You Can't Make Mistakes.

There are very few more American things that this I suppose

So the weekend after I returned to the States, in-line with my continued pursuit of doing typically American things, I worked for Tara (housemate) at Just Good Food in Kalamazoo. This place in in the business of making magical, special days happen. Weddings, proms, you name it. Good food too, like the name would indicate.

This evening it was senior prom for a local high school. Frankly, I was unimpressed. Not by the venue—it was lovely, as always—but the prom kids were atrocious. Let me rephrase that. The prom kids were boring.

Now, I am sure that when I was in high school, I would have seemed boring to someone ten years my senior as well, but I think that there is something else going on as well. At my senior prom, we were relatively badly behaved. I know, from various sources, that loads of folks indulged in not a few cocktails beforehand. I am also relatively certain that there were a variety of intoxicants consumed in the restrooms of the prom venue. Not to mention other illicit, unsavory activities.

In many cases, in high school, we had the adults snowed. They thought we were well behaved, and we were for the most part, but we also realized that the mischief that we got up to was relatively harmless; not to mention unpunishable.

Today’s children are very different.

There was no whiff of Schnapps on the breath of these kids. There were no shady dealings. There was no sneaking off to the back for some extra-curricular groping.

One might assume that this is because of the rock-solid chaperoning that was in place.

Not so, in this case. The chaperons were relatively shiftless. They stood in groups, talking to each other, not watching the kids and certainly not watching the potential scenes of unsavory behavior. They were also relatively stupid creatures. For example, I was nearly stabbed in the face with a pair of scissors during the “balloon drop” at the end of the event. Not by a child, no no, but by a bullish, rounding-fifty woman whom I assumed to be a teacher. She was attempting to cut open the bags in which the balloons were contained. It nearly cost me my eye.

So what is it? Are today’s children better behaved. I recognize the limitations of my current data sample, but bear with me. My theory is this: children’s continued exposure to television and the internet—which they only use to watch television and plagiarize—has rendered them in lack of the creativity required for general mischief. Those still capable of mischief are therefore actually in possession of the faculties for more advanced forms of criminality. General mischief—i.e. drinking mom’s schnapps before prom—has come to be punished by such draconian means that those children who might have done so before are terrified to do so. Those young criminals who haven’t the qualms about punishment—the real criminals, in other words—will walk right past the schnapps and go straight for mommy’s OxyContin and hold steady on till heroin.

I’m not saying that I condone underage drinking. Well, okay, I am saying that I condone underage drinking: within reason. I have a feeling if we lowered the drinking age to 18 from it’s currently puritanical 21, we would have fewer college-alcoholics. There wouldn’t be as much binge drinking before going to the bar, because 18 year olds could go to the bar and have a beer with their older friends. Oh, yeah, we won’t have to worry so much about what Amy Winehouse is teaching our kids, because we will be teaching them about moderation and responsibility by example.

I suppose that my real point is that we all need to step back, have a cocktail, and lighten up. Honestly, if you have a favorite song or painting which wasn’t created and executed by someone who was stoned, drunk, or on some opiate or another, I’ll eat my hat. Though, while I am eating my hat, if you do have such a favorite song or painting, it is likely crap. No offense or anything.

This sci-fi is fortified with extra “fi” and low in “sci”

I read this article on Slashdot and started thinking.

Never good.

The idea is that climate changes on Mars happened more recently than we previously thought. Maybe our Sun used to really kick out the jams and Mars was warmer. As the Sun lost some steam over 3 or 4 billion years, Mars cooled, glaciers form, then recede. Canals and trenches, etc are created in the process. Atmosphere changes. Suddenly, nothing more than a frozen little rock floating around the Sun.

In the mean time, the very, very hot Earth next door has also started to cool and settle down. Volcanic activity is down, rainfall is up. It is becoming more habitable.

In the mean time, Venus next door is still rocking and rolling with the greenhouse gases. Hot and smoky: no fun for a vacation.

Let us introduce a race of intelligent beings into the mix. They are hanging out on the homeland, doing their thing. Then there occurs what is called an Extinction Level Event. This may have been caused by a weapon of some kind which the folks decided to test or use against one another some sunny afternoon, or an meteor. Who can say? It kicks up the dust. The planet cools, the Sun is cooling anyway, freezing, glaciers, we’ve heard it all before.

These guys have very little time to get out of Dodge, but they have the technology. They gather together a group, lie to the rest—who are, by all accounts, totally screwed—by telling them that they will come back for them, and blast off.

They head for the nearest safe-looking haven and land on, that’s right, Earth.

Perhaps that is where we are now. We’re the Martians. Our new digs aren’t so new anymore. We’re approaching critical population mass, Earth is warming up.

Do we need to think about calling up Two-Men-and-a-Spaceship and heading for Venus? If so, be sure to make your reservations early.

Don’t worry, I promise I’ll call too

Last night I heard a load of people almost griping about how they had to get up early and go see their mothers today. You have to? Really?

I would like to go see my mom today (Hi, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day, by the way), but it ain’t in the cards. I will see Mom soon, and I just saw her last week—we took our mandatory Mother’s-Day-picture. It used to be that Arnold (brother) and I would all take a picture with our mom and grandmother, but it is getting increasingly difficult to get us all in one place, so we take small group pictures instead now. This year it was just me and mom and Jeff, and then a hilarious second-take with my mom wearing the scarf I bought her in Cairo as a hijaab—which was its original intended purpose, I suppose. It was cute anyway.

Back to my point, if you feel that you have to begrudgingly go and see Mom on Mother’s Day: don’t. Go see her on a different day when you feel happy about seeing her. Send a card or call on Mother’s Day, but don’t make a big deal out of it, just enjoy your time when you can.

See, it’s about quality time, after all. I have very few life-long regrets, but one is that I grieved over my grandmother’s death before she died, and in the process, I forgot that she was still alive. In the two years that she had cancer I saw her very little, and when I did, our interactions were perfunctory—as though they had been rehearsed. It wasn’t until the week before she died—the very last time that I saw her—that I felt like she and I were the same people we used to be I wrote the experience here.

Again, to redirect, I wish not to be a downer, only to remind everyone—myself included, to go see the people you love when you want to, not when you have to. Remember that even if you don’t get along with your family—genetic or chosen—that they are doing the best they can with the resources that they have at their disposal. And, don’t forget to thank them for the things that they did which made you who you are, whether they meant to or not.

So, on that note, I wish to thank my mom for the following things:

1. Reading to me every night when I was a kid, so that now I would enjoy reading and writing more than almost any other activity
2. Teaching me, by example, about patience
3. Becoming a vegetarian when I did and remaining one even to this day, even though I no longer am
4. Teaching me the importance of spelling and proofreading, and for the book about the joy of diagramming a sentence—it is among my favorites.
5. Never, ever asking when I was going to quit going to school and get a job, and for telling me that she thinks of me as a scholar anyway
6. Innumerable other little things that I never once took for granted, even though it may have appeared that way

I love you, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day.

Back in the Saddle

Sorry for the recent hiatus in posting. I have been a bit lazy and let-lagged this week. 10 in the evening in Kalamazoo feels like what I have been calling 5 in the morning for the past year. It has been as rough transition, but getting better every day. The best part about this, as I sit and write at 7:50am on a Saturday, is that my increasingly late wake up time in Cairo is nice and early here. I have reclaimed the best part of the day, and I usually have it all to myself.

It’s good to be back… at least for a while.

I suppose that this is why I left in the first place, after all. I could have stayed here in the States and written my thesis. I would have had access to a great many more resources—the university library, easy access to the internet, face time with professors, and much more—but I would have likely been bored stiff, trudged on, written, worked some shitty part-time job: you get the picture.

Had I stayed here for the last year, I would not be writing now about how much I enjoy the air, the trees, the cool 10°C mornings, Taco Bell, Miller Lite, American Chinese food, walking barefoot in the grass: so many things. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate these things before, it is just that I didn’t appreciate them that much. I won’t gush or wax poetic about the joy of mundane things, but I will say that living in a place where everything is difficult makes me appreciate living in a place where everything is easy.

It also makes cake out of those things which before seemed difficult: as in “piece of.”

Regardless of all of that, I am having a blast. It is also stunning to take note of the things that I have learned in the past year. For instance: I went to seen Iron Man last weekend. It was great. I love comic-book movies, I love movie theaters. I didn’t go to the cinema nearly enough while in Cairo. Something to think about for the future. The best part of the film, though, was not the popcorn and bucket of soda that I was endowed with upon stepping into the joint, but that the film had loads of Arabic in it: and I understood every word. Obviously, it wasn’t very sophisticated dialog—certainly no more than the dialog in the primary language of the film—but I got it. I didn’t even notice at first: then I realized that I wasn’t looking at the subtitles when I laughed at some little quip or joke. Suffice it to say that I was very pleased with myself.

Same thing when I noticed what an easy time I was having understanding Ayad—dear friend and former roommate—when he showed up late one night before leaving for Saudi Arabia for the summer. We could always talk before, but it is certainly easier now.

