Friday, November 26, 2004 [21:48]
Bearing witness
A couple of nights ago, one AM-ish, I woke to the sound of my ringing cell phone. I didn't recognize the number, but my fuzzy brain somehow managed to rank the potential callers, in order of decreasing possibility, as "family," "girlfriend," and "moron dialing wrong number".
Good guesses, brain, but wrong.
It was a friend I haven't spoken to in a while. To protect his anonymity, we shall refer to him as "George." Then again, that's actually his name, so maybe I would have been better off going with "Clarence" or "Miguel". Too late now. Sorry, George.
He said he was sorry about a lot of things, and that he missed the old gang. Then he went on a long ramble about how I was the sanest person he knew. By the time he started gushing about how much he loved me, it was clear that he was under the influence of certain substances of unknown legality but obvious potency.
As the sanest person George knew--from anyone else, them there would be fightin' words, but I've met some of George's friends and have to accede to the possibility--he called upon me to bear witness to the craziest moment of his life. I'm not clear on what made it the craziest moment of his life, and getting high with your girlfriend and calling innocent people at 1AM to ramble at them only qualifies as moderately crazy in my book. But since he was the one standing atop Crazy Mountain, staring down into the Valley of Insanity, where the buffalo of nuttiness bellowed out their mating calls of madness, I'm willing to accept his view of the lay of the land.
We talked about my blog, how he always enjoyed my writing, how I should always approach writing with the attitude of "I'm the greatest," how he'd lost the URL (BOOKMARKS! C'mon, people. It's not hard!), and how he wanted me to write about this moment. Specifically, he wanted me to write three words, and he wanted me to write them with all the truth in my heart. That was a real stumper of a request. However, after much soul-searching and self-flagellation, I came up with something I believe is fitting, something that fully captures the spirit of the moment.
"George, you're stoned."
There. Now it feels complete. Except I'm still not clear on where the catnip fit into things.
Wednesday, November 03, 2004 [17:57]
Four more wars!
I don't know what happened. Seriously, I'm at a loss to explain what happened yesterday. After four years of gross incompetence, lies, cronyism, and gaping deficits from the Bush administration, the people of the United States rose up, went to the polls in record numbers... and voted him back in.
Why do people vote Republican? As best I can tell, Republicans have one guiding principle: Hurt the poor. It guides everything they do. They fight raising the minimum wage because it would help average people at the expense of business interests. They fought to eliminate estate taxes even though it would lower the tax burden on everyone else, while only hurting a very few people who could easily afford it. They fight environmental protections, consumer protections, and worker safety laws, each of which improves the overall quality of life for the vast majority of us, but interfere with the ability of big businesses to make money.
And yet, there are vast swaths of the heartland where people consistently vote against their own economic interests. The next step for the Bush administration will be to try and privatize portions of Social Security. That is, allow people to decide where their Social Security money will be invested, including the stock market.
This is a bad idea on many levels. First, the fact is that Social Security is supposed to provide security. If someone makes bad investments, we have to decide whether we're going to subsidize their stupid decisions, or let them starve. The latter is heartless, the former encourages gambling, with the government making up for the losses. Then there's the question of what the stock market returns will be like when retirees start withdrawing in large numbers.
All in all, an iffy proposition for the average person. But the people on Wall Street are salivating at the prospect, and I'm sure that the idea of hundreds of billions worth of federally-mandated investment dollars was enough to inspire many patriotic contributions to the Bush campaign.
So many people around me have bought into the lies. Welfare is nothing but stealing from hard-working Americans to subsidize those who refuse to work. Environmental regulations kill jobs dead and lower the quality of life for everyone. If a gay couple gets legal recognition, it puts all heterosexual unions at risk.
The last part may be a big reason Kerry lost Ohio. There was an initiative on the ballot "protecting marriage", and conservative voters lined up by the millions to vote for it. Having a chance to remind a much-despised minority of their rightful place in society was enough to bring in voters who wouldn't have bothered if the only thing they got to vote on was, say, the leader of the free world.
Utah passed a similar referendum, and passed it by a three-to-one margin. The talking heads agree that it increased voter turnout. Why? I can't imagine an alternative reality in which the Supreme Court of the State of Utah would pull a Massachusetts and declare unconstitutional the numerous "defense of marriage" laws already on the books. The only thing that could have overruled those laws was a decision by a federal court, and such a decision will overrule the state constitution as well.
I'm convinced that the law was unnecessary. But far more important, I find the stance of the "traditional marriage" crowd morally repugnant.
In an attempt to be open-minded, I went to a lecture by a few of the most outspoken proponents of this amendment [Lynn Wardle, BYU Professor][William Duncan]. It was a fairly technical lecture, as it was primarily for a bunch of pre-law students. But I think they dumbed it down enough that a lowly CS major like me could follow. After trying to convince us that the amendment wouldn't do many of the things its opponents claimed (I'm still not convinced), Duncan tried to explain to the polite but skeptical audience why traditional marriage needed defending.
As far as I'm concerned, he failed miserably. We pressed him on what specific rights marriage afforded to heterosexual couples that should be denied to homosexual couples. His answer struck me as rambling and evasive, but came down to marriage being a unique institution designed to protect children. We pointed out that lesbians were still able to get pregnant, and that a significant number had a real desire to do so. He said something about such situations requiring intent and planning.
Everyone can look up the writings of these two for themselves, but though Duncan was polite and thoughtful in the way he expressed his opinions (Wardle--who only spoke for seven minutes--came across as a bit of a blowhard) I found those positions to be wildly inconsistent. He couldn't point to any clear examples of rights that homosexual unions shouldn't have, and admitted that public recognition of the unions might be a stabilizing influence on homosexual relationships. He was favorable to the idea of allowing a gay couple hospital visitation rights, medical decision-making rights, and every other right we suggested. But he still believes that the institution of marriage is in very real danger if we call it "marriage" or treat it as legally similar.
In my mind, nobody has a right to say that the love shared by a gay couple is somehow inferior to the love of a straight couple. They deserve to live in a society that recognizes their love, and sees their union as a force for good. But the people of Utah--a group of folks whose ancestors participated in the most flagrant redefinition of marriage our country has ever seen--rallied to pass an amendment to make sure that the benefits of marriage could never fall into the hands of the enemy.
I've come to a decision. Marriage, as defined in Utah today, is an anachronism. Traditionally, it served great social good. But in the rush to "defend marriage", its supposed protectors have turned it into an institution of bigotry and fear. These days, nobody really knows what marriage is. Is it a religious union? Legal? Social? Is it a real marriage if it's arranged on national television? Is it marriage if one of the participants is a fourteen year old girl? It's legal in Utah, with a judge's consent. We accept the inevitability of some divorces, but should it be easier or harder to get out of? The entire institution is suffering an identity crisis. In the fear bred by that crisis, people are happy to have something where they can stand up and proudly say, "I may not know what marriage is, but I know it isn't that!"
But in the process, the concept of marriage is being tarnished in the eyes of those who believe that the definition can be safely expanded. For my part, I'm having trouble with the idea of ever getting married while knowing that many who deserve to cannot. I might consider a civil union from one of the states where such "abominations" are allowed.
I fear for this country. Nala wants to move away entirely. While I don't think four years is enough time for Bush to destroy this country, I think the conservatives have found the perfect mix of big business, fearmongering, and bigotry and hatred under the guise of "values". It will allow them to tighten their grip on this country and keep it for a long, long time. I don't want to leave, but I can't bear to stay and watch these oligarchs-playing-populists as they loot this country of its wealth, its status in the world, its commitment to fairness and justice, and its goodness. My only question is whether to finish my education, or just go.
Friday, September 24, 2004 [11:49]
I still have a girlfriend
Okay, now I'm just gloating.
Monday, September 13, 2004 [14:53]
Full refunds for everyone
The management regrets any inconvenience caused by the recent failure to close an <i> tag. This regrettable error has been corrected, and constitutes the failure of a single individual, who has been sacked. Please contact our main offices to receive a complimentary subscription to this blog.
Saturday, September 11, 2004 [14:35]
Supersize Me!
Or: Thirty days to a pudgier you.
Last night, Nala and I went to see Supersize Me at Kingsbury Hall. Morgan Spurlock's scathing attack on McDonald's and the entire fast food industry. At 6PM, the movie was unleashed on a packed auditorium--the same auditorium where, a few days ago, I watched the live feed as $250,000,000 worth of NASA hardware splatted into the west desert. After the film and a twenty minute intermission, Mr. Spurlock came out and talked about the movie, fast food, and fielded questions from the audience.
