Tell me what you think about your motivation

The secret of effective motivation? Steer away from instrumental (external) consequences and incentives. Focus on cultivating the internal drive. Sounds good and all...but how easy / practical is that?

Kon Leong on career/goals

A wise guy. In the good way:

If you experiment in different jobs and functions in those two or three years out of school, you will have a much better shot at finding your sweet spot. And the sweet spot is the intersection between what you’re really good at and what you love to do. If you can find that intersection, you are set. A lot of people would kill for that because, at 65, they’re retiring and never found it. So don’t put so much emphasis on initial compensation. Don’t listen to all the harping from the family. Try to find your sweet spot and, once you find it, invest in that. You don’t want to get degrees just to do work you don’t really like. If you’re miserable, even if you make a lot of money, that’s still 40 years of your life.

He says a lot of other smart things in the interview, so it's worth reading (e.g., his innate strength is that he can "zoom in, zoom out")...

"Lab Lit"

I'd never heard of the genre before. Now I want to write the next Frankenstein.

Jerry Neil Morgan, RIP

Story about a young man from Pikeville, KY:

Interview with a vampire

Well, actually, just a local pastor interviewing a local atheist.

And a weak one at that ;)

On the idea of law school --> patent law

This is an encouraging point:

The outlook is also pretty rosy for aspiring lawyers with technical backgrounds. Sure, the market is saturated with liberal arts graduates, but firms are so desperate for science graduates that they’re hiring them into technical-adviser programs and then paying for the folks to go to law school and hiring them after graduation. The Recorder reports the programs exist at Ropes & Gray, Morrison & Foerster, Wilson Sonsini, and other firms.

Indeed...full article below:

Silicon Valley Pushes to Turn Scientists Into Lawyers
Amy Miller
2010-09-08 12:00:00 AM

There are plenty of patent attorneys in Silicon Valley, but there aren't enough like Alexander Shvarts.

The Ropes & Gray associate possesses a combination of science and communication skills increasingly demanded from patent attorneys. He's not only a techie with a degree in computer science from Cornell University, which helps him understand complicated patents and work with their inventors; he also likes writing and schmoozing with clients. "This fits my personality perfectly," Shvarts said.

That's why Ropes & Gray accepted Shvarts into the firm's technical adviser program, which first trained him to be a patent agent and then paid his tuition at Fordham University School of Law. Now the 32-year-old is based in Ropes & Gray's Palo Alto, Calif., office, and travels to universities to persuade other future engineers and scientists to become patent lawyers in Silicon Valley, too.

Ropes & Gray may have a long list of big-name clients such as Apple Inc. and Pfizer Inc., but getting the right candidates to join the program isn't easy. "One of the biggest challenges we have is recruiting," Shvarts said. "These people can go wherever they want."

Ropes & Gray's technical adviser program isn't unique. For years, firms such as Morrison & Foerster; Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner; and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati have sent people with science degrees to law school and hired them as patent attorneys after graduation.

But the competition for patent attorneys like Shvarts is so keen in Silicon Valley that Ropes & Gray has pushed hard to expand its program there, with some success. In 2009, the Palo Alto office had only one person in the program. This year, two have transferred to Palo Alto from New York City and three more have been hired.

"That's the result of an active effort on our part," said Ropes & Gray IP partner Joseph Guiliano, who completed Fish & Neave's program in 1993, more than 10 years before the firm merged with Ropes & Gray. "We want that practice to expand."

This year, Wilson Sonsini has 17 people who are at various stages of the firm's technical adviser program, and they work exclusively in the firm's life sciences and clean tech practices. That, too, is an increase from past years, attorneys said.

"Law schools don't produce enough of the people we're looking for," said Wilson Sonsini IP partner Vern Norviel. "We are always actively recruiting, and going around to the top-notch Ph.D. programs. We're always trying to find these people."

'AN ART THAT MUST BE PRACTICED'

Ropes & Gray's program is fairly typical. Those selected work in the firm's patent office for one to two years before starting law school, and many become registered patent agents. While in law school, they work either full-time or part-time at the firm. If all goes as planned, they're offered an associate job -- with pay at the second- or third-year level -- right after graduation.

