Tag Archives: Zach

AI

AI is quite the buzz word now. I’ve followed the story about the data centers being built all over the place and their insatiable need for electrical power. I’ve seen some of the AI creations, both in news stories and in what people post on FaceBook. While remarkable, I never felt that the result justified the means.

But today I found a use for AI that I hadn’t thought of before. I have noticed in the past few months that Google searches have been returning AI summaries rather than just a list of links as had been the past practice.

At Mom’s yesterday, we looked through the things in a closet in one of the spare bedrooms. There was some interesting old stuff stored in there. I hope to make it a subject of another post.

One of the things we found was not so old. It was a . . .  I don’t know what to call it. It’s a very nice table top display of a flag that was flown over LSU after Zach’s death. I don’t remember how it got to Mom’s. I probably took it down there to see if anyone was interested in taking it. Since no one in the family has space for displaying such things, it went unclaimed.

Now it has resurfaced and I’m pretty sure no one will want it. I left it there to ask people about it on Christmas. We’ll see.

The whole thing got me to thinking about Zach’s legacy at LSU. Besides the flag, I had gotten notification of a logo that was put on the URec Center basketball court about a year after his death. I wrote a short post about it here.

This morning I got curious about whether the logo was still there and what condition it was in. I did some Internet searching and found the web site for LSU URec but could find nothing about Zach. Looking again at the search results, I noticed that there was an Instagram link with a reference to a ‘zwood’’ court at the URec. So I tried searching using that phrase in a real question and followed up with a ‘deeper dive’ into the AI search.

What came back astounded me. Here’s a screenshot of the results:

Here’s a link to the page. I was able to scroll down and followed other related questions that the AI had come up with. The questions were germane and the answers were useful. Remarkable!

Is this worth building data centers all over the place that have insane power requirements? I’d still say no. Zach’s old boss at URec is still there. I may write to her and get an update. No AI can do that.

Zach speaks

Today is the 6th and this entry was written on the 7th, of December. Why is this important? It’s not, really. The date thing is just an excuse to choose something.

It’s long-ish, from 2013. Zach was still working at the Rec Center, but had decided that he was going to quit and get his Phd so he talks (among other things) about some of his efforts to choose a school. In the end, he stayed at LSU. Fateful decision . . .

Saturday, December 7, A day that will live in infamy…

Not really. But, I’m sitting here at my office, quite a bit of coffee down, and it’s 721a, having been here since about 615a.

I am, more than I’d like to admit, making really stupid decisions that feel insignificant at the time. A great example is this morning–the rest of my clan of friends is volunteering at Habitat for  Humanity this morning and I chose not to go because this morning is really the only shot I’ll have this weekend to accomplish anything (since tomorrow is a planned hangover day). I feel kind of bad but I know that I would hate myself tomorrow night if the weekend were to pass without some more accomplishment. But anyways, the Habitat group was meeting here at work at 7a to go to their site and, as par for the course, I felt this deep compulsion to be there before all of them, I guess with the intention of wowing them with my slave-ish intensity and dedication. But what happens is a)when they do “marvel” at me, I just get annoyed for having to explain myself, and I don’t even think there is a small part of me that likes the attention, or b) they think I’m a kook for keeping the hours I do. And frankly, I can’t really blame them for that– last night we hung out, drank wine, and stayed up until about 1a, and my alarm went off a little before 6a. Which is nowhere near enough sleep, especially at the end of a week, and could potentially lead to me not feeling well later in the day/weekend, which would suck. So why did I get up early?

Well, from a pragmatic standpoint, there is much to be done, and once I get finished banging out some thoughts in here, I hope to have some accomplishments, in some form or fashion.

So, some thoughts…I guess in keeping with that faux-health theme, it’s been a weird/semitough week from a health perspective. It’s largely my fault. Last Sunday night I, of course, couldn’t sleep when I went to bed early and then ended up with wreckage of diet with late night snacking. It carried over into Monday and really throughout the week, as I had a litany of poor eating choices and really regressed as far as eating enough calories. I don’t know why but I’ve been doing a terrible job with eating enough food, at the right times, and as a result, I haven’t been feeling that amazing. Compounding that is the bursts of caffeine that I’ve been ingesting, including too much coffee–today has to be my last day of coffee until at least later next week, if not longer.

