BoldUlysses.com

Is there anything more mind-bendingly aggravating (or as the French would say, agaçant) than a printer or a fax machine that won’t print properly? Much of the film Office Space is a parody or an exaggeration of real office life, but the scene in which Michael (the programmer) gets irate at the fax machine in the office is completely true to reality. They do that and we react like that. My printer went through the same ritual earlier, totally denying that it had paper even though there was ample paper in the tray, a litany of creaky mechanical noises, a few blank sheets of paper as an offering before finally relenting and complying with my request to print the document. Amazing. There’s got to be a better way to do this. The process involved in getting something from the screen onto a page should not be this convoluted. It’s Rube Goldberg-ism at its finest.

a brace of pictures

1. Fun word of the day: hypereutectic.

2. I bucked the stereotype today. I stopped and asked for directions. Driving back from lunch today in Kernersville, I inadvertently timed my return to coincide perfectly with the President’s arrival in said town. Needless to say, those secret service folks and the local authorities don’t take any chances, and they had the eastbound lane of business I40 completely blocked off. Cars were backing up the entrance ramp to the highway just to get out of there and find an alternate route. I did the same, doing an about-face roughly halfway up the entrance ramp so I wouldn’t have to crane my neck to see where I was going. Got back on the local road with little drama and headed south in what I thought was the direction of the I40 bypass, which would get me back to work. Unfortunately the road I was on headed more to the southwest than south proper, so I drove and drove for quite a while. I finally gave up and stopped at a gas station. The kindly gentleman behind the counter, very engaged in mopping up a very large pool of some undetermined liquid, reoriented me and I made it back to work.

3. Been listening to a lot of Simon & Garfunkel lately, specifically their early material. One song, “Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall,” is a triumph of existential lyricism wrapped in a disarmingly folksy package. The coexistence of the heavy-handed theme and the jaunty melody is arresting.

4. Kind of a neat little treatise by Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip “Dilbert,” on the elements of writing humor.

5. random pictures of domesticity

I did okay. The one thing for certain was that it was (and still is) quite cold. Having to warm up muscles in 35° weather is never fun. If the race had been around lunchtime the situation would have improved a bit, but… Morning races have their own set of virtues–getting a jump on the rest of the day, better traffic situation, among other things.

I didn’t set a PR, but I ran better than my last 5K. 21:40. The good news is that I didn’t crash and burn during any of the legs of the race–kept a steady pace. It’s a good baseline, then, since I didn’t have an overly “good” or “bad” race, but ran very near capacity the whole time. The bad news is that I seem to be stuck in a rut of sorts in terms of my training. I need to vary my course a bit and do some speed drills, I think. Not to mention get my watch fixed. Heh.

One of the qualities of a race that I appreciate is that they’re like a test that actually benefits you. In other words, if you take an academic test, you’ll have to draw on the reserve of knowledge accumulated during class, but you won’t learn anything new. They’re designed purely to see what you know, not to increase your knowledge. In a road race, on the other hand, not only do you get a sense of where you stand in terms of athletic fitness (the “test”), it also serves as a great exercise period (the “class”). So you get the evaluation and the workout. Two-for-one.

Driving back to Chapel Hill today to participate in my dad’s birthday festivities and do the whole buying-a-Christmas-tree thing with the family. Tomorrow will also be the first time I’ll have been to my home church in several months. I’m looking forward to it. And sleeping :)

Good things about today so far:

• Between emulating the solid modeling process on a similar, but not identical, lazy susan tray, having the actual part in front of me with digital calipers handy and a copy of the actual blueprints, modeling up the first part in SolidWorks is going very smoothly indeed. I should have it done and drawings made by the end of the day, which should please Bret.
• People at work. Ming, the Chinese production engineer who barely speaks any English, is carrying on a very animated cell phone conversation next to me with a cab driver in New York supposedly driving his wife to the airport. The cabbie evidently made a detour from the route Ming feels he should have followed and they’re now delayed: “You make big turn into Manhattan! No! Want to go to La Guardia!” etc…
  Meanwhile, Karl, a very outgoing distribution supervisor of Austrian origin, is joking with Andreas about how they’re the only two straight men in America who own a pair of Italian-designed red jeans. Don’t have the foggiest how they got on that topic. Later on, Karl gives a waltzing demonstration while mentioning how the rubber soles of his shoes squeaked while dancing at the Austrian 50th anniversary of independence celebration in Vienna…
• Received an e-mail from Félicie today. No word on whether she received my letter over the summer, but it’s still nice to hear from her. Funny how my mind immediately starts planning a trip to France next summer (or sooner)…
• This post amused me greatly, especially the Family Circus and auction barker bits.

I’ve had too much soda lately. I don’t really care to ingest this much caffeine–it ceases be a subtle pick-me-up and becomes the chemical equivalent of slapping me awake as the oscillations between jittery alertness and barely-contained drowsiness intensify. It’s certainly no substitute for sleep. And as I was telling Em last night, I seem to live between big sleeps these days. Let’s see… The last was this past weekend, and the next time I’ll get a decent window for sleep will be…this Saturday? Yeah. It’s like that.

Had my longest flight block yet today–I was in the air for the better part of two and a half hours, practicing short- and soft-field takeoffs and landings.

The good: Most of my landings were spot-on and excellent. In one particularly successful short-field landing, I got the plane on the ground smoothly and to a full stop in about 1000 ft. Soft-field landings are nice because the main criterion instinctively used to judge a landing’s success–its softness–becomes the whole point. The descent is halted a few feet above the ground and by juggling the yoke and throttle the plane is coaxed the remaining distance to the surface for an almost imperceptible touchdown. It’s not as hard as it sounds and almost all the ones I did were very comfy indeed.

The bad: Flying out of Lexington, coming back to Sugar Valley, I got lost. And what’s worse, without even realizing it. Sugar Valley was back to the northwest, and I flew a northeast heading for some time before Mr. Hahn prompted me to reevaluate the situation. The worst part is that not only did I announce over the unicom that I was leaving the pattern to the northwest (and didn’t do it), I had the correct heading written down beforehand and right in front of me on the approach plate. It’s one mistake I won’t make again.

The ugly: My instructor got out of the plane at Lexington and let me fly around in the pattern for 6 or 7 landings by myself. On the first time around, my approach was dead-on, but I didn’t relax on short final, instead pulling the yoke too far back, floating quite a bit and porpoising the airplane, cycling up and down a few times, bouncing off the runway before finally sticking. Not pretty. Not pretty at all. And not good for the airplane either, heh.

Mr. Hahn said flying has a way of keeping you humble, and today was certainly a humbling day. I’m just glad there were some positives in terms of the main goal–practicing those specialized landings.

Just got home from my first half-day stint at Peter Meier. Job-wise, I can’t imagine a better fit. It’s such a blessing and it was so encouraging. I got reacclimated with SolidWorks and remembered how much I love that program. It’s intuitive, versatile and targeted precisely towards the kind of products I’ll be drafting, so the channels in which it operates align very well with my tasks.

Even my coworkers are great. Very ethnically diverse staff–one Chinese gentleman, several Hispanic guys and a considerable population of northern European folks, all laid back and friendly. My boss used to work for Buell, so we talked motorcycles for a bit, and I also discovered he’s a fellow SNL fan whilst discussing my desk’s proximity to the coffee machine (Rob Schneider paraphrase: “Makin’ coffeeeee!”). And even John, the guy I’ll be working closest with on the project, is another NCSU alum (class of ’94, IE). So there’s no dearth of conversation.

Heard on the radio a few minutes ago that Stan Berenstain, co-creator (with his wife Jan) of the Berenstain Bears series of kids’ books, died late last week. I grew up first having those books read to me, then reading them myself. We had a substantial collection of them and I must have pored over every one at least a dozen times, in that childlike way of watching or reading something until every last ounce of enjoyment is wrung out of it (and then some). My mom’s probably given them all away by now (I’ve halted her ongoing effort to sell off parts of our “library” by making her promise to give/will the whole thing to me. I love books). It was sad to hear about Stan Berenstain’s passing, but it brought back good memories of his books.

One in particular stands out. It’s something I’ve been thinking about recently even before I heard the news today. I remember reading a Berenstain Bear book about Christmas. I must have been about 7 or 8 years old and I think the book was one of the first they wrote, before they were really stretching to find new, more up-to-the-minute themes. I don’t even remember the plot of the book, only that the family of bears was experiencing Christmas together in some capacity. I can recall pictures of them shopping for one another and bring a tree home to install inside their tree house. One moment stood out, though–an image of Sister Bear and Papa Bear standing outside on the front porch, looking at a star-covered sky and discussing the plausibility of Santa Claus. Sister, being the age that she was and still believing in Santa Claus, asked Papa Bear all sorts of questions about Santa’s purported abilities, like being able to fit down chimneys and deliver toys to all the children in the world in one night. And Papa Bear’s response wasn’t to topple her belief, but to speculate about how, in his view, there’s something “magic” about the time of year and how Santa Claus was wrapped up in and privy to that “magical” effect of the season, allowing him to do the things he does.

The memory of reading that came back to me as this year’s Christmas season was getting ready to begin, and I started to realize that it’s exactly the sort of theme some overprotective parents want stricken from the books their kids read–especially in the ostensibly Christian community with the outcry against the Harry Potter series and its heavy emphasis on magic, and even some parents who have issues with the Narnia series, unable to grasp its metaphorical themes. Somehow they think that their kids are impressionable enough to read things like that that have it shake their worldview or worse, encourage them to believe in some form of occultism themselves. But thinking back on my own experience as a young child having read many, many books with “magic” running through them, it didn’t faze me a bit. I believed in Santa Claus for a few years, sure, but almost from the beginning I was self-aware enough to know it was a childish belief, and I held on to it just for the sake of believing it. And even without any explicit guidance from my parents, I knew better. The things they said and did, the way their real belief system meshed with the reality of their lives–these things had a far greater and more lasting impression on me, and through their tacit influence I was able to easily see through little things like the viewpoint of the Berenstain Bear book, and that of many other novels and literature.

