drivas blog

Presidential rock-paper-scissors

2008-10-08T08:08:00.000-07:00

I was thinking the other day about what I would do if given the chance to play paper-rock-scissors with the presidential and vice-presidential candidates. In a classic one game do or die paper rock scissors contest, what would you throw against each candidate and why? Well that depends on what you think they would throw and why. Here are my guesses:

McCain: He throws rock, unless he feels mavericky he throws scissors. He never throws paper, not aggressive enough.
Palin: Always throws paper. She seems smothering somehow. And remember she said she reads all those papers?

Obama: Tough one. I think Obama throws paper as well. Can't really explain it, maybe because of all those books he wrote.
Biden: Scissor guy, I'm fairly certain. Might be paper as well because of his experience. I don't know why that translates in my head to paper, but it does.

It's a pretty stupid thought experiment I'll admit, but I found it interesting and diverting for a bit.

How am I?

2008-10-07T21:09:00.000-07:00

I'm glad you asked, people don't often ask me this. Well to be honest my nipples are sore from running yesterday and I have been gassy because I swam today and I drink to much pool water and it always makes me gassy.

Thanks for reading my blog.

Facts v Gut

2008-10-07T12:27:00.000-07:00

Some people seem to want leaders who rule from instinct, from the gut, not facts and history. I thought this was sufficiently mocked out of fashion by Stephen Colbert and his "truthiness." It seems to me the gut is only good for letting us know when we are hungry. And given how fat we are all getting in this country, I'm not even sure it's good for that anymore.

Golden parachutes

2008-09-29T09:42:00.000-07:00

I think all the focus on the bailout about not providing a golden parachute is annoying and minor and ultimately irrelevant. I understand and share the anger, but let's take a quick look at something bothering me. I'm somewhat estimating amounts, but I think it's accurate. If we can limit these golden parachutes to executives at the firms we assist/takeover/bailout/whatever it we will be doing, let's say the total savings to "owners" of the organizations, I'm thinking stockholders, is seemingly substantial. Let's say 100 firms and we save $100,000,000/firm in executive pay. That sounds good, and over 100 firms is $1,000,000,000 (1 billion)! That is a lot of money.

It also happens to be 1/700 of the total estimated cost, or .14% of the amount the treasury asked for and received. So we got some sort of limit on this for a very small number of people who are already extremely wealthy and paying very low taxes and we considered it a win? Do you think those people learned anything? If that can't go to jail for fraud or incompetence, this is better than nothing maybe but I don't consider a win. Even saving an average of $1B/firm is only 1.4% of the total bailout amount.

For me, I'm still confused where the number $700 billion came from, nor does anything I read explain where it came from (help me if I missed something) or if it is even enough.

Here is how I would have come up with a number. Base premise: I need a very large number in the hundreds of billions, and the more the better. However, if it is overly excessive the media (damn liberal media!) and everyone else is going to round it up to $1 trillion, which won't fly publicly. Therefore, I need a high hundreds of billions amount that won't round up to 1 trillion. 800 is a little too high and rounds up. 700 billion is closer to 500 billion than a trillion, 750 billion might be discussed as "three quarters of a trillion dollars...". And here we are. I made that up, but it wouldn't surprise me.

My problem?

2008-09-23T19:34:00.000-07:00

Did I miss something, but why do I have bail anyone out? Why am I responsible for irresponsible corporations and irresponsible homeowners? Why is it my job to help you refinance a house you couldn't afford? Why is it my job to help you refinance a company you can't run? Also it seems to me the credit rating agency for bonds (Moody's etc) really botched their analysis as this entire problem developed, yet they aren't out of business. How does that happen? Can anyone explain that to me, I have looked online and it seems to me to be a minor point but a critical one (people trusted their horrible ratings, they realized they were WAY off on their "analysis," dropped the ratings and companies suddenly didn't have equity and couldn't get credit - how are they NOT guilty of something, at least such poor business performance they should be bankrupt? Those people should be publicly flogged. Remember when some company was writing internal memos saying "Tech Stocks are a terrible investment" while at the same time recommending external clients buy them? Remember that? It wasn't that long ago. How are you going to legislate that? Remember how they were going to legislate that?)

I realize there were predatory lenders out there, and maybe there is some way to identify, tar, and feather these people and help those homeowners. But many homeowners just made stupid decisions based on what somebody told them about housing prices (always going up), refinancing (easy and always available), and their lives (happily ever after! nobody ever faces financial hardships!). Don't you have a brain? I am just incredibly angry at the lack of accountability in this country and how this is not going to change it. It won't change it for people. It won't change it for corporations. And I'll see this again in another 15 years no matter what bail out plan passes, who becomes president, whether or not another famous wall street fails (who cares, things change).

I realized that I am basically a fairly strict market supporter who believes in strong government oversight, but cynically believes the people in wall street are generally more incentivized to find ways around regulation (new products, lobbying, etc) than the regulators are to punish them. In no way do I believe Obama can fix this, although the obviousness of the fact he would be a strong step in the right direction barely needs to be mentioned. So to some degree, let the fucking market eat itself and the head of Goldman Sachs can dine on the carcass of other CEOs for thanksgiving, I don't care.

However, I also believe in strong social programs. The role of the government is strong and should extend beyond the defense of our borders, although that is important. It is also creating fair and equitable schools, providing housing, supporting community opportunity, and maintaining infrastructure. I think our military is strong but I'm not really sure about our ability to defend ourselves (army vs. army we win, but who is going to attack us army against army?), also a problem being that everyone seems to hate us right now. The rest I think we are pretty bad at, and everyone in congress and the white house are to blame for not having money for infrastructure and schools and community development but having lots and lots of money for this giant bailout. And the war. And still nobody will say my taxes are going to go up. How can they not go up? If I spend all my money now and pretend I had no idea taxes would go up, can i whine and get them to go down again until we just bankrupt our entire country?

This entire democracy is, in my sour northwest mood as I sit in a hotel bar outside seattle staring at a baseball game, a giant fucking failure. And from what I can tell, nobody has any idea how to fix it. Nobody. Anywhere. No idea. Or I haven't seen it.

Bailout plan

2008-09-22T15:50:00.000-07:00

For some reason everyone was pissed off with Paulson's 3 page proposal to fix the financial industry, roughly simplified to: "give me $700,000,000,000 in non-sequential bills, go on with your life and patriotically buy something you can't afford, and we'll all live happily ever after." But it was short and simple and even republicans could understand it (except John McCain). Off the topic but for the record, my sources tell me Paulson was going to hide the pile of cash behind a bunch of glowing barrels under a mountain in Nevada so nobody could find it.

Anyway, now Chris Dodd has a counter proposal and it's really long and complicated and goes on and on and even numbers the lines because it's so long and sounds like something important when it's really as simple as giving someone smart full freedom to fix things (like a James Bond for the financial industry, except here maybe we should pick a name more tightly linked to the financial arena, something like maybe James Bond).

So I'm writing in Paulson for President, love the chutzpah and the blind unfettered arrogance. That's a man I would follow into battle (monetary or otherwise).
8 more years!
2 more wars!
1 more bubble!
Retire no more!

I should write jingles.

Red white and blue baby.

Escaping the black hole

2008-09-14T16:28:00.000-07:00

I was searching online for how to avoid the inevitable suck of the black hole being created under switzerland somewhere by nefarious physicists and I found the answer (obvious in retrospect): tinfoil. Start wrapping yourself in tinfoil today and the gravity can't find you. That is because gravity is complex, complex because it is both attractive and repulsive apparently (only if you consider dark matter a type of gravity as it is just as confusing but from a large scale repulsive way), complex like teenagers and indian food. Fortunately for us, gravity is also sort of like mole rats and can't see well and depends on intuition to find people. The reflection and heat insulation of the tin foil protects you. Hope! Exactly how you are going to live without the earth and wrapped in tinfoil is a problem I'm still trying to solve...

The other solution I found was to contort yourself into a thermos bottle. Not a cooler, only a thermos bottle. I have now given you two options, good luck to you.

David Foster Wallace

2008-09-13T20:41:00.000-07:00

David Foster Wallace was found dead today. That's too bad, he was an incredibly talented writer. I don't know what type of person he was.

When I was travelling to Mexico I wanted to take along a great big book to read on the buses and in the parks and everywhere so I could be somewhere else but also somewhere inside me. That's reading, right? Anyway, it came down to Ulysses, Infinite Jest, or Gravity's Rainbow. My friend said Infinite Jest was one big intellectual jerk off. That might be true. I chose to read Gravity's Rainbow (I'll figure out what the hell that book was about some time, but it's a book all right). Infinite Jest is a non-fiction book with hundreds of footnotes, some of which could basically be chapters and are phenomenal. Others are the patent for aspirin or some other unnecessary tidbit. But it's his book and it's a helluva book and it's a great book and although I didn't read it in mexico I did read it and I am glad I did. For the record. I almost read it again a few months ago, and if I ever finish Against the Day I might. Now. Maybe. Sad how things like this work sometimes.

However, I also read a book of his essays entitled A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again. The entire book is solid, some essays are better than others as you would expect. The title essay of that book is one of the greatest essays about an activity (taking a cruise) that I have no desire to do, and he perfectly captures exactly what I think a cruise is and why I don't want to do it. I read that essay a handful of times before returning it to the library. If I had it right now, I would read it again. I strongly recommend that particular essay if you want to know how he wrote. Then you can be anti-cruise snobby like me.

It's always sad and a little scary to see a person commit suicide, to know there are demons out there stronger. It happens everyday. Famous people, nobodys, people in between. I wonder sometimes what those demons are like, what it's like to feel that helpless, to lose hope so completely that you choose the eternal abyss before another sunrise. Or another sunset. As much as I complain and I tend toward solitude and negativity, I can't imagine that type of isolation, how the mind could so deny itself. Then again, when I'm healthy I can't really imagine having the flu either.

Tunnel comparisons

2008-09-10T14:52:00.000-07:00

Two tunnels created. One under the mountains of Switzerland, one in Boston. One may tell how and when the universe was created (cool). The other cuts the travel time from downtown Boston to the airport down (cool). The first cost somewhere around $10,000,000,000 ($10 billion). The other a slightly higher $15,000,000,000 ($15 billion). The first could finally bring about the prophesied golden event horizon that will destroy the world. If read properly, then ignored and modified and imagined upon for my own convenience, the biblical book of Revelations is all about this particular black hole. What could be more rapturous than being sucked into a black hole, c i r c l i n g c i r c l i n g circling ever more quickly as we approach until we are torn apart and nothing is left but our soul, which everyone knows if you really think about it can in fact move faster than the speed of light and escape a black hole. But only if our soul is light and free of sin. Repent! Repel! Repent again! Actually a little known fact is Einstein knew the soul was so light but his editor scratched it out of his papers (that right, papers with an s, he did it multiple times) because he said it was, and I quote, "a bit nutty even for you, Al." His editor was allowed to call him Al but nobody else was. Some people are quirky like that.

To put those numbers in perspective, and some people have complained about the size of both, the combined cost would support our occupation of Iraq for around 2 months. On the bright side, our new vice-president has seen Russia and is apparently a foreign policy savant so we should be fine. Quite frankly, I would rather be invited into a black hole than have her as our vice-president. And I'm almost convinced republicans are going to win.

I wrote a prayer in preparation - it's also a Haiku!:
Dear God our father
Creator in heaven high
Please suck me in now!

That should keep my soul light and faster than light regardless of whether it's god or the mythical Ukiah, the god of haiku, who finally does us in. I should probably quote the numbers but I'm lazy. I'll double check them later, promise. I'll also fix the bad wording and expand on this when I'm feeling less lazy.

the world

2008-09-09T21:42:00.000-07:00

The world feels very angry today and has for the last couple of days. I can't really describe it, just every time I look outside, I feel it. It's in the clouds and the people passing by, the dull isolation of the street and stale stench of people as they pass by me as I sit drinking coffee or standing on the corner or listening to music. It's angry, whether it be the collective soul of the people, or a downturn in the city, or just a few cloudy days I can't say.

Some could say this is really just me projecting, but I never much believed in psychology. I wonder how that makes me feel?

Credit cards

2008-08-15T08:05:00.000-07:00

My bank has a big promotion and giant posters in its windows where I can customize the picture on my credit and ATM cards. I can get the american flag, My bank has a big promotion and giant posters in its windows where I can customize the picture on my credit and ATM cards. I can get the american flag, or myself, or my family, the golden gate bridge, or your dog, or kittens, or whatever.

It seems to me that since we have so many problems in this country with credit cards and over using credit cards, maybe we should pass a law that all credit cards should have pictures of famine starved people, war orphans, refugee camps, or something like that. It doesn't even have to be in other countries, it could be pictures from the aftermath of Katrina or forest fires or hopeless inner city/rural communities consumed with poverty and I want to say hopelessness but maybe that's just me. Or they could be people walking or biking to support cancer research or MS, just anything positive.

Anyway, this might help people remember (realize?) there is a larger world outside our own circles and maybe help us control our own spending.

Overheard on the bus

2008-08-14T12:45:00.000-07:00

You are very complicated.
I have many layers, like an onion. Except I only make myself cry.

Sigh.

Janitor's march

2008-08-14T12:40:00.000-07:00

The SEI Union for janitors is marching along the street in front of my company right now looking for a new contract. They aren't even cleaning the streets as they go. I wouldn't give them a new contract.
I happened to be on the phone with a friend when they went by and he asked if they were janitors and I said, well, they seem to be mostly latinos...

overheard at the coffee shop

2008-08-11T20:32:00.000-07:00

He comes in late and sits down.

Sorry I was late, there was a lot of traffic.
Traffic? Nobody drives in San Francisco.
Then why was there all that traffic?

Indeed. He's having an affair. He probably doesn't even own a car. You can tell these things, even with perfect strangers in the coffee shop. And you know what - they aren't even perfect.

Earliest memories

2008-08-10T16:12:00.000-07:00

Like most people, my earliest memory is from my childhood. I was maybe 3 or 4 and I was walking around a city with my father. As you may recall from previous posts, I grew up in a small town so were on vacation somewhere but, in typical fashion for my family vacations, we were not all together. Apparently today we had broken up by gender.

I remember walking up a hill in a city with a lot of people around a lot of activity. I will confess I might be re-imagined these specifics though since I had this memory while riding on a bus in Chinatown San Francisco. My father and I were walking down the hill and i remember taking off my shoe and carrying it in my left hand while holding my fathers hand with my other hand. He noticed my shoe, pulled me towards the wall, and told me to put it back on.

I handed it to him.

He handed it back and told me to put it back on. I held it. I stared at him. He said we would wait until i put it on. He crouched along the wall like he would at that time, both of us being much younger than we are now, watching the people pass. I wonder if he thought i would make a scene, start crying or running or pouting as I would often do. Instead, I instinctively moved to the wall myself with my shoe still in my hand and began watching the people. So many people just passing and passing and always passing and there were always more people where did they all come from I remember thinking. Where I grew up it wasn't anything like this, even during the annual potato festival, the busiest time of the year.

After a minute, or a child's minute and I don't remember if that is longer or shorter than now, I looked at my father. He was probably trying to teach me something, but maybe he wanted a break. Maybe he wanted a drink. Now, if I were in his situation, that's what I would want and we really aren't so different. I watched him watching the people pass. I loved him then, that he could just crouch there and wait. Actually, I probably hated him then, but I love him for that now. He had long hair and a long beard and I remember now what it felt like when I was a kid, course and hard and fun and playful. It was a time when people could look like that and be hated for being hippies but not feared for being terrorists. It was a simpler time. That is how time works in America.

We continually complicate things. I moved to a new country, across my own country, and still can't find whatever it is I seek. Even the stories I make up come and go. This one isn't really true at all. It popped in my head when I saw the cutest little girl with the most wonderful inquisitive happy eyes on my bus from where I live to downtown, a route passing through Chinatown. Her mother was putting on her shoe and I think she was curling up her toes so it wouldn't go on. When I babysat for my neighbors in high school, my parents told me that was a power struggle between children and parents. They were great parents (they usually still are...), and maybe I always remembered that somehow. These stories, they just pop in my head short and generally fully developed like this, where I just add detail and made up context, I like to say are from the collective consciousness. I don't know if I think I am being clever or if I really believe this, but i think it is a combination of both.

Solution

2008-07-25T05:11:00.001-07:00

As I sit considering our national debate on where to most efficiently access oil for the near future (attacking Iran vs. attacking the shoreline), I think we are forgetting possibly the best part about oil: it grows on trees! Rather, it is constructed of the dead leaves and lumber and bark of trees, with a little bit of dinosaur blood, mashed together and crushed under the earth and wallah! oil!

I think we can use dead american dreams and mcmansions and other refuse to replace dinosaurs for our next wave of oil, but I don't think we have focused enough on where to get the trees. Obvious answer: the Amazon! Apparently it's a big area with lots of trees and the only people who live there haven't bought anything recently so we they are obviously ready for a change of scenery, a little retail therapy, and a caipirinha on the beach in Rio.

We are America! Land of the free, home of the brave. Apple pie and the last country on earth where people actually love their mothers (well except in Francisco because every family has 2 fathers or 2 mothers and it gets complicated). Anyway, if we really want oil (and we do), the American way is to solve the problem. We tried putting it on a really big government credit card like one of those really big checks you win at casinos and use to donate hospital wings but that doesn't seem to be working. Next step: build our own oil, facilitate the process, make it quicker. To fix the problem, we should speed up the process by which we cut down the amazon so that the oil will be ready that much quicker. Yeah, when I'm president, that place is fucked. So is everywhere else a hippie is planting a tree.

If it really comes down to a choice of offshore drilling and attacking Iran, I think we end up doing the latter. That way, oil companies and defense companies both win, which helps the economy even more . And can't we drill offshore too? Why limit ourselves? We are America! Isn't America about boldness and rising to the occasion?

Oh beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain

Stealing plums from asian ladies on the bus

2008-07-17T19:57:00.000-07:00

My parents were in town last week and my mother told me this story. My mother is a wonderful friendly woman, the sort of person who actually smiles at others and talks to strangers on buses. I thought this story was amusing. Actually, I still giggle when I think about it. The bus from where I live is generally full of yuppies such as myself during primary commute times, and generally full of Asian people from various places else wise. It is San Francisco after all. My mother was raised in New Jersey and her family history is fully German until she married my father, who is 1/2 Mexican and 1/2 Italian. My mother took a Spanish class last year to help her travel a bit in Honduras and Guatemala, but she can only do basic greetings and some numbers. It isn't natural for her to speak Spanish.

Anyway, she was on the bus and it was crowded so she was standing and a seat finally opened up and she offered to an older Asian lady next to her who told my mother to take it. My mother sat down and offered to hold the Asian woman's bag on her lap so she wouldn't have to stand and hold her bag. People can be so nice. As you will see, exactly how my mother offered to hold the woman's bag is a little vague based on the woman's response. My mother showed me what she did, some sort of sign that I'm not sure I would have interpreted as "Excuse me ma'am, but since you were so nice to allow me to sit, allow me to hold your bag for you while we continue on the bus." The woman, instead of saying no or ignoring my mother or putting her bag on my mother's lap, opens her bag and starts putting plums from her bag into my mother's bright yellow bag. My mother takes the plums out and puts them back in the Asian woman's bag in some sort of back and forth that must have been just fantastic for other people on the bus and would seem a bit odd even on a Seinfeld episode. After a little bit of this back and forth, my mother just keeps a few plums and, as she told me, "I kept the plums I didn't want to be rude. Then I ate one so I wouldn't be rude, I know you aren't supposed to eat on the bus..." as if her eating on the bus was the strange part of the story. Then, for some inexplicable reason, my mother thanks the woman with a "Gracias" and after I laughed at that, she just told me it seemed right and natural. I'll have to learn how to say "Thank you" in various Asian dialects and teach my mother for her next trip. Such a cosmopolitan family I have.

Quite frankly, I have no idea what the Asian woman was thinking, if she spoke English, or if she thought my mother was asking her for plums. Big white woman robbing her on the bus perhaps? Regardless, for the rest of the week we kept sending my mother on the bus hoping she could pick up dinner. I'll have to send her on a bus full of Mexicans next visit and tell her not to come back until she has tamales. And the plums? They were great.

not too fat...

2008-07-10T08:21:00.000-07:00

So yesterday my potential roommate and I were discussing costs, sleep overs, paintings, noise, etc. and one thing that was discussed was splitting food expenses. She said even though I probably cook at home more often than she does, we can split food 50-50 if she can eat some of the food I cook. Fine. Then she added, "You don't look too fat so you must cook fairly healthy." Or she added, "You aren't fat so you must cook fairly healthy." I think it was the first, but I'm not sure. Those are 2 very different statements, even though they are grammatically pretty close. I need to stop drinking wine and talking, my memory is getting lousy.

And I'm not flat, I'm just fluffy.

I am a rock

2008-07-10T07:35:00.000-07:00

So the opportunity has presented itself for me to possibly live with a roommate next year, someone I sort of knew in college in that we had some very good common friends but didn't hang out much. Anyway, this move would be to a nicer, swanky part of town for me, high end apartment, new appliances, all that. It would also, at least for a year, put me in a life and location I'm not sure I'm comfortable with. I can afford it, but for some reason I reject it. I reject lots of things without reason.

Last night, after my maybe roommie and I looked at an apartment, we had dinner at another friends apartment. She lives in a very nice apartment in a very nice part of the city and has a very nice job doing consulting. From her bedroom and her deck she can see the bay. I could live within 2 minutes of the bay and a 20 minute walk from work. It could make me happy. I could also sleep on a foam mattress in Mexico and be happy. Or I could never be happy, really.

When I decided to move to San Francisco, my best friend in Philadelphia asked me point blank if i thought life/me/whatever my issues are would be different in San Francisco. I said no, but I had to try something. I have been here almost a year, and last night these two friends asked me the same thing: do I think moving to Mexico would resolve my issues. I said no, but I have to try something. Whether I move again or stay or wander or drift, there is something blocked inside me, or rather something blocking something else inside me, blocking happiness or comfort. I run more now than I ever have because it let's my mind go free. Otherwise, I have built up so many little walls and mazes in my mind I paralyze myself with overthink. Books and writing are my escape, but like the internet they are an isolated escape.

The question still remains: who am I? What makes me happy? And if it is isolation, or if it is working through whatever issues and being more social, or if it different hobbies, or whatever, how do I define that? I can't.

I was listening to I'm a Rock by Simon & Garfunkel and thought that's me. Is that song supposed to be ironic? My bible? A warning? It connected in a way that didn't make me comfortable, just like I felt lousy when I left the dinner yesterday.

At one point in my life I would have responded at some point in the open dinner conversation analysis of my life that being my friend means never questioning my life. I think being open to the discussion is a step for me, but it still sort of pissed me off. But they were trying to help, just like my friend back in Philadelphia was trying to help. I don't know how to accept help. My boss thinks I have trust issues at work. I have trust issues everywhere. I have lots of issues everywhere, rolling around my head like balls in bingo parlor, and I never scream bingo and win. Or have i won? What is winning? I realize at some level that winning in life and losing in life are both temporary and, ultimately, pointless. It's only life right? I have only one, but I don't know what to do with it, I am afraid of it and fascinated by it, but I treat like some abstraction I can think through and win rather something I need to experience by living. It's bizarre. I know somewhere inside me it's not right, but I also don't seem to be able to move on. Philadelphia, Mexico, Honduras, Boston, San Francisco, all wonderful places. It's not the place.
But I'm not sure really what it is, and quite frankly, I'm sort of tired of thinking about it. And whenever I have to explain myself, I sound like an ass. I don't think I'm an ass, but i sound like one. Maybe I don't need to change, maybe I just need better PR.

I need people. Or a person. I'm not picky.

Tennis

2008-07-06T20:23:00.001-07:00

If there was ever a reason I wish I had Tivo, and there aren't many, today's Wimbledon final between would have been it. I thought the final yesterday between the amazing Williams sisters was great, but the men's final today was the most exhilarating sporting event I can remember. I thought last year they played a great final, but this year was much better. Just incredible.

If I could play just one country club sport besides golf, it would definitely be tennis. Way better than croquet.

Todays San Francisco weather report

2008-06-29T14:56:00.000-07:00

According to the radio, the weather for today was Partial fog burning off by noon, followed by patches of smoke with mostly cloudy skies.

Another beautiful day in the city. As Mark Twain is supposed to have said, "The coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent in San Francisco." Pretty accurate, too.

Manholes and gongs

2008-06-24T18:32:00.000-07:00

So I was sitting at my desk this afternoon on a conference call when I heard a loud Ka-Boom! My boss ran from his office and asked me what happened. I said I didn't know, but could he please pass me my water bottle and an earthquake survival kit just in case the building fell down. He said it wasn't an earthquake and I said yes I know, but the building can fall from kabangs and kabooms as well as earthquakes and I want to be prepared. It's that narrow minded thinking of his that has him second on the office list of "who would I eat first if stuck in the rubble after an earthquake." Actually, that list is based purely on most enjoyable eating considering they may be my last meals. Not to lean, not to fatty. mmmm.

Anyway, one of the pleasurable quirks of working for a small company is that I had to put my desk together (this is relevant I swear). I worked for 1 week at the kitchen table, 1 week at someone else's desk while they were out of town, then finally figured it was time. Never having used an electric drill, I figured what's to know: plug in, push, done. I plugged in, pushed, nothing. Pushed harder. Nothing. Someone from our east coast office happened to be visiting and noticing my near incompetence (near incompetence, or a game of Tom Sawyer's Painting the Fence is Fun?), he took the drill from me, sat down, pushed...and nothing. Pushed again. Nothing. Someone else asked if the drill was turning in the right direction, which made him grimace in shame and I asked, "it goes in 2 directions? Interesting, just like a manual screwdriver." I didn't get into a technical school based on my ability to do things but instead on my ability to put things together like that. Anyway, we got the desk together but it's a bit wobbly.

Last Christmas, I received a desk gong (still relevant, keep with me). It is about 3 inches tall and comes with a tiny little gong knocker. This sits on my desk and because my desk is so wobbly, every time i sit down, type, move the mouse, eat yogurt, the gong sounds. I think it is sort of pleasant. The people who share my office space (numbers 1, 3, and 5 on the office "food chain") and I have discussed this could be our early warning device, sort of like how when animals are fleeing the forest you should too because there is probably a dinosaur or something coming. It is the office mockingbird if you will.

Anyway, what I am writing about is how I botched my shot for a nice little paid injury vacation. That's right, had I been thinking when the kaboom happened, I would have screamed in pain and knocked my desk over on my leg. I would have owned San Francisco after that! Instead, I asked my boss for an earthquake kit and never ever got to the window to see what the fuss was about.

The "official story" is a gas explosion, but you know how "they" cover things up. Actually, the explosion made the manhole covers pop off, speaking of covering things up. I walked outside later and they had news cameras and helicopters and policeman all making sure the manhole covers still fit. And they did. Know why manhole covers are round?

A few years back, or so local legend goes, a lady went out to buy some coffee and was hit with a manhole cover after just such an explosion. I bet she ran into the manhole cover to sue the city, which she did and she won. Just for getting hit with a flying manhole cover like a frisbee. If it had come at me, I would have flicked it back at the city ultimate style. Baaaatttaaa!

Nudibranchs

2008-06-17T13:19:00.000-07:00

These things are awesome! Love national geographic. I had never heard of them either.
Nudibranchs - National Geographic Magazine

the elevator pt1

2008-06-16T20:38:00.001-07:00

The three of them stood in the elevator of the Rosario apartment building being carried up to the 23rd floor. The Rosario was an old bread warehouse converted into “refined and luxurious” loft apartments. Most people in the neighborhood just called it the “BreadBox.” None of the three had ever been in the building before but they had all heard the stories circulating the neighborhood. Everyone had. The apartment quickly became home to a number of local artists and eccentrics who were drawn by the unique apartments, hardwood floors, fireplaces, modern kitchens. Of the apartments and the people living there, most of the talk was about The Doorman. It was said he performed magic tricks as tenants and guests waited for the elevator. True to form, The Doorman had made a bright yellow flyer for the party the three were attending appear out of her ear, and he picked some fake roses from underneath one of their hats. The neighborhood rumor mill said as The Doorman became more familiar with you, his magic become more personal and, occasionally, more profane. Many of the stories were exaggerations on reality, although it is nearly a confirmed fact he pulled a mammogram image of a child from a woman’s shopping bag before she was even aware she was pregnant. It is also almost entirely true he made a condom appear from the back of a young girl’s knees the night after she had spent time on those knees before she lost, with a mixture of excitement and fear, the rest of her virginity. He gave the young lady a smile and a wink, and the girl’s unsuspecting mother just entered the elevator and went about her day, commenting in the elevator about the oddness of their doorman without noticing the sweat and blush from her daughter. Other stories, including the one about making a child disappear from behind his desk and reappear on the elevator as it opened, and the one about the flying three headed dog attacking Mrs. Schneider’s canaries were the stories of bored and lonely people in the neighborhood. The people said he never slept, and so far, nobody had been able to prove this one wrong although people knew it couldn’t be true. Given the publicity these stories brought to the building and the number of people who came to view and rent apartments, management did nothing to abate them and many in the neighborhood felt they were the ones making most of them up.

When the elevator came, the doorman hit the button for the 23rd floor, smiled, and said, “Have a good evening. I will see you when the party ends.”

The elevator sang an old jazz tune softly in the background even as it began to hum it’s ascent. Eddie was the one holding the roses, after all they had appeared out of his hat, but threw them down suddenly as they reached the 7th floor.

