Shafted, again!

THEY GET RICH

WE GET FORECLOSED (or it takes a year to sell a house in a high demand area at 25K below the minimum realtor valuation in 2009, but it serves us right for livin' the fine life in  a house way beyond our means until we could flip it)

THEY GET A BAILOUT (see http://imerimer.blogspot.com/2009/07/oh-ba-rack-ob-ma-to-tune-of-ob-la-di-ob.html)

WE GET MAD! (My hands are toasty warm from sitting on them for the last 11 years, how are yours?)


WE GET ARRESTED (see the next post)

OccupySFFoodBlog 1+2

If nothing else, please re-post, maybe one of your friends who does have more time can contribute.



On that first day, we took along a massive potful (The 2.5 G pot) of Poha: rice flakes cooked with onions and some very simple spices and a 2 lb. bag of mixed frozen veggies; and the apple sauce that Maya and Elsa made by themselves, from scratch.


I had promised to take them along the boardwalk for some fun activities after that, but they ended up staying two hours and helping Meagan sort the bread, organize the kitchen and distribute evening snacks walking around through the camp. In the meantime, I picked up staples from them and also did some organizing - I know my place is the kitchen.

This is the food I took along on the second trip:

 CW from the TopLeft: puliyogare (spiced tamarind rice with peanuts), roasted yellow peppers (with salt, olive oil and garlic), Vangibhaath (spiced rice with vegetables, perhaps an eggplant?), curried frijoles (with sauteed pumpkin from garden) and curried frijoles (with pork and beef, perhaps chorizo, and of course, spices).

That evening, this was the sign we saw on the Organization tent: HOW TO GET INVOLVED

 1. SWITCH YOUR BANK ACCOUNT (TO A LOCAL CREDIT UNION)
2. OFFER YOUR SKILLS (you never know what they may need)
3. TEACH A CLASS OR WORKSHOP

 4. JOIN AN OCCUPY WORKING GROUP
5. DONATE FOOD
6. DONATE SUPPLIES (paper plates, disposable cutlery, bowls, cups, board games, paper towels, foil ...)
7. DONATE BOOKS
8. SPREAD THE WORD (which is what I am doing, so please FB share or send the link)

 9. MAKE A SIGN (of the cross, to ward off the naysayers and the cops)
10. SPEND SOME TIME HERE W/ YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY (you have no idea how morale-boosting this is for the people in camp, particularly the ones organizing and keeping things together, they ENJOY the opportunity to chat!, and seeing children in camp - the first day we went to Occupy Oakland Snow Park, Maya and Elsa started this madcap raucous screaming banshee game of freeform tag, many adults joined in, and it suddenly brought huge smiles and laughter to a pretty morose camp, it was the kind of game that people could see that anybody could join without waiting to be asked, without rules, if you unknowingly broke one, you were just corrected or not and the game went on! it also provided a safe way for physical contact.)
11. BRING YOUR OWN IDEAS AND CREATIVITY TO THIS MOVEMENT. (see above!!!)

On a sadder note, the kitchen had been threatened and cleared out, no food had come in for a couple of days and they were all out:

"WE HAVE NO FOOD", "KITCHEN CLOSED UNTIL MORNING", "SORRY"

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Berra

"When you come to a fork, take it!"

Visual poetry.

I saw a fork,

came to it

and took the one unseen.

I looked back,

... and wondered...

OccupyOaklandFail

Here is what the plan was:

1. Participate in a brain-storming session to develop “socializing games” for the duration of Occupy.
2. Participate in the march through downtown Oakland to a new site.
3. Camp overnight, donate various needed goods and food. I took fresh produce from my garden, stuff to make a cocido and also some idli mix. I was going to OccupyOccupyOakland'sKitchen.

Reality ended with an idiot walking out of a bar alone in SF.

1. Done: The game development session was quite structured and focussed, there was an agenda which was tightly stuck to and a wrap-up of the meeting and plan for the next session was e-mailed within a couple of hours or so of the end of the meeting.

2. Did do: Various members left to go and support the Occupy SF movement which had apparently faced some police action. Sage and I were the only two who would join the Oakland march, and it took us a while to get going, mostly so she could finish the meeting notes and so we could have lunch. The OccupyOakland website only stated where the march would end; I at least couldn't recall where it was supposed to start, but rather hopefully we headed downtown. We left late enough to give them time to actually start walking. In order to ensure that we would encounter the rest of the marchers, we started at the destination and walked towards them. It felt antidisestablishmentarian, to be walking in the direction opposite to the disestablishmentarians.

By the time we managed to join the march, we'd met various other people headed there, already at the destination or on their way there. One of them was a woman who, it turned out, had gone to the same small beyond liberal-arts college where you design your own program, in where else? … Massachusetts. Yaayy, joyful hugs between the two. (I wasn't included, even though I was wearing my “Kiss me, I'm Indian. Diwali was only 4 weeks ago.” T-shirt. Yes I update it, and will continue to do so until it works.) The “sharing” seemed like a good idea: “Arrey, Jasvinder, where did you do your undergrad?”, “IIT-Bombay, yaar”, “Yaayy, me too, group hug!”.

