#149: Hypothetically Speaking

The day before the Hypothetics conference, I got a small package in the mail. It was from Gene. The note read, “Consider this a belated birthday gift”—he’d missed it back in February—“and a congratulations on your presentation, which I’m afraid I’m also going to have to miss. About the gift: Whatever you do, don’t point it at your eye. Good luck.” Inside the padded envelope was a small, silvery, pen-shaped cylinder.
        “It’s too small to be a vibrator,” I said.
        “Get your mind out of the gutter, Sissy,” said Avie, who was reading a textbook for school. “It’s obviously some kind of writing instrument.”

#103: Call for Papers

The week before school started, I attended an afternoon orientation for grad students in the urban theory and social planning program, after which I got a buttload more textbooks and readings for the recitations I’d be teaching. A recitation, in case you don’t know, is a class connected to one of those big lecture classes taught by a professor for hundreds of students in big lecture hall a couple times a week. Then the teaching assistants, grad students like me, go over or “recite” the material in smaller breakout sessions in regular classrooms on another day for about twenty students at a time.