Areas of Unrest

6 June 2005 - 25 Years

Before I get started, let me mention that I probably won't be doing an entry next week.

I flew up to Boston on Thursday evening to attend my 25th M.I.T. reunion. It's amazing to me (and pretty much everyone I talked to there) that we graduated that long ago. The graduating seniors looked incredibly young to me. The campus also looks somewhat different and, frankly, not for the better. Both Simmons Hall and the Stata Center are incredibly ugly in my opinion. At least the Infinite Corridor is unchanged.

Anyway, I spent Friday morning at the New England Aquarium, largely because I wanted to see their current exhibit on jellyfish. That was worth seeing, but my favorite part of the aquarium was still the pipefish, including both weedy seadragons (moderately cool) and leafy seadragons (the coolest fish on the planet and a favorite ever since I saw them at the Baltimore Aquarium). The aquarium was, however, amazingly crowded and that did limit my enjoyment of it some. It was still worth a visit, especially since I hadn't been there since 1985.

Friday afternoon, I took a tour of Haystack Observatory. There was an interesting presentation on some of the future radio astronomy work going on both there and at other sites. We were quite amused, by the way, to learn that there is a librarian at Haystack whose last name is Needles. After the presentation, we got to go into the radome and see the 120 foot dish. It was an interesting tour, overall. However, the ride back was very tedious. It took us 40 minutes to go about 2 miles on route 128. So we got back to the M.I.T. campus an hour later than we'd been scheduled to. That made me fashionably late for my class's welcome dinner. Which was okay. I didn't really know many people there, but it was interesting to talk with almost everyone.

I went to the first part of Technology Day on Saturday morning. The presentations I heard were interesting and I'd have liked to stay for the rest of the event. But the Red Sox were a higher priority. I'm pleased to report that Fenway Park remains one of the most perfect places on the planet. There's an intimacy and a spirit that just makes it an awesome place to go to a ball game. Alas, even that can't make up for truly pathetic relief pitching and the Sox lost.

Our Saturday evening event was at the M.I.T. Museum, which is interesting, but not as interesting as chatting with my classmates. It struck me as odd that few people knew about our one real scandal - a classmate serving a life sentence for murder. I suppose that I might not have heard about if I hadn't also been at Berkeley. I'd paid a lot of attention to the story because he's from the town just south of my home town and one of my housemates at the time knew the woman he killed.

I should also mention that I wore the Lunch at the Ritz earrings that I'd bought in December and they got a lot of attention. I'd agonized about what to wear to all of the events but my instincts were actually reasonably good. There were, inevitably, a few guys who wore jeans and t-shirts to everything, but moderately dressy for the evening events was the general consensus. The little black dress goes a long way.

This morning was the best attended event - a brunch with the new president of the university. Dr. Hockfield was a gracious hostess but, of course, none of us had a chance to talk with her for long. But I saw some more classmates who hadn't been at other events and that continued to be interesting. Overall, I had an even better time than I expected to and I was glad I'd gone to the reunion.