Lakota Sioux cultural center and museum on the edge of town, and spent an hour or so checking out the different exhibits. One thing about reading about the American Indians...their entire heartbreaking history post-1492 really just makes you feel shitty about being an American. It's one of those problems where you think, well, at this point, what can really be done? Obviously returning all the land to the Indians isn't going to work. So what do you do, give them some cash? Hey, here's 500 bucks. Sorry about, y'know, murdering almost all your people and stealing all your land from you!

I had what purported to be the 'perfect cheeseburger' (not so much) from a place called Friendly Casey's, then hit the road, en route to the Badlands.

To San Francisco, Part 1

It is raining in Buffalo.

The whole world is grey as I drive through the final few miles of upstate New York to the Canadian border. I stayed in a motel the previous night - my first of the trip - and awoke to a flat grey sky and a surprisingly cold rain. It's July, but it feels like October would back down south. The rain has slowed to a drizzle when I pull into Niagara Falls State Park and walk down to Horseshoe Falls.

The water is kind of a light turquoise. And there's, like, a lot of it.



I stare off the edge of the falls, thinking, That's a lot of fucking water. I'm a little disappointed in my mind for its total lack of profundity. I take a few pictures, gawk the required amount of times, then wander back up to the restaurant at the top of the falls (called, imaginatively, the Top of the Falls restaurant), where I sit down with an adult beverage and crack open my laptop. "I BELIEVE I CAN FLY," blares the extremely unfortunate selection of music, and after a couple of minutes of this, I go outside.

"STAYIN ALIIIIIIIIIIVE," the Bee Gees shout down at me from the loudspeakers. "STAYIN ALIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII-IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!!!!"

Somebody help me, cuz I'm goin nowhere.



The first leg of the trip could mostly be characterized by a single word, Hot. The end of June in the south is murderously, unpleasantly hot, and even driving 70-something with the windows down doesn't help much. But I made good time to Asheville, and waited for my aunt Diane outside a grand, asian-looking building called, appropriately, the Asiana Grand Buffet. I've always liked talking to Diane. Of all my relatives of my parents' generation, I think she's got the sense of humor most similar to mine. Also, not coincidentally, she's probably the most sarcastic. Sarcasm is pretty much the only way I know how to communicate, so this works out well.

After we gorged ourselves, we drove up to the North Carolina Arboretum and sat down in rocking chairs as we waited for the rain. Diane and her partner Bren told me how nice this place was, and how they'd taken my grandparents up here to relax one time. I, in turn, told them a horrible story about some demented parents that had basted their toddler's face in honey and tried to get a bear to lick the honey off. (It did not end well.)

We parted near the entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I spent most of the rest of the afternoon puttering happily up the winding road. It was pleasant, although it was also quite slow. Before I'd left, my dad kept mentioning Mount Mitchell (and I dutifully paid him no heed at all), but when I saw a sign that said, Highest point east of the Mississippi!, I figured, what the hell.



The Black Mountains are cool, even in the summer. There's a brochure there that claims that the climate is more like that of Canada than North Carolina, and you can see it in the spruces and firs that inhabit the area. The vegetation was of a completely different quality than the dense southern forest below. The trail to the summit, however, was like any other trail through the southern summer forest: dense, humid, and, to be blunt, unpleasant. I was decked out in all wicking fabrics, though, so I actually felt pretty good as I hiked. After several miles, I saw this:



So after all that, I didn't actually get to the highest point east of the Mississippi. Ah well. I did, however, get to eat at the highest restaurant east of the Mississippi, and what a god awful mess that was. The place was run by the state, so I figured it was going to be bad, but it went beyond bad, into the realm of both expensive and bad.

I was planning on camping at Mt. Mitchell, but it was really too early to stop for the night, so I pressed on (and when I say 'pressed on,' in Blue Ridge Parkway terms, that means I went maybe another 20 miles). It was already dusk by the time I pulled into the Linville Falls campground, and thunder rolled as I hastily assembled my tent and attached the rainfly. I hammered down the last stake as the rain began to fall, then ducked inside, happy for my good timing (and pissed that it was raining...rainflies are wonderful, but take all the fun out of camping). I stayed happy about this for all of ten minutes, when a bunch of loud hillbillies pulled up in the campground next to mine, broke out the beer, and proceeded to be obnoxious drunken assholes for the rest of the night.

