I am about to embark on yet another of my trips to the environs of Boston, this time for the dreaded thirty-fifth high school reunion. The main reason (though not the only reason) I am going to this is for some hope of ego satisfaction, to see my art on the walls and to prove to the aging preppettes that the weirdo classmate of their teen years survived and is still active. It's not that they were cruel to me or that they did bad things to me; they didn't. As I remember, they were mostly rather nice girls from privileged families whose destiny in life was to have a career in some form of social service, as well as doing philanthropic work as a volunteer. From what I remember about the school, the emphasis on social welfare, fund-raising, and everything having to do with community was intense. I, naturally, had no interest in helping other people, all I wanted to do was make art, read superhero comics, and watch STAR TREK. In one incident I'm sure that one or two of these alumnae will remember, I stood up during an assembly and said I was sick and tired of hearing about "community" so much.

I remember my high school years through a haze of embarrassment and often outright misery, which I relieved then and now by retreating into an imaginary science-fiction world where techno-wizards in cool black and silver costumes did psi-magic in futuristic architectural settings. I still have never successfully done any social welfare.

Mathematics was the cause of a large chunk of my high school misery. One of the reasons I am going to this event is to tell those who were witness to my math misery, that I have overcome those thirty-five years of incompetency and that I now know how to factor a quadratic equation, and how to figure out the acceleration of gravity at any measurable level above, if nearby, the earth's surface.

When I'm in New England, I don't get to do much of either mathematics, physics, or art. There is too much social activity with relatives and friends. But I want to try to do at least one problem a day, to re-connect with the wider universe of Newton's laws, the impersonal world of physics and mathematics that waited for me for forty years, until I finally heard its summoning call.

Posted at 2:55 am | link