ceteris non paribus

I could have sworn I blogged about this before, but I guess not.

The bobble during Obama’s swearing-in caused me to remember my wedding day. No, I wasn’t being married to a supreme court justice, but it was more important to me than the recent inauguration, believe it or not.

During a Quaker wedding ceremony:

Following a period of silence, as long or as short as the couple is led to observe, the two rise and, each in turn taking the other by the hand, make their promises to each other, in the words from their marriage certificate, in tones clear enough to be heard throughout the meeting.

In the run-up to the wedding, Lindy and I had agreed to “use the vows in Faith and Practice“, and checked off the “write vows” item on the checklist. Easy, peasy, right?

Come the day of the wedding, I stood and, in tones clear enough to be heard throughout the meeting, said my vows. Lindy took her turn and, I thought, got it a bit wrong. “Ah, well,” I thought, “it’s the thought that counts.”

It wasn’t until we escaped into the getaway car that we compared notes and discovered that we were both right. Turns out that I had used the 1972 edition of F&P and she’d used the 1997 version. Whups!

I’m pretty sure that Justice Roberts doesn’t have that same excuse, though.

<merzy> I first logged into a unix box on an account of my own... hurm, exactly 20 years ago this month, actually.

*boggle*

University of Delaware. Basement lab with horrible florescent lights. Summer program for young minority engineers. The clunk of walking over raised floor in the lab. Old Wyse52 terminals. Tech support for confused students at the next terminal. Line printers and greenbar paper. Thumbing through the linear feet of printout (!) of the man pages and finding the section on games. nethack. Teaching a friend pascal in a weekend. Learning vi.

This is the top of my current .cshrc, which I snagged from Eiji the fall of 1988:

# Luke Hankins’ .cshrc file
# Original written by Garth Snyder and Dan Rice 9/18/87.
# Modified extensively by Eiji Hirai, Jan 1988.
# Last update: Um, yesterday.

A long, strange trip indeed.

Today’s flashback: Listening to early Genesis (having been convinced by Jon and Eiji that it was superior to the Phil stuff) in the KlotzLab playing empire against people all over the world. The year is 1988. The computers are Macs. The songs evoke the smell of pizza, the IRC conversations with people in Australia, the light of the setting sun over the rugby field outside, the visceral feel of a game you’ve been playing for hours on end.

For my 30th birthday (I think it was 30…), Lindy and I flew to Tucson, AZ to see Dar Williams play. It wasn’t as capricious as it sounds, since Lindy’s dad was living down there at the time and could put us up and show us the local hotspots while we were there. (I remember a great little Mexican place just up the road from the show, though I’ve not had bad Mexican in Tucson, so that’s not surprising.) It was a good show, though the crowd was surprisingly muted. I’m not a big fan of Dar With Band, but Gail Ann Dorsey was touring with her at the time and that’s the first time I heard them do that version of “Better Things”. *swoon*

(Brought to you by a mellow day and Dar showing up on the tunes we’re listening to while we work.)

Half my life ago, give or take a few hours[1], I met the girl who would someday be my wife.

It was August of 1988, at the yearly week-long Young Friends summer retreat at Camp Onas. Lindy was 14 and at her first conference[0], I was 17 and had been attending for years at that point. It was a bright, sunny day and everyone was amped at seeing friends again for the first time in months[2]. Folks were straggling in over the course of the day, and the best place to be sure not to miss your friends was the dining/assembly hall. The four-square[3] court hadn’t been set up yet so I had gone out to hunt for the tape and balls. When I returned, I found a young woman I’d been crushing on for a while standing where the king square was to go and all thoughts of games fled. After an effusive greeting[4], I noticed the two girls (Lindy and Hannah) that she’d been talking to and introduced myself; “Hi, I’m Luke. Who are you?”[5] Not the most sophisticated of opening lines, but, hey, it worked. I was vaguely aware of her over the next few days[6], but it wasn’t until she randomly threw me on the ground during a smear-the-queer[7] game when I didn’t have the ball that I caught on that something was up[8]. The fact that she sat next to me through a Risk game as a spectator[9] (and my good luck charm) a few hours later confirmed it, and that evening found us smooching on the steps of one of the tent platforms. From a chance meeting, a great life together has come, and every day I thank my lucky stars that she was standing in the right place at the right time.

(There should be a picture of us 2 months later right here, but I can’t find the scanned file anywhere. I’ve got the original, still, but the fact that it’s missing worries me.)

[0] I think.

[1] Yes, I wrote a script to do the math and page me when it was time. I’m a geek, what of it?

[2] Typical attendance was 4 confs a year, and many kids (myself included) didn’t see much of the other YF’s between times.

