first, the novel, which i mentioned offhand. i wrote it for nanowrimo, or at least in the spirit of -- 27 days, 42,000 words. (i was aiming for 50,000, but the plot ended.) it was a great experience; the reason i wasn't writing here, or at least a reason, was that all of my words were going into the novel. i might do it again in parallel with the official nanowrimo (which came at an inopportune time for me this year; plus, more importantly, it wasn't really in my consciousness at the time) this november. anyway, the novel is finished; it is entirely unedited, and probably contains spelling and grammar errors and plot inconsistencies, although i'm arrogant enough to claim that they are very few in number.
i'm getting a few copies bound tomorrow for posterity. i'll be mailing some out; if you're in the area, and want a hard copy, i'll certainly lend it you to read. nanowrimo is all about quantity, not quality, so don't expect much of the latter. it seems to me that the act of reading a novel is a hell of a lot more satisfying with the actual book than on a computer screen, so i don't think i'll actually be putting it up on the webpage. if you promise to print it out and get it bound, though, we might have a deal.
second, the job thing. due to circumstances beyond my control, i basically have no particular compunction to be anywhere in specific next year. i've decided that my top choices, professionally, are to live in minneapolis, cambridge (ma), davis, ithaca, and ann arbor, sort of in that order at the moment though with lots of potential for flux. other possibilities, darker horses if you will, include piscataway/new brunswick, philadelphia, princeton, new york, seattle, and san diego, in no particular order. i'm sure you can figure out the universities in question for most of those places.
so i'm soliciting advice. especially if you've lived in those cities, but even if you've just visited and have an opinion on whether or not i'd like to live there. i likely won't be rooted to any one place too tightly, but obviously i'm going to be in a given place for a period measured in years, so it's important to me to be in a place i like.
which brings us to my current mid-life crisis, which is that nothing really matters to me. i'm sort of groping for reasons in this process of determining where to live, because i have no ties in particular. no person in particular i'm focused on being near (i.e. no relationship.) no activities in particular that are must-haves, such as religion or rock-climbing or "the nightlife." i feel i'm a pretty adaptive person, but the flipside of that is that i have no particular hopes or dreams to pursue to specific places on the earth.
currently, the location factors i'm paying attention to are climate (especially mosquitoes), and snowboarding, which i'm getting into. it strikes me that one important thing might be the accents; for instance, i could never live in texas (aside from the lack of criteria a and b), because i can't stand the texan accent. probably the south in general too. i'm not too keen on midwestern accents, but i don't find them as grating as the texan one; could i live in the middle of them? this is unclear.
this segues nicely into one of my longtime pet peeves, which is people who are sure who they are. it's a great excuse: "that's just not who i am," or equivalent. for instance, people who stress over everything because they feel it's part of their personality; people who don't feel they're cool enough or smart enough or whatever. basically people with preconceptions of who they are; in our society, we castigate preconceptions against others, but most people are going around with these damagingly fixed views of who they are.
to some extent, of course, it's necessary, as this tribulation of mine is showing; without identity, there is precious little force that goes towards decisiveness. when people accept who they are, it's understandable; when people use these preconceptions to make decisions, it lists towards circularity in the direction that is so unappealing to me as a mathematician and purported rational thinker. (disclaimer: i'm not claiming to be a rational thinker with regards to my personal life, but this is an impersonal enough issue that i feel i ought to be fairly objective on it.) it smacks of the masses convincing themselves that something is right because it gives them a feeling of satisfaction, while the feeling of satisfaction itself comes from doing the supposed right thing.
of course, the whole thing is bootstrapped on what society was like awhile ago; this is a good way to encourage continuity, which is a good thing in general but bad if it's all we have because we will never progress. in a sense, this is the process of memetic evolution itself having evolved to mimic genetic evolution. if our mutation rate is too high, we can't maintain the ability to interbreed; this corresponds to societies which are constantly splintering due to locally changing ideas, and thus forgoing the advantages of the economies of scale in today's mega-societies.
on the other hand, if the mutation rate is too low, an individual society (like, say, the ussr) will not evolve fast enough to keep up with the other groups. the creative inventions that spur our society forward (memetic as well as tangible) come from people who have little allegiance to this concept of fixedness; that's why so many of them die crazy as loons, to be immortalized as eccentrics after having been unhappy and insane in life.
group selection, of course, is a relatively controversial theory, although i was entirely convinced of its merits (or at least its plausibility) by biology 174, the evolution of cooperation, in which we discussed in depth how this formerly debunked process was actually responsible for perhaps most of human evolution throughout the years. in any case, this balance between fixed identity and all-inclusive perception and reaction is one that i think doesn't get nearly enough press.