Talk about optimism

I'd just like to say, I love the idea behind this book. When the big blackout hit in the summer of 2002 (oops, 2003: thanks, JJR, for catching that), I was left staring at a pantry that contained a box of tomato soup and canned corn. While the situation couldn't be considered dire since at least one of the take-out places downtown was still operating, things could have been worse. Like aliens-taking-over-the-earth worse. And in that situation, the best remarks to hear from the people around you would be: "Dammit, no lights, no water, and we're all about to die, but whatever that is smells delicious! Let's eat!"

Interpreted or misinterpreted?

The following is a true story that, as far as I can recall, I've never shared with anyone.

When I was in fourth grade, I was in a class for the rather un-PC-sounding "talented and gifted". (I won't go into the exact acronym that was used -- it's embarassing to say, even in my head.) Every Monday the teacher would assign us something called "creative homework" which was due the following Monday and required us to come up with a solution to some open-ended problem. I can now recall only two of these assignments. One asked us to design a musical instrument out of household items. (They were all of this nature -- it was only fourth grade!) Another asked us to design a garden and specify what kind of flowers and plants we'd put in this garden and why. It's this second one I want to tell you about.

The creative homeworks never took much time to complete. I suspect most of us cobbled something together in an hour or so each Sunday evening. The directions were usually brief, and only rarely were examples of solutions given. This left a wide margin for interpretation and, at least in my case, sometimes added some anxiety to the process. Each Monday we'd be given the opportunity (or should I say, coerced) to present our work by a combination of our teacher's requests, peer pressure, and awkward preteen sideway glances.

The Monday after the garden design assignment was given, I remember sitting in the classroom watching other students present their ideas. One by one, they laid out grand ideas of colors and geometries. Meanwhile, I was attempting to sink farther and farther into my seat. I'd done the assignment, but to this day I still don't know if I misread what was asked or just had a completely different take on it. What I'd done the day before was ask my dad to take me to the library where I checked out a book on the medicinal value of different flowers. And when I actually got around to putting something down on paper, I started by trying to think of what ailments a gardener might want to treat, rather than how the damn thing would look: this plant was good for colds, and this one was good for stomach aches, etc. So, on Monday while others were showing their colorful designs (I remember one looked like an American flag), I sat in the back nervously fingering the black-and-white layout I'd sketched out of medicinal-valued plant species. I was sweating at the thought of trying to explain the drab text-filled boxes to my friends. Thankfully, the period ended before everyone had the opportunity to present.

We all passed in our assignments and a few days later received them back. Usually they were returned with comments like "Good Work!" or "Interesting!". But I never did get mine back. I still don't know what happened to that assignment -- whether it was lost, or whether the teacher kept it as an example, good or bad. But I'll never forget the feeling of reading something in a completely different way from my peers and the nervousness that follows. On my bravest days, I say to myself: of course I would've done it the same way if I had the chance to go back. But on days when the winds blow cold, and the world seems dark, and all I long for is the glow of friends nearby, I wonder if I should have opened up a box of colored pencils instead of a book on medicinal plants.

To go along or to go alone -- how many times have I asked myself that question since then?

What news from Iraq?

With all the news out of Israel and Lebanon lately, I'd started wondering what was happening in Iraq. Wasn't there a war going on there or something? My sporadic viewings of the TV news and daily checkings of the CNN and Google News websites were starting to leave me with a funny feeling: withdrawal. I expect now to hear of at least one U.S. death whenever I see anything labeled the news, and clearly something's been different lately.

A quick Google search for "deaths Iraq" delivered what I'd been expecting to see, news of the death of U.S. soldier, this time a Marine in Anbar province. The death was attributed to the rather generic "enemy action". I realized that what I'd been fearing since the war's beginning was now coming true: Iraq was disappearing from the news. This news item had taken too much time to find -- it wasn't linked off the main CNN home page, though it was dated today, and no mention of the soldier's death was made until the second paragraph -- and I was a little peeved that I even had to try.

While I don't disparage the severity of the events in Israel and Lebanon, the cynical part of me can't help but wonder if the current administration breathes a sigh of relief when no mention is made of U.S. military deaths in the news. I don't mean to say the administration isn't happy when all of our service men and women survive the day -- I'm sure it is, as we all are -- but in lieu of a death-free day, I wonder if it's glad when other news crowds out the mention of death. It's not inconceivable -- let's not forget, after all, that this is the administration that closed the lid on coverage of military coffins returning to U.S. soil (news).

Tao 31: "War is conducted like a funeral. When many people are being killed, they should be mourned in heartfelt sorrow." In our not hearing about the deaths in Iraq, and in the news' not reporting on them, and in the administration's acquiescence of both, we dishonor those who would make the ultimate sacrifice. I'll close by saying this:

If a soldier dies and we know not his name,
Will the war he fought be a little in vain?

80s music is not good work music

I spent the afternoon at work listening to the 80s channel on Shoutcast, and I think I've proved to myself that, yes, you can have too much of a good thing. Two hours into this exercise, the only thing I wanted to do was to crawl into my old bed at my parents' house, turn on an episode of ThunderCats, and snarf down some Nacho Cheese Doritos. (Hey, I just made a pun -- Snarf was a character on ThunderCats.) Later on, I had the urge to ride my bike to the library, popping wheelies on the way, so that I could get caught up on all the Encyclopedia Browns that I'd missed since 1985. To top it all off, when I finally left for the evening, I realized I'd absorbed almost nothing from the technical papers I'd been reading but instead had conjured up every Paula Abdul lyric I'd ever known. Gracious!

Ask naut what your vocabulary can do for you

I've just returned from a trip to Washington D.C. where I was visiting my brother. Among the places we visited this time was the U.S. Botanic Garden near the Capitol grounds. A placard within the garden reads: "Orchids are beautiful but not particularly delicate. Leathery leaves save water in windy, sunny treetop habitats; devious pollination schemes lure sex-starved insects who pollinate but remain unfulfilled." Rowr! Pretty racy writing for a functionary of the federal government.

Speaking of literature, I've moved on to reading another book this summer, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick. From this account of the nineteenth century sinking of a whaleship by a sperm whale (the inspiration for Moby Dick, natch), I'm picking up a lot of archaic terms that I will probably never have occasion to use. Terms like scupper -- which is an opening at the edge of a ship's deck that allows water to overflow -- and cathead -- which is a wooden peg to which an anchor is secured.

I've been trying to think of a good reason to apportion part of my brain for the memorization of these terms. Like, maybe they would make good metaphors for some larger ideas? At one point in high school, a random rifling through the dictionary led me to the word remontoire -- a mechanism within a clock that provides the impulse to the pendulum. In effect, it's the timekeeper behind the timekeeper, which acts as a nice illustration of the Latin saying: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" ("Who watches the watchers themselves?"). There was a time when I wasn't familiar with this phrase -- when I was interviewing for the Computational Biology program at UPenn in the spring of 2001, to be exact. One of my interviewers was delighted to see that I had majored in Latin (in addition to something science-y), reminisced about his own experience taking Latin, and brought this phrase up... in Latin, of course. When I told him I didn't know what it meant, the smile passed from his face. The rest of the interview was just formality. How often I've wanted to turn back the hands of time (which a remontoire won't let you do) and say, "Why, of course I know what that means! Isn't just like a remontoire?"

Now I'm trying to think if scupper and cathead would make good metaphors for anything? Yeah, this is definitely worthy of my time, definitely going to help me graduate. But, hey, you never know when you're going to be at a cocktail party with pirates.

Words like sunspots

First, a linguistic observation. Every few years the situation will arise where people around me start using a word that is rare, real (i.e. in a standard dictionary), and not derived from popular culture (e.g. "inconceivable" from the heyday of The Princess Bride). Last night, while bidding farewell to a friend from my Rice days who's leaving Michigan, DMB, over sangria at Casa Dominick's, the people I was with started using the word trebuchet. (For those not in-the-know, as I was not, a trebuchet is "a medieval military engine for hurling heavy missiles, as rocks".) I'd tell you what the rest of the conversation was about, but I didn't have the slightest inebriated clue at the time and I still don't. But then this afternoon, while walking around the Ann Arbor art fairs with my friend BH, she said something that I heard roughly as "yada yada yada trebuchet". Once again, I had no clue what she was talking about. (Blame the heat.) But I thought, how weird is that?

The last time this kind of thing happened to me was in high school, after I locked my keys in my car and started calling any friends whose numbers I could remember for help (from a nearby mattress store's phone -- no cell phones yet). As luck would have it, my friend EP was home and was able to pick me up, with a friend of hers in tow. And for whatever reason, I used the word cravat ("a band or scarf worn around the neck") with her on the phone. Later on, at EP's house, just a little down the street from my parents', the three of us were hanging out in her room and her friend said "[something] [something] [something] cravat". EP noted that she had never heard this word so often in her life as she had that afternoon -- she often made observations like that. When BH said trebuchet today, I felt the same way. It was tres weird.

