Raw

The way i remember the story, on the way home from the beach, my father spotted some fishermen in a small boat, hauling a shark onto shore. He stopped the car, walked over to them, and, not speaking the language, bargained with them for the shark's jaws.

I doubt that's a 100% accurate rendition.



We've had those jaws in our family ever since that time in Somalia, some 30 years ago, and they remind me of the rawness of overseas living. I now have them at home, and i now also carry a permanent reminder of that rawness.



This weekend also marks the end of my Stats class. I took 80 minutes (out of 240 allowed) to get an 89% on the final exam. I think i finished the class with a low A.

I set out with two criteria for this class: watch none of the dvd lectures (it's an online class - all lectures are provided on a set of 6 dvds), and no use of the special features of the fancy calculator that was marked as a requirement for each homework, quiz and test. I even managed to go the first couple weeks without using any calculator, after which i grew tired of long division (not to mention square roots) and started using perl for nothing more complex than sqrt().

Now that i'm done with the class, i plan on watching the dvd lectures; maybe the material will start to make sense.



Taking closeups of one's own arm (these 3 are full frame) is a little tedious and best not done in a hurry; pardon the imperfections.

Smarts

A few days into the semester, i've yet to buy my materials for the classes i'm in. Only once did i complete a class without buying the book (and got a near perfect score - missed a couple extra credit points for lack of trying), but as i recall that was an art history class that focused on too much European art, so i was starting with an advantage. I'm hoping to get myself hooked up with some of the materials sometime soon, we'll see how that goes.

But for now, there may still be some time to place your bets for how long i will stay in these classes. I'm shooting for at least 4 weeks, but last i heard Vegas odds on that were 20:1.

workstudy

It's been over 50 hours since i last slept, not counting Friday morning's hour nap i took on my office floor. 30 hours ago i got home feeling dead tired, having slept but 4 hours the night before, and 4 before that, and checked e-mail - main database server was down (why can't we do RAC?). Couldn't let that sit lest i lose my superhero status.

The 30 minute nighttime bike ride to work woke me enough to resolve the situation by morning, just before anyone noticed that the major service was down, just before anyone was around to start yelling about their inability to register students, and just before anyone was around to say "good job" (but there are countless other diatribes on the haplesness of a sysadmin's job, i won't bore you with a rehash of those, i'm working on my own particular hapless diatribe here).


In 8 days i'll be heading to a graduation ceremony. The student speaker will speak of sleepness nights spent with classmates in the studio, of the comraderie, of the endless work, of the shared bleary eyed mornings with friends. I'll remember no one said "thank you" when i singlehandedly brought up that database server before registration started (but i did get some nice overtime). There will be more words on how tough the regimented studies were, on the uncertainties of projects, on the deadlines, on the friends they asked for help. I'll remember all those tasks on my work todo list, some of which have been there for years. I'll wish i had help through the tougher tasks - these days it's an increasingly solitary job.

18 hours after that grad speech, i'll start a 80 hour stretch during which i'll sleep under 10 hours, and during which i'll begin to wonder why i couldn't hack school. I can work for 36 hours straight. I can sit and work in front of a computer for 12 hours before i need to get up. I can get home drunk at the wee hours of the morning and still be alert enough to solve any work problem that presents itself. But school work? It's an unsurmountable labour for me.


Still, challenges are good for the soul. The reason i learned to put my pants on right leg first, decided to eat vegan, am growing my hair out, or bike to work, even through the dead of winter: gotta constantly challenge yourself, in both big ways and small ways (lot of that i learned from my brother). Perhaps one day i will find a way to complete the school-task without resorting to a Herculean solution.


In other news, i'm tired.

Work.

I am supposed to be at work in 4.5 hours for some hardware repair on a major server. The rest of the day i get to interview people for a web programming position. Of the applicants we will be interviewing, 66% have at least one Masters degree; i am a collidge dropout.

Today at work i was talking with a coworker and an instructor when the instructor - in reference to the semester's beginning - asked us, "are you guys all fired up?" I responded, "FIRED?!?!?" as if i had only heard certain words. My coworker was kind enough to laugh and say to me, "you walk on water up there, you would be the last to get fired - the rest of us would be gone and you'd still be working there." I hope he knows how deep the "Thank you" i said was meant to be.

Still, a degree or three would be in order. Maybe i can lease one of my brother's.

bridges

If i were an architecture student, my thesis would be to design a number of bridges for third world countries. Would give me a reason to travel to a variety of places at my leisure, since i'd have to travel by my own means in order to study the land and surrounding area.

Return of the prodigal son, part II

Found my way to my old high school, the Amerian Overseas School of Rome. As the bus travelled down the old familiar road my heart started beating faster and harder, a strange sign of a strange nervousness. Spoke my way through the security guard and up to my old math class room, which is now a computer lab. A student pointed me to the math classroom on the other side of the hallway, and i spoke to my old math teach, Mrs. Fiochi, who didn't remember me but did say that my eyes, no, the look in my eyes, was very familiar and unique. She said the same thing 12 years ago, and couldn't say much more this time since class was starting.

Walked up the villa (my school consists of a number of modern school-type buildings and an old villa in the middle, housing offices in the first floors and classrooms in the upper floors, as well as a large soccer field on one side (contrary to runour, it wasn't sold off)) to my Italian classroom as i knew Mrs. Levine wouldn't mind me waling in on her class. Sure enough, she was giving her advanced French students a test on the last day, last period before the break, but she welcomed me in and talked with me at length. The students were very talkative during their test, at which Mrs. Levine would look up every now and then and say, "students, be quiet, this is Francisco, an old student, and i'm trying to talk with him. One day you too will return after ten years." You had to know her and her unique pedagogical techniques.

I was surprised that she remembered where we used to sit during class, and was most delightfully surprised to hear she remembered a unique stunt (hack?) pulled at our school: someone took salt and wrote the words "FUCK ED" (Ed Tatko being the principle at the time) in large letters in the field (salt kills plants, in this case killing the grass in the shape of the letters for a number of days, weeks after the stunt was pulled, and the words were quite beautifully visible from the top of the villa). Levine remembered our class b/c of that stunt, and related the tale to her class, though in her memory the letters were the size of the soccer field (a notion i almost scoffed at since writing letters that big would have required a little more skill than i give the possible culprits credit for). I hear that stunt was one of the main causes of his nervous breakdown, and he left the school after only 1.5 years.

Levine walked me down to the offices where i met some of the new staff, including the Spanish instructor (they now offer up to AP/IB Spanish), who happened to be friends with the mother of a high school friend of mine, Maudy Tuseth, who used to live in New York but moved back to Rome just over a year ago. Through Maudy's mother i got Maudy's number, quite a treat, of which i'll talk more later.