Sunday, December 25, 2005

My family has the best luck on Christmas

Last year, my grandmother fell and broke her hip as she was walking to the car after Christmas dinner.

This year, my aunt is in the hospital waiting for surgery to remove her appendix.

Who will it be next year?

In happier news:

This year my dad bought two presents for himself, wrapped them, and put them under the tree. He acted surprised while opening them.

Excellent. I love family. And there was a case of Black Butte Porter waiting for me in the fridge when I arrived (sans luggage).

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

!!!!!

After compulsively checking my e-mail all day hoping I would hear from the PiA program about whether I got an interview for the position teaching English in Kazahkstan, by 9 pm I had finally given up. But then...at 9:01 pm...I got an e-mail saying that...

I got an interview! I could potentially be going to Kazakhstan!

I'll be going to Princeton in January to, hopefully, win them over with my charm, good looks, and spirit of adventure.

Now I really won't be able to focus on studying for my probability final...

No, I haven't died...

...I've just been up to my ears in uteri and torsion of shafts and forced vibration and Markov chains. But soon (oh very very soon) I'll be up to my ears in quality microbrews, temperate weather (I hope?), books, fleece jackets, amazing sushi, running trails, urban forests, and everything else that makes Portland great.

I feel like a neglectant parent, so...

Here:
Icy Courtyard
The view out my window

Friday, December 09, 2005

No way!

Right now there's a simultaneous blizzard/thunder-storm. This is by far the craziest weather I have ever experienced.

Trying to get from one building to another a few minutes ago (a distance of oh, about 50 meters), I:
-almost got run over by a bull-dozer clearing snow
-slipped and fell
-couldn't get inside the door because it was too gosh-darn windy
-got completely coated ice and snow...completely...

Insane. Absolutely insane. How am I supposed to focus and do work when there's lightning intermittently blasting through the white-out...right outside the window...

And the saga continues...

This message was misdirected, but obviously meant for me:

---------------------------------------------------

From: Jitka Stiger
Sent: Friday, December 09, 2005 8:58 AM
To: Cirillo Mallen
Subject: Re: spumy elves

obviously-see that the car is missing and get out of there fast, gunning your engine. And leave you alone? cried Alex. Its the only way I can take him. The only way he can be taken. Lunacy! spat out Krupkin, his jowls vibrating. No, Kruppie, reality, said Jason Bourne simply. Its the same as it was in the beginning. One on one, its the only way. That is sophomoric heroics! roared the Russian, slamming his hand down on the back of the seat. Worse, its ridiculous strategy. If youre right, I can surround the armory with a thousand troops! Which is exactly what hed want-what Id want, if I were Carlos. Dont you see? He could get away in the confusion, in the sheer numbers-thats not a problem for either of us, weve both done it too

---------------------------------------------------

I find this endlessly amusing. Apologies to those of you who look to this blog for more, er, high-brow entertainment. Right.

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Leaky Vessels

(Sorry about the high frequency of random--and inane--posts as of late...I'm a bit scatterbrained and stressed and stressed and scatterbrained...)

What an opening sentence for a paper:

"The incontinence on which this essay will focus is not the relatively comfortable subject of sexual incontinence in women but its much less comfortable analogue--bladder incontinence."

(From Gail Kern Paster's "Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy")

It's relevant, I swear!

Oh man...man oh man...

re: hunger

Possibly the most intriguing piece of spam I have ever recieved:

------------------------------------------

From: "Mattithyahu Borgman"
To: "Poncio Dumbleton" [that's me, apparently]
Subject: Re: hunger



Wrap things up there and wait for the car. Ill take this one! No! Not unless you want to blow everything. Weve got time. Wrap it up out there. Cactus ... hes hurt-shot. Ill call Ivan. Hell get back in a hurry. Theres one brother left-only one, Alex. I killed the other two-I was responsible. Cut that out. Stop it. Do what you have to do. Goddamn you, I cant. Someones got to be here and I wont be! Youre right. Theres too much to keep under wraps out there and youve got to be in Montserrat. Ill drive out with the car and take your place.

------------------------------------------

Wow, I'm not quite sure what Mattithyahu wants me to do (and he probably isn't either), but I'm about to run out and do it (or stay here and do it?).

Why don't my friends send me e-mail like this? Seriously.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

From my cave...

I just read a really pretty sentence:

"For as Lear's undone button invokes nakedness and the heath, Bosola's departure is seaward, to the galleys, to the pathless wilderness from which he entered the play, a castaway looking for solid ground to call his own."

It's from "Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi" by Frank Whigham. And that's the kind of thing my life is about right now...

Friday, December 02, 2005

I miss Oregon...

Wow...Portland is so pretty.
I especially love the pictures of bridges.

Also, browsing the Library of Congress online prints and photos catalog is so fantastically addictive. At least for the moment I can claim I'm legitimately using it for homework...

Thursday, December 01, 2005

A few notes...

First of all:

My dad sent me this link. Scary. Especially since I was attacked by a squirrel once. A black squirrel that looks just like the one in the story lept out of a trash can and used my shoulder as a spring board.

Second of all:

How odd is it that I go my whole life without running into so much as a single cheese phallus, then today I encounter two (yes two!) completely independent towers of chevre within a 6 hour window. Weird. Very very weird. (I took one home with me.)

Third of all:

K.T., I thought of you as I posted that essay...I somehow knew it would get you going.

Fourth of all:

That's it, I'm done.

Origins

His front paw was the size of my torso. When we performed the trick where the glistening knives embedded in his gums clamped down around my head, though carefully and deliberately enough so not a drop of canine saliva dampened my hair, the crowd went wild. No one had ever seen an eight-year-old lion tamer before.

Ok just kidding (obviously). An odd sequence of events led to an inquiry about the title of my blog, and unfortunately I have no scintilating stories about my encounters with vicious beasts (or even benign beasts).

If I can remember all the way back to May (which is surprisingly difficult), I think I chose "Jordan Meets the Animal Kingdom" because I was vaguely disappointed that I would be spending my summer in suburbia and not some unincorporated wilderness (full of furry and feathered beasts, no doubt). Perhaps if I give my blog an exciting title, I thought, my "adventures" at NASA will have the flavor and excitement of a wilderness safari...or something...

Maybe I should have just stuck with the lie. I'll come up with a better fake story tomorrow, when I've actually had some sleep (oops, I'm going to have to wait until after tomorrow if I condition it on sleep...).

Are my sleeping patterns really that erratic?

Yes.

Remember when I was smart and stuff?

I've been struggling for the past five hours on an application for a teaching position in Kazakhstan. (Kazakhstan? Yes, Kazakstan.) In a moment of desperation, I looked back to some of the essays I wrote four years ago when I was applying to college. Wow. I used to actually be able to write:

(sorry to those of you who might have already read this)
----------------------------------------------------------
Outdoor School is a magic act so sublime that the audience, a group of sixth-graders, never even finds out they are being beguiled. The illusion that High School students with less than 24 hours of training know exactly how to handle teaching, supervising, and entertaining rambunctious 11-year-olds is so well maintained that after a week illusion becomes reality.

With my right hand atop my head and my left arm rotating slowly in a massive circle, I carved meandering loops across the grass with my feet as eight sixth-graders trailed behind me following suit. My random bursts of song and uninhibited flails of excitement had superseded the apprehension and introversion that blindsided me at the training weekend as soon as the sixth-graders arrived. Changing my gentle pace into a high-kneed skip I led my girls off to our cabin to get them ready for field study.

Rita was loud, rude, and obnoxious, constantly pulling on someone's sleeve at the most inconvenient moment and pleading for attention. Her unkempt hair framed the round cheeks of her small red face, which was dwarfed by her awkward towering body. Her abrasive foghorn laugh caused my shoulders to involuntarily tense up and invariably meant she was brutally pointing out the shortcomings of one of her cabin-mates. I still hugged Rita every night as she settled into her bunk, but my smile in the face of her constant complaints came slower as the week progressed.

Sitting on the damp wooden log during our final campfire, I heard steadily increasing sobs and peered down the line of my cabin's flame-lit faces and saw Rita's profile shiny with tears. I looked at my co-counselor and, with the unspoken understanding that develops between two people after a week of being responsible for a group of kids, she communicated that I should go take care of Rita. Rita's trembling hand in mine, I led her, away from the campfire. She took a seat on a wet stump and convulsed with sobs as I knelt in front of her. I gave her an enduring hug and when her sobs receded I asked her what was wrong. "Everything," she sputtered before launching into a story that was painful to hear. I held her damp hands and looked into her face as she told me about her sister's boyfriend who had died in a car crash, and her mother who had been laid off. Rita had much more to cry about than she was telling me. I opened my mouth, found no words to say, and closed it again. When my cabin began the walk up the dark hill Rita and I slipped in at the end of the line.

Later that night I sat with my peer mentor, a 26-year-old who was as wise to me as I was to a sixth-grader, on a picnic table under a haphazardly strung tarp. She lit a small candle, draining it every few seconds to make designs with the turquoise wax that hissed as it fell onto the soaked wood of the table. Large globules of rain splattered around us as I told her about Rita and asked her advice. She looked at me and sighed.

"You're just like me. You want to save the world. Am I right?" she said with the wisdom of a sage. I looked at her and nodded. "Saving the world is hard," she continued, "you can't always do it."

I frowned. "That doesn't mean I have to stop trying, does it?"

A smile spread across her face. "You're more like me than I thought. Consider this: Rita is going to go home tomorrow, and nothing you can say will make the situation when she gets there any easier. I know this sounds cheesy, but sometimes you have to offer Band-Aids and not cures."

An hour after we put the girls to bed a dark figure appeared in front of my bunk and I recognized Rita's clumsy silhouette. Outside on the steps we talked about her day, and her favorite song, and I told her about the time I tried to unclog a mustard bottle and it exploded all over my face. Rita's laugh made me smile.

The next day Rita went home to her world and I went home to mine. A month later I received an envelope addressed in a large lopsided script. I opened it and found a letter written in pink magic marker. "Dear Jordan, Outdoor School was so much fun. Thank you for talking with me. Maybe we'll see each other again someday. Love, Rita" I took a pushpin and stuck my Band-Aid to the wall.
----------------------------------------------------------

Ok, so it's a bit cheesy (I'm convinced, at this point, that admissions people really like cheese), but at least it's better than anything I could come up with now.

Argh.

So I really hope I get this teaching job, but I feel like I can only spew crappity crap crap as I try to answer questions about "major transitions in my life." Let's hope Tapscott wrote me a damn good recommendation...

Monday, November 28, 2005

Returning to MIT after a pleasant Thanksgiving weekend is a swift uppercut to the jaw. Literally.

At basketball practice yesterday evening I got elbowed and now it hurts to chew. I'm not trying to appear sympathetic, I just want you all to appreciate the literary appropriateness of the way my physical body so quickly jumped in front of an incoming highspeed elbow, just so it could reflect my internal mood.

That being said, I had a very excellent Thanksgiving and post-Thanksgiving. Maybe I'll write more about all of the festivities later.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Tuesday morning trauma

Disclaimer: Yesterday began with a revelation; this morning began with an excretion (not my own). If you don’t enjoy gross things as much as I do, you may want to instead look at this link instead of reading further.

Waking from 3 hours of sleep, I stumbled into the shower and had mustered a meager dowsing (college dorms are not known for their high-flow shower heads) when I noticed that something didn’t smell right. In fact, something smelled downright unsanitary. Squinting down at the drain, I leaned closer in an attempt to counteract my myopia (and pre-contact lenses grogginess) and…wait, is that? No…

Yes.

Poop.

Feces.

Excrement.

Dung.

Guano.

Shit.

Whatever you want to call it, I sprinted as fast as I could out of there, nearly dropping my towel as I left a dripping getaway trail connecting one co-ed restroom to another.

I enjoy scatological humor just as much as the average person…Er, ok I enjoy scatological humor significantly more than the average person. But there is a fine line between shouting, “Poop!” in a crowded party to ease the social tension and shitting in the shower. No wait, it’s not a fine line, it’s a fucking eight-lane super-highway.

When I was a freshman I thought it was so rad that most students at MIT live in the same dorm for four years. But seriously, if I thought a 400-pound cement octagon oscillating overhead was a stiff price to pay for “community”, I have now been pushed over the edge. It’s the small brown lump festering in the wrong plumbing installment that breaks the camel’s back.

I can’t wait until I can get out of this place and finally realize my calling as a mountain woman, marathoner, and lover of literature. But until then…pass the PBR, please.

Hair jackets trump hair shirts in my book

My favorite high school teacher, Sean McEnroe told our Senior History Seminar class that, being the well-bred prep school kids we were, we would without fail exit college with some sort of addiction. Whether that addiction would be cigarettes, caffeine, alcohol, hard drugs, gambling, pornography, or browsing the free section on Craig's List only time would tell.

(Sean McEnroe is also the only person I've ever met who owned a jacket made out of human hair. Don't scoff...I think it ony adds to his credibility.)

Right now (as I've regaled a few of your already during recent procrastination binges) I have fantasies of moving into a house or apartment (where? It doesn't really matter; anyway I have no idea where I will be in six months) that I stuff full of free items from Craig's List. Only free items from Craig's List.

Some recent free posts I've found that may be useful:
-a pool table
-hand built bookshelves
-a "cow colored" microwave (it's just what it sounds like)
-male and female New Zealand rabbits

Some recent free posts I've found that may not be useful:
-piles of brick and mortar
-a tree that fell on someone's house
-miscellaneous unconsolidated lawn "debris"

Since when did Craig's List turn into a compost heap? That's ok...this has actually bumped Craig's List up the totem pole to my fourth favorite way to waste time. (I don't know what one two and three are, so don't ask.) I like to justify it to myself by claiming I'm doing an informal sociological study on junk, value, and insanity.

Monday, November 21, 2005

Quick Fix

If you are feeling bogged down by work, the weather, the suffocating cold industrialized landscape in which you live, or life in general, one consumeristic solution is to buy new socks.

This is especially effective if you buy wool socks, soft socks, or striped socks. And if you buy a week's supply, then you'll start your day off on a positive note and at least one good thing will happen every day for a week.

Socks are great.

DAMN it feels good to be a gansta

…a literature gansta, that is.

This has been quite possibly the best Monday morning I have ever had. Or…at least the best in recent history, and definitely in the top 5.

Why? Exactly two reasons:

1) Coffee (sad, I know…but I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’ve become a coffee drinker in the past two weeks…and I’m not ashamed!)
2) After an entire weekend of researching, brain-picking, library browsing, photo-copy machine wrangling, ceiling-staring, thumb-twiddling and reading (and more reading, and more and more and more reading), my two literature term-projects have finally fallen into place (or are at least well on their merry ways).

This morning (after going to bed at around 3:30) I woke up at 8 to head to the library to grab some more articles. After that I got some coffee (I know), did some more photocopying, then grudgingly decided to go to my aero/astro class (Structural Mechanic…engaging, I know). It’s a good thing I went to class because a) I found out our professor cancelled class on Wednesday for Thanksgiving, and b) while reading articles on renaissance medicine instead of listening to the lecture about beams and buckling, the pieces of my paper on medicine and gender in renaissance drama fell into place. It’s going to be about midwifery and pregnancy and surgeons and physicians and internal- and external-ity and oh man I’m so excited.

(I got very excited last night reading a 17th century guidebook on midwifery. There was so much talk about “yards” and “the matrix” and “spongy flesh” it was fantastic.)

Right, so great Monday morning continues as I’m walking back from my unexpectedly stimulating lecture I stop by my “Shakespeare and his Contemporaries” professor’s office and talk to him about my project…and he’s just as excited as I am. And he said don’t worry about getting the annotated bibliography to him today because he knows that I’m thinking about my term paper and making progress. That means I’ll have to work on it over Thanksgiving but…I think things will turn out all right.

(Oh yes, for those that would be interested—Mom, Dad—for Thanksgiving Saideep, my personal therapist, is coming to Boston and we are going over to his friend’s house—a.k.a. a stranger’s house from my perspective. I’m excited that it will be a home cooked meal and a house not a dorm. Then on Friday I’m going to New York for some festivaling or something similar.)

So, the fact that the payoff that I recieved (or even the suggestion of payoff) after hours and days of literature reasearch has brought me so much elation leads me to the conclusion that I think I want to be a literature professor. I know two weeks ago I wanted to be a volcanologist but…can’t I be both? I hate the “choose one path and stick to it” philosophy of life. Me being a literature professor makes so much sense why didn’t anyone suggest it to me before? I love books and I love to read, I love teaching, I love libraries, and (now) I love drinking coffee. It sounds like I have all the pieces, now I just have to make it a reality (which will actually be quite hard…).

Ok, I had such a great Monday morning that I ran right down to the laundry room and picked up my laundry (which had been sitting in the dryer since Friday afternoon). I hope my meeting with the professors for my aero/astro thesis class doesn’t ruin my day.

Oh yeah…for my photo archive project I chose to do logging photos from the early 20th century in the Pacific Northwest. I’ll post some of the most interesting ones up here soon.

Wow, today has been so great I’m even going to go to my probability lecture!

Sunday, November 13, 2005

Wow. Flurry of updates. My mind must be spinning in circles...probably because I started drinking coffee (bad! I know!).

But:

Five minutes ago, a stranger at the library asked me if I have any relatives in Portsmouth, NH, because apparently I look like some people he knows there. Huh.

I'm currently reading The Grapes of Wrath (though not quickly enough...), and today I noticed that in the front of the book there's a tiny pig with wings under the inscription Ad Astra Per Alia Porci. The flying pig is "Pigasus," Steinbeck's personal mascot, and the Latin motto means "To the stars on the wings of a pig."

All I want for Christmas...

Is this.

Also along the lines of relativity...

I had dim sum today for only the second time in my life (shocking, yes).

Instant gratification. Amazing.

Ontology recapitulates phylogeny

I usually scrunch my face when confronted with an analogy the compares an individual to a system as complex and dynamic as the Earth (or the Universe), but lately I’ve found myself understanding my own life in geologic terms. Most dynamic processes on the Earth are slow; the tectonic plates and your fingernails would have a very tight race. Orogeny (an erotic sounding term for mountain building) takes hundreds of millions of years, as does evolution. However, some geologic events are catastrophic; volcanoes (my personal favorite) can completely change the face of a landscape in a matter of hours, altering the atmospheric composition and global temperature for years to come. Meteor impacts, obviously, have similar sudden and long-lasting affects.

So…

My life is like the Earth. Most of the time my tectonic plates slide along, building up tension, elastically deforming along their boundaries, and creating new oceanic crust along mid-ocean ridges. But every now and then the mounting tension is released in a massive earthquake that shakes me and reverberates me like a gong (not to mention the tidal waves).

Those slow processes are always happening, though their rates can change, and the prediction mechanism for sudden natural disasters, while improving, are still far from accurate.

Maybe I should be a geologist. Or maybe I need to get out more…or stay in more…

At least I’m not comparing myself to Hamlet or The Duchess of Malfi.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

My dad sent me a surprisingly insightful email today

Jordan,

Is this an accurate characterization of your life??

Allen




Yes. The answer is unconditionally yes.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

EXCITING! NEW! CUTTING EDGE!

All right...I'm not exactly living up to my title...but I did realize that my latest three posts have been mere sentences. How embarrassing! (I once knew someone who referred to nearly every abrasive interpersonal situation as embarrasing. I do not do so. Most embarrassing situations include me and...myself...) I will attempt to rectify this by writing about my thesis project (as if I haven't gotten to do enough of that recently):

The goal: study methods of extracting power from ocean tidal currents in order to ultimately improve efficiency of turbine design.

