Trophy Husband

This past weekend I was fulfilling spousal duties and appeared as arm candy for my partner's 10-year high school reunion.  Granted, I'm something akin to a 10-year old strawberry bon-bon you find in the back of your junk drawer and are unable to satisfactorily separate from the wrapper kind of arm candy, but there I was anyway just as my partner insisted.  As the "trophy husband" I spent much of my time telling people, "My eyes are up here," and dropping hints about my partner's net worth.

My first clue that this was going to be an enjoyable weekend was when my partner mentioned her wardrobe change bag which she quickly glossed over after noticing my face and decided to refer to as a back-up bag "because there are some things in there that are back-ups...like a bra."  I guess she wasn't wearing a bra or maybe she was and anticipated some accident that would require a bra change, I'm not really sure.  It was all very confusing.  The concern and confusion grew as we got closer to our destination.

My partner is usually a very good driver.  A tad lead-footed at times, but a good driver nonetheless.  I noticed that her decision making ability was diminishing exponentially the nearer we got to Farmington.  "I don't see a speed limit sign," was apparently code for I'm going to begin driving like a fucking maniac.  There were some harrowing turns onto highway interchanges.  Of course, she could have simply been distracted by some awesome things we saw on the road.

Smitty's Sporting Goods sells guns and ammo as well as fishing and archery equipment.  Apparently those are the only sports down there.  Either way, there's nothing like a sporting goods store the size of a Waffle House.

I couldn't help but think of what a team President George W. Bush and Jesus made in the White House for eight years.  Nothing like having "the Decider" and the "Problem Solver" on your side to make sure things go smoothly.  What's that you say? President Bush's eight years were a complete clusterfuck?  Oh. Nevermind then.

My disdain for consumer Christianity was greatly mitigated by the fact that this church sells fireworks.  I want to go to fireworks church.  Who wouldn't want to go to fireworks church?  Clearly these people get it.  I am in.

This place wins the internet for best name ever in the history of naming things. This is in fact an ice cream joint (frozen custard to be exact) and is so eloquently named that we had to stop and sample the wares.  Sadly their frozen custard was terrible which I guess is why they had to come up with such a kick-ass name. Crafty owners they are.

The rest of the weekend was your general homecoming fair.  A parade, a football game, and of course the all important actual reunion booze and schmooze.  It was exhausting.  My plan from the get-go was heavy on the booze and light on the schmooze so I took up residence at a table with my beer and proceeded to yell at various football games on TV for the rest of the night.  The other part of the plan was to incessantly text my buddy with snarky remarks and wallowing self-pity until the night ended.  Did I mention that my partner graduated from a podunk town and the reunion was in the middle of nowhere?  Yeah, no reception and to spice it up a bit we almost hit a few deer on the way out there.  I was thrilled.

On the bright side, we did fill up the gas tank at the rock bottom price of $2.93 a gallon.

An Homage to Space

I would love to become an amateur astronomer.  I've never had a telescope, never lived in an area of the country where the night sky looks anything like this and have only seen a lunar eclipse (that I can remember with any vividness) once but I think I could do it.  Granted, I know nothing about telescopes, or where to point the thing to actually see something but I figure I could find something on the internet about it.  Which brings me to this little list of things in space that I love.  Starting with, perhaps, the most obvious of things in our sky:

The Moon - Our closest celestial neighbor (most of the time) in more ways than one.  I guess the moon is just kind of...well...the moon.  We've all grown up with it, lived with it, seen a gagillion pictures of it but it's also the only place not on this Earth that human beings have ever been.  It's our first step out into a whole new era in human history.  Without this little gem in the night sky, it's possible that life would have never been.  After all, the moon is us, most likely created from a large impact that sent this piece of the Earth sailing billions of years ago.  

Andromeda - Our nearest spiral galaxy neighbor in the cosmos at a mere 2.5 million light years and closing.  Andromeda has always featured in our night sky because it's so bright, but what makes Andromeda so interesting to me is the rate at which it is approaching the Milky Way and our little solar system.  In about 4.5 billion years, the two galaxies are expected to collide.  I have no idea what will happen when the collision occurs, but many scientists expect the galaxies to merge and became a gargantuan eliptical galaxy.  

  Colliding Galaxies - A glimpse into the future, here is a snapshot of a couple of galaxies in the process of collision.  We're actually looking at a couple of things here.  The colliding galaxies are at the top of the picture which, admittedly, looks like a mess of gas and stars and is difficult to distinguish one from the other (which makes sense if they're colliding).  The separate galaxy at the bottom is actually no where near the colliding galaxies and the trail of gas and dust in between the two pictures is somewhere over 100 light years long.

Exoplanets - An artist's rendition of the nearest exoplanet we know of that orbits nearby (about 10.5 light years) Epsilon Eridani.  I'm always overly thrilled by the discovery of new exoplanets, probably because I'm still waiting for that one definite sign of life (flashlight in hand) outside of our own terra firma.  A man can dream...

Horsehead Nebula - Properly known as Barnard 33, the Horsehead Nebula represents a curious and very human tendency to imagine things where they aren't.  I'm not sure if that's because we have a need to find the familiar in the stunningly alien or if it's just some odd sense of vanity left over from thinking that the Earth was the center of the universe, either way, it strikes me that we tend to do the same things with nebulae that we do with clouds on Earth.

Binary Stars - Perhaps because we live and exist in a single star system, I've always been fascinated by the existence of binary star systems.  In this picture we see two white dwarfs orbiting each other at the astonishingly shrinking speed of 321 seconds.  Eventually, they'll merge together and create a new stellar body.  Not all binary systems are doing this, some are in stable orbits and their planetary systems can orbit the gravitational center of the primary star and its companion star or just one of the binary stars.  It's all quite the dance.

Hubble Space Telescope - There's no better way to end this list than by paying homage to the thing that has given humanity its eye into the universe.  Most of the images in this post and most of the images of space we've seen comes from this single object.  Hubble has lifted the veil on nearly 15 billion light years worth of space and time.  It is, in a very real sense, our very own time machine and human knowledge will forever be indebted to it's magical mirrors.  

Yeah, space makes me want to be a poet.

An Homage to Earth and Earthling

I spent a good chunk of time in my formative undergraduate years in the concrete confines of Temple Hall.  Partly because it had a cozy nook at the ground level which I used for various study sessions and last minute reading and also because I minored in Geography.  I know, you thought that was a class you took in middle school, but apparently some people will let you get a degree in the subject. Geography allowed me to take my love of maps and topographic features to new, incredibly geeky, heights.  Here's just a few pictures of some of my favorite and most interesting things on Earth.

Mount Roraima - Is part of a larger plateau that marks the converging borders of Guyana, Brazil and Venezuela.  Mount Roraima is the highest elevation in that plateau chain.  Mountains have shaped the history and spread of human culture for the entirety of our short history on Earth.

Merapi - A stratovolcano in Indonesia known for some nasty eruptions complete with pyroclastic flows.  Beautifully deadly, the Javanese culture believe it to be the home of two spirits, Empu Rama and Empu Permadi. 

Cahokia, Monk's Mound - It may look quaint (and perhaps a bit unspectacular) but Cahokia was an ancient Native American city and this mound is the third largest pyramid in the world (by volume).  Cahokia serves as a reminder that cultures and civilizations use what is available to them.  The Mississippian culture didn't have ready access to iron or stone which is why there was no "iron-age" and their pyramids weren't made of stone which, in turn, is one of the reasons many people thought/think their civilization so "primitive"...this is incorrect.  It's population was larger than London at the time (c. 1250 CE) and the engineering that went into building the city would have rivaled anywhere else in the world.

An artist's rendering of Cahokia in it's prime, Monk's Mound being the big pyramid.  You can also see "woodhenge" on the left of the rendering which is reproduced at the site of Cahokia today.

Masai Mara National Reserve - The most well-known and acclaimed African reserve, Masai Mara also carries the distinction of maintaining a functioning Masai culture in the bounds of the reserve.  It's an interesting  contrast to the American notion of wilderness and nature in National Parks that maintains an absence of human settlement.

Aral Sea - The Aral Sea today is less than a fifth the size it was in the 60's when the Soviet Union began damming rivers that emptied into the sea.  The environmental degradation that resulted from human decisions stands as one of Earth's most poignant reminders of the ability of humans to affect this little planet.

A side by side comparison from 1977, 1989 and 2006.

Mount Washington - As mountains go, Washington isn't particularly high nor does it display any spectacularly original features.  What Washington is home to, however, is some of the most erratic weather ever recorded on Earth.  Temperatures have been recorded as low as -50 (that's without a wind chill) and the mountain held the record for highest surface wind speed at 231 mph from 1934 to 1996.  Things can get hairy up there.  

I imagine, for the majority of human beings, geography isn't the most stimulating of topics but the impact our world has on human interaction and vice versa should remind us of the power that place has on the human psyche.  To this day my first drive up a mountain still stands out in my memory.  It was the middle of summer in Colorado and we were able to drive high enough to find snow sitting on the ground.  I had found my paradise (I love snow).  Anyway, geography (and sometimes even geology...but only sometimes) is cool.  

Disclaimer: Most of the images were just google searched.  I was once told something about being a great writer and stealing from other people and that being okay.  I'm not a great writer so please don't sue me or shut down my little blog.

Why I Love the Word Fuck

Some of my favorite words are curse words and not least because they tend to convey emotions far better than other words.  There is something visceral and real about curse words that, for me, tend to break down pretense in conversation.  I also realize that curse words can do the exact opposite for some people and I'm okay with that, I guess.  But I also feel like there is a component that is both psychological and physiological when exclaiming fuck or shit or some interesting combination therein.  Sometimes, it just feels good.  And I know, we're taught to be wary of things that make us feel strongly one way or the other, and we tend to demonize those things or at least control those things so people don't feel TOO good or are TOO angry.  But fuck it.  Thankfully, I can rest on the laurels of scientific inquiry.  Timothy B. Jay (a personal hero and, I'm sure, a wonderful human being), a professor of psychology, relates through the research he's done that curse words fill a vital role in society.  Namely, curse words alleviate anger and help prevent people from physical violence.  This, of course, is what I try to explain to my partner when someone cuts me off in traffic.

Besides all of my personal feelings and preference for the vulgar, the history of curse words is a fascinating trip through social change and etymology.  Curse words change over time, are different from place to place and carry with them a history of dissent and revolution that appeals to me on a human level.  Many words that we find completely harmless today draw their etymological heritage from religious imagery that would have been offensive to contemporaries of its conception.  Zounds, for instance, was an oath of anger that meant, "by God's wounds" and was offensive because it made light of the crucifixion.  I always thought zounds referred to some imaginary large number.  Who knew?  Well, I guess those English speakers living around the time of Shakespeare did, but that was like eleventy billion years ago.

I guess there is a part of me that wonders to what extent curse words become the scapegoat of controlling emotional outburst or keeping some arcane notion of public decorum.  Because, I assume, it would be a bad idea to reveal so much of ourselves to the world.  I mean, we all feign some level of public outrage when our role models or public leaders are caught using some vulgar language.  This is not to say, however, that words shouldn't mean something when we use them.  Few days go by that I'm not reminded of the power of words when reading about the newest back and forth political pageantry from the tea party, republicans, or democrats.  Words are powerful things and I'm not discounting that; my problem is that society has chosen to care about some words that are basically harmless.

Cursing in the past revolved mainly around religious imagery.  Even today, saying something akin to goddamn is a near capital offense for some people.  Most of our other common curse words refer to the body or acts of the body and I can't help but wonder what the words we choose to vilify say about our society.  Religion and sex, sex and religion (why is it always one or the other?).  We can't talk about sex so we convince ourselves if we just preach abstinence things will be okay.  We can't talk about religion without pissing someone off so we hear explanations of religious practice and theology from mainstream media that is sterile, ancient and meaningless.  So, conversations in the public realm about these things tend toward the safe and non-confrontational instead of the places where actual discussion is not only helpful, but desperately needed.  It's frustrating, even maddening at times, but here we are.  Maybe if we could interrupt those conversations once in a while with a little anger management in the form of a good curse word...

Space

If it is at all possible for us to grasp the actual distances that make up the universe and the mind boggling numbers of celestial bodies and galaxies that exist within it, then there are two conclusions I feel are especially poignant.  First, there are other worlds out there, somewhere, in which intelligent life evolved, exists and thrives.  Second, we will most likely never meet them.

The journey to realization of others in the universe was profound for me.  As a child I would take flashlights outside at night and beam little messages into the sky hoping that someone might see them.  Those messages usually consisted of an S.O.S. as that was the only actual signal I knew (come to think of it, it's still the only signal I know that could be used over distance).  It could lose myself for hours attempting to "contact" something beyond our little world always with a deep yearning of wonder and possibility.  My childhood mind was given to imaginations of different people (who sometimes looked just like us but usually didn't) one day visiting Earth or perhaps welcoming us to their own Earth.  And yet,the more I learned about the universe the more I came to realize that, for all my hopes and dreams of others that might be out there, we exist in a cold emptiness of scientific limitation that all but guarantees we'll only ever know this one planet.  It's a thought I've never really been able to shake; that slow, inexorable rise to understanding of the immense size of space and the limitations of our knowledge of the universe laid waste to my childhood wonder of who else might be out there.

It's also a thought that spurred me to begin looking at my own place on this planet differently and more critically.  If this is the only place we'll ever be (or at least the only place we'll be for a very long time) then it would probably be a good idea to be a little more honest and prudent about what we do here.  I guess it's a bit odd really, space tends to make me wonder more and more about what it means to be human.  I feel like, if nothing else, we should be able to look at the sky at night and admit that there is at least one thing we all hold in common.  Against a backdrop of war, xenophobic attitudes towards immigrants, divisive rhetoric in politics and so much more that tends to make us think about our differences as bad things, I want to believe that a backdrop of stars, comets, and nebulae can remind us that our differences are what makes us human.  We all call the same place home.  

The day my dad bought a Mag-Lite and I got my hands on it I was convinced I was finally going to have something strong enough to actually make contact with some kind of extra-terrestrial intelligence.  I nearly dropped it when I was carrying it outside, my hands were sweaty with anticipation.  I took my time.  After all, if this was going to be the moment of contact I wanted to collect myself and my thoughts.  I realized at that moment the glaring problem with my plan.  My feeble S.O.S. probably wouldn't cut it for actual communication, in fact, nothing I could think of would cut it.  Instead, I decided on a slow steady pulse.  I clicked the button to examine just how powerful this beam of light was.  It was substantial, light saber substantial.  I chose the brightest star I could find and began pulsing the flashlight towards the sky.  I don't remember how long I sat there, probably to long, but I was determined.  At one point the star twinkled slightly and my excitement reached a fever pitch.  Alas, there was no contact that day with the Mag-Lite.  It was another blow in my quest to contact aliens with a flashlight.

For all the realistic expectations and precise calculations, there is still something romantic about space.  There is something that calls to me, that reminds me to continue to push forward, to learn new things, to explore not just the world around me but the world within.  The questions and possibilities of what is and what was and how it all came to be continue to fascinate me.  I still like to think that one of those beams of light could reach someone else out in the desolate expanse that is the universe and that one day we'll know more than life on this singular pale blue dot.