I tried to get some information from the cops at the destination about where the march was located at the moment, I'll fill in details later, however, the last comment to me was to look for the police helicopter and head directly under it. “Like towards the fire-bombs?” But I wouldn't say that to a man in a uniform with his hand on a truncheon.

The march was high-energy, lots of sloganeering, lots of racket, numerous marching bands, including the Brass Liberation Orchestra, and, lots and lots of smiling faces, which is NOT what you see at the typical Tea-Party or right-wing rallies, which is mostly bared fangs in tight rows. Two of the people in the game group had warned me not to expect too much organization that first night, and they turned out to be right. So I decided it would be better to make the donations etc some other day. There was little bit of a street party air to it, the fence around the park came down, quite a few tents and a music stage went up.

3. It started raining, nobody I knew was staying there, my car was a 40 minute walk away and it seemed pointless to stay overnight with the “white kids from Marin County” occupiers who were dancing on the street. Besides, I'd managed to get myself invited to a birthday party in SF, where we would be occupying bar-stools.

In SF, in the first bar, Sage introduced me to her friend from elementary school, whose birthday it was. The first thing I did was to join in loudly and sing “Happy Birthday Emily”, except it was Beth's birthday. One pitch, two strikes. Beth took it well.

We waited a bit for some more of the party to show up. A couple joined us: one of them was Dennis, who looked as Chinese as his name sounded. The other guy introduced himself, “Hi, I'm Hong.”. “Well, fuck you, and I have a PhD in Physics”, I replied. I mean, what a cheesy pick-up line, right in front of his boyfriend too! I'm not even gay! Not that there is anything wrong with that, I have that rainbow patterned bumper-sticker, the one that says, what … “Straight but not gay!” as a sign of support, I'm just waiting for the right car to put it on. Plus, the colors are in the wrong order, don't gays know anything about Rayleigh scattering?

I mean, come on, I am an Indian guy, there is no arranged marriage for gays, hello-o! Who would pay the dowry?

After a drink or two we walked into the next bar, where there was a stand-up comic night. These guys were bad, so bad that Sage pulled out her phone and started playing traffic jam, and three guys immediately gathered around to tell her what to do.

One of the comics had a bit of a riff about American guys marrying foreign women. “Why is that?”, he asked, I think rhetorically. One of our party -the neck-sucking-boyfriend- yelled out, “Because American women suck!”. I'm proud of you, man, don't let anyone domesticate you! Ever! “Apparently not well enough!”, I yelled back.

There was group of three beautiful brunettes in front of us. Two of them were tall, hair was the same length, their asses were the same shape and size, the hint of a roll just above their pants was the same shape as well. They even had the same smile, just toothy enough to draw attention to how attractive they were, and they were drinking the same beer. The third one was not drinking anything, must have been the DD – designated dyke. I went over to them, since I'd already struck out with two of the women in our group. After a run of really bad misogynistic jokes from the stage, I said something to the pretty ladeej about their seeming to really enjoy the show. One of the tall ones looked at the full beer in her hand, “As soon as this is done, we are out of here.” How bad were the jokes? The third woman grabbed the beer and proceeded to chug it.

Unfortunately for me, she didn't finish the beer.

The last comic was actually pretty good. Plus, the ice had been broken.

The comic picked on a guy in the audience, “You, yes you, you don't look American. Where are you from?”.

Big bright smile, “Europe!”.

The comic: “Europe isn't a fucking country, what country are you from, unless your parents were Euroswingers from 30 countries?”

“Moldova.”, came the reply.

I interjected, “Moldoova is the unhappiest country in the whole world!”

The comic: “Who said that? You?”. Addressing the audience, “This guy's from India, and he's saying the saddest country on the planet is Moldova? Besides, Euro-trash here doesn't look too sad to me!”

Me: “That's because he's OUT of Moldoova!”

Comic: “How do you know about all this, anyway?”

Me: “I'm a physicist, I read a book about happiness.”

That ended up being a bit of a non-sequitor, and the comic moved on to jokes about dating women. I leaned towards the tall brunette who was still drinking her own beer and said that the comic had women who are dating pegged, he must have been reading a lot of profiles of women on dating websites, that I didn't know if she, the brunette, was on those sites.

She said, “I'm on the dating sites, everybody does that nowadays.”

Me: “I don't know what men's profiles are like, and you don't see women's profiles, so ...”

She: “Oh I do, I'm a lesbian so I see women's profiles.” I should have read that, I actually had, but refused to recognize it and refused to allow myself that stereotype.

Me, digging myself deeper now: “Oh, I thought a lot of these sites prohibit ...”

She: “No, that was a long time back, now I'm on all these sites, and I'm a lesbian.”

I saw the opening, and I took it: “But you are too attractive to be a lesbian!”

She, freezing up now: “That is such an offensive stereotype! Look at my girlfriend, she is gorgeous.”

