vicarious.ly (7 page)

It kills me that I consider myself to be a very level headed person who plays mathematical odds when it comes to the decisions I make in life. I’m starting to come to the conclusion that Michelle was right when she told me that
“the odds play me”
a few months back. I thought that I was able to get where I am in life right now by systematically playing it safe and betting on the path of least resistance for success. That would explain why I decided to go into a corporate career as opposed to an academic career in linguistics where I would probably never be successful in right?

The night after I met Diego, I did something very uncharacteristic of myself. I started thinking I’m not quite as rational and level headed as I thought. Bear with me here, I bought my first lottery ticket. I spent two dollars on one. You may agree or disagree with me, but for years I have been rallying that buying lottery tickets is a statistically losing proposition that masochistically caters to a person’s sense of hope. The same goes for roulette or slots.

I felt so out of place buying a lottery ticket that I put on a sweatshirt, hid under my sunglasses, went into the convenience store, filled out a ticket, and left before anyone could see me. Buying the ticket wasn’t the strangest part, the couple of days afterwards waiting for the drawing were. For a good 48 hours, I convinced myself that it was possible, if not probable, that I would hit the jackpot and finally achieve my financial goals without having to work another day in my life. Then I could retire to do anything I wanted to do. I thought about what it would be like to write the next American novel, sail around the world, spend time studying words… oh hell then I started daydreaming about how amazing it would be if I could give Eden another stab.

I didn’t win the lottery. Was I upset? Yes, I was upset that I started actually thinking about Eden again. Also, I’m upset that maybe the decisions that I make aren’t always grounded in a statistical understanding of maximizing my outcomes. What was I even trying to maximize these past few years? I have maximized my economic potential given the cards that I was dealt my senior year. Did I maximize other things though? I like my career and the friends I talk to. The couple of things that are missing are a romantic partner and Eden.

The romantic partner issue is my fault alone. I’ve come to realize that I do like to live in a fictitious world in which I spend time daydreaming about a girl who I believe exists in real life. Truth of the matter is I like spending time in my daydreams more than I do with the person that exists in the real world. I came to this conclusion after I talked to my therapist about my last encounter with Michelle. She found it especially interesting that I juxtaposed my memory of her and Kyla the way I did. My therapist said that I’m spinning my own story in which I function as the antagonist to all my goals. I’m still trying to wrap myself about that statement. I’m not sure I believe that my therapist knows me better than I know myself.

You might have caught onto something I said earlier. Yes I finally said it and admit to it, I miss Eden. But why, I really can’t think of any rational reason to why I miss the days that I worked on Eden. I just do, it was something that I enjoyed. It gave me satisfaction in ways I can’t describe.

A few days ago the feeling of nostalgia started overpowering me so much that I decided to take a walk back to campus. It only takes about fifteen minutes to get there from my apartment via the T but it’s been at least two years since I have been there. Two years ago I only went there to go to this one Tex-Mex restaurant Paul was so fond of. I guess my memories of college are so interlaced with Eden, I don’t know how to revisit them so I just have been trying to shut them off fully.

As I walked around campus, I found myself slipping away into memories of the first time that Michelle and I walked around at night along the fresh snowfall. Unsurprisingly, the campus was pretty dead and there we were treading through the snow trying to find some hot chocolate to warm us up.

My memories of Michelle and Kyla were interrupted as I passed by Boylston Hall.

Right then I stopped what I was thinking about, went up the steps leading up to the front doors and stopped about halfway up to sit down on a bench. I sat there realizing that I spent so much time in
Professor Craig’s office as an undergrad. Sitting down I remembered about a conversation we had a few years ago right on this bench.

Professor Craig and I would talk about life all the time. Our conversations would generally start on the topic of languages and words and hours later we would end up talking about life in general. Why are we here? How have humans attributed meaning to concepts and been able to communicate that meaning to others? It was a different time in my life in which I was searching human history looking for things to describe my place in the world.

Professor Craig told me once, “You’re young! You have your whole life ahead of you. Aren’t you excited to do something? What do you dream about?”

