walking in memphis, etc.

what a week!

friday and saturday i was in chicago, sunday back in jersey, monday and tuesday driving to TN, and now i'm here for a couple weeks.

highlights
* i had lunch with jenny (one of only a very small handful of HS friends i still keep in touch with regularly) in DC on monday.  i was SO excited it worked out.

* stayed with roommate in durham, NC on monday night.  this included dinner with some of her NC friends, and minigolfing... lots of fun :)

* tuesday, we visited the american museum of science and energy in oak ridge, TN on the way over.  i hadn't been there in like 10 years, but it's still as fun as ever

* eric's with me for the next week just to see memphis, so i'm having fun playing tour guide.  yesterday we actually saw the march of the ducks at the peabody hotel (they keep 5 ducks in a duck-penthouse on the hotel roof, and every morning they play the king cotton march while the ducks ride down the elevator then run across a red carpet and dive into the fountain in the hotel lobby... i'd seen the ducks in the fountain before, but not their grand morning entrance.  it was hilarious).  we met elvis presley's personal tailor at his shop in the same hotel.  we visited the national civil rights musuem (which has expanded to a second building since i was last there.  they now own both the hotel where king was shot, and the building that the shooter was believed to have shot from), and walked the riverwalk on mud island.  it was a quality day.

* dad is already making life interesting.  i'll ignore all the anecdotes from yesterday i could share and just put the most recent one.  last night, mom moved dad's truck to a different spot in the driveway because it was blocking hers.  dad got ready to leave for work this morning, and couldn't figure out how to start it since the steering wheel was turned, which had locked the ignition.  after 10 minutes, he came back inside and glared at me and asked if i could skip showing eric around today to drive him to work and on the errands he needed to run.  i asked if i could try to start the truck instead.  he told me he doubted i could, and he would be really mad if i broke the key, but i took the key out of his hand, went outside, and in 10 seconds had it going just fine.  he was shocked.... and irritated with me for succeeding.  to his "how on earth did you do that?" i replied "dad, i drove an ancient nova for 6 years... i can convince old cars to do lots of things."  he groaned and left.  my dad.  ha.

but now, here's the real connundrum of the day:
i got a call from one of the rutgers graduate school deans yesterday offering me the chance to apply for a more active role in the graduate school.  namely they have a program specifically running pedagogy programs for teaching assistants and one of the 2 graduate student staff people who works on that is graduating this summer, so they want me to apply to be her replacement.  i'm excited about this and it sounds like fun, but....
they want a writing sample to include in my formal application.

i write a lot, but most of it is either (a) informal, such as blogging, writing mass emails, etc., or (b) technical... because, face it, math papers are a very different kind of prose than humanities/social science papers.

so i write, i'm fully capable of writing, but what does a mathematician submit as a writing sample?  i really don't know!  current best thought is that maybe i'll write a short essay about something random (suggestions?) and submit that as well as one of my recent papers. any better ideas?

the end... for now. :P

be parties one and all.