I started reading Neal Stephenson’s latest novel over breakfast at the Four Seasons resort in Maui, where I was attending the wedding of a friend from college. That was really kind of the perfect setting in which to be reading the early chapters of this book, which follow the tech zillionaire Richard “Dodge” Forthrast (one of the main characters from Reamde) through the course of a morning. Stephenson has a knack for describing the everyday lives of quirky rich people in a way that’s both sharply observed and highly entertaining.

As I said on Twitter at the time, I could read Stephenson in this vein more or less endlessly, which is why I buy and read his books right away. The problem is, he can’t or won’t write in that vein endlessly, but insists on trying to do other things, too. And that’s where we run into trouble.

The “quirky rich people going about their business” thread does continue for much of Fall, and it’s very successful for almost the entire time. There’s some plot to this– Dodge dies, and his family is horrified to discover that his will requires him to be cryogenically preserved, whereupon there’s a whole bunch of legal maneuvering to find a better alternative, all of which is weirdly entertaining. There’s also a weird interlude about a terrorist attack on Moab, UT that doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but is fun to read, and some amusing stuff about tech-y academia. About the only thing that doesn’t work in the real-world segments is a near-future bit that’s supposed to be satirical but is way too ham-handed about it for my tastes.

The problem comes about a third of the way in, where they switch on a digital simulation of Dodge’s brain (which was scanned instead of frozen), and the book develops a parallel thread about Dodge’s experiences inside the simulation, as he creates a virtual world for himself. These are written in a style that’s (intentionally, I assume) reminiscent of a “modern” translation of the Bible, and a lot of the incidents parallel stuff from the Old Testament, in a way that I can see a certain group of readers finding really clever. Sadly, I mostly found those bits kind of tedious, and would sort of skim-read to get back to the sections where the real-world characters (and their lawyers) react to what’s going on in “Bitworld.”

Then in the final quarter or so of the book, it switches to an entirely different plot, which is basically an epic fantasy novella about a new group of characters within the Land created by Dodge (who was calling himself “Egdod” at the time) going on a Quest. As epic fantasy novellas go, it’s perfectly enjoyable– way better than the previous sections in the Land– but it’s kind of an odd shift.

And then, because this is a Neal Stephenson novel, it comes to a weirdly abrupt end that isn’t all that satisfying. There’s a coda that works reasonably well, but the actual resolution of the plot didn’t make much sense; it’s possible there was some clue buried earlier that would explain it, but by that point, I didn’t care enough to go back and look.

I don’t know exactly how to describe the problem I have with Stephenson, or how to fix it. It basically comes down to there being too much in them. Not in the sense of page count, but that they feel less like coherent novels than collections of cool scenes he happened to think of during the period he had marked “Write Next Book” on his calendar. That’s clearly not entirely true, as there are enough hints about later bits planted early on to show that there’s some overarching structure, but it has that feel

In some ways, this book has the same problem as Seveneves did: There’s a really obvious place where it could be split into two books, each of which would likely be stronger for not being stuffed in the same package with the other. The ending of the first bit of Fall isn’t as good as the ending of the first bit of Seveneves (which if it had been a stand-alone would’ve been the first really good ending in the Stephenson catalogue), but I think that would be fixable. And the final epic-fantasy-novella section could easily have been made to stand on its own, in the same way that the “several thousand years later” section of Seveneves could’ve.

I think there’s a sense in which Stephenson is ill-served by being a genre writer. That is, being in the SF field creates some expectation for grand sweeping plots in which Big Things Happen and lead to some kind of resolution. The ideal vehicle for his talents would actually be the kind of plotless modernist novel you find in literary fiction, where nothing particular happens but the setting and characters are sharply observed and cleverly written. He really ought to be, I don’t know, David Foster Wallace or Don DeLillo, but feels obliged to try to be Robert Heinlein (early Heinlein, that is), and that’s where his books inevitably go wrong.

(As an aside, in a lot of ways, William Gibson has a similar skills/genre mismatch, but manages it a lot better. That is, the overarching plots of Gibson novels rarely make much sense, but the bits where the characters move around through the world are so much fun that it doesn’t matter all that much. I think Gibson just has a better eye for the exact right amount of detail to put in the frame to make a clean and elegant picture, while Stephenson can’t resist throwing in all sorts of weird Hieronymous Bosch shit all over the place.)