I continue to reflect thus as I sit here and wait for the installer to finish on my new low-energy, headless Linux server. A year ago, I didn’t know what a headless server was. In the past year in learning how to use Linux on my laptop for data analysis, I accidentally learned loads about how it works and how to use it. So, now, rather than just having a slab running Windows crap factory, I have a laptop running a scalable set of software which is tailored to my needs. I was particularly pleased when Jeff asked me to put Ubuntu on his laptop to replace the Windows Vista that it shipped with. It went from being a relatively slow, unresponsive, one-year-old system to being a blindingly fast, extensible, little mobile monster. He was/is very pleased by the improvement. He is still gushing about it, in fact.

But, to think, a year ago I attempted an install of Ubuntu on my old laptop—I have since upgraded in a very serious way—and ended up with a command-line laptop for a month. That was cool and all, but it must be noted that it is very difficult to browse the internet using the command-line terminal. Kind of fun though.

Incidentally, I just converted that laptop back into a command-line laptop, just for kicks.

All in all, though, this year was a complete success: I learned a great deal. Had I stayed home, I might not have. Or, I wouldn’t have enjoyed myself nearly as much while doing it.

Anyone else learn anything this year?

We ask all the wrong questions

I read these two articles this week:

The Future of Space Games

The Physics of Zero-G Whipped Cream

I realize that when presented in this manner, the two articles seem a little bit more tawdry than they were probably intended.

Or are they?

My question after reading these, and following up with a bit more research, is this:

“Has anyone—or, more appropriately, “Have any two (or more)—ever had sex in space?

If you tell me that you haven’t wondered this, or even at least thought about it for a second, then you are lying to me. You can’t tell me that you can think about what it would be like to float through 0-gravity attached to a makeshift medicine ball of your own design without thinking: I wonder if it would be difficult to stay engaged while copulating at 0-G’s.

Or maybe that is just what I think about when people start talking about “games” aboard the International Space Station and “whipped cream in space.”

Come on people. Lighten up. We went through the whole “space toilet: everybody poops” scenario about 15 years ago. I think that it is high time that we discuss the realities of performing “the deed” while floating, unencumbered through the void.

And, if none of the ISS crew nor any Soyuz or space shuttle crew from the USA was ever done it, I will eat my words. But, if this is the case, then we have a whole new—and really fascinating—set of experiments to carry out, don’t we?

There are so few good ones left.

To celebrate my recent return to the land of my birth, I have compiled a list of American heroes. Now, these are not your typical heroes—firefighters/police/soldiers have all had their day in the sun. Nor are they the fictitious heroes of my comic book youth with their super-powers, good-intentions, and very efficient spandex pants. No, these are the little guys.

The American Editor

This guy is going around with a felt-tip and actually making edits to poorly spelled, worded, and punctuated signs and t-shirts. I want a correctly-spelled and punctuated t-shirt with his emblem on it. Screw Superman.

Here is his website: www.apostropheabuse.com

Revivers of the Classics

Americans who get out those dusty volumes of Vergil, Catullus, Cicero, et al. and breathe new life into the stories are heroic. It takes years to learn to read Latin or Greek, and since there is no purpose for it other than having done it—I have a BA in Latin, I know something about this feeling—every act they commit is an act of love. Bless them and their yellowed, dog-eared pages; their prose and verse.

Wow. I almost got choked up over that. Weird.

Nerds

Nerds of all variety, shape and size are inestimably heroic. Without them we wouldn’t have; math, computers, zombies, physics, blogging, comic books, Facebook, science fiction, Mystery Science Theater, science or Dungeons and Dragons. They contribute so positively to the world and go always unrewarded—Nay! Punished!—for their nerdery.

Keep nerding guys and girls. Don’t be put off by the nay-saying of others.

I know that you might be thinking: “But nerds don’t have to be American, do they?” No, of course not. But we have amenities that pave the way for such advanced nerdery that it cannot be found elsewhere: free and ready access to internet, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly (for unending sessions of Dungeons and Dragons), coffee, and beer—depending on the time of day. So, there is a great deal of incentive for being a nerd in the States.

Anyway, those are my heroes this week. I’m sure there are more that I am forgetting, but mostly I am just glad to be back home. Not because I hated where I have been, but because of what living in Egypt has taught me about where I am from.

So, I will leave you with a question—one that my roommate left me with a few weeks ago: What did you do to be privileged enough to be born an American? And, how are you utilizing or taking advantage of that privilege in your life and what you do?

Okay, that did choke me up.