The next morning, I realized that I'd made terrible progress towards Philadelphia, and that I'd need to abandon the Parkway if I was going to make my cousin Joel's place at a reasonable hour. So I drove for an hour or two through rural North Carolina and Tennessee until I found I-81, then stayed on that road all the way to Pennsylvania.

Joel is 27, and I'm 24. We've never met. Our family is peculiar like that. I'd always been curious about him, and his place was right on the way to NYC, so I figured I'd stop by and meet him. It was about 10 at night when I walked into the lobby of his (actually pretty swank) apartment complex. He came down to greet me, beers in hand. He was a big dude with big muttonchops. He introduced me to his girlfriend, Candy, a cheerful hairdresser with a frank demeanor, and after a few minutes of shooting the breeze, we proceeded to start taking Jaeger shots washed down with Heineken...which we continued to do for the remainder of the night.

We went down to a place called Manayunk in Philly, and went club-hopping, and drank more Jaeger...and more Jaeger...and more Jaeger. Joel told me about himself, his family, and his intense hatred for his ex-wife. He'd gotten married very young, after his high school girlfriend had gotten pregnant, and had been working full time since he'd finished high school. He was a real outgoing guy, and was doing pretty well for himself, but his exuberance seemed tinted by frustration at the opportunities he'd given up because of his failed marriage.

I woke up the next morning on Joel's couch, my spirits high. They remained high for about 30 seconds before I noticed the small garbage can placed suspiciously near my head, containing something that smelled suspiciously acidic.

Candy strode into the room, and glanced at me, amused.

"Hey, Candy," I mumbled, sheepishly. "I, uh...I think I might have thrown up in Joel's car last night..."

She laughed. "Yeah, I think you might have."

Joel was surprisingly cool with this most ultimate of party fouls, and, after we spent a good chunk of the day lying, inert, by the pool, nursing our hangovers, we drove over to the car wash, Mr. Clean and paper towels in hand.

Joel grinned at me as we scrubbed away. "Bet you didn't think you'd be doing any auto detailing this weekend, huh?"

Once his Trooper was sufficiently denastified, we drove to a local place called Steve's for my first authentic Philly cheesesteak.



I should have been impressed, and I really wanted to be, and I didn't exactly lie because all I told them was that I thought the cheesesteak was tasty, but when it comes right down to it, it was just kinda...meh. The cheese fries were great, though. Hard to mess up cheese fries. Soon, we were saying our goodbyes, and we agreed that it'd be cool if saw each other again before we died.

The drive to New York City was hell. On the map, the shortest route from Philadelphia to Brooklyn, where my friend Doug lives, is to take I-95 to the New Jersey Turnpike to Verrazano Bridge, but DO NOT BELIEVE THE MAP'S LIES, this route is pure hell and the traffic on these roads will devour your soul and leave you a lifeless, drained husk of a man.

So I, lifeless and drained, pulled into an alley behind a row of apartments in Brooklyn, jumped out of my car, and bear hugged my old friend. Doug and I grew up together, and it's always nice to see him again. Talking to him makes me feel like I'm a 12 year old again, sitting by the River Forest pool, with nothing to worry myself about except drawing, Japanese animation, and how to get the upper leg in our endless sparring matches.

"So I met this chick at this gallery with a couple friends a few nights ago," Doug was telling me, as he related a hilarious, vaguely disturbing story that reminded me in very jarring terms that we were not, in fact, 12 years old anymore.

Doug's old roommate from Florida, who was possibly the world's skinniest man, stopped by with his fiance the first night. He was a metrosexual sort of guy with fashionable clothes and neatly coiffed hair, and he talked in an endless stream. "One thing I wish I'd picked up from you from when we lived together," he mentioned, in between comments about art and, well, fashionable clothes and neatly coiffed hair, "is your cleanliness!"

His place really was clean. It was clean, but, since Doug's an artist, there were neatly placed pieces of artwork all over the apartment that gave it a pleasantly lived-in feel. I liked it.