"By the time they set foot in law school, they can honestly say they have clients," Guiliano said.

Programs like Ropes & Gray's address a central problem in the legal profession, said IP recruiter Katharine Patterson of Patterson Davis Consulting in San Francisco. To even take the patent bar, you must have a technical degree. But passing the exam doesn't necessarily prepare someone to be a patent attorney. "This is an art that must be practiced," she said.

So why is it so hard to recruit scientists and engineers, given the attraction of earning a law degree for free, and graduating with on-the-job experience and an almost guaranteed roster of clients?

There's a host of reasons, lawyers said. People with advanced technical degrees have a lot of options. If they don't want to be researchers, they can become heads of cutting-edge companies, for example. A few who went through Wilson Sonsini's technical adviser program have left the firm, but they weren't lured away by other firms, Norviel said. They became CEOs of health care companies.

"These people are very on top of their game," he said. "They don't have to be lawyers. They could do any number of things."

Enticing patent lawyers from other firms can be challenging. Ropes & Gray IP attorney Mark Rowland said he suspects that after recent law school graduates develop a client base, they're reluctant to move to another firm. And the structure of patent prosecution programs differ from firm to firm.

"At some firms they are almost solo operators, and we have a different model," Rowland said. "They're working on their own, and they prefer it that way."

NO GUARANTEES

The program may be filling a need, but at Ropes & Gray, there are no guarantees, for the firm or the participants. People aren't obligated to join Ropes & Gray as patent attorneys after they graduate, and the firm doesn't have to offer them a job. But the vast majority are hired, even if they don't stay for long.

A few participants have left Ropes & Gray because they decided to work in house for a client that they developed a strong relationship with, Guiliano said. That's not always a bad thing, though, as they can end up hiring the firm as outside counsel.

"It's kind of a mixed bag," Guiliano said. "The opportunities get spread out a bit."

It's a chance both firms and future prospects are willing to take. Current and former participants who were interviewed agreed that they made a smart, and economical, career move by joining the Ropes & Gray program.

For Shvarts, patent law combines his love of writing and communicating with his obsession for high-tech gadgetry. He can stay up-to-date on the latest technologies while working for some cutting-edge companies. "I've done just about everything you can do in IP law," Shvarts said.

None said it was easy, though. Juggling law school and working at the firm requires careful time management, not to mention finding time to study for the bar.

"There are growing pains along the way," said Matthew Bertenthal, 26, a patent agent in the program at Ropes & Gray's Silicon Valley office. "But at the same time, I feel like this is the best thing I could have done."

Bertenthal graduated from Cornell University with a computer and electrical engineering degree, but he liked writing and interacting with people too much to spend his days in a computer lab. Now he's attending Fordham University School of Law, but has spent the last semester at Santa Clara University School of Law. "I wouldn't be going to law school any other way," he said.

Like many of the people chosen for the program, Yang Xu, 31, has more than one advanced science degree. She's earned both a master's and a Ph.D in organic chemistry.

She tried working as a chemist for a biotech company for a couple of years, but soon realized that it wasn't want she wanted to do for the next 10 years. "To me, it felt very repetitive," she said.

Xu hasn't lost her love of science. But now that she's a technical adviser for Ropes & Gray and is preparing to apply to law school, she gets to see the broader landscape of the IP world, something she'd wanted for a long time.

"I'm starting all over again," Xu says. "But it's really exciting."

I think so too.

A personal note

This is something I wrote when a friend of mine passed away in August of 2005:

