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the mistake of bringing up my latest attempt at a novel instead. I should know by now that this is a mistake, but I keep thinking that someday my mother is going to come around. The problem is that my mother views all novels as attempts to replicate my father’s work. That’s not an exaggeration; she once told me that F. Scott Fitzgerald should have read A Dying Breed before he wrote The Great Gatsby . She seemed to be dead serious, despite the fact that my father hadn’t been born when The Great Gatsby was published. My mother only reads “literary” fiction, and by “reads” I mean she skims the first few chapters, decides the author is no Edward Bayes and then puts the book on her shelf with all the other great literary works she’s never actually read. My mother spends most of her time watching soap operas. Once, in a misguided attempt to bridge the gap between us, I mentioned that a writer who had worked on one of her favorite soaps two years earlier had just won an Edgar Award for his latest mystery novel. Her response: “That wasn’t a very good season.”
    So her response to my statement that I might try to finish the novel I ’d been working on is predictable. She says, “Is all this writing distracting you from your job?” If, by the way, I had made a comment about my job, she would have said something along the lines of “How long are you going to keep teaching at that school?” She disapproves of my job but also disapproves of the idea of me neglecting my job. Just like she disapproves of both my marriage to Deb and my divorcing Deb. Not that I particularly care about her opinion, but you see how it’s difficult to sustain a conversation with the woman. I don’t really want to get into a discussion of my job situation, so I ask her if she’s heard any news about Seth’s latest endeavor. This sends her into a seemingly endless explanation of clinical trials and the FDA approval process. After twenty minutes, I beg off, telling her I need to get back to unpacking.
    I drive home and unpack a few boxes, thinking that it will make the apartment feel more like home. It doesn’t. It makes it feel more like a failed imitation of home. I didn’t even particularly like the house that Deb and I lived in, but at least it felt like home. This place feels like a box with a bunch of my shit in it.
    I take a break and have a drink. I find myself staring at an unlabeled box, trying to remember what’s in inside. Not a dead cat, I hope.
    I remember reading a book about quantum physics a few years back and thinking how much more interesting it was than the physics I learned in high school. In high school you learn almost entirely “classical physics,” which is all about exciting stuff like how fast a rock will fall or what will happen if it hits another rock. It’s more “useful” than quantum physics, I suppose (although why the average person needs to know how fast a rock will fall is beyond me), but quantum physics is so much more fascinating, because it relates to philosophical issues like free will and the underlying nature of reality. Tali got into a little of this yesterday; I figure I’ll spend a few hours doing research online so that I’ll sound reasonably intelligent when we continue our discussion tomorrow night. I start by reading a little about the history of classical physics and how it differs from quantum physics.
    Probably the most important thing to know about c lassical physics is that it’s completely deterministic: every event has to have a cause. Strictly speaking, that means there’s no such thing as free will. You may feel like you’re making free choices, but in a deterministic world, every choice you make is necessarily determined by something that has gone before. So it may feel like I chose to go to my mother’s house and be subjected to her canonization of my brother and father, but in fact my actions were predetermined from the beginning of time. I couldn’t decide to