I Could Use That Much Sleep, Though

Because everyone loves to hear about other peoples' dreams, here's last night's entertainment at the Theater of My Brain.

I dreamed that I was very tired (also true in real life), so I went to bed, and when I woke up I realized I had slept for three days straight, and missed my flight to Portland, OR, for Christmas (this flight is real).

I was very distressed that not only had I missed a holiday vacation of awesome familyness, but it was all my fault, and I was therefore not going to be able to get any use from the enormous amounts of money that I spent on the plane tickets (the high cost of these tickets is true in real life).

Doing a little highly sophisticated dream interpretation, I perceive that certain themes occupy my mind:

• sleep
• time/being late*
• money* 

Obviously my spirit is troubled, and vague premonitions of ill fortune disturb my peace of mind. I should take a nap.


*These themes also appear in another recent dream, suggesting ongoing preoccupation.

Mmm, Salad

Must pack, off to the Southwest tomorrow. Everyone behave in my absence. Don't have too much fun at the parties I can't attend.

Meanwhile, enjoy this post on Sociological Images about vintage ads for vegetable-flavored Jell-O and Jell-O salads full of exciting things like olives and celery. Yum.

It's interesting that these days we (speaking from my own experience and naturally assuming I speak for us all) associate Jell-O with dessert, so it's usually teamed up with fruit and whipped cream and stuff, not vegetables, while apparently it was totally a legitimate veggie side dish back in the day.

Or at least someone hoped that advertising would make it a legitimate veggie side dish.

My grandmother used to make a salad with lime Jell-O and shredded cabbage. I found it revolting as a child, and something about the pictured salads in these old ads, with bits of vegetable suspended in translucent molded blobs, similarly turns my stomach. Eww.

I've enjoyed a good wiggly dessert, but somehow a wiggly salad is just not cool.

But of course gelatin is derived from cow's hooves, making it more of a meat product, which means there's no real reason it shouldn't be linked to vegetables as well as, or instead of, fruit. As with so many things, it's all what you're used to.

I'm Out of Here. Pretty Soon.

This is going to be a busy travel month for me. I'm heading off to New Mexico on Thursday, then back the next week, then to Oregon for New Year's.

And since I'm not in the office for the intersession period when school's out, I just realized this means I only have 6 1/2 days of work left this year.

Niiiiiiiiice. I'm trying not to mentally sign out right now.

So long, suckers! Oops, that would be me failing in my attempt not to mentally sign out right now.

Sigh. OK...hi there, suckers! Let's do some work!

Oh, Goody!

New security procedures at Logan airport. We're always so lucky! Among the first to get the much-beloved body scanners, and now pioneering a program in which

...TSA officers will speak with every passenger passing through the Terminal A security checkpoint, asking each two or three questions, such as “Where are you traveling today?’’ or “How long have you been in town?’’

This is with an eye to seeing whether or not people look unusually twitchy and nervous, or say "oh, I'm just here to blow up a building--oops!"

Apparently they're trying it out for two months to see...I don't know. How much people love it? How many people confess?

And if it doesn't produce awesome results, I'm sure it will nevertheless be continued if someone thinks it's cool enough.

I seriously hate airport security. I mean, love! 

Love, and appreciate how much it does to keep us all safe through the process of continually making flying as unpleasant as possible.

I can't wait for my flight on Friday.

And We're Off!

Getting packed up and ready to head to the airport for something exciting!

Not at the airport, no one wants any excitement of any kind at or involving any airport, but the fact that we're going on a trip that will extend beyond the airport, that's exciting.

I'm not used to flights I don't have to get up at the crack of horrible for, because usually I go west inside the United States (it's hard to go very far east inside the United States when you start in Boston), but when you head across the Atlantic you seem to leave in the evening.

The better to try to get some sleep so you can pretend to your brain that it's totally time for morning 6 hours earlier than usual.

I got up kind of early anyway, in the hope that I'll be tired enough to doze off. I well remember, from past experiences jumping several zones, that dazed, faintly nauseated weariness, and the feeling of really wanting to just sit down somewhere and go to sleep, never mind where the deceitful sun is in the lying sky.

Squinting against the mocking sunlight, trying to make out, through a haze of eyelashes and glare, whether or not that stretch of sidewalk is clear, because it looks mighty comfy.

Can't wait!

But jet lag aside, we'll be in Paris, and I hear that's moderately interesting.

So I'm going to be away from the internet for a few days, and I trust it will behave itself in my absence.

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Reflections on Commuting

I had to notice this Slate piece called, bluntly, Your Commute Is Killing You.

I had to notice, because it happens that I have a reasonably lengthy commute myself, and have sometimes wondered about how awesome that really is. Not very, I have sometimes suspected.

I live about 10 miles from where I work, but it takes me on average an hour and 10 or an hour and 15 minutes to get there, through a combination of walking and taking the train.

In case you wondered, it would certainly take nearly that long to drive, too, plus the additional joys of parking fees and sitting in traffic seething about the precious gasoline that's being quietly burned up to move a couple of feet in a minute. I drove to work for a while years ago and it was maddening. Never again!

I'm not worried about the fact that I take the train. I love the train. At least I can read and not think about traffic. Public transportation! Yay! Woooo! Etc.

Seriously. Public transportation is key. Please use my tax dollars to fund it. Thank you.

Nevertheless, even loving the train, the sheer amount of time I spend getting to and from work is kind of daunting to think about. I mean, that's close to 12 hours a week in travel time. Well over an entire workday. Spent not working, but not not-working. Just getting from place to place.

I'm on salary, but I worked out the hourly rate once, based on my official 8:30-5:00 workday, and it's OK. And then I factored in 2 to 2 1/2 hours per day of commute--which is time that essentially does belong to work, even though I'm not actually accomplishing anything work-related, since I'm also not using it for anything productive in a non-work sense--and that was kind of depressing.

So depressing, in fact, that I immediately forgot it, and am afraid to figure it out again lest I be plunged into despair. All I remember is that apparently it takes better than a librarian's salary to make a 11-hour workday look like a really good deal on an hourly basis.

Especially because I just read this story in the free daily paper--which I now realize is all I can afford on a librarian's salary--saying that the average starting salary for a new college graduate is $50,462 (the figure is in the sidebar). Now I'm going to confess a perhaps shameful secret, given that it's just not nice to talk about money, and divulge that this is only about $1,000 less than I'm making right now, and I've been out of college for 12 years.

So if you want, you can work out my hourly wage yourself, but don't tell me, because I probably don't want to hear about it.

What are new college graduates doing? I don't know. Not studying to become librarians, if they know what's good for them.

Anyway, whatever, I'm not worried about that either. I'll make the big bucks some other way, perhaps with my brilliant novels or my truly excellent cocaine. Or, more to the point, I make big enough bucks to afford housing, food and video games, so I'm good. It's not about the money. And that money is plenty good compared to what plenty of people live on.

But the time, you know. All that time, hundreds of hours a year spent just going from home to work and back. I don't know if I actually even recommend you read that article, because it may just depress you.

Some notes from the piece:

Couples in which one partner commutes for longer than 45 minutes are 40 percent likelier to divorce. 

...every 10 minutes spent commuting results in 10 percent fewer "social connections." 

...one in three workers with a 90-minute daily commute has recurrent neck or back problems.

When we spend more time commuting, we spend less time exercising and fixing ourselves meals at home.

Fun, right?

Now I like to put a positive spin on my commute, because I like to not be overwhelmed with the desire to curl up and weep for days, so I think happy thoughts.

For example, my commute involves walking about 15 minutes to the train station, riding the train for about half an hour, and walking for about 15 minutes to work. (The additional 5 to 10 minutes usually come from waiting for or on the train.) That means I'm out and walking for about an hour a day, in 15-minute chunks, and that's good for accumulating some exercise, which all the health-interested people say you should do.

I like getting out and walking, and it's way too easy not to leave the house at all on weekends, what with the video games, or to leave only to get in the car and drive to visit someone (because none of our friends live within walking distance), so it's kind of a good thing I have a commute to get me out and moving around on a regular basis.