So initially it might seem like I’m speaking out against the kind of spiritism depicted in the book, but really it’s more of a knock against parents whose well-meant efforts to guide and instruct their children are misplaced in creating animosity toward influences that exist mainly on a surface level, not realizing that children are affected more significantly by deeper things: worldviews borne out, actions taken, things stood up for along the lines of more fundamental concepts like trust, love, honesty, responsibility and the like. Those are the things that make a lasting impression on kids. And those are the areas of my life I pray that He will shore up to the degree necessary, and supply me where I am weak, when I have kids of my own.

to taste and to touch
and to feel as much
as a man can
before he repents

Got back from seeing Walk the Line a little while ago. It makes me wish I was more familiar with Cash’s music. I have “Ring of Fire” on my computer, along with “The Wanderer,” which he sung for U2 on their Zooropa album, but that’s all.

The movie was okay. A lot of times it just seemed like a retread of a standard music star’s career, complete with the violent outbursts, strained relationships, drug use and soul-searching. I wished they had focused more on what made Cash’s music so unique and the man so iconic in the first place. That would have made for a more compelling film than one that just chronicled, in linear fashion, his rise to fame. Although I should say, to be fair, it did approach a look into his individuality with a few scenes’ focus on the way his music spoke to people where they were and his ability to imbue his music with a sense that he had lived what he sang.

In spite of those shortcomings, though, I enjoyed the film if only for the glimpse it is into a time when even brooding music stars on the fast track to fame had an underlying sense of decency. I could see it in the way he approached the owner of the recording studio, the way he talked to June Carter in a diner for the first time. It gave me the sense that no matter the larger swings of temperament Cash underwent, there was still a foundation of right and wrong, a way folks treated one another ingrained in him that served as a plumbline for his eventual redemption. It seems almost like a frame of mind from a bygone time in this postmodern moral climate. I enjoyed that aspect of the film very much.

Interesting observation vis-a-vis customer service: A lot of other cultures observe ours and draw the conclusion that American consumers are essentially spoiled brats who can’t brook disappointment but feel they are always entitled to get their way. I’ve decided, though, that most American consumers can handle disappointment just fine–just not at the first level. In other words, if their complaint or suggestion goes farther than just the first person in the store they approach about it, they’ll be satisfied to a degree whether their issue is properly resolved or not.

An example: I went to the Y late today, around 7:30, to work out and to turn in my registration for an upcoming 5K. It was the last day to turn in registration without getting slapped with a late fee, and I thought I was in the green. However, upon approaching the front desk, I was informed that the member service desk had closed at 6 p.m., at which time they had stopped taking registration forms. I pleaded my case to the attendant at the desk and was stonewalled; there was absolutely nothing she could do. I mentioned that nowhere on the form had it said that it had to be turned in by 6–November 25 was the only thing mentioned. “I’m sorry sir, nothing I can do, not my fault,” yadda yadda… At that point I turned around to investigate the member service desk and saw two people sitting behind the counter. I walked over to them, and through a few explanations and some persuasion, got them to waive the late fee and agree that I could just bring my form in the next morning when the desk was officially open.

Thinking back on the event, even if I had gotten turned away at the member service desk, I would have felt better about the situation knowing that I had exhausted at least more than one option in terms of pleading my case. I see this at the grocery store all the time. People will ask me if we have a particular item, and even if they’re ultimately disappointed, they’re happy that I take their issue to the next level up–the customer service clerks–instead of immediately turning them down or issuing a patent response. I think this is a pretty universal attitude. People like to feel empowered.

After resolving the 5K registration issue, I hit the weights for a little bit. The evening of the Friday after Thanksgiving is officially the best time to go to the gym. The weight room was completely empty and it was nice to have everything totally to myself. I felt a bit as if I had just come into a hefty chunk of money and had splurged and built my own private gymnasium annex onto the house. Although, truth be told, I would have had different music. Justin Timberlake, Rob Thomas and Nickelback don’t exactly fire me up.

The weight room is unfair to tall people. We’re at a disadvantage on just about every exercise. How, you ask? Leverage. Longer limbs mean farther to push/pull the weight for a given rep and also means the weight, or load (for you physics fogies) is farther from the joint (or fulcrum), requiring greater force to move. Not only that, but we just need more material, period, to bulk up to the same degree as shorter folks on account of the longer distances between limbs. I see a short person on the bench press, moving the weight the extent of his arms’ travel (all of 12 inches) and think, “It’s so not fair,” as I climb on the same bench and have to press the weight two feet because of my freakishly long arms.

Being slim, on the other hand, is a decided advantage, especially for the types of exercises I favor–more body weight resistance ones, or calisthenics. My reasoning is that it’s good to be able to move a lot of weight, period, but being able to move weight in relation to one’s own body mass is advantageous for all kinds of athletic pursuits, not to mention agility and flexibility. So in terms of exercises like chin-ups and dips, where I am disadvantaged by tallness, I have the advantage of lightness (relatively speaking) and things even out. That’s what I tell myself, at least.

You know you’ve slept long enough when you dream about getting up but don’t actually get up. I dreamed, among other things, that my mom was calling me downstairs to help put up the Christmas decorations on the house. The horror.

For those of you with a DivX codec for your Windows Media Player downloaded and installed, view the original Great Expectations teaser trailer (right-click save-as, 66M), courtesy of my roommate and his PC. Sorry Mac folks (including myself–the only way I could see it is here at my parents’), it won’t work for us yet.

I wish I could stay here the weekend but somehow I got scheduled to work tomorrow at the store. Shouldn’t be as hectic as yesterday but the fact that I have to still kind of sabotages my weekend back in Chapel Hill. I wanted to visit people. Maybe in a few weeks.

Actually got in the air today for the first time in a couple of weeks. It’s just been too rainy and/or windy on the days I was scheduled to fly, and even today was borderline with a gusty 15 mph wind out of the northwest, but I made the executive decision to go up anyway. I thought we’d just do some ground reference maneuvers and fly back to the airport, but we ended up flying all the way to Winston-Salem. I got some good practice with Class D airspace communications and a chance to land at their nice, wide runway. Didn’t hurt that the prevailing wind was blowing straight down the runway, either. Made my life easier–no crosswind to wrestle with. Landing at Sugar Valley was another story, though, since the runway doesn’t exactly line up with the wind and the surface is only 25 ft wide to begin with. And even just flying back from Winston… I had to crab into the wind darn near 45° just to maintain a constant heading tracking down I40. We flew 9899J, the only plane in the fleet with a GPS, and with it we could view our groundspeed–it was close to 70 kts with an indicated airspeed of 105-110. ‘Twas interesting. But I did well.

Mmm… Gotta do dry cleaning.

1. I’ve had Bono’s cover of Richard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” (which every artist on the face of the planet seems to have covered by this point) going through my head all day. Not altogether unpleasant, just…there.

2. I’ve also had a small but persistent headache all day. I had one Killian’s last night around 10:30. With food. I wasn’t buzzing at all. Can just one have that effect? I’m an alcohol newbie.

3. Something mentioned during the apologetics conference last weekend that I’ve been mulling over in my mind all week: “Adulthood and maturity are attained with the loss of narcissism.” The speaker for that session, Michael Craven, was giving a talk on sexual ethics in popular culture and their evolution over the course of the past century or so. He denounced the luminaries of the sexual revolution–Freud, Sanger, Kinsey, Hefner and Calderone–and showed how our over-sexualized culture is built upon a disintegrating view of sex, reducing it from the most intimate physical and emotional connection two people can share to mere copulation, a physical act motivated by self-centered desire for gratification and misplaced hedonism. He quoted at length from a writer on the subject (I wish I could remember to whom it’s attributed) and the quote above was mixed in. He used it to make the minor point that the sexual revolution has trapped many of us in a kind of state of perpetual adolescence, focused primarily on gratifying our own desires in at least that arena, if not others. It was a very poignant session.

4. Turns out the Great Expectations trailer is on the DVD after all. I think they must have added it recently, since the last time I rented the film all I can remember is the other version. In any case, it was perfect and just as I remembered it.

I’ve watched all 16 episodes of the first season of “Scrubs” on DVD in the past three days. For a guy who hardly watches television ever, that’s a lot of boob-tubing. But a nice change of pace. And a stellar show.

That’s all for tonight, folks. Nothing profound. Just a place marker.

I got off work at Harris Teeter at 10:30. I hate working that late, especially when I have an exam in the morning. I know I’ll pass it as is, but I want to ace it and that means more studying…

Late in my shift, especially if there are enough cashiers up front, the customer service clerk will send me to another part of the store to block and face the shelves. I don’t mind aisle 1 so much–it’s just ketchup and salad dressing and marinades–but today I had the privilege of doing the dairy section. One word: Yogurt. Those little cups are the bane of my existence when I have to stack them four high just above eye level and they topple over, inevitably knocking over three or fours rows in the process. It’s maddening enough during any other time of the day, but around 9:45 when that area of the store is really quiet and all I have is my tiredness and my thoughts to keep me company, the activity ascends to a whole new plane of aggravation.

Around that time this evening I was arm-deep in the sour cream section, pulling the containers to the front and stacking them when I noticed someone in my peripheral vision, browsing the section I was working on. Didn’t think anything of it and kept going. They moved over to my left and looked through the yogurt. My hands were freezing from rooting around in the cooler for so long and I pulled them out, stood up, cupped them to my mouth and breathed, trying to warm them. In doing so I glanced over to my left and was amazed to see a beautiful girl smiling in amusement at my attempt to warm my hands. I returned her smile as she said something to the effect of, “It feels just right” (I assume she was making a reference to the cold weather outside). I managed a reply: “Yeah, it gets me ready to go outside again.” (What the hell?). I smiled again and returned to my blocking and facing, glancing over periodically to see her loading her arms with little yogurt cups. At that point I figured I would make a gesture and offered to get her a basket, but she said she already had one as she walked over to it, in front of the meat department. She thanked me and walked on.

Time sped up again. My activity wasn’t so mundane and monotonous anymore. A thousand alternatives to my reply flashed through my mind in the minutes immediately following the encounter. “I should say something; I should say something,” I thought. I casually walked down the aisle traversing the back of the store, glancing quickly down each aisle to see if she was still around, hoping to see her again and just let her know that her smile had made my evening. But by that time she had left. I kicked myself again.

There are so many things we don’t tell each other, so many things we think are assumed. But we need to tell each other those things, even if in our mind it seems redundant or superfluous or silly. What do we have to lose?