I spent two nights in Brooklyn, doing nothing in particular. Nursing a hangover (and a nasty sunburn), this was fine by me, and I'd already seen most of the NYC sights last time I was here, so I was free to ignore my touristy impulses and just chill for a while. We drove out to Coney Island and wandered out onto the pier, watching the kids and the crab fishers and the obese shirtless people making out in public. There was a really cool mural there that we stopped to admire, but I forgot to take my camera with me! I dearly wanted to photograph all the chub, too, but some dreams must go unfulfilled, it seems. We bought the world's worst pina coladas at an oddly out-of-place tiki bar on the boardwalk, mostly because the girl selling them was a knockout.

We drove over to another part of Brooklyn to meet up with Doug's friend from work, Sebastian.

"He lives over in the projects," Doug told me as we drove, offhandedly.

I tried to act unconcerned. "Oh, yeah?" The Brooklyn projects. Oh, god.

We drove, and chatted about the different parts of Brooklyn. According to Doug, the part of Brooklyn where he lives, Bensonhurst, is controlled primarily by the Italian mob, and the neighborhood is actually pretty peaceful and safe because these guys ruthlessly enforce their own brand of justice that includes chopping up the bodies of offenders and dumping them near the fence by the shore, and lying down their families in the middle of the street and crushing their legs with a car. And this is the good part of town.

There were several men hanging around outside of Sebastian's apartment building on the sidewalk. They smoked and played checkers, watching us as we passed. They seemed more bemused than hostile.



Sebastian, it turned out, was a big, genial guy with long black hair and a scruffy beard, a comics and anime fan, and all-around Japanophile. We agreed that the way he seemed to be cool with the rough area he lived in was just by being large and completely unflappable. The three of us trekked around the nearby park, which seemed like a completely different universe than the surrounding slums, then went back to Sebastian's place, where I spent some time jamming on his guitar. It was a steel string electric, and I'm used to a nylon string classical acoustic, so I felt like I played pretty poorly, but at the end of it, Doug mentioned that I ought to come with him and Sebastian to Japan as their guitarist! As we went out for a delicious dinner of all-you-can-eat sushi, I kept wondering if he was being serious.

Sebastian ended up crashing at Doug's place, and we were lying down to sleep when Doug, looking highly agitated, exited his bathroom and began pacing around his basement apartment.

"Um, hey, G," he said, after a few awkward moments. "Got a question for you..."

Shortly after he posed his fateful question, we were dragging ourselves to a laundromat at two in the morning. By the time we got done, dawn was breaking.

Doug and Sebastian left for work at about eleven that morning, and I roused from sleep to say my farewells, and then didn't really manage to get back to bed after that, although Doug said I was welcome to stay as long as I liked. I ate pop tarts, drank iced tea, and read and re-read the map. I guess because NYC is all islands, the roads leading in and out of the city are an almost comically complex maze. Eventually I settled on a route out of the city and hit the road, headed northwest, towards Buffalo and Niagara Falls.



The drive across upstate New York was boring. There wasn't anything in particular that I wanted to see, so I just ate, drove, gassed up, drove, pissed, drove, etc. etc. etc. I missed the turn-off onto highway 17, and spent about 45 minutes on a pointless jaunt into the countryside and back. That didn't particularly help my morale. Because of our strange ordeal the night before, I was exhausted before I'd even gotten to Binghamton. Far too proud of my status as a veteran roadtripper to halt for the day so early, I pulled into a country gas station somewhere in the Catskills and decided I'd just nap in the car. Ordinarily that works pretty well, and sleeping in your car definitely boosts your cred as a hardcore insane nutball...I mean roadtripper. But the sun was shining on my face, and it was just too hot to sleep, so, frustrated, I got out and just lay down on a grassy hillside by the gas station, a water bottle resting against my knee.

An hour or so later, feeling much better about the world, I woke up, got back in the Civic, and didn't stop until midnight, at a fleabag motel about 20 miles from Buffalo.

Final thoughts...

...about World of Warcraft, having quit it a couple of weeks ago, removed it from my computer, etc. etc. The game is obviously a time sink, but more than that, I've come to realize that it steals away your creativity, as well. The whole time I was playing, I never once felt the urge to pick up my laptop and write a story, and in the two weeks since I quit, I've become a fiction-producing machine.

I wasn't really planning to pick the game up again when I got to San Francisco, and I suppose this is just one more reason not to!

89 years

I sit in a room with my dying grandfather.

The only sounds are his rhythmic breathing and the soft ticking of the clock on the wall. The sun has gone down, and the cheery light no longer filters through the blinds. The harsh fluorescent light in the room contrasts sharply with the rural North Carolina darkness outside. There is only a single light in the room, and it brightly illuminates my grandmother's snow white hair and brings a greenish tint to her wrinkled skin.

Two of my aunts are here as well, as well as my mom and dad. My brother is away in Michigan, and had the same reaction I did when I heard the news: a vaguely apprehensive confusion.

Grandpa had a stroke? Say what...?

The doctors said that he had only a few hours left, so we all rushed here as fast as we could. But hours pass, and he lies in the hospital bed underneath the fluorescent light, and his breathing continues, rhythmic and strong. My aunts are back in the room now, and the conversation has resumed. Mom wears her usual look of unflappable calm, though it is tempered by empathy today: the Chinese believe that the separation of soul and body that occurs when a person dies is acutely painful, and that a dying person ought not to be touched or spoken to.

"A mountain sits on his chest," she tells me softly, where the others cannot hear, and tells me of the Chinese belief that a dying person is scoured by earth, water, fire, and wind before passing away. Wind is the final phase, she says, and the most painful. "Ah mi tuo fuo," she says, repeating the Buddhist prayer quietly, musically. "Ah mi tuo fuo. That is all you should say." She turns away, and walks down the hall, continuing to pray for him.

I return to the room, where the bright sound of Dancing With the Stars blares from the TV, and stare at grandpa's sunken cheeks. He will never regain consciousness, they told me, and he has no chance of recovery. So we are here to make him comfortable, and stare at him and each other as we wait for him to die.

Roadtrip!

This is the tentative plan, anyway! I've been trying to figure out how much time I ought to allot for this trip. At first I thought a month would be wayyy too long, but when I break it down:

- 2 days to get to NYC (probably a stop-over and some hiking on the Blue Ridge Parkway somewhere)
- 2 or 3 days with Doug in Brooklyn
- 1 day to get to Niagara Falls
- 2 or 3 days with James in Michigan
- 1 day to Wisconsin
- overnight at Aunt Ellen's, then 1 day to get to the Badlands
- 3 days hiking and camping at the Badlands
- 1 day to Yellowstone/Grand Teton
- 4 or 5 days combined hiking and camping
- 1 day to Arches/Glen Canyon
- 3 or 4 days combined hiking and camping
- 1 day thru Monument Valley and to the Grand Canyon
- 3 days at the Grand Canyon
- 1 day to get to Las Vegas
- 1 day in Vegas
- 1 day to the Sierra Nevada
- 1 day hiking
- 1 day to San Francisco

...add that up and that's 29-33 days total. So if I leave on June 30th, that should be about perfect for an August 1st arrival in SF.

Everything's still up in the air, of course!

Blurbs

I made an A in my QM2 class!

I graduated.

I went dirt biking, which was awesome.

I went for an all-day hike at Fort Yargo. I need to hike more often.

I read up a bit on rock climbing. Always thought that would be a really cool hobby. Gonna call Atlanta Rocks! tomorrow to set up an intro lesson so that I can climb on my own!

Realized that flying lessons probably are not going to work out this summer (again!). Just not enough money, and the discounted lessons didn't come through after all.

Set a date for my move-in to SF: August 1st, which gives me a little under a month to explore the city before classes start.

Setting up my Grand Crazy Road Trip for the summer, en route to SF, which I'm planning on drawing out for at least a few weeks. At the very least, I'm thinking of hitting up Philadelphia, to see my cousin Joel, NYC, and maybe staying with Doug for a few days, Michigan, to see Niagara Falls and hang out with my bro for a few days, Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, just cuz they'd be awesome. Gotta go up into Canada for a bit, just to say I've been to the country. Grand Canyon would be nice, even though I went there before. Definitely gotta go on a long drive up the coast highway in Cali.