As I sit here, a week after hearing of my dear friend's death, my heart still breaks. My eyes tear up, and it hurts. She was so sweet, so vital, so alive, so damn beautiful...and now she's gone. I knew her since she was 14, and saw her grow into the gorgeous and vibrant young woman she became. I was in love with her once, and she with me. Then we became the best of friends, for a very long time...then we slowly grew apart. I didn't realize how deeply I still cared for her until I heard. How feeble words must be to attempt to make sense of this tragic loss. How pitiful arguments are that pretend there is anything good about it. The consolation I find is solely that she is now beyond pain and being hurt. Kayla isn't crying now, we all are. This person I cherished isn't hurting anymore. That helps me not to hurt. My memories of my dear friend will never die, though they may dim. The years will certainly temper the heartache, but true solace will likely never come for me. It will never give me peace of mind or heart to think of what happened. I will always miss her, and think of her, as one lost to tragic circumstance or cruel fate. I will always wish for one more word, one more hug, a chance to tell her goodbye. And as the years go by, my mind will return to the times we had together, the laughs, the tears we shed...and the pain will resurface, rising out of this deep place in me like leviathan coming up from the ocean. It is wrong to say she WILL be dearly missed...for I miss her, oh so dearly, right now. And a part of my life is forever tainted with the pain of her passing. Surely, she no longer feels pain, for we all do. My tribute is to you, Kayla, for letting me share your life, and your death...I will miss you so much. Although part of you is forever gone, and part of me too, part of you will never die, for I will carry it in me...so long as I shall live.

Her death had a real impact on my life that I am still trying to measure.

Ego, or something like it

As I mentioned before, I once decided to weed out my facebook friends list. I decided the other day that it was that time again.

It's almost hard to believe that at one point in 2007, I had 350 friends. What's funny about that is that they were almost entirely people I knew from college. I cut the list down to about 80-some, but it crept back up to 155 (today's count) mostly from adding random people I knew from my home town, but people I didn't really care to keep up with. As of a few hours ago, I now have 53 friends, including 3 family members.

I suppose I've grown more antisocial with age and having a child. Although some basic human social drive makes us want to be liked and feel important in the eyes of our peers, I can honestly say that I think I've "outgrown" this impulse almost entirely, with the exception of colleagues at work and some people I respect. Perhaps that's why I don't have even a tinge of desire to go to my class reunion. I won't go, in fact, even if I get invited -- which is somewhat nebulous, given that I have no idea who is "in charge" of sending out such invitations or how they get to be deemed the authority.

Maybe it's a consequence of being a sort of social pariah from my recent history of atheist activism. Maybe it's my unfailing sense of moral and intellectual superiority. It's got to be ego, or something like it, that drives us first to accumulate markers of social importance and then to discard them in the belief that they are like 99.99% of the other shit that constitutes daily life: absurd.

Anonymity

** UPDATE 8/24/19: Since I'm working at a public school (no longer at a religious school), I don't feel I have to maintain a pretense of anonymity. At the same time, I take professionalism as a teacher seriously and will refrain from posting personal information. **

** UPDATE 2015: I know that most people, if digging here at this site long enough, could probably identify me. My anonymity is tenuous, at best. I just ask that if anyone desires to identify me, they consider the consequences for me: there's a reason I went from a serious blogger about ten years ago to a very infrequent blogger now. It's called family and career. And those two things take huge precedence over this little soap box. In order to protect them, I write anonymously. Thank you for respecting that. **

Dowd writes something today that is a little near and dear to me. The issue is anonymous blogging. I think the takeaway lesson is this: if you're an anonymous blogger, you have the right to say whatever you like, but there may be consequences for it when you start bashing other individuals or topics that some people are enamored with (politics and religion). But it's far less likely to wreck your life if you have an anonymous blog where you make fun of, say, Christians in general than if you have an anonymous blog where you call an individual a "skank" and "ho" and "ho bag"...After all, no judge can find for a plantiff in a defamation suit and out you if you don't single out someone by name (or identify them individually in some other way).

I think it's true that most people are anonymous on the internet due to the desire to hide from the consequences of their writing. Noble usage of pseudonyms through history was often politically-motivated and the writers feared for their lives or livelihoods. Today people just want to have a soapbox but wear a costume as they stand up there and talk. I guess you could say I'm like that now. It didn't start out that way.

