backing-up into computers, Marta Van Leuven, finishing college
        It was during the time of this dream that i felt as if i hit the bottom of something, not in a depressive way but simply coming up empty and more pliable, more malleable than i had felt in a long time. It was in this bottomed-out state that i posed the age-old question:   "What makes money? Computers make money, but i woodn't be any good at that -- they're too complicated for me." Nonetheless i drove over to UC Berzerkeley one morning to scope out their computer science program. i found that it was heavily impacted with a lot of people already waiting to get in.
        On the way back to Bolinas i stopped at College of Marin in Kentfield to see what i cood pick up. Walking around i fell into conversation with a very vibrant woman who was a computer instructor named Nancy Zamfirescu. She encouraged me to sign up for a class she taught on Fortran that was soon to begin. In comparison to the "off limits" feel of UCB, this situation was pleasantly inviting and i decided to give it a try. It was one of the best decisions i ever made.
        From that spring semester thru December, 1985 when i graduated from UC Santa Cruz, Nancy turned out to be one of the most inspired and gifted teachers i ever had learning about the world of computation and logic. She possessed that rare gift of bebembering what it was like not to know the course material or the discipline being taught and truly hear the questions posed by students on the level where the student was at and was coming from. i learned so much in that one course on programming Fortran and it was because of her animated, excited, clear presentations and explications of the subject matter. Initially i was not expecting to necessarily find the field particularly interesting, but within about six weeks i began to feel this stuff was actually fun!
        It was in a different class that semester that i met another life-long friend in Marta Van Leuven. Legally blind, she cood still see three degrees out of one eye and was herself setting out to learn about computers at the same time as i. We became very close that spring and summer. By her own living and being Marta has taught me worlds about the tenacity and indomitable nature of the human spirit. She was fully sighted until her mid-teens when she suffered an almost complete loss of sight. In the later eighties her remaining vision dissipated entirely. Despite such unimaginable-by-me challenges she graduated last spring in a masters program at Dominican College in Marin with a degree in counseling psychology as part of her goal of becoming a fully qualified Marriage, Family and Child Counselor. She is now completing the latter half of her 3,000 hours training, racking up the hours needed as an intern therapist to fulfill those prerequisites for her MFCC license.
        Marta's living example of pursuing her dreams despite personal adversity is unparalleled amongst all the friends i've met and know. In my teens and twenties i experienced a deep sense of hopelessness about life. Depressed, i felt as if i was backing-up into the future with eyes fixed on the past, unable to let go of the yearning for the sense of paradise that was childhood. This was in large part the result of my not being able to come to terms with the fact of my parents divorce;   from that time forward i was determined to not accept what had happened and not participate in the changed psychic as well as physical landscape. Such inward obdurateness extracted a heavy toll.
        But during that winter and spring with Marta i witnessed a dimension of melancoly i'd never even imagined prior to that point in my own journey. There was a night that spring when we were lying in bed in the dark and she was expressing such a sense of despair and hopelessness as i have never known inwardly. She was sharing a very painful part of her own journey that had as its recurring motif the message that this affliction was not going to get better or "go away" no matter how much she endeavored to improve her own condition. There was a similarity here with my own challenge of having to come to terms with one's own experience of reality and accept the fact of what is, but the degree and depth of her hardship seemed infinitely more overwhelming than what i was grappling with.
        i hold Marta's loving friendship in the highest esteem and regard as one of my own richest life's blessings. She has given me a rare understanding and appreciation of just how much one can change the locality and even the dimensional basis of one's own psychic landscape. Her spirit is a beacon that always serves to re-mind me of and re-align me with my own ineffable gifts of creatively responding to life's teachings and an "urge to health" i have been blessed with since birth.
        By springtime i felt i had finally found something i cood actually answer the what shall i do to make money? riddle with and truly apply myself to. i set about tendering applications to Cal State San Francisco and Sacramento. i'd given up on UCB or Davis as they both had very impacted programs. In March Steve suggested i apply to UC Santa Cruz which i hadn't thought of. i was accepted in May and began classes that fall. Time acceleration commenced up to December 1985 when i graduated with a BA in Computer and Information Science.
        i had another long conversation with Ok on the blower after my decision to pursue a degree in computers. He was very excited and felt my own musical inclinations wood serve me well in the study of logic and programming. i had found the programming assignments in Nancy's class to be surprisingly engaging. i came to appreciate them as puzzles, the solution for which required an understanding of what operations needed to be performed in order to arrive at "the answer".
        Over time i came to see that virtually everything about computers and programming is based on counting (which is also a fundamental ingredient in Music). Whether it's done iteratively or conditionally, the flow of logic is determined by the state of the numerous variables which, in one form or another, possess values that can be manipulated and compared on an ordinal basis.
        During the 28 months at UCSC i found people began to respond to me as a person more and more in the way i wanted to be inside my own self as well as the way i wanted to be seen by others. It was a rich time of personal social development in that unique social environment that is [ grade / high / university ] "skool." Such a socially engaging venue rarely is as present or available in any community of people one encounters after "graduation" into the skool of working life. But there is a "skool of life" we are all ways a part of no matter what physical age we are counted as.
        During the final year i did a senior thesis on creating a fractal surface generator based on Loren Carpenter's triangle subdivision algorithm. i had found computer graphics, otherwise known as "making pretty pictures", to be the most interesting of my studies. Together with skool mate and friend Giulia Pagallo, we had implemented a 3D software library as part of the intro to graphics class. With Giulia's help i had great fun employing this library to fashion images that had the appearance of naturally occurring landscapes. The title of the thesis paper was Using Fractal Geometry as a Stochastic Terrain Model to Generate Fractal Landscapes. Fractal derives from the latin word fractus meaning rough and broken-up. The generation of the scene's irregular shapes was accomplished with random as well as deterministic data which gave them the appearance of natural terrain.
        These daze fractals are much more commonplace than they were eleven years ago. At that time i found the exploration of fractal geometry to be very curious and compelling. Most people finished the CIS program by taking a comprehensive exam. This seemed about as boring a way as i cood imagine to finish skool and the idea of a senior thesis as an alternative to that was something i had wanted to pursue since arriving in September, 1983. i also knew the beauty and distinctiveness of such a graphical thesis wood be very helpful when it came time to find work after i graduated.