I'm tentatively planning to leave my job on June 20th, then spend a week or two with my parents, before heading west (well, north, first, but ultimately west!). I'm thinking July 1st would be a nice round date to leave on...

Finally got a response from my research advisor! He has approved my program and methods, and now I've just got to assemble the paper. Hello publication number 2!

James says he's going to buy Civ 4. Yes! I'll finally have someone to play Civ with!

Blizzard's coming out with a big game announcement on the 19th. If it's not Starcraft 2, there will be much moaning and gnashing of teeth.

I'm getting pretty burned out on World of Warcraft. Just hit level 63, and I realized that I'm not having that much fun...

Decided that I think that the WoW version of l33tspeak is hilarious. L2blog, nubcakes lololol!!!1!1one1!!roflcopter

Watched James play Dawn of War the other day. Daaaaamn, that game looks cool! Might pick that up.

Broke up with the girl I've been seeing. That sucked. But she was leaving for Europe in about 20 days, and I was leaving for Cali before she got back, so our relationship would have ended then anyway. Drawing it out was starting to feel very pointless and lame.

But I generally like being single. Guess I'm sort of a solitary guy, so being alone again's fine with me.

Bought a new mouse! Corded laser mouse with 5 buttons. 2000 dpi! Don't know exactly what that means, but the tracking resolution seems very nice. Yay mouse.

Isabel's coming back in a few days. Heard from her for the first time in a while a couple of days ago. That'll be neat. She seems to have had a really miserable time in DC, and is re-enrolling at UGA in the fall.

Developing a bit of an issue with acne. Kinda let my diet go there at the end of the semester. Hopefully it'll clear up now that I'm back to eating relatively healthy stuff.

Decided that I like Ron Paul quite a bit as a presendential candidate, and that Obama might be a bigger douche than he seemed originally. 'Equivalent work,' lol. Kinda hoping Paul wins the Republican nomination, and Richardson wins the Democratic. Not that either has a chance in hell of happening. It'd be neat, though.

Decided that Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) is a lame hypocrite. Really don't care for his modus operandi of pretending to have this 'I link, you decide!' neutral attitude, but linking to the most partisan bullshit you can possibly imagine. Feel the same way about Rand Simberg, although he at least is fairly upfront about what his opinions are. Guys, stop pretending you're independents (or libertarians) when 95% of what you say is just shilling for the Bush Administration, 'kay?

I'm looking forward to leaving Athens, more than pretty much anything in the world right now. Gotta go gotta go gotta go. Over the past year or so I've really come to realize just how intensely I dislike the South and the attitudes of people in this part of the country.

In the same vein: frat boys. Why am I living in a place where like 2/3rds of the people I meet are bigoted, asshole fratties? To hell with these guys, seriously.

I feel like I really ought to do something remarkable this summer, since it's my last summer that I'll have off, and I actually have some money for once! There's the road trip...but, I dunno. I kind of want to fly off to Australia or China or somewhere really far away and just explore for a while, before school starts. China probably wouldn't be a good idea, since my Mandarin sucks, but... I don't know if I really want to blow all that money to go to a place like Australia. Hmm...

That's pretty much all my thoughts...for the time being, at least.

Fin

Well...I'm done.

That final was pretty brutal, and it did, in fact, take almost the whole week to finish. I think I probably made a low to mid B on it...so I have no idea what my grade is in the class, but I'm pretty sure I passed, which is what matters.

Still kind of waiting for it to sink in!

The final insult

Holy crap this take home final is really really really hard.

I have a week to do it...might actually take the entire week! O_o

Cookie cutter

It's so nice to not have to study quantum mechanics...

Thinking of re-starting the World of Warcraft account, though probably not till after I take this final. Might roll a rogue character. Haven't decided yet. Thinking of respeccing to 33/28 arcane/fire for my mage, too...

Penultimation

My quantum mechanics class ended early. Apparently he just ran out of stuff to teach us, so today was our final lecture (and it only lasted about 15 minutes)...so we're done. Sort of anticlimatic, really.

