You Can't Make Mistakes.

That dread that I feel about flying to the Middle East has nothing to do with fear of flying

Well, I have two weeks until take-off. On my birthday I will experience the joy of flying and sitting in airports for 20 hours. I complain now, but I am very excited about the trip. What I am not excited about is that the airlines that I am flying keep changing details. I have had one leg of my departure flight changed twice and two legs of my planned return flight changed. Originially, I was to leave at 8:00pm, now I leave at 7:10. Originally I was supposed to depart from Alexandria on the return next spring, now I depart from Cairo—which complicates things greatly, I’ll explain later.

What I can’t figure out is why there haven’t been revolts on planes and in airports based on poor service and bad scheduling. I know that airfare hasn’t really increased over the past 20 years, but that doesn’t mean that the service associated with flying should be totally left by the wayside. I am not talking about in-flight cocktails or pillows or that stuff—though, wouldn’t it be nice to have an included-in-the-price bourbon on an overseas, overnight flight that you just shelled out $1500 for? No. I am talking about keeping the scheduled departure rather than changing it twelve times between booking and take-off or completely canceling the flight entirely.

Part of me believes that this is another example of the cellular phone’s destructive power. The cell phone destroyed the plan. Do you remember when we used to make plans, say “Let’s meet Friday night at 8:30 at the corner bar,” and then actually meet at the agreed time and place? I do. We don’t do that anymore, though. Now we will say, “Hey do you want to get together on Friday night?” and you will hear in response, “Sure, I will call you.” This is really a kind way of saying, “I will hang out with you, if I don’t have anything better to do.”

Airlines are now doing the same thing to us. We are saying, “Hey, I want to fly to Paris on Thursday,” and the major American carriers are saying, “We will take your money for that, and perhaps we will leave at the specified time, but maybe not. Oh yeah, also, you might not have a flight because we may have sold your seat to someone who paid five times as much for it. We’ll call you.” Some people believe that the little phone messages reminding us of our flight times, terminals, and departure gates, delays, changes, and cancellations are a valiant effort on the part of airlines to help us to deal with the harrowing experience of traveling. I say that they are a non-solution, a band-aid that falls off in the pool, or bullshit. If airlines really want to win their customers back, I suggest opening a bottle and proposing a toast to free drinks in the air. At least that way we might not remember why we were so frustrated before we finally got on the plane.

See you next time. I’ll call you.

A few months ago, I was sitting on a delayed plane in Albuquerque reading the Economist magazine to pass the time. It happened to be the quarterly technology feature issue, so there was some decent stuff about recycling technologies and holographic data storage. I flipped the page and lo and behold, there was an article about a South African programmer named Mark Shuttleworth and his Linux-distribution-brainchild, Ubuntu.

This was the first that I had ever heard of Ubuntu Linux. I had been dabbling with Fedora Core—another Linux “flavor” or distribution. I really knew nothing about Linux beyond that it was open source, free—in most situations—and pretty difficult to use. I also knew that Linux came along with a great deal of ideology, having developed in a community-based, collaborative, project-oriented way. I had been using all sorts of open source software on my Windows system—stuff like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, etc.—but I had not really delved into open source OS or anything.

As I read this article though, I really began to identify with the cause. This guy, Mark Shuttleworth, and the company that he set up to develop Ubuntu were dedicated to making highly-functional and user-friendly operating systems which are also free and open source. In the article, the word ubuntu is identified as a Zulu and Xhosa word which means “universal bond of sharing between humans.”¹ The idea behind the development of this particular distribution of Linux is to focus less on the ideology of open source software development and focus more on usability. Shuttleworth wanted to create something for people everywhere, and that could be developed by people everywhere.²

Then, recently, I had the good fortune of being invited to attend a talk by the Archbishop Desmond Tutu at Western Michigan University. In his talk, he discussed ubuntu at length. Not the open source operating system, but the concept. It was the basis of his discussion of why people should work together rather than against each other. He describe ubuntu in two ways: first, by saying that “the humanity in me is the humanity in you,” explaining that there is not humanity without other humans. We are only fully human when we are fully engaged in the community of humans around us. He later described ubuntu as “the art of being human.”

Tutu talked endlessly about forgiveness and its importance for bridging gaps between people, countries, places and in creating peace where there has only been war and violence. It struck me as he was talking that he and Shuttleworth had more in common than their country of birth and their choice of buzzwords. They both seek to empower people by encouraging them to embrace their community, whether local or global. In the development of Ubuntu, software developers from all over the world use technologies which allow them to collaborate virtually. In Tutu’s own efforts over the past 40 years, he has encouraged people from vastly different places and cultures to communicate with one another in order to understand each other. This understanding, he believes, will eventually lead to collaboration, which will lead to a sense of joint or group ownership of the world. Perhaps stewardship would be more apt even that ownership. If we get to know and understand each other a little better, we will be more apt to take care of our brothers and sisters, fathers and grandmothers the world over. It would be like living in an open-source world—if I can extend that as a metaphor to this idea. It is this shared care-taking that will save the humanity from destroy ourselves and the world we live in.

