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Jun. 13th, 2007 12:16 amI went to college at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute. In Europe, a Polytechnic is a trade school, kinda like DeVry or something in the States. In New England, RPI is one of the top-tier engineering schools, up there with MIT and perhaps a nod to CalTech...except that a lot of people have heard of MIT and CalTech, and not too many people outside of engineering or college hockey have heard of RPI. We were mighty in our tech, yet small in population.
After several -20F (near -30C) winters, with strong winds and snow whipping down the Hudson Valley, I couldn't take the climate any more, and my first job landed me in south Florida near Miami. My childhood included Nebraska and New England, with High School years in Washington DC, but most of my childhood was in Florida, so I didn't mind being back in the tropics, and I haven't lived north of Atlanta since.
I've been North a lot on biz, though. I'm currently in Boxborough, Mass, and it's still weird coming back. For one thing, I'm continually being surprised that the water coming out of the faucet is actually cold, even in summer.
It's weird here in the summer. It's pretty and nice, but the summer green is palpably temporary. Everything is green now, not that it's not in Florida, but landmarks that I navigate by in winter are now hidden by foliage. Ponds in the winter, dammed by beaver and white with snow and ice, are now flowing streams. I'm strangely reminded of my college roommate from Chile, doomed to perpetual winter as classes ended and he went back home to family well south of the equator just as things began to bloom. This exploding period of life is doomed to freeze back into dormancy in just a few months. Cyclical progression is now foreign to me -- I'm more used to the tropics, where the competition of foliage and fauna take a brief pause for a few weeks, then resume their Darwinian exuberance.
The history here is strangely present as well. More than four centuries of population create strange side effects. Driving to work, I pass through a dozen towns, each no larger than a street-light and surrounding alleys. Boxborough through Acton and Stowe to Maynard, near Concord, north of Sudbury. The same area in Florida (and beyond) would be one town. Even in a rural-ish area in the Boston suburbs, there are distinctions of townships, each with historical precedent. Atlanta absorbed prior communities of Buckhead and Brookhaven, even where Sandy Springs residents have an Atlanta address. Will Boston ever absorb Braintree and Quincy into one address? Probably not, given that a father and son, both US Presidents, lived there and shaped the world in their own ways. The South has its own history and its own war, but the time and geography and even density of this place almost matches Europe, even in its history of revolution.
After several -20F (near -30C) winters, with strong winds and snow whipping down the Hudson Valley, I couldn't take the climate any more, and my first job landed me in south Florida near Miami. My childhood included Nebraska and New England, with High School years in Washington DC, but most of my childhood was in Florida, so I didn't mind being back in the tropics, and I haven't lived north of Atlanta since.
I've been North a lot on biz, though. I'm currently in Boxborough, Mass, and it's still weird coming back. For one thing, I'm continually being surprised that the water coming out of the faucet is actually cold, even in summer.
It's weird here in the summer. It's pretty and nice, but the summer green is palpably temporary. Everything is green now, not that it's not in Florida, but landmarks that I navigate by in winter are now hidden by foliage. Ponds in the winter, dammed by beaver and white with snow and ice, are now flowing streams. I'm strangely reminded of my college roommate from Chile, doomed to perpetual winter as classes ended and he went back home to family well south of the equator just as things began to bloom. This exploding period of life is doomed to freeze back into dormancy in just a few months. Cyclical progression is now foreign to me -- I'm more used to the tropics, where the competition of foliage and fauna take a brief pause for a few weeks, then resume their Darwinian exuberance.
The history here is strangely present as well. More than four centuries of population create strange side effects. Driving to work, I pass through a dozen towns, each no larger than a street-light and surrounding alleys. Boxborough through Acton and Stowe to Maynard, near Concord, north of Sudbury. The same area in Florida (and beyond) would be one town. Even in a rural-ish area in the Boston suburbs, there are distinctions of townships, each with historical precedent. Atlanta absorbed prior communities of Buckhead and Brookhaven, even where Sandy Springs residents have an Atlanta address. Will Boston ever absorb Braintree and Quincy into one address? Probably not, given that a father and son, both US Presidents, lived there and shaped the world in their own ways. The South has its own history and its own war, but the time and geography and even density of this place almost matches Europe, even in its history of revolution.
