Letter from Boston

My Home Office

By MASAKO YAMADA

I had a few hours between classes one day, so I decided to go to Allston to buy a new carpet for my room. The wooden planks on my floor are in good condition, but the room isn't very warm and inviting with just the bare planks. So I selected a pretty mauve carpet that would almost cover the entire floor.

It was rolled up into a log two and a half meters long. I put it on my shoulder and wobbled my way to the Harvard Avenue "T" stop hoping to take it home before returning to school. When I tried to get on the "T" however, the driver yelled at me and said I couldn't carry such a big carpet on board.

I've carried things like bookshelves on the "T" before, but it turns out that there are rules regarding the size of objects that one can carry. The other passengers looked at me with sympathetic eyes as I walked away. Some of them told me I should try to sneak in the back door the next time.

You can probably imagine how ridiculous I looked trying to drag that carpet onto the "T." Since I was running late for class, I decided to take a cab home, instead. The problem is, the carpet was too large to fit into a regular cab, so I had to call in a special order for a station wagon. I ended up being very late for class, but I did finally get that carpet home, safe and sound. I even bought some big pillows so I could make myself comfortable on the carpet.

I read somewhere that Japanese people think of the floor as practical living space, while Westerners think of it as an extension of the outside ― a way to get from one place to another. For example, Japanese people sleep on the floor, but Westerners wear shoes inside their homes. I don't really care much about the sociological implications of this, but I do know that I've now doubled my effective living space just as a result of getting this new carpet.

I don't have a proper desk in my room, so whenever I study at home, I end up either lying on my bed or on the floor. The nice thing about having two such "study spaces" is that I can spread out all of the necessary materials from one subject on my bed and still have a free study area on the floor for another subject. I don't get papers mixed up this way.

The bad thing is that I often get too comfy and end up falling asleep among the mounds of papers. This is especially true if I use my CD remote control to put on some pleasant background music.

In my room I also have two personal computers, a Mac and a PC, with two sets of system software (English and Japanese) and two printers, a black and white laser printer and a color ink-jet. The computers are connected to the Internet through the phone line. This means I can even work on group research and programming projects from home.Being connected is especially good since the field in which I want to pursue research centers on computer programming. Personal computers aren't really designed for scientific research, because they tend to be too slow. But I can use the cutting-edge supercomputers at the physics department by calling up the BU computer system and connecting my home computers to those at school.

I also write all of my articles by computer and submit them to the Shukan ST via e-mail, so my comfy home-office is actually quite high-tech and functional. The bad part about being connected to the Net, though, is that I often waste hours browsing the World Wide Web or writing e-mail to my friends when I really ought to be studying.

Whenever I have a serious assignment or exam to study for, I try to go to my office at school. We physics students are lucky to have personal desks assigned us by the department. My office is especially pleasant, and I've added many amenities to make it an even more comfortable workplace. It's almost as if I've set up an "office home" to parallel my home office.

Of course, if I make it too comfortable, it'll defeat the whole purpose of going to the office. But it seems that in the lifestyle of a grad student, home and school can never be separated.

Shukan ST: Dec. 6, 1996

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