We can't afford you.

Otherwise, we (mostly) like you.

Signs we can't afford you:

1.) The leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is inability to pay for medical bills.

2.) Over 45 million Americans have no health insurance, which does not include the under-insured. Add to this the uninsured non-citizen immigrants.

3.) The cost of a universal health insurance program is a primary barrier to its implementation in the U.S.

4.) Health care expenditures continue to increase at a rate exceeding economic growth, which is unsustainable. For every $6 of income generated in the U.S., over $1 goes to healthcare, or about $7,500 per year for every U.S. citizen. This is over $2.2 trillion per year. In contrast, the current proposed healthcare reform will cost $0.9 trillion over 10 years.

5.) Hospitals are reporting record costs to treat those who cannot pay for their healthcare. In the hospital health system where I work, these uncollectable fees have exceeded the system's capital expense budget for the first time ever.

I want to put the healthcare reform debate in another perspective. Healthcare is already too expensive. There seems to be a public perception that national healthcare reform itself will carry a price tag too great for the country to bear. I argue these costs already exist below the radar, absorbed across multiple areas, such as bankruptcies and indigent care provided by hospitals.

Granted, a universal system will increase total costs short-term, but supporters claim long-term savings. The theory is that by providing less expensive preventative care to the uninsured and under-insured, they will stay healthier longer, be more productive, and avoid the need for expensive medical treatments and emergency room visits they cannot afford (which will be absorbed by the economy one way or another).

Preventative care has long-term healthcare savings by delaying the need for more expensive medical treatment. For example, most chronic health conditions are progressive or degenerative diseases, which increase in severity over time, especially if left untreated. Examples are diabetes, high blood pressure, dyslipidemia, osteoporosis, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and Alzheimer's dementia. Such diseases are less expensive to treat early when symptoms are less severe and when treatment can slow disease progression and delay more expensive treatments... but the early stages of such diseases are also easier to leave untreated, and they progress more quickly into expensive, debilitating diseases.

Why I Encourage a Change in Perception

So, why am I saying healthcare is already too expensive? And why do I say the transient cost increases of healthcare reform is not the crux of the issue? Because if the healthcare sector is already too large, then logically, it must contract and shrink. I'm not necessarily saying healthcare professionals must be laid off (on the contrary, there aren't enough of us), but the total costs of healthcare must decrease.

Consider the recent real estate bubble and the tech bubble of the 1990s: whenever an economic sector has a prolonged period of vigorous and unsustainable growth, what is popularly called a "bubble," it is followed by an inevitable crash, as the bubble bursts. Healthcare is a bit different, however. The real estate bubble burst when unsustainable growth made property too expensive, and demand plummeted when the foreclosures began. The tech bubble burst when unsustainable growth and investment failed to produce returns, and demand plummeted when customers and investors pulled their funding.

Other bubbles burst when demand plummeted. But demand for healthcare is increasing, and will continue to increase as baby boomers age. Long-term, demand will decrease as baby boomers die, because the next generation is smaller and will be a smaller elderly population... but I think the crisis will reach a critical point before the baby boomers have died. More precisely, I think the crisis will reach a critical point because of the baby boomers.

The healthcare bubble will burst because healthcare will be too expensive for us to pay for the services we need. How will this play out? Well, if you think public rage over Bernie Madoff and bonuses paid to executives by corporations receiving federal bailout money was unprecedented, just wait until you see what's next.

Hospitals and healthcare systems are terrified by the current proposed healthcare reform because President Obama has said Medicare payments to them will be cut by $500 billion annually. Hospitals don't know how they will remain economically viable. In fact, a study by (I believe) MIT has said virtually all hospitals would operate at a loss if this happens. Of course, this assumes hospitals take no action to improve the efficiency of their cost structure.

But here's the irony: this $500 billion cut that terrifies hospitals, which threatens to make all of them operate at a loss, is a soft landing. It's the best case scenario! If we do nothing, and the bubble bursts, and the public is enraged about the healthcare they cannot afford, one or more of three things will happen:

1.) We adopt a national healthcare policy of the "Have's" and the "Have Not's," where those who can afford it get it, and those who cannot suffer. The U.S. has already implemented this to a degree, but the distinction will become greater. As any public health policy expert will tell you, having so many ill and unhealthy people living and working near well and healthy people is not practical. The spread of disease will be rampant, and this will lead to either #2 or #3...

2.) As a nation, we'll continue to go in debt to pay for unsustainable increases in healthcare expenses, until other nations and their economies stop buying treasury bonds and investing in the U.S. dollar. The dollar will be worthless, inflation will be unimaginable, employment far worse than the 25% it was during the Great Depression. This will lead to #3...

3.) The U.S. government will be forced to implement Draconian cuts to healthcare. Healthcare workers -- including as doctors, nurses, dentists, pharmacists, radiology techs, psychologists, medical office staff, and hospital workers -- will either be out of work or be forced to take drastic salary cuts, or both.

I have no solution to propose, but merely describe the situation as I see it: either we, as a nation, have a bumpy, uncomfortable landing now, or we continue to delay the inevitable, bringing an increasingly catastrophic crash the longer we wait.

When I say healthcare is already to expensive and we can't afford it, I mean there are excessive costs, and they must be absorbed somehow. There are a few basic choices. There is no "ideal" solution, but the best would be a nuanced blend of these. Here are your choices, folks:

1.) Shift the costs to the healthcare system (a.k.a., "government takeover"). Healthcare will be cheaper... which may comes at the cost of fewer services, but also a more cost-efficient system.

2.) Shift the costs to the government. Everyone might get healthcare... but by itself will not reduce rising costs.

3.) Shift the costs to the payers, that is, insurers and patients. Reduces wasteful spending... but also reduces preventative care, and increases long-term costs.

I wish I have it all wrong, but basic economical concepts of limited resource allocation and supply and demand have an uncanny way of asserting themselves. Sometime in the next 10-15 years, between 2020 and 2025, I'll revisit this post, and discuss how prophetic or foolish I am today.

Cited in this post:
A&E Biography: Barack Obama - online video
This American Life: The Inauguration Show (link to mp3 here)

There was a time, let's say a year ago, when the presidency was much less certain, and I leaned toward Hillary Clinton as the safer choice. This was a time when Mike Huckabee was the Republican front-runner, and my reasoning was that under no circumstances should another openly evangelical become president. At the time, Clinton and Obama's policies seemed more-or-less the same (there was, you recall, their struggle to differentiate themselves). So, Clinton was the safe and roughly equivalent choice. She would be a lightning rod for Republican derision, the singular individual Limbaugh, Hannity & Co. love to hate, but it seemed she stood the best chance against a relatively inexperienced newcomer, and, let's face it, a mixed-race black man. Despite his charisma, the thought of an Obama's presidency was surely a pipe dream.

I remember telling my wife that Republicans (of course) wouldn't use race outright against Obama, but they would find subtle, very subtle ways of using it to prey on people's fears and prejudices. When I first heard Sean Hannity and his talk show callers referring to him solely as "Barack Hussein Obama," I was ready to retract my prediction that it would be subtle.

As the seasons changed, winter to spring and eventually summer, so did my perception of Barack Obama. At first, I began to hope he could pull off the primary, because the man was downright inspiring, although I still worried his race would unfairly be his downfall. For this reason, in late winter, I still would have voted for Clinton, but I live in Kentucky, whose primary was in late May.

By May, I fully supported Obama. Again, I didn't perceive much to distinguish on platform and policy issues, so it came down to personality and, more importantly, ability to win the final prize, the presidency. I cast my primary vote for Obama. In Kentucky's primary, Clinton handily defeated Obama by more than 2-to-1, 65% to 30%. This was expected. I can say without reservation that race was a leading reason for Clinton's landslide victory in Kentucky. I've lived here my whole life. I grew up in a rural area, and hearing racial slurs and epithets was common, even in my family. It's particularly insidious when it's subtle, allowing it to be explained away as no big deal. The most frustrating excuse I heard was when someone 40+ years my elder would say something racist, only to have it explained away as "the way things were when they were brought up." Personally, I've always believe one should behave and act according to the way things are, not the way they were, but such concepts are difficult to articulate when you're young. Worst of all, I've never been confrontational, so I'd let it stew inside my mind, venting my frustrations in less confrontational ways, such as I'm doing now.

By this time, McCain had the Republican nomination. McCain's Centrist appeal, his ability to draw voters from the middle, was an advantage over Hillary Clinton, the chink in the armor this Republican lightning rod could not overcome. Barack Obama also had a Centrist appeal, but I still doubted he could defeat McCain. I began to rationalize to myself that a McCain presidency wouldn't be so bad, anything was better than Bush. McCain was friendlier to environmental concerns and actually acknowledged that the budget deficit was a problem. Reproductive rights would suffer, with abortion rights one Supreme Court nomination away from being lost, but at least there was hope McCain would accept the clear evidence that "abstinence-only" education has been a failure.

Everything changed after the Democratic National Convention. When McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate, there was a surge of excitement. In those first days, I thought McCain had won for sure. But it was like a wave, a surge of high water, which was followed by a return to a normal level, which was followed by a trough of low water, a trough which never recovered.

When Sarah Palin opened her mouth, the tide began to turn. I couldn't imagine a president worse than Bush, Jr. until I thought about what would happen if McCain died in office. I mean, even Bush went to Yale, but Palin? Well, whenever she spoke, it was clear she was uninformed and lacked curiosity about the world outside Alaska before she was tapped by McCain. I'm no politician, but even I could best her in knowledge of current events. Okay, I admit I didn't know what the "Bush Doctrine" was by that name, but if told it had to do with foreign policy, I immediately would have known it was the philosophy of pre-emptive strikes against perceived foreign threats, a.k.a. Operation Iraqi Freedom. And in my adult life, no one has had to explain to me that Africa is a continent of 50-some nations, not a single country.

Things only got worse for John McCain when the economy began tanking, and he insisted the fundamentals of the economy were strong, then said economic matters have never been his strongest suit. Finally, when McCain suspended his campaign to return to Washington to deal with the undeniable economic crisis, only to re-engage when Obama responded in his calm manner, it was clear who was strategic and thoughtful, and who was tactical and knee-jerk.

On election night, that fateful night, my wife and I knew Obama had to win, it was so obvious, but still, we weren't certain, weren't confident, until late that night. I cried, folks, yes, I did. I was joyous my candidate had won, I was happy for him and for history. I was proud of my country for proving me wrong and overcoming generations of racial bias to elect Barack Obama president.

Still, though, all the McCain and Clinton campaign rhetoric about Obama's lack of experience took its toll on me. What if... what if he couldn't deliver? About a week after the election, I happened upon an A&E Biography episode about Obama available on our cable's "OnDemand" service. It removed all doubt.

Obama came from diverse backgrounds. Kansas, Kenya, Hawai'i, Indonesia, Harvard, and Chicago. He struggled with his identity as a child, which ultimately led to his respect for all backgrounds and being a consensus-builder. President of the Harvard Law Review. Community organizer. Voter registration programs. Constitutional Law professor. State senator. National senator.

Obama's life has taught him to understand people, to see how we are more alike than we are different. He has developed a systematic approach to accomplish his goals by winning the support of those around him. I've heard critics say he inspires by telling everyone what they want to hear, which makes everyone identify with him, but when it comes to putting all his promises into action, he will fall short and fail.

Well, sure, he probably won't be able to deliver on everything. But after that Biography episode, after getting a better understanding of the man and his accomplishments to date, there are a few things I believe about Barack Obama:

• He will prioritize and concentrate on his "grand slam" promises.
• He will address issues strategically in order, so that a chain of events will fall into place. For example, bandage the economy just enough and bolster infrastructure so that when the wave of recovery begins, he can address energy independence by stimulating innovation, and use the mounting economic momentum to begin addressing the national deficit, or at least pave the road for the next president.
• His inspirational and consensus-building personality is his most valuable asset. It's not "bark and no bite" as critics claim, but the perfect execution of the Dale Carnegie philosophy. That is to say, How to Win Friends and Influence People. His ability to inspire others is what always has helped him succeed, and will continue to do so.
• He genuinely cares about people.
• He's going to do just fine. Do great things, even.

There was honesty and truth in his inauguration speech. He said things I couldn't have imagined a president saying before. Things like...

• Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.
  ...
  But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed.

Our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation. Wow. That's Social Security, healthcare, and deficit spending he's talking about. Presidents to date have ignored Social Security reform out of fear of the political repercussions of changing the program. Someone needs to go there and fix what's broken. I hope he will.

• We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost.

He shouldn't have to restore science to its rightful place -- it never should have been removed from it. But you know, if it hadn't been for George W. Bush, would the nation have been ready for Obama's new way of thinking? It took a frustrated nation hungry for change to pave the way for Obama.

And speaking of fresh ideas and new ways of conducting business, these last three quotes from Obama's inaugural speech are a bold departure from the Reagan-style politics that have dominated for nearly 30 years:

• The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works...

Some will say this is typical Democratic "big government" and "tax and spend," but the last four words make the difference. The Reagan-style assumption is that government must always smaller, and big government is bad. Do you want better government or bigger government? That's a false choice. The real choice, the question we should always be asking, is "whether it works."

• Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.

A truth can be so obvious that it seems it doesn't need to be said. But in saying it, stating the obvious, a great realization and awakening can occur, a realization that sometimes what is so obvious is so easily forgotten or overlooked. "A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous." Again, I say, "wow."

• Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use...

Just when it seemed diplomacy was dead, along comes Barack Obama to remind us that while the military has its purpose, not every problem is a nail that can be solved with a hammer. In the age of George W. Bush who would not "negotiate with terrorists," or anyone else he didn't like, for that matter, it's important to remember Republicans like Nixon failed in Vietnam by use of force, but when he used diplomacy, we found out that "only Nixon could go to China," and a diplomatic Reagan helped Gorbachev peacefully end the Soviet Union.

While I never expected my home state to support Barack Obama for president, I was pleasantly relieved that the nation as a whole would. I'm glad I was wrong about the importance of race in national politics. But most of all, as I was reminded by this episode of This American Life, I'm glad we have a president who will listen, as was explained by a member of an Iraq and Afghanistan veterans organization, IAVA, who was shocked when the Obama Transition Team contacted his group for input who they'd like to see appointed to the Veterans Administration, something that made them do a double-take after their dealings with the previous administration.

No matter what happens, this president has a different approach and philosophy. I don't know how many problems he'll manage to solve. But when was the last time we had a president come into office with such a mess to manage? The fact there are so many problems to manage from day 1 suggests many things were not done well before. An administration with a new mindset and a leader who seeks input from all the stakeholders could hardly do worse. I am proud, so very proud, to have a thoughtful president, this breath of fresh air. Not to mention one who speaks in complete sentences without mushing his words.

Yeah, I'm sorry, Mr. Obama, because I know you wouldn't approve of such gloating and mean-spirited pettiness directed at your predecessor, which flies in the face of what you're trying to achieve. I couldn't help myself this one last time.

January 25, 2008: Day 184

It's been six months since you were conceived, and you're two weeks into the third trimester. You're due in 82 days. If you were born today, you could probably breathe on your own and at least respond to changes in body temperature, even if you would still have to be in an incubator since your little body couldn't generate enough heat. But the important thing is, if you are born today or any day after, the odds are overwhelmingly in your favor. The nurses and doctors will fight for you and do whatever it takes.

I realize that in my writing, I often comment on your survival odds, and upon reflection, I admit it might seem obsessive and even morbid to dwell on such things, but you know what? Damn right I dwell on these things! I'm practical, and I'm a realist. It doesn't change my love for you... quite the opposite, in fact, because it's how I've expressed my concern for your well-being. I never allowed this line of thinking to escalate into a frenzy of worry, but there was always enough concern to keep us (your mother and me) aware of and focused on your health. We never lost focus, we never considered your successful birth to be a foregone conclusion, which means we were never complacent or flippant about your pregnancy, we never took this for granted. We were always in your corner, pulling for you and cheering you on.

I believe that every once in a while, when we're in the privacy of our home and not around other people, it's worthwhile to go a day or two without a shower, because that next, much needed shower is a most rejuvenating experience. You can't appreciate how good it feels to be clean until you've known the misery of being grimy and dirty. In the same way, being aware of all that can go wrong in a pregnancy helps us appreciate how fortunate we are when things go right. Our family has been extremely fortunate thus far, enough so that whatever challenges may come our way, we can take them head-on with confidence. Not arrogance or complacency, but confidence. Of course, some couples try so hard to have a child, some spend a small fortune trying to adopt, that'll we'll never truly know how lucky we are.

We enrolled in a Bradley Method childbirthing class. This was your mother's planning, and it's been a valuable experience. We've learned exercises to strengthen your mother's body and prepare her and you for birth, simple ways to help birth go better for everyone involved, things I think the medical community should teach all expecting mothers in a country where one-third of babies are delivered by Caesarean-section and birthing interventions abound.

The Bradley Method has also taught us a new way to approach diet. For example, avoiding excessive weight gain is important, but it should never trump proper nutrition. The Bradley Method teaches what a balanced pregnancy diet is, and how a proper diet will maintain proper weight gain. Traditional obstetric practice addresses the issue in backwards fashion: stressing proper weight gain to expecting mothers, and placing less emphasis on diet. So, by telling a pregnant woman she's gaining too much weight, but not teaching her how to make informed diet choices, many medical professionals unwittingly motivate women to eat less and get inadequate nutrition.

I always thought it was normal and healthy for the breaking of the waters to signal the start of labor (in fact, many ob/gyns will puncture the amniotic sac to help labor progress). Breaking the waters early is not necessarily a good thing. The forewaters around the baby's head provide cushioning and protection during labor, and reduce the mother's discomfort as the baby's skull pushes against the pelvis and pubic bone. Consuming plenty of protein helps strengthen the amniotic sac, ideally keeping it intact for cushioning until moments before birth. So now, we hope for a birth where the water gushes out as the head begins to crown, and we will not allow a physician or midwife to break your amniotic sac simply to progress labor for convenience's sake.

Episiotomies are to be avoided. Even a few minor tears are preferable to the single incision of an episiotomy, because on the whole, vaginal tears heal with fewer complications than episiotomies. Call me crazy, but I believe that our good friend Evolution has responded to crowning by developing vaginas that can heal from tears, but hasn't had an opportunity to respond to the relatively new practice of episiotomy. But in the meantime, squatting and consuming plenty of unsaturated fat and protein helps make the perineum all stretchy-like.

I could go on, but you get the point: these childbirthing classes have given us a new perspective. And to think I was initially resistant to the $250 cost and 12-week commitment! I'm almost ashamed.

What else? We have your crib and dresser with hutch. That crib is quite nice, I must say. Solid, heavy construction, the kind that won't wobble when you grab on and push and pull. Unless we use it for a second child, you'll come to know it as your childhood bed, for we also bought the rails to convert it into a full-size bed. This, too, was your mother's doing. She takes the lead on most everything, while I sit around and pontificate about them in my weblog.

Well, I did take the lead on the electronics: a camcorder to record your milestones, and a camera to capture the moments that go by so quickly and only come once, the moments we want to treasure and not forget, the very moments you'll hope we never show a significant other before a date. Please understand we do it with the best intentions at heart, as a test. For whoever adores our daughter at her most precious or entertaining moments, only these people are worthy of her heart. Trust us on this one.

You're kicking quite a bit, your poor mother's bladder... and sometimes, when you flip, it's your poor mother's ribs we talk about. Not only have I felt you kick, I've seen lumps and bumps move around. A couple weeks ago, we first heard your heartbeat with our own ears through a stethoscope, not amplified through a doppler microphone. The other day, when I coughed next to your mother's belly, you kicked as if startled, so we know you're aware, if not consciously so. I've been shining a laser pointer and moving it over your mother's belly, trying to elicit a response... none yet, but we're certain the glow penetrates blood and tissue, because it's red and bright. Perhaps you think the red glow is nothing to be concerned about or worth moving for, at least not enough for us to feel. Of course, you can't even open your eyes for a few more days.

Until then, we'll leave the light on for you.

December 9, 2007: Day 138

The story so far:

Back in 1975, when your mother was still unborn in her mother's uterus, the egg cell that would become you was formed. Fast-forward through time to August 1996 when your mother and I met, to July 2004 when we married. In mid-May 2007, an unknown and unremarkable spermatogonium in my body became a committed stem cell, one of a million to do so that day, and began the process of producing numerous sperm cells. On July 25, 2007, your mother ovulated and released an egg cell; sometime during the next 24 hours, it was fertilized by a sperm cell descended from my unknown and unremarkable spermatogonium. Thus you were conceived, a lone zygote. Over the next few days, the zygote divided time and again to form a blastocyst, and implanted into your mother's uterus. Thus began your pregnancy, the result of a long series of highly improbable events leading to your creation.

A few days ago we found out you are a girl. I suspected as much, but knowing with certainty is a new perspective. I try to imagine what the start of your life will be like, your personality and who you will become, based solely on your gender. No doubt, you will surprise me at every turn. I am told raising girls is easier than boys for the first few years, then puberty comes, and the tables turn. I will always question the example your friends set, as well as my own actions. No boy you bring home will ever be good enough for you, and I will probably make them painfully aware of my opinion with my critical glare when you're looking the other way.

As for now, we can begin preparing to indoctrinate you in the gender roles ascribed by society. This starts with your name, which we've given only the briefest of consideration, but I imagine a name starting with a letter in the first half of the alphabet. Next is clothing. I pledge to keep the number of pink and/or poofy articles to a minimum, insomuch as I can influence the family and friends who may give you such gifts. The rest is up to you. Then the toys. I expect you will have dolls, appliances, and houses to simulate being a homemaker in your own family someday, and as long as you feel free to aspire to anything you desire, I will be happy to help bake cookies, choose outfits for dolls, and have tea parties with you. I'll even do the dishes.

November 3, 2007: Day 102

You are the lucky one. Birthwise, that is. Your mother has been coming home with a box of diapers every now and then. Stocking up, she says, to spread costs over time and soften the blow. Yesterday, I saw Winnie the Pooh bibs on the kitchen counter (yellow, of course) when I came home, and I suspect your grandmother may be responsible for those. My mother has taken her daughters-in-law to Gatlinburg for the weekend, and I think she brought those bibs with her. Your mother will return from her trip with clothes for you, I am sure.

Your younger sibling won't enjoy anything approaching the level of attention you've had during your pregnancy. We'll be too busy with you, taking care of you, reading to you, peeling grapes for you (seriously -- you could choke), to devote as much time and energy preparing for pregnancy number 2 as we did for number 1. Number 2 will have to peel their own grapes, or brave the skins alone. The infant clothes you wear will be the same clothes number 2 will wear, with the added fashion statement of the stains you left behind... and if you are both the same gender, number 2 will be wearing your stains for years.

I won't write as many weblogs to number 2. We won't take a weekly picture of your mother's belly. She'll forget to take her prenatal vitamin and omega-3 supplement more often. You'll learn to read sooner than number 2 because we'll read to and work with you more. These things are unfortunate realities for number 2, but a boon for you.

Starting when I was 6 or 7, until I was maybe as old as 10, I would ask my mother who her favorite child was. Her answers were appropriately non-committal: she loved us both equally, she said. I obsessed with the question for two reasons: one, I had a brother after four years as the spoiled only child; and two, his health problems earned him coddling and attention I never knew. I understand now that my mother's evasive answers were truthful. A parent does (or should) love all their children equally, but that doesn't prevent the firstborn from enjoying an unfair advantage because of the excitement and newness the parents experience the first time around, both before and after birth.

Someday, years from now, when you are a toddler, and your mother and I have a second child, you may feel forgotten when we bring home a new baby. You may act out, and, if you are old enough, you may experience a most unpleasant emotion, jealousy. If you experience these emotions, you will perceive your situation as unfair. I felt that way, too. Not until years later did I see things from a different perspective. In fact, it wasn't until I began writing this weblog that I realized what I actually lost after the birth of my brother wasn't fairness, at all. In reality, I had lost part of the unfair advantage of being the firstborn... just a part of it.

What I considered unfair was actually a leveling of the playing field, but the field can never be perfectly level. No matter how many babies we bring home after you, you will always be the first. Your mother and I will always devote that extra effort, that unfair advantage, to prepare you and us for your milestones. Walking. Talking. Learning the alphabet. Reading. Spelling. Writing. Making friends. Going to school. A second language. Memorizing multiplication tables. Algebra. The first relationship, first kiss, and it's painful end. Driving. You'll always be our first child to do anything, and that means we, your parents, will always spend that extra time sweating and fretting for you.

October 19, 2007: Day 87

We heard your heartbeat last week, 155 beats per minute.

Welcome to the second trimester. Since the last time I wrote, you've tripled in size, from just less than an inch back then to over 3 inches today. A couple weeks ago, you were growing 250,000 brain cells every minute. Like glitter in a snow globe, many of those neurons will flash into life only to flicker out and be replaced by others. No one knows why the brain develops that way. It seems wasteful, but there is always a reason. Prenatal development is the most amazing time of an animal's life. In the weeks ahead, you'll grow faster than you ever have, or ever will.

I have no way of knowing if you are a boy or a girl, but before next month when we'll find out, I want to say it for the record: I think you're a girl, based solely on my "Spidey Sense." We'll find out soon enough.

Something that's been troubling me is the matter of religion and how you will or won't be indoctrinated into it. Your mother and I have differing opinions on the subject, and mine is undecided. I was raised evangelical Baptist, once considered myself a student of Buddhism, and today I am agnostic-about-as-close-as-it-comes-to-atheist.

Part of me hopes you'll follow in my footsteps, and part of me worries for you and hopes you don't, because it isn't easy believing this way. There are those who fear and despise people who believe as I do. I know -- I used to be one of them. I don't want that for you, for you to have to endure that. After a recent school-shooting in South Carolina, TV crews interviewed the school's students, and every one of the shooter's classmates said he didn't believe in God, as if to imply, if only he believed in God, this horrible tragedy would not have happened. The popular opinion seems to be, that of those who believe in God, some are good people and some are bad people, but of those who don't believe in God, all are bad people.

What is it that I want for you? What will make me happy for you and proud of you? I've been pondering those questions as I've been thinking about how to write this.

Roughly 7 in 8 people practice the same religion as their parents. If you believe as I believe simply because I taught you to believe what I believe, I could never be happy knowing that. Conversely, I could never be satisfied with you growing up in a church and being taught to believe what the other members of that church believe. It doesn't matter if the belief system is mine, your mother's, or a church's -- either way, it's indoctrination into a belief system not your own. I will be happy if you are never afraid to think independently and critically, to always and relentlessly question why, and decide what you believe based solely on your own reasoning.

September 11, 2007: Day 49

Today we saw you for the first time. I have many private anxieties about you and your well-being, and today, two of them have been laid to rest: first, there's only one of you in there; and second, you are securely implanted in your mother's uterus, not a fallopian tube. Your mother got to see you move, but I wasn't there, and only got to see the pictures later on. You were 2.24 cm long, but since you grow about 0.15 cm each day, you're already larger than that by now, only 10 hours after the ultrasound.

You've been moving around for about two weeks. Your first muscle cells form around your spine and actually ooze through your body to their final destinations. You still have no awareness, no sight, no hearing or other senses, no thought. But your heart beats, your legs kick, your arms thrash, your head turns, and your kidneys make pee. You're well on your way to your first dirty diaper.

August 6, 2007: Day 13

Your mother and I were surprised to discover today that you exist. We know you are there, but we don't know much else about you. We don't know if you're going to be a boy or a girl, the color of your eyes or hair, or what your favorite flavor of ice cream will be. We only know that you are.

Know that you were wanted. We planned to make you happen. Your mother had it down to a science. For the past three months, the first thing I heard in the morning was the beeping of the thermometer as she took her temperature, waiting for the spike that signaled ovulation, learning the pattern of her body, learning when was the best time to make you. There were ovulation test strips, ovulation predictors on the Internet, and other things about which I won't go into detail. After all your mother's planning and watching patterns, the first month we tried, we made you. We took a picture of the pregnancy test. It said, "Pregnant." That is the sum total of what we know about you.

We know when you were conceived, to the day: July 25. When you were conceived, your parents loved you and loved each other. I was in love with your mother that day as much as I ever have been. You were created about 12 days ago, and today you are a blastocyst, a tiny ball of cells. In another day or two, your nervous system will begin to form and you will become an embryo, but right now, you have no fingers or toes, no brain, no heart, no awareness. This will all soon change.