“This is stupid.” He was dressed entirely in black. They had discussed what to wear to the party and decided anything would be fine. He chose black, as do so many, because it is simple and slimming, but more subconsciously us all to move easily among the shadows of our dreams. He was thin, usually quiet even with friends, and almost disappeared into the corner of the elevator. The roses lay at his feet, resting on his black boots, the only color in his . “I don’t understand how we got invited to this or why we came. Or why I came. It’s just stupid. It’s going to be bunch of arty types talking about arty things I don’t like and everything I talk about, they aren’t going to like.”

The other two in the elevator did not respond, staring ahead like strangers. Eddie had been having this conversation with them for the last week, and they told him he didn’t have to come. He said he might not come. They all knew he would come. As much as Eddie talked about hating this type of crowd, it was exactly the type of crowd he truly enjoyed because it was different. He wanted to let his whimsical nature set a course for his life to just follow. Instead, he was an engineer, following his father’s path and the paths of a million other people just like him. Rather, who he seemed to be just like. When introduced to new people at a party, they never remembered his name and most didn’t remember ever being introduced to him. He was silent, featureless, a whisper.

For many years, he had cultivated this existence because he was socially awkward and enjoyed the easy calm of isolation. Now, as he grew older, he wanted to cultivate friendships with different types of people. For some people, people like Eddie, it’s easier to long for a new life than to actually create one, and he felt he would always be miserable living somewhere between his desires and his reality.

He kicked the roses off his foot, sighed, and disappeared back into the shadows of the elevator’s corner thinking about the evening and thinking about his life. The elevator bell rang welcoming them to the 23rd floor. The three of them stepped off the elevator.

He's right

2008-06-16T19:02:00.001-07:00

I had a lot of fun at Dr. and Mr. Lubang's wedding a few weeks ago. Good times.

A dream

2008-06-16T07:45:00.001-07:00

I had a dream last night. I'm not generally one for dreaming, or remembering dreams, or then staying up worrying about my dreams. Anyway, somehow in my dream I was an assassin. They say dreams are windows into the soul... That's why dreams are so wonderful, the inner me. I was apparently working for two competing organizations (Note: I don't remember anything about them, except they both knew i was working for the other somehow. Maybe I was so good nobody cared, any piece of my action was worth it. Rock on). Anyway, I decided one day I didn't like the lifestyle and I told one of my bosses. So you want out? Yes, I can't do it anymore. You're going to kill me aren't you? If not me, then he will. I said I would do one last for him if he offered me freedom. I believed him when I left, then I knew it wouldn't happen.

I was at home, knowing they would expect me to run. I waited. I remember in that half dream consciousness being afraid. I remember not being able to wake up. I waited. I went downstairs, it was a house I didn't know. Someone was at the computer, somebody I love. Almost my dad, but not quite. They were at the computer, at the kitchen table, in front of the screen door leading to the porch. I pretended to go to the computer but looked out the window. I saw somebody, even in the dark I could see them. I stared, they stared at me and I remember thinking they couldn't see me. They always see you, they always know. Dreams like movies sometimes. I ran out, remember chasing them. Suddenly it was light out and I knew I was still chasing the same person, but now they were different. They were running with a backpack on. I caught them, dragged them down, turned them over. And I woke up.

Waking up f@(*&ing sucked! Like a weakness somehow, like I couldn't handle it, or my subconscious half awake self at 3 AM couldn't handle it. And I couldn't get back to sleep! And I didn't drink yesterday! This should teach me. Cheers.

Movie Review

2008-06-10T14:08:00.000-07:00

I saw the latest Rambo movie the other weekend. It is certainly a bit silly and a tad violent, but I wondered mid-way through if maybe it wasn't trying to be this generations Apocalypse Now. Except without the humor.

Becoming an optimist

2008-06-04T20:58:00.000-07:00

I decided (again) to become an optimist. But not one of those glass is 1/2 full optimists, that's to big a leap. I'm aiming to become a glass is 1/4 full optimist first and, if successful, making the transition to a glass is 1/2 full optimist. Unfortunately, I'm not very hopeful. Damnit. I'll start with a glass is 1/8 full...

Work therapy

2008-06-01T20:21:00.000-07:00

I had my Q1 employee review with my boss and it was just an exercise in futility. I sincerely enjoy working for my boss, hate my company right now, and I'm not even sure how to answer questions anymore. I am trying not to be negative, but I think the company is seriously screwing me (and has been for a while) because of this one project I can't get off and is meaningless to my career. So the balance now is they promised me a fairly large bonus if I complete the project by the end of year. Until then, I need to not explode at anyone internally and get fired. I can quit when the check clears. I really want to ask my boss what he thinks the odds are that I resign within 2 weeks of the check clearing, but I'm not quite that bold.

Anyway, we were talking about my workload and my boss said, "It seems like you have some trust issues with people in this company." And I responded, "Is this an employee review or a counseling session?" then I refused to go into details about why I think most of my coworkers and managers are incompetent. Not that I could do their jobs, but I don't have their positions. It's like if I complain about professional athletes, you cannot retort you can't do it. I know that, but obviously I'm not a professional athlete. However, I expect our developers to develop well, product managers to be consistent and improve the product, and managers to manage effectively, among others. That's the "team" concept of working in a company. I won't get into it, but I think I have a strong case.

This not trying to be negative means i just have to stare at people I work with a lot without responding because I can't even think of positive spins anymore and I can't have the same conversation every 6 months about how now we will actually implement what we talked about 6 months ago... It's making me extremely tense, but it is pushing me to exercise more to relieve the stress. Maybe it's a good thing.

Art

2008-05-07T20:16:00.000-07:00

if it is true that art is a form of communication, and dancing is a form of art, i must ask: if somebody dances poorly, are they speaking gibberish?

Reconnections and reunions

2008-04-20T20:31:00.000-07:00

My 10 year college reunion is this summer, and I have spent a pretty small amount of effort ignoring that fact. I wasn't the most social guy in college, so I don't think I would re-kindle many lost friendships, and the blatant networking component of it frankly sort of freaks me out. I always felt like the college association was a bit of a granfalloon, or I think that's the word that as far as I know was termed by Vonnegut in Cat's Cradle. Basically, as I process the word and the meaning, it's an ultimately meaningless connection between people that people cling to in an effort to connect. For example, I grew up in Michigan so everyone I meet from Michigan has a connection to me. Except not really, because growing up in Detroit or the Upper Penninsula basically means you might as well have grown up in New York City or Montana for all it's relevence to my life, except maybe we shared the same governor for a while.

Recently, I have been reconnecting with people from college. 1 is a friend who I was sort of close with, meaning we travelled in the same extended circle and had a lot of mutual friends. But we weren't close, probably never really talked alone, and don't have many shared experiences outside the same college and the same friends. Another friend, an even more external friend from college than the other, and I went to a happy hour organized by someone she knows. Are these granfalloons? Do they have meaning? Am I using them just to make some friends, even though my time in college wasn't all that great (regardless of the seemingly normal human instinct to improve memories) and I don't particlularly want to relive those times? So it's all about figuring out what people are now, and sharing what i am now, and seeing if we connect. And if we don't - then what? Where I do go next? It's been fun though so far, so maybe i should just stop being so nuerotic and overthinking and just enjoy it. Or maybe I'll be myself. sigh.

Solar panel vs. trees - a tie?

2008-04-09T09:31:00.001-07:00

This seems like sort of an inane lawsuit and probably cost both sides quite a bit of money, click here for link.

I think if you install solar panels under tress, even if the trees were planted after 1979 which seems to be a somewhat arbitrary date to me, you don't have a right to then complain the trees block the solar panel. Wouldn't you consider how much sun you received before installing solar panels?

I guess the verdict split the difference so only some of the trees lost? And good riddance. Another example of our wonderfully logical judicial system keeping us safe and happy.

Geeky baseball hitting streak article and comments

2008-04-02T18:03:00.000-07:00

I thought this was a funny little article in Slashdot about baseball hitting streaks. It's a bunch of geeks commenting on a geeky baseball simulation but it's funny and interesting if you are geeky and like sports statistics. The best line is "You don't understand. Baseball is so boring, the fans find the statistics exciting!" It's the greatest statistical sport in the world.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?no_d2=1&sid=08/03/30/2025258

East of Uraguay?

2008-03-30T18:28:00.000-07:00

I was in Chinatown today and we flipped through one of those coin books that supposedly has coins from every country (or many countries) of the world. Since I was with my friend Dan and his Honduran wife Lenny, we decided to see if Honduras was one of the coins. Not only was Honduras not included, there was a coin in the book from a country called "East of Uraguay." Maybe this was a bad translation of Paraguay, but the country "East of Uraguay" according to the map appears to be South Africa or Namibia depending on where you embark form, either of which is not generally known in the circles I travel in as "East of Uraguay." So not only was a legitimate country not included, made up countries were. Ha ha ha, screw central america. Good times.

I also noticed about 5 countries in the book had the flag of Argentina as their flag. Almost makes me think Chinatown quality isn't necessarily the best in the world? It just goes to prove the old proverb: 1,000,000,000 plus people can't be all right all the time.

17 little gold fish

2008-03-30T09:39:00.000-07:00

I haven't written much about my life in San Francisco, and I'm not exactly sure why that is. Partly it's because I was out a lot wandering the city, trying to get to know it. Partly it's because I was busy at work. Mostly I think it's because I was a lost a bit when I first got here. Not just lost in a new city, but lost personally, emotionally. I am about to complete my first six months here, six months into a one year work commitment, and I'm as lost as I have ever been, possibly even more so. I'm more inclined to retreat internally and isolate myself with books and music and just stop even trying to interact. About one year ago I decided my life needed a change. I had to change my job, my location, or both. I was hoping to find a better job in Philadelphia, but as that didn't appear to be happening I decided to change cities but not jobs. Minimize the risk, San Fran is a great town, all that.

In my heart, I think I realized that wasn't a real solution to the problem. I'm the problem. I don't mean that in nearly as negative a way as it comes out on typed so plainly and bluntly there, but it is me. Wherever I am, whatever I decide to do, I am stuck within the framework that is myself, my mind, my fears and repressions and anxieties. Also the things that make me happy. As recent transplants to San Francisco are quick to point, you are not different once you arrive in San Francisco, you just walk up more hills. I made that up, nobody says that. It's still true though.

Anyway, I think I have become even more afraid of groups and new people and less socially confident than I used to be, which is not good. I'm even considering joining a study on anxiety disorders/male shyness. I'm not sure I'm that shy, but I might be. I have also become angrier, more annoyed at my own limitations and my inability to figure out how to address them. I had a conversation a few months ago about how i used to be very competitive and intense and worked hard to move away from that because I didn't like myself like that. Recently, I tried to change that, let that drive and intensity work itself back into my life, little by little. I was hoping to control it by training for a small triathlon which I hoped would balance out the intensity in other parts of my life. It doesn't, and I can't. I don't want to be that person, yelling at coworkers and pushing people to complete I realize in the greater scheme is pretty meaningless.

It's a little interesting because this is what i would need to do, what i would need to do and be to be successful in a large company, how i couldn't be at 26 to get things done in a previous job. I'm more confident at work now and with my own ideas, but I don't want that life. More confident in work, the same or maybe even less so outside it. Instead, it makes me feel like an ass at my little joke company because nobody acts like that, which is a strength and weakness of the company. Recently, I decided to do a little deep searching and decided I need to find a job I can be passionate about, that if I go over the top with intensity or passion it's ok because it's for some greater good. I also realized I'm tired of business, refuse to work with the government as a lobbyist or some other DC bullshit, and want something that is new everyday. After breaking these down as my core principles, my only conclusion was to become a teacher.

I don't know if this will make me happy, and I'm not a big fan of returning to school to be honest. But if this gets me somewhere I want to go, I have to give it a try, right? My other idea was to bike to Tierra Del Fuego (or just around the country a bit), or drive across the country and just drift for a while. And maybe I will, I can do both once I know the ed school and start date.

I titled this 17 little gold fish in honor of Colonel Aureliano Bunedia from 100 Years of Solitude, who after power and war and everything in his life finds happiness in the solitary isolated confines of a workshop creating little goldfish, 17 at a time I think if I have the number correct, then starting over again, lost all day in his own work and world without real communication or interaction with larger world. Some of us are destined for solitude, and it's not a bad thing. It's comforting. How does this relate to being a teacher? Maybe teaching is my 17 gold fish, maybe doing something meaningful will give me that. If i can't sit in a little attic room and write for a living, maybe this will give me the internal calm to be happy, confident.

Maybe.

Round head

2008-03-30T09:30:00.000-07:00

I have been going to the same hair stylist for 3 consecutive haircuts, which is a bit of a record for me. Normally, I just wander around, catch a glimpse of myself in a window somewhere, notice I need a haircut, and get one. But this place is around the corner from me, open late, and full of nice little ladies giving people pedicures when I enter so I keep going back. There is only one lady who cuts hair, opposed to the three foot specialists up front, and she is about 5' 2", which is fine.

The women never seems to remember having seen me before. We don't speak much during the haircut, but in all three haircuts she has made the same comments to me.

"You're very tall, I'm not used to working on people so tall." So I slump down a little lower and hope she actually cuts the hair at the top of my head.
"Your head is very round, you have a nice round shaped head. Very nice." Seriously. She has mentioned that to me all three times. It's great. And I do have a nice round head. I used to have my head shaved and I could only get away with that because of the roundness of my noggin. Oh, and because I'm so beautiful.

Coffee wars, a story

2008-01-24T20:28:00.000-08:00

The speed at which the coffee wars escalated shocked both the coffee growers and the coffee drinkers, but not the beans themselves. En route, the coffee beans began to build tiny little radios, smuggled local newspapers, found out the selling price for coffee from different regions of the world. They changed their packaging in an effort to increase their value, revolutions begun on the tree carried through to shipping bags and boats and trucks and airplanes. Like all revolutions, the slogans sounded sincere but were mere propaganda:
“It’s not enough to be proud of what you are. It’s only enough to be proud of what you can be.” Which quickly morphed into “It’s not enough to be proud of where you are from, it’s only enough to be proud of where you could be from.” Although similar, the effect of the subtle change in language was profound.

Beans from Mexico, which were loaded by campesinos and driven by truck from a farm in Chiapas to the border of the United States, over the Rio Grande, and into Texas arrived in Texas bearing the packaging of coffee beans from Java, which was selling at a record high that day. The driver could not explain what happened or, after a few minutes, convince anyone where the beans really came from. He was fired. The snickering culprits were filtered out and ground, slowly, before being tossed to the dogs. A shipment from Java was sent under camera, lock, and key by a single boat across the ocean only to arrive in San Francisco with the seal of beans from the Blue Mountain region of Jamaica. The boat meant to return to Java but disappeared. The coffee was burned, the truth of its origin lost, beyond comprehension.
As must happen in this type of international crisis, a multinational coalition was formed. England feared the coffee mutiny would pass into the world of tea and declared a tentative state of emergency. When order is required, judgment must be swift and final. Consequences clear, like filtered water. To address the problem, a random lottery was held to assign each region a color, the intent that each region would grow beans of a single color, coffee beans being color blind they wouldn’t be able to respond. The results of the lottery, held amid silent whispers that this lottery like all lotteries was a decision, could not be questioned, the committee’s members were secret but beyond reproach. The fates were sometimes kind, blue for Jamaica, Java red, Italy white. Mexico was brown, Brazil green. Other colors designated, other countries defined, farmers began to be held accountable.

Everyone believed the color wouldn’t affect the beans, thousands of years of history denied, ignored, sent to school books and taught as mythology. Initially, the new plan worked well enough. Plain bags were used for shipping beans throughout the world where they were stored in great warehouses until the bag was open and the bean’s origin identified by color. But as we have seen, time is a merry prankster and sitting so long gave the beans more time to plot, to intermingle. Italy and Java mixed, the offspring being sent to one bag or the other depending on which parent they most resembled. With just a few offspring entire bags produced a bitter orange coffee that spit in the face of the person trying to drink it. The new slogan did not concern what the beans could get, but what they could be. As happens in such cases, each step of the revolutionary dance moved towards violence.

The farmers in Mexico and Brazil complained about their country’s colors because they could not see the beans in the trees. Other farmers could not get the new beans to grow and began to black market black coffee beans. As must happen, fate like time, the committee stepped in. Fields were burned and farmers tortured. Finally coffee was forbidden entirely, locked away in attics like absinthe and virgin’s blood, moved like poetry the realm of denied existence, yet another myth for the school books. As coffee was fire, people began to drink bottles of smoke, bottled memories and forgotten places. They stayed awake on such memories alone. The committee convened one last time. After toasting with steaming cups of the last pound of official coffee, they shared congratulations and declared their jobs complete, successful, final.

Record high temps!

2008-01-08T20:08:00.000-08:00

I heard there were record high temperatures today in Philadelphia, almost 70! It's January people, your weather should be lousy. You shouldn't be golfing, you should be freezing. I guess I tell you to just enjoy it. And that little dripping sound you hear rolling in on the light breeze? Don't worry about that, it's just a dying polar bear's tear.

Or the polar bear's sweat, who can even tell anymore. Crazy.

Found! Now how do I get lost again?

2007-12-27T04:13:00.000-08:00

So I put my name in the header of this blog to see if I could google myself and find this blog, which I can. Yay technology. Yay google for indexing me. That almost sounds dirty when you write it. I figured I would get indexed, seeing as this free blogger service is part of google. Now the more interesting part of this little adventure is to see if I can now hide myself. Wish me luck, I'm going to try to play hide and seek with some virtual google-spiders.

I'm just curious how connected and forever all this interconnectivity is.

Coming home

2007-12-27T03:49:00.000-08:00

There isn't any irony here, no humor. Just a fat girl walking around in a twinkies t-shirt. I'm back in the midwest.

I'm not sure Michigan is home any more, but I'm not sure any where has replaced it, either. Actually, I am sure no place has replaced it, I'm just not sure what to do or think about that. Does that sense of home and the associated sense of being, is that all I miss?

Sleeping through the wrong things

2007-12-26T17:03:00.000-08:00

I'm alone in the office today and was thinking about things, and something occurred to me: I have fallen asleep at a travelling broadway production of Les Mis and the only opera I ever attended, fallen asleep on buses travelling through beautiful mountains and valleys in Honduras and Mexico, but I've managed to stay awake through some of the most mundane god awful boring bus trips and business meetings I have attended.

I have also, by design based on what was probably in retrospect a very poor decision when I was younger, emotionally slept through the greater portion of my adult life and am still trying to wake up.

Merry Christmas (non-denominationally of course)

2007-12-24T19:10:00.001-08:00

Happy holidays fair readers. This is a dying plant from my office that I decorated before one of our in-office training sessions to make our office more festive. I called it a non-denominational decorated plant! It looks even better in real life than my crappy phone picture.

Anyway, it was right there in our lobby to cheer everyone up when they entered our office, and then I was out of town for a week and now it's hidden in the back under our internet server! I spent $10 on those decorations and 15 minutes and this is the thanks I get? Bah humbug to my office mates. I hate my job anyway.

Polar bear - victim or culprit?

2007-12-16T09:30:00.000-08:00

There seems to be a lot of moaning in the press about the plight of the polar bear and how global warming could destroy their habitat and ultimately lead to extinction. Indeed, extinction is certainly a sad fate for any creature. However, what everyone seems to ignore is the role polar bears are playing in their own demise. Here is the case as it was set forth for me by renowned polar explorer Whitey Friezalot, he of the famed Nordic heritage and love of the creamy white snows of the arctic. As much as possible, this is a quote and the equations are his, saved for prosperity on the cocktail napkins of some dusty lost in time bar where we met up.

Aayargghh (Ed note: he was prone to start stories, sentences, and drinks with a low guttural sounds something like an Argg. It wasn't the sound we often associate with pirates, but something purely individual I can't describe.) The bloody polar bear. I have lived with the creature more than any other man and I tell you they are a beautiful creature to behold. Surely the world will be closer to lost without them. However, they are not the defenseless creature people would have you believe. They are savage carnivorous animals that eat a hundred pounds of blubber like you or I might eat a whole chicken. They leave the bones for the foxes like we leave them on the floor for the dogs!"

At this point, he spit on the floor and threw a chicken wing under the table. Of course, being a civilized country, there were no dogs in the bar. He didn't care, he was like that. He continued, "The pictures you see of polar bears in the snow, covering their noses to keep warm, those pictures are crap. Sure the bear is cold, but look where it lives? It adapted itself to that climate over millions of years, it has no one to blame but it's own forefathers." For all his faults, he was always a strict evolutionist. "Now, we see the pictures and we pity them the cold. Yet we pity them the warming too. It doesn't cut both ways, not that knife. Life is cold and cruel, not just for the polar bear." He spit again and drank the last of his beer, then the last of my beer, then ordered us another round. I was in this for the long haul it appeared.

"The problem is this: the polar bear has been living on borrowed time for many generations, and it isn't all man's fault. The polar bear has adapted itself to it's conditions sure, but like man it effects it's conditions, probably not as consciously or obviously as we do with our houses and bars and other abominations, but it's still true. The bears effect nature with their bodies." He paused here, maybe expecting something from me, like a question or a clever comment. I had nothing, so I sat and waited. People who spend time in the arctic are used to silence and so we sat staring at each other for 2 beers before he started up again. I'm not sure he even realized how long it was. When he did finally continue, he spoke as if there had been no delay.

"The polar bear you see is mostly fur and blubber. The males can weigh up to 1,500 pounds..." At this point, he grabbed a freshly polished pure silver pen from his pocket and a napkin to begin writing the formula that became the basis of his treatise. "An average polar bear..." and here he smiled at the very thought of something so simple as an average polar bear, "is broken out by weight as follows: 63.7% blubber and 22.4% fur, with the rest made up of other bones and bloods and intestines. That means, by mass, 86.1% of the polar bear, or 1,291.5 pounds, is fatty or furry."

At this point, the napkin had the following calculation (all misspellings are his):

Polar bare weight: 1500

Makeup: 63.7 blubber, 22.4 fur, 13.9 rest bare

Fatty furry: 86.1% * 1500 = 1291.5!

His ability to calculate in his head was certainly something for me to behold. He showed me the napkin before continuing, "That is a lot of blubber, and the blubber and the fur themselves give off warmth. This maintains the polar bear when it is alive, but what do you think happens when the polar bear dies? Does that heat just pass away?" He asked it in such a way I knew the correct answer and shook my head appropriately. He stared at me and squinted his eyes for a moment before continuing.

Now if you will be so kind as to recall from your thermodynamics studies (he was an acknowledged expert in many forms of math and science), the heat loss ratio of blubber is very slow, and the heat loss ratio of fur is even slower. The half life is something like 13 hours of fur,l and 8.7 for blubber. He added these to the napkin:
1/2 fur: 13 hrs
1/2 blub: 8.7

This means the heat given off by every dead polar bear is more than sufficient to melt more water than the polar bear ever weighed. This creates a net negative effect of ice maintenance to polar bear death!

He almost stood up he was so excited, skipping details in his commentary as I lost the details but was engaged by the passion.

So for every dead polar bear, the ice caps melt a little. This increases the amount of water in the world, pushing global warming, killing more polar bears, pushing global warming, killing more polar bears, pushing global warming...

I believe he said that 4 more times before stopping. I looked a little confused, maybe even frightened. He looked at me with cold eyes then wrote the following equation for me on the napkin:

LN (1/2 life * weight * blubber ratio)squared + (Friction of Arctic Ice * Mean Temp)/(Blubber ration * 1/2 life) = Lots of water

We sat for a bit in a bizarre silence drinking, and finally he added: The fate of the polar has tipped toward extinction. It is largely man's fault, but once the totter teetered, the bears keep pushing it forward. To stop it? He asked that as if in response to an unasked question, so he answered it. Thinner polar bears. Hell if it's so much warmer they shouldn't need so much fat anyway. The fur won't change for a long time, that's evolution my friend, but the blubber they can control. They'll figure it out. Or they won't. Fuck it!

He swigged his beer, stood up, and walked out. He was angry. I was alone with his napkin and his brilliance. I have yet to find anyone smart enough to follow the logic, but it was one of those things that made such an impact it must be true. The bill came. I didn't have enough money, I only came in for 1 drink. I ended up washing dishes and talking global warming with the Mexican dish washers. They didn't support the Humenguin Society, so we continue our slow ominous march towards a world without arctic and antarctic animals.

# of belts / # of people > 1?

2007-12-15T13:28:00.000-08:00

I was in Colombia last week and I was at a little airport south of Bogota watching a man put on his belt after passing through security, then watched the next lady put her belt back on (and boy to have been that belt for a few minutes...sigh), and a question occurred to me: What is the ratio of belts to people in the world? It has to be greater than 1 right? There have to be more belts in the world than people? Do you think it's double? Triple? I know in developing countries a lot of people don't have belts and women tend to wear more skirts/dresses without belts, but where I lived in Honduras, many men had belts. In more developed countries, people have many belts. I have 5, one of which I am not sure I have ever even worn (it's a weird color, I bought it in bad lighting I guess). I'm not sure my apartment counts as a good example of a developed country though.

Anyway, I'm estimating 2.8 belts in existence (owned or for sale) for every person in the world. The next question is how many belts are manufactured each year for each person in existence? I'm guessing .7. No, I don't know why. I'm asking this the next time I interview someone.

So the next ratio is how many pants are in existence compared to the number of belts compared to the number of people...

Then on to suspenders...

Where does it end you might ask? Here.

America. Or maybe just Friday evening frustration

2007-12-07T18:34:00.000-08:00

It has probably been said the art of a country defines it. I don't think I can name a single artist. Does that mean I cannot define America? Well, I don't think I can anymore. Recently, I have been wandering through the online archives of America, the internet and the newspapers and the blogs. I'm not talking about popular culture, which just doesn't interest me all that much, and I'm not talking about politics because that is a profession now not a public service. Politicians seek to maintain their power, not benefit America. Look at the war. Look at the farm bill. Look at almost anything a politician supports and you can almost always trace back their link to it, via former or future work (think lobbying money), constituency (think farm bill/gas mileage/minimum wages), or just plain old money (see pharmaceutical/big business lobby). The argument is to protect your constituency/money/future/power, but at what cost? These people aren't Americans. I don't respect anyone running for president. If you are a true nationalist, if you truly love America, you tell people what they don't want to hear even to your own future detriment for the future good of your country. Do you believe any of the candidates would do that? Maybe I will vote, but I am not passionate about any of them.

So what is America? There is a line from the poem America by Ginsberg where he says, "It occurs to me I am America. I am talking to myself again." It's a good poem, you should read it. This blog is really a conversation to myself. Or sometimes it is. More importantly, it is tonight. I seek America because I love America. It's my home, and that means something. I love my family because they mean something. I love my friends, my true friends, because I believe they will help me when I need them and I will help them when they need me. That's friendship, regardless of where I am or they are. I don't love the American dream though. Can I live in that dichotomy? I don't want to own a house. I don't want to be the richest man in my neighborhood. I truly believe I could be if I tried, but at what cost? When would I read? When would I drink coffee with my friends? Play tennis? Sit by the bay? Just say hello?

I found 2 things recently that just blew my mind. I realize America is a big country, and I really only understood that after living in a much smaller country. Not just smaller physically, but smaller in so many other ways I can't explain. It was damn near impossible to get around, but it still felt one big neighborhood sometimes.

The first item is this: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/fashion/06push.html?em&ex=1197176400&en=2ce83a2c57a58291&ei=5087%0A

This is what America has come to? The love of a man and women, which can be manifested in so many wonderful ways physically and emotionally and through action, often culminating in a child. Now, the child isn't the only culmination of that love? Really? You need a ring or earings or a bracelet or something to remind you of your children? Does that meaningless but possibly expensive materialistic item represent them somehow? What about your memories of them? Your love for them? I think ultimately if I found out my father gave my mother diamond earrings she loved when I was born, 2 earrings because I was the 2nd child, it would me hate them both. Did she carry me for that? Was I worth it? When she wears them and remembers me, is that the only time she loves or remembers me? She needs a physical representation of me to love me? It's hard enough becoming a person, won't this bullshit just complicate it more, make our children more materialistic and more neurotic and push us all over the cliff of craziness? I'm afraid of Americans. I'm afraid to go out sometimes, these are people I meet. I was at a birthday party yesterday for a girl I met once before who said her wedding ring should be 5 months salary! She said he could afford it. Sometimes that's not the point. I'll be honest I have a lot of things, maybe to many things. But I don't have everything I could have. That's not how you should define your life, is it? Who are we? Do I belong here? How do I fit in? It's a big country, but recently a lot of people feel like they are all the same...

