Christmas 2006
How should I remember it?
Unfortunately, I didn't write about the holiday soon after it happened, so I've forgotten many specifics, like what I did on the 23rd or 27th. But I can give an overview now of what sticks in my mind before even general details dissolve in the tears of passing years (poetic, but dumb :-P).
Firstly, and most vastly importantly, everybody was here!. After a shredded yet not entirely unpleasant Christmas last year, Grandma Kari, Grandpa Ken, Uncle Keith, and Ken descended upon Mom, Dad, Daniel, Daisy and me. After thinking we had probably had the last normal Christmas ever, we had another :-) It really didn't matter much what else we did, just waking up in the morning and knowing everybody was around was enough.
I came into the holiday rocking and rolling from the categorically most intense academic period of my life. Two pillar classes on the line and a grade to rescue and excellence to demonstrate in process control. Half of my evenings were surrendered to the computer lab, as well as most of my days, and Sunday the 10th Charlie and I pulled an all-nighter, going from 3pm to 9am. After clawing through the process control final and finishing up the design report, I turned my thoughts to NOVA, which I had deserted for the past three weeks. I went to Akron Thursday for the Christmas dance show, and spent Tuesday through Thursday at NOVA. Monday I went with Mike, Justin, Hezz and Shannon (and Matt?) to pick up Daniel at Grove City. It was well worth $120 of pay to hang with them all and pick up Danmybro. We toodled around the campus, got lunch at Taco Bell (Except Hezz, who hit up the mysterious Subway [i.e. Sheetz] for her xenophobic meal), hit the thrift store (Can you say "turquose jacket with black-trimmed lapels?") and rocked tunes there and back.
On Tuesday I spent all day preparing my resume and coverletter for submission in regards to a full-time position in NOVA's technology department. There was a posting for an EPS Polymer Scientist/Engineer which my boss Tom had alerted me to. It's looking for a MS or PhD, but not much experience, so I have a shot. It would be a scarily-challenging yet amazing job - responsible for developing new EPS products and improving existing ones. Then I spent Wednesday and Thursday finishing up my various projects, particularly writing the work instruction for doing Painesville and Belpre's SARA 312 Tier II monthly and annual inventory reports. I left Thursday with one last day on the docket, January 2nd, before my nearly three-year tenure with NOVA (temporarily?) ended. I'm still waiting to hear if approval has been given for me to return part-time to do computer guru work with C++, Access and other lovely things (how ironic, eh?).
I got things a bit mixed up in my mind earlier, and before this week everybody had arrived on Friday. Ken got in from somewhere in New England after his trip to Spain (such an awesome-sounding trip!), Grandma and Grandpa (and Dally) drove in from Lansing, and Uncle Keith rolled in in his new motor home. Yes, our crazy Uncle has now bought himself a 30-foot Class A RV :-) He parked it in the dead-end street, and once he finished putting an antenna adapter in we watched some TV out there and Daniel and I spent the night in it's spacious luxury. SO cool! So yeah - those three days I was working, everybody was at home and the Christmas holiday was rolling along. Although my time spent at NOVA was not unpleasant, it was kind of a downer the couple times I let myself realize that I was missing everything at home. But so it goes. With a future career in the works, it was worth the sacrifice. And hah, how self-focused is this blog post! Oy. Other people in my family may read this and marvel at how callously I pass over things they did (if I mention them at all), which were central points of their time. But my ignorance limits what I can honestly write about, so I talk about myself and stay in this narrow perspective. Hopefully in 10 years I'll be much better at opening myself up to others' worlds (marraige will probably help that :-P).
The counter had Grandma's chocolate cookies, truffles, Hershey's Kisses, Fannie May candies, Mom's oatmeal cookes, pistachios, and other unremembered goodies occupying it's toaster-oven/napkin holder flank. The other end was, as always, full of in-use stuff. Less Daniel's and my pocket stuff, which was dutifully tucked away in our sanctioned Glad container in the pantry. I realized over the holiday that my copious affection for pop was not developed in a vaccuum--we drank through twelve-packs of Dr.Pepper and Diet Pepsi like pros, as well as Black Cherry Vanilla Coke (The taste of the shed, as Daniel called it) and IBC root beer and cream soda. While we're on snacks.. one point that came up in my mind a lot was my decreased appetite for such goodies. Pop was often a laboriously sweet blah, most cookies were unattractive... in short, I didn't eat nearly as much of these delights as I wished or would have in the past. I'm not sure if that came from dulling thoughtless overindulgence, or if it indicates a taming of the youthful passion of the past. In any case, it was mildly disconcerting, and I lost 3 pounds over the holidays.
I was home for Christmas Eve and Christmas day. Every year Mom gets Christmas Eve as HER time, in the midst of all the football and swirling activity. This year she planned a Norwegian Christmas (actually planned for last year, but... yeah, that didn't work out). We gathered for her program, which involved some Norwegian Christmas songs, some readings, some group gifts, annnnnd, Ken - the Yule Nissa! Heheh. Ken was appointed to be the Norwegian version of Santa Claus, and carried it out with his usual dissenting aplomb. He made it fun. The glug wasn't so good, but the ginger almond cookies kept on tasting better than I expected over break. Mom did a fine job bringing us another forced yet fun and memorable evening. Ahh, our family:-)
Lessee.. Daniel and I slept down in the basement since I had been banished from the family room couch after graduating. One year a good while ago we slept down there on cots and it sucked. Cold, bad sleep, and we had colds as well. This year, probably because we're hearty and sturdy young men by now, it was fine, even right on the floor with a cot pad and some blankets. I never moved in officially, so my clothes were a disaster, but whatev, right? (gag)
We spent most of Christmas day opening presents. Daniel and I slept in till 10:30 I think, and Ken, as the Yule Nissa, dispensed the gifts. We open then one-by-one, enjoying each one with its opener. We broke for lunch sometime after noon and then reconvened to finish with the sub-tree population. Uncle Keith got tons of stuff for the new RV, which Grandma named Samson (Sam is the name of the old pop-up UK has). Daniel got a "Pandora's Box," a compact bass/guitar effects unit. Ken got dough, I think. All the adults exchanged many gifts, which I think is cool, being as it is a sign of how intertwined their lives are, and what genuinely good friends they are. I got a pair of Shure ES300 earphones--as valuable as my iPod. They're so precise they sound lousy at first (no exaggerated bass), but I'm appreciating them more and more each time I listen to them. It's analogous to the clarity and rich detail you get with a thousand-dollar lens vs. the Canon snapshot digital cams we all use. Perfect clarity. AAHHHHHH :-) Oh sound - how wonderful you are!