The movie was positively gripping. As Spurlock mentioned in the Q/A session, he came up with the idea for the film on a lazy Thanksgiving afternoon when, in a tryptophan-induced haze, he watched a news story about two girls suing McDonalds. A spokesman for McDonald's came on and--as Spurlock sat there in utter disbelief--claimed that his company's food was perfectly healthy. An idea struck him: If the food is perfectly healthy, he figured he should be able to eat it day and night with no ill effects. So he made a goal of eating nothing but Mickey D's for thirty days straight. His girlfriend was properly horrified.
He started by taking a physical, which showed him to be in excellent health. Then he ate. And ate. And ate. Nothing but McDonalds' food, three meals a day. Spurlock says he spent $778 on their food that month. By day 21, he was having severe medical problems. Headaches, heart palpitations, depression, the works. At the end of it, he'd gained 25 pounds.
I liked the movie, and I hate the fast food industry. But I don't trust the direct conclusions of the film. Spurlock obviously was eating far more than he was comfortable with, as demonstrated by the first day when he tries to eat his first super-sized meal, then vomits it back. He intentionally stopped exercising and limited his walking, to bring himself in line with the activity level of most Americans. He was definitely pushing himself in order to make a point about the food, rather than conducting a reasonable experiment. I wish he'd posted an exact schedule saying how much he'd actually eaten so I could decide for myself, but his total intake was close to 5000 a day. The nutritionist working with him throughout the experiment said 2500 was a healthy target.
But let's not overlook the broader themes. His look into the fastfoodification of elementary and secondary schools was illuminating, as was the analysis of the media onslaught we inflict on children. There are a dozen reasons for the tidal wave of lard sweeping the nation. We're too busy. We're too sedentary. There are entire communities where you can't get anywhere worth going by walking. People have no idea how the food they stuff down their throat hurts their bodies. It's not all about the fast food industry. But they are a major contributor. They ride the tidal wave, eager to make it cheap and easy to choose the sorts of food that destroy your life and hasten your death.
I'm becoming anti-corporate as hell. I see myself surrounded by huge, uncaring entities whose only goal is to separate as many people from as much money as possible. They're not afraid of buying legislation and scientific research to protect themselves from criticism, nor do they have any qualms about using their advertising revenue to punish those who criticize them. They're big, they're scary, they know how to manipulate people. We are their bitches.
But I digress.
I didn't have time to research the movie beforehand, but I was vaguely aware of Soso Whaley's upcoming documentary, sponsored by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (motto: Only we have the guts to stand up for the rich and powerful). Her message of personal responsibility rings hollow to me, given that so much of McDonalds' $1.4B advertising budget is spent convincing impressionable children to nag their parents. "How dare you take your children to the funnest, excitingest, bestest restauraunt in the whole wide world? Don't you have any concept of personal responsibility? Bad parent! Bad!"
First impressions: Spurlock has an agenda. He makes no bones about it in his presentations. During Q/A, a young girl went to the mike and asked if someday McDonald's might go out of business. Spurlock's response was to turn his eyes upwards and say, "O' Lord, hear this child's words." I'm okay with that. I'm also glad that the movie has put some pressure on McDonald's Corp. to make some changes--changes which Spurlock described as "a curtain of lettuce" hiding a lard monster. Salads are available, which wasn't true when the documentary was filmed. According to Spurlock, salads represent far less than 1% of all meals sold.
Monday, August 30, 2004 [13:14]
Keep Utah Weird!
KeepUtahWeird.com is up and not-quite-running. It still needs a lot of work, but I intend to make it a safe refuge for weirdos everywhere. In Utah.
Monday, August 23, 2004 [12:05]
Hot Air America
Last week, I finally got around to reading Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Since then, I've become addicted to Air America (especially the Al Franken Show), watched Outfoxed, and wondered with my wondering brain how to figure out what's really going on in this country and still have time to shower.
Political discourse is dying in this country. While my first reflex is to blame right-wingers like Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh, and agenda-driven channels posing as objective news outlets like Fox News, such a conclusion seems premature, and deserves deeper thought. So after much deliberation and consideration, I've decided to blame right-wingers like Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh, and agenda-driven channels posing as objective news outlets like Fox News.
But adding a level of indirection, media consolidation should bear the real blame. The fact that the biggest media owners, like Rupert Murdoch of Fox News and countless other media outlets, and Billy McCombs and Lowry Mays of Clear Channel (Fortune magazine's 27'th, 140'th, and 227'th richest people, respectively). Notice that I'm leaving Ted Turner off the list, because I'm partisan enough to basically agree with his liberal politics. I suck.
I'm not a political commentator. I don't even play one on my blog. I've tried to write about politics before, and always thrown the result away in disgust. But after watching all those clips on Outfoxed of Bill "No-Spin Zone" O'Reilly telling guests to "Shut up" and cutting their mikes, and reading the daily marching orders telling the folks at Fox how the day's news was to be "spun", and then seeing the words "We Report, You Decide"... it all makes me wonder how the current crop of Republican blowhards and faux objective commentators can sleep at night.
From: John Moody
Date: 5/22/2003
The tax cut passed last night by the Senate, though less than half what Bush originally proposed,
contains some important victories for the administration. The DC crew will parse the bill and explain
how it will fatten -- marginally -- your wallet.
Most of the fattening, of course, happened to be directed at those whose wallets were already fattest. The dollars themselves were acquired through the magic money tree we like to call "deficit spending" and "unfunded mandates". As bushtax.com puts it: "For the bottom 60 percent of Americans, the average tax cut was just $304. The median tax cut for all Americans was only $470. In contrast, the average tax cut for those making over $1 million a year was $112,925."
From: John Moody
Date: 3/23/2004
The so-called 9/11 commission has already been meeting. In fact, this is the eighth session. The fact that
former Clinton and both frmer and current Bush administration officials are testifying gives it a certain
tension, but this is not "what did he know and when did he know it" stuff. Do not turn this into Watergate.
Remember the fleeting sense of national unity that emerged from this tragedy. Let's not desecrate that.
"National unity?" That unity was dead within a month of 9/11. We quickly reverted back to partisan attacks, with each side trying to push all the blame onto the Bush or Clinton administrations. Fox News was as bad as any news outlet, and certainly worse than most. But now that it's the President's butt on the line, they happily go back to mouthing platitudes about not politicizing a national tragedy.
Many more can be found at http://www.wonkette.com/archives/fox-news-memos-the-whole-batch-017613.php. It's incredibly damning stuff.
So the question is, how do we break the influence of those simple-minded blowhards who distort and lie for political gain? The only answer I can think of is to end the drive towards deregulating media. One single entity shouldn't be feeding you the radio you listen to, the local and cable newscasts you watch, and the newspaper you subscribe to. Breaking up media conglomrates like the Murdoch empire should be a goal. As little people, we should be pressuring the FCC and our elected officials. But we should also consume a much wider variety of news sources, on both sides of the political spectrum.
The way I see it, Air America is an admission of defeat. In order to compete with conservative news outlets, liberals in the media are following the lead of liberal politicians, doing away with even the pretense of objectivity. I don't trust Al Franken any more than Rush Limbaugh, or Michael Moore too much more than Ann "Liberals Want To Destroy Your Country and Molest Your Children" Coulter. They're all hiding those facts which might keep fans from coming to the "proper" decision. Both sides are giving people what they want, and if we can't raise the level of political discourse, it's going to tear this country apart.
Thursday, August 12, 2004 [12:00]
Rear...March!
I'm not going to [name of South American country]*. The fact is, when an opportunity like that gets dropped on you on such short notice, you don't have time to make all the preparations you would like. For a while, I was very accepting of my unpreparedness. Not a lick of Spanish beyond Sesame Street? Fine. Rushing to get immunizations that wouldn't become fully active until half way into the trip? Fine. Throwing my immune system into the proverbial meatgrinder? Where do I sign? Doing it all in the company of a group of total strangers? Okie-dokie.
Then around 1:30 AM two days before I was supposed to leave, I screwed up my left shoulder, aggravating an injury I've had for years. It's a stupid story, and I won't bore you with the details except to say that a mild dislocation is not a pleasant way to wake up. Five minutes after it happened, I knew I wasn't going.