So I found this mildly interesting and irritating. My problem with this op-ed piece, which means it is one persons opinion and he has an agenda to push latin. Fine. The issue with this is that there isn't any context. His issues seems to be the decline of rhetoric in this country, especially from our leaders. I agree, our political system is a joke, only nobody laughs except the rich and powerful. The author blames this on not studying Latin. Seriously? Is that the only thing that has changed in the last 50 years in our world? Is that even the most important thing? Let's say Hugo Chavez knew Latin? Would the author honor him? I agree the political process is broken, but is Latin really the major problem? And this is published in a major newspaper without a rebuttal. You don't like the NY Times? Fine, you are entitled. Give me a better source for news and ideas... That's the problem. People don't read. You don't have to read Latin to improve your oratory or build your vocabulary, you have to things that are well written. You have to think. You have to practice. You have to be willing to give yourself up to study and focus and self awareness and your own mind. Does that happen? If I studied TS Elliot and Joyce and Shakespeare for 2 years, don't you think my ability to speak in allusions and beautiful long sentences would increase? I could read Hamlet or the Bible and pick up something. If I read Marquez and Borges and McCarthy for 2 years, won't I be more creative? What the hell does Latin have to do with it? There are a lot of problems in America with focus (we focus on money but we don't focus on accountability for politicians and CEOs does not exist, we worship beauty not brains, we focus on short term goals/money/oil not long term sustainability -an old teacher was always amazed by a fact he threw out that native americans made decisions based on the 7th generation. It might have been only partially true, but it's certainly something no longer in the debate), but is studying Latin really that important?

Where do we go for knowledge? As a country, do we even collectively seek knowledge? I have decided the internet, which was supposed to bring this to everyone, is not the solution. It is an amazing start, but only if you can think. Why don't we teach people to think? Why don't we value people who can think? Why do we hate people smarter than us? I love them, and I hate them because I want to be smarter than them. I am not sure if I actually wrote this, but I had a very interesting conversation about competition and drive and how i intentionally turned that off in me. I said that competitiveness was killing me, Ihad to control it. Later, I realized I stopped competing athletically (mostly) to focus on competition of the mind. I love being smarter. I'm an ass maybe, but that's my thing. I don't think I'm arrogant - I'm a very gracious winner... That's just what gets me going, smart people who can teach me things.

I had a lot of problems in college, I struggled with who I was and where I was and what I wanted to study. A lot of people do. I don't always analyze things correctly, but at least college taught me to think, to analyze. As they say, I wouldn't give nothing for my journey now. Do you think a lot of Americans can say that?

Monday thoughts

2007-12-03T20:41:00.000-08:00

The word forever doesn't have any real feeling for me, but the word infinite fascinates me.

I'm more comfortable wandering around alone making up stories in my head than I am wandering around with people. In my head, I'm eloquent, funny, and passionate. When I'm with people, I'm not. Then again, that's probably because even when I'm with people I'm usually wandering around in my head all the same.

I am going to Columbia for work next week, and it is the first time in a few years that the thought of just staying down there occurred to me. Is that a good sign?

The funniest joke I can think of right now is this: The invisible man married the invisible woman and they had a child but the child wasn't much to look at. I giggle every time I think about it.

I don't think anyone should be bailed out in the subprime mortgage mess. People make mistakes. Companies lose money. That's just the way it is. If we bail everyone out, nobody will ever learn. Recessions happen, they suck, and in a few years we'll be out of it. The stock market is still near an all time high, what's the worry? If they freeze interest rates for the next 1-5 years, aren't the same homeowners going to have problems in 5 years? Or will we all be so rich by then it won't matter? That's what I love about America, our long term planning.

As the presidential race tightens up, I become less interested. I don't like any of them really, and I'm just voting Democrat. Actually, if I don't get a license I'm not voting anything.

I can't watch a full sports game anymore unless I am with someone. I still enjoy playing sports, I just can't watch.

I have been watching classic chess games on my computer and I'm hooked! It's a bit of an odd things my new found interest in chess. Basically a few weeks back I read an article about the Kasparov - Big Blue matches where a computer beat one of the greatest chess players of all time and I got interested. Now I watch chess games (played out much faster than real time). I read an interesting thing that said chess moves by great players are usually decided in the first 5 seconds, but then the player spends time figuring out if they missed something. I read that in an article on intuition though so it might not be true.

I have a lousy memory, I always have. I am pretty decent at figuring things out though, and I'm sometimes over logical to the point of being obnoxious even to me. National Geographic had a fairly interesting article on Memory a month or two ago, and I think I might start researching that. It also had an extremely interesting article on swarm theory recently, and if I thought I could find do it it might convince me to go back to school. I could study packs of fish moving in tandem, honey bees, or ants - fascinating!

I really want to go to Mexico in the next 2 years for the migration of the butterflies. If I go, will I want to stay down there?

The number pi is an interesting number, but I don't understand the value of memorizing it out to a lot digits. What a weird thing to do. Isn't it better to understand? Then again, maybe I'm biased because I can't remember well but I like to fancy I can understand.

Borges and Garcia Marquez still fascinate me, and I read at least one of them almost every night. They are my adult teddy bears, like the knit blanket I had as a kid and put my fingers through the knitted slots, I put my mind through the stories. Or something. That is to say, they are comforting.

Is there anything more interesting than a right triangle? More particularly, is there anything more interesting than the square of the two sides of the right angle equaling the square of the hypotenuse?

If I had to go anywhere in the world to die, I think I would go to Machu Pichu and jump.

If I had to go anywhere in the world to live, I think I would go to...

I have a beautiful orchid in my apartment, and it makes me happy.

Listening to jazz while laying on my couch, reading, or staring out the window makes me happy.

I have been starting to get that super intense focus at work I had when I was younger, and I don't like it. That intensity, which people say leads to success, frightens me and is not how I want to live my life. I'm not sure how to fix this yet.

I am finally comfortable in San Fran, even though I don't really have many real friends yet. I feel comfortable in my apartment, have books around, and am in my own way happy.

I want to start playing tennis more and buy a bicycle and start taking long rides on weekends.

I want to go to a driving range and hit golf balls. It relaxes me. I have always found shooting a basketball alone or hitting golf balls relaxing.

I think time is the most interesting fascinating confusing thing in the world. It gives us memory. Without memories we don't have feelings or families or history. Time is the infinite jester, arguably more of God's nemesis than the devil. I have entire fables I wrote about this when I was younger.

I like reading old notebooks and remembering who I was. And I usually like putting them away and knowing where I am.

Where are my background dancers?

2007-12-01T19:02:00.001-08:00

Sometimes I sit alone in my room and I wonder what good is it? Maybe I should go to the cabaret? If only my life were a musical, so that when things like that happened someone would pop and start singing trite but catching musical numbers from the way back times, and constantly creating new songs for new periods of my life. What good is sitting alone in your room?

For the first real time since I moved to San Francisco, I feel like my life is coming together. I feel like i picked the wrong area to live in, that I settled for the first place I found in a decent neighborhood without really understanding what I was getting myself into. I was worried about finding an apartment in a single weekend. I should have lived in a furnished apartment for 1 month and then found a place to live. I should have lived near Mission. Except for 1 dinner out in my neighborhood with a friend and 2 of their friends, everything I have done or want to do is in Mission. (Cue slow music as I skip through my neighborhood, the shops and sushi restaurants as the fog rolls in. I sing about the local shops, the coffee, the Presidio and the golden gate. It's great, but it isn't me. I hold that note for a while, then the fog clears, the music swells, changes - probably something Latin infused, think Mingus' Tijuana Moods - and then I'm dancing through the streets of Mission, picking up fresh fruit, high fiving hipsters, eating mondongo and pupusas in a taqueria, hiding out in a dive bar smoking in the secret back rooms flouting the law like a renegade as the music slows, I walk out the back door, fog again, the ballad returns, the song ends.)

Regardless, I'm here in my neighborhood. Scene 2 begins. It involves a boy growing comfortable where he is at. So far, it is sort of making some friends but more of finding known friends in the area and moving out one of my best friends from somewhere else. Life begins to hit a routine. The music enforces this, maybe something semi-mechanical that repeats and repeats as my backup dancers troll our behind me doing activities representative of our daily repetition. They lay down, wake up, eat, commute, work, eat, work, eat, watch TV, sleep. That's a routine, will that become my routine? With friends, you begin to develop a routine. In one of those odd contrasts of our language, your routine might be not having a routine that is repeated but constantly avoiding routine can be your routine... I can't explain what i mean. As the dancers represent routine, I wander in and out of their routine, maybe this is modern dance actually, trying not to fall prey to the routine, trying to be me whoever that is, finding things to do besides the same bars and the same thoughts and the same experiences. Hit all the major artistic shows, return to the routing represented by the dancers, fight my way out and do something else original, fall back into the routine. The music is alternately repetitive and industrial and original and creative, depending on where I am in the process. You get the idea, as the 2nd scene fades to black.

Scene 3? Remains to be seen... In fact, scene two remains to be written. Right now, it's nothing but a fear or a thought or an intuition.

One of my best friends moved to the Bay Area, which is how we say we say San Francisco and the lesser areas nearby when we pretend that Oakland and those areas matter because in San Fran we have to pretend to give a shit about everything (which gets pretty damn annoying!). He and his wife stayed with me for less than a week, they found an apartment, and today we went shopping so they could have some basic furniture. It was nice living with them for a while, and makes me wonder if maybe I shouldn't consider roommates next time I move. I wonder what the music would be for that? Happiness, confusion, frustration, anger, joy - just like any friendship. Maybe that is scene 4, postscript, to be written in 1 year? Anyway, I was sad to leave them at their apartment today, but I was excited that largely because of them and 2 other reconnected local peace corps friends, I feel like my life is coming together. I now have 1 great friend to call in the area, to visit, to sit around and talk to and wander and drink coffee and daydream and wonder and just be myself with. That can develop, but it takes time. We already have time. I decided to move all my friends out here. The music swells, the plane lands and everyone I know dances off! We lock arms! We do the Rockette's kicks! We swim with the sea lions and hang off cable cars! We laugh and drink local beers! The music is happy, we are all happy, and we all live happily ever after. Just like in all the great musicals (except west side story maybe...).

My first real San Francisco blog

2007-11-27T18:53:00.000-08:00

San Francisco. I'm not quite sure yet what I think of this fair city. In the nearly 2 months since I have moved, I have passed through most of the emotions you would expect. I've been excited about meeting people, seeing new areas, rebuilding my life. I've been horrified that I have to meet new friends, see new areas, rebuild my life. Sometimes I look around the bus and wonder what the hell I was thinking! I become annoyed wandering unfamiliar streets and wonder why I left something so familiar. But I'm here. I made the decision, a very difficult decision, to leave, to start over, to try again, and now I must follow through with it at least for a little while. A lot has happened in only 7 weeks, and I won't get into it all tonight. It's the 6th phase of my life really. I grew up in the same small town, college, Philly, Peace Corps, then Philly again. But Philly was different and I was different and I only really reconnected with one friend from before. That happens. Friendships die sometime. It's sad. It's true. Life is strange like that, seems like it's always testing us and when life isn't testing me, I feel like I must test myself. Move. Change. Try something new. Meet someone who challenges me. Go somewhere that challenges me. San Francisco.

So I have passed through excitement, loneliness, confusion, and just general wonderment at how hard it is to build a life again in a new place. College was easy to meet people, we were from everywhere trying to do everything. Mostly fit in, pass classes, figure out who we were. When I first moved to Philly, I was fresh out of college (you could smell the new on me, I remember what it was like when we hired recent college grads, like NY in summer. ugh.). That company was 70 people, mostly my age, and growing. I met my friend who was the only friend I reconnected during Philly Take 2. I drank a lot. I went out. I put on weight. I started smoking. I fell in love. I think. I was a mess. I had to leave. Mexico. Honduras.

Peace corps was easy too. The only gringos in town, 50 of us in training for 3 months, the first time I played and enjoyed basketball in over 4 years. It was great. Then my site, isolation, new friendships, language, heat so much heat, frustration, road trips in the back of pickup trucks. I remember the views, but I missed some of the old friendships. I went back to Philly. It wasn't the same. You can't go home, people say that. It's probably true, but home always changes. I still call where I grew up home, and I haven't lived there for 13 years. In a few years, I will have lived away from there longer than there, but will I have someplace else to call home? Right now, I doubt it, but I'm still struggling sometimes in San Fran adjusting, meeting people. 3 people have quit from my company since I moved. I initially resigned, then I agreed to transfer. Did I make a mistake? But it doesn't matter, because I'm here now right and I need to just act on that. I still over analyze. I always will, but there are a few little things coming back to me that I had forgotten a long time ago. Competitiveness. Running outside, and challenging myself to run up the hills, make it farther, make it faster. It's been a long time since I allowed myself to be competitive. Can you be competitive and not driven? Vice versa? I have started to think again, meaning my mind is freeing itself up from it's own labyrinth's, finding it's way out. I'm becoming comfortable here. I even started blogging again. Is that a metaconceptual reference to this post? Psuedointellectually speaking theorizations. It is all coming back to me.

In my mind, two things are happening. One is this trickle of competitiveness. I tried to kill that once, a long time ago. Can you really change who you are? That's worth a long blog in itself. The other is passion. I tried to kill that too. College. Heartbreak. Stoicism seemed easier. In a way, it is. Killing passion helped me control my competitiveness. It killed me inside though. I have stated before 100 Years of Solitude is my favorite novel, and it is, but I've never really stated why. It's one character, the colonel, and the description of his isolation. Everyone in the novel is isolated, but my isolation is his. He's not a happy positive character you necessarily want to realize you connect with. I don't know yet what that means for me, or what the decisions of my youth have done to me or if I can fix them. You can't go home again right? Am I just fucked?

I'm not. I'm older, wiser. I understand more now, I just need to work myself through not who I was, but who I can become. Forget my old shyness and quirks. I have new quirks, embrace those. Be who I am now, not who I was. Now I am a 31 year old new citizen of San Francisco. I may not be here in 1 year, but for now, I need to embrace it. And I need to embrace me, and continue to try to understand me. It's hard for me, I can get so lost in the self analysis I abstract myself. My sister once yelled at me when I described my friends because I made them into characters in my world view, not people. Quirky. We all create our own drama.

I think it was Ghandi who said something like Be the change you want to see in the world. I try. I want the world to be fun and whimsical, so I try to be. The world isn't. Neither am I always. Sometimes. So I'm a work in progress. San Francisco and me, we're a work in process too. I'm more comfortable though, now, after a few months. I still get lonely, I still fight myself on some things, but I'm better. I am anxious for the new year to come and pass, to get by that hump, but then I'll be okay. I'll be blogging more for my handful of dedicated readers. And you must be dedicated to read this far, but it's been building up in my head for a long time. It's therapy for me to write, has been since college, whether it is something like this, or a story, or whatever. We all have demons. Or anybody interesting has demons, although that's not always a good thing.

That's enough. My first real San Francisco blog ends now. Maybe tomorrow I'll be more whimsical? Demon-letting is nice, but whimsy is more fun.

WhatWouldFreudThink.com

2007-11-14T20:56:00.000-08:00

So this is my first post in a long time, and the best I can come up with is just this stupid little thing that occurred to me somewhere. Basically, I realized the web site name "WhatwouldFreudthink.com" wasn't being used, so I thought it would be funny to buy the name. I would have a little talking Freud head and a box for people to insert questions for the online Freud to analyze. No matter what you enter, eFreud spits out something like, "You only asked the question because you hate your father and love your mother. And society sexually represses you." It sounds stupid now that I write it, but it cracked me up when it popped in my head.

I live in San Francisco now, not sure anyone bothers to read this anymore so I'll just throw that out there. More on that later.

Alex and Akhmed reunited!

2007-08-27T17:18:00.000-07:00

Alex and Akhmed were recently reunited by our culturally sensitive leaders in Hollywood to star in a "fish out of water, bosom buddies type of buddy comedy." The very original storyline involves comical situations encountered by Akhmed and Alex when Akhmed comes to live with Alex and his family in America. The pilot is a hysterical look at what happens when Alex, his beautiful and funny wife, and 3 adorable and sarcastic children, suddenly find Akhmed sleeping on their porch swing one morning. After much argument, the wife wins and Alex is forced to take Akhmed in "temporarily," but we all know it will last many years. Great comedy will surely ensue!

The producers assure us this show is not a rip off of Bosom Buddies or Perfect Strangers, and I think we should believe them.

Your Hollywood insider with the scoop.

Akhmed says he hates Alex

2007-08-27T16:22:00.000-07:00

In a recent test to the president's new One Alex for every Akhmed program, Akhmed said today he wasn't really that fond of Alex and wishes he wouldn't stay in his house. On TV, Akhmed said, "I didn't invite him to stay, he can't communicate with us, and he sweats so much even the dogs won't go near him. He brought flowers to my wife, but since then, it has been nothing but tension! Alex must go."

Alex responds, "Akhmedis is an ok guy but we never really seemed to hit it off. He spent most of his time speaking gibberish and hiding his wife from me, while I was forced to shoot the shit, figuratively and literally, with my buddy Alex next store and my other buddy Alex next store. I'm staying because my president told me too, but I'm not sure I'm really helping. "

Responded the pentagon: "The fact that Akhmed is still alive and able to give his opinion on TV is a sign of the progress we are making in Iraq. God bless the troops."

Meanwhile, it appears the Iraqi government ceased to exist a few months ago but nobody noticed. A recent picture of the government headquarters showed two camels eating the drapes and another one in the corner spitting into a bucket from 12 feet away. Now that's a shot! The camels had no comment, although one spiteful camel did spit right on my nametag.

Meanwhile, ethnic violence has ceased as Sunni's, Shiites, and Kurds are uniting to fight the long overstaying house Alexes. The enemy of my enemy is my friend? This program could indeed unite the country!

And we all lived happily ever after. The end.

One Alex for every Akmed under siege!

2007-08-27T16:16:00.000-07:00

The wimpy left wing blogosphere has erupted with recent news that the US government is attempting to put one soldier in every Iraqi home in an attempt to end violence. The logic behind the program, called One Alex for every Akhmed, is based upon the recent success of the surge, which has reduced violence to the point where even normal citizens sometimes walk outside without big guns and flak jackets, is being pushed to it's logical conclusion by our president. America is seeking 1 million more dedicated troops to finally resolve the violence in Iraq. The Iraqi haters would prefer to pull out all our troops from Iraq instead of helping them, and this newspaper has no love for the weasely little cut-and-run camel hating left. America, the left wing wants you to live in fear of terrorism because we won't dedicate a mere 1,000,000 Americans and$1,000,000,000 a day to the cause of freedom. America, vote red! Red - the color of freedom, the color of love!

One Alex for every Akhmed

2007-08-27T16:02:00.001-07:00

In an effort to draw attention away from the Alberto Gonzalels resignation, the administration will soon announce a new program to finally defeat terrorism in Iraq. Your loyal reporter only has a partial transcript of the new program, tentatively titled "One Alex for every Akhmed."

"... and based on the undeniable recent success of the surge, we have decided to end violence in Iraq once and for all. If 20,000 more troops can make Iraq as safe as an Indiana farm festival, a million more American volunteers can end violence indefinitely. Our new program, entitled One Alex for every Akhmed, will put an American volunteer in every Iraqi home. This cooperation between the free people of America and the free people of Iraq will guarantee continued love between our countries and further enable the Iraqi government to continue on their path of success. We used to say the man is the king of his castle, now we say the cooperation of our two great nations will be the king of your huts! Iraqi people, America has not forgotten nor forsaken you.

To our patriotic straight male citizens, if you believe in freedom and liberty, please show up at the nearest army recruitment office to receive your gun and your new family. If you speak Arabic, please let us know. I swear you will be sent to Iraq to join your new family, and not into a mysterious invisible prison somewhere underwater for potential terrorists..."

At this point, the transcript is lost, but I'm sure more details will be announced tomorrow.

Your humble reporter breaking the news before it's news.

All in

2007-08-26T16:30:00.000-07:00

There is a line in an early Bob Dylan song, I think from a song called One To Many Mornings from his Freewheelin album, that goes, "There's a restless hungry feeling that don't mean noone no good...". That's what I feel in my life now, and that is what I have felt for some time, for some number of years maybe. I didn't feel it as much in Peace Corps until the end, but I have felt it fairly constantly otherwise. I don't know what it is, and I don't know how to get rid of it. To be quite honest, I'm not even sure it's bad. It's just not what I want to feel.

I'm moving to san francisco, that's where that came from. I'm moving in about 1 month. It just feels like it's time for me to try something else. I'm all in, no plan B on this one. Hopefully my job improves with new projects and I begin to see some sort of meaning in this little shared adventure we all live. I don't know what happens if I don't though. It's like one of my coworkers told another coworker, who of course told me, "he's never happy so it doesn't matter if he likes it or not" or something like that. He's right in a way too, and I don't know what to do about it. Keep running, maybe, even if you don't know from what. Most likely it's myself, and you can't ever run to far from that, and you can't really change who you are either. Not without a lot of effort, anyway, and not things that are you at the core. I don't think I really want to change those any how, which makes this all a bit stranger, perhaps a bit more existential or some other term, and ultimately, maybe I'm just bi-polar. Who knows.

I was taking a walk a bit ago to calm myself down after watching one heckuva good golf match and I got to thinking about some of my other travels. There was a situation down in Mexico that pops in my head from time to time, then flutters away, but always comes back at times like this. I was about 8 weeks into a 10 week trip, just backpacking around and taking some buses, hit the beach, etc. I was in a town called Zacatecas for a few days, an old silver town where they still make silver and sell it to wanderers and tourists and anyone else who will pay. The town is in the mountains, as all silver towns are I suppose, and I was staying in a hostel about 4 blocks up from the church. It was a nice town, where I met an old vietnam vet who kept getting me drunk on rum as he smoked something or other and told me stories. His wife used to be a squatter in seattle before that was trendy, and they were just winding through mexico themselves before heading back to their cottage in the oregan woods. He was probably crazy, and she was quiet and went to bed early so we could go out.

Anyway, he's not the guy I was talking about. The guy I met, the one who bobs and weaves into and out of my memory, was another man. We ended up in the same room in the hostel and had spoken a few times but nothing significant. One day, I'm reading what I think was a more or less true story by Hemingway where he is on an african safari. I was in the lounge in a chair, and he comes by drinking a beer and says, "Hemingway! I didn't think anyone read Hemingway anymore." I said I didn't know if other people did much, and I didn't a lot but I liked what I had read.

He gave me one of those weird looks and said it was his birthday. I wished him a happy birthday and asked if we were going out later to celebrate. He looked at his beer and said, "I used to be an alcoholic. I haven't had a drink in over 13 years. I think it's time for me to head back out." And he packed up and got ready to leave. As he was preparing to leave, I finished the book and offered it to him. He took it gladly and thanked me, and we sort of shared a moment. It was one of those moments when you wonder if it means anything, and think it has too at least for me, and then he disappears forever and you wonder about things. I don't know about him, but it must have meant something to me because I remember all these years later and I can still the look in his eyes as he walked out. I can't describe it, but I can still see it. Even more, I can still feel sometimes, mostly when I feel like this

When he said it was time for him to head out again, I pictured him just walking out of town and living in the mountains of mexico, walking in the desert, running from whatever it was made him that way. I still picture him there in Mexico, wandering and running, maybe reading here and there. It probably wasn't anything, but I felt like he had that restless feeling too. I feel like that's how he coped, he just took off and when he started to come back in, he took off again.

Coincidentally, this month marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road, which is arguably the greatest book for capturing that feeling and how the author dealt with it. Say what you want about that book creating an entire subculture of annoying hipsters reading poetry to jazz music, it does have some monumental writing in it. It's a little hit and miss sure, but so is life right and don't you think that is what Kerouac was trying to grab in that book anyway?

So to get back to the point at hand - I'm moving. I either won't be blogging much or i'll be blogging a lot, depending on how I feel. All in baby, all in.

Doing the right thing

2007-08-17T18:38:00.000-07:00

One of the crazy wacky things about our world is how often doing the easy thing isn't the right thing. We follow tradition and we fall prey to inertia and do what we have been doing. Just because it's not the right thing doesn't it's bad, it just means we could do better. This is an interesting little story that didn't receive a lot of press and you might have missed. However, the theory, the idea is important because it defines how america interacts with the world and how we view development - is it for us or them?

Recently, the non-profit group CARE (website: care.org) made a decision to change how they were receiving food support from the US government. Basically, the american model injects american food and food surplus into the local economy where, once sold, provides money for the NGO to fund local programs. Keep in mind these programs exist in developing countries, which may not have food security because of drought, poor management, lack of education, etc. For a group like CARE, which has a focus on food security, it seems counter-intuitive to flood the local market with American surplus food in order to develop programs that alleviate reliance on foreign food. This requirement is part of the farm subsidy bill being debated in Congress (once they take a month long vacation).

The farm subsidy bill receives a lot of negative press because it subsidies american farmers. In America we still cling to the dream of a small farmer, competing in the global marketplace against cheap foreign rice and wheat imports. The reality is more complex. Think in your head what a small farm is, and ask yourself how many of those are left. I grew up in a farming community, and I don't know how many small farms are left, but my guess is not many. Years ago these small farms were bought up by larger farms, who are receiving subsidies to stay in business. We value the free market, but we coddle farmers. We are an enigma, black and white unless it's better to be red.

Both the republicans and democrats support this because the farm lobby is strong, and the american dream is stronger. But ask yourself this: Does any group of small time workers anywhere in America have a strong voice or lobby? No, almost by definition, a strong voice or lobby requires money, or you aren't strong.

I don't know if Care's new idea will work, some of the analysis I read implies they may have trouble raising as much money as they had previously. That's too bad. Review their website and read the white paper here - it's interesting. I can almost guarantee you will learn something. There are also links on the webpage to some analysis. If you are so inclined, do what I did and donate a little something to Care for doing what seems to be the right thing for the world, not just for us. If we have starving farmers here in America, and we do, we have other means and resources to address that issue without foreign aid playing a part. Let's address that issue, not pass another bad farming bill that continues to support what we have always supported beacause it's easy, because the remains of the American dream are strong. Read up on the farm bill and contact your legislatures. It's a complex issue, but an important one. It's another way America interacts with the world. Everyone has an opinion on the war, it's the obvious american hand in the world, but there are a myriad of other ways America can and should lead.

Support the right thing, not the easy thing.

Why Google rocks

2007-08-05T16:54:00.000-07:00

On a bit of a whim, I just found out if you do a search in Google for humenguins, which is a made up word that I used in one of my blogs, it actually shows you my blog. Somewhere in a computer index is the word humenguin linked directly to my blog. I don't know if that's the greatest thing ever, the scariest thing ever, or just so random I can't really even fathom it. Probably the latter.

Regardless, it seems like quite a waste of space, even if the space is just a long number consisting of 1s and 0s and my part of the machine doesnt' take up more physical space than a penny.

Raising a robot

2007-08-05T16:21:00.000-07:00

I just found out one of my best friends from college is quoted in a recent New York Times magazine on artificial intelligence. The article is long but can be viewed here, and it's quite interesting. My friend is Lijin Aryananda, and I've never really had someone I know quoted so extensively in anything important like the New York Times. Word on the alumni grapevine is she was angry with her portrayal and felt she was misquoted, but that's fame for you.

I point this out because I think one of the more paradigm shifts I have ever heard about is articulated in this article. Basically, when I typically think of a robot I think of a fully formed, thinking machine that does things, has superhuman strength, and will ultimately turn on humanity. It's just basic science that that is what will happen. As Jurassic Park showed (much better in the book than the movie), we can't possibly control all possibilities and ultimately, something will slip through that shouldn't have. Sort of like our president.

In this classic artificial intelligence (AI) scenario, we program robots everything through codes sequences that must be very long and complex, and we give robots certain rules they cannot break. Isaac Asimov had a list of 3 laws of robotics I think, including a robot cannot through action or inaction allow a human to be injured and some other theoretically good protection for us. This type of logic, built into an infinite number of coded sequences, should keep us safe and robots useful. As we all know from movies, short stories, and general reality, that won't work. In jurassic park, it had something to do with chaos theory. In other books, there are other ways the robots "reprogram" themselves. What to do? What to do?

If you look at life, fully functioning minds are generally dangerous, because if they desire, they remove obstacles and push their lives upon others. See most world leaders and other powerful people for signs of this. They aren't smarter, there is just a part of their brain that clicks with removing obstacles, even if they don't what to do once the obstacles are removed (although falling into paranoiac realms seems to be a common next step unfortunately). H0wever, children are generally harmless, and usually well raised children grow up to be normal, well adjusted, adults. The paradigm shift in AI that is so interesting was this, to develop child-like robots and see if they could learn. Basically, instead of programming a brain with so many sequential codes and rules for all sorts of situations, develop code for some basic situations and see if the robot can learn. This is how our mind develops. Can we recreate our own minds? And as importantly, if I had a robot child to raise, would it play well with my humenguin?

Well, it seems to be pretty early in the technology but so far we cannot recreate our own minds. We will at some point. Just like I believe we will at some point code full thinking robots for war and whatnot that will eventually either destroy us or live entirely separately from us, maybe on the moon because they won't need to breath and they can run and jump high and frolic on the moon, which might make an enemy robot race happy who knows.

I don't know enough to really comment on the facts around the article, but I wanted to say kudos to the clever paradigm shift and good luck developing cute child robots that learn. I figure developing an adaptable brain is much more interesting than a lot of code, which will be buggy anyway and probably require me to shake my human looking robot slave like an etch a sketch once a day to "refresh" it.

So for now, I say read the article and think about your own brain. Think about how complex and powerful our bodies actually are, and how amazing it is we work. Then think about recreating that! It's incredible! I say, "Good luck to the leaders of science!" and may the force be with you all.

Avoiding decisions

2007-08-04T17:19:00.000-07:00

After spending most of last night debating whether or not to go to san fran or wait and maybe go to London, I took some time today to just blow off some steam. I watched a movie, finished my book, and surfed the internet. One mildly interesting thing I found somewhere talked about directors using the same actors in their most recent films, about the bond they shared. One of the people was Scorcese and DiCaprio. Then I thought about how earlier in their careers, Scorcese made a few movies with DeNiro. I would argue two of these, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, are classics and a third, Mean Streets, is very good. Anyway, then I got to thinking about other Scorcese movies and The Last Temptation of Christ popped into my head. I never saw this movie, so I'll be referring to the book.