Just got a new job! This is a huge answer to prayer.

Interviewed here about an hour and a half ago. I’ll be preparing assembly drawings and instruction sheets, among other things–not the most exciting work in the world, but it pays much, much better than Harris Teeter, their schedule is flexible and it looks better on my resume. The interview was a little intense as my future boss gave me some sample problems I might encounter involving dimensioning and tolerances and asked how I would solve them. I haven’t done any hardcore CAD work or drafting in about three years so I fumbled through them a little. But evidently I passed muster.

Just wanted to share. Lunchtime!

A couple of things from the day:

At the store today I rang up a twentysomething woman newly moved here from New Orleans, probably in response to the storm. She bought a decent number of groceries but we couldn’t accept her check because it was a starter check and she had written in her address (needs to be pre-printed). She had just opened a bank account in the area and had forgotten to get cash. She didn’t have an alternate form of payment and elected to just leave her groceries and go home. I felt terrible for her. I kicked myself later for not buying her groceries for her. A missed opportunity…

I splurged and bought the latest issue of Rolling Stone today, wherein is an excellent and comprehensive interview of Bono, much better than the joke that was the SPIN interview. Probably isn’t as insightful for you, Lindsey, but for those of us who don’t comb the message boards it’s quite good.

• Harold Faltermeyer, “Axel F” — My introduction to techno/electronica. I remember vividly hearing this song for the first time. Summer of 1988, July 14, Bastille Day, a field outside Tourettes-sur-Loup, France, dusk. My family and I were sitting on some hastily erected bleachers overlooking a soccer field waiting for the fireworks to start. There was a sort of truck/mobile sound system on the other side of the field blasting various New Wave tunes to pass the time while waiting for the light to dim. The first synthesizer strains started and grabbed my attention. I hadn’t heard a song quite like it before. Then the beat came in. The slow progression of the melody superimposed onto the fast-moving rhythm blew me away. I loved it. It would be a while before I heard another song from that genre, mainly because at the time I was 9 and had no idea where to begin in exploring that area of the music world. But the song made an indelible impression.
• Phil Collins, “In the Air Tonight” — One of my first experiences with unconventional song structure. I heard this for the first time in my 6th grade music class during my three-week stint in a public middle school before my parents starting homeschooling my brothers and me. I liked my music teacher. She seemed more friendly and accessible than the other teachers, and that counted for a lot in a social and academic environment I was having a tough time adapting to. She asked us to listen to the song several times and to write an essay detailing our impressions. Truth be told I didn’t listen much to the words; instead, I was fixated on the ebb and flow of the music building to the climactic breakthrough of the drums in the third half of the song. There was that rhythm again…
• Enya, “China Roses” — The first song I really ascribed to a person. I listened to this song with my headphones alone in my room while staring at a picture of her, my first girlfriend, that my parents had taken but I had appropriated. The music set a mood and I just thought about her, how beautiful and wonderful she was and tried as hard as I could to wrap my mind around the fact that she was with me and genuinely seemed to like me. I never succeeded in understanding but the act of trying itself was enough to bowl me over with emotion. Before long she, that moment and the song were inescapably linked.
• Stevie Wonder, “Part Time Lover” — The first time a song was my favorite. I must have been about 6 or 7 and my parents, being Motown fans, had purchased Stevie Wonder’s record In Square Circle. I have memories of them placing the record carefully on the turntable, closing the lid and watching as the “start” button was pushed and the arm magically lifted, moved over just the right distance to the record’s edge and placed the needle carefully on the grooved plastic surface. There was a faint crackle–not too evident; it was a new record–and the song would begin. It was the first one on the album. I loved his vocalizations during the intro and chorus and the forward-moving, progressive glide of the music. I danced in the living room and did laps around the dinner table until my mom called me into the kitchen for dinner.
• U2, “Discotheque” — The first time U2 really appeared on my radar screen. Must have been 1996 or ’97–just before POP came out and they released the single on the radio. I heard it for the first time and immediately liked it. It had a sophistication to it the other songs on the radio didn’t have… Something that implied that the band had been around longer than most, knew exactly what they were doing and created songs with shelf lives longer than your average rock band’s tunes. It was on American radio, and yet there was something about it that reminded me very much of Europe… the swirling, synthetic electricity and overprocessed layers evoked the feeling of Paris or another big European city at night with the diesel fumes of the cars, buzz of the scooters all around and patchwork concrete of the sidewalks underfoot. I didn’t pursue my attraction to the song and thus the band until several years later through my friendship with Elyse and introduction to the masterpiece of Achtung Baby, but “Discotheque” really was the first contact with what would become my favorite band.
• Cyndi Lauper, “Time After Time” — How I first knew how profoundly a song could sink into my subconscious and affect me. I had heard the song before. I heard it again during a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul during the summer of ’93. The Turkish olympic committee was returning home from France after their lobbying efforts to hold the 2000 Olympics in Istanbul, and the airline had rolled out the red carpet for their dignitaries–a brand new Airbus A340, fresh off the assembly line. By coincidence my family and I were on the same flight (there weren’t many flights from Nice to the Turkish city, I gathered), and the amenities were stellar. Great food, mostly empty plane (it’s big) and a movie. The movie was Strictly Ballroom, Baz Luhrmann’s excellent first film, subtitled in Turkish and fortunately not dubbed. I didn’t watch much of it, alternating between gazing out the window, thumbing through a magazine and talking with my brothers, but I did catch the part where the two protagonists danced on the rooftop to that tune. There was an odd convergence of feelings–being caught up in the tenderness of the moment on screen, looking down at the clouds from the airplane’s window, those sensations flying always conjures up and some unnamed 14-year-old longing… In any case, it made an impression. A year or so later I was in my bed at the house in Tourettes, done with my reading and about to go to sleep when I turned on the radio beside my bed, just like every night. I would do so precisely at midnight, hear the time announcement and the *beep* indicating midnight GMT and listen to the BBC news on Riviera Radio (the local British station) before drifting off. That night, though, I switched on the radio a few minutes early. Only the tail end of the song played, but I was instantly transported back to that moment on the plane and all the emotions that had coursed through me at that point. It surprised me, shocked me even and I could nothing but sit there for several minutes, letting it all subside.
• Mono, “Life In Mono” — To date the strongest synthesis I’ve found between a song and a visual image. It was between this song and the first teaser trailer to the 1997 movie Great Expectations. You won’t find the teaser any more anywhere–I’ve looked–only the full-length, inferior trailer remains with a different accompaniment. But if you hear this song and think of muted red and green, symmetrical, baroque icons and elaborate shapes rotating deliberately on a black background intercut with the more passionate moments from the film, you’ll be on the right track. Beautiful, delicate, enchanting. Haven’t seen the like before or since.

I really should write in here more often. I used to write a lot more, but lately my entries have tapered off to one or two a week. Usually that’s indicative of the fact that I have someone else with whom I’m sharing the thoughts and observations that go in here, but that’s not presently the case. Granted, I’m making friends, but the prospect of having someone in this neck of the woods with whom I can share more than just casual observations is remote. Part of the cause of the dearth of entries it is that I just haven’t had time, and I think another part of it is just my innate perfectionism and having to sculpt, polish and hone most of them until they’re “acceptable” for mass consumption (and by “mass” I mean all four of you). More often lately I’ve plowed through half an entry only to decide the insight was inane or ill-conceived or just not worth sharing. It’s like I want to share a fully-formed opinion or a complete thought, but how many of even my more lengthy entries fit that description? Hardly any. I don’t know where I draw the line. I think like most right-brained endeavors, it’s intuitive. The entries just feel like they’ve come to a good stopping place. And if I don’t have the sense that there’s been enough of substance by the time the entry reaches that point, I’ll usually nuke it. Maybe I shouldn’t. But regardless, I just want to write more, even if it is just about my flight training or life around Winston-Salem or worldviews and apologetics or fixing my car. So brace yourselves for more reams of half-baked drivel constructed of appallingly dyslexic turns of phrase. Hee.

The Sunday night mood is back. I’m sitting here at the keyboard of my seven-year-old computer, v-neck undershirt, jeans and old shirt on, letting my gaze drift over to the wall over my bed and wondering why I haven’t decorated it even though I’ve been here two and a half months. It feels like longer. Maybe some of the slow pace of the community here, the intrinsic cadences of the houses that have been here for decades, lived in by dozens of families, maybe some of that slowness of life makes its way into the air and time. Who knows. We’re descending into winter and the frost is already appearing on the ground most mornings. Perhaps as the molecules of the matter around us resonate more slowly in their orbits, they transmit a slowing effect into some sphere of thought or sense or impression.

The past Christmases all blend into one. There was a time when each was distinct, when I could pick out which of my toys and Lego sets I had received last Christmas and which were given to me several ago. I remembered individual pageants, songs, shopping trips, concerts with the boys’ choir and my dad mentioning me by name one Sunday morning in church as a sermon illustration when he was guest preaching and I had shared with him how disillusioned I was one year because I couldn’t “get into the Christmas spirit.” I remember my pride at being referenced by my father overwhelming whatever petty ennui I felt from the slight shift in my approach to the season. I’m light years away from that now; I don’t even feel the weight of this time of year until the holiday itself is almost upon us. I’m seriously contemplating not even getting a tree this year, which would be a first. For all my busyness and multiple endeavors I lead a streamlined life, free of any excess I can find and composed of only the necessities. But what is excess? Have I drawn the line too far in the direction of austerity? A big part of me feels that it is right to fête certain things. But at the same time I have the undeniable sense that there should be a prerequisite to any attempts at seasonal embellishment–relationships. Friends. People. I’m taking small steps in that direction through my involvement with the church group, but…I still have a ways to go.

Back to homework… I’m looking forward to next semester when I don’t have class at 7:20 a.m. But it will be just my luck if I’m assigned a flight block then. I guess we’ll see.

Just got back from Charlotte a few minutes ago. A few points to share:

1. I love my car. I realized this on the road away from the hotel, just about to get on the Charlotte beltway to come home. Why then? Not entirely sure, but the car had performed flawlessly over the course of a couple of days of pretty hard driving. I think it was its faithfulness that made an impression. The companionship of a faithful vehicle is not something to be overlooked.