I accepted the fact surprisingly easily. Part of me didn't realize just how much those uncertainties in the back of my mind were really bothering me. If anything, my parents were less accepting than I was. They pushed me to continue with the preparations, and not turn it down before clearing my injury with a doctor and talking to the director of the expidition.
At the time, it sounded like sage advice. What's wrong with exploring options? It was probably right to second-guess my decision at that point, but in retrospect I wish I hadn't. The more I tried to talk myself back into it, the worse I felt about everything. Going down to South America to do humanitarian work sounded like a wonderful idea. Going down with a bum shoulder, not sure if I could even do the work, didn't.
The fact is, I'm stupid enough to think of myself as a bit of a badass. Whatever danger faced me down there, I figured I could kick its butt (or at least make an effective attempt to run away from it). I had no idea what I was getting into, but I felt ready for it. But it's hard to think of yourself as a badass when the simple act of reaching for a can of pork and beans makes you wince.
With a healthy shoulder, I would have gone. If I'd already spent a comfortable amount of time in South America, I might have gone. If I didn't believe the tour would be completely successful without me, I might have gone. But I'm comfortable with waiting until I feel ready before trying something like this again.
Unfortunately, by the time I realized I was comfortable with everything, my parents had blown $250 getting the ticket changed into my name, and another $150 on the doctor's visit and a round of immunizations. We weren't happy with each other for a while. It's not just about the money; they think I've blown a huge opportunity.
I'm not sure how I feel about that, beyond being pissed at my own shoulder, and greatly comforted by the fact that staying means more time with my girlfriend. Nala is a happy thing.
* For the record, it was Peru.
Sunday, August 08, 2004 [00:40]
I have to flee the country now
The bad news is, my grandmother fell and broke her hip. The good news is twofold. Firstfold, she's going to be fine. Secondfold, she's offering to let me take her place on a two week humanitarian aid trip to [name of South American country], where I will have the opportunity to [describe helpful activity].
I wish I had more details. I'll post more when and if I get them. In the meantime, I should probably start brushing up on my [Spanish or possibly Portugese].
I must say I'm awed by my girlfriend's reaction. I thought that, with all the time we've been spending together, she might want to keep me here. But when I explained the situation, she said, "You should go." And she didn't say it in such a way as to imply, "Please please pretty please stay." The way she said it left no doubt in my mind that she would gleefully knock me out with a baseball bat and throw my unconscious body onto the plane if I even considered backing out.
I love that girl.
Wednesday, July 28, 2004 [14:44]
Internet! Girlfriend me!
Okay, I've been trying for a week to figure out how to come out and say something. It needed to be said perfectly, poetically, and it needed to fully express everything I've been feeling. But that's not working, and in trying I've only been setting myself up for failure. Hence, I would like to blurt out the following announcement:
I have a girlfriend. She's perfect.
The words don't capture much of what I'm feeling right now, but if you precede it with a trumpeting fanfare, and maybe follow up with a bit of the Hallelujah chorus from Handel's Messiah, it comes closer.
I've never met anyone like Nala. Thoughtful, artistic, passionate, intelligent, athletic... you know, I knew the laundry list approach wasn't going to give me much traction. She's all those things and a thousand more, but it doesn't satisfactorily explain her uniqueness, or how all these disparate attributes get wrapped up into one adorable--and adorably compact--package. I'm still fumbling for the words, but maybe they'll come later.
While I wait for them, I'll get the basics out of the way. She's 5'5", twenty, with brownish hair and eyes whose color remain a mystery to me even now. Sometimes they're green, other times they're blue or gray. One time I would swear they were brown, but that seems very unlikely. She is the sole offspring of two university professors, who raised her as a devoted follower of Terry Pratchett.
Did I mention she's perfect? Okay, I thought so.
We're falling pretty hard for one another. Last week, we pronounced ourselves boyfriend and girlfriend, because we sat down and compared our relationship to the stereotypical boyfriend/girlfriend paradigm, and decided it fit surprisingly well. Things are going so well, I'm even willing to share our deepest, darkest secret. Blurting time again:
We met over the Internet.
Shock! Horror! The Internet! You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany! Yeah, yeah. We all know the stereotypes. The three-hundred pound pervert from Michigan pretending to be a twelve year old girl. The neo-Nazi pretending to be a twelve year old girl. The gubernatorial candidate pretending to be a twelve year old girl. The nine year old girl pretending to be a twelve year old girl. Twelve year old girls outnumber everyone else on the Internet fifteen to one. Something weird about that.
Anyhow, despite its reputation as a haven for psychopaths and other loonies, I've decided it's a very useful little device. I think one should be installed in every home. While there was a time when all you could get off the Internet was scientific research, 256-color bitmaps of naked women, and bad fanfic, times have changed. For one thing, there's more colors. For another thing, it is no longer the playground of complete misanthropic shut-ins. Widespread access has allowed even the fairly normal among us to come online, participate in roiling debates, and embarass themselves with their bad spelling.
Disclaimer: Nala consistently kicks my butt at Scrabble.
The actual website is called OKCupid, which I've been on for a couple of months. After answering hundreds of intensely personal questions, it deemed the two of us "86% compatible", which was unusually high. So we started e-mailing each other, tentatively at first. But over the next month, it got to the point where it felt stranger not to meet. So one Friday evening, we went to Spiderman 2. After a quick desert at my sister's workplace--and an unintended introduction to a big chunk of my family--we hung out in a park and talked until nearly 3AM. I think we were both pretty smitten at that point, and I can say with absolute certainty that it was my best date ever.
I could go on for ages without telling everything there is to tell. All I really wanted to say right now is that there is someone new in my life, and that life is far better because of her. Until next time.
Thursday, July 22, 2004 [11:47]
Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere's Bobo!
And now, because the whole sorry lot of you have been griping and whining about the lack of photos, Dee Zell and Gerry proudly present a series of pictures of their odd-looking son, Beauden. Each picture was taken less than an hour after his birth, and each picture has been cleared by FCC censors.
The first picture shows Beauden with his Aunt Appy. Aspen sports a playful yet functional black tee and rimmed glasses, while Beauden shows off his trademark woolen cap and blankie, for the "giant burrito" look that is all the rage among today's infants.
The second picture shows Beauden bravely staring down an enormous, floating ball of hair. The child is a born warrior.
In the third picture, we see the proud, exhausted parental units as they try to figure out which end is for feeding. Beauden seems to be taking their parenting hijinks in stride.
Picture number four depicts Beauden yawning, shrieking with indignation, or preparing to swallow an entire banana. You decide.
In the last picture, Grandpa Dad and Beauden re-enact the final scene from E.T.
[Click on the pictures]
[Click on the pictures]
[Click on the pictures]
[Click on the pictures]
Tuesday, July 20, 2004 [11:07]
First Contact
Well I'll be a bubby's uncle.
Dee Zell's son, Beauden, came into the world yesterday in much the way I would like to leave it: naked, covered in slime and gore, kicking and screaming, with a heart rate of 162. I was standing outside the door when he made his appearance. A slap, an indignant wail, followed by a single word, "Congratulations," and I was tearing back towards the lobby.
"Touchdown!" I shouted. I had expected whoops and backslapping from my dad and non-pregnant siblings. Instead, they opened up with a barrage of questions. "How do you know?" "Is it a boy?" "What does he weigh?" Geez, people! I come bearing tidings of great joy, and you're all acting like I should have stuck around to wait for them to count his toes and perform a rudimentary IQ test. I wasn't in the room, okay? I just put two and two together and got 'baby'.
Then my mom, who for one brief shining millisecond was the newest grandmother on the planet, came out all teary-eyed. "We have a beautiful baby boy." Apparently, Mom has obtained a higher level of trust amongst our clan than I have, because nobody questioned her reliability. She then handed us a digital camera with Beauden's first ex utero baby pictures. Thus began that long, uncomfortable period when everyone wants to race in and congratulate the mother and poke and prod the baby, but cannot because we have to wait for the hospital staff to congratulate the mother and poke and prod the baby. Something about that tradition strikes me as odd.
Finally, we were allowed into the room containing the new life and its happily exhausted mother. Dee Zell looked a little overwhelmed about everything, and it was all she could do to let us borrow the baby. In fine, American fashion, we took turns having our picture taken with the baby. When Beauden got to me, and I held him for the first time, he looked up at me in a gesture that required using his entire upper body to get his head into position. Then, for just a second, he glared at me as if to say, "Who the hell are you? What happened to my jaccuzi?" Then his eyes were off again, following random oxygen molecules across the room.
