Skip to main content

On the Road, Again

I attended MathFest in Indianapolis last week; the day after I flew back I left with my wife and son to drive to Pennsylvania, and we drove to Long Island yesterday. Our current plan is to drive back on Friday but our daughter who hadn't planned to accompany us is recovering from COVID and we may head back early if she needs assistance.

I am a creature of structure, with set routines that not only make it easier for others to rely upon me but also, as I grow older and my memory dulls, make it easier to trust in myself and not have to constantly check if I've done what I intended to. My checklists, written and unwritten, give me a good deal of self-confidence. (Whether or not that is earned is a subject for another day.)

When by myself at the conference I instituted little routines in my hotel room to allow me to relax and not have to constantly be creative. I have traveled to conferences for decades so these kinds of routines are second-nature to me by now.

Traveling with my wife and son is different. They are much more spontaneous than I and I find myself rolling with constant changes in plans. This is not bad, particularly as my son is an adult and my parenting is less of a commitment to vigilance.

My skin suffered long-term sun damage when I was younger and most summers part of my face is scraped off to prevent skin cancer from forming. I was never a beach person but now my dermatologist has truthfully given me an excuse to not go along with the family. I am content to find a quiet table in an air-conditioned space with my laptop and deal with correspondence, follow the news, etc. For me this is a vacation.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Standing Your Corner

I'm a long-term David Simon fan ever since I read his book "Homicide", detailing a year-long embedding with Baltimore homicide detectives. It was clear-eyed about all of the strengths and weaknesses, good reflexes and prejudices of everyone that he met.  I enjoyed the television show that followed that he wrote for, and then of course "The Wire" on HBO and a number of his other shows---only limited by my access to streaming services.  There was a histrionic moment in a later season of "Homicide" where he just let a character vent; a homicide detective who was part-owner of a bar frequented by cops watched a particularly violent drug criminal, responsible for many unsolved homicides, come into his bar with his associates, violating the detective's territory. The detective came around the bar holding a billy club in his hand and loudly discussed his first year as a patrol officer walking a beat. His supervising officer told him that he had a corner a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Momentum

In my youth my primary social justice commitment was through Amnesty International. As an affluent white male I enjoyed freedoms that I thought ideally everyone should share; in the 1980's we had had the vine of United States support for repressive regimes that were nominally anti-Communist bearing cruel fruit and I in my small part of the world wanted to do something about that.  It was a more active support Amnesty International sought back then; nowadays they just ask me for money. We members were encouraged to write to foreign government officials to urge them to take care of political prisoners that we named, the idea being that as long as they knew that they were seen the cruelty would diminish. One letter per prisoner, because they were all human beings, not just a faceless group. I have no independent way of verifying if the hundreds of letters I wrote eased any suffering; I know that they changed me. Selfishly I am grateful. At the time I made a point of reading journalism...
Post a Comment
Read more