Chin up, darling

I walk past the same street vendor every morning on my way to Oren's. I never stop; I get my coffee,  I sip, I walk back to work, head down, lipstick smearing on the white plastic lid.


Thursday, I stopped. I was parched, exhausted, and saw the cooler filled with slightly muddied Poland Spring bottles as an oasis.


I picked one out. "How much?"


The vendor, an older balding Indian man with a dark maroon shirt, had been in deep conversation with the guy who hands out flyers for Cafe Basil. He started, and looked down at me. "One and one quarter."


With coffee in hand, I tried to balance my open wallet and water bottle, and after some fishing around handed him the money.


I smiled weakly, and turned to walk away, and he called out: "So, where you from?"


I expected the question. It's a standard greeting, the response to which can make or break your inclusion into the diaspora. I still hadn't yet had a sip of my coffee. I looked down at the brown cup, looked back up at his brown face, and then resigned. "India."


(I usually respond, "New Jersey," just to be a brat, but my brain had not yet thawed [it was 89 degrees out].)


"Oh!" And then he stopped speaking English and told me he saw me walking every day, back and forth, to and fro.


I was a bit lost, and almost dizzy. "Yes, well, um, I understand Hindi perfectly, I just cannot speak it very well."


He stopped. "I was speaking in Gujarati," which is the language my mother speaks. I blanched, took a few sips of my coffee, and could finally understand what he was saying.


He told me where he was from, where he grew up, asked me where I was from, what my father did for a living, what I did for a living. When I explained my job, he asked to confirm: "So, you can help people?"


I took another sip. "Yes."


His eyes widened. "Do you have card?"


"Yes," and I proceeded to balance once again my water, open wallet, and with coffee in one hand, handed him a business card.


"You know," he said in Gujarati, "I see you everyday. Every day you walk by fast, and you never see anyone."


I nodded politely.


"Too many thoughts," he said in English, "sometimes, too many thoughts so you cannot see around you."


I stopped nodding. 


"Sometimes, try to look up. Nothing to see on ground." He smiled. "See the world."

therapy at Secaucus Junction

Secaucus Junction is the station at which all NJ Transit trains converge. Every morning, I join thousands of other commuters in the mezzanine, people teeming from all corners and spilling out of platform exits, all desperately trying (and failing) to beat the bottleneck that forms amid the finite number of automated turnstiles protecting access to the Manhattan bound trains.

This morning, right after a woman with a cane shoved me toward Sbarro, I briskly walked past the station attendant talking to a very petite woman wearing Louboutins. I was about to scan my ticket when I heard, "I know, I know, let it out sweetheart. You're fine. I'm here."

I turned back to see the station attendant stroking the woman's back, and the woman's face streaked with tears and mascara. Time stopped for them, and the two women were in an elusive nimbus, untouched by frenzied commuters.

The woman smiled bleakly back at the station attendant, nodded, regained what little strength she had left, and then walked towards the turnstile.

The station attendant yelled to her as she walked away: "Remember, honey, you're beautiful."

A mother with an infant child (most likely a Cabbage Patch Kid wrapped in a snuggie) elbowed me in the ribs and I lost sight of the woman in Louboutins and the station attendant, both of whom seemed to have vanished.

the Higgs boson: Man is Matter, and now we know why

On July 4, 2012, while my friends and I joined the rest of the country in toasting to America, to summer, to veggie chips, physicists across the ocean at CERN uncovered the final clue that could potentially solve the mystery of the universe. The Higgs boson, a fundamental particle whose existence was posited by Peter Higgs and his team to explain the diversity of existence, was (most likely) discovered by two teams of persistent physicists this past Wednesday. The New York Times' piece on the breakthrough provides more detail.


The powerful implications of the (almost) confirmed existence of the Higgs boson are a bit difficult to understand without a keen understanding of physics, of outer space, and of the Higgs' position in both fields (or without a very gifted and patient college science professor, as I was fortunate to have).


Essentially, this specific particle explains the fundamental question of why the universe is as it is, not solely how or what. Third grade science has taught us that we are surrounded by, and are part of, "matter," which is simply, "things." But we were never taught why these "things" came into being. Why is that that an atom can be of various weights, that oxygen is in vapor form, that humans have opposable thumbs? The immediate responses to those questions are much like responses our parents would provide to us as children, when we asked the fundamental questions of our childhood.

Daddy, why is my hair brown?

Because your mother and I have brown hair.

But why do I have to have the same hair color as you and Mommy?

 Just because.

In the same way, atoms of different isotopes can be different weights because they are composed of different numbers of neutrons, oxygen is in vapor form because at standard pressure its molecules bind as a gas, and humans have opposable thumbs because we evolved from primates. And why does all of that happen? Just because (well, and some more profound scientific rational, but for the sake of example, work with me).


However, there is an underlying structure, a gorgeous rhythm that pervades the seeming arbitrary nature of the universe.


It's cooler than Jesus.


In 1964, Peter Higgs theorized a mechanism (later dubbed the Higgs Mechanism) by which particles, everything in the universe is given mass. Essentially, there is an invisible force, a field that permeates the universe. It is the "quantum excitation," or breaks in the symmetry of this field that give rise to the seeming arbitrary distribution of mass in matter all around us, within us. It's a flaw. It's a screw up. The entire universe is a series of flaws, snowballing screw ups, exponentially expanding, creating, evolving. 


The Higgs boson explains why there was even a Big Bang in the first place. There was no man on the moon beating pots and pans, no looming head in the sky grinding his teeth. It was an arbitrary excitation of a point in this field that propelled into creation our unique universe. Though random, arbitrary, it was a flaw fundamental to the existence of the universe.


I'm not conventionally religious. I can't sit cross legged because of my bad knee and houses of worship make me queasy. However, the grand implications of this flaw are awe-inspiring. This singular "error," the quantum break in an otherwise beautiful symmetry, could have easily occurred on another point in the field, could have easily created a completely different universe, or potentially no universe, an existence of which we would not be a part. The specific excitation in the particular point on the field put in motion the creation of the universe as we know it, the creation of Earth, the creation of humanity.


I'm not sure what is God, and I don't think I'll ever be sure what people mean when they refer to God. The only certitude is that humanity, life, the entire universe is bound by a single, fundamental flaw, an essential asymmetry that shapes, creates, and renders mass to "things" and meaning to life.


I guess this just means we're all just a bunch of screw ups, but we're in it together, and for the long haul. Amen.