Matthew Zimmerman

On Tuesday I successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation, and am now a doctor (of philosophy in biophysics, so I'm afraid I can't write you prescriptions). Those of you who feel that me finally finishing my degree after nearly a decade is a sign of the apocalypse (and at points I counted myself among your number) should make your way to the bomb shelters. My public seminar and defense went well, and I only have a few revisions I need to make.

Later that night, I found that my girlfriend Bonnie had thrown together a surprise graduation party for me in the church basement, helped by many other people. I was completely surprised. I kept saying I've never felt so smart and so dumb in the same day. Many of my friends, coworkers, and family were there, and some traveled a long way to be there. Leslie, a friend of Bonnie's and mine, put up some pictures on her blog.

Thank you to everyone who came, and thanks to those who couldn't make it but passed along good wishes. Extra thanks to my sister Suzanne, who put together a very nice (albeit mildly embarrassing) slide show and a wonderful scrapbook for me, my family for driving such a long way in a such a short time to be there the whole day, and to Leslie and Renita for helping to prepare the party and taking wonderful pictures. And of course, enormous thanks to my lovely Bonnie, who deviously masterminded the whole thing. I love all of you.

This has been a very long journey, and I'm so happy and relieved (and in some ways, a little sad) that it is over. I am so grateful for all of you who have walked with me at various phases of the trip. I couldn't have done it without you.

In case you may be concerned that I have fallen off the face of the earth, I've been working on my Ph.D. dissertation. But I am emerging from my cocoon now, as yesterday I turned in my dissertation to my committee. (Yes, this has been a long time in coming-- cough, cough, nine years, cough...)

My defense is scheduled for Tuesday, September 18, 2007 at 1:00 PM. I will give an hour-long public presentation of my research, then my advisor and the four other faculty on my committee will shepherd everyone else out of the room for a closed-door oral examination. If all goes well, they will sign my cover page and I will be a doctor. (No, not that kind of doctor.)

The presentation is open to the public (if you are in Charlottesville, it will be held in the large conference room on the fourth floor of Jordan Hall) but I suspect that unless you're a structural biologist, you would find it pretty dull. There will be some sort of celebration to take place that week, so stay tuned.

I wrote my last "A Year In The Life" column for the Wesley Word, the Alumni newsletter for the Wesley Foundation, and I must say I think it's a good one. As not to steal their thunder, I'm not going to reprint it here until the newsletter comes out.

Incidentally, it's much, much easier to write about a trip to Beijing, which is what the last one was about, then about writing my dissertation, which is what this one (and my entire life at the moment!) is about. Just sayin'.

Today has been a wonderful day, chiefly because my nephew Micah Smedberg was born at 1:33 PM this afternoon. He's 8 lb., 3 oz. and 21 inches tall, and I'm told that both he and my sister Suzanne are doing well. I have not seen him yet, as they're several hours away from here, but I'm going to get up to Pennsylvania this weekend and take lots of pictures.

Little Micah has three older sisters, and accordingly I've been having pronoun troubles (I'm so used to using "she" for the babies). I'm going to have to get used to the the phrase "my baby nieces and nephew" instead of "my baby nieces". It will be hard, I know. Congratulations to Suzanne and Ben and the rest of the family!

Okay, so I'm good at planning, not so good at followthrough. I've actually been more productive in terms of writing than I have been in a long time, but it's papers for work. Writing long technical treatises on the molecular mechanisms of nucleotidases is a very different kind of writing than the kind of introduction to my work I hoped to do here, so that project lost steam. I did drink most of the beers of the world, and write essays about them, but I hoped to put non-beer-related posts in between them lest you think I devoted my summer to alcoholism. (I did not.)

Anyway, the update is that next Saturday, 19 August, I will be moving across town to what we informally call the Hinton House, next door to Hinton Ave. UMC. I'll be living with Andrew Marshall, Jimbo Hughes, and Brian Vaughan. The address is:

513 Rialto St. Charlottesville, VA 22902

We also have a land line, but in the interests of some privacy I'd rather not put the number here. I'll probably be sending out an email to everyone I've ever met with complete contact information pretty soon. I will have the same cell number, which I'd like to use as my primary phone.

The plea for help: If you live in Charlottesville, or can be in town next weekend, I would greatly appreciate your help loading and unloading the truck at 2:00 PM on Saturday, 19 August. (Yes, I do know that that is student move-in day, but both the old place and the new place are a few miles away from the University, so I think we can avoid the traffic.) Depending on how many folks show up, I hope we can get everything loaded and unloaded in a few hours, and then we'll either fire up the grill and have a little picnic or order some pizza, whatever people prefer. If I were mean, I'd also remind you that I've helped move many of you over the years, and you owe me. But I'm not mean, so I'm not going to say that. :) If you can help, please send me an email or give me a call on the cell, so that I know you're coming.

Update at 10:00 AM, 16 Aug: The address is Rialto St., not Rialto Rd. Corrected.

While we're talking about March birthdays, there is another I must reluctantly mention. It so happens that today is my birthday, and even worse, my age is one evenly divisible by 10. If you're thinking 20, you're very sweet, but wrong.

Thanks so much for your kind wishes, especially to my friends in northern VA who threw me a party last weekend. It makes the feeling of mild depression I'm sure to have all day just a little better.

My sister Suzanne finally had her baby yesterday afternoon. Abigail Porter Smedberg was born March 7th at 3:38 PM, and weighed 8 lbs., 1 oz. (Kids in our family come big.) This is her third daughter (and my third niece), after Ellie, who's now 21 months old, and Claire, who's about 11 months. Here's a picture I shamelessly stole from Abby's webpage:

My brother-in-law Benjamin has the whole story here, with some more pictures.

Oh, and by the way, there may be a few of you out there whom I forgot to tell that Suzanne was going to have another baby, so, um, sorry. Suzanne was about to have a baby. In my defense, she's been having them slightly more frequently than I've been speaking with some of you.

Feh.

As I write this, I am hurtling in a giant metal tube 31,000 feet above the state of Indiana. I want bonus points for blogging on an airplane. Not that people keep score or anything, but if they did, I want the extra credit, okay?

I used to hate to fly. Every minor shake and shimmy of turbulence, every acceleration in the pit of my stomach convinced me that the flight would end in a plummeting fireball, not a smooth landing. Oh sure, people love to quote statistics about how air travel is safer than cars or trains or walking or, say, getting out of the bathtub, but here's the thing. You crash your car, and there's a decent chance you'll survive. But when you crash in a plane, the question is less about survival and more about how many burnt, charred pieces you'll wind up in.

(We just flew over Cincinnati. I don't know what they've been doing down there, but there's a fair amount of turbulence over their city. That's not very nice, Cincinnati. Stop it.)

But now, I just don't care, more by sheer repetition than anything else. For the last few years in grad school, my advisor has sent me out for data collection and meetings about six times a year, and the frequent trips have beaten the fear out of me. I'm much more likely to be anxious about the length of the security screening line than whether I'm going to die in a fiery crash. Apparently familiarity can breed indifference as well as than contempt. Who knew?

Well, it has been two months since I announced I would write every day, and since that time, I posted a grand total of three blog posts. (So I was little off.) Part of the problem is that I am often moved to write about topics I decide are too personal to post here. My name's in big green letters at the top of this page, and I'm paranoid about the consequences of what could happen if I were to post the wrong piece of private information in this space. So I err on the side of caution, probably too far. As a result, all that you get are occasional posts about novelty carols in half-dead languages and double entendres about jazz singers. (Please forgive me for the Norah Jones thing, by the way.)

One of these personal stories is that my family conspired together to give me a laptop, a Dell Inspiron, for Christmas. I'm writing this post on it right now. I plan to finish my Ph.D. work this year, and as you might guess, this requires a fair amount of writing: papers, presentations, dissertations. I have a computer at home and use another computer regularly in the lab, but they differ in operating systems, software installed, and general capabilities. I no longer have to worry about a lot of problems I would have had transferring data and converting files, and now I can get out of the house and work if I have to. (God bless Panera's wireless access.) This was an extraordinary gift, and I am honored by it.

To be honest, I feel truly blessed to have Mom, Dad, Ben, and Suz in my life, computer or no computer. If it weren't for their love and support, I wouldn't have made it here in grad school as far as I have. More times than I can count, a call or two to Pennsylvania has given me the strength I need to keep going. So if I haven't made it clear before, folks, thank you. I love you guys.