In that moment, the little guy had me. He reeled me in with his big, hyperalert eyes and his scrawny, flailing limbs. By the time I had to pass him over to the world's newest grandfather, I was choked up and teary-eyed. More than that, I felt this deep sense of responsibility for him. I think everyone there felt the same way. Less than an hour old, and there were already seven people ready and eager to crush, pummel, and eviscerate anything that could possibly stand between this child and a happy life. The boy is a small evolutionary wonder.
I have this vision of ending all wars simply by propping the little guy up in front of the United Nations and having him glare at them. "Who are you people? Is somebody going to feed me?" Then the tearful apologies would begin, followed by the hammering out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ending of the slave trade in Sudan, capped off with a stern and unanimous resolution admonishing Dee Zell to check the boy's diaper at regular intervals and start on his college fund.
On second thought, I don't want the U.N. to start meddling in my nephew's affairs. They'd probably send peacekeeping troops to my sister's house within the week, only to be driven out by my mom a few days thereafter.
I wonder if Bo-Bo will ever read this. I wonder what kind of person he's going to become. I wonder if we're at all equipped to keep this amazing little person safe and happy, and to introduce him to a world that we only pretend we understand. I wonder how old he'll be before he gets annoyed that I call him 'Bo-Bo'. In the face of such great responsibility, I feel a guilty sense of relief that the bulk of it will fall on his own parents.
Welcome to Earth, Beauden. Sorry about the mess.
Postscript: I'm not telling you how long he is or how much he weighs. It always makes it sound as though the mom went out to the river and caught herself a bigmouth bass. He's small, but healthy and energetic, and beyond that I don't see any reason to care. Plus, I don't remember exactly. For a compsci major, I'm pretty crappy with numbers.
Saturday, July 17, 2004 [09:49]
No Bo-Bo
Most of yesterday was spent impatiently waiting for my sister Dee Zell to give birth. She went in bright and early to have labor induced. After an exciting and fulfilling day of lounging around watching Buffy re-runs and reading A Primate's Memoir (Thanks, Nala), we met the parents to consume some animal matter, then converged en masse on the hospital. When we got there, Dee's husband Gerry (a spouse of the cheap Canadian knockoff variety) was lying in bed, and Dee was sitting on an ugly orange recliner, looking profoundly annoyed. Not annoyed at Gerry, mind you. He's not the steal-the-bed-from-the-pregnant-wife type. The annoying thing was that there was no miracle of life going on; just a private screening of that one Whoopi Goldberg movie where she pretends to be a nun.
We hunkered down for a long, long stay. My brother Leon and I soon got into a brutal game of Monopoly, where we managed to block every monopoly with the exception of two. He managed to snag Boardwalk and Park Place, while I was stuck with lowly Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues. In the long run, he was in the much better position, but I'm sure a mathematical proof could be devised showing that the game was likely to go on forever. Without monopolies, there is a sharp limit on how much rent one can collect each time around the board, and on average, I don't think it's enough to chew up the $200 you get each cycle.
I'll re-check my figures and get back to you. But we didn't get a chance to test my theory, because an hour into the game, Dee Zell gave in and went home. The hormones that were supposed to induce labor were doing no such thing. When she gets a full, written apology from the medical community, I'll be sure and post it.
In the meantime, Beauden (a.k.a. "Bo-Bo", a.k.a. "Mack the Knife") is lounging inside the combination sauna and all-you-can-eat buffet that is my little sister. We've tried everything in our power to get him out. Mom has been using the "Does Beauden want to come see Grandma?" line on him, and I've promised him everything from a pony to a ride in my spaceship if he will simply exit the premises. Scolding doesn't work either; it's like it goes in one ear and out the other.
I have to admire this kid. He knows when he's got it good.
My next goal is to find out if the hospital has an open wireless access point. If we do manage to pry this kid out of there, I want to have him photographed and blogged within thirty minutes of birth.
Monday, July 05, 2004 [11:11]
The Karmic Avenger
He's a new superhero I've come up with. The more famous superheros like Superman, Batman, and Wilford Brimley are already doing a great job of protecting the world from murderers and mad scientists. But they aren't doing squat to defend us against people who drive while using their cell phones.
Enter The Karmic Avenger. He has the power of teleportation, and a comprehensive database of small-time scumbags and impolite people, which he stores on a stylish PDA. Much in the vein of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, he has devoted his life to systematically hunting these people down and giving them wedgies. Possibly alphabetically.
His quarry include spammers, chronic whiners, grandstanding politicians, and drivers who habitually abuse the carpool lane or forget to use their turn signals. He finds them, one by one, then appears directly behind his target, mighty in his rage and intimidating in his purple fright wig and pink tutu. With a swift, upward yank to the waistband, he shouts out the name of the crime against humanity for which the wedgied is being punished. Then he disappears, leaving the poor sod to a future of temporary discomfort.
Any suggestions for an arch-nemesis? E-mail me.
Friday, July 02, 2004 [09:17]
Prepositions are good for ending sentences with.
I just finished Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. It's chock full of fascinating facts and cunning linguistics, but my favorite part has to be Chapter 12, where he climbs down from the ivory towers of academia and starts launching mortar shells at the elitist breed he calls "The Language Mavens."
While Pinker lays out his arguments in a relentlessly persuasive manner, and I risk trivializing them by attempting a summary, I know that it's unlikely that most of you will ever take my recommendation and read his book. I would guess 98% will fall into the non-Steven Pinker reading category, but that would require that I have fifty readers. Ain't gonna happen. So I set the risks aside, and charge headlong towards victory or self-humiliation.
Pinker spent the first eleven chapters explaining that the human brain has a natural, exquisitely evolved capacity for interpreting language. How else to explain the fact that four year olds can utter sentences of surprising gramatical complexity long before they even begin to master learned skills like shoe-tying or the seven-ten split? So by the time Pinker reaches "The Language Mavens," he's put some serious momentum behind the idea that even the dumbest among us are natural grammatical geniuses.*
With this fact in mind, he starts cutting down the nightmarish thicket of rules that elementary school teachers consistently drum into their charges. The verboten double negative (I can't get no satisfaction), the split infinitive (to boldly go where no one has gone before), and the "inappropriate" conversion between nouns and verbs each get examined in turn, and in each case the rationale behind the word is convincingly demonstrated to be incoherent.
One of the most interesting claims of the chapter is Pinker's assertion that many of these rules were actually bolted onto the English language during the rise of the British Empire. Some were pulled from Latin, where they did make sense, and inflicted upon a language where they didn't. For example, in Latin there is no way to split an infinitive, because the language lacks multiple word infinitives like "to go" or "to have gone". A split infinitive in Latin would be akin to a split word in English (such as "abso-friggin'-lutely").
I didn't like it when he provided a rationale for one of my pettest of pet peeves: the peppering of spoken language with, y'know, like filler and stuff. Pinker doesn't like it much either, but says it may be used by speakers to "minimize social distance"; that is, to avoid sounding like a pompous know-it-all. I still think of it as a bad habit, giving one's mouth something to do while waiting for the mind to send along the next bit of actual content. But to each his own, y'know?
Nor is there anything wrong with saying, "Who do you trust?" rather than, "Whom do you trust?" The general populace appears to have decided that the latter sounds pretentious, and fixing the question by specifying the "who" in question is often needlessly wordy.
I'm happy to report that just because our language changes over time doesn't mean that it's degenerating, and that those who loudly proclaim that our culture is headed towards a linguistic iceberg are full of it. The entire book is an excellent read. Even if you've never taken any particular interest in the mechanisms of language--I hadn't--there are plenty of things in The Language Instinct to spark such an interest.
Oh, just as a spoiler: The reports of primates learning sign language have been greatly exaggerated.
* This excludes sufferers of certain very specific language disabilities, which are only weakly correlated with generalized intelligence.
Monday, June 28, 2004 [19:34]
My Monkeysphere
I came across a fascinating, hilarious, gratuitously vulgar article that makes more sense than anything I've read on the Internet in the last couple of months or so. I could follow it up with my own tirade about why we're all a bunch of slobbering morons, but I think PWoT does well enough for the both of us. So read it, then go and try to be a little nicer to all those people you really don't care about.
I was dragging a batch of laundry around on TRAX a few days ago, when this ginormous Fiji islander with dreadlocks rumbled aboard, sat down in front of me, made as if to put his bag right on top of my laundry basket, and then laughed. We got talking, though between the noise of the train and his accent I could only make out every other word, and had to interpolate a lot from context. He was in his forties, worked for an excavation company, had family "back on the island", and despite being recently divorced, he was one of the most aggravatingly cheerful people I've ever met.
I can't recall his name, which is a pity because at the time I thought it was cool enough to put on the short list of names for potential offspring. It just rolled off the tongue.
Well, Whats-your-name of the Island, welcome to my monkeysphere.
Maybe that's part of the trick: learning to invite people in, if only for a moment. Just keep doing it until you can look at a stranger and know, deep down, that this enigmatic "other person" could fit there.
I've been playing with zen meditation for the last few weeks. I should write that up later.
Saturday, June 19, 2004 [10:47]
Rantom
It's a new word I'm proposing, defined as "a rant characterized by the fact that it touches on a wide variety of disparate subjects." It's a noun, and given the sheer number of rantoms which have been made possible by the Internet, it's a great one.
What follows is not a rantom. The only thing I have to really rant about at the moment is my parents' belief that Dubya is doing great things for the country, and rants like those have been done to death. I could touch on a wide number of topics right now, including the cantankerousness of digital cameras, the coolfulness of XM radio (and its utter insufficiency as a means of pleasing four people sharing one car), my idea for replacing all traffic signs with a GPS/heads-up display, the difficulties inherent in an inter-heightal marriage, my uncle's insistence on breaking out his Billy Bob teeth for every family event, the recent demise of my cat, my desire to write an "open source" astronomy textbook targeted at fifth graders, and the physiological effects of drinking a full liter of Mountain Dew: Code Red.
To spare my poor readers, I will only be covering a few of these topics. If anyone wants more details on anything listed above, you have my e-mail address.
I passed up Jaime's apartment-warming party (sorry) to attend my cousin Brandon's wedding. My parents rented a car, and we drove out to Denver with a cousin and her two bubsies. One is a seven month old boy, who happens to bear a surprising resemblance to Robert Patrick of Terminator 2 fame. The other is a two year old girl, who doesn't look like anybody famous but looks precisely like her mom when she was that age. Given that it was an 1100 mile round trip in under forty-eight hours, it stands to reason that the kids would be fussy from time to time. What I discounted was the inherent power of fussing in stereo. Overall, they were very good and very cute, with a high level of silliness and a low level of soiled nappies. I give them 4 out of 5 stars! Which makes them only slightly less cool than the XM radio in the rental car.
Brandon is twenty-ish, a music major of some sort, and--like everyone in his family--an Olympic-calibre goofball. But none of that is important. What is really important is his tallness. Or at least that's what the flow of our conversations would indicate:
Me: What's up?
Brandon: Not much.
Me: Still tall?
Brandon: Yup.
Me: How's the weather--
Brandon: Don't make me crush you, puny man.
He's 6'9". His sisters both tower over me, and one of them is just going into eighth grade. So I came to the wedding, fully expecting his bride-to-be to be at least a 6'3" Amazon who ran track and spent her spare time crushing shelled walnuts with quick squeezes of her powerful fists. She turned out to be a fairly short, very normal person.
I fear this. Five years from now, the police will drag her away, stuff his bloody corpse into a special-order bodybag, and the only explanation will be the tearful confession, "I told him to stop putting the vegetable oil on the top shelf!"
Okay, there was nothing about "Mindy" [*] that would indicate that she is prone to murderous rages, and certainly not rages triggered by arguments over vegetable oil. But how do two people who see the world from such different viewpoints actually make a marraige work? Have they even discussed whether they're going to raise their children as tallians or shortians? [**] Have they discussed prioritizing the kitchen to make things easily accessible to both parties? Has she considered the burdens of being married to a man for whom nine foot ceilings are not an option? It will make apartment hunting much easier.
If only I'd been told in time. I could have put a stop to this madness. Or at least bought a small stepladder as a wedding gift.
Welcome to the family, Mindy. As somebody who has been a part of it for twenty-six years, I offer you my sincerest condolences.
As with every family gathering, I nominated myself unofficial wedding photographer. Which didn't exactly sit well with the official wedding photographer, but what could she do? I shot well over a hundred pictures with a digital camera, because I knew only one out of every ten would turn out really well. The lighting was mostly crap, so the options were either flash, which feels amateurish and leads to the overexposed foreground/invisible background phenomenon, or the low-light setting, which makes the picture quality really prone to jitter and motion in the subject. But the setting was an old Catholic church, and it had lots of stained glass and statues. Pure ambience. I got some really cool photos of one of the bridesmaids standing next to Saint Flower-holder.
The wedding was probably the best one I've ever attended. Very formal, the vows didn't suck, lots of cute bridesmaids, etc. I give it four out of five stars!
We headed home soon afterwards. I drove from about midnight to 2:30 AM, wired to the eyeballs on Mountain Dew. Not a terribly safe or healthy way to travel, but for someone who consumes caffeine so rarely, having those tiny molecules flooding through your brain, whispering sweet messages to you can be an exhilarating experience.
Caffeine: "You are alert."
Caffeine: "You are alive."
Caffeine: "We have blessed you with our essence, and chosen you to rule over this night."
Caffeine: "We have made you a god."
Caffeine: "Drive on."
* I've avoided using her name thus far because I'm not totally sure it was in fact Mindy. I suck at names. But from a narrative perspective, it becomes narratively difficult not to. My apologies to Mindy/Mary/Marie/Mookie or whoever the hell you were, and my best wishes on your marriage.
** I would advise them to let the kids decide for themselves. As opposed to, well, major height-altering surgeries or something.
Tuesday, June 15, 2004 [21:42]
Man, it's like he knows me
Pretentious twat? Check!
Sheep? Check!
Maybe linking to this will make up for the previous post. I must have been on something.
Monday, June 14, 2004 [11:38]
Writing in water
I'm not special.
Neither are you.
Probably not the happiest news you've heard all week. But I've been thinking with my thinking brain, and realized that in a world with six billion other people, it's very difficult to stand out. If it could be said that I'm "one in a million," there are still three hundred such people in the U.S. alone. Too many to feel truly unique.
How do you stand out in a world that has gotten so big? Some people still manage. Timothy McVeigh detonated his way into the history books, Adolph Hitler left his mark on the world (okay, maybe more of a gory, bloody splotch). Bill Clinton managed to do it, by presiding over the bulk of a decade marked by technological progress, but otherwise so uninteresting that a number of years were spent focusing on Clinton's own libido. Bill Gates did it by monopolizing an entire industry, positioning Microsoft in such a way that it's difficult to do anything with a computer without him getting a kickback.
As far as I can tell, fame is usually a result of either dumb luck, or unconscionable greed and lust for power. If you look back throughout the ages, who have we seen fit to remember? The tyrants, the conquerors, the oppressors, the people who held the power of life and death over vast multitudes, and wielded it. Fame of that sort isn't worth having.
But what if the alternative is utter oblivion? Probably 99% of the people who have walked the Earth have had every trace of their existence obliterated. Nobody remembers their struggles, their regrets, their loves, their losses. Those who knew and loved them mourned their passing, made peace with the emptiness they once filled, and continued living lives which were themselves destined to be forgotten. It seems like even the most ordinary life deserves better than that.
Nothing really changed with the advent of censuses. A few vital statistics were recorded about most of the people living in any given time. Occasionally some historian might use such information to gain some insight into the times a person occupied. They might even speculate on the where's and why's that got a person into the situation. But all the uniqueness of their lives is rubbed out.
You would think that I might hold some hope because of our new ability to record information digitally. I don't. The old problem was a lack of information, the new problem is an uncontrolled flood of the same. But a problem it remains. Nobody two hundred years from now is going to look back at the hundreds of thousands of digital photos I'll probably take over the course of my life, or read all the crap I've written. Maybe some data packrat will consider it worth shelving away, but nobody will sift through it, trying to puzzle out my life so as to answer the questions they have for their own.
I'm not depressed about any of this, or even worried. Okay, a little worried. I don't care if the name "Bryce Anderson" doesn't get drilled into the unwilling heads of future generations of schoolchildren. In fact, I'd prefer that it didn't. I wonder if any famous people would recognize themselves in the biographies we've written about them. Probably not. We don't usually see history as it was, but as it must have been in order to maintain our own preconceptions.
Take Adolph Hitler. I wonder if he preferred Wagner to Beethoeven. I wonder how he made up with Eva after an argument. Did he send flowers? Maybe he took her to a night at the theater.
Most of all, I wonder why questions like that make me uncomfortable. Maybe it's the mere possibility that a man who brought wholesale slaughter to an entire race could be in love, could thrill at the sound of beautiful music, or--to put it bluntly--have any vestige of humanity in him. We want to remember him as a soulless, murdering embodiment of pure evil. Nor does he deserve any more complimentary epitaph. But we deserve better than the lie that the evil Hitler embodied is a thing apart from the world of men. The fear and hatred that guided his actions exist in everyone to a greater or lesser degree, and the evil of Hitler exceeded that of your run-of-the-mill anti-Semitic crackpot only because other men gave him the power to act on his hatred. The moment we forget that is the moment that we willingly hand power to the next person who would wield it in evil's name.
Our heros fare little better, when it comes to understanding the flavor of their lives. We want to see them as wise, decisive men and women who understood the full implications of their actions within history. So that's the way history gets taught to non-historians. History books are populated by heros and demons, never men and women. Is it better to be lied about, and misinterpreted to support the lazy preconceptions of future generations? Or forgotten entirely?
Maybe I am worried. I do take comfort in the idea that no individual's treatment in the history books is as important as our common heritage. My actions will influence the future, for better and for worse, whether or not anyone can trace their causal chain back to me. In a world seething and brimming with humankind, our future is the total sum of all our choices, all our actions, and all our wisdom.
Yeah. We're royally screwed. I know.
Last night at dinner, my cousin's not-yet-two-year-old daughter fed me a slimy slice of cheesecake with her bare hands. She used the tried and true method of sticking her entire fist in the cheesecake, then shoving the whole thing in my mouth. I still have cheesecake in my hair.
It didn't change the course of human events, or right any great injustice in the world. But it seems worth remembering.
Sunday, June 06, 2004 [23:18]
Nothing to report
Nothing new at all.
Oh. Wait.
New apartment.
You probably heard it here first.
Sunday, May 30, 2004 [23:31]
Gone clubbin'
That. Was. Weird.
Last night, what started off as a straightforward attempt to help a friend move into her new apartment turned into something totally different.
No, this isn't one of those "Dear Penthouse, I never imagined something like this would ever happen to me" entries. She was going to dinner and a dance club with some friends afterwards. I figured I would tag along, and in one of those totally out-of-the-blue, unexpected plot twists, I did.
There's nothing particularly weird about the basics of the story. We went dancing after dinner, then I caught the last TRAX train down to Sandy to crash with my sister and her Canadian. But for me it was a consciousness-altering experience.
The thing is, I don't dance. Okay, I dance a little. I once took a ballroom dancing class just to do something totally new. It was fun in a way, but it also drove home what an uncoordinated, self-conscious git I've always been.
Yesterday wasn't like that. As far as I can tell--and I'm certain to incur the wrath of somebody or other for saying this--there is no particular talent required for dancing at a club. The first minute or so out on the floor was a little self-conscious, a little awkward. I wondered if I was doing all right. Then I looked around and decided it couldn't be any worse than what everyone else was doing. About thirty seconds later, I was... hmm. I was going to say, "having a blast." But that's not it at all. I was gone.
It's an odd sensation to describe. At first, at the times when I would describe myself as "present," I would listen to the music, then consciously decide how to make my body respond to the input. But when I was gone, there was no intermediate step; it felt as though the music was controlling me directly.
Which, of course, is entirely impossible. Everything I was doing was still under the control of brain matter. But I don't think it's a stretch to say that my body was no longer moving according to the directives of my conscious mind. For minutes at a time, my body was taking its cues from somewhere else. Then I would become conscious of the fact, and start trying to issue commands consciously. This led directly to a momentary feeling of awkwardness, and then I would step aside again.
This possibility both bothers and intrigues me. It's a nice, easy abstraction to think of your consciousness as an integrated whole, much the same way as its easy to imagine your car's gas pedal simply tells the wheels to move faster, without thinking about the engine and transmission and all the other heavy equipment separating cause from effect. When everything is working as we expect, it's difficult to see beyond the abstraction.
But things break. Sleep deprivation, drugs, overexertion, and neurological diseases can all knock the machine out of balance, and in doing so provide new information about what is actually going on between your ears. Each new bit of information sheds insight, and each gives lie to the idea of the unified, coherent "I".
These are the sort of things I was thinking about as I rode TRAX south. If I was moving according to the whims of some piece of my brain separate from that which I normally think of as "I", what does that say about the reality of my self-conception? What does it imply about my belief that I freely choose my actions? What else will I find if I pursue more experiences like that? Not necessarily more clubbing, but more experiences that seem to divide the mind.
Finally, what if there are some illusions that shouldn't be swept aside?
Maybe I should have left it at "I had a blast." I think I did.
Saturday, May 29, 2004 [13:07]
Robocupid
Every Sunday, a group of exmos meet at the local Squatter's for lunch. I like the crowd, but they're surprisingly computer-centric. Maybe that's why I like them. I'm a bit new to the scene, and I was surprised when everyone started listing their "compatibility percentage." Everyone was saying, "Oh, Mike and I are 76% compatible. Um, hold up. How did you two decide this? Was I on vacation when the compatibility fairy came to visit?
It turned out that just about everyone at the table had an account with okaycupid.com. I was hesitant to join the madness, but apparently not hesitant enough. Six days later, I've gained the moniker cheatasaurus, have answered hundreds upon hundreds of ridiculously personal questions, and have gotten my hopes way up over a particular girl with whom the servers have deemed me compatible.
The basics of the system are pretty straightforward: You take an introductory test, then create an account, and start answering questions. With each question, you also have to tell them how you'd like your ideal date to answer it, and how important it is to you that she answer it properly. If both you and a potential friend/date both answer a question, your answers and your requirements are used to calculate your compatibility.
One interesting thing I discovered was that I'm only 94% compatible with myself. This sounds like a bug, but it's not. For example, I said I'm not a talkative person. But when answering for my date, I said I would want her to answer 'talkative'. My reasoning is that one of us has to keep the conversation rolling. So when compared against myself, not everything matches up perfectly. But I'm 6% more compatible with myself than anyone else on the site, so something must be right.
I've been thinking for a while about what makes or breaks a relationship, with an eye towards the sort of knowledge of two people that would allow a computer to take a reasonable guess about the likelihood of a successful relationship. Of all the matchmaking sites I've ever seen, okaycupid.com comes closest to what I had intended to write.
This is fortunate, because it means I can get a glimpse into whether my ideas were at all valid, without doing the hard legwork myself. So far it's pretty hit and miss. I've looked at my worst matches, and can't see anything wrong with many of them, and most of my best matches aren't terribly compelling. I wrote the one girl I mentioned earlier, but haven't heard back from her. Hard to believe I'm actually nervous about that, but I am.
I'll have to hold out on making a final judgment until I've actually dated some people on the site, but I think the whole system relies on a couple of invalid assumptions. First, there is the assumption that people actually know who they are and what they want. Some of the questions require a whole lot of introspection, others require some level of awareness of your standing when compared to others ("Am I smarter than average?" I'm guessing a good 70% of people answer yes), and some are just too black-and-white; they're practically begging for a dishonest answer. "Are you a racist? Yes or no." No, "Maybe just a bit, but I'm really ashamed of the fact and trying to overcome it." That sucks.
But on the whole, the questions are mostly useful. If you've gotten bored with "The Sims," this could be an excellent alternative to having an actual life.
Thursday, May 20, 2004 [19:04]
What I did on my summer vacation
Despite some distractions towards the end of the term, all my grades are B's or better. I don't know if that means I'm a good CS student; more likely it means our entire educational system is in danger of imminent collapse. But if it means I don't have to retake any classes, then by all means, let the thing crumble.
Everyone is surely dying to know how my trip south went. I'll try not to keep my legions of fans (who, as we know, have been furiously refreshing the page every ten minutes since I left) in the dark much longer. I crashed with my aunt and uncle in Cedar City Thursday night, after a drive so uneventful that the only thing that stands out is the really kickin' gas mileage my car was getting. 43MPG, baby!
The eldest cousin of the family, Christopher, has started his own personality cult, which is quickly and decisively altering the cultural, political, and socioeconomic landscape of Southern Utah. I've discussed LARPS in previous entries, but I had never had a chance to see it up close and personal until now. To refresh your memory, LARPS stands for "Live Action Role Playing System," which makes the whole thing sound very innocuous. Almost as though the inventor was trying to lure you into thinking it was nothing but a slightly geeky game. I was concerned. I was suspicious. I knew that I could not rest until I had gotten to the bottom of this mysterious and sinister LARPing phenomenon.
But first I had to do some hiking. So Friday morning, after dragging the youngest cousin to elementary school, I threw my stuff back in the car and set off towards Bryce Canyon. I'm happy to report that I found it still intact, and still chock full of geological rockiness. It costs $20 to buy a week long pass for the park. Since Zion was going to be another $20, I splurged and bought the $50 year long pass.
Why, Mister Anderson? Why are you boring us with this dull recitation of park entry fees? Do you really think we care? Are you punishing us for daring to read your blog? Do your readers a favor and get on with it already!
Forgive me for my digression. The point I was about to make was that, at this point, I'm still $10 in the hole due to my extravagence. Therefore, anyone who knows me knows that I'm already planning another trip to remedy the fact. Back to our story:
Once I bought the pass and flashed my "Not a Terrorist" card, I was waved in. I didn't see any grizzly bears I could kill with my bare hands, so instead I found a map, then found a trail. Armed only with a liter of water, some beef jerky, and enough sunscreen to strike fear in the hearts of every ultraviolet photon within a three mile radius, I started hiking.
And hike I did. The trail I ended up was called the Fairyland Loop Trail. You can shut up now. Anyhow, it circles around the... look, I told you to shut up. It's just a name. The trail circles the rim of the canyon, which means that the whole time you're looking down into this vast chasm of red stone columns and--I said shut up! Okay, it was really called the Testosterone-laden Trail of Xtreme Guyhood. Happy now? Good. Where was I?
Where I was was about three and a half miles around the loop. I hadn't actually intended to do the entire loop, but by the time I really started thinking about where to turn around, turning around would only save me a mile, while leading to what can only be described as "geological reruns." So I was committed. But because of the imminent LARPing, I was also under a deadline. So it was fortunate that I didn't have a camera. I would have had to spend time looking for the best shots, packing and unpacking it, etc. Valuable walking time right down the drain. It was similarly fortunate that there was nobody with me to slow me down, or to converse with, or to tell me to lighten up and enjoy the scenery.
Seriously, I wish I'd taken more time to stop and smell the hoodoos.
By the time I got back, Christopher was already headed towards scenic Toquerville. Say it with me: Toke-ur-ville. Think about the image that pops into your brain when you hear the name. Er, try it again without the marijuana references. Pretty small town, right? Well, the real thing is a good deal smaller.
I snagged one of the smaller cousins and headed out. After an hour of driving and several wrong turns, we all met up in front of the (apparently) historic Toquerville City Hall. Christoper and his friends were passing time by beating each other with the customary weapons of LARPS: PVC pipe covered in foam padding and duct tape. They're remarkably sturdy but safe; precisely the qualities needed for an evening of harmless mayhem. Spells are represented by pieces of cloth wrapped around a handful of popcorn kernels, which we flung at each other until we got bored.
We continued whacking each other until everyone arrived, and then we headed off towards the war zone--a rock outcropping in the middle of nowhere called Devil's Hole. So I've got this carload of high schoolers and I'm driving up this dirt trail, wincing as boulders maul the underside of the Saturn, until finally we pull off to the side of the road. From there we hiked a couple of miles through sand and sagebrush, dragging our camping gear, our food, a five gallon jug of water, and my lucky lucky autographed glow-in-the-dark snorkel, singing "The Cheat is Not Dead" the last half of the way (these are my kind of people), and generally having a pretty good time. We threw down our sleeping bags, started a fire, and met the Toquerville branch of LARPS.
In-game, they were a clan of dark elf necromancers called The Deathspeakers. In real life, they were high schoolers with a bit of a goth vibe to them. We met and mingled, and attempted to cook spaghetti over the fire, while I was brought up to speed on the rules of LARPS. The first problem was that I didn't have a character. They came up with a few basic, wimpy stats for me, and then demanded that I choose a name. Well, I was wearing green army BDUs and carrying a green sword/child-beating stick. So of course my name had to be "The Yellow Dart".
I also needed some basic storyline for the character. I made up some stuff about being a former soldier who had lost everything and had joined the battle in order to seek an honorable death. Not too far from the truth, and it gave me an excuse for running around picking melees.
With din-din over, the battle commenced. That is, the Deathspeakers wandered back to their own camp. At first, too many people were having too much fun just sitting around the campfire, so it was slow at first. After night fell, I wandered off to try and blend in with the scenery. It turned out to be the only part of the game I was really good at. The moment I actually jumped out and attacked, I was invariably whacked about like the proverbial redheaded stepchild.
To keep things interesting, the GMs would occasionally create side quests like treasure hunts, or taking a small group of people off and telling them, "Okay, you've just been promoted to Skeleton Knights. Now run around and kill people."
I know it sounds like the geekiest thing in the entire world. And it was, but not in a bad way. Everyone laughed, and goofed off, and had a blast plotting ambushes and defenses. The kids showed an admirable lack of concern about what the cool kids thought of their pasttime. I only wish I had that sort of intestinal fortitude when I was their age. Maybe I wish I had it right now.
Finally everyone settled down to sleep. It was a warm night, so I spent most of it on top of my sleeping bag rather than inside it. It took me a long time to get to sleep, and in those quiet moments, I realized that being alone wasn't helping. I'd packed up in order to get away from my own internal drama and angst, but running away from yourself doesn't work. I'd tried to take a page from John Denver and let the mountain winds blow away the heartache, leaving me a peaceful, satisfied wanderer.
Instead, I dwelled. I pondered. I fumed. It scared me that I would get that way whenever I was alone, because I'd planned on spending a lot of time alone on this trip. That's why my original one or two week trip was soon cut down to four days. It just wasn't doing what I'd hoped. On the other hand, I had enough fun that I'm strongly considering going back down in July for Christopher's week-long LARP-o-thon. I have drunk the Kool-Aid, and it is grape.
We broke camp and managed to get everyone back to town. On Sunday, I started working on Zion's National Park. Kolob Canyon is a beautiful stretch on the north side of the park, and only gets better when you're driving through it with The Matrix soundtrack going at full blast. When I'd hiked myself into the ground there, I drove around to the south side of the park and grabbed a campsite. I'll spare you the rant about a campsite being half the price of a decent hotel, as it would add several pages to an already long entry.
The next day, I woke up and packed up a couple of MREs for the day's hike, which would take me past the Emerald Pools then up Angels Landing. The lower pool struck me as a disappointment at first. Really, it was just a slight depression where the water had collected to a depth of approximately six inches. But I found a shady spot and rested for a while, and I realized that the whole place had a pleasing, Japanese rock garden aura to it. Even better, because there were no giant mutant koi swimming around looking to take your finger off. The upper pool was also very scenic. I met a nice guy from Grantsville who came down to do some photography. His website is at jackmanphoto.com, or will be once he gets it up and running again.
At the trailhead to Angels Landing, I met a nice group of people from Boston. In an effort to not repeat the mistakes of Bryce Canyon, I vowed to try and stick with them for the trip. They were cool, and I hope I didn't come across as too stalker-like. The path to Angels Landing is a steep uphill with a lot of switchbacks. But it's paved, and therefore not too difficult. I got to the top and took a long look around, and let me tell you that millions of years of erosion never looked so good. Then my wandering eyes caught a single, miniscule detail that changed my whole perspective. A small, inconspicuous sign that read, "Angels Landing 0.5 -->". So I looked -->, and my heart sunk. In fact, I think my spleen had to move over and make room. A series of cliffs led to the southwest, and people were climbing all over them. It looked steep, rocky, narrow, and girded on each side by multi-thousand foot drops. Where there should have been railings, there were chains riveted into the rock.
I've never liked heights. I knew that whatever lay at the top of Angels Landing, it wasn't worth seeing. It would be a scary trip that culminated in a view little better than the one I had right in front of me.
So don't ask me why I went. I blame testosterone, dirt bikes, and all other things guy-ish. Whatever the reason, I would have shamed myself by not going. At that moment, I really wished I had a girlfriend. A cowardly one. Hopefully she'd be even more skittish than me, and I could grudgingly allow myself to be talked out of it without losing face.
