No, you probably haven’t heard of this town. It does have a Wikipedia entry, however, and it is a UNESCO world heritage site, settled right in the center of Mexico, about 400 miles northwest of Mexico City. It’s also the site of the 7th joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society and the Sociedad Matemática Mexicana, running from Wednesday through Saturday of this week.
This is my first time to Mexico. And it’s beautiful. Zacatecas is in a valley, and it’s astonishingly clean. As you drive along the road surrounding the valley, you look out and see a wash of colors. About half of the buildings are standard brick color, but the rest are brightly painted blue, red, yellow, orange, so that the dominant impression is of jubilant pigmentation. The Cathedral is just outside our apartment, and although it’s not as grandiose as what one might encounter elsewhere, it sets a tone for churches all around the area: its dome and towers seem mimicked everywhere. There’s a cable car between two of the hills nearby, and we plan on trying it out at some point.
There is apparently some kind of festival going on around town. Bands—generally composed of trumpets of some variety, valve trombones, and a battery of percussion—wander the streets, with crowds of youths trailing behind, until they stop in some open place (in a local square, an arcade, or even just an intersection) and everyone dances. The attendees range from the clean-cut to the punk-ass, and they wear shotglass-sized clay cups on ribbons around their necks, from which they drink Mezcal when a supplier arrives. Occasionally the liquor rides in on a donkey.
Earlier this evening two bands, one clad in gray, the other in red, were dueling in the plaza next to the cathedral. I followed various bands around, hoping at some point to get up the nerve to ask for a dance partner (either in really broken Spanish, or maybe even in English, hoping they’d find it cute). As the evening continued, however, the proportion of peripheral males to females grew substantially, so I just watched. This is an awful time not to have Hannah here.
A concert stage is currently being set up in the plaza by the Cathedral, which is just outside our window. What are we in for tomorrow night?
The conference is going well. My particular crowd isn’t really represented here, but I’ve picked up some things in the conformal dynamics and differential geometry sessions. Meeting this city is well worth the trip.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Friday, May 18, 2007
how awesome is family?
Today was a wonderful day. Hannah and I have been in Tennessee since last Saturday night. Today (Thursday) we went with my dad to Nashville. Unfortunately, my mom couldn’t come because of work. As soon as we arrived, we picked my granddad up for lunch. We went out to an old family restaurant called Dotson’s, although it was apparently sold by Mr. Dotson to another family some years back. We had Southern vegetables (i.e., everything was either fried or boiled for a long time) and meringue pie. Afterwards, we took Granddaddy to get his beard trimmed, then Hannah and I took the car to go shoe shopping while Dad and Granddaddy rested.
I’ve been wanting a new pair of sandals for some time. We drove through all of the nearby malls, failed to find a shoe store, and ended up at REI. I found a good pair of hefty sandals on sale, making it one of the easiest clothes shopping trips I’ve had in a long time.
Next we went to the grocery store and got food to grill at my aunt and uncle’s house. They just acquired a new grill for Mother’s Day. My little three year-old cousin was adorable as always, and still demonstrating phenomenal competence at everything from language to arithmetic to manners to physical prowess (for a while she pretended to be a bear, about to come out of its cave and devour us). She also made fun of Hannah and me for apparently liking each other.
My brother arrived a little late, having flown in from Los Angeles. We made a great and happy crowd around the dinner table. Finally, before driving back home, we stopped by my brother’s house and met up with some of his friends there.
I’m leaving out so much, of course—all the small but marvelous details that really make a day like this special. Perhaps I’m only recording the bare sequence of events to remind myself later of what happened, and I’m too nervous (or too tired) to write down the personal things. Sorry about that. I will mention that my aunt showed us a video that’s being created by the company she works for, focusing on their projects to provide safe places to raise children in shelters. The photos and interviews are heart-rending. I’ll post a link once I get it. But I simply want to convey that this is a day Hannah and I will cherish, and that I hope all of you are still finding such moments and days with your families.
I’ve been wanting a new pair of sandals for some time. We drove through all of the nearby malls, failed to find a shoe store, and ended up at REI. I found a good pair of hefty sandals on sale, making it one of the easiest clothes shopping trips I’ve had in a long time.
Next we went to the grocery store and got food to grill at my aunt and uncle’s house. They just acquired a new grill for Mother’s Day. My little three year-old cousin was adorable as always, and still demonstrating phenomenal competence at everything from language to arithmetic to manners to physical prowess (for a while she pretended to be a bear, about to come out of its cave and devour us). She also made fun of Hannah and me for apparently liking each other.
My brother arrived a little late, having flown in from Los Angeles. We made a great and happy crowd around the dinner table. Finally, before driving back home, we stopped by my brother’s house and met up with some of his friends there.
I’m leaving out so much, of course—all the small but marvelous details that really make a day like this special. Perhaps I’m only recording the bare sequence of events to remind myself later of what happened, and I’m too nervous (or too tired) to write down the personal things. Sorry about that. I will mention that my aunt showed us a video that’s being created by the company she works for, focusing on their projects to provide safe places to raise children in shelters. The photos and interviews are heart-rending. I’ll post a link once I get it. But I simply want to convey that this is a day Hannah and I will cherish, and that I hope all of you are still finding such moments and days with your families.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
walking around Cornell right now is like playing Myst. except that instead of solving puzzles, you’re waiting for construction to finish
Yes, this is meant to parallel my description of Marseille as being like Labyrinth. Myst is pleasanter than Labyrinth; even greater is the difference in niceness between Ithaca and Marseille. Normally I don’t approve of describing things in real life as being like virtual things (e.g., “Hey, this is just like that time in that movie!”), or natural things as being like artificial things (big example, one that has occurred more than once: “Oooh, those fireflies look just like Christmas lights!” Huh? Fireflies have been around a lot longer, so shouldn’t the comparison go the other way? Wouldn’t it be terribly poetic to think of Christmas lights as fireflies decorating our trees?) This is possibly something I need to get over. After all, we use our experiences, even those with virtual or artificial origins, to make sense of life. Books have played this role for centuries. I just think we need to pay attention to what piece gives meaning to the other. The Orion Nebula does look like something out of a Star Trek sequence. But the reason Star Trek backgrounds are so evocative is that they have copied the heavens, not the other way around. Perhaps this Myst analogy will help me overcome this aversion. The worlds of Myst really are beautiful; construction sites are not.