I must be honest with you. Life is a constant struggle, but once the ball gets rolling, things take care of themselves, and it gets easier. Why, in the first 12 days, you've overcome nearly impossible odds, and there's a 3 in 4 chance you'll make it until the next month, and a 2 in 3 chance you will be born in the spring of 2008. Those aren't the kind of odds you want to play Russian Roulette with, but just a week ago, the odds were very much against you. I am not a religious or spiritual man, but I do believe in the miracle of life. The miracle is that, despite unimaginable odds, the egg and the sperm that became you managed to meet and merge in the first place. The fact that you even exist makes you incredibly lucky and special. You could easily have been someone else, but it had to be you. That is the miracle of life, your life.

I am a pragmatist. No romantic would fret over their unborn child's odds of survival. Despite my best intentions, you will be exposed to this part of my personality from an early age, I'm sure. All apologies if it makes me seem neurotic, distant, or cold, and I will never forgive myself if it makes you any of those things. In any situation you find yourself, I want you to have a realistic perspective and expectation. There's a fine line between realism and cynicism, however, and constant anxiety and risk aversion are traps I hope you will avoid. When you find yourself up against a challenge, instead of asking "why me?", I hope you ask "why not?" Instead of saying "I can't possibly," I hope you say "I possibly can." In other words, I hope you aren't hindered by the negative attitudes I sometimes have.

Know that your mother and I have always loved you, from the time when you were no more than a tiny ball of cells.

August 8, 2007: Day 15

I told the first person about you today, someone you'll probably never meet or know: my pharmacy preceptor at Samaritan Hospital. His name was Lanny. We were eating lunch in the break room, and I mentioned we were ready to have kids. He asked if your mother was pregnant, and I told him yes, we had just found out two days ago, and asked him to keep it in confidence until we were ready to tell our families. And he did.

August 17, 2007: Day 24

Your heart began beating a few days ago, and you are a little bigger than an apple seed. Your mother's cramps have ceased, and she's taking an omega-3 fatty acid supplement to help your brain and nervous system develop.

When I was born, breast milk and formula didn't go well for me. I was colicky and screamed for six weeks. Distraught, at wit's end, and against doctor's advice, my mother fed me the only thing that didn't make me scream: powdered milk. It's meager on fat, and infants need plenty of fats and omega-3 fatty acids to gain weight and develop a healthy brain and nervous system. I guess I turned out okay, but I'm hoping for better for you.

August 23, 2007: Day 30

Today we met with a nurse-midwife. Obstetricians deliver most babies in the United States, but your mother and I have concerns with the status quo. I find it ironic that your mother, an optometrist, and I, a pharmacy student, as part of the medical establishment, would have such strong concerns with allowing said establishment to bring you into the world. For one, most obstetricians work in a group practice, so when it comes time for the birth, the mother's obstetrician may or may not perform the actual delivery, depending on availability. Second, we believe U.S. healthcare's approach to birth and delivery is overly aggressive, quick to employ interventional techniques such as induced labor, caesarian and vacuum-assisted delivery, and forceps to hasten delivery more in the interests of the healthcare system than in the interests of mother and baby.

Our hopes for a nurse-midwife would be someone who could deliver you in a hospital in lieu of an obstetrician. Sadly, no midwife with hospital privileges is to be found in Lexington. Many cities don't even have professional midwives, so it seems we're fortunate simply to have a nurse-midwife nearby.

The practical upshot of all this is that we're actually considering a home delivery. Only two weeks ago, I would have thought it crazy, but now... if you were not a high risk pregnancy... and a maternity hospital only 15 minutes from home in case we needed it... home births being the only method of delivery for thousands of years... I think I'd go for it. But the final decision is your mother's -- she's the one who would have to do this without any pain meds.

In country where 98% of births occur in hospitals, people may think we're taking a huge risk, but the World Health Organization advocates home births for low-risk pregnancies. In the United States, the infant mortality rate is 7 per 1000. In the Netherlands, it's 5 per 1000 in a country where 33% of births occur in the home and most low-risk pregnancies are delivered in midwifery units, not hospitals. On the other hand, in Sweden, with an infant mortality rate of 3 per 1000, over 99% of births are in hospitals. So at the end of the day, I wonder... in a developed country with access to advanced medical care when needed, does home birth significantly impact infant mortality? And if not, then the logical conclusion is that it's safe for low-risk pregnancies, and should be done without reservation if the parents so desire.

So... only time can tell if you will be born at home, but if you were, it was done because of what happened today.

August 25, 2007: Day 32

This is the weekend we're announcing you to our families. Today we told my mother, grandmother, and brother. With the element of surprise, we met my mother and grandmother at grandmother's house, chatted for a while, and gave my mother a baby picture book in a gift bag. The first picture is your positive pregnancy test.

We talked to your grandmother about a birth defect both my brother and I had, anal stenosis. It causes painful bloating and constipation, and requires gradual instrumental dilation of the anus, also painful (at least it was for me, I am told), but the long-term prognosis is good. Sometimes anal stenosis (the mildest form of imperforate anus) is associated with other birth defects in what is known as VACTERL association. I mention this only because my brother also has cardiac congential deformities consistent with VACTERL association. Actually, VACTERL usually requires 3 of the defects, and 2 defects qualifies as "VACTERL-like."

The important thing to know is that VACTERL association does not appear to have a genetic origin, but there is some evidence VACTERL-like does, because cases tend to cluster in families. To add to the rub, though, VACTERL-like is more common in girls, and neither your uncle nor I are.

I mention all this now not only because we talked about it today, but because the defects associated with VACTERL arise from events occuring between weeks 7 and 10 of pregnancy when the embryo reshapes itself from a mass of cells into the characteristic embryo body, a crucial period of time you are about to enter.

I'll be thinking of you often during the next few weeks, hoping all is well.

August 26, 2007: Day 33

Today we told your mother's family about you. Your grandmother had already become suspicious of us. Your mother told your cousin Emma to pull the gift bag out of my backpack and take it to your grandmother. We gave both of your grandmothers the same baby picture album with the picture of the positive pregnancy test. Your aunt April is also pregnant, due about a week before you. We had meatloaf, mashed potatoes, green beans, rolls that failed to rise in the oven, and angelfood cake with blackberries and strawberries for dessert. Between lunch and dessert, we drove down to the creek where your grandfather is building a cabin on stilts in the woods to stay in while he builds a regular-size house not far away in a clearing. Perhaps someday you will spend the night on a camping trip with your cousins in that cabin high among the trees. While you were taking shape in your mother's belly, so was that cabin. On this day, it was still a frame, with only three exterior walls and no roof. After dessert, I took a nap at your grandparent's. It was sunny and hot outside, but shady and almost comfortable in the woods; 2007 was the hottest and driest year in a long time.

I don't know why I tell you all these small details... I think it's so you or me or both of us will read this one day and recreate the event in our minds, for you to see it through your imagination, and for me to hold on to the memory for as long as possible.

August 27, 2007: Day 34

Today I told my father about you. Your mother and I were going to visit him at home when we told my mother and grandmother, but he was at the state fair judging the karaoke contest. Don't ask. Suffice it to say, I had to tell him over the phone. I was driving home from Samaritan Hospital, where I was doing my pharmacy rotation that month. After some chit-chat, I told him exactly as I was driving home on Clay's Mill Road, going through the intersection at Keithshire. I remember looking at the green traffic light passing overhead as I told him, "Rachel's pregnant."

August 30, 2007: Day 37

Today I posted all I've written so far on my weblog.

Adopting a barn cat from a farm with a large population of cats is sure to familiarize you with one thing: parasites. This is something we learned from our new kitten, Zoe, a calico we adopted from Cynthiana. I suppose the same could be said for adopting dogs, stray animals, and even people. Anywhere a population of animals is living in close quarters with others, is a paradise for parasites.

Parasites are masters of finding niches, and there appears to be no limit to their morbid success finding ways to exploit their hosts. Blood suckers like fleas, ticks, chiggers, and mosquitoes are just the beginning. Even though they rob us of our living-giving fluid, blood, they don't make us cringe like some others do. Lice, for example... now, there's a parasite that literally makes your hair tingle. Bedbugs, also an aversive bug, pale in comparison to kissing bugs, which add injury to insult by being two parasites in one. Kissing bugs suck blood from a sleeping victim (they prefer the face, hence their name), and then poop on the bite site when they crawl away. In the feces is the protozoan parasite that causes Chagas disease, which is implanted when the victim scratches the wound, eyes, mouth, or nose. Yeah, that dump they take when they crawl away strikes me as brazen disrespect, the ultimate calling card.

Then there are ear mites, which our kitten Zoe had, finally eradicated after repeated treatments with pyrethrin ear drops. These aren't so bad as kissing bugs. They burrow into the skin in the ear canal, drink some blood, cause severe irritation and itching, and then something else they do turns the host's ear wax black (I guess pooping), which is one of the hallmarks of ear mite infection. The other hallmark is placing a bit of that black ear wax on a dark background, smearing it, and carefully or microscopically observing the tiny, white ear mites as they crawl away. Kinda gross, eh?

But perhaps the most repulsive parasites of all are the intestinal worms. Everything about them makes you say, "Ewww." They live in the intestines, with digested food and poop, feeding on the host's intestinal lining and robbing nutrients. Eggs are transmitted via the fecal-oral route; that is, one infected host has eggs in its poop, and an uninfected host somehow gets an egg in its mouth and swallows it.

Just think that one through. Apparently, fecal-oral transmission occurs more often than we'd care to think, because evolution has determined it happens often enough to be a reliable strategy for supporting the lifecycles of most intestinal parasites. Delicious!

Our Zoe has roundworms, and we're not sure of the exact species. Toxocara cati lives exclusively in cats, except for the larvae, and I'll get to that tasty part in a bit. The other, Toxacaris leonina, can infect and develop in multiple host species.

The T. cati roundworm lifecycle is fascinating. They lay eggs that pass in the cat's poop. The eggs spend about a month developing in the environment, and then can wait for years for a mammal to eat them. If the eater is a cat, the eggs hatch in the intestines, the larvae burrow into the tissues, and usually encyst in the liver to develop. Next, they emerge from the cyst and enter the placenta of unborn kittens or the milk of nursing cats to transmit from mother to kitten, or the larvae go to the lungs, get coughed up, swallowed, and develop into adults in the intestines, which lay eggs that are pooped out.

If a host other than a cat (known as an intermediate host) eats a T. cati egg, the larvae hatch in the gut, burrow into the tissues and usually encyst in the liver, but not always. Lucky larvae develop in small mammals that a cat will eat, such as mice, rats, small bunnies, or chipmunks. The larvae's burrowing behavior is a problem for humans, because the larvae can burrow into the eye and cause blindness, the brain and cause seizures, or severe inflammation wherever else they go. Fortunately, the vast majority of the time, the larvae burrow in the liver, and that's the end of it. The really tasty fact is, if you have ever had a cat that goes outside and comes into your home, there is an excellent chance you have worm larvae encysted somewhere in your body. Same goes for toxoplasmosis, which is a single celled protozoan, not a worm. Basic message: you don't want to be an intermediate host, because the larvae can mess you up. Being a definitive host to adult worms is actually better, notwithstanding the "ewww" factor of worms slithering around in your poop.

T. leonina roundworms lay eggs that pass in the host's poop. The eggs develop, and the lucky ones are eaten by some mammal and develop into adult worms. Thus, humans can be definitive hosts for T. leonina, with adult worms in their intestines. This is ultimately delicious, but wormy parasites typically do less damage to definitive hosts than intermediate hosts, because as gross as the adult worms are, it's the burrowing larvae that can do the most damage.

So, we're not sure which species our young Zoe has, but I kind of wish we did. When we first got her, the vet found and treated her for roundworms, but because we didn't understand the lifecycle, we didn't ask about a second roundworm treatment, and the vet didn't offer. Because you see, a roundworm medicine only treats the adult worms in the intestines (and it doesn't even kill; it only paralyzes worms so they lose their grip on the intestinal lining and pass on through). Any larval worms hanging out in the liver or lungs are unaffected, so roundworms can re-establish unless the cat has two or three de-worming courses about two or three weeks apart.

The night before we re-discovered Zoe had worms, I drank a latte while studying for tests. I put the large latte cup on the bathroom counter, studied some more, heard Zoe jump up on the counter, but thought nothing of it. Later that night, I rinsed the cup out with water, and drank from it. Then I watched Zoe walk over to the cup, lick the inside of it, stick her paw in it, then walk away.

Thinking about all the times I've watched her lick her butt or play with "things" inside the litter box, I was grossed out. When Zoe jumped up on the bathroom counter, before I drank from my cup, she may have licked the inside or stuck her paw in it. I'll never know, but when she puked up a few roundworms the very next day, I wished I had known. Better yet, I wished I hadn't drank from that cup without washing it better. Hopefully, she didn't leave a worm egg for me inside my cup, but if she did, hopefully it was T. cati, because I'd really hate to find adult roundworms in my poop in a couple more weeks. Aside from the shock of seeing wriggling worms in my poop, I'll be really embarrassed if I have to go to the pharmacy where I work (or any pharmacy, for that matter), and present a prescription for mebendazole, explaining that I caught roundworms from my cat.

Maybe I'll just lie and say I caught pinworm (although that's a one day course of mebendazole, and roundworm is a 3-5 day course... however, it would take a keen pharmacist to catch that), because pinworm eggs spread through the air, and it's entirely feasible and easy to inhale a few from a passing stranger who stirs up pinworm eggs from their clothing. Here's a short video from a colonoscopy showing a pinworm infestation up close and personal. Enjoy!

It's mind-boggling to comprehend the insignificance of your own existence with the incomprehensible vastness of not just the universe, but the multiverse. This very concept was used as capital punishment in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in a machine called the "Total Perspective Vortex." It was a punishment so hideous only one person survived to tell about it, and even then, he cheated.

Imagining the Tenth Dimension is a website to accompany a book of the same name by Rob Bryanton. It presents a short and engaging audiovisual of our 10 dimensional multiverse as described by Superstring Theory.

When I realize myself for what I am, a miniscule fleck lasting for but a flicker in the entire timeline of the universe, there are no words to describe the sense of humbleness and disappointment I feel. Comparing one's own existence in the universe to sitting in a huge, dimly lit stadium for 10 years and barely noticing a tiny flash of light in the far distance out of the corner of your eye late some night on day 218 of year 4, and not being sure if it was really there or your eyes playing tricks on you, is a poor metaphor because it still doesn't come close to conveying the insignificance of you compared to the immensity of everything there is, ever was, and ever will be.

What kind of an existence is that? Seriously, we're nothing man! Even a star, a million times the mass of the Earth, which is itself is at least 70 sextillion(70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 -- typed out since hardly anyone knows what a sextillion is) times more massive than you or me... even that massive star is insignificant in the universe. It's one of a hundred billion other stars in a galaxy, which is one of anywhere from hundreds of billions to an infinite number of galaxies.

Now, imagine our entire universe, from beginning to end, as one possible timeline. Then imagine all the other possible timelines for our universe, an infinite number of them branching from each point in an endless timeline. Finally, imagine all the infinite, different manifestations of the Big Bang, each with different constants for the fundamental forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, and strong and weak nuclear forces), amount of mass in the universe, speed of light... and each of these "starter recipes" for the universe would have its own infinite number of possible timelines.

Okay, so this infinite number of Big Bangs followed by an infinite number of possible timelines defines the grand total of all there is, all there ever was, all there will ever be, all there could have been, and all there ever could be. It's everything, and it's represented by a single point in the 10th dimension. We're left wondering, "what comes next?"

What comes next, indeed?

Maybe this is a better metaphor: it's like comparing all those possible universes (what is known as the multiverse) to a single proton in our universe, and all the other protons in our universe are each their own multiverse. And you and me? You and I are a rather miniscule bit of the energy that forms a single proton for a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillionth of a second in the entire lifetime of the universe.

All this might give some insight to my struggle with the existence of a God, because the multiverse is so vast, the concept of God I formed as a child is incompatible with the perception of reality I have today. I'm sorry, but my mind struggles with the concept of a God who demanded animal sacrifices, assumed a human form for a brief 30 years, and requires an unquestioned belief in Itself as price of admission to immortality. If God did exist, it seems extremely improbable such an entity would even notice us, much less take an interest.

But on the flipside, supposedly our entire multiverse, and all the subatomic particles in it, is comprised of a single Superstring that vibrates, folds, and interacts with itself to form the universe we see. That's one busy string! Well, maybe I shouldn't anthropomorphize our great big Granddaddy Superstring and suggest it has self-awareness of everything that occurs within itself... and maybe if it were self-aware, it wouldn't necessary mean it was aware of things at every level of detail. For example, humans are self-aware, but our self-awareness isn't detailed enough to include every cell or every molecule in our bodies. But to suggest the nature of God's existence is somehow related or equivalent to the Superstring is fascinating, but ungraspable by our brains. I just don't know.

School has been going at a breakneck pace, so there hasn't been much time for writing this semester. The main issue has been homework... pharmacokinetics labs, pharmacy practice labs, and various assignments. While there is a massive volume of material, it hasn't been so hard to learn, in part because the homework exposes and re-exposes us to the material. By the time we begin studying for tests, we're making the second or third pass through our notes. The averages on three of our tests were in the 90s; the average on the fourth was 87. All of the course coordinators remarked these are the highest class averages they've ever seen. Our class is awesome... what more can be said?

Rachel and I had some drama last month. The optometrist she's been working for in Florence made her a job offer she couldn't refuse. Problem is, Florence is a 90+ minute commute from our house in Lexington, so we were planning to put the house on the market and move to Georgetown this summer. Living in a home two years and selling it in a slowing housing market would have put us in negative financial territory after moving expenses, realtor fees, and closing costs, to say nothing of the pain-in-the-ass (PITA) factor. But it was an offer we couldn't refuse, an offer that made financial sense.

Rachel had tentatively accepted the offer, and then a miracle happened. Another practice in Lexington offered her a full-time position and matched the pay. Well, it really wasn't a miracle; it was a counter offer to keep her in Lexington, and it wouldn't have been made had she not announced she was leaving before the summer. Rachel's patients love her, and they tell the receptionist, who tells the optometrist who owns the practice, and so they try to keep her on staff.

Being successful in a medical career is a lot simpler than being successful in a corporate career. There are fewer terms in the equation. If you want to be successful in a medical career, treat your patients well, don't rock the boat with the office staff and techs, and you have it made. If you want to be successful in the corporate world, it's not only how well you do your job, it's also how well you market yourself, along with being in the right place at the right time and taking on the highly visible projects that earn the most kudos from the people who determine which opportunities are presented to you in the future. The corporate success equation includes a complicated political element.

Poor Rachel gracefully had to back out of the job in Florence, which had us worried, because the doctor up there closes his business deals with a "yes" and a handshake. He doesn't do contracts or written agreements; his trust and respect is earned through honesty and not going back on your word. She was honest and direct, though, and it seemed to go well, but he's a difficult man to read, so who knows?

So now we get to stay in Lexington at least until I graduate from pharmacy school. You have no idea what relief that brings both of us. We were ready to move because it was the logical thing to do, but I don't think the desire to do so was in either of our hearts. We love our house, the neighborhood, and the neighbors. We love having a huge backyard that stretches 350 feet from the street to a corn and soybean field. We love the privacy. I love tending a garden in the spring and summer. I love having a compost pile and getting coffee grounds from the nearby Starbucks to mix into it. I love being able to set out a hummingbird feeder in early April when the first hummingbirds return from Mexico. I love my herb garden in the frontyard.

Most of all, I am thankful for being able to stay here in my Lexington home after realizing just how much we love it here. Wanting what you already have is the most wonderful feeling in the world.

Religious differences have caused more and bloodier wars, more suffering, more persecution, more harmful laws, and justified more hatred than anything. So much human energy has been expended on religion that could have been used more beneficially elsewhere.

I've pondered those thoughts for a long time, and I believe them. I used to think these observations justified going on the offensive against religion, to dismantle it as an institution, but then I realized something. While it is ironic institutions regarded as "holy" and "good" as religion manage to spawn so much suffering, religion manages to rise above it all, and still does a lot of good.

Religion is an easy target for those who spread suffering because religious interpretation is so subjective. Relgious texts are plentiful, diverse, and vague enough to be interpreted however a reader chooses. The believer can find passages to justify whatever was already in his or her heart, and then argue their point convincingly. You can't prove or disprove anything about religion, and this is at once the very thing that has allowed religion to endure so long and it's fundamental flaw. A double-edged sword, if you will.

So people use religion to justify what is in their hearts. Some use it to reduce suffering, and some use it to create suffering. If religion did not exist, people would find surrogates to religion to achieve their goals. Further, I think people are afraid to ponder a universe that is random and without purpose. Society would be lost without the (real or imagined) sense of purpose religion gives. Hats off to Karl Marx, for truly, "religion is the opiate of the masses." Given how well society behaves when it believes something greater is watching and judging, how would it be if society believed there were nothing? If for no other reason, religion should be maintained to prevent anarchy.

And with that, I'm done. My beliefs change constantly, and so in another five years, I'll probably believe something else. My wife thinks my frustration with George Bush's brand of Christian Conservatism has caused me to go over the edge by announcing myself agnostic. Perhaps she's right -- I take the opposing extreme position to U.S. society's currently prevailing extreme belief. So when the current U.S. political climate changes, as it always does, we'll see if I start wearing red bowties and thumping my Bible again.

Some resources I found helpful for this series of posts:

• Why Does God Hate Amputees?
• An Atheist Manifesto
• Get A-Life
• Penn and Teller - The Bible, a Helpful Hand
• This I Believe - Penn Jillette

We'll probably have children someday, which will raise the question -- how should our children be exposed to religion and spirituality? My wife and I don't share the same beliefs, so this is something we'll have to sort out.

I struggle with an internal conflict between faith and reason, and I would not wish such confusion upon anyone, especially my own children. It is an epic existential crisis. But I am what I am, and I have to deal with it.

The wish I bestow upon my children is for them to be open-minded. I think I am more close-minded than not, more than I'd like to be. All good parents hope for their children to be better than them, and I do not want my kids to share their father's prejudices.

When I was a close-minded believer, I thumped my Bible and told people who worked on Sunday they were sinning. We dislike in others what we dislike most in ourselves, so as a close-minded agnostic, I hold Bible-thumpers in contempt, even as I admit I used to be one of them. You'd think I could understand them and cut them some slack, but alas, how soon I've forgotten what it was like! I also know that I probably wrapped myself in the vestments of hardline evangelical Christianity to deny the doubts that had begun causing cracks in my beliefs. Just like people who smear putty into cracks in their house's foundation soon realize they're living a pipe dream, the cracks in my religion burgeoned into something huge.

I think the world's long-standing religions offer allegorical stories to teach the collective wisdom, ethics, and morality of humanity. For this reason, I am thankful for being raised in the church; however, the literal interpretation of those allegories causes trouble and confusion, and it is something I could have done without.

I doubt there is a better environment than the church to teach my children to know the difference between right and wrong. I want my children to appreciate the impermanence and suffering inherent in life caused by desire and envy. I want them to seek a way out of suffering, and to find joy.

So in the church, I hope for my children to judge fairly what is right and wrong. I hope they will be independent thinkers, questioning what they are told, and accepting things on the basis of their own thinking, not the thinking of others. Blind faith has caused bloodier wars and more deaths and human misery than anything else. If my children choose to accept religion, I wish for them to understand it is a double-edged sword, capable of great good and also great evil.

Someday, perhaps my children will ask me if there is a God, much as I asked my parents. Perhaps, if they are not cursed with my existential pathos, they will never need to ask. But if they do, I will answer that church tells us about a God. If my children then ask whether I believe in God, then I will know they are thinking abstractly, able to analyze conflicting ideas. I will know my children are ready to decide for themselves. So then, and only then, will I tell my children the truth about my belief in a God, which is "I don't know, because anything I am willing to accept as God is indescribable and unknowable... but in the sum total of my experiences and how they've shaped my thinking, I find it hard to believe."

Part of me hopes to be asked someday, but mostly I hope never to go there.

I was raised in a conservative Southern Baptist church, and since the age of 12, I've been locked in a continual struggle of faith and fear versus proof and reason. For me, proof won out over faith some time ago, but I couldn't completely let go until reason had won out over fear.

I am agnostic, meaning I'm uncertain about the existence of God. Some folks might like to change my mind and "convert" me, but as a corollary to my belief that I can never know, the same applies to everyone else -- you can't know, either. There is faith, and there is proof. Some seek to convert the world by offering biblical passages and religious rhetoric as proof of God or God's will. This is a fundamental logical flaw -- one cannot offer the purported word of God as proof of God's existence without first giving proof (or at the very least, some independent plausible evidence) of God.

I've tried to take in the religious rhetoric and biblical teachings and embrace them. Allegorically, they are fine. When it comes to accepting them as a metaphysical explanation of the universe, however, they fall apart in my mind. With the passage of 2,000 - 5,000 years, it seems to so obvious these stories were conceived in the minds of people living in a different time. They do not convey a eternal truths -- they convey the culture of a long ago society.

As a child, I was told God was constant and unchanging, but the incongruence of the Old Testament God and New Testament God were troubling. When I asked about it, I was told God "make a new covenant" with humanity. The much more logical explanation to me was that the Old Testament was written by a people living in a volatile world ridden with external and internal strife. At various times, the people of Israel were nomadic, a kingdom, overthrown, a kingdom again, and conquered again. They were often at war with others, and when they weren't at war with outsiders, they were at war with themselves. Their God reflected their society, loving one day, angry and murderous the next.

For example, in 2 Kings 2:23-24, a group of kids made fun of the prophet Elisha and his bald head. In my Christian upbringing, I was taught to focus on the New Testament and Jesus' example of taking the high road and "turning the other cheek." The rules were different in the Old Testament. Elisha cursed the kids in the name of the Lord, and a couple bears killed 42 of the kids. Because the kids were killed after Elisha cursed them, it's implied the actions of the bears are the work of God.

This kind of stuff (and the rest of what happens in 2 Kings chapter 2) doesn't happen today. Or maybe it does. Maybe when wild animals maul children, it is the work of God responding to the curses of unrecognized present-day prophets. If you accept the 2 Kings 2:23-24 story, you must accept this statement: God killed kids for being kids (and if you don't, skip to the next paragraph). You must also accept one of these statements: One, God is constant and causes similar deaths today (and on this point, I will argue with you the concept of a benevolent God); or two, God doesn't kill like this today (and on this point, I will argue with you that God is not constant).

Another possibility is God didn't cause the kids to die, and this story is the author's peculiar way of warning the reader against laughing at prophets, because even though God doesn't cause it to happen, terrible things may happen to those who poke fun at God's workers, however disjointed that line of thinking may be. Maybe Satan does it to make God look bad and fool everyone? But how can a benevolent God allow this to happen? The book of Job is dedicated to discussing this question, but in the end, the answer God gives is, "because I say so." Ipse dixit.

So what is my take on all this? Remember what I said about Occam's Razor in the last post? Occam's Razor states the most probable explanation is the one requiring the fewest unproven assumptions. There was probably an eccentric bald man, and people called him a prophet. Adolescents, unsure of themselves and striving for peer acceptance, make fun of people, especially eccentric bald men. The eccentric bald man had recently lost his mentor and friend, and was in a foul mood that day, so he lost his temper and gave the kids a tongue-lashing. Some time later, some of the same kids stumbled upon a group of bears, and being kids, foolishly taunted them. Or maybe the bears were rabid. It doesn't matter, but the bears killed some of the kids. Trying desperately to make sense of this tragedy, the townsfolk attributed the death of these kids to taunting the prophet who passed through town a while back. Yes, my interpretation is dull and simple, and it implies the universe is random, and people suffer and die senselessly. Yes, it does all those things. It is what it is. My explanation is dull and simple, and that's the beauty of Occam's Razor.

I was told one must approach worship with the mind of a child. Actually, I think this statement attributed to Jesus (Matthew 18:3-4 -- "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.") is an allegorical teaching of the importance of humility, but it has been said to me as a warning not to question or over-analyze Christianity and the bible.

Whatever that passage really means, I have tried approaching my religion with the openness and heart of a child. I've been so moved in worship that I've been overcome by wave after wave of sobbing repentence. I attended a charismatic Christian church in college and regularly waved my hand in the air as we sang, and even spoke in tongues a time or two and had hands laid on me (that's when a group of people stand around you, place the palm of a hand on your head or upper torso, and pray for you). And after everything, honestly, a lot of it strikes me as the stuff of fairy tales. So much for the mind of a child. Read here for some examples by Marshall Brain, founder of the popular howstuffworks.com website, and while you're at it, the entire website whydoesgodhateamputees.com is well presented; the author's thinking is better organized than mine, but I'm trying to express my own original thinking here, so this is what you get for reading my weblog.

Christians find it easy to consider believers of other religions deluded. How many believe in the Greek/Roman gods? Would they proclaim Allah as the one true God, and that Mohammed was his prophet? And how about the countless Hindu gods, Buddha, and Native American spirit gods?