Sounds easy enough, right? Ha...while I was trying my darndest to turn my despised aerospace engineering major into something that I care about (volcanoes and literature weren't quite so feasible as sustainable energy, in this case), I inadvertendly stumbled onto one hell of a complex and interesting problem.

Harnessing power from tidal currents in the ocean using turbines is exactly like harnessing power from wind using windmills...only underwater. My illustrious (ok, so that's probably not the most accurate adjective) partner and I are focussing on buoyed tethered turbines. They float but are anchored to the bottom of the ocean via a leash so that they can pivot according to the changing direction of tidal flows. We are studying whether it is more efficient, in terms of extracting power from a flow, to position the rotors (blades that spin round and round...I know not all of you are engineers) upstream or downstream of the buoy (which contains all the electronic and mechanical equipment to convert the spinning axis of the rotor into electrical power). Yes, I know a picture would help immensely. I wish I could doodle diagrams for you in this blog. If any of you are truly interested I can send you a link to my intermediate proposal (which has crude hand-drawn visual aids...yes!).

We are testing this in one of MIT's water flow tanks. That means we have to actually design and build some buoyed water turbines. What did I get myself into? Despite three and a half years of engineering training, I don't feel like I could build anything! I'm more than a little overwhelmed, and the nature of the class has been forcing me to focus on communicative aspects of the project (like the oral presentation I have to give on Thursday) rather than the nitty-gritty nuts and bolts (and generators, and gear boxes, and propellors, and buoyant materials) of the experimental design.

But I should just trust in the system, right? It will all fall together in the end, right?

I hope so. I'll keep you updated. But until then, here is an interesting link on tidal power: http://www.bwea.com/marine/index.html

Sorry this post hasn't been that enthusiastic. It's not because I'm not enthusiastic about my project (you should have seen the first draft of the introduction I wrote...I blabbed on and on about how important sustainable energy is, and how cool tidal power is, and the writing instructor told me "Wow, you've written very eloquently and your passion for the topic shines through...now delete it!"), it's just that it's 2:21 am and I told my friend I would meet her at 8 am to go running. What was I thinking?

My life is about to be consumed by a bouquet of research projects. Luckily I'm excited about each and every one of them (though some more than others...).

Sunday, November 06, 2005

I'm in the library trying my darndest to be studious, but there's a thunder storm outside and the lightning flashing over the Charles River is really distracting.

Monday, October 31, 2005

Ponderance of the moment

Why does sentiment have a positive (or at least neutral) connotation whereas sentimentality has a negative connotation?

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Happy Birthday Saideep!

That is all.

Mambo-jumble...

Excuses don’t get you very far. Neither do aphorisms. So…without any further introduction…

Update on Running
My cross country career has come to an end. I could have a debate (or even a bedate) with myself for hours over a cup of tea about whether the dividing lines we draw through our lives are artificial or inherent, essential or meaningless, helpful or misleading, but instead I’m just going to state it as a given that a chapter in my life has finished. I will never compete in an intercollegiate cross country race again. Now that I’ve stated it so melodramatically, I’m going to take a sledgehammer to my foundations and claim that the fact that this chapter is closed won’t make an iota of difference. I am still a runner, and hope only to embrace that title more fully in my post-collegiate years of competition.

Next up: a rematch between Jordan and the Boston Marathon. The first round went to Boston (due to the unexpected treachery of latecomer streptococcus bacterium), but if I were you I’d put my money on Jordan for round two. After that: trail marathons, ultra-marathons, adventure races, anything and everything.

I feel like I should make a few statements about how significant running on the MIT cross country team has been in the past four years of my life (because I’m worried my ambitious plans to move on may have overshadowed this). Echoing the words of Liz Walker: “Choosing to run at MIT was far and away the best decision I have made upon coming here, and you guys are some of the best friends I have ever had. Thank you.” There’s no way I would have survived here without athletics. Not a chance.

But onto the other things that are keeping me afloat…

Update on Reading
I’m slowly working on my “library problem.” The number of items I have checked out from MIT libraries has, thanks to my diligent efforts, dropped from 21 to 18. It’s a step (albeit a small one) in the sane direction.

I don’t have time to write about all my reflections here (yeah, I remember what I wrote about excuses), but I’ll try to at least list what I’m reading.

For class: “Merchant of Venice” and the “Jew of Malta” and a lot of related and peripheral sources including Marx and Bacon and Nietzsche (who was way more frightening this time around), discussions of anti-semitism and mercantilism, and, or course, usury. I’m not an economist or a sociologist, but I think it’s very interesting how economy, morality, and the relationship between politics and religion form a complex chicken and egg dynamic. I’m going to default to Jones on this issue, just to give you a quote to chew on:

“Theology, law and economic reality chased one another around usury creating a compound that greased England’s entry into the capitalist world of borrowing and lending within socially acceptable limits.” (Jones 203)

I never thought I would find such things fascinating…but I do. Maybe I should add whatever field that quote most closely addresses to my long list of career possibilities.

Up next for that class is “Richard the Second”, which I haven’t read yet. And I need to read “Macbeth” for my own enrichment.

With all this Shakespeare in my life already you’d think I’d be saturated, but I also started reading Greenblatt’s new biography Will in the World. It’s a lot of “educated guessing” put into a story-like narrative. I’ll let you know more once I get further than 60 pages into it.

Ahem, and there’s more. Like I said, there’s a lot…

Until a few weeks ago, the only Kurt Vonnegut novel I’d ever read was Cat’s Cradle. While I enjoyed it well enough, I wasn’t left with a desire to run out and read more Vonnegut. That was about six years ago. For some reason (no speculation as to its origins, please), I decided it was time for me to re-approach Vonnegut. I read Slaughterhouse Five a few weeks ago and loved it. Unlike my first experience with Vonnegut, I left the book somewhat insatiated and needing more. So now I’m working my way through Hocus Pocus and have also checked out Player Piano and Sirens of Titan. (My selections are based solely on availability and circumstance…and whatever fell into my lap.)

Per my brother’s request, I started reading Sebald, “anything Sebald”, to be more specific. An 80% random pluck from the library landed me with The Rings of Saturn, which I wasn’t very into until I reached this passage:

In August 1861, after months of irresolution, Emperor Hsien-feng lay in his Jehol exile approaching the end of his short and dissipated life. The waters had already risen from his abdomen to his heart, and the cells of his gradually dissolving flesh floated like fish in the sea in the salt fluid that leaked from his bloodstream into every available space in the body tissue. Through his flickering consciousness, Hsien-fend followed the invasion by foreign powers of the provinces of his empire by perfect proxy, as his own limbs died off and his organs flooded with toxins. He himself was now the battlefield on which the downfall of China was being accomplished, till on the 22nd of the month the shades of night settled upon him and he sand away wholly into the delirium of death. (Sebald 146)

I have a lot to say on Sebald, but again, that’s for another time.

The face that it took so much space just to describe what I’m reading without even commenting on it should be indicative of…something. And that’s just the humanities stuff. There’s also all the reading I’ve been doing on tidal power for my pseudo-thesis, and all the environmental earth science stuff…and oh I’m getting excited again.

It’s kind of ironic that my section on literature deteriorated into my most prosaic writing of late.

Update on Randomness
Ever since I read about Cranberry World almost a year ago I’ve been dying to visit. Today I decided to take advantage of the unseasonably warm weather (it snowed yesterday; today it got into the 60s), the good company (Jane is visiting for a med-school interview), and the generous wheels of a friend (Chandler was nice enough to lend me her car…again…) to go to Plymouth, MA and make my longtime dream a reality. The planets weren’t aligned in my favor, however, because apparently Cranberry World closed four years ago. Even though my aspirations educational videos, daintily painted models, flooded bogs, and tart-tasting samples turned out to be a bust, I did get to see Plymouth Rock for the second time, walk along the ocean at dusk, and eat some darn good fish and chips.

A note on Halloween: I dressed as Toucan Sam and Sarah dressed as Tony the Tiger. It great. I mean GGGRRRREAT! (Sorry, couldn’t help it.) A picture can describe it better than I can:
Sam and Tony

I had so much fun.

At my cross country meet on Saturday there was a man dressed as a whoopee cushion. That’s right, I was in the presence of a life-sized whoopee cushion. No, I didn’t go up and squeeze him and make a fart noise. Yes, I wanted to.

Today I watched Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times.” Why aren’t movies made today that funny?

I really wish I had some insight in this post but…not today, my friends, I’m just cataloging.

A note on eclectic-ness: So what?

Monday, October 24, 2005

Fun with AIM

A modified version of my current away message:
I've been toying for eons with the idea of changing my screen name. I think that the time has finally come. Help me decide what my new screen name should be:

awakedinosaur
radbadlibrarian
fungible goods
gurgitator jordan
gurgitator gordon
[your own choice]
[don't change it, you imbecile!]

Post a comment to vote!
As my brother says: "DEMOCRACY IS NOT NERDY"

Also, my brother and I give each other's blogs rave reviews:

EWirfs (4:16:49 PM): its not generic cause it's about you!!
jfloat31 (4:18:50 PM): i'd read it even if i wasn't your sister!

Thoughts over a cup of carrot-dill soup and a hot apple cider (with a stick of cinnamon)

This entry is dedicated to my brother, who claims that I’m better at blogging than he is. Maybe this will prove him wrong?

As I hinted at a few days ago, lately I’ve been struck by an overwhelming urge to get away from MIT. Unfortunately, this is coupled with an even more overwhelming inability to convert that urge into action. (Circumstance, circumstance, circumstance…again, it’s mostly self-imposed, but I probably take self-imposed restrictions more seriously than those that are externally imposed.) So, in an effort to maintain my sanity, I’ve been doing my best to steal away from MIT in snippets, bits, and pieces. I’ve been taking refuge in places on campus where I don’t normally tread in an effort to rediscover my three-year home, and I’ve also been sneaking away off campus as much as I can. For example, right now I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Central Square (1369 Coffee House, for the locals).

