I am a member of the underground.

I have become a subway nerd. Despite the filth, I love the New York City subway system. The routes. The trains. The history. The stations. The design. The culture. The performers.

Every time I learn something new about the subway, I learn just how much there is yet to learn.

The subway system in New York is 108 years old. And it followed after 35 years of a previous elevated train system. Some 470 stations. 200+ miles of routes. Over 1.5 billion (with a 'b') rides per year. Nearly 6,300 cars in service. And it all runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It was at one time three separate systems — a mishmash of private and city-owned companies eventually combined into the current system. The march of progress has pushed and pulled on the system in interesting ways. For instance, the most beautiful station in the system, City Hall Station, is no longer in service because train cars have grown too long for the station's curved platform, creating unsafe gaps between the platform and train car doorways. I recently rode the 6 train through its turnaround to get a glimpse of the now dark station. 

You've become a veteran when you know what part of the platform to use to get on a train so that you exit the train at just the right spot; if you've never ridden New York's subway you won't understand how key this is. Small talk in New York is as often about subway construction and best routes as it is about the weather. People complain about the subway often, but I think it's more the way longtime spouses complain about their beloved. There is a romanticism imbued in the subway. Movies, TV shows, and commercials all use it as settings and backdrops. Art projects in the stations, on the platforms, and even in the tunnels are numerous. Stunts and impromptu performances with the subway as a stage are manifold.

I've seen many acrobatic dancers. I once had a beatboxing impressionist on my train with a microphone and battery-operated amp strapped to his chest (his impression of the male subway announcer voice brought down the car). I've seen a three foot tall Michael Jackson impersonator. And though I didn't see it with my own eyes, a Star Wars reenactment is my favorite subway performance of all time. So much of my life is intertwined with the subway. I've even done class projects about the subway. I've met people on the train. Had many conversations with friends. I do most of my coursework reading on the train. You have little idea how disappointed I was to be away from the city when the annual No Pants Subway Ride took place this past January. Because they love me, when recently visiting friends said goodbye, they left me with a gift of a toy Q train (the line nearest to my apartment). One of my favorite sights in all of New York City is the Manhattan skyline as seen from the Q train as it crosses over the East River on the Manhattan Bridge.

So it will not shock you to learn that I spent many hours one day during my spring break at the New York Transit Museum. In fact, all of the photos above were taken there. I sat in 100 year old restored subway trains and saw period-appropriate ads on the trains from the mid-Twentieth Century. But the best part? The museum is housed in a decommissioned subway station! The trains are all sitting on real track along a real platform. I saw and heard a working “tower” (subway lingo for the control rooms that are funnily enough underground). And, it's right here in Brooklyn. I can barely contain myself over such things.

With so many and so many different sorts of people, New York has a very tolerant attitude towards what shows up underground. Apart from outright rudeness, there's a very live-and-let-live vibe on the trains and platforms. People are quite friendly and helpful. Someone once chased me down to return my wallet that had fallen out of my pocket in an escalator mishap. Even wackos handing out leaflets advocating the wearing of tinfoil hats seem to do fine. In many ways, the subway is something of the city's rolling public square. This was not quite what I expected. I had a more cynical view of what I would find underground and in New York City in general. I expected a certain level of harshness and rudeness and contempt that I've just not found here.

I also expected a certain high level of “godlessness” in a city I presumed to be too sophisticated for religion. Quite to the contrary, the city abounds with churches, synagogues, and mosques. Of course, since real estate is so expensive, these communities do not always meet in the sorts of buildings that may spring to mind, but abound they do. Beyond organized religion, all sorts of expressions of New Yorkers' wrestling with spirituality surround me on any given day.

What brought me to New York was graduate school (and a certain spiritual motivation underlying that — a long story perhaps for another time). Ironically enough, the one place where I can feel my “Jesus thang” rejected is at school. Not necessarily in my department so much, but it hangs in the air — especially among non-technical people and amidst the classes and settings outside of my core requirements.

Since getting settled here I've been surprised at how many people have taken an interest in setting me up with members of the fairer sex. I haven't even been here a year, nor do I yet even know people with much real depth (at least according to my definition of depth). And so it was recently that a member of a class project team wanted me to meet her sister who is reportedly a cooler and funnier version of said team member (this is saying something). I was definitely interested to do so, but I thought it best to inquire about, shall we say, spiritual compatibility. Sadly, it was not to be, and so I did not pass go and did not collect $200. But in the exchange I was struck by the observation of my classmate in relation to my “Jesus thang” (her words); she expressed her respect for me that I should hold such views in the context of academia. She went on to compare being a Christian in the halls of higher learning to the US military's now defunct “don't ask, don't tell” policy regarding homosexual orientation among its soldiers.

