But First, It’s All About Me
It’s still Saturday. I spent the whole morning setting up this Blog and posting my first, what, blog? Is blog the story different than Blog the venue? Does one blog in a Blog? Why is it that in American English words can be both noun and verb? You know, we live in a strange culture, where any noun can be verbed. Like verb. “Impact” comes to mind. I really hate that. Or where two identically spelled words can be pronounced differently, as in “conCRETE”, emphasis on the second syllable and meaning solid, tangible, palpable; or “CONcrete”, emphasis on the first syllable and meaning the ubiquitous building material incorporating cement. By the way, just for the record, “route” pronounced “rout” is a verb. You “rout” an internet packet or a wiring bundle. And “route” pronounced “root” is a noun. A “root” is the path you take on the way to some destination. It should be against the law for them to be pronounced differently yet mean the same thing. It doesn’t matter to me, either way, pick one and stick with it. Just saying.
And what about when two ostensibly opposite words mean the same thing, as in “flammable” and “inflammable”. Then there are “bivalent” and “ambivalent”. The first means taking on one of only two possible values. Despite the negating prefix (a–sexual, an–hydrous, etc.) the second isn’t opposite the first, it is just the inability to choose between the two mutually exclusive values. Like when things really are black and white but you are desperately hoping for gray the color but not Grey’s Anatomy. These things drive me crazy. It’s no wonder the rest of the world sees us (see us, the world is plural in England) as hopelessly uncultured and functionally illiterate. Which to some nontrivial extent we are.
But ANYWAY, this morning when I set this Blog up (or is that set up this Blog?), I was allowed 160 characters — only — to provide a biography. This is barely enough to write a coherent sentence with a dependent clause. I don’t tweet, twitter, cheep, chirp, or anything else that might be constrained by the limitations of a bird brain. So while as I mentioned in my inaugural post this morning, I did make that excursion to Lake Willenpaupack this afternoon, I think I will provide a biography for those who don’t know me. Perhaps after doing so I will find that some would have been satisifed to remain ignorant.
I spent my first few postpartum years in Florida, where my Dad earned his Masters Degree in Geology at FSU in Tallahassee. My birth interrupted my Mom’s undergraduate education, permanently as it happened. After graduation Dad got a job with Esso Oil Company, known more infamously today as Exxon. The job was as an Oil Exploration Engineer in Bogota, Columbia, and there we did move, including my brother Mike, two years younger. My brother Kevin was born there.
My Dad spent weeks at a time out in the boonies in Venezuela, where the big oil fields were. He was the guy that they gave the daily seismograms. From time to time he would point at a map and say, “Drill here.” It invariably gushed up out of the ground, Oil That Is, Black Gold, Texas Tea, just like in the Beverly Hillbillies theme song. He was an incredibly intelligent, immensely capable man in great demand at the time. He had a big sign over his desk that said “THIMK!”
Or at least he was in demand until about 1959, when the bottom dropped out of the market, I don’t know why. He had to bring us all back to the States, where he found himself unable to find a job in his field. We wound up in Dallas, Texas where my sister Lisa was born a few years later. Hence, I am the eldest of four. Dad turned to selling insurance for Prudential and for a while was successful at that, too. Eventually we moved to Jacksonville, Florida and the family settled there.
I went to first and second grade in Bogota at an American school. I might be the only second grader in the history of that institution to get expelled from school. Long story. I completed elementary and middle school in Dallas, and I graduated high school in Jacksonville. I have very few happy memories about anything connected with my childhood. I am a strange man now, and as a child I was weird beyond description. I was alone much of the time and did not fit in well with anything or anyone around me.
I wound up in the U.S. Air Force just after I turned 19, and I spent the next 10 years there, becoming a pretty darn good avionics technician and traveling the world several times over. I left the service in 1980 to go to school on the GI Bill. I was in Utah at the time and enrolled at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. I was ten years older than all of my classmates, which turned out to be a mixed blessing. I graduated in 1985 with a double Bachelor of Science, one in Physics and one in Mathematics.
I went on to graduate school at one of the best schools in the nation for Astronomy and Astrophysics, the University of Arizona in Tucson. I received my Ph.D. there in 1991. That’s what makes me the AstroDoc, my handle when I play bridge online. I went on to a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) at the Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore. STScI is the NASA agency that operates the Hubble Space Telescope, still in service though just barely after all these years.
I then joined the faculty at Villanova University as a Research Professor, where I remained for ten years, doing independent research and teaching undergraduate courses. I had some success in my field, and I have published quite a few papers in refereed research journals. Once I discovered something really, really cool, 15 minutes of genuine fame then what have you done for me lately? I experienced a major life crisis in 2006 and left active research, indeed, the whole field entirely. I worked in IT for a few years, then I finally got back to the classroom at the Community College level, and there I have remained until now.
I am quite happy to have landed on my feet, and I am still doing what I love and what I think is deeply embedded in my DNA, and that is to teach. My Dad spent the last 30 years of his life as a high school science teacher, well loved by his students, their parents, and the administration. Whatever gifts I might have, I got them all from him.
Along the way I was married twice, once for 26 years and the second for 6 years. Not so very long ago my girlfriend ended our 3–year relationship, and since then I have not pursued another. When people ask me about things like this, I always say that I have been incredibly blessed to have been in long term relationships with those three women. It’s not that I have been unlucky in love — quite the contrary. It’s that I think I’m not too good at it. Yet. But who knows? Dad was married four times.
So that’s me, more or less. I’ve done a lot of different things, none of them badly and some quite well. I’ve been able for the most part to do the things I love, with passion. I’m never bored.
I leave for Florida on Monday. I’ll be spending three weeks down there in Tampa with my baby sister, who I haven’t seen in over two years, along with her husband Joe and my only nephew Joey. She is one of my last living relatives, along with my remaining brother Kevin, his wife Debbie, and my nieces Laura and Erica in Jacksonville. Mike, my younger brother, died several years ago from liver disease. I miss him greatly, we were very close in our later years. He took me in for a year after my first divorce and helped me to put my head back together. Both he and I forgot to reproduce. We were always a small family, and there are no male progeny. Barring a miracle like parthenogenesis, this branch of the Saffer line has ended.
I’ll pick up on the narrative about today’s events tomorrow morning.
All the best,
On Saturday evening, 08/07 from Lake Ariel, PA
Rex
