1. On the Eve of St. Nick, my son Nick has set off for China where he’s going to present a paper at a professional conference. This freaks me out so much I’m not fully aware of how freaked out I am. But if I could put a number on it, the number would be very large.
2. I actually saw a copy of Blood of Ambrose on a shelf in a bookstore the other day. It would have totally freaked me out if I had not already been freaking out about Thing 1 (above).
3. Earlier this week, Nick and I attended a lecture by Larry Lessig, one of the founders of Creative Commons and of Change-Congress.org. It was less academic than I’d anticipated (in a good way) and much more entertaining. He made some great points about the way politics is done (and decent policy debate fails to get done) in this country, without falling into the left-vs-right culture-war stuff that stultifies our political discourse. Highly recommended, if the circus comes to a town near you. (Or to the interwebs: the talk was supposed to be released online under a CC license. But if it has been I haven’t been able to find it.)
Oh wow, I totally forgot it was St. Nicholas’s Eve. We celebrate it in Hungary. What is it that freaks you out? That Nick is flying in an airplane? That’s he’s about to be in a different country? Or a country that far away? Does his paper suck? Are my questions making things worse?
It’s the far-awayness that’s getting to me. Also the fact that he’s grown-up enough to be presenting a paper at a professional conference. The paper itself is a deceptively simple and elegant piece of work to result from pretty long and complicated project; to the extent that I understand it, I would say that it does not suck.
Missing him is tough, but not all the freaking out is bad. It’s just sort of all hitting me at once.
Coraggio!
And safe travels to your son. There and back again. The road leads ever on…