The status of my being a blogger has changed a few times, for a few different reasons (most of the following links are broken because I moved all my posts to this new site and made most of the personal stuff private):

1. I began writing a blog in Nov 2005. It was a public blog that used my real name. It didn't have many readers. One day, I wrote something on Sternberg and it got linked to, and from there, I had a lot of interest in keeping readers. Some of the original research I did has been incorporated into this article at Expelled Exposed.
2. A few people from my hometown, and relatives, learned of my site and I learned of that. I got nervous in Feb 2006 and made my website private. I stupidly deleted a lot of my posts. A lot of this had to do with the fact that I was no longer religious and, while I didn't mind them knowing, I didn't want them reading my stuff in which I "debunked" their religion. If you hunger for more details, here they are.
3. I changed my mind about three months later and began writing again on a public blog. Once, I realized I was in trouble with getting my Ph.D. finished because of the time I was spending online. We see where that worry took me...
4. I ended up doing an interview on Hannity & Colmes in Nov of 2006 over a controversial topic concerning politics and religion. I got really active in doing hands-on real-world stuff for a while there and did less personal blogging.
5. That trend was fairly unbroken until I got my M.S. and started the job search. Then, I decided to go private again, because I was afraid that people at my new job would find this site and I would have to deal with a bunch of BS from it.
6. I planned to write less due to work; I'm pretty much still in that same boat, and my writing over last summer increased only because of free time.
7. Now that we have a child, free time isn't really an issue anymore, since I don't have any.
8. Finally, on around 1/11/09, I decided to use Blogger's export/import feature and start a brand new site. I used a text editor to search and replace all instances of my name and identifying information I could think of and also change all URL references to my old site to this new one -- that's why there are so many broken links, btw. I made a lot of my personal posts private (leaving only rants about politics and religion, mostly). I published them here at NSEFL. And I really want to stay anonymous here.
9. ** UPDATE 8/24/19: Since I'm working at a public school (no longer at a religious school), I don't feel I have to maintain a pretense of anonymity. At the same time, I take professionalism as a teacher seriously and will refrain from posting personal information. **

I guess I think I have lots of really important things to say and I need a soapbox. But regardless of merit, I think everyone has the right to have an anonymous soapbox so long as they don't single out individuals or put up embarrassing or defamatory things about people. At that point, IMHO (and the in humble opinion of the judge in the case Dowd writes about) you lose your right to privacy:

“...the dangers of its misuse cannot be ignored. The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions.”

Cyberbullies, she wrote, cannot hide “behind an illusory shield of purported First Amendment rights.”

Indeed.

Death wish

I want to be cremated before any ceremony friends and family have in my honor. At said ceremony, I want Eva Cassidy's version of "Fields of Gold" to play. Check it out here.


Also I think I'd like this version of Sting's "Shape of My Heart" played (this other version is cool but a little dramatic). If you listen to the lyrics it may or may not seem appropriate to you, since it's about cards on the surface, but I like the subtle underlying theme and think it's a beautiful melody.

Finally, I have loved "Dust in the Wind" since I heard the original version from Kansas. Although I prefer such ballads acoustic, the only version I can find besides theirs I like are acoustic female vocals like Sarah Brightman's version.


Besides those three songs, it doesn't matter. I'll be dead, after all!

Last resort

I've mentioned before that I had a lot of friends involved in drugs when I grew up. One of the places they often went/were sent was to a Christian-based treatment program called Teen Challenge, as there was a center located only about an hour from my hometown. There are lots of resources out there debunking the statistics they claim about their "cure rate" but all in all the center near my hometown had a good reputation.

On the other hand, there are stories like this one from 2003, places where parents send "troubled teens" who end up getting abused or worse. I suppose when you're at the end of your rope, sending your teen off in handcuffs with strangers somehow doesn't seem all that scary...

...okay, I think these parents are dumbasses with too much money, but still.

Early xmas

My beautiful wonderful wife got me the G1 phone with Google's open source Android platform. I love it. I've never had a "smart"phone before and so that alone is great, but adding on the awesomeness of Android is even better. I won't review anything, since you can find hundreds of those in seconds, but I'll just say that the phone is great and the software is sublime, which is the major reason for buying the G1.

our baby doesn't sleep much

Our little baby doesn't like to sleep very much.

At the risk of sounding like a zillion other parents who think their child is gifted or special in some way, I have done my homework on this one. My kid sleeps less than 10 hours a day, sometimes 8. The average newborn should sleep about 16 hours a day, but ours probably never slept more than 12.