There’s so much thinking going on here it hurts. Everyone with a computer has a Mac. It’s…a complete embodiment of every college-saturated self-portrayed-as-intellectual community stereotype. Bisecting the road from MIT to Harvard, this place seems worlds away from MIT. People at MIT just don’t do this—this being sitting in a coffee house reading, writing, relaxing, observing, anything. MIT coffee shops are meeting points and waysides, places to hash out important details, places to get a cup of coffee that is a necessity rather than a luxury, places to breeze through but not to linger.

Hanging on the wall above me is a painting (at least, I think that’s the right word) where the artist has meticulously and deliberately glued dozens of bright orange earplugs onto a bright yellow canvas. They form a footprint around a black painted shoe—or rather, an archetype of a shoe. Some of the silo-shaped insulating sentinels are standing at attention, others are teetering indecisively at an angle, and others have resigned themselves to a prone position. It’s the middle group I associate best with right now, oddly. (This is a very ironic analogy seeing as I’ve been in desperate need of a pair of earplugs in order to fall asleep lately.) At this point I feel like all MIT has given me is an acute sense of my own masochistic tendencies and a bad taste in my mouth whenever I think of engineers. It’s taken from me my writing skills, my reasoning abilities, my confidence, my sense of direction…should I even go on?

At least I’m running well, though. That, I think, has nothing to do with my level of fitness, but everything to do with finally figuring out how to compete instead of just run. Maybe I’ll be able to apply my newfound ability to focus on my goals during a cross-country race to the rest of my life. But first I have to figure out what those goals are.

Saturday, October 22, 2005

A great day for a footrace

So it wasn't quite as dramatic as "Chariots of Fire" (especially not that scene where they race around the quad to the chiming church bells), but it was a great day for a race at Wellesley College today.

The skies were overcast ("omnivorous", as a confused dj bubbily misnomed on the radio this morning) and we were graced with a barely detectable drizzle and a sea of golden leaves. Aw, autumn...so pretty...

The conditions were perfect, and even my inability to fall asleep the past two nights and abdominal pains in the third mile weren't enough to hold me back. I ran a personal best of 20:40 for the course (by over 2 minutes...zing!) and was just 5 seconds shy of my all time cross country 5K PR (which was on a course that was actually a tenth of a mile short).

So...fantastic! I loved running around the lake. It was so pretty and...I said that already, didn't I?

Here's a picture of my awesome and dedicated friends who made the schlep (either from their dorm or from Cambridge) to the race to see me run.
Wellesley Invitational 2005

On a completely unrelated note: Homemade guacamole is the best thing ever...and so easy to make. I think this could be trouble...

Friday, October 21, 2005

Deer Island: More than just a bunch of giant eggs

Continuing in my theme of human waste (and my fascination thereof):

I'm taking an environmental earth science class (12.102) this semester, so my mind has been bobbing and churning around a myriad of resource conservation issues as of late. My professor, the notorious Sam Bowring, claims that although everyone is worried about looming fossil fuel shortage, the potentially more disastrous issue is water. Water is deceiving because living in certain parts of the country (everywhere I've lived: the Pacific Northwest, the Northeast) it is easy to be fooled by the impression that the supply of fresh water is unlimited. Obviously, it isn't unlimited and water is a non-renewable resource (which is why I'm talking about this in the first place).

But, bringing things back to human fecal matter:

Another reason I never really gave water conservation a second thought is because I assumed that water treatment facilities were good enough that we can basically purify any water we use. Well, this is true. Sewage treatment facilities (like Deer Island in the Boston Harbor) can produce amazingly clean water. But that treated water is just dumped into the ocean because of social taboos. (I.e., people don't want to drink water that came from sewage, even if it is cleaner than water we get out of aquifers.)

So I just wanted to say: I would drink the water. Just like I'd drink the water from the magic (ok, so it's not really magic) urine purification machine I saw at Glenn this summer. The water on our planet is all part of a water cycle, so even the "clean" water we get from ground sources wasn't always clean. Sheesh.

Ok, so maybe this post wasn't that revolutionary. I just...don't get why we would go through all the trouble of purifying water just to, essentially, through it away. (It takes a lot of energy to purify salt water into drinkable water.)

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Testing the waters...

Yes. Eons have passed since I last updated. There are several reasons for this:

-I originally started this blog to write about my experiences during the summer. Summer is, for better or worse, over.

-Writing about my life requires a level of introspection that I haven't been able to muster as of late. Or rather, I've been mustering that level introspection but I haven't been mustering the will to put it into concrete terms. (As if bytes are concrete...)

-I truly have been busy this term. I know everyone at MIT is busy, but 69 units (5 and three-quarters classes) plus varsity athletics is crazy, even by the this crazy institute's standards.

-I have a fear of being boring. I don't want to write about things that bore you, or worse, about things that bore me.

-General disillusion. I hate disillusion. What a cop-out.

(This will be an interesting experiment. I bet most of my readership--vast subset of the population that it was--has given up on this thing. I know some of you, however, are probably still checking it--Mom, Dad...)

Friday, August 12, 2005

Is this the end?

Well...I made it! Ok, so technically that's still an "almost", but it's close enough for me.

You can expect a "wrapping it all up, this is what I learned, yadda yadda" type entry coming soon. Also, my last week at Glenn turned out to be my best (and no, not just because the end was in sight, I promise: there were adventures to be had). So, my final escapades are coming as well.

But first, I'm still utterly exhausted (3 hours of sleep and then less than an hour...not a winning combination), but I need to go for a run. It will be my last run in the metroparks (unless I somehow wake up early to run tomorrow before my flight), which actually makes me quite sad. I won't miss much about Cleveland, and particularly about North Olmsted, but I sincerely will miss the parks.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

And so it goes...

We've met a handful of NASA Academy alumni this summer, and they've all asked us if we're getting much sleep. "You're actually getting sleep? Well, then that must mean you aren't having fun and aren't fully embracing the true NASA Academy experience!"

Ha. Yeah. Sleep makes me happy, and is essential if you are running 60 miles a week. But anyway...

With two days left...it's 2:30 and I'm still up...this abnormality (at school it would be mundane) can be attributed to both work and play. Go me.

I have to get up at 6 to go running because I'm going to be busy all day, afternoon, evening, and night tomorrow. Are you happy now, crusty alums?

I thought so...

No, I'm not bitter, just tired.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

I think it's funny that even though I wrote about many non-food-related things in my last entry, the three comments I got were exclusively about food. They do, however, inspire the question:

Hush puppies v. samosas, which would win?

I think I would have to vote for samosas, because you get not only onions and fish oil (thanks for explaining that, Anat) but potatoes and peas and that amazing sauce. But then again...I had some pretty amazing sauces down at Greenbrier.

But...all of this will be irrelevant because in a week I'll be in Boston, where there's an Indian restaurant on every corner.

Why didn't anyone ask about frozen custard? I'd never heard of it before coming to Ohio. It's basically ice cream...only creamier!

Monday, August 08, 2005

Bringing you up to now...

Well it’s my last Monday in Cleveland, and I am burning, no, itching (wow, sounds like I’ve contracted a nasty venereal disease) to leave. But, before I can pack my bags and blow this popsicle stand, there’s a lot of work I need to get finished. On the research front, the experiment I’ve been setting up all summer doesn’t seem to work. Damn! After all that set-up and calibration I did (oh, don’t mention the word “calibrate” to me when I get back to Boston, or I just might bite your head off with my sharp fangs), when I tried to back-calculate the coefficient of friction of glass I was off by an order of around a thousand. Hopefully there’s something wrong with my calculations and not the set-up itself, so my boss can use it to do abrasion testing on coatings for solar panels after I leave.

As far as our movie goes, it’s coming along excellently. I’ve pretty much finished editing my segment, now I just need to go back and make it shorter. Then there’re also opening sequences and credits to do. Those are going to be hot. Once the whole shebang is done and up on the internet somewhere I’ll link to it.

Hmmm…let’s see…what else has happened since my last update (which was, I’ll admit, somewhat of a case of verbal diarrhea)? I took a trip to Huntsville, Alabama, which was actually a lot of fun (despite the early start…we woke up at 4:15 am on Thursday in order to be at the airport at 5 am…and that was after coming home to a no power at around midnight). But before I get to Huntsville…

Going back even further, last Wednesday I went to the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the Great Lakes Science Center in downtown Cleveland. (The first Body Worlds is currently in Chicago…maybe I’ll get a chance to go see it when I’m there next weekend.) A German scientist named Gunter Von Hagen started a project where his team plasticized hundreds of real human specimens. They have done amazing things, like plasticize just the blood vessels, or just the muscles, or do a cut-away so you can see the muscles, bones, and organs, or they can position the bodies into interesting poses so you can see how the muscles change shape and size when the body flexes them. It also allows you to preserve real organs. In short: it was an amazing exhibit. My favorites were the all blood vessel views…it’s fascinating how dense the blood vessels in the body are. And you can see the places that have the most blood vessels; they also had the same sort of view emphasizing nerves (which are equally fascinating to ponder but not as visually striking). For those of you who are fans of poop, they had the intestines of a woman who died with a massive constipation-induced blockage…it was crazy! One of the most shocking things was when they placed side by side cross-sections of an obese man and a thin man.

After the science museum I went out to an excellent Indian restaurant for dinner…only the second time I’ve had Indian food all summer (the first was when we went to visit Goddard and I sprinted across the parking lot when I saw the “Indian Lunch Buffet” sign...the place wasn’t opened yet, but they let me in early and allowed me to get as much food as I wanted to go…they even gave me a separate container for dessert…mmm…that was so fantastic…).

But back to Huntsville...

We had to leave so early because we were flying to Birmingham (through Cincinnati), and then we had to drive from Birmingham to Huntsville. As far as I can ascertain, that’s the furthest I’ve ever been into the deep south (Florida doesn’t count, right? Also, I was two years old last time I was there…).

During the two days we spent touring Marshall Space Flight Center we met two astronauts, heard about high altitude balloons, saw the Payload Operations Integration Center (where they control all the science that goes on in the ISS and Space Shuttle). We also got to explore the place where they have “Space Camp”, which has some rides and a lot of cool space history stuff. The highlights of the trip, however, were when we ate dinner at Greenbrier, a famous local barbeque restaurant, and when I went running in the dark on top of a mountain around a planetarium. At Greenbrier I ate so much fried food that I ended up feeling drunk. I had fried okra, fried oysters, fried shrimp, fried cornmeal (called “hush puppies”), fried stuffed crab, and even a whole fried catfish. The parts of my meal that weren’t fried were the sweat tea and the cole slaw (called simply “slaw”). Somehow the feelings of euphoria ushered in by the fat and sugar managed to neutralize my stomach’s revolts, so even though I was running with a brick of golden brown breading in my stomach I still felt amazing.

The observatory/planetarium we visited deserves some mention. It was named after Werner VonBraun, who’s somewhat of a legend in Huntsville (and rightly so), and the dome is part of the fuel tank of a prototype Saturn V rocket. Now that’s pretty cool.

Hmmm…what did I do this weekend? I’ll keep it brief: running, reading, Rock Hall, great home cooked meal, more running and reading, lots of video editing, birthday dinner and frozen custard for Marshal, and some sleep.

Sunday, August 07, 2005

The moral of the story is...

Teetering Kiss

Look! A massive Hershey kiss teetering on the edge of a building in Niagara Falls, Canada.

Fireworks

At Niagara Falls there's a balloon that takes people up into the sky over the falls. During the fireworks show it looked as if the balloon were floating right into all of the explosions.

Enola Gay

At the Udvar-Hazy Museum in Maryland I saw the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Amish Buggy

After the Amish Buggy Classic I stopped under a buggy crossing sign.

Amish Farm

There were lots of farms in Amish Country. Many of them looked identical and were situated in clusters.

Bales of hay

I am fascinated by fields covered in bales of hay..."Why are all those sheep standing in rows like that?"

Blossom at night

This is the Blossom Theater, where the Cleveland Orchestra plays in the summer. I didn't remember that I had brought my camera with me until after it got dark.

Thursday, July 28, 2005

Not a normal Thursday lunch

We just met with Doreen Zudell, writer and editor for Aerospace Frontiers, Glenn’s monthly news publication. She used to put together the entire thing completely by herself; she now accomplishes the daunting task with the help of one assistant.

Even if I had tried, I couldn’t have manufactured a collection of publications as diverse and crazy as the list on Doreen’s resume. Before working for NASA she wrote for a Catholic convent, the premiere trade magazine of the hospitality industry, a magazine that evaluates carpeting and tile for schools and colleges (she seemed really excited about this one, for some reason), and a car engine parts magazine. Whoa. She had a lot of useful things to say about writing and about life in general. Each industry or field has its own lexicon of commonly used words and phrases, a bag of tricks a writer has to master for each type of publication. Doreen told us that, for example, when she handled the nuns’ publications she was constantly using words like “affirmed” and “triumphant”. For Doreen the most valuable skill she has is adaptability. She emphasized the importance of mastering the basics but making sure you are flexible, and I agree with her and think that advice can be applied to any vocation. It’s also important to love what you do; Doreen interviews a lot of NASA employees, and she says it’s evident when she speaks to someone who isn’t inspired or doesn’t believe in what he is doing. Crying when you are driving home from work is ok too; that’s what Doreen did when she first got the job of editing the Glenn newsletter and felt completely over her head and out of her league. Of course she persevered, mainly through she was determined wasn’t afraid to appear ignorant and ask a lot of questions.

Doreen’s words of wisdom were largely things I already intuitively know, but it was refreshing to hear them again from someone who isn’t working in a purely technical field. Yeah yeah, this entry devolved into somewhat of a generic motivational career advice pep-talk, but I think at present I really needed it. Speaking with Doreen also made me think more about writing and the possibility of becoming a writer (maybe a science writer?). For at least the third time this summer I heard about how there’s a complete lack of science knowledge and understanding in the media.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

This is getting old...

I know the National Weather Service likes to make their "Severe Weather Notices" sound really scary, but this is what I had to bike home in today:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
* SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING FOR... CUYAHOGA COUNTY IN NORTHEAST OHIO

* UNTIL 630 PM EDT

* AT 519 PM EDT...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR INDICATED A SEVERE THUNDERSTORM CAPABLE OF PRODUCING NICKEL SIZE HAIL...AND DESTRUCTIVE WINDS IN EXCESS OF 80 MPH. THIS STORM WAS LOCATED NEAR WESTLAKE...AND MOVING EAST AT 35 MPH.

* LOCATIONS IMPACTED INCLUDE... LAKEWOOD... NORTH ROYALTON... PARMA... CLEVELAND... CLEVELAND HEIGHTS... EUCLID... SOLON...

THIS STORM HAS A HISTORY OF PRODUCING DAMAGING WINDS.

IF YOU ARE CAUGHT OUTSIDE...SEEK SHELTER FROM THE WEATHER IN A STRONG BUILDING. DAMAGING WIND...LARGE HAIL...VERY HEAVY RAIN...AND DEADLY LIGHTNING ARE ALL POSSIBLE IN SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS. STAY INSIDE AWAY FROM WINDOWS UNTIL THE STORM HAS PASSED.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

It amazing how quickly it goes from hot and humid to windy and cold...and then rainy and dark and scary and thundery. I thought I was going to get blown off a bridge...I was yelling the whole way home because, well, no one could hear me through all the heavy rain and thunder, anyway.

It's still storming outside, nearly three hours later...when will I be able to run? I just hope I don't have to resort to the treadmill.

In other news...today I watched the shuttle launch (way to go Discovery!) from the room at Glenn where people control all the experiments that are up in space, either on the shuttle or the space station. Each experiment has a little console where you can get a direct link to talk to the astronauts. The patch for each experiment (like the one Chandler designed for her dad's experiment that went on the space shuttle) hangs above each console. NASA is really into patches and logos.

Today I also made a lot of progress on my abrasion testing experiment. I haven't been talking about that much (mainly because it's frustrating how long it's taken to set the whole thing up), but the details of it really aren't that interesting. A lot of road bumps have come up along the way, and I've learned a lot from dealing with them. Wow, isn't that reassuring...

Sorry if I sound a little ornery...Ohio is making me angry at the moment. Stop being so volatile, Ohio! It'll be unbearable hot and then thunderstorms will swoop in...this patterns reiterates itself on a daily basis. Argh! People keep telling me summers aren't usually like this, but I don't believe them.

Ooh, also I finally finished Parade's End today (sure took you long enough, Jordan!), and I'm about a quarter of the way through Kafka's The Castle, which I brought to Cedar Point with me to read in line (not just because I enjoyed all the funny looks people gave me for reading a book at an amusement park...).

Monday, July 25, 2005

Adrenaline and whatnot

So I don’t know who the rollercoaster fans out there are, but I’m sure at least some of you will appreciate this. Yesterday I spent the day at Cedar Point, the self-lauded biggest most amazing amusement park in the world.

The day was almost scrapped before we even left North Olmsted. Our tickets, purchased with a special NASA discount, were only good for July 24th, but the weather forecast warned of “severe thunderstorms” (a few notches above the typically advertised “scattered thunderstorms” or “isolated thunderstorms”…this weather report included a Severe Weather Notice from the National Weather Service, much like the kind Boston receives nearly every other day). Nonetheless, we decided to at least drive to Sandusky, OH (about an hour away) to see what we would see, and headed down the freeway in a light drizzle.

When we got to Cedar Point it was still cloudy and rainy, and there were dark purple evil-looking clouds looming on the horizon, but we decided we’d trust our luck and enter the park. For once the weather favored us. After an hour or two of grey drizzle the clouds parted and the sun came out to give us some of the most cooperative climate conditions we’ve had all summer.

But enough about the weather! I think I rode more rollercoasters yesterday than I have cumulatively in my entire life. (That is, if you count all the times we rode on Space Mountain in Tokyo Disneyland as just one rollercoaster.) I lost count eventually, but trying to look back, I think it was…um…twelve or thirteen, plus two really awesome rides that can’t quite be considered rollercoasters (the Power Tower, which takes you up 240 feet and then drops you, and this crazy thing that spins you around and swings you like a pendulum). So, after riding roller coasters that take you upside-down every which way, that dangle you and force you to stand up, and do just about everything else imaginable under the sun, my conclusion (besides that screaming makes everything more fun) is: the traditional no-bells-and-whistles rollercoasters are by far the best.

By traditional, I mean the rollercoasters that take you on a slow climb up a really big hill and then send you careening down the other side at an obscenely steep angle, where you then proceed to go up and down (and around) lots of smaller hills until you’ve used up all that potential energy you got from climbing the hill. Really, that’s way more exciting than going upside down again and again, because the thrilling part are all the acceleration changes you feel (i.e., going down a hill you feel weightless), and when you are going around a loop you are basically feeling the same acceleration the whole time. Also, I love the long climb up the hill, because the tension keeps building as you get higher and higher. You have time to take in the amazing view—Cedar Point is right next to Lake Erie—and freak yourself out a lot before you finally go down. And if you aren’t in the front car you never quite know when you’ve reached the top and when you are going to start the descent, which is just as exciting as getting the full view from the front. Also, wooden rollercoasters are RAD. So so rad.

That said, there was this really awesome rollercoaster called the Top Thrill Dragster. It’s marketed as the tallest and fastest rollercoaster in the world (at least, it was when it was first built). Unlike the traditional rollercoasters I just described, on the Dragster you are accelerated almost instantly (from zero to over 120 mph in four seconds) by a hydraulic launch system. Then you go pretty much straight up for 420 feet over a hill and back down. That thing was…something else. The scariest part is definitely the initial acceleration of the cart, but coming back down on the drop wasn’t too bad either. Oh, and I got to ride it at night. They closed it for several hours due to “high winds”—gives you a lot of confidence in the construction of the ride—but then reopened it around 9 pm so we were able to barely make it through before the park closed. This thing is so awesome it’s fun just to watch…over and over and over. Before each cart goes up to the start position the entire crowd waiting in line starts clapping. It makes this great noise when it goes by, and every so often the cart won’t get fast enough to make it over the top of the hill and has to come back down the way it came. I never saw that happen, unfortunately.

