Dis-Orientation
It's been a while since I have written in the journal: things have been terribly busy. I think the last entry was about a month into our stay in Bloomington. In the course of the last 17 days, we drove from Bloomington, IN to Washington, DC. We rented a Chevy Blazer to get from Washington, DC to Princeton, NJ. We took a day trip by bus from Princeton to New York City. From Princeton, we flew to San Francisco where we drove all over visiting family and friends. The time spent in Princeton, NYC and SF was mostly occupied by our orientation. We did have a couple of days in SF that we used to visit Zina's Mother and Father, who are both located within a 45 minute drive of our hotel.
The schedule of events for our orientation isn't too difficult: we need to be in the lobby of our hotel -- the Nassau Inn on Palmer Square -- by 7:30 each morning. In Prospect House on campus, we are fed bagels, muffins and a functionally unlimited supply of coffee, which presents it's own problem about an hour later. Promptly at noon, we descend to the first floor and are fed lunch by the tux-clad cafeteria staff. Generally, we are finished with our lectures by 5 in the afternoon.
Starting at the beginning, we arrived at Princeton, unloaded our copious quantity of gear and returned the rental car where we caught a cab back to the hotel. We took a quick shower and arrived in the lobby a tad early to our 4 PM formal cocktail party where we were to meet a number of the primary players in the Luce organization.
I was immediately uncomfortable: I was the only person in a gray suit, and I've gained a few pounds, so it was snug around the middle. I make a Mental Note: when we go to Hong Kong, have a black pinstripe suit custom made. Zina and I make the acquaintance of the Left Coast scholars: Zina has already met many of the East Coast scholars during the selection process. In fact, Zina's roommate from the interviews arrived late, hauling an impressive array of luggage. The best part is that I met Helene Redell shortly after we arrived. Helene fairly exudes a warm confidence and competence that immediately put me at ease. She was genuinely interested in knowing what I do for a living, what we did before arriving in Princeton, how our trip was, and how we were feeling after our journey. I grew to enjoy Helene's company a great deal.
We are fed the first of several formal dinners. We are introduced to numerous Luce Foundation employees and Luce scholar alumni. I find it remarkably hard to be comfortable at dinner: I have a sense of being judged and evaluated, so I was really on my best behavior and made sure that all my comments were well considered and concise. Later in our orientation, I decided that much -- but not all -- of this feeling was due to my own emotional baggage. I know that I was getting to know the other scholars as they were getting to know us. Part of that process is, in fact and by it's very nature, a judgment.
The following three days were quite intense: we were tutored in the ways of the world outside the protective borders of the United States for about 8 hours per day. We had, on average 6 speakers per day, including dinner addresses. I took pretty extensive notes on several of the lectures. I have a vivid memory of some of them, each for different reasons. Virtually all the lectures were former Luce scholars. The first lecture was given by a distinguished-looking gentleman by the name of Bob Sutter, a former White House advisor. Not only did he introduce us to world politics, he introduced me (at the very least) to the level of achievement and prestige represented by The Luce Foundation and it's scholars. Realizing this, I felt extremely self-conscious about my own educational background. I have a good enough education for what I do. I am a graphic designer and illustrator. I guess that I've been fortunate in life: I've always known what I want to do, and I've achieved some measure of success by doing it, which should soothe me. Instead, in my mind, I still hear my father's voice criticizing me for my academic failures.
When I was in High School, I was chronically bored, socially clumsy and, in 1982 I graduated with a 1.8 GPA in my senior year, the lowest possible passing grade. When I went to our local community college, I was "counseled" by a older gentleman, who I now estimate to be a failed Unix Geek, that if I wanted to be in "this new computer graphics field" that I needed to study Pascal and Fortran, both a now-dead and then-dying computer programming languages. I suppose that to say Fortran is dead may be a slight overstatement: the old custom-made legacy government programs still use it. Perhaps you remember the "Y2K bug" that plagued government software written in the 1970's? It's Fortran code. Here's a bit of Y2K trivia: the government actually called old Fortran programmers out of retirement in order to modify the code because NOBODY writes Fortran anymore. Anyway, for 2 years at Montgomery College, I stuck to my guns and took classes outside of the "career track" out lined by my institution. I earned my credits, but because I studiously avoided any phys-ed classes, I was not allowed to graduate.
