Animal Husbandry: An ACOD Story

I never pictured our departure from Princeton this way. After each completing a six-year long Ph.D. program, my wife and I drove out of that quiet little suburb at four o’clock in the morning, the car packed with our final belongings and our cat. It was also black Friday, the day after American Thanksgiving, and the strangeness of the world at that time of day was made even stranger by the full parking lots and line-ups at the malls and big-box retail stores. A quiet departure in the night marked the end of one chapter of our lives and the start of another, and that was what should have been occupying my thoughts on that dark drive along New Jersey’s Route 1. But instead my thoughts were almost four thousand kilometers away at a farm just outside of Vancouver, British Columbia.

Just weeks before that early morning drive, my Dad, Ron, had called to say that my Mom, Barb, had suddenly left him after a thirty-year marriage. The news was a complete shock to me for a number of reasons, one of them being that I had spent the previous weekend with them and neither had said a word to me about it. But as the news sunk in, I put the signs together: Ron’s haggard appearance and gloominess, Barb’s negative remarks about Vancouver and its inhabitants, and her long periods in the barn, where – I found out later – she was speaking with the new object of her affection, Martin, on her cell phone. Each for their own reasons, they decided together that that weekend was not the time to tell me or my brother, Aaron, and so I found out by telephone from Ron. Barb was not there.

The next few weeks are clear in my memory, but hazy, somehow, like they took place in another world, removed from space and time. Here I was, trying to wrap up my last days of one life, while at the same time coming to terms with the fact that – in a totally different way – the other home I had left years ago would not be there for me in the future, as I had always thought. Some of our furniture disappeared as we sold it on Craigslist in preparation for the move. As our apartment became increasingly empty, it all began to sink in: my relationship with my mother would never be the same – if I went to visit her, she would with someone other than my Dad. Even living so far away, I had celebrated Christmas with them and Aaron every year of my life. That would never happen again.

The effect of divorce on children is well known and openly discussed. The research has been done, parents agonize over the decision and, if they decide a divorce is necessary, send their kids to counselors if needed and –hopefully – realize that speaking badly about their ex damages the child as well. My wife’s parents divorced when she was a child and I assumed she would have some insight for me on what I was going through and what I could expect. This turned out not to be the case. Adult children of divorce, known as ACOD’s, have a totally different experience. While as adults they are somewhat more emotionally equipped to deal with the fall-out, the change in perspective can be just as jarring. As adults we are often expected to be supportive to one or both parties, and that leads to all manner of messy situations. But the biggest problem is that no one seems to realize how difficult or debilitating it can be. Over my final weeks in Princeton, many friends and people I looked up to (with the best of intentions) gave me different versions of the same advice: your parents have their own lives, it’s between them, it doesn’t involve you. I believed it after a while as it seemed logical enough, and focused on preparing for our departure and on my life and career.

But through all of this doubts nagged at me and occupied my thoughts, sometimes ceaselessly: if my Mom left to live with another man, would she receive alimony payments? How was that fair? What effect would it have on my Dad to know that he was paying for the happiness of two people that had screwed him over? What would happen to my Mom if this new relationship didn’t work out? Who was this man? I thought I knew my Mom well enough to think that she wouldn’t blow everything apart for a loser, but what kind of person knowingly professed undying love for a married woman he barely knew? And did I know my Mom? She had always seemed rational and careful in her decisions, and she worried about money, often needlessly, but always erring on the side of caution. This seemed out of character, to put it mildly.
A family friend explained it this way: her decision was based on emotions, and emotions aren’t rational. You can’t expect them to be. Moreover, they had a shared dream.

I should back up: although my Dad was a University professor and I grew up in the suburbs, my parents had moved to a hobby farm one year before I left for Princeton. My Mom had a veritable menagerie of animals: chickens, sheep, horses, dogs and cats. Her plan was to take all of them with her and start a new life as a “real” farmer with Martin, who lived not on a small hobby farm, but a sprawling sheep farm in a remote region of Manitoba. It has a romantic sound to it, but everyone who knew about the situation thought it was insane. And those “fucking sheep” (as my uncle called them) added to my doubts: she cared for these animals, and she had little options if she wanted to keep them and leave my Dad. It was Martin or nothing. They also had serious implications for my relationship with her: if she wanted to see me, she needed someone to look after them, because I was sure even at this early time that I wouldn’t be traveling to Manitoba.

As we packed up our car and headed out of Princeton, the situation in Vancouver continued to deteriorate. Ron’s clinical depression was obvious to anyone who spent more than about three seconds with him, and he was living in his sister’s basement without any clear plan of where to go. Aaron tried everything he could think of to try to convince Barb to reconsider the way she was making decisions, and then, after a particularly angry outburst, essentially cut off all contact with her. Aunts and uncles and family friends also exchanged angry words – at times it was as though everyone I knew in connection with my family was splitting into opposing camps. Amidst this I left the only other community I had ever called home and moved to Boston in the middle of winter. Not surprisingly, it was then that things got really bad.

