The Last Lecture

The Last Lecture
would be impressed if you brought her back to this place?”
I replied: “The right kind.”
But who was I kidding? I was a fun-loving, workaholic Peter Pan
with metal folding chairs in my dining room. No woman, even the right
kind, would expect to settle down blissfully into that. (And when Jai
finally arrived in my life, neither did she.) Granted, I had a good job
and other things going for me. But I wasn’t any woman’s idea of perfect
marriage material.
I met Jai in the fall of 1998, when I was invited to give a lecture on
virtual reality technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. Jai, then a thirty-one-year-old grad student in comparative literature,
was working part-time in the UNC computer science department. Her
job was to host visitors who came to the labs, whether Nobel laureates or
Girl Scout troops. On that particular day, her job was to host me.
Jai had seen me speak the previous summer at a computer graphics
conference in Orlando. She later told me she had considered coming up
to me afterward to introduce herself, but she never did. When she
learned she’d be my host when I came to UNC, she visited my Web site
to learn more about me. She clicked through all my academic stuff, and
then found the links to my funkier personal information—that my
hobbies were making gingerbread houses and sewing. She saw my age,
and no mention of a wife or girlfriend, but lots of photos of my niece
and nephew.
She figured I’m obviously a pretty offbeat and interesting guy, and
she was intrigued enough to make a few phone calls to friends of hers in
the computer science community.
“What do you know about Randy Pausch?” she asked. “Is he gay?”
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