Publicists? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Publicists.

I am a tastemaker.

In first grade, I brought my Phantom of the Opera coffee table book for show and tell, and by the next month, everyone else had one.  In second grade, my name for a four square move where you bounce the ball off your buttocks (the “bouncy poo”) entered the schoolyard lexicon.  In third through sixth grade, my peers studied every word I spoke and action I took that that they might ostracize me more effectively.

While my cultural prescience and innate understanding of The Hip has always been self-evident, leave it to one group to recognize the extent of my sway: Cirque du Soleil.

Physics Prom

Recently, I dated a theoretical physicist, an experience I would recommend to anyone, particularly those who watch The Big Bang Theory.  It was educational not only in an academic sense—my knowledge of math and science doubled—but also in an anthropological one.  For, during a period of two months, I got to run alongside physicists, to study them in their native habitat, and, a privilege afforded few others, to attend Physicist Prom.

Like gazelles or other species who suffer depredation, theoretical physicists travel in packs and establish communities where the resources they need (whiteboards, Trader Joes) are close at hand, and the annoyances they’d eschew (civilization) are far away.  The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey provides just such an environment.