Dear John, (How horrid to receive a lifetime of "Dear John" letters. Maybe that explains things.)

John, I am obviously in way over my head with all things seismic and will not trouble you with any more questions (though Don just called to enlighten me that you and I both received our doctorates from UCLA—perhaps the only thing we will ever have in common.)

Now, please put yourself in my shoes. Were you to announce yourself a novice in my particular field on, say, some fictitious literature board, asking if Shakespeare's "The Tempest" prefigures Ibsen's "When We Dead Awaken," I would certainly ——

(Hmm. Allow me to digress into a little bipolar hypo-mania. I just tossed off that postulation as a haphazard example, but not one without merit. Perhaps I shall think on't and write a paper on what is now percolating in my head, as I sit here listening to the Solti version of Verdi's "Requiem.")

Don can vouch for that; he just called me, as he always does when I post, and I made him listen to part of the "Agnus Dei." That was sweet.

Don's only words were, "What the hell was that?"

Which segues nicely into my next point, which is that you didn't really answer any of my questions, offered up humbly by a novice in a field not her own, or if you did, certainly not in nomenclature any non-seismologist could possibly hope to understand.

Well, back to the thrust of my argument: Were you to ask me the above question on our fictitious literary board that you had been a member of for five years, I would not bombard you with a lot of technical jargon about the sociopolitical forces at work in the early 16th c. English theater, or the Elizabethan Stage's abrupt California lane change into the ever droll Jacobean era.

Nor would I bore you with it's subsequent influence on a late 18th c. Norwegian playwright. And surely I would not try to impress this imaginary board with the arcane details of a universe of knowledge you may just be dipping your little pinkie into out of interest. Nor would I flaunt my knowledge with the poignancy (A happy synapse!) of "The Tempest" and "When We Dead Awaken" having been their respective authors' last plays.

So please understand this self-described lay person is just that, someone trying to learn a little bit about something that interests her outside her former field.

As for my current field: "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here:"

http://www.alpert.com/cathryn/index.html

Most of us on this board can fling graduate school BS like rice at a wedding, but what is the point if the bride never conceives? (Pun intended, as were all above.)

Now I'm going back to the Dies irea. Can't wait for the Vienna Philharmonic to blast Don out of his mobile home as soon as he sees this post. Heh, heh. I'll be lying in wait...

Cathryn