Likewise, believers of other religions find it easy to consider Christians delusional in favor of their own beliefs. I will quote directly a bit from Marshall Brain's website because it is so well put:

"Here is the thing that I would like to help you understand: The four billion people who are not Christians look at the Christian story in exactly the same way that you look at the Santa story, the Mormon story and the Muslim story. In other words, there are four billion people who stand outside of the Christian bubble, and they can see reality clearly. The fact is, the Christian story is completely imaginary."

I was listening to a phone-in talk radio program the other day. The topic was the controversy over the numerous mega-churches that were closed on Christmas Sunday 2005. The guest was a minister from a non-mega-church who thought closing the church's doors on Christmas Sunday was absolutely abominable. A lady called in to defend the mega-churches, saying it was an internal matter between the churches' leaders and parishioners, and that making a public spectacle of the divisive controversy only served to cast Christianity in a negative light to the rest of the world.

The minister and the caller began quoting Bible verses to one another in support of their viewpoints. As they began their contest of launching one volley after another of scriptural quotes, I was hardput to side with one or the other based solely on their scripture, for they each quoted accurately and in context, both claiming an intimate knowledge of God's will in this situation. Each was obviously a devout Christian and had the best intentions in heart, but yet they were diametrically opposed on this issue. There seemed to be no middle ground, and realizing this, the talk show host thanked the caller, let them agree to disagree, and ended the call.

This exchange exemplifies my central thesis in this series of posts: it is impossible to know the will of God. But I take it a step further: it's impossible to know if there is a God, and if one were to apply Occam's Razor to the question, mostly likely there isn't based on what we as humans can know, understand, and perceive.

I am a white 30 year old male living in North America. This means I've never been in a minority or protected class, never at risk for discrimination or persecution by a large segment of the population. What I wrote in the previous paragraph changes that. Agnosticism is not well understood in our society, and it is frequently confused with atheism. Atheism itself is a socially unacceptable belief in American society. The thought of being labeled and identified in a negative way troubles me, but so be it. Saying all this means that I could never successfully run for a political office.

2003 Pew poll: 69% of Americans completely agree with the statement, "I never doubt the existence of God," and 87% mostly or completely agree with it.

I'm somewhere in that unlucky 13%. From the time I entered puberty and began to think abstractly, I began losing my religion. At first it was creation versus evolution, but over time it's morphed into faith versus reason. A lot of reasonable, sensible people I know embrace religion and reasoned thought simultaneously. Somehow, the glaring incompatibilities between the two are resolved or deemed unimportant. Perhaps they dismiss it by saying logic can't be applied to religious matters, because that's not how spirituality works, and so they never bother trying and aren't troubled by it.

As far as I'm concerned, though, religion and reason must be reconciled, because they each offer a different ontological definition of the universe. In other words, you cannot say that 2+2 simultaneously does and does not equal 4. Maybe I am a mental midget. Maybe I am close-minded. Maybe I am arrogant for insisting that things must have logical explanations, and even if I don't understand those explanations in detail, most of them should make sense to me at least conceptually. Maybe I am a heretic. Maybe I am a lost soul. Maybe I have a point.

I've been dealing with this since I was 12, and now I'm 30. So instead of telling the tale of how I got here, I'll just describe "here."

I forced myself to consider why I was so hesitant to let go of a belief in God. There are several answers:

First, the egoist reason: it meant I had to let go of belief in eternal life, immortality, as it were. The most terrifying thing was coming to terms with death as a complete cessation of existence. I want to exist forever. And since my sense of self-awareness is all I really, truly know, it's terrifying to think it will cease to exist when I die.

Second, the existentialist reason: it meant I had to accept the universe was random, and there was nothing (no one) guiding the course of things. This meant considering the vast universe and acknowledging my own significance is rather insignificant. And no guardian angels to look out for me, either.

For the first time in my life, I have come to terms with both of those fears, those reasons favoring a belief in religion. I have accepted them. I can approach the question more objectively than I've been able to before. What does this mean? Very simple: I am an agnostic.

And what does that mean? It means I don't think it is possible for me to know if there is a God, simple as that.

More in part 2.

We went to New Orleans the first weekend in August. Katrina hit three weeks later. We went to Slidell for a swamp tour, then on a whim, drove on through Bay St. Louis and Gulfport on our way to Biloxi along I-10 and US-90. So when we see the scenes of New Orleans flooding and destruction along US-90 in Gulfport and Biloxi, we can pick out familiar landmarks. We were there three weeks ago, and contrasting the horrific scenes on TV to the memories of the happier times we experienced is chilling and eerie.

I can only imagine what it's like for the people who live there, dazed and unable to escape. I think of the people we saw walking around New Orleans and working in the casinos. I can clearly picture our bed and breakfast hosts and their orange tabby cat, tour guides, restaurant staff who waited on us, clerks in the wine store, street car drivers, street performers in the French Quarter, and coffee shop baristas. Are they alive? Are they okay? And what kind of hell must they be suffering through?

All up and down St. Charles Avenue, we saw thousands of Mardi Gras beads hanging from power lines, tree branches, and street signs. They are gone, I'm sure, buried in debris and under water. We heard looters were roving up and down St. Charles Avenue, breaking into the million dollar historic homes we admired walking from Audubon Park, all the way past Napolean Avenue to our B&B on Constantinople.

Some of the scenes from television and newsfeeds that chill us:

Canal Street. We took the St. Charles Avenue streetcar to Canal Street. It's a divided street, a boulevard. A streetcar line runs in the middle, between the two rows of lampposts. I remember crossing the street here.

I-10 Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. We drove over this several times on our way to the swamp tour in Slidell and Biloxi. The major artery to New Orleans from the east, several sections of this bridge are no more. The other two highways from the east are US-11 and US-90, but I haven't heard anything about their causeways across Pontchartrain.

US-90 in Biloxi, Mississippi. Nothing but the trusses remain across Biloxi Bay.

Treasure Bay Casino. We drove past Treasure Bay and thought about going into this one in our search for a good buffet. We drove on by, but remarked at the unique design. Before the hurricane, Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel gave several reports from the beach with Treasure Cove in the background. I thought the masts would be the first to go, but they survived; instead, it was the dock moorings and the body of the barge itself that gave way.

Grand Casino 1 | 2 | 3. This is the casino we decided on. Billboards along US-90 declared it's buffet the best in Biloxi, so we went. The yellow building is the Grand Casino hotel. In the first picture, the structure with the blue roof in the middle of US-90 is not the casino - it's the Kids Quest building. The casino itself was carried down the beach. You can see it in the second and third pictures.

And the band played on. It took a couple days to come around, but this ole cowboy has stopped playing guitar and talking up Social Security to take the disaster seriously.

Rumsfeld held a press conference today. At one point he compared the violence in Iraq to murder rates in American cities, implying that Iraqi cities are no more dangerous than those in the United States:

"We had something like 200 or 300 or 400 people killed in many of the major cities of America last year. Is it perfectly peaceful? No. What's the difference? We just didn't see each homicide in every major city in the United States on television every night. It happens here in this city, in every major city in the world. Across Europe, across the Middle East, people are being killed. People do bad things to each other."

Such deception and truth-bending sums up why I cannot stand that man. He's so deceitful and devious. On the surface, one can almost swallow that analogy smoothly, but turn on your brain, and it's obviously pure b*lls*it.

First of all, how can anyone possibly think Fallujah and Baghdad are equivalent to high crime U.S. cities like Detroit or Los Angeles? Are people regularly kidnapped and beheaded in Detroit or L.A.? Are there car bombings and assassination attempts? Is the U.S. military or national guard running aird raids or patrolling the streets in an attempt to regain control because rebel insurgents have taken control?

Second, the population of Iraq is 25.3 million. The U.S. population is 293 million. The population of California alone is 1.4 times that. The population of Fallujah is 285,000; the population of Los Angeles is 9.3 million; Detroit's is 911,000. Get what I'm saying? Rumsfeld's was not apples-to-apples comparison, and he knows better. He's a deceitful snake in the grass. In the past year and a half, 13,000-15,000 Iraqi civilians and over 1,000 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq.

Let me put it another way. In 2001, the murder rate in the United States, including the September 11 terrorist attacks, was 7.1 per 100,000. That's 20,800 murders. Using the 13,000 Iraqi civilian deaths figure, that's about 8,700 per year in a country of 25 million, or 34.8 per 100,000. In the United States, that would translate to 102,000 murders a year. And that's just what the United States and rebels directly instigate; it doesn't include murders committed by Iraqi civilians.

On Thursday, he told a Senate committee that if the election could be held in three-fourths or four-fifths of the country, but violence was too great for a vote in the rest of the country, "So be it. Nothing's perfect in life."

What?!?!?! That is unacceptable. Sloppy. Florida, anyone? The fundamental principles of a representative, democratic government are defeated if 20-25% of a country's people are not heard. And that's all I have to say about that.

Iraq Body Count

What once was an ornately detailed sand sculpture on the beach becomes an unrecognizable mound after the tide advances and retreats, a paltry shadow of its former majesty. I want to hold onto my sentimental treasures, but my new lifestyle will mean new people, routines and places. Like high tide washing over sand castles, the New replaces the Old, and memories fade with each day passing by like a new wave washing over the sand.

Yesterday was my last day as a GE employee. It's cool being able to say Friday the 13th is your last day.

As I walked around saying goodbye and best wishes to coworkers, there was a very present awareness I was seeing many of these people for the last time. I have a horrible track record when it comes to staying in touch with distant friends. After seven years with the company, I've known and become closer to many of these people than anyone else in my life except family. I hope it will be different with my GE friends, because some really are like family, but I know my own ways and habits. When I graduate from pharmacy school, I'll be in touch with only 4 or 5 of them if I'm lucky.

Being the sentimental introvert that I am, I also become attached to places, things, and daily events: Badging in and out of the turnstyles, entering my office, logging out of my workstation, turning off the lights and closing the door for the very last time. Even the signature smells of each building in Appliance Park.

People who leave the company talk about life after GE. The corporate culture is pure genius. The gist of the message is that working for the company is a privilege. Achieving the company's goals is a service to humankind because achieving the corporate goals makes the shareholders wealthy, serves the customers better, and ultimately betters society.

Work has a way of seeping into the cracks and crevices of your personal life: Whipping out your wireless email device during a commercial break or while waiting for the popcorn in the microwave, signing into work from home to spice up an otherwise relaxing block of time, late night and early morning telephone calls with your team in India, mulling over a problem while in the shower. For someone like me who's leaving the 8-5+ workday routine for another lifestyle, the change is even more dramatic.

Now that I have all this time, I'm left wondering how to put it to equally good use on my own without an employer to give me a worthly cause. I've already felt drawn back in... this morning I woke up and realized I had forgotten to send a final email to my team leader explaining how I handled a change request for an application I supported. I'll probably send the email from home because my replacement hasn't been determined, and without the benefit of spending time with me before I left, having this information is the best I can do to help my replacement hit the ground running when they start.

Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "get a life".

Renewable Environmental Solutions successfully tested its patented Thermal Conversion Process (TCP), converting turkey offal into petroleum, natural gas, and other raw materials. Under a new U.S. government program, others may follow.

Critics argue the process is not economically viable, may consume more energy than it yields, and cannot replace society's total energy demand. Since RES was making a test run, the critics are probably correct, while at the same time ignoring advantages of economies of scale and technological maturation. In this respect, the critics are penny-wise and pound-foolish. Perhaps you're familiar with the accountant jibe: an accountant knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Valid points. But not all investments yield immediate returns. An investment analyst knows the highest return investments tend to be the most risky. What is investment risk? Simply a measurement based on time, magnitude of potential gain or loss, and other outside factors which tell the investor the chance that an investment's return will differ from the expected return. How does one determine an investment's expected return? Aha, that is the million dollar question, the test of an investor's muster.

Perhaps in the end, the critics will be proven correct, and the returns and net energy output to make TCP viable will never materialize. Or maybe they will. Such are the uncertainties considered by the risk calculation.

For the critics who say thermal depolymerization alone can never quench our thirst for energy and hydrocarbon raw materials, you're damn straight, but if we really are facing a bleak future without cheap oil, we can hardly afford to continue our wasteful lifestyle, and must find numerous solutions to balance the equation. Thermal depolymerization would be but one piece of a larger puzzle.

Critics of the ethanol-as-an-alternative-fuel industy make similar arguments about negative profitability and negative energy yields, adding that without government subsidies, ethanol would be several times more expensive than gasoline. I take a more moderate approach, arguing that perhaps the ethanol fuel industry hasn't matured (that is, become energy efficient) because the government hasn't properly motivated it.

Effective government funding comes in two phases: the investment, followed by the subsidy. Funding designated for process development, efficiency, and/or improvement is investment. Funding designated for offsetting a net loss and masking inherent process inefficiencies is a subsidy. It's a careful balance... first an investment to develop the technology followed by a period of decreasing subsidy while economies of scale and technological maturity develops. The goal is a self-sufficient process.

Petroleum serves a dual purpose in the fossil fuel society. First, it makes us go... it's energy. Second, it's a raw material, the source for countless modern conveniences ranging from plastic to paint to clothing to pharmaceuticals. Even with a limitless energy source to replace fossil fuels, our society would still suffer from an addiction to petroleum-derived hydrocarbon raw materials.

Energy sources are plentiful if we're crafty enough to find novel ways of exploiting the renewable sources, but hydrocarbon raw material (at least for now) seems to be the more difficult to replace of the two petroleum uses. So as time passes and cheap petroleum is harder (and more costly) to come by, we will develop and exploit new energy sources. For an encore, we'll look high and low for new sources of hydrocarbon raw materials. To solve part of the problem, perhaps we will turn to our discarded organic waste - the turkey offal, used tires, and mountains of plastic that otherwise take up space for generations to come.

Bio-remediation and other waste-to-energy technologies may consume more energy than they produce, but if they satisfy the greater need of raw material and the energy crunch is solved, it won't matter. Raw materials and empty spaces are cheap and plentiful enough that we consume both indiscriminately, but the demand and supply curves are moving to an intersection. If the energy crunch isn't solved, it won't matter, because civilization as we know it will grind to a halt. If the energy crunch never occurs, then RES and other bio-remediation companies are doomed investments, and the critics will have their day to say "I told you so."

Now comes the investmen analyst's muster test. Will there come a day when demand will surpass supply of hydrocarbon raw meterial? History and economic theory tell us when the demand and supply curves have begun sloping as steeply as they appear to be sloping today, nothing short of a crisis, nothing short of demand outstripping supply can force the market to find alternative solutions and correct itself.

In the end, critics and pundits (including yours truly) be damned.

After my recent "poo-poo on Wal-Mart post," it's in the interest of full disclosure that I admit to shopping there and tell you about a recent Wal-Mart purchase. I purchased a hand mixer from Wal-Mart the day after Christmas 2003, December 26. For our wedding in July, Rachel and I registered for a nice mixer. But with seven months to go, I was mixer-less. Thus, my goal was to find the cheapest mixer possible.

Low Price Gold Mine
The local Wal-Mart Supercenter carries more product models than you can shake a flimsy, $0.84 made-in-China stick at. When it came to sub-$10 hand mixers, I had two choices:

• The $3.24 eco-friendly model resembled this
  
• The $4.88 no-brand "Made in China" electric 5-speed model... dubbed simply, HMR12-2.

Of course, I bought the HMR12-2.

Except for Wal-Mart itself and some antique stores, a hand-powered egg beater can't even be had for that price. In fact, even a single beater can cost over twice as much!

I searched unsuccessfully for Wal-Mart's HMR12-2 hand mixer on Google and the company website. The receipt went in the trash long ago, so I can't prove the price, but trust me, it really was $4.88. The closest I found was this 125 watt 6-speed for $7.99. The HMR12-2 has a 100 watt motor and no cord storage.

Fool's Gold
At $4.88, my mixer was designed to mix the batter for one cheesecake (recipe) and burn out. It didn't even last that long, though. Per the recipe, it beat the cream cheese till fluffy, beat in the sweetened condensed milk until smooth, and nearly finished adding the melted chocolate chips when the cheap motor gave out. I mixed in the eggs and vanilla by hand.

The American Monster
The American consumer economy is a ravenous beast. It must feed. Those capitalizing on the consumer economy use subtle tricks to exacerbate the feeding frenzy ever higher. Two examples of consumerism follow. They are presented as analogies to American dietary excesses.

• Cruise Vacation Consumerism
  The automotive industry wants to take you on a cruise vacation. On a cruise ship, the food is rich and filling, and it's everywhere. So you keep eating, even though you're not hungry. When the cruise is over, you have no idea how long it'll take to shed those extra pounds.

  Foreign competition forced the automobile industry to produce higher quality, longer-lasting vehicles. Demand for new cars and trucks decreased; manufacturers were punished for giving customers what they wanted. Solution? Lease programs! You can't help but admire how auto companies manage seemingly opposite marketing strategies. When you buy a new vehicle, the dealer guides your selection on quality, reliability and features. "It's built to last," they say in so many words. BUT in an instant, the dealer does a 180 and tries to sell you on a lease contract. The implication is subtle: "You really don't want to drive this old bucket of bolts longer than 3 years, do you?" And if you decide to buy, anyway, in 6-12 months they mail a steady stream of new car offers. Sure, your car is perfectly adequate, but don't you deserve the status of driving a new car?

• Chinese Buffet Consumerism
  Wal-Mart has also capitalized on our "use and toss" culture, but from a different angle. Wal-Mart uses the "Chinese Buffet" strategy: "all you can consume" at a low price, but you'll be hungry again in a couple hours. Marketers abandon the quality play when the game is price. For $4.88, I wanted the mixer to last until July; after that, I would have tossed it, anyway. As it is, I don't use a mixer that often; thus, the mixer managed to last four months until the day before Easter. I probably won't require mixing services during the next three months, and if I do, the eco-friendly model will suffice.

I was weak! I played into the hands of the consumerism I so detest! Might as well be heroin. And there's a greater danger at play... read about it here (or here until Yahoo expires the article, if you don't want to register with latimes.com), here, and here.

The Fudge Truffle Cheesecake (recipe) was excellent, by the way. Despite my chocoholic appetite, even I had to take a break after a few bites. Note - the recipes calls for a chocolate cookie crumb crust. If you use a ready-bake crust from the store, you'll have extra filling. I used a ready-bake crust, thinking that's what the recipe called for, and poured the extra batter into a springform pan and baked for an hour under the main cheesecake to protect it from the oven heating elements (also used a water bath). The extra batter was overcooked, but steam from the water bath prevented cracking... it turned out to be a delicious flourless chocolate cake instead of a cheesecake - ah-ha, I always wondered how those were made! Use this recipe for the crumb crust if you prefer to use a springform pan and avoid the extra batter.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ralph Nader were on Meet the Press this morning. One thing I've said before about Schwarzenegger and still say today: I like him. He complements his political opponents and seeks collaborative government. This is more than I can say for Bush, Jr. I dis Bush frequently, but that doesn't mean I dislike Republicans. I strongly dislike Bush, simply not because he's a Republican, but because his style of leadership is to divide Americans, alienate our allies, antagonize our potential enemies into becoming our bona fide enemies, deceive and distort facts, and pillage our environment. I disagree with most Republican ideology, but don't necessarily dislike people who identify with the label "Republican."

Fiscally, Schwarzenegger's a no-nonsense balanced budget kind of guy while remaining sensitive to civil rights, social, and environmental issues (I wish he had a more progressive stance on gay marriage, but I say the same of most Democrats). For example, he believes California should stop spending money it doesn't have and turn the tide on the deficit. Once accomplished (easier said than done, I'm sure), freeing California from interest payments galore, there will be enough money, he says, to fund more programs than California borrows to fund today. Spending money you don't have is not good, okay? All together now: governments shouldn't make deficit spending a habit. Now for an example comparing personal and national finances. Not all debt is bad. Buy a house, go to school, start a business, and you'll probably go into debt. This debt is "good." You assume debt so you can make a high yield investment requiring more capital than you have. The theory is that the returns will exceed the interest and inflation rate; in other words, the benefits should exceed the costs. FDR's New Deal deficit spending was a good example. On the other hand, if you borrow money to supplement your lifestyle or live above your means, the debt is "bad" if you're not in a better financial situation after the debt is repaid. It's no different for a government. Now, sure, cyclical businesses utilize short-term debt to finance operations during downturns, just as a government sometimes must do during times of recession, but it's just that - short-term debt. Debt which finances a government through recession should be repaid in the next boom.

Ralph Nader... wow. Faced with popular opposition to his presidential candidacy, he said the corporate-controlled two party system was a mockery of democracy, and maintained his right to run for president. You know, he's absolutely correct, he does have a right to run, but just because you can do something does not necessarily mean you should. Discretion is the better part of valor. When this country unites to pursue a more progressive agenda, then it is time for Nader. But not now, not when we have a such a popular (albeit declining) president who succeeds by polarizing the nation instead of bringing us together. The 2004 presidential campaign will show we're still a nation trying to decide between conservative and progressive values. For now, the divisions within the two camps must wait for their day, a time when the nation has decided which philosophy it wishes to pursue. Love it or hate it, such is the nature of the two party system. But as for Nader's assertion that the legislative and executive branches of our federal government are strong-armed by corporate interests, oh, yes, I think he's absolutely correct.

This morning I took a friend to the airport. Afterward I picked up breakfast at McDonalds and pulled into work at 7:45, less than 5 minutes before sunrise. To the left the sky was a richly warm, Impressionist orange-red glow with hints of cloud bottoms catching the early sunlight. A surprise was high in the sky to the right - a rainbow, mostly red with muted greens, indigos, and violets.

If you're lucky enough to see one while flying or simply turn your back to the sun while spraying a misting water hose on a sunny day, you may have noticed full rainbows are not arches at all, but circles. To see a full circle rainbow, water droplets must be visible in a 42 degree angle all around the light rays. Viewed from terra firma where the ground usually allows that 42 degree angle only from above, most rainbows appear as just that - bows - the tops of circles.

The unrisen sun, bent around the earth's surface by the atmosphere, formed the rainbow this morning, striking the rain sheets approaching from the west, and I could see maybe two-thirds of the circle, certainly enough that the color bands began arching inward before diving into the horizon. The rainbow was absolutely beautiful, arching higher in the sky than I had ever seen one go, and I had to slow down the Prius so I could lean down close to the steering wheel and look out the window high in the sky to take it all in. The parking lot where I work is large, and it takes about 2 minutes to drive through the labrynthian lanes to a parking spot. In only two minutes the clouds moving in from the west had obscured the rising sun.

So it goes with life's everyday miracles on a Monday morning. As if controlled by the flip of a switch, the rainbow blinked out. The warm, orange-red glow in the east was replaced with the cold, flat, dismal gray of overcast rain clouds. It was as if the day had made a false start, remembered it was February, and immediately corrected itself, hoping no one would notice.

I walked into work.

I post gasoline prices on LouisvilleGasPrices.com, part of gasbuddy.com, and read the message forums there. Most topics are light-hearted or, at least, seem that way to me. Occasionally, though, I get drawn into the conversations.

What drew me in today was the need to clean house within the Pentagon to remove fundamentalist religious bigots leading occupation forces in the Middle East who make incendiary public comments against Islam, a house-cleaning campaign which Donald Rumsfeld has refused to do. In fact, Rumsfeld appointed one of the bigots, Lt. General William Boykin, as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence to track down Saddam, bin Laden, and others.

So here's the scene: Someone pointed out Rush Limbaugh must be blushing now for his "war on drugs" comments throughout the years in light of his own drug addiction. Someone I'll refer to as "Off-Topic Dude" redirects the thread by quoting Dennis Kucinich for a peace and love quote he made (see below), as if that somehow vindicated Rush. Then someone else quoted Bush as saying God made him president to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which, to "Off-Topic Dude's" credit, isn't exactly true. Then "Off-Topic Dude" comes back with this post:

No leader said god told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

However Kucinich said : "I am running for president of the United States to enable the goddess of peace to encircle within her arms all the children of this country and all the children of the world."

Kucinich is on drugs

Okay, that did it - I could stand the ridiculous lines of reasoning within this gasbuddy.com message forum debate no longer. Someone would make a valid anti-conservative point, and "Off-Topic Dude" always came back with "Kucinich bad!" I was like, okay, already! That might be a weird statement. Either it's been taken out of context or the senator's election rival must have been that much worse if he won the election.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that one of my main development points is maintaining focus on the big picture. All too often, I get tangled in the web of distractions and completely lose sight of the primary goal. Psychologists and counselors tell us that the behaviors/habits we dislike most in other people are the very same traits we dislike most about ourselves. It's the whole "don't worry about the splinter in the other guy's eye until you've removed the log from your own eye" philosophy.

Well, I never claimed I was completely perfect, so I couldn't resist taking "Off-Topic Dude" to task. And I am working on my development needs. Honestly, I am. That's why when I was able to see the big picture, I couldn't resist posting this in response:

Off-Topic Dude -

Nice. Page 1 from the Conservative playbook: whenever a conservative public figure gets into trouble, IMMEDIATELY fire a shot off the bow at the liberals. How does that statement by Kucinich justify Rush Limbaugh's hypocrisy?

Correct, no leader publicly said God told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, watch this... I'm about to use your own tactic against you - not once, but twice by quoting the same person - except instead of digging up a quote by someone who doesn't even change the direction of a national political party or campaign, I'm going to quote a high-ranking Pentagon official who's calling the shots in Afghanistan and has been praised and protected by the Bush administration in light of his remarks which are causing an uproar in the international Muslim community, and ultimately causing people to die.

Ready? Here comes the first one: "the god of Muslims is nothing but an idol" by Lt. General William Boykin. He's a leader, and Rumsfeld is emphatically defending him for his statement.

Here comes the second: Boykin also presented a photograph from Mogadishu, Somalia with a dark spot on it and said it showed "the principalities of darkness. . . a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy."

Here's the source: UK Telegraph

So, on your Kucinich quote, what's your point? He brings up the rear of the Democratic candidate pool. In the polls he has, what, maybe 2% of the primary vote? He's not representative of Democrats across the nation, in all likelihood won't get the nomination, and doesn't influence the direction of the Democratic campaign. He's not shaping public opinion or leading a military occupation force like Rush or Boykin. He hasn't shown himself to be a hypocrite like Rush, and he's not causing civil unrest and people to die like Boykin.

You pick obscure Democrats and quote odd-sounding things they've said. Likewise, I can match you ironic quote for quote and action for action by prominent Bush administration officials and others near and dear to them, such as Boykin, Rush, and Ashcroft, who are causing real harm.

Next time a prominent conservative says or does something truly destructive, let's evade the issue and find some near-unknown yahoo who calls him-/herself a Democrat and make another attack, as if that somehow justifies the atrocities and issues at hand.

A couple other Boykin quotes from the same article I didn't include in my post, which I will include here to further illustrate why this guy is a disgrace to every U.S. taxpayer:

• "Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. He's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this."

• In January, he told Baptists in Florida about a victory over a Muslim warlord in Somalia, who had boasted that Allah would protect him from American capture. "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real god and his was an idol," Gen Boykin said.

• In the same month, Gen Boykin told an Oklahoma congregation that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were not the enemy. "Our enemy is a spiritual enemy because we are a nation of believers. . . His name is Satan."

And the best one of all, which I wish I had included in the message forum:

• Gen Boykin told NBC that he would be curtailing his speeches to religious groups. "I don't want to come across as a Right-wing radical," he said.

Woo hoo! You might not want to come across that way, Boykin, but a wolf in sheep's clothing is still a wolf, if not a more dangerous one.

Boykin apologized, and naturally, all is again well within the Bush administration... "Shhhh, boys! You can privately be bigots and fundamentalists if you want - in fact, that's what many of us within this administration are - but don't ever admit it in public! As long as you don't don't say anything to make the American people suspect your radical beliefs are affecting your judgement, it's a gray area, and we'll see to it that no one can prove your true intentions!"

Next Tuesday Seattle residents vote on Initiative 77, an innocuously-named proposal to place a 10 cent tax on espresso-based drinks to fund childcare for low income parents. This would set a dangerous precedent by sending the message that it's okay to single out products for taxation.

I can appreciate the theory behind what they're trying to do: espresso drinks are luxury items consumed mostly by the upper middle class and upper class; Seattle intends to use sales of espresso as an indicator of wealth, and thus tax higher income individuals via their discretionary spending. But I disagree completely with the approach. In the interests of full disclosure, I am an espresso addict, but not a frequent coffeeshop patron because I usually brew my own lattes.