Plus, that half an hour each way on the train is nice quiet time to sit (or stand) and read a book. I don't have as much time to read books as I used to, what with the video games and the internet, so it's nice to have some time where there's really nothing else going on and I can delve into that novel I borrowed from the public library. (Public libraries are key. Please use my tax dollars to fund them. Thank you.)

So my commute is not all bad. Not as bad as if I were just getting in the car and driving/sitting in traffic for an hour and 10 minutes. If that's what you're doing, I'm sorry. I guess you can still listen to music or audiobooks, though?

The article talks about how a lot of people make the trade between a larger house and one closer to work, so you basically pay with time for a bigger house farther away from work, but that's not necessarily what's going on for me. Sadly, my gracious spouse and I currently live about midway between our two workplaces, so moving closer for one of us would just make things worse for the other.

We did not play that right, it turns out.

Still, I can think positively that my personal commute is not actively killing me. It gives me exercise and reading time! It's totally awesome!

Around 24 full days a year of awesome.

My best commute ever was the summer in college that I stayed and worked on campus. I stayed in on-campus housing and was about a block from work. It will probably never get better than that.

I've decided you just have to think of the commute time as accomplishing something in addition to travel. Otherwise, you might as well curl up and weep for days.

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My Triumphant Return

I come back from Minneapolis in splendor, with my head stuffed with knowledge and my shoulders weighed down with swag.

I met some new people, attended some interesting programs, followed some Twitter feeds, experienced some wonders (Bearded Pigs! Lady Gaga song!), caught up with some awesome folks, and got lots of exercise hurrying back and forth on the skywalk between the Hilton and the Minneapolis Convention Center.

I can see my breath outside here. The weather was much nicer in Minneapolis.

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Dancing With Security

Having been burned once, when I obediently went through the backscatter body scanner and then got patted down anyway for some unspecified reason, I've taken to just refusing the scan.

I mean, if I'm going to get the pat-down, I may as well not also get the extra radiation, right? (I once read this described as "no more radiation than a chest x-ray," which I think is not a very reassuring comparison since as far as I know it's not normally recommended that you get chest x-rays multiple times per year. The "as much radiation as two minutes in an airplane" comparison is much more soothing.)

Anyway, who doesn't like being touched by strangers in a stylized, formal context in public, to serve some larger theatrical purpose? I was thinking of taking up ballroom dancing, but air travel fills the bill without the need to be careful about stepping on people's feet.

In closing, thanks for the free WiFi, Logan. The MLA 2011 Adventure is about to begin!

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Step 1337ly, Everyone

I'm taking a short vacation to New Mexico, and would just like to note that I will be traveling on flight 1337 tomorrow.

Appropriate, given my vast, vast reserves of technological cool, right?

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A Triumphant Return

I have returned from a lively trip to the distant lands of Salt Lake City. Now, to have a rousing New Year's Eve of wine and Futurama.

We party hard around here.

I resolve to continue viewing free movies whenever possible in 2011.

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What? Where? Who Am I?

I haven't been on the internet in a week. I have no idea what's going on. It's completely disorienting.

However, given there was a ferocious heat wave in Boston while I was gone, I can say that I was able to escape the horrible New England summer by fleeing to Texas.

At least for a little while. I'm back now, and it's humid and gross.

I missed you, Boston. Not that much, but I missed you.

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Gettin' Around

It has gotten quite warm here in Massachusetts in the past few weeks, and I've had enough.

Next week, I'm going to Texas.

I'm not going to the Gulf, so I won't see the oil washing up, but I'll be using lots of fossil fuel along the way, doing my part to demonstrate why we need that oil so desperately badly. Just another person on another day, guzzling down precious oil in the form of travel, power, clever plastic gadgets, tasty and entertaining things shipped from thousands of miles away.

We can't give that up! Seriously, there's no way.

We are so doomed.

But in the meantime, I'm going to Texas to see my sister and my nieces and get out of the humidity for a few days.

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On the Road Again

Wow. Airport security at Boston is even more of a hideous production than ever, now that they've got one of them newfangled 'body scanners'!

Based on my experience, you have to stand with your feet carefully placed on this footprinted mat, facing this blue screen (possibly they'll add in a creative background later!), with your hands raised above your head, while you're bombarded with mysterious invisible rays that I suspect will eventually be responsible for a new race of mutant humans who can see through people.