Me: “Well, yes, which is why I was trying to chat her up. But, I'm sorry, I hope I haven't offended you, I was playing off the stereotype...”

She: “I'm not offended, it's just idiotic! It is so old and repeated so often ...”

The Comic, from the stage: “Ma'am, is he bothering you?”

She: “No.”

Me: “No! I'm complimenting her!”

Comic: “Complimenting her? You looked like you were trying to kiss her!”

Me: “No, no, you are not understanding sir. I'm from India, and we Indians we are liking to be close to peepul.”

She then proceeded to lecture me. I listened for a while, tried to excuse myself again, no go. When I could get a word in, I said, “Of course you are a lesbian, you have no sense of humor!”

Just then her girlfriend said, “Dee-Dee is done with my beer, let's go.”

As the one I'd been talking to turned to leave, I tried to excuse myself again, “Let me just explain where I am coming from. Can I do that?”

She: “I'm leaving now.”

Me, further abasing myself: “Just half a minute, please?”

She assented with a nod of her head.

Me: “Look, I go to International Women's Day marches, with a T-shirt that says, “This is what a lesbian feminist looks like!”. Please sleep with me!” I didn't mean that! Or I must have meant it but not meant to say it. How fucked-up can I be on two beers?

To top it off, at the end of the night birthday girl Beth says to me, as she and Sage prepare to drive off into the sunset together, “You are such a sweet guy!” Oh those magic words of death!

Sometimes, you see an opening, and you take it. Often though, the opening is a trap you've set for yourself.

My Friday Night Love Life

A couple of months ago, not long after my separation, the girls' after-school had a talent show on an evening that M and E were with me. There was a very attractive European woman there, who liked the gazpacho I'd made and told me so. She didn't give off any “mommy” vibes, and it turned out that she was a very close family friend of one of M's Latina classmates. I chatted to the parents in Spanish, and to the friend, D. To cut a long story short, she and I have been on a few “dry-dates” since then - good ones, long ones, lots of talking ones, but ones that left me in blue-balled pain like I haven't experienced since, well, in a while.

Yesterday I'd called D to see if she was free tonight, but she said she was going to a party with her friends. What a great day for me to do my laundry and iron my underwear!

The after-school had a Diwali function this evening, and though they were with their mom, M and E both had expressly wanted me to come. So after work I went to the laundromat, started a couple of mega-loads in the washers and made it to the Diwali function in time. M had organized some of the younger kids into some kind of group play, E was very excited because she had mehndi on her hands, hence couldn't play and was facing the model vs. athlete dilemma for the first time. M had already come down in favor of "athlete".  Their mother was sitting with a group of Indian fellow-moms from the Cupertino colony. She was easily the most elegantly and appropriately dressed for Diwali, except for the after-school director, who is of Indian origin.

After a while I realised that M's Latina classmate had turned up and out of the corner of my eye I saw D. She is a striking woman, in fact it was the first thing about her that had struck me when I'd struck sight of her for the first time, and it had been a stroke of luck that she was also recently separated. It is another matter altogether that I had struck out.

I played it cool, approached her and mentioned what a pleasant surprise it was to see her there. She said, “But I told you I was going to be here with my friends!”. Huh? Am I already not processing what she is saying to me? Anyway, I sat and chatted with them for a while, then borrowed $5 in cash from M and E's mom for the dryers, and left for the laundromat - intending never to return. As I left I noticed that M and E's mom had met Maya's friend's Latina mom and D and they were all chatting quite pleasantly.

On the way to the laundromat, I first stopped at home, shaved and changed out of my grungy work clothes and into decent ones, and then went to the supermarket. As I paid and headed to my car, myself all spiffed up in a nice shirt and with a bunch of flowers in my hand for the woman I'd met in the laundromat an hour earlier and who I'd given my cell number to so we could go get a drink later, well, who should I run into but the Latina mom, my ex, my nex and all the kids!

The woman from the laundromat never called.

Anybody in the market for a bunch of second hand flowers?

Make Hunter proud!

Guys, we are only a few days away from our H-8 B-Wing reunion trip to Vegas, and I thought I would take the opportunity to inspire you to great feats.

Hunter S. Thompson did not write Fear and Loathing in Columbus, OH. Columbus, OH, has gambling, shows, drinking and prostitution. But it is not Las Vegas. And we, señores, are going to Las Vegas, which brings up the question: What are we, as individuals and as a group, going to do that will have to stay in Vegas: something that will make HST proud, Las Vegas what it is, and ourselves, laudably loathsome?

Now, you don't have to transgress my boundaries, leave alone those of HST. All you have to do is transgress your own. Let's consider some examples of transgressions that won't count.

• Lose more money gambling on this trip than your previous high. (Unless it is greater by an order of magnitude.)
• Eat till you are sick and have to be hospitalized. Obviously, this proscription applies only to Raj A. and Sanjay U., for everyone else, this is a fair challenge.
• Plain and simple vomiting. Unless

1. You do it from the top of a ride
2. You do it from a gondola into the canals of Venice
3. You first drop your glasses and then puke on them.