As a side note, I was reading about the constellation Aquila tonight while elliptical-ing at the gym, and the stars Alshain and Tarazed were described as Altair's epaulets. That's another strange word, meaning "an ornamental fringed shoulder pad formerly worn as part of a military uniform" or in other words the defining characterstic of a Member's Only jacket. (Interestingly, you can still buy a Member's Only jacket on Amazon. I guess the club's still taking applications.) I haven't had a freaky high frequency word usage experience with this word yet, but I think it's in the running. At the current rate of having this phenomenon happen once every twelve years or so, almost like the sunspot cycle, I expect to be 42 for the next one. (Shudder.)

In other news, as I mentioned up top, I veni-vidi-vici'ed my way through the art fairs this afternoon. I reckon I saw two hundred or so booths and came away being interested in about five percent of those. Of those five percent, the one to which I felt the most drawn was Zu Sheng Yu's. Apparently he's something of an inventor as well as a painter, and one invention of his is a method to represent music as colors. In his paintings he uses one-meter square canvases and fills most of the space with scenery, which I equate with a rhythm section, while reserving a small portion for a speck of a thing which I equate with a melody. You can see an example here. Great stuff. I also made one purchase this afternoon, a shirt made by the folks at Made in Ann Arbor on South University. They make by far the least kitschy and most attractive shirts I've ever seen with the words "Ann Arbor" on them. And I've seen a few.

Slippery slope

How often can you say, I'm glad that weekend's over?

This is what I found myself thinking Monday morning after a weekend that included a not-so-wise decision to go biking after a rainstorm last Friday afternoon. Coming from North Campus to the Medical Campus of the University, one has a choice of routes which include downhills of varying steepness taking you into the valley of Ann Arbor. That afternoon I went with my usual choice, Jones Drive, which whips you down in a hurry and has the added plus of little to no traffic. Unfortunately Jones terminates in a wicked 90-degree shank to the left at the bottom of its hill. You can see this devil-in-wool for yourself here. I probably should have known better, but I'd been cooped up all day and the feeling of wanderlust was strong.

As I came down the hill, there had been signs I should have been going slower. The brakes had been squeaky, and the steering felt a little unsteady. But the air felt good -- cool and moist -- and I even took my hands off the handlebars for a few seconds. As I approached the turn, I leaned in like I usually do. Most times the bike responds by giving me a centrifugal push back, but this time the push wasn't there. The tires began slipping out from under me, and my distance to the pavement started closing in a hurry.

My last remembrances before falling are the last-ditch adjustments I tried making: gripping the handbrakes more tightly, turning the steering left then right, trying to arc my torso outward, all of no use. My bike went flying into the bushes. I landed on my left side, but somehow in the roll my chest and right arm took the brunt. I felt the air get squeezed out of every alveolar sac. When everything came to a stop, I looked up and realized I was seeing everything from just inches off the road surface.

I lay there for a moment, feeling wet dirt and gravel through my clothes and on skin that was exposed. I pushed myself up and started checking for wounds. White skin had been pushed to the side on my right arm -- gashes of two or three inches apiece -- and I knew blood would soon be coming to the surface. Breathing didn't quite feel normal; it hurt a little, felt stressed. Nothing seemed to be broken, a good sign, though looking down, I saw that I had opened a gash in my pants. My helmet had stayed on, and my backpack was slung to one side.

By the time I retrieved my bike from the bushes, straigtened out the handlebars, and picked clumps of grass from out of the pedals and wheel spokes, my arm had started bleeding. The pain in my chest persisted, and still a little woozy from the experience, I asked myself questions in slow fashion, questions like should I go home and am I well enough to get there? I managed to bike up Jones Drive and get back to my apartment, cleaned off the wounds in my bathroom sink, and collapsed for the rest of the evening.

In the days since then, I've come to the conclusion that I've bruised something in my chest and possibly fractured my sternum. I was well enough the next day to bike to Ypsilanti, but I haven't been on Jones Drive again since the accident. It's the thought of being splayed out again on the pavement, I suppose, that keeps me away.

In other news, I found out that Money Magazine picked my hometown in Texas as the 19th best place to live in the United States (details here), even ahead of Ann Arbor which came in at #25. Whoa. I told my older brother about this, and he said, "I think they need to re-evaluate their criteria." But the survey's good enough for me -- I [heart] Texas.

