Requilibriating

Dear blog,

I have decided that life will never sufficiently equilibriate for me to contribute to this medium in the sense I described years ago. It has been four and a half years since I last posted, and so I must review a few things.

(voop)

After beating cancer, December 2012, I went on to walk the stage of Ohio University with an overpriced nylon master's hood that I threw away immediately afterward. I had a sense of pride in the master's which I never had with my undergraduate degree. That was May 2013, and that summer, Vivian and I trained for and rode a couple's century (100 mile) bike ride.

Vivian and I decided to enroll in PhD programs at Kent State, where I would study characters with Don White. With both of us making money, and neither of us having cancer, money started piling up pretty fast. We managed to repay family loans incurred during my sickness in just a few months. A little while after that, I decided that graduate school without fighting cancer was just too boring, and we had plenty of money, so we started making babies. Juniper was born on June 25, 2014 (her due date).

(!)

That pretty much did the trick for me. Having a newborn in my room cry at all hours of the night for the months preceding qualifying exams was almost as difficult as fighting cancer, and made it seem like a worthy task again. I would go on to score the top grade out of ten takers on the combined analysis half of the qualifying exam. I did not score the top grade on the algebra half, because I had the flu on that day and was running to the bathroom with severe diarrhea after each problem (ten problems per qualifying exam). At one point, I was actually just shivering in a cold sweat on a couch in the waiting area outside the exam room. Good times. I got a 77 on that exam, and 62 on the analysis. Three of us passed.

(four more passed a second attempt, and two passed a third)

Then I had to pass candidacy, which was a farce. One of the committee members fell asleep (though he always does, so I cannot claim that contributed much in way of farce-ness to the exam). Finally, the easy part; solving an unsolved problem, or at least part of it. I did, and the same committee plus a few computer scientists all said I could be a doctor of mathematics. So I walked across the stage of Kent State University in a rented nylon gown in, and was given the silly doctoral hood by the university, so actually less money out of pocket than the master's. I haven't thrown it out yet, because I may well find I am required to attend a function in it someday. That would be May 2017.

(car up!)

I had one of the best experiences of my life last summer, August 2016. I rode Pelotonia (pelotonia.org). It's a cancer research charity bike ride put together by the James cancer hospital at OSU (where I was originally diagnosed). For Pelotonia, the longer rides correspond to bigger donation amounts, and I wanted to ride the longest of them all, which is the 180 mile, two day ride. I raised 2550 dollars (2500 minimum for that ride). There's a thing in group biking called 'drafting' where you ride really close to a person or group of people and get a cut in wind resistance. I did that for the first time on the first day of Pelotonia. I also received more positive feedback than I ever had in just a few hours. I wore a shirt detailing my cancer story on the back, and with all the drafting, plenty of folks got a chance to read and congratulate me, or explain that I'm why they ride, or that I am their hero.

The flip side to drafting is 'pulling', where people are hot on your ass and you're taking all the wind resistance. That's the deal, whoever in front may get tired and drop back, and someone else has to take the wind. I didn't pull the first day. The second day I got in with a group of eight to ten guys, all of them on aluminum and carbon fiber bikes, with clip-ins and fancy pants, cruising about 30kph over rolling hills. I was in the back at first, but the lead kept dropping off until I realized it was going to be me pulling. I got myself as pumped as possible and kept that team moving at 30kph for about two minutes before falling back. At that point, one of them shouted "riding a '72 commuter, in tennis shoes and gym shorts! You are rocking it." I corrected them, "it's an '83." My father in law insists now that it's an '81. I don't know, but it was fun being the only person out of a hundred or so at any given pit stop with a kick-stand. One of that group patted me on the back at the end, and said, "good job, '83," and told me I made a big impression on their group.

I pass a lot of people with multi-thousand dollar, bike/gear packages when I train on my father in law's old Raleigh 10-speed, in sneakers and gym shorts. I am hoping to ride Pelotonia 18 as well.

(Cold beer!)

It is now July, so it is over a year since I began preparing application materials for the job search that began last fall around November. People have asked how it is going, the job search, periodically for the last six or eight months. Honestly, it compares pretty easily with cancer. I hated every minute of the process. The networking, the white lies on paper (oh glorious employer, oh you are the greatest employer, oh joyous and righteous whom it may concern, I am but a humble applicant, but the most emphatically well qualified applicant regardless who else may have applied!!), the waiting, and absurd amounts of rejection. I absolutely would not live a life if the entirety was fighting cancer, nor if its entirety was searching, and not securing, employment. It's a life not worth living. I gained considerable weight for the first several months, and despite very consistent effort this summer, have not made much progress on it.

(side bar)

After one very important rejection came in, I gave up on a career in academia and started learning Python on the advice of a friend in tech. I applied to about twenty positions in programming, and was rejected for all but one, which kind of never progressed. Then my undergrad called and made the offer, about a month after they stopped returning my emails on the subject, and so some weeks since I figured the job had gone to another candidate. The hiring process at Central State has been marked by nonsensical and unreasonable behavior so far, and so I'm planning to keep programming in my pocket, and picking up display projects while eyeing the market. Computer programming has advantages over academic work, to be sure.

(back to business)

My very good friend, Conrad Zagory, who I met at Central, is still there and I am very much looking forward to spending some more years with him as comrade. I call him my sensei, because he taught me the game of go after I was kicked out the college of education. Someone asked if I had a real Japanese sensei. I said he's a 6' tall jew, but he spent 20 years there, had a career, hobbies, wife and children there, so pretty good 'Japanese sensei' credentials. My go game improved considerably when I roomed with him for a semester out of dire poverty at the end of undergrad. It didn't improve very much in graduate school, and actually got a good deal worse while I was researching for my dissertation. I went from 6 kyu on KGS to 10 while researching. After I finished, it took a few months to get back up to 6 kyu, and to relearn how to play guitar.

I re-read this entire blog this morning. That chapter I wrote the second month at Central, 'The Dream' is really good, I think. I should really write the rest of that book. I probably won't. I don't really know how to play guitar. I can play three songs. I don't practice often enough to get any better. I don't expect that to change anytime soon.

(back, back...)

Some things never change. Every behavior I exhibit today is drastically different from those I exhibited at the start of the blog. They are all for the same purposes; I just have vastly superior methods of achieving the same ends. I still want to play guitar, play go, speak German, teach mathematics, record music, and I still only find time for a few of them at a time. Sometimes you go back a ways, see where you started, and everything is different from one perspective, while being completely unchanged from another. A few weeks ago I reread a hundred pages of old IM chats I saved from 10 years ago. Some of the participants are still friends. They think they have changed. I am not so sure.

Your Obedient,
Ian Hogan, PhD