Just a Personal Update

Things are good.

Personal:
I'm pretty energetic and in a relatively maintainable good mood. In Chicago I felt bipolar with violent emotional swings. I've been feeling well here for the past month or so. Moving to Livermore was an excellent decision - I'm much less rushed and more calm in life as well as bathed constantly in Sun. I'm also nearing my old brown-skin tanness of old. I swear I'm not trying, I use sunscreen and everything - it's just always so nice out.


Eating Paleo also has been fun. I had a burrito the other day as a back-on-grains experiment. It was a fantastic burrito and afterwards I had that food-coma feeling that we all love. Wait! Food-coma? I haven't had one of those since starting this thing. I can eat a huge amount of paleo food and go out hiking immediately (I speak from today's experience) without feeling the least bit tired or weighed down. It also felt pretty cool running around in the hills without my shirt on pretending I was hunting the other hikers.

I'm writing this from a Cafe as an experiment into "cafe culture." I'm about to start working, I promise. About the cafe internet habit I think it would be a great experiment to only use the internet out-of-house. It's such an isolating experience that it's probably good to balance out with an inherently exposing and social location.

Work:
I'm writing. I'm submitting an "Extended Abstract" of my recent work on multiweighted graphs. It's really fun to write things down, formalize them and give an argument as to why they're important. Luckily for me I've actually believed that last part for most of the work that I've done. I'm finding that it's quite challenging to write everything well in a very restrictive space. It forces you to be both extremely precise and often overly-general.

I was asked to give a 30 minute talk to a general (non-networks but still technical) audience. This will be a new experience for me but I'm excited for the challenge.

Future:
Looking for apartments in Chicago

Livermore

In moving 36.7 miles from Berkeley, CA to Livermore, CA I have traveled back roughly twenty years in time and reentered the 90's.

I took an internship position this Summer at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA mainly because of the CA part - I wanted to come home, if only for a while. In playing out this decision I was also enacting several experiments

1. Work full time
2. Have a stable car that I know won't break down
3. Commute 73.4 miles every day
4. See if Northern California was the place where I wanted to settle down

Number three is an interesting one. I wanted to try living in Berkeley, where I had friends, family, awesome food and a wonderful climbing gym - but work in Livermore, where there are not one but two giant national labs (places I'll probably end up working for in the future). Many people commute to work - I've never been one of them - and I wanted to see if that lifestyle was something I could tolerate. Turns out, no.

After a few weeks of working nine hours and spending another two on the road I said goodbye to the organic produce, the bay, the hippies and the climbing gym and said "Hello Livermore." 

Livermore is the east-most town that could possibly call itself part of the SF Bay Area. It's home to two national labs, more Ph.D.s per capita than any other city in the U.S. and the worlds longest burning lightbulb (it's four watts). 

Despite it's academic demographics and pseudo-proximity to San Francisco, the culture of Livermore is more closely related to agricultural, inland California. Having lived in academic, liberal, and artsy-fartsy neighborhoods most of my life this was somewhat of a stark change for me. In asking for the best place to get decent produce I received a compare/contrast of the various Safeways in town (I have the luxury of living next to the newer 24/7 Mega-Safeway with it's own gas pump). The cars here are huge and, I kid you not, my housemate just got "The Internet." She even asked me if I had ever heard of Limewire (really it's better if this is a reference lost on you). 

Taking food as an example people here lose weight by buying individual frozen "lean" meals and I've oft-overheard conversations about calorie counting. Now, the hippie food movement has it's share of ludicrousness - seemingly incompatible trends grow and decay on a yearly basis - it just seems like it took sooooo long for this information to cross the 36.7 miles from Berkeley, the maelstrom of this hippie-food-revolution to Livermore. 

In fact, we can compute the speed at which information travels to be roughly 

36.7 miles / 20 years = 8 meters per day

All that being said, Livermore is actually a lovely place. It's filled with houses, cars, strip malls and chain-bistros yes but it's also filled with a kind people that strike me as completely unpretentious. This quality was perhaps absent in my past artsy-fartsy hangouts and it's quite refreshing. In addition we're surrounded by California wild, smooth hills with dry grasses, windmills, and numerous regional parks within a stone's throw's distance. Yosemite is three hours away and the bay, when I want it, is still accessible. Also, I forgot to mention that it's hot and sunny here every day without a trace of humidity. I wake up happily at 6:20 to the sunrise and take a brisk morning walk in shorts and a t-shirt. I have yet to experience a cloudy day or drop of rain. 

Would I settle down here? Probably not, but I am really enjoying myself. I can't remember a time in the past few years when I've been in such a consistently good mood. 

!Grains

As an experiment a couple months ago I decided to forego both Gluten (wheat) and Dairy (milk, cheese, yogurt). I wanted to minimize the downtime I experience from feeling sluggish during the day for no-apparent-reason. I've heard anecdotal evidence from many sources about how Dairy in particular can be terrible on your system in many non-obvious ways. Gluten is the common second offender.

I did, in fact, mostly eliminate periods of unexplained sluggishness, although this change also coincided with Springtime, confounding any ability on my part to add to the body of anecdotal evidence.

In Chicago, this sort of experiment was looked on as truly bizarre while, upon my return to California, I was greeted with a "Are you going Paleo?" from my sister. Not only is the no-gluten no-dairy experiment popular here but, because of my novel footware, it was supposed that I had been attempting another even grander experiment, that of the Paleolithic diet.

I, as you gentle reader, was confused at the question as I had no idea what "Paleo" was at the time. The idea is that you eat those things that your body was designed to during it's Paleolithic evolutionary adolescence: vegetables, meats, nuts and berries while shirking those ultra-modern luxuries of cooked grains and dairy. Apparently, the pop-culture website devoted to it (and health foods company conveniently) has a proprietor who also rocks Five-Finger shoes as Paleolithic alternative to you modernites call "shoes."

My other sister at the time had given up grains and so it sounded like an interesting challenge.

With the exception of the occasional corn tortilla and pinto bean taco (I still have pounds of this in my freezer) I'm now eating mainly fish and vegetables and nuts. It has really forced me out of my old routine (oats, corn tortillas, beans) and I've been finding a number of good foods as a result. It has also found great synergy with my discovery that I actually like fish (hated it as a kid). I doubt that this will continue for long but I'll have found some new foods and, at the moment at least, I'm filled with energy.

And so that's what happens when I move from Chicago to Berkeley. I change from appearing truly outlandish to realizing that I need to step my hippieism up a notch.