I noticed how alert our newborn was early on, and so did the nurses and doctors, who all commented on how much our newborn watched the surroundings and how little sleep was required. As time has gone on, the baby learned early to hold its head up all the time on its own and interacts with toys and its play station. I am happy to see the baby developing so fast (my wife wants this stage to last as long as possible: something about that maternal instinct of needing to be needed), but the sleep thing has become more of an issue lately.

I was reading about how sleep is seen as the enemy by CEOs and defense contractors for the military but people forget just why we need sleep. It may be that gifted people sleep less than others; that's been proposed before:


Also:

Hyperactive is a word often used to describe gifted children as well as children with ADHD. As with attention span, children with ADHD have a high activity level, but this activity level is often found across situations (Barkley, 1990). A large proportion of gifted children are highly active too. As many as one-fourth may require less sleep; however, their activity is generally focused and directed (Clark, 1992; Webb, Meckstroth, & Tolan, 1982), in contrast to the behavior of children with ADHD. The intensity of gifted children's concentration often permits them to spend long periods of time and much energy focusing on whatever truly interests them. Their specific interests may not coincide, however, with the desires and expectations of teachers or parents.

I'm not sure if our baby is gifted or not, but I'm hopeful that's what it is from the evidence I've seen. Now I know you're a genius if you're reading my blog, and I know that I'm a little fixated on the idea of giftedness generally and especially studying the lives of the highly gifted. Thus this may be me fixating on something that doesn't exist, but that I hope does. Otherwise, our baby may be autistic or something...but I'm not too worried about it, since it makes eye contact, smiles, coos and goos, &c.

new baby!

Our baby was naturally born this Sunday morning at 4:58 am (9/21/08). [surprise!]

Our baby weighed 6 lbs, 12.4 oz, was 19.75 in from head to toe, and is in excellent health.

Mom and baby are doing great!

baby on the way

For those few of you who read my site, our baby will be born by c-section Monday morning around 7:30 am.

Our baby didn't turn until very late into the pregnancy (8 months) and still hasn't descended into the birth canal, despite the due date being 9/22/08. Thus, the doctor advised going now, rather than waiting until she starts labor on her own and having to do an emergency c-section.

It may be a long time...perhaps a very long time, before I'm regularly writing anything of note here on this site. I will be posting pics soon, of course.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for caring. Wish us luck!

Cleaning things up some

After hearing about someone getting fired at Hammond School for what they had on their MySpace page, I decided to take privacy to the next level. I made my Blogger profiles private, am in the process of killing the links and references to them I had on my index pages, and have whittled down my list of "allowed readers" to 18. If you're reading this, I must think you're a genius.

Seriously, though, it's sad that someone can't have a private place to enjoy freedom of speech without worrying about losing their job, but there are consequences to actions, even when they're protected constitutionally. Right, Maurice's BBQ owner Maurice Bessinger? So I'm also googling my name and variants of it and my email addresses and trying to go through and do what I can to make finding material about me online as difficult as possible. One good thing: the revolutionary war hero by the same name makes it harder to search for me.

If in the future you find yourself unable to read the blog entirely, don't think it's personal. It's just me being a little overly cautious. Even people whom I trust cause me to worry because they may forget to log out of their computer somewhere and someone else, whom I don't trust, may see it or use it against me. I've whittled down my Facebook and MySpace friends list and changed the privacy settings there for the same reasons.

If you're bored enough to wonder how many times I've changed my mind about whether to make this blog private, public, or somewhere in between, read this or figure it out yourself from the various postings.

Justifying the silence

This has been a wild week. We moved across town on Monday, picked up new furniture (baby stuff and a bedroom suit) through the week, helped my sister with her wedding on 8.8.08, and have been doing a lot here at the new place, with the help especially of my dad, who works like an Energizer once he's wound up...

I have a feeling that, with the baby coming so soon, it'll get a lot more quiet around here for a lot longer.

