✡ Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure – Rainier Maria Rilke
It seems strange to write a page like this on my blog as this whole entire thing is about my travels both physical and existential through life. I suppose I can try to give a brief overview of who I am at this time. Let me give it a go.
I’ll start with some basic communication information:
- my Google Plus Profile
- my LinkedIn Profile
- AIM/YIM – dsrptvpatrnmatrl
- Obviously, this is my blog
- Twitter is @ntableman
As far as where I live and where I come from. I live in Northern New Jersey, right outside of NYC. In fact I can see the Empire State Building each morning as I leave my home to catch the bus to work. I grew up in essentially three places, Greenville, ME, Bangor, ME and Brunswick, ME. Greenville is generally considered the ancestral homeland of the Maine branch of the Tableman family as it is the one place that has been in my family since all of us can recall. It is spectacularly beautiful and sits on the side of Moose Head Lake. My father is a retired/semi-practicing orthodontist in Bangor where he lives today. I graduated from Brunswick High School. A fun fact is that each of the three children in my family went to different high schools.
In many ways we personify the wandering Jews except I have lived in NYC area for 16 years, my brother has been in LA for what must be over 11 and my sister is the only one that seems to still wander and is right now in Vancouver, BC.
I left Maine to go to a small liberal arts school that couldn’t meet the science demands I was looking for. I really should have attended a larger university. So I did! After one year I returned to Maine to attend UMaine. I got into much more prestigious universities as a transfer student, but I deiced to stay at UMaine because I liked the professors, the environment, and Maine is a pretty good place to study Marine Zoology.
I did my honors work on Limulus polyphemus (one of my publications) in conjunction with one of my bestest pals, Anders Green, who is an electrical engineer and lives in NC now. I had a lot of fun in college, but was focused on a goal.
My goal was rewarded when I entered Columbia University in the department of Biological Science in the College of Arts and Sciences to study the neuroscience of olfaction. It is not over stating the situation when I say that I hated it. I wish I had not be sold a bad load of goods by a school with as many structural problems as Columbia. I basically was bowled over by the prestige factor. I was going to study under a man who studied under the man who found out how vision worked at a very molecular level. In the sciences pedigrees like this matter. Two of the labs I worked in have go on to win Nobel prizes. I would say that anyone who is thinking of going to graduate school look into some key things that I will not get into here, but I will leave it with the make up of tenured professors vs. non, the make up of degrees granted vs. drop outs, and national origin of the majority of students.
After having a class with one of the Nobel winners who was particularly disinterested in teaching I decided to make my way on my own. True to form Columbia only awarded PhD’s making all my hard work amount to not much in the paperwork department. What came to pass was that my love of working with technology found me smack in the middle of the .com boom.
You can read about most of my working life on my resume page.
This is already getting long and where I left off above puts you right in the midst of when I started writing my ramblings online. SO! you want to know more, well there are years worth of ramblings to read.
I suppose if I wanted to summarize some of what I am up to on a goodly basis…here you go:
- I have been driving Ducati’s for 12 years and was even in one of their advertising campaigns. You can read all about that mess by using the tag Ducati.
- I have a dog, Ellie, duh
- You can check out my fish tank by clicking on aquaDRAMA above. There is a listing of the inhabitants and live video feed from the side of my tank.
- I enjoy travel immensely. Right now I am in a little bit of a place where I am not that interested in large sections of Europe, especially Italy and France, but I am thinking over North Africa when it settles down and the more developed parts of Asia. I recently was in India and Iceland.
- I live in the first LEED certified residential apartment building in NJ
- I really like WNYC and NPR, listening to them hours a day on the radio and via podcasts
- Pretty crazed about rock climbing, at NJ Rock most night of the week, sometimes at BKB, climb up in NYS, local in NJ, and up in Maine. Looking to setup some more travel climbs next summer.
Oh and one other area I would like to highlight is I am voracious reader. I read dozens of magazines a week from Foreign Affairs Quarterly to The Economist. I tend not to read fiction but instead read books on science, religion, philosophy, and history. Some of my current reading obsessions are:
- Cross roads of Judaism and Buddhism
- The notion of sovereignty and how it shaped history
- Chassidic theology and philosophy – Sefat Emet, etc…
- Anything about artist in exhibits that I see – I buy books that I can read and look at the style and evolution of artists. I enjoy thinking about their creative process.
Ok, this is incredibly long and much much much more than I thought I would write in this spot, but I did promise myself that this quarter would be the time I spent to clean up this mess of a blog, so there! Done!
Photos of Nathan
In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours. – Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand