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FWIW—now that you’ve expanded to five lines, you may want to try working with the Limerick, which allows 34 syllables as opposed to Haiku’s 17.

Sonnets are arguably a better mode of expression with regards to most things because most things are too complext to describe accurately but quite so succinctly. 14 lines and 140 syllables allows much more to be said -but they are close to a lost art form, although my oldest boy is into them. He also, in all probability, can clean your clock in chess, even if you are a STEM guy and it is only about fifth in his priorities.

I’m glad you’ve been to Greece. Have you read the Odyssey? The Illiad? Or are you an American STEM guy who thinks that visiting a place where culture happened is the same thing as absorbing the culture.

It has been fun playing. Unless you have tech skills useful in the oil industry or mining industry, I’d bet money you’ve never been to Edmonton Moose Jaw, Moose, Factory, or the Australian interior. Moreover, I’m guessing you’d have a hard time appreciating local culture in any of these areas, and that doing so is not high on your bucket list. The attitude you expressed in your original post on this thread screams this to high heaven.

If you turned down Cornell for Stanford or MIT (I am aware that people don’t always end up at their back up school), I’m betting you went with MIT, which is a great school for professional formation, but is a bit weak on what is traditionally understood as education, which involves more than professional development.

I’ve been to Stanford—my father’s effective step father whose surname I bear as a middle name) was class of ‘37. He met his future wife (my great-Aunt) while there. However, although he married a local gal (working class Norwegian who had become a nurse), he was from an Eastern Washington farming clan. His mother was very big on education.

Perhaps being able to see the handwriting on the wall from the changing California demographic from 1925-1945, they got the hell out of California just after WWII and settled in rural Oregon, where my mother’s family already had fairly deep roots.

I never, in a million years, would have dreamed of applying to Stanford, Cal Tech, or Berkley—and Chicago as a city is too big for my taste (I didn’t know at the time that the University is effectively located in a war zone).

Yes, I have heard of MIT—but as I had no clue what to major in, I figured play it safe and go Ivy. My school had sent a (relative) boat load of folks to Harvard—one a year for a long time (I suspect they had a rural western Oregon slot that we had a death grip on). As there were three of us going for it, I more or less flipped a coin between Dartmouth and Cornell on the grounds that those were the only two that might pass for local. In hindsight, Dartmouth would have been a better fit from a human perspective—but what does a 17 year old know?

Hillsdale likely would have been a better choice, but I had never heard of it. While there is a family tradition tied to small liberal arts schools (Harvard prior to the 19th century, and a greatX5 grandfather who was on the board of Hillsdale at its foundation), that had effectively been lost long ago. My Uncle noted the Hillsdale connection after I became involved in founding a small liberal arts college—not something I had planned on doing. Dad was the first college graduate, so far as we know, in his line, ever, and my mother in hers in probably between 4-7 generations.

You should try reading Sinclair Lewis. The American character he holds up in a mirror is still around today.