I opened my laptop in a coffee shop. This once cliche activity seemed exotic after nearly two years of COVID-19. Adding to the novelty, I was in Tillamook, Oregon. My wife and I had just finished camping on the coast, and I decided to practice algorithms.

This trip west was part of a two-month road trip in the summer of 2021. Vaccinations were widely available and infection rates rapidly declining. I stopped wearing my mask religiously in public places. My wife and I love to road trip, an activity afforded by the academic calendar. One summer we drove to Alaska and spent a few weeks volunteering on a small farm. As I considered my transition to more traditional work hours and vacation, I realized I wouldn’t get ten weeks of vacation each year.

“Vacation”, though, is a deceptive term, and a more slippery concept. I’ve heard some balk at teachers’ low pay, usually in the K-12 realm, by saying “well, they get summers off.” And, perhaps this might be justified, if many didn’t work 60+ hour weeks the other 9 months of the year. I have found it might not be quite as intense, in my experience, for college instructors. However, the expectation, then, is that professors, to earn and maintain tenure, must research and publish during their “vacation.”

The result, for me, was that I felt constantly bombarded with a sense that I always might be working. I know some who thrive in such unstructured environments. They are time-gymnasts, elegantly moving from leisure to work in a given day. I, however, am more awkward — robotic, if you will. I learned that I enjoyed the structure that a workday provides. Alas, I am a child of the late-industrial era (and not so nascent digital era), forever synching my clock. This career change also forced me to confront my very field of study — English, and more specifically, poetry. Poetry certainly has structure, although simultaneously usually less and more than people commonly think. No, it doesn’t always have to rhyme. Yes, most English poetry before 1900 had a strict, yet flexible structure. Some writers and critics may bristle at me saying it, but there is certain algorithmic beauty in a Shakespearean sonnet.

There is a misnomer that those in English and the hard science are diametrically opposed. It’s usually expressed in the sentiment that those who go into math like concrete answers and objective facts. I am by no means an expert in the quantum world, but from my armchair reading of the science (and scientists), I know that dichotomy to be false. Annie Dillard offers the following analogy about the act of writing: “The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow.” An equally apt metaphor is the constant, ongoing uncertainty of the quantum world.

I was increasingly encountering the uncertainties of my own identity, or at least my conception of it. I never thought of myself as a “techy.” I thought myself more as a “creative”, as they have come to be known. What would happen to that side of me, if I became a professional programmer?