On Saturday Ben and I pushed our way through throngs of graduates and their parents on the Penn campus to go the gym before its closure this week. Then on Sunday, we went to Massachusetts to see his little sister graduate from Smith. It was sort of a lot of driving, and Smith is in the middle of nowhere so we couldn't figure out how to combine it with another trip somewhere without adding a lot of driving and inconvenience. But we got to hang out with a lot of Ben's family, listen to an endless list of names, and hear a very good commencement speech about teaching given by Margaret Edson. It's hard to give a good commencement speech, but hers was very funny, well-written, and touching.

I remember liking my Berkeley commencement speech, which was given by David Gross, because it had a good discussion about what being a scientist means and why we do it. I liked that we had a graduation just for physics, since his advice to us was more specific, rather than 'you are going to do great things!'. It also meant that we only had something like 100 names to sit through, rather than the 900 we sat through at Smith (which is a small college!). A full graduation at Berkeley would have been crazy though.

I have to say though, that academic regalia can be really cool. It is impressive to see professors in various colorful robes, with some sleeves down to the floor and those jaunty octagonal hats. To me a big perk of being a professor would be dressing up in such a ridiculous way as a sign of accomplishment one day a year. I think that at Penn, in physics, I could wear a red and blue gown with a hood and bars in yellow (for science). The whole ceremony of being hooded by your advisor is really cool, too.

PS. LAHS people, do you recall who our commencement speaker was? I was trying to remember but I can't; I just have the guess that it was one of our congressional representatives, Domenici maybe.

I really like Ben's family.

We've been hanging out with them a lot, first in San Diego, now in Ojai. We went to the San Diego Zoo (for free!) with a bunch of his family, including his adorable two year old niece, and then stayed the whole day. We had a nice sushi dinner with Winnie and Jim, his mom and stepdad, and then another nice dinner with them plus his sister, Aimee. We also saw the Golden Compass (for free! worth the price...), walked between the bluffs and the ocean, and read outside in a hammock. Yesterday we took a train up here, and I realized to my great horror on the train that I never did my NDSEG essays and the deadline was Wednesday. Or at least, I thought it was Wednesday, and it turned out it's this coming Monday, so I freaked out a lot and then was relieved and now am actually doing them. I knew I had to do them over the holidays, but then things started happening and I just forgot.

Now we're in Ojai, helping walk dogs and reading. It was pouring rain yesterday, and today it's just gray, with big misty clouds washing over the surrounding mountains. And verbally figuring out parts of the wedding, of course. Right now it's slated for late July or early August in Mammoth Lakes, which will solidify once we figure out a venue. (I really like the idea of Convict Lake or Tamarack Lodge.)

I haven't been able to squeeze in time to post, partly because I was on dial-up at my mom's house, but mostly because things have been very busy but fun.

In New Mexico, we spent several days at my mom's house, hanging out with her and my stepdad, seeing friends, etc. She has gotten really into glassworking recently, so she helped Ben and I make some fused glass plates, by cutting out glass pieces, fusing them in a kiln, and then slumping them into curved dishes. She also showed us and some friends how to make an implosion marble, by melting clear glass, punching holes into it, capping them with colored glass, and heating it so that the colored glass is pulled in and elongated. That was really, really cool. I had a nice lunch with Heather, Tamie, and Jeanine, and a nice games party at Jeanine's house, and some amount of Guitar Hero 3, which my mom got us for Christmas along with a 360.

The day before New Year's Eve, we flew out to San Diego to see Ben's mom and family. I was really glad we got out here in time to spend a little time with Chih, and then yesterday we went up to Pasadena to see Erin, Josh, and Adam for New Year's Eve. It was great hanging out with them and playing games, and then this morning we watched the Parade of Roses from their roof. Now we have a couple more days here, with Ben's family in San Diego, and then we'll head up to Ojai.

Ben's sister gave me a wedding book for Christmas, which was sweet of her. But it is a little stressful to read, because they really cover everything and so they imply a lot more expense and planning then I think we will end up actually having. I am happy about one thing, though, which is that I convinced my mom to make my wedding dress. It saves us money, but more importantly, she has made some really lovely dresses and I love the idea of wearing something she made.

ring, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Ben asked me to marry him, and I said yes.

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My mom is visiting me here in Philly for the first time in a couple of weeks, and naturally I want her to really like my house. Thus I am spearheading the initiative to actually decorate the big blank wall in our dining room. I also have something to gain from this, since when we eat I am looking at said wall. I have a big framed print hanging in the same room already, which I don't know the painter of, but I believe it's Chinese. The reason I am fairly into Asian art is simple: around when my parents first married, they bought and cheaply framed a lot of Japanese print posters, mostly Hokusai and Hasui. When they divorced, they split the prints, and so both of my Los Alamos homes have a lot of that style of art in them. I like it, and I especially like it in long fabric scrolls with a beautiful painting in the middle. I'm looking at making my own scrolls from dowels and fabric, getting some posters off the internet, and affixing the posters to them. But I'm trying to decide on three prints that would go well together. Here's what I'm looking at:

Hiroshige: Plum Garden over Shin-Ohashi Bridge
Hiroshige: Snowy Landscape
Hiroshige: View from Satta Saruga
Hasui: Moon at Magome
Hiroshige: Sudden Shower

I'm currently leaning towards the first three. There are some that I like but feel weird about getting because they are actually prints hanging in one of my parents' houses, like this one.

I love, love, looove music. I love playing it, and wish I had more time to take up another couple of instruments, but I also love listening to it and having something on all the time: when I'm walking to school, cooking, reading. At this point I have really broad tastes, largely from asking other people what they think is good and then giving it a chance (or in some cases, convincing them to give me a copy of their mp3 collection to explore). I would love the radio, if it wasn't so often repetitive. But in a lot of ways, my musical tastes cleave to those of my parents, because in spite of music lessons, they were really the ones that taught me to listen. Here are four of the pieces that I remember them introducing me to.

Copland - Rodeo/Appalachian Spring: My mom had a CD of these which she loved to play on weekend mornings, and the sound of them is perfect for living in the west. I liked the way the pieces sounded before I could name why I liked anything, and when I hear them it's easy to picture my living room, the big window looking out on the canyon and mesas behind our house, sunshine and a morning paper. When I was in high school, in the orchestra, we had one concert where we combined with part of the marching band and played Hoe-Down, and it was really amazing. I'm sure we sounded awful, but it was a really enjoyable experience.

Dave Brubeck - Take Five: My dad loves Dave Brubeck, to the point that I almost felt guilty about telling my dad how I got to see Dave Brubeck in concert. He doesn't have any musical background, unlike my mom, but he loves listening to music and singing, and I remember him trying to explain to me why a 5/4 time signature was so revolutionary, and counting out the measures so I would hear it. I also remember later my mom telling me you could dance a mambo to Take Five, which I disagreed with, and we found that she had a version of Take Five with a similar melody, but a couple of beats inserted to make a more regular tempo.

Beethoven - Fifth Symphony: Yeah yeah, everyone knows the beginning, but have you listened to this the whole way through? It's a really amazing symphony, one of my favorites. When I was little, I loved the third movement of it, because I loved things that were minor and haunting; as such, I didn't like the gradual build into the triumph and majesty of the fourth movement, which is in a major key. That is, I didn't like it until one of my parents (I no longer remember which) listened with me and talked about how at the time, you didn't permanently change keys in a piece like that, and you never ever switched between a minor and major key. You could do it for a short stretch but not permanently, but Beethoven did it permanently anyways, and it was revelatory. I listened to that passage a million times, the transition, and I remember putting it in a sixth grade project that had a bunch of hyperlinked pages.

The Beatles - Abbey Road: Sometime during eighth grade, for whatever reason, I became a huge Beatles freak. My stepdad had all their albums, and I listened to them obsessively, and read Beatles histories, and became able to sing along to pretty much every song (save the ones on the Yellow Submarine album, which I never had). But before that, when I was little, my parents had the White Album and Abbey Road. I liked some of the songs on the White Album (I still have a stuffed animal named Rocky Raccoon, which I've had longer than I remember), but what we really listened to a lot was Abbey Road. I don't know why, and I also don't know why I remember some songs from when I was really young, but not others. And I'm sure I would have still loved the album had I come across it later, but now it's linked to what I remember as being happy times.

Rodeo and Abbey Road especially are linked for me with Saturday morning sunshine and time with my family. My parents helped me love this music so long ago that I can say it like that, "my parents", because they weren't divorced yet. And even though I've had big fights with both of them, and am happy to be living on my own, it makes me happy when I'm making sourdough bread and I hear the jubilant opening of Buckaroo Holiday, and think of my family when I was little.

window, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Our road trip was a lot of fun! It was much colder than I've ever had a spring break be (-5 degrees F with windchill in Providence), and it snowed as we were driving back, but we still got to see a lot of people we like.

We drove up to South Norwalk Saturday to visit Barry and Mandy, and to save them from helping out at the most elaborate sweet sixteen party I've ever seen, for Mandy's little sister. We wandered around with them, saw their ridiculously nice grocery store (Stew Leonard's), and then on Sunday we drove up to Northampton to visit Ben's sister. She seems to be doing well, and we walked around getting ice cream, eating ravioli, and visiting the Smith Art Museum which is surprisingly good. Then we went to Providence for the remainder of our vacation, where we had amazing south Indian food, cooked dinner, walked around Brown (which is beautiful and has lovely applied math buildings), drove to Massachusetts for cheap Trader Joe's wine, and spent a lot of time just chatting with Steph and Scott. We didn't end up going to Boston, because it was the last day of our trip but also the amazingly cold one, and we figured we'd have more opportunities in the future that would be less frigid. Providence seems beautiful, but also like a great summer city.

However, the primary purpose of our trip was to visit friends, which is happily something you can do in any weather. :)

steph, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Spring break is next week, though it's still snowy, slushy, or muddy everywhere within 500 miles of here. There are a lot of places I want to see in New England, but none of them are nice to see right now. So it looks like Ben and I will drive to South Norwalk, CT on Saturday to see Barry and Mandy, drive to Northampton, MA to see Aimee on Sunday, and then drive to Providence Sunday night to see Steph and Scott for a few days, and take a day to go to Boston and sightsee.

Ben's stepsister Holly is also in the larger vicinity, going to graduate school at Cornell, which is supposedly a four hour drive from here. We may do that as a weekend trip later, when the weather is nice for being up there.

What I really want to do, once it's early summer, is drive up to Montreal for a bit. I have heard nothing but the best things. Maybe we can do that after finals end in May...

Apparently arriving in the middle of a big snowstorm wasn't enough, now I'll be trying to leave during it. But all the snow makes me very happy.

I've been hanging out at my mom's house a lot, which is very relaxing and fun. We made cocoa foie gras ravioli the other day, using the pasta maker and ravioli attachment for her Kitchenaid mixer. The ravioli is super-tasty, and then she gave me an identical mixer and pasta attachment for Christmas, so fresh pasta is imminent once I get back to Philly. Yesterday I went to Santa Fe with my dad and we hung out, did some shopping because that was my Christmas present from him. The most valuable things that I got were firstly, a pair of jeans, because I hate pants shopping almost as much as I hate shoe shopping, but I do need more jeans. And secondly, we talked a lot about family and his experiences with marriage, and it was really pretty cool... I learned some things I hadn't known before.

Today, after we got over a foot of fresh snow on the ski hill last night, I tried to go skiing. The snow was really wet and heavy, but thick and great, but you know... I could tell after half a run that my knee wasn't up to it. It was twinging a little and it felt really weak, every time my right leg was downhill. And parallel didn't even feel stable, I was snowplowing and going really slowly. I felt so much like I was going to fall, even though I was skiing slowly and retardedly, so I took another run to get back to the car and then hitched a ride home with Andrew and his family. It basically sucked; I guess the moral of the story is that my knee is not strong enough for skiing, especially in difficult weather conditions. But I knew so much that I did not want to fall and start over with crutches, so you know, maybe next year.

Hey, sirista, chickyboo, innamoramento, are you guys in Albuquerque? Are you busy tomorrow night? I have a really early flight out of ABQ Sunday morning, so I will probably spend the night tomorrow in Albuquerque. It would be the perfect evening to get together!

The last few days have been really, really good. I went to a big get-together with a lot of food on Saturday night, and saw people I haven't seen in ages (Jeanine, Andrew, Steph, Scott, Sam, Caroline, Ken, Mike, Brian, Ashley). Yesterday I went sledding and had a blast, and then cooked massaman curry and played Trivial Pursuit with my dad, and gave him the best present I've ever thought of, which made him (and me) really happy. I came over to my mom's today and had delicious food, and also managed to give her and Kevin nice presents, which I'm really proud of. I've finally managed to come home without being overwhelmed, stressed, weirded out, or unhappy. It's really great.

It's times like this I can't help but feel incredibly lucky. I try to appreciate what I have, though... I'll talk more about how this year in particular ties in to that later. For now, Merry Christmas, friends.

1. Homemade toffee is really quick and easy, provided you have a candy thermometer. Plus it impresses other people. :)

2. My dad calls spatulas 'rubber policemen'. There's chemists for you. :P

It turns out that Ben did get sick, for several days, with the stomach flu I had and something else on top of it. To make it up to him, I made some turkey soup from my mom's approximate recipe. It came out great so I thought I would write down exactly what I did, and I might as well share it with you guys; it's great soup. But this recipe is a little bit approximate. :)

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Most useful time to have a live-in boyfriend: when you get the stomach flu. Only parents have the same level of loving you and feeling bad for you and helping you and not being too grossed out.

I think I got it this weekend from Barry, who developed a sudden illness Saturday night while we were staying there which involved a lot of vomiting and pain. I started feeling really sick last night and then spent most of the night feverish and vomiting... but the nice thing about the stomach flu is how quickly it passes. Now I'm just weak, slightly feverish, and find all food unappetizing. Isn't medicine great? In the past this sort of thing was a staple of life, and now it's just an unpleasant exception.

And btw, I would advise any guy who wants to win the trust of his girlfriend's dad to arrange for an unpleasant accident, and then nurse the girlfriend back to health. I think my dad has become considerably fonder of Ben this year, after he has been so sweet when I've been sick, and after he did so many things for me when I couldn't walk. It is the surefire way to please the father of an only daughter.

innamoramento tagged me for ten random facts. So there!

1. I like large-format painting. Like, a lot. I wish it were cheaper to buy large-format reproductions of awesome paintings and put them up in our house. Our whole downstairs long wall would be Monet's Nympheas.

2. I am deathly afraid of giving birth. I could maybe some day have children, you know, raise them, but I'm afraid of the process of giving birth (and nearly as afraid of being pregnant). It sounds... bleaaaagh.

3. I love to eat raw hamburger. This is something my dad and I used to do, is get ground hamburger from the grocery store (and check that it's been ground that day), and then salt it and eat it. My dad would do elaborate things to it with raw onions and eggs and pepper. And I've never gotten sick from doing it.

4. I really do think that everyone could skip grades if given the opportunity. Our educational system as it currently stands does some good things and has a lot of dead space, which any student, if appropriately instructed, could do without. Kids could learn a lot more in the same amount of time.

5. When I was little I cried really easily. Like, to the point that other kids made fun of me, and I remember one of the hardest things about switching to public school in fifth grade is that no one else cried as easily as I did. Then I stopped, and in the last few years I've become an easy crier again, but more out of empathy than for personal things.

6. I have thin skin and take things personally too easily. I try not to, but I can't say I've really improved at it much over the years.

7. Despite having had at times a chaotic relationship with my immediate family, I have nothing but positive associations with family-oriented holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. It has frequently been a pain to plan family things at those times, but they always come off nicely and I don't remember any huge fights or awkward situations or anything on those holidays. I'm always surprised when people dread seeing family for holidays, because even with my family problems it goes fine for me.

8. I am not very close to my extended family. The closest relatives I have are restricted to occasional letters or visits, and most of my family I haven't seen in years. This stems from one side of my extended family not getting along very well, the other side being detached, my mom not liking to travel, my dad not being able to afford travel, and my growing up very far from my relatives. At this point I'm closer to Ben's family than to my extended family.

9. At one point, when I was young, I wanted to grow moss in my room and cover everything with moss, because it's soft and I like plants. Then I wanted to paint my room black, so that I could put up stars and have it be like the night sky. Eventually I did get a big black fabric with stars, moons, and zodaical symbols that was pinned to my ceiling for several years. But I never got to do anything so elaborate (and I still kind of want to).

10. I miss my navel piercing.

I tag newsbean, starr5d, erindubitably, and chickyboo to carry on with their own ten random facts.

sun, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Thanksgiving was a lot of fun! On Wednesday Ben and I went up to Queens to stay with Ben's grandparents, and on Thursday we drove with them to Norwalk, CT to partake in a huge dinner with the family of Ben's uncle's wife (this is Barry, the uncle who is barely older than Ben). It was a lot of fun, and then Friday we went to the Met and spent pretty much all day there. On Saturday we went to Chinatown and Little Italy, had really good dim sum at a place on Mott Street, and then walked around Central Park for some time. And then we returned to Connecticut for dinner with Barry, Mandy, Ben's sister Aimee, and her friend Walleigh. It was a really good time, and then today we gradually worked our way back here, with a little more dim sum thrown in for good measure. We had a really nice time.

I identify a lot with the spirit of Thanksgiving, because the idea of keeping in mind the things you should be happy about is definitely a solid one. But especially this year, which has gone so blazingly, improbably well for me. Maybe you remember, not even a year and a half ago, things were going definitively poorly, and it surprised me the other day to realize that I recall the exact date that I got my first acceptance to graduate school, and more so the moment when I found out I could go to Penn. Fragile, carefully wrought things can be exquisitely beautiful, and it is gratifying to think how carefully I planned so that my life could be this way, even though from where I'm standing now it's quite stable. Sometimes it is easy to be grateful.

sarcophagi, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

The Met was a lot of fun, and I would hope this is the first of many visits. We saw the sections on musical instruments, American art, Egyptian art, modern art, Weimar German art, and we saw parts of Chinese painting, Japanese painting, and Indian art. Especially noteworthy were the Frank Lloyd Wright room and the Temple of Dendur. And what was surprisingly cool was the German thing, a special exhibition on art, mostly portraiture, between the two world wars. It featured prominently the work of Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, and George Grosz, and was very moving.

Oh, and the stupidest thing at the Met was Sean Scully's Wall of Light, which was about fifty copies of the same painting, which was not that good to begin with. I am an open-minded person, but in modern art exhibits I find myself in awe half the time and wisecracking the other half the time. Now that I've stopped being serious about the Met, let me say how great it was that we checked our bags there Saturday, when we didn't go to the Met, so that we wouldn't have to schlep them around Manhattan.

central park skyline, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

So all in all, a very good weekend, with an abundance of good food and company. I hope you guys had fun too.

I'm in Los Angeles now, visiting Ben. He's working a lot of the time, though, because the SIGGRAPH deadline is soon. And it's really warm here, which is a big change from New Mexico. The last few days I was in Los Alamos, I mostly socialized with friends and family. I went to Gabriel's with my dad and Kay, rode in Kay's awesome new car, watched moies with my dad, went out to breakfast with Jeanine, Andrew, and Sam, took my old calculus teacher out to breakfast with Steph and Jeanine, had an eye appointment, met Jen and Tamie for lunch, things like that. The last few days I'm in town on a longer trip are always kind of stressful, because I feel wistful about leaving and like I didn't quite get in everyone I wanted to see. It's always like that, though.

I think that my favorite place in New Mexico is one I went to on a hike with my dad this trip. My mom's house is on Los Pueblos, and if you go all the way down to the end of the road, you can keep walking to what we called "the end of the mesa" when I was a kid. It's not really the end, because the mesa goes on a couple miles after that, sort of twisting and turning. It's one of the longer mesas in town, really. If you look to the north when you're on Main Hill road, you're looking at Otowi Mesa, which is Los Pueblos. Hiking out on it alternates between walking along the flat mesa top and climbing large rocks when the mesa gets taller or shorter or twists. The views are wonderful, both of the ski hill and townsite, and of the valley and the Sangre de Cristos. It's the fundamental New Mexico place for me, I think, and the best physical representation of what New Mexico means; lonely, beautiful, familiar.

It will be a while before I go back. Tomorrow I'm driving to San Diego to see Chih, and the rest of the week here I'll squeeze in what time with Ben I can.

My mom picked up all of my gran'dad's old photos when she went out to the memorial service, and has been slowly scanning them in and touching them up, vital for photos that are anywhere between twenty and sixty years old. You can see so much in them, from my grandparents' army wedding to their first little house, how happy they were in those early years for the first few children. For my oldest uncle as a baby, their smiles are huge and charming, and for the next few children they continue to look young and happy. But at five children, their faces fill out, and the children get olders and angrier, and by the time they can't fit all the kids into one photo, a lot of the happiness has faded. You can see bits of history, like how the oldest and youngest daughters were the only ones who got new clothes, so there are photos of my mom and my three aunts, with the three oldest girls wearing somewhat frumpy brown fifties-style clothes, and my youngest aunt in white taffeta in the front. Around when my mom finished high school, my grandparents divorced, and even after that, my gran'dad remarried and spent twenty years with the woman he died married to. I also saw my parents' wedding album, my mom and my Aunt Mary doing a double wedding, both looking beautiful and happy, all the family together. Mary's husband ended up dying of cancer, and my parents were married for a time, happily, but have been divorced for over ten years now. It's amazing the changes you can fit in a lifetime, amazing the way that things can change so much in the world and in your personal life. It makes one wonder how much you can rely on anything, even the things that matter the most to you.

But then there's the opposite of that, eatting with Sam and Steph and Scott, some of my closest friends from high school who are all applying to graduate school now too. We had pumpkin soup, pasta with sun-dried tomato and artichoke hearts and garlic and capers, fresh French bread, wine, and cookies. It was a great feeling of fellowship, and even though we've all been through a lot, we're still very much the same people we were when we saw each other more.

Happy everything to you guys. Always remember that I love you all very much, and I'm happy to help when I can. Thank you for your patience and support in the hard times I've had this year. Take care of yourselves. :P

I'm back in Los Alamos, where I'll be until January 7th. I spent a couple days in Los Angeles with Ben and a couple days up with his family in Ojai.

I'm dead tired right now, having gotten my habitual first night of terrible sleeping at altitude, but hopefully tomorrow I will be more cheerful. It's great seeing my dad again, and I've already spotted Steph and Sam. I'm cooking and having a good time, and as soon as my legs recover I can start swimming or something (I went to a spinning class and an exercise ball class in Ojai with Nancy and while it was fun, it just about killed my quads).

If you're in town, ring me up!

I drove out to Mammoth Lakes on Wednesday with Hollis, through Tioga Pass and Yosemite. At night, though. Mammoth was beautiful, blustery, wintery, very cold and clear the way I like it. Our Thanksgiving dinner--tilapia filets, wild mushroom barley soup, sourdough bread, wilted spinach salad, stuffed squash, and mocha cakes with lime sauce--was a big success. We played a lot of this game, Racko, which I somehow won most of the time, and I was encouraged to take up cards seriously. ("Are you encouraging me to gamble?" "No, we're encouraging you to win.") Ben and I went to see Harry Potter, which was a fun and well-made movie, but for the first time it was quite evident how much better the books are. There's only so much of a book like that that you can fit into a movie.

The best parts were the food, getting to talk to Hollis so much, and my time with Ben. :) We couldn't return on Tioga Pass because they closed it due to snow in the time we were in Mammoth, so we came back a little further north no the 88/89. When I left, it was still rather warm in Berkeley. But suddenly it's winter and the temperature has dropped. It isn't raining yet, but it's poised to. The sky and the bay are slate gray, and I'm fishing out my peacoat and umbrella, learning how to use the radiator in my room. Suddenly, the speed with which my room can cool off ceases to be an asset.

Oh yeah, and I went with some BFC people to see Fidelio last Tuesday, the only Beethoven opera. The production design was possibly the best I've ever seen in a stage performance... it was helped by the impressive performers and the power and beauty of Beethoven, but it was still a very impressive staging. It was alright that Beethoven's skill in operatics is much less than his skill in sonatas, and that the end of the opera had the worst case of Deus ex Machina I've ever seen. The three images I don't want to forget are the grates in the floor rising open to admit the prisoners into the light, the chasm of darkness out of which Florestan sings "Gott! Welch Dunkel hier!", and the way the walls of the prison fell with a door open over Florestan and Fidelio, so that they burst into daylight.

My gran'dad died this morning, in his sleep.

He lived a very long life, to 82, and was happy and exploring for nearly all of it. He wasn't in a lot of pain, never lost real control of his faculties, and went peacefully even though there was the potential for a long, drawn-out death.

He believed in me, in the most sincere way, and it hurt me to have to tell him when I didn't get into graduate school. When I daydreamed about telling people that I got in somewhere fantastic, I knew he would have been the most proud. I regret that he won't see that.