Question Meme: Long Road Home
Mar. 14th, 2008 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaAnd so ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
princejvstin asked me about my:
Favorite long-distance trip from home.
First, understand that "favorite" in this case means "The good outweighed the bad." Even under ideal circumstances, I dislike travel; I am the biggest homebody you've ever seen in your life. My usual response to "Where would you like to visit?" questions in surveys is "I'll stay right here, thank you very much."
Having said that, the best trip I've ever taken had three large things working in its favor from the beginning:
1) It didn't involve my parents. I got to travel with a small group of my fellow students, all but one of whom were very good friends of mine, and our coach/chaperone from MSMS, the physics teacher who was not the kick-ass Mrs. P. Given that he was exceptionally laid-back, I expected that we would not be under 24/7 supervision, and I was not disappointed.
2) It was by plane rather than by car. At this point in my life, I was already sick to death of car trips, and the Alaska Trip From Hell hadn't happened yet (it was, when this trip happened, several months in the future; that I'd had this relatively pleasant excursion beforehand may in fact have made the Alaska trip that much more tortuous, simply because I now knew it didn't have to be this way).
3) It was by my choice, and for the benefit of my school, rather than one of my parents' work trips. One of the worst things about our interminable car trips was that they were not, in any real sense, vacations most of the time - they were work trips so one or the other of my parents could present a paper at a conference. (The Alaska trip was actually an exception to this rule; it was one of the few trips that was for the sole purpose of visiting non-family friends.)
In the spring of 1992, I, the Imzadi, a very close friend of ours, and two of our kohei won the regional Science Bowl sponsored by the Oak Ridge lab of the DoE. We hadn't thought much of it at the time - we'd sort of been recruited at the last minute. Being from MSMS, we'd expected to win; the only real competition was the teams from Stark Vegas, Muscle Shoals, and Oxford - we plowed through everyone else, including the Indian Springs team. However, at the time, there were only two levels of competition (I believe there are three now), and so everyone who won a regional event went on to nationals, at the DoE's expense. For one of my juniors, it was only his second or third time out of the state.
So we were flown out of GTR, the regional airport near the hometown, on a little prop jobbie to Atlanta, where we raced across the whole airport to make our connection to Washington, DC. This was the first time I'd ever been on a non-prop-jobbie plane. We were picked up by a shuttle bus and whisked to our hotel, which was actually a pretty nice one, and met our sister team - the champions of Oak Ridge's Georgia/Tennessee regional bowl. Like us, there was only one girl on the team; unlike us, she was the alternate. (They were also being followed around by camera crews; we didn't find out why until later.) She and I got to split a room, while in both cases the other four boys were all in one room together. I snuck into their room the second night; I have occasionally wished in retrospect that I had been a little bolder, but at the time I was still something of a prude, so I didn't take advantage ofthem the opportunity.
I won't go over the whole tournament. We won our first round, got crushed in the second by the Sandia Labs team that would go on to reach second place, came back strong in the third round, and narrowly lost in the fourth, which eliminated us from competition. After that, we watched the Georgia team, who got 4th place and lost to the Supercollider team, who in turn went on to narrowly edge out the Sandia team and win the bowl. We were pretty happy with ourselves for making it as far as we did. More interestingly, we were treated to guest speeches by one of the shuttle astronauts, Jaime Escalante (whose autograph I got), and Bill Nye the Science Guy (who was watching one of the matches for the Georgia team with us - they asked an electrical current problem, and I glanced to my right to see Bill Nye doing the Right-Hand Rule just like I was; he looked up, grinned, and turned the rule to give me a thumbs-up, which was cute - guy knows how to work an audience). We also got to visit the Natural Science and Air and Space museums at the Smithsonian for free.
Overall, the whole experience was an experience in feeling valued. The whole reason the DoE ran (and still runs) the tournament is to get high-school kids excited about science, and reward them for that interest. It had a big impact on my attitude about government programs, too, oddly enough - it was the first time I'd really had much personal interaction with a federal program of that size, and left me with a profound sense of gratitude towards it. It was the era of the Supercollider, before the program was shut down; there was a great sense of optimism about science and progress and all those other wonderful things about the human search for knowledge. Even now, it's nice to have a memory anchored in that experience; it helps combat my cynicism about human stupidity - I know that at the very least there are all the other kids who were there, who are now adults and about in the world, who had that enthusiasm for science, for knowledge, and hopefully still do, even if that's not the career path they chose.
I can think of two other multi-day trips that I would characterize as, on the balance, positive experiences; they were also both trips for competitions, without my parents. One was my trip to the national competition for Odyssey of the Mind in 1987, and the other was our Mu Alpha Theta chapter's trip to the national competition at Princeton University, for which I left three days after returning from the Alaska Trip from Hell and which I may only remember as pleasant because of the contrast, as it was emotionally rather piquant (it was when the Imzadi finally tried to make our breaking up emotionally real, as opposed to remaining in love with each other and just not dating anymore). These were both road trips, but they were with substantial groups of people by chartered bus, and so very different from my usual experiences.
princejvstin asked me about my:Favorite long-distance trip from home.
First, understand that "favorite" in this case means "The good outweighed the bad." Even under ideal circumstances, I dislike travel; I am the biggest homebody you've ever seen in your life. My usual response to "Where would you like to visit?" questions in surveys is "I'll stay right here, thank you very much."
Having said that, the best trip I've ever taken had three large things working in its favor from the beginning:
1) It didn't involve my parents. I got to travel with a small group of my fellow students, all but one of whom were very good friends of mine, and our coach/chaperone from MSMS, the physics teacher who was not the kick-ass Mrs. P. Given that he was exceptionally laid-back, I expected that we would not be under 24/7 supervision, and I was not disappointed.
2) It was by plane rather than by car. At this point in my life, I was already sick to death of car trips, and the Alaska Trip From Hell hadn't happened yet (it was, when this trip happened, several months in the future; that I'd had this relatively pleasant excursion beforehand may in fact have made the Alaska trip that much more tortuous, simply because I now knew it didn't have to be this way).
3) It was by my choice, and for the benefit of my school, rather than one of my parents' work trips. One of the worst things about our interminable car trips was that they were not, in any real sense, vacations most of the time - they were work trips so one or the other of my parents could present a paper at a conference. (The Alaska trip was actually an exception to this rule; it was one of the few trips that was for the sole purpose of visiting non-family friends.)
In the spring of 1992, I, the Imzadi, a very close friend of ours, and two of our kohei won the regional Science Bowl sponsored by the Oak Ridge lab of the DoE. We hadn't thought much of it at the time - we'd sort of been recruited at the last minute. Being from MSMS, we'd expected to win; the only real competition was the teams from Stark Vegas, Muscle Shoals, and Oxford - we plowed through everyone else, including the Indian Springs team. However, at the time, there were only two levels of competition (I believe there are three now), and so everyone who won a regional event went on to nationals, at the DoE's expense. For one of my juniors, it was only his second or third time out of the state.
So we were flown out of GTR, the regional airport near the hometown, on a little prop jobbie to Atlanta, where we raced across the whole airport to make our connection to Washington, DC. This was the first time I'd ever been on a non-prop-jobbie plane. We were picked up by a shuttle bus and whisked to our hotel, which was actually a pretty nice one, and met our sister team - the champions of Oak Ridge's Georgia/Tennessee regional bowl. Like us, there was only one girl on the team; unlike us, she was the alternate. (They were also being followed around by camera crews; we didn't find out why until later.) She and I got to split a room, while in both cases the other four boys were all in one room together. I snuck into their room the second night; I have occasionally wished in retrospect that I had been a little bolder, but at the time I was still something of a prude, so I didn't take advantage of
I won't go over the whole tournament. We won our first round, got crushed in the second by the Sandia Labs team that would go on to reach second place, came back strong in the third round, and narrowly lost in the fourth, which eliminated us from competition. After that, we watched the Georgia team, who got 4th place and lost to the Supercollider team, who in turn went on to narrowly edge out the Sandia team and win the bowl. We were pretty happy with ourselves for making it as far as we did. More interestingly, we were treated to guest speeches by one of the shuttle astronauts, Jaime Escalante (whose autograph I got), and Bill Nye the Science Guy (who was watching one of the matches for the Georgia team with us - they asked an electrical current problem, and I glanced to my right to see Bill Nye doing the Right-Hand Rule just like I was; he looked up, grinned, and turned the rule to give me a thumbs-up, which was cute - guy knows how to work an audience). We also got to visit the Natural Science and Air and Space museums at the Smithsonian for free.
Overall, the whole experience was an experience in feeling valued. The whole reason the DoE ran (and still runs) the tournament is to get high-school kids excited about science, and reward them for that interest. It had a big impact on my attitude about government programs, too, oddly enough - it was the first time I'd really had much personal interaction with a federal program of that size, and left me with a profound sense of gratitude towards it. It was the era of the Supercollider, before the program was shut down; there was a great sense of optimism about science and progress and all those other wonderful things about the human search for knowledge. Even now, it's nice to have a memory anchored in that experience; it helps combat my cynicism about human stupidity - I know that at the very least there are all the other kids who were there, who are now adults and about in the world, who had that enthusiasm for science, for knowledge, and hopefully still do, even if that's not the career path they chose.
I can think of two other multi-day trips that I would characterize as, on the balance, positive experiences; they were also both trips for competitions, without my parents. One was my trip to the national competition for Odyssey of the Mind in 1987, and the other was our Mu Alpha Theta chapter's trip to the national competition at Princeton University, for which I left three days after returning from the Alaska Trip from Hell and which I may only remember as pleasant because of the contrast, as it was emotionally rather piquant (it was when the Imzadi finally tried to make our breaking up emotionally real, as opposed to remaining in love with each other and just not dating anymore). These were both road trips, but they were with substantial groups of people by chartered bus, and so very different from my usual experiences.