• Make a fool of yourself. This blanket proscription is in place because

1. It is too non-specific
2. You've done it before – Dude, we know you.

Let me throw out some ideas.

Gambling: Remember the order of magnitude rule. You have to risk at least 10 times your previous maximum net loss. OK, it doesn't mean you have to end the weekend with that much net loss, just that at some point during your stay you have to be down by that amount. You can, and in fact are encouraged to, stay at the table so you can win back your losses. This has the advantage of potentially lowering the amount you'll be obliged to risk next time you are in Vegas with us, a factor of 11 marginal benefit. For example, say your previous maximum net loss on a trip was $10. This time you have to risk $100. You play till you are down $ 101 and have met your goal. But are you satisfied? Next time, you'll have to risk $1010. Whereas if you stay at the table and win back $10, so that your net loss is only $91, next time you'll only have to risk $910! That is an overall saving of $110 over this trip and the next!

What does this translate to for me? $2.50! Why? Some decades ago, in a desperate attempt to read the romantic tea-leaves as it were, I played 3 quarters in the slots, one each for myself, for my fiancee at the time and for TWIWF. The quarter for TWIWF won back 50 cents, my fiancee and I broke up, and TWIWF went back to her cheating hubby. Isn't astrology amazing?

Climbing: Being jilted doesn't make you a better climber, it just makes you less concerned about your own mortality, makes you give even less of a shit. Within the space of a few months I'd repeatedly taken a 30 foot whipper on a 5.10+ trad route and one 35” whipper on a 5.10d sport route. My previous hardest climbs have been a 10b/c trad and 11b sport. So in Red Rocks my goal will be to do either a midlength 5.9+ or a very long 5.8. How exactly is this “upping the ante”? In the increasingly inaptly named Yosemite Decimal System, the grades go from 5.0 to 5.15a, passing through grades like 5.8+ (harder than 5.8 but not quite 5.9) and 5.9- (5.9, but just about) and grades like 5.12a, 5.12b, 5.12c, 5.12d after which comes 5.13a. Somewhere we also have 5.10b/c, and we also have qualifiers like sport vs. trad, a length scale from I through VI+ and a safety scale : PG, G, S, R and X. So now it should be perfectly clear why a long 5.8 is going to be a wordy challenge for me.

Sex: In increasing order of merit:

1. Pay for sex
2. Fall in love with an escort
3. Fall in love with an escort without realising his/her profession
4. Get into a barfight with the pimp in an attempt to “save” the person in question

Where am I on this ? I've struck-out on AshleyMadison, so (1.) will be a good goal for me. However,

mitigating circumstances exist. 

I'll be attempting to climb one of the tall, free standing, erect, towers in Red Rocks, and as any half-decent Freudian knows, that is an expression of my deep-seated and suppressed homo-erotic fantasies. For women, (and just by the way, why aren't there any women in our reunion?) the equivalent would be to climb in Owen's Gorge or the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. Plus, after I'd taken that 40' whipper on the 5.10d, and Orlando had driven himself into a drunken black funk on New Year's Eve by expecting Las Vegas to be like a “plaza in Spain” and, hungover, had properly dishonoured himself on Fear&LoathingIII by dogging and pulling and hanging his way up, we were quietly getting stoned on the drive back to Santa Barbara, when he looked at me and said, “Hombre, if you were a woman, I'd kiss you right now.” To which I'd replied, “O-man, you are so beautiful I would have kissed you back.” Then we'd stopped just before the CA border, at the last chicken-ranch in NV, imagined the girls in the back rooms and looked up at the curtained windows. “Last chance!” he said. “No. Our cheating bitches will be pleading for us when we get back.” said I. And it was true.

That is when you know you are well and truly fucked, when she pleads for you, when she lies and promises and cajoles her way into your bed before washing herself off and going back home to her BF or husband. She can afford rejection from you because patient, kind, loving, or, this is a good one “He understands me!” is waiting for her at home, to comfort her should you be smart enough to reject her. She can afford to give you a choice which is no choice because you'll never, never, in that moment, say “no!”, because before that deeply miserable and lonely night you will have glory, and if you say “no!” you will have no glory and only slightly less miserable and lonely a night.

And O-man and I made a pact, that we would climb more, waste less time on the women who respectively and respectfully had us by the balls, a pact that we knew we wouldn't keep, because we would be admired for our bruises, for our sunburnt skin, for our stories of valor and failure, for our twisted, bent and damaged but strong fingers and other words would be said, words which would atrophy our brains but swell our heads and one other body part each. Where are you O-man?

So I'll give myself a pass on this one. What do you guys think?

Other, innocent ideas:

• See the wild burros in RRSP
• Listen to the coyotes howl in the desert
• Confess to us something that none of the rest of us know about you. (And fukinn make it good, I don't want to hear about some stolen patent or how you fired a 100 people, not unless you stole their panties and screwed half of them first.)

