all is bright and gay

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posted by tom / September 24, 2004 /

I wanted to take my time and let the experience soak in, but I was almost late, so all I could manage was a renewed confirmation that students continue to get irritatingly younger-looking, frat guys continue to get amusingly sillier-looking, and it would've been nice to have a Best Buy back when I was in town. Then I hurried over to the Neuroscience building.

It's tucked away into a nice shady spot with lots of ivy and little foot traffic. It's got the requisite columns, but the inside is anything but grand. There are a lot of yellowing vinyl tiles, and dull white paint, and gigantic unguarded canisters of liquid nitrogen sitting in the hallways. It's pleasantly cool once you step inside, the kind of cool you get from shadows, not air conditioning. It smells like science.

Dr. Levy is a pretty neurotic guy who spent the first part of his career quantifying the energy efficiencies of the brain in physical terms, and is now trying to build computer simulations of tiny parts of it. He's as intimidatingly brilliant as you'd expect, but at least he's shorter than me. We sat down and talked about what had been going on in his lab.

I realized about halfway through our 90 minute meeting that it was a sort of test. The first part was a casual talk about the computer science-y stuff he'd been working on: parallel computing, Beowulf clusters -- lots of fantastically nerdy jargon that was way out of my league, but which I could halfway fake. I think I eked out a win when I said "Von Neuman architecture", but please don't ask me what it means.

Then he showed me some current results via a few stupefying three dimensional graphs and patiently waited to see if I could tease out the moral of the data. Again, appearances were casual. To any outside observer it wouldn't have appeared to be a titanic intellectual struggle. Actually, probably to any observer besides myself. I couldn't be sure I was being tested, but I approached it as though I was and figured out what hypothesis the data suggested. So far so good.

Finally, an informal "are you qualified and prepared to be poor" screening where I watched as Levy quizzed one of his star lab members on his own grad school ambitions -- this weird little Russian CS major was obviously intended to be a proxy for me, only he was much better- yet still hopelessly unqualified. I listened politely.

And then we sat back down, and I said I hoped for a letter, to which he responded he figured that's why I had come. I had explicitly said I wanted one when I scheduled the meeting, but I didn't want to split hairs. He said okay. Score.

Charlottesville looked even more beautiful as I walked over to the corner to buy a celebratory spinach roll. An attempt to relieve my filesharing guilt by buying the Arcade Fire CD was met with the news that they had sold out, and so had the regional distributor. Guilt alleviated, yet money still in wallet: yes! And hey, isn't that Catherine's brother? Hi Peter!

But it wasn't until I walked out of Frank's, my digestive system happily struggling to grapple with a pound and a half or so of clarified butter, dough and traces of spinach, that I knew things were going to be okay: the Gumby's storefront, across the street from Frank's, had closed.

Gumby's is a franchise that exists only in college towns, and only because it's open until 4AM. If you didn't have one at your school, you had something like it -- a not-so elite cadre of hopeless burnouts slinging tiny cups of spoiled ranch dressing and discs of... food to an undiscriminating, drunken constituency. Debating whether or not those discs rise to the level of pizza is a little like debating whether or not the crisis in the Sudan is genocide: the more salient point is just that it's very, very bad. For a long stretch of my junior year I greedily took advantage of Gumby's "Half-Price Pokey Stix" deal. The Pokey Stick is even further removed from classical definitions of "food", consisting mainly of dough, garlic salt and Pam. But you could buy several meals' worth of food for $2.75 or so (not counting a generous $1 tip for the delivery guy). All in all I was very pleased with this weekly investment until I became convinced that it was going to make me die.

I'm happy to say that no more undergraduates will have to suffer at their own hands as I did. Gumby's is gone. I have a letter of recommendation. Somewhere, a delicate flower is blooming from a crack in the concrete -- or at least an equivalently inspiring cliche is occurring. It's morning in America, and for once God doesn't seem to be quite as hungover and pissy as usual.