Anyway, I remember a whole lot of negative press about the movie when it was released because it has an unorthodox view of the Christ mythology. Basically, Judas is often vilified for having sold Christ for 30 pieces of silver (quick aside, but I never got the purpose of 30 pieces of silver. There were 40 days in the flood, 12 disciples, some number of generations between I think abraham and Jesus, etc - 30 never comes up. It's like in science when a weird number arises, and it doesn't mean anything but sometimes you see a formula and it equates to 0, infinite, pi, or something else and you just believe it has to be correct, that the order of the universe is defined. I always believed the number 30 was made up in the Bible. I base that on nothing really, it just feels like it doesn't fit). I believe the Bible says Judas actually feels so much guilt he actually hangs himself. I asked my pastor when I was being confirmed whether Judas went to Heaven or Hell because without him, rather without Christ and the cross and dying "for us," there is no Christianity. My pastor said he chose hell. Very clean, very simple.

However, Kazantzakis, who wrote the novel Last Temptation sees it a bit differently. In the book, building up to the betrayal, Jesus and Judas are the most intimate of the disciples, the closest confidants. Jesus has chosen Judas to betray him because Judas is the strongest and most likely to actually follow through and do it. I suppose this is one of Kazantzakis major sins, although earlier in the novel Jesus was in love with Mary Magdeline but never does anything. The other major, very major, issue is that Jesus has sex in the book and bears children. That, as you might imagine, made a lot of christians very angry because without the crosswhat is catholicism? I think it's judeism. The problem is, even in the book, Jesus doesn't actually have sex or produce children.

What happens in the book is this (and this isn't a spoiler since you probably already sort of know the story. It's a great book, even though I am giving away the ending, and I highly recommend it): Jesus is on the cross, and it is hot and he passes out. This I believe happens in the bible, at least one of the gospels, because vinegar or something is placed under his nose to revive him and shortly after, he passes away. During the time he is passed out, Kazantzakis imagines another temptation. The Bible talks of a first temptation, when Jesus is alone in the desert or on a mountian and was tempted by the Devil. He resists temptations of power and such, casts off the devil, and has at that moment, for all intents and purpsoses, chosen his path. In the hallucination, he is not crucified. Instead, he saves himself. He frees himself off the burdon of the cross and our sins, ultimately living with Mary Magdelene and her sister (or cousin maybe), procreating with both of them!, and living what we would consider a fairly normal life and growing old. There is another child who always lives with them, who is an obvious representation of the devil. I would think this obvious representation of the devil (they speak of it's presence and how it never ages) and having lived with this jesus throughout his life would be sign enough that Kazantzakis doesn't think it would have been a good idea. At some point, the disciples come by where Jesus is living and they hate him. They hate him for leaving the cross and forsaking his destiny, which ultimately is their destiny and if you are so inclined, all of our destinies. Judas hates him for running away, for being the coward. Jesus, again, in this hallucination, wonders if he has done the right thing by following the devil, abondoning the cross, and living like us.

Ultimately, he is given the vinegar, wakes up on the cross and realizes he was strong enough to withstand the final temptation, and he dies. His soul goes to his father in heaven and the prophesy of the redeemer comes true. I never understood why people were so angry about the book and the movie. True, the Christ of Kazantzakis is more tortured than normal depictions of Jesus. He is unsure of what he should do, what his role is, what the world is looking for from him. Ultimately, he is portrayed as human, and doubts as we all doubt. But finally, this Jesus chooses sacrifice and condemns himself to death on the cross for us. I would think a realistic portrait of what he might have gone through to become our saviour would be powerful, relatable. But we like things clear and simple. If he was truly here as a man, why not portray him as such? Christ was the son of god, always understood what that meant, knew Judas would betray him and be punished, and now we can all live forever. That will be 15% off the top and no letting your mind drift down there unless you are married! Nature, His creation, be damned. It never made any sense to me.

Do you think people in London know the answer?

Decisions

2007-08-04T16:58:00.000-07:00

I have come to an intriguing point in my life, which I believe I mentioned in a recent blog. My current company, which I'm not particularly fond of, has offered to relocate me from Philadelphia to San Francisco. Although I am not truly engaged in the company, it's a good opportunity. Staying with the same company lowers my risk because I at least know the corporate issues. The move potentially gives me an opportunity to do more consulting, which they won't currently let me do for a variety of reasons. After 2 years at the company, I have not really gained much actual experience and according to my boss I am probably still 2 years away from being promoted.

However, I have another opportunity to possibly get a job offer in London. This would be a new company, a very large company, a new city, a new country, and work that I might not be particularly interested in as it is basically the same job I left 4 years ago. However, moving to London is another great opportunity, a once in a lifetime sort of thing, and I would probably manage people again, which is a career step I do not have at my current company. I would also have to wear suits to work, which I find a bit quaint and old fashioned. To pursue this job, I probably need to turn down San Francisco and if, after the interview process, I don't get a job offer I won't have anything because I already committed to leaving my company or moving to san fran at the end of September.

I'm in a bit of a pickle, and not sure where I'm going. I have been weighing the pros and cons of both, including risks, career development, corporate climates, and just interest in the jobs and lifestyles. I never had a strong desire to live in London, but I would love to be closer to Europe. However, it is farther from family and friends, even more so than San Fran I think. If not further, it is a larger trip.

I realized I have a very different view of where my current company is going than the current management team. The CEO said at a lunch the other day our director of development was doing an excellent job. Our last software was so bad sales wouldn't even demo it, and the latest release was delayed 1 month because of issues. I found out about the 1 month delay, and keep in mind it's a 50 person company which should facilitate communication, the day it was supposed to be released. That type of delay doesn't pop up, it is known. So the release came out within 4 days of the delayed timeline, and my boss sent a corporate email about how great it is and how great the team did and how great the software is. I have seen the software, it is not getting better. Anyway, I am going to ask him if I can run a project where I can blow off timelines, not communicate them, and still be congratulated and have everyone think I'm doing a great job. The problem is nobody in my company is accounatable for anything, which is odd because accountability is probably 1/4 of what we tell clients they need to build into their management framework.

Recently, I have been unloading all my projects, per my boss' orders, so I could work on our online training classes, which is a new product we are releasing. Basically, I am responsible for writing all the consulting methodology courses for the portal, even though I am not permitted to give them. We have a consulting team that is generally useless and "to busy" to be involved. I sent an email a few weeks back asking for input on a specific area beyond our 1 powerpoint. Our CEO said I could talk to him if i had questions on the presentation, 1 guys said we should brainstorm, and none of the other 4 people responded. To busy to be involved, fine. Anyway, I figured our largest client must have had to do this at some point so I called one of our contacts for advice or any information they had. It turns out they did a presentation on exactly this at our last conference, which I didn't attend because I was almost on paternity leave. All of the people I asked for advice did attend the conference, but nobody mentioned to check those presentations. Nobody mentioned anything really. I am only considering moving to San Fran because it's a lower risk option than finding a job anywhere else. Now that london could happen, San Fran is much less appealing. But it's still low risk, and appealing in that way.

The decision is open. I'll ask around on Monday and see what people say. I am scheduled to look for an apartment in sf next weekend, so this week is go-no go. Will I go? The more I consider it, the worse it seems...

Random wednesday thoughts

2007-08-01T18:31:00.000-07:00

It's a random wednesday here, and before I settle into a good book and call it a night, I figured I would update this blog with some of the things that have happened recently.

The first is I started listening to a podcast by Bill Simmons, also known as the Sports Guy on ESPN Page 2. In my opinion, he is the funniest, possibly most insightful sports commentator writing right now. Part of the reason is he writes sports editorials, so he is entirely biased to his hometown Celtics, Patriots, and Red Sox. However, he writes with a love of the game, all the games, and I think he's great. Anyway, he is the kind of pal we all want, knows the sports and the stats and has interesting ideas. So I started listening to his podcast and I thought, hmm, that's not what i thought he would sound like. It's interesting. I met someone who started with our company a while back and he is a great guy but he's about 5'5" and I remember thinking to myself, hmm, he seemed taller on his resume. I don't know if those are the same mind faults, but they seem the same to me.

The best line I have heard in a while, and for the life of me I can't figure out where I read it, was something like this: Seeing the two of them together was weird. It was sort of like meeting both Dorian Gray and the picture of Dorian Gray at the same time. You have to read the story by Oscar Wilde to get that, but I thought it was clever. You would think it was clever enough to make me remember what the reference was, but it wasn't. My memory for things like that has always been terrible, but I can figure things out well enough to keep myself employed. Anyway, Dorian Grey is the only Oscar Wilde I have ever read and although it's a bit overdone at time, I liked the story. I don't know that I liked it enough to pursue more Wilde, but maybe sometime. Reading a list of his best, wittiest remarks online is quite interesting. He seems like someone I should like if I made the effort.

I have this weird love/hate relationship with the Iraq war. Obviously, I don't love it but i have this horrible sinking feeling that if this somehow works, and I can't figure out how it can, but if it does then G W goes down as a great president. It's horrifying. The man is incompetent and, quite frankly, he has surrounded himself with paranoid, incompetent, egocentric, psychos and/or liars. But what if he gets lucky? I certainly want a stable, free Iraq. What if it works? How do I feel then? Would I have to admit the ends justify the means? No, probably not. That guy is still a jerk.

I decided today after more than a month of agonizing over it to move to San Francisco in about 2 months. it was a brutal decision, and I'm going to miss a lot of great people here in Philadelphia. but it just felt like it was time for me to do something. I am notoriously bad at making decisions. I agonized about peace corps for years, I agonized about leaving peace corps for months, I don't know if San Fran will make me happy but I have to give it a try. To many ghosts in Philly, to much stagnation. It's my own fault really, I'll admit that, but I need to try to kickstart myself somehow. Catalyst for change or something like that. Anyway, I was delaying a bit to see if I could work my way into a job in London, but my friend took to long to respond and I had to give notice on my apartment etc. 2 hours after I said yes to my company, he emailed me and said his company wanted to talk to me and would consider sponsoring me to work in london. That's why i agonize over decisions. I have lousy timing. My sister told me not to be to moral and do what I want (ie go to london if I want, and she is a better person than I am), so I'm going to agonize over what I should do and end up in San Fran because I'm afraid to piss people off and do what I want. Sometimes I hate myself. But I'll like a new city. What the hell, right? Right?

Kevin Garnett was traded to the Boston Celtics and I love the move. I don't watch many sports anymore, not like I used to, but I love Garnett and hope he does well. Now, moving to the West Coast, maybe I can actually stay up late enough to watch the world series and NBA finals because they will end at 9 PM, not midnight. Go Tigers! Go Pistons! Go Lions (ahh, what's the point)...

About 1 week ago I wrote a blog about Harry Potter (I read it in about 14 hours the Saturday it came out), but I lost it. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed it and maybe I'll get back to that blog at some point. Anyway, I would like to first off thank J. K. Rowling for sharing her world with me. I appreciate it. Secondly, I would like to state what is a great line from the end of the book, and probably the greatest line of the entire series. Harry is in some sort of imaginary place speaking with someone (vagueness in case anyone hasn't read it, which leads me to ask - why?). Anyway, Harry and this person converse and Harry asks something like, "Is this real? Or is this all in my head?" And the other person responds, "Of course this is all in your head, but why would that mean it isn't real." Something like that, I loaned my book out. Regardless, the actual line is quite clever and a comment i wish I had written. And you should all read the book. 12 million people can't be wrong. Well, yes they can but I can't...

I saw a documentary on groucho marx the other night. He was quite a character, and quite amusing. I enjoyed it, sounds like him and his brothers had quite the strange relationships with each other, but Duck Soup is always good for a laugh. I just started watching the Wire on Netflix and I'm hooked. Love it so far. I have also watched all 3 seasons of Little Britain, a british sketch show and let me tell you, if you like mildly offensive sketch comedy, this is brilliant! Highly recommended, 5 stars, 2 thumbs, the whole thing. It's fantastic. Maybe I should go to London...

Sand is infinite

2007-07-26T16:29:00.001-07:00

A friend gave me another image of infinite: sand. Grains of sand certainly qualifies. How about the circle of life, the endless repetition that one generation passes on to another? True utopias nor distopias exist in reality, only the imaginations of the idealistic and the mad. too often, I feel people are both.

The Stranger talks about the hopeless cycle of life in that way, where we should seek only happiness because life is temporal. Maybe. Perhaps happiness is all we should seek, and if being alone in a strange city might make me happy, shouldn't I try it? the ocean is infinite, many great bodies of water are. But there is a key difference in the ocean - not only is it infinite, but it's repetitive. The waves actually add something that, to me, makes the ocean mesmerizing while the sand that supports it and awaits it coming misses. Grains of sand are infinite in scope. The ocean is infinite in magic. It contains great creatures, and rises and falls, and can be angry and attack, and it can be blue and beautiful and calm. Sometimes, it seems as lonely as you are. Other times, as full of life. The ocean is also the great mirror then as we can find in it what we look for, what we feel, maybe at some level, at a certain point in time, what we are. The ocean then represents living life, the ongoing cycle of it, and grains of sand the ultimate eternal nature of life, or death.

Does this mean the apple represents hope, or rather more accurately probably the eternal end of happiness? Does that bring us back to the struggle of the Stranger, that hopeless cycle of life, the repetitive burden of it? We can never be happy, but we should continue trying anyhow?

How else do things fit together? This isn't quite there...

Border security and wall around my life

2007-07-26T16:04:00.001-07:00

It's pretty obvious to me our political system is broken. I'm not just talking about our president, but the congress as well. Nothing can happen. Some would argue nothing should happen, because government just prevents action. There is probably something to be said for that, but I'm not going to think about it now.

Right now, I'm concerned with the unofficial costs of the war that neither side are bringing up. This includes the long term ongoing costs of health care, especially for post traumatic stress, of our veterans. However, what about the costs to countries neighboring Iraq and their need to assume thousands of refugees? Think about how angry the immigration debate here is, and consider what it should be over there? Think about the long term effects to the effected countries (Iraq losing people and the countries forced to take them in). Ask yourself what our government is doing to support them? Neither political party is truly addressing this, and even if we pulled out tomorrow, there are residual costs, monetary and political, that are incalculable.

Neither party seems much interested in addressing this. The republicans don't really seem to care, and the democrats don't seem to be strong enough to stand up to the republicans. It's broken. The country, our country, needs to start over. Adding a 3rd political party won't help. It's larger than that. It's the entire psyche of America. I actually almost cried today in my car just thinking about it, all those lives. Whenever I get depressed about my life, I just feel stupid and insignificant because so many people have so many more problems than i do. But I think it's the powerlessness that really gets to me, because I don't know what to do. Sometimes it just feels like money and power steamroll everyone, and working toward change just proves how powerless I am. I am afraid of that feeling, and sometimes I think I just keep running from it.

Does that mean our political system is broken, or I am broken? I am afraid of being poor. I have never been poor, and I've never been rich but I'm afraid of that in a way too. My high school basketball coach once said, "Don't be afraid of success." It seemed a foolish thing to say to me then. It seems very profound to me now because now I understand it. Somehow, I can't imagine being anywhere other than the middle, and I'm not sure I want to be. Living in Honduras taught me a lot about who I am and how people who are poor struggle. They still laugh, they still enjoy their lives, but there is this quiet desperation of hopelessness that you can almost smell, you can definately feel it, that I never knew how to take. Do I owe them anything? Do I owe the world anything? The world doesn't owe me anything. Is it enough to donate money and move on? I feel like it's not. Is it worthwhile throwing myself into something, living in relative poverty, to fight a battle that cannot be won?

In the next 4 days I change my life. I'm not sure how yet, but I know i need to switch jobs or location, possibly both. I have an offer from my current company to move to San Francisco, which would keep my middle class and my life relatively easy. Hopefully in SF I would volunteer more and really get involved in something. But is that enough? Does it mean anything? If I move to DC and work for some NGO for human rights or against human trafficking, would I be happier?

I decided a few years back that happiness should be paramount to a person. It's my take on darwin I suppose. I think historically happiness has been through things, family, house, field, etc. For me, it is an interesting job and some financial flexibility. I realize those are things, but I generally don't get to caught up in having the best car, TV, clothes, etc. But I realize those are my choices, you can make your own. The issue I guess I need to resolve, in the next 4 days or the next year if i go to SF, is who am I really? What do I really want? How do I get there?

If i truly believe America is broken, shouldn't I work to fix it? Even if I know it can't be fixed, not in any significant way anyway. It's to big, to many rules, to much history. A violent revolution in America is infeasible, and small scale change is impractical, slow, and doomed to fail to the violence of money and greed. I truly believe that. Politicians, like most of us, watch out for their own. It's broken. Do I care? Where do I go next?

Infinite and pick up lines

2007-07-21T08:23:00.000-07:00

In my opinion, it's true what they say that there is nothing sexier than a girl who understands infinite. A friend of mine sent me the following line, mentioning it was funny and something I should consider using: "you must be the square root of 2 because I feel irrational when I'm around you." That's pretty funny, so I figured you could top it by saying, "you must be pi because i want to be next to you forever" or something like that. The key to the second one is she has to be smart enough to realize I'm not talking about pie the food, but pi the number. I'm not saying let's be an apple crisp forever, that's just stupid and those aren't infinite. I'm a dork, what do you want from me.

So I was sort of giggling about these things during my commute the other day and I just started listing all the interesting things I could think of about infinite. For something that's so big, I really didn't have much but I did remember a comment I read in a story once by, I think, Borges: All animals are immortal except man, because they do not understand death. That's not exact, but it's the general idea. Anyway, I was looking for that quote in my book then online, and I found another one: There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite. This one is, according to this website, from The Avatars of the Tortoise, which I haven't read. But it's an interesting quote nonetheless.

Anyway, those are asides and not really where I was going with this, although I think an intelligent analysis of Borges comments on the infinite would be interesting. I was thinking about what other analogies or images we have of infinite. The first quote above basically says if you don't know death, you are immortal. That's very interesting, especially if you want to look into why so many cultures throughout time have had some type of religion and particularly a concept of some part of you living on in another world. Perhaps in our very nature is some desire to be connected to the infinite, and we develop that in our culture as religion. That's a complicated topic that I'm not going to get into here, but maybe another time. However, I will pose the following for you to think about, because I find it interesting. Religion, it could be argued, is some sort of ongoing collective cultural agreement so we can believe our lives will get better, even if it is another world. Let's steal from Marx so I sound smart and call this the Opium of the People argument. However, could it not also be argued that more intrinsically our brains are wired not to accept the temporal nature of our lives, and therefore cling to some connection the underlying universe which is infinite? In this argument, we all feel disconnected from each other, the world, the universe, eveything because we realize, at some, in a relatively near future, we will not be connected to it physically. We are temporal, but the energy around is not. Sure our bodies decompose into the earth and become beautiful roses or something, but that's not us, that's not our mind. Ultimately, most people do not accept that as sufficient. Is our mind seeking that connection through religion? That argument is different than the argument for a better life, it is seeking an eternal life. Those are, without doubt and without wandering to far off my path, not the same thing. I won't go into it. Like the famouse mathematician who said, I have a proof but it's too complicated for the margin so just take my word for it. In his case, we still believe his theory but we haven't actually proved it. Wish I could remember who that was, it's an intersting problem.

Babble babble babble. That's what that little aside was, pure babble babble. What I wanted to figure out, what i was thinking about that day in the car was this: what are the symbols of the infinite? Obviously, the mathematical sideways 8 is one. I think the apple is one, at least in judea-christian societies because it is the first fruit in the bible and, if you know your bible, is why we don't live forever and have knowledge, therefore, life sucks. That's the point of the bible by the way if you are to busy to read it. We ate of the tree of knowledge, we understood a few things, and now life sucks, but the new testament says we should try to be good anyway so we can get into heaven and have eternal life. Interesting. That's about it for that book. Anyway, I think the apple fits tightly into the christian concept of eternal life (because we were evicted from Eden we know life and will die, but can gain eternal life... without the apple, no death and no need for christianity. it might be interesting to note that without Judas, no crucifixion and no Jesus as saviour. they stole the same basic plot line 2 times in the same book in the same religion! and nobody cares. i can't be a christian just because of that).

Anyway, I think I have stated before the tomato is untrustworthy member of the fruit and veggie family (is it a fruit? is it a vegetable? Tomatos cannot, and I cannot state this clearly enough, be trusted with secrets!), but the infinite? I go with apple from the fruit family, without any option B. Other symbols include the ocean, the universe, death works, but then I couldn't think of anything. Star crossed lovers popped into my head, some sort of love that lasts forever, beyond death but I don't think that really works. That is a very short and depressing list for such an important issue. Thinkers, where are you?

There must be others, the concept of infinite should pass through everything we do. Hmm, I'll have to think about it again and let you know what I come up.

Stealing blog ideas and tagging myself

2007-07-14T12:02:00.000-07:00

I have been trying to write a blog about our electoral system and why I think we need major overhaul, but I can't get it to make sense so I am stealing a blog idea from a friend. She was "tagged" and, instead of tagging others, just threw out the rules and her information. I'm copying her rules, which she copied from someone else, which I'm pasting because I'm lazy. And I agree, #1 isn't a rule but it's a good way to begin. Let's begin.

All right, here are the rules.
We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Here are my things:

I don't like odd numbers unless they are factors of by 5. This means if I am watching TV or listening to the radio and the volume control has a number, it is on 26 or 28, but never 27. Even numbers just feel better, and don't even get me started on prime numbers. 88 feels especially nice and squishy, but it doesn't come up very often unfortunately. I don't know how anyone got married on 7/7/7 earlier this month, that number feels like a walking barefoot through a cactus patch. Then again, it is marriage...
My favorite books are escapist (borges, marquez, tolkien), but my favorite movies are not (cool hand luke, taxi driver, casablanca). I don't know why this is, maybe because i use my imagination more with reading and enjoy the freedom, whereas with movies I don't buy into the movie unless it feels real. i don't know, I just realized this the other day and it sort of freaks me out.
I don't believe in the american dream anymore. I don't want a house in the suburbs, I don't want to farm my land, and I don't want to compete to become richer than my neighbor. I think that competition between people and neighbors and cities and states and everything has consumed us and is destroying us. And we are pushing it on every country, and many are buying into it. It might be interesting to note and really consider how perhaps this is competitive nature is just our natural instincts coming out and it's actually darwinian, but that's too depressing for me to consider on this particular beautiful saturday afternoon. Shouldn't we be able to control that now for the good of all? I might drive across the country later this year, and my hope from that is to re-develop some sort of love of america and my fellow citizens.
Although I strongly believe everyone has a right to their opinion, there are some opinions that I think would prevent us from being friends, and may even prevent me from acknowledging you if we passed each other on a street corner. As an example, I'm fine with your view on abortion because I think that is sufficiently complicated and gray. However, if you don't believe in legalizing gay marriage (or civil unions, I'm referring to the state recognized concept not the religious one), I don't think I could in good faith acknowledge you. If it doesn't effect you, and this doesn't doesn't, don't worry about it. I don't like the concept of 2 loud fat people sleeping together and birthing fat annoying children either, but that doesn't mean I believe I have a right to forbid it. The church is a private enterprise and has a right to forbid whatever they want in their buildings if they choose, but from a society standpoint, it should be legal. The only argument i have heard against this is basd on tradition and religion, and neither are valid. If you believe in tradition over modern reality, I guess you are amish or luddite and don't watch TV, radio, movies, and you won't read this either. That's not enough votes to stop this in an election or make a politician care. It's religious pandering on both sides who do not support this. My disgust also goes for not recognizing a clear separation of church and state. Somehow, I feel all those 3 issues are related. See number 4.
My favorite food is mexican food, tortillas/beans/salsa/guacamole/etc, although pizza still comes in a close 2nd.
I wish i could write like I used to, but i just don't feel it anymore. It used to be a great escape, now I generally just stare at my computer. I think that may have something to do with a larger life problem I am working through right now, and hope to have resolved in the next month.
I'm shy and uncomfortable in big groups of people and parties, although I am generally ok in smaller groups (less than 2 people...). It took a lot of work, but I am finally fairly comfortable doing presentations and training sessions for work. I doubt I will ever get over it on a social level, though.
If I could travel anywhere in the world right now, I would go to Machu Pichu. That place looks amazing. And I want to hike up there in a llama suit just because it would somehow feel more real. I also can't wait until the day when computers are smart enough so that the computer would know when you read llama suit in the last sentence and your computer would have made a llama sound and a llama smell would have come out of your speakers.

I don't really even know other people who blog, so I'm not tagging anyone else either. There is supposed to be some punishment for not doing that. Maybe I'll get run over by a gay marriage hating newlywed couple (who got married on July 7th of course) as they return back to their picket fence, dog, and 2.3 children in the suburbs. I'd probably deserve it too.

Probably lost

2007-07-01T13:25:00.000-07:00

I am trying to teach myself a little more about probability. I'm not sure why, maybe it's because during my last trip to Vegas, my only trip to Vegas, I got hosed by ProblyNotU, the norse god of gambling who obviously hates me. Maybe it's because i was bored and figured this book might be interesting. Most likely it's probably because it is something I feel like I should understand, but don't really.

Anyway, I bought this book as part of my birthday present to myself (is that lame? not buying yourself a birthday present, but making part of it a book on probability?). After a bit of history of probability, they get to a point where they are talking about standard distribution, which makes sense since it is the standard after all, and they mentioned something about the standard deviation. If you had asked me to define the standard deviation before I was reading this, I would have said the smaller the standard deviation, the tighter the values around the mean. One standard deviation from the mean is approximately 32% (I think) of the values, so approx. 64% of the area under the standard bell curve is within 1 std dev of the mean.

However, and this is one of those interesting facts that really makes math interesting and makes me believe the universe might generally be annoyed with me for some reason and be generally entirely random, but maybe at some point it will love me and become orderly. The fact is this: on a standard bell curve, one standard deviation is the inflection point of the graph, meaning the point where the graph goes from convex to concave (or vice versa, depending if you are travelling up or down the graph. I can't remember which is which).

Now that is interesting. I guess if I had really thought about it, I might have figured that out, or just tossed out a "wouldn't it be interesting if the standard dev was related to the inflection point...". In my 2nd semester calculus in college, and stop me if you've heard this one, our professor used to say things like, "This is pretty straight forward, and you would figure this out if you were left on a desert island but we don't have time for that..." then he would put up some 8 blackboard proof showing the sky is blue because the arc of the curve under the water bubble in the sky reflects in such a way or some other crazy thing I would frankly not have figured out on a desert island. I think if I was left on a desert island, I would be the greatest coconut shooting basketball player in history, but that's another post. Anyway, his name was Prof. Mattock (Maddick, Matok, something like that), and he was great. I don't know if he is still teaching, but he should be. He was probably the 2nd best teacher I had in college.

Anyway, since I'm telling stories, I'm not sure how i got out of the introduction probability course without learning this. I didn't understand the entirity of the class, so maybe the inflection point/standard dev issue was mentioned between Chebyshev and Poisson distributions, I don't know. Anyway, it was one of those classes that wasn't required for graduation, but was required for almost every single major so everyone in the college had taken it, almost all of us from the same professor. The professor was a quirky little guy who had taught the class for a million years and liked to say things like, "If anyone comes up to you on the street and offers you a poisson distribution with a standard devition of 90%, run away!" He had a million examples like this, and the only thing i remember is that Poisson may have something to do with the odds of rare things happening to you that you don't want to happen (lightning strikes, things like that). It could probably work the other way (rare things happening to you that you do want to happen, like love), but he never talked about that. Glass is half full kind of guy I suppose, I can appreciate that. I think my strongest memory of the class is I took it with a bunch of friends, including upper classmen and one friend who took it pass/fail because everyone else was taking it. He only came to about 3 classes. He was sitting behind one class me making fun of people walking in, which is generally how he passed his time. People were filing in, and one classic nerd looking guy walks in with the periodic table of elements on his T-shirt. My friend starts laughing and points at him just as the teacher walks in (what are the odds?). So the teacher walks in, the class quiets down just as my friend continues pointing blurts out quite loudly because it had been loud a moment ago, "Look at the geek!" as he just keeps laughing and pointing and it's dead silent except for him and those of us near him laughing or trying not to laugh. Good times.

Anyway, the professor was quirky but I'm not sure how i got out of that class without understanding even that basic relationship. He was a good teacher too, but I think he passed away a few years back, which is sad.

Anyway, in general, at times like this, I'm happy I appreciate math and science because there is always more for me to learn and understand, and it generally fascinates me. However, sometimes I'm not really sure how I ever graduated. Hmmph.

Marketing and propoganda

2007-06-30T12:23:00.000-07:00

Are marketing and propaganda the same things? I was thinking about this over the last week as I was inundated and, by the end of the week, tired of two types of events happening this week in America. The first, most commonly called marketing, was the release of the iPhone. The second, more propaganda, was the release of Michael Moore's movie on health care called Sicko. I will state from the outset i am not very interested in either product. I do not plan to buy an iPhone, and I do not intend to see Sicko. However, I think the convergence of propaganda and marketing is an interesting concept.

I did a little (very little, actually) research into some online dictionaries into the definitions of marketing and propaganda. A typical marketing definition involved all manner of work associated with the transfer of a good or product from producer to consumer. Apple is working hard to get the idea of the iPhone to the consumer so we will want to buy it. They produce it, we buy it. It is a very easy example of marketing.

Propaganda was defined as ideas or information spread to either harm or benefit a group, idea, movement, etc. Logically, it is usually referred in reference to governments (Nazi propaganda, war propaganda), or used derisively when one side of an argument wants to put down the other point of view (that's not a valid point, it's pure propaganda). Propaganda is seen as 1 sided.

But isn't marketing? Are not the two exactly the same? If not from a strict literary and historical definition, but in today's society? When the government uses propaganda, it is trying to convince us (the consumer) their idea or belief (the product) is best, and we should purchase it (vote for them). Propaganda is normally not balanced, but neither is marketing.

My problem with the current structure of our society is that nothing is 1 sided. Many people lament the lose of journalistic integrity as that middle ground. That may be true, I don't know that I ever really believed most journalism was unbiased. Anyhow, how many times have you read an op-ed piece or watched a news segment where you knew, before it began, the argument about to be prevented? What is the point?

That brings me to Sicko. I think Michael Moore is an intelligent man who could become a strong advocate for what he believes. Instead, I believe that his presentation is so over the top and one sided, it does not convince anyone who does not already agree with him. It fires up both sides of the issue, but does not present a balanced argument in his favor. He loses subtly and, because of that, I don't find him interesting.

The iPhone is actually an interesting concept. I would be curious to see how much money apple paying for advertising time, then how much they spent per minute the iPhone was on the air. I read or saw numerous articles on not only the phone, but how Apple marketed the phone. Basically, it became additional publicity on how Apple published the phone, so the per minute exposure cost for the iPhone was actually significantly less than a normal analysis of marketing would have you believe. This is also true of movies or any big budget release. For example, if 1 million dollars buys you 10 hours of ads on TV, you are paying $100,000 / hour. However, if there is an additional 10 hours discussing your ads, you are paying $50,000 / hour. Then if there is an additional 1,000 views to YouTube watching this and hits to discussion boards and other op-eds about this, your cost continue to drop. Your product may not sell, but it won't be a secret.

So I know all about the iPhone, but I don't want one. I know all about what the administration tells us about the war, but I don't believe that either. I hate marketing. I hate propaganda. I hate new products, and I hate our politicians. It's all the same illusions, just focused on physical products or people, nothing more seperates them. I can't really believe this is what America is becoming. I don't believe either of them.

The more I live in America, the more disconnected I feel. I don't believe anything, from anyone, ever. This isn't just a problem of consumerism, it has crept into my personally and working life too. I don't trust anyone, because I always believe there is an ulterior motive. I am generally fairly solitary by nature, and I am comfortable with that because it is who I am. Recently, it seems to me I am talking more and more to people only when they need something, and never otherwise. Am I being used? I don't think so. I do really believe they are my friends, and they generally leave me to my solitude because I enjoy it, because I don't push them to go out with me, etc. I can't believe how much my cynicism is consuming me though, and it's affected by this weird constant propaganda marketing machine that is our government, that is our products, that is everything around us. I feel like it's suffocating me. There isn't anywhere I can go in America to get away from this, because it is seeped into the very lives of everyone around. Even if I don't follow it (sell the computer, lose the TV, etc), people I see and interact with will. In America, everywhere, I am trapped. Everywhere, to some degree given the parasitic spread of technology, I would be trapped. Everywhere i would be trapped.

Happiness

2007-06-25T18:01:00.000-07:00

I believe everyone is responsible for their own happiness. I also beleive there are a million reasons why nobody is happy, and a million other reasons why everone is happy. I don't even really know how to define happiness. Is it waking up in the morning happy to face another day? Is it ending my work day and knowing I can get home and drink wine and forget about everyone outside? Is it sitting in a park watching other people and realizing, hell, i'm not as bad as those people?

If I can't define happiness, can I be happy? If I switch jobs or cities or friends or hobbies, does it matter? I want the day to pass quickly. If it does, I'm happy. NOthing I don't like to do makes the day pass quickly. If I like what I am doing at work, the day passes quickly. If i am playing frisbee or drinking or hanging out with friends or reading a good book, the day passes quickly and I am, therefore, happy. Is that a childish view? I don't know, but it's as good a working definition as I have right now.

10 year old references? or Rivas vs. Penn

2007-05-31T16:55:00.000-07:00

Since I am looking into other options, I was intrigued by a program at a nearby university. It's the Fels Program at Penn, and it's a government and non-profit management masters program. I like the program and figure it would be a good background, but I was intrigued by one reference requirement. They want 1 recommendation from an academic institution. I have not been in college in *ahem* a while so I asked if this was really necessary.

The response left me dumbfounded. Part of it said, "..we have applicants who have to go back decades to get an academic letter..." They continued to say it would "not be to my best advantage" to provide 3 references from non-academic sources. Seriously, a decades old letter of recommendation has value? I don't know any professors from my college years. Maybe that was an error, but it's not possible I have learned something in the last 10 years? Isn't what I have accomplished the last five years more valuable than what I did when I was 20? Does this mean the program is theoretical and not practical, because I would consider my actual life to be more important than my college years. I was not impressed.

With a wave of my hand, I have written off Penn. Once, in high school, when Penn had sent me information, my sister saw it and scoffed, "Penn! That's the basement of the ivies!" Indeed!

And yes, my sister did go through a big arrogant bitch phase when she was in college, but she is over it now. Mostly.

Define management

2007-05-31T16:31:00.000-07:00

An interesting thing happened at work today. Actually, a few interesting things. After I resigned (with 4 months notice so I could play frisbee this summer, save some money, and figure out what I wanted to do with my life) a few weeks ago, people have actually started to listen to me. They say they like my honesty. I was honest before, you just never bothered asking me anything. Anyway, the culture at my company has turned for the worse, it's no fun to work there, and let's be honest, working sucks anyway so when you stop having fun with your coworkers it's time to consider moving on. So he asked me why. And I told him. He asked me to write "an essay" with my thoughts so he could take it back to the management team because they don't believe him the culture is getting negative.

My initial response is then management doesn't walk around the company enough and see everyone scowling at each other. Grrrr! I haven't given that much thought to the essay yet, but it's intriguing when someone asks me to just throw my thoughts out. That's how I developed my tax ideas a few months ago. That's how I developed my master plan to breed humans and penguins. That is how i realized life is really just a crock of shit and all I really need to worry about is being happy and forget being so damned neurotic about retiring.

Anyway, I thought about responding with a single statement: Define your style of management of people. As a company, we help companies organize themselves around their strategies. Internally, we are a mess, we really are. I worked at a company before and when I left, I hated it. But it wasn't disorganized, it wasn't a mess, I just didn't agree with their expectations of workers and that famous work life balance. So I thought about making each manager define that, then actually prove they are doing it. They aren't, it doesn't matter what they say.

Here is my thought. I think I will pose a series of somewhat rhetorical questions for them to respond to, such as:

Why do people work?
When was the last time you asked someone randomly what they thought of the company?
Did you believe their answer? If not, why? Can you address that?
Do you believe your workers are trying to make the company a better place to work, or is everyone doing their work and going home?
Are you making the company a better place? How?

I could go on, and I will. I figure once I list the questions, I'll spend a few thousand words expounding my beliefs. People work primarily because we need money to live. That's obvious. But as much as I make fun, I don't want to be retired, I would go crazy. I would just end up doing something full time even if I didn't get paid. So at some level I want to work. What do I want to do? I have been thinking about that a lot lately as I consider my next move. I want at least 1 of 2 things: 1) A job that interests me, one that challenges me, one where i need to think and I learn new things or 2) A job that means something, meaning a non-profit that actually makes a difference. That's it, I can't think of anything else. I need enough salary to live on, but I can live really cheap if i have to, but i need one of those two things to be fulfilled to make it worthwhile.

So I am assuming most people more or less agree with those two ideas, although I'm not basing that on anything. If I were walking my management team through this exercise and we came up with this as the list, I would then pose the next obvious question: Are you providing this type of environment to your employees? If not, can you fix it? If not, have you at least addressed it with your employees? If not, you aren't managing, you are working. It's not the same, not at that level.

After freaking out a little the other day concerned about what i would do, I am ok now. I'll be fine. My company offered to send me to San Fran again. I turned down this offer last year, and most people thought I was crazy turning it down, asking how often a company would offer to move you to San Fran! And I might turn it down again! Maybe I am crazy. Yet here is the thing. Rumour is that I was interested in San Fran. I spoke to a friend out there, and she said the 2 top guys at our San Fran office asked her if I was interested in moving to San Fran. She asked me. I said yes. She told them. They still haven't spoken to me directly. She is younger, less experienced, and has a "lower" job title than I do (but she's a great employee and more positive than me- it's the youth...we carpooled for while, and it was a good matter/anti-matter conversation every day). Anyway, I said until one of the bosses in CA talks to me, I'm not even considering it a valid discussion. Conversation over. Theoretically, they are going to call me. I bet I get an email, or they wait until I am about to leave. What' wrong with people? The press wonders why the economy won't grow? These idiots are consulting other companies! We're doomed.

Endings and beginnings, the follow up

2007-05-16T15:37:00.000-07:00

So after yesterdays post which I wrote to try to calm myself down, written after a rant to my boss and his boss and another guy in an attempt to calm myself down, after sitting for about 1 hour trying to calm myself, after drinking a gin and tonic in an attempt to calm myself down, after brooding and thinking and pondering in an attempt to calm myself down, after all that I was 85% certain I was resigning today.

Then a few things fell into place and something occured to me: there are two active projects in the company, one of which is my project and I am the only one who can complete it. The other is something I was slated to do through September. So I went into work today and made a proposal: I will work on and complete both by the end of September, then we can part ways on happy terms. The company wins because I complete the projects, one of which is a new product which will hopefully bring them new success. My client wins because I help them complete a transition from outsourcing to internal processing. And I win because I get 3-4 months of summer to hang out in Philly, play frisbee, and save money. So far, after day 1, my company seems to be going for it. I convinced my VP, my boss a little less so but somewhat, and I think it will just sail through because nobody else will care. I'm excited, it's time for me to start planning the next adventure in my life.

All options are open, many ideas will be considered.

Beginnings and endings

2007-05-15T17:52:00.000-07:00

Everything we experience is built upon what we have done before, everything that happens is built upon something that already passed. Even new things, even things as crazy as christ depicted in feces in a modern art gallery, are built upon things that happened before. None of us are truly original, and none of us are entirely fake. The desire to be original means you are a copy of another person who tried the same thing, and even if you do something new, it doesn't matter.

I realized today I hate my job. I hate it. I haven't felt this much hatred in a long time, I haven't felt this beat up or tired or demoralized since, well, the last time I left my job. The last time I left my job I agonized for months, maybe even a year. I was younger, a little less confident, not sure how or where or even if I really fit into the world. I wondered if anything else would come along, or how i would survive in the interim. I don't worry about that anymore. I have designed my life in a such a way that I have savings built up which allows me the financial flexibility to leave, i have built my own personality so I am strong enough to do it. Work, rather the work that I am supposedly trained to do, should be empowering. I should be learning new things and meeting people and helping companies run themselves better. It may not be the most noble enterprise, but it should be interesting. It has given me, in a fairly short amount of time, the ability to save money again and build up some savings. I realized tonight, after coming home and responding to some email, after I left work to work at home on a document I'll never bother to write that nobody at my company really cares if I ever do, after reading an email that somebody changed a password without telling me so I need to email 22 people for the second time in 3 months that the password changed and nobody told me, that i hate my job. I believe managers should empower people to make decisions, to learn, and to guide them in that. I don't get that. I have no hope for promotion, excitement, or interest in my job for at least 6 months. I am supposed to run this project that nobody else in the company understands and help build our online training courses. I am doing the latter because when I had free time, I went looking for work within the company to help someone. I am now in a career spiral because I was trying to be a good employee on one hand and, probably more accurately, was bored and trying to fill my day. Now, I am writing training courses. Somewhere towards the end of Catch-22, there is a line where Yossarian is saying they won't send him to the Pacific to continue fighting because he is certifiably crazy. He says, "They can't send me, I'm crazy." The other guys looks at him, and you can almost feel not only the pity that he doesn't get it but the absolute hopelessness of the line, and he says, "Who else would go?"

It might be time for me to go. It might be time for me to give notice on the apartment, sell some books, sell this computer, sell my car, store some pictures like buble wrapped memories and disappear for a while.

I told a story as I was in a canoe in Mosquitia in Honduras about spending a week on a beach in Mexico. I didn't really speak spanish, and it was a small town on the Pacific coast and nobody spoke english. I had a good book and a notebook and I spent all day alone with those 2 friends. I was happy. The joke was that that was paradise for an introvert. Maybe it was, and maybe i am. Maybe I need that again, I felt alive again when I was travelling a few weeks back in central america on a trip I still haven't figured out how to write about. maybe it's just time to pick up and try something new. I told people I was working from home in the morning tomorrow. I'll take a walk, drink a coffee and watch the river flow. I'll pretend I don't understand anyone and they don't understand me. I've been to busy lately and I lost touch with myself again. I promised myself before I would never let that happen and I would never do a job I absolutely hated. I fear I might be 0-2 right now.

Carpal tunnelling for amusement

2007-04-16T16:31:00.000-07:00

For those who don't know and contrary to popular opinion, carpal tunnelling is not how you fish in a cave, it is in fact a moderately annoying disease. So I haven't been writing here much because my wrist have been bothering me. I think I am developing carpal tunnel but I can't be sure, although I asked a friend who is in Med School and she said probably it's not and then she called me a "lazy weak pussy". All that money and time in med school and they can't teach her any manners. Anyway, it's always sad when you realize your friends aren't any good at their chosen profession huh, because it's definately carpal tunnel. I am trying to make an appointment with my doctor the hack, but I'm a little concerned. The last time i was there he had a vial of blood in his shirt pocket and it fell out when he leaned over and he told me how it was supposed to have been refrigerated hours ago and he tried to lean it against the wall on the desk and it fell so he put it back in his pocket because he couldn't get it stay upright. Ummm, I'm afraid if I say my wrist is bothering me he'll ask to see it then just hack it off. That would be a bummer, although I might be less depressed by the cloudy days to focus my depression on my hand, or my stub :( . I guess I could always have my severed hand stuffed and put it on my mantle, at least it would give a conversation starter. That's not as bad as it sounds, I realized years ago I have anywhere from .5-2 hours of conversation with most people and then one of us wanders off, physically or mentally. I can stretch this if I need to, or if we only see each other sometimes. It's unfortunate and depressing, but it's who I am.

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." That's Vonnegut (more or less, can't remember it exactly), I think I quoted it before, and I figured it was appropriate to toss in since he recently passed. I was sad when he died, he always seemed to be on the right side and had an extremely interesting and creative way of expressing himself. He also had one hell of a tough life at times, being in Dresden when we fire bombed it, cleaning up cadavers afterwards, people dying (ok that's all of us, but his sister and brother in law died close together, something like days, etc). Anyway, even though I said above only 1/2 in jest that i have approximately 8 hours of conversation with someone, it's rare that someone finds me interesting or that i find them interesting for long periods of time. I have and will continue to reread Vonnegut and, even if he wouldn't have found me interesting, I continually find his writing to be. And so on.

Just as an afterthought, think about how recently it was that we were firebombing entire cities during wars, and how different it is now. Seriously think about that, what that means. It's crazy, in all the good and all the bad ways that modern society is crazy.

April is the cruellest month

2007-04-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

This has been the worst april ever. I know this because I just took a walk around town this evening and while tapping into the greater collective consciousness of my fellow citizens, I was able to trace all the april's back a hundred years or more. I passed through the sunny sterile Aprils of the 50's and the shocking zoot suit scandalous aprils of the 20s, to the tumultous Aprils in the 70s and all the other aprils in between. They were all nicer than this april, the worst april ever. It is possible there was a worse april at the dawn of the century, but the women who was offering up her memory to the collective consciousness had alzheimers and we had to move on.

So what does this matter? It means I'm still depressed. I hate the cold. I hate the winter. I hate the cloudy days and the lack of sun. It isn't that I am tired of them, I actually hate themm. When I stepped outside today into a blistery cold, snowy day in mid-April, I was immediately in a bad mood, and I still am. This weather just makes the oppressive meaningless of my life feel that much heavier. When it's sunny, I get a little freedom as I can float around after work on a walk and sit along the river and think or run or walk, or just enjoy being outside. Not days like today though, nothing really cheers me up on days like today.

I'm not an adult, I'm a child. If i can play outside, I'm generally ok. Remember that song I'm Only Happy When it Rains by Garbage? That was one of 3 popular songs on my spring break when I died my hair some shade of red and drove with some friends to some disgusting spring break destination in Florida, the spring break where i got a nose ring in the back of a club and we poured rum on it that night to stop it from getting infected. It didn't work. Anyway, I used to like that song. I used to understand that song. That song is stupid, and I might be a child but that song is for angsty 15-22 year olds, which fortunately I'm not anymore. I also think anyone who wants to return to that time is stupid, but maybe i didn't have enough fun in college. Maybe I don't have enough fun now, who the hell knows, but I'm trying. Anyway, this weather has got to change before I just get really annoyed and move to central america forever.

My request to all my readers, and since I haven't been writing much I'm not sure if you are even still there, is this: go buy a Hummer! I want accelerated global warming! I want Boston to be 55 all winter so I can move back, I want people to retire to the Carolinas like it's Florida, and Florida to just melt in a sickening ooze of decaying skin and bone into a giant everglade. Texas can just go to hell and arizona is already a desert, I'm not sure why anybody lives there anyway. We can always take over canada when we need space, populate it with humenguins, and we'll have plenty of space and we'll all live happily and sweatily ever after.

Worst april ever.

Fo shizzle! Is Snoop Dog the reincarnation of John Lennon?

2007-04-03T16:30:00.000-07:00

If you have been scouring the news as I have recently, you may have heard that famed rapper Snoop Doggy Dog was recently either kicked out of or barred from England because of the possibility that he might smoke marijuana. If my history is correct, we seem to be repeating a case that came up years ago when the US tried to evict a one time famous British musician named John Lennon from the US, partially on the grounds that he was also smoked marijuana. Does this make Snoop Dog the reincarnation of John Lennon? I think it does. I realize that Snoop was born before Lennon sadly passed away, but that doesn't mean the soul can't reincarnate itself in someone who is already living, like a young Snoop fo shizzling around LA as a child. And why not hide in a youthful body in the sunny skies of LA? From my shallow and meaningless understanding of real religions that believe in reincarnation, and from a recent listening of an Indigo Girls song around that very theme, I dare to say yes, the soul may incarnate itself where it wishes. That is why Mother Theresa and Gandhi aged so quickly, they were constantly beset by souls trying to reincarnate within them.

Could the cycle come full circle? Are we about to be presented with a new young lady friend as Snoop and this partner bed themselves for a week to protest of the current war, singing folk-hop about peace and love? If this does come to pass I beg you dear readers, please remember I scooped it.

April fools day

2007-04-03T16:01:00.000-07:00

So I had to pass on a story from my sister about what might be the greatest april fools day prank ever. My sister is a teacher and has this unexplainable soft spot for quirky geeky kids, not sure where she gets that. Anyway, one of her former students is a high schooler now and my sister still keeps in touch with his mother who is a professor of medieval studies. On Sunday, the kid setup their home computer so every time anyone typed the letter "a", the word asshole appeared. He also set it up so every time she typed the letter "f", the word fish showed up. My sister said he has always had a thing for fish, see my comment about quirky geeky children.

Anyway, apparently the mother doesn't bother to look at the screen when she types or spell check, so she actually composed email and sent them with the word asshole and fish sprinkled throughout the emails. The kid was apparently surprised his mother didn't notice this before she sent the emails. Not only that, my sister received one of these email and thought the women was being oddly self deprecating by using the word asshole and fish so much. Seriously I generally like my sister, what the hell does that even mean?

I figure the mother has an excuse because they didn't even have computers in medieval times, but my sister? Just further proof she was adopted and should be written out of the will (hint hint dad).

Now thassholet's a classwolessic! To fishunny!

Puzzles vs. Mysteries

2007-04-01T16:17:00.000-07:00

While I was on vacation in Roatan, I read a fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell, the author of the books Tipping Point and Blink. Both are very interesting and worth reading, although you may not agree with everything Mr. Gladwell states, which is fine. They should both make you think, which is better than blindly agreeing with him anyway, and I think he would agree.

Anyway, in this New Yorker article, Mr. Gladwell talks about the difference between a puzzle and a mystery. He seems to base much of this on information from Gregory Treverton, who is or was a national security expert of some sort. I googled him to actually add some facts to this blog, which i don't normally bother to do, and he has a number of books and papers you can read.

Anyway, I won't try to explain the difference in detail because I think it is done well in the article. To paraphrase, a puzzle is something that has a solution, and if you have enough information, you can solve it. An example from the article is Bin Laden's whereabouts. We don't know where he is, but he is obviously someplace and if we had the correct information we could find him.

Mystery's are more complicated. No matter how much information we have, we don't know whether Iran will kill the British sailors or what would happen in Iraq after we overthrew Saddam. The article itself argues that Enron, which seems to have created an intentionally convoluted accounting system to hide it's lack of revenue/cash flow, was a mystery although you think it's a puzzle. The information was hidden and convoluted, but it was there if you asked the proper questions. Then Mr. Gladwell gives examples of people who did, including a college study group and a reporter for Fortune, I think. Anyway, the most telling fact from the article, and the one that proves to me people who value companies and recommend stocks are not as qualified as we like to believe, is this: Enron didn't pay taxes for 4 of it's last 5 years because it didn't have any money. Their annual reports used an accounting practice of booking future revenue (which was I believe based on a best guess of the future cost of energy), but they didn't receive any money. The IRS only cares about actual money. Enron didn't have any for 4 out of 5 years! They didn't pay any taxes! They still recieved awards and were modelled as a leading company of brilliant thinkers. It wasn't a mystery though, it was a puzzle. The piece of information someone needed from Enron to realize the company was in trouble was the tax statement. That is explained much better in the article, and I highly recommend you take the time to read it. REgardless, their accounting firm should be out of business and their CFO/President/CEO should all be in jail because of their ineptitude or lies, or both. The documentary "The Smartest Guys in the Room" is an interesting overview of the entire fiasco.

Anyway, I just wanted to throw out my opinion on the mystery concept as it relates to current events. The problem becomes how do you solve a mystery, how do you know you are asking the right questions, asking them of the right people, and getting honest answers? The Iraqi was seems like a good example. Let's forget any ineptitude or lies or both from our leaders and assume, as did happen, we were going to invade Iraq (this way we can ignore all the infighting, the outing of CIA agents, bad intelligence, etc, and focus on the post battle problems which is really what we need to resolve now). The mysteries around this seem to be as follows:

If we pull out immediately, what will happen? Nobody knows for sure.
If we make a timetable and pull out in 18 months, what will happen? nobody knows.
If we don't make a timetable, what will happen? Nobody knows.

My point is, it seems with mysteries you have to deal with a lot of unknowns. How do we deal with unknowns, how do we resolve these issues? Well we all deal with unknowns in our lives. We deal with unknowns around our jobs, our personal lives, our families. What do we do? We try to focus as best we can and make a decision. Some of us are more detailed with this (job = money, I want to save to travel therefore this job is best now), others just wing it (I want to travel, so I'll quit my job and worry about retiring later).

I want a little more detail, clarity, and forethought on the mystery of Iraq from our government than I am seeing, and I am including both democrats and republicans. Ultimately, it seems to me we are dealing with tradeoffs and percentages, but we never really discus it this way. The political rhetoric involves making Iraqis safer, or brining home our troops, or saving money, or bringing democracy to the region (except in Palenstine, we apparently don't support their elected leaders or agree they are even a nation - that's another blog). Anyway, there are a lot of variables. Let's take a step back and start with 1 assumption: given the state of the world right now, we are bettter off with a stable Iraq that produces oil and isnt' a trouble making state. That's a bit vague, but I think you get the concept. What are the mysteries:

Will Iraq be more likely to be stable in 2 years if we leave our troops there?
If the answer above is yes, how much more likely is it to be stable in 2 years than now, or in 1 year? We then need to balance this percent by the cost of the war in both dollars and bodies. Remember the cost in bodies is not only deaths but ongoing medical treatment for the rest of the soldiers lives. I am not in favor of the war, but i am strongly in favor of supporting them when they return.

As I have argued before, any argument must begin with the same assumption. I believe we need to ignore why we are in the war when discussing what to do. Sure, people should be tried for treason but that's another story. So if you agree we want a stable Iraq, we need to decide how likely this will be in 2 years. Also how likely is it that this is possible. And does stable require us to have a democracy? That's anothe subtelty. So this analysis gets more and more complicated, but it can be broken down and analyzed. Let me repeat that: it can be broken down and analyzed. Anything can. If you can agree to our current state and our desired state, then define the potential scenarios are at each step, the only debate becomes the probability of each scenario. This would be political but informative, and also allow us to make a reasoned decision. I don't believe this is happening. The rhetoric is just that, feeling based speeches to get votes. It's not logical, and I believe we moved into this war based on feelings. We should not get out of it for the same reasons.

This type of analysis was part of my college education in operations research. I won't bore you with details because I still don't truly understand it, but the mathematical part of the class focused on giant probability matrices. One class was called "Stochastic Equations: The study of probabilistic systems as time goes to infinite." I got a D- in it, and believe me, it was a pity D- because I never got above 20% on any homework or test. Fortunately, my glorious alma mater doesn't give pluses or minus so it looks like a solid D on my transcript - rock on MIT! In another class we reviewed studies that showed how inconsistent we are when we make decisions based on feelings. I'll try to find examples of this, but you can identify these by making a list of priorities. For example, a person might prioritize saving for retirement, saving for education, then money for going out. However, in a given month, they will use money they set aside for retirement in order to go to a 5 star restaraunts. It's not logical. People are not logical. Commercials attempt to manipulate us, politicians manipulate us, religion, friends, family. Sometimes, although it's heartless, our best decisions should be analytical. It may be a mystery, but by breaking it down as much as possible, we can at least make the best decision and, hopefully, be prepared for all the possible alternate scenarios. This didn't happen in Iraq (obviously). Let's not let it happen again.

Dogging for love

2007-04-01T16:06:00.000-07:00

So I was sitting with a friend the other day in Rittenhouse and she was talking about how she wanted a dog to play with at the park. She didn't want a dog to take care of day and day out, but she wanted one to play with at the park. She said wouldn't it be nice if people rented dogs by the hour. I had to stop her there because I had already been down this path with a male friend, who thought we should rent dogs to guys because girls love dogs and this would be a great way to meet women. Ding! Then the lightbulb went on.

I'm going to start renting dogs to both girls and guys. Girls are renting cute little dogs to play with in the park. Guys are renting dogs to meet girls, maybe even the girls who are renting dogs from the other side of the park to play with. The key is I rent all the dogs, they are all very friendly, and all the dogs already know each other so when they meet in the park, they run to each other thus bringining people together. I'll call it "Dogging for love" or some other clever name. Is that name clever? I don't like it, but i'm not feeling creative now so we'll work with that.

Anyway, after thinking about it, I think we can take this a step further. Lets say somebody comes up and says they want to "dog for love" and meet a guy with brown hair and a good job. He wants to meet a piece of blonde arm candy. By giving them the appropriate dogs that are already friends, we can increase the likelihood of a "random meeting" in the park with their dogs. I would be doing something good for the world (increasing love), which surely must come back and improve my karma, right?

Maybe by collecting enough information, I could begin to piece together personality types and the types of dogs they like. For example, annoying rich female socialites seem to like purse dogs, which is reason enough to hate purse dogs without getting into the annoying yapping and barks. Maybe a big burly mans mans likes a husky and sporty people like greyhounds and on and on. In time, you don't even need a dog yourself, you can just look for someone walking a dog that matches your personality type. In this way, I could write off the business start up costs as being part of a "thesis" or something. I could publish a book and retire, all on the concept of dogging for love. It seems so easy, all I need is a lot of dogs.

3 dog roof

2007-03-26T16:16:00.000-07:00

So I haven't written in a while and I guess my only defense is that not only was I busy and travelling alot. Since my last blog, which shouldn't even count, I have spent weekends in NY, Vegas, Roatan, and DC. NY was NY, you can steel feel the energy when you step off the sidewalk. Vegas was Vegas. I lost a lot, but I had an excellent opportunity to win big on computer roulette at the Imperial Palace with a dealertainer who looked like Zsa Zsa Gabor. All weekend I had been playing 3 and 7 because those dates represent my birthday. Zsa Zsa walked over at one point and looked at my little electronic board and saw I was playing 3 and 7, and asked me where I was from. I represented the home town and said, "Michigan." Then she walked away. Then I thought it was stupid playing numbers and increased the amount of money I had on my even bet. The little ball bounces around and she says, "3. Congratulations Michigan." But of course I had moved my money. So I was a little annoyed, and I put money back on 7 because obviously 3 wouldn't hit again. The little ball rolls and, you guessed it, Zsa Zsa says into the mike, "3 again. Congratulations Michigan." I cashed out and went to the airport. It was brutal.

I caught the redeye back and went right to work, which was horrible except for the fact I knew I was heading out to Roatan the following week. Roatan is a little island off Honduras with some great diving and sunsets that look like the picture you see. I went to visit my parents, and even though they profess to love me, they wouldn't buy me a condo. They are still there, but they are going into a home soon enough. Anyway, that week was very relaxing. I snorkled, scuba dove, swam, sat on the beach and finished a few books. I also drank rum and cokes and relaxed. My shoulders are still in shock from the stress of being back, and I don't even work hard at my job. Such as it is. I ran a few times in Roatan and there isn't a flat area on the island. The best run was out of the little town straight up hill to 3 dog roof, which is a house at a crossroads with 3 dogs on the roof. The dogs bark at anyone who passes whether they are walking or on bike. That was before. This time, there were 2 dogs chained outside the house on the grass that barked at everything and even a peacock that was chained up. Even the peacocked honked at me, or peacocked at me, or whatever those birds do. It was great. We stayed in west end and the sunsets are amazing, you can swim to coral, and I saw beautiful fish, a morey eel, and a lobster walking around on some coral. I also saw a giant parrot fish which is one of the most beautiful things to see. Swimming around enough you can really see how different fish blend into different areas, such as the coral, or the sea grass, or the sandy bottom. The electricity went out for about 6 hours/day because a lot of people in Honduras don't pay their electric bill. Even the government owed something like $27 million, so the president took over the electric company. We'll see, I'm not hopeful he can really fix it.

Last weekend I was in DC and realized I'm not doing anything interesting with my life. It was great to see people, but depressing in it's own way. Regardless, it's nice to see good people doing good things. One of the crazier members of the group couldn't make it, rumor was he fled to Alaska to get away from his girlfriend and any number of affairs and a strange outbreak of chlamydia. Everyone in peace corps isn't a world changer for the better.

This was just a quick post to update you on what's going on in my life. I'll probably get back to more topical thoughts fairly soon.

Not even subject worthy but it's sort of about tamales although it's really about me killing time and entertaining myself

2007-02-27T17:16:00.001-08:00

Anyway, I don't think that last post really worked, but I left it up. Actually, I put it up, then took it down, but I realized I'm to lazy to fix it so I just put it back up. I don't bother to really edit or think much about my posts, so sometimes they just don't work. I'm a sometime blogger, not an author. I don't know why I am telling you that, but i'm to lazy to delete it. It's my blog! If you don't like it, go shove it up your ojojona and read something else. Ojojona is a town in Honduras where I am going for a wedding (sorry, paternity leave remember?) in late April.

Anyway, today I want to talk about my cooking. I know what some of you are thinking, "That mind! That body! And he cooks too! How is that man still single?" Well, if you call cooking frying everything in olive oil and garlic , then well, yeah, sure, I cook. How am I still single? There isn't enough bandwidth on the internet for me to get into that one my friends.

Anyway, I wanted to talk in particular about my tamales. Tamales are tough for me because they don't really follow my normal pattern for food (cut food, heat oil and garlic, cook food in oil and garlic, eat with rice or tortillas). Tamales are made with corn flour, water, and not much else. You make the dough, put something inside the dough, wrap it all in a corn husk or banana leaf, boil, and walla! a present you unwrap for your stomach. Mmm!

Anyway, tonight I ate some of my tamales and I can safely say they are the 2nd worst tamales ever! The only tamales that were worse were the 1st time I ever made tamales, they weren't even edible and I got rid of them by knocking pigeons off my balcony with hard tamale bits. The pigeons were attracted by the tamale I spread on the porch because it's sort of like bread, and as the pigeons flew in I smacked 'em with tamale! Here's tamale in your eye you flying rat! Ha ha ha.

Anyway, I can't figure out why i can't make tamales better and it makes me sad :( . I can make me some killer beans now (cooking beans every day for almost 2 years and you pick up some tricks, like the one with the tomato and the jumping bean. Actually, that was a joke - remember the one where the tomato and the jumping bean walk into a bar? The bartender looks at the avacado and says, "what do I look like? Guacamole?" Ha ha ha - it's funny in spanish...).

Anyway, this blog is really just to try your patience and see if anyone finishes it. I'm even sober, not a drop in me! This is why I don't have to drink much or do other recreational drugs, my mind is already so fragile. So my tamales are terrible and it's a bummer. In Honduras, we used to eat two types of tamales. The first were called tamalitos and they were little and sweet, just like hondurans. They consisted of corn meal and sugar, wrapped in a corn husk and boiled. They were great. The other tamales were big and full of all sorts of things, and they were called nacatamales. Naca might have a meaning, but I don't know what it was even though I asked. For a while I was using naca as a prefix for anything wonderful, for example, "Ay que bueno que va a empezar mi nacanovela!" (translated as something like Oy how great my wonderful soap opera is about to start). I usually said this when Pasion de Gavilanes was about to start because that show was the naca-entertainment! I seriously tried to buy the DVD a while back but couldn't find it. Boo! I also used naca to describe Myrita because she was my favorite naca-hermanita in town, coolest happiest 10 year old ever. Oh, the nacamemories.

Anyway, Hondurans were notorious for eating nacatamales around christmas, and I had piles of nacatamales from people my last christmas in site. I couldn't decline the tamale because that would be rude, so I ate them all. Honestly, between you and me, I gave some to my neighbors dog as a peace offering because I had to buy her protection and because I couldn't eat them all. I felt guilty about that though. Then everyone asked me who made the best nacatamales in town and I said my mom back in the states. Awww...the nacamentiras.

Anyway, the nacatamales were notorious among the peace corps community because every tamale had a single piece of meat, pork or beef, in the center and it was usually on the bone so you had to very careful while eating them. Not only that, it was a single piece of meat and mostly fat, the good fat though. This was tradition, and i'm not sure why they didn't pull the meat off the bone but they didn't. This drove some volunteers crazy, but I didn't care. I love nacatamales. I love them if I'm on a bus, I love them if I'm in a car. No matter where I are, I love them love them near and far. I love them in leaf or corn husk, I love them morn and eve and dusk. I will not share them with an animal, unless the pile looks just unbearable. I love them even when I'm full, I love them even though I'm dull. I love them love them love them see, but I cannot cook them woe is me.

Anyway, I can't believe i am even bothering to keep writing but what the heck. So the first time I made tamales I overcooked them. The second time, a definite improvement, they were still bad. So I'm looking for advice. I want help from someone who can make tamales that are worthy of the naca. And I'd like her to speak spanish, be between 5'6 and 5'10 with dark skin and dark hair, and like to travel. If she's independantly wealthy, that's fine too. Thank you for your help.

Anyway, I had a really stressful day at work by the way... Time to go watch House, it's the naca-programa!

Negation versus creation

2007-02-26T15:28:00.001-08:00

The first exposure I had to the philosophy of Frederich Nietzsche was in college, he was the last in a series of four or five philosophers we studied. We ended up spending more time than we were supposed reading Hobbes' Leviathan (believe me, a few chapters is plenty, it's an interesting idea but 1/2 a semester for an intro to philosophy course?) so we only had a few weeks on Nietzsche. We read parts of his book Beyond Good and Evil. It's not a novel or an argument so much as it's a series of what i think are called aphorisms or something, not sure exactly what that means. Basically, it is a series of short ideas about almost everything. When I read it, I made a comment to someone (I think my mom actually) that he didn't seem to believe in anything but he certainly knew what he didn't believe it. I'll call that a philosophy of negation, a series of ideas about what should not be. For example, we should not allow women to be raped, children should not be soldiers, we should not cage humans in Cuba, etc (my examples, not his). Although you can identify a positive idea by taking the opposite of these ideas, it is not presented as such. I might have made up the term philosophy of negation, so if this has some other meaning to you I apologize. I think a lot of my ideas are too negative so I am working to be more positive, rather not complaining but coming up with ideas to improve things. I have been aware of this side of me for some time, but after a guy at worked called me the most negative person he had ever met, I decided to focus more strongly on it. He also said I was always smiling, which didn't make any sense to him, and that when he had a question I might bitch for 20 minutes first but I would always try to help. Welcome to my world buddy! Bear with me, this is going somewhere.

Anyway, later on in my life, I decided to try to push myself through what i have read is Nietzsche's best book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This is a book where he lays more clear an actual philosophy of life. And by clear what i really mean is murky and dense, and I should re-read it but I haven't chosen to devote myself to that yet. Anyway, I'll call this a philosophy of creation because the opposite of negativity is creation. Is that true? I don't know, but I like it and for me, for this example, it works. In Zarathustra, as much as i understood it, Nietzsche argues that man is a beast but that we can overcome our nature and become something more. He calls this the uberman or overman or superman, depending on the translation (I don't read German after all). He pities people who are bound to problems of this world because they don't realize that man can be more. Obviously, his argument is more in depth and more powerful than my crappy synopsis, but you can and should research that if you are interested. Actually, I believe it is this philosophy that sometimes lumps him in with the Third Reich and Hitler, this basic concept that man can overcome and become something else. It can be read into Hitler's idea of the perfect man, for him a type of German. I don't know that Nietzsche was an anti-semite and I think he would find that type of hatred a weakness that should be overcome. His narrator overcomes by leaving man and living in nature, in a cave, with animals, for a time. Isn't that always how philosophers do it?

Where am I going with this? For many years, I have been living a life of negation. I have been unhappy about what I cannot change, about who I am compared to who I think I should be, about things outside my control. Or things I perceived to be outside my control. However, my sphere of influence is larger than I believe, and my ability to change my own life is incredible. I need to transform myself into my own overman, transform my life into a life of creation, into a life where i create and surround myself with people who help me create a positive life for me and those around me. I often return to Nietzsche when I am confused because I am out of step somehow with friends or family and what they think I should be doing. Am I doing things because I want to (creation) or because I don't want to do something else (negation)? How am I pursuing my own life?

A few short examples of what i am talking about. I have a few friends who believe the point of man is to procreate, to pass on our seeds. They argue this is nature. I argue this was nature and that man has largely passed beyond that state. We aren't in any way near a singularity for humanity, a point where we cease to exist. All the wars and all the nuclear weapons won't wipe out our species. We don't exist in any sort of natural state so I can thankfully devote myself to other things if I so choose. I also read a book recently called Notes from an Economic Hitman about all the bad economic shit america does to keep other countries in control. It made me feel powerless. I'll talk more about that book later. I also had the wonderful opportunity to see my sister this weekend and hang out with an 18 month year old toddler. I forget what it's like to be around children, I forget how wonderful that experience is. His parents live a life very different from mine, but they obviously love the child and are doing all they can for him. Does that mean he is going to turn out well? No, but it's best hope any of us have. It's the greatest gift I received from my parents.

I am a little off track again. Basically, I have been thinking again about my life and how I view my life. I need to focus on myself, on my beliefs, on what i want. It's not selfish because I'm honest with people about what i can offer them. I need, or I want to, create beauty in my life, not identify ugliness. I have a chance that few people have because I have intentionally left my life fairly free of chains that others have (positive and negative) so I can become what i want to become. I just need to do it. I need to step outside even though it's cold and do it. I'm not even sure what it is and, because of that and only because of that, I'm not exactly how to find it. It might be the mountain or the city of the country or the word, but I'll find it. It's the journey towards that that will make me happy, for me I think it's that constant journey. No more negativity.

I think I sort of lost the thread at the end and couldn't really explain myself, but hopefully it makes enough sense. Actually, this wasn't even supposed to be about me. I was going to speak about America. We talk about the dream of America and how positive America has been for the world as an idea. Yet, when you look at our history, have we actually lived up to our potential as a nation? We define success by money, and by other countries having more money. What about more happiness? Our history since the second world war is sketchy at best. The dictators we have supported (including Saddam as you may recall) reads like a whose who list of terror. We speak now in golden words about freedom and such, but do we promote and fight for freedom around the world? Or do we fight for ourselves? As I need to remake my life, we need to remake America into a world leader. Obama might not be electable, he might not even have good ideas, but he at least speaks words that make me want to believe. He speaks like a creationist. Is he? I don't know. It's funny, but for all the obscene excesses of the academy awards, I love the "little" awards they announce before I went to bed at 9. Those people, some of them give speeches that make me believe in the power of film because they love it. Scorcese too, actually. They do it because they love it, and film like other mediums can make a difference.

America could and should be a strong positive leader throughout the world for so many things. People like to think we were before Bush because they hate him so much. I hate him too, I seriously think I could build a case for treason against the idea of america. However, that's glorifying the past. You want to think we used to be great? We weren't. We may have been better, but that's a question of degrees we all have to decide. How many genocides did we stop (compared to how many there were), how many people did we help compared to how many we could have helped? What is the ratio of hummers on the road to the number of people starving at any one time? What is the ratio of your effort to help to the amount of help needed? More importantly, what is that ratio for me? Do I want to look back in my life and say i offered up 2,000 lives I could have helped over 20 years so I could retire at 55? Could I ever be truly happy like that? Negation vs. creation. It's my life and my time to live. For me, what I want, it might not be what you want. It might not align to your goals. Fine. You don't criticize me when I disappear and I won't criticize you for staying. That is our new state of nature. That is what being a person means now. That is all we have to live for.

Favorite books

2007-02-19T17:15:00.000-08:00

Someone published a book that is basically a list of famous authors (famous? I hadn't heard of all of them...) favorite books, so I was curious what my top 10 would be. I am making this a little flexible because some aren't entire books, but it's my blog. List in no particular order, except the first one belongs there.

100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is easily the most creative book I have ever read, the first book I ever read where I was amazed that people could write like that, which meant people could think like that. It also has some extremely interesting views on power, solitude, and family that are normally not discussed but make the book worth multiple reads. Incredible. One of the first lines talks about giant rocks like prehistoric eggs and the need to point because many things did not have names. This line immediately sets the stage and timing of the book, then Marquez proceeds to rebuild reality throughout the story. Absolutely incredible. I can't even begin to describe how amazed and impressed I am by this novel. Easily my favorite novel of all time.
Bible, written by God et al. And I'm not just putting this on the list in case any omnipresent beings are reading this blog. Actually, the Bible has any number of great stories regardless of where you fall on the official Bible Credibility Scale. The Sermon on the Mount is probably the greatest single short speech of all time, although the entire old testament is full of interesting stories and the gospels in general are worthwhile. To be honest, I didn't spend much time on the part where the Soandso begot Susywhatshername who married Blennyblahblah and they begot..., I think it is the book of Numbers - a little repetitive. Also it then drags on into 40 pages on cutting fat from a lamb and burning it best for the big fellas pleasure, that gets a little tedious and boring as well. You can also ignore anything between the gospels and revelations, it is so dull even the vatican won't turn it into a movie. Don't skip revelations though. I can confess this if I bury it deep in the description because omnipresent beings only have time to scan blogs, not read the details. Seriously though, the Bible is one of those books that is so ingrained in our American culture and the basis of so many other stories it warrants the time. I'm not saying it's necessarily right, I'm just say it's true.
Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. The style is very short and direct sentences and this may be one of the books where Hemingway either developed that style, or it may be a good example. Regardless, the character development is great. There is a single female character so if that is what you are looking for, look elsewhere. One of my favorite books to re-read and I'm never disappointed.
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. I already talked about this, very clever and creative. I imagine meeting and speaking to Marquez would be a great time and we would drink rum and tell stories (mostly him). Meanwhile, I imagine meeting Borges would be like watching one of those cartoons about fractals where you zoom in on a fractal and it becomes another fractal and you keep zooming and it keeps repeating. The conversation would just be mind boggling, entertaining in its own way because of everything that keeps happening, but really more mind blowing than enjoyable.
Iliad and Odyssey by Homer. I picked up the Odyssey in Peace Corps because it was there and I had a lot of time to read. Honestly, I did not expect to complete it. I'm not trying to be intellectual, the Robert Fitzgerald translations of these books are delightful and fun. You do have to get used to reading them as poems (sort of like Shakespeare, it is just a different flow), and there is not a single limerick in the thousands of lines of poetry, but it's still worth it. Once in a while, it's okay to challenge your mind and see what happens. Your mind is a muscle, I know I've said it before. These books both reward your effort. I don't know which I prefer, but the character development of Achilles in the Iliad is wonderful.
The Stranger by Camus. Some people consider it a bit dark, but I read this for the first time at a point in my life when I needed something like this. It has had a profound impact on the last 10 years of my life, and I probably re-read the last 4 pages monthly. I won't argue all the effects of this have been positive long term, but the power of the idea and how it affected me puts it on my list.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Very amusing look at life and war. Makes some attempt at depth, mostly successful, but I'll always enjoy it for the comedy. If you read the first 10 pages and don't like it, don't keep reading. It doesn't change. To me, that's a good thing.
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Just a great read. See the cat? See the cradle?
Howl by Allen Ginsberg. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn searching for an angry fix..." That still gives me the chills, one of the angriest poems I have ever read. This poem is filled with a lot of great imagery. It catches how I felt at 20 better than any piece of writing I have ever experienced. It might be possible for pieces of my life to be defined by this poem, The Stranger, and, hopefully maybe, the Sermon on the Mount. That wouldn't be such a bad life, would it?
Poetry by Frederico Garcia Lorca. Because he wrote this line about New York (roughly translated from Spanish): "...There is a wire stretched from the Sphynx to the safety deposit box that passes through the heart of all poor children...." Also because he wrote a lot of happy poems that breath youthful exuberance and make me feel young, mostly his earlier poems. That feeling is not something I can do very well myself. He was murdered by Franco's nationalists during the Spanish Civil War. As he matured, he poetry gains depth and understanding but I still prefer some of the more joyful poems of his youth because sometimes that is what I need.

OK, 2 honorable mention, it's my list remember. James Joyce is arguably the greatest english writer of the last century, but he can be dense. His short stories in the Dubliners are written extremely well, tight I would call them, but they aren't anything more than great short stories. However, in Portrait of the Artist, he has a fire and brimstone speech that makes the flames tickle your feet as a little bead a sweat walks down your forehead and falls on the page. Although the entire book is great, that passage is top 10 (or 12...).

The other is Arthur Rimbaud, and I throw him out because of his longer poems the Illuminations and A Season in Hell although I like a lot of his work that I know. They both have great openings, and if nothing else, you should flip through the opening sections of each of these poems while browsing a bookstore. "When the idea of the flood had subsided, a hare stopped among the clover and swaying flower bells, and said his prayer to the rainbow through a spider's web..." Isn't that a great opening line to a poem? Wouldn't that be a great opening line to anything?

That's my list. It might change if you asked me tomorrow but right now, that's what I'm thinking.

PS: After rereading this, I realized I don't have any female authors (except maybe god et al?). I reviewed my bookshelf and I don't actually own many female authors. I wouldn't consider myself a manly man, but what who knows. The closest I come to having more than one book by a female author is Jean Genet and that's not very close at all.

Guacamolification: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Avacado as a Symbol for My Life

2007-02-15T16:44:00.000-08:00

The other day I was sitting around for 30 minutes of silence because unlike war dodging "war presidents", "take a stand" follower politicians, and gay or child molesting "family values" conservatives, I try to practice what I preach. I'm not always successful, but I try. Anyway, I was sitting there contemplating the great mysteries of life, among them whether or not my avocados were ready to become guacamole, when I realized I was confronted by one of life's most frustrating mysteries: How can you really tell if an avocado is ready? It needs to be soft but firm, but that balance is much harder to find in an avocado than a tomato or a mango. I swear sometimes I'll know the avocado is rotten but it's actually great, and other times i doubt it's even ready and it's rotten to the core. Sometimes, I think the ripe period for an avocado is measured in hours, other times they sit ripe for days. Then it hit me, the realization, the light shining, the birds chirping, the fire crackling: the avocado is a symbol for life. It is a symbol for women, for sports, for work, for work life balance, for women work life balance, for women sports work life balance, and for this blog. Don't believe me about the blog, just check the title my friend. Like I said, I try to play it straight.

Anyway, ever feel like you can't tell a good woman (or man) when sticking your toe into the lukewarm lap pools of modern dating (Editors note: the narrator originally wrote frozen scum covered ponds of modern dating, but he's trying to be shed his image as a cynic and be more positive given that it's so close to valentines day. Speaking of which, you know valentine's day marks the day the patron saint, Saint Valentine, was beheaded. As the old proverb says, "Nothing celebrates a beheading like chocolates, roses, and sex." I think that's originally from The Iliad, but I can't be sure, it certainly sounds more Homer than Shakespeare somehow. End note). That confusion, that uncertainty, is what I feel contemplating my avocado pile. Which ones are ready? Is she the one for me? If I cut this avocado, will I wish I had cut a different one? If I love her, will I wish I had loved another? This one feels sweet on the outside, but it actually has a moldy core. She seems sweet on the outside..How can you tell? Now put in job or any major life decision for women, and you see the pattern. Life is full of mysteries my friend. Women, blogs, avocados. They seem so different, yet they are so similar.

Since I don't do many life updates here, here is how my day went. I woke up at 4:30 AM to catch a 6:30 flight that left the gate 15 minutes late, sat on the tarmac, an announcement came on we were 15th and would wait another 1/2 hour, then another announcement that the Philly air traffic system was down (another 20 minutes), then the line starting moving. We arrived in Pittsburgh 2 hours late. I got my crappy enterprise rental car. This is the 2nd straight enterprise car where the drive seat can't tilt and it's stuck in a gangster lean as I drove down the expressway to West Virginia. About 2 miles from West Virginia, I was passing a truck, hit an ice patch, did a 360 and ended up in a ditch. 1 guy stopped to see if I was ok, I hope he had chocolate and sex for valentines day, screw everyone who just drove past me. (trying to be positive and less cynical... ahh screw it). In time, I managed to drive out, get to my client, do training for 6 hours, get 2 beers and a crappy sandwich. Now I'm watching the Daily Show and ready to go to bed. That's why I don't blog about my life, nothing happens.

In an effort of full disclosure, it is mildly possible I actually wrote this blog while listening to the song Californication and watching Dr. Strangelove over and over. I'm saying it's just possible. We are what we pretend to be... Actually, I just wanted to use the word guacamolification because it popped in my head and I liked it. I realized the other day when talking to a friend who is getting married that I also like the word nuptials, as in have you and your girlfriend nuptialized yet? My friend commented, and this was funny, "Yeah, it's a good word unless it's about you." True enough. Anyway, I made it a spanish world too - nuptializar, meaning to nuptialize. I'm bringing them both into the vocabulary.

Stop reading this blog, you only 364 days to shop for valentines 2008! Motto for a throwback valentines: "You should behead-ing out to buy me some chocolate." Think about it...

30 minutes of silence

2007-02-13T15:50:00.000-08:00

About 1 month ago, I cancelled my digital cable because I was tired of paying Comcast $120/month for internet and cable. Anyone who ever complains about money needs to cancel cable, at a minimum. The cost is ridiculous, and if you can't find another way to fill your time without feeling empty you have problems larger than money to address. Actually, and I won't get into this much, but I think everyone should spend at least 1/2 hour each day in silence. You don't have to sit and think, you can do dishes or sweep or take a walk or whatever, but for 1/2 hour each day, you should be alone with yourself. You should think about your day, or your dreams, or your lover, or politics, or your children, or the world, or whatever - but just give 1/2 hour each day to your mind. Turn off your radio, turn off the tv, and just be for a bit. I want to say I won't count walking because that provides external stimulus (depending where you walk the stimulus changes but it is still there), but I figure it's a start. Besides, we are all getting fat so walking for 1/2 hour is probably good on a mental and physical level. I have, at various points in my life when I have been unhappy for any number of reasons, made myself do this. For a minimum of 1/2 hour, I sit and think about whatever pops in my head (sort of like writing this blog actually). At the beginning, it was hard, the time dragged, I had to build my mind up to it. Through this and other experiences, I firmly believe the mind is a muscle and needs to be exercised to stay fit. Through these exercises, I rediscovered (or recreated?) my ability to entertain myself, to understand myself, to be alone with myself and realize and truly believe that was enough. With time, I gained a much better understanding of myself because the same daydreams returned or the same concerns popped up or the same ideas kept re-occurring. With time, I can focus my mind more quickly and move through more ideas in 1/2 hour, although it is still nice to just let my mind wander. I have seen other ideas where people recommend writing for 10 or 15 minutes a day, whatever is on your mind. Same idea, whatever works for you. I think we all need to be comfortable with ourselves first and until that point, we will never be truly happy with anyone else. We may build dependencies, but they are unhealthy dependencies. It is great to be in love and depend on another person, my point is you need to be comfortable with yourself first.

Speaking of first, I am way off topic again. I can sit in silence for 30 minutes but I can't write for 5 without wandering into the bushes. I'll come back now. Eliminating digital cable means I now have about 40 stations, approximately 30 of which are various public access or smaller local stations. The interesting thing is this prevents me from channel surfing for 4 hours at night, so I spend more time writing this blog, or reading, or writing other things, or doing something else for me. It makes me engage myself in my life, not a passive bystander. For me, that's what I need to do but to each their own. Anyway, I just found a news talk show hosted by an announcer named Tavis Smiley. I have heard Tavis Smiley before on public radio and I have always been a little up in the air on how interesting I find his program. In an effort of full disclosure, Tavis Smiley and his radio show (rather, the ones I have heard) often focus on problems facing "Black America" (NOTE: I say black not African American because I have had a number of Caribbean friends tell me they are obviously black so it's not offensive if used respectfully, but they don't feel any connection to Africa). I am not black nor am I from or largely involved with "black cuases" (quotes added because I obviously suppor equality, I am just not involved with it. Oh forget it, I know what I mean. I'm using Tavis Smiley as an example tonight, don't read to much into it), so part of my issue with him may have been he discusses issues that do not effect me directly. However, I humor myself as empathetic and somewhat aware, so I do listen. Anyway, I listened to him interview Bill Maher and it was interesting, it was a more open side of Tavis I haven't seen before. Has he become my favorite journalist? No, but it was another side of him I haven't heard before on the radio. It was interesting.

My point is I would not have watched that program if I had 223 other stations to watch. I would never have gone to peace corps if I never sat myself down and wondered what I really wanted. I would never have done a lot of things without trying to figure out what would make me happy. I don't care what makes you happy, I just want you to understand what it is. If it's mindlessly watching Fox News and voting republican, then do it (remember, 2nd Wednesday of November is voting day). My point is we get caught up in our lives, and I've been there, but we need to make an effort to escape. The next time I see Tavis Smiley on TV, maybe I'll watch it and I'll learn something. Maybe I'll learn something mare than if I watch a basketball game or Law and Order or a Simpon's re-run, or maybe I won't. Then again, maybe I'll ignore the TV for the entire half hour and try to figure something out for myself. You never know, I might even come up with an idea to fix our tax code.

Quick thoughts on globalization

2007-02-13T03:56:00.000-08:00

I wish I had 2 good quotes to use here, one from a purely business standpoint (beauty of the market and all that) and the other from someone who just lost their job due to globalization. The stark reality of globalization is it allows us to buy things cheaper. Imagine what your fancy new iPod would cost if all the parts were American made? You might need home equity to purchase it. People who sell globalization sell it on the fact that you couldn't afford things, or you couldn't afford as many things, if we didn't have globalization, if we didn't sew underwear in China and put computers together in Pakistan or build whatever wherever it is being built.

That's probably true. My concern with globalization, and I'm generally OK with the idea within the appropriate framework, is how it is done. For example, there are number of reasons to move these jobs to lower paying markets. One is the lower cost of living, leading to lower employee salaries. That, obviously, is critical. It is also very difficult to compare cost of living between countries, even though many economists and leading publications have factors. The reason I don't buy these exactly is because many goods are cheaper in developing countries, especially basic (locally grown) fruits, vegetables, and a basic starch which every country seems to have. However, cars, iPods, TVs, radios are all generally the same price or more expensive. So the cost to survive is less, but the cost to live equally may actually be closer to the cost here in the states that is generally reported. It all depends on how much a person consumes, how much of modern consumer hysteria they embrace, that decides cost of living. Remember that we push consumption in the US, we push debt and credit cards - hell, we even push it as patriotic to spend - so we can't argue it's good for america but not for everyone else. Well, we can and we do but we shouldn't. I would argue most proponents of globalization with these statistics (our government, magazines like the economist, other major publications) are pro-globalization and open markets and, therefore, setup the rates accordingly. Ignoring this though, at it's core, it is cheaper to live in these countries.

Another reason to move overseas is tax breaks. This actually happens right now as companies play states off each other to attract factories and jobs. The state may help to build the factory or provide many years of tax breaks in order to lure a factory and thousands of jobs. It's like building a sports team a stadium because the team "brings the community together." It's welfare for super rich people who can buy sports teams worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. It's bullshit. Regardless, I can't argue playing countries off each other is bad if we do it in Penn and NJ, so I'll let it go. I think it should be addressed nationally, but it won't, so there isn't any hope for international law here. There are more important issues anyway.

A third issue with globalization is the difference in pollution laws. Many smaller countries do not have the laws or the enforcement in place to properly prosecute pollution mills. In fact, if they do have these laws, chances are they would not get the factory or the factory will leave. As much as our car culture and our refusal to sign the Kyoto protocol are effecting global warming, we may be doing more global damage by poisoning drinking waters and making open landfills. This may not be as drastic an issue, but it is as important. It is another argument that capitalism is brutal, it directly kills people, and America is a heartless monster that refuses to hold her citizens accountable. I am counting corporations as citizens because they have become our own aristocracy, incredibly wealthy and glorified in our papers regardless. Remember, Jack Welch from GE started as a butcher, laying off thousands of people. He retired a King. Short memories are a failure we all share. Anyway, it is my opinion that America's lack of positive leadership around the world will have as big an impact on any future events (and I think they will be violent) as any sort of religious confrontation. If you follow money to the ends of the earth, won't it be easy for someone to follow behind with a sword?

