Taking pleasure in others' frustration

I was just going on a walk around my work building (with a bowl of cereal in hand) when I stumbled upon the highlight of my day so far. As I approached the office of one of the unnamed dozens of mild-mannered, middle-aged, computer-oriented emplyees I heard the sound of forceful computer tying; verging on keyboard pounding. As I walk past his open door, I see him throw himself back into his chair with an exasperated sigh of "What the hell?!" while the green and black command prompt blinked back at him insolently. From a passerby's perspective, it was amazing. Hopefully he didn't hear me laughing out loud as I walk away.

I loathe grocery store checkout banter.

Yesterday, I stepped up to the cashier at the tail end of a transaction with the customer in front of me. I was buying Honey Bunches of Oats, she was buying something else (it's not an important part of the story). They were apparently fixing some sort of difficulty, like an extra charge that the cashier then voided, or something along those lines. At the conclusion of this exchange, when the problem was solved, the cashier casually remarked "there, everything is right with the world."

No it's not. I guarantee you, everything is not right with the world.

I know that most people would just dismiss this as a meaningless grocery checkout comment, but it struck me as a sympton of something greater. Maybe it was just the vacant, contented look on her face that makes me think that she really did believe that everything is right with the world. If you keep your head down and only focus on your immediate surroundings, it probably is pretty easy to think that everything is hunky-dory. It's unfortunate that you actually have to work in order to realize that things are wrong.

These pictures were taken five days ago in and around Biloxi, MS by Hands On USA volunteers:

I just wish people could try to keep things in their proper perspectives. Things might be great here, but there are plenty of places were it is very easy to see what is wrong with the world.

The bird flu cometh, Part 1

Seriously, guys. This bird flu is no joke. 78 people have died in China, now it's infected fifteen people in Turkey, including four in the capital city, Ankara. Turkey has confirmed three deaths so far. What makes this so concerning is that all the experts are saying that it's only a matter of time until somebody gets the version of the virus which decides to mutate into a person-to-person virus, instead of bird-to-bird or bird-to-person virus that it is now. It would suck to be that poor guy, unwittingly being responsible for what could be the death of millions of people.

In short, this thing is coming, and I'm starting to prepare for the hard times ahead. I'm not usually one to panic, but so far as I can see, it's time to start planning for the future.

I've been doing a little brainstorming on the subject and have come up with a few relocation plans in case of a global epidemic. My current residence in West Seattle is definitely not going to cut it in the worst case scenario: I'd be surrounded by people and all kinds of birds with water on three sides. No good. It's a veritable death trap. So I'll obviously have to flee the metropolitan Seattle area in search of a remote, hermit-suitable destination (you know, the kind of place Ted Kaczynski would call home). And I'll need a gun for shooting any flu-zombie birds that might try to kamikaze attack their way into my hermit quarantine zone.

-note to self: take gun lessons next week-

OK, here's the destination I've been thinking about (and don't even think about trying to snatch this place before I get there. Cause I'll be armed. And hopefully I'll have found a gun teacher by that point):
Not bad, right? It's a bit of a fixer-upper, but it looks cozy. There's a little stack of firewood outside and I could plant vegetables on the roof. Plus, I could hang out in that chair (you know, whittling or whatever) with my gun in my lap while I keep watch over my homestead. Human intrusions shouldn't be too much of a problem, since this cabin is located in the wilds of Alaska, specifically Yukon-Koyukuk County. Under normal conditions, this place wouldn't be much of a destination for outsiders, but when contact with another human being could bring about your demise, Yukon-Koyukuk's lowest population density in the United States (0.000044923 people per acre) is ideal. So assuming that this is a 10-acres property, there should be less than 1/2000th of a person on it. Perfect.

But my one reservation about this choice is the bird factor. Look at all those trees and tall grass: perfect hideouts for birds bent on my destruction. There could be thousands of them out there, waiting for the opportune moment to fly into my face and spread their invisible virus-seed. I'm not going to flee all the way to the arctic circle just to be defeated by some willow ptarmigan with a cough.

Alright, so I guess I'd better start thinking about a Plan B. I'm going to head back to the drawing board and get back to you in a couple days.

Asking the important questions.

Today my roommate, Paul, had the pleasure of teaching sex education to 35 unruly sixth graders. I personally cannot imagine many things more awful than this. But Paul is a trooper, so he did his damndest to maintain some level of professionalism and academic integrity throughout this trying classroom experience. One of the segments of the class had the students write any questions they might have on slips of paper, then Paul would try to answer them in front of the class. The following are a few of these questions (I wish I could re-create the handwriting, which is part of the charm):

"What is sex?"

"How long can dicks grow?"

"What age do you have to be for sperm to emerge from a boy's penis?"

"What are dildos and condoms and why do we need them?"

"Hi I'm Jeff what's a condom?"

"What are semen and why is hot water bad for your sperm?"

"How do you get rid of moles?"