We go in on Tuesday morning to pick up the take-home final, and then we have a week to do it. This is a huge relief for me...I don't have to cram for this thing! I can do pretty much anything he'd care to throw at me if I've got a week to do it. I'm not sure where I really stand in this class...I ended up getting a 90 on the second test, so if he counts that first horrible exam, my average, including my homework grade, is about a 65...which is a mid-C according to his odd grading scale. If he doesn't count it, then I've got a pretty high A. Either way, I'm definitely passing, and I'm basically guaranteed a passing grade thanks to the final being take-home! (And after I turn that sucker in I'm headed down to Atlanta to have the most extravagant meal at Pappasito's Cantina that you can possibly imagine...)

My research project still isn't finished, but hopefully Jake will get back to me soon with the news that my analysis and routines basically work fine, and all that's left is to assemble the paper.

So, I'm basically done...my protracted undergraduate years are finally at an end. This summer I'm gonna chill a lot, play a lot of video games, and then go on a long, one-way road trip to California in July. Lookin' forward to it!

Ding!

Going up!

The latest news on Bigelow Aerospace's commercial space station plans. Genesis is still in orbit, Genesis II, set to launch later this month, is in the pipes, and Sundancer, which will be launched in 2010, will have a human crew.

The Genesis I, which is still orbiting, will be followed by a series of larger and more sophisticated vessels -- with a first functioning space complex by 2013 and a set of three complexes by 2017, Bigelow said.

Awesome.

Another one!

Got a letter from UC San Diego today...apparently I've been accepted into their program. This is odd because it took so long, and because they're not offering to interview me...the letter is simply an unconditional acceptance. If they had sent this sooner, I would have seriously considered their program, but I'm set on going to UC San Francisco now (which is a better school for what I want to do anyway, although UCSD is not much worse), so it's a moot point.

Also had my second quantum mechanics test today. I'm pretty sure I aced it! I discussed the test afterwards with some other folks from the class, and I can't identify a single mistake I made. Unless I made some careless error (and I double-checked my work, since I finished early), I may have actually gotten a perfect score!

OMG Madagascar doesn't really exist!

I was late for work this morning. This is odd, since I woke up when I usually do, spent as much time sitting around yawning as I usually do, and traffic was no worse than it usually was. I didn't even feel like I was all that unlucky with the lights this morning. But somehow, I was about 10 minutes late. Not really sure what happened there.

Something I found out indirectly (that is, via the facebook hotline...) some time ago is that my ex-girlfriend Kara has become an atheist. Not just an atheist, I found out when I had an actual conversation with her a couple of days ago, but a militant atheist, with a particularly strong animus towards Southern fundamentalism. Didn't get much detail about it at the time, but I sent her some kind of obnoxious little message along the lines of "ZOMG WTF WHO R U AND WUT HAVE U DONE WITH KARA LOLOLOL?!1??/"

Kara and I dated back when we were both freshmen in college -- which, by my lengthy college standards, is a good long while. We broke up almost exactly 6 years ago. (We have intermittently kept in touch since then, mostly online, but I haven't actually seen her in years.) I remember our relationship as being a ghastly failure, primarily because of our extreme differences in religious belief: she was a hardcore Christian fundamentalist, and I was perched atop the fence between agnostic and atheist, as I am now. Since this put us at odds on just about...well, every conceivable subject, our relationship went downhill pretty fast.

Over the past month or so, I've been reading this blogalogue between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan (whose blog, The Daily Dish, I read regularly), on the nature of faith and religious belief, and whether or not being a religious moderate makes any sense at all. It's an interesting debate, although most of it has spun off onto related tangents. Here's a paragraph that neatly distills the essence of the discussion:

There appears to be no principled separation between religious moderation and religious fundamentalism other than a facility for (and an inclination to) doubt. But how much doubt is too much? Why not doubt the whole shebang, as I do? The pope seems to believe many things which you doubt. Do you have reason to believe that the pope is mistaken about the true doctrine of Christianity, or do you just not like the social consequences of some of his beliefs? Can you justify the intermediate position you've taken with respect to Catholicism in terms of truth and falsity (rather than consolation and its lack)? And if you disagree that the truth of an idea can be neatly separated from its consolations, what does the phrase "wishful thinking" mean to you?