Anyway, to wrap this up, Fall is pretty much exactly what I expected going in. The good parts are really good, while the other parts are a bit much. It’s a Neal Stephenson novel, with everything that implies, and I’ll buy the next one, too, knowing full well what I’ll get.

A few weeks ago I did something that’s become unusual for me: I bought a paper book for myself to read. Nearly all of my reading these days is in e-book form, though we still buy a fair number of paper books for the kids. Most of the time I’m in Barnes and Noble, though, I’m just showrooming– looking at the shelves to find things I’ll buy later via their app.

In this case, though, I needed a paper copy, because the book in question was Dignity by Chris Arnade, which has a lot of photographs to go with the text. It’s about several years he spent visiting troubled communities in the US– both “bad neighborhoods” in major cities and rural areas–taking photos and talking to people about their lives.

This is also a slightly awkward book to talk about because Twitter. I actually first encountered Arnade via his Twitter feed, but in the last couple of years he’s become a regular target for dunking-on by people who are otherwise usually sensible. This is largely because a lot of his commentary has been spun as a form of Trump apologism, which is a mischaracterization, but, again, Twitter. So when I end up talking about it, I find myself sort of pre-emptively apologizing, as I’m doing now, to head off the Twitter-caricature version of his argument.

The central theme, which you can find spelled out pretty well in this long interview with Arnade, is a division between “front-row” and “back-row” America. The “front row” in this case is the population of people who operate well in terms of mainstream success: pursuing education, jobs, and money and willing to move around as needed to attend the best schools and get the best jobs. The “back row” on the other hand, is the population of people who, for one reason or another, don’t work that way. Some of them are people who are actively prevented from participating in front-row culture by barriers of race and class, others are back-row for reasons of personality or culture: people who have roots in a particular community that they’re not willing to leave, or who just aren’t temperamentally suited to the front-row life.

This is a distinction I’ve also come to think is really important (partly independently, partly through reading Arnade’s stuff), so obviously I found the worldview of the book congenial, even if the stories are often difficult to read. It also took on a bit of extra resonance because while I was in the middle of reading it, we spent a weekend at my parents’ so I could go to my 30-year high school reunion.

That was very definitely a front-row/back-row sort of experience. I’m very much a front-row person in Arnade’s formulation– went to the best schools, moved around a bunch to pursue opportunities, ended up in a completely different place than I started because that’s where I could get the best available job. I now make my living teaching the next generation of front-row kids.

A lot of my classmates have similar stories, and have ended up spread all over the country. At the same time, there’s a lot of “back row” in the town, and quite a few people who never really left. And Broome County is not exactly the front-row powerhouse of New York State.

Being back in town specifically to re-connect with people from high school (as opposed to just visiting family, which we do fairly regularly) was kind of bittersweet. In a great many ways, I would never have been able to stay there, but it was also a reminder that I’m really not a part of that community any more. Really, I’m not part of any community in as deep as way as most of the people still in town are, and I’m a little sorry to have lost that sense of rootedness.

That’s something that comes up in Arnade’s book, and also a lot of the better discussions of it. This blog post by Matt Shapiro in particular had some sections that really resonate, though unlike that author I was always pretty front-row: my parents both have college degrees, and I was always academically oriented in a way that made moving away inevitable.

That post also has a really good discussion of another of Arnade’s regular themes, namely the problem of treating “back-row” people as a problem to be fixed. That’s pretty clearly sinful in the Granny Weatherwax sense. And in keeping with that quote, there’s also a bit of worrying truth:

There’s a vision of “helping” people that is common in the front row, and it largely amounts to using our money or our abilities to alleviate material problems. We’re constantly asking “What can I do?” because we live in a world in which our effort plus money plus time has solved most of our problems. So we keep laying our blueprint of life and success on top of people whose foundation is simply not ours.

We shouldn’t be adopting her. She wasn’t a child. She wasn’t our project. She’s a person with dignity, however damaged and hurt by this world. It’s not our job to fix her or to bring her into our world. Sometimes just listening, without expectations or judgment, is all we can do.