2. I hate Charlotte. There are many reasons–the traffic, the road construction… But more than anything I hate how it’s a version of Jacksonville, NC, a town where my grandmother lived and I visited quite a bit when I was younger. But Charlotte is a version of that town, only a few sizes larger. In what sense? Sprawl. Endless Suburbia. Straight roads lined with stores and strip malls as far as the eye can see. Americana. The knowledge that many, many families live and breathe without stepping outside the bounds of that environment, barely scratching the surface, barely deviating, high or low, from the median point of life. Not that I am to any large degree either, but nevertheless, just driving through there leaves a bad taste in my mind.

3. The conference was stellar. Amazing. Fantastic. Of course I’m on the post-conference high but I hope I can extend the influence of the event in the longer term. Particularly noteworthy among the keynote speakers was especially Ergun Caner, who spoke twice. The first time he spoke about the need in our Christian worldview to counter the overwhelming cultural focus on happiness and feeling to the detriment of knowledge and belief. “What you believe is more important than how you feel,” was a key quote. The second time he spoke on the reinterpretation of the historical, biblical Jesus by the mainstream media, among other groups, who try to redefine His nature in the popular view and otherwise marginalize Him when the Bible is very clear about Who He is and His relevance in the here and now. Both times, Caner displayed a very sharp intellect, a remarkably easy manner with the audience and a fantastic sense of humor. I’m giving a pitch/presentation tomorrow in Sunday School for a new discussion group I’ll be starting and this conference couldn’t have come at a better time. I’m excited to know, to learn, to encounter my faith head on and plumb those doubts that still remain. It’s a way of worshiping Him with my mind, and I’m confident Truth can withstand whatever petty doubts I have.

That’s the short review–I’m still unpacking my mind… I need to read over my notes again. I’m so glad I went.

go, go where you are
bury your roots underneath
doubt your doubts
and believe your beliefs

the leaves are finally turning

Insightful article.

I’m off to Charlotte until Saturday for this conference. Really looking forward to it.

I want to read this book. Laura Ingraham had the author on her radio show this morning. Looks like it has the potential to become the Beatles’ “bible” in much the same way Flanagan’s book is for U2, though I doubt we’ll ever really hear the whole Beatles’ story until Yoko passes.

Did the “airport tour” today with my instructor. Having already been to Class D airspace on Saturday and thus a little ahead of the game, we decided to up the ante and fly into the local Class C airspace, i.e. Piedmont Triad International in Greensboro. Flying the airplane is much easier on account of the fact that ATC (Air Traffic Control–the control tower) gives you vectors–headings to turn to–every step of the way and also that the runway is much (read: MUCH) longer and wider than anything. I felt like a fly landing on an empty dinner table.

That said, communications are much more difficult. You have to know what to say exactly when, and how to say it as well, to convey only the relevant information in the shortest space possible. It’s going to take practice before I get the hang of it. I can’t imagine learning to fly from scratch out of a Class C airport–I’d go crazy trying to learn to control the airplane and talk to ATC at the same time.

We landed at Greensboro, employing probably only a tenth of the runway to land, stop, and turn off at the first taxiway. After contacting Ground Control and taxiing back around to the hold short line in position to move on the same runway we just left, we sat and waited for a jet to land. Turned a little bit so we could see the approach, I watched the jet on final (i.e. about to land), nose pointed at the runway. Suddenly, with just a few hundred feet to go, I saw its nose rise and its landing gear retract. It did a go-around and flew perhaps fifty feet directly over us, giving me a good view of its underside. It betrayed sharply swept, artistically tapered wings and tailplanes, a relatively thin fuselage and two huge engine nacelles. I recognized it immediately as a Cessna Citation X, one of my favorite airplanes since before its first flight in ’94, probably on a training flight. Absolutely unmistakable. And beautiful.

Spent midday with a friend at the local “big” airport:

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1. This is bad. This is very bad. I received a catalog in the mail from Sporty’s Pilot Shop, the big retailer that caters to pilots. I now want about 90% of the items in this catalog. Leather flight jacket? Sure. Cross-country nav log kneeboard? Yup. Active noise-canceling headset? Uh huh. AOPA leatherman? You bet. I don’t have any materialistic leanings at all except for things that pertain to cars…and now planes. Just when I thought I was over the car product weakness, when I thought I could safely walk into an auto parts store without wanting to buy 75% of the things on the shelves–this starts up. *sigh*

2. I am eating a slice of leftover marbled chocolate cake. Mr. Hahn’s birthday was Monday, so a few of us decided last Saturday that we’d bring some birthday trappings to class Monday morning. I bought the cake and the candles, Jon brought the milk and David scared up the utensils and plates. I think he appreciated it. I lit the candles, started the birthday song and the guys followed in what must have been the most on-key rendition I think I’ve ever heard. I wonder if the 12 of us could start a glee club?

3. The weather’s been amazingly clear, so this weekend I’m finally going stargazing. The moon was new yesterday so viewing should be top-notch if the skies stay clear. Mars in particular is supposed to be very prominent. Some church folks and I are going down to “my” little airport in Mocksville and staking out the middle of the runway on Saturday evening. I’ve been told it gets pretty dark out there, so the telescope should have no issues picking up the planets and nebulae and stellar miscellanea.

4. Flew to the practice area and back all by myself yesterday. The practice area is a ~50 square mile region of sky north of the airport in which we practice maneuvers and air work. Talk about being alone in the wide open sky–there’s nothing quite like being by yourself in the airplane at 3500 feet on a crystal-clear day. I admired the foliage, did a couple of stalls and some slow flight before finding my way back to the airport. There are two water towers (east and west) that serve as handy landmarks for visual navigation. I flew back to the east water tower while descending to about 2000 feet before overflying the airport to check the winds so I knew which direction to land on the runway (it makes a big difference). I couldn’t quite see the windsock, but the ripples on the lake were a giveaway that the winds were out of the south. I was hoping they weren’t, since it meant that I had to land runway 20, coming over the 50-foot trees before fighting a stiff crosswind to set the plane down. The landing wasn’t pretty (kind of a clunker) but I got it on the ground okay. Landings are kind of like the punctuation mark on the end of the sentence that is the flight–they can color the after-impression of the flight a disproportionate degree given that the crucial part of a landing only lasts about 30 seconds. So the rest of the flight was spot-on, but I still didn’t feel that great about it on account of the landing. More practice…

5. We learned to use this doodad in class this morning. It’s a flight computer (rather unfortunately nicknamed the “whiz wheel”)–essentially a slide rule turned into a disk and tweaked so that a wealth of relevant information can be found during flight in a few seconds–if you know what you’re doing. It wasn’t intuitive to any of us and there was much head-scratching from the class and frustration on the part of Mr. Hahn, to whom it’s just second nature. We agreed that he now knows the feeling of abject disbelief our generation gets when we try to explain computer functions and processes, completely intuitive to us, to someone of his generation. Computational devices from his era aren’t natural to folks who’ve never used a slide rule before. So he got a little payback this morning. But in the end, most of us figured it out.

I need out. The grocery store pays the bills, but I can’t get complacent. I have to keep up my motivation to find something else. A customer service supervisor position just opened up that most of the folks there think I’m handily ready for, but…I just need something else. The feeling was especially acute as I blocked and faced the medicine/cosmetics/dietary aisle with Nicole. We didn’t say anything for what must have been fifteen minutes, silently rummaging through the little boxes and bottles on the shelves. I contemplated making some inane comment about the products, but it would have been kind of like calling a secret meeting in communist Russia and discussing ways to improve the Party–like those cloyingly cheerful “associates” in the training videos that chat casually away from customers and management about how great the store is and how much they love their job. It just wouldn’t jive. But we ended up talking about school and fall break and her stint at Governor’s School and whatnot… Not too bad. I still need to find something else, something…design-oriented. We’ll see.

Here’s the only thing I’ll say re: Judge Alito’s nomination. Listening to the immediate reactions to the event this morning on NPR, I couldn’t help but notice the number of times his race and sex were pointed out, the latter especially in contrast to Justice O’Connor and Harriet Miers. “He’s not a woman,” was mentioned many times among other factors that might dissuade certain special interest groups and pundits from giving their approval. Can’t we get past things like that? Can’t we evaluate people “by the content of their character” instead of by things over which they have no control? If our society’s ever going to become truly colorblind and equal we’re going to have to stop pointing out things like that. Yes, our country’s not equal (and there’s a time and place to be proactive about fostering diversity), but neither is it homogeneous, and if we truly let the chips fall where they may with respect to someone’s race and sex and evaluate them based on merit, it simply stands to reason that the makeup of the public arena will reflect the percentages in the country at large. And we have a long way to go before we get there. But pointing it out over and again and encouraging our minds to dwell on it won’t help. Race or sex should be as much of a non-factor as, say, eye or hair color when evaluating someone’s aptitude for a role in public affairs–we shouldn’t even think about it. Dredging it up again on the airwaves certainly isn’t helpful.

Listened to Rush too. He was certainly excited about the whole ordeal.

I soloed today.

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1. Got my first issue of AOPA Flight Training magazine in the mail today. I signed up for the free six-month subscription. I was excited about this–just glancing at the cover, I don’t think I’ve ever held a magazine where more of the articles were directly relevant to what I’m learning about and involved with.

2. Finally broke down and turned on the heat in the house. I hadn’t had any type of HVAC running for over a month and a half, except for the ceiling fans, and it certainly showed on my power bill for last month: $36 for a 1500 sq. ft. house. I was pleased about that. But the heater is gas, so the energy bills are likely to take quite an upward spike this winter. After the previous owner vacated the house, the gas was turned off, so I had to venture down into the basement yesterday morning and light the furnace’s pilot light. It was an exercise in contortion to get to the furnace’s access panel, since the side with the panel was approximately 6 inches from one of the basement walls. Finding the pilot light was another challenge–it wasn’t obvious and I didn’t want to poke around back there with a lighted fireplace match. But after a few phones calls to helpful folks more experienced than me in the subtle art of pilot light location, I found it and we have heat. The warmth always varies slightly from room to room, but in this house I’m very fortunate that the bathroom in particular is well-heated. It’s a nice incentive to haul myself out of bed when it’s especially cold outside.

