Skip to main content

Sacramento

I arrived in Sacramento today for MathFest.  The name MathFest always feels a bit inward-facing to me---only my tribe seems to find math festive.

The conference hasn't started yet; traveling three time zones I wanted to arrive before things started to allow for travel mishaps; sure enough my first of two flights today was delayed enough to make connecting to the second flight impossible. Big up's to the Delta phone app; it offered me alternatives and I found one with a different connecting city that had more of a layover (I had been nervous for the original layover being too short, which it turned out to be). I did arrive quite early though.

Second, big up's to Hyatt for letting me have a room at noon when check-in time is 4 PM. In times past when this has occurred I have checked luggage and wandered a bit until my room was ready but this is much nicer.

I am a bit wearied, having started my day at 3:00 AM EDT (early and paranoid about there being flight problems, said paranoia being a product of decades of experience) which was midnight Pacific time. When I crash tonight I will crash.

I do wish to visit a specific art gallery (I try to take half a day at these meetings to see the city) but it is closed on Tuesday's so I couldn't use my early arrival to profitable advantage. I unpacked thoroughly before lunch and now I will have to see if I will be awake enough for dinner.

Seeing Sacramento on the way in from the airport reminded me of Raleigh and many other state capitols that I have visited. There tends to be a grid with statuary, convention centers named after rich companies, etc. But each state capitol has its own flavor and I could see a little of that on the ride in (and hope to see more in the coming days).

These conferences are separated enough also to be milestones of my mortality. My right knee was replaced two and a half months ago and I have not yet fully regained the flexibility I once had. I did not feel impaired in the three airports I walked (quite a ways) in today but walking to lunch here I did feel it. Cumulative weariness did not used to get to me but I feel it now and will work from and rest a bit in my hotel room before dinner instead of exploring as I feel that I should. I am either getting old or am old; which one I believe in varies hourly.

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