This is a very consistent message on Arnade’s part (he says a bunch of similar stuff in that interview, as well, hammering on the importance of recognizing the dignity of individuals. And this is one of the frustrating things about the Twitter-dunkings he attracts, as many of the people mocking him will speak passionately and sensitively about the effects of the indignities suffered by groups that they favor, and then turn around and heap contempt upon the rural component of the “back row.” As Shapiro puts it:

Their vision of helping the back row is to let the government give them enough money that they don’t starve and then hopefully they will shut up and let us smart people do our thing. They have very little sympathy for rural culture or values. They don’t see that culture as worthy of dignity on its own terms. There is this sense that the only real way to help them is to give them the opportunity and ability to become more like us. Their values are bad and their culture is bad and they aren’t valuable in and of themselves; they are valuable because they could become us if they just get the right education and resources.

(I might amend that to “they are valuable because their children could become us,” at least for the worst offenders. This is also a problem at the political level, where a lot of the liberal policies supposedly intended to help these communities in fact come off as “we’re going to make it easier for your kids to go to college and move to Seattle,” which is less attractive than their proponents realize.)

At the same time, though, probably because I’m so thorough enmeshed in the “front row,” I can’t help noticing that a lot of the problems Arnade describes so vividly in the book have a large structural component. A recurring theme in virtually every struggling community he visits is the loss of the jobs that in the past were the backbone of those communities. This is a problem not just in the obvious economic sense– no jobs means no money, with clear negative effects– but in terms of personal dignity. Those jobs provided not just income, but a source of meaning, a positive identity. The aimlessness that comes with the loss of jobs-as-identity is almost as corrosive as the loss of income.

While “everybody should be more respectful” works on the level of individual dignity in personal interactions, it really doesn’t scale up in a way that addresses the structural issue. And that structural problem, by its nature, seems to demand some sort of policy change from the front row, at a political level, beyond just being personally nicer.

Of course, it’s frustratingly difficult to say what that ought to be. There’s a bit of low-hanging fruit available in terms of making it harder for the front row to make things worse— a lot of the problems in these communities are caused in no small part by rapacious behavior from Wall Street that could perhaps be reined in. There are also some obvious steps that could be taken to empower labor to improve the conditions of jobs that remain.

But some of that structural piece of the problem does, in fact, defy easy policy solution, in the sense that a lot of manufacturing-type jobs that have been lost just aren’t coming back. Which means finding ways to reshape the way that individuals and communities construct meaning for themselves in ways that respect the needs and desires of the “back row.”

Unfortunately, I really don’t know what that could be. I kind of think there’s something in the general direction of “job guarantee”/”universal basic income” policies, but I think there’s a cultural piece to that that’s a bit tricky– you can’t just pay people to dig holes and fill them in again, as that’s fundamentally pretty undignified, but have to build something meaningful to the community. I suspect it’s doable, but it’ll take a good deal of thought, and also listening to people from those communities in a more serious and sympathetic way than is common in front-row policy circles.

I don’t think, though, that it’s really possible to punt on the question of changing laws and policies to quite the degree that Arnade and Shapiro are saying. Though as a front-rower, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Anyway, that was long and rambling, and I’ll be a little surprised if anybody actually reads it. It’s been nagging at the back of my mind for weeks, though, so maybe this will get it out. If nothing else, you should check out the book, which is very, very good.

I’ve gotten away from the thing where I transcribe papers the kids bring home from school, but the latest from the Pip is just too good not to share. It’s a paper with a picture of a watering can, and the prompt I found a seed on my way home from school. followed by a bunch of blank lines in which to write a story (trying to accurately reproduce his spelling and punctuation):

I found a seed on my way home from school. I carefully picked it up and took it to my house to plant it in my garden. When I got home I still didn’t know what tipe of seed it was. I walked into the kitchen. “Hi mom, Hi dad,” I said. “How was you day at school?” my mom asked. “Good,” I said paying no atention to her. “Hey mom,” I said, “Do you know what kind of seed this is?” I showed her the seed. “Hmm,” she said. “It looks like a sunflower seed.” “You know what, how about you plant it and see.” “You read my mind, mom,” I said. Quickly, I raced to the garden and planted it. I watered it and the next it grew! It was a sunflower! It was also bigger than me! Then a bunch of bees attacked me. I swallowed one, two, or a million bees and three flys.