The day after Christmas was primarily spent, for all of us but Grandma, Grandpa and the dogs, driving to a Laurel Highlands resort for UK's present of an off-road driving experience in a Hummer. Yes, UK's main gift was the experience of driving an H2 over some real off-road terrain. We drove out there in the van and everybody but Mom (oh Lord how she would have hated it!) rode along in the wide heavy Hummer. He went through a little training course under the direction of our guide, and then we drove over to an extensive set of trails running through the PA woods within the resort. UK drove for more than an hour through the mud, logs, rocks, puddles and hills, grinding through under the direction of our guide. It was interesting for me.. most of what we did didn't seem that extreme, but any normal car would have bottomed out or spun out in a second. It showed me dramatically how cushy all of our cars are. We are crazily dependent on our nice paved roads, folks. Even back in the extra seat far in the back, I could feel the commanding weight of the massive Hummer. It planted itself on the ground like somebody was holding it down, and ground over rocks and up hills like a giant was pushing us from behind. Pretty cool. I kept wishing we could ditch the guide guy and head off into the woods, no holds barred. Definitely what I would think :-P
Lessee... now I suffer the loss from not writing this out earlier. The rest of the days between Christmas and New Years are kind of a blur. I didn't have work, so I was around. We watched football and other sports games as the default activity, which unifies us in the family room/kitchen area, under the glow of the Christmas lighs and surrounded with copious laptops. Daniel and I worked away on 24 season two every night, getting wired and stressed-out right before bed :-P The good snacks eventually got eaten, and more 12-packs of Dr.Pepper had to be purchased. UK worked on the motor home a lot, I think Dad had a project or two (he usually does, being the great man that he is), Mom worked away in the home (what an insanely gracious and giving lady!), Daisy sought food like an automaton, and Dally got in the way of everybody better than a congressional committee. I had a couple nice long talks with Grandpa about chemical engineering and got to hear about what he did in his career, which was quite interesting.
Daniel and I had the new challenge of balancing family time with friend time, since we had a whole group of folks who were back for Christmas break and not normally around. I think that balancing act went well--I feel like we had a complete time with home folks, and I also feel well caught-up with "the senior crowd" as I call them, though they're actually freshman now. Funny how most of my friends are four years younger than me, discounting about 7 church friends. I guess I associate with those who are roughly as young as I feel and act :-)
For New Year's Eve I declined the several invitations I had and chilled with the fam, eating a nice dinner, watching football (of course) and playing Scatergories (oh, what a battle :-P). When it got close to the turn of the year I proposed the idea that we ring in the new year without a TV on (*gasp!*). Struck by a burst of creativity reminiscent of childhood, I grabbed Daniel and headed downstairs with about 15 minutes to put together our celebration. So we rang in 2007 with an atomic clock countdown from UK's laptop, a toilet paper roll dropping down a yardstick (the ball dropping. Get it?), shredded colored paper confetti, a crashing Zildjan 8-inch spash cymbal, and seltzer water, which refused to spray about like I wanted. Daniel and I chugged the seltzer water, the dogs barked and Daisy chased her tail, everbody laughed, and I was pretty happy. Over the course of the holiday I was affected by the reality of God's grace to me personally, demonstrated by these wonderful people around me who treat me far better than I remotely deserve. I struggle with believing God's existence sometimes without an undeniable personal experience of His reality, but I realized clearly and poignantly that these people around me ARE real, and there's no way in heaven or hell they could ever be as tirelessly kind and caring to me as they are without God's grace being what the Bible says it is. I may not have it all working right now, but they do, and they're right in front of me, as real as my calloused fingertips and lousy knees. So, that was nice. It was nice to have Grandma and Grandpa there, and words could never describe the enveloping warmth and happyness of having having all those special people around, here to stay for a good long time, hanging around and making every little thing funny and special.
OK, before I wrap it up with more touching sentimental, spiritual and intellectual invtroversion... the weather was FREAKY! Fifties and pleasant on average, with only a few days of clouds and rain. It was like Florida or something. Pleasant and appreciated, but occasionally recognized as the freak show that it was. In fact, I think it was New Year's day that Daniel and I went to TJ Highschool for a frisbee game with TJ and church folks--it was about 70 degrees, sunny, and just stop-drop-and-roll gorgeous. We PChOPers killed the TJ folks in ultimate frisbee, and then we lolled around and took pictures (I bet we looked wierd :-P) while the TJers and Nick played football (bleah!). It was lovely running about in shorts and T-shirts, and made for a pleasant and slightly odd Christmastime. I'm dreamin' of a bright Christmas? :-)
That's about it, I think. I left early Tuesday morning, the 2nd, for work, and that day Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Keith left. Ken hung around for a couple more weeks till he headed to Bolivia last Saturday, and of course Mom and Dad remained, forming the backbone of this amazing, sturdy life-backbone I call home. God knows where I'll be for next Christmas, who will still be alive, and who might be new to the family (a girl or two? Hmmmm :-) ). I'll probably have a full-time job locking me down, and goodness knows where Ken will be and how Grandma and Grandpa will be doing.
Looking back, I'm just grateful that God gave us this Christmas all together, like old times. Having tasting the possibility of loss, I (and we all, I think) savored every hour together, in the glow of peace, health and home. The world could fall apart, and I would feel complete with our family. Another year of wondrous prosperity and kindness, another time of walking around a bustling house lit by Christmas lights and alive with humor, another piece of ineffable peace and golden happiness. What unmerited goodness, that I should be included in this family, in this country, in this time, with this freedom, security and luxury. I tremble to think that it's true, in the global historic perspective, but I'm so grateful it has been so, and I'll carry the memories for the rest of my life. Hah - I sound pretty Christmas-sappy, but it's the way it is, call it what you like.
That's it folks! Yay, I've written this! Now to write about the Texas trip, in which I am currently living :-) Later gator.
--Clear Ambassador
Monday, January 22, 2007
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
A Look from the Helm
Here are two little snippets that give an idea of where I'm at in the grand scheme of life right now, and what kind of thoughs are pinging through my brain. The first is from a note Grandpa Ken wrote me for our celebration of my graduation. I include it because these sentences struck me like a bell, tolling the weight of the coming days and weeks (e.g. tomorrow).
----------------------------
. . .
Your future now stands before
you. Choose your path wisely.
Love,
Grandpa Ken
----------------------------
The second is my articulate response to the question, "What's the difference between a boy and a man?"
----------------------------
Boys are in training to bear responsibility. Men bear it.
Boys ride home in the car. Men drive the car, maintain it, and they bought it three years ago with five thousand dollars of their own money.
Boys do chores for a few minutes each day. Men do chores 8 hours a day.
Boys are blown around with every feeling and happening. Men have seen more of how the world works, and they ride the waves.
Boys have devotions because Mom and Dad say they should.
Young men have devotions becaue their spiritual lives depend on it.
Men have devotions because their wife and kids' spiritual lives depend on it.
Boys do what they want with their time. Men have no time
----------------------------
A time like this usually comes only once in a human's lifetime, if he's even fortunate enough to have a choice of his path. If I didn't believe in the God of the Bible, and if I didn't have my family to live Him out in front of me, I would be nervous and anxious beyond words. As it is, I know I can't fail, because He stands with me and His purposes will never fail. To say that's my only hope is to hang a bridge of truth upon a hair-thin cliche.
Temperate-lengthed post! Duuuuude.
--Clear Ambassador
----------------------------
. . .
Your future now stands before
you. Choose your path wisely.
Love,
Grandpa Ken
----------------------------
The second is my articulate response to the question, "What's the difference between a boy and a man?"
----------------------------
Boys are in training to bear responsibility. Men bear it.
Boys ride home in the car. Men drive the car, maintain it, and they bought it three years ago with five thousand dollars of their own money.
Boys do chores for a few minutes each day. Men do chores 8 hours a day.
Boys are blown around with every feeling and happening. Men have seen more of how the world works, and they ride the waves.
Boys have devotions because Mom and Dad say they should.
Young men have devotions becaue their spiritual lives depend on it.
Men have devotions because their wife and kids' spiritual lives depend on it.
Boys do what they want with their time. Men have no time
----------------------------
A time like this usually comes only once in a human's lifetime, if he's even fortunate enough to have a choice of his path. If I didn't believe in the God of the Bible, and if I didn't have my family to live Him out in front of me, I would be nervous and anxious beyond words. As it is, I know I can't fail, because He stands with me and His purposes will never fail. To say that's my only hope is to hang a bridge of truth upon a hair-thin cliche.
Temperate-lengthed post! Duuuuude.
--Clear Ambassador
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
The Chosen Five
There were five.
Five among dozens.
Five who braved ferocious storms and ceaseless battering.
Five who got screwed by their lousy online schedules.
Five who had to take design and control at the same time.
I was one of five, and barring the hyperbole of dramatacism, it was indeed a very difficult semester I was faced with this fall. I faced it with Charlie, Drew, Jewel, and Willis. Charlie and I go way back - back to the Team Bloat days with Jenna and Joam in Transport and Kinetics. Drew has been a co-op at NOVA with me for my last 3 rotations. Jewel I knew of, but didn't really know, and Willis.. Dave Willis.. well, with a name like that he couldn't help but be the man :-)
There were 15 other people in control, but only us five for design and health & safety. We spent many many hours down in B72, the basement ChemE computer lab, hashing out progress reports or putting together laborious H&S reports. When everybody else was down there worrying about the monstrous impossible process control homework, we were worrying about that plus tomorrow's progress report on exergy plus the 38-page health & safety draft due Friday.
The groups were formed as soon as we walked into the classroom at 8am Monday morning in late August. Willis, Drew and Jewel were over at a computer desk on the right side of the room, and Charlie was sitting at the left front desk. Thus team Willis coalesced, and Charlie and I joined forces yet again. I consider myself fortunate to have had him as my partner. He works extrememly diligently, and I don't have to worry about being cool around him. I suppose from the outside we're both ChemE nerd dorks who pool our dorkiness and are very uncool. But from the inside we're like brothers--don't have to worry about what you say or do, just work, joke, blow off steam, and get done what needs to get done. Exactly my style :-) Team Willis always finished their work before us, and we were usually late - for classes and assignments. I kinda feel bad for that, but it's how it happened, and our professors were gracious. And in the end I think we turned in better work, or at least as good.
So, with that backdrop, let me usher you down to B72 early on a crisp and frosty Monday morning. We hop up the 4-foot ledge at the truck loading docks underneath big grey Benedum and walk in the door to the loading foyer. Pull through the double doors, pass the drinking fountain and bathrooms on the right, face left, and punch in the code at the door of the lab. It's really not a lab, it's a computer classroom. Two-story-high ceiling with innocuous vents and pipes running around, 15-foot screen in front of the extra-long blackboard on the wall at our left. The instructor's desk, rounded by it's brushed metal ledge, is tucked back in that corner. On the right are the desks - 9-foot long semicircles with two computers in each and chairs scattered around them. Most of the chairs have formed a herd in the back of the room, over by the printers, unused and out of the way. The desk right at our right is me and Charlie's--he sits by the wall and I sit by the aisle. Team Willis sits at the second desk on the other side of the room. But they're not here now. Charlie and I sit at our desk, typing, leaning back and sighing, and leaning in again to the screens and keyboards. The strange thing is, it doesn't seem like a classroom at all. Books and backpacks are littered around like a dorm room, and the whole room flickers and glows in the warm light of Christmas lights and a crackling fire. Julie Andrews sings with spirit undimmed by her bleak listeners, and the media player visualization flickers warm flame on the giant projector screen. Colored lights circumnavigate the blackboard, and a string of white lights is taped around the instructor's desk. Even though it's 4am and the new day is starting, you can't help but feel pretty cozy tucked down there in the basement, carpet under your feet, open computers, a classroom at your command, a locked door if you want to close it, and a clearly-defined task steadily chipping away under your efforts. It doesn't feel at all as though you've been sitting at that desk since 3:30 Sunday afternoon, that the Steelers have played and won, night has come and gone, and workers are waking and starting their days. You know that there are five more hours until the report is due, and you will need all of them to get close to finishing it, but you don't think about it enough to realize it. You just keep scanning the marked-up progress report on Pipes and making changes to the document on the screen. Every once in a while you or Charlie kick back and make some comment about how ridiculous some of the comments are, or bust out some South Park quote, but by this time you're pretty much in a zone, and there's not much talk except for questions about the report.
