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I set the computer to wake me up at 8:30, and I figured that I would be so excited I would wake up before then, so I was surprised when I awoke to a different song than I had planned. I had slept through my alarm and it was now about ten. That meant the others had left and I need to find my own way to work. I knew they took the Metra, so I decided to do the same even thogh from the map it looked like the Metra was going to go almost due north and then almost due south after an exchange, which was only going to save me about half my walking distance. The stop closest to the science and enginerring campus of UChile is Parque O’Higgins, which is really large, but unfriendly looking becuase there are lots of heavy iron fences around it. I decided to walk around it, rather than risk getting lost in the maze of fence.

The campus is very nice looking, though without a lot of space, because of the large number of buildings. They are a mixture of a kind of neo-gothic/spanish, and “modern university” styles. (You know the style I am referring to.) It was hard to find the physics building, but there are lots of stationed guards around who eventually pointed me in the right direction. The theoretical division is on the third floor of a very large and drafty building that’s reminiscent of many of the older buildings at the University of Chicago, but a little more dilapidated. Someone has to buzz you in to the area with the professors, and I found “F. Barra” easily enough. He buzzed me in but I walked past the hallway just on the right where his office is and began to feel lost. I did discover a rooom with some yellow and orange bohemian furnituture. I figured this was where the grad students took their dates to make out with them while simulations were running or devices were warming up. I had just gotten to the end of a hallway and another locked door when someone shouted across the central ourtyard to me. It was Felipe. He showed me his office and explained the simulation that he was working on, and also that he was having some difficultes and that he would like to try a different approach that was more thermodynamic and less mechanical. We spent about an hour talking about the prospects of this approach before Felipe said, “This would be a lot easier if I could figure out how to view these scanned textbooks that I downloaded from a site in Russia.’ He proceeded to show me a huge list of files on his computer in some format that I had never seen before. We got a browser program working so we could open them and sure enough, they were apparently just textbooks that some industrious Russian(s) had scanned into a computer.

After we came back from lunch, Felipe asked me if I knew how to install a second internal hard drive in a computer. I have had bad experience helping someone doing this, but I said yes. The problem turned out to be with the jumpers as usual and soon Felipe had doubled his storage space. I noticed that he was only using about 35GB on his original 80GB hard drive, so I asked him why he needed a whole new one. He told me that he wanted to install Tiger (the newest version of Mac OS X) on the other hard drive so that he could do a clean install without losing his files. Sure enough, he pulled out a bootleg Tiger DVD and popped it in. By this time, it was time to go home. When I got arrived en casa, Nathan told me that his work computer had about $2,500 in pirated statistics software. In my first day at work, I helped a professional physicist rip off a few hundreds of dollars of stuff. All in the name of science.

It’s less than 24 hours until I step onto the plane to Santiago. For those of you not in the know, here’s how Santiago looks. Note the Andes visible in the background.

I don’t know how long it may be until I can find an internet connection and start blogging, so I may be out of contact for a while. If this place is half as sweet as it looks, I am going to be a little distracted.

While I was at the library the other day to get some movies in Spanish, I bumped into my friend Natalie’s stepmother, who works there. She was very happy to tell me that Natalie had a “real job.” I was curious what that job was, since Natalie used to work at a place called the Den, where they mostly just sold CD’s cigarettes, glass pipes and pornography. Natalie told me that she really liked working there, and that it was one of the few things that she liked about Morgantown WV. For the record, Morgantown really sucks. I figured that Natalie must have gotten a a real sweet job to leave her old one at the Den. But, what job was her stepmom so excited about? She was doing customer service for a company that had been contracted by a local utility company. What? This job was clearly numbingly boring, had no advancement opportunities, and definitely couldn’t have paid much more than the Den. At least when you work in retail, you can spend some time chatting with whoever also works there. It may not exactly expand your horizons, but people can turn you onto new things, or tell you things you never knew before. What the hell do you gain by talking about utility bills the phone all day? I hope I am wrong, but it sounds like her stepmom cared more that she was just no longer associated with unwholesome activities like marijuana smoking and pornography than about her actual career or personal prospects. Bizarre.

It’s a good time to start writing, since so much in my life is changing right now. After graduating from the University of Chicago, I am leaving the city for 3 months in Santiago, Chile. I intended to start this blog a couple times before, but lots of things, only partly lack of time held me back. During the first few weeks of a quarter, I felt like my brain was burning with new ideas and tangents that I at least wanted to record, if not flesh out into something substantitive. (Of course, this was before the periods closer to the end of the quarter, when I would smash something delicate because I was shaking it too hard ormake four separate trips from the table to the kitchen for the cereal, milk, bowl, and spoon, becuase my common sense and motor skills had been ruined from all that higher thinking.) So I had all these good ideas, but I hesitated. Unlike most of humanity, I imagine things as better than they are. Especially my own writng. Ever since I have been able to critically assess my own writings, I’ve been a little appalled at how the concise, intricate gems in my imagination were manifested as crude, sloppy, and obvious scribbling. I want to write better, and forcing the habit of writing whatever is in my mind seems like the best way. I also realized that blogs really are a new literary form, and one that’s particularly suited to the way I think, in short bursts.

What really pushed me over that edge was a request from a few people that I write some kind of email travelogue of my journey. I decided that I might as well use this little page that I whipped up as a more permanent record I meant for this thing to be more of an insight-into-the-nature-of-humanity-in-the-cosmos-that-you-only-realize-while-staring-off-a-cliff-into-an-exotic-desert kind of blog, but if people want to hear about the tasty meals I eat and the silly spanish things I say, I am happy to oblige. And if you weren’t even interested in my introspection in the first place, I’ll make sure to add some categories so that you can just click on the “travel” link to see that stuff.

It’ll probably be a rough first week or so, while I play with the format and all, but with all the stuff I have to say, I expect this to be a pretty good blog. Make sure to leave your comments, good or bad.