East of Uraguay?

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

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

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.

1. "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.
2. "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

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!

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?

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

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

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)

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?

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.