For the most part, I'd say that Sam appears to be cleaning Andrew's clock, but they are still in the process of writing, so it wouldn't do to make a final judgement too soon. But here's a different, but related, point that I thought was germane, especially with regard to Sam's stance, and Kara's recent de-conversion: Does being a militant atheist make any sense at all?

Since speaking (well, typing) with Kara a few days ago, I've been giving this a fair amount of thought. I've always described myself as an open-minded agnostic, and, when it comes down to it, an atheist, as well. The logic behind is goes something like: I do not know whether or not there is a god. Therefore I am not actively believing in a god. Therefore I am an atheist, sort of by default. I've read all sorts of arguments that attempt to show why there must (or must not) be a god, and I've found them all very unconvincing (it would not be charitable to call them 'laughable,' I suppose). I think militant atheists are a peculiar breed, and the zealous ones befuddle me. What are you being zealous about? Your lack of belief? And you think everyone else ought to share this lack of belief? Well, it's odd, that's all I'm saying.

But not necessarily wrong, just because it's odd. And being zealous about a negative belief is not that unusual, when you think about it: suppose you thought up a conclusive disproof of the theory of relativity. Wouldn't you be eager to share this with the world? (Well, perhaps you wouldn't. I would, though, being of a scientific mindset.) Or suppose you found good reason to believe that Madagascar did not exist? If you started sharing the news, would you be regarded with disdain as a 'militant amadagascarist'?

So, I guess, in this sense, there's nothing weirder about being a militant atheist than a militant arelativist, or a militant amadagascarist, which are both logical or illogical exactly to the extent to which their arguments make sense. To date, I haven't seen a militant atheist make a particularly conclusive case (to wit, you can't prove a negative, so any such case would have to revolve around negations...so the argument would be sort of a protracted siege, at best. This doesn't mean it couldn't be done, however, and there are certainly negations one could imagine that could make the hypothetical militant atheist's case much more persuasive than it currently is), but this doesn't mean that one could never be made, or that the attempt to make one is in any special sense silly, or worthy of condemnation out-of-hand. (Well, someone who's spent their life studying the theory of relativity, only to have the rug pulled out from under them, would understandably be pretty defensive, too.) It's probably also worth pointing out that there is quite a lot of evidence in favor of Madagascar actually existing, and of the theory of relativity being correct, so the analogy fails somewhat at this point.

So the answer, as far as I can tell, should be: It could make sense to be a militant atheist, but only if you have a real case for it. If you, like most atheists, are just saying, There sure seems to be a lack of evidence that god exists, then you probably ought to be what philosophers call a 'weak atheist.'

Dead run

I am doing really badly in my QM2 class. I think that he has dropped the first exam, which I failed terribly, since everyone else also did terribly. He was a bit vague, but I'm pretty sure he dropped it.

My next exam is April 12th, and then all that's left is the final. I can't fail this one. I really need to knock this one out of the park, just in case he decides to count that first exam. (Rumor has it that my professor will let you retake the final if you need this class to graduate and you're failing, but there's no way I'm going to let it come to that.) I figure if I do nothing but study from now until the 12th, I can at least console myself that, if I do fail, I did everything I could have possibly done to pass. I need to know everything completely cold. I'm going to work and rework homework problems until I can do this stuff in my sleep.

Right. So, degenerate perturbation theory, here I come...

(...and on a happier note, my knee is feeling better, and I've finished my past three runs without incident!)

Frat boys and matrix elements

First of all, let me just say that I hate frat boys. I really do. Screw frats and the people in them. It's 11 AM and I'm at work at the SLC and there's about 20-30 frat boys here (and they ARE frat boys, you can tell just by looking at them) screaming and running around and cheering. AT THE SLC. For about 2 hours solid. It's intensely obnoxious. Anyone who would be in this area studying has to go to a different area of the building because of these imbeciles. I can't even tell them to shut up because this isn't technically a quiet area.

Anyway...

One thing that turns up over and over in QM2 is 'matrix elements'; this is because you represent operators with linear transformations, and linear transformations are written as matrices. I realized that I don't understand that well why this is, so I'm reviewing that, and using this as my notepad...

