Aaron Robert Parsons
It was long overdue, but I finally updated this page. If you are interested in the old me, take a look.
But let's take it from the top. I'm Aaron Parsons, age 27, male, from
Rangely, Colorado, who, as the result of
an unlikely series of events, has ended up in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The first,
and possibly most unlikely of those events was leaving Rangely. You see, people
from tiny towns in the middle of deserts don't just up and leave. And if they
do, they don't go far. But somehow I managed to convince someone on an
admissions committee at Harvard that
building stonehenge out of bails of hay was clever,
and I left for Boston that fall. A flurry of faux pas's ensued.
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| Inescapable Rangely, in the middle of the desert. | Phil Matchett and me, showing off our faux pas's (millipedes). |
I distinctly remember sitting at a crowded dining hall table describing the
incredibly humorous time my friend Cole Johnson and I were golfing, and a
prairie dog popped out of a hole directly in front of Cole, and how he and the
prairie dog stared an each other in gaping astonishment for an endless moment
before Cole made history as the only guy to ever golf a prairie dog with a 9
iron. This story is already a legend in Rangely. However, where I expected
to hear fits of laughter, I heard only silence. I came out of my reverie to
the horrified stares of everyone at the table.
I was met with a similar reaction when, one bright spring morning, I
attempted to capture one of the yard squirrels. My elaborate plan involved a
recycling bin, a length of rope, and a stale bagel, and I had made concessions
to the delicate sensibilities of city-folk by choosing 7 a.m. as my zero hour.
However, inches from victory, I was thwarted by the appearance of the police,
who had evidently been tipped off by a concerned citizen. I was curtly
informed of my rights, the rights of the squirrels, and interrogated at length
about my motives. I informed them that I was, in fact, not going to put the
squirrel in a cage I found, break into a girl's room, and release the squirrel
there, but rather, I was merely testing the plausibility of capturing a rodent
with such a cartoonish trap. I was eventually released under strict orders
to never get caught doing this again. I complied, but with a deep-seeded
resentment for the squirrel, and all squirrels, whose boring, chubby lives
were thus insulated from the outside world.
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| Devon Horntvedt, Reid Parsons (my brother), and me, wallowing in the mud of hickdom as kids. | Brian Lambert and me wrestling in the mud of hickdom as high school seniors. |
Eventually, I learned that as a member of a subculture known most simply as "hickdom", there was a side of me which had to be censored. My eventual seduction of Sarah Spiegel is probably the greatest testament to the degree of success I experienced. No doubt her experiences as a wrestler must have to some extent inured her to my peculiarites, since (and as a wrestler myself, I can attest to this) wrestlers are even more sub-cultural than hicks. However, as a native Bostonian (actually Brooklinean, but that only reinforces my point), Sarah's exposure to culture far exceeded my own, and is still evidenced by such curious behaviours as overlooking meat as a consumable and bearing little to no hostility toward small mammals.
It was inevitable that I would blow my cover. On the 6th morning of a 7 day canoe trip on the Green River in southern Utah, my father and I approached our camp to discover that a squirrel was ravaging our stores. Upon our arrival, the coward retreated to the dense grove of willows immediately up the hill from us, where he remained concealed, except for that tiny head of his, peering out from behind a trunk. He was obviously waiting only for us to leave to resume his reign of terror. Sarah sat at the bottom of the hill, removing her shoes. I removed a rock from the ground, and in one fateful moment, I cast it vaguely in the direction of the enemy. It was a one-in-a-million shot, and was not even attempted with feeling. But as Terry Pratchett observes in Men at Arms, though a one-in-999,999 chance will never come through, a one-in-a-million chance has to happen. And it did.
The fact that all of nature was conspiring against me at that moment was
just made all the more clear when the squirrel rolled all the way down the
hill, through the willows, directly onto Sarah's newly removed shoes, and
proceeded to bleed all over them. Sarah, naturally, ran up the valley in a
retreating chorus of "Oh my God, oh my God, ...", while I was left staring in
utter disbelief at the concequences of that one idly-thrown rock. The seconds
dragged on. "Well," my aunt Amy said, "you better get that cleaned up before
she comes back and sees it again." Amy, it is clear, did not grow up in a
city. She added, with a smile, "All over her shoes, too."
At the beginning of the canoe trip, a man named Dirk issued us our groover
(an ammo-box with a toilet seat, or if you want to know the origin of the word
"groover", without one). In his good natured explanation of the policy of
only putting 2 things in the groover, we all recalled his especially vivid
illustration: "I don't care if a squirrel falls in there and dies, you've
gotta fish him out." So as I was making my way past the goover to the sand
bar where I was going to bury my ill-fated friend, my father calls out with a
smile, "Hey, don't put him in the groover." Obviously, my father did not
grow up in a city either.
As I was returning to camp, from behind a rock, I heard a whisper, "Aaron,
is that you?" It was Sarah. As she had found out, by about noon, desert sand
is entirely unwalkable without shoes, and hers, as you recall, were not on her
feet. So to mitigate the pain, she had hastily removed her shirt to stand on.
Lucky for me, this situation forced Sarah to resume communication with me, and
by allowing me to rescue her, provided me with an opportunity to, in some small
way, make up for the squirrel.
So Sarah, unexpectedly, forgave me, my score with the squirrels was settled, and we decided to move in together (Sarah and I, not the squirrels). In 2005, we got married. Sarah went to Boalt Hall law school and I am in a Ph.D. program in astronomy at Berkeley. Recently, we have moved to Puerto Rico where Sarah clerks for Judge Fuste and I am continuing my Ph.D. remotely while working at Arecibo Observatory.
My research involves designing general-purpose signal processing instruments for radio astronomy, and in particular using an antenna array I am helping build in Western Australia to detect the Epoch of Reionization when the all the photons from all the stars and galaxies in the universe finally overwhelmed all the neutral hydrogen in the universe. On the instrumentation side, I work with Dan Werthimer (one of the architects of SETI@home) as a member of the Center for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER) , and on the science side, I work with Don Backer (who until recently held the record for discovering the fastest spinning pulsar) on the Precision Array for Probing the Epoch of Reionization (PAPER).
And finally, Sarah and I are expecting a little one, March 15th, 2008.