If I ever become a high school physics teacher I am definitely going to do whatever it takes to take my class to an amusement park to teach them about physics via rollercoasters.

I could write a whole blog entry about the people watching at Cedar Point, too. But…my lunch break is definitely over so I’ll have to save that for another time.

Nuts and bolts...

This morning I was reveling in the fact that right now it seems like I’m messing up in many avenues of my life. So, instead of continuing to revel, I decided that I would just change my behavior and, well, not mess up anymore. That doesn’t mean that I won’t make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. I should qualify this: when I mean “messing up” I mean repetitive behavior that is counter-productive to what I really want (for example: making mistakes and not learning from them).

So, with that background to my Monday morning mindset: I spent a long time searching for a nut that would fit this one specific bolt that I needed to put part of my experiment together. As I was searching all over I kept thinking about that party at Cruft-Labs where when everyone walked in the door the guys got a bolt and the girls got a nut. In order to get drinks from the bar you had to find your counterpart, screw the two pieces together, and deposit them in a bowl by the bar. Anyway, I finally found a nut that fit the bolt, but it was some sort of locking nut that only screws about twice because one end is smaller than the other. With some more searching and improvising I was able to arrange things so that my experimental set up sort of worked the way I wanted it, but not really. I am definitely going to need to find that perfect nut eventually.

I don’t know what the moral to that story is, but I’m sure there must be one. Or not. I really hope my life isn't turning into a hardware allegory.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

Big and clean...

All right, all right, what did I do today? Well, right after I posted this morning I proceeded to lock myself out of my lab, and my Glenn Research Center ID and key inside the lab. This posed somewhat of a problem when I left for the tour of Plum Brook Station, but I learned that when security guards are checking IDs for a whole bus full of people, they don't really care what you show them after a while.

At Plum Brook Station I saw the largest vacuum chamber in the world. Nevertheless, it was a bit underwhelming-just a big room with very very thick walls. The highlight of my day was the tour guide for the other test facilities we saw (B-2 and SPF?). He was a mechanical engineer but he looked like your stereotypical geologist: big bushy beard and a big bushy gut. I loved it. Geologist-but-he-doesn't-realize-it was very into talking about safety. He emphasized how important it was to know every little detail about the test facilities so you know where to run if something goes wrong. For example, if there is a liquid nitrogen spill and you step in it, your feet are gone. But if you happen to be wearing foot protection and can stay in the spill, the nitrogen will eventually turn into a gas and you will suffocate and collapse onto the floor and freeze and shatter like a bouncy ball. Another scenario: liquid oxygen condenses and then drips onto your pants. You don't realize it's liquid oxygen and think it's just water. Then you go over to machine something and a spark lands on your pants. Now your pants have been completely incinerated. Oooh, there was one other good safety scenario but I forgot it. Damn!

Some people got to ride the “Aero Bus” to Plum Brook Station, but I wasn't one of the lucky ones. Apparently it has chairs that swivel a full 360 degrees and satellite television…but no air-conditioning.

Today also featured: a cookie cake! Of the moon!

A quickie

I came in early on my own before our tour of the Plum Brook Facility (owned and operated by NASA Glenn, where they test a lot of cutting edge propulsion stuff...basically the bread and butter of Glenn, and what has made Glenn famous)in order to check on and finish an experiment that I left running overnight. Well, I got here and my boss had stopped it after I went home yesterday, so I guess I'll just write a quick blog entry instead.

This morning I had a dream involving a very violent (sublime) thunderstorm. I was running home (home home, meaning Sherwood) up our gravel road and there were giant booms and lightning flashes every few seconds. Then I woke up and realized that there was a real storm outside, with lightning so close and so intense that I could see it flashing through my window (with closed blinds). Because it was pouring and storming, I had to nix my plans to go running this morning. I'll have to squeeze something in after we get back from Plum Brook. We've been having thunderstorms nearly every day. It's craaaaazy!

Sorry I've been lettting up slack on the blog-writing. It's a combination of me losing steam and enthusiasm about the NASA Academy program and being really busy at work. I also think the daily thunderstorms have something to do with it, too. But, my time hear is drawing to a close (I can almost taste it!), but it's going to be a hard push (or a mad dash, whichever you prefer) from here on out.

Just another note: all my favorite people around are security guards and janitors.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

This is kind of weird

Right now (12:17 am) there's a car parked outside my room (that means in the parking lot of an extended stay hotel) with all its lights on blasting the Cure loud enough so I can hear it perfectly from my second story window. There are people shouting and dancing around, too. Maybe I should go join them?

Oh, now it just changed to Franz Ferdinand. I feel like I'm back at East Campus.

Monday, July 18, 2005

Sestina skirmish

For the Glenn Academy website we have to write weekly summaries. Last week was mine, and so I wrote this (somewhat crappy, but still time consuming) sestina:

Week Six Sestina

To start week six, th' Academy at Glenn
learned censorship makes Jordan roar like thunder.
Then later Monday the students found a new space-
the best one dollar tacos in Ohio-
had margaritas and just like a movie
star, there was rhinestone cowboy Marshal Blessing.

Tuesdays aren't always received as a blessing,
but this Tuesday was not pure work at Glenn.
A physics speaker dazzled with a movie
of waves (the pressure kind cause all the thunder).
On Wednesday at the Aero Inst. of Ohio,
a conference held; all eyes were turned towards space.

But no, the shuttle didn't return to space
(to find out why would be a NASA blessing).
At least we didn't road-trip from Ohio.
Filmed interview with Landis: guru of Glenn.
At night the skies erupted with rain and thunder,
which at Candlewood meant pizza and a movie.

On Friday we presented on our movie
and work from Kevlar to bone-loss in space.
Biking home J fled from rain and thunder;
had she been pious she would have been blessing.
Kat's mom and grandma came to visit Glenn:
a long drive from Tennessee to Ohio.

Saturday saw Kat to Dayton, Ohio,
and Kenyon (almost in the Harry Potter movie)
where Jordan went to take refuge from Glenn,
with trees and hills and wide green open space,
And no shenanigans from Marshal Blessing.
She ran for miles on mighty thighs of thunder.

Back in Cleveland beach plans foiled: the thunder
brought the stench of sewage to the Ohio
lake. Then Moses, Chris, and Marshal Blessing
rounded out their weekend: a drive-in movie.
Mo braided with mayonnaise and browsed web-space.
Time for another week of work at Glenn.

Over halfway through, thunder stormed near Glenn.
We understand Ohio, though not yet space.
Should we let Marshal Blessing be in our Mars movie?


All right, so it isn't the best poem in the world, but I'm proud of it. So I was extremely pissed when I got an email from the notorious Marshal Blessing (I could write a treatise complaining about him, but I think I've already vented enough) telling me that I needed to write a “more straight-forward prose version” for the website. The “censorship” I mentioned in the second line of the first stanza refers to how everything we write gets censored before it makes it to the website. And it's not inappropriate content (for the most part) that gets cut out, it's opinions and observations about things that are going on in NASA and in our program. I realize that we are affiliated with NASA (though only partially; none of us get paid through NASA), but I don't think that means we can't describe our reactions to the things we encounter during NASA Academy. The purpose of NASA Academy is to expose smart analytical driven creative students to the “big picture” of the aerospace industry. Those kinds of students are going to have opinions, right? (At least, I would hope so.) The purpose of our website is to show the world what our program is about and what we are doing. So why do we need to portray ourselves as boring mindless drones who don't question or challenge anything? Anything with character that we try to put up on the website gets vetoed. (And what makes me mad is that Marshal, our staff member, censors these things himself before the actual “censor” guy sees it.)

So…one of the most important lessons I've learned so far this summer is that we are never going to get very far into space unless the public gets excited about NASA and invested in space travel. We also aren't going to get very far if the quality of education, specifically science education, continues to decrease and kids don't want to pursue science and engineering. I think that one of the reasons a lot of people don't want to study science and engineering isn't that it's hard, but the stereotype that those fields are boring, stiff, and uncreative. I know that's why a lot of my friends didn't enjoy science in high school. I don't think the NASA Academy should be perpetuating that stereotype; it should be breaking it. So I think my poem should go on the website and I'm going to make sure that it does.

Before I head off to do a long run in the 90 degree Cleveland swamp, I just want to say that I know there are bigger battles to be fought. Give me some time (to cool off, among other things) and I'll get over my tunnel vision.

Thursday, July 14, 2005

The significance of pressure waves...

Today I had a mondo adventure.

Glenn Research Center, though situated in the most sedentary inactive state I've ever visited, does make attempts to foster athletic activity. There's a nice dirt loop down by the "picnic grounds" that is exactly 1 mile long. Today after work I decided I wanted to do some mile repeats for speedwork on said dirt track, which is where my adventure began.

The run itself was good, even though I had no eye correction and was wading through a blurry world (which made the deer that was relaxing unperturbed about 6 meters away slightly less amazing). Between the second and third mile repeat the temperature dropped about 10 or 15 degrees (based on my acutely calibrated personal weather prediction system...uh...my skin...). A storm was a-brewing!

I got back to my building around 6:15, only to find that they lock all the GRC buildings at 6. Stranded outside with a thunderclouds looming, how perfect. I was finally able to break in (er, find a nice old lady who could let me in), get my bike, and be on my way. Not ten seconds after I left the storm hit. There was thunder and lighting all around me. I wasn't scared, not at all! Soon a torrential downpour started, making the already bike unfriendly pot-hole ridden Cleveland roads even less inviting due to the quickly accumulating standing water. And it didn't help that I was wearing glasses, which were rendered completely useless in the downpour.