3. I’ve had to wear a belt with my jeans lately, even just after having washed them. I think I’ve lost a little weight. My 4 miles, 3 times a week running routine (versus ~3 miles, twice a week back in Chapel Hill) might have had something to do with it. This is the first time losing weight has actually affected my clothes-wearing habits, too. Hmm.

4. Matt’s no.2 grammatical annoyance: The phrase “try and do.” As in, “Let’s go try and do it.” Okay, so I’m no logician, but if you’re trying something, isn’t there the option that it might possibly not work out? Either you try something, and it may or may not happen, or you do it and it does. Can’t have both situations. In other words, the correct phrase should read, “try to do,” as in, “Let’s go try to do it.” Aaaand… I’m done italicizing things.

5. I feel like I’m finally starting to connect with people and make friends here, mainly through the local church group. I went to a local steakhouse with a bunch of them last Friday (spent waaay too much on an admittedly good sandwich), helped with church set up on Sunday and ate out (again, ugh) at Q’doba after church on Sunday. They’re a good group, lots of intelligent, substantial personalities–people I feel like I can have real conversations with. An interesting tidbit is that, with respect to my situation here, many of them are in a similar place; in other words, they have good four-year degrees but are working at dead-end places for $8/hour while pondering their next step, in some cases taking a few classes on the side in furtherance of a future goal. In a weird way it’s refreshing to ask someone what they do as far as work and to hear a sigh and admission that their place of employment isn’t their first choice. It gives me a sense of connection and understanding, if nothing else.

6. Harsha (roommate) made me some food last night after I returned home from work. I got back around 10:15 and he was watching the baseball game but immediately offered to cook me some of what he was eating. I was hungry and it smelled wonderful so I couldn’t refuse. He put some naan on the stove and served it with chicken curry and cashews. It was delicious. Huzzah for good roommates :) I’m offering him some lasagna for sure next time I make it.

I have a theory that there’s more to names than we think. Of course it’s fairly common knowledge that to make it very far as an entertainer, in any sub-genre, it helps very much to have a marketable name. Bands sometimes agonize for eons over this very issue, trying to come up with a name that sounds cool and reflects the band’s values. But I have a hunch that the qualities a name conjures up have repercussions in a larger arena than just entertainment. Of course we could make the case that this is a recent development due to the all-pervasive nature of the media in society and culture, but that would be putting the cart before the horse, I think. I would make the case that our response to a name’s qualities is instinctive and thus originated before the era of mass media. It’s just another built-in human quality that the media recognized and made use of, not the other way around.

The most obvious example of this ingrained bias we have for the right name, in the public arena, is in our presidents. Think about the presidents whose tenure in office was a success (and even those who were failures)–do you think a president like John F. Kennedy would have been looked at the same way if his name had been Archibald W. Berkerleck? Or would we revere Abraham Lincoln like we do if he had been born Seymour Trumblehome? But more than just looking back at them through the lens of hindsight–in their time, would the American people have accorded them as much credibility and instinctively had enough confidence in their policies to make them as great and effective as they were? It’s a fair question.

The name bias extends, I believe, even into the area of a hopeful’s electability in the first place. One of the primary criteria of a presidential aspirant is that his or her name sound “presidential.” Not many people will go with me on this, but I think that it was a major factor in the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. I maintained for months beforehand that Gore would not be president (among other reasons) because he didn’t have the right name for the job. Whatever the man’s character qualities and platform, which really should be at the forefront of anyone’s consideration of a future commander-in-chief, his name, to me at least, just conjured up images of slasher flicks and unpleasantness. Gore. Maybe I’m the only one, but I have a hunch more people were subconsciously affected by it than they know. And there are more obvious examples: Spiro T. Agnew, Michael S. Dukakis, Lamar Alexander, Ralph Nader… Sorry folks, those just aren’t presidential names. On the other hand, “John Kerry” most definitely is the right name for the job–strong, concise, commanding–and based on this criterion alone I was far more unsure about the outcome of the 2004 election than the previous. Call me shallow–I believe it’s a big factor. It’s all subjective in the end, but name one president with a stereotypically unpleasant name. “Millard Fillmore” isn’t ideal, and “Calvin Coolidge” isn’t perfect either, but by and large you’ll find that all the names of past presidents sound appropriate for the job.

And of course it all trickles down to daily life as well. I wonder sometimes what kind of impression someone would form of me if they only knew my name and nothing else. I try to think about my friends’ names while blocking out what I know of their personalities, and think solely of what impression I glean from their name. I’ve recently been getting more involved in the local church group, and I’ve been meeting lots of folks. Trying to remember everyone’s name is a challenge, and I haven’t yet gotten good senses of the nature of their personalities, so I’ve been thinking a lot about this concept in reference to my day-to-day. Just today I met a young lady named Meredith, and immediately upon hearing her announce her name and shaking her hand, I had a good impression of her based almost entirely on her name, which I find very appealing. I hope I have the good sense not to let it override an assessment of much more important character qualities, but if nothing else I’m self aware and it provides fodder for a journal entry.

I just want it to be night all the time. I got up at 5:45 this morning so I could help the church set up for the service, got out of the house around 6:15 and was amazed at the number and clarity of the stars just before dawn. Orion was clear as crystal, as were the Charioteer and the Pleiades, and even the Crab, typically a very faint constellation, was in evidence. I lumbered over to the car in my semi-awake stupor and thought to myself how I just wanted the sky to be always the same, the stars and the red dashboard lights of my car as my companions as I drove around to see them and stay wherever they are, which is everywhere. Wet grass and blankets, cold, toboggans and sleep. I’m going crazy.

1. How much do we really need? Really. It’s a thought that crossed my mind recently whilst doing go-backs late at night at the store and realizing that there are more varieties of pretzels and seltzer water than I could have possibly thought. Among many other products–premixed marinades, breakfast cereals, dog foods, motor oils… I feel like I’m swimming in the excess of our culture for several hours every day when I cashier there. Maybe it’s just the time of year, pre-Halloween, but I’ve rung up literally hundreds of packages of confections and desserts recently… And we have the audacity to wonder why 2/3 of us are overweight? Yet another reason why every American should spend at least six months in another country. We need to experience the concept of moderation in reference to daily life. But honestly, a lot of my reaction is probably sour grapes on account of my quasi-vow of poverty at the moment–the last sweets I ate were a couple of Krispy Kreme donuts when my dad was in town and we stopped there before he headed back to Chapel Hill. I broke down and bought hummus and pita bread at the store today for the first time in fully two months. I used to live off the stuff. It’s not cheap, and it was wonderful.

2. Practiced more landings on Tuesday. I can fly the plane perfectly from takeoff, all the way ’round in the pattern and through the approach, until we’re just a dozen feet or so above the runway, in ground effect, and I’m flaring out (raising the nose) to touch the main gear first… That’s the hardest part of the whole landing to judge, and I haven’t had a really good touchdown yet that I don’t attribute to luck (I had a few early ones). The plane inevitably either floats quite a bit further down the runway than I’d like and I have to do a go-around (full power, flaps up, climb out) or the plane stalls 5-6 feet off the ground and settles to the runway with a *thump*. I’ll get it one of these days.

3. Incidentally, I love it when I’m running, or simply outside, and I hear a plane overhead or I see fresh contrails from a cruising airliner. It’s like a summons to someplace I long for. I want to buy a house under the landing or takeoff path of an airport–real estate nobody really wants, but that I would relish.

4. Mike () recently posted a survey about body image and our opinions with regards to our bodies in general (not necessarily just image but well-being also). The range of responses was very interesting. I came across this article a few days ago and found it well written, especially the second page. Interesting blurb:

And it is precisely with such unqualifiable, gender-jiggling definitions of sexuality (and hence beauty) that Americans remain uncomfortable – bred as we are to homespun, well-scrubbed principles rather than the jaded and deeply cynical beliefs about the human condition that mark the European mindset (especially around issues like marriage and infidelity). This discomfort may also derive, as a transplanted friend of mine insists, from the fact that Europeans see the connection between inner and outer beauty better than Americans do. Or with our readiness to assume, in our can-do, Yankee sense of enterprise, that anything to do with beauty must translate into a concrete and consumer-friendly product or service rather than reside in the realm of a phenomenological conceit, a flourish of sensibility.

Thoughts?

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It’s indescribable how I’m drawn to things like that. I keep a pretty even keel most of the time in terms of getting excited about things, so that’s saying a lot. The rent isn’t exorbitant. I suppose a lot would depend on how much I could make at a job over there; but really, just to live there, subsistence would be enough, at least initially. A good $6-7000, saved up, would probably tide me over until a job came around. Some days–a lot of days–I would do that in a flash. I would do it.

The college hosted its annual “missions conference” last week. In it they invite representatives from a whole host of different missions organizations to come recruit students for long- and short-term missions assignments. I attended the nightly sessions at the church and went to a few missions board presentations. The second one I attended, a presentation by a representative from Baptist Mid Missions, struck a chord. Not necessarily concerning their philosophy of ministry, which was good but by and large similar to those of the other organizations, but more in terms of the areas and cultures to which they minister–much of Africa, lots of South America, a few places in the Far East and some spots in Europe, among them, France. That last bit got my attention. Not only that, but they have opportunities next Spring/Summer for short-term missions teams in France. I talked with the representative after the presentation, and he seemed encouraged to hear about my interest, background and personality. His eyes lit up when I told him I spoke the language fluently, had lived there for five years and had an indelible love for the people, culture and country. He referred me to one of his higher-ups, with whom I talked at the evening session later that day.

He explained the assignment to me. It’s just a sort-of introduction to church planting in France/Europe, during which I’d travel around several different areas of the country (Bordeaux/Gascogne, Normandy, etc) to different missionary families and experiencing and helping with their ministry. Honestly, church planting has never been something I’ve felt called to do, so the benefits for me as far as experiencing that way of life would be negligible; however, just to be there, to be able to connect with the people and culture and to help out in whatever is taking place there–that would be enough. That’s something I would love to be a part of. The total cost is $1900, plus spending money, for a trip that would run May 22nd to June 29th. They have my e-mail and contact info; we’ll see what happens.

