At Wesleyan's 2009 commencement, Anna Quindlen reminded graduates of Samuel Beckett's bold proclamation, "To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now." Instead of tidying the mess, or assuring graduates that things were not as messy as they appeared in the chaos of that May, she simply said,

We leave you a mess. And I won’t apologize for that. Instead I want you to see it for what it is: an engraved invitation to transformation. Certainty is dead. Long live the flying leap.

A long-time fan of Anna Quindlen's, I especially loved that last declarative: long live the flying leap.

And so, here goes my flying leap. As I travel to Japan, back home to run my first math camp for middle-school girls, and then to France, I will be flying in more ways than one.

Friday, June 18, 2010

Japlanning

C and I have taken to calling our bi-weekly research and organizing sessions our time to Japlan. But here's something I discovered yesterday for which I have no idea how to plan: when we fly to Tokyo, we will be going so many time zones in reverse, that we will end up in tomorrow when it is still today, here.

This has truly blown my mind.
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