"What are you smelling?"

and finally,

"How are babies born and why are we attracted to girls and why are my balls so big?"

That last guy there started off with two very reasonable questions, so you could only assume that the third would follow suit. But he decided to throw in a little curveball, and I applaud him for that. However, my concern is that he really IS worried about the size of his balls, and his cry for help got dismissed as classroom prank. That poor kid. Let's hope that he finds help for his huge balls.

Vive le Brain Drain!

Those yellow-bellied, liver-lillied, wine-drinking, outrageous-accent-having, American-tourist-hating, generally-silly-sounding bastards at L'Ecole Centrale Paris decided to accept me into their Research Masters Aéronautique et Spatial program! Le hurray!

(INTERJECTION- speaking of the brain drain, it feels like my brain is draining from my skull right now. A word of warning: the Jolly Roger christmas beer by the Maritime Brewery, while delicious and festive, seems to cause the worst hangover in the history of drinking. Waking up in the morning to go to work and realizing that you feel like shit run over twice is a serious bummer. It doesn't get much more bummer than that.

Then I got to work and immediately took a couple Aspirin from the medicine cupboard. But alas, an hour later I still felt like taking my own life. It turns out that this Aspirin is extra-super-weak-made-for-babies strength, and that it reccommends not taking more than 48 in 24 hours. 48 pills in 24 hours??!! I basically drank the rest of the pills from the bottle and now I'm finally sensing some improvement. END INTERJECTION)

But since all their classes are taught in French, I think I should probably learn this language. And while I should automatically know French by virtue of my last name, unfortunately the only advantage it gives me is already knowing how to say "beautiful" and "laurel" (or "beautifullaurel," specifically). So if I ever want to describe the pleasant appearence of a green, leafy shrub, I am golden.

I think I'll start taking some classes twice a week in Seattle, then I'll head to either Paris or the island of Guadeloupe in the French East Indies. That will be sometime in March, I believe. Until then, my focus will be on stackin' that paper, a key part of which is moving back in with my parents. Moving out for four months has been f-ing sweet, but for some reason which I can't figure out, I cannot manage to save any money. I'm pretty sure that I'm either somehow spending money in my sleep, or someone is slowly robbing me, $40 at a time. Either way, I can't seem to amass any sort of savings while living alone. So set an extra place at the table, mom, I'm a'comin' home!

By the way, in the time it has taken to type this, I've gone from being semi-consious and in agony to feeling like a million bucks (thanks to a fistfull of aspirin)! Actually, I don't want to exagerate too much....I feel more like a hundred bucks. Maybe I'll take a few dozen more aspirin.

A conversation:

Me: Hey!
Blog: Hey, how's it going? I haven't seen you around here for a while...
Me: Yeah, sorry. I've been really busy...
Blog: Yeah, me too... Busy is good, though...
Me: Yeah, busy is good....

(several awkward seconds of prolonged eye-contact, head nodding, and silence)

Me: Well, I think I'm going to type something soon.
Blog: Oh, OK. That'd be cool, I guess.

Over the past month or so, I've neglected my blog. This blog, which so many depend on for nuggets of wisdom and insight, has not been updated for 44 days! And for that I am ashamed. But rejoice! An update is nigh!

Aerial photos of Gulf Coast

I found this website put together by a guy from the Biloxi Sun-Herald. It has a bunch of really intense aerial photos of the devastation which capture the magnitude of the devastion much better than could my on-the-ground photos.


http://www.sunherald.com/multimedia/sunherald/KRT_packages/archive/
katrina/090205_katrina_aerials/index.htm

Confessions of an engineer

I'm supposed to know how things work. That's what having a degree in aerospace engineering implies. When people are baffled by technology, I should be able to answer their questions in a competent (sounding) manner. This should definitely be the case with the sorts of seemingly mundane technology that we all encounter on a daily basis.


Like construction cranes. We see them peppering the skylines of cities everywhere, with their improbably long booms sitting atop their impossibly tall and skinny support masts. I have seen hundreds of these things in my life and was very comfortable with them. They seem like they are way too skinny to lift anything really heavy, but the triangular cross-section of the lifting boom truss allows it to handle huge loads without buckling. And the counterweights act to balance the moment about the crane support, preventing the whole structure from tipping over whenever it picks something up. Knowing this stuff made me feel like my years of education had provided me with the adequate tools to explain unlikely structures in terms of engineering and science.

Not so. To my dismay, I recently realized that I had absolutely NO clue as to how these cranes were constructed in the first place. And how the hell do they get so tall. And how do they end up on the top of skyscapers while they are being built? With the help of another crane? No. That doesn't make any sense. Who built the crane that they used to build the other crane? It's a chicken before the egg issue. My other explanations were equally unsatisfying:
1) They are built by hand. No they aren't. How the hell would they get the big lifting machinery piece up to the top of the support mast?
2) They are installed by spaceships in the middle of the night. The weaknesses of this argument are obvious.