A flat sales taxes is one thing, but I oppose Initiative 77's concept because it seeks to tax a single product whose production and consumption does not affect the problem being addressed. For example, cigarettes and alcohol increase health care costs; owning property means you benefit from the services of the local fire department and public school system; burning gasoline and driving cars increases environmental impact and wears out roads... gasoline, cars, property, cigarettes, and alcohol are taxed because they increase costs government entities must absorb. Now, whether those tax revenues directly benefit the expenses they were imposed to fund is another question, but it works out at the level of total expenses verus total revenues.

In the case of Initiative 77, the production and consumption of espresso beverages is not related to low income families' need for childcare. Therefore, the government should not single out espresso and tax it. It just doesn't make sense.

As a liberal, I agree with the theory behind Initiative 77, that higher income individuals should carry more of the tax burden. And to an extent, I can appreciate with Jesse Ventura's opinion that people should be taxed according to the lifestyle they choose to live, not their incomes (that is, eliminate income tax and increase sales tax). My only concern is that individuals and especially corporations will find loopholes in sales tax laws. For example, today there are only state sales taxes, which don't apply if the buyer and seller make the purchase from different states (that is, via mail order, purchase order, or online), but do apply if both buyer and point-of-sale are in the same state - such policies favor corporations over individuals. If there were a national sales tax, what taxation would occur if buyer and seller were in the U.S. and another country? I suppose an extensive taxation policy such as the European VAT tax (which I believe the buyer pays even through mail-order and online purchases) would close most loopholes.

But let's not fool ourselves: sales tax has a high transactional frequency - it occurs whenever a purchase is made, and is easily noticed. Income tax withholdings are more transparent on a paycheck, and have their highest visibility that one time a year when filling out tax forms. There seems to be an impulsive, irrational trait of American culture: if given the choice between no income tax with a high sales tax on every purchase, and no sales tax with a high income tax paid annually, I think they'd opt for the income tax, even if the sales tax plan resulted in less taxes paid per individual. What really matters from a financial perspective is the bottom line - how much does it cost? But as a culture, we focus on the wrong quantitative variable - we focus more on number of transactions than the total expense to our pocketbook. That just doesn't make sense, either, but that's another issue altogether.

And on the opposite end of the political spectrum, a couple of friends have forwarded the MillionforMarriage petition seeking legalization of same-sex marriages and human/civil rights protections for the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender community. If you agree with their cause, please consider signing.

My belief is that all humans are entitled to human rights, and all citizens of and immigrants in the United States are entitled to equal civil rights. The preservation of human and civil rights is pre-eminent above all else. Even Christianity, under whose ideologies many people oppose civil rights legislation for GLBT persons, teaches equal treatment for all people is the second greatest commandment, second only to loving God... and the Bible says this twice, where it also appears in the Jewish Torah.

Those who know me would be shocked to find me quoting the Christian bible... I have a big chip on my shoulder vis-a-vis Christianity because of hypocrisies I've seen amongst the Christian soldiers, "marching as to war," and generally dispensing with logical thought. But when I read the Christian bible, I must admit Christian moral ideology such as what I'm discussing in this post matches closely with my own. Yes, Jesus was a social liberal. I must also admit that in the same way many Christians judge and look down on the GLBT community, I judge and look down on those very same Christians. I guess I'm just as much of a hypocrite as the religious zealots who have perverted Christianity, and I'm no better than them for allowing their poison to get under my skin and run me off.

How's that for humility?

I'm fired up again after receiving a mass email from a college friend. First, I will confess to being a conservative in my university days, followed by a steady slide to the left after graduation. After delving into the philosophies of the Left and the Right, I had to admit everything I thought I stood for politically was in opposition with my core ideologies. Oh well... live and learn.

Yes, I used to be a Republican, so I understand the party's views and beliefs, even if I don't share them, and I support their right (no pun intended) to speak out. When it comes to spreading lies and misinformation, however, I don't care which hand describes your political persuasion - IT PISSES ME OFF!

Argue ideologies: Good. Express your opinion: Good. State facts supporting your views: Good; take those facts of out context: Not cool, but determining what's in and out of context is a gray area, more art than science, so okay. But whenever I encounter shameless distribution of misinformation and blatant lies my blood roils in vexation. In a democratic society where everyone is entitled to express their opinion, the integrity and accuracy of information are crucial. The information technology industry hit the nail on the head with its familiar adage: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

My rather radically religious right-wing friend apparently hasn't figured out I've started speakign with my left hand. Or maybe she has, and she's trying to convert me back via mass emailing of blatant lies propagated by prejudice, hatred, and anger from especially radical elements of the radical right. When I say "prejudice," I mean it in the narrow-minded sense of the word, not the racist or xenophobic senses. To be clear, it's more along the lines of the Jerry Falwell/Christian Coalition brand of radical conservatism, definitely not the David Duke brand.

One would think she'd learn: everytime she includes me in a politically or religiously motivated mass email full of lies, I first go to snopes.com to determine if it's an urban legend, and if it's not there, I do my own research in pursuit of the facts and respond with the facts in a reply all email. I'm sure it annoys the other recipients, but in my opinion, the original email is just as unwelcome and annoying, so it becomes a question which is the greater evil: lies or truth? Enough said.

I discovered the value of snopes.com when she sent the email about Hillary Clinton defending the Black Panthers in a 1969 murder trial (in fact, I've written about my friend's propensity for disinformation before). Like any powerful tool, the Internet can do great harm or great good depending on how it is used: not only can the Internet be used to spread malicious propaganda, it also has the power to dispell the very same falsehoods.

After granting me a (nearly) two year reprieve from her mass email distribution list, she's at it again, this time with an email blaming Democrats for taxation of Social Security benefits and allowing new immigrants to receive Social Security payments without paying into the system. Okay, as I've said, my political viewpoint moved from the Right to the Left after an honest assessment of my personal ideologies to determine which was the better fit. The claims in the email did not match my ideologies, which align closely with ideologies of the Democratic Party, so a red flag immediately went up, especially the second paragraph which takes a potshot at Democrats while simultaneously claiming to be non-partisan in an attempt to appear disarming to the reader! I must admit the skillfulness matches WWII propaganda - the brazenness is impressive! Here is the first half of the original email (which is followed by a lengthy ideological argument not quoted here because I'm not attacking ideological views since they are opinions; again, I'm only going after the lies. Interestingly enough, however, after the lies are dispelled, the ideological rant falls more in line with the Democratic Party!):

Here is a message that might help make sense of the nonsense in
Washington.

This really crosses party lines. Don't get put off by the Democrats vs. Republican part first. Read till the end. It is important.

Q: Which party took Social Security from an independent fund and put it in the general fund so that Congress could spend it?
A: It was Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic-controlled House and Senate.

Q: Which party put a tax on Social Security?
A: The Democratic party.

Q: Which party increased the tax on Social Security?
A: The Democratic Party with Al Gore casting the deciding vote.

Q: Which party decided to give money to immigrants?
A: That's right; immigrants moved into this country and at 65 got SSI Social Security. The Democratic Party gave that to them although they never paid a dime into it.

Then, after doing all this, the Democrats turn around and tell you the Republicans want to take your Social Security.

And the worst part about it is, people believe it!

So I set out and found the facts from my new friends at BuzzFlash.com, complete with a sample response to repudiate the original email's claims:

Q: Which party took Social Security from an independent fund and put it in the general fund so that Congress could spend it?
A: It was Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic-controlled House and Senate.

FALSE

Rebuttals can be found at:
Cato Institute
http://www.socialsecurity.org/
SSP Report No. 24 p. 6

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98jul/socsec.htm
"The Social Security Trust Fund is an accounting fiction."

http://www.aarp.org/bulletin/departments/2002/news/0405_news_1.html
"Trust Funds: A Healthy Picture"

Q: Which party put a tax on Social Security?
A: The Democratic party.

FALSE

Ronald Reagan signed a bill taxing Social Security benefits.
http://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html#1983

"In the early 1980s the Social Security program faced a serious short-term financing crisis. President Reagan appointed a blue-ribbon panel, known as the Greenspan Commission, to study the financing issues and make recommendations for legislative changes. The final bill, signed into law in 1983, made numerous changes in the Social Security and Medicare programs, including the taxation of Social Security benefits, the first coverage of Federal employees under Social Security and an increase in the retirement age in the next century."

Q: Which party increased the tax on Social Security?
A: The Democratic Party with Al Gore casting the deciding vote.

TRUE, But Misleading

The answer is misleading because it does not mention any specific bill on which Al Gore cast the deciding vote. It may refer to the VPs constitutional power to break a tie vote in the Senate. Thus the reference might be to the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 in which the VP did cast a vote in the Senate to break a tie. This Act was a huge bill that covered everything from agricultural commodities, licensing of radio spectrum, luxury automobile taxes, fuels, banking, Medicare, etc., etc. The bill passed in the House by a vote of 218-216 and in the Senate by 51-50.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d103:HR02264:

|TOM:/bss/d103query.html| H.R. 2264 Latest Major Action: 8/10/1993 Became Public Law No: 103-66.

Q. Which party decided to give money to immigrants?
A: That's right, immigrants moved into this country at 65 and got SSI Social Security. The Democratic Party gave that to them although they never paid a dime into it.

FALSE

1972 Public Law 92-603, enacted October 30 "Other Eligibility Provisions Citizenship and Residence. The individual must reside within one of the 50 states or the District of Columbia and be a citizen or an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence or permanently residing in the United States under color of law." The SSI (Supplemental Security Income) and the automatic annual COLA (Cost of Living Adjustments) based on the Consumer Price Index were pushed, signed, and implemented during the Nixon administration. So immigrants first received SSI under the Republican administration of President Richard M. Nixon.

http://www.ssa.gov/history/pdf/ssi.pdf

Bill Clinton signed legislation barring immigrants from receiving SSI as part of The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.
http://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html

As for my college friend, well, seeing this sort of stuff from her makes me think she's been misled. If she truly dislikes the Social Security legislation described in the email, then hopefully when she discovers the political party she affiliates with signed most of it into law, she will embark on a voyage of self-discovery and realize she's really in cahoots with the Democratic Party on this one. Yeah, I held the Democrats in disdain at one time, but once I overcame my own misconceptions and opened my eyes, wow, everything started making sense.

Cool concept: Flash Mobs. I learned about them after two recent events in New York and London.

By coincidence, I'm planning to use a modified version of this tactic in response to the numerous botched service maintenance visits I've had with the Prius at Oxmoor Toyota's less than capable service department. It's been 10 days since the fiasco that pushed me over the edge, long enough to cool off and come down to earth. I still firmly believe Steve Smith couldn't manage a service team to save his life - independent of my opinion, his incompetence speaks for itself. Steve Smith is also such a common name, hard to single out - my apologies to the innocent Steve Smiths out there. Such a pity his name isn't more identifiable so he couldn't hide in the relative anonymity of its commonness... Horace Finkelsteinmen or Humphrey Cababblesworth III. But I digress.

My meeting the next day with the service department manager revealed the corporate culture of Toyota's customer service division. I met with the manager of the service department the next day, and got the sense my complaints were going to be ignored, or at best, nullified by their 95+% customer satisfaction (if you don't return the mail-in service satisfaction survey, you are considered a "satisfied" customer; oddly enough, I wasn't given a form for my recent visit), the increasing popularity of Toyota positioned to overtake another auto manufacturer this year in terms of autos sold, and because Oxmoor trumps the two other Toyota dealerships in the Louisville area for Prius service because their Prius-certified techs excel in experience and workforce size.

I walked out of there feeling my concerns had been invalidated and, needless to say, it didn't do much for my frustration level. I'm not good at coming up with quick comebacks and arguments - I need time to reflect on a situation - but the experience was so bad it was immediately obvious Toyota Customer Service doesn't care about the individual. Toyota may say otherwise, but perception is reality, and my perception of Toyota Service is they play a volume game.

This problem isn't limited to just my dealership. Doubtless there are good Toyota dealerships, but the bad ones are widespread, not isolated - both are equally dispersed in the dealer network. Many times has the admonition been posted on Prius Internet chat groups, "It's worth the effort to find a dealer with a good service department." Two years ago when I was thinking about ordering a Prius, such warnings troubled me because a word-of-mouth survey amongst friends and co-workers revealed none of the Toyota dealerships around Louisville are exactly renowned for their service departments. I had been driving a Saturn for 4 years and knew Consumer Reports ranked Saturn dealerships #1 in the industry (81%) and Toyota near the bottom of the pack (62%) (see link for details).

Reflecting on these, it suddenly it hit me: Toyota does not manage the customer relationship. "Customer Satisfaction Rating" is a worthless metric, because every dealership service shop naturally has a 95+% satisfaction rating from the customers they haven't pissed off who have yet to take their business elsewhere. Relationship - this is the difference. Focusing on Relationship Management is why Saturn and Lexus (a divison of Toyota) surpass their peers.

Toyota plans to incorporate its Hybrid Synergy Drive into its mainstream vehicles, which has already begun in its Lexus division. Until hybrid technology becomes a commodity, trailblazing consumers must rely on dealers until their trusted personal mechanics gain the expertise, and if dealers play their cards right, this is an opportunity to win back customers lost to independent shops. Gasoline-Electric hybrid vehicles are leading the way to the next generation of clean, fuel-efficient automobiles, and I applaud that, but if Toyota and other manufacturers want their investments in hybrid technology to succeed, dealerships must improve customer service to bridge the gap between their level of customer service and that of a friendly, trusted mechanic.

That is the essence of my Prius Manifesto. First I'll write my own letter to the Prius U.S./North American Product Manager, VP of Customer Retention, CEO, and the Board of Directors. Next, I'll take it to the Prius Internet chat groups and ask them to do the same, focusing on the Prius Product Manager and VP of Customer Retention, and provide a sample letter. The great thing about Prius owners is we're left-wing liberals, believers in social and environmental activism, which gives me great hope for making such a grass roots campaign work. Hear us, Toyota! Prius owners demand relationship management! We demand you provide the service quality of Lexus and Saturn, lest we buy our next hybrid vehicle from a manufacturer who will! (Saturn is releasing a hybrid in late 2005!)

Ever notice how so much in life happens at an inconvenient time? Earlier this afternoon, my mobile phone rang while I was changing the water in my aquarium. I haven't changed the water in over 3 months (and am paying for it with a well-established algae infestation) and, except for sleeping, bathing, and defecating, am never incapacitated from the phone. But not 20 seconds after water began siphoning from the tank, *beep* *beep*. My friend will probably never know he was mere seconds late.

Not all inconveniently timed events in life are so easily ignored. Take death, for example. Two women I love dearly are at odds with death, and they make for an ironic juxtaposition. One is my favorite teacher from high school, the other is my grandmother.

Janis Warfard taught middle and high school English, Literature, Latin, and Yearbook. I took all those classes with her, I loved knowing her that much. It's hard to describe in a paragraph or two why she is so special to me. Charismatic, compassionate, sensitive, so full of happiness and love for the world that she had to give it out to everyone. These are all true. Adolescence is a difficult time in life, and for an unpopular, geeky kid like me, being encouraged for my mental talents and ways of thinking that were different from my classmates' helped me stand my ground despite insecurity, loneliness, and general teen angst.

Five months ago, Mrs. Warford was diagnosed with diffuse brain stem glioma, a form of brain cancer most common in children 4-10 years old, but extremely rare in adults. She had a biopsy to confirm the diagnosis, which paralyzed the left side of her body (the brain stem conveys sensory and motor signals from the brain to the rest of the nervous system). Today she drifts in and out of lucidity with child-like speech slurred partly from cancer, partly from paralysis, and often doesn't recognize her grandchildren. I visited her in the nursing home a couple weeks ago and she told me, "I'm not ready to go." I asked her why she wasn't ready. "Too much left to do." At 57 years old, her grievance is justifiable, but hearing her say it pained me so much that her child-voice haunted my dreams that night.

Oncology has come a long way in 60 years. In 1940, less than 10% of cancer patients were alive 5 years after diagnosis; today the 5 year survival rate is about 50%. If a cancer patient remains in remission for 5 years after treatment, she is deemed free of cancer with much lower odds of recurrence.

Despite decades of steady improvement in treatments, I consider cancer a worst case scenario. It's the fight of your life and the promise of dreading for the rest of your days: The fear and dread of a long, agonizing spiral of deterioration before death (mercifully) comes. And for the lucky survivors comes the nagging dread, never far from thought, that a single seed found refuge and will silently grow for months, maybe years, inevitably announcing the war has not been won.

If there can be such a thing as a worse case scenario in the worst case scenario of cancer, diffuse brain stem glioma would be a prize contender. Diffuse brain stem glioma deals several blows to its victims. Chemotherapy has little effect because few drugs can cross the blood-brain barrier. Surgery is also ineffective, because the tumors are situated deep in the brain, and as the term "diffuse" implies, the neoplasms are not localized in a central mass. Even if the tumors could safely be reached surgically, they couldn't be removed without also removing a large amount of brain tissue from a critical area of the brain, which brings me to my final point. The area in and around the brain stem regulates critical biological functions and relays sensory and motor signals between the rest of the brain and the body. The brain stem is Grand Central Station; hence, a simple biopsy could paralyze Mrs. Warford's left side. For these reasons, victims of diffuse brain stem glioma go quickly if not treated with intense radiation therapy, and even then, most only receive a temporary reprieve.

After considering the side effects of intense radiation therapy, the sole treatment option with less than favorable odds, Mrs. Warford elected to forego medical intervention and make the most of the time she had left. I knew five months wasn't long enough to come to terms with death and find solace, but still, I felt so dejected when she said she wasn't ready. With hardly any cognitive ability, any conscious awareness left, she uses it to lament not being ready to go. There was no hope in her voice, and no acceptance, either - just sadness in the face of forced resignation. You see, what hurt so much when she said "I'm not ready" was knowing that even if she lived 10 years longer, she can't get out of bed and complete the things she still needs to do, and there isn't enough of her mind left for her to reason through and come to terms with dying. If she were given 10 more years, she would spend them locked in a single moment, saying "I'm not ready." With her limited awareness, all she can know is "I'm not ready." She's stuck. When her body dies, her soul will depart sadly.

My grandmother is also at odds with death, but in a different way than you might expect. For my grandmother, death does not come soon enough. She's not going to hasten its approach by doing anything rash, but she is ready for it. I think she's been preparing since my grandfather died in 1996, and for the longest time, I couldn't understand her attitude toward it. At first it was frightening, then confusing. I was talking to Rachel about it not long ago, and she said something that gave me an epiphany. I had been looking at the situation from my perspective as a 20-something, not from my grandmother's. She'll be 89 in September. Most of what is dear to her is long gone: her husband, most of her friends, and an increasing portion of her health. She lives alone, and even though I'm an extreme introvert, if I spent that much time alone and were powerless to change it, I'd probably think the best days were behind me, too, as I nostalgically relived the memories.

As Rachel told me, my grandmother has lived a long life. Once she might have said there was "too much left to do," but not now. She's done all the things that were left to do, and then some. She may not wish for death, but she is ready for it. When it comes, instead of sadly resigning herself, she will welcome and accept it. My grandmother is not dying of untreatable cancer, but she will die someday, someday sooner than later. When my grandmother found the solace and peace that Janis Warford couldn't, I was frightened to hear her express it. Frightened not for grandmother, but for me, because I hadn't accepted the fact she will die. But when I got over my own fear of death and considered it from her perspective, I realized my grandmother couldn't be luckier.

Formula for failure: Try to please everybody.
- Herbert Bayard Swope

I've mixed this formula and become ensnared in the jaws of analysis paralysis enough times (I'm not the sharpest razor in the box) to instinctively sense the teeth cutting into their familiar grooves and incapacitating action long before I can put a finger of conscious awareness on it. In true, profoundly introverted fashion, instead of gleaning the signs from the more direct external events that are easier to interpret, I get an inkling by monitoring the pattern of my thoughts, behavior, and reactions for those tell-tale signs. So after passing the signal through two layers of obfuscation, I'm left trying to interpret an interpretation, which is often futile, and all I can see is an inpenetrable wall ahead.

The intuitive, subliminal message comes through loud and clear: You're going in circles. You've completed the discovery process, and although the quantity of quality data seems woefully inadequate, it's all you're ever going to collect. As your subconscious mind, I can tell you as much, but can't hear what the data is trying to tell us. Get help. This is my cue to seek the sage advice of more extroverted, experienced friends or mentors who are experts at predicting how a train will derail before passing the final junction, when there is still time enough to reroute onto another track. I am nothing without my friends.

* sound of needle sliding across a record *

This post was intended to be about something else. This is why I write and revise them as I go along instead of getting the whole thing out first and going back to revise later, because when doing the latter, I end up with 2/3 of a post orphaned by my sidetracking.

This post was supposed to be about negotiation and self-confidence, but instead discusses my vagaries of project management. The transition of subjects is somewhat understandable, because key to PM success are negotiation and self-confidence. The aspect of it all that is truly ironic, however, is that I am sorely unqualified as an authority on any of these things for one reason or another: either I don't have adequate experience, it's not in my potential abilities, or I lack the confidence - I'm not sure which, but do know one or more is/are at least partially true.

But about trying to please everybody... it's not worth it, not to mention impossible, and often times it's not even worth considering, because the only "everybody" worth considering is you. Two examples to wit: one's chosen profession and career path, or planning a wedding, both of which have recently been foremost on my mind.

Once you're settled on something, have your mind made up, or have been walking down the path for a while, no one gives you much flack. But when you're trying to make a decision, they come out of the woodwork, everyone who is full of suggestions, and if you discuss finding a different path, they're quick to question your judgment, perhaps motivated by not wanting you to repeat their mistakes, perhaps envious of your courage, probably both. After millenia of humans and their machines being firmly attached to the ground, there were plenty of naysayers to undermine Orville and Wilbur's ambitions, until their dream was realized.

My fiancee is suffering, trying to decide the what, where, and how of our wedding amid the opinions and advice of friends and family... myself included. Hmm... well, I guess maybe my opinion should weigh in, but the point is, if she carries the burden of planning, my opinion should play second fiddle to hers. Let's be honest - in American culture, the bride is the star of the wedding, not the groom - and if she plans it, the privilege to veto or cast the deciding vote is hers.

I'm hoping she will realize this, and also that the opinions and wishes of the various stakeholders can be mutually exclusive. After the discovery phase comes the time for action, deciding on one or a combination of three things: selling your ideas and influencing the opinions of others; discerning if and where overlap zones exist and negotiating consensus within those zones; or deciding that negotiating on a particular issue will result in everyone's dissatisfaction, and that the best solution is to veto unilaterally to make at least one party happy, and that might as well be you or someone with whom you wish to reset the balance of things.

I respect and have used all three methods. When used judiciously, each is effective, but when haphazardly chosen, they can wreak destruction. But you have to do something or nothing, which really is something, after all - so that's a fourth method: dropping it all altogether. Yes, you have to do something, and that's the crux of the issue.

You never know the grit of sandpaper until it starts moving.

Lately, I've been experiencing an increasing number of senior moments, certainly enough to give me cause for alarm. No joke. If asked to name the most likely hypochrondriacs in their lives, I doubt friends and family would include me in their list. I'm not one to suffer from the malady of the month, but I've toyed with the idea that all these senior moments are a sign something isn't right.

Today's senior moment at work was traumatic enough to tip the scales. I work from two office locations depending on my schedule; my primary desk is an office at a factory, and my secondary desk is a cubicle at the Forum Office Park. Our building at the Forum has an "A" wing and a "B" wing, which is rather dull, if you ask me, but corporate types embrace this sort of sterile simplicity, the kind that arbitrarily labels locations and objects as if they were bullets on an outline, using collections of meaningless names perfectly suited to languid lists: 1, 2, 3, 4. A, B, C, D. I, II, III, IV. You get the idea. At the very least, they could have been called the East and West wings.

Yes, even as I succumb to dementia, I take time out of my final days of lucidity to notice which cardinal directions the opposing sides of the office building are facing. It pays to know your place in the world. Heck, if you want to name a collection using some sort of sequence, fine, but why not spice it up once in a while to keep it interesting, using, for example, names of the elements? Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, and Carbon. Nerdy? Perhaps, but at least it's not boring. Street names have tired the idea of naming after tree species, but I suppose grasses and agricultural crops could pass - fescue and turnip work for me. Other ideas I entertained were Us & Them, Black & White, Earth & Air, Pluto & Charon, Major & Minor, Peter & Wolf, Cable & DSL, Incandescent & Fluorescent, Deciduous & Coniferous, Romulus & Remus, Nickel & Dime, Strange & Charmed, Up & Down.

Ah, yes... the joy of weblogging, my old pasttime. How I miss it. Other time-intensive activities such as work, school, and Christmas shopping have robbed me of the pure, simple enjoyment of writing.

But what of my senior moment? Well, it was so traumatic, I only told one person three hours after it happened. I sit in the "B" wing. I was walking from the "A" wing to the "B" wing, when I decided to go to the restroom. As a force of habit, I took the path to the restroom as if I were coming from "B" wing, forgetting I was coming from "A." Once inside, I immediately stopped in my tracks. It took at least 3 seconds for the sense of complete bewilderment to pass as I slowly realized why there were two extra toilet stalls where the urinals should have been. After hastily exiting the women's restroom, I was relieved no one was inside and that no one on the outside had seen me go in.

Am I that stressed? Is there really that much on my mind? Maybe the shorter days and longer hours at work are leaving me depressed. I guess it's fair to say I'm not eating as well as I should be, and that more often than not, I'm not getting a full night's sleep, either. That's about it for the causes of dementia at my age, and all are reversible. Oh... but I forgot the chronic fungal and cryptococcal infections, also reversible. I'm hard-pressed to cite a single case of Alzheimer's or Parkinson's in a 27 year-old.

I found one of these heat guns recently. It's a lot of fun to play with, although my neighbors would probably have a hard time seeing beyond the fire hazard. I've used it to melt and reform candles, toast bread, dry out the cards in my business card holder that accidentally went through the washing machine, and melt zinc just for the hell of it. Speaking of zinc, another fun activity has been attaching two electrodes to the 12-volt battery charger I recently took on a camping trip and sticking them in a solution of warm salt water to form hydrogen and oxygen gas. Sometimes I collect enough hydrogen to fill a test tube or old baby food jar and hold it next to a flame. Other than that, I haven't found much use for it.

The heat gun and hydrolysis experiment reminded me of being a kid. And I realized that I'm not as inquisitive as I used to be. As a kid, I froze grasshoppers in the freezer and revived them. Once I tried collecting maple sap to make syrup. I chiseled a section from a slab of bedrock and tried to make concrete, but was unsuccessful (didn't have a source of quicklime handy) and ended up using the carved bedrock as a race track for my Hot Wheels, instead. I explored the creek across the road, drew a map of my travels, and named the islands. I could even be creative and write mediocre poetry. I peered at the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter through the telescope I made out of PVC pipe.

And now... well. What went wrong?

The second significant thing I forgot to mention in the July roundup is related to the first, which was the excision of a mole on my chest. It was benign, but formed between the dermis and epidermis, which is the type most likely to develop into melanoma skin cancer. That means removing it wasn't a complete waste of time.

The second thing I wanted to mention is cancer and the effect it's having on some of those close to me. Sunday was the funeral of a friend's grandmother. Her grandmother had been diagnosed with colon cancer several years ago, had it removed, did the standard cancer treatment, and went into remission for several years. Unfortunately, it came back about a year and a half ago and had already metastasized when her doctor found it.

If you're unlucky enough to get cancer, "metastasize" is not a word you want your oncologist to use. It's when cancerous cells dislodge from a tumor and spread elsewhere through the lymphatic and circulatory systems. Should your oncologist say "metastasize," he or she will also probably use another word you don't want to hear: "terminal."

Given the circumstances, she decided against treatment, wanting instead to enjoy the time she had left with family and friends from church. I think she did what was best for her and her family; cancer treatment takes its toll, and her family didn't have to see her go through that hell again. Thursday night she was fine; a daughter found her Friday morning on the floor next to the bed. She kept her dignity.

Someone made copies of an interview with her that a great-grandchild had done for a school project, asking what life had been like for her growing up. He asked what her dreams were when she was a kid and a teenager, and both times said she wanted to grow up, get married and have a family. She had 7 children, 25 grandchildren, 50 great-grandchildren, and 11 great-great-grandchildren. She was 90 years old and had 93 direct descendants. Her dreams may have been simple, but she knew they would make her happy and she experienced the joy of fulfilling them. Those are two things I haven't known.

She lived a full and happy life, collecting countless memories along the way. She said the worst thing about growing old was outliving your friends. It was her time, and she was ready. She already had everything she wanted, and it showed in her face. I took this picture of her last Christmas. Even then, the cancer had spread throughout her body - she knew it, but she also knew there were plenty of reasons to keep smiling.

And then there's my aunt, who is 35 years younger and isn't through living life yet. A few weeks ago she found a lump in her breast a routine mammogram had missed. She had a second mammogram, but the tumor still wasn't visible. Its shadow was visible on the ultrasound, although the tumor itself wasn't, but her oncologist estimates it's a 4 cm tumor.

I went to the grocery store last night and saw her walk into the checkout line. The Kroger in Fern Creek near my condo is on her way home, so it isn't completely unheard of to run into her, but it's never happened in the three years I've been living here, and it was 9:30 at night, to boot. I had been wanting to talk to her before her surgery later this month, so I got rid of my cart, stood in line behind her and said "hey."

We talked for 30 minutes by the customer service desk at the front of the store about her oncologist appointment earlier in the day. Tumors between 2 cm and 5 cm like hers fall into Stage 2 breast cancer. Stage 2 is further divided into two substages according to whether or not metastasis has occurred in nearby lymph nodes: Stage 2a if no, Stage 2b if yes. The thing is, her lymph nodes must be biopsied to determine the substage.

She's weighing the pros and cons of a new lymph node screening procedure called a Sentinel Scan that might prevent her from having all lymph nodes in the chest and armpit area removed. Extensive lymph node removal increases complexity of the surgery, lengthens convelescence and post-operative pain, and has a risk of causing permanent impairment in the arms.

In the Sentinel Scan, dye is injected in the tissue around the tumor site during surgery. The surgeon only removes lymph nodes that pick up the dye stain within a certain length of time - these are the sentinel nodes. A quick biopsy is done on the sentinel lymph nodes. If they are negative, no more nodes are removed, and the sentinel nodes are sent off for a detailed biopsy; however, if the sentinel nodes are positive, all lymph nodes in the chest and armpit areas are removed. The Sentinel Scan has two risks, however. First, the detailed biopsy may return a positive result the quick biopsy had missed, in which case a second surgery is performed to remove the rest of the lymph nodes. Second, there is a 7%-12% chance the cancer has metastasized past the sentinal nodes despite negative biopsies.

These aren't easy choices she has to make. If she chooses the Sentinel Scan and several remote tumors appear, she's going to spend the rest of her life wondering if she was part of that unlucky 7%-12%, or if the cancer had already spread beyond her lymph nodes, and it didn't make a difference, anyway. Conversely, if she has all the lymph nodes removed and is cured, but loses 70% of the function in an arm, she'll wonder if such aggressive treatment was necessary, and if her arm was damaged needlessly.

The battle doesn't end for her, though. Afterwards, she'll have to endure the pain of recovery and reconstructive surgery, the loss of chest muscle, the changes in body shape, not being able to sit up in bed... the hell of chemotherapy... the long 5 year journey to remission... the dreaded wait for cancer screening results, the constant fear of recurrence in the back of her mind.

She's strong and has kept the will to fight. And why shouldn't she? The odds are clearly in her favor: the survival rate is 88% for Stage 2a breast cancer and 76% for Stage 2b. Still, I admire her determination and will - I don't know how I could overcome the shock and be that strong so soon after finding out. I told her I have no life experience to compare with what she's going through, so I can't even feign pretending to understand, but that I was there for her. It's all I, or anyone, can do.

I hate cancer.

Days like today make a person wonder if it isn't better to turn one's back on the hot, blistering sun and swear off diurnalism altogether, electing instead to spend your waking hours communing with the nocturnal creatures of the night, like cats, screech owls, ferrets, slugs and bats. The world of night is its own ecosystem, hiding from the sun that powers it, venturing out into the darkness to feed on sun-charged morsels left exposed and forgotten by day world's inhabitants.

Like the Dark Side of the Force, the nocturnal world is always present, but hidden from day's view, living in the shadows, under the rocks, inside the hollow tree trunks and beneath the forest's carpet of dead leaves and pine needles. The Dark Side was ubiquitous, yet undetected by the Light Side until it was too late. It operated out of view, its agents seemingly materializing out of the ether to carry out a mysterious agenda and dissolving back into nothingness... and sometimes, the Dark Side dropped a black cloak over a Jedi.

I'm mesmerized by metaphorical patterns, and I've noticed there aren't many others out there who look for them, much less aware they exist. It's my niche, truly something to call my own.

English is a fairly expansive language boasting over 1 million words; 750,000 of these are non-archaic, and roughly 80,000 of those are commonly used and considered well known. Of all the professions in our society, writers and journalists generally have the largest vocabularies, averaging 70,000 word lexicons. That being said, I consider myself an amateur writer, and in all fairness, probably have a 50,000 or 60,000 word vocabulary. I'm also ashamed to admit that I commonly resort to artificial augmentation of my vocabulary and cheat (although I haven't thus far in this post, except to check the meaning of lexicon and make sure it was a suitable synonym for "vocabulary" and not just a seven letter word for "dictionary"). Bear with me, this is going somewhere...

There's probably already a word or phrase in English for what I refer to as "metaphorical patterns," but I don't know it, and I'm also certain an appreciation for them isn't as rare as I'd sometimes like to think - any poet worth their salt has a strong grasp of the concept.

When two or more things - ideas, objects, systems or entities - resemble one another in form, function or purpose, and you can draw multiple connections between the resemblances, you have found a metaphorical pattern. It's like making an analogy, but an analogy only requires one connection and infers other connections must also exist; making metaphorical patterns requires exhaustively finding those other connections for the sake of finding them and offering evidence the nature of the universe is the creative and complex cumulation of numerous, simpler patterns. It's an artform and a science, get it?

The connections between diurnal/nocturnal creatures and the Light and Dark Sides of the Force create a metaphorical pattern. Lucas may or may not have had them in mind, but the connections are there. Let's introduce a third node to draw more connections: the superstring theory of quantum physics. This theory proposes the existence of small, hidden dimensions in addition to the three spatial dimensions and fourth dimension of time to smooth out irregularities between theories for energy, mass, fundamental forces and gravity. I think String Theory has 4 or 5 extra dimensions in addition to the 4 we readily perceive, and most of them are hard to visualize and must be mathematically represented. Oh, yeah - this is some mind-boggling shite we're getting into, to be sure.

In String Theory, every point of spacetime is visualized as a string or membrane... mathematically. Well, so much for a point having no dimensions, right? No, a point still has zero length, width or height; if this string represents the fifth dimension, then the fifth dimension wraps around every point in three dimensional space. Well, at least that's how I think it works... I'm limited to mental representations since I don't understand the math behind it.

The most interesting way I've heard it explained is at particleadventure.org: Imagine walking on a tightrope. To you, the tightrope is a one-dimensional line, because you can only go forward or backward on it. On a much smaller scale, however, say that of a flea, the tightrope is a three-dimensional cylinder. The flea can walk on the tightrope as if it were a plane folded around on itself, allowing it to walk on the tightrope sideways or even upside down, which is something that you, big and massive as you are, simply cannot do. And although particleadventure doesn't take it this far, I'm sure it's fair to say that on an even smaller scale than that of the flea, the tightrope is composed of fibers, allowing a bacterium to wander through the tightrope as if it were a three-dimensional entity, although to you walking on the tightrope, the experience is, for all intents and purposes, a linear trip.

As entire microcosms hide in the small scales of superstrings, so too does the nocturnal world hide behind the surfaces of the diurnal one, as does the Dark Side.

Fractals also exhibit this same sort of infinitely repeating, ever increasing detail as you analyze them on increasingly smaller scales. Well, I guess that's to be expected as that is the definition of a fractal. Visual aids rarely accompany my rants, but the Shodor Foundation's Fractal Microscope and a little PhotoShopping made it possible to create an animation of everyone's favorite fractal, the Mandelbrot Set.

The sequence starts with a 5 second pause showing the entire Mandelbrot Set, centers on an area in the tip, and zooms in for a 32X magnification of another image of the Mandelbrot Set at a smaller scale. Next, we center over a knot in one of the tendrils extending from the mini-Mandelbrot and zoom in to reveal another image of the Mandelbrot in the knot's center at a total magnification of over 65,000X:

As the animation zooms in to reveal ever-increasing detail, try to keep in mind the border of the entire Mandelbrot Set is one, continuous line forming a loop. The loop gets extremely narrow in places, and sometimes appears non-existent as it runs in the center of swirls and tendrils, but zoom in for a closer look and, sure enough, it becomes discernable, curving and swirling in ever greater, indivisible, infinite detail. Such is the beauty of fractals.

Where was I? Oh, yes... musing the wonders of nocturnalism. Last night I went to bed at midnight and woke up when the phone rang at 2:30am. Almost three hours later I was falling asleep again, wondering why the best phone conversations are the ones you have in the middle of the night. I just don't get it. So, after sleeping off and on until 2:30 in the afternoon and not taking my first sip of latte until 4:54pm, three minutes later than 4:51pm (thanks, Donnie) which interestingly is the number of degrees Fahrenheit at which paper catches fire, and feeling on top of the world and the most well-rested I have in months, I was left wondering why I'm always fighting my predilection to be a night owl... like I am right now by forcing myself to end this post and go to bed.

In Part 1, I explained my non-committal pacifist ways (aka apathy), and now, at the risk of veering off course yet again and having to save my original post for part 3, I'd like to add another explanation for my apathy. As I was growing up, graduating from high school and attending university, I was a registered Republican and took the conservative highroad more often than not. After graduating college and joining the ranks of corporate America, that grand bastion of Republican conservatism, my views began to change, and as a consequence, this new liberal is in the process of finding his roots and deciding what he believes.

Maybe it's because I can't help but take an opposing stance to what I perceive as the majority around me. Thus, at university where liberalism reigns, I drifted toward the conservatives, and in corporate America where conservatism reigns, I was drawn to the left. Perhaps when I'm immersed in the rhetoric of the predominant political mindset for a length of time, the realization dawns on me that what I'm hearing is complete drivel and utter crap, because neither the Republicans nor the Democrats sufficiently represent my beliefs. Furthermore, very few politicians earn my respect by having the intestinal fortitude to "do the right thing" if it means losing a few constituents or some face in the process. The two party system has never worked for me, although one is usually a better fit than the other, and at present, I'd say Democrats are a two- or threefold better fit with my beliefs than the Republicans.

You know, the more I ponder the previous paragraph, the more it rings true. More evidence I dislike our two party system: Guess who I voted for in the 2000 presidential election. Go on - take a wild shot. Bush? Only if I checked myself into a sanatorium first. Gore? Definitely preferred to Bush, but not nearly a perfect fit. Nader? Although I'm pro-environment, I thought he was whacked on most everything else. I voted for John Hagelin. He was the Natural Law candidate, and got all of something like 308 votes in the state of Kentucky. After reading his website today, I learned Hagelin is a quantum physicist, which I didn't know at election time. So I voted for a scientist, that profession I hold in higher regard than almost every other because of its strict adherence to a tried and true epistemology, the Scientific Method. Go figure.

On the other hand, I'm having second thoughts about Hagelin after reading his website. The use of phrases such as "Minister of Science and Technology of the Global Country of World Peace" to describe him are unnerving. That alone was enough to make me think, This is not the person I voted for 18 months ago, but it got worse - much worse. In his Proposal to Prevent Terrorism, Hagelin promotes the use of transcendental meditation by 40,000 individuals to defeat terrorism and reduce social violence. Oh, dear...

He cites 50 experiments and 19 published studies that suggest a large group of people performing daily transcendental meditation creates positive feelings and goodwill in the collective consciousness of others in close proximity. I haven't reviewed these studies, so it must be very prejudiced and unscientific of me to express serious skepticism about the idea, but so be it - I am seriously and gravely skeptical. John Hagelin probably won't be getting my presidential vote in 2004.

It's not that I don't believe in the powers of meditation; in fact, I've expressed my Buddhist inclinations more than once or twice in previous posts. For me, the practice of religion and spirituality are deeply personal and private. Meditation unquestionably alters the mental state of the meditator, a change which is easily measurable on an EEG machine. But to suggest my personal meditation will positively influence others around me? At the very least, I think it's fair to invoke Carl Sagan by saying extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Find the nature of this meditative influence, isolate and measure it, and repeat the process over and over again. Then, and only then, will I be convinced.

If I had to venture a guess, I'd say meditation improves the meditator's outlook on life, putting them in a better mood. When a proximal group of people in a society meditate, the improved demeanor of the few meditators is amplified and measurable throughout the population. No metaphysical energies required.

On the other hand, what Hagelin suggests is precisely what Buddhism teaches. Suffering is endemic to human nature, but it is unnecessary. Buddhist monks meditate and pray for humanity to help others on the path to enlightenment so they might understand the nature of and reasons for suffering and purge it from their lives. Metaphysical energies are implicitly required.

What we have here is a classic test of faith. How effortlessly we can simultaneously maintain two conflicting views of the universe around us in our heads - the concrete and the metaphysical - as long as they don't collide like mine are at this very moment! If I believe there is truth in Buddhist philosophies like I say I do, and if reducing the threat of terrorism and the death of innocents is as important to me as I say it is, then I have no choice but to vote for Hagelin should he run again in 2004. Yes, I must, even if I don't think he has the full skillset to be president, because I know he won't actually get elected, which makes it all the more important I vote for him... on principle.

Damn.

I hate getting caught up in quandaries like this. For some of you, it's probably no big deal to put your faith aside in favor of more concrete "common sense" methodologies to resolve issues existing outside the confines of the "Sunday Morning Box," in which case I congratulate you on your mastery of multi-modal thinking.

My happy little voyage of self-discovery takes me to strange and exotic places. No, I'm serious, folks. Did you catch it? Did you notice how "Hagelin is a wacko" I was at the beginning of this post, only to flip around by the end? That's a huge change, and good or bad, I pin all responsibility for it on this weblog, because none of this would have happened if I hadn't created it in the first place - I never would have forced myself down this path of the discovery of my freakish self.

So much for apathy and not taking a stand.

And so much for the real reason why I wanted to write this post, which now must wait for Part 3.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

I'm no political maven, rarely debating or even adopting clear-cut opinions on world issues. There's a reason for choosing one's battles, and I must sheepishly admit it's possible I self-limit to preserve my peaceful and comfortable lifestyle. Eh?, you say? Allow me to explain: Assuming I were to research all current events in depth to become a well-versed pundit and formulate an Official Opinion of Bryan for... well, everything, I know myself well enough to realize it would be impossible to sit here at home on a Sunday evening blathering in my weblog about finding personal Zen in growing herbs, paddling on lakes to commune with Nature, or experiencing the beauty of music.

Even as I am today, with only a vague, detached awareness of what's going on in the world via Internet newsfeeds and the opinions of my fellow webloggers, it's hard to shake a haunting sense of being callous to the plight of other human beings - all 6.1 billion of them. Despite the insulating effects of my vague awareness, that's a lot of callousness for one person to maintain. Nevertheless, my Prime Directive echoes throughout my mind: Must... maintain... comfortable... lifestyle!... Must... remain... fat... dumb... and... happy... at all costs!

Cursed with an intimate, detailed knowledge of all the injustices and cruel deeds committed in the world, an emotional detachment would be impossible to maintain, and failure to take action would mean the loss of all self-respect. I'd have to disobey my Prime Directive daily. It would be like Obi-wan saying, There has been a great disturbance in the Force, and then ignoring the fact an entire world has just been obliterated by a blow from the Death Star. With such awareness, I wouldn't, couldn't be so mild-mannered; at a minimum, I would have joined the Peace Corps long ago.

But Fate is a restless dancer - she always keeps in step with the music, and I missed my cue to join her onstage when the orchestra was playing that gigue. Perhaps it's for the best, though - most of us are meant to stay in the audience, which probably includes me, for I might be many things, but charismatic is not one of them. Hordes of activists wouldn't flock around me as I shouted a call to action, demanding unity as we worked together to make the world a better place to live.

So I've limited and muted my activism to environmental concerns and personal freedoms - particularly the freedom of self-expression, civil rights and equality, and freedom of (or from) religion - on a domestic scale, thus preventing my conscience from ever attaining enough critical mass to do much of anything about any of it, including the two aforementioned issues I believe in the most. Am I a bad person for wanting (and living) a more tranquil life? If I walk down the street and pass someone lying on the curb covered in blood pleading for help and I keep on walking without so much as calling 9-1-1 on my mobile, most would agree I had acted with selfish indifference toward another human being in dire need. If I, or any one of us, walk down the street with the awareness millions of people thousands of miles away are lying on the ground covered in blood or starving or suffering oppression, are we guilty of the same selfish indifference a million times over? Surely not to such an extent... but do you think our consciences are entirely clean? Where do you draw the line?

I didn't write this post to pose answers to those questions, because I don't even know where or how to begin answering them, but that's what it turned into. What was intended as an introduction for something else entirely turned out to be an entire post in its own right. These questions have plagued me for years, and I share them today so you, too, may struggle with them.

Yup, I've got nothin' but love for my readers, asking such unanswerable questions. You should be so lucky.

What I really wanted to say when I began writing this post and more, in part two.

This was going to be a philosophical, woe is me, rags to riches post, but I don't feel like being any of those things. I had a really bad day last year on May 9. Make that night - it was a really bad night, and it began about this time of day, almost exactly at this moment, just after 11 o'clock at night.

I can't do it. Everything I was going to write was planned out in my head, but now it's gone. This sucks.

Oh, that's right - I was going to reflect. Reflect on how life had changed, juxtapose the positives and the negatives. Then I was going to make an assertion about the increased sense of self I now have. But there will be none of that tonight.

Truth is, it's all the same. The only thing that's changed is the year. A year ago and before, I could see a bridge and knew it would have to be crossed someday. Today, I'm on the other side of the bridge walking away. But everything else remains the same. Some things I really enjoy, others only annoy. Good days and bad. Assurances and insecurities. Satisfaction and longing. Certainty and confusion. It's... all... the......... same.

Way back in 1998, a cult called the Unarius Academy of Science began mailing me flyers proudly boasting the heading

A 21st Century Cosmic Event....
Preparation For The Landing
-2001 AD-

Don't look yet as I'll give a tour shortly, but here are scanned pages from one of the flyers grouped for your convenience:

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

My initial reaction was along the lines of "Um, okay," and the flyer was promptly tossed into the garbage can. But more flyers followed, and they kept coming. Of 80 million mailing addresses in this country, why did they pick mine? Well, why not? The real question was why in the hell did they think I was such a promising prospective cult member?

Okay, now read the cover page [1] and introduction [2].

On the cover is a flying saucer with a serious exhaust problem. The Unarius Academy of Science is headquarted in California, and I'd venture to say any vehicle blowing stars and nebulae out the tailpipe is most assuredly not welcome to cruise the 101, even if it is a High Occupancy Vehicle transporting 1,000 scientists and Space Brothers. If the Mytons weren't enlightened enough to invent the catalytic converter, I find it hard to believe the good people of California would have anything to do with them, which is precisely why the Mytons were to be forced to land on the resurrected "Atlantis continent, situated in the Caribbean Sea."

The introduction goes on to talk about the "arrival of our Space Brothers" in 2001, when the "essential ingredients for a new paradigm are coming into parallax." Whoa, whoa, whoa, Cletus - that doesn't make any sense! Where did they come up with parallax? Did they get it from the Pleiadeans' Dictionary of Cool Astronomy Terms Sure to Make You Sound Frightfully Spiritual and Sexy? Do they even know what parallax means, and that its use here makes no sense whatsoever?

R-r-r-r-right. At this point I decided to save a flyer until after 2001 and compare notes with reality in 2002. I stumbled upon it last week when changing desks for my new job at work. Where I work, the bottom of a desk drawer is probably a safer place to stash secret documents than a bank's safety deposit boxes.

The next page [3] is classic - I can't make this stuff up, folks: A crew member on the Starship Hope informs the ship's chief officer, the valiant Captain Star, that they are about to enter earth's atmosphere. And, despite the seething trail of starsmoke Starship Hope leaves in its wake, "none have been alarmed, nor are they in any way endangering our descent," not even the Californians.

Irreverently paraphrasing:

Starship Hope appeared as a large flame and rose more than 500 feet. When they saw it, the first exclamation from the people of Earth was, "Damn, Dawgs! Screw a muffler onto that jalopy, or we, the International Cabinet, be shovin' your Creative Infinite Intelligence up your Muon asses all the way back to Myton, yo!"

The fourth page [4] continues with... ohmygosh!... more meaningless prattle! Particularly informative, I trust, was the behind-the-scenes video documentary of the UFO phenomena. Yes, if you didn't catch it, you missed learning relevent information about the science of interplanetary space travel, because as we all know now from our vantage point in 2002, the Mytons truly removed the "last remaining barrier of spaceflight" with their nebula-fuming spaceships, universal intelligence, cosmic consciousness, and progressive cycles, to name a few!

The next page [5] reveals more startling facts. For instance, did you know U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was actually a Muon, Space Brother to humanity? Yes, it's true - says so on page 5! The reincarnated FDR Space Brother reiterates something he said in a speech during his earthbound years, "There is no fear but the fear of fear, which is the unresolved nature of past-life negative traumas!" Oh, dear! That means years and years of therapist fees have been wasted, when all this time I should have been channeling the Archangel Uriel to remind me the "future of mankind is positive and progressive!"

A detailed explanation of metaphysical mechanics is given on the next page [6]. The spiritual forces governing planetary changes and the New Science of Life are synchronized firmly with the supreme Gregorian Calendar, not other, lesser timescales such as the Jewish Calendar. Why not? Well, the year is 5762 on the Jewish Calendar, and the next Jewish millenium is 239 years away in the year 6001, a worrisome inconvenience for the Muons' agenda!

The last page [7] concludes the flyer's message of good news with a summary of the symposium's agenda. How I wish I had attended - a speech by the self-proclaimed "renowned author" of the Unarius Library, watching the Interplanetary Banner Procession, dinner in the dark, and an actual Live Contact With a Space Brother, all for only $135! Bummer! And, oh, look... the Unarius Academy of Science has a website, complete with Starship Hope's cosmos-polluting stardust, at www.unarius.org! (Beware people of New Brunswick and Newfoundland, for the Unarius Academy website graphic predicts a ferociously peaceful hurricane is coming your way.)

Being that we're in 2002 and all, I know what you're probably wondering: What is the Unarius Academy of Science's explanation for why the Muons didn't visit Earth in 2001? Fortunately for the Muons' eagerly awaiting brothers and sisters on Earth, they sent not one, but two mental transmissions letting us know the 500 foot tall Starship Hope is hovering undetected somewhere in Earth's atmosphere!

They're waiting for "a time or cycle when the majority of earth people will be receptive." Hopefully Captain Star remembered to stock plenty of coffee in the galley before leaving Myton and that jalopy of theirs better have plenty of fuel! Read all about it.

We completed the last of the orbital insertion burns yesterday, and entered an elliptical orbit with an inclination of 60 degrees, 250,000 mile perogee over the northern latitudes on the nightside and an 800,000 mile apogee over the daytime southern latitudes. We're never closer to Jupiter than the earth is to the moon, but even so far away, Jupiter's disc is massive. As we sail away from the globe and approach apogee, the Great Red Spot is swirling into view. I could spend hours in this room gazing out the window, watching the maelstrom feeding on the opposing winds of the zones surrounding the belt it swims through. If you watch intently, you can see the clouds swirling, actually moving before your eyes; if you look away for 15 minutes, Jupiter greets you with a new kaleidoscope of swirling patterns. This planet is vividly alive, but not with countless individuals - Jupiter itself is a living creature, its clouds a chameleonic skin, its lightning storms and aurora a constant song of radio waves, its magnetosphere a powerful lifeforce extending millions of miles into space around it.

I've never been so far away from home, from you. On the other side of the ship looking out the window toward the sun, the now familar semi-bright speck of earth, a crescent through the telescope, waxes slowly over the months as it speeds away around the sun. Each day takes you further away.

I fell asleep watching IFC last night, and behold, sometime around 4 or 5 am, I groggily awoke to an insightful quote onscreen between scenes of a movie:

The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married. - Cyril Connolly

The second module of the MBA program is finished, and I'm glad to be done with it. This semester was demanding, a seemingly endless succession of projects. Yeah, so I'm bitching - it's not as if the pressure was making me crack and frequently run to the restroom to wipe away the tears so no one would see my vulnerable, emotional self, or anything. And yes, I do have a vulnerable, emotional self, and no, it's not that far below the surface.

Truth be told, it really isn't that bad. Bellarmine's MBA program isn't difficult, but it is a lot of time-consuming work. The classroom discussion is based on business cases, so either you read them or you're lost and unprepared. Any master's program requires setting aside time to read 100-150 pages weekly, time most normal people would rather spend with less soporific material, or just doing something else altogether. Bellarmine compensates for its test-free MBA program with a plentitude of presentations, projects, and assignments, all group-based.

If you haven't spent time working in a group - and I really mean doing everything as a group, not where everyone does their own thing, effectively working as disparate units with enough common goals to call themselves a "team" - you might think the team-based approach eased the burden for everyone by spreading the work around. At least that's what I thought, but reality had other lessons in store for me. Working around busy schedules, the importance of communicating effectively and often, delegating tasks, incorporating everyone's work into a seamless product, compensating for the occasional missed deadline, resolving squabbles... the overhead required to ensure the team functions as a productive, organized unit almost negates the benefits of a shared workload.

On the other hand, someone like me with a non-business background doesn't have to consult a textbook or hunt down a professor when they don't know how to do something; instead, they go to the team, discuss, learn and share together, arrive at a consensus, and develop their ability to work with others. This is assuredly the greatest benefit of a team-based approach in an academic environment.

Musings about group dynamics aside, school's out of the way until our trip to Nicaragua in June. This gives time to focus on my new job at work. I have many needless, senseless phobias and lesser anxieties, so it should come as no surprise that I am so abolutely, positively terrified of change. There, I admit it - my risk averse tendencies are nearly paralytic in scope. I have my mother to thank, God love her. To her, everything poses a potential threat - a shift in direction of a gentle, spring breeze could mean a twister-spawning storm will soon reign destruction upon us.

I'm exaggerating, of course. Here is a faithful assessment, though: To my mother, being successful is the result of a lucky combination of circumstances, and changing terms in the equation is to risk bringing down the castle walls. To some extent, she may be right, but she overlooks two critical points: 1) talent and skill have more influence than chance, and 2) the way things are today isn't necessarily the best they can ever be - sometimes improvement requires radical change.

I've had several springtime pruning sessions with my herbs over the past week. Today I pruned my rosemary for the second time after realizing the truth of one of horticulture's greatest secrets. When the days started getting warmer and longer, my rosemary plants started sprouting new growth - which was great, except the growth was unsightly. The new leaves were small, curly and spread further apart than the existing leaves, making the new growth stand out like a bad haircut.

When I first pruned the rosemary last week, I did it to remove the most hideous of the unsightly new growth, with the idea of hopefully enticing the rosemary to grow denser, more attractive leaves. Today I was layering a branch in the soil to propagate new rosemary plants for use as bonsai and noticed the roots in the pot were rather dense. That's when it hit me - after less than one year, my rosemary is about to outgrow its pot.

I hadn't planned on repotting it after the first year, but hey, rosemary is an herb, not a tender, slow growing tropical, and I have been using Miracle Grow regularly. Problem is, I'm trying to propagate two branches by layering them and will soon need a fresh supply of rosemary for a couple projects I have planned this summer, and transplanting it to a larger pot would disturb the layering and prevent me harvesting more than a few branches.

So I pruned the rosemary again today, this time removing anything that didn't look in top condition, and then going back to remove some that did. I'm betting that removing a lot of weak growth now will stave off the need for repotting until next year, or at least until after I begin harvesting it heavily later this summer, while at the same time encouraging the growth of a few additional, healthy branches in place of numerous useless and spindly ones.

While pruning the rosemary, I realized an entity can grow to fill its container. If it tries to keep growing, any new growth is meager and unhealthy looking, and ultimately weakens the entire organism. Sometimes the best way to ensure continued, healthy growth is to make radical changes, as severe and painful as they may seem. This is as true of large corporations in times of layoffs and downsizing as it is of people and rosemary.

When trying to understand the governing principles of macroeconomics or any largescale system, I've found Nature to be one of the greatest teachers. New growth is often haphazard and ill structured to serve as a foundation for unplanned future growth. It may hamper the well-being of the organism. When I was younger, I remember watching my mother's daffodil and tulip plants during the spring and summer. The plants died away each year so that the bulb hidden underground could survive until the next spring and flower again. As I was pruning the rosemary, I could pull off much of the unsightly growth without so much as a tug, much less pruning shears. This growth would have died and fallen off, anyway, as the rosemary naturally pruned itself. Behold Nature's version of the pink slip.

So where were we? Ah, yes, risk aversion... and that, I am. Sometimes we find our roots in a spacious pot with rich soil and plenty of water, and we grow, grow, grow until there are roots everywhere and nowhere else to go. In order to grow again, we must stop searching for new places to go inside our root-bound pot and instead leave our comfort zones - accept the small risk incurred by pruning ourselves back and finding a larger pot, as it were, in order to achieve fulfilling growth again. As my plants would tell you if they could, it's stressful and there are only a few times a year it can safely be done, but it's almost always worth it, and there's nothing like the feeling you get when your roots find fertile soil and can grow unimpeded.

Someone was telling me about a rather cool talent they had and said rather frankly, "It's a gift from God; I don't know any other way to explain how I can do it."

A humble statement like that said at the right moment makes one ponder on a number of fronts. As it sifted in, I didn't have a response to this statement. I realized the crusade to purge my spirituality of the fallacies of religion had gone a bit too far, dimming my soul in the process. The closest analogy I can think of is chemotherapy, a precarious balance between healing and poisoning.

From the time I could first think abstractly, question ideas and come to my own conclusions, my upbringing in a rural Southern Baptist church and love of science have been in a fierce struggle to win control of my belief system. When I was younger, the theories of Creation and Evolution somehow peacefully co-existed in my head, colliding only briefly until I was about twelve and entered puberty, at which point all hell broke loose, no pun intended.

I'm a Star Trek fan, for which I make no apologies. I don't wear Vulcan ears, don't own a Starfleet uniform and don't read starship manuals. The attraction for me is in what Star Trek represents, a universe in which humanity has achieved a higher awareness and can finally dedicate its resources to answering the ultimate question "What's the universe all about?" In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Dr. McCoy says, "According to myth, the Earth was created in six days, but watch out, here comes [Project] Genesis - we can do it for you in six minutes!"

I had watched that scene several times since I was seven years old when ST:II was released, but to my 12 year-old mind, its meaning suddenly took on a whole new dimension. According to myth. Myth. Creation had presented some problems vis-a-vis Evolution, but it had never occurred to me one of the two might be the stuff of mythology. The Creation versus Evolution conflict would have erupted in my head sooner or later, but I happened to pop a Star Trek movie into the VCR at just the right moment, and that's how the greatest of all my internal struggles began. No, Star Trek is not evil - that's something that might be said at the church where I grew up - Star Trek simply made me think. That's what Star Trek is good for - it's always made me think and wonder.

Up to this point, I had accepted Southern Baptist religious teachings as fact. My religious beliefs had never been questioned, so when science came into my life, bringing with it a methodology known as the Scientific Method to gather data and test hypotheses for the purpose of proving or disproving them, a paradigm shift took place. I recognized the Scientific Method as the epistemological system, the ultimate foundation on which knowledge was acquired.

Faced with a religion relying on faith alone and a methodology that could not be denied, fact defeated faith. Up until this point, I never really had faith, because I had accepted religious teachings without question, so it isn't that surprising I embraced atheism sometime between the age of 12 and 14. Without faith to support it, my religion could not stand up to the test of science.

The atheism bit lasted for about 6-9 months, when I continually found myself meditating with a presence in my heart. I pushed it away only to find myself once again meditating and drawing comfort from this presence a short time later without realizing it. The tables had reversed as faith emerged and grew in me. The conflict intensified as my sense of spirituality sprang up and co-existed in seemingly direct conflict with the science whose facts I could not deny.

One day I could support the burden of heart versus mind no longer, and in meditation I told this presence, which I now called God, "I believe you are real, but I cannot accept the concept of you as presented by my religion. I must begin my own journey of spirituality to understand what I can of your nature."

The journey hasn't been easy. I'm too stubborn to accept the concept of God as presented by any Christian church I've been to, so my journey has largely been a private one. The concept of God in the organized religions I've studied is one of an all-powerful and perfect entity, but who acts on the scale of a human. I really can't describe it better than that - it's a vague, conceptual impression I get. Whatever the case, God appears all powerful, yet Its existence is somehow limited by the religions I've known.

I think Bill Moyers said it best. If you look at the long-standing religions of the world, you'll find the essence of the nature of God. I couldn't agree more. Religions have two layers of beliefs; at the core are the moral beliefs and on the outside are the ceremonial beliefs. The core beliefs are common in all the long-standing religions: don't murder, be truthful, love others as you love yourself, and that sort of thing. I think you're well on your way if you recognize the core beliefs and hold them dear to your heart. Examples of ceremonial beliefs are Buddhist Prayer Wheels, the Lord's Supper, confessionals, and Jihad; they aren't key to spirituality, but many find it helpful to establish a ritual and routine of worship.

At this point, I'm about half done; I'm in a groove and could go on for a while, but seeing as it's 1:30am and I've made several statements that some could perceive as dissing religion (though this isn't at all my intention), it's a good stopping place. Perhaps more later.

But you get my point: sometimes a simple statement said rather matter-of-factly can really make you think.

First, a Flash egg timer (a la Monty Python) by way of pop culture slut.

Second (maybe I've linked to this before), one explanation of the movie 2001.

Earlier this week I went to the grocery store. One of the items on the list was peanut butter. I was drawn to a blend I hadn't seen before - "natural" peanut butter. Unlike it's blended-until-smooth-and-creamy counterpart, the natural peanut butter had brown specks of not-completely-pulverized peanut skin. The ingredient list read like the ingredient list on a product full of goodness should: Roasted peanuts, salt. I thought to myself, This looks like my kind of peanut butter, put the jar in the grocery cart and moseyed on over to the cereal aisle.

Later in the week was the grand opening of the jar of "natural" peanut butter, and my first impression was profoundly disappointing. It's natural, all right; I'm sure it's just like the peanut butter they used to make at home it in the late 1800s. The brown specks did not provide the pleasing texture I had hoped for - the peanut chunks were too small, and the sensation was one of grittiness. Even after stirring well, the consistency bordered on runny, like jelly or preserves, and not at all smooth and spreadable - I easily could have poured it out of the jar and onto the bread like lumpy molasses.

So far we've established "natural" peanut butter is ugly, but that's no big deal - we eat ugly food all the time. Have you ever looked closely at a cheese or shrimp ball? How about a pate? The speckledness of these foods is like finely grained granite, and not unlike my natural peanut butter. I could have lived with the visual undesirables and been happy were it not for the flavor. When selecting the natural peanut butter, I applauded the absence of added sugar, but when eating the natural peanut butter, I lamented it. You'd never guess how much a little sugar can do for the flavor of a bunch of nuts. And yes, peanuts are legumes - not nuts - but I really wanted to say something about a bunch of nuts.

Suddenly it dawned it on me. This is not my kind of peanut butter - it tastes like poo. That's life. If you want to be sure you pick the best peanut butter, you have to risk picking the worst and have faith that one day in the not too distant future, you'll stumble onto the Holy Grail of peanut butters and live happily ever after eating kick-ass PB&J sandwiches.

It's a romantic concept, but a cool one worth having. And that's all I have to say about that.

How easy it is for us to dwell on the negative in our lives, but that's where wit and wry humor - the best things in life - are to be found hiding.

I'm 26 years old and have lived in Kentucky all my life. Many of you may think I'm culturally "less fortunate" as a result, and if this is the case for you, please make your checks payable to the "Bryan Travis Cultural Amelioration Fund." A few of us may have family trees woefully bare of branches, but we'll gladly accept your generous contributions if you think we're somehow disadvantaged. It's for a good cause - with your help, we could purchase Uncle Billy Bob's first pair of shoes this Christmas. But this post is not about Kentucky and the Great Appalachian Nightmare, so before I get too carried away, I digress.

Kentucky is not exactly the heart of Tornado Alley, but even so, we get more than the American average. When I think of what goes with tornadoes, the first things that come to mind are trailer parks and hail. Hail and tornadoes go together like America and apple pie, or however that saying goes; quick - someone call George Bush! He'll know how it goes! He's the self-professed expert on Americans and their needs and wants.

Despite the summer thunderstorms and twisters that come our way, in 26 years I've never seen larger than pea-size hail. In Kentucky you hear about inch or golf ball-size hail on the radio falling in some obscure place from time to time or see home videos of it when TLC airs Nature's Fury, but it's never something you see in person. It's such a freak occurrence.

Today is February 24, and right now, it's 30 degrees F outside. It's winter, folks, let there be no doubt about it. You can imagine my surprise last Wednesday afternoon at work when one-inch hail began pounding the roof. This sort of thing is not supposed to happen on February 20. The wind picked up and inside the office, all we could hear was roaring and pounding above our heads. This is so uncool, I thought to myself, less than two months, and the Prius is screwed!

It lasted less than 2 minutes and ended more abruptly than it had begun, as hailstorms often do, and everyone walked out into the winter wonderland as the mass exodus to the parking began. Normally, I would call it an "eerie winter wonderland" when describing the scene after a hailstorm since they usually occur in late spring or summer, but as this is February, it's a stretch to call ice on the ground "eerie," except that it was a layer of rapidly melting ice pellets one-half to one inch across.

DWebb and I walked out together to check on our vehicles - his PT Cruiser is only a few months older than my Prius. With the hail and water droplets on our cars, neither of us could find anything wrong. Relieved, we went back inside.

When I got home Wednesday night after the water had evaporated, I reexamined the Prius using the garage light's reflection on the body panels to look for dents. Sure enough, the smooth curves of the reflection distorted and bubbled in numerous spots as I slowly moved my head along the Prius' contours. Note to self: remind DWebb to double-check his PT Cruiser.

I'd like to pause for a moment as I was examining the Prius' body panels so I may inject a touch of irony to the plot. Auto insurance for a Toyota Prius is very expensive, on the order of $1,650 per year for full coverage with good driver status. That's something to consider if you're thinking of buying one and joining the ranks of the Priusceti. I had the foresight to check ahead of time, and it's a cost I'm willing to accept; try to do the environment a favor, and this is what you get in return as part of the package, although the premium should drop as more Prii get on the road and, unfortunately, generate some real world crash data. Your mileage may vary by insurance company, no pun intended. The global conglomerate I work for owns a few insurance companies, so I probably didn't shop around for car insurance as much as I should have since my employer compounds several employee-related discounts.

Where's that irony? Oh yeah - well, with insurance as expensive as it is for the Prius, I had to do a bit of cost-benefit analysis. The difference between a $250 and a $1,000 deductible over 5 years was greater than $1,000. Understandably, I thought full coverage with a $1,000 deductible was a prudent decision since I can liquidate that much at any given time, and a safe driver can reasonably expect to be in an auto accident less than once every 5 years.

Inside the garage, as my eyes followed the reflection of the light over the contours of the Prius, I became acutely aware of why I have no interest of ever going to Las Vegas. I had made an educated gamble about car insurance using statistics and lost. I was about 67% confident something like this wouldn't happen for at least 5 years, long enough for me to produce the $1,000 deductible from insurance premium savings instead of having to pay it out of pocket - even the insurance agent could appreciate my logic. Yet against all probability, it had happened in less than 2 months: an act of God, a true freak of nature - a one-inch hailstorm in February. In north-central Kentucky something like this is undoubtedly a once in a lifetime occurrence. Too bad it had to be in the infancy of the Prius' lifetime and at the point in my lifetime when I had just bought my first new car.

What can you do? I suppose some people would be sick over it and others would curse the universe, their dumb luck or whatever constructs they form in their minds to visualize the intangible and make it tangible so they can channel their undirected frustration. For me, this is one of those times when Buddhist beliefs and putting things in perspective are more helpful than usual, and that's putting it lightly, my friends. Buddhism acknowledges feelings of strife are part of human nature, but the vast majority of it is unnecessary.

How true! I am blessed with health, family and friends. All my material needs have been met, as have most of my emotional needs; in fact, I honestly think I've made good progress down the path of self-actualization for someone who's only 26. That's not to say I'm happy as a lark all the time, or even that I'm comfortably satisfied only a fraction of the time, but as far as it goes when it comes to knowing what it's about, or at least how to get to a point someday where figuring it out will be somewhat possible, I think I'm doing okay. Point is, I'm at a place today where it's evident a few dents on the roof and hood of my new car don't matter, and there are a lot of potential problems I don't have that really would merit concern.

In a nutshell, despite this freak of nature, I'm luckier and better off than I'll probably ever know, and chances are (beware my previous statistics experience) if you have the luxury of browsing web sites reading weblogs, so are you. Remember that. Everyone who reads this is basically free (although Ali and I have opposing views on free will, free choice and the difference between the two, if there is any) to take any risks (I should also note Ali's statistics skills are better than mine) they desire and attempt to become or do whatever they wish with the rest of their lives.

My kingdom for a horse! "Life sucks" is a relative term. If you're fat, warm and happy, life sucks when you get a hangnail. If you're famished, cold and destitute like two billion people in the world are at this moment, life sucks if you can't find your next meal, and you'd give anything to only have a hangnail to worry about.

So, to hell with one-inch hailstones - I'm lucky to have a car to get inside of when an unexpected storm blows in. And to hell with the deductible, too. I have big hopes and dreams for my Prius: I actually entertain the notion that the 2001-2002 Honda Insight and Toyota Prius will be collector's items someday when we're driving fuel cell vehicles. Hey, it's not that outlandish - the Prius and Insight are the first steps in a new direction and their numbers are extremely limited - so I'm hanging onto my Prius, and I'll pay the deductible. I'll recover it someday.

It's 1:30 in the morning and I'm feeling philosophical, or maybe it's more like contemplative. Whatever it is, it's no way to be when what you really want to feel is the soothing pleasure of sleep.

I was driving home from a friend's house when a sudden urge to take a long drive came over me. A Barenaked Ladies CD was playing, and maybe it put me in the mood to keep singing along. It painted quite a picture, driving my hybrid car at 12:45am on the curviest road I could find, playing loud music while I blared along in unison, face bathed in the green and orange glow of the touchscreen display.

During the summers in high school, I'd spend entire days riding my 12 speed bike on the rural roads where I grew up. My favorite trips were finding scenic spots on cooler days when I could pack a lunch and notebook to write poetry. It was an overwhelming sense of serenity and solitude.

Those were the days, and the feeling from driving in the Prius tonight with only the electric motor running was a close match. As I got home and pulled into the garage, the temptation to put the transmission in reverse and drive through the night was immense. I could have driven around the world if the oceans weren't in the way.

What's the point of all this? None that I am aware of, except for a growing sense of 21st century weekend warrior wanderlust. Oh, springtime, where are you? I want to grab my camera, hop in the car, find a scenic locale to rejuvenate the soul and make a vain attempt to capture its beauty and breathtaking splendor with a camera.

This is the most aimless crap I've written in a looong time. No marijuana was smoked in the writing of this post, honest. Sometimes, no matter how contemplative you feel, mental clarity isn't an option. I'm going to bed.

In 2001, an American is exposed to as much information in a single day as an American living in 1900 encountered in an entire lifetime.

Source: A knowledge management presentation written by someone in the I/T department of my company; despite this and despite being a member of said I/T organization, I'm sure this information originally came from a reputable source.

They aren't kidding, folks - disbelievers should read this and ponder for a few moments. Three billion is a huge number. So huge, in fact, you can't possibly fathom it because you don't have enough fingers and there isn't a wall tall or wide enough to hold that many bottles of beer, although I'm told McDonald's has grilled over 100 billion burger patties and served them between 200 billion pieces of bread.

Speaking of, have you ever wondered where those 100 billion burgers came from, where they go and if a burger has ever been a burger more than once? It takes a lot of pasture and a lot of dead cows to produce that much beef. When people eat 100 billion beef patties - that's 100,000,000,000 (!) - they have to crank out a helluva lot of feces. With so much land put aside for cattle grazing, where does all the feces go? Sewer sludge is an excellent fertilizer. Okay, I think you know where I'm going with this. Cycles are everywhere: the water cycle, Krebs Cycle, solar cycle, economic cycle, nitrogen cycle, life cycle and the motorcycle - so why can't we acknowledge a beef-poop-grain-cow-beef cycle?

I think we all agree I'm a mean philosopher at 3am, so I'll accept your groans and shrieks of pain as acquiescence and just go to bed.

Dudes, what gives? It's December 8 and I haven't begun my Christmas shopping yet! Ha ha, that's a joke, get it? My Christmas shopping never gets started this early. But seriously, it's December 8 and I haven't put up the lovely, artificial Christmas tree yet.

Whoa, that is serious! Last year, I put up the tree on Election Day night as the confusion over who won the presidential election unfolded. Little did I know, it was the beginning of a three month saga that would culminate in discarding every election ballot in the nation except for nine.

For some reason, perhaps because I'm so busy with things like school and work that drain yuletide joy right out of you like a huge hole in a mop bucket, I'm just not getting into the Christmas spirit this year. Tonight is the night to fight that blight right out of my hair! The tree is being assembled, strung with lights and decorated tonight, by damn! And thanks to my good friends at KaZaA and Morpheus, I have 353MB of Christmas music goodness to cram that Christmas spirit down my throat!

Even Smashing Pumpkins wrote a song about Christmastime. If the spirit of Christmas can calm a semi-angry-music band like the Smashing Pumpkins and fill their hearts with love and joy, then surely, surely it can do the same for mine.

My heart is tingling.

Meep! How disturbing...

If I were a work of art, I would be Edvard Munch's The Scream. I express the subconscious troubles and anxieties of the world. I hold my head and let loose the primal terror of my innermost fears, surrounded by a lurid landscape which reflects my feeble grasp on reality. Which work of art would you be? The Art Test

The significant other, who lives 360 miles away, called while dinner was cooking, changing the course of the weekend, which was off to a slow start after an uneventful Saturday morning...

With no latte until 3pm, my tell-tale coffee drinking habits betrayed the sort of lazy, funk mood I was in. When the beans were ground and the wondrous infused elixir came out of the espresso maker, the evil withdrawal demons had already put such a fierce constriction on the blood vessels in my head that I could hardly think for all the pain.

By 3:30pm the headache was gone, and the world suddenly took on richer, more vibrant colors and worthwhile living was again possible. The overall effect was a combination of The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy steps out of her house after the tornado drops it in Oz and the mountain field scene from The Sound of Music.

By 4pm I was showered - there's no denying I celebrate laziness on my free weekends, but I always bathe daily. Next mission was food, then I would be prepared to conquer whatever. Setting up the Christmas tree? Absolutely! Cleaning off the dining table? Pshaw! Fighting off Genghis Khan and his horde of Mongols? Bring it on, tough guy! Sure, most of Saturday's daylight hours had been squandered, but it's the quality, not the quantity; for those last 90 minutes of daylight, I was going to be the meanest, toughest weekend warrior this end of Bear Creek... well, at least I felt like I could fly if I jumped off the roof, even if the laws of physics had other ideas.

So, the significant other calls about this time, and we talk for a few minutes about how we both started the weekend in a similar funk, and wouldn't it be great if we could visit. I lamented the meeting with my MBA team the next morning, a commitment which kept me from leaving town, and the S.O. says she could be here in four hours. "You mean six," I corrected her (her city is 360 miles from mine), but she insisted it was only four hours. It took a couple times to sink in - she'd been on the road for two hours. What a pleasant surprise!

After she arrived later that evening, events of no interest to anyone else ensued, like the bottle of lambic ale; good stuff, that lambic - drinks almost like wine. Let's just fast-forward along...

I woke up at 4:30 in the morning, watching her for a long time as she slept. Life works out in the strangest ways. It seemed the realization of how deeply I felt for her had come only too late. Yet here she was - this woman I know I will always love, the person I long to spend the rest of my life with, the very one I feared was gone for good - sleeping mere inches away, so close I could feel her breathing.

The wave of emotion hit me like a ton of bricks - it was too much. I wanted to hold her in my arms until the sun came up, and then keep holding on for a little while longer, but I didn't want to wake her. So I cried, instead. Yes, me. I broke down into tears, and my sobbing woke her up, anyway.

I'm not sure why it happened. It was everything, it was nothing. Joy, hurt, love, regret, relief, grief, gratitude, fear, forgiveness, anger, recognition, confusion, fulfillment, anxiety, peacefulness - the emotions swirled inside me one after another more quickly than they could be discerned.

We held on to one another in the wee hours of the morning, she a bit confused, and I unable to explain, as the tears ran down my cheeks. And it felt so good.

I've been suffering from Weblog Writer's Block during the past couple weeks, so I read a few previous posts and found one where I mentioned my coffee fetish, saying it was a subject for another post. Today's a fine day for another post.

Truth be told, it's not so much a coffee fetish as it is a caffeine addict-, err, fetish. "Fetish" sounds rather more desirable than the "a" word. Of all the drug dependencies, though, caffeine is the most socially acceptable. Consider a few other addictive substances: Crack cocaine? Too dangerous. Nicotine? Grounds for social ostracization. Heroin? Collapsed veins are out this year. Quaalude? That's for heroin addict wannabes. Amphetamines or barbiturates? Nope, everyone'll think you have no control. Marijuana? No one smokes that past college. Alcohol? Come on people, even alcoholics don't think alcoholism is acceptable.

How many misguided Google searches do you think that paragraph will send my way? Over the past few months, I've risen to be the number one hit for "scatterplot" and "funtongue," thanks to all the links out there named "funtongue scatterplot" pointing back here. You see, Google not only ranks a site according to its content, but what other people have to say about it - this phenomenon is well-known and feared by many former disbelievers. Perhaps for my next act, I should try to wrestle the number one hit for "crack cocaine" from cocaine.org, but what would that prove? There used to be a funtongue.com that specialized in, umm, shall we say, "adult entertainment," and a search for "funtongue" would return hits precisely for that genre. I've pushed all those links to the bottom of Google's results. Isn't that enough? Must I also lay seige on "crack cocaine?"

What about my caffeine fetish? I have one, dudes... and it's a serious one. If I don't find a rich caffeine source within 2-3 hours of waking, the blood vessels in my head begin constricting. That puts a serious hurt on my style at work: instead of being my usual immersed in work, do not disturb, reserved self who tolerates interruptions from clients with occasional manic outbursts, I undergo "An Incredible Hulk"-like transformation to become Uber Bastard, an evil twin who looks like he hasn't slept in two weeks, scowls at everyone as if they're to blame for it, and communicates only in grunts, under-the-breath curses and one line emails. I'm not exactly a social butterfly who's fixated on being everyone's favorite bud at the water cooler and office parties, but I recognize my Uber Bastard persona is more than anyone should have to endure - even Uber Bastard himself knows it, but it can't be helped.

It's a chemical addiction, people - it's not something that can be turned off! (There, I said the "a" word) My need for caffeine is no less vital than your need for oxygen, so before suggesting to Uber Bastard that he should "chill" or "get over it, already," try holding your breath for a few minutes first and see just how cordial and focused you can be. If you can successfully overcome your oxygen addiction, then I promise Uber Bastard will respect you and not step on or kick your face, but instead will step over your dead, asphyxiated body in the aisle on his way to get water for his first pot of coffee of the day.

Coffee and I go back a long way, at least since I was 10 years old, and I suspect we're going to go forward even longer. As a child, adults told me coffee would stunt my growth, but I knew better - coffee was my friend, it would never betray me like that. Plus, even as a child, I knew human growth hormone and a well-balanced diet were the overwhelming contributors to growing taller.

I learned at any early age that some adults lie to children unceremoniously, but tend to do it using a certain tone of voice. I remember once when I was six and asked an adult what went on in my stomach to digest food. She told me in a particular tone of voice there were "choppers" in my stomach, like bunches of little knives, cutting up the food into little pieces. I believed her for a while (hell, I was only six), then found out the truth about a year later. That scarred me for life - I still have flashbacks to this day when the subject of digestion comes up in daily conversation - no joke. She may have been speaking metaphorically - the "little choppers" were enzymes breaking proteins into amino acids - but young children are incapable of abstract or symbolic thinking. She should have known better.

Her tone of voice, though... when I found out the truth about digestion, I remembered the tone of voice she used, and I immediately distrusted anything an adult using that tone said to me. Adults spend a great deal of time using that tone when talking to children; the most common examples include:

• Coffee stunts your growth!
  
• Uh-oh, I hope Santa Claus doesn't find out about this.
  
• God loves good little boys and girls who are quiet in church and don't ask questions about dinosaurs and monkeys.
  
• Did you see that? I just saw the Easter Bunny hop across the road; he must be checking to make sure you're buckled up.
  
• Don't let the boogeyman catch you!
  
• The tooth fairy doesn't leave a dollar if a tooth has a cavity, so you'd better brush!

My caffeine use was very moderate throughout high school. Things changed my freshman year in college with the approach of fall semester finals. One Saturday morning I drank a whole pot of coffee (10-cup size) and spent the rest of the afternoon all jittery-like with frequent heart palpitations. What a welterweight I was! But something about my biochemistry changed after the experience. I worked as a summer intern for my current employer between my junior and senior years of college and religiously drank several cups of coffee each morning because starting work at 8am was a bit of a bummer. That fall when I returned to the routine of college with the first class of the day at 10:30 or 11:45, I started getting these huge headaches before lunch, which went away after I ate. It could have been blood sugar, except I ate breakfast every morning. It took a few weeks of experimentation before the connection was made between the Mello-Yello I had at lunch and the cessation of my headache.

That started my tea phase, which was fortunate, because it would soon give me an excuse to invite Rachel to tea one afternoon after Bacteriology lab, for it was my passion for tea and the whimsically philosophical rants in which I went on about its pleasures and wonders that led her to the realization freaky, eccentric people are amusing and make wonderful partners, and that I was one of them, even if I couldn't make up my mind about her at the time. Tea is great stuff. I infused a pot today at work, and even now a tingling, relaxed sensation washes over me. Jasmine tea is my favorite, and I am proud to say I discovered and enjoyed chai before it became fashionable in the United States.

These days, though, I'm an avid cafe latte fan. I've been known to drink as many as three triple lattes in a day, which works out to nearly 1,000 milligrams of caffeine - that's like taking 5 No-Doz, folks! When I first embarked on this new plateau of caffeine consumption, I went to the dentist and the hygienist offered to take my blood pressure (just something she does to pass the time after she finishes cleaning while waiting for the dentist to arrive), and naturally, it was borderline high. Six months later my body had fully adjusted to such megadoses, and my blood pressure was back to normal on my next visit to the dentist. What my hygeinist didn't notice, however, was that I had lost nearly 30 pounds, thanks in part to the caffeine - but that's a story for another post.

So take it from me: with proper training, your body can learn to cooperate with caffeine and appreciate it for the miraculous chemical compound it is. The measure of any human's metabolism is its ability to utilize caffeine, befriend it, and ask for more. Personally, I worship that wonderful molecule - it's even on my coffee cup - so if you're looking for a great Christmas present, think caffeine and more caffeine... and don't forget this or this from a previous post, either.

And whoever said Christmas shopping for me was hard? Seriously, dudes, just think "caffeinated products," and you can't go wrong.

There's a song stuck in my head. It's been there for a while, and since I haven't written for a few days, I'll take the liberty of blaming the absence on the song. It's just a song - it can't put up a fight, although it can stick in my head for the better part of a week.

The song stuck on continuous repeat is "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" by The Proclaimers, which may help you understand this post's title. Why the song has been going through my head is a story for another post. I'm here to tell you a story about something the song reminded me of from my past, a story that took place long, long ago when I was barely in high school, a story I thought about numerous times over this past weekend during the long hours spent driving.

This is a story about Julie, my first crush. Remember your first crush? It awakens something in you, releases a Pandora's box of emotions, and your outlook on the world is never the same. When the emotional flood washed over me, I was taken by surprise - I had never known such feelings before. These new emotions were so foreign and powerful, yet pleasant, and I had to fight the urge to walk around with a big, dumb grin on my face lest the steady stream of drool ruin my leather tennis shoes. It had that kind of an effect on me!

As far as personality goes, I have to say Julie was really cool. We grew up in Kentucky, but compound that with living in Spencer County, which was and still is exceptionally rural, and you'll soon find yourself wanting for stimulating conversation. Bucolic it is, think tank it ain't. Here's an example to sum it up for you.

Farming is a major economic activity in Spencer County, especially tobacco, and both of my parents grew up on farms. You've probably heard the American farmer is an endangered species facing brutal competition from an international marketplace and increasingly unable to make ends meet. The effects can be seen in Spencer County as farms are sold and carved into subdivisions to make way for the sprawling suburbs of Louisville. Farming is hard work and demands long hours, leaving little time for leisure and other such frivolities. That's why many male farmers in the midwest have a difficult time attracting wives - many women want nothing of it and move to the cities in search of a less agrarian lifestyle. I completely understand.

