home is what the heart remembers
[more personal than usual. I turned twenty yesterday, so I figured I'd indulge in a little introspection. Normally I think about my life as ~starting at sixteen, but I was conscious a little before that. This is me trying to remember who I was]
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When I was 15, I used to take a bus to school. Wake at 5:40AM --> catch the 5:55 --> stare with bleary eyes out across farmland and reservoirs for three-quarters of an hour --> bike another three miles --> be late to 0th period by a couple minutes. It was fun. One of the two regular drivers was mute and always waited for me to show up before starting his route. I never talked to the other one.
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The first time I took the bus back, I was wearing a full-body banana costume and carrying 30lbs of camera equipment. Left the bike at school because I realized I couldn't manage everything, got very tired (you try walking uphill in a plastic bodysuit at the end of summer in a desert with 30lbs of camera equipment), missed the bus, was refused water at Starbucks for a lack of quarters, got accosted by a pale-skinned meth addict, convinced said addict to buy me 25c water, hopped on the last bus and made it home
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The second time I took the bus back was mostly uneventful. I remember sitting in the back listening to a Lex Fridman podcast (I had just discovered podcasts as a consumption medium) while a gang of (mostly Black) middle schoolers ran onto the bus chugging gallon cartons of whole milk. One or two older women accompanied them; I remember being surprised that I was the only Latino. Only later did I realize that the route stopped at the regional prison, and these kids were visiting their fathers during visitation hours.1
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I am grateful both of my parents are still alive, that neither are drug addicts, that against reasonably stark odds they remained financially solvent, housed, and ultimately cordial with each other. My then-best-friend's stepfather is now imprisoned for a decade; she lived in fear of being shot by her neighbors when she went for a walk. At least seven of my other friends were fatherless: one literally lost their home in a tough job market, another had a opiate-addicted mother so lived with his grandmother, a twin I knew shared a phone with her sister to appease her mother's safety concerns. An upperclassman who taught me how to film videos lost his mother to suicide.
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All of these people went to college. Most first-gen. CS, aerospace engineering, CS, cogsci?, pre-med. Others became roboticists or went to the Naval Academy. Really, deeply grateful to have known them. Some of the best people I've met.2
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Arguably, the formative moment in my education was when my AP Lang teacher forced me to learn how to write. I've been negative enough today, but I really don't like words. I hopefully will one day! But I've never really instinctively read on the level of words (or sentences), so it's hard for me to perceive the mind of someone who does. (And I think good writing must engage with gears of the minds of others).
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Timed essays are a peculiar construct because they're not truth-seeking whatsoever. The goal is essentially just to argue an arbitrary point effectively to another in a way that is internally consistent, grammatically correct, and showcases 'mastery of the English language.' I remember being unable to write anything for hours at first, because I couldn't conceptualize the argument in sufficient detail to know where to start.
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Eventually I got the hang of it.
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She wrote me a recommendation letter to apply to MIT a year early. I didn't finish the application because my laptop was stolen, I didn't have money to buy a new one, and I was so tired.
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The other formative moment in my education was discovering the Chicago undergraduate mathematics bibliography.
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I appreciate my biology teacher for teaching me Java and how to mix sound systems. I appreciate my chemistry teacher for letting me ignore her and do QMech problems in the back of her class. I appreciate my physics teacher for teaching me the virtue of humility (and letting me make a bunch of friends!). I appreciate my oft-beleaguered principal for letting me skip school three times a week to travel a different sixty miles to the nearest university.3 I appreciate my literature teacher for casting me as Iago, and generally being so kind to me.
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My calculus teacher was a saint. He would probably take offense to that. He kept four flags in his classroom: Prussian, Israeli, Ohioan, and American. One of our quiz questions was finding the optimal number of kids to his family to adopt, given separate welfare curves for each individual in the family and budgetary constraints. He knew Hebrew and taught me what the Nicene Creed was for the first time (twas a long wandering down that path).
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I remember starting to go to mass because I had a massive crush on a Catholic girl in my physics class. Eventually I read Augustine and realized error-management in a living theology is really hard.
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I spent about 500 hours memorizing a binder. Unfortunately, I did not really try to memorize it.4 I now know a surprising amount about the effects drought patterns had on civilizational collapses over the course of human history, Jared Diamond, the music theory of glass armonica repertoire, the context suburbia held in the 1950s American short story scene, and the economics of Southern Californian water rights. It was a lot of fun. Thank you to the teacher who held this torch.
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On the last day of school, I and two others were the last people on campus. After helping the janitor clean up the mess from graduation, we cast copper in a 1200C crucible. Ingenuity was required to bypass various circuit breakers, but we got it done.
It was a good time. I don't think I'd trade it for the world.5
The part of the Inland Empire I grew up in was half Hispanic and less than ten percent Black. At other times of day, you'd see middle-aged women / single moms en route to the local community college, or farm workers commuting.
I think this particular combination of ills and successes is almost uniquely American and quite regional.
Also for teaching me what a quant was, letting me use district funding regulations to a kind of ridiculous degree, giving me tickets to my first baseball game, and honestly also being one of the best men I've ever met.
One of my larger regrets is not learning how to care deeply about the labor of accomplishment until quite recently.
Taken as a metaphor in the metaphoric sense, etc. etc.