Perfect Day 1 was May 5, 2002.If somebody were to ask me to describe a perfect summer vacation day, it might go something like this: It would be sunny in Ireland, where I’d be, and I would spend the morning in the garden making progress listening to Henning Mankell’s Innan Frosten, in Swedish, on the iPod, while following along in the book, much as I promised Erik I would.

After lunch, I might take the bus into Dublin to pick up my copy of Prime Obsession, which would have been ordered at Hodges Figgis the week before. Then, I’d wade through swarms of Spanish English-language students just released from the day’s classes — all practicing their immaculate Spanish on each other — and make my way to the Irish Film Institute, which would be starting a Richard Linklater retrospective that day with a showing of Before Sunset, the sequel to Before Sunrise, a movie I saw twice in so many days in 1995 — once secretly, in order to avoid the barbs of so-called friends that I was showing the symptoms of terminal hopeless romanticism.

Before Sunset is 80 minutes of real-time conversation between Jesse and Celine as they meet in Paris, not so accidentally, nine years after a first encounter in Vienna in Before Sunrise. A Linklater retrospective would show both films, of course, but I’d resist the tempation to see them chronologically, preferring instead to try to resurrect memories from 1995, much as the protagonists do in Before Sunset. And the movie would stir the heart: perversely, in the intervening years, Celine has gotten herself an MA in international relations, while Jesse has become a novelist — where I am & where I’d like to be. And they’ve both lived in New York. No wonder their duet is even more compelling to me the second time round, if that’s possible.

After dinner, there’d be a public lecture by Roger Penrose — around the corner and down the street — capping a week-long international conference on quantum gravity. Penrose would title his talk Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in Modern Physical Theories, and he would illustrate it with transparencies of mermaids.

Penrose would point out that the famous (hypothetical) Shrödinger’s cat experiment still leads to a paradox in quantum mechanics: Whenever the cat is both alive and dead, the result of a superposition of possible states for a particle that decides the fate of the cat, there can also be an observer that is both happy and sad, until we observe him (or her). But we, in turn, might also both happy and sad, simultaneously, until observed by an outsider. The boundary for the macroscopic effects of quantum behavior seems to be arbitrary, in other words — or, at least, not well defined. This would be problematic, and hence quantum mechanics, while immensely useful, still requires a measure of faith. Penrose goes on to show a transparency describing an experiment, being built, that should probe this boundary.

And then I’d blog it. And that is exactly how I spent July 23, 2004.