[3] The three signature games of Young Friends of that era were Wink (”a combination of spin the bottle and professional wrestling”, where dislocations or broken bones were not uncommon), Russian Ratscrew (a version of slapjack where rings and long nails were expressly prohibited to avoid excessive injuries) and four-square (the typical game, but played with an element of seriousness that I’ve not seen anywhere else.) Yes, these were Quakers.

[4] It was tradition by that point for me to pick Heather up and spin her around as a hello. She later ended up dating a future housemate of mine for a while. Then again, lots of people ended up dating Jon…

[5] Smooth, huh? Actually for someone as shy as I was at that point, introducing myself to a girl was a notable event.

[6] Ben’s impression was “Kind of cute in a 14-year-old sort of way.”

[7] Yet another violent Quaker game. I always hated the name, but wikipedia says that it’s not as bad as I thought.

[8] “I take hints, yea, but only when applied with a sledgehammer.”

[9] The first of many sacrifices she’s made for me over the years. Risk is a boring game to play and I can’t imagine watching a session without going stark raving mad.

More fatigue means more random long-term memories surfacing without an obvious trigger. (Does this happen to anyone else?)

Sitting in an IHOP around 17th and Chestnut in Philly with Ben and Lonnie. The service was horrible, but we had a craving for pancakes and were too far from our usual haunt, the American Diner. It’s late morning. We’re sitting about half-way back, next to a support pole.

Why’d that pop up while I was madly juggling perl and php debugging? Odd.

Among the things not to do when you’ve got a million things on your task list for both home and work, are short on sleep and need to have been in bed an hour ago:

Stumble on your college-era diary and spend a few hours skimming through angst, stress, love lost and stupid phrases like “Instead, I sit here in front of this damn box and blow my life away in silicon.”

Even worse if you detour into your old saved email from around that time. I was more selective in the mailboxes I read, though, so got to relive the more fun parts of my misspent youth, er, exploring the bounds of ethical computing.

On the plus side, I found a list of all 31 Young Friends cons I’d gone to over the course of a decade. It’s amazing how much a part of my life that was. Every four months, on average, I’d leave real life behind and go immerse myself in an intense but safe environment that helped keep me vaguely grounded and sane.

Dammit, why am I not in bed?

Over a decade ago, a friend who enjoyed dredging the local music scene for interesting artists introduced me to a nifty little self-produced tape by a guy recording as “Aqua Travesty”. (Described by him now as “imagine Depeche Mode with no gear; melancholy, DIY synth release from 1987″) He gave me an extra copy he had and I played the heck out of it for years until it wandered off while I was in the process of converting my collection to CD’s. Since it had been recorded in the dark ages before the common adoption of the CD, I despaired of ever hearing it again and tried not to be haunted by it when it got stuck in my head at the strangest of times.

Fast-forward to yesterday when I did one of those “the internet sucks, it can’t provide me with something as simple as an obscure pre-www album that likely only had 100 copies made to begin with” searches in the dead of night. Up until now, the only result had been my attempt to find a copy using Google Answers. (Failure!) Last night, however, there was a second hit! Ben, now spinning in the NYC club scene as “DJ Abstract” had ripped the tape and had it as mp3s. A quick begging email later and I was soon greedily watching those long lost notes slide towards me over the cablemodem. I was listening to the first track even before the second had arrived and was lost in a haze of memories before the last bit was safe on my drive. (For example: Ben, Ben and Jon discovered that I was going to be spending Christmas day alone one year and drove 50 miles to drag me back to Philly for an all-night bridge session. I remember sitting in the back seat of a car going hazardously fast on snow-slick roads, staring out at the flurries flying past and thinking how cool my friends were.)

I keep meaning to do an entry on how much of my early life was tied to music; Not because I played, but because I tended to listen to the same tape on repeat for hours or days at a time. (No fancy random-play mp3 collections back then. We had our walkmen and liked ‘em, thank you very much.) Even now, a random song will invoke the visceral feel of a specific game. (Note that most of the memories thus dredged up are of games or traveling and not, say, studying…)

My grandmother has filled a binder with memories of her childhood that makes engrossing reading. I’m not going to be that prolific or interesting, but as my memory fades, I’d like keep some things from drifting off.

My earliest memory is of sitting on a couch being read The Cat in the Hat by my dad. “Band On The Run” by Wings is playing in the background, so that makes it 1974 or thereabouts.

My only other memory from before my brother was born (when I was 5) is playing with wooden blocks, I think while at the Akwesasne reservation. It’s all a bit hazy.

On the plus side, this means that Sabrina won’t remember the snotsucker. (…except that Lindy says she remembers things from when she was 2. Uh-oh.)