As exciting as that has the potential to be, the strength of my attraction to a situation like that, in which I’d be, in some respects, engaged in a more “normal” way of life conjures up questions about my current course of study. Also, in driving around today and putting up “room for rent” flyers again, walking through Wake Forest to their student union to employ the bulletin board there, I couldn’t help but observe the students around me. And I couldn’t help thinking that most of them have a vision to graduate, get a good job, perhaps get married and have kids, settle down and acquire a certain amount of financial and situational security, something that has never really appeared in my life and will likely never do so. I have a degree; I could just drop out, save up and move to France, hunker down and gather those things, good things, around me.

I met with a member of the administration at PBC today about some school-related activities. After the business-oriented part of the meeting was over, we chatted a little about my progress in the aviation program and he talked about what was happening around PBC. I came to find out that he had been in the aviation program at Moody Bible College (arguably the best there is), but had dropped out for one reason or another. And Mr. Mathis, the excellent financial aid and admissions director at the college, was in an aviation program too–here, no less–and had to drop out as well, even after progressing reasonably far. And I remember having a conversation with Jeff, one of my car friends back in Chapel Hill, during which I discovered that he had been enrolled at Embry-Riddle down in Florida for a time, had the desire to become a pilot, but ran out of money and had to quit. The rate of attrition among would-be pilots is fierce. I’m as motivated as I can be, I love to fly and want to help, I’m right on track with my flight training and acing the ground school classes (haven’t yet missed a quiz question), but there are so many factors, so many variables. To use an aviation analogy, pursuing the flight program seems a lot like landing a taildragger–you have to stay on top of everything that’s happening, otherwise it will get away from you. Negative dynamic stability.

And if I let myself, if I dwell on those scenarios, the question always comes: Why not save yourself the step? Why not just pack it in now and save yourself the expense of costly training you might never use? And I can’t reply. I can’t debate. I can’t indulge those thoughts. I can’t do anything except keep moving forward, keep walking the fine line, keep tiptoeing along the ledge toward something, keeping my eyes fixed on a goal.

And now to mow the lawn.

Here’s a recurring thought I’ve had: What kind of sense of humor would you say you have? Sure, we’ve all taken those personality tests that categorize your sense of humor based on 14 thousand factors, but the reality I think can be reduced down further than that, specifically into two categories: Reflexive humor and spontaneous humor.

Spontaneous humorists are most often those we’d label “funny” or folks with “a good sense of humor.” What the moniker refers to is their ability to generate a laugh without any outside catalyst. In other words, they can elicit a laugh seemingly out of thin air, just by being themselves. These are the good storytellers, the pranksters and the class clowns. They usually don’t mind being the center of attention because they’re confident in their ability to entertain.

Reflexive humorists, on the other hand, usually need something to which to respond in order to generate a laugh. An unusual situation will arise, something unexpected will happen, any number of things, and through a well-timed quip or expression in response, the reflexive humorist will elicit a laugh. Paradoxically, these folks are often the observational stand-up comedians, those who, through their perspective on the world around them can make the frustrating or bizarre seem funny. They’re usually more reserved, not always comfortable being the focus of attention all the time, but only when they can wield their sense of humor quickly and effectively, get a laugh and then retreat out of the spotlight.

I’ll wager most of us fall into one of those two categories. Myself, I’m a reflexive humorist (which isn’t to say I’m roaringly funny, but on the rare chance that I do get a laugh it’s usually in response to something). I’ve wished many times that I were a member of the first category, but it doesn’t seem to be my lot. Thoughts?

November… December… remember
Are we just starting again?

I can’t organize my thoughts. I can’t write if I can’t organize at least the beginnings of my thoughts into paragraphs. I’m unbelievably stressed, and I keep making mental notes to write about this or that in my journal, but there’s inevitably a mental impasse and I can feel the pressure building and building and building, like the water behind a dam…

I flew this morning. Probably shouldn’t have, but I hadn’t flown since last Tuesday (because of the rain) and I need to stay on top of things, especially now that we’re practicing landings. I did four landings over at Twin Lakes and two at Sugar Valley, and maybe one out of the six was reasonably satisfactory. Regardless, the whole event takes such a degree of concentration at this point that after parking the airplane and shutting off the engine back on the ramp, I can barely get through the debrief on account of the release of pent-up emotion that shudders through me. It’s not healthy. I can’t be in this state when I solo in a couple of weeks. I’ll ball it up.

There’s just…so much. Work, school, life–all three. I don’t know where to start. I don’t have anyone. Maybe things will settle down in a week or two; who knows.

[listen]

my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of height

this motionless forgetful where 
turned at his glance to shining here; 
that if(so timid air is firm) 
under his eyes would stir and squirm

newly as from unburied which 
floats the first who,his april touch 
drove sleeping selves to swarm their fates 
woke dreamers to their ghostly roots

and should some why completely weep 
my father's fingers brought her sleep:
vainly no smallest voice might cry 
for he could feel the mountains grow.

Lifting the valleys of the sea 
my father moved through griefs of joy; 
praising a forehead called the moon 
singing desire into begin [...]

[1 2 3]

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot […]

[4 5 6]

Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. 
On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some 
of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken 
men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies 
of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal 
chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O'Donovan Rossa, 
or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged 
in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice 
safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in 
strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were 
often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my 
heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the 
future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I 
spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body 
was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon 
the wires. [...]

1. The winds are out of the northwest this evening. They’re changing after the passage of tropical storm remnants. The effect that this prevailing wind has on my particular corner of Winston-Salem relates to my house’s proximity to Stratford Avenue and the plethora of restaurants thereupon. In short, I just discovered that when the wind blows from that direction, a wonderful scent of Swedish meatballs wafts over my house. At least I think that’s what it was–my olfactory senses aren’t known to be particularly attuned. Coming back from my run earlier, having not eaten for several hours, it was agonizing/blissful. I really need to find where it’s coming from.

2. Worked my second multi-hour shift at Harris Teeter this afternoon. I’m certainly looking around for other opportunities, but for now I’m content where I am. It’s good, honest work, active and interpersonal without having to push the product o’ the month or what-have-you. Everything I used to do is coming back to me. I think the supervisors and coworkers were fairly amazed at my bagging and scanning speed for only having been at the register for an hour or two.

One thing irritates me, though: the computer-based training. It’s insane. I’ve probably worked there for a dozen hours total, and about eight of them have been sitting behind a computer screen listening to some hackneyed and redundant presentation. Seriously–when I first started cashiering back in the day, they just plopped us behind a register for a couple of hours in training mode, with an occasional visit from a more experienced cashier to work out the kinks, and that was it. But the process has become more automated and “technologized”–for the worse, I think.

3. Rented Pretty In Pink last night. I hadn’t seen it before. Cute film. I think it’s probably the most dated ’80s movie I’ve seen, though, with the possible exception of St. Elmo’s Fire. The costumes, cars, language, attitudes, everything–straight out of the middle of that decade. I have The English Patient lined up for tonight. I’m overdue for a viewing and appreciation of the sublime qualities of that film.

4. U2 was on Conan Thursday night. Even though I had class at 7:20 Friday morning I stayed up for it, and it was worth it. They essentially were the show–Edge did a “In the Year 2000” bit with Conan (hilarious), he interviewed them as a band and then just Bono, and they played three songs: “All Because of You,” “Original of the Species” (which was awesome), and an acoustic version of “Stuck in a Moment.” Great show.

It’s still raining out. In the kitchen earlier, preparing dinner, I could hear the sound of the drops tapping against the outside vent conducted down the metal shaft to the canopy above the stove.

*tap tap ta-taptaptap tap ta-tap taptap tap*

The windows are almost all open to one degree or another. The air outside is saturated, but finally beginning to cool down. The ceiling fans, spinning parallel to whatever breezes decide to flow through the open windows, do little to circulate the air.

A guy came by earlier to check out a room. He’s of Indian descent, just moved to the States a few years ago, and working as a business consultant for the Sara Lee branch in the area. His name is Harsha and he seems like a stand-up guy; the only bad news is that he can’t commit to more than 4 months. But a bird in hand is worth two in the bush, so I’ll sign him up if he’s truly interested.

I finally got a job… …at Harris Teeter (grocery store). I’ll be a part-time cashier there starting next week, working about 30 hours, give or take. It was my first job so I think I’ll be up to speed in no time. I turn in at least 15 applications to various places in the area and this is what I get… But I will do what it takes to stay financially afloat here. I would have gotten at least a job at GNC, where I’d be a shoo-in (had a great conversation with a local franchise owner a week or two ago), but the paycheck, while potentially more, could end up being a lot less (it’s minimum wage + commission) and he could only offer me 15 hours a week. I got a copy of InDesign today, Illustrator is on the way and I’ll buy Dreamweaver in the next couple of days, so hopefully some freelancing will materialize. One thing I know–having the HT job won’t stop me looking around for other opportunities. They have to expect that; they’d be naive not to.

I’m bummed out. I shouldn’t be, but I am. I wish my job and roommate situations could be going as well as the scholastic part of my time here. The latter is really the main reason I’m here, so I should be encouraged that it’s going well. But even in thinking about it, I can’t help but be aware of the loans I’m taking out, the potentially irrecoverable financial hits I’m taking. So even there, there’s a twinge of uneasiness.

We’ll see.

And I would kill for a neck massage. I’ve been nursing a crick all day. Ugh.

The life that we have missed,
I think it still exists

I saw her in my dream last night. I wish I didn’t have to wait until I returned from class in order to record these things… So much is lost. But I woke up early anyway (I haven’t been able to sleep the whole night through lately) and some things were lost then as well.

I was folding clothes in front of the television when she came in. I was wearing a white undershirt and some weathered, comfortable jeans. I remembered seeing glimpses of her through half-open doorways and down hallways into rooms as she passed across the sliver of the doorway that I could see. I knew her name, but I didn’t know her name, and even when she introduced herself I still didn’t know it. I even had it written down in front of me and when I looked at the written name it made sense, but as soon as I would look up it would disappear from my mind.

And she was fascinating to me. Intelligent, with well-formed opinions and a bearing in her voice that I caught in every sentence. But that didn’t keep her from being playful—indeed, there was an ease in her manner that complemented my own perfectly.

And she was beautiful. Not an intimidating beauty, but so, so pretty nevertheless. She was average height, with shoulder-length, darker hair and rounded features. She wore a dark blue or violet shirt and indigo jeans. She turned her head to the side to watch the television for a second—I could still trace her profile, even now. She smiled and a light would appear in her eyes the likes of which I had never had directed my way before.