Not so strangely, this sentiment is coming not from a gain-focused, monetary-profit-maximizing worldview, but a non-profit, shared-benefit worldview in which more than money is considered when evaluating what it profitable and what is not. It is my hope that we will all start listening to these folks and—better than listening—help them in our everyday behaviors, actions, and interactions. It is only then that the words of visionaries will actually benefit the world. Until then, it feels as though they fall on lots and lots of deaf ears attached to people only waiting for their turn to talk.

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¹ “Bringing Free Software Down to Earth.” The Economist v 383, no 8532. June 9th-15th, 2007. Permalink to the article.

² Since that time I have been using this operating system on both of my computers. The learning curve was a little steep at first but after a while I got the hang of it. The biggest part of the curve is in learning about how the Linux file system works and why, figuring out how to download and install software. Also, it takes a bit of doing to figure out what the software and file-type cognates are so that I could do cross-platform work. Since installing the OS, I have not gone back. I haven’t booted back into Windows to use familiar software opting instead to use the cognates found in the Linux universe. It has been fantastic. I love the way that it works. I love that it is less resource-intensive for my systems, so that I can use valuable memory and processor speed to do actual work, rather than just running the GUI, like with the newest versions of windows. It’s been great. I suggest trying it out at www.ubuntu.com.

This is a piece that I wrote for submission to the “Readers Write” section in The Sun magazine.

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I would say that my grandmother battled cancer for nearly two years before it finally killed her, but that sentiment would be too strong. From the time of her initial diagnosis, she was never the same. Her smile was forced, her hospitality perfunctory. She was dying, she knew it, and it scared her. She went through course after course of chemotherapy at her doctors’ suggestion, but it was only effective in throwing her emotions into a see-saw and causing her memory to be faulty—and she never once believed that it would help her. No one expected her to be happy about having cancer, but she had been such a feisty, hot-tempered woman throughout her life. This was probably going to be the last fight of her life. We all thought that she would go out swinging, rather than only going through the motions, never fully intending to win.

My grandmother’s seventy-sixth and final birthday fell while I was on a trip to Portland, Oregon visiting my boyfriend’s family. I called her to wish her well, but my grandfather answered the phone and told me that she had gone to the hospital that morning. He gave me the number of her room so I could call there. When I called, she was sometimes incoherent, sometimes herself, alternately asking me how Oregon was or talking about birds coming to carry her off.

When I arrived home two days later, I rushed to my parents’ house so that I could go see her at the hospital first thing in the morning. She was a wreck: thin and frail, wide-eyed with a terrible sweetness on her breath. She was heavily medicated and would slip in and out of consciousness and coherence. My boyfriend left the room so that she and I could talk, and in one of her more lucid moments, I asked her if she was scared. She replied, “No, Grandma’s not scared,”—she had always referred to herself in the third person—“I just want to get this over with.” She smiled at me, and we both cried. I knew that she was lying, just as she had throughout her “battle” with cancer, but I loved her for still trying to protect me from the pain of not being able to help her. It was the first time that I had seen the grandmother that I knew since she had been diagnosed.

When I left the hospital, I knew that it would be the last time I saw her—she died at home two days later.

I had a conversation last night with my good friend Mo who is currently living in Quebec. He is Egyptian, has lived in Canada for 6 years. I always, for some reason, think that Canadian governmental and political structures are similar to those of the United States. However, every time we have these conversations about Canadians, provincial politics, and the Maritimes, I remember that these countries are as different as night and day.

Here are some little-known facts about Canada, which I gleaned from our conversation. All quotes are direct from M. Zakzouk:

1. “Newfie” is not, apparently, a derogatory way to refer to someone from Newfoundland. [CORRECTION: After some thought overnight, Mo decided that "Newfie" must certainly be a derogatory term for Newfoundlanders, and should probably not be used in polite conversation. I would imagine that this term is akin to "Okie" in reference to Oklahomans. Wikipedia has this to say about the term.]
2. Toronto is not like New York City so much as it is like Chicago. A New York Equivalent would be too much for Canada to handle. There is way too much crime and filth.
3. Gun laws in Canada are confusing and ineffective because the provincial laws often counteract the national laws.
4. There is a Ministry of Statistics.
5. “Calgary is in the wrong spot on the map.” – on how Calgary seems like it should be in the United States. Apparently Calgary is the Dallas of Canada.
6. Some provinces dislike other provinces for no reason whatsoever.
7. “It would make more sense for Quebec to take over Labrador.”
8. “Alaska should clearly be a part of Canada.”

This information has been brought to you by the multitude of weird different types of Kit-Kat bars available in Canada. I believe that Canada is the test-market for new flavors of Kit-Kat, but this information cannot be verified by statistical data.