I've been considering becoming a member of the subway museum. In a certain sense, it seems I already have membership in another, much different underground. Perhaps it's the simple reality of being displaced in an unusual life position — in school at the age many, including my professors, are well into their working careers plus I'm far away from what is familiar and comfortable for me — I have been feeling prompted to love those around me in school in a different way than perhaps I might ever have done in the past. I struggle to put words to this. It's certainly not a “turn or burn” evangelical fervency thang. It's something different than that. Something against the current of egos and titles and fretting about competition. Instead, it's more akin to wading out into the waters of murky intellectual cynicism not to tread water alone but to swim alongside those in the water with me. What this will be, I don't rightly know, but I have a few more years and an unlimited use MetroCard.

Postcards

Now that the semester is over I have had a little more freedom to get out and around the city. It doesn't hurt that Scot and Kim, two friends from various parts of the country, have been visiting over the last few days. They make a great excuse to go out and see the sights.

Photos:

• First three images: Times Square.
• Turtle Pond at Central Park.
• Brooklyn Bridge at dusk (on the greatest bike ride of my life).
• Lower Manhattan skyline at dusk (also on the greatest bike ride of my life).
• Toys "Я" Us in Times Square.
• Before and while riding the world famous Cyclone at Coney Island.
• Miniature golf on Pier 25 along the Hudson River in Manhattan (In the background: One World Trade Center under construction).
• Lobby of the Empire State Building.
• Looking up at the lit pinnacle of the Empire State Building.
• Views of New York City as seen from the 86th floor observation deck of the Empire State Building.

That time I took an office chair on the subway and played like a talk show host.

Roommate and I have been slowly getting settled into our new apartment. I had essentially no furniture to speak of when I moved to New York. And we figured out early on that we would likely be moving out of the first place we shared. All this to say that furnishings did not begin happening in earnest until the last few months. Desk? Check. Bookshelves? Check. Bed? That fits me? Double check (thanks, Mom and Dad). Office chair? And that brings me to our story.

When I'm at home I'm often working on schoolwork. When I got an actual desk, I had this uncanny desire to actually sit at it. Which required a chair. That I was far too often borrowing away from my roommate. Justin's chair is an Aeron. Aeron chairs are fantastic. Especially size C that fits me. I got it in my head that I needed to get one. The cost of a brand new Aeron is prohibitive. So I began watching Craigslist and also dealing with the flaky people that use it. Several good deals slipped through my fingers. It took weeks and months to find a chair in the right size at an affordable cost. Even then I had to make an arrangement to pay a deposit to actually buy the chair. The seller had been similarly burned by Craigslist flakes, and my commitment to buy the chair was not getting the job done otherwise.

Our arrangement was for me to pick up the chair on a Sunday afternoon after church. On the Friday morning before, I got a message from the seller saying that pickup needed to happen Friday. Thankfully, at the time, though I was full up with school, I had enough flexibility to make this work.

It was afternoon before I could get out to pick up the chair. Thanks to ZipCar, I could have gotten a car for a couple hours. But as rush hour in Manhattan would be creeping up on my return trip, I thought it best to avoid an automotive four-wheeled conveyance. The subway was my only option.

I rode the subway into Manhattan and got a good deal of my weekly reading done in so doing (I do most of my coursework reading on the train, in fact). I picked up the chair with no real trouble. I then proceeded to wheel it down the sidewalk and through various intersections to get it onto the subway. I got a few looks, but, hey, it's New York. My chair is not nearly as chrome-y as the one in the link above so it blends in with the drab of the subway pretty well.

When I made it on the train, I found a nice little spot for my chair against one end, nestled between the two short benches at that far end. By the next stop the train got full in a hurry. So I motioned to one of the riders standing nearby that they could take a seat. She did. And then her son came and sat on her lap. And they bounced along on that Aeron suspended seating while I learned that they were a whole family from Turkmenistan (I made that up; they did all have accents, though) sightseeing in New York. Several of us around mom and her boy and the rest of the family tried to help them figure out a route to get them down to the Macy's flagship store — next on their sightseeing list. Everybody smiled and got a big kick out of this chair. Funny how bringing a chair onto a train where half of the passengers already sit can bring such joy. If nothing else, it was the best seat on the train.