For any vector with components a1, a2,..., an where you know what a linear transformation T does to its set of basis vectors, T|a> returns a new vector |b> with components:

b1 = T11*a1 + T12*a2 + T13*a3 + ... + T1n*an
b2 = T21*a1 + T22*a2 + T23*a3 + ... + T2n*an
...
b3 = T31*a1 + T32*a2 + T33*a3 + ... + Tnn*an

And T acting on the basis vectors gives you:

T|e1> = T11|e1> + T21|e2> + ... + Tn1|en>
T|e2> = T12|e1> + T22|e2> + ... + Tn2|en>
...
T|en> = T1n|e1> + T2n|e2> + ... + Tnn|en>

These equations give you the matrix elements for T. Take the inner product of each equation with one of the basis vectors to find these; for example, to find the element T21:

<e2|T|e1> = <e2|T11|e1> + <e2|T21|e2> + ... + <e2|Tn1|en>

But the Tij's are scalars, so you can take them out of the inner products. Assuming this is an orthonormal basis, you are left with only one term on the RHS that is not zero:

<e2|T|e1> = T21<e2|e2> = T21

So this is the formula for finding the matrix elements.

C++ ftw

I've been thinking that I would like to get involved in computational biophysics research when I get to UCSF, even though my background is mostly in experimental work. The work I've been doing with Jake here at UGA is mostly computational/analytical stuff, and while the specific stuff we are doing (analysis of threshold traits in multiple environments) is not particularly interesting to me, I do like the sort of work that I've been doing. I guess I've always enjoyed working with computers, so it's not any great surprise that I like this kind of stuff.

One thing that I am planning on doing this summer is really throwing a lot of energy into re-learning C++. I knew C, and C++ to a lesser extent, fairly competently when I was in high school, so re-learning it should not be so difficult, but I think I will probably have much more success getting involved in computational research at UCSF if I show up and can demonstrate that I am a good coder. It is something that I do have a relatively strong aptitude for, but a lot of the more complex ideas and syntax fades from memory when you haven't done it for such a long time.

I actually sat down at Hot Corner tonight and spent some time reviewing simple C++ stuff, and it's coming pretty naturally to me, so that's a promising sign! I guess I shouldn't spend too much time doing this during the semester, though. I've got a little over a month left until I graduate...ALL I need to do is pass this crazy quantum mechanics 2 class and I will be done. Easier said than done, though...

Not even four-letter words

Words really can't describe how much I hate having to be at work at 8 AM.

End do

So, I ended up getting rejected from Harvard. I expected this, since their application was due back at the beginning of December, and you normally don't wait this long for an interview offer! It's a moot point anyway, though, since I've already accepted UCSF's bid.

Would have been a nice ego trip, though...heh.

So, I applied to 8 schools, one of which (the University of California, San Diego) actually returned my application fee, which I suppose means there was some undetermined problem with my application and it wasn't processed or something. Of the 7 I was considered for, I was rejected from 4 (MIT, Stanford, UW, and Harvard), and received 3 formal admission offers (from ASU, UCSB, and UCSF). And I'm going to UCSF.

Perks!

I just found out that UCSF's graduate program includes not only payment of all fees and tuition and health insurance and a $26,500 annual stipend for living expenses, but also includes a fitness center membership and they give you a free brand new Mac laptop when you begin. I mean, I'm sure this is a for-business-use-only sort of deal, and you probably have to give it back when you graduate, but...wow! How cool is that?

Hee. Excited!

I am teh uber nerd

So I'm sitting at a coffee shop downtown, reviewing some mathematics (calculus, actually), and it's spring break. Everyone else is out partying, and I'm sitting here, studying theorems about infinite series and convergence. I guess this makes me some kind of uber-nerd or something. What's more, although I am reviewing this because I need to for one my classes, I actually enjoy this stuff a lot. I like learning about mathematics. I find it satisfying, and interesting, and even fun. I think I like it more than I like, for example, drinking myself blind, which is, I suppose, sort of the normal thing to do over spring break.

It's strange that a person can go out and drink until they puke every night of spring break, and their peers will think this perfectly normal, even praiseworthy, but if a guy would prefer to sit down and study something, that's weird, and mockable.

Ah well...that's why I'm such a nerd I guess...