Taking the liberty of the omnipotent narrator, we now sweep past those five hours, rush up the 13-story staircase, round the corner past Parker's office, and pull up in front of the Chemical Engineering main office. Charlie and I weakly greet Dr. Enick and Dr. Parker, whom I salute and call "masters," since they have ruled our lives for the past 4 months. We hand Dr. Enick the light blue 1.5-inch three-ring binder, exchange a few words, and turn towards the elevators. The sun is already well risen over the convoluted hospital buildings of Oakland outside the 12th floor window next to us. 18 hours ago I drove down to campus from a brief nap after church, and now I roll back down those roads, for one of the last times. I'm not tired, just zoned out. My nose started dripping around 6am, and my throat has gotten scratchy, and my rear end is sore from sitting for so long, but I'm plenty alert. It's a pretty strange feeling, but not unpleasant. I'm actually glad I got to do such a crazy thing at the end of my college career, and I'm amazed that it actually was that much work, for that long, and we did it.
Two days later, after the dreaded process control final kicked our butts from 11am to 2pm, Charlie and I finished the last edits to the 92-page Chemical Engineering Plant Design final report, printed out the remaining pages, and under the recording eye of my cell phone camera signed the cover letter and plopped it in the holder outside Dr. Enicks office, thus ending our undergraduate careers.
OK, I think I'm done with the story. There's more I want to say, and it's too clusmy to put it in that kind of clothing. Yes, 14 design progress reports culminated in a crazy all-nighter down in B72 putting them all together into the final report draft. We got an A in the class. Team Willis turned their final report in one hour before we did :-)
There's one other picture I want to take you to, actually. When I think of this semester, that comfortable and friendly image of B72 is the primary one that comes to mind. I also strongly think of parking my car around Oakland - waiting for spots to open up on Atwood, finding a meterless 4-hour spot on Bellefield, and that sweet sweet feeling of slipping into a spot where you know you're set for the day. I sorta think of sitting up in the 12-floor classroom listening to Parker's performance lectures. But one of the stirling memories is down in the darkened basement room of Fuel & Fuddle, a popular Oakland bar and pizza place. Twenty-some chemical engineer students sit around tables and on benches, faces fixed on the screen at one end, listening intently to people talk about hot wort, mash tuns, yeast collection patterns and heat exchangers. After a month of excruciating work on the Process Control project, we have all made it here--our presentations are in Dr. Parker's briefcase and we're presenting our work to the class. What I want you to see is the attention to the presenters; the quality of the graphs and discussions; and the questions. Dr. Parker only had to ask a few the whole time. After the end of every 10-minute presentation hands shot up all around the room and points were raised, discussed and usually answered. Fuel & Fuddle employees slipped through occasionally, and a few patrons passed by on their way to the restrooms, and I wonder what they thought. Uber-weird, probably :-) But I was proud of us. After getting beaten around by two exams with F-grade averages, merciless homeworks and brutal lectures, we had risen to this project and kicked it squarely in the heine. Non-linear simulation using grad-student-level matlab code? Barebones project information and difficult research? Gruelling controller tuning to achieve stability? Harsh time limit on the presentations? Cold steely questions from the super-intelligent Parker? We ate 'em all for breakfast :-)
Parker himself agreed with me the following day about the quality of the projects and participation. It was by far the best project he had ever seen in his 8 (I think) years of teaching this class. And my team's paper was by far the best of the bunch. Those words settled a tremendous weight of failure, uncertainty and hope inside of me. I had worked myself to the bone the night before pulling our paper together and tightening up the analysis. We had killed ourselves Thanksgiving week to get the filter and pasteurizer models working, and now we had a bunch of closed-loop controller responses to interpret and discuss. We threw all kinds of disturbances at our system once we had it designed and simulated, to see if it could handle it. Our beer pasteurizer came out with flying colors, and I covered every single base with our assumptions, decisions, and reasons. At every point I unconsciously asked myself "What would Parker ask here?", and then proceeded to answer it. The paper was 38 pages, but it was perfect, and to have Parker realize and acknowledge that meant more to me than every A+ I earned in college (and I earned 15).
That project was the best-whipped-into-shape that I have been since Critical Writing last fall and Organic Chemistry the summer before that. And those three are the academic pinnacles of my college career. A close fourth is Thermo 2, where I lived in Chapter 11 of the book and plunged my brain again and again into fugacity and gibbs free energy and all the hateful abstract concepts of thermodynamics until I actually understood them and got an A+ in the course. Those were the four times I had something really hard to do and I squared it up, took it on, and came out successful. I came to realize at the end of this semester that that is one of the best things you can do in life, even though it's always hard, discouraging and hateful at some point along the way. Now that I'm graduated, I miss that kind of clear-cut challenge within the relatively safe confines of academia. I miss the prospect of hanging out with the students whom I've finally gotten to know and who've gotten to know me. I wish for more of the heedless expenditure of time on things that have no choice but to be done, yet are pretty much independent and fun as you do them. Real life seems a good bit harsher and less interesting, but I suppose it will turn out to be just as rewarding once I get into it.
So yeah - down there in Fuel & Fuddle, our class glowed with professionalism, quality and solid scientific behavior. It makes me very happy to think of us down there. After all the misery and failure in process control, we proved our capabilities there, and Parker saw it and acknowledged it gladly. I talked to Dr. Parker the next week about the course and some of the comments I had developed over the months. We ended up talking for almost 2 hours, and I got to share, completely, coherently and demonstratively, exactly the things that had bothered me about him and how he ran the course, and together we considered them and how they could be addressed. At the end he thanked me heartily and said he'd never been given such well-thought out and considerate feedback, removed from emotions and didactic in nature. That was likewise very rewarding, because the unsettledness of being in what appeared to be a mismanaged class was relieved, and I came out really believing that Parker is a solid guy.