And she liked me. She wanted to spend time with me. She wanted to have conversations and carry on with me. She was interested in me. I never felt as if I were selling myself to convince her to spend time with me—there was a natural reciprocation, a give and take that just felt…perfect. She was intelligent and active and she wanted to be with me. I couldn’t believe it then, and I have even less success trying to wrap my mind around the sensation a few hours afterward.

The funny thing about dreams is that in them, most of the time, I feel what I should feel in a particular situation and then half again. Not only that, but the ecstasy, terror, disgust, unease or what-have-you will extend far into the day provided monumental distractions don’t arise. I was in a glow driving home an hour ago from class, thinking about the girl in my dream, just buoyed by the thought of her and how for a little while she existed.

I can still conjure up fragments, gestures, syllables even, but any hope of continuity is gone.

On with the day…

Shouldn’t be up this late on a Sunday night. I only have one class tomorrow morning, though, early–7:20, ground school. We’re “learning” about weather. I say “learning” because Mr. Hahn, though he certainly knows enough of the material to be of use to him as a pilot, isn’t the best communicator of said material. I’m no professor, but I have a hunch just rattling off “Hadley cell, Ferrel cell and Polar cell” without any prior setup (they’re bands of convection that exist in decreasing proximity to the equator) isn’t the best way to get the information across. Honestly the only reasons I’m hanging in there are a. I read the book, b. I took intro to meteorology at NCSU (and aced it), and c. my brother is a meteorology grad student. Otherwise I’d be swimming untethered in a sea of alien terminology and concept.

Paul, David, Rachel and I watched Ong-Bak last night. It’s the second time I’d seen it, and their first. I had certainly hyped it up enough. All the video rental places only had one or two copies, which were invariably checked out, so I broke down and bought the thing. Watching it makes me want to emphasize my core muscles more when I work out at the gym. I’ve been doing an ab exercise routine for years, and routinely focus on my pecs and my lats during a workout, but I haven’t done a dedicated exercise for my obliques or my back muscles in quite some time. I’m definitely going to focus more on them tomorrow at the Y. Between that and flexibility exercises I think I’ll be set. Also need to find a racquetball and tennis partner–but that’s another dilemma entirely.

Tragic. Just…tragic.

“My” airport. Note where it says “RY 20 HAS 55 FT TREES 50 FT FM THLD ON CNTRLN.” Translation: Runway 20 (landing from the north) has 55-foot-high trees 50 feet from the runway threshold, centered on the runway. Which is correct. Except that the trees are more like 5 feet from the end of the runway.

I practiced landings yesterday and encountered that very issue, having to land from the north due to the wind. It meant that I was able to fly a left-hand traffic pattern, which is preferable since I can see more easily the direction that I’m turning, but landing was interesting. And not only because of the trees–there was a low ceiling and we had a 6 knot (~8 mph) quartering headwind (combination headwind and crosswind) gusting to 15 knots. The challenge in that kind of situation, or indeed any landing in general, but more so when the winds are dicey, is to fly the airplane by feel, referring to the instruments as little as possible. And on my fourth landing of the day (we did five, just circling around in the pattern), I got it. Came down over the trees perfectly, power off, just gliding with full flaps, dead on the centerline, wing dipped a little into the wind, flared out at just the right time and heard the stall horn come on just as we touched down. Gosh that was satisfying, even if I did get a little lucky.

The fifth and last landing was more interesting. We caught an updraft coming off the trees just as we were crossing the runway threshold a hundred feet or so above. Power was off, flaps full down and the nose was angled down so I was expecting us to sink like a stone once we got over the trees–but we didn’t… Until a couple hundred feet farther down the runway. Then, *whooomp* down we came until we were in ground effect and flaring out all of a sudden. We were past the cones (orange cones placed at a certain point alongside the runway with the understanding that if we’re not on the ground by the time we reach them, we do an immediate go-around) but the instructor was in the airplane so I landed anyway. And braked. More landings on Tuesday! Hoping for smoother air then…

If nothing else, driving around Winston-Salem fosters a healthy hatred for stoplights. Holy cow. They’re evil. Every few hundred yards, always red, and fully half of them don’t have the magnetic pickup under the pavement that senses when a car is waiting, so they proceed through the whole light cycle no matter who’s there (“There’s nobody IN the left turn lane!”). I want roundabouts! I’m even willing to have enough faith in the average American driver to sincerely believe that he/she could master the roundabout concept–and that’s saying a lot.

I’ve been trying to mix up the music I listen to in the car. My cd wallet fits pretty well down in the door’s map pocket so I don’t venture to take it out much and switch up the cds–I just leave it there. Last week it finally came to a head, though, and after the fourth time thumbing through the case looking for something I wanted to listen to, finding nothing, sitting there in the driveway, car warming up, I just took the whole thing inside, scooped a few random untouched albums off the shelf and threw them in the car.

One of them I hadn’t listened to in a while: Jars of Clay’s The Eleventh Hour. I bought the cd when I was in Florida back in the summer of ’02, and I like it very much. I’m particularly fond of track 6, “Silence.” It fills the role on the album allocated to “Frail” on their second disc, Much Afraid, and sounds very much like the earlier song–atmospheric, orchestral, building slowly to a crescendo, slowly unveiling new sounds in the song in response to shifting emotions. There’s even a touch of a standard Portishead-like static and fuzz running throughout the song, though with nowhere near the gothic quality or contrast of the British band. The Jars album is stripped down from their earlier sound. I can hear it every time I listen. I remembered reading something about how The Eleventh Hour was the first album since their excellent first that the band had arranged, engineered and produced themselves. The lack of polish is certainly evident throughout the album, and serves some songs better than others.

As I listened to the song, I started thinking about that aspect of the album, and then about the nature of the band itself. It’s a core of four guys that have partnered together in the same endeavor for many years, through many albums and concerts and I’m sure many struggles, internal and otherwise. I thought about the success the band has had, and about the commitments each of the members must have made to stick together for as long as they have. I started to wonder what makes them stay. What kind of mindset must they have to reconcile themselves to working with the same group of people for so long? Is it the success that does it? The friendship? The fact that without music they’d have little else to do, that it’s their best shot at ambition, their best hand of cards? And what happens when a band member decides to leave a band? Do they feel like a failure? Or is it simply a transition?

Then it occurred to me that bands break up all the time, members leave, fundamental shifts occur. And we never hear about most of them. We’re too busy moving on to the next thing, the next sound, the next wave, the new, the fresh, the vanguard… Is that representative of our culture in general? Or does it even represent our natural way of thinking as humans, in a wider scope? I have a hunch failure is much more prevalent than we know, and that it happens all the time in fact. Businesses close up, go bankrupt, people get fired, flunk out of school, any number of things–all sorts of circumstantial letdowns happen all around us every day. And it’s understandable that we don’t hear about these things. In general, people aren’t overeager to broadcast or even quietly share things like that. But the end result, taking a few liberties of generalization, is that failure acquires a stigma, a negative characterization that’s applied across the board to most anything that bucks the trend of better, newer, higher, more… And some “failures” that shouldn’t be in that camp. Sometimes they’re just needed transitions. The societal paradigm is warped. But it still doesn’t help the fact we often feel so, so isolated when we’re in the throes of a letdown. Success is shared, but we bear the burden of failure alone. And I have a hunch that if we knew just how often people take a few steps back, as it were, we could at least draw some comfort from the knowledge that the current of the standards we see around us isn’t just passing us by–people would be more open and we could find solace in shared experiences instead of just sweeping them under the rug.

I dunno. It’s all wishful thinking. But I do a lot of (too much?) thinking these days and I’ve been revisiting my fear of failure here in Winston-Salem a lot lately. I failed in Florida–I returned home to North Carolina with a pocketful of change to my name and nothing worthwhile to show for my six months there except experiences which to this day have yet to demonstrate their purpose (though I have faith they will). I can’t let the same happen here, I tell myself. I can’t. But the intensity with which I feel that grasping, clawing for stability and sustenance makes me rethink its validity and appropriateness in my life with regards to who I am and Who my God is. And I am compelled to let go, open palms… It’s not about what I do, it’s about who I am and Who He is and who He wants me to be. I have a feeling I’ll be revisiting this for a lifetime.

I am shot, body and mind, and it’s only 4 p.m. We did two flight blocks today to make up for last week’s bad weather. The second was my first stage check (which everybody passes, really–they just want to make sure you’re actually making measurable progress). It went really well. All it consisted of was another instructor flying with me, not giving me feedback or correcting my procedures, but just telling me what to do when and making notes. There was something about not being able to defer to the flight instructor that kicked in a survival instinct of sorts, I think, and I was able to run through all the procedures very well and maintain my bearings in the area. I’m beginning to feel like I’m actually flying the plane instead of just kind of hanging on and chasing gauges.

Nevertheless, it’s mentally exhausting to be in the air for two and a half hours, even if there was a lunch between in between the hour-long sessions. So between that and the fact that I’ve been working out and running a lot lately, you have an individual in dire need of a nap.

For those of you keeping up with Emily’s journal and adventures, I received a text message from her this morning at 7:30 (12:30 local time, presumably) saying that she made it to England but wasn’t yet in Swansea. She seems well, all things considered :)

Thoughts and prayers for Aaron, his family and especially his mom, who is going through some rather weighty medical issues at the moment. If you are a pray-er, remember them.

1. Today was the first day of autumn. Still feels like summer here, except in the evenings. I really should buy a jacket before it gets too cold.

2. Did anyone catch the news coverage of the plane with the landing gear problem at LAX last night? That pilot did us proud. I doubt I could manage a landing that beautiful in the 172 with fully functional undercarriage. The runway will probably be out of commission for a while, though, while they repair the trench left by the nose gear stub. The news coverage was the typical sensationalism, and a lot of it seemed almost let down that the act of landing itself was so uneventful. Another case study on the American media, I suppose.