“I find it strange how people use youth as an excuse to dream. What does it even mean to be young or to be old? What kind of difference does that make on the self?” I said.

Then Professor Craig said something that used to be a part of my daily inspiration, but then ended up being a source of despair.

“People use the words young and old to describe physical and mental conditions. I think the most important distinction between being young and old is in your mental state. Someone is old when that person focuses more on their memories than their aspirations.”

That’s when it hit me. Lately, I thought I hadn’t aged in the past few years. I thought that since it seemed like no time passed since college, I was stuck in some sort of arrested youth. It turns out, I’ve become old. I’ve failed to create new memories or aspirations. I’ve been waking through life accepting many of the decisions I’ve made and constantly reliving the ones that I’ve regretted.

The last time that I could remember the burning desire to accomplish something was when I was working with Punjab on the algorithms for online dating websites. Before that, it was when I was working on Eden with Professor Craig. I wonder what would have happened to it if I didn’t pull the plug on its development.

I haven’t even checked the website since my senior year of college to see how it was doing. I transitioned Eden to Professor Craig before I graduated. While I was on the bench I took out my phone and typed in the web address for Eden, out of curiosity.

I was greeted to a new slick mobile website. I played around with different languages and expressions for a few minutes and thought that the application was much faster and the statistical mapping was much more accurate than I last remember. After a while, I thought of a few ‘linguistic edge cases’, expressions which would make Eden return nonsense because the computer program couldn’t decipher the meaning of what was entered. These edge cases are what made me frustrated with Eden. I fell in love with Eden because I was mapping human languages in a way that was never done before. I got frustrated with Eden because as I kept improving the system and theories behind it, more and more time wasn’t focused on creating new things… it was focused on fixing things that were
broken. To my surprise, this version of Eden handled all the edge cases that I remembered with linguistic and statistical beauty.

I stopped and looked at the snow around me. How could I have been so far removed from something that I thought was dead? I thought that Eden died with me but it turns out it was kept alive by a person who really believed in me throughout the years. Great mentors are hard to come by and when you have them you should hold onto their advice and friendship as long as you can.

Professor Craig must have been working on this. From the main website, I found an Eden Blog. It showed that Eden had been referenced in hundreds of linguistics articles throughout the years. The blog also demoed the new functionality that had been implemented into the Eden project. There were new algorithms that mapped languages to advanced linguistic concepts. Some of the things were things I never thought possible, some were things I dreamed about implementing one day back in the day.

I finally hit the about page on the website. It had been changed since the last time I modified it.

Welcome to Eden.

Eden allows you to understand how human beings have connected with each other since the start of written history.

Jake Parker – Founder and Owner
Craig McIntyre – Lead Researcher

My name and title hadn’t been removed from the page. Surely this had to be a mistake. I was finally interested in seeing how Eden had transformed. Even though my name being the founder of Eden was a mistake in the page, it still made me tear.

While I was on the bench, I sent Professor Craig an email stating that he needed to update the about page on Eden because my name was still on there. I also asked him if he wouldn’t mind meeting up to discuss some of his new research. It would be great to catch up.

Why do crazy thoughts always run through your mind while you’re sitting on a bench in the middle of the snow? As I sat there I thought about the irony of a few of my thoughts. While I was thinking about Kyla these past few years and Michelle more recently, these women have been moving forward in their happy and fulfilling lives. I’ve only taken part in very small snapshots of their lives but I decided to make these snapshots the focal points of my life. I’m a secondary character to them. But they became primary characters in my narrative because I spent so much time thinking about them.

While I’ve been keeping myself company and feeling sorry for myself, somebody took the work that I started and created something beautiful out of it. Professor Craig really turned Eden into what I wanted it to become but I didn’t have the discipline or drive to continue working on it at the end of college. I guess he never forgot about me. Here I was telling myself that he mentored so many students, he taught so many classes, and that my work with him was something that he had long forgotten about. Something must have stuck.

