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.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Nice is nice

A and I have made it to the French Riviera, which proved to be more complicated than we anticipated. In the hour before we left for JFK, I decided to play it safe and book us seats on a TGV bound for Nice so that we could hop on as soon as we arrived. Turns out that everyone wants to hit the Cote d'Azur at this time of year, and there were no seats to be had! So much for playing it safe.

However, the guy on the other end of the SNCF hotline was a gem, got us seats on the earliest train out of Paris today, and waived the registration fee. THEN, we had the great fortune of being able to procure a room at a lovely Paris hotel, AND they did not charge us for our cancellation in Nice. So, crisis averted, and we got to spend an extra night in gaie Paris. I think that this is auspicious.
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