And then they pat you down, just in case the body scanner missed something, which it almost certainly would if I were plotting nefarious acts and had any clue what I was doing. You may ask: does this offer a significant advantage over the old x-rays?

Well, it does take longer and involve more physical contact with strangers, which is what I'm usually looking for when I travel*, so on the whole, yes, a net plus.

But whatever, right? I feel super secure, except for the nagging sense that I might have lost my wallet, belt, watch, ID, phone or boarding pass while undressing and unpacking for the big show, and that's the important thing.


*Wait...that sounded kind of weird.

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Ready...Steady...

So I got home from work today, still badly needing to pack for MLA, since I'm leaving tomorrow morning and all and I hadn't done more than make a neat list of all the stuff I should pack but hadn't.

Naturally I decided to wash the dishes and clean the bathroom instead. Because someone is coming from Verizon tomorrow to install FiOS, and I do not want this person to know that we are pigs.

Although if he or she reads this blog, I guess the secret is out.

Anyway, distractions notwithstanding, the packing is now more or less done. Here is the thing that I would prize above rubies: a pair of shoes that is nice enough to wear at conferences and in the office and such, that is also comfortable enough to walk around outside in.

This has to exist. I have known people who claim to possess it. But shoes and my feet have an uneasy relationship at the best of times, and I have not found that shoe for my foot. If I ever do, I will buy 10 pairs and never wear anything else.

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Follow-Up Whining

I'm particularly peeved because Boston got approximately no more snow than in any usual winter storm, and today was clear and nice, and sure maybe they needed to cancel flights along the East Coast but we were headed for Kansas City and points west which are not currently buried in ice, and we could have left on time this morning.

Instead, we can't leave until tomorrow, for nearly twice the price of the original tickets.

Thanks a lot for the panic, everyone who hyped the story of this storm in Boston.

Sigh. Well, what can you do? Whine to the internet and then finish packing, that's my answer.

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Boring Personal Whining Post

I was supposed to fly to NM tomorrow, but of course a large storm has shut down the East Coast. There's no getting out of Boston in the near future.

So I had a car accident Sunday and now I can't get out west to attend a funeral. It ain't been a great week. And only Wednesday, too!

Meh. It could be worse. I could be stranded in an airport halfway there. With two broken collarbones.

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Wandering Somewhen

I enjoyed this Respectful Insolence post about time travel (answering another post at Aardvarcheology), inquiring how well someone would do if dropped in a familiar city with no money or ID, 500 years ago, or 300 if we're in places that didn't have extensive cities 500 years ago.

There are lots of interesting answers in the comments, with some people coming up with practical plans to advance the sciences, and some others concluding that they would just immediately catch plague and die of general uselessness.

I'm going to put myself in the latter camp, having no very transferable skills. I mean, I'd say I could try to advance library science using the awesome bits of MARC Bibliographic that I manage to retain from one day to the next, but I doubt that society would be hanging anxiously on my words (especially since book-learnin' was not exactly admired in womenfolk back in the day). In all likelihood I'd just succumb at once to whatever flu was going around.

Or, as several commenters suggest, be executed as a witch.

I do have nice strong teeth for 300 years ago, but I don't know how far that would get me, beyond assuring that I could chew the food of the day.

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Goodbye, Sweet Virtual World

Well, I'm off to the other coast tomorrow to ring in the New Year with some family.

This will certainly be fabulous, but it does mean that I expect to be away from the internet for a while. It'll be hard, but I think I can get through this. Distraction is key.

Note to self:
When the urge to go online strikes, take deep breaths and try talking to a family member, or perhaps reading a book. A brisk walk may also help.

If all else fails, take up smoking. Heh.

Anyhow, Happy New Year to all my legions, and may we all have a good 2010.

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Risking Tickets

Slate has an article by Tom Vanderbilt about how traffic tickets serve the greater good.

I liked its point that many people tend to think of traffic violations as not 'real' crimes. Everyone does it, we think. And seriously, almost everyone does. Speeding must be the most common crime in the country. (I'm just guessing on that, and have no citation to back me up, so don't even ask.)