Things in life have a weird way of coming full circle don’t they? Lots of things go unnoticed and unfinished but those things that do come back have a way of stinging you.

The ride back home was sobering to say the least. I thought about a lot of things that I didn’t give enough thought recently. Most importantly, I started to think about the word legacy.

The word legacy is very interesting to me because of the many different contexts it’s used in. Most people like to use the word to describe something antiquated or something that is left as inheritance. The way I thought about the word was to think about the gifts that I would leave behind to the world after I die. At the back of my mind it was always Eden.

Sometimes the remnants of what you leave behind grow into something you’d never imagine. The word remnant sounds so archaic and irrelevant. Let’s try this again.

Sometimes your legacy grows into something you’d never imagine. Okay Eden wasn’t my legacy yet, but I was intrigued if there was any room for me to get involved in the project again.

The next morning I got an email from Professor Craig

Jake – Great to hear from you! Come over any time after 3pm if it works for you today. I’ll be in the office until 7pm. If not, I’m attaching my office hour’s schedule. I’m usually here until 6pm every night. If you’ve got the spirit for it, I’ve got a lot to update you on. Hope you like the business world, you’re still doing consulting? I can’t wait to chat.

-C.M.

I usually work from home on Fridays, so the entire day I was thinking about what I would say to Professor Craig. The suspense was killing me, the adrenaline flowing through my blood allowed me to razor focus on the outstanding assignments I had for the day so that I could give my full attention to Professor Craig at night.

At about 5pm I turned off my computer, walked outside, and got ready to meet Professor Craig for the first time in almost five years. I hadn’t been this nervous in such a long time. Worst comes to worst, I would finally get closure with Eden. As you can tell, closure isn’t something that I do that well. It’s terrible, when you let things linger as a part of you always stays in the past when the world around you is in the present. It was finally time to face something that I’ve tried to block out for so long.

I walked down the stairs of my apartment feeling like I was marching towards something important but I couldn’t quite place what it was. My instincts started kicking in and all the thoughts extraneous to Eden started fading out of my mind. I thought to myself, I’m coming home. If home doesn’t take me back, well then at least I’ll be able to put this experience behind me.

I texted Professor Craig that I was on my way to campus, in thirty minutes I’d be back in his office. He texted me back,
“you might want to grab a cup of coffee before you come in here.”

En route to Professor Craig’s office, I hesitated while passing by a local bar. For a few seconds, I wondered whether it would be a good idea to pound a few shots to numb my senses a little before seeing him for the first time in years. That’s when it hit me I’ve been consistently drowning out my feelings in important times recently. So I darted in the coffee shop instead.

The warm cup against my hand helped to fend of the Boston cold. Winter affects people in different ways. I caught the T to Harvard Square and began think about feelings and desires I haven’t experienced in a very long time. It’s like the tunnel I was in was flickering me back to a different time and place where I was excited to see what the future holds.

It’s been awhile since I've daydreamed about the future. I've been stuck thinking about memories of the past almost incessantly these past few years. It’s not that out of the ordinary so I’ve heard. Many people have a hard time adjusting to the pace of life post-college.

You spend your entire childhood dreaming of what you are going to be when you grow up. When you finally grow up, you start thinking about all the shit crazy moments where you were forced to make decisions you didn’t quite fully understand. That’s been my experience anyway.

As the T passed over the St. Charles River I saw Boston fade away and Cambridge come into view. Boston and Cambridge are only separated by a bridge about a third of a mile long. Physically it’s not much but to me it’s the world. To me Cambridge is college and Boston is everything else.

When the train passed into Cambridge the memories which I’ve tried to block out for so long found a way to permeate into my conscious thoughts. Did I mention that I avoid going back to Cambridge as much as possible? Twice in two weeks sets a record for me. The train went into a tunnel after passing the river. While underground I thought back to a conversation that I’ve blocked out of my memory.

“Eden could be the legacy you leave for humanity and future generations,” Professor Craig told me on graduation day.

