Hello darkness, my old friend

I took a trip to the States this summer, first a brief stop on the east coast, then to LA.

Hello darkness, my old friend.

I didn’t submit any conference papers this year, but instead, I went and attended a Symposium on Computational Fabrication as well as the subsequent summer school. Both were held at MIT in a building designed by Frank Gehry. Great architecture, a bit difficult to clean. Without this sounding like a report, I did have interesting conversation with a number of people working in different yet related fields. But, that is not what this post is about.

I went with a colleague who has previously never visited United States before. Her exposure to this country is mostly from the TV or what others say. After spending several days in Boston, we were walking along an affluent street lined with Brownstone townhouses, and one of the most memorable comments about what she has seen so far was “I feel like I am walking in a movie set, and this is all staged.”

This sentiment came up again and again, and it makes sense. As exaggerated as American TVs are, they are based on American behavior, culture and way of life. It is almost as if we were all of a sudden allowed to interact with zoo animals that were previously behind glass windows. She says it is because the cultures seem so similar, that this dissimilarity feels eerie as hell. After all, the American culture is rooted in European culture, just with 200 odd years of tweaking. Whereas when she were in Asia, she expects difference and what she experiences match her expectations. Maybe it is another one of those uncanny valley phenomena.

It is difficult to pin-point what these slight misalignment are, but I will list a few.

Everyone patronizes the shit out of you. Every time I walk into a shop or a restaurant, I feel like I am an unstable mental patient who needs to be handled gingerly. In a slow tone with an annoying upward inflection at the end of every sentence I hear this, “Hello, my name is (a name I forget instantly). I will be serving you today. Would you like something to drink to start with?” and whenever I need a second to decide, I hear “Oh, of course, take your time. I will be right over there, okaY?” After ten meals like this, even if I weren’t a mental patient, I would want to stab the next person who talks that way to me.

The prevalence and the stigmatization of recreational drugs. I have lived in Amsterdam for more than half a year, I have yet to see someone overdosing on anything. Of course I have been around people who were high as a kite, but I have actually never seen someone who is visibly destroyed by drugs.

On the third or the fourth morning in Boston, we were sitting in a Starbucks getting some breakfast when we saw and heard a woman collapsed onto the ground with a thud, unconscious and foaming around the mouth. The firefighters came and behaved like professionals who knew exactly what to do. She regained consciousness after a while and were carted away in an ambulance. After our initial shock that lasted half a day, I started to reflect on this. First, how many similar situations would the firefighters have to deal with on a daily basis to know exactly what to do and say. “What did you take? Heroin? You must have had a bad batch.” Second, where is all the patronizing then?! The firefighters and the paramedics delivered the most straight-forward sentences I have heard that whole week! The irony.

I have been in California for 20 days now. I don’t actually have a lot to say about the university, my life here, or the people around me. I found a flat sharing with a washed-up Hollywood writer, divorced and with a son who lives with him every other week. The first time we met, he proclaimed of his cleanliness. Maybe he has a different definition of cleanliness than I.

My office is shared with 12 or so first year PhD students in a basement with prison style little windows. As a PhD advances, he/she gets to move to a smaller, still-basement, office with perhaps 6 people. As a post-doc, you get to move above ground. Secretaries however occupy single offices sometimes as big as a professor. The average salary of a PhD student is 30k a year. Caltech is not nearly as flush with money as ETH. I am surprised by that.