my dad showed me his doctoral thesis once. the pinnacle of his academic career was housed in an unmarked, bound black book tucked away in his study. the only things i remember from this show and tell were the carefully penciled in symbols for the complicated equations that peppered its typewritten pages, and on the front, an acknowledgment to my ( Read more... )

Wow, I've turned into a real LJ slacker.

Just finished up a Four Swords session with Jen, Joe, and Grant. Even though Grant figured out a bunch of the puzzles, we kept stealing his rupees and voting him the Hero of Darkness ( Read more... )

the cantabrigian weather machine is bipolar. today's heat is stifling, causing my clothes to stick uncomfortably. i could do with a big ice cream cone ( Read more... )

turns out that growing up has little to do with either chronological age or physical appearance--just mention marriage and mortgages and suddenly you're middle-aged even if you still look 12. i sometimes feel like a kid playing the yuppie pottery barn version of house ( Read more... )

i’ve been thinking lately about relationships-not the deeply-rooted ones that are as constant as the pull of tides but those that are ephemeral and apt to fade like poor cell phone reception. the main difference with people i’ve fallen out of touch with is that my recollection of their lives end with when i last saw them; the events since then are ( Read more... )

happy belated chinese new year! since i did absolutely nothing to celebrate the year of the monkey (demanding red envelopes didn´t seem quite right for someone so advanced in years and was also too logistically difficult given the distance from home), i will talk about my other new year´s instead ( Read more... )

for fun, i sometimes make lists. one that i hastily scrawled a couple of months ago was entitled ¨roommates¨, starting with my sister and winding up with 4 crazy spanish friends + dog. the dynamic that exists among young people who live together is unpredictable; some become lifelong friends you play tony hawk with every night while others never ( Read more... )

some wiring in the brain makes it effortless to learn a language during the first few years of life--then a switch is pulled and suddenly 23+ years later you find yourself mired in the endless confusion of trying to master 84 different subjects and verb tenses ( Read more... )

wrote this c. may 2003, but never posted ( Read more... )

my first day of unemployment was filled with a lot of manual labor. my sub-5-foot mom and i moved two cars-full of furniture/clothing down three flights of stairs. (random aside: i decided that her priorities were out of whack when she suggested we leave the tv but take the unused boxes of kleenex). afterwards we drove to a dim sum place where she ( Read more... )