Enoughing It: Enoughing it in the New Year

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville. The new year kicked in, and I decided that for me, the word of the year is "freudenfreude" -- the act of taking delight in other people's joys. I am learning that it is a skill, a practice, and an art to be able to hear the joy in what people are saying and magnify it back to them and to myself.

I'm also thinking of freudenfreude as a kind of a medicine for a kind of sickness; in 2022 there were things at work that shoved a bunch of people I love (including myself) into the territory of saying, "I don't like to think of myself as a bitter person, but because of [X] I can't keep myself from feeling and acting bitter." Indeed, in addition to the front-porch collection of cows I keep, I've started a collection in my address book of contact info for really, really cool people who left my college. One of the big reasons for the unhappiness seems to have altered significantly, so I'm crossing my fingers that those of us who remain will start to feel better . . . and any of those sparks of happiness and contentment I see are like little flames among wet wood; I'm going to give them oxygen so they can grow. Freudenfreude, 2023. Here I come.

Of course, one of the most wonderful combinations of things possible in the entire world is Travel + Friends + Math, and so I've been super happy to kick off the year with exactly that combination. On Wednesday early in the morning, I boarded a train headed for Boston, where I got to do/breathe/live/discuss math with 5000 of my closest friends.

The funniest part of the trip for me is that we were in a section of hotels and convention center that were connected by glass tunnels reminding me of hamster tubes, that ran through a very swanky mall. I felt like I was traveling abroad, to a foreign (to me) country.

Learning the local vocabulary.

How the locals dress.

It can be overwhelming,
but stick with it.

(Okay, that was very silly, but it did tickle me to walk daily past these stores with my very geeky, practical, and dowdy math friends, and I felt I had to document the moment).

I took advantage of the trip and reached out to a bunch of other Boston-area friends of mine, which include several of my former students.

Three of my former students and me, in Boston

In fact, I got to meet up with one of my very first-ever students, who I'll call "Amy" (not her real name). She was a student in a calculus class that I was a TA for when I was in grad school, and she shaped a lot about how I think about struggling students. She used to ask so many questions (SO many questions), and they were mostly of the roll-your-eyes variety that showed she'd had a really weak background. This was a large class, and the other 100ish students would kinda sigh. After the first of two midterms, the professor of the class (a guy I really liked and respected) asked me how Amy had done, and I said she'd barely passed. He surprised me by saying "Oh, too bad!" (implying he'd hoped she'd have failed the test). He followed up by saying, "She's not going to pass the class, but now she'll think she has a chance, and so it's going to be heartbreaking."

Amy kept going, kept showing up to all my office hours, kept asking lots of questions in class. But her questions got more and more sophisticated. Shortly before the second midterm, the prof asked me how Amy was coming along, and I said, "Actually, I'm impressed. She's explaining related rates [a notoriously hard topic] to other students in my office hours." And on that second midterm, she ended up getting a 97. She went on to get an A- overall in the class, went to med school, became a doctor, and after finding that not intellectually stimulating enough, moved from there into clinical research, where she's been part of a team finding successful treatments for cystic fibrosis.

Amy and me, friends for three-and-a-half decades.

Amy was one of the first people to babysit my birth daughter, and in turn I babysat her three kids: I became a dinosaur with two pillows for "bread" and made Little Boy Sandwiches that I gobbled up with gusto. The sandwiches were loud with laughter. Now those Little Boy Sandwiches have gone on to get their own graduate degrees in math and science; it was good to catch up with their mother again. Hugs, Amy!

Speaking of boys who have grown up, Nelson is very much enjoying his volunteer work, coaching a middle school basketball team. When Nelson was young, I told him and his brother Jason that I taught Barack Obama how to play basketball, and if you believe that, you will correspondingly believe that I taught Nelson everything he knows about basketball, too. I must have been a great teacher, clearly, and it passes along to new generations, as Nelson's team won their most recent game. Way to go, team!

Look at them go!

And OfSnough, while I was away, he consoled my dog Prewash as best he could, and also attended the very last Tuesdays With Toomey protest.

That's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures. May you and yours be similarly prosperous, whether you're celebrating the New Year with fancy clothes, . . .