Truly, he is a master of the twist ending…

So, as anyone who follows my social media already knows from the photos I was taunting people with, I spent last week in Wailea, HI, at the wedding of a good friend from college. This was a solo trip for me, much to the dismay of SteelyKid and The Pip, who were still in school, and to a lesser degree Kate, who had to argue a case in NYC last Friday.

This fall will mark 30 years since we all started meeting each other, and we’re all rapidly closing in on 50. We’ve all been married at least once, and all have kids (the oldest of whom will be starting college in the fall). It’s kind of amazing, then, how many of us made the non-trivial effort to get to Hawaii on relatively short notice (the wedding date was announced in April). A couple of guys couldn’t make it because of other family conflicts, but one flew in for the pre-wedding events flying home after the rehearsal dinner, and another worked around a family trip to Japan to get there.

(It must be noted, of course, that we all have the immense good fortune to be successful enough to afford a short-notice week-long trip to Hawaii. I’m probably the least well-off of the whole crew, which means we’re operating in some pretty elevated strata of the income distribution…)

It was also striking how easily we all fall back into old patterns of friendship. My stress level, which had been pretty high thanks to the end-of-term craziness and the long-ass flight, dropped enormously pretty much as soon as I arrived and found the guys watching the NBA Finals in the bar by the pool. It was great to just hang out again.

Of course, I had to come back at the end of the week, making it just in time for Union’s graduation (news story), which is part of the reason this is a blog post. The combination of my wedding trip followed by giving the Class of 2019 a big send-off was a reminder of a point I regularly have to make in discussions with colleagues and on-line: a lot of the most important and influential things that happen in college happen outside of the academic context. The formal curriculum is great, don’t get me wrong, but for many students the most lasting influence of college comes from the deep and lasting relationships formed with fellow students during those years. The kind where thirty years later you fly halfway across the Pacific to see them get married.

This was my 18th year at Union, and I’ve never missed a graduation– I’ve come late to a few that coincided with my own college reunions, but never skipped one entirely. Even in cases where I’m not especially close to the specific class, it’s worth a bit of hassle to see the sense of joy the students have regarding their own accomplishments, and even more the joy they share with each other. I don’t always understand exactly what’s going on, but it’s fantastic to hear a big roar when a particular student crosses the stage, and to see the surprisingly diverse groups of students hugging and posing for photos together.

Those relationships are a critical part of what we’re offering to students, especially in the elite small college corner of academia where I’ve had the enormous privilege to spend so much of my life. It’s sometimes easy to forget how much that stuff matters, but graduations and reunions are a great reminder that the outside-the-classroom piece of the college experience is not something to be brushed off too lightly.

For whatever reason, it was a Thing for a while this week to look at whether rural communities are “really” suffering, with a lot of statistics crunched to show that in average economic terms, they’re actually not doing that much worse than more urban areas. But as much as I hate it when people angrily declare that aggregate statistics don’t tell the whole story, this is a case where there are genuinely some subtleties, and Kevin Drum does a decent job with some of them, asking If Rural Communities Are Doing OK, Why Do They Feel Like They Aren’t?.

I’m not going to contribute much by way of statistical data, but as someone who grew up in small town in a rural area in central NY state (here’s a nice photo essay about the town), and who still visits there several times a year, I can at least add plural anecdotes to the story. And, like Kevin says, it’s complicated.

For example, there are a number of things that suggest economic improvement since I last lived there full-time in the 1980’s. The Italian restaurant that opened when I was a kid is still going strong (and making the best chicken fingers in the world, according to SteelyKid), and a number of other eateries have popped up and seem to be sticking around. The dilapidated hotel across the street from Aiello’s has been restored, and there are a couple other places on Main Street that weren’t there back in the day. There are even some chain fast-food places– Arby’s, Macdonald’s, and a surprisingly huge Dunkin’ Donuts. 1987 me would’ve been psyched about those.

Other bits of infrastructure have also improved. The state finally replaced the craptastic bridge across the river from Main Street with one that’s a whole lot more functional, and the facilities in the county park on the lake are vastly improved from the pit toilets they had when I was a kid. The schools are in good shape, physically, and they’ve weirdly turned into a field hockey powerhouse, winning multiple consecutive state titles.

