December 31, 2010
Geneva, Switzerland
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Dear friends and relations,

Once again, the calendar and I find ourselves at a disagreement. It claims that the year is ending; I say the year is only half-done. Such is life on the academic calendar. I suspect this is a similar argument as television executives must have with sitcom producers: "You claim that your show is only beginning to develop a strong narrative; I say that your show is being canceled."

Thus, in the absence of any sort of genuine climax or resolution---or, for that matter, plot of any kind---here is a postmodern take on my life over the last twelve months. Were you to have popped up at random moments, you would have seen me:

1) spending a weekend driving around West Texas with R., going for a swim in a river, and only later realizing the river was the Rio Grande and that I had illegally-immigrated into Mexico for several minutes,

2) attempting to bankrupt the "Bioethics Defense Fund" by drinking as much of their open bar as I could while hearing about the evils of stem cells/abortion/Obamacare at a benefit dinner,

3) catching an hour of sleep during a marathon reading of the Iliad at my school before being awoken by a student slapping my feet with a copy of the Lattimore translation and shouting "Mr. Alexander! Mr. Alexander! Get up! You have to wake up! It's your turn to read!"

4) returning to Chicago for the U of C's annual Scavenger Hunt, building a steampunk-inspired "meat launcher" and dressing up as a goth for a party held on the dais of the U of C's (neo-Gothic) chapel,

5) watching my roommates give each other tattoos at the kitchen table using India ink and (sterilized) sewing needles,

6) idly browsing through the math library at the Santa Fe Institute, finding a manuscript of Kurt Goedel's proof of the undecidability of the continuum hypothesis, opening it up, and seeing a handwritten inscription signed by Goedel,

7) eating free falafel from a food cart in Queens as a kickback for M.'s participation in a food-cart-judging contest,

8) having my students write and solve a word problem as their final exam for our differential equations unit, and having one student write the word problem in verse (sprinkled with allusions to Dante),

9) spending winter break not in beloved Ithaca, but in Switzerland, where my dad is spending a sabbatical year at CERN,

10) and sending the following text message to a friend: "I've just spent half an hour at an art festival looking at fancy pottery. This means I'm turning into my parents."


For once, I find the calendar reassuring: it reminds me that I will always be 32 years away from turning into my parents... though, as I sit typing this in their high-ceilinged, wood-floored apartment in downtown Geneva, with Schubert playing inside and snow falling outside, that doesn't seem like such a bad thing. 

Happy 2011,
Andrew