To conclude: You guys are all Masters of the Universe, goal-setters, accomplished followers of Stephen Covey. Set a goal, make a plan to accomplish it over the weekend and publicize it so you can be held accountable. Recall what Prof. Isaac, then Dean of Student Affairs, said to us: “You represent India's best. You are the brain in 'brain drain', you are the cream in 'sour cream'! You've floated to the top, like shit or Sorrow.”

And as Gandhi said, “If you don't plan to make an ass of yourself, you won't!”


Acknowledgements: This work was supported in part by Arun Yethiraj Patron of the Arts Grant LV-SEP2011.

I hardly know you!

As the party wound down after the dancing, we made our way outside to the cool air, the sweat clamming to our bodies. R went back inside to fetch me a drink, and Cathy and I watched him silently till he disappeared.

“Where did you find him, Cathy?” We'd been to high school together, we had both been under-the-radar smart ones, but we'd been in equally peripheral and non-interacting cliques – separated by god knows what! We'd even fought at the prom, when her date and I ended-up dancing together in the crowd. No big scenes, but she'd quickly and firmly interjected herself in between and hustled him off, leaving me alone on the floor. I was without a date, so it wouldn't have hurt her to let me have one dance, but I suppose it had been difficult enough for her to find her pimply-faced date. We'd then been thrown together and grown closer together in college, room-mates in fact for 3 years until the incompatibility of our boyfriends (her two or three always callow anglos, and mine -more frequently changed- graduate assistants of all available kinds) caused us to live apart, not without regret on both sides.

So it had come as a complete surprise to me, first that her 'guy' was, as her grand-mother (and, I will add for generational context, Cathy's high-school aged children's great-grandmother) put it, “not really Hispanic”. That bitter bitch's bile should have left her dead long-ago, maybe soon after that humiliating Thanksgiving I spent with Cathy, but at least it had brought her to confront the image of her own favorite grand-daughter being stuck on someone brown. … and second, after R had been considerate towards me ever since I'd arrived for the wedding, that when R had asked me to dance (and he was a surprisingly poor dancer!), Cathy had given us this peculiarly smug smile; and I don't think she was thinking “threesome” - we'd tried kissing each other one mutually bereft Saturday night in college, and had found comfort but nothing more. Either her divorce or the meditation she'd taken up or R himself had worked wonders on her.

Since we'd watched R enter the bar-area, Cathy had continued staring silently at me. “That's always been your first question. This is the first time it isn't tinged with 'What rock did you find him under?' ”.  I'll admit the truth of that, but … ohh! differing tastes I guess.

“Some years back, at our baby-sitting coop's annual camping trip, this guy gate-crashed with his two young daughters … I guess Anne-Marie's husband -one of only two dads with us- had helped him set-up his tent, and then Margaret quite independently invited the girls over for s'mores. Within minutes Emilia, his older daughter, was playing with our kids at the fire, and Silvia, who must have been 5 at the time, had snuggled up to Anne-Marie, and he was chatting us all up, in Spanish and English, even faking French with Anne-Marie. Soon enough it became "known" that he was recently separated and that after some years as a “full-time mom” he was in career transition. Almost immediately Cawley had gravitated to him and was giddily throwing herself at him, hanging on his every word ( and he had plenty of those!) and spouting her 'man-ego-builders' at him: “... this is the place to be for someone as smart as yourself … I've always found genetics fascinating … my boys were asking about cloning, would you explain it to them?”. Somehow they got talking about Cawley's career change to social media marketing and then 'gender-neutral writing'.”

I asked Cathy if she herself had been immune to his charm then, and she actually blushed. I suppose a 45 year old now can blush if a 40 year old then could have “giddily thrown herself”. From what I'd seen of Cawley on my visits to Cathy, she had struck me as a fairly no-nonsense woman.

“Any fool but he could see Cawley's infatuation with him. There were even moments when she was not worriedly shepherding her boys, you know how she's become so over-protective after her divorce. … but then he stopped flitting amongst the women like a hummingbird between flowers, once he got a good look at what Cawley was flaunting!”

“Cathy, not that I'm one to defend men, but aren't you being a little harsh?”

Cathy continued as if she hadn't heard me. “When it was time to put the kids to bed, he approached me and asked if I wanted to go for a walk afterwards. Jack wasn't feeling to good and I didn't really like the idea of leaving Jess and Jack alone without me in the tent ...”

“... 'and it will take me a while to get them settled and it could get quite late and won't your girls need you with them n the tent?' ...” I finished for her, she'd always been so predictably tentative.

“Lynn! Really ! … I did agree to go for a short walk, but back in the tent, I had second thoughts, because of Jack, and because of Cawley.”

“How loyal!”, I thought to myself, but kept a lid on it.

“When I came back out and walked towards his tent, it was moonless and all quiet and I didn't see him till he stood up from the rock he'd been lying on and greeted me. I told him I would have loved it, I really liked the idea of a walk, but I didn't feel comfortable leaving Jack without me in the tent with him.”