Baugh, this post has become an untidy and obese growth of text. It doesn't even talk about final's week (and the harder week before that) chronologically. But, I think it carries most of the spirit of this last month and semester of classes, and that's what I really want to remember. I think of B72 affectionately, and I have great memories of working with Charlie and my other groups, and the fun times down in the lab with everbody focused on a common assignment. It has been probably the best sememster of college in that respect, even as it has been the most miserable at times and the most difficult by far. I'm glad to have ended out my academic life on a genuine note--a hard challenge well met. We'll see what the coming weeks hold, and I'll write later about this whole 5-day trip to Akron that I just got back from :-)
If anybody has read this far, I'm amazed at you and you deserve a smoothie. This post has taken full liberties of the "for future John" purpose of this blog. It's been a great time of life these past months, and perhaps I'll come up with a more succinct and vibrant way of describing it some other time.
--Clear Ambassador
Five among dozens.
Five who braved ferocious storms and ceaseless battering.
Five who got screwed by their lousy online schedules.
Five who had to take design and control at the same time.
I was one of five, and barring the hyperbole of dramatacism, it was indeed a very difficult semester I was faced with this fall. I faced it with Charlie, Drew, Jewel, and Willis. Charlie and I go way back - back to the Team Bloat days with Jenna and Joam in Transport and Kinetics. Drew has been a co-op at NOVA with me for my last 3 rotations. Jewel I knew of, but didn't really know, and Willis.. Dave Willis.. well, with a name like that he couldn't help but be the man :-)
There were 15 other people in control, but only us five for design and health & safety. We spent many many hours down in B72, the basement ChemE computer lab, hashing out progress reports or putting together laborious H&S reports. When everybody else was down there worrying about the monstrous impossible process control homework, we were worrying about that plus tomorrow's progress report on exergy plus the 38-page health & safety draft due Friday.
The groups were formed as soon as we walked into the classroom at 8am Monday morning in late August. Willis, Drew and Jewel were over at a computer desk on the right side of the room, and Charlie was sitting at the left front desk. Thus team Willis coalesced, and Charlie and I joined forces yet again. I consider myself fortunate to have had him as my partner. He works extrememly diligently, and I don't have to worry about being cool around him. I suppose from the outside we're both ChemE nerd dorks who pool our dorkiness and are very uncool. But from the inside we're like brothers--don't have to worry about what you say or do, just work, joke, blow off steam, and get done what needs to get done. Exactly my style :-) Team Willis always finished their work before us, and we were usually late - for classes and assignments. I kinda feel bad for that, but it's how it happened, and our professors were gracious. And in the end I think we turned in better work, or at least as good.
So, with that backdrop, let me usher you down to B72 early on a crisp and frosty Monday morning. We hop up the 4-foot ledge at the truck loading docks underneath big grey Benedum and walk in the door to the loading foyer. Pull through the double doors, pass the drinking fountain and bathrooms on the right, face left, and punch in the code at the door of the lab. It's really not a lab, it's a computer classroom. Two-story-high ceiling with innocuous vents and pipes running around, 15-foot screen in front of the extra-long blackboard on the wall at our left. The instructor's desk, rounded by it's brushed metal ledge, is tucked back in that corner. On the right are the desks - 9-foot long semicircles with two computers in each and chairs scattered around them. Most of the chairs have formed a herd in the back of the room, over by the printers, unused and out of the way. The desk right at our right is me and Charlie's--he sits by the wall and I sit by the aisle. Team Willis sits at the second desk on the other side of the room. But they're not here now. Charlie and I sit at our desk, typing, leaning back and sighing, and leaning in again to the screens and keyboards. The strange thing is, it doesn't seem like a classroom at all. Books and backpacks are littered around like a dorm room, and the whole room flickers and glows in the warm light of Christmas lights and a crackling fire. Julie Andrews sings with spirit undimmed by her bleak listeners, and the media player visualization flickers warm flame on the giant projector screen. Colored lights circumnavigate the blackboard, and a string of white lights is taped around the instructor's desk. Even though it's 4am and the new day is starting, you can't help but feel pretty cozy tucked down there in the basement, carpet under your feet, open computers, a classroom at your command, a locked door if you want to close it, and a clearly-defined task steadily chipping away under your efforts. It doesn't feel at all as though you've been sitting at that desk since 3:30 Sunday afternoon, that the Steelers have played and won, night has come and gone, and workers are waking and starting their days. You know that there are five more hours until the report is due, and you will need all of them to get close to finishing it, but you don't think about it enough to realize it. You just keep scanning the marked-up progress report on Pipes and making changes to the document on the screen. Every once in a while you or Charlie kick back and make some comment about how ridiculous some of the comments are, or bust out some South Park quote, but by this time you're pretty much in a zone, and there's not much talk except for questions about the report.
Taking the liberty of the omnipotent narrator, we now sweep past those five hours, rush up the 13-story staircase, round the corner past Parker's office, and pull up in front of the Chemical Engineering main office. Charlie and I weakly greet Dr. Enick and Dr. Parker, whom I salute and call "masters," since they have ruled our lives for the past 4 months. We hand Dr. Enick the light blue 1.5-inch three-ring binder, exchange a few words, and turn towards the elevators. The sun is already well risen over the convoluted hospital buildings of Oakland outside the 12th floor window next to us. 18 hours ago I drove down to campus from a brief nap after church, and now I roll back down those roads, for one of the last times. I'm not tired, just zoned out. My nose started dripping around 6am, and my throat has gotten scratchy, and my rear end is sore from sitting for so long, but I'm plenty alert. It's a pretty strange feeling, but not unpleasant. I'm actually glad I got to do such a crazy thing at the end of my college career, and I'm amazed that it actually was that much work, for that long, and we did it.
Two days later, after the dreaded process control final kicked our butts from 11am to 2pm, Charlie and I finished the last edits to the 92-page Chemical Engineering Plant Design final report, printed out the remaining pages, and under the recording eye of my cell phone camera signed the cover letter and plopped it in the holder outside Dr. Enicks office, thus ending our undergraduate careers.