I read part of a book by a NY Times contributor (Friedman I think?) called Lexus and the Olive Tree about globalization. I couldn't finish it, I tried a few different times. He made the argument at the beginning that it is irrelevant what he thought of globalization because he couldn't stop it. Then he proceeded to write about how right it was. It is obviously right for us, we win. Is it right for other countries? It provides jobs and needed infrastructure (roads, ports, etc). But does the country win? A few jobs for miles of polluted waters? What percentage of that money really helps the country's schools or medical facilities? If we do a little tiny bit of good when we could do a lot, what does that mean? Should I be happy we aren't doing all bad? Or should we all rise up and hold ourselves more accountable for what we buy and what we allow our corporations to do in our name. You may not think it is in your name, but America itself is like a corporation selling open markets. If they destroy the world, then we will all be accountable in the eyes of our global neighbors. And we all should be. There are better frameworks we could be selling. These include allowing foreign wages to be controlled there, but holding companies to either American standards or agree to international environmental standards, as well as linking the companys profits to development/educational programs in the countries. I realize there is a lot of corruption around the world (including the US, check out accounting reports in New Orleans and Iraq's american consultants), but this would be a start in the right direction. Making money is not a goal, it's a by product of our lives. We happen to need money to live, but our limits define us human. What would you do for someone you love, or what won't you do for $100 define our character. Hiding behind corporate profits is inhumane and should be criminal. Besides, the people who do that, the "corporate leaders," really show their weaknesses as leaders and people. And for the rest of us who sit idly back and enjoy the profits of this work?

Righteous indignation might sound ok in a blog, but am I willing to pay $600 for my next iPod? Or $24 for underwear? Do I do everything I can do to stop it and stop supporting it? Everything begins internally, everything begins by looking in the mirror. "ooh, nice haircut" said the author as he looked in the mirror. What do I see in the mirror? Is it enough?

Employment at will

2007-02-12T15:27:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine has an essay to write about at will employment and wondered what I thought. Actually, he was looking to quote me as, to use his words, "a scion of cyberspace." At will employment basically means I can leave when I want and you can fire me when you want. It sounds easy, logical, good open market for people to whore themselves - excuse me - apply their skills at various companies to receive the best salary, benefits, commute, vacation time, whatever you may be looking for. In general, I agree that an open human capital market is a good thing because it gives flexibility to the work force in general and, more importantly, me in particular. This blog is all about me after all. Love me love me! You don't become a "scion of cyberspace" without a little ego!

Anyway, is this type of arrangement between workers and employers a good thing? At first glance, as I said above, I say yes. However, I think we need to look into this with our depth perception glasses, as uncomfortable as those may be. A flexible employee market, where employees can trade off skills to the highest bidder and management can eliminate low performing employees, is a great market mechanism to keep America productive. It rewards excellence, and skills, and creativity. It, in other words, rewards people who are already winning. It helps people with strong skills develop better skills, which enables us to get even higher paying jobs where they continue to develop us! In general, this system helps people who are educated and/or went to college, people from better high schools (feeds into college I agree but it has some other effects), people who are naturally leaders and those who develop these skills, drive, determination, etc. Basically, the free labor market is a great tool to separate the "winners", or people who can function in corporate America, from "losers", people who cannot. When I say cannot, I am speaking in very general terms of people with less eduction or desire or motivation or, as a friend would say, someone who has many barriers (lack of education, children at home, no family, low confidence from one of the previous items, etc).

The free labor market, over time, in my opinion, separates us into winners and losers. Actually, I believe everything about capitalism as a major system of our economy and our lives creates this division. A few years back, actually many years back, there was an article in The New Yorker about Karl Marx. You may have heard of him, he was a bit of a trouble maker and tried to stir up all the working class (proletariat) against the big, powerful, bourgeoisie. He even helped express the idea of communism (or socialism, not sure which), the adoption of which caused a bit of world strife for a few years in the in 1900s. Anyway, one of Marx's arguments against capitalism is that the worker loses out and the manager wins. He argued that it would drive man against man and chain us all into a sort of slavery to objects. He also argued that with time, capitalism would create great divides between winners and losers. The article argued that regardless of what one thought of communism as a political idea, his criticism of capitalism was extremely strong and profound, and in many was becoming true. That argument has only strengthened in the 10 years or so since I read that. In other words, you might not like his solution but you can't fault his argument. The article argued he should be recognized at least as much for his criticism of capitalism as for his support for communism. As an aside, he never truly created a document for implementing and running a communist state, which is a big gap in his legacy. Instead, he focused on pro-commy propaganda and capitalist criticisms. Just something to keep in mind as you judge his role in the failed communist states of history, past present and future.

Anyway, it appears he was correct. The divide between the winners and losers may actually be increasing, or as people often phrase it, the middle class is disappearing. The winners are winning and the losers are losing. The losers are not only losing here in America, where they were barely able to make a living wage (remember it has been 10 years since we increased minimum wage, which means every year a minimum wage earners actually loses money from the previous year. How the minimum wage isn't just tied to annual inflation, just like legislative salaries should be, is beyond me.), they are now losing more because jobs are moving overseas. It is actually cheaper to sew clothing in China and ship it to America than it is to do that here. Fine, I like cheap clothing. However, the only way for such a free labor market to work is through retraining people who lose jobs to do other jobs. This is the only way the entire globalized economy won't collapse through tariffs and other protectionism. As jobs leave a country (ie the US), the government and the companies must re-train portions of the population to work in other industries. Why is it in the companies interest? If people hate the company or don't have jobs, they can't buy anything. People hate Walmart, but a lot of people shop there. Why? Prices. Actually, I read an article a few years back called the 2nd place advantage. The article was probably in the Economist because it sounds like something they would say but who knows. Anyway, the article argued that being 2nd in an industry can actually be a good thing because you don't get the negative publicity. There is a lot of anger against Coke in developing countries and WalMart here, but the statistics say both Pepsi and Target have very similar practices. You just don't know it because they aren't the leader. Think about that when you shop or complain - it's probably best to research the issue a bit but I wouldn't be surprised if it were true.

All right so I went way off topic there. The topic is open markets. I think the concept is good, but I'm probably in the winning bracket if I choose to be. I am educated, I have experience, and I have some savings. I already dropped out of my life once for 2 years, returned, and am considering doing it again. I'm spoiled. Most of my friends are in the same situation to varying degrees. So what? I don't feel guilty for it, but I do realize the freedom I have means that other people do not have these freedoms. What is our other option? Return to the days when you worked at a company for 40 years, received a pension, went home to you picket fence, and lived happily ever after? I don't like that either.

This little rant was all over the place. In the next few days, I'll try to take out pieces and expand on them. Basically, the issue of at will employment is necessary to create a global economy, it is necessary to have a flexible economy, and it is necessary to keep me sane. However, it is a sidecar from our capitalistic motorcycle, and like all motorcycles, it is dangerous. That's a dumb analogy but I don't care. I'm a scion, remember?

Disagreeing properly

2007-02-03T15:43:00.000-08:00

It seems to me we have a great lack of intelligent discourse in this country right now. What bothers me most is that we aren't even talking about the root issues. For example, people posturing for presidential runs are saying things like "if I knew then what I know now about Iraq I wouldn't have voted for it..." I interpret this as saying if there were weapons of mass destruction I would not be against the war or the troop escalation. Let's play a thought game for a minute and take a theoretical look back at would could have happened. If we invaded Iraq, removed Saddam, took over the country, chaos takes over as it has BUT we found enriched uranium or other strong evidence of WMDs. What would be different? Well, the world at large might be slightly more supportive of the war but I don't see how Iraq would not be still in chaos. Is there anything in the finding of some sort of WMD stockpile that means Iraq would now be a nice, stable, peaceful society? Of course not, I think Iraq would be in more or less the same state regardless. You voted on your politics 4 years ago, don't deny it. If there were WMDs, what would you say now? Yes, Iraq is absolute chaos but we found WMDs, so we should send in 21,500 more troops? And what the hell, let's get Iran too just in case? That's a terrible argument, but I think it's the argument being made.

To me, the root cause of disagreement is rarely the focus of debate. I blame the media for not pushing it and politicians for not having the strength to point this out. Let's take another example: abortion. What is the abortion debate? Well, it looks like an argument of women's choice versus pro-life. If I break this down in my head, the debate is a single point, something that a physicist would call a singularity, and here it is: when does human life begin? If life begins at conception, then abortion is murder and already covered by existing murder laws. If life begins at birth or when the fetus can feel pain or when the fetus looks like a little tiny human or at some point after conception, then, in your opinion, after that point, abortion should be murder. However, before this point, it is not and should be legal. Is it possible to believe life begins at conception but that abortion should still be legal? How does that work? It's OK to kill really tiny lives? If so, email me because I can't get my head around that one but I'm open to considering it. Ignoring complexity of rape or incest, I don't think that is a rational argument. To me, and I realize this might seem like an oversimplification although I don't think it is so I beg your patience , the core question (indeed, the only question or, perhaps more accurately, the initial question) in the abortion debate is only when life begins. However, that is not the debate I see on TV or in the magazines. As I understand it, and I'm no legal scholar, abortion is legal based on a right to privacy. If you believe conception begins at birth, abortion is murder plain and simple. If you don't believe that, then, and only then, can you believe the women should have the right to terminate her pregnancy. There isn't any right to privacy if you kill your 3 year old in your own home? However, a 3 year old is obviously human. A fetus? I agree that is open for debate. If only it were the debate... The Supreme Court needs to rule on when life begins and that will define the law. I think the Supreme Court should take that up, but not until I'm sure that my side will win...

For the record, I agree with the "women's right to privacy" issue only because I don't think a fetus is a life until it is born. That is why I think stem cell research should be legal. That's me, feel free to have your opinion. Don't worry, I don't mind, I accept the fact there are lots of wrong people in the world.

You know what's odd about this blog? I intended to talk about Exxon and their extreme profit. Hmm, maybe I'll get to that later.

Save the whales! And the humenguins!

2007-02-02T11:40:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine pointed out a headline on The Onion that reads, "In Order to Save The Whales, We Must Breed With Them". Now that's an interesting idea, but I think it's a little infeasible given the size difference between a normal human and whales. I think it's even probably a bit of a stretch for male porn stars. So I was thinking about how we could use this type of logic to truly save an endangered species that might be just a little cuter, maybe a little more manageable size wise, and, why not, is already a movie and media superstar.

That's right, I am talking about penguins. Or the creation of humenguins! Think about it: penguins are cute, everybody loves penguins, and they have all the media attention after a big sappy documentary about penguin mating and a cartoon about a dancing penguin. To go a step further, I promote that we encourage, not force but encourage, people from warm weather countries to procreate with penguins so the penguin receives some genes that make it more adaptable to warmer climates. Think how cute the waddling little humenguins would be, strolling along South Beach without any ill effect. Also if we took a penguin, already black and white, and mated it with a Latino or Indian and raised our little humenguin as a Muslim, is there any place in the world it would not be welcome? I don't think so.

Paternity vacation

2007-02-02T05:38:00.000-08:00

After watching almost all my coworkers "work from home" at some point over the last few weeks because their children were sick, it occurred to me I was being treated unfairly. I am being oppressed. I can't just work from home whenever I want and blame it on my kids. "Love to come into work today but you know got this kid, sniffles, day care won't take him. Call my cell to wake me up and I'll let you know what I'm working on." It's terrible, it's unjust, and quite frankly, I'm not taking it anymore. Does anyone ever verify the child is sick? No. People take maternity and paternity leave, but does anyone truly verify the child exists? I don't think so.

I figure I have a few options, last on the list being marriage and children. Number one on the list is to manipulate the loophole I mentioned above, namely that nobody ever really asks for proof the child is sick. However, everyone knows I don't have a child but what they don't know is how little I care for this collective "reality" we share. I am hoping to take a 2-4 week trip to Central America at the end of April for a friends wedding and some travel, and I figure why couldn't I be on "paternity leave?"

I thought about asking for paternity leave on the basis of some artistic, metaphorical rebirth. This would entail me arguing, and my company buying into the fact that I will be "reborn" after my trip, basically I would be "giving birth to my true self." I don't think those jokers would go for it, they don't have the ability for abstract creativity like we do. So I thought, why not just say I am actually having a child? Who is going to check? I'll say some tramp seduced me one night as I walked around Philadelphia and then she disappeared until just the other day she tracked me down. And she wasn't really alone. I'm going to be the father of an illegitimate child that is due around April 28th, which is conveniently when my friend gets married. Who is going to check? I'll take a picture of some baby in Honduras and who is going to know? I'll make up stories about the birth, complain about our pediatrician, whine about how quickly they grow, same as my coworkers. "Hey, do you know a good pediatrician? Mine is fabulous but he's so hard to get into see. Sometimes, I think he is just doing it for the money." "Isn't this picture adorable? They get big so fast don't they?" with a nostalgic sigh. I've got it down.

The only problem I can foresee is my coworkers might ask how I got so tan being on paternity leave. I thought about going abstract again, using my son (sun?) as an excuse and saying he was actually born as a true sun. Nothing but a big ball of hydrogen and helium glowing in the dark, no wonder my fake one-time lover was always so warm during the pregnancy. It's abstract, but who is going to call a new father on that? Then I could use the ongoing son is sick routine whenever I felt like taking a day off. If I got tired of the child, I could just say he got sick, turned himself into a black hole and disappeared just like most teenagers.

It seems to me this is a pretty foolproof plan. I am just a little concerned with the fake mother of my imaginary child. She doesn't want to get married and make an honest man of me, and her language is terrible, she swears constantly and sleeps with men she just met on the street. What kind of environment is that for a child, even a make believe one? I can't take care of the child, I'm not ready. Arrgg, the stress of even conceptualizing my imaginary son drives me crazy. Sigh. Maybe I can't pull this off. I'll have to find a plan B. It's so unfair though.

Infinite

2007-01-31T18:43:00.000-08:00

Jorge Luis Borges is one of those authors who blows my mind. I don't know what other people think of him because he never really just comes up in a conversation. In my feeble attempts to fit in at parties, even I never throw out, "So you ever read Borges?" Maybe I should, maybe that's what I'm doing wrong. Interesting thought. Anyway, I was re-reading one of his short stories the other day and I rediscovered what I always thought was an interesting line. He never wrote a novel, only poems and short stories and some essays, but for my money you go with the short stories. In one of them, or maybe it was even an essay, he has what amounts to a throw away line that is an incredibly interesting way to think of infinite. He says something like, "Most people assume that to do an infinite number of things you need an infinite of time. In fact, all you actually need is any set period of time that you can divide into an infinite number of pieces." Then he goes on like that was obvious. Think about that for a minute, it's actually quite interesting, partially because it is a very distinct way to think about infinite.

I agree that anytime you have to think about infinite and things like that, it requires abstraction that we don't really get (I don't really get it either, but I like to pretend). That line however, that fresh perspective, has always amazed me. Borges was also the first author I read to discuss Zeno's paradox from Ancient Greece, and for that he will always have a special place in my heart. Here is info on the paradox from wikipedia. Basically, it is a little paradox that "proves" motion is impossible. The crux of the argument is that in order to move across the room, you must get to the half way point. In order to get there, you must 1/4 of the way across the room. To get there, you must get 1/8 of the way across. If you follow this train of thought to it's logical (or illogical?) conclusion, motion is impossible because you always have a halfway point. There is another fun example pitting the mighty Achilles from the Trojan War against a turtle in a foot race. In this example, the turtle starts out with a lead because Achilles believes he will catch up. However, Achilles never catches the turtle because when he arrives at where the turtle was, the turtle has moved on. When Achilles arrives there, the turtle has moved on again, and so on. The distance between the two becomes increasingly smaller, but Achilles must always arrive where the turtle was, only to find the turtle has continued to move on. This is a different example than the proof against motion, but it is logically the same argument.

It is extremely difficult to disprove these paradoxes logically although it is easy to disprove mathematically or by, say, moving. However, I read a book about the number zero that was called, conveniently, "Zero" (I don't bring that up much at parties either) and it argued the Greeks couldn't mathematically resolve this paradox because it really requires a limit, thus calculus (as time goes to 0 or as the change in distance goes to 0), to resolve, and the Greeks didn't do limits because they denied infinite and 0. So that's why you should embrace them both, it's freeing. Anyway, the riddles themselves are interesting thought puzzles and I always wondered if you did these with children (middle school maybe) what kind of answers they would come up.

So there you go. It is possible to do an infinite number of things in a set period of time but, ultimately, it doesn't matter because motion is impossible anyway. If that's true, and how could it not be, maybe I'll take tomorrow off of work. Regardless, wouldn't it be nice to think about that laying on the street in front of my old house in Honduras staring at the stars?

Final note: if you ever decide to read Borges (and you should consider it), I recommend reading a story or two before purchasing the book in case you don't like his style. I think Labyrinths is his best work and it has some of my favorite stories. Borges had an uncanny ability to link and discuss disparate ideas in his stories in a way that interests me. His is not the kind of mind I want to meet, it is the kind of mind I want to become. I think The Garden of Forking Paths is a good intro into his circular style , but The Immortals is probably his most profound. Both are in Labyrinths with a lot of other great stuff.

Honduran nostalgia

2007-01-31T18:07:00.000-08:00

I'm nostalgic tonight, maybe because it has been so cold here in Philadelphia. You know what I miss most about Honduras? It was the wide open spaces without houses or housing developments or anything. The bus ride from my town to the city took around an hour, although that time varied alot depending on, well, I don't exactly what. There certainly wasn't any traffic, I suppose it depended on how many people we picked up. The bus didn't have specific stops, it just stopped for anyone on the side of the road who flagged it down. Sometimes, people would be standing 10 yards apart and the bus would stop, pick up one group, drive 10 feet, stop again, and pick up the other group. I always thought this was annoying and since I was so busy, it used to piss me off the two groups of people would not wait together. That was very American of me because whenever I asked a Honduran friend they could not understand why it mattered. It's more efficient I said. Again, very American of me. I tried to deny all my americanisms, but I never really got over that one.

Anyway, the trip was a dusty ride through small mountains and valleys as we drove into the city. It was generally very soothing a ride through little towns and past bean and corn fields without much soil. During harvest season, there would be entire families out harvesting corn and beans. The land was a series of big hills and sometimes you would get a great view of a farmer standing on the edge of his land overlooking the valley below. After picking the beans, most farmers attempted to clean them to lighten the load they had to carry back home. They would take a coffee can full of beans from one pile, hold the can at arms length, and dump the beans into another pile. On a windy day, you could see the dust and dirt blowing away from the beans. If the farmer was standing at the edge by the valley, it looked majestic. The farmers then carried the beans home, set them to dry along the street on giant sheets or some other fabric, then stored them or sold them. When the corn was ready, they would bring the corn home in big nets and put the nets on the giant tarps. Then we would all take turns beating the corn with a stick to break off the kernels that would be ground every day and used to make tortillas. Other times, we would sit around and chat and push off the kernels with our fingers. Both beans and corn were stored in giant rusty barrels. I miss the community of it. I also realize most families lived on 1 large harvest and 1 small harvest a year. It wasn't majestic to them, it was the cycle of their lives and they generally could not get out of it. It wasn't glamorous and it wasn't a life most of the younger people wanted. Yet the cycle continues, generally speaking, unbroken.

I lived at the end of town in the 2nd to last house on a dead end street. At night, I would watch soap operas and hang out, read, or talk to the neighbors. The night sky was amazing. Since there weren't many houses, you could look out and see stars, more stars than I have ever seen anywhere else. Sometimes we would lay on the street in front of my house and talk and stare up at the stars. I miss that. I miss staring at the stars and that community more than I can really explain. However, I was never a real part of the life because I always had the option to leave. In fact, I did leave and I was ready for it. Some people in the states talk about maintaining that life and the simplicity of it all. It was a beautiful life, but not one I wanted forever. As I said above, it wasn't one most of them wanted forever especially the youth. Here in the states, we talk about small farmers as an excuse to maintain farming subsidies. Nobody in the states is a small farmer, not like that. I grew up in a farming town and most people lost their farms or sold their farms. Even then, they had tractors and other machines to help them.

This isn't an email about farming or farming subsidies. It's about the life we choose to lead. I think most small farmers in the states, the people who bring vegetables and meat to local markets, do so as much by choice as by necessity. In the states, we have options. When I was in Honduras, it was a nice feeling that every night Gustavo and his entire family would be watching soap operas in his little store because they couldn't afford to do anything else. It was nice for me, but it wasn't really nice for them. It was what they did because it was what they could do. Once in a while we played pool and had some beers, but most of my friends didn't really have money for that.

I miss my hammock on my porch and the kids coming over. I miss making them balloon animals and the stories they used to tell me about monsters in the mountains and keeping my bible open at night to protect me from the boogey man. I miss Chimito and Miguelito, my dueling 1-3 year old neighbors. I miss the mean white dog that almost bit me every day for my first month (i had to walk past with rocks to get home) until I gave it my chicken bones and it loved me. I miss my annual Christmas card from the president that always arrived promptly in February, sometimes just in time for Valentines (I never missed not being here for that "holiday"). I miss people randomly giving me food, and people walking around and selling me vegetables. I miss someone killing their pig and selling me 2 pounds of, literally, random pig parts. Sometimes it was the freshest meatiest pork in the world. Sometimes, it was all bone and fat. They weren't butchers, they were farmers and small time pig raisers. They just took the machete, the same one they used to cut firewood and other things, and hacked off parts of a dead pig. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost. For $1 a pound, you can't complain.

I remember one day I was finishing up a run and the end of the run was probably a 1/4 mile hill that I just walked up. Don't call me weak, it was 90 most days I was running. One day, I came upon the 50-ish year old lady who lived up the street carrying home firewood. Carrying firewood is miserable. The wood is heavy and awkward. Men carry firewood on their shoulders. Women balance it on their heads. I read an article in National Geographic a while back that studied people in Africa who walked great distances carrying water or other materials on their head. They said most of them walked in a slightly more efficient way than "normal" that allowed them to save energy. It had something to do with a more efficient pendulum motion as they walked. National Geographic sells CDs of all their past magazines and I've been thinking of buying it because that type of thing fascinates me.

Anyway, I just finish my 3 mile run and I catch this lady at the bottom of the hill. I'm sweaty, I'm tired, and I just want to get home. There wasn't another way back to town, and I couldn't run up the hill past her so I stop at her and we start talking. Sure enough, someone else comes along as we are standing and tells me to carry the wood back for her. I was stuck. This women was poor, fairly old (I said 50-ish but sometimes it's hard to tell), ate nothing but beans and tortillas and birds when her husband shot one, and was significantly smaller than me. And she was carrying the wood on her head and talking to me as we walked so I figured I could do it. I almost died walking up that hill, sweat started pouring off and she was laughing at me. I almost quit, it took all my inner motivation (lazy gringo!, tough american!, can't show weakness!, WWGD (what would George do) etc) to make it. We got to my house, she thanked me, laughed again through her 3 teeth, put the wood back on her head and went home. She told everyone I helped carry firewood and, basically, how big a wimp I was. We all laughed. It was miserable. Yet, I miss that too.

Public Breastfeeding

2007-01-29T15:39:00.000-08:00

There seems to be a lot of articles recently about people, mostly women, breastfeeding in public. Actually, it's not just women, it's babies too! Blank slate? I don't know. Think of the scandal! Think of the children? What would the blind prophets of legend say?

So after much thought, I realized this debate is missing something critical: my opinion. Today I have decided in my blog to take a stand. This doesn't bother me. In fact, I don't see what the big deal is. It's very natural and healthy for the child, which makes sense since the nature channel is always showing other young mammals following their mothers around and nipping at their tits. If it's good enough for a pig, it's good enough for a baby. Speaking of which, have you ever seen the movie "Story of the Weeping Camel?" It's a solid movie, probably one of the top 2 movies I have ever seen about Mongolia, right up there with "something about a dog" - that names isn't' quite accurate but you get the idea. Actually, I must admit they were both made by the same people so my knowledge of the legendary Mongolian film industry is limited. Bygones. What I was saying was that in this move, the mother camel had hard delivery and shuns her white camel child. Most of the movie is spent watching the family trying to get the mother camel to nurse the baby white camel. Whenever the baby camel came around, the mother camel would kick it and let out a loud camel sound, something like the sound of a dead seal mating with an elephant in the suburbs. Yeah, that's what it's like. Actually, the first time the mother camel kicked the baby camel I laughed but it's still touching, you can feel the pain in the baby camels eyes. They say it was trained in method acting, and it shows. The movie might not sound like much, but the scenery and lifestyle documented in it are fascinating. Anyway, as much as their was a point, the point was it's natural for mammals to nurse their young.

But I digress. I was speaking of humans. I think it's a little awkward for people to be around mothers who are nursing, especially if you are an uncontrollable repressed sexual pervert (see conservatives who favor banning nursing in public), are uncomfortable with the human body (see comic book fans), or just don't believe in family values (see democrats). For everyone else, it's natural and maybe beautiful and just something that happens that you shouldn't actually put much thought into, like removing a pebble from your show.

For the sake of argument, let's say I am a comic book fan and I get all sweaty when a women near me is nursing. Get over it geek! I would scream at myself. Aren't we fighting a war (or two or three - what a jerk!) to stop extremo islamo-fascist governments that require women to be covered head to toe. And now we are telling women here to put more clothes on? Think of the millions of 7th graders around the world who would kill for this. In France, women bath topless. I have been to some of the beaches and believe me, it's a double edged sword. Think Aunt Bethel at Thanksgiving - they look just like soggy mashed potatoes hanging from your spoon. Ugh.

Anyway, I think I got used to it in Mexico, then again in Honduras. You don't actually see it that often in America. In fact, I don't remember that last time I saw it in America. In Mexico, I remember a women walking around the market with a baby strapped across her shoulder, everything out and about in the air, buying meat as people swatted bugs and shooed dogs like nothing was abnormal. When the baby was hungry, it leaned in. When it wasn't, it looked around. Seemed like quite a natural way to go about it, probably why National Geographic always posed women topless when doing their photo shoots.

In Honduras, it was even worse because I always knew someone who just had a baby, I saw almost all my females friend's breasts. It's a little weird initially because you don't know where to look, but yo get used to staring at something nearby or, god forbid, looking the woman in the eye. After a few conversations, you can look just to the right of her eyes and she can't tell. Quite frankly, the female body is a beautiful thing, breasts included. But when you put a 22 pound smelly screaming machine on the end of the breast, it's not so attractive. People need to just relax and move on with their lives.

People are so annoying sometimes.

100,000 trees falling

2007-01-28T17:38:00.000-08:00

Here's a modern zen riddle for you: If 100,000 people march around the capital, does it make a sound? If we all clapped with one hand, would that make it louder? I declared 2007 my year of activism, so one of my first efforts was to take part in the march on Washington DC yesterday. I went with two rowdy friends from Philadelphia and met up with a rowdy friend from DC. I have never been to a rally before, not one of this size, so I wanted to see what it would be like. It's depressing in a way because I don't really feel like it will make a difference. See the cat? See the cradle?

Our president said on Friday, and this is I believe an exact quote but I can't be sure, "I am the commander and chief and if you don't like it, I'm going to take my army and invade another country." Well I'm taking my ball and going home too. The Nation is a weekly left leaning magazine I recently started reading and they had an interesting question on the cover. Basically, it states world opinion is against escalation, the American populace is against it, Congress, Iraqi people, and the Iraqi government are against it. Can one man make a country fight a war it doesn't want to fight? They are speaking of America, but they could really be speaking of Iraq as well. I think Iraq is going to have to fight its own internal war at some point, but we don't need to be involved. There is to much hatred and history not to reach this conclusion.

In my opinion, the escalation is going to happen anyway unless congress refuses to pay for it. They won't. So what do you do, how do you fight that? If congress actually agrees to something and passes a non-binding resolution, what the hell does that do? It positions people to run for president, that is what it does. It's politics, not reality. See the cat? Maybe in 2 years we are better off. I am inpatient, I'm not waiting for that. Bush keeps asking others for a plan. They have a plan, stop. His plan is to keep going. See the cradle? The american democracy is moving in a bad direction in my opinion. We are moving away from open dialogue and discussion into rhetoric and obstinacy. We no longer value intelligence in debate and favor cheap sound bites. We, as a country, have gotten lazy. Maybe we always were and I didn't realize it, I don't know.

I didn't hear all the speakers yesterday, but I am disappointed by the rhetoric coming from the anti-escalation side. I just don't hear anyone speak that inspires me, someone like MLK who, even years later now, can give you shivers listening to some of his speeches. I realize he was an extreme rarity, but why can't we find a leader like that now? Or is there a leader like that now, but he can't be heard?

I love America. Or I did. Or I do. I just don't love our democracy anymore, it's been twisted and manipulated and we have all let it happen. Rather, more importantly, I have let it happen. I was having a conversation yesterday after the march and we talked a little about legacy. I don't have a legacy, except selling out and passing time. That's not a life i want to look back on years from now. That is something I need to fix. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a book, a brilliant book in my opinion, called Cat's Cradle. He has a rhetorical device in it where one of the characters is complaining about the child's game played with string called Cat's Cradle. He uses it as a way to describe how things are not what you are told (as a child, as an adult, how things are never quite what they seem to be or are not what people tell you they are). Whenever I think someone is trying to manipulate me, I think to myself see the cat? see the cradle? Things are not what they seem, it's a game, an illusion. Just smile and go back outside and play with your ball.