Okay, didn’t really mean to get onto that rant. This topic came up because of my walking to campus one morning last week. I had dropped off Hannah’s car to get an oil change and decided it was nice enough weather to walk in from Community Corners to Malott. When I got to North Campus, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice, instead of just taking the footbridge across the falls, to take the path behind the observatory and walk along Beebe Lake for a while?” So I did. And it was nice. I like the wooden staircases. But then I started walking along the road, and quickly found it closed, including the sidewalk. There is a staircase down to the lake, but at the time it was sealed off by gates and by the lack of the remaining steps at the bottom. I walked past it and started down Forest Home Drive, which should lead back to the stairs at the near the bridge, and quickly discovered that the whole thing, sidewalk and all, was closed off. So I walked back to the as yet unusable stairs. A grounds worker was in the process of removing the gates and told me that it would be ready in about an hour. I was perplexed, however, because I had seen people walking towards us down by the lake, and despite the lack of stairs they had somehow joined us on the road. I looked a little to the side of the stairs and saw—aha!—a somewhat steep but definitely well-established path. Entirely not obvious from when I first walked past.
On the very first island one encounters while playing Myst, there is a generator that powers the door to a spaceship. You have to get just the right amount of current running to the door. And if you run too much, you trip the breaker switch and the current no longer runs out. Of course, none of this is clear at first, like anything in Myst, and you’re bound to trip the switch several times before you figure out what to do. But the very first time you trip it, suddenly all hope of getting the power to go out again seems lost, because the switch is nowhere to be found. So you poke around the island some more, and eventually come back, and find a small, barely visible path beside the door to the generator controls. That path is exactly what this path beside the gated off staircase reminded me of. If I had actually been playing Myst, however, I would have gotten to the bottom and had to put together the staircase myself to make future ascending and descending easier.
The parking lot in front of Malott is being turned into a pedestrian area, so the sidewalk and which entrances are accessible from which directions are thoroughly in flux. Certain routes which were closed when I left due to construction on the Thurston bridge have opened up, but the bridge itself (now completely naked and skeletal) remains an unsolved problem. Maybe if we can get the rocks in the gorge below to spell out the right word, it’ll open. Or perhaps the solution is entirely somewhere else in Ithaca. Pull that lever beside the Dewitt Mall and the bridge will return?
After being in Marseille, I will no longer complain about certain features of Ithaca. Construction is a perennial mocking point, however. The beauty of the surroundings makes it totally worth living here.
Okay, didn’t really mean to get onto that rant. This topic came up because of my walking to campus one morning last week. I had dropped off Hannah’s car to get an oil change and decided it was nice enough weather to walk in from Community Corners to Malott. When I got to North Campus, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice, instead of just taking the footbridge across the falls, to take the path behind the observatory and walk along Beebe Lake for a while?” So I did. And it was nice. I like the wooden staircases. But then I started walking along the road, and quickly found it closed, including the sidewalk. There is a staircase down to the lake, but at the time it was sealed off by gates and by the lack of the remaining steps at the bottom. I walked past it and started down Forest Home Drive, which should lead back to the stairs at the near the bridge, and quickly discovered that the whole thing, sidewalk and all, was closed off. So I walked back to the as yet unusable stairs. A grounds worker was in the process of removing the gates and told me that it would be ready in about an hour. I was perplexed, however, because I had seen people walking towards us down by the lake, and despite the lack of stairs they had somehow joined us on the road. I looked a little to the side of the stairs and saw—aha!—a somewhat steep but definitely well-established path. Entirely not obvious from when I first walked past.
On the very first island one encounters while playing Myst, there is a generator that powers the door to a spaceship. You have to get just the right amount of current running to the door. And if you run too much, you trip the breaker switch and the current no longer runs out. Of course, none of this is clear at first, like anything in Myst, and you’re bound to trip the switch several times before you figure out what to do. But the very first time you trip it, suddenly all hope of getting the power to go out again seems lost, because the switch is nowhere to be found. So you poke around the island some more, and eventually come back, and find a small, barely visible path beside the door to the generator controls. That path is exactly what this path beside the gated off staircase reminded me of. If I had actually been playing Myst, however, I would have gotten to the bottom and had to put together the staircase myself to make future ascending and descending easier.
The parking lot in front of Malott is being turned into a pedestrian area, so the sidewalk and which entrances are accessible from which directions are thoroughly in flux. Certain routes which were closed when I left due to construction on the Thurston bridge have opened up, but the bridge itself (now completely naked and skeletal) remains an unsolved problem. Maybe if we can get the rocks in the gorge below to spell out the right word, it’ll open. Or perhaps the solution is entirely somewhere else in Ithaca. Pull that lever beside the Dewitt Mall and the bridge will return?
After being in Marseille, I will no longer complain about certain features of Ithaca. Construction is a perennial mocking point, however. The beauty of the surroundings makes it totally worth living here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)