9/28/16: SPS Tabling and Dinner Party Fiasco

1. 9/28/16 Wed
1. First day of classes! Wake up early, prepare posters for SPS club fair tabling, do laundry so I can wear my SPS T-shirt.
2. Go to StatMech. Good philosophy-of-physics stuff, actually like the prof despite abysmal RateMyProf reviews. Kyle’s in the class.
3. Go to club-fair tabling! On the way there, pick up Isaak and Justin. We arrive at the League of Astronomers table and start setting up. Isaak uses my room whiteboard to make a basic SPS sign, which we decorate with barely legible equations. Put up our posters on the table and set up a physics challenge problem. Now a miracle occurs. Isaak and Justin, typically introverted fellows, now faced with a position of responsibility, flower into extroverted, SPS-pitching enthusiasts. Isaak drags countless saps in to answer our challenge question. Justin, after watching me a couple of times, starts expounding on the virtues of lunchboxes. It’s great teambuilding just for us. And people love it! The challenge question inspires a lot of thought. A few people just go off and think about it for 5 minutes, then return with a wrong answer and lots of goofy reasoning.
4. We end up with at least 40 signups on our mailing list and hand out all the open house posters.
5. Random postscript: in the middle of the event Alex messages me from the Swing booth. She needs socks for some bizarre reason. So Justin covers for me and I get her socks and stop by the swing booth and greet those guys--plus I get some apples for lunch!
6. I don’t remember what happens immediately after that. I think I go back to 2104 and end up hanging out with some people. But then I have dinner with Irina and Johan. And that is a whole ‘nother enchilada. I really like Irina but I never get to see her around campus (we have no classes in common, she still lives with her parents), so I’m hoping this goes well and we can set up another meeting.
7. Meet Irina in Red Square, start chatting about our summers and my weird retail experience in China.
8. Then who should walk up, but Ethan Bashkansky, Issa’s roommate and distinguished nihilist? He diverts himself from Odegaard, where he’s going to work and then spend the night, and attaches himself to our conversation :), which, of course, inevitably turns to Issa.
9. Then the good fellow invites himself to dinner :) We head to Chili’s to meet Johan. The food is delicious and the chai is tasty. We keep talking about Issa, which is weird because Irina has never met him, but Ethan does not seem to care. We do get in some good conversation about Johan’s trips. At one point Irina turns to the crazy Bollywood video screen in the restaurant and starts humming along :) We all look at that for a while.
10. But then, disaster strikes :) My family has a complicated, confidential model of human behavior we’ve been using internally for a long time. It’s controversial so we don’t share it often. But Johan and I are pretty close so the previous week I had shared it with him. He really identified with and loved it. But I forgot to tell him to keep it close to the vest. And so he brings it up, asks me to explain and defend it. What can I do? Poor Irina is simply not cynical enough to handle it, especially after an evening of disconcerting nihilism from Bashkansky.
11. So we walk out from the restaurant in totally awkward silence. At some point I ask Irina if she’d want to hang out again later, but it is completely the wrong time.
12. I am greatly saddened by the transpirations of the evening, so I do what I usually do--I take a run and exhaust myself. It helps. Then I hit the hay.