Nonetheless, I persevered through all these physical impediments (surprises!) as I felt like I was racing home, battling for my life against the elements. I made a wrong turn when I was almost back (like I said, I couldn't see), but when I did that I passed a nice dude who shouted at me from the shelter of his garage asking if I wanted a poncho--I was almost home and already completely soaked through so I didn't take it, but it made my day anyway.

I thoroughly enjoyed the adversity. The only downside is my phone is now on the fritz. Completely useless.

I wish you all exciting adventures in the near future.

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

I've said it before, but...

I just want to travel around and have adventures. I'm getting so restless. I have this road atlas (the National Geographic "Adventure Addition", which means it has inserts on a lot of national parks and descriptions of great places to hike, bike, climb, paddle, everything) and I spend so much time looking at the maps and planning imaginary trips that I would want to take if I had the time and freedom (and money). I want to go everywhere. I want to live in the woods and not in a hotel. I want to climb mountains and hike through deserts and paddle on white water and scale cliffs and eat cacti and fight alligators. How am I ever going to survive as an engineer?

I really want to organize some kind of adventure between when I get done with work (August 13th) and when school starts (after Labor Day). I am supposed to be back for cross country on the 22nd, but...our captains have already kind of said if you have cool adventures planned that's ok since we don't even know who our coach is yet and no one has officially given us a "you must be here on this day" mandate.

If I ever get married I'm taking my honeymoon in Glacier National Park. But we can also swing down to the Grand Tetons, too. Or maybe I want to trek through Australia? Who cares that your sex drive drops when you are hiking 15 miles a day or that sex attracts grizzly bears...I'm sure I could overcome those obsticles and have the sexiest wilderness honeymoon ever.

More woodland creatures than you can shake a can of bear spray at (though why would you want to?)

Yes yes, I know it's been eons since I really updated this thing...you don't have to remind me. I haven't written about my trip to Niagara Falls or to Washington, D.C. (where we met with the Goddard Academy, aka the "dark side"...more about that later...maybe). You can discipline me if you want, or...

You can read about the awesome run I had. Today I had a whole bunch of extra energy. Why? Who knows. Maybe it was the fact that I started running in the morning again, maybe it was the coffee I had today--though I hope it wasn't that, or maybe it was the fact that I actually had a ton of stuff with which to keep myself busy at work today...though Saideep, my new nutritionist/"life coach" might tell me it was something else all together. But anyway, today I ran in the morning, where I encounted a dog that was really more like a small bear (think Newfoundland, only bigger and white with brown spots). It was lovable and cute, and tried to run along with me when I passed it. Then later, minutes after I got home today a massive thunderstorm hit. I went running in its aftermath, through air that was so warm and thick and wet that I could see it (really) and feel it (really really) and even could have tweezed it (huh?) if I had wanted to. The river was engorged from the rain of a few hours before and the fireflies were buzzing about freshly re-charged from the lighting (ok, so that's now how it works...but wouldn't it be rad if it was?).

On my second run I saw three raccoons crossing the road (a mother and two babies) right in front of a quickly approaching car! "No!" I said "There are racoons in the road!" (Really, I said this aloud.) So I kind of ran into the road a bit because I knew the car would see me and swerve to get around me. Yay. The raccoons didn't die. But as I passed them they kind of hissed at me. Ok, ok, so I didn't expect them to gratefully hand me a medal or anything (ok, so maybe I did), but still...

Um...also I've been perfecting my finger skills during my runs. Around North Olmsted, OH I get heckled, yelled at, and honked at than anywhere else I've ever run (even College Park, MD at night...where everyone warned me that I'd be "bothered"). It used to be that my mouth was quick with a rebuttal ("Fuck you, asshole in the car!"), though it was pointless because the car would have already sped around the corner and couldn't hear me anyway. But now I've honed my skills and improved my hand-mouth coordination so that I can give the finger while shouting an insult. I'm so proud. But seriously, I'm not being rude or vulgar, I'm just returning the sentiment.

Today I heard the best phrase ever: phantom dook. It was used on my new favorite TV show Brat Camp. It's a reality show that takes place in Central Oregon (near Hancock Field Station), where trained wilderness staff members (with names like "Little Big Bear") take troubled teens on a 60-day mission of strenuous hiking and outdoor skills to work out their emotional and disciplinary issues (a la Outward Bound). I've seriously entertained thoughts of devoting my life to such a venture (the wilderness staff part, not the troubled teen part), though I'd need to be thoroughly convinced that this kind of thing actually helps the kids. I know outdoor education was a huge part of my personal development, but I don't know if it can help everyone.

All right, there is a more eloquent, coherent, educational and information entry coming up some time in the near future.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Whoa! It's all connected (again)...

So I was searching for information on lunar regolith (moon dust) and lunar simulant (fake moon dust...the stuff we use to do research), and I was looking through the abstracts from the Lunar Regolith Simulant Materials Workshop held at Marshall Space Flight Center this January, and lo and behold (behold!) I find a paper by none other than Donald Sadoway (for those who don't know: my totally badass chemistry professor from freshman year, also the guy who basically convinced me to go to MIT when I was a pre-frosh)! Whoa! I had no idea he was into lunar simulant! The paper was way over my head, but I think the jist of it is: if you are going to make lunar simulant, its properties when you try to process it (the ways you can process it are the things I don't really understand) have to be the same as the real deal.

All right...I'm probably getting a little too excited, but think how great it would be if I could call up Professor Sadoway and say "Hey, so I have this little problem with some fake moon dust..."

Anyway...back to work...

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

The Amazing John H. Glenn

I thought that my summer had already peaked when I got to ride on a Segway last week; I was so wrong. Today I had lunch with John Glenn and his wife. That's right: first American astronaut to orbit the Earth John Glenn, Senator (who ran for president in 1984 but didn't make it past the Democratic primaries) John Glenn, the very same. It wasn't a huge anonymous assembly-style meeting (though that would come later in the day), either. It was an intimate 5-students plus John and Annie Glenn lunch around a very shiny table in a very swanky conference room.

Though I don't need to tell you, here are some (lesser-known) reasons why John Glenn is awesome:
-Even though his name is plastered everywhere around this neck-of-the-woods, he still finds it startling and unnecessary. He tried to argue them out of renaming Lewis Field to Glenn Research Center. (Though even his negotiating skills as a politician couldn't curb the enthusiasm of the hordes of people who look up to him.)
-He extremely passionate about education. Someone asked him what work from his time in the senate he's most proud of, and he said nuclear non-proliferation legislation, voting in support of every bill favoring educational funding, and pushing towards improving communication with China.
-He and his wife met when they were 2 years old. It's implicit to an observer that they can communicate clearly and completely without even speaking. When he was offered a chance to return to space on the shuttle in 1998, he wanted his wife to accompany him so they could be a husband and wife astronaut team. Annie Glenn said she'd love to go to space, but would never be willing to go through lift-off or re-entry. Nonetheless, she went to most of his "astronaut classes" with him.
-Before John Glenn's flight, no one really knew what would happen to humans in microgravity. They thought that maybe vision would fail, debilitating nausea would ensue, and they didn't know whether it would be possible to eat. John Glenn said that he wasn’t worried about swallowing, though, because when he was a kid he and his friends stood on their heads to find out if they could drink water “up hill.”

I guess being in the Glenn Academy does have some perks, after all...

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

Whoa! Landis!

Dr. Geoffrey Landis, who I raved about a few weeks ago, was just announced as a visiting lecturer (I think the official title is "Ronald E. McNair-NASA
Visiting Professor in Aeronautics") at MIT for the upcoming academic year! How crazy is that? Maybe I can take a class or seminar from him, because he's so totally rad. Anyway, I'll ask him about what he'll be teaching at MIT when we interview him next week.

Oh yeah, he's also the principal investigator on the Robotic Exploration of Venus project. So...maybe now I have two new heroes.

I'm a walking (no longer wheeling) road hazard

I was late to work today because when I was nearly a mile away from my hotel on my way to work my pedal fell off. I was making a left turn, thus I stopped in a lane of on-coming traffic. My bike couldn’t even make it a week! I tried to reattach the pedal, which screws into the pedal-shaft, but the threads were all eaten up. I had to walk back home and get a ride to work. Sigh. I was really sad that I couldn’t bike to work, but really happy that the cars didn’t get angry and run me over while I was scrambling to pick up my pedal and make it out of the road. Hopefully I’ll get my bike replaced later today.

Saturday, July 02, 2005

In which Jordan experiences interplanetary travel more than once...

I'm about to head off to Niagara Falls for the weekend (as long as I keep reminding myself that the “camping” we are doing isn't anything like real camping, I won't be disappointed; I really excited to get out of North Olmsted…and I've never seen Niagara Falls before!), but before I do…

A few things…

We heard this talk on Thursday all about futuristic and innovative ways to design planes (if you can really call them that) that can fly in the atmosphere of other planets and moons. This is a complicated problem because some planets, like Mars, have an atmosphere that is much thinner than Earth's, which means you need to generate much more lift somehow (either by flying really fast or having a huge wingspan). Some planets, like Venus, have very thick atmospheres (which makes the aerodynamics easier) but are enveloped by extremely noxious gases. Another engineering problem arises when one considers that these planes need to be packed up into tiny spacecraft in order to get to their destinations. This means designing wings that fold up in inventive ways.

I was beyond excited to hear that they are working on creating a “dummy” rover for Venus that will be controlled by a plane that soars above the noxious layers of gasses (we can design metals that withstand the heat and sulfuric acid, but electronics just frazzle). Venus's geology is my first great scientific love, and physically exploring the surface is something that used to be an impossibility.

I was also fascinated by some of the creative flight designs they are considering for Martian flight. They are developing planes that flap their wings like birds. The wings are made out of some kind of special plastic that is very thin and flexes up and down. They are also using insects as inspiration. People like to say that insects like bumble bees are aerodynamically infeasible, but that's only because they don't use the same aerodynamic concepts that airfoils use. Instead they use the principles of an unsteady flow. If you'd like to read more about the way insects rely on vortices to produce lift, here's a good article.