Farming is its own way of life, it's own culture. When farms are sold and divided up into little pieces of suburbia, the former farming families are left with a lot of time on their hands. Without long hours working in the fields, a cultural vacuum forms, and the kids find new ways to pass the time. The same holds true for the families who flee the cities and move into the country, much to the detriment of their children. Cow-tipping, demolition derbies, bashing mailboxes with a baseball bat late at night, tractor pulls, and "cruising" become popular ways of passing the time. Egads, the insanity, I tell you! Having little in common with my schoolmates, my childhood was spent anxiously waiting to go to college so I could get the hell out of Spencer County.

With that, you hopefully have a suitably adequate mental image of my impressions of rural life, which isn't to say the countryside's not beautiful, green, serene, peaceful, and full of sweetly scented fresh air, because it is, but unless you're the next Thoreau and have plans for a better Walden, one of that dying breed of successful farmer, a technophobe, or have severe tinnitus and can't endure the bustling sounds of the city, a life in the country will drive you batty. To invoke a cliche, it's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. Plus, I'm pro-environment, but require a substantial amount of technological infrastructure to support me: roads, automobile, electricity, cell phone, broadband Internet, coffee shops, sewers, theatre for the performing arts, airport, commercial centers - the list goes on, but the point is the countryside is defaced when we drag along all of our support infrastructure, so my philosophy is to live in a city to minimize my environmental impact and let the virgin forests keep their virginity.

Dudes! I've done it yet again! I've completely wandered off the subject, so much so that the only effective way to get back on course is abruptly ceasing the tirade, calling myself out like I'm doing right now, and getting on with the original storyline in the next paragraph. With such a penchant for loquacity, you'd never guess I was an introvert, huh? I surprise even myself at times.

Let's backup to where I said Julie was cool. And so she was, and still is. After high school we lost touch for eight years (I'm bad about writing letters), but she found me on classmates.com and we've been emailing since March. It's good to find lost friends. She has a family, which she wouldn't have thought possible in high school, and is a dedicated mother. She had a fierce sense of loyalty and protection for those she cared for, one of the qualities I admired most about her, and it was good to see it alive and well after all this time.

Let's backup even further. Sherman, set the Way-Back Machine for 1989 so we may visit a younger Bryan in the thralls of heartthrob numero uno. Another thing I admired about Julie was her ability to express herself in words and writing. She not only had the gift of self-expression, but also to understand and think abstractly in metaphor. To this day a woman who can express herself elegantly with words is a wild turn-on for me, the truest indicator of inner beauty I know of.

Having just said what I find to be the most alluring thing about a woman's personality, this is an opportune time make a profound observation about rural life:

Julie was the first girl I met in Spencer County (excluding family members - make an incest joke and incur my wrath) who could express herself by going beneath the surface, who had a steady supply of original thoughts, and who appreciated those things in others. I don't know what it is about the country - maybe all the exposure to nature and fresh air overloads the brains of the natives and they become resistant to it, rendering them incapable of recognizing the beauty around them so that it gets taken for granted. For some, the overload must be excruciating, which certainly would explain all the beer cans and discarded furniture one finds littering rural roadsides and yards. Remember what was said earlier about dragging our infrastructure with us when moving to the country?

Resisting the temptation to wander off the subject yet again, I was mesmerized by this kindred spirit, and naturally, I knew she had to be the only other kindred spirit in all the world, and I felt so lucky to have found her. Well, come on, how else is your first crush supposed to break your heart so you think it's the end of the world? Duh! I may be taking the quote slightly out of context, but Thomas Jefferson said it so well: "I find as I grow older that I love most whom I loved first."

Julie asked me to go out with her on the last day of school and gave me her ring - she was a woman of the 90's, bravely defining a decade a whole year before it began, or perhaps she knew she was dealing with a hopelessly clueless, sensitive New Age guy. I don't know which she was, but I'm sure the females out there will agree whole-heartedly when I say it takes a smart woman to be either of the two, and a diva to be both.

Living on opposite ends of the county and in different telephone exchanges made it difficult to maintain a summer romance. In those days, email had not yet come to the masses. We hadn't heard of the Internet, and in the 1980's the idea of connecting over 70% of America's households to a global computer network was still something out of Star Trek or an Arthur C. Clarke novel. Julie lived 13¹/2 miles away, but it might as well have been 370 miles, or 500, or even the far side of the moon.

When the inevitable happened and she called it off, I felt it my duty to return the ring. I considered potential alternatives. For some reason, it never occurred to me to ask my parents for assistance, probably because I expected them to tease me. It was not safe to mail jewelry, and walking was out of the question. The next day I got on my bicycle and rode to Julie's house. Boldly marching to the house and knocking on the front door required at least an additional 20 feet of intestines and a spine, neither of which I could produce as I rode back and forth on the road in front of her house in quarter mile circuits before turning around to ride by again. Fortunately, her sister came outside and stood at their mailbox, relieving me both of the ring and the need to find the guts and backbone I knew didn't have in the first place.

Sad story, huh? What's more, it had a way of repeating itself on an annual basis, usually in the springtime a few weeks before school ended for the summer. In a fit of satirical wit after my second crush on Julie in 1990, I found a calendar for April 1991 and wrote "time to fall for Julie all over again" in anticipation of the third round. And sure enough... But 1991 was the final cycle - third time's the charm, as they say.

In 1992 I went to GSP, the Kentucky Governor's Scholars Program, a 5 week summer camp for gifted students entering their senior year of high school. When discussing reasons for and benefits of GSP, I frequently used to quip, "Because smart kids in Kentucky need a break from the rest of the state." Needless to say, it wasn't well-received by other Kentuckians who hadn't been to GSP, and since I was the only one in my class who attended, that meant most everyone. Yeah, GSP made me arrogant, but I think I did a good job of keeping it to myself. I knew I only had to endure one more year of Spencer County High School before heading off to college to reunite with my GSP cohorts and new friends. I was suffering from my own private strain of senioritis, but after going to college and experiencing a life more normal, my attitude improved overnight.

Back to Julie for some closing thoughts. She was the first to stir my heart, and I gained a treasured form of self-expression that would be with me through college - poetry. The first 10 or 12 poems were about her, but they were enough to get me started and reason to dedicate the whole collection to her. Ah, the women in my life have done so much for me! They've seeded long quests of self-discovery, inspiring deeply emotional self-reflection - why, even this weblog must someday be dedicated to a woman in my life. But as for Julie, 120 poems later, I can definitely say it was salve to sooth the soul. Thank you, Julie, for everything. You are a lifelong friend.

I'm fascinated by all things self-referential and self-recursive, but especially the self-referencing ilk because they're paradoxical while at the same time conceptually small enough to fit inside your brain and conducive to your mind spinning them around in mindspace for examination. Take, for example, Tigger's song from Winnie the Pooh:

The wonderful thing about Tiggers
Is Tiggers are wonderful things

But the most wonderful thing about Tiggers
Is I'm the only one!
Yes, I'm the only one!

What is the ordinary's purpose in life? It's like being a ceramic floor tile in a large bathroom. You just sort of blend in unnoticed with the other floor tiles, and if you're unlucky, you get grouted in an obscure corner, but if you're really unlucky, you'll find yourself underneath the toilet that never gets cleaned and always overflows.

For the unfathomably unique there's the prospect of being a hot tub, shiny brass faucet or pine green guest towel. Someone like Tigger never questions their purpose in life, for obviously, it is to add spice and variety to the mix, and it's a great way to be unless you're unlucky enough to be the neglected, perpetually overflowing toilet.

Most of the time, though, being a little strange or eccentric is great. You'll find yourself with the most peculiar hobbies. I've cooked steak on the exhaust manifold of my car, made wine from Welch's grape juice and yeast, frozen grasshoppers in the kitchen freezer to revive them later, and made silly putty out of cornstarch. Once I poured lye drain cleaner onto a sheet of aluminum foil, rolled it up like a reefer and dropped it in a bucket of water to make hydrogen gas. Considering how unstable hydrogen is, you can probably figure out how it was put to use. This was my childhood, folks; I got off to an early start.

Growing up out in the country in the middle of nowhere can be pure, hellatious boredom for 18 years unless you find novel ways to keep yourself occupied, which is why the teen smoking and pregnancy rates are so high in Kentucky. There is a stream called Plum Creek across the road from my childhood home, and one summer I convinced my brother and a few neighbors it would be fun to map out the creek and officially name the more prominent features like islands and waterfalls. We actually charted and named all the landmarks for a mile long stretch of Plum Creek.

I took a 10 minute break from writing this post to have happy reflections of my brief stint as a cartographer. Today there's a GPS in my car for driving and Geocaching; I guess some things never change, although technology does. I remember another time when I dug a huge hole in a small field next to the woods behind our house trying to reach the water table... so you can understand my embarrassment when I tell you we lived on top of a large hill and, as any geologist knows, the water table was nowhere inside the hill - I would have had much better luck digging around the creek. Just because someone has an active imagination doesn't necessarily mean they're the smartest cookie in the jar.

Case in point: A recently discovered hobby from which I derive great pleasure is making CD compilations. At first, my CD's were nothing more than the songs selected according to a common theme, but I've taken to making CD covers, too. This hobby is definitely Tigger-esque; there aren't many others out there doing it - we are a proud few. My first cover design is shamelessly hacked; my apologies and thanks to the unknown original designers:

F*CK-IT BUCKET: Front Cover | Back Cover

Track List:
1. Rodgers & Hammerstein: I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair
2. David Sedaris - You Can't Kill the Rooster
3. Sarah Harmer - Coffee Stain
4. Rufus Wainwright - Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk
5. Susannah McCorkle - The People That You Never Love
6. Weird Al Yankovic - One More Minute
7. David Sedaris - Diary of a Smoker
8. Bonus Track
9. Elvis Costello & Paul McCartney - You've Got To Hide Your Love Away
10. Skeeter Davis - The End of the World
11. Al Green - How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
12. Roberta Flack - Killing Me Softly (With His Song)
13. Dionne Warwick - I'll Never Fall in Love Again
14. Doris Day - Que Sera Sera
15. Gloria Gaynor - I Will Survive

"Dude! What's with that freaky back cover?" you ask? I created F*CK-IT BUCKET this past weekend for a friend going through a breakup because I thought she could really use such a bucket and benefit from its philosophy. Just for effect, and because a few Trick-or-Treaters might knock on my door this evening, I picked up 7 or 8 pounds of candy from the store to fill a large Rubbermaid container (it even had a handle - what a bonus!) and placed the CD under the lid. I filled the bucket with more candy than I could eat in 3 years and still had a bagful for the kiddies. Sometimes you have to get extreme and go over the edge - F*ck It Buckets are solemnly reserved for such occasions.

As for the cover art and musical selections, I reflected on how she described her feelings, stories she told, and what I knew about her. Then I sifted through my collections of Internet clip-art and 2,500 various and sundry MP3's, looking for those that best captured the essence of her emotions, personality, or portrayed an upbeat, positive, forward-thinking attitude. A preference was given to female performers. It was important to select music from her point of view and if a selection was a fit, to use it, even if it wasn't a particular favorite of my own - you won't find me listening to Rodgers & Hammerstein showtunes that often, for example (nor her, for that matter, but oh well...). Some, like "The People You Never Love," are poignant by virtue of a single line that hits home; others, like "Diary of a Smoker," have nothing to do with the situation, but match habits or personality (she smokes). Not to toot my own horn, but I was quite pleased with how it turned out.

Perhaps you're calling my bluff, saying to yourself, "There's gotta be more to this story," or maybe I'm just paranoid you are, because it's true... there is more. I suppose it would be fair to say I'm a hopeless case. If the CD had been about me, I would have included an entirely different mix: Aerosmith's "What It Takes", "There She Goes" by The LA's, "Take Good Care of My Baby" by Bobby Vee, or "I am a Man of Constant Sorrow" from O Brother, Where Art Thou, although I think that last one would be a touch melodramatic.

Steven Tyler asks a profound question as only his lips can - what does it take to let 'em go? How do you shake the sense of having made a fatal mistake, forgive yourself, let go and move on? If the wind refuses to blow, how does the captain turn the sails to leave the harbor? It's like counting the licks to the center of a Tootsie Roll pop - so frustrating!

As for reasons why? Well, frankly, somewhere in me lives persistent, stubborn hope, and that's why I haven't moved on, don't want to move on. Hope comes in two flavors: the kind that gives the courage to keep on going, and the pointless, please-answer-the-clue-phone kind, and I think it's safe to say mine leaves a decidedly clueless flavor in the mouth. A F*ck It Bucket doubtless would have been better received by almost anyone else - someone willing to reciprocate, much less capable of it. Nevertheless, I forge ahead.

On the other hand, my friend has been dealt a blow to her ego, and I know it hurts. The bucket says "you have a friend." It's true - above all, she does.

And so it goes.

These are too good to miss, and with any luck, they'll absolutely make your day. If your day has been dismal. Maybe. I'm no good at marketing. Well, I think they're incredibly great. So great, in fact, I almost broke my layout standard of no inline graphics in the weblog... but... well, the sanctity of some institutions is unviolable, even by...

This was in a men's restroom at my place of employment, folks. Yes, a dark horse rode into in the lackadaisical offices of corporate America on Tuesday, and that great steed was called Creativity! My faith in the indomitable human spirit is restored. Partially. Well, no... mostly restored: the revered urinal prankster combined wacky creativity with attention to fine detail by carefully punching holes in the picture to match those in the rubber mat. That's dedication, folks, because it's hard not to get your hands dirty doing that kind of work. Did I mention he (I assume this was someone of the male persuasion) put a picture in both urinals? That's worth double points!

One of the advantages of being male is that you can aim your urine stream with great precision, kind of like a guided missile. Well, what do you expect from a 4am post? Profundity? Humor in good taste? Get real. I'm going back to bed.

I bet that title caught your attention. It certainly caught mine whilst looking through a batch of referral logs last week. That was someone's search query in Google, and let me be the first to say I don't get it.

I don't get it.

The first interpretation to come to mind is some form of bestiality. Hmm... considering where this post is quickly going, it just occurred to me it will probably generate more hits for obscure searches than all other material on this website combined. But bestiality is so passe that it can't be allowed to suffice. Perhaps this person is on the SPCA's most wanted list for locking cats in the shower and turning on the showerhead, and the request is indeed innocent - no animal sex is involved. Another possibility is that the use of felines is a metaphor for young women, and though the search query will likely sound bizarre and fringe no matter how we try to explain it away, this is a rational explanation and likely the correct one. When considering the British term for "housecat" is "pussycat," the metaphorical link becomes even more apparent, although there were indeed several animal love links returned when I ran the search.

I could spend the rest of the night coming up with quippy hypotheses seeking to explain what is in all probability no more than a poorly designed query. But I'm not, because it's almost 3:30am, my laundry is nearly finished, I was in class all day, which was also Zehnder's last lecture, I haven't had time to play Gran Turismo 3 or even turn on the PS2 in nearly a month, but more than all these things, I'm just plum tired, as we say in Kentucky. And I need a haircut in the worst way - have to keep the hair looking good while I still have it, you know, because nothing does more for a man's appearance than a well-groomed pompadour.

So it's time to get on with the show, already!

No, I don't plan to post it to Disturbing Search Requests. But what I do plan to do is give my unknown searcher/viewer exactly what she or he was looking for. So here it is, what I thought a hit for this search should return:

Enjoy.

Oh, but wait, there's more: "background of the blackberry cobbler in the 1600's" You think there might be some American Pie overtones here? Oddly enough, mine was the first of two sites returned by Google, and I doubt the restaurant review gave the great cobbler what she/he was looking for, either. Ah, another dissatisfied customer!

Ooooo... what a large meal, and even after the latte, I'm sooo sleepy.

My father's birthday was yesterday, October 6, lest you be fooled by the post date since this won't go out until after midnight. I'm so chronically anal and discriminate about my posts that I couldn't write one from start to publish in less than 15 minutes if my life depended on it. Hmmm - peculiar, that. I'm so laid back about running the dishwasher, clearing junk mail from the kitchen table, donating that old loveseat to the Volunteers of America and uncluttering my desk at work. I never considered those tasks critical to serenity. If a foul, horrible odor invaded my kitchen, that would impede my serenity, and I would stop at nothing to hunt it down and attack it at the source. On the other hand, junk mail and magazines can sit on the kitchen table for months, and as long as the bills get moved to a separate stack once a week so they get paid on time, my serenity is not threatened. Junk mail does not a foul odor make. Meals eaten at home are rarely large or complicated enough to require use of the kitchen table. The kitchen has limited usefulness, limited to eating cereal, keeping my Guinness chilled and making latte; it's the least used room in the house.

The point of this exercise was to show I'm so Type A it should come as no surprise that I wonder if I'm OCD (but maybe I'm not), and that you'd never suspect it solely by my physical environment. In fact, my living and work spaces are cluttered precisely because I am so Type A. In the happy little worldview of Bryan, ideas, methods and an uncluttered mind are far more important than all else. Therefore, sorting junk mail and uncluttering my condo and desk at work are relatively unimportant, and my Type A complex generates much frustration and discontent if I do these things daily. It just feels wrong. Something inside me screams it is a waste of time, and that I should be focusing my mind on something that would "really make a difference." The kitchen table is functional. Oh, sure, I put candlesticks and a handcrafted chess set on it for decoration and to remind myself chess is the coolest friggin' game ever conceived and I should play it more often, but the table's first priority is to provide a surface for holding things. So it holds my junk mail until I feel like throwing it away. However, should that offensive odor invade, you'd find me unable to think about anything else and unable to concentrate on the task at hand, be it a case study for grad school, the Discovery Channel or posting to this blog - deodorizing would be priority one.

So, the take home lesson is I fanatically obsess about things which are important to me, which are knowledge, ideas, processes and understanding interactions. All else is extraneous and of little consequence, so if I can tune it out, I neglect it. If I'm unable to tune it out, it's an annoyance, and neutralizing the source of the annoyance becomes a temporary obsession.

Wow, that was relieving! After deconstructing Zehnder not once but twice, I finally pointed the Great Raygun of Deconstruction™ at my own brain and deconstructed myself. Well, I always said I was an eccentric loner, and deconstruction has revealed the reasons why - not only to you, but to me, as well. This sort of soul-searching makes me think it would be wise to abandon searching for a soulmate because I'm just too freakishly eccentric. For the record, I'd like to say this weblog has been an amazing path to self-discovery for me. When shining the flashlight of introspection into the darkness of our mind and soul, what we find is not always pleasant (case in point), but there is nothing in ourselves more powerful than the truth.

Okay! Now that's out of the way, let's go back to my father's birthday, which was October 6. He's 51 years old, which means, as I explained to him, he's turned 17 three times. Ain't that sobering! I've only turned 17 one and a half times. Whenever I get cheeky like that, he's quick to remind me I'll be his age one day. And I counter by saying he'll be 76 when that happens. Though it's endearing and strengthens our bond, this bantering goes nowhere fast.

This year my father's birthday fell in the first full weekend of October, which is the weekend of the St. James Art Festival in Louisville, Kentucky. Dad and a neighbor used to do woodworking and setup a booth. The start of St. James coincided perfectly with the time school dismissed, so I was drafted to help setup the booth every year. I usually had nothing better to do on St. James Saturday, so I was drafted to help out with the booth all day. The show ended early Sunday evening, and I was drafted to help out with the booth all day and tear it down in the evening. From my use of the word "drafted," one might surmise I didn't fancy St. James. Damn rootin-tootin! It always seemed to rain during the show, and the ground was covered with hay so all the pedestrian traffic wouldn't create a muddy mess. The real reason I hated St. James was not so much the long hours as it was the hay, which would throw my allergies and asthma out of whack, especially if it rained and turned chilly, and I would be miserable for the next two or three weeks.

Yeah, I know, cry me a river, but this is my weblog, and I'll cry if I want to.

My dad and our neighbor went to several shows a year in Louisville. I've likened arts and crafts shows to the circus. The circus has two realities, or worlds. The first is the spectators' reality, what goes on in the main tent inside the circus ring. The second reality is the world of the circus performers and the relationships they have with one another, which is completely different from the reality presented to the spectators. There is the same dichotomy at arts and crafts shows; there is the customers' world and the vendors' world. It wasn't long before my dad started seeing some of the same people at various shows and started talking to them. We got to know Shirley and her friend Jill because Dad's booth was next to hers at several shows. Shirley is an emotionally deep person, not in an unstable wishy-washy sense, but in a fully aware sense of her own emotions and those of others. People like me need someone like Shirley in our lives, because they remind us to be aware of our emotional and spiritual selves, but that's getting ahead of the story. When I was a 10 year old kid, she was a fun person to pass the long hours with, and I loved pestering her. She must have found it entertaining in her own way, because I don't remember ever being "sent home" to my own booth. In the years that followed, we began having thought-provoking conversations and discussed religion, emotions, science and philosophy as customers browsed the booths, buying merchandise.

When I went off to college I didn't see Shirley often, and my dad got out of the arts and crafts show scene. I graduated from college four years ago, and saw Shirley once or twice a year during that time. The four of us (Dad, Shirley, Jill and myself) quickly find the "groove," as true friends who are separated do when reunited, and then we went our own ways, although email helps keep in touch. This year has been different for me, though. I saw Shirley in August at the state fair and today at St. James, and the bond feels different... strengthened. Maybe it's because my life is topsy-turvy and in a period of transition, and as a teenager whose life and outlook were always topsy-turvy and changing, her perspective was wise and enlightening for me. Maybe I've realized Shirley wasn't just a childhood friend, but is my friend as an adult, too. Often when we meet a friend from high school or college, we get the sense the friendship was bounded by our common environment (school), but now that the environment is no longer common, the foundation of the friendship is gone, and we reminisce about old times instead of catching up with one another's lives. But when we meet an old friend, establish that same rapport and start talking as if never separated, we know the friend is lifelong. That's how I think of Shirley.

Before I get all teary-eyed, let's move the story along. Not only was it my father's birthday, but after he quit running a booth at St. James and I graduated from college, we made it a tradition to visit Shirley and Jill Sunday afternoon. My dad usually goes on Friday, too, but it's the only time I have to peruse the show and find anything I'd like to buy. At 5pm, we help them tear down. My dad sold wooden bookshelves, cut-outs, chairs, tables and coatracks; these were heavy and required a sturdy, heavy booth to support them. Shirley sells wreaths, small paintings, candles and jewelry, so her booth is much lighter and easier to pack. Tonight four of us finished by 6:30pm. It took three of us until 10:00pm to tear down my dad's booth. Dude, I really hated having our own booth!

After leaving St. James, we celebrated my dad's birthday at Club Grotto, which is another of the unique and eclectic restaurants in Louisville I've been wanting to visit for some time. It was most excellent! In fact, I give it a coveted platinum star because they serve carpaccio as an appetizer; I just love the way it slithers down, and you can imagine my glee as my unsuspecting fellow diners experienced it for the first time! My fondness of carpaccio is a story for another post. We had a bottle of wine, Shirley and Jill had filet mignon, dad had New York strip and I had swordfish. Although I savor carpaccio for its novelty value, I prefer seafood for its health benefits, even if swordfish does contain high levels of mercury. After dinner we were stuffed, but dessert was irresistable. I am a chocolate fiend - the more bitter, the better - and had the chocolate torte. They had carrot cake and key lime pie, then there was coffee for them and latte for me. How we made it out of the restaurant and to the car is anyone's guess...

... which explains the first line of this post and brings us full circle. If you held in there like a true trooper and read the whole thing, my nod of great approval goes out to you. As for me, writing this post and doing miscellaneous chores around the condo in preparation for the upcoming week has kept me awake for four hours, despite that large meal. If I always had something to write about, I'd never sleep. I think it was daVinci who said sleep is a great waste of time. Hear, hear!

On my other website, Menu del Dia, which simply is funtongue scatterplot sans scatterplot, is the "Infamous Girlfriends Page." It gets more hits than any of the other pages because it's in the search results everytime an amateur porn fan searches for "ex girlfriend picture" on Google. Or, when someone searches for "pictures of Alaska," the more curious surfers can't help clicking the "Infamous Girlfriends" hyperlink.

The point is, however visitors come to my website, a lot of them visit the "Infamous Girlfriends" page, many of them read "The Story of Rachel," a handful send an email, a few of which are to ask why I'm sharing those 12 pages about a breakup with the whole world. They just don't get it, and their befuddlement is understandable. If I had done something pride-worthy, like climbing Mt. Everest or designing a better mousetrap, and created a webpage or two to let everyone know about it, no one would ask why. But telling the world about a time I loved and lost because I had brought it upon myself? Well, that just doesn't make sense. It's not the "interesting fact about yourself" you'd want to use as the theme of your speech at this month's Toastmasters meeting.

A few days ago, the question was raised again, but this time it was on a message group, not an email. The tone of the post wasn't derisive, merely curious and thoughtful, so I wrote a thoughtful response. The most positive outcome of this breakup was a realization of self, largely thanks to rediscovering a love of writing. This weblog was a direct result of those events. If it hadn't been for this weblog and the fondness I've developed for it (or is it an obsession?), there would be no www.funtongue.org and I wouldn't have the inner tranquility I've found with it. The second most positive outcome of the breakup was going back to school for an MBA, and it's fortunate I have this weblog, because the compounded stress from adding school to a full-time job approximately equals the newfound serenity from this weblog and other Zen-ful hobbies I took up over the summer.

I nearly forgot to paste the reply I wrote, the reason for this post:

Subject: Response from "that funtongue guy"

Why does one put a letter in a bottle and cast it into the ocean? Or better yet, why does one write a letter and never send it?

The story of Rachel happened nearly 5 months ago, and though the pain is gone, I'm not going to remove the webpages. It's a part of me, that website is about me - it belongs there. As Erin said, I found it therapeutic. You know... for Zen. And the reason we're so "fascinated" (although I would use "ardent"), or at least my reason, is because the person becomes such a large part of our life over a long period of time. We share our happiest and saddest moments with them. They see us triumph and fail and still accept and love us. I'm not into co-dependency - far from it, I'm fiercely independent, but we come to rely on our significant other for their acceptance and emotional support. If they're suddenly gone one day, we suffer a huge loss and a lot of pain. We all deal with it in our own way.

Like I say on my site, I believe we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously. Finding a way to joke about it helps wounds heal. It helps remind me it isn't the end of the world.

And you know what? That's the most important thing I needed to realize, and the only purpose the Rachel pages needed to fulfill.

Be well.
funtongue (Bryan)

Jeff, a friend from work (whom I usually call by his last name, but am calling by his first name here for security reasons because I get the impression he's "wanted"), and his wife had their second baby Monday afternoon. Let's be fair here - his wife actually all the hard work, so bravo for her. He called to say everything went well, but was strangely silent after his newborn daughter's picture appeared on the hospital's website. I copied the webpage for your viewing enjoyment.

Oh, look... she has her father's hands; how adorable - they're learning sign language so early these days! She's going to be just like her daddy.

Congrats, Jeff!

Jerrod describes some of the issues he has with his church. He discusses the intolerance often found in the church, which is a major issue I have with organized religion. It took me years to reverse the thought-shaping I received in my childhood church. By that I mean being told non-Christians, homosexuals, scientists and the like were blasphemous and evil. If you want to play strictly by the rules, a sin is a sin is a sin. If we have all fallen short of the glory of God and if it is by grace alone that we are saved, then debating who is more sinful than who is pointless; it's the pot calling the kettle black, to invoke a cliché for "hypocrisy."

Great. I've done gone off and gotten myself all stirred up, so here we go. This isn't the most convenient time to get into this, but life isn't always convenient... perhaps it will keep me succinct.

Okay, look, folks. I don't think Christianity as a belief system is bad. Quite the contrary. I study Mahayana Buddhism because its moral code is elegantly straightforward, but when I need a context in which to frame my thoughts on supernatural and spiritual matters, I almost always turn to Christianity. My issue is with how people use it:

• To justify taking human life.
• To place oneself on a pedestal, and conversely,
• To denigrate others when they are different from us or we do not understand them.
• To deny other human beings protection from violence, prejudice and all other forms of endangerment and injustice.

So, please, when you chose to succumb to the human foibles that occasionally get the best of us all (much like I'm doing now by stereotyping and criticizing "certain Christians"), don't compound the infraction by saying it's in the name of God. If blasphemy is truly "an indignity offered to God in words, writing, or signs" or "the act of claiming the attributes or prerogatives of deity" as Webster claims, then I can find no better examples of it than those above. Be an adult and admit your imperfections.

Well, I think my peace has been spoken. I'm all flustered out. So there. Thanks, Jerrod.