Up I went, moving slowly, always maintaining three contacts like the Army taught me. Technically, that technique was for climbing around on hummers and five-tons, but it seemed applicable. Sometimes I did this even on the flat spaces where you were supposed to walk upright, doing a decent Gollum imitation. I'm sure I looked silly, but I figured I'd feel even sillier when I was falling to my death and had a full twenty seconds to ponder the stupid thing I'd done to precipitate my own demise.
So I got to the top, clung white-knuckled to the rocks for a while, decided that no, the view really wasn't any better than back at the sign, and climbed down again.
After that fiasco, I went down to Saint George and visited relatives. I spent the night at my grandfather's house, and in the morning he took me out to show me a really cool dinosaur track find. He's good company for an old guy. Then I headed back to Cedar, visited the cousins some more, then got back to Lake Point around midnight. I'm definitely going back, and next time, I'm definitely bringing a camera.
Thursday, May 13, 2004 [11:04]
Later
I'm going to go camping now. I'll be back when I get back. Somebody feed the cat and bring in the mail while I'm gone, okay?
Saturday, May 08, 2004 [09:47]
The Beatification
Weird dream. In the dream, I was bored. Very bored. I had nothing in the world to do.
Solution? I went to the nearest Catholic Church, and demanded an application for sainthood.
I need help coming up with three miracles that I have performed. Also, I need incontrovertible proof that I am dead. I don't think sainthood actually requires you to be Catholic.
Thursday, May 06, 2004 [15:04]
[caption]
Today I celebrate the end of finals. By "celebrate," of course I mean "wonder what the hell happened to all the stuff I thought I'd learned this past semester, while sizing up my odds of getting decent grades this semester." Same difference, really.
I'll admit, I've been a little unfocused the last couple of weeks, but this has been building for a lot longer than that. I generally get burned out the last third of any given semester, but never quite like this. Imagine a dog that has been standing out in the rain for about six hours. Try to guess his level of enthusiasm. Okay, you've got a pretty good idea of how I'm feeling towards school right now.
Actually, the dog would have to be standing in front of a large window, where he could see a warm fire and a mouth-watering steak. Maybe throw in a cat warming itself by the fire and smiling smugly at the dog.
Let's not read too much into that analogy. I just wish I were somewhere else, doing something that felt like it mattered. When you see couples walking around campus arm in arm, it's a small comfort to think, "Yeah, well at least I know how to design an arbitrary-sequence counter!" Except that I can't. This morning's final proved that with absolute certainty.
Of course by the time fall rolls around, I'll be bored crazy and banging on the doors to get back in here. I always am. In the meantime, I think I'll have another nice long mope, where I sit here in my foul mood and try to drag the rest of the Net down with me.
My plans for the summer are fairly simple. I've got an ever-lengthening list of books to read, a vague hankering to learn a new language and/or musical instrument, and an urge to go camping. Also on my list are brush up my math skills and get something resembling a social life. Of course, that last part might lead to girls, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that quite yet.
This weekend, I'll be doing something a little more pragmatic. My parents have a trailer they have been trying to give away, and it's going to take some effort to get it prepped for moving. The story behind this is both long and painfully dull, so let us never mention it again.
Tuesday, May 04, 2004 [09:38]
Rocky Mountain High
Apologies to any readers I may have left. I imagine that last Sunday's entry was more than a bit incoherent. Truth is, I had my heart broken. Same old story, really: fell for a girl who fell for another guy.
I wouldn't mind spilling all the gory details here. But the funny thing about my life is that it has other people in it, and other people might be a bit more reserved about having those gory details cached in Google for all eternity. So I forbear.
I should have been able to see this coming a long way off. In a way, I did. But it was so wonderful just to feel needed for a while, that I just didn't care. In the rare unselfish moment, I hope that everything works out for her, and that I'll move on. But mostly, I just feel this aching need for her.
There is only one thing that can ease this blinding pain; only one balm for a hurt this deep. That's right, folks. Karaoke.
I'll tell you how it goes. If I really despise you all, I'll post MP3s.
Monday, May 03, 2004 [18:48]
Teen Girl Squad!
My sister wants a Teen Girl Squad t-shirt, so I've decided to start taking donations. So if someone would be so kind as to hack my website and set up a PayPal account so I can start taking donations, it would be most appreciated. Anything collected in excess of $15 will be donated to the Fighting Growlbacks Bottomless Spirit Pit.
Finals are over on Thursday, and I couldn't be happier about it. Actually, I could be happier. For example, if someone were to lodge an arc welder directly into the pleasure sensor of my brain. I'd be dead, of course, but it would be an exquisitely happy dead. Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to getting this semester over with. I'd like to do some camping this summer.
Emacs hotkey of the day: M-q reformats a paragraph of text to fit inside the current fill width.
Sunday, May 02, 2004 [20:37]
What if...
What if the nice smiling people on TV are lying to me?
What if I get plowed by a bus tomorrow?
What if Germany had won WWII?
What if they are out to get me?
What if it doesn't all work out in the end?
What if the pain isn't worth it?
What if I'd done something different?
I'm tired of "what if's". They're here now. So they're your problem now.
Monday, April 26, 2004 [03:57]
I'm a jerk. A real kneebiter.
I'm an embarrassment to the blogging community.
Nothing else to report.
Saturday, April 17, 2004 [23:52]
Ew.
Here's something I did back when I was sucking up to the educational establishment in order to pass my "Introduction to Unix" class. I'm putting it here because, hey, what else am I going to do with it?
Sunday, April 11, 2004 [13:50]
Happy Zombie Jesus Day!
So let me get this straight. Today is the day Jesus pops out of his tomb, looks around, and if he sees his shadow it means six more weeks of winter?
I think I'm confused.
Tuesday, April 06, 2004 [03:29]
Internet Swallows Itself
Film at 11.
Monday, April 05, 2004 [01:48]
First things first
The Ramen Noodle recipe posted earlier is incorrect. It actually uses closer to 3/4 cups of water. The management would like to take this opportunity to apologize for any soupy, cheese-covered pans that might have resulted.
Also, when corrected, the cheese tends to cause the noodles to lump together. I'm still working on a way to fix that.
Now, on with the business of the evening. First, I would like to congratulate Jaime into strongarming the book club into choosing "Wicked" for its next literary tour de farce. The fact that she didn't attend the meeting where the book was chosen serves as a reminder that none dare cross her. As usual, I will be abstaining for moral reasons, and ask for a replacement assignment. Something fun and trendy, like "Computation in Living Cells," or "Applied Cryptography." You know, something that really speaks to the human condition.
Some evildoer has been downloading MP3's off the Internet. This looting of our shared culture has gone on too long, and authorities are asking that the public aid them in their search. Suspect is described as fifteen, male, with mild acne, answering to the name "k3wlMoNkEeMaN1722". Suspect has a thing for Linkin Park and Eminem, and is therefore considered extremely unstable. If sighted, do not approach. Alert the RIAA hotline at 1-888-PIRATES, and stay tuned for more public safety bulletins and hot spring fashion tips.
Let's go to the mailbag. Doris Lothgreen of Sandy, Utah, wrote in asking how she can help the ongoing struggle to clean up all the crap that's on the Internet. Well, Doris. The first thing you can do is sign a petition banning all males from accessing the Internet except when supervised by a member of the Lutheran Knitting Society. It should be making the rounds in your neighborhood in the coming months. Then start a boycott of this blog. Remember to get as much media involvement as possible.
Hayden White from New York City wrote in, saying, "Back in my day, we didn't have these fancy, schmancy websites. When we wanted to communicate, we would take the ferry over to Shelbyville to buy paper, ink, and a nice sturdy printing press. They don't make sturdy printing presses anymore. Today if you want to besmirch someone's good name, it takes three presses just to get a run of a thousand pamphlets finished. And do you know what's to blame? I'll tell you what's to blame: Good for nothing young punks. Why, when I was a boy, we didn't have young punks. People respected their elders, and nobody complained when an old-timer started telling a story about the winter of '67. It was a long ride to Shelbyville, and we were always happy for the distraction. And the ferry only cost three cents, because in those days everyone knew the value of a penny: A penny would get you a third of the way to Shelbyville. After that, they threw you over and made you swim the rest of the way. It built character, which is a property much lacking in good for nothing punks these days."
We feel for you, Hayden. We really do.
Well, that just about wraps it up for today. Next week we'll be interviewing former important person Dennis Kucinich. Be sure and tune in. You wouldn't want to miss this.
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