Making like a yo-yo...

It's way too early in the morning. I woke up around 5 am and could not fall asleep again...so here I am, back at the keyboard. If all goes according to plan, I'll be back home in a little over 15 hours.

By all accounts, it's been a very unusual trip. Just my visiting my old high school was enough to make this visit unique. Whenever the urge had struck during past visits, I'd been reluctant to indulge my curiosity, as several similar attempts to revisit old haunts had ended disappointingly, supporting Tom Wolfe's assertion that you can't go home again.

The visit itself did not ressurrect any memories, really. Then again, nothing particularly memorable happened in the two years I attended the school. The building is largely the same, and all traces of my graduating class have been relegated to a small corner, where the names of some classmates who won some national scholarship are mounted on a board.

The kids - and I spoke to about six classes representing a broad range of grades - seemed more or less normal, although it was one of those "school spirit" days where it's apparently okay to show up with green goop on your face and tee shirts proclaiming "Falcons rule!" and similar sentiments. The language department chairman thought my visit was ideally timed, as the day was one in which purely academic goals had already been relegated to second place.

I have no idea whether my words struck home, but if the questions were any indication, then at least I connected with the kids and held their attention. I was gratified to see, by the way, that besides the traditional French and Spanish offerings, the school also now teaches Italian, Japanese, and is resurrecting Latin. I also found out that my old nemesis, Mrs. V., who was chairman in her day as well as teacher of French, had passed away recently. This was told to me by a staff member who had started working with her shortly after I departed the school for bigger and better things. The news saddened me.

Another high point of the trip was a stop at a local Barnes & Noble bookstore, where I stumbled across a display of several new (to me) books on cryptography. I picked up a book by David Kahn on the WW II German Enigma machine, and a recent fiction work called Cryptonomicon, which I've heard a lot of good things about. Seeing as how I pretty much don't have the time to visit my local Barnes & Noble at home, this visit turned out to be very serendipitous.

I have also done a lot of thinking about my future, but there's not much residue from that exercise, as yet. The basic question reduces to the classic: Do I follow my heart and risk failure, or do I opt for a security that is very likely illusory at best? Ever the romantic, I am inclined to follow the former path, but there are a number of complicating factors to consider, not the least of which is the fact that I'm not alone in this. The good news is that I have not yet factored in any positive effects from pursuing several options that I've noted down, but have not been able to investigate these past couple of days.

But I am not prepared to set all this down here; not now. Not yet.

Cheers...