On Mars, because of the fluid properties of the atmosphere, insect type flight can be scaled up to create larger flying insect-robots. Yeah…it's crazy. They are using technology that DARPA has been working on (apparently the military has tiny insect- flight technology robots but a lot of the work is classified…which makes me a little suspicious about the fly that attaches itself to my left shoulder every single day while I am running…seriously, it follows me, buzzes around my head, and then lands in the same place…am I being watched?) and making it bigger!

We saw lots of crazy far-fetched animations of all these designs. They were awesome.

Ok, getting back to reality, though…

Having a bike is the most wonderful thing ever. I have started biking to work, which is fantastic. I even love biking up the two huge hills every day, twice a day. I went on a long bike ride Thursday evening (don't worry, I didn't ride my bike at night; civil twilight began at 9:38 and I was back at around 9:45). I haven't gone on a long bike ride since…last fall along the Charles River, with Rob Radez (of all people) on the bike Sarah bought from the police auction (of all things). Anyway, I biked through the MetroPark and there were so many fireflies it was like I was biking through a planetarium. I didn't even know there were fireflies in Ohio. It was amazing…like a million tiny cameras flashing, or sunlight reflecting off a lake-only it was fireflies in the woods. Fantastic. I also rode through the entire solar system. Along the bike trail there are signs set up for each planet in the solar system and then the sun spaced to scale. So I biked in all the way from Pluto to the sun-which took about a mile-and then back again. It was awesome.

I hope everyone has a great weekend. Don't forget: Deep Impact is making its dynamic collision Sunday night/Monday morning. I'll be in a campground that has heated pools and is right next to a casino. Talk about “roughing it smoothly.”

Friday, July 01, 2005

An odd collection...

This entry is dedicated to K.T., who has the book-a-licious job of interning with a librarian doing educational outreach this summer. That means she gets to coerce kids into reading with promises of wealth and glory.

I read George Eliot’s Middlemarch during my first two weeks in Ohio. It was an interesting experience reading about provincial Victorian English life from suburban 21st century Ohio. In some bizarre ways the two settings are strangely analogous, but they are completely discordant. [For graduates of OES Humanities: I know, Sean and Debbie would whack me in the back of the head for that wishy-washy “similar yet different” thesis.] But back to the novel… Middlemarch is everything a Victorian novel should be (a snapshot of life in an era on the cusp of social change) plus a whole lot more. The massive size of the book give it freedom to cover a much greater scope: the lives of nearly a dozen “main” characters interweave in ingenious ways. The book seriously and meticulously addresses gender roles, political and economic debates, views on science and medicine, wealth and social status, the dynamics of a small society, the ever present dichotomy between physical and mental prowess, and much more, all in an community that is just stifling and restrictive enough to allow its satisfaction but not completely happiness. This book is not as comic or overtly progressive as a Jane Austen novel, but it takes you far beyond the happy ending where every loose piece is tucked into place. Eliot narrates with a subtler and more understated voice, but then catches you off-guard with a passage or sentence that knocks you down with its eloquence and beauty.

After that, I raced through Swann’s Way, the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I read the “new” translation by Lydia Davis, which is part of the Penguin Classics series. Many (if not most) of the books I’ve decided to tackle this summer are in translation, and translation is a topic that fascinates me. My favorite book on the subject is Hofstadter’s La Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language. But…I’m supposed to be writing about Proust!

The translation was clear and lucid, but I haven’t looked at the Moncrieff version, so I can’t offer any kind of accurate comparison. It’s hard to evaluate the quality of both the original prose and the translation at the same time, especially if you only have one translation. So, staying more on the thematic side…

I wanted to underline something (or several things) on every page. I wanted to remember so many passages that I went out and bought sticky tabs to stick on the pages. Proust’s portrayals of personal and social psychological phenomenon offer not only accurate and beautiful description, but also profound analysis and contemplation. He presents his observations in such a way that they are philosophical yet unobtrusive, which is a really hard thing to accomplish. I find reading Proust to be a lot like reading Dostoyevsky (except that Dostoyevsky’s subject matter tends to be much darker, but then again, I’ve only read the first of many volumes, and this one focused on childhood and young adulthood). The two authors have similar genius when it comes to describing human character while offering philosophical insight on human nature.

I need to acquire volume 2, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, because I definitely want to read more Proust.

The next book I read was The Golden Ass, by Apelius. I didn’t have the Robert Graves translation, which made me sad, because I really liked I, Claudius (though apparently not enough to have read the sequel yet…). I had to buy a different translation because I bought the book for a class which I then later dropped…such is life. Anyway, The Golden Ass is structured sort of like Don Quixote, where there’s a main storyline about a traveler, but he encounters many colorful characters who get to tell their own stories. There was magic, witchcraft, mischief, more cuckoldry than you can shake a stick at, a healthy dose of intervention by the gods, thievery, tomfoolery, kidnapping, comic violence, attacks by vicious beasts, and just about everything else under the sun. If I were to write a paper about this book, it would definitely be on the use of sex as a coercive tool (and how that relates to gender roles, of course).

I just stated reading Parade’s End by Ford Maddox Ford. It’s another brick (840 and some odd pages), so it might be awhile before I update again on my summer reading…

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

I feel so bad, yet I feel so good...

Ok, so I just completely compromised my morals. But I also upheld my morals in a sick and twisted way. Let me explain:

I hate Wal-Mart. They are the world's largest corporation, with the largest profit, yet they still can't manage to pay their employees decent wages or offer them health insurance. They impose their moral beliefs upon their customers by censoring media products and by refusing to fill certain prescriptions (i.e. prescriptions for emergency contraception). Sure, they are a private company, and people can choose not to shot at Wal-Mart, but the way Wal-Mart makes money is by going into a small town, buying out all the local retail stores, and basically becomming the only shopping option. You can read more about Wal-Mart's evil doings at Wal-Mart Watch.

So...why am I ranting about Wal-Mart? Today I talked with someone who had bought a cheap bike from Wal-Mart while she was in Alaska for the summer. She used the bike until it broke (which wasn't that long), then took it back and got a full refund thanks to Wal-Mart's no questions asked 90-day return policy. Hmmmm. I've been looking for a bike. Hmmmm. There's a 24-hour Wal-Mart right across the street. So, you can put two and two together and figure out what happened. At 12:30 am I went to Wal-Mart and bought a bike for just under $60. The plan was to use it for the rest of the six weeks that I am here and then return it.

Ok, so I feel like I'm just on the dodgy side of the moral spectrum here. Am I right to feel a little skeevy? True, that is their policy, so I wouldn't be breaking any rules, just taking full advantage of the ones that are in place. And true, the bike may in fact break and I may in fact have a legitimate reason to take it back. But I still feel a little wrong, first because I purchased something from Wal-Mart (tonight I stepped foot inside Wal-Mart for the very first time), a company I wholeheartedly DO NOT support, and second because I feel like I'm cheating...someone? something? But what am I cheating? An organization that cheats the rest of the world?

So...I was wondering what everyone else thought. Am I psychotic for feeling guilty about doing this? Or am I a horribly immoral person for attempting to do this in the first place? If I can't sleep tonight because of it, I'll return the bike tomorrow unused. (Ok, maybe I'll ride it to work and then decide.) If I still bad about it in the long run, I can always just use the bike for the summer and say that the $60 was worth it and not go back for my refund...or hope the thing breaks.

I'm a nut, I'm a nut, I'm craaaaazy...

Oh, I'd like to add: This was somewhat an act of desperation. I'm getting a slight case of cabin fever here in suburban hell (or maybe it's agoraphobia?), and I want to be able to go places. I want to bike to work because it's only 3 miles away and I feel like driving is completely unneccessary (if two of us bike, the rest can all fit in one car and that's half the pollution--right now we need two cars). I want to bike to parks that are further away so I can run in new and exciting venues! I want to bike for extra exercise. I want a little bit of freedom and autonomy. So, when I found out I could get a bike, now, kind of free, I was a little drunk on excitement.

Also, I realize that my Wal-Mart woes aren't exactly the most pressing problems in the world right now. But my little dilema spawns some important moral discussions, like: is it ok to cheat something evil? is there such a thing as a victimless crime? does intent overshadow action?

I really just need to go to bed...

Too good to be true

All right...get ready...

This happened on Monday, but I wanted to wait to present it to the world (meaning: you, my loyal audience) until I had photographic evidence to supplement my story. What you see before your awestruck eyes is me. On a Segway.

Segway

We were visiting Cleveland State University, idling in a conference room waiting for our tour guide, when Gregg Schoof (the bald guy next to me in the picture), manager of the Fenn College of Engineering, comes gliding into the room and starts doing laps around the table on a Segway like it's perfectly normal to ride one around in an office building. (I think he really enjoys picking jaws up off the floor for his collection each time he does that.) The engineering staff at CSU thought "Hey, we need one of those so that we can be badass!" and bought the second Segway to be sold in Cleveland. Gregg "Aerodynamically Shaped Whippersnapper" Schoof keeps it in his office and uses it whenever he wants, although it officially belongs to the department and is used for a freshman design project.

Anyway, Mr. Schoof kindly let us ride his gentle steed. It was on "slow" mode, so I couldn't get up to supersonic speeds, but I definitely tried. On a Segway, you just lean forward and it starts moving forwards. It's like it reads your mind (almost)!
Schoof mentioned that the battery-life depends on the terrain over which you are gliding. I imagined trying to take a Segway off-roading or mountain climbing...but I don't think that's quite what he meant.

Oh yeah, we also toured a lab at Cleveland State where they are developing a satellite that will be launched this August. The satellite doesn't really do anything special. I'm not sure what the point of that tour was, actually. The (not even close) second coolest part of the visit was the big 3D color printer (MIT has one too). It had just finished printing a piece, so we could look inside and see how the chamber was filled to the brim with dust. To get the piece out you have to do an excavation archaeologist style.