Having picked up my grades, I could fortunately move on to University of Maryland, Baltimore County where I again picked up the quest to learn "computer graphics". At least UMBC had a dedicated computer graphics lab with some real state of the art equipment. Here, I did actually learn to write a genuinely now-dead programming language: Apple Basic, which was a variant of Basic altered to run on the old Apple command-line interface computers. I learned with a real fire and passion, and reaped the benfits. I had never before achieved academic success as I did while I was in the CG program. It was an incredibly formative time for me. Then came the disapointment. UMBC made the fundamental mistake of aligning the computer graphics lab with the computer science department. I pointed out then, in 1985 and still maintain today that computer graphics belongs to art, not science. Long story short, in the middle of my third semester at UMBC, the Dean of Computer Science defamed the CG lab as "unprofitable" then raped and pillaged the program the way Sherman screwed Georgia. This bastard sold all the equipment -- including the immensely powerful Quantel PaintBox station, which could produce network TV broadcast quality animation -- to Towson State and gave all the funding to the Information Systems Management department.
I was gutted. I had found my dream program and it was denied to me because some fucking short-sighted idiot needed more money for mag-tape, punch cards and maintenance of his precious, outdated IBM mainframes. To this day I hate IBMs and only use Apple products. I recall the most bitter irony: a couple of years later, I received a piece of junk-mail from UMBC touting their "state-of-the-art desktop publishing" lab featuring all Apple Macintosh equipment.
A while after I quit UMBC, I went to work for the Washington City Paper, which was an all-Macintosh shop. I went to school part time back at Montgomery College and learned quite a bit about black and white darkroom photography, which has served me well over the years. I even researched other schools that offered computer graphics courses, but unfortunately, after the crushing blow dealt by UMBC, I never again really had the passion for higher education. Even today as I write this, I'm overwhelmed by bitterness with UMBC's failure of vision, and the domino effect that it's had on my life. I believe that if I had not been denied the education I was seeking, that I would have been able to follow a much higher-profile, higher-paying career path, possibly achieving my original goal of working in network television. Of course, at the end of the day, I'm the one responsible for my choices and I know that I was unprepared to take the steps necessary to gain this education.
Aside from pinging the rev-limiter on my personal insecurity meter, Zina and I had a tremendously enjoyable time: we got to know a few of the scholars and started developing new friendships. One of the wisdoms of the orientation schedule is to allow the scholars an evening on their own for dinner plans. A group of us decided to follow Dave's lead: he went to school here in Princeton and knows the local ropes. He suggested a good sub joint, or hoagie, as they're called in this neck of the woods. We dined "al fresco" hovering around a park bench and next to a trash can. It was a delightful glimpse of what I consider a much more normal form of eating.
Of course, there were no activities planned after dinner, so what is the natural course of events after a strenuous day of orientation? To go out and sing karaoke, of course. We joined the crew on one occasion, but didn't make it a regular thing: smoke has always bothered Zina, and has begun to bother me since I quit smoking 6 months ago. We had a couple of beers, but didn't make it a late night.
Another highlight for us is the visit to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The Met, of course, is one of the premier museums in America, if not the world. We had the privilege of joining the director of the Asian wing for a personalized tour of the Asian collection. This was really tremendous and informative. We learned about Chinese and Japanese gardens, scroll paintings and architecture. I enjoyed this lecture more than most, despite our requirement to wear formal clothes.
After The Met, we had dinner at the Pratt Mansion, hence the dress requirements. In Luce fashion, this years scholars were interspersed with former scholars and scholars spouses. I sat next to a delightful woman who was on an Arts Council for Philadelphia. The dinner speaker was none other than journalist Bill Moyers. The speech was interesting, if not a little shocking. The topic was the terrorist attack of September 11th. To completely oversimplify his eloquent discourse, he shared the points of view that our freedoms make others jealous enough to kill, and that we should never allow terror to diminish our dedication to freedom. I think that the first point is something of a crude distillation, and it doesn't jive with my views, but I wholeheartedly agree with the latter point.
NOTICE: all contents copyright Alan Lapp 2002