When my sightseeing family exited, the train was still relatively full. A couple gentlemen in a suit and business casual ended up near me. Once again I motioned to the chair. Once again I was playing subway talk show host, interviewing them. They both were from Chicago in New York on business. The furniture business. One of them sold Aeron chairs and congratulated me when he found out the price I had paid. In fact, they both knew Grand Rapids quite well. We talked about Steelcase and the Meyer May house and the Grand River and ArtPrize. We had a lovely chat, in fact. I had a ball with the whole thing.

I'm half inclined to take my chair on the subway again to ride up and down Manhattan picking up passengers for a one seat ride. Actually, the idea of making it into a little web video series has, in fact, crossed my mind. In the meantime, I sit in my chair, toiling away at my desk, building things like in the photo above.

April Foolishness Brings May Sleep Deprivation.

It's been a while since I last wrote. You've been languishing without my occasional posts. How can you continue on? I know. I apologize. To make up for it, I'm publishing two — count 'em two — posts today. (Special bonus post: That time I took an office chair on the subway and played like a talk show host.)

When last I left you in April, I was telling you how very much was pressing down on me. I may have underestimated just how bad it was to become. These past six to eight weeks have been the single most stressful of my life. It all ended yesterday. To give you a flavor, I managed a single hour of sleep (actually two half-hour naps) Wednesday night while finishing one last final project before heading off to administer a research study for four hours. It's 3:30 in the afternoon on a Friday, and I am still in my pajamas. I say this with pride. I am about to head out the door to ride my bike down to Coney Island and back.

So what was it like? Well. I made a deal with myself that I wouldn't list everything off until it was all over. This is the first time I'm actually writing it all down. You and I are going to work through this together so that I can process the psychosis I have surely developed.

• Twenty-one meetings.
• Two interviews with candidate faculty members.
• A lab open house and party.
• A project demonstration at DemoDays.
• Completing an online course to be cleared and certified for research with human test subjects.
• Assembling fifteen pages of application for Institutional Review Board approval of my research project.
• Eight separate sessions of a research study with human test subjects for my research project.
• Configuring and installing an automated video system to record activity for the preceding. I had to build a rig that allowed temporary installation so that it could be installed on a doorway without special permission from facilities.
• Managing volunteers and scheduling and administering three sessions of a research study for a different research project — that was cancelled and rescheduled five times.
• Preparing for and leading discussion for a graduate seminar class. It just happened to be the lengthiest (and broadest) material we covered all semester. This was a solo act.
• Preparing and leading discussion in another graduate class. While this was a group effort, our professor was losing her voice and she tapped me to take her place.
• Assembling a mini-curriculum for a high school student who will be joining my summer research project as an intern. This included conversations with his teacher and one of his parents (a well respected professor at Poly).
• Approximately forty-seven hours of class.
• Ten homework assignments.
• One midterm project presentation.
• Two final project presentations.
• One Artificial Intelligence final exam. That only three of thirty-five students completed on time (I was incredibly close to finshed when I turned mine in).
• Reading thirty-seven articles, book chapters, and/or academic papers.
• An Artificial Intelligence final project: 3D animated game of checkers wherein a human player competes against the computer (including extra credit).
• A twenty-five page final project with thirty references on using an in-air gesture interface for security applications.
• A final project wherein I programmed an Android mobile phone communicating over USB to a custom motor controller I built from a microcontroller and transistor circuits. Plus six pages of contribution to my team's final paper on the same.
• Researching and procuring all the parts and negotiating funding through our professor for everything required to build the preceeding. Plus conversations with the university about patenting the same.
• A required entry into IGERT's Poster and Video competition (my funding currently comes through the National Science Foundation by way of an IGERT). I designed a standard academic poster about my research work and a full-on infomercial for the video entry (“Act now, and we'll throw in…”). They encouraged creativity. I took them at their word. I can't show it publicly to you just yet. The competition occurs in two weeks. Roommate is a video professional and helped me out big time.
• A weekend trip to Washington D.C. to help showcase Poly's work to the public at the USA Science and Engineering Festival.
• A week long trip to Austin, Texas for ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. I demo'd a research game and attended sessions.
• All the facilities and equipment logistics for the demo mentioned in the preceeding.
• An application for the Values in Design Workshop in Irvine, California to be held in August. I was accepted.