It's a little eerie to be on Google Street View and have such a clear view of the house:

View Larger Map

What I love the most is we're only about 2.1 mi from my workplace, and I can avoid the main arteries entirely (Garner's Ferry):



That's the back entrance to Hammond. The front entrance is just about one-half mile further:

The many motives of blogging

It seems that blogs bring to mind one of two sorts of person: 1) thinks they have really important things to say and needs a soapbox, 2) wants to "overshare" all the inane trivia of their life with a world who, by and large, doesn't give a fuc*. I don't know exactly how I stumbled onto a blog post about oversharing, but this led me to learning about Lena Chen. This led me to finding out things about her I really didn't want to know (NSFW: or see), but out of it all came a sliver of good, as she wrote something I find strong rapport with:

Part of the reason why I write about my life is because I am scared of not remembering anything about it. I have a terrible memory, no doubt an ironic symptom of childhood bullying that taught me the art of forgetting terrible memories. (Truth: I routinely have problems with recalling things that happened before the age of 12). Unfortunately for me, I never quite unlearned how to forget. Now that I am full-grown and expected to remember things like faces and names, I find myself standing around dumb-founded as all my friends recall events at which everyone but me seems to have been present. I routinely fail to recognize guys with whom I’ve gone on single dates, or even people I went to high school with. It seems I am a spectator to other people’s memories but never the one doing the remembering herself.

And it’s not just memories either. It’s skills like how to use JSTOR (thank you, high school debate) or how to swim (thank you, community pool) that I must relearn because I’ve somehow magically forgotten despite everyone’s insistence that there are some things, like riding a bike, that you remember forever. Well, trust me, if there were ever a person who could forget, it’d be me. In Ibiza, for example, this was precisely my problem. Here I was with miles of unpolluted ocean before me, and I was terrified of wading too far out because I hadn’t swum in years. I was always scared to go into pools as a kid until I braved swimming lessons during early elementary school. Then I promptly forgot and had to learn again, this time during a summer around age 10. I don’t think I’ve really swum again since. Eventually in Ibiza, I gave it a go at a shallow beach but I conceded defeat after several gulpfuls of seawater. This was a performance from someone who used to relish jumping off diving boards several yards above her head.

Although my ability to remember how to do things physically (ride bikes, swim, ride 4wheelers, play ping-pong, pool, &c.) is not a problem, I strongly agree with her motive of wanting to document her life out of fear of forgetting. I found myself last week in my hometown talking to a friend I literally went from K-12 with, and she reminded me of universal remote controls at Richlands Middle School, as well as other funny tales, that I had completely forgotten about.

Now I'll have to write a post just to explicate the details on that.

Blog-as-journal/memoir works for me. I must confess that I have this creepy urge to see how many people would read my blog after I died, and how long people would still find it on the web. In 2000 years, will the internet as it exists today still be archived somewhere? In a million years, will aliens from some far-off system store the entirety of the internet on little cubes and put them on a shelf somewhere?

The status of this blog being private has changed a few times, for a few different reasons:

1. I began writing a blog in Nov 2005. It didn't have many readers. One day, I wrote something on Sternberg and it got linked to, and from there, I had a lot of interest in keeping readers. Some of the original research I did has been incorporated into this article at Expelled Exposed.
   
2. A few people from my hometown, and relatives, learned of my site and I learned of that. I got nervous and made it private. I stupidly deleted a lot of my posts. A lot of this had to do with the fact that I was no longer religious. If you hunger for more details, here they are.
3. I obviously changed my mind and began writing again on a public blog. Once, I realized I was in trouble with getting my Ph.D. finished because of the time I was spending online. We see where that worry took me...
   
4. That trend was fairly unbroken until I graduated from UF and started the job search. Then, I decided to go private again, because I was afraid that parents at my new job would find this site and I would have to deal with a bunch of BS from it.
5. I planned to write less through the work year; I'm pretty much still in that same boat, and my writing over this summer has increased only because of free time. Once my son is born, that won't be an issue.
   

Also, I think I have lots of really important things to say and I need a soapbox.

NCOBS and Transcendentalism

I just completed a 4-day course at NCOBS, running Sat 5/10 to Tue 5/13, and it was great. More on why...

I was wrong when I said:

In other news, I'm going on a NC Outward Bound trip with my students from May 10-13. It's an outdoor experience with no showers or toilet paper (read the fine print).

