IHTFBS

"We'll ride the spiral to the end
and may just go where no one's been..."
-Lateralus, Tool

Okay, so the other night was fucking terrifying. In a bad way. It went like this: I missed my bus stop on the way home, since presumably the bus didn't take a different route than normal. We were heading home the normal way and I knew where we were and it was good. Then, quite suddenly we were somewhere that looked just a little bit wrong. It was a little darker than normal, and the streets looked a little sketchier than normal. But I didn't recall passing Av. Independencia, which is the edge of my neighborhood and a pretty big, well-lit street. The kind that's hard to miss. Somehow I did though.

Anyway, once I realized we weren't where I was expecting to be, I started rationalizing (because I sure didn't want to get off the bus in this sketchy looking area): maybe we took a detour. There's construction all over the place, so that's probably it.

Wrong. Almost certainly we had passed into the section of town just a little ways past my apartment that Adrian described to me as "somewhere you probably don't want to go." I stayed on the bus, hoping to see something familiar.

That didn't happen though. Quite the opposite, we were soon in an area with very little light, graffiti on every surface, and some very old, falling apart buildings. Great. To my great fortune we left that area fairly soon, crossing a bridge (what, a bridge?) into the industrial sector. Or what I assume was the industrial sector, given that there were factories around and not much else.

It was about this point that I went from feeling uncomfortable to thinking "Oh FUCK where am I? What the HELL have I done?" I was pretty sure that if I got off the bus I would get stabbed.

Then we turned into another area that looked rather slummy. People started getting off the bus. I was pretty sure I was fucked at this point. I didn't know where I was in Buenos Aires. I don't speak enough spanish to ask someone for help or directions. I had very little money on me (not enough to get a cab, ripoff or not). There was little lighting and no way to figure out where I was. And even if I was capable of finding my way back home on foot, I'd have to walk through some very dangerous sections of town.

I was so freaked out, I didn't register much as we passed through a bus station and went further into hell.

Then, quite suddenly, we were somewhere else. There was a big street with lights and stores and another bus station! Excited, I looked around only to realize that I, yes, I was on a major street, but no, it wasn't any place I even remotely recognized. Then we turned down a side street into a small neighborhood. Like a suburb.

What the fuck?

Most of the rest of the people on the bus started getting off. At this point I decided I'd had enough. Although there wasn't a lot of light (still), the suburbish area looked safe enough to walk through without getting assaulted. I got off the bus and immediately started fast walking toward the main avenue. At this point I was pretty upset: it was cold, I was hungry, it was late, I was very, very lost, I had no money, and no help or a way to get help whatsoever.

Then I decided that it would be more helpful to focus on figuring out a way home than mentally listing how shitty my situation was. So I did just that.

I headed back to the bus station on the main avenue I had passed a little earlier and caught the first bus of line 45 that was headed back in the other direction. I wasn't quite sure it was the right bus (the sign was for a different place than the one I usually take to get to the university), but I figured I had enough coins for two more bus rides, and I'd be able to at least get back to the station I just left and find a different bus.

I was luckier than that though. We went back along the same route I had taken to get out to the suburb area and we eventually got to the bus station I had initally seen after leaving the industrial looking area. And of all things there was a subway station there for the line that has a stop two blocks from my apartment. I jumped off the bus and ran down the steps to the station.

The subways in BA close early. They officially stop running at 11 PM. They stop letting passengers in sometime around 10:15-10:30. I had left the university at around 8 PM and I had been on the bus for a very long time (not to mention walking and taking the bus back).

It was 10:23, and the last train of the night was about to leave. I got a pass, and got on.

Less than 10 minutes later I came out of the subway next to Av. Independencia. I walked two blocks to the pizza place down the street from my apartment, greeted the guys there and ordered some empanadas.

"IHTFP"
-MIT motto

On the other end of spectrum, today I decided on an argument for why I should get into a place like Caltech or MIT or whatever for graduate school. It's easy: I should not be the first to figure out the biology paper that a computational biology grad student and a professor of bioinformatics are trying to understand. Both of these guys have better backgrounds and many more years of experience in the field than me.

Maybe the study of mathematics just gives one the magical ability to interpret graphs. In any case, I think Adrian gained some respect for me today when I was able to explain what the hell the guys who wrote the paper were doing with their simulation.

To their credit, I did spend a good bit of yesterday programming a simulation like the one in the paper, so I had some idea of how the network works. But it's much cooler if they only see me do the Will Hunting thing.

-J