In relation to this, I’ve completely fallen on my face as far as making December my bitch and have had a troubling, overall, malaise with using my time. My weekly review will go into this further tomorrow but it hasn’t been pretty and that is extraordinarily frustrating. What’s interesting is that I don’t feel like I’ve really been wasting that much time, all things considered, but it has been a bit of unique week with my birthday and all that, so in some sense there are some confounding variables. I don’t know–I need to really rebound next week and today.

Speaking of the birthday, which was Thursday–I actually really enjoyed the experience, way more than can ever really recall before. There wasn’t anything at all special about the day other than the normal humdrum-ness but it was just a really positive and happy day for me. I think that is indicative of a larger phenomenon that I’ve touched on before about my experience here in Baton Rouge about how I really cherish a lot of my social life and times here. I don’t know if this is a function of a greater sense of individual maturity and I’m thus appreciating “life” more or if I’ve just lucked into a situation here where I’m surrounded (socially) by good people and I like the role I have within the relationships. I guess it’s probably a bit of both.

For example, the small clan (Micah, Julie, Melissa, Chris, and Jake) hung out last night and watched Love Actually and it was such a small event in the grand scheme but was so incredibly fun and comfortable for me. Chris and Jake came over and cooked a quick dinner and then Micah and the rest of them got home and we drank a bit, watched Love Actually, and then sat around bullshitting in the living room for probably another two hours after it finished. The movie, as always, was incredible–I sat there with a silly smile, I laughed at the hilariousness of it, and as dumb as this seems, it was really special for me to “share” that experience with those
people. Granted, I pined to actually have a girl there to cuddle with (really, mainly just Rachel, since that was the gateway) but even that was a secondary feeling to the giddy happiness I felt for most of the evening.

One thing that I think really makes my relationships right now so fulfilling is the huge sense of open-ness that I feel like I have with everyone, and the fact that pretty much everything is on the table as far as what we talk about. It’s not like I have a great need to process a lot of stuff that happens in my life with a group (Chris and I are pretty mutually fulfilling in that sense) but it’s nice to have my life feel mostly like an open-book with the group, and that is a really relaxing feeling.

Chris and I also watched Animal House on Thursday night, for my birthday, after we got Whole Foods and it had been awhile since I watched it, and it’s as funny as ever. So, in recap, two great movies in two days!

I held what were hopefully the last two thesis interviews this week, and now just need to transcribe them before I can (hopefully) say that the data gathering process is complete. The coding/analysis process is about to fully commence, which is truly exciting, since I think this the peak of any project like this–the write-up will be more like the icing on the cake, as far as results go. I had a meeting with Garn yesterday where he talked me through what he wants to see as far as the coding and have some steps to work on in the next few weeks before meeting with
him again. I like Garn a lot–he seems to have a ton of trust in me and definitely strokes my ego but he’s also pretty realistic but our relationship is evolving to the point to where I’m looking forward to seeing him and we have a normal conversation about the real world.

In relation, the ph.d application process is in progress. In fact, today I should finish enough stuff to consider being on the downslope of the whole process and although there is some trepidation still, I’m starting to feel cautiously optimistic about the whole goddamn endeavor. I was bitching about some aspects of it yesterday and Chris reminded me that the ph.d is just academic hazing and they want you to be pushed in the process and it was a good reminder for me–I need to not get caught up in the silliness or injustice or the process and just go out and make it my bitch, as blunt as that may seem. That may include dropping a lot of money to take visits in the early spring, which is lurking nastily in the back of my mind.

The process is also interesting because of the natural reduction of schools, which is a bit unnerving but I guess a natural aspect. I had originally had a list of 5-6 schools but some professors at some institutions have literally not responded to my requests, which I interpret as a sign that 1)I don’t want to work with someone like that anyways  and 2)they probably don’t want ph.d students if they aren’t responding to those emails. So, the list, as of earlier this week, had dwindled to just FSU and UTK–in a random manner, however, KU reinserted themselves into the conversation mid-week, and quickly have risen to a dead heat with FSU, in terms of overall potential fit. I ended up having close to an hour long conversation with a prof at KU this week and most of it was just the two of us going back and forth about the pervasiveness of sports and how it’s a fascinating research topic. It was really fun. On the flip side, I had a conversation with a second professor at UTK and it was awful–the guy was nice enough but didn’t seem to really give a fuck, and the conversation lasted barely ten minutes. So, that helps crystallize the direction I want to go, as far as UTK is concerned.

It’s still frustrating and annoying because I have to present this air of compartmentalization with my process and I have to keep reminding myself that my goal is just to get into a program and if that means I have to get a little creative in my personal statement with regards to my research interests, I’m fine with that. I’m all over the map with that shit anyways. I think, in a traditional academic sense, I’m not really suited for a ph.d program–but, in a 2013-sense, I think I am.

There is a huge need for me to stay focused this month and start really thinking creatively about my back-up plans and my overall next steps. With the comfort of my life right now, it’s really easy to get complacent and not do things like save money. Ha!

Rae got engaged this week. I knew it was going to happen, or I feel like I’ve known it was going to happen for about a year, since she drunkenly called me last December and was clearly alluding to her fear that a proposal was coming. There’s a small sense of loss there, although I think I’m mature enough at this point to not be derailed by it. She still, to this day, I think is the only girl who knows most of my story and is also willing to stand up to me and call me on my shit. Good for her.

Zach speaks

Apropos my recent post on ten years, I looked up a Zach journal entry today. It’s short. From 2014.

November 16, Weekly Reviewage

My long elusive week of kick-assery finally arrived, in the form of a 53.75 hour week, which is a full five hours longer than any I’ve recorded this fall. It as a pretty simple formula- getting shit done on a Saturday and doing enough on Mon-Wed to counter some lower totals on Thurs-Fri.
The major jump is in research, as I’ve really been going hard at this project with both a lot of time on the lit review and with interviews and transcribing and whatnot. One noticeable trend is the significantly lower amounts of time I’m spending on classes and schoolwork- that’s mainly me not spending as much time on stats. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve hit a wall with it or because there isn’t as much useful “work” to do on it but it’s a bit worrisome when considering what next semester will look like, when I assume I’ll have more real work, as well as more schoolwork. I guess the bright side is I have a better understanding of what I have to do for teaching, so that will (hopefully) be a bit less time consuming.

Apropos of nothing, here is a photo of Zach’s desk as I found it, a little more than 24 hours after his death.

Ten years

I marked ten years yesterday. No one said or otherwise communicated about it to me. It’s only my human obsession with round numbers, really. I don’t have anything profound to contribute. Just a sigh. By one measure it’s a long time. By others, not so much.

Zach’s presence has receded into the background. I still have my ‘Z’ in my medicine cabinet that I look at every day. I’m pretty sure the ‘Z’s that I put up around Davies Hall are still there. Most do not know what they are for, I’m sure. I went looking for some pictures of them. I remember taking them, but now I can’t find them. Grrr . . .

Thinking about ‘what would Zach do’ or wishing for his advice or perspective has pretty much stopped. We are all so different from ten years ago. Guessing what his life arc would have been is futile. Sad, of course, because of all the great potential that was there.

Not to say that I don’t think about it from time to time. I’ve been struggling to find ways to make this blog relevant and I think getting back to Zach might be a way forward. I haven’t looked at his journals for a long time.

In the words of Paul Simon, ‘Preserve your memories; they’re all that’s left you.’

some Zach thoughts

It’s not every day, or even every week. Sometimes a month may go by without thinking of Zach. But when it comes, it comes hard.

The three friends, laughing, then the yells of warning, then the sudden screen of skidding tires, the thump, followed by more yelling. ‘You’re not going to pin this on me, man!’ The sirens and the lights. And the realization that their friend was gone.

This reimagining comes without warning, at odd times. Most often in the wee hours but sometimes, like today, in the bright afternoon.

All I can do is grieve some more. And sometimes write about it.

There are other times, when I think of Zach and the insights he might have. Some profound and some just funny. That’s when ‘I miss you’ really has meaning.

Zach’s thesis notes

Yesterday I alluded to the fact that, at the time of his death, Zach was close to finishing his doctoral thesis. I remember it had something to do with sex roles in co-ed recreational leagues.