There actually was TP. I was able to actually avoid having to poop in the woods, though, as the urge didn't really hit me until the evening of day two, when we came down from the summit of Table Rock and there is a parking lot and outhouse there that we were allowed to use. Also, we wore rain gear so much (especially Sunday night, during the storm) that I didn't get very dirty at all, and I was able to clean up some with baby wipes and such in the aforementioned outhouse. So, for me at least, the typically-cited discomforts of "roughing it" were not really discomforts at all.

• Day 1: Got all our gear together (Eric called this the "Duffle Shuffle" IIRC) and walked about 10 minutes to the intersection of multiple trails, called "five points" I think. They taught the students how to make a shelter of their tarps and set up camp.
• Day 2: Went to the summit of Table Rock via the Devil's Cellar. It was tough for me, as I am so out of shape. I also had overloaded my gear by trying to be tough and packing two of the four dromedaries, the 5-L water containers. I had to get T.U. to carry one for me after a few minutes of hiking. Both my soles of the shoes I borrowed from C.S. blew out, and my feet got very wet. We camped at the base of Table Rock, just off a campsite, and a large storm blew in that night. It was damned cold and some trees fell, but we had heavy-duty rain gear, which blocked the wind and cold out entirely. I went to bed early, though, as my feet were hurting.
• Day 3: We walked down the S.O.B. trail ("shortness of breath") to near base camp and went rock climbing and repelling. Best day by far. We camped that night on a platform just off from base camp.
• Day 4: Awoke at 5:45 AM to do a 4.2 mile run around the trails. I had to run in Crocs(R) because the low-top hiking shoes had blown out. The run's a story in itself. We left around 1 PM.

And to compensate for the extreme wind and cold of Sunday (I didn't pack warm clothes) I got the beauty of the Devil's Cellar and Table Rock summit views. See my pics. Our guides names were Luke and Eric. I talked with Luke a bit alone and discovered what an interesting fellow he is: went straight from high school to being a nature guide, basically. He and Eric and I were all 26: Eric was born in August while Luke was born in October.

Luke seemed very at peace with himself. It's a very physical job, and he had injured his ankle, but he never once complained, although he used walking poles to help support the weak stride. This made me think of how his life for the past eight years was probably going to get more complicated soon, just as mine was. My fault, in retrospect, was in thinking, "How long can he do this job, and what will he do later in life?" I thought this before the solo time of introspection, and realizing that this was a faulty notion occurred to me then.

We did our solo time while at the Devil's Cellar, spending a few hours alone with a journal and the stated intent of reflection, introspection and enjoying the views. We were also told to write a letter to ourselves during this time, one which would be collected by the guides and then mailed to us 6 months down the road. I took a few minutes to do this, and wrote a letter to myself about Transcendentalism. In April '07, I quoted Thoreau. I didn't realize that in May '08 he'd come back to me with a vengence:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!
...
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. The town's poor seem to me often to live the most independent lives of any. Maybe they are simply great enough to receive without misgiving. Most think that they are above being supported by the town; but it oftener happens that they are not above supporting themselves by dishonest means, which should be more disreputable. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change.

Walden

What I wrote in the letter to myself was about how I had changed over the years. As I reflect now on my life's choices, I look back and see a boy, dumb as he was, who had a real sense of adventure and thought that life offered many exciting mysteries to solve. I used to stare out of the classroom window of Mrs. Reynold's chemistry class and Mr. Blevin's biology class and contemplate going off into the woods with but a backpack full of gear. I felt the call of the wild in some way.

Growing older, I am now more concerned with security and comfort. Have I lost for that? Am I the less for it? The fact that I feel cynical about life...did the "meanness" of it get to me? Have I forgotten the wisdom of KISS?

I pondered these things in my solo time.

I also snuck in a nap.

I ponder these things still -- is it the case that the responsibilities we accumulate throughout life, with a family and with debt obligations, lessens the vigor of life itself? Will the way that our human evolution has occurred reverse itself to some degree later on? Will we move back away from urbanization to live simply and close to nature? Ideally, our technology and progress would simplify life, but the real does not meet the ideal. Not in that.

I don't know if any of the students (4 girls, 5 boys) got what I got from it, but I really enjoyed the peace, the absence of an itinerary or schedule or clock. I think we forget the part of our biology that is 100% animal. We are human, yes, but humans are social animals that have moved away from where their biology evolved -- nature red in tooth and claw -- and perhaps we are the less for it.