OK, I think I'm done with the story. There's more I want to say, and it's too clusmy to put it in that kind of clothing. Yes, 14 design progress reports culminated in a crazy all-nighter down in B72 putting them all together into the final report draft. We got an A in the class. Team Willis turned their final report in one hour before we did :-)
There's one other picture I want to take you to, actually. When I think of this semester, that comfortable and friendly image of B72 is the primary one that comes to mind. I also strongly think of parking my car around Oakland - waiting for spots to open up on Atwood, finding a meterless 4-hour spot on Bellefield, and that sweet sweet feeling of slipping into a spot where you know you're set for the day. I sorta think of sitting up in the 12-floor classroom listening to Parker's performance lectures. But one of the stirling memories is down in the darkened basement room of Fuel & Fuddle, a popular Oakland bar and pizza place. Twenty-some chemical engineer students sit around tables and on benches, faces fixed on the screen at one end, listening intently to people talk about hot wort, mash tuns, yeast collection patterns and heat exchangers. After a month of excruciating work on the Process Control project, we have all made it here--our presentations are in Dr. Parker's briefcase and we're presenting our work to the class. What I want you to see is the attention to the presenters; the quality of the graphs and discussions; and the questions. Dr. Parker only had to ask a few the whole time. After the end of every 10-minute presentation hands shot up all around the room and points were raised, discussed and usually answered. Fuel & Fuddle employees slipped through occasionally, and a few patrons passed by on their way to the restrooms, and I wonder what they thought. Uber-weird, probably :-) But I was proud of us. After getting beaten around by two exams with F-grade averages, merciless homeworks and brutal lectures, we had risen to this project and kicked it squarely in the heine. Non-linear simulation using grad-student-level matlab code? Barebones project information and difficult research? Gruelling controller tuning to achieve stability? Harsh time limit on the presentations? Cold steely questions from the super-intelligent Parker? We ate 'em all for breakfast :-)
Parker himself agreed with me the following day about the quality of the projects and participation. It was by far the best project he had ever seen in his 8 (I think) years of teaching this class. And my team's paper was by far the best of the bunch. Those words settled a tremendous weight of failure, uncertainty and hope inside of me. I had worked myself to the bone the night before pulling our paper together and tightening up the analysis. We had killed ourselves Thanksgiving week to get the filter and pasteurizer models working, and now we had a bunch of closed-loop controller responses to interpret and discuss. We threw all kinds of disturbances at our system once we had it designed and simulated, to see if it could handle it. Our beer pasteurizer came out with flying colors, and I covered every single base with our assumptions, decisions, and reasons. At every point I unconsciously asked myself "What would Parker ask here?", and then proceeded to answer it. The paper was 38 pages, but it was perfect, and to have Parker realize and acknowledge that meant more to me than every A+ I earned in college (and I earned 15).
That project was the best-whipped-into-shape that I have been since Critical Writing last fall and Organic Chemistry the summer before that. And those three are the academic pinnacles of my college career. A close fourth is Thermo 2, where I lived in Chapter 11 of the book and plunged my brain again and again into fugacity and gibbs free energy and all the hateful abstract concepts of thermodynamics until I actually understood them and got an A+ in the course. Those were the four times I had something really hard to do and I squared it up, took it on, and came out successful. I came to realize at the end of this semester that that is one of the best things you can do in life, even though it's always hard, discouraging and hateful at some point along the way. Now that I'm graduated, I miss that kind of clear-cut challenge within the relatively safe confines of academia. I miss the prospect of hanging out with the students whom I've finally gotten to know and who've gotten to know me. I wish for more of the heedless expenditure of time on things that have no choice but to be done, yet are pretty much independent and fun as you do them. Real life seems a good bit harsher and less interesting, but I suppose it will turn out to be just as rewarding once I get into it.
So yeah - down there in Fuel & Fuddle, our class glowed with professionalism, quality and solid scientific behavior. It makes me very happy to think of us down there. After all the misery and failure in process control, we proved our capabilities there, and Parker saw it and acknowledged it gladly. I talked to Dr. Parker the next week about the course and some of the comments I had developed over the months. We ended up talking for almost 2 hours, and I got to share, completely, coherently and demonstratively, exactly the things that had bothered me about him and how he ran the course, and together we considered them and how they could be addressed. At the end he thanked me heartily and said he'd never been given such well-thought out and considerate feedback, removed from emotions and didactic in nature. That was likewise very rewarding, because the unsettledness of being in what appeared to be a mismanaged class was relieved, and I came out really believing that Parker is a solid guy.
Baugh, this post has become an untidy and obese growth of text. It doesn't even talk about final's week (and the harder week before that) chronologically. But, I think it carries most of the spirit of this last month and semester of classes, and that's what I really want to remember. I think of B72 affectionately, and I have great memories of working with Charlie and my other groups, and the fun times down in the lab with everbody focused on a common assignment. It has been probably the best sememster of college in that respect, even as it has been the most miserable at times and the most difficult by far. I'm glad to have ended out my academic life on a genuine note--a hard challenge well met. We'll see what the coming weeks hold, and I'll write later about this whole 5-day trip to Akron that I just got back from :-)
If anybody has read this far, I'm amazed at you and you deserve a smoothie. This post has taken full liberties of the "for future John" purpose of this blog. It's been a great time of life these past months, and perhaps I'll come up with a more succinct and vibrant way of describing it some other time.
--Clear Ambassador
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
**Six Stars**
[My apologies to anybody who got excited about a new blog post and sees that it's the same as my post on Facebook. Different pools of possible readers. The end is different, though!]
Six Stars
That's the title of a playlist in my iTunes, and I just listened through it all tonight. It's the handful of songs that, over time, have affected me every time I listen to them. They're the ones I hear and think, "Man, I wish I could give this more than 5 stars to mark down just how GOOD it is!"
Listening through these songs has been a transcendant experience. Starting with John Williams' "Hologram/Binary Sunset" and the french horn that makes me want to cry because I can never really be in the Star Wars world, I traveled through 20 songs, each of which left me silent with wonder. Some of which left my heart so tugged that I didn't know what to do but savor the bittersweetness.
As I sat there with my eyes closed, the comfortable couch and the warm room and house around me seemed oddly small. I thought of thanking Mom and Dad for providing this incredibly peaceful and pleasant building for me to live in here on this earth, compared to so much harshness and misery elsewhere. Occasionally the thought of God's infinity and my existence in heaven shot through me, and I finally made peace with my heart by figuring and accepting that in heaven all these heart pangs would be met, whether its the equivalent of standing on Tatooine watching the twin suns set, or just finding a "bottom" for the feelings stirred up by hearing songs from years ago, from times that will never be again.
