Efficient Wanderer
Sunday, June 13, 2004
Well?:
How was Edinburgh? Did you get up Arthur's Seat? I regretted not doing that but I was sick when I went. Stupid cough. Congrats on your graduation also!
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
Off to Edinburgh
We're going to be climbing a bit (apparently they have hills there). A full report to come Thursday.
Sunday, June 06, 2004
On climbing:
On Saturday, Will, Sudeep and I went to Starved Rock State Park, downstate a couple of hours from Chicago. The park itself consists of miles of paths, most of which are generally the sort of over-marked, boring things designed to protect the state park district of Illinois from lawsuits.
However, if you look a bit, there are infinitely cooler paths, beaten by others who hated the park ranger's processed paths as much as we did. Sure, technically using these cooler paths isn't 'legal' in the strictest sense of the word (since the park did have big signs threatening various punishments for those who ventured off the marked trails), but clearly we weren't the first. So we spent an afternoon scrambling up cliff faces and pulling ourselves up sandy mountains with giant tree roots, choosing places where we probably wouldn't die if we fell, though possibly convincing old ladies otherwise.
Will raised an interesting question, though. Would this have been as fun if it were legal? I was pretty sure not, though I was never afraid of being caught, so I don't think we could have felt that sort of thrill. I think it was more because had the climbing we did been legal, we would have known that it was perfectly safe. No state park is going to let a couple of dumb kids climb up a cliff without making damn sure that it's as safe as walking a level path of raked gravel. So we were courting danger a bit, but not the danger of getting caught; rather, we were in danger of hurting ourselves, a much more satisfying thrill.
This is tied into why roller coasters don't really do it for me. I'm not particularly afraid of heights or speed, and I know that riding in a roller coaster is about a hundred times safer than driving a car down the interstate. Why should I find it thrilling, then? My thrills need to involve some sort of fear, that moment when the horse I'm galloping loses his stride for half a second and I wonder if he and I care going to fall in some desperate mix of human and half a ton of horse, that moment when I'm windsurfing (which I haven't done in far too long) and I hit the funny wave and go under and my board's over me and I have to struggle to the surface, or that moment when I'm climbing a cliff and realise that my footing's precarious and I can't see a good way up from there, but I can't go back down either. I can't feel that way on a perfectly safe roller coaster.
Saturday, April 17, 2004
school
on the days when i feel like i take it for granted i'm glad there are articles like this
Thursday, April 15, 2004
cities
i feel like there must be more to it (at least for me) than just walking around. walking through cambridge is beautiful--it's one of my favorite things--but it still doesn't make living here worth it. (although the sainsbury's flavored bubbly water stuff--to which i'm now addicted, thanks to you--is going to be really hard to leave)
2 frustrating days of trying to get articles from the library. all possibly salacious journals (ob/gyn, gasp; and some random ones that didn't have anything at all sketchy in them, but that i needed for my paper) are in closed shelving and you have to ask for them, which is annoying. the rest of them (rather than being shelved by title) have some strange code involving the size of the volume--which means that different years of the same journal are scattered all over and close to impossible to find. i manged to get 14 articles in 2 hours of wandering around confused. when i used to xerox for a living i could usually do about 20/hour.
on the up side, it's sunny and warm.
Friday, April 09, 2004
answers:
i don't know. ultimately with me right now, my number one criterion is that it have a job for me. i tried to think about cities i've loved, and why i've loved them and it seems to come down to whether i like walking around there. if the streets are interesting, if i feel like i can see something new and surprising around every corner (like the awesome pigeon fight i saw today, i guess), then i'll probably be pretty happy there. if i could choose, i'd require good public transportation, interesting architecture, a grocery store with good meat near my house, good cheap persian restaurants, and the ocean or at least a decent size river nearby. but i'm happy pretty much anywhere, so i'm not terribly picky.
i don't know. you oculd try asking about math parties to see whether they exist, i guess.
don't i know it. lets make the drive back from st. louis on sat night even worse...
Saturday, April 03, 2004
Up past my bedtime:
What 5 criteria would you use to pick a city to move to?
Is there any way you can tell by just walking around a campus if the people are nerdy enough? (assuming no one invites you to a math party)
Why does it feel like the time always changes on exactly the night when you could really use an extra hour?
