THE DEAL WITH MY LIFE The deal with my life is that every time I face a choice between doing something useful and doing something interesting, I inevitably pick interesting. I would stack my life up for interesting against anyone to come out of Fritch, Texas. But the awareness has been growing in me over the years that the whole is less than the sum of the interesting parts. I have assumed for the past 17 years that my life is headed in the direction of putting myself at the service of poor people. But I never bothered along the way to attain any skills that might actually be useful in that service. I have seen this month how my friends Doug (from Fritch, Tx) and Dean (from Pincher Creek, Alberta) and Grant (OK, Grant is from California) have arrived at midlife with a resume that can actually land them a useful job. On the plus side, I learned some interesting stuff this month about relativistic cosmology. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE BLACK DOG If it's true that the eskimoes have over 100 words for snow, I should have over 100 words for depression. The stuff falling on me now is much more subtle than the blizzard of a couple of years ago. Perhaps this is the kind that melts away under medication. That was not the case a year ago when I first got prescribed -- I merely transitioned from unmedicated depression to medicated depression. But I resist, preferring natural reality over synthetic reality. Maybe it's just "useful versus interesting" in another guise. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ FERMI NATIONAL ACCELERATOR LABORATORY If you haven't figured out by now, it was a very slow month. The only event was my mid-month trip to the Advanced Computing conference at Fermilab in Chicago. This was the site of my first forays into particle physics 9 years ago. The weather was gorgeous -- I had previously concluded that they only have two seasons in Chicago (winter and road construction) but I split them this time and was treated to dazzling fall colors among big, dense trees in the western suburbs. The lab itself is more beautiful than I remembered, although they suffer from a bit of a goose turd problem. I was very amused by the rental car courtesy van driver, who performs his job with a bouquet of one dollar bills sticking out of his left hand (driving, slinging luggage into the back) in case I had any doubts whether tipping was appropriate. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ BOBOLOGUE REDUX Most of my mail after the September Bobologue was from men justifying their goatees. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ OTHER STUFF THAT HAPPENS UNSOLICITED PHONE INTERVIEWER: If the election were held today, would you vote for Adam Schiff or James Rogan? ME: No. UPI: (Taken aback.) No, what? ME: No, I would not vote for a Republican or a Democrat. UPI: (After a moment.) Thank you sir. BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. ME: Isn't 80% of what Dobson says OK? SHE: If you're a man. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ QUOTE OF THE MONTH "One can imagine that, when the caveman of Altamira began to paint their buffaloes in natural colors instead of merely incising the contours, the more conservative cavemen foretold the end of paleolithic art." -- Erwin Panofsky, Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures Current Reading - "Gravitation", the largest, blackest textbook ever published. Current Projects - Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.