At the same time, there are a lot of other signs that aren’t so positive. Two of the churches on Main Street aren’t churches any more, and the Catholic church I went to as a kid now shares a priest with another town some miles up the road. Where we used to have three weekend Masses within walking distance of our house, my parents now have to keep kind of a weird schedule to catch one on Sunday.

And some of the reasonably positive indicators that Drum cites are, in fact, masking a decline in quality. The cost of health care may not be increasing at a ridiculous rate, but what you get for it has changed for the worse. When I was a kid, there were two full-time GP’s in town, now there are zero. There’s a medical clinic run by a hospital consortium where you can see a physician’s assistant, but if you want somebody with an MD, you’ve got to drive a ways. In purely statistical terms, health care is still readily available and reasonably priced (by American standards), but the process of getting it is significantly worse than it used to be.

I’d also push back a little on the bang-for-buck argument in Drum’s post, particularly as regards computers. It’s absolutely true that a really cheap computer now is way more powerful than you could get at that price a decade ago, but the experience of using a bottom-of-the-line computer or phone to deal with sites and apps designed for top-of-the-line hardware is pretty miserable. And it’s also a lot more essential to life today than it was ten years back, when a computer would’ve been a relatively expendable expense.

So, the state of rural America is really a mixed bag, and depends a bit on what you care most about. If you want to get Chinese food in Whitney Point, NY, life has never been better. If you want to go to church or see a doctor, though, you might very well think that the world is going to shit.

I was thinking about what to write this morning, and said “You know, it feels like it’s been a while since I did a round-up of Forbes posts…” So I went and looked, and, um, yeah. It’s been since last October.

So here’s a giant collection of what I’ve been writing over at Forbes:

—Einstein’s Complicated Relationship With Quantum Physics: We mostly think of Einstein as making disparaging remarks about quantum physics, but in fact he made pivotal contributions to the field.

—Redefining The Kilogram: The Ancient History Of New Measurements: Some thoughts about the bootstrapping process by which we redefine standards in a way that improves precision with minimal disruption.

—Stagnating Science Or Sign Of Success?: How one of the indicators sometimes cited as evidence of a problem facing science is actually what you would expect from things working the way they’re supposed to.

—Three Ways Quantum Physics Affects Your Daily Life: Shameless Breakfast with Einstein tie-in number one.

—Three Everyday Things That Couldn’t Exist Without Quantum-Mechanical Spin: Shameless Breakfast with Einstein tie-in number two.

—Three Weird Quantum Phenomena You Didn’t Realize You Were Using: Shameless Breafast with Einstein tie-in number three.

—Physics Is Not In Crisis: No matter what high-energy particle physicists tell you.

—Facing The Future Of Particle Physics: In which I try to comment on the status of our most overexposed subfield without getting sucked into the specific argument about money.

—The Thorny Question Of Whether To Build Another Particle Collider: In which I fail.

—Einstein’s Model Of Light And Changing The Physics Of Empty Space: A look at experiments that change the rate of spontaneous emission by atoms.

— Testing Nature With Unnatural Materials: A look at near-room-temperature superconductivity in materials at extreme pressures, and why that’s an interesting system to study.

— The Physics That Explains Why You Shouldn’t Wear Stripes On TV Could Lead To Better Superconductors: A look at maybe the most exciting recent development in condensed matter, the discovery of superconductivity in twisted graphene bilayers.

— One Hundred Years Of Gravity Bending Light: The connection between the recent Event Horizon Telescope and the famous Eddington eclipse expedition that confirmed General Relativity.

— Neutrino Physics And A History Of Impossible Experiments: A look at some of the crazy things required to get good information about the lightest fundamental particles.

— How Faceted Droplets Show That We’re Not Done With “Old Physics” Yet: Some experiments with very ordinary systems lead to extraordinary behavior, and show the richness of well-known laws.

— “What Is Life?” Then And Now: A look at the how recent work on the physics of living systems complements and extends an influential classic.

So, yeah, that’s a giant pile of stuff. As is often the case, if you exclude the book-related posts, I suspect the traffic to these is close to inversely proportional to how interesting I find the actual physics topic. This has been frustrating me since, well, pretty much since I got the ability to track traffic to individual posts back in the early ScienceBlogs period…

I’ve gotten out of the habit of sharing cute-kid stuff on a regular basis, mostly because there’s less free time in which to do that. The kids are sleeping in this morning, though, so here is the opening of the book that The Pip decided to start writing the other night.