Maybe Luke had things figured out. Worrying about how you'll support yourself is the hallmark of the modern man. Living in the present is difficult. That's all the more reason to cultivate it.

Personal reflections

The decision to finish with an M.S. in Chemistry rather than staying to complete my Ph.D. is something I've been mulling over in recent days. For one thing, I attended Hammond's 2008 commencement, and I was looking at everyone else's robes and hoods and thinking about the pride of wearing doctoral regalia. Shallow, eh?

With a baby on the way, (now at 23 weeks, 8 inches and ~1 lb., we've decided to name him my son) it sometimes seems that my career options are limited by the responsibility of raising a family and keeping a steady income stream. I look back and wonder if I'll ever live to regret the decision not to finish, given that it seems now my professor was right: if you leave with the statement, "maybe I'll come back to finish it later," you probably won't ever do so. And I think that subconsciously I knew that, even then.

Timeline of my thoughts: I look at my blog entry preceding the defense of my research proposal, then the one directly proceeding it, where there is a hint of wanting to quit:

It's a relief, I guess. I'm also just tired, and I've been thinking of taking the M.S. and getting a job...*sigh*

However, about five days later, in one of my blog posts, I refer to finishing the Ph.D.:

I certainly agree that my wife takes priority over everything else, that staying healthy is tied with my Ph.D. in close second, that running the AAFSA group is a distant third, but should still take huge precedence over blogging...

However, then on April 22 I admitted I was looking for jobs and was making the blogsite private again as a result. So it really seems that I made my final decision to quit the Ph.D. program some time between April 11 and April 22. About the only big thing I know that happened between those times was the shooting at VT, but I really don't think that influenced me (unless it was subconscious). I didn't go for my Hammond interview until the end of June, and I was notified I got the job only a few days later.

It's so funny, because as a kid and teen and even in college, I was so concerned with the question, "what will I do with my life?" My view then was that carefully choosing my career path and following crucial steps in the process would produce unbounded happiness and success. What seems to have happened, instead, is that a somewhat-arbitrary set of circumstances simply showed me, along the way, that I would be happier changing course from my originally-perceived "perfect" career path(s). And it appears to be the case that teaching chemistry to highschoolers at a private school in Columbia was never "in my sights" as a goal, yet happened nonetheless.

I know that for some people, this would be a nightmare: I have a childhood friend that I think of as almost preternatural in his ability to plan and determine his own course in life. He was valedictorian, an athlete, he wanted to go to med school since I can remember him, and all he's accomplished has proven, at the least, that some people have a powerful drive and deliver on their own goals. I was just never that way. Maybe I never will be.

I wonder, as with kids who are not planned, if some of life's surprises are the best things to happen to us. The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and perhaps our preconceived notions of our own happiness and success are often flawed, much to our chagrin. Lou Holtz reportedly said that,

"Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it."

If that is indeed the case, then I wonder if I will one day look back upon my responses to life's happenings (i.e., my decisions) with regret or with pride. At the least, I have more options available to me if anything about my present choices should prove to be beyond accommodation and incapable of living with.

Here are my pipe dreams career-wise:

1. Go to law school, perhaps while working as a teacher by going to USC, and become an IP attorney. With my technical background, I qualify for the USPTO exam.
2. Get my left scaphoid non-union fixed and my 90° wrist bend back so I could enlist and attend OCS to become a pilot for the Navy or Air Force. (The age window is closing fast, however)
3. Sign up with the Effa Bee Eye or the CIA. The new FBI drug requirements will help (modified 12/06), as I experimented a little during my senior year of high school. The CIA's requirements seem extremely lax, but, as with most things in the CIA, they're probably just unpublished publicly and highly flexible. However, I haven't used any illegal substances since I was 17 (roughly since November of 1999), so I should be good with either one.

At least in theory, all of these are open to me and I could work them out financially if I really wanted to go for them. For the time being, I'm happy teaching at Hammond. Perhaps Lou Holtz was right, and this is just my response to what life handed me, but I don't feel like I'm "settling for less".