Thomas Zehnder, ABD (All But Dissertation) strikes again! This was one of the rare times we had classes on two consecutive weekends, a Big Z double-dose. Hey, before we get to this week's Zehnderisms (twice as many as last week), how about a another installment of Deconstructing Zehnder? The formula worked so well last week that I'd hate to abandon it before milking it for all it was worth. It's impossible to kill this horse with a season maximum of four episodes. Let the deconstruction begin.

Check out the unit on this guy. No, you perv, not HIS unit... the ZZ Top belt buckle unit. "Proficient Photoshop User" will not be a bullet appearing anytime soon on my resume, so one might surmise if I spent 45 minutes figuring out layers, shading and how to make a circular selection (yes, folks - my Photoshop skills are indeed that pathetic), there was some significance in the buckle. Correct! Zehnder once taught an Honors Economics class at a local high school. Conversation will wander as it may, and found itself on the subject of ZZ Top. Zehnder is a big fan, but didn't think the rock group had a belt buckle, so he said he would give an "A" to anyone who could find him one. Just before Christmas Break, Zehnder walked into his Economics class and discovered a gift wrapped package on his desk. He asked who had bought the belt buckle, and his students said, "Well, we all chipped in." So he gave them all an "A," and wears the belt buckle to this day. Zehnder forged a bond with the Honors Economics class that year, and he symbolizes it with the big double Z under his belly. He's 56; if he's walking around in 2021, I'm sure he'll be wearing it at 76.

That sort of deconstruction adds a whole new dimension to Thomas Zehnder, ABD, don't you think? Oh, don't think for a minute he's just some guy. No, he's exceptionally unique, and that's why I can't help writing about him after he gives a lecture. If you're looking for your very own ZZ Top Belt Buckle, Red Devil is selling one for $30 - look at the bottom of the page, second from last entry.

Ben brought a Sony Vaio PictureBook to class and took a few snapshots of Zehnder in his classroom element. It was a covert operation, and a conventional digital camera would have blown our cover. The image quality isn't the best - the camera's maximum resolution is 640x480, and that's with interpolation. Well, come on! It's a laptop, for crying out loud. There isn't a "Nikon" logo stamped on the side, so relax. Many of our best men and women were lost obtaining this rare Zehnder footage. Check it:

Zehnder gets to know his students Zehnder in thought Side Profile Zehnder relaxes whilst lecturing

I thought this was going to be the most Zehnder-rich document on the W3, and my cover would be blown if Thomas Zehnder (ABD) ever used a search engine to search for his name in case he forgot it. Far from it. Failing to consider how common the surname is in Europe, particularly Germany and Switzerland, the results of a Zehnder search were shocking; at this writing, there were 43,800 hits for "Zehnder" on Google! Even "Thomas Zehnder" returns 181 hits. 43,800 hits - wow, Zehnder must be the equivalent of "Smith," "Jones" or "Williams," right? Not at all - even though 90% of all web pages are written in English and you'd expect any English or American name to be more common on the W3, "Zehnder" is still much more rare. Strictly speaking, it's a 9:1 ratio, but we'll round up to 10:1 for the sake of easy estimation, which would give "Zehnder" 438,000 hits if it were English. Google's hit counts for various common surnames:

• Smith: 14,100,000
  
• Johnson: 9,610,000
  
• Jones: 9,470,000
  
• Williams: 8,660,000
  
• Davis: 7,080,000
  
• Miller: 6,530,000
  
• Anderson: 6,600,000
  
• Moore: 4,360,000
  
• Adams: 4,120,000
  
• Nelson: 3,940,000
  
• Thompson: 3,850,000
  
• Campbell: 3,600,000
  
• Roberts: 2,990,000

... Many surnames later, those roughly equivalent to Zehnder...

• Fontaine: 457,000
• Sweeney: 451,000
• Schilling: 421,000
• Storey: 420,000

The U.S. Census Bureau ranks first and last names by commonality using 1990 U.S. census data. When comparing to the number of web pages, the ranking of the most common names matches pretty well with Google, but it was hit or miss trying to find names in the 400k-500k hit range. Dual meanings skew the results (for example, "schilling" is currency in several European countries; "Wilson" and "Scott" are both first and last names) as does the celebrity effect ("Spears" has nearly 2 millions hits, far too many for the 717th most common surname; the duality effect also plays in).

Okay, there were two points of that exercise: this page won't catch the attention of too many Zehnders, and this post was written by a borish eccentric, also known as a "complete geek" to those with less refined vocabularies. Let's move along...

Zehnderisms #2:

• On the 1970s American automobile industry:
  "Johnny Lunchbucket started driving a Honda Civic instead of a Chevy."

• On price gouging after the World Trade Center catastrophe:
  "I've got four sisters. One of them's kind of jumpy, if you know what I mean. She calls me at home after school, 'Tom, I'm glad I got a hold of ya!' I said, 'Why, what's wrong?' 'Quick! Go buy gas! It's already $4 a gallon!'"

• When dimming the lights for the overhead projector:
  "Now, you can get really sexy here, folks... these are our nightclub lights. Ever noticed how people look better in the dark?"

• On homemaking:
  "My wife says a clean house is a sign of a dull woman."

• Another:
  "A house should looked lived in, not like a museum. Well, we win!"

• On vehicle emissions testing:
  "No one keeps a car 35 years... well, some do. It's a real screamer, too. Everytime I drive it, someone's screaming."

• On mediocrity:
  "Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, nuclear war and slow dancing."

The situation:
On Friday you go to work, then follow it up with MBA classes from 5:30 - 10:00 that night. On Saturday, you're in class again from 8:00 in the morning until 5:00 that afternoon.

Question:
It's 2:00 Saturday afternoon. Having just eaten lunch, your belly is sated and your mind is soooo very relaxed. Uh-oh, you're in trouble, and with three hours to go, how are you going to make it?

Answer:
Salvation comes in the form of Thomas Zehnder, ABD (All But Dissertation - no joke), a man in his mid to late 50s whose character and presentation are as rough around the edges as his voice, and that always makes for an interesting afternoon.

If you saw Tom Zehnder walking down the street, you'd think he had less than no sense of fashion at all, one of those few individuals with negative fashion sense who somehow managed to elude any trace of taste. But such is not the case; in the middle of his lecture, he comments on his large, white knit shirt. He says his wife asks him why he keeps wearing it, because you can see through it. He illustrates the point by stretching the shirt over his large belly - the man loves his beer - and says he wears it because he likes it and it reflects the sunlight. I was impressed. Not only was he a Zen philosopher, he was fully aware of his bad fashion and didn't care. The difference between Tom Zehnder and others with "bad" fashion is they're oblivious to it or think it looks good, like teenagers who wear bell-bottoms. But Zehnder knows it looks bad and doesn’t let it deter him. He's above it. Now, that's style!

There’s no doubt Tom Zehnder is a hit with his economics students. His off the wall comments and examples never fail to take his audience by surprise, and his demeanor is so dry he never misses a beat by laughing at his own jokes. His wit is quick and plentiful. He replaces the lecture notes on the overhead projector with a copy of his county tax bill and says he doesn't mind paying local taxes for the fire department because he's drinks beer with the St. Matthew’s firemen over at BW3's; he wouldn't want to put the firemen out of a job because they buy his beer sometimes, so he wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize that. The largest line item by far is for school tax - "Jefferson County Public Schools," the bill states. "Jefferson County FREE Public Schools," he corrects, using the school system's official name. He's all for the public school system - "our society would collapse without it, but don’t say it’s free," he concludes, "because it's not."

One trait of Zehnder's body language quickly caught my attention. His eyes spent more time closed than open. I’m familiar with that tactic. The guy is terrified talking in front of people, I realized. Strange for a high school teacher turned college professor, and you’d never know it, he hides it so well. His other tactic is to make them laugh - works every time.

We have him in lecture three more times, and I plan to post Zehnderisms from each lecture. Before this week’s quotes, however, it might help to have an idea what he sounds like. I don’t tape lectures, but Tom Zehnder’s voice bears an uncanny resemblance to Tom Waits’. Here’s an excerpt of Tom Waits singing his cult classic, "The Piano Has Been Drinking:" piano_zehnder.mp3 (1 minute 6 seconds, 130 KB).

Zehnderisms #1:

• On angina: "I got liquored up and jumped around a bit."
  
• On a cancer study linking cranberry juice to bladder cancer: "Fifty gallons of cranberry juice a day would grow cancer on a billiard ball."
  
• On college: "Everyday is Derby Day when you go to U of K."

One of the books I'm currently reading is a collection of stories well known to countless other bloggers - I've seen it touted and raved on the sites of 15 to 20 others - Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (complete with obligatory Amazon link). You pay $9 at Amazon plus $4.50 or so for shipping and handling. In the endgame, you save about $1.50 by waiting 4 days and having the willpower to resist walking into Barnes and Noble's and having it in your hot hands the same day, you tart little pickle, you! And don't you know Amazon needs it, too - the stock dropped, nay, plummeted as much as 20% today, closing 10% down. Recession be damned - I'd say they're safely undervalued at tonight's after-market price of $7.75. The company spokeman is indeed valiant as he licks the corporation's wounds and attempts to play down the agony of the sting: "We never try to divine why the stock is up or down, and just keep our focus on serving our customers." Whatever, buddy - I'm sure that wasn't your tune 24 months ago! It hurt like a mo-fo and you know it! And if it didn't, you have no business being in business.

But back to David Sedaris, whom I know for a fact doesn't give a flying fortress about the stock market. I recently read "You Can't Kill the Rooster," one of the stories in Me Talk Pretty One Day. Vulgar humor turns me on like a $2 peep show, and that's not vulgar in the "common" sense, but vulgar in the "crudely indecent" sense. David Sedaris is always a malcontent, but rarely vulgar, except when describing his brother (the "Rooster") as he did in this story. I was laughing so hard it hurt, and rolling on the floor until I banged my head into the wall, which really hurt and finally took the wind out of me. If you've ever heard David Sedaris on This American Life, you know his only gift greater than his ability to write a story is his ability to tell it out loud, so I got on LimeWire and started searching for the MP3. GnuTella - it'll never fail ya.

Take the time to listen to the sound bytes - they're small and download quickly, even for you modem-restrained folks. If you listen to these MP3's and buy the book, you're furthering the great MP3 cause.

I love this one for its sheer one-liner shock value - it certainly strikes a chord with me, which is to say I can identify, and it was the first punchline in this story to knock me out of the chair and into the floor laughing. I think I'll make it my new motto and use it as a response whenever someone asks the cliché question, "How are you?" stones.mp3 (22KB, 11 sec)

Despite his rough edges, David Sedaris' brother is remarkably "no nonsense:" youhaveapoint.mp3 (86 KB, 43 sec)

David Sedaris has a quick wit that never fails to take you by surprise; always the unexpected: twoblackeyes.mp3 (181 KB, 1 min 32 sec)

His stories frequently end with a thoughtful reflection or expose a sensitive and vulnerable side of a character, revealing a profound truth of what it is be human. In "You Can't Kill the Rooster," it was the final thought that drove the story home and made it strike a deeper chord in me, which is precisely the reason why David Sedaris is so gifted - his stories resonate deep within you. This summer has been a difficult one, and I had to toughen up and straighten myself out before I was done grieving, before I was ready - an aggressive schedule is never easy. I can't help wondering if everything I've done to keep my schedule booked and stay busy isn't partly an attempt to escape or avoid deeper issues. Perhaps what I need most is someone to bring a "bucket" over and give some reassurance... bucket.mp3 (96KB, 49 sec).

We made noodles with Grandmother a couple weeks ago, and I promised pictures. This was more work than I originally anticipated. When predicting the amount of work required to do something, I have a tendency to underestimate time requirements. Friends and family who must wait on my eternally late arse know this about me all too well and dread it. Well, I hate it, too, but like them, I am powerless to do anything about it. It's just me, and I digress.

Running the pictures through Photoshop takes a while, and there are plenty of other things vying for my time - graduate school starts this weekend, there's always plenty to do at work, and sleep is such a waste of otherwise productive quiet time. And let me say this: no offense to certain family members, but my brother can't take pictures for sh*t, and I handed him a digital camera with an LCD display. WYSIWYG, for crying out loud, and half his pictures with human subjects are still missing half a head and an eye. I have pictures with anything from the knees to the upper lip of partially dismembered bodies with various exposure settings to work with, so cropping and tweaking brightness and contrast increases processing time (what a waste of code if this is all I'm doing with Photoshop, eh?). But I would never, never, ever blame my brother for my misfortunes, so I'll cut short the excuses and get on with the program.

As I said way back when, noodle-making was a German family tradition. We begin with the beginning: the most important thing when cooking (aside from good ingredients) is the recipe. We used the second recipe, which calls for whole eggs and a tablespoon of water as opposed to egg yolks and one-half cup of water. That's my grandmother's handwriting. Whenever I see it, there is immediate recognition and I am awash with pleasant childhood memories. I wouldn't expect most of you to have the same reaction, though, and for that, I'm sorry.

Pictures will follow the recipe from here on out. Noodles:

2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 eggs - (hey, look... didn't break the yolks) - beat up a bit - (bummer, had to ruin my eggs)
1 tablespoon cold water

Make a well in the flour and salt - add eggs and water

Blend well - [1] | [2]

Knead well on floured board for 5 or 6 min using just enough flour to keep from sticking - [1] | [2] | [3] | [4] - As you can see in [1] and [2], I'm not quite getting the hang of it and seem to be afraid of getting my hands mucked up with dough. so Grandmother takes over for a minute in [3] and [4] to demonstrate proper technique, saying you have to work in some air to make the dough softer. To further illustrate the point, she invoked what she considered a risque simile, "You want to work out all the lumps so it's soft like a girl's you-know-what." Now, in my experience, I've noticed girls have several soft "you-know-whats," so I wasn't exactly sure to which "you-know-what" she was referring and had no desire to go there with my grandmother, so I assumed she meant the buttocks and let it go at that. Unfortunately, without this specific information, any response would have to be equally vague. I accepted the challenge...

"But Grandmother," I explained, "the you-know-whats of the girls my age are getting lumpy." After thoroughly kneading the dough, I demonstrate its velvety softness and offer my interpretation of the mysterious "you-know-what's" identity.

At this point, we broke away from the second recipe and followed the first. Let dough rest 30 min.

After "resting," make a semi-suggestive - ahem - "log" as shown and divide dough into 1/2's or 1/3's

Roll into paper thin rectangles. Dust lightly with flour - [1] | [2] | [3] | [4] | [5] - As you start rolling the dough, it will probably stick to the rolling pin as shown [1]. Take the easy route and sprinkle flour [2] to prevent sticking. You're not trying to prove a point here, this isn't a battle of the wills betwixt you and the dough; the dough is composed of unborn chickens and wheat germ ground into fine, white powder, both of which are suitably dead (unless you're baking bread with yeast culture, in which case you wouldn't roll it into a thin sheet), so as you're straining to shape the dough into a flat, rectangular sheet [3] so thin light can shine through [4], you may relax in the knowledge the dough is not consciously resisting you. The day we made noodles was my first experience working with dough, and I hadn't yet realized this universal truth. It was personal. Do not befall the same fate I did; do not submit to the whims of maniacal glee [5].

Let dry 1 hr

After drying, stretch the dough sheet a bit. Then dust with flour and proceed...

Roll up loosely. Cut into 1/4" strips - [1] | [2] | [3] | [4] | [5] - As my grandmother explained, roll it like you would a pastry roll [1]. She assumed I knew how to fold a pastry roll, so this analogy was lost on me. When cutting [2], fold your fingers so the knuckles steady the knife; it also keeps your fingertips out of harm's way. The resulting noodles will be neatly folded, and you may either unfold them into strips by hand as shown on the cutting board [3]; there's also the quick'n'easy way, simply tossing [4] the noodles to loosen and unfold them. However you choose to go about it, the final product [5] is the same. Allow the noodles to dry for one or more hours, then cook, freeze if storing for long periods or store in a canister for up to a couple days. These are homemade noodles, not the store-bought kind. They retain a lot of moisture and have no preservatives - a few days at room temperature in a closed container will demonstrate your homemade noodles are a veritable smorgasbord for zygomycetes.

Finally, keep in mind that above all else, the idea here is to have fun.

Last night "sync ; sync ; halt" ran for the last time on my Linux box and I bid farewell to a trusted friend, tried and true. It's hostname was "win", for Witten Imperial Network, which is a story all its own, and not at all the subject of this post. If the Guinness and Star Wars and David Sedaris mp3's hold out, perhaps I'll get to it tonight. Perhaps, but I doubt it nearly as much as I doubt the sun will peter out before it rises again tomorrow or that you will win the lottery next week. That means it just ain't happening, get it?

Sherman, set the Way-Back Machine for February 1996. I was still in college five and a half years ago when I purchased my second personal computer. It had a Cyrix 586 120MHz CPU, 1.2GB hard drive and 24MB RAM, later upgraded to 48MB - this configuration positively kicked ass for early 1996. This was around the time of Windows 95's release, but I distrusted that pseudo 32-bit operating system and installed Windows 3.11. Dune II, Doom, X-Com UFO Defense, Wolfenstein, X-Wing and Tie Fighter -- these were the watchwords of my college education's gaming days. Oh, the hours squandered; oh, the tragedy - I could have been a Ph.D. by now!

The capabilities of Windows 3.11 would astound you. I had a shareware IRC server with a 20 user limit in the unlicensed version, and although limited, it was about twice the number of connections I ever used. I ran the most unstable telnet and moody SMTP servers ever coded. The FTP and web servers were the final touch, the cherry on the sundae of incredulity, the ultimate in what Microsoft Windows 3.x was never meant to be.

My super-charged Windows 3.11 server reached its peak in January 1997 when Dan Mercer, friend and Linux proponent, convinced me to install RedHat Linux 4 and dualboot with Windows 3.11. As Dan adroitly explained, there were so many servers running on it that I was functionally making it a Linux server, anyway, so why not dedicate my energies learning how to administrate them on a stable platform instead of spending so much time restarting Dr. Watson'ed processes and rebooting the system? And with the dualbooting, he added, I could learn Linux and switch back to Windows when I really needed to get something done and didn't know how to do it in Linux, although after a month or two, that would never happen.

He was right. It wasn't even a month - more like two or three weeks - before Linux ran for weeks on end without starting Windows, and what kept me dependent on Windows was figuring out how to setup that pesky XF86Config file, the bane of all Linux neophytes in the days before Linux distributions had extensive collections of X configuration files. The only way to experience that kind of pain today is to find an old, off-brand monitor and just for kicks, deny yourself the luxury of Xconfigurator. But why waste precious time you could be doing the things in life for which no allegorical Xconfigurator utilities exist?

But I'm digressing again, and this digression is so large it warrants a sectional tilde to make closure. I think it's been adequately illustrated how dear this Linux box was to me, so you can imagine my sense of loss today, five and a half years later.

Let us eulogize my departed friend...

You ran the 2.0.36 kernel local build #5 beyond my greatest expectations; how many times did you see 150 days of uptime only to be shutdown by a power outage or change in location? From hosting the Witten Imperial Network mailing list to teaching me the basics of system administration and C++ to providing rogue email and shell accounts for friends at college to taking down entire subnets to recompiling the kernel to running StarOffice when it was still owned by Germans to portscanning entire Class B's, you were the bomb, you ate that stuff for breakfast and weren't afraid to ask for more. When I came home from college for the holidays before I had a hub or a switch and spare NICs lying around, you had PLIP and made it possible to share a dialup Internet connection with another computer, long before in-home networks were cool. Later, when I was still using a dialup ISP and needed simultaneous Internet access on my 7 other computers, you were the best software-based firewall and NAT provider a geek could ever hope for in the days before Linksys Cable/DSL routers. You were the great Internet gateway 192.168.1.2, and even Windows 2000 Advanced Server on a mighty 1.5GHz CPU with half a gig of RAM deferred in respect to you and instructed DHCP clients to seek your sage advice as the gateway to the outside world.

It is because of you, and only you, dear friend, I am where I am today. Because of you, it was possible for me to switch from Biochemistry and a career in medicine to one in information technology and find my true calling. I am forever indebted to you, win. Thank you, and goodbye.

So this really is how it ends, is it?, I thought to myself. The system was five and a half years old, and I knew a catastrophic failure had to occur eventually - all things must end. For win, it was a hard drive failure in Linux's root partition, /dev/hda3, although it probably extended beyond this because 'df' reported the same arbitrary amount of available space on all partitions, which I knew wasn't right. Fortunately, Linux could boot with the filesystem in read-only mode and I was able to retrieve the minute amount of personal data on the server.

I ran a few commands to survey my beloved Linux box for the very last time and placed my hand lovingly on the side of the system unit, running my fingers over the "120" glowing green in the LED panel. I remembered configuring the jumpers to display the CPU speed was the first thing I did after lifting the system unit from its packing box and brushing off the styrofoam peanuts. I typed "sync ; sync ; halt" and whispered, "Goodbye, old friend." I pressed ENTER... "System halted"... and it was over.

Ironically, Thursday night while still at work before learning win's fate, I registered "funtongue.org" and signed up with a web hosting service that provides telnet/SSH access to the Linux servers hosting their customers, so it's like I lost one Linux box and gained another. Sure, I installed Mandrake 8 on a VAIO PictureBook, but it's a petite, little laptop - it's just not the same. There will never be another win.ml.org. Rest well, faithful friend.

Hey, kids, sorry there haven't been any posts for a few days, but the writing was diverted to filling out graduate school applications. Yes, this techno-geek with a Biochemistry degree has sold out to corporate America and will be persuing an MBA for the next 22 months! Woo hoo! Jokes about corporate America aside, tuition reimbursement is a beautiful thing. $28,000 total tuition plus books, and with a B-average I won't pay a penny. Nice.

How about an essay, since I spent a sizeable chunk of the afternoon writing it? The topic was "What are your long-term career aspirations and how will a Bellarmine MBA help you accomplish them?", the token "what do you want to be when you grow up?" essay question. It's not exactly peering into the dark depths of my soul, but the first half is a fairly accurate account of where I've come from.

I elected to remove references to my employer and replace them with "ACME" or "BRAND X." I wouldn't want to attract undue attention when Google starts returning links here to searches for certain corporate buzzwords. The web team at my company actually purchases reports on Usenet articles and websites containing the very corporate buzzwords I chose to remove. Am I being obstructively paranoid? Nahhhhhh!

But... I'm warning you... it is an admissions essay, so the facetious remarks were toned down a bit.

Okay, okay... without further adieu, a 26 year-old's rendition of "what I want to be when I grow up."

After spending a few minutes comparing my long-term career goals of five years ago to where I am today, I made two self-observations. First, call me Horatio, for there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy – it’s obvious I don’t have an affinity for predicting the future. The second observation is less obvious than the first, but more profound: increasing one’s adaptability makes it possible to take advantage of a wider range of opportunities and simplifies planning for the unexpected. For someone like me, whose nature is to be risk adverse, there’s great comfort in being prepared for contingencies – it’s a salve to soothe the itch of the unknown. This is to say nothing of the benefit of broadening one’s opportunities and the sense of empowerment it brings. Having more opportunities to choose from is an asset to all, regardless of disposition to risk.

Five years ago I was completing a Biochemistry degree and wanted to attend medical school and become a general practitioner. Today I work in the Information Technology organization of Brand X. In my four years at Acme, I’ve graduated from the Brand X Leadership Program and joined the technology infrastructure team where I own the strategy for desktop computing.

Not long after joining Acme I began feeling the effects of having no business background, either academic or experiential. Performance didn’t suffer for my lack of business skills, but I had to ask more questions, do more research and work harder to make up for it. The Brand X Leadership Program was an eye-opening experience for someone with my background, with four rotations in different areas of the business providing real-world experience and exposure, and several training courses covering basic theories and concepts of business and economics. When I graduated from college, I thought a corporation’s 10-K was the company-sponsored employee marathon. Two years later, I not only knew what an annual report was, I could read and comprehend one, although I rarely read more than a few pages past the balance sheet.

Looking 5, 10 or 15 years into the future from the perspective of where I am today, I see myself working in an information technology related field. I love technology, and I always want to be near it. When I go home after troubleshooting a problem or designing a novel solution to meet a pressing business need, that’s when I most feel I’ve made a difference and contributed to the organization. Digging into a challenging issue and finding solutions is what I do best. I’ve found my niche.

During the past 15-20 years Information Technology has gone from being the pastureland of burned-out CFOs and a collection of mainframe operators printing reports to a strategic business function providing tools that empower the sales force, improve productivity, maintain and manage an expanding compendium of data and that finally allow users to run and print their own reports.

The growing demands on the I/T industry to work in close partnership with their business clients and to do it faster, better and cheaper have created the need for I/T professionals who not only have technical smarts, but business savvy, as well. With limited resources and seemingly unlimited customer demands, I/T leaders must be able to create and execute on a vision. This is where I want to be.

An I/T leader faces a varied array of challenges that are exciting and foreboding at the same time: planning and vision for tomorrow must be tempered with the financial realities of today, budgeting and resource allocation to maintain existing systems and implement new ones, finding and retaining talent to make it happen, understanding the business’ needs and technology’s potential to meet them.

To get there, I must expand my business and soft skill-sets. Meeting the challenges posed to I/T requires a combination of “hard” and “soft” skills, a balance I believe is best provided by a liberal arts education program. What’s out there is a whole new realm of challenging issues to dig into, waiting for solutions. Expanding one’s adaptability and opportunities has never been so exciting.

Now, off to study for the GMAT...

Have you ever been moved to action by a force deep inside that you knew was The Right Thing To Do, having the most pure and simple good intent? A calling to reduce the suffering in the Universe a bit, knowing there would be no recognition, because it wasn't about you for once. You were just a conduit. So you answered the call of your soul and acted.

I did The Right Thing(tm), honest to God I did! But... a poor marksman misses the criminal and shoots the hostage. With time, I feel more like King Midas, so I've bound my hands to prevent doing more harm, for in this situation, my hands have consistently failed to improve circumstances.

Mahayana Buddhism has a simple philosophy. Suffering is inherent to human life, but it is unnecessary. We seek enlightenment by understanding the nature and causes of suffering. Through understanding the causes, we gain awareness and acquire the wisdom to remove the sources of suffering from ourselves and help our fellow humans find the path of enlightenment and do the same.

The mantra is a fascinating concept. A mantra is one to a few phrases or sentences, usually spoken or uttered to oneself repeatedly. Words have no tangible existence, but they are nonetheless powerful entities because we perceive them as real. Our joy and suffering often consents to the words of ourselves and others. A mantra is enlightened sound with no ultimate reality. By repeating a mantra we experience both of its aspects at the same time: the enlightened sound with the non-reality of the words.

The most common Buddhist mantra is "Om Mani Padme Hum" or "Om Mani Peme Hung." The six syllables represent the six forms of human suffering, and their sound brings enlightenment to absolve it:

Om - pride, arrogance
Ma - jealousy
Ni - passion, desire, lust
Pe - stupidity, prejudice
Me - poverty, greed
Hung - anger, aggression, hatred

Some believe genuine altruism is an illusion. Not me - I think it's very real in people's hearts and intentions, but hard to quantify in the outcome of an event. I did what I could, but there are other terms in the equation, and the final result isn't always easy to predict, and sometimes is entirely unexpected. That's why I believe a Utopian society is as improbable as anything ever was (though not entirely impossible), because even with the best of intentions from all parties, Murphy's Law applies, and one person's heaven is another's hell. Oh, how I wish things had turned out differently! But I did my best, and my heart was in the right place. The rest is up to the wind.

I turned 26 earlier in July and the weeks since have been the first time in my life I haven't felt young. The timing wasn't convenient, but perhaps it was related to the sense of panic I had, the urge to merge, the feeling time was running out to get hitched. Maybe. The panic is calmed, I've purged the urge, and what was the obsession again with wanting to get married in such a hurry?

Still, I don't feel young.

When I was in the 6th or 7th grade my class wrote a paper about what we thought the best age of our life would be. Little did I realize when I wrote the essay, half the age I am now, I was setting the stage for my second identity crisis by saying that my 26th year would be the best of my life. I wrote that, at 26, I would be out of college for several years and financially secure, the resources in place to charge full ahead toward life's goals.

I'm right on schedule, and that's the problem. The issue is not that I fell short of my goals, but that my goals fell short of me. I think a few unidentified goal pieces are needed to complete the picture.

Enter the identity crisis. In the senior year of college I had my first crisis when deciding on a career path. Resolving it required the introspection to recognize the difference between what I and others had always told myself I wanted and what I really wanted to be. Medicine or computers? I chose the latter (twice) and haven't looked back since. This second crisis involves deciding what I want from life. The identity_crisis object class has been extended.

I may not get this second crisis worked out for a while, and when I do I still may not feel young, but age won't matter anymore when the crisis is solved.