* * *

The beginning of a “post-doc” – as my job was called – is a notoriously difficult period in the best of circumstances. One goes from being an expert in one area to a neophyte in another, and after a long graduate program, it can feel like going back to square one. Adjusting to life in Boston was difficult for all manner of additional reasons: the apartment which had seemed close to work was more than a forty minute walk, the transit system which had seemed so impressive was almost intolerably slow, and the free street parking which had attracted us to this particular area of town was basically non-existent. The noisy radiators kept us up at night and the walls were chipping paint. Of course, the weather was cold. It got dark early and light late. After a particularly ill-advised bike ride home from the lab on an evening when it was well below freezing, I chilled my lungs to such an extent that I was coughing up blood. I began to notice that my nose never ran anymore, and I constantly felt pressure behind my cheekbones. My lips never got enough chapstick, and I was constantly drinking water. During my first two months at my new job, I had three separate colds that caused me to miss work. I thought about the years ahead in this city and pictured myself slowly drying out, like a raison.

I was miserably unhappy. While at work, I couldn’t stop watching the clock. I would get home, make dinner, and go to bed, waking up after two or three hours of sleep. Wait until morning, and then do it all over again. I didn’t understand why; during graduate school my day-to-day life had been virtually identical from the way it was now, but my feelings about it couldn’t be more different. I might as well have been punching in.

It was during this period that I talked to Barb face-to-face for the first time. She traveled to visit us a couple of days after her lawyer had sent Ron a cease-and-desist barring him from all contact with her. We went through the motions of sight-seeing in Boston while she tried to explain to me that she was still the same caring and rational person she had always been, and that this was just another chapter that all of us were entering. She said that any meaningful relationship she had had with Ron was years gone, and that Martin had just given her the courage to seek a better life. My thoughts were that that was an awfully convenient way to look at it.

The evening after I took her to the airport to head back to Vancouver, Ron called me. He asked how things had gone and I told him that it had gone OK, figuring that the particulars were none of his business. He then began to insinuate that I wasn’t putting enough pressure on her to reconsider her decisions, the way Aaron had done. I replied that I deeply empathized with him, and I agreed with him that I thought what she was doing was wrong, but that there wasn’t a lot I could do about it that wouldn’t permanently damage my relationship with her. The conversation ended with him saying that he had thought he could count on my support but obviously he was mistaken.

I went to work the next day feeling worse than ever, and - instead of working - drafted an email explaining that if they couldn’t leave me out of the middle of their fight, that I would cut off all contact with both them. In my first serious mistake in handling the situation, I never sent it.

February came, and on the day the Olympics came to Vancouver I turned in my first major grant application. It was a Friday, and I resolved to take the weekend to re-group, and come back in Monday with a changed attitude. Without the grant hanging over my head, things would be different. When Monday came, and everything was the same, something broke inside me. In my second mistake of that year, a few weeks later, I explained to my advisor that although it was nothing to do with him, I had made a mistake in coming to his lab, and I would be leaving at the end of the month.

* * *

I didn’t have much trouble finding another job. I missed an opportunity, though, and I wish that things are turned out differently. I don’t blame my parents for what happened to me. I’m an adult and I know that I’m responsible for my own choices. But I wish Barb had considered that the gravity of her decision would impact the world around her, and not just herself and Ron. I wish that Ron had valued his relationship with my brother and me for its own sake, and not as way to exercise some quantum of control over what was happening to him. The decision to divorce is never an easy one and - whether children are young or grown - there are no easy answers. But I wish that no one assumed that what happened didn’t matter to me because I was grown up and out of the house.

But mostly I wish that I’d taken care of myself first. I should have staked out the grounds of what my role was, no matter how much difficult it might have been for them to hear. I wish I’d had the insight from other ACODs.

As adults, we have one distinct advantage over children of divorce: we can learn from the experience. I sit writing this on a weekend as we await the arrival of our first child. I love the mother of that child, my wife of four years, and my only unchanging friend between the three cities I’ve called home, more than my life, but I’m also old enough to know that romantic love is fleeting, and that holding onto it takes far, far more work than simply falling into it. For our child’s sake I can be sure that it’s worth the effort. A freak October snowstorm reminds us that winter will come again to Boston. A little older and with a little more wisdom, maybe this time will be different.

Corollary to an Infinite Universe

I'm very bothered by the idea that the Universe may be infinite.

If the Universe is infinite, there must be an infinite number of galaxies. And so some of those galaxies must be like ours: some very much like ours, some having stars just like our sun, some of those suns having planets just like our Earth. And on some of those not-Earths, there will be intelligent beings, some of them very like us. Some of them exactly like us. And so somewhere, there's another intelligent not-human, who is exactly like a human, named Casey, sitting and writing a blog post about this very topic. And there isn't one world like this, but an infinite number. But that's not what bothers me.

In addition to the planets exactly like ours, there also must be many that are sort of like ours. Like one's where I'm not a scientist, but an engineer, a doctor, a hockey player, or play some other sport never heard of on our planet. Where I'm not writing this in a blog post, but on Facebook, or Myspace, or Friendster for some reason. And there's an infinite number of combinations, each one existing an infinite number of times. But that's not what bother me either.

