Thursday, March 23, 2006

A Room with a View

Those of you who know what we do for a living (and are in similar situations in life) will be pleased to note that we recently moved offices to a room with a window. For the moment let us abuse our notation a little bit and loosely use that term for a smallish hole in the wall that lets you see outside. Gone are the days when we had to look at a clock to figure out if it was day or night. Yes sirree, we know by the light that streams in through our window.

My window (said in the same tone as 'My precious') is triangular - a right angled triangle with a convex hypoteneuse. Convex - oh, how i love that word. It brings to mind convex graphs and convex sets and other such words. I occasionally use them to show how real-analytically-proficient i am.

It opens onto a view of another building - a building with red walls that happens to be a library. There isnt too much of a view of anything else - if you really strain, you can make out what appears to be the sky. And you can catch glimpses of a path between our two buildings. Not that open skies and such things have any use for us. Countless nights spent in the cell-like environments of the big room aka the bat-cave aka the fountain of scholarship have made us allergic to open skies and sunny days. Sunny days, especially, for they make others happy, and, by the law of conservation of happiness, contribute to our misery.

The view is nice. Libraries can be interesting places. I get to see other people because my window opens on to a library. I used to know people once. There was something exciting about that, but I cannot put my finger on what it was.

Most of the time, the people in the library have their noses buried in their books. But occasionally something really interesting happens. Like the other day, I saw a girl talking into her cellphone. And the most exciting thing that has happened in my life in a long long time - I saw someone smoking through an open window in the library. That does not happen too often.

My window makes me happy. And no, you may not have it.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations :-) Make sure somebody doesn't snabble this one..

Falstaff said...

WHAT!!!???? YOU HAVE A WINDOW? But, but you're not faculty yet, are you? Then how? AARGGHHH!! I hate you! My life just became even more meaningless. My whole face is turning green. I feel like scrabbling about for my copy of Othello. So, so desperately envious.

Anonymous said...

Aargh. Which grad school is this? Please to enlighten us so that we can app there in the future

~ windowless-grad-inmate

J. Alfred Prufrock said...

You also have the choice of transferring to Stony Brook. Practically every office there has windows.

On the other hand, it's Stony Brook.

J.A.P.

Tabula Rasa said...

i hate to break this to you, but some faculty don't have windows either.

Heh Heh said...

m: Na-ah, not happening. anybody who comes near my window dies.

falstaff: schadenfreude. what a beautiful word. :)

anonymous: it wouldnt be too hard to guess, actually.

j.a.p: actually, i wouldnt mind stony brook apart from the fact that the fresh air might kill me.

MR: Not if i have my way (which is to live off someone while i do all the housework)

TR: What!? You mean there is no point to this, after all? What else is there to life but windows??

Tabula Rasa said...

well... you get a research budget, so technically i got me twenty inches worth of windows.

not linux.

but live for the present, my friend! now when *i* was a grad student in nyc (wheeze) *none* of us had windows. heck, we only had cubicles with partitions five feet high.

they're really spoiling you these days. how do they expect to cultivate intellectual fiber in broad sunlight?

Heh Heh said...

to be absolutely fair.. i'm not going to have this place for very long. they're renovating the bat-cave. so the joy is short lived.

Anonymous said...

which school ? columbia ? NYU?