Just get on the the highway somewhere and you're surrounded (if not by people stuck in traffic and frustrated by the inability to go anywhere) by people blithely flouting the law.

I myself am strictly law-abiding in many ways (I dutifully declare my internet purchases for purposes of state sales tax), but I still disregard the speed limit. I don't habitually break traffic laws in other ways, although I've racked up a few parking tickets in my time, possibly since I rarely drive or need to park these days, but here I am, deciding which laws I want to obey and which I don't, exactly as one should not really be able to do in a society of law (right?).

I was particularly struck by this example of how we tend not to take traffic crimes seriously:

Even the most socially abhorrent driving crimes, like a fatal crash involving an alcohol-impaired driver, often evoke curiously lenient legal responses. Consider the nonautomotive case of Plaxico Burress, who accidentally shot himself with an unregistered, concealed gun. Stupid? Yes. Illegal. Yes. End result? A painful leg injury (to himself)—and two years in jail. Now compare that with fellow NFL player Leonard Little, who in 1998 ran a red light and smashed into a car whose driver died the next day from her injuries. Little was found to have a BAC of 0.19, more than twice the legal limit in the state of Missouri. Stupid? Yes. Illegal? Yes. End result? Another person lost her life. Little's sentence, compared with Burress', was minor: 90 days. He missed only eight football games and was able to keep his license.

Put like that, it does seem a little off.

The piece argues that traffic tickets are good in a couple of ways, one being that a lot of people wanted for more serious crimes are caught during traffic stops, and one being the suggestion that enforcing traffic laws is a way to encourage generally more lawful behavior, kind of the way that the 'broken windows' theory suggests that cracking down on petty crime will help keep neighborhoods free of more serious problems.

I don't know that I would ever actually want a traffic ticket, and I argued about a couple of mine (I contend that it's legitimate to contest tickets given for violating parking rules that were not posted), but in general I figure them's the breaks. If I'm violating a law, I know I'm taking the risk of a ticket.

The question then arises, given that I just admitted I speed practically whenever I drive, but have never gotten a speeding ticket, should we be getting more tickets, to even further advance the greater good?

After all, a lot of times you don't get pulled over for speeding. I've heard the argument that cops figure it's actually safe for most people to drive faster than the posted limit, but that having it lower than most people drive both keeps you from driving even faster, and gives them a reason to pull you over if they think you're doing something else you shouldn't be doing.

Either one of those notions could be dissected on its own, but I've already said too much.

For any reader's patience, I mean.

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Martian Vacation...FOREVER!

Dangerous Intersection, quoting Lawrence Krauss, wonders if it wouldn't be worth considering, as a means of making a trip to Mars financially feasible, not planning for a return.

Just send some people to Mars and leave them there. Somebody would certainly be willing to go--heck, it's the first trip to another planet, and this opportunity doesn't come up often! Or ever!--but would it be morally acceptable to send them, knowing they were going to die there?

I was thinking how people used to go off on years-long sea voyages chasing whales and such, and often never returned, but there was always the possibility that they might, and the general idea that they at least intended to, which makes it different. There's something awfully final about knowing you're never coming back to an entire planet.

What I would wonder is, whether there's a specific time limit on the mission (we're sending you to Mars and then you have enough food, water and oxygen to gather information for six months, and then 'bye), which is appealing only in a very daring, suicide-mission, my-life-for-discovery way.

If it would instead be something where you could plan on having enough supplies to live out your life on Mars, that's much less alarming. (At least until Space Madness sets in when you're overcome by the unbearable desolation of being millions of miles from everything on Earth.)

It would be kind of lonely, and the living conditions would probably be pretty spare, but people have lived decent lives in spare conditions before. We could just send a few thoughtful introverts who got along OK but didn't need a whole lot of human social interaction, and they could putter around out there and send back reports and meditate on existence and eventually manage each other's bodily remains until finally one lingering hermit closed up the shop and went to bed.

Or possibly they'd all perish in a ghastly fashion, depending on whether or not it turns out Mars is inhabited by secretive subterranean life forms that are just waiting for us to come along and give them an excuse to flip out, as I like to speculate.

Anyway, I'm going to go on record as tentatively supporting the Send Hermit Volunteers to Mars program.

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