Master Chu video

My tai chi chuan teacher, C. K. Chu, in an old video I just discovered on Youtube:

He’s doing the 36-posture Cheng Man Ching short form, up to a little past the first section (at the end, he’s just starting Wave Hands Like Clouds). I’m very happy to find this, because I’ve never seen footage of Master Chu from before I started studying with him.

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330, eh?

Just got my rejection email from Canada’s leading department. 330 people applied there this year. This should make me feel not so bad, but instead I feel cheapened. That’s way too many philosophers for any reasonable market I can think of. Maybe there’s strength in numbers. I wonder how the 330 of us, banded together, would have fared defending Thermopylae against the numberless Persian forces. Philosophers are of course known for their swordsmanship and physical courage.

It’s cold comfort knowing that I wouldn’t have accepted anyway. Turns out Laura could not work legally in Canada while I studied. Why did I apply in the first place, you ask? I like to think I was testing the spirit of NAFTA, but it was probably just my incredibly poor judgment.

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The remains of the day job

A couple of weeks ago, I announced my departure from the software engineering position I’ve held the past five and a half years. I’ll be leaving April 11. When I decided to give notice early, I thought my last weeks on the job would give me a chance to roll up my sleeves and leave on a positive note. There was a project about to go into development that had been delayed again and again over the past year, to which I felt uniquely qualified to contribute.

I was being naive. Within days after I spoke to my boss about leaving, office denizens both familiar and faintly recognized started to wish me well in my “new endeavors.” When I’d tell them I’d be around for several more weeks, they’d look at me quizzically. Shortly thereafter, I took a long-weekend trip with my wife. By the time I came back to the office, I could sense that I had become a ghost.

I’m a visible enough spirit. People still greet me in the hall, ask about my plans and say, “Well, good for you,” when I tell them I’m going back to school to get a Ph.D. in one of the few disciplines even less lucrative than music performance, my first career. Like a wan household spectre, I’m observed but taken for granted, now that the novelty of my plight has faded. No one sends me Outlook(TM) meeting requests anymore. In standing phone meetings I’ve attended for weeks, my name is no longer uttered during roll call. I stay on the line, lurking. And in the project I was supposedly indispensable to, software updates have already begun to take place without my involvement—or knowledge, for that matter. Where normally I would have requested test data, confirmed code and config changes, and put out myriad fires, shepherding project content through every phase of the build process, now I sit at my desk, organizing and packing my stuff, making too many cups of tea, and answering the stray question that reminds me I used to have a purpose here. I’m Captain Dunsel, and I’ve got two and a half weeks to go.

Forgive me for waxing bathetic. My having too little to do at work isn’t the tragedy it would be for a striver of more Protestant ethic. In fact, things would be copacetic if only I had heard from school X by now (and, of course, been accepted). Being rejected by school X would create a situation not unlike a Democratic Convention in which Obama has not secured the nomination outright: There would be an outcome, one we can live with in some fashion, either way, but only after considerable kicking and screaming. If rejected, I’ll “fight” to be squeezed in somehow—I’ve been told by more than one person in the department that there may be alternative routes to acceptance. If that fails, Laura and I will have to make harder decisions, such as which of my “safety” schools to embrace and whether to stay in town or move away. The latter would require opposing commutes, mine to school and Laura’s to her work.

So in the worst case, things could get ugly, but they will work out in the end. That’s the long and short of it: This all has to work out, because for me there’s no turning back. I can feel myself relishing this change, after so many years without change and without prospects in the areas that have always mattered to me most, family excepted.

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Panegyric upon WordPress

WordPress rules!

Managing categories and pretty much everything is so much easier than in that other blogging software, which by the way is not available as a free (as in beer) download that might one day be installed on one’s own server (hint to self). I especially appreciate that the entire blog can be exported as XML to back up the site. Handy, since this is a vanity project that, by the grace of Dawkins, may never see the light of internet readership.

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