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Eurotrash Confessions
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I hung out with the local rock climbing crowd this afternoon.
We were in a forest in Huntingdon County Pennsylvania. Here there is a vertical rock formation 50-70 feet high with plenty of overhangs and nice cracks to grab a hold on. After about 2 hours of climbing, two forty-something firemen joined us on the rock.
After an additional two hours, one of the firemen somehow manages to detach himself from his safety rope and takes a 30 foot plunge off the rock face. He falls backwards off of the rock face, manages to keep one of his hands on the rope, but doesn't get a real grip and plunges downward. After the first ten feet he is falling side down and horizontal in the air. He then strafes a ledge, does barrel roll in mid-air, strafes another ledge and falls flat on his back amidst pointy rocks and boulders.
I am standing less than 15 feet from where he lands.
I freeze on the spot. That dude has got to be dead.
about 5 people rush in to check on him.
Amazingly, the guy raises his arm, grips the jagged boulder he missed by 3 inches and tries to sit up.
People urge him to lie still. They ask him his name, urge him to be calm and not move etc, etc.
His fireman buddy comes racing down from the top of the rock formation cussing at the top of his longs, visibly horrified.
We check his head
- it is fine
We check his back
- No fractures, cuts or bruises.
We check his limbs.
- Nothing, except a scraped ankle.
He seems to be in excellent health, except for a bruised angle and a very bruised ego (he basically unclipped himself from his rope).
He then stands up, shakes his arms and legs, brushes down his clothes and packs his gear. His buddy calls their fire department, and asks that the paramedic on watch prepare to give him a thorough look-over. They thank us for our help, and take off.
Never in my life have I witnessed such magnificient luck. when he hit, I was expecting his brains to be scattered all over some rock.
his overconfidence in his own experience almost killed him today.
I think I am going to come of this experience with something.
I just don't know what, at this point.
Life is glorious
-m
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So I finally made it Stateside.
I left home wednesday evening at 8pm, and arrived in SC, PA at 10pm Saturday evening. (both US eastern time)
In this time I have experienced the following slightly noteworthy things.
1)
A middle-aged man of middle-eastern appearance trying to get a gas-driven chainsaw through copenhagen airport security as carry-on luggage. He himself got onboard, but was forced to leave the tool behind. He made the security personnel quite nervous, and by the time the ordeal was over, 5-6 additional security personnel staff had showed up to witness the debacle.
2) Spending 24.5 hours at Heathrow Airport's, terminal one.
I really enjoyed witnessing the ebbs and flows of people and activity at an airport. It has a slow, steady pulse as if the airport itself is alive. Life is indeed glorious.
But being unable to be enamored by this observation for the full 24 hours, I picked up a copy of Cevantes' "Don Quixote". I got through the first 250 pages at Heathrow. A shame that I had to wait to my 28th year to begin reading this work. It is a most pleasurable and amusing experience.
3) getting held back 2.5 hours as the passport control centre at Newark Airport. The travel documents issued to me by my university in 2002 had expired during this past year I spent in Denmark. My university was aware of this and had issued new ones to me. The 2.5 hours were spent mostly standing in line at the "detention facility" as they had more than a dozen staff members manning the ordinary passport control facility and only two manning the detention centre facility. The result was a bottleneck which cost many passengers their connecting flights. Luckily I had no such need of haste and was able to get the red tape cleared up in good order. I found the staff courtious and professional, if slighty lacking in the english department (but seemed to have no trouble with Spanish, a language in which I communicate exceedingly poorly).
4) On the shuttle bus from the airport to the NY port Authority I spent my time chatting with a finnish man who had been living in New York for seven years, and was returning after having visited finnish relatives. He was a Photographer and we discussed the merits of viewing displays og human frailty (through the medium of deceased specimens) as an artform. We had a great time engaging in this issue, to the point where we got wierd looks from other passengers within earshot.
5) Spending almost 3 hours waiting in line at the greyhound gate for my bus ride to milesburg. The greyhound baggage security system was amatourish, painfully slow and from what I could tell, wholly ineffective. It consisted of one security staff briefly peering into (but never touching or searcing) the opened carry-on bags for each passanger. Another staff member asked each passenger in turn to empty out their pockets and then proceeded to casually wave a hand-held metal detector about the passenger. A suicide bomber could easily just have gotten in line and blom him or herself up before being subjected to this mock security search and could kill dozens more than if he or she waited until getting on the bus. The whole exercise was a futile waste of time and ressources, in my opinion. But I guess the placebo "feel good" effect offered to the passengers has a modicum of merit in it's own right.
6) I arrived at my destination and was picked up by one of my friends that promptly invited me to a Eurotrash Party with free wine and beer. I was appalled at the lack of good cheese, crackers and fruit. But I decided to rein in my outrage and instead settled with drinking a bottle of South African Mulderbosch Sauvignon Blanc anno 1996, and watching lithe white females trying to dance like black people.
I guess I could have had a worse trip.
Cheers
-m
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I will finally make my first real contribution to science. The reviews were extremely positive. "add some more illustrations" was pretty much the only changes the article needs. I am proud. Months of painstaking work in the lab. Long hours embroiled in the intricacies of statistical analyses. communicating back and forth with my fellow authors, with the inevitable delays and changes of plans. It is going to pay off. This coming fall, I will have my name in print in an international scientific journal.
I should be a happy camper. but my joy and pride is somewhat lessened after telling my friends though. A typical phone conversation goes something like this:
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Me: oh, and by the way... I am finally getting published.
Other: great stuff man. congratulations.
Me: thanks. it is about time too.
Other: when can I read this marvel?
Me: sometime during the fall.
Other: cool. What journal.
Me: HOMO - Journal of Comparative Human Biology
Other: *silence*
Me: what?
Other: *snickering*. homo... that is fucking precious.
Me: oh grow up.
Other: HAHAHAHAHA!!!... your very first homo debut.
Me: oh great.
Other: hehe... you must really be looking forward to "it". I cant wait to tell the others. Talk to you soon.
Me. uh-huh... bye.
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Life is glorious, if a little socially handicapped at the moment.
Cheers
-m
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I have slowly been revising my priorities lately. I find that in my neck of the woods too much emphasis is being placed on being a productive member of society for my liking.
one of my friends chose the business career path less than two years ago. He is a marketing analyst answering directly to the board of directors in a major industrial corporation.
He gets paid handsomely by the month. His schedule is "as long as it takes to get the job done", which often translates into 60+ hour weeks. he gets up at five thirty every morning, works 10-14 hours, returns home utterly exhausted, eats with his girlfriend, hangs out with her for 3-4 hours and goes early to bed.
I have decided that this lifestyle is not for me (but it very well could be, If I get a job in academia when I'm done). Too many of the things that fascinate me are outside the reach of commercial utilization.
At this point in my life, 25-30 hour work weeks are optimal for me. I like to read books, build and play strange instruments, dance and sing according to century-old traditions. Paint toy soldiers, design new casings for existing consumer electronics, invent wierd gadgets, be politically active. And I also love spending time with my beloved.
This partial list of hobbies is not compatible with being a career chaser, and as such... I need to acknowlege that I won't be earning enough money for indulging in all my materialist urges.
This is no sudden realization. My dad owns a company and I have vivid memories from when I was a kid of how lonely I felt when he had to back out on promises he had given me about spending time with me, because some unexpected extra work demanding his attention at the company. He worked, much like my friend does now, about 12-14 hour days. My revolt against his way of life happened as a teen, when he offered me to be part of the business, provided I took educational steps that would steer me towards a engineering degree. I basically said "Hell no" and started a degree in archaeology. He respects that now. Even if he was quite sad at the time (before my revolt he was telling me about how he longed to add "& son" to the company name).
I want my work to be life-enabling ... not the other way around.
But I find that such sentiments are frowned upon by many of my peers and indeed society at large.
Luckily, my GF is sympathetic to my current view of the world. There is no demands typical of "high-maintenance" women. She does not long for two-point-five kids, a villa and one-point-three cars parked in a garage in some fashinable neighbourhood. Hippy females are truly a blessing to mankind (or at least to me).
So now I just need to figure out how to go about it. I still want to go through with the PhD, even if it seems unlikly that I will be using it for it's intended scientific purposes. Right now I am going at the thing like a three year employment contract
I am still at two minds about virtually everything at this point though. Time will tell how things pan out, I guess.
Cheers
-m
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Belief (and by extension superstition) exists only for people who have their world views dictated to them by a central institution.
In the beginning, when humankind first started to ask why-type questions about the world around them, belief did not exist. There was only the world and a tangle of notions about cause and effect, based on how each individual person experienced the world and tried to make sense of it all.
reality was a whole. There was no difference in kind between what westerners today call the physical and the metaphysical, the material and the spiritual. For example: The "dead" ancestors of past generations were still part of the social group, and they were still active participants in the society, with all the glee, temper tantrums and hissy fits one could expect of a person. One would have to interact with the ancestors and spirits as much as with the neighbours and relatives, even if the ancestors required slightly different means of communication. It would be like living in a world where the average lifespan is a thousand years, where prestige and power increases with age, where you live with your family, and where you must do what you parents, grandparent, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, great-great-great-grandparents etc, etc... tell you to do.
Sounds fun, right?
All these different perceptions of how the world works could freely be exchanged, adhered to or abandoned by individual persons or social groups.
No-one had the time, power or reach to make sure others thought as they did about the world.
but such time, power and reach would become much more available as larger societies, sporting more complex social structures started to emerge. Belief gets introduced into the world with the emergence of statehood. For Northern Europe this is about AD 700 or so, but the timing varies immensely around the world. There is indeed still areas of the world that do not acknowledge the nation-state structure they are pigeon-holed into.
The state structure is associated with a need for extensive energy surplus to enable the non-food producing members of society to be fed and to make sure that enough energy is available to sustain the social organisation that the system is built upon. The most important tool for fulfilling such a need is being able to justify it, and that can only happen if everyone is on the same page, i.e. has the same view of how the world works.
Ahh, religion. It is such a streamlined neat little package, complete with a very energetically hyped and often militantly defended FAQ. How can I...? READ THE FAQ, n00b!!! *WHACK!*.
Most times the FAQ doesn't cover everything, and in this little analogy the admins (priests) don't have a clue about programming(causal relationships), so they just refer to the FAQ a lot, complain about "stupid n00b questions", and ask people to shut the hell up or face the consequences.
Such behavior invariably leaves people to go elsewhere with some of the questions they have, and this is precisely where the notion of belief is born.
Belief is the view of the world that is dessiminated and perpetuated by the religious institution and backed by the system in power. One Nation obeying one god, through the mediation of one king. A coincidence? yeah right!
Superstition (or heresy) then, is the part of how people experience and make sense of the world that is not covered (or indeed covered poorly) in the FAQ. It is outside centralized control and manipulation by the religious institution, more often than not because it runs counter what is represented in the FAQ. It is driven by experience, is dynamic and not set in stone.
Go on... have a day beyond belief.
Cheers
-m
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