(The transcript below has some of the spelling cleaned up a bit.)

Origin Story

Hello, my name is Nick Astro (A.K.A. Atomic Armpit). I wasn’t always a super hero. I used to be an ordinary business man, until I accidentally fell into a nucular substance that my scientist friend was presenting to me. After they pulled me out I was covered in a toxic stench, Luckily my scientist friend found a way to control the stench. Then he suggested I use my stench for good. After all it was so toxic that it could burn your nose hairs! Ever since that day, my life was never the same.

It’s very seven-year-old-boy, but I’m curious to know where it goes from there…

One of the staples of the social-media ecosystem of Takes is the “How I Broke Out of [Social Evil] by Learning [Critical Idea].” These tend to follow a common pattern of being miserably unhappy for reasons that couldn’t be articulated, then discovering [Critical Idea] through academic study or therapy or some linear combination of the two. At that point, eyes are opened, realizations are had, lives are transformed, and then thinkpieces are written. The clear implication is that if only everybody else would follow the same course, they, too would embrace [Critical Idea] and be transformed.

There’s a moderate amount of discussion about how these pieces are affected by social factors and social-media design– click-chasing and “echo chamber” effects, and the like. A thing I haven’t seen discussed as much, but have started to wonder about, is the degree to which these things are affected by a sort of survivorship bias.

That is, the academic/therapeutic activities that lead to the transformative insights in these kinds of stories seem like the kind of thing that naturally work best for a certain kind of person. That personality type shares a lot of traits with the sort of person who would be predisposed to write thinkpieces about their experiences. On the other hand, the kind of personality that would incline someone to find the relevant academic study or therapy an unconvincing waste of time seems likely to also make that person see the writing of “this was a waste of time” thinkpieces as a waste of time.

Of course, that sort of thing is more or less by definition an intractable problem– how do you learn the stories of people who by nature aren’t interested in sharing their stories? I’m not sure how you’d even figure out who those people are, let alone get them to talk.

In the end, I guess this lands in the umbrella category of “Reasons I’m Glad I Don’t Work in Social Sciences.” It’s a thing I wonder about every time one of these “Everybody MUST read this!” stories crosses my feeds, though.

A week or so ago, some publication ran the latest in an endless string of career-advice articles about how some particular successful woman manages to balance her time between family and career. I noticed this thanks to multiple retweets of someone’s response on Twitter along the lines of “I eagerly await the article about ‘How Fathers Manage Having a Family in Academia.'”

We’re in peak kid-sports season, so believe me when I say I have Thoughts about this, and I tweeted an offer to write such a piece if someone would agree to pay me for it. Unsurprisingly, no such offer was forthcoming, because half-assed tweets are not, in fact, a way to get hired to write things.

But, you know, there’s a lot going on here that’s frustrating. On some level, “How to Manage as a Father in Academia” really is a category of article that ought to exist, if we’re ever going to move in the directly of a more equitable division of labor in academia. Better gender balance in academia (and everywhere else in the working world) will require men with families to make some of the sacrifices that are normally expected of women. One important element of getting to that point would need to be advice about how to do that and still have a successful career.

At the same time, this is a sterling example of the sort of article that’s incredibly frustrating to write, which is why I’m not doing it as a blog post for free. There are a nearly infinite number of failure modes for that kind of thing, starting with “What Do You Want, a Cookie?” and going downhill from there. And if you somehow manage to successfully thread your way between all those gaping pits, the most likely response is crickets and tumbleweed. It’s just too easily dismissed as “Well, OK, but that’s just you, and you’re atypical.” (Which is super extra frustrating, because as noted in the previous paragraph, that’s the whole point…)

So, dashing something off quickly risks widespread mockery with a small chance of social-media mobbing, and putting in enough time to navigate around those hazards most likely ends with being ignored. That’s not a good use of time, unless somebody pays for it. (There’s a productivity tip you can have for free…) Even this self-indulgent noodling on my own blog is probably a sub-optimal use of my time, but it will at least (hopefully) allow me to stop thinking about the subject for a bit.

