longer update

mostly april

went on a road trip with a friend, let’s call them K, to see the total eclipse! (shoutout to K for carrying the driving.) the original plan was to meet in pittsburgh and drive to/from western new york, but for cloud cover reasons we ended up taking a much longer path

things that happened on the trip:

• spent a few hours the first day driving through communities in rural pennsylvania, my first time in trumpland (texas doesn’t really count as it was conservative long before 2016). you can really see how hard life has been on these people - minimal safety net, lots of buildings in disrepair, etc. i think i understand that part of the us a bit better now

• john and hank green did a roadtrip livestream the day before the eclipse. it was cool to listen to them point out various landmarks in eastern indiana as they passed them (rax, a “biden sucks” sign, wilbur wright’s birthplace, etc) and then drive past those same places a few hours later

• hung out with a friend in indianapolis, let’s call them Z. for reasons i can’t discuss publicly, we weren’t allowed to sleep in Z’s house, and instead spent the night in Z’s grandmother’s senior home

• i’ve always wanted to visit indianapolis ever since john green mentioned it in the anthropocene reviewed. some of my favorite paragraphs from that essay:

  • “Sarah said, ‘So what do you think of Indianapolis?’ And then the guy standing behind the counter at the U-Haul place paused for a moment and said, ‘Well, you gotta live somewhere.’”

  • “Indianapolis has tried on a lot of mottoes and catchphrases over the years. Indianapolis is ‘Raising the Game.’ ‘You put the “I” in Indy.’ ‘Honest to Goodness Indiana.’ But I’d propose a different motto: ‘Indianapolis: You gotta live somewhere.’”

  • “Vonnegut once said, ‘What people like about me is Indianapolis.’ He said that in Indianapolis, of course, to a crowd full of people from Indianapolis, but Kurt Vonnegut really did hold the city in high esteem. Toward the end of his life, he answered an interviewer’s question by saying, ‘I’ve wondered where home is, and I realized, it’s not Mars or some place like that, it’s Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and father and uncles and aunts. And there’s no way I can get there again.’ Vonnegut’s greatest novel, Slaughterhouse Five, is about a man who becomes unstuck in time, and how time conspires with consciousness. It’s about war and trauma, but it’s also about not being able to get back to before—before the firebombing of Dresden, before his mother’s suicide, before his sister’s early death. I really do believe that Vonnegut loved Indianapolis”

  • “As with all the best sci fi writers, Kurt Vonnegut was really good at seeing into the future. Way back in 1974, he wrote, ‘What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.’”

  • “That seems to me an even more important, and more daring, endeavor than it was forty years ago. And when people ask me why I live in Indianapolis when I could live anywhere, that’s what I want to tell them. I am trying to create a stable community in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured, and you gotta do that somewhere. When I am sick with the disease of loneliness, good weather and shimmering skyscrapers do me no good whatsoever, as a writer or as a person. I must be home to do the work I need to do. And yes, home is that house where you no longer live. Home is before, and you live in after. But home is also what you are building and maintaining today, and I feel rather lucky in the end to be making my home just off of Ditch Road.”

• by coincidence the senior home was just off 86th and ditch, the intersection john green writes about living next to, which made me very happy (have i mentioned that i’m a john green fan yet?)

• the midwest is incredibly beautiful in the spring, with all its trees flowering in various shades of green and pink and red and white. the color palette was so gorgeous that i thought the first few clusters of trees i passed by were curated and planted by hand, and it was only after driving past the same types of trees for an hour that i realized this is just the natural greenery of the region. same for west virginia and the parts of maryland closer to dc. (i had not previously visited any of these states other than pennsylvania)

• total eclipse was cool but i have no good pictures as my phone camera is sad

• because of the long detour i missed my return flight from pittsburgh and instead took the amtrak from dc to boston. witnessing another cpw and visiting friends and playing ddr again was very lovely

• learned all the travel hacks from K, like how amtrak is almost fully refundable so you should just buy lots of tickets if you’re not sure when you’ll reach the train station, you can keep rescheduling nonrefundable flights to get most of the benefits of refundability but cheaper, too many things about the interstate highway system, etc

picked up more books, i’d been slacking for a few months:

• read the writing life, a good exploration of how difficult writing is and how it’s inherently a lonely task, though it often felt too self-indulgent for my comfort

  • it put into words something i’d been feeling for a long time, namely that saving feelings to write about later doesn’t work: “One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”

• read someone who will love you in all your damaged glory, mostly because the author was the creator of my favorite show (bojack horseman). the book is a collection of short stories that does lots of experimentation with form. some of the stories were excellent and some were not very good, but the spirit of bojack really shines through all of it

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• reread a few books that i hadn’t touched since high school

  • kafka on the shore was even better than last time, mostly because i understand more of it now, particularly the parts about attachment

  • catcher in the rye was… interesting to revisit. i really related to the protagonist in high school but when i reread it i just felt bad for him. i suppose that is growth?

  • the fault in our stars was a lot better than i remembered it being, probably because i had no relationship experience the first time i read it. it’s still very much a typical YA novel, but you can tell the writing is much more polished than his earlier work and every few pages you’ll encounter a gorgeous sentence like my thoughts are stars i cannot fathom into constellations

other things that happened:

• some really pleasant calls with internet strangers! the most notable ones were a) two undergrads trying to start a new coworking club b) a math education phd student who interviewed me as part of their study on high school math research. it was fun to reflect on my history with math and think about how to do math education better. encounters like these remind me of why i love the internet

• watched the premiere of silicon valley: the musical, which my friend wrote / starred in!

• being oncall for a week was exhausting but extremely fun. i think part of the appeal of oncall is that everything you work on is obviously important and urgent so there is a very clear sense of purpose that is not as apparent normally. i am thinking about how to feel more urgency on a day-to-day basis