I know he had made video recordings of games as part of his research. I’ve seen the files in listings but never looked at them for more than a few seconds. Today I was looking through a set of folders that were from his iPhone. One of them was called ‘Notes’. It was an even dozen text files with dates in their filenames. The dates were all from the week before his death.

I’m going to share some of these as I think the insights are wonderful. Without looking at the videos, I’m not sure what sport he is talking about. Judging from the context, it could be soccer or volleyball or even basketball. The cool thing is that it kind of doesn’t matter. I suspect – and I think he did too – that the insights would carry over into any mixed sex game.

Here’s a sample from the first one:

Males start in serve for both
Both team have alternating and positions that appear to be set
Sayre comes up from the back line in front of the girl and makes the play. She is weak – he is hiding her.
What is the rule with people running up from the back line and getting spikes? Check on this
Male overplay on one side exposes the other, which is then exploited by opponent – it imbalanced the court and the team couldn’t recover.
Sayre continually creeping up – he would say that he needs to, and he’s not exactly wrong. But what does it say about coed that it puts you in position where gender is so polarizing.

Game two a girl starts at serve for both
Both of these teams are hopeless. Does it even matter to try and assess gender when everyone is so out of their element?

‘Serve’ implies volleyball to me. Here’s the next one, later the same day:

Lesser teams celebrate each other a lot more.
These teams are also dreadful. The guys especially. The girls on gold are significantly better than the guys, and they control the ball more. It’s a refreshing reversal.

Now the next day:

I’ve seen at least one of these teams before. They are terrible.
Guy starts at serve for both
The other team has only two girls
Shitty guy player tries to make a hero play instead of bumping it and loses the point instead. This is a running theme.
. . .
Two guys on the white team are literally running around in front of their girls, including one where the girl was standing still and the guy kind of bodies her out of the way. Wow.
Now, that girl is playing more tentatively, and they just lost two straight points because of her lack of aggression.
. . .
Interesting to watch a girl talking up a guy on her team – a role reversal all the way down to the encouragement for having done a basic thing right.
Now the guy is overplaying in front of another girl. Ironic.

And another day:

Per usual, the really shitty guy overplays in front of a girl. Maybe it’s not a gender thing but a general sucking at sports thing
. . .
Second game when it’s close and late, the best girl made a couple overplays into her guys zone to keep him from screwing up the play.
I realize that i type that approvingly, even though if a guy did the same thing I’d take issue

Another:

Guy comes up from the back line, cuts in front of his girl twice on consecutive plays. Is literally ignoring her being there – no acknowledgment whatsoever. And in this case he won the point and is celebrated by his teammates for hos efforts (although the marginalized girl didnt say anything)
That is the quintessential anecdote for guys wanting to play an extra game and coed is that outlet, so they recruit female bodies to stand on the field for their own pleasure. If guys could play in unlimited men’s leagues, would coed numbers go down?
. . .
See a girl literally get down in basically the fetal position and her guy jump over her to make a play on the ball. Sounds crazy but it happened.

This sounds more like soccer:

Girl plays defense on a guy, steals the ball from him in normal fashion, and there is a chorus of congratulations and affirmation for her. The same level of affirmation does not occur when a guy does this same thing minutes later, despite the plays being quite similar.
Guy makes a normal play and trips up a girl, then instead of running on, stops for a second and looks to help her up
Guy runs from across the field to take an OOB, going past three girls and loudly announcing that he’ll take the ball. The girls don’t even look to do that. And then his throw in is a two foot toss to a guy. And then he runs back across the field.
Even during the championship team picture after the last game, the girls all group together, even though about half of them are bigger or the same size than the guys who are all grouped behind them. And the girls strike a stereotypical sorority squat.

And this is the last one in its entirety. It’s the first one I read and the one that made me want to write this post:

11/12/15, 6:35 PM

Guys play reckless when they low skilled. The low skilled over aggressive male is a unique and dangerous addition to coed teams. He has hero tendencies that lead him disproportionately into his female teammates. Oddly, i feel
Like i don’t see him crowding out his male teammates.
I’ve smiled more watching this game than i have any other. The VSA team is very genuine and positive. I’m rooting for them.
Other team confers on strategy before the third game and it makes me wonder about the thought process with gender alternating (as both teams are doing).
Is it really possible to assess strategy though? Or the merits of it?
Even on the VSA team…guy runs around, overplays, and screws up an easy point his girl was about to get. She looks at him disgustedly.