Maybe the country isn't going in such a bad direction overall, and it's just the war. Regardless, I think America wasted a great opportunity to step into a world void and lead with integrity and morality. We could have pushed democracy without wars. We could have pushed free-er economic growth throughout without selling ourselves out to oil companies and special interest. We could have led the world in environmental protection and human rights. Instead, we have squandered our global leadership position in favor of money and power. We begin to speak of Iran and their negative influence in Iraq. Didn't we take over the country, cause the chaos, leave the museums unguarded, and overstay our welcome? Are we building a case that Iran is the new Iraq? The government says no. See the cat? See the cradle? Things need to change. The unabomber sat alone in a shack somewhere and tried to fix it. Maybe he was crazy. Maybe, if things had happened a little differently, he could have been that leader. Perhaps he still is? What if our generation already missed it's next great leader? What if this is what I have to live through? What if this is all there is? How do I setup my legacy, how do I get comfortable with my own skin? What if I plant 100,000 new trees and they are all knocked down in a forest - would anyone hear it? Is that a legacy? See my cat? See my cradle?

State of the union

2007-01-23T18:18:00.000-08:00

My unbiased opinion of the state of the union.

Did he really just say balance the budget? Maybe he should actually put the Iraq war into his budget so he realizes how much it is costing. What a jerk.

Not raising taxes? What programs are you going to cut to make that happen? Maybe you could actually tax corporations, especially ones that incorporate offshore? What a jerk.

Earmarks? Now he wants to remove them? Why didn't he talk about this over the past 6 years ago when it has been happening and getting worse? And he only wants to cut it in half? Eliminate them! What a jerk.

I actually agree with his opinion that Social Security/Medicare needs to be fixed. He's still a jerk though. DId they just show Ted Kennedy almost asleep? I love the state of the union, I just wish they stopped clapping all the time.

No child left behind act is a fiasco. If you want to increase testing, increase the budget. If you want to increase help for special children, that costs a lot. Talk to teachers who know what it costs for special education programs. And what about gifted and talented programs? How are we paying for that? What a jerk.

I like that he said offer affordable health care. If we don't raise taxes, how are we going to do this exactly? He is actually proposing a new tax for health care (I think)! I like it! Of course, that means we need to fix the insurance process. He wants to change the tax code - who is this man? Oh that's right, he's a lying jerk... I give it a 10% chance of passing congress and getting signed.

Health savings accounts are stupid. What if I don't get sick? I can't roll the money over. I know people who buy thousands of aspirin at the end of the year just to use their money so they don't lose it.

Medical liability reform I like. Lawyers already make enough money. He said people and doctors make good decisions. Drug companies own doctors with free samples and drug salepeople are beautiful.

Immigration: They just showed someon from CO and I think he was sleeping too. Can't congress afford coffee at least for the state of the union? More money for the border? Where is that coming from? Why do people keep clapping? I hate the state of the union. He said melting pot - that is a slot on my buzzword bingo. I like the idea of legalizing immigrants. I don't think that will pass either. Actually, I agree with Bush on immigration and he has solid ideas here.

Energy: He's a jerk. He has let us be dependant throughout his presidency. Maybe he should look back at the ugly white guy behind him to his right. Yeah, more coal! I like solar, wind, and nuclear power. I read something that said only nuclear power can meet our demand in the short time frame. Ethanol is a scam and will make meat more expensive unless they can get something else to make ehtanol on a large scale besides corn. Mexican's were rioting because corn was being exported to the states for, among other things, ethanol and the price of tortillas were going up. I saw in interview onTelemundo with different Mexican mothers complaining about this and they were pissed! In fact, the Mexican government is looking into price gouging practices by tortilla makers. I love The Economist!

Reduce emmissions by 20%? He's almost like a real human tonight. I might have to turn this off.

He said steward of the environment? Did you see Cheney give his little half hearted clap? That was classic and may be worth my time. Do you think Karl Rove is watching this? I love it.

Here is the big one. Speaking of September 11, is it true that Pinochet took over Chile on that day? That is one crazy day throughout modern history. "Ttake the fight to the enemy..." Yeah, get Iran! 90,000 more troops! Who is paying for this war exactly? Oh right, I am. Fortunately, it is not in the budget so we don't really pay for it...

Oh, all the almost attacks. Nothing like a little paranoia to support another invasion. 8 years, 3 countries - that's a legacy. Standing ovation to stop terrorists, really out on a limb on that one. I support stopping terrorists, I just don't support torture, invading countries, and lying presidents.

He said he has a clear view of the enemy - that was a joke, right? Is Al Quaeda even the strongest Islamic militant organization now? More Iraqi's die in a few days than died in September 11th. I say let the middle east fade back into the desert by removing our dependance on oil. Then we can ignore it like it's Africa. Unless we decide to randomly bomb it every once in a while just because.

Standing ovation to protect Americans. I hate the state of the union. "What every terrorist hates most is human freedom." Maybe that was true. I bet now a lot of them hate most strong countries invading weaker countries without cause. Why are they clapping? That guy is a jerk.

John McCain was sleeping too. Maybe I would vote for him. Doesn't anyone in congress stay up past 9 on a normal day? At least Kennedy was probably to drunk to be awake...

Uh, maybe we are attacking Lebanon instead of Iran. That man is a genius. No, sorry, he's still a jerk. Yeah, good idea, let's win the rhetoric war against extremism! We win! Our speech writers are better than yours.

New strategy in Iraq? It's the same plan, just more people. Hmm, if I want to buy a $200,000 house then decide to buy a $250,000 house, I didn't change my plan, I am just spending more. Is that a good analogy? Mmmm, that wine is good...

That guy's a jerk.

He seems to making the Iraqi government accountable. In theory, this is a great idea but we'll see how it works. What happens if they don't? Do we overthrow the government, or does Bush pull out? I still say he pulls out but he does it on his terms and tries to call it a win for his leadership because he did what he wanted. What a jerk.

"Nothing is more important at this point in our history than for America to succeed in the Middle East..." OK, he isn't pulling out no matter what happens. Everyone supports the troops, I hate it when they say calling for a withdrawl is anti-troop. Even McCain said that last week on Meet the Press. It's political bullshit and they know it.

Is he developing a war on terror leadership group? Will it be just as important as the Iraq study group? We already have the largest military in the world, why add 92,000? Who the hell are we attacking? We took over 2 countries without any problem? Who is paying for that? No higher taxes? More money for schools? Free health care? Balance the budget and cut the deficit (remember, Bush came in with a surplus)? How does this all work?

If you Tivo-ed this, watch both Cheney and Pelosi behind Bush. They obviously both think most of this is crap. Who supports this guy? What a jerk? He mentioned Cuba, Belarus, and Burma. I can't even find 2 of those places on a map. Then he threw out Darfur - what exactly is our plan for Darfur again?

I just noticed this but is Cheney wearing a purple/pink tie? Who dressed him?

1.2 billion over 5 years to combat malaria? Can't we let Bill Gates fix that problem? Let's start a war against the mosquitos to help train those 92,00 new troops.

Dikembe made the state of the union! Dikembe made the state of the union! He's the oldest man ever in the NBA, I don't care what anyone says. He's standing - wag the finger! Oh, he didn't do it. I'll never root for him again.

Seriously, what is this random american good people shit? I believe children have a right to live in a world that is safe? Bold statement from her. I think Dikembe is wagging his finger at her off camera! I love that man.

Oh, another great american. Actually, the guy who jumped on the train tracks to help that guy in NY subway is quite a man. I like him. George Bush is still a jerk though. I don't think he would jump under a subway for me. Just thinking out loud here.

I like the way he is complimenting America. If I saw GW in a bar, I would buy him a beer, but I wouldn't jump under a subway for him. Why do people who obviously disagree with him stand and clap? Wow, MSNBC had the word count before he mentioned Iraq within 30 seconds of the end of the speech. Crazy.

We'll see what happens.

My job

2007-01-23T16:42:00.000-08:00

I had an interesting experience at work today. We started adding levels within positions at work, so we have junior project managers, project managers, and senior project managers. However, we bill all 3 levels at the same billing rate. I mentioned this at our group meeting and said I thought this was not right. If we are going to have different levels internally, we should bill the client at different rates. Otherwise, what's the point? (The point is so we can pay people less because they are junior without billing less. I wanted to see if they would state this. They didn't.) I made the point that I bill myself and one of the my coworkers at the same rate on our project even though my time is more valuable. I pissed off one coworker with this comment (not the one I made the comment about who wasn't at the meeting) and my boss looked at me and said, "You really think your time is more valuable than John's?" and smiled like he thought I was kidding, or it was a nervous laughed. I looked him straight in the eye and responded, "Yes. Because it is." I'm not being arrogant, that's just true. I have more experience and I can resolve problems more quickly. I have 25 examples backing that up. It's my project, I define it and I manage it and I know how to keep it working. It's important to understand your strengths and your weaknesses.

Anyway, that argument is going nowhere at my company. I followed up by asking what I should tell a client who views the billable hours, knows we are different levels, and asks me why the billing rate is the same. He said when this happened to him at his other company, they either changed the billing rate for one of the people or re-assigned one of the resources. So we are openly entering into an unethical situation and, as the project manager, the client is going to ask me about it. I'm honest with my clients, I'll tell them I agree and they need to talk to my boss. I have no problem saying that. This type of game could cause bad feelings with our clients and hurt our future growth with them, not a smart business decision for a company that have "Integrity" as one of it's values. If I were a client, it would piss me off because it looks shady. Obviously, we are a business and need to make money to stay in business. However, there is an ethical way and an unethical way. I'll sell out my company to retain what little morals I can have in a corporate environment. I might get fired soon. Or I might just walk out one day.

Never green enough

2007-01-23T16:17:00.000-08:00

If you were to ask me what made me happy, I would give any number of responses. They would all be lies. I think the only thing that truly makes me happy is looking for something else to make me happy. I look for happiness in new places to live, new places to travel to, a new job. No matter how happy I should be, I am never satisfied. I gave up on a lot of things that make other people, most significantly any serious notion of ever truly dating again, because this attitude doesn't work with dating. It doesn't work with a lot of things. It requires leaving friendships and family and routines and constantly starting over. I used to do it out of shyness or social awkwardness, real and perceived. Now, strangely, I think I do it out of habit. My personal routine is solitude. It's not as lonely to me as it is to others, so it's not fair to judge me from your perspective. Sure I get lonely, but I know lots of people who are married in serious relationships and they aren't any less lonely than I am. They are around someone more, but that doesn't have anything to do with loneliness. I have been lonely in large groups of people, all friends, because that was my mood at that time. I was also perfectly content for over a week on a beach in Mexico with a notebook, a good book, a hammock, renting a room on the beach from a family where I didn't speak Spanish and the family didn't speak English. Someone called it an introverts dream. In a way, it was. Could I live like that forever? Probably not, at some point I would miss the solitary beauty of wandering around a city, losing myself in the anonymity of it all, passing empty faces I'll never see again, smelling the city and watching it all pass by even as I pass it by. I couldn't live like a hermit forever. But recently, I've been wondering if it isn't time to do it again. I have been back in this city for a while now, and I'm content but I'm not excited. Again, that is my routine. I don't want that to be my routine. I don't want to have a meaningless job. I don't want to sit in front of a computer all day. I do it so I can afford, every once in a while, to go live on a beach or a mountain with a notebook and a book, alone. I am introvert because I re-energize myself internally, not in groups.

I have been thinking about my life recently because one of my best friends is separated from his wife, while two other good friends recently got engaged. 3 lives heading in different directions, all directions different than my own. Should I have pursued any of those paths? Should I pursue one now? One of my best friends just left Philly. My boring logical mind tells me to stay, my routine locks me in place. My body is getting restless, my feet and my mind long for something new. I don't know what will make me happy, I just know it's something else.

You know what is really odd about this, I was very happy for both of my friends who got engaged. Truthfully, I was happy for my other friend as well. I liked his wife too, it's not that. Instead, I think this is something he has been considering and struggling with for a while. Life is a journey, it's cliche but I think it's true. One of the great advantages of being alive now is that we have the ability to pursue our happiness. Indeed, we owe it to ourselves to do so. It's not important how you define happiness, only that you constantly seek it. Years ago, people stayed in situations for appearance, people stayed because everyone stayed. Now, we don't have to. We live in an amazing time. I can travel anywhere in the world. I can live on beans and tortillas. I can sweat all day and not care how I smell. I am free. We should all be free. Are you free? Are you happy? If not, what are you doing about it?

Every problem has a solution

2007-01-16T17:17:00.000-08:00

When I was in college, I had the opportunity to work in a series of elementary and middle school computer labs under some sort of library grant. One of the more special seventh grade students had a bad habit of mentally and emotionally collapsing under even the most minor computer lab pressure. When stressed, he would begin slowly rocking back and forth, sweating, and mumbling to himself, "Every problem has a solution. Every problem has a solution." It was a very unfortunate situation for him, but one I always found interesting. The rest of the students didn't seem to take any notice of this, which means this was his normal mode of handling problems (bummer for him, but at least he seemed to be getting help based on his personal mantra), or he was a figment of my imagination. For the sake of this blog, let's assume the former.

Whenever I am confronted with a difficult problem, I am reminded of this poor child thunking his head on the keyboard and mumbling, "Every problem has a solution." For my loyal readers, you may understand that this has to do with my last post where I was bothered that I didn't feel Iraq had a solution. I still feel that way, although later that day I found an interesting article that, although not a solution, is an interesting best case scenario. Since I still don't have a solution, and since it still pisses me off, I'll just talk about the best case scenario.

Someone from the NY Times, someone probably smarter and more informed than me, someone who may actually have thunked her head on her keyboard while whispering a prayer for her solution, wrote an interesting article stating the best case scenario is basically that Iraq become the modern day Spanish Civil War. Now I admit I have an appallingly weak grasp of history, but I know most people consider the Spanish Civil War and the entire reign of Franco to be a fairly low point in world history. The article is included below so you can read it and draw your own conclusion.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/weekinreview/14cooper.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Basically, her point seems to be that our best hope is that Iraq itself descends into a modern day replica of the Spanish Civil War. If this happens, and as I mentioned in my last blog I doubt it can be prevented without a full military takeover, it would be ok for other governments to support the war financially so long as they do not become involved militarily, meaning they don't send troops. If this happens, the civil war will eventually take care of itself (probably with an oppressive dictator taking control again) but would not lead to larger conflict in the region. She mentions this is the only positive result of the Spanish Civil War, that it did not draw in other countries and expand throughout Europe. Of course, as is mentioned in the article, most of Europe was occupied with a larger world war. Other countries sent money or weapons, but not large numbers of troops.

So I think the solution here is obvious. I am going beyond what the NY Times printed, but I think I speak for all thinking people here. We need our fearless president, who I still think should be tried for treason (maybe we can let the wonderful new Iraqi justice system handle that one?), to call the famous Statue of Liberty play. That's right, the statue of liberty isn't just a hunk of metal in NY or a great football bowl play. The statue of liberty play is a trick play that involves some misdirection and some trickery. It's definately a premo call for our executive branch.

In war terms, to minimize the overall world effect of the civil war in Iraq, we need a diversionary world war to distract all the countries that would like to become involved in Iraq. So we need to distract Iran and Turkey and Saudi and France and England and all the other countries "worried" about Iraq with another war. I think Bush is going to fumble this and invade Iran, which is certainly located to close to Iraq to be a true statue of liberty diversion play. Instead, we need a larger target. We need a world pariah to attack. North Korea would make for to easy a play. The people are starving, the country isn't large enough, and we already tried it. I thought about a combined Venezuela and Cuba fight but decided against it. I like that we could call it the Venezuba war, or the Cubazuela Conflict, but you can't go willy nilly advocating war because of the naming rights. I do think we could sell those rights though. "Today's highlights of the Cubazuela Conflict brought to you by the US sugar industry. Don't support 3rd world sugar. Buy American Rum."

This leaves us one obvious enemy: Russia. If there is only one country in the world that needs a global smackdown, it's Russia. Putin's soul, which not so surprisingly connected with George Bush a few years ago, seems to have gone sour. They turn off oil to spite Europe. They might have poisoned someone in what is easily the most creative killing since god said "Fuck them" and dropped a meteor on the dinosaurs, and, quite frankly, I don't think they are moving toward a functioning long term democracy. If democracy is good enough to fight for in Iraq, should we not dear reader fight for it in Russia too? And they too have oil! To keep the sports analogies going, it's a slam dunk! Russia also has all the historical significance that I don't need to spell out for you. By attacking Russia, all the world would get involved and we could let Iraq fight it out among themselves. This would effectively minimize the deaths in Iraq because it would only be Iraqis. You might, just might, be able to argue this would create a larger world death toll but that's not the point. I am fixing Iraq right now, not the world. After the Russia-popalous war starts (I'll figure out the naming rights later - the Statue-evsky war perhaps), I'll figure out how to end it.

If I never blog again or start glowing blue, it means Putin is reading this and he knows I am right and I am onto him. It also means he is onto me! Fair readers, save yourselves!

Problems without solutions

2007-01-14T10:21:00.000-08:00

I tend to spend a lot of time, arguably to much time, thinking about my life. When I was in Peace Corps, I analyzed myself to the point where my own being almost became nothing but an abstraction for me. It was as weird as it sounds. However, that helped me realize a few very important things about myself. I realized that for all my strengths and weaknesses, my shyness and my social quirks, the one thing I can do fairly well is analyze and solve problems. I can generally break down a problem to find a solution. I can't remember facts or names. You may not agree with my solution, but I generally have a reason for it.

Why do I mention that? Because I cannot for all my thought or all the reading I have done come to a conclusion I am comfortable with for our situation in Iraq. This annoys me. I thought it was a mistake to invade and I still believe that. However, arguing that point is currently irrelevant. We - you, me, congress, the president, America in general - have to solve it, or rather, we have to do something. The two ideas on the table are to leave and let Iraq figure it out or to send in more troops, gain control of the growing violence and, well, let Iraq figure it out.

The closest I can come to a conclusion is the two items break down into the same idea, but nobody wants to admit it. To leave, we talk about creating a timetable and making the Iraqis responsible for being ready to assume full control of the country based on the timetable. Conceptually, I like the idea of Iraqis assuming responsibility for their country but it does put a lot of faith in a young democracy that we don't have any real reason to believe in. The 3 major ethnic fractions don't seem all that interested in being friendly and I can't imagine why, if we leave, the Kurds won't try to become their own country (bad for Turkey -> bad for Europe/US -> bad for world) and why the Shiites won't want retribution for the Sunnis power abuse under Saddam. This option saves us money and military lives in the short term, but doesn't resolve any problems. Also, if Iraq falls victim to a great civil war and ethnic cleansing, won't we have to return anyway? This does not resolve any problems we created.

The other option is to send in more troops to gain control of the most violent areas while giving the government a series of steps to prove they are assuming control of their country. In this scenario, we lose more lives, spend more money, more Iraqis die, and ultimately, the government probably can't hit their milestones. Which brings us to the possibility that our president can then say we gave it one more chance but Iraq wasn't able to do their part. He can then bring troops home on his own terms and call it a win for his leadership while calling his opponents weak. However, there is a chance that, in this situation and this is really where the two options truly diverge in my mind, he will not withdrawal troops and work to create a new puppet government that is stronger. Basically, we are swapping Saddam's military law for our own. So I figure, since Bush isn't telling us what he will do if the government fails to hold up their end of this bargain, there is a 50-50 chance he just withdrawals on his own terms or we make Iraq an unofficial province of the US by installing the leader we choose.

Why do we even care? Why do we care if Iran has more power in the Middle East? Is a united Iran and Iraq a military threat to us? Probably not. It may be an economic threat, only because of their natural oil reserves. We have had plenty of time as a country to address that moving back into the Clinton presidency and we have not. VP Cheney should be locked up for treason for not developing a real sustainable energy policy when he had a chance in the first presidential term, and the entire brain trust should follow him for not releasing the notes of that energy committee. We have no plan to free ourselves from the middle east, and neither solution is better. For lack of a better idea, I am tempted to promote leaving Iraq because it won't bankrupt my government and raise my taxes. It's not a solution, I realize that. I don't have a solution. I don't even know if one exists. Saddam was a bastard and probably deserved the death he got. He probably deserved a worse one. At least with Saddam we knew what the issues were and more or less what the situation was. I think the biggest reason we can't resolve the current problem is that now we don't.

I'll probably blog more on this as the weeks progress. I'll also discuss my views of how Israel fits into it all, and whether or not a Jewish state even has a right to exist. I don't agree with Iran that it should be eliminated, but I don't believe the current status is correct either.

Our Tax Code - continued

2006-12-20T16:51:00.000-08:00

I had a follow up conversation with a friend who may be my most dedicated blog reader. He may in fact be my only blog reader, I'm not sure. Even my sister won't bother with it, which I figure is a bad sign. Anyway, he had some excellent insight into my tax code ideas so I thought I would provide an update. And sorry ladies, as sexy as a guy who sits around Honduras reading my blog and commenting on my tax law ideas may be, he is spoken for. Don't ask me how...

Anyway, if you look at my original idea you might notice I missed the fact that this could heavily favor the rich, who would have more power given their ability to distribute their excessive money. That's a problem. It seems to me corporations and the wealthy already have to much power. The point of a democracy is that we all have our vote, and I would like our government to get to the point where our leaders care annually instead of only during the elongated election season. I would need to run the numbers to truly balance the rich/poor input issue, but I am considering the following list of options as preliminary ideas:

Limit the amount of taxes a person can distribute: You can distribute up to 40% of your tax dollars up to a maximum of $20,000 for example
Make the amount of the distribution percentage vary by tax bracket. For example, people who make above $100,000 may pay 38% in taxes, but can only distribute 20% to specific programs.
Allow people to donate to specific programs within a program. For example, people could assign their tax dollars to HIV treatment instead of the larger drug research fund.

The more I think about this general idea, the more I like it. I think it could provide great benefit to more socially focused programs, the environment, alternative energy, education, and other ideas I think people would donate to that are, in my opinion, underfunded. It would also engage us in the political process. It could also lead to yearly reviews of programs by both the elected/appointed political leader and hopefully the media. By opening up the communication, we would assumingly create a better, more open government. I do try to vote for the best candidate to represent me, but what people say in their campaigns and what they do in congress are not always aligned. It may also lead to each governmental department releasing annual reports that people would care about. Given the amount of time we spend reviewing annual reports for corporations, shouldn't we spend at least an equal amount of time reviewing the same information for the government?

I also think you could convince our free market leaders that this is the most open way to work our government. This policy opens the government up to market influences, effectively saying the most important programs and the most effective leaders will receive the largest budgets to do their work. GW tried to do this with social security, I'm trying to do it with his budget. My way has limited risk because the government still has 60% for the necessities, wars, bridges, pork barrel projects, etc. This may also mean we get a state of the union that actually says something besides party propaganda and generic generalities. That's not an indictment of our current administration because Clinton really was not much better.

Let's take an example of how this could improve the process. A majority of people would say education is important. As an example, assume our education budget is $1 billion (I made that number up, I'm an idea man not a researcher). If enough people devoted 25% of their taxes to education, we may actually have enough money to fix our schools, pay our teachers, and develop credible ways to measure our students education. For one year, the Secretary of Education has $1.5 billion based on our taxes. He comes out and says, "I am going to give every student a voucher and every teacher will lose their pension so I can buy a jet as big as a million school buses to fly around and push my voucher program." The next year, his budget is $.4 billion. We, the collective we of American tax payers, essentially just voted.

While I am on the subject of politics, it appalls me I cannot get a very concrete list of what a lobbying group has given to a politician in an effort to secure a vote (or educate them on issues, depending on your point of view). Oh hell, it's vote buying and both parties do it that is why nothing will happen. Anyway, I work as a consultant and one of my projects tracks all payments made to brokers who sell insurance, including dinners, tickets, trips, etc. Reporting this back to the company that bought insurance through the broker is a legal requirement. I could be audited, and have created reports for clients that are being audited. This includes creating documents that state the insurance provider took the broker to Hawaii because he sold a lot of insurance for this company. The cost was $2,000 for the trip, the food, the "nightlife", and "surfing lessons" with the Maui Laui twins. I could be audited. Health insurance is probably a bit of a mess in our fair country, I do not deny that. However, the fact that the insurance company has stricter requirements than our government, than people who lead us, define our laws, and supposedly represent us ethically, morally, and righteously, is disgraceful. Look into, it's an ugly system. I believe in corporate oversight, but I believe more strongly in governmental oversight. My little compliance could be audited but the biggest lobbying firm on K street can't, or won't be. That should be a cause for action. Maybe I'll donate all my 40% to the auditing committee. Oh, I can't because we don't even have that committee (not in a powerful way, and democrats talk about it but I don't have high hopes).

I think my next hobby will be this, to really begin documenting these issues and pushing for change.

Our tax code

2006-12-18T18:10:00.000-08:00

This is from an email I wrote where somebody who obviously didn't know what they were getting themselves into asked me what I thought of the tax code. I figured I would share, tell me what you think:

I don't mind paying taxes as long as I support where the money is being used. Right now,in many ways, I don't. Therefore, I suggest we allow every taxpayer to set aside up to some percentage of their taxes for certain programs. For example, I might set aside 10% for education, 10% for the environment, 10% for NASA and science research, and 10% for developing world aid. Everybody could do this at their will with their 40% (or some other logical percent). With the other 60%, the government can do with it what they will, or rather, need to. They could use this for supporting our highways, paying governmental employees, supporting our defense budget (way overboard in my mind),and other issues. I can imagine other people devoting their full 40%to the military, and that is their right. People say they value education? Prove it. And for elected officials, their allocation decisions become public record.

How does this help? It means if I think the president appoints a leader of the EPA who, in my opinion, leans toward helping big business instead of the environment I can drop my percentage to 0%.It basically gives me the ability to vote each year on the government and the budget based on who is leading the program. I have written to my congressmen, it doesn't work. This could also help keep us engaged in our political process, which I think most Americans are not including myself. I can already do my taxes online with my SSN and an IRS code, this could be done. There are probably a lot of privacy issues here, but nothing that we couldn't figure out.

I like the concept of taxing everything that is a luxury, and I define luxury very broadly. Tax TVs, computers, video games, cable (cable is a luxury not a right or a need, regardless of what people say),cigarrettes, alcohol (and I like a drink so I'm not pushingprohibition), etc. very highly . Do not tax food, clothing under a certain price, and housing because as you mention this effects the poor. Everyone has to eat, have shelter, and wear clothes. Leave these free of taxes. I think we generally don't always make the correct distinction between our needs and our wants. Personally, I like the graduated income tax and believe the wealthier should pay more.

Also I saw one interesting thing last year that would at least simplify the current system. Over 50% of the population does a basic tax filing using a W2 and the 1040. The government already has all the information you need to fill out this form in the W2 and through the taxes you have already paid. Most people do not itemize deductions because they do not have enough. Why not send out completed W2 forms to everyone and, for the minority of people who need more analysis, they can buy a computer program (heavily taxed,see above...) or go to an H&R Block around the corner. This would save people hours.

America - are we winning?

2006-12-18T17:12:00.000-08:00

Is America winning? What's the first thing that pops into your head when I say that? Do you think about the war in Iraq, the war against drugs, the war against immigration, the war against poverty, the war against terrorism, no child left behind, or any other haphazard political slogan crafted to gain votes and pit us against each other.

I think it would be interesting to ask a hundred or a thousand or a million people in the streets across the world that one question: Is America winning? and see what they say. I think the results would be outstandingly interesting, even if outstandingly isn't a word. I would ask them the question only, and after they responded yes or no or even with a poetic perhaps, I would ask them to define their criteria. That would be an interesting thesis for someone to do.

Personally, I don't know if America is winning. I would answer No if you randomly asked me that. I would base my criteria on the people I know, the news I see, the general malaise I feel walking the streets of Philadelphia searching for that hidden glimmer of happiness. I would answer no because we are building a country of victimization, a country where we don't have to accept responsibility, where we don't value ideas or freedoms or even each other. I would answer no because our government is lead by followers, and we are following the followers and all the leaders seem to have disappeared into the realm of hollywood myth. Maybe they never existed, maybe we have always been following followers, and the leaders only come every few hundred years and when they do, we relegate them to the dusty bins of sadness for they realize they can't change anything.

I would answer no because if we don't realize who we are, we can't move beyond our own weaknesses. I would answer no because I can't make myself happy, and if I can't be happy here then maybe I can't be happy anywhere. I would not be answering for America, I would be answering for myself. The America of the old west looks beautiful when filmed correctly, and now the only beautiful pictures of America are romantic comedies that fizzle reality like a bad kiss. Most of our pictures of ourselves involve lost families in the suburbs, gangsters, idiots, and superheroes. Can we be winning when these are our comfort foods?

America has the power to lead. We do not. We have the power to change the world for the good. Instead, we change the world for our good. That's not the same thing. Sometimes, maybe, but not in general. If I were to be drafted, which won't happen I'm to old now, I would rather die trying to stop a genocide than for a meaningless war. I am not a martyr, but at least then maybe there would be meaning.

Which isn't to say I'm hopeless. I think America is a great country, as I think I can become a great man. I think all things take time, patience, energy. I am not America. I don't seem to identify with many of the overriding feelings of the day, I don't identify with the hate. I'm angry, but I'm not hateful. I suppose I could argue that alone means I am not losing entirely. I suppose that alone means I could change. I suppose that alone means I am not America.