N
this picture, I see... a butterfly! A peaceful freely-flitting
butterfly. Serenity incarnate. Oh, how it reminds me of the carefree,
idyllic days of my childhood, every minute spent in pure contentment,
laughing and chasing butterflies, the existence of worries as yet
undiscovered. Except, all I can remember about junior high school is an
endless string of tormenters, real and imagined, and a crushingly
miserable sense of isolation. (Interestingly, every autobiographical
account I've ever read of the junior high experience has been almost
identical to this. Either junior high is universally a purgatory before
ascension to puberty, or those at the top of the pecking order never
learned to write.)
ut
then... high school! How fondly I recall the carefree, idyllic days
spent at Castro Valley High -- a successful track career, a newly awakened
passion for the piano, a best friend forever, and a pretty girl
by my side. Except until a couple of hamstring injuries ensured that I
would never sprint again, and Carpal tunnel pain physically limited my
piano time to five minutes a day, and some sort of space-time anomaly
apparently remapped forever to a small, finite expanse, and
fits of adolescent idiocy resulted in my fleeing to cower in a corner
whenever my side was occupied for too long. I guess high school wasn't
that carefree or idyllic after all.
ut
then... college! Frankly, the only ones who have ever found Caltech
at all carefree or idyllic were those whose failure had already been
assured, and were simply biding their time until eviction. Nevertheless,
Caltech was the best four years of my life. I was introduced to
brilliant, fascinating, inspiring people, people who thought and played as
I did, people who made me feel at home. I was taught the Way Of The
Electron, and I found Enlightenment in an epiphanic discovery destined to
guide my journey down the Path Of Life -- the profound, soul-completing
Joy of creating Boxes With Lights And Buttons. And, for the first time, I
experienced the gentle caress of a woman's hand, and love and passion and
quasi-cohabitation, and whispered "I love you"s, and whispered "I don't
know if I love you anymore"s, and the enraged slap across the face of a
woman's hand, and tears and heartbreak and basically, all of the dramatic
elements you would expect from the finest Telemundo soap opera (even
including the terrifying, life-threatening medical condition), except
mostly in English and without impregnation by space aliens. As far as I'm
aware.
ut
then... grad school! My experience at UC Berkeley was, to leave a
word unminced for once, hell. My own indecisiveness and non-specificity
of interest, coupled with Caltech's broad but shallow curriculum, had
rendered me a jack of all trades, and master of jack. Many students
stride into Ph.D. programs with purpose, determination, and narrowly
focused research interests and experience. I blindly stumbled in with a
stunningly naive ignorance of contemporary research areas, a stunningly
apathetic indifference toward choosing one, and a bunch of stunningly
irrelevant Boxes With Lights And Buttons. Problems arose. I spent much
of the two years directionless, advisorless, adviceless, deskless,
friendless, and generally rather miserable. I was the Ronin of the EECS
department. After the concurrent decay and demolition of an
unsuccessfully long-distance relationship, I decided to choose defeat over
seppuku, and I wrote a thesis about something, got some sort of degree,
and left it all behind me.
ut
then... unemployment! I gave myself a year to recover from the UC
Berkeley Experience and figure out what to do with my life. In that time,
I completed various personal projects, read a lot of books (both technical
and non), walked to and
from everywhere within a seven mile radius of my house, almost started a
company, and got no closer to coming up with a research interest than
deciding it should eventually be Boxed With Lights And Buttons.
ow...
what the hell did all that have to do with butterflies?