During all this I was also acquiring furniture and getting it moved into the new apartment. And at one point I was dealing with a bed bug that somehow hitched a ride from our old apartment to our new place (new itchy bites every three or four days for several weeks). Finally caught him and then had to have an inspection by exterminators.

As my final days working for my last client ticked off before I resigned from my job last spring, the joke amongst my colleagues was that I wasn't really heading off to grad school. You see I had done some work a few times around then for a secretive government agency (this is true — not making this up). So, obviously, I was actually going to work for said agency. Graduate school was just a cover. Ha ha! Jokes on them! I just experienced sleep deprivation, tests of mental acuity, biological warfare, and stress positions. Almost like spy training. Wait a minute.

My advisor promises me that next year will not be like this. And, frankly, some of this was due to a remarkable set of worst-case circumstances that piled on top of one another as the end of the semester unfolded. Let's hope it never happens again.

I have next week off though I will be tackling a number of important to-do list items. Then it's off to Raleigh, North Carolina for the Foundations of Digital Games Conference. Immediately upon my return there is the World Science Festival. And then after that is a summer of work on my research project. This will be like a nine-to-five job with two interns. Sounds like vacation to me.

Except for the final image, all the photos above were taken during my trips to Washington D.C. and Austin, Texas:

• SpaceShipOne at the National Air & Space Museum. I played hookey for ninety minutes specifically to see this (last time I was at the museum I was a teenager). It was all I could squeeze in. I also had goosebumps and nearly cried a couple times.
• An actual Apollo space suit worn on the moon.
• Menu at a soul food cafe in a church in D.C. Macaroni and Cheese is listed as a vegetable. My bread pudding was made by Mother Grace. Princess rung us up at the cash register.
• Washington D.C. metro.
• Bill Nye the Science Guy at the USA Science and Engineering Festival.
• Predator and prey sausage in Austin, Texas: rattlesnake, rabbit, a little jalapeño, and two kinds of mustard. Blew my mind.
• A shoulder-worn robot at the CHI conference in Austin.
• A sign prohibiting hand guns from part of the Austin international airport. This is Texas, people. Where you can openly carry a firearm. These signs are necessary.
• My kitchen table while I built electronics for one of my projects.

April Foolishness

Recently I've been likening graduate school to experiencing the tide coming in and out. At times it's not unlike a nice walk on a warm sunny beach. At other times the water is up over my head, and I'm struggling against a rip current. A friend reminded me just how appropriate this comparison is in that the tide is due to the lunar cycle — which is to say there's a strong element of lunacy involved.

The tide has definitely rolled in with classes, projects, trips, and various other academic and non-academic responsibilities now upon me at the end of the semester. I have barely had a moment for anything else other than schoolwork over the last several weeks. And this is despite my best efforts to stay on top of and ahead of all that's due. As far as I can tell, I'll be drowning for the next four to five weeks to come as well.

My birthday is tomorrow. Being born in the middle of April means that in undergrad, my birthday always fell on the week before final exams. That's not the case this go around, but it's only because a classmate is forcing me that I'll be celebrating at all tomorrow. I understand there will be carrot cake involved.

I'm not going to list everything on my plate at present. You might not believe me anyway. Don't get me wrong. Everything on that list is a good thing. My classes are really quite excellent this semester. My research projects are going well. I'm meeting new and interesting people and having opportunity to be exposed to all manner of valuable ideas and experiences. That said, what I wouldn't give for a life preserver right about now.

Thirty six. That's how old I will be tomorrow. I'm starting to catch myself accusing the younger people around me with the charge of being young. I never did enjoy hearing that when I was younger. So I'm trying to be mindful of not hurling such unhelpful observations. Nevertheless, I'm old enough to, on occasion, now wonder just what this fool thing is that I've gotten myself into.

And speaking of fool things to do, the photo attached to this post was taken during testing of an experimental game at my lab. We've all been taking turns at our weekly lab group meeting testing out an iPod-based movement game where teams compete based on how in-sync we move with our partners. It's supposed to be a dancing game. But I don't know how much what we end up doing really looks like dancing. Ultimately it will be used to study social dynamics in games that do not rely on screens for their primary interaction with players.