(And, of course, there’s the usual nagging worry I have whenever writing about career matters that my personal situation really isn’t generally interesting or useful, and thus genuinely wouldn’t be worth anybody’s time but the crickets and the tumbleweed…)

Anyway, on the off chance that any editors blow through here with the tumbleweed, the offer stands: I’d be willing to take a stab at a “How to Manage as a Father in Academia,” piece, if you think it would actually be valuable to have such a thing. In the meantime, I have a bunch of work to do before it’s time for me to pick up the kids and shuttle them to their respective sports activities.

The story really starts around lunchtime on Wednesday, when I was playing hoops in our regular pick-up game. On the first play of the first game, I whacked my right ring finger against something and sprained it a bit (I’ve done this dozens of times, so recognize the feeling…), and then late in the second game, I took a knee in the shin in a way that made me see stars, and by the time we finished the game and I made my way down to the locker room, there was already a big swollen welt there. So I spent the rest of the afternoon in “Every f*&king thing hurts” mode, icing my leg during a faculty meeting, and gritting my teeth through taking SteelyKid to a doctor appointment and then serving as first-base coach for her softball game that night. At bedtime, I took a couple of over-the-counter naproxen to help with the pain and swelling.

In the morning, my leg was somewhat better (though with a garish purple welt on my shin), and my finger was sore and purple, so I took another naproxen before heading off to write at Starbucks and the get a haircut before going to campus. I grabbed a bagel at the Breugger’s next to the barbershop, and as I was walking in from the parking lot to my office, noticed that it wasn’t sitting super well.

“Great,” I thought, “Those naproxen helped with the leg, but they’ve aggravated my heartburn.” And, sure enough, as the morning wore on, my stomach continued to feel not-great. In addition to being a little unsettled, I was getting a kind of stitch in my side, like I had run a long distance, or pulled a muscle. Which we really weird, as the most strenuous thing I had done all morning was standing up out of a chair…

We had a lunchtime colloquium, and I felt really unwell at that, and my side was getting painful, so as soon as it finished, I headed home to take a nap. Which didn’t really help.

While sleeping, an email had come in saying that The Pip’s baseball game Thursday night was rained out, so I texted Kate to say “Hey, I’ll get the kids, but my stomach is messed up, so once you get home, I’m likely going to bed.” She replied sympathetically, and I started to write back “It’s OK, I just have this weird sharp pain in the lower right part of my abdomen…” And then changed it to “You know what, I’m going to Urgent Care to get this looked at.”

Something like six hours later, after winding my way through the bureaucracy of emergency medicine, I was lying on a gurney in an operating room, waiting to be put under for an emergency appendectomy. So, that was fun.

(They did eventually give me a dose of morphine, while waiting on the CT scan results, which I had never had before. It didn’t exactly make the pain go away, but it made it seem a lot less important…)

Happily, it’s 2019, and they can do an appendectomy laparoscopically these days. Roughly 24 hours after I noticed that my stomach was messed up, I was home, with three small incisions in my belly, and one less vestigial organ. It’s more than a little amazing when you think about it– we may not be living in the future with flying cars, but the fact that what used to be major abdominal surgery is now a home-the-next-day kind of deal is a testament to how far medical technology has come.

I’m going to be moving slowly and gingerly for a while yet, but I was able to go to the kids’ games of modified rounders on Saturday (SteelyKid went 2-3 at the plate, and scored both times she got on base; The Pip was 3-3 and made five outs in the field). And even when I woke up in the hospital, the post-surgical pain was nowhere near what I had from the inflamed appendix.

Many thanks to the medical professionals at the Albany Med urgent care facility in Niskayuna, and especially at Ellis Hospital, where everybody from the ER to the OR to the nursing staff who watched me overnight was very professional and cheerful (though honestly, I could’ve done with a bit less cheer when checking my vitals at 3am…). They certainly seem to have done a good job, and given how I was on Thursday afternoon, I’m remarkably comfortable now.

And, of course, infinite gratitude to Kate, who not only has to deal with wrangling the kids and Charlie the pupper through my period of medically-ordered uselessness (I’m not supposed to lift anything over ten pounds for the next couple of weeks), but has to badger me into not overexerting myself as I go stir crazy during said medically-ordered uselessness. If you believe in the ability to send people positive energy via warm thoughts and the like, direct it all her way…