3. Had a little bit of excitement yesterday vis-a-vis the flight program here at PBC, and not the good kind. It turns out that after much deliberation the board of trustees of the college recently voted to end the missionary aviation program. The board cited a number of reasons including rising fuel and liability costs and in their view the troubled future of missionary aviation in general. It won’t affect current students, including myself–they’re phasing out the program over a number of years–but we don’t yet know what to tell prospective students about the status of things for next year. All the administration, instructors and students at MAI (Missionary Aviation Institute–the airport and everything associated with the flight program) share a completely different view of things than PBC’s board of trustees, but…the board has come to the conclusion that missionary aviation isn’t the college’s thing any more, so that’s that. There are many reasons for this, and I can provide them if you’re curious. MAI actually used to be an independent entity, and could very well become one again if the college exercises wisdom in what they do with the airport and to the brand new hangar, both of which they hold the deeds to. We’ll see. There’s a college-wide picnic down at the airport tomorrow evening and all the aviation people are going to gather together to discuss the situation. I’ll know more then.

4. This new “TimesSelect” feature started by the New York Times online site is pissing me off. Firstly it’s a ripoff, and secondly I don’t have unencumbered access any more to the inane ramblings of lovely columnists like Maureen Dowd or Bob Herbert. Oh well.

5. Way back in 1997, Sixpence None the Richer’s song “The Lines of My Earth” was the first time I noticed the impact good production and mixing can have on a song. I love the way all the different song elements are balanced to create a quasi-palpable aural texture. The song would feel and be totally different, I’m convinced, if mixed according to the industry pop standard of equalizing everything out, and would be very much the lesser for it.

The cold front is finally rolling through. The fog was as thick as clam chowder this morning and the rain has been coming down intermittently this evening, just enough to dampen the ground and let up again. I haven’t had the air conditioning on in the house for probably the last three weeks, just subsisting on open windows and ceiling fans (I’m really not picky about temperature–anywhere from 65° to 85° and I’m fine). It does get warm in the house in the evenings, though, so a cool evening outside makes for a more pleasant climate inside. As I search for a job to try to stabilize that part of my life, the atmosphere in the house reminds me of what I do have–a roof over me, a car that gets me from point A to point B, a vision of and movement toward a possible future, food in the pantry and fridge and people that I love on the other end of the telephone line.

I was supposed to fly this morning but the fog was prohibitive. Mr. Parrish gave a lesson on ground reference maneuvers, which I’ve already done, and I washed one of the Skyhawks. Not the whole thing–that’s a once-a-month ordeal–but just the leading edges of the wings and struts and the windows. It’s uniquely tactile experience. The ability to see out the airplane’s windows without fogging or distortion is key to being able to spot airborne traffic, so there are specific procedures and substances used to clean them. Actually washing the windows is a task performed with plain water and my hand (no rag or cloth) to eliminate any possibility of chemical reaction or scratching. Also, the cleaning pattern must be in the direction of the airflow, or along the long axis of the airplane. So in terms of learning about an object and even experiencing a sense of closeness to it through my sense of touch, the process of washing the airplane is fairly well tailor-made.

The experience of washing and detailing a car is similar in that I learn a lot about the intricacies of its lines and intersections and materials through physical contact, but I think the sense is even more pronounced with an airplane. The reason I think has to do with the underlying functionality of surfaces with which I’m in contact. On a car, 90% of the contours probably serve no other purpose besides pure style. Granted, the body does have to enclose the mechanical organs and the passengers and provide the structure to hold everything together, but by and large style plays the predominant role. On an airplane, style does play a certain role (the swept tail of a 172, for example, is functionally inferior to an unswept one, but Cessna wanted the airplane to look more modern and rakish), but function is always the overwhelming concern. Running my hand along the wing’s leading edge after cleaning knowing that it is part of the structure that holds the airplane in the air, feeling the spanwise depression under the front portion of the airfoil, letting my fingers oscillate over the rivets knowing each one connects to a structural spar underneath, curling my hand around the fairings and fillets that reduce interference drag, sensing through my fingertips the inherent lightness of the aluminum skin (so different from the thick steel shell of a car)–all these things create a connection between man and machine that’s hard to express. I found phrases and fragments of sentences coming to mind as I stepped back and took in the whole of the airplane. I don’t know if I could arrange them into anything, though. But suffice it to say the morning was not wasted by not flying.

After being here for about a month and setting up the house and paying for school… money’s finally starting to get a little tight. Doesn’t help that money management and the perils of bad credit and consumer debt are the lecture topics of the last two “Student Life Seminars” I’ve been to (my token one-credit-hour course at PBC). Not that I have any debt, but being lectured to about financial doom and gloom, while occasionally necessary, never sits well afterward. And really, how hard is it to find a decent part-time job? Are people looking at my application/resume and rejecting me out of hat because I’m overqualified or something? I’ve applied at about 8-10 places, made callbacks, talked to managers… Nothing yet. It’s ridiculous. Am I that unemployable? Does finding a job really depend that much on who you know and your personal connections?

Anyway. Prayers appreciated about that. I really don’t need that stress on top of the stress of the first year flight student’s learning curve.

Matt’s no.1 grammatical annoyance: Confusing the words “anxious” and “eager.” NPR news, of all people, just did it half an hour ago while I was making lunch. If you are anxious about something, you are anticipating it but you might be nervous about it–looking ahead, the emotions might not be overwhelmingly positive. If you are eager for something you anticipate it as well, but you are probably looking forward to it and welcome its approach. Feelings surrounding the upcoming event are good in the latter case. Nobody uses “eager” any more; “anxious” has become a one-size-fits-all word, and I’m on a one-man mission to remedy that. Dang it.

For all you more progressive-leaning folks out there, here’s a well-written and thought-provoking article from the other side of the fence. It’s the article from which the quote a few entries down was gleaned. What do you think?

Lesson 105 was today. I think I did okay. According to my instructor I’m right on track, but I set the bar for myself higher than that. We did lots of procedures, and about the only ones I did to my own satisfaction were takeoff and departure, ground reference and my s-turns over a straight reference object on the ground (in this case power lines). I suppose my power-on stall was okay too. But everything else I missed one or two items on the procedure. My minimum controllable airspeed (MCA) flight developed into a stall because I brought the flaps down too late and didn’t bring the power in soon enough. We have a checkride coming up in two lessons. It’s like a quiz except all they’re ascertaining is whether we’re actually applying ourselves and making measurable progress. So there’s really no pressure, even though there won’t be any instruction taking place during the flight–just observation. But I want to know these procedures cold by then. Busy weekend.

a couple of pictures

Rooting through old cds earlier today in search of something new to import to iTunes, I came across my copy of Toad the Wet Sprocket’s Fear. The cd case was long gone and the cd was decently scratched, but the computer didn’t seem to mind and imported it seamlessly. I put it on and listened as I mopped up the front bedroom in preparation for painting the closet. The chords drifted through the air from my bedroom door across the hallway to the front room and brought back a lot of memories.

It’s the first cd I bought with my own money, way back in 1994. I had bought tapes before then, but the Toad album was something new. I purchased it after having heard “All I Want” on the radio. I liked the song very much and I remember having a vague premonition that it was going to be the only one of that quality on the album and I would have wasted my money, but happily I was proved wrong. I liked almost all the other songs on the album and Toad became my first real “favorite band” by virtue of that fact.

“Walk on the Ocean” and “All I Want” are easily the most two accessible songs on the album and they were my point of entry for the rest. “Is It for Me” was my favorite for a long time with its strong hook, dreamlike story in the lyrics and straight-ahead rock sound. “Something to Say” and “I Will Not Take These Things for Granted” are more or less dialogue songs between the singer and another party, and as such fit in well for thinking on the drive home after encounters with friends or romantic interests. “Butterflies” is more baroque, with multi-layered rounds in the choruses and surreal imagery in the lyrics and it whetted my appetite for songs that broke the mold of conventional song structure and theme. And the others were all relevant in some way, whether they touched on social commentary or the popular face of religion or anything else. After all that, though, and revisiting the album again, I’d have to single out my enduring favorite as “Nightingale Song.” It’s brooding, sparse, concise and beautiful. And representative of the album as a whole in lots of ways. Quality stuff.

Just got back from the Y. Huge facility–the biggest I’ve seen–with three stories and provision for just about any type of athletic activity one could wish to participate in. Very friendly people. They gave me three free passes until I get my “financial assistance” form filled out and turned in to see if I qualify for a discount as a student.

I got in a workout. It was the first time I had visited the weight room since, oh, fall ’03, and it felt like it. I did a good circuit of just about everything, wobbly arms and all. The activity on which my drop-off was most pronounced were dips… I used to be able to strap a 45-pound weight to a belt on my waist and clock off 12, 15 without thinking about it. But today I struggled to do 8, with no extra weight involved. Oh well. All in good time.

While rotating my car’s tires yesterday morning, I discovered that the front right outer CV joint split and flung its grease all over the inside of the wheel well. Joy. Guess I’ll be ordering a new boot repair kit soon… I hope I don’t have to disassemble the joint itself to remove the boot. Wishing for a bench vise and a brass hammer and drift set…

Drove back to Chapel Hill for the first time in three weeks to attend a wedding. It was great to see the family. Paul and I had lunch at Carrburritos and David and Rachel were there too, on the verge of heading to Top of the Hill to celebrate their 6 months of dating (do you call that an anniversary?). At the wedding, the bride’s family are long-time friends of ours, and we have many mutual acquaintances that go back very far, so we saw folks we hadn’t seen in many, many years. They put us together at the same table at the reception, so we all had a chance to catch up with one another. It made the whole group activity more bearable, but nevertheless, I was still conversationally drained after an hour or two. They say the difference between an introvert and an extrovert is the effect group situations have on your social energy–whether they drain you or energize you–and by any measure I am an introvert. Between the wedding reception, social activity before a big class last Friday during which I felt like I was suffocating and countless other conversations with classmates over the past few weeks, I’ve firmly decided that I like people. I even like talking to people–have a conversation with me and I will genuinely care about what you’re talking about and be interested (not just seem so)–but there are maybe only 6-7 people with whom I can sustain a conversation and not feel like my social energy level is dipping lower, and lower, and lower… until it hits “E” and I need to be alone for a while. I’ll never understand how some people can walk into a room of strangers and feel excited, alive and alert by the situation. It’s a mindset I greatly admire but don’t think I’ll ever feel, no matter the amount of practice I get.

Well…I’m off to Barnes & Noble to study for a bit and to find and strike up a conversation with that dazzling but attainable beauty reading Descartes or Locke or Schaeffer across the coffee bar. Cheers!