Two days later he was dead.

photo of Zach

We got a new printer which in today’s world includes scanning and copying capabilities. I had a stack of photos so I went through them to test the scanning process.

There really isn’t anything special about this photo. I’m not sure of the year or the place. The prints were marked with a December 2000 date so it had to be before that. Most likely in the summer in the foothills.

Earlier that year we had all gone to England for two weeks. It turned out to be a great trip. Zach was 11 and spent much of the time holding my hand as we walked around London. I remember thinking how precious that was and how unselfconcious he was doing it. I miss you son.

Eight

Eight years today since we lost Zach.

It’s still early afternoon here in California as I write this. At this time on this day eight years ago, Zach was riding his bike around the LSU tailgate parties visiting with friends.

It’s a measure of how far I’ve come that I had to look up the date to make sure I had the right one. I get the 14th and 15th confused for some reason. Zach was killed on the evening of the 14th. November 14, 2015. Many of us got on an airplane the next day and were in Baton Rouge less than 24 hours after it happened.

I had a resolution for a long time that I would not mark Zach’s death date but instead focus on his birth date. On the whole, that hasn’t worked very well. This year is the first time I haven’t been counting down the days to November 14th. I will take that as a good thing.

I’ve averaged about one or two crying jags over Zach per year in the last 5 or so years. Sometimes a photo of him comes up on the screen saver and I have to catch my breath.

No one else in the family has mentioned it and, aside from this post, I’m not going to bring it up.

Sepi and I came down to Mom’s today. We usually come on Sundays but because of a quirk in my schedule, my only option this week was today, a Tuesday. All the way down here I kept thinking the traffic was weird for a Sunday. Somehow, my confusion over the exact date of Zach’s death seems related. My work is very stressful and I think of retirement often. I also know Zach would have something interesting and useful to say about my work situation.

Diaries and legacies

I’ve kept journals – diaries if you will – for many years. I remember writing some diary-type things even in high school. I don’t know if I digitized that writing I could go look but if I did that I wouldn’t write this post. I know I purged a lot of paper from that time when I moved in with Sepi.

When I was about to become a father, I started writing a journal more seriously. I suppose I thought it would be something that my children could go back to and find interesting. In fact, all of my kids did read the accounts of the day of their birth. We had some interesting discussions of that back in the day.

Originally, there was a journal for each child but it eventually devolved into general journals of my life. I’ve gone back and looked at some of them over the years. It can be troublesome emotionally but I am glad I have the option to revisit those times if I want to.

Zach, as readers of this blog know, kept a diary regularly during his time in Baton Rouge. I have read some of it with the range of emotions one might expect. A couple of entries I have shared here. I have tried to be sensitive to the privacy of the people mentioned so that is a significant limiting factor.

I know Mom has journals. The ones I’ve seen are travel journals but I suspect there may be other more personal diaries. The travel journals take up about 6 feet of shelf space. When will I – or anyone else – read those? I haven’t asked Mom about what purpose she felt in writing originally. I think it will be the same as me: it’s just something I do. If it has value to later generations, then that’s a plus.

I used to do a lot of photography with an SLR camera. Now that I carry a different camera with me all the time – we generally call it a ‘phone’ – I take pictures of this or that but don’t spend any time thinking about the longer term. Why did I take pictures before? Why did I haul that big camera with me everywhere? I took pictures of people gathering to memorialize the event but I also took ‘art’ pictures. Why? Now that everything is digital I’ve saved everything carefully in my hard drive. Mom has another 6 feet of shelf space dedicated to photo albums. With few exceptions, they are untouched. When she passes and her house is to be sold, who will take them? Who will take the journals? Do they have value to her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren? People outside the family?

Getting back to journals, I hope that my children and grandchildren read my writing and feel that they can know me in a new way.

When Zach was killed, we were faced with the issue of what to do with his things. More importantly, our relationships with Zach were no longer dynamic. Memory became the only relationships we had. I see his journals and this blog as a way to keep a person alive. Of course, it’s not the same but it’s all we have.

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