Part 6

With a forecast of high winds and choppy seas, the boat excursion scheduled during our day off was canceled, leaving a completely free Sunday with nothing organized by the Institute.  This seemed to be generally welcomed by students, especially myself, as I had been privately dreading the thought of a full day stuck on a boat under the blazing Mediterranean sun reflected and focused off of the water onto my pale skin.  During the early lectures or during breaks, I set to work scouring the internet for an appropriate hike to instead fill the day.  Corsica is blessed with world-class trails, of which the GR20 is probably the most famous, but is not a feasible option for a one-day excursion from Cargèse as it runs roughly north-south in the center of the island, a long drive or train ride away.  Instead, signage for the southern terminus of the Tra Mare e Monti is planted just outside the central business district of Cargèse, and quickly rises with the mountains from the sea.  Further, about 13 km along the trail was a small village, the first refuge in this direction and the perfect place to snack and turn around.  Once settled, I spread the word at lunch and advertised my plan with a mass email: meet at 8 am tomorrow morning in front of the grocery store to stock up on water and snacks and hopefully return by dinner.

In high school I had played trumpet in our small, rural school’s mediocre band, and the director would joke with us that the faster we played the quicker our mistakes passed.  My talk was scheduled with four others in the late afternoon.  I had had some practice giving talks from attending a couple of conferences or presenting at an informal Friday seminar at home, and I suppose then that I thought that my preparation and experience was exceptional, but now, my memory separated from my experience by a vast rift of time, so was my naïveté.  Those previous talks, however, were allotted at least 20 minutes or even an hour, which allowed for significant background to be developed while simultaneously exposing bare the gaps in my knowledge.  This latter feature was typically interpreted as an endearing, teachable moment by a more learned audience for a graduate student’s talk, one necessary stage along the educational journey of the Ph.D.  Here, the audience was nearly entirely other students and each talk was very short to ensure high student volume throughput.  The slides for this talk were hacked carelessly out of those previous talks, introduction and motivation reduced to a single page, calculational details eliminated, and my goal was to speed through it, just slow enough to enable a few students with adjacent research to jump on my train of thought while passing by a waypoint marked by a reference to some famous paper.

Presenting was a healthy mix of high and low tech with a video projector long since replacing transparencies and the glass platen of an overhead projector, but for gesturing and pointing on the screen, a dowel was used, more mechanical and easier to visually follow than a laser pen.  This ensured that speakers would only have to press a single button on a remote to advance their slides, which definitely helped reduce distractions of my already unfocused mind.  The strategy I employed during my talk was mostly successful, though I did overstay my allocated time by a minute or two, but received several engaging questions suggesting that other students had been paying attention.  When I returned to my seat, my neighbor poked me and stated not quite inquisitively that they thought the techniques I had employed were only esoteric, and not of practical relevance.  I was a bit taken aback; I somewhat understood what they meant as my advisor and I had attempted to use a method that had been developed effectively for its pure mathematical properties, but for making concrete predictions in collider experiments.  However, all I had shown on those few slides were equations with abstract symbols and notation and nothing concrete or nothing predictive, no plots, no numbers to compare with measurement, not even much detail as to what the symbols represented.  By the time my brain had processed this and a reply and explanation had reached the tip of my tongue, my lips remained firmly shut as the final student speaker of that day and of the first week was shuffling from their seat along the row of desks, and was now handed all of the tools for presenting.

With the title slide on screen, the speaker looked down at the remote and their brain must have been a bit frazzled because their thumb moved to the prominent red button and the projector turned off.  The audience tittered, but one of the organizers ran up to the front, calming the speaker down, but waiting for the innumerable fan cycles of the projector to work through before pressing that button again, and then re-emphasizing the left and right arrows.  While this exchange was happening, the resident dog sauntered in, but this time didn’t curl up on the steps.  The speaker’s gesturing was animated and lively, and the titters grew to chuckles as it became obvious that the dog’s one-track mind was utterly engrossed by that great stick stalked by the dog’s snout as it went this way and that over the screen.  Like a tractor beam, the dog was slowly pulled in, one paw deliberately placed in front of the other, and now the speaker noticed and realized if it came to it, he would definitely lose the battle.  He placed the stick on the table and began to point digitally when the dog pounced on the desk, and proudly began munching on the dowel, now lying, at ease, on the floor.  There was no holding back, and the room erupted in laughter, nearly everyone completely doubled over, but Tim kept his wits about him, gently retrieving the pointer and shooed the dog back outside, allowing the speaker to continue with whatever dignity remained.  However, the dowel, a bit wet and gnawed, remained on the desk for the rest of the day.

We only had time to run to our apartment for a quick dinner before getting back to the Institute.  Exploiting the lack of a schedule for tomorrow, students throughout the school had planned events to fill it, from sunning and swimming at Plage de Péru, the main beach in Cargèse, to short walks around fortified Genoese towers that dotted the coastline, to the longer trek I had scheduled into the mountains.  A group of Spanish students realized that no schedule implied that there was no need to wake up before, say, 3 pm, so tonight they had planned an extravagant party on the beach, buying up the booze and finger foods from the supermarket and hauling it down the slope, and distributed it all over the tables.  AV equipment was carried from the auditorium and arranged in front of the canteen, casting the Euro techno beats curated by the hosts out to the sea.  Even the school organizers partied in solidarity with all of us students, who had clearly been overworked for the week, and needed a release. 

Among the relatively small group of American students, we had privately and quietly complained about the music and the deejaying of the Spaniards.  Diplomacy was not an option because we were vastly outnumbered, so we opted for a direct attack, wresting control of the speakers by plugging in an iPhone that was pre-loaded with hits.  Dead air and bated breaths occupied the bluff while we huddled to decide on the best selection for wowing and winning over these skeptical and discriminating Europeans, well-trained to associate song with nationalistic pride from Eurovision.  Now settled, one of us scrolled through the phone and tapped the song that was so quintessential Americana that everyone else hated it: “In the day we sweat it out on the street…” grated The Boss while we rocked out on air guitar and Max Weinberg’s drumming.  However, it was clear that we were on a very short leash and were nearing mutiny when the final fermata of “Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oooh ooooooh” and the wail from Clarence Clemons’s saxophone stretched to silence, so we switched it up to something that everyone could at least dance to.  On came Miley Cyrus and her dream of making it big in LA, which we were generously allowed to play to completion, but further American meddling in the music was strictly forbidden and associated with the harsh punishment of being subjected to it.

I kept half an eye on my weathered Wenger watch, setting a personal curfew of midnight so I would get at least a few hours of sleep.  From our American rashness there had been a positive outcome as the playlist became more eclectic as the night deepened.  After a necessary and sufficient number of beers, someone got the idea to play Hava Nagila and hoist the Israeli student high up on a chair, dancing a particularly poor rendition of the hora.  I joined in, grabbing a leg of the chair, and most importantly and surprisingly, no one fell.  At that moment I also learned that even with four people lifting, coordinating dancing with raising and lowering the chair to the beat was hard work, so once we had repeated “Hava Nagila” a few dozen times or so, because none of us knew any of the other verses, the seated student was lowered and I migrated to the less strenuous pursuit of final advertisement for the morning’s hike.  Alejandro would be joining, so with some brief waves and goodnights, we walked back to our apartment together, helping each other navigate the treacherous path out of the Institute.  On Monday, once we had all returned to the unforgiving, brutal regular school schedule with a 9 am lecture, I learned that, long after every other student departed for their bed, the Spaniards had partied until dawn.