Suckers and neighbors

Right now I'm sipping an iced latte which I got with my deca-punched frequent customer card at Espresso Royale. But I'm wondering whether it even makes any sense to get an iced latte, or should I have just gotten an espresso with a free cup of ice and some free milk from the condiment counter? Can anyone really tell the difference between steamed milk that's been iced from regular iced milk?

This morning I saw a speech given by Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, to the Detroit Economic Club on TV. He made passing reference to $2.75 lattes, comparing it to the extortionate cost of Raisinets at the movie theater: you're paying for the experience as much as the product, he said. And now I feel like the sucker in the Looney Tunes cartoons who gets the face of an ass superimposed over his face.

A couple hours ago, the Italian national team won the 2006 World Cup final in a big way: during an overtime that came down to penalty kicks. I was at a bar in downtown Ann Arbor, and the place erupted when the fifth kick sailed into the back of the net. Afterward I biked down to Silvio's, one of three places in town owned by actual Italians, the other two being NYPD and Bella Italia. Inside, people were still celebrating as images of the Azzuri being bathed in white confetti flashed on-screen. I got three slices of frutti di mare, said hello to Silvio, and went outside. Drunken frat boys were cheering for Italy probably just for the sake of making noise, and later, as I was munching down, cars passed with Italian flags draped outside of their windows.

Had I time and money to study whatever I wanted, say, a MacArthur grant, one thing I'd like to look at is how emotions spread throughout a nation, kind of like epidemics. I love those rare times when nations attain consonance: in the U.S. we all get a little bit more charitable at Thanksgiving and Christmas, a little more patriotic on the 4th of July. In Italy right now everyone's in soccer ecstasy. I love this idea that you could call anyone in Italy right now and talk about the game, probably to the sound of cheering in the background. How long did it take for everyone to get the news? And how long will that emotion last? Can you rate how neighborly people feel, and do feelings of social isolation vary inversely? Do crime rates go down when more people feel neighborly? Or will there always be some people who are immune to neighborly feelings?

Karma

A couple of days ago I was on my bike coming off of a three-hour ride down to Saline, MI and back when a firefly landed on my pants. Night was beginning to fall, meaning it was around 9:30 or so, and I had seen the little fellow light up a few moments before he latched on to me. "That's curious," I thought. I was in the middle of climbing a hill, so I didn't have time to brush him off, nor did I want to out of fear of crushing him. (Why does every arthropod outside of a ladybug get assigned a male pronoun?)

At the first convenient stop, a parking lot behind an apartment complex at the top of the hill, I pulled off to the side to consider what I should do next. I'd often tried to catch fireflies while on my bike, mainly as an exercise in dexterity, but never successfully done so. And now, here one was. Others flew lazily in the air ahead of me. My mind wandered to childhood possibilities of making a firefly lantern, as if I was some character out of a faerie tale! I thought about whether any items in my backpack could be used as a container, preferably something transparent. I'd brought no water with me and so had no bottle. The only possibility was my eyeglass case where I swapped glasses for sunglasses during my rides.

I unzipped the small pocket on the front of my backpack and took out the eyeglass case. The firefly had crawled to the outside seam of my pants and appeared to have no desire to leave. Perhaps it was fate that tonight I'd make my own firefly lantern -- the idea had never even occurred to me while growing up in arid North texas. I pried the case open, gently coaxed the firefly in, and snapped the case shut. I slipped the case into its pocket, and I was off again.

A few minutes later the sky had grown dark, and I was coasting into my apartment complex. When I finally hauled my bike up the stairs and got into my apartment, I immediately went to the kitchen cabinet in which I kept empty glass jars. I had a whole shelf of them (habit, I suppose) but no cheesecloth to strap across the top. I thought about nailing a hole into the lid of one, but I'd probably end up making it too big and allowing the firefly to escape. A lid held on loosely would have to do.

That evening, after I'd moved the firefly into his new home, I went out to a bar to meet some friends. Two hours and a couple of drinks later, I was back at my apartment, a little woozy but mostly exhausted by the ride and the late hour. I passed out in bed, glasses on.

The next morning I awoke to find that one of the nosepads on my glasses had broken off, probably the result of my having rolled on to my face during the night. Or was it something else? Glasses crooked on my face, I walked out to my breakfast table where I had put the jar with my firefly friend. Inside he was still climbing up and down the sides like a Sisyphus in miniature. It didn't escape me that I had kept him in the eyeglass case for the bumpy, dark ride home last night.

I took the jar out to my balcony door, opened the jar top, and shook him free. I looked at the tops of the trees next to the road, alit from the still early sun, and wondered how many other childhood aspirations I'd have to leave by the wayside.