But then, due to the laws of probability, there must be planets that are much like ours, but where nothing that happens makes the slightest bit of sense. Events occur that are not impossible, but are so improbable so as to seem so. And this happens over and over and over again, to the point where effects don't logically follow from causes. And the intelligent beings that populate these planets, rather than being used to this, are continually surprised, and live their lives expecting life to make some kind of sense and continually frustrated that it doesn't. And this is what bother me.

Because I realize that maybe those world do exist, and that maybe this is one of them.

I've had it up to here with your rules!

We're rolling near to Day 100 of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and while the leak may have stopped, we continue to find out more and more bad news about how the whole thing was handled. First was the revelation that BP had Photoshopped several photos designed to show what a good job they were doing handling the spill. But the US government has also not done all it can. From the Financial Post:

Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. "Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour," Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

Unbelievably, the US turned down the offer. Why? Because the ships don't remove enough oil from the water.

The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

When ships in U.S. waters take in oil-contaminated water, they are forced to store it. As U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the official in charge of the clean-up operation, explained in a press briefing on June 11, "We have skimmed, to date, about 18 million gallons of oily water--the oil has to be decanted from that [and] our yield is usually somewhere around 10% or 15% on that." In other words, U.S. ships have mostly been removing water from the Gulf, requiring them to make up to 10 times as many trips to storage facilities where they off-load their oil-water mixture, an approach Koops calls "crazy."

This is typical of how things seem to work down here, when well-intentioned rules seem to go awry. Worse, nobody ever has the authority, or the courage, to take the side of reason and throw regulation to the wind. Didn't Star Trek teach us that even the Prime Directive could be violated if the circumstances called for it?

Richard Dawkins, Neville Chamberlain, and Tony Blair, part I

So I just finished reading "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. I know, I'm a little late, but in a way the book is even more meaningful now that there is some cultural infamy surrounding it. In this post I will give my thoughts on Dawkins central thesis: that God almost certainly does not exist.

The failure of most of Dawkins' critics to understand his arguments in many ways makes his case even stronger. We're all used to creationists mis-representing science, either out of ignorance or out of deliberate attempts to set up straw men that work in their favor, but it seems that sometimes this applies to agnostics, too [disclosure: I consider myself something between an atheist and an agnostic, and reading this book didn't change my opinions much].

The usual criticism one can use in defense of possibility that God might exist is the universe, after all, exists, and so why something instead of nothing? The most basic problem with this argument is that a universe in which God exists has exactly the same problem: where did God from? Dawkins points this out again and again, and yet some people don't seem to get it. At one point, Dawkins discusses the possibility of multiple universes (the multiverse) as one explanation for how we happen to inhabit a universe that is suited to develop life (this is a variation of the anthropic principle: how is it that the Earth is so perfectly suited for life? Well, if the Earth weren't suited for life, we wouldn't be here, but intelligent life might be on some other of the billions of planets that are suited for life, wondering exactly the same thing).

Robert Stewart, writing for the Journal of Evolutionary Philosophy (whatever that is), seems to be either an agnostic or an evolutionary theist, so we can leave fundamentalism out of it, for now. Yet he seems to employ the same tactic that many of them use:

Dawkins' explanation of the multiverse was short and vague, and his case for cosmological evolution required the reader to see connections between a loose collection of fuzzy concepts.

Throughout the book, he throws the term ‘natural selection’ around like it means the same thing as evolution. But evolution requires ‘random mutation’ as well as natural selection, and Dawkins' failure to address the question of how universes might randomly mutate spells doom for his probability argument.

Biological evolution is only possible because of the laws of nature that govern the universe and give organic molecules their remarkable properties. [emphasis mine] With cosmological evolution, however, there must be no external laws governing how universes behave, otherwise we would be back to square one trying to explain where these higher laws came from.

Every possible way in which a baby universe might be different from its parent would have to be determined by the internal laws that govern the parent. Every universe would have to contain the potential design of every other universe that ultimately descended from it. This would include the seeds for life in our universe.

This addresses one possible variant of the multiverse hypothesis in which new universes are born within black holes of existing universes, but it completely misses the point. The reason Dawkins refers again and again to natural selection is that it has the power to raise our consciousness of how other routes to existence are possible. Before Darwin, the fact extant species were created wasn't proven, it was assumed. The fact that modern physics hasn't explained the origin of the universe is not reason to evoke God as a reasonable alternative. So when Stewart says "Biological evolution is only possible because of the laws of nature that govern the universe and give organic molecules their remarkable properties," it becomes clear whats going on. If Stewart had been around in Darwin's time, he would have argued that biological evolution was impossible because we didn't at the time nature of the organic molecules and their remarkable properties. As we still don't really know really know what the universe is made of, the Darwin of physics is yet to be born. The answer is unlikely to be cosmological evolution, but a creator God that set the universe in motion is even less plausible.

Even so, one problem I had with the book that the supposed central thesis: that there is no God, was largely confined to one chapter. Most of the rest of the book is concerned with the danger that religion poses - I'll cover that in part II of this post.