That's all I had. The college-degree-holding engineer was suggesting that aliens are intrical players in urban construction projects. And nobody I asked was able to provide an answer any better than those I had already put forth. So what could I do to solve this quandry and put an end to my sleepless nights? Actually, I've been sleeping quite well recently. This was more of an occasional daytime annoyance than anything else. But who could I ask when all others had proven ignorant on the subject? Who could possibly know this?

I asked Jeeves. And he knew. He always does. He pointed me to this website:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/tower-crane.htm

Apparently I wasn't the first person to have this intellectual crisis. "If you have ever wondered about how tower cranes work, then this article is for you." God bless it. I've learned that tower cranes build themselves. After initially feeling like this was a convenient explanation offered in order to cover up the real truth (alien spaceships), I've come to accept this crazy "crane-building-itself" theory as the real deal. So maybe cranes can build themselves, but can the pyramids do the same? I think not.

What a wonderful resource I've found in howstuffworks.com. It's almost like a religious text for scientists and engineers. Have you ever wondered how zippers work? Me either, but if you had, you could find that here. And my all-time favorite "how-does-it-work": stars. How do stars form and die? How do supernovas work? http://science.howstuffworks.com/star5.htm. It's all there.

In fact, there's so much there that I don't think I'm going to get any work done today. Sorry Merck, I'm busy. Ask somebody else to do it.

Biloxi photos posted online

You can check out the pictures that I took in Biloxi at http://www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?mode=fromshare&Uc=kbz2ml9.6bf1d725&Uy=-v3ecp5&Ux=0


I've noticed when I'm showing these pictures to people that they automatically assume that I'm taking pictures of isolated devastation (simply because you can't see beyond the frame of the pictures). I really want to emphasis that in many neighborhoods, I could have pointed the camera in any direction and ended up with a shot of rubble and debris. Unfortunately, I didn't take any 360 degree panoramic shots, so you'll have to take my word for it. There are also a bunch of pictures taken by various Hands On USA volunteers posted on http://www.flickr.com/photos/handsonusa.

Cool things about doing hurricane relief:
1) You ride all over town in the back of dump trucks
2) You get to use chainsaws regardless of prior experience

Where's all the rubble?

Having spent the past three weeks in the disaster area of Biloxi, MS, I knew that I was going to have a hell of a time adjusting upon re-entering into urban civilization. I had the most intense feeling of purpose while I was in Biloxi. I could see and hear the results of my work in the people that we helped and their heartfelt thanks. There was a need for a help (and will be for many more months) and I was there to be that help. Here in Seattle, however, the wheels keep turning as they always have. The commonplace, trivial matters of urban existance stand out to me more than they ever have before. My coworkers were talking about getting their yearly bonuses. People are going out to bars with friends, then going to work the next morning: the constant cycle of twenty-something life. People (including myself) are planning Halloween parties. The same ridiculous Seattle hippies are holding the same 6-person anti-war rallies on the corner (could you guys please stop making it so easy to make fun of liberals? please).

But I like all this stuff. I enjoy getting paid. I really like going to bars with friends and going to work tired the next morning. I freaking love Halloween parties. And I appreciate that people are so committed to a cause that they don't need a huge crowd to hold a "rally". I guess the problem is that 48 hours ago I was trying to distribute the last of my supplies to hurricane victims in a town which smells of rotting bodies (both animal and human). People are living in the rubble of their former homes with little help in sight. When I was able to give them a tent or a sleeping bag, it was because I was there to help them. It wasn't because it was part of my job. I did it because it was an extremely tangible way for me to help those in need and because my station in life made it possible for me to leave for three weeks. I'm sure people would do the same if a huge earthquake hit Seattle tomorrow. But it was this desperate need in Biloxi that makes it difficult for me to saunter back into the bohemian bourgeois (abbreviated "bo-bo") Seattle everyday life. The disconnect between the two is hard to reconcile.

Talking with the people in Biloxi was one of the most sincere experiences of my life. The conversations cut through all the formalities and awkwardness of normal everyday dialogue. I told them how I could help, and they told me that they would really appreciate that. You could see how much they appreciated it by the steady eye contact or the tears welling up in their eyes. Even if I had nothing to offer them, they appreciated that I had traveled across the country to be there. They appreciated that other people cared about them. It's real easy to feel forgotten when your living in a tent on your front lawn for a month, waiting for FEMA and State Farm to call.

So maybe it just boils down to having a purpose. I'm not quite sure what my purpose is at the moment. I'm sure, in a few days, I'll chill out a bit and go back to being young and carefree. But until then, I'm stuck pondering why I'm sitting in my office with no windows doing semi-interesting data analysis. Meanwhile, my friends in Biloxi are wielding chainsaws and crowbars, working their asses off to try to get people's lives back together. Sigh.

Please excuse me if I seem grumpy or rude to my friends. It will pass. And I sure managed to start off this blog with one hell of a downer, didn't I? My bad. It'll be all sunshine and laughs from here on out.