I found indescribable peace, while listening through these songs, from knowing that I had created a song on that list. For whatever reason, I just can't stand hearing outstanding music and knowing that I can't make such stuff myself. Most of the time that's the case, and I'm left chafing, but tonight I knew that "What a Night" deserved to be on that list. And even as I marvelled at the perfect intricacies of David Altrogge's "Coming Home (1945: The GI's Song)" and wondered how much of Switchfoot's stunning beauty in "Might Have Ben Hur" was planned, I knew that a song like that had come from me.
I myself had written a song from the most inexplainable and deeply-rooted threads of my being, and it had come together in a recording that is better than I could ever have planned, and better than I could probably make again.
This is the unstable source of my peace, for it is not necessarily skill that gets you a "six star" song. We are subject to the cold winds of chance. A mistake on the first take, a deleted track, and transcendence can be lost. I feel good that the pieces came together for this song, and by the same token I chafe, because I cannot force more greatness to happen. It just has to come out when I least expect it.. when it's not on my mind.. . . when it doesn't come from me.
Such is the curse and the joy of a musician.
This all being said, do you have a "six star" song you'd like to share? I love telling other people about these songs that mean so much to me and having them appreciate them, so by the same token I'd love to hear what songs leave you "sitting back in wonder."
And if anyone is interested, here's What a Night.
In a way, it's the best thing I have to offer the world at the moment.
And here in my blog I'll write out what I decided to forgo in the Facebook note: The "introversion disclaimer." It states, basically, that I realize this has been an effectively Godless rumination--that these words make things seem grander or more important than they are from a higher perspective. It defends against correction readers might bring to the "cold winds of fate" statement, which is how it feels, not how it is with a sovereign God. Is says that I realize I was emotional as I wrote it.
I left it out because I get tired of qualifying every sensitive statement I make and feeling like I have to prove to anyone who might criticize me that I "see around my work." I left it out 'cause I get sick of the "curse of the analytical" sometimes--the neverending circumspection and self analysis that must bring everything down to cold, intentional purpose and correctness. But here in this journal, I'll leave the comfy couch of the bulk of this post and point myself, and anyone reading, to another of my songs here at the end. Once you've shared my joys and sorrows (if you actually did), finish up by listening to "You Ain't That Big of a Deal." It's the truth, like it or not :-|
Six Stars
That's the title of a playlist in my iTunes, and I just listened through it all tonight. It's the handful of songs that, over time, have affected me every time I listen to them. They're the ones I hear and think, "Man, I wish I could give this more than 5 stars to mark down just how GOOD it is!"
Listening through these songs has been a transcendant experience. Starting with John Williams' "Hologram/Binary Sunset" and the french horn that makes me want to cry because I can never really be in the Star Wars world, I traveled through 20 songs, each of which left me silent with wonder. Some of which left my heart so tugged that I didn't know what to do but savor the bittersweetness.
As I sat there with my eyes closed, the comfortable couch and the warm room and house around me seemed oddly small. I thought of thanking Mom and Dad for providing this incredibly peaceful and pleasant building for me to live in here on this earth, compared to so much harshness and misery elsewhere. Occasionally the thought of God's infinity and my existence in heaven shot through me, and I finally made peace with my heart by figuring and accepting that in heaven all these heart pangs would be met, whether its the equivalent of standing on Tatooine watching the twin suns set, or just finding a "bottom" for the feelings stirred up by hearing songs from years ago, from times that will never be again.
I found indescribable peace, while listening through these songs, from knowing that I had created a song on that list. For whatever reason, I just can't stand hearing outstanding music and knowing that I can't make such stuff myself. Most of the time that's the case, and I'm left chafing, but tonight I knew that "What a Night" deserved to be on that list. And even as I marvelled at the perfect intricacies of David Altrogge's "Coming Home (1945: The GI's Song)" and wondered how much of Switchfoot's stunning beauty in "Might Have Ben Hur" was planned, I knew that a song like that had come from me.
I myself had written a song from the most inexplainable and deeply-rooted threads of my being, and it had come together in a recording that is better than I could ever have planned, and better than I could probably make again.
This is the unstable source of my peace, for it is not necessarily skill that gets you a "six star" song. We are subject to the cold winds of chance. A mistake on the first take, a deleted track, and transcendence can be lost. I feel good that the pieces came together for this song, and by the same token I chafe, because I cannot force more greatness to happen. It just has to come out when I least expect it.. when it's not on my mind.. . . when it doesn't come from me.
Such is the curse and the joy of a musician.
This all being said, do you have a "six star" song you'd like to share? I love telling other people about these songs that mean so much to me and having them appreciate them, so by the same token I'd love to hear what songs leave you "sitting back in wonder."
And if anyone is interested, here's What a Night.
In a way, it's the best thing I have to offer the world at the moment.
And here in my blog I'll write out what I decided to forgo in the Facebook note: The "introversion disclaimer." It states, basically, that I realize this has been an effectively Godless rumination--that these words make things seem grander or more important than they are from a higher perspective. It defends against correction readers might bring to the "cold winds of fate" statement, which is how it feels, not how it is with a sovereign God. Is says that I realize I was emotional as I wrote it.
I left it out because I get tired of qualifying every sensitive statement I make and feeling like I have to prove to anyone who might criticize me that I "see around my work." I left it out 'cause I get sick of the "curse of the analytical" sometimes--the neverending circumspection and self analysis that must bring everything down to cold, intentional purpose and correctness. But here in this journal, I'll leave the comfy couch of the bulk of this post and point myself, and anyone reading, to another of my songs here at the end. Once you've shared my joys and sorrows (if you actually did), finish up by listening to "You Ain't That Big of a Deal." It's the truth, like it or not :-|
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Monday
I don't have time to do this, but this is the last week of this Pitt season of my life, and I don't want to forget it like I've forgotten the last week, nay month, of my home school season.
So... TODAY:
"Class" with Dr. Enick at Starbucks at 9. His treat, and we just conversed.
Process, high on caffeine and understanding discrete step response modeling.
Heath & Safety / Ethics - last class. Watched the 60 Minutes bit on the BP Texas City refinery explosion, did the evaluation.
Drove home 'cause I didn't have my lab report sections on the USB stick or emailed. Mom was leaving to take Daisy for her checkup as I arrived. Veggie soup.
Back to Pitt, waited and waited for a spot on Atwood, ended up down by Bellfield, but set for the rest of the day. COLD walk. 20's.
7 hours of Process Control homework. 5 continuous hours spent in one chair, getting up exactly 4 times to get my printed stuff 10 feet away. Brain so active I didn't eat, drink, or even listen to music part of the time. Writing code. Busting head. Got it working.
Nice break down in B72 sharing Phae's pomegranite and putting up Christmas lights.
Final 3 hours of process control, doing the Simplex algorithm for linear optimization with multiple constraints. Got my answers to agree with Matlab, hallelujah!
Fuel and Fuddle. 2 Jameson's and a flying buffalo provided some nice relaxation and needed nutrition. Read "God Is The Gospel," talked to Willis and Janie while they waited for a table. Christmas lights were the best idea I've had in the last 4 years.
Jenna gave me a snowflake with designs like hearts and biker club symbols. I played with the order of songs for my album.
Cold walk to car.
Listened to my own stuff on the way home.
Came up with and recorded a 1 minute acoustic song. Indirect fruit of listening to Vince Guaraldi 5 times today.
Titled it "Fuddle."
Here it is. To be listened to whilst looking at black and white photographs.
Good night.
Pitt is good, but somehow I have no thought of missing it when I'm done. I have no feelings about my graduation at all, strangely enough. Right now I'm just starting to feel Christmassy, and that's sublime.
--Clear Ambassador
So... TODAY:
"Class" with Dr. Enick at Starbucks at 9. His treat, and we just conversed.
Process, high on caffeine and understanding discrete step response modeling.
Heath & Safety / Ethics - last class. Watched the 60 Minutes bit on the BP Texas City refinery explosion, did the evaluation.
Drove home 'cause I didn't have my lab report sections on the USB stick or emailed. Mom was leaving to take Daisy for her checkup as I arrived. Veggie soup.
Back to Pitt, waited and waited for a spot on Atwood, ended up down by Bellfield, but set for the rest of the day. COLD walk. 20's.
7 hours of Process Control homework. 5 continuous hours spent in one chair, getting up exactly 4 times to get my printed stuff 10 feet away. Brain so active I didn't eat, drink, or even listen to music part of the time. Writing code. Busting head. Got it working.
Nice break down in B72 sharing Phae's pomegranite and putting up Christmas lights.
Final 3 hours of process control, doing the Simplex algorithm for linear optimization with multiple constraints. Got my answers to agree with Matlab, hallelujah!
Fuel and Fuddle. 2 Jameson's and a flying buffalo provided some nice relaxation and needed nutrition. Read "God Is The Gospel," talked to Willis and Janie while they waited for a table. Christmas lights were the best idea I've had in the last 4 years.
Jenna gave me a snowflake with designs like hearts and biker club symbols. I played with the order of songs for my album.
Cold walk to car.
Listened to my own stuff on the way home.
Came up with and recorded a 1 minute acoustic song. Indirect fruit of listening to Vince Guaraldi 5 times today.
Titled it "Fuddle."
Here it is. To be listened to whilst looking at black and white photographs.
Good night.
Pitt is good, but somehow I have no thought of missing it when I'm done. I have no feelings about my graduation at all, strangely enough. Right now I'm just starting to feel Christmassy, and that's sublime.
--Clear Ambassador
Saturday, December 02, 2006
AIM with Danmybro
[Sorry 'bout the double spaces. Too hard to get rid of.]
[I started by making a comment on his away message, to the effect that he was now the big man on campus since he was working out and consequently huge.]
odiousbane: noo, not me
odiousbane: it was a contest
slickitized: I pretty much figured so :-)
Auto response from odiousbane: Big Man on
Campus. Oh yeah.
odiousbane: yyyeah
odiousbane: this sweet guy one
odiousbane: Darrius Pugh
slickitized: wawawiwa!
odiousbane: he's awesome
odiousbane: he was in the Maryland Boys' Choir
odiousbane: and he was the best kid in it
slickitized: niice
odiousbane: wow, UK's rig is sweeeeet
slickitized: heheh
slickitized: fo' real man
odiousbane: wow
odiousbane: he's bringing it to our house
odiousbane: that's awesome
slickitized: yeah dude
odiousbane: we should take an overnight when he's
here, or something
slickitized: satellite TV!
slickitized: Mom was thinking that too
odiousbane: wow
slickitized: birding up in Erie or something
slickitized: I think you and I should sleep out there
odiousbane: yeah!
odiousbane: duuude
odiousbane: I hope he would let us
odiousbane: he may want to
slickitized: yeah, I'm not sure
odiousbane: pretty awesome
odiousbane: I wonder how many it can sleep
odiousbane: man, people aren't going to believe it :-)
slickitized: heheh
odiousbane: our crazy uncle has done it again
slickitized: foshizzle
odiousbane: what's up at home?
slickitized: well, M&D are looking at how to reorganize
the basement and put a futon in
slickitized: Daisy is mushed up against my laptop
odiousbane: ooh, nice
slickitized: Jonathan is disappeared upstairs
odiousbane: and you?
slickitized: and the music of Ecuador is farting away in
my ears
odiousbane: mmmmm
odiousbane: the stuff from Ken?
slickitized: yep
slickitized: this one song is hilarious
odiousbane: farty?
slickitized: yep
odiousbane: awesome
slickitized: gratuitious tuba and bass drum/cymbal action
:-)
odiousbane: ooh man
slickitized: it makes me laugh
odiousbane: does it make you feel like un gordo
ecuatoriano?
slickitized: Kinda like that german dude in the
"Magnificent Men and their Flying Machines" movie
odiousbane: haha
slickitized: si si
odiousbane: good movie
odiousbane: we should watch that over break too
slickitized: if we can find it, yeah
odiousbane: it's out there
odiousbane: somewhere out there....
odiousbane: haha
odiousbane: is page 6
slickitized: heheh
slickitized: YES!
slickitized: COOORTIS
odiousbane: what a turd
slickitized: developin'
slickitized: seventeh
slickitized: horsepower
odiousbane: good stuff
slickitized: quality film
slickitized: how's your Friday night progressing?
odiousbane: not bad
odiousbane: I went to lunch with Chris and Sean
odiousbane: dinner
odiousbane: and then I went to the Big Man on Campus
contest
odiousbane: it was really crazy
odiousbane: some of the things the guys did were
unbelievable
odiousbane: like hard to believe they actually did that at
GCC
odiousbane: it was