I just hoped Cathy hadn't apologized to him, and told her so.

“He wished me goodnight and started off down the path. After a few yards he turned back, called softly and came back to where I'd stopped. He came up close and thanked me for coming back out to tell him that I wouldn't join him on the walk. I said “Of course” or some such thing. The star-light, it must've been that, threw light through the trees, and his face was partly visible. Then he leaned in towards me, and I said “No! I hardly know you!”. He laughed silently -I've never seen anybody so pleased at a rejection- and said, 'And I don't know you, but have a good night!' and then turned around and walked away.”

I was getting confused by Cathy's story, and thirsty for my drink. I looked around, one or two cigarettes glowing in the dark, the unhappy looking middle-aged couple silently nursing their drinks...  I heard the lapping of waves in the pool as someone climbed out. “... and he showed up for the pancakes with your group the next morning?”

“He didn't seem to be awkward about it when he walked Silvia to the bathroom in the morning, the rest of the kids were all over the place … he greeted Cawley and myself and chatted quite happily, if a little subdued. Though it might have been something else …”

“What?”

“Cawley said he wrote to her, and mentioned something about realizing that “... he was going to die under unfamiliar stars...” and his feeling of "soudade" at knowing us ... I've held on to that word ever since.”

I love that girl, but seriously, where in a comfortable upper-middle class married with children drive them to swim lessons is there room for soudade? If I have my loneliness to bear, can't she leave soudade to me? “Have you never asked him about it?”

“No... that morning he came up to us ...”

“To who 'us'?”

“Cawley and myself. We found something in each other that morning..., AnneMarie claims we were almost in a huddle, that even she didn't want to interrupt us”

What a guy, I thought, helping females bond.

“ ...He came up and apologized for his actions the previous night.”

and what a 'SNAG' he was! I couldn't imagine the R I'd met today doing that … he seemed too proud, all things nice, but a bit of the torero in him. “.. and then?”

“Nothing, he went off to play with the kids, and then I could watch him. He played their games, by their rules, except when he wouldn't and would cause them to scatter in mock-fright. He hung upside down from Hanna and Jess' flimsy jump-rope obstacle course tied off the trees, never once seeming to test the strength… breaking every rule we'd set for our kids. He fought them to the top of their hollow tree-stump castle”

That I was sure none of the other adults had set foot near …

“ … and stood there a while, arms on his hips, ignoring the taunts of the kids, leaning over as if ready to fly, … an aging Adonis with a Peter Pan complex...”

You could never imagine that Cathy had been a Lit. major; didn't they have rules against such mixed metaphors? Her current tech-writing job suited her. Besides, from where I am, an aging Diana with what? a "Wendy" complex? (surrounded by a band of younger men), “an aging Adonis with a Peter Pan complex” sounds pretty good.

“... he never removed his shirt, it would have ruined the whole effect had he! … then they started sword-fighting, he went out of his way to get the girls involved in the rough and tumble. The older kids, his daughter Emilia included, formed one team, but Silvia was always on “Daddy's team” and the two of them sword-fought like the 3 Musketeers! Each time he let himself be disarmed, Silvia was magically there with an extra stick for him, which she would somehow manage to get to him through the pack.”

“Are they here now?”

“Who?”

“His daughters!”

“No! Why would they?”

I'd always known Cathy as rambling, but this was … I decided to let her go on. “You were creaming yourself looking at your Adonis, standing there in a shaft of sunlight under the evergreens, then what?”

Cathy had brought her wine out with her, and she took a sip before replying. “As we were all packing up, Cawley gave him her contact information and asked him to send her “that information”. He'd forgotten what she was talking about – the “gender-neutral language”. Here she is, studying to be a marketeer to the social web, and she can't think of googling that herself? ... Then when we were finally all packed up and it was time for us to go he looked at me very directly and said, “Find me … if you are interested.” as if he was starring in some French movie.”

Or a Spanish film, Julio Medem perhaps, but Cathy had never made it past Almodóvar and "Sexo y Lucia". Besides, if 9 year old girls can be continually narrating and starring in their own bio-pics, why not a grown man? Now after all that vacuous gallantry and courtesy I'd been subjected to this evening, I was finally beginning to find this guy intriguing, so I 'gently' pointed out, “Cathy, wasn't this around the time you were in your “eat olives, drink red wine, pray, love under the Provençal sun” phase?”

She was silent a minute, and then contritely apologized, adding, "I don't know what came over me.". Honey, I got news for you, I certainly don't know either.  “So then what did you do, Cathy?” I was almost shrieking at her slow indecisiveness!

"I thanked him."

"You thanked him?! You silly woman, you are supposed to stare them down! What favor is he doing you?"

“... Lynn, you sound as if you hate men. Besides, that afternoon we bumped into each other again at a cafe in Saratoga. While Emilia and Silvia joined our kids at their table, he declined my invitation to join us, saying he could see Cawley and I had a lot to catch up on. Over lunch Cawley and I gossiped about it all, while he sat with the kids and scribbled in his notebook until Emilia borrowed it from him.”

She sighed, “It took me a week to ask Cawley about him, since that afternoon, we'd always stepped around that topic. Then she somehow didn't get around to replying for a week, saying she thought she'd deleted his e-mail. Finally I noticed she'd already friended him on FB, and sent him a casual request. When I did get in touch with him, over the phone, he said he would be happy to have play-dates for the kids, but he'd already started seeing someone! Lynn, are we all that interchangeable to them?”

I didn't answer, " 'they'  are, to me!" I am quite happy with a pale, blond, goateed barista with artistic pretensions one week and a visiting professor on sabbatical from Europe the next. We can all be unique, and still be good solutions.

“When did the two of you get together then?”

“We never did. We had a couple of play-dates for the kids, once I even met the woman he was with, and he played wing-man for Cawley for a while, until she met her “techie” - a classmate of his from India, I think they are all good friends.”

“But Raúl...?”

“Raúl? I wasn't talking about Raúl! This was some Indian guy who'd walked in on us that night at camp!”

"... and why Spanish? Why was he speaking Spanish? His daughters' names?" 

"Lynn, his ex was Latina, didn't I mention that?"

I could have shaken her! No!, and neither that this wasn't Raúl she'd been talking about, nor that this guy was Indian! “Cathy! How did you meet Raúl?”

“... At a birthday party. He'd been hired to do a science show for Jess' friend's birthday. I was helping him pick up when out of the blue he invited me to have dinner with him that night." 

"Annnd...?"

"I said, “I hardly know you, but I will. Can I bring the kids?” ”

I looked up to see Raúl approaching us with Cawley and an Indian guy hanging on to her. “Look who's finally made it to the party!”, Raúl said, as he handed me my red wine and a plate of olives.

Some women have all the luck! 

Family trip to India

Click here to view this photo book larger

response to Pandurang nayak's blogpost on Greene's "elegant universe"

http://pandunayak.blogspot.com/2007/05/elegant-universe.html

Hmm ... "string theory", maybe it should be classified under meta-physics?

I haven't read Brain Greene's book. But I have been hearing about strings since about 1988, from people of the likes of Gary Horowitz (with whom I did a postdoc later), Ed Witten, David Gross, Strominger etc.

Early strings: In relativity, the action (which is later extremized to find the equations governing its motion) for a free particle is simply the path integral of the infinitesimal distance ds. So Nambu-Gottu proposed that the action governing the motion of a string is its surface area. Now if you just extremize this the solutin would lead to the collapse of the string to a point, so you add in a linear tension term. The resulting solutions to the Eqn of Motion have the usual oscillatory modes etc.

Now, fundamental theories are field theories and particles are thier quanta. So far so good. But when you put in interacting fields (EM field (photons) and Dirac field (charged particles)) and quantize them you can't do it exactly. So you do perturbations about the 0 interaction, or the vaccuum. It turns out that even QED is perturbatively "non-renormalizable", sort of like a divergent series. However, unlike a divergent series, it turns out that removing certain infinities and adding the perturbation term by term does lead to converging answers that agree with experiment to astounding degree of 10^-12 etc!

So why are interacting particle field theories singular? Hand waving, it goes like this, any paricle interaction involves a node in spacetime (the "collision" or disassociation) where 3 worldlines come together. Now this is no longer a "line" and leads to trouble. Also, there are (solved) causality problems and reference frame problems for multiple interactions. However, a string interaction is visualized as a smooth manifold, the trousers topology - imagine two circles coming closer and merging to form one: while the sequence of two dimensional slices of this event appear to have a singularity (non-hausdorff ness or a cusp formation) the spacetime manifold (surface) is smooth!

So lots of excitement, particularly for string field theory. Claims and expectations:

1. string interactions are just smooth 2 dimensional surfaces
2. lack of point interactions means should be renormalizable
3. critical dimensions for string FT to be consistent, either 26 or 10, lots of yummy math, extra dimensions are compact manifolds, could be beautiful Calabi-Yau manifolds, topological invariants etc.
4. Then things got even better, solutions to string field equations (which themselves arise from requiring SFT to be “perturbatively renormalizable”) include general relativity with matter, physical matter field equations etc. Hence the claim it a TOE – Theory of everything!
5. Lots of connections between different areas of math discovered, by Witten and others.
   However,

1. No 2D surface admits a non-singular, non-degenerate Lorentzian metric everywhere. Metric = infinitesimal distance tensor, which is the geometry of the manifold. Lorentzian means one spacelike and one timelike dimension, I.e, one positive and one negative eigenvalue. In other words, somewhere on that trouser there is a singularity. This is not very important.
2. “renormalizable” means “perturbatively renormalizable”. What this means is one that the background spacetime in which the strings live is flat (why should that be so?) and this flat metric is used to setup a measure of distance for the perturbative expansions. Now: no one has actually done any perturbative calculations in full string theory, unlike in QED. Two, assuming a flat background spacetime is senseless for a self-proclaimed TOE (either GR is assumed and hence the string tension will cause curvature, or the background metric is a parameter whose value should be determined by the string EOM – see later. Three, a TOE should be exact, not perturbative, about some again arbitrarily chosen homogeneous solution.
3. In the perturbative expansion, in order for the first order term to be finite, certain conditions have to be met. These are the string field equations. One solution to the string field eqn is that the background metric used satisfy Einstein's field eqn for the metric, G mu nu = 8 Pi Tmu nu. However, there are other solutions, how many (not “countably how many”, rather how many dimensions and are these countable)? One doesn't even know the structure of the solution space. Other than knowing that GR is right, there is no way to pick that particular solution and hence claim that GR arises from string theory. Also, all this can only take place in 26 (or 10 or 11) dimensions of the background spacetime. Then one is left with explaining the apparent 4 dimensionality of the physical world – how do the extra dimensions compactify, why are they small and not say large. Note that the extra dimensions are physical (like a very tightly rolled up sheet of paper appears to be 1D but is actually 2D on the small scale), not extra dimensions in the fibre-bundle sense (where the extra dimension is just a property holder, say e.g. a sphere to represent the spin of a point particle).
4. See above. So string theory is not just a TOE, it is a TOEPUCI+ – Theory Of Everything Possible U Can Imagine and then some.To counter this and patrt of the previous criticism, let me make an analogy: suppose that immediately after Maxwell's EM and the Lorentz transformations somebody (the analog of a string theorist) said I have this wonderful theory of a thing called a metric that explains everything, I have an action principle (very important in physics then and now), I extremize it, the eqn says the ricci curvature of this metric thing is 0. A solution is that the world is flat! See, I have proved the world is flat. The analog of Lee or myself (in a very small way) or Woit would say, wait a minute, but there are numerous other solutions to your “metric equation” which say the metric is curved (what we now call the weyl curvature can be non-zero), how do you pick your flat metric from all the other solutions without knowing in advance that the world is flat? The answer is that you can't, the world is not flat and the metric theory is correct! So might String theory!
5. There have been a series of String bandwagons, all but the most recent few started by Ed Witten: matrix theory, conformal field theory, String BHs (most notably the CGHS black hole - a 2 D mini-micro nanomodel and symmetry reduction of string theory then with the sign of the exponent in the potential term arbitrarily reversed because everything else is too hard to solve), M-theory, membrane theory, Maldacena etc. The lifetime of each of these (as measured by publications) is about 5-6 years. Every two years there is a big string conference, some major breakthrough is announced, stringers dance the macarena in the aisles, the fever subsides, it proves a physics dead end and one moves on.
6. Now, contrary to Voit's claim that ST is “not even wrong”, a Weyl-square theorist whose seminar I attended in 1996 pointed out that string theory does actually make one very concrete testable prediction, and that never in the history of science has a theory been so wrong! Roughly speaking, in a non-perturbatively quantized ST, the string tension (actually stress) would be quantized, its quanta would be the planck tension (appropriate dimensional combination of G, c and h), which will also be the leading contributor to the cosmological constant (which is an energy density and has the same dimensions as tension/ area). There are strong astrophysical observational upper limits on the value of the CC, the planck tension is greater by about 40 orders of magnitude!
   Now, I have written much less than I could write, but already much more than you are interested in reading, so I'll just sto     

Letter to Amherst Bee about ACSD math teaching

“Data shows math textbook doesn’t hurt scores” (June 23, 2010) http://www.amherstbee.com/news/2010-06-23/Front_Page/Data_shows_math_textbook_doesnt_hurt_scores.html shows nothing of the sort.

The school district has no data for years prior to use of the mentioned text – Math Investigations, so no comparison can be made.

All data presented were based on the NYS test, which the state Education Dept. itself admits has been lowering thresholds for “mastery level” for years. The district's own longitudinal data shows a drop of 2% “mastery” per year of exposure to MI at Amherst, while NYS and Erie county averaged 2% per year increases! For Maths 3,4,5: at the end of 4 years, Amherst finishes at the bottom of all 5 neighboring districts.

Ms. Lavin's vociferous claims of children's and teachers' “increased ... ability to think, ...understanding and ...confidence” have no basis in reality.

Dr. Carosella's “ (The Adminstration's) ...statements do not support that MI is a bad program ...” makes me proud to have a Board member with such incredibly high standards.

The relative high performance of ACSD students (and the difference between SDS and Windermere) can be attributed to the socio-economic status of the parents, and there is no way to attribute it to MI.

A US Dept. of Education 2009 study found that MI is “the least effective” of 4 curricula and found a 9 - 12%-ile drop attributable to MI. 40 of 70 school districts touted as “successes” by the publisher of MI dropped the program within two years and 24 have funding that obligates the use of MI.

Your ostensibly neutral reporter, Mr. Nagy, displays a bias towards the Administration and no understanding of the issues or the Math involved.

For a comprehensive pedagogical and mathematics based critique of MI, allow me the opportunity to write an article.