That was the day I told him of my plans of ditching academia entirely. He supported my decision wholeheartedly. He even told me, “Jake if you ever need anything or you change your mind, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’m probably going to be here well past emeritus days.”

It was painful to leave all the work that I dedicated my life to behind. Do I regret it? As much as I want to say I do, I don’t. I couldn’t continue working on Eden burnt out and uninspired. If you would have seen me during my last year of college you would understand what I’m getting at. But I’m that friend you forgot about, so you probably didn’t see me.

“Stars burn most brightly right about when they are about to burst,” Professor Craig said.

How do things go from being your inspiration to something you’re tormented by? I’m just starting to understand what Professor Craig meant about the whole stars thing.

I think he was referring to a supernova. What a beautiful word. It was coined in 1931 to describe the phenomena of a star exploding and possibly outshining an entire galaxy before it dies out. Over the period of a supernova a single star can emit as much energy as our sun emits throughout its entire lifetime.

“You’ve done more in four years than most other linguists do in a lifetime. Take time to do something else. Sometimes you have to leave something you created and love. Only time will tell if you can ever come back and love it again,”

Professor Craig would always find a way to relate every conversation back to love. That was the way he determined what was and wasn’t important in life. Why am I coming back? I took a sip of my coffee as the train was slowing down.

Gravity. That’s what this whole thing felt like. I was getting pulled back in.

The doors of the T swung open at the Harvard Square stop. My half-drunk coffee was going lukewarm in my hand and I didn’t need the extra energy so I decided to throw it away at the closest trash can. I walked up the steps to ground level and took the quickest route to Professor Craig’s office. I didn’t want to be late. I only had a few minutes before thirty minutes had past.

Walking into Boylston hall was like stepping back and experiencing a previous version of me. I flashed back and saw the youthful exuberance I had but then I also was reminded of some things I forgot about. People tend to glamorize the past, but I was just reminded of so many memories of youthful recklessness and selective apathy that now seems so distant from anything I’ve recently experienced. Maybe Professor Craig was right when he told me I needed time to explore other things. Coming back it made me realize that I did mature in a way or two since college.

I took my time walking down the hallways and then finally arrived at Professor Craig’s office. The door was wedged open just like always. Before I knocked to announce my arrival, I looked at the articles he had pinned on his corkboard by the wall. I quickly glanced and saw references of Eden. I took a deep breath and knocked.

“Yes? Come in.”

I stepped inside. His office was the same as I remember it. I looked at the corner of the room, where Professor Craig kept pictures of him and his past graduate students. We had a picture together there which I guess he never took down.

Why did I always feel like I abandoned Professor Craig? For the past four years I thought that somehow I let him down and that he was ashamed of me. I felt that I disappointed him because I never continued my study of philology. Judging by his welcoming spirit, I’m thinking that I was wrong about that whole train of thought. We looked at each other like no time had passed at all between our last conversations.

“Professor Craig, it’s been a while. How have you been? Still doing computational linguistics?” I said.

It was the only thing that I could say. Sure, I could have tried to update him on my entire life but I felt like there wasn’t that much to say other than to ask him how he was doing.

“Jake I was wondering when I would finally see you again. I was actually going to contact you before the semester was over because I wanted to showcase how much the ideas you had in your college dorm room have trickled down to the linguistics community. I know you didn’t leave Eden on the best of terms,” he said.

Professor Craig always knew how to make you feel important and understood. I tried to divert a serious conversation by just answering in a way that didn’t leave me too open to an emotional response.

“Who would have thought right? I’ve been doing the whole management consulting thing. I’m told I’m pretty good at it. Honestly, I still do think about Eden from time to time. Last week was just the first time I checked it since graduation. I could never get myself to go back before that,” I said.

“I wasn’t wrong when I told you that Eden could be your contribution to the world. It took me over a year and a whole team of grad students to decipher what you were even doing with that computer code. Since then we’ve been working on honing in some of your initial theories,” he said.

Professor Craig later told me that he was waiting a few weeks to contact me because he finally got to a point where he could take Eden no further. He wanted me to take another look at it to breathe some fresh air into the project. For the past four years he had been working on bringing what he thought was my vision to life. Apparently no other graduate student or linguistics professor had any other ideas on how to radically improve Eden anymore. For that, Professor Craig said he needed another burst of energy from me. If I wasn’t able to provide another creative burst, he would finally consider the project finished.

The talk of Eden seeped into us talking about life in general again. Like always I told Professor Craig about the intricacies of my life. I told him about how I felt like I was a secondary character in my own life. There was nothing in my life that I was doing that could ground me to time as all I felt like I was experiencing were a bunch of disconnected moments. As always, I got a little emotional.

“I’ve been floating around feeling like there’s no gravity to make me feel grounded,” I said.

He was like a father to me. I think that’s one of the reasons why I avoided him for so long. In the back of my mind I always knew the advice that he would give me if I updated him on my life. He would be proud that I was doing well in my career but wouldn’t stop at those superficial questions. Most people I know don’t dig that much past the surface. If I say I’m working at a prestigious consulting firm and that I’m on the fast track to partner, they’ll automatically assume that things are going splendid for me. Not Professor Craig. Within a minutes of conversation, he was already listening to me describe my identity crisis.

He just sat there listening to every word that I said. It doesn’t sound like much but something about the way Professor Craig listens just makes you feel understood. Also, when you’re around him you can’t help but come to conclusions about your life that seem like they are self-evident but come as a result of complex introspection.

“It seems to me like you’re doing great Jake, except you’re missing a little something. I think that something is personal meaning. You know your external facing responsibilities, but what do you do entirely for yourself?” He asked me.

His words always sunk into my thoughts.

I stayed silent. While I was silent, Professor Craig took the opportunity to show me the new source code for Eden. I hadn’t programmed in a long time but it didn’t take a genius to realize how much improved the product was. The algorithms had been cleaned up and everything had been rewritten. It was so new and exotic that I couldn’t help but get excited.

“How can you say I own this, I don’t even recognize the code anymore,” I said.

Eden had grown up without with me.

“Everything was built from your original ideas. We wouldn’t even know this was possible without your work. Do you think that Bill Gates still knows the intricacies of Windows code? “He said.

I don’t know what felt worse. Leaving Eden or coming back to an Eden I barely knew. I started getting overwhelmed and couldn’t focus anymore.

“Jake, I know it’s a lot to take in,” Professor Craig said slowly.

“It’s just that I don’t even know how I can help out. What you and your team have done is beautiful,” I said.

“I’ve never met anybody with your pattern detection skills,” he said.

“Funny you say that, I can’t help but get myself out of the same patterns in my life that lead to disappointment,” I said.

“It’s only because you want to feel the way you do. You’ve always known that. When you’re ready to grow up you will.”

That’s the second time someone said that to me in the last few months. What is it that inspires people to tell me to grow up? I don’t think I’ve told that to a person since I was in high school.

I thought for a while. A career in academia was so far gone that it wasn’t even a possibility anymore. But maybe, I could do a little something with Eden on the side. It could be like a hobby. After some hesitation I told Professor Craig that I would take a look at Eden and see if I could incorporate it as a hobby of mine. After all, I didn’t have a single hobby.

When I’m constantly traveling for work I can’t help but feel that I spend so much time between the places that I want to be. Maybe Eden could close the gap a little.

But how would I even get back into studying and analyzing languages? Did I even have what it takes anymore? All these questions kept piling up and before I could overload myself with doubt I committed.

“I’m in. Let me see what I can come up with.”

Professor Craig looked at me and pumped his fist.

“I have faith in you Jake. I think you’ll surprise yourself with the things you can do. I just have this feeling about it.”

Was I scared? Sure. Was I excited?
Extremely.

Professor Craig invited me over to have dinner with his family. He told me that his highschool son had wanted to meet the person who created Eden. Everything was strange, but something about the gravity of the situation kept me steady on the ground.

We walked back connected like old times and I felt like I had no idea what was to come next.

I know it’s crazy, but something about this feels so familiar yet so new.