Richard Feynman on connectivity

Last night was remarkable in that I wasn't in bed by 10pm. It was Friday and I was out stamping around Cornell and collegetown in the callousness of winter, although winter is not at all conducive to Going Out (GO). First, unless you're an undergraduate girl for whom leg attractiveness is more important than frost-burn protection, you bundle. 

For me this involves my purple puffy coat, a scarf extended and then spooled around my neck, my "bah" hat with fleecy ear flaps which straps under my chin in a manner appropriate for the hat of an infant. Then purple mittens (yes, I am five) and 4-pound boots and by the end of this I'm so encased that I can basically take in no sensory information and I hear my aunt say something in the next room. Muffled like cars driving on deeply-snowed roads. She's saying something to the dogs about Marvin Gay.  

Oh wait, no, how rude of me. "Thank you!" I call out thickly after a dismally long pause, which is the appropriate response to "have a nice day!" 

Marvin Gay. good grief. 

My evening started at the Big Red Barn, the hang-out spot for graduate students. And what looks like a graduate student and behaves like a graduate student, is a graduate student by certain definitions and so I went.

The Big Red Barn is like walking through a field of people, everyone elbow to elbow--sometimes backpacks jutting out creating impasses--talking about their research, being young and smart, drinking $1 beers. All in groups of people they already know. 

I want to be doing this and I always feel a little like an unduly hopeful meerkat, peering around, standing alone. But the first time I went I managed to strike up conversations with a couple different strangers, to my utmost glee.

One was a student from Puerto Rico studying biomedical engineering, amazingly from the same city near which I was staying for my farm and beach visit a few weeks ago. Of all places in the world, and here we were in this crazy barn. We spoke of the same road, Route 13, which is lined with mango trees where you can just pull over and load your car up with roadside mangoes. And then a man from Brazil studying chemistry who told me that I was having a beer in the very same building where Richard Feynman would come for beer himself, and where Carl Sagan would work just across the path. 

And a guy from Italy studying planetary science. I stood there with the dollar beer he'd bought me (I no more than looked at him for half a gaze and voila, was given a beer) and took in his theatre of hand expressions--it may be a stereotype of Italians but in this case the data were affirmative. Hands rising grandly for mountains, thumb and fingers pressed together for delicious, some sort of miserable wave for how cold it was here. We were talking about traveling in the tropics and Mr. Italy, in his description of huge plentiful insects in places warm, formed the international sign for Humongous Big Bug (thumb and forefinger) and rolled out: "The nature is very aggressive!" 

Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Portuguese, oh the languages! What a collection of brilliant minds from around the world, studying everything from planets to soil, all elbowing their way around the din of this space. If you step back and really think about it, all the places and ideas and topics of study represented here: wow.  

People ask where I'm from, and while I can make conversation with pretty much anyone about pretty much anywhere in the world, I can only answer, "Um. Well. About 90 miles north of here actually. A small town you've never heard of." 

Everyone else is from everywhere else. 

The second time of the Big Red Barn was last night, of the heavily bundled me. That place is not designed for Winter: ergonomically challenged indeed. Having a building capacity is all fine and good, but this fails to account for Winter where everyone now takes up at least 30 percent more volume in their outerwear, or at least I do because I dislike being cold. And then that volume needs to be removed and hung somewhere. There are approximately 7 coat hooks for 435 people, the coat hooks, incidentally, situated in the decidedly narrow hall leading to the men's bathroom. And in their slidy-puffiness coats do not stay suspended in bulky aggregation if they are draped atop each other. And so the men were like Jesus on palm Sunday walking over downed pile of coats.

 

So I come into this lively furnace of beer and research and then have to unwind the scarf, pry off the hat, juggle the mittens, and suddenly it's like I'm carrying an armload of laundry and I'm dropping socks and underwear on the stairs.

 

But I found a spare horizontal space above a storage box and stuffed the lot and went mingling. There I found Moustache Nick, who I'd met before, and so was welcomed into the loud fold of his friends and thus they adopted me and we all went out afterward.  So I had dinner with a bunch of plant breeders who I didn't know and had a great time. (another lovely serendipity: found an enthusiastic soul in a similarly-shorthaired woman who went to highschool in that impossible-to-pronounce town of Puyallup where I did my master's!)

Then I went salsa dancing, and with music and moving like that you forget about frostbite and mittens. 

There I was approached by a gentleman in a purple colored shirt with his wife. "This is the third time I've seen you this week," he explained, "and I just need to introduce myself."  I, however, had not been so observant and did not recognize him.  He explained that he'd seen me at the Trumansburg Presbyterian Church (where Aunt Awesome plays pipe organ) on Sunday, then at a seminar about deer browsing and invasive plants on Thursday, and now finally at salsa dancing. "Those are all so disparate that I almost didn't believe it, but no one looks quite like THAT" he said of me.

He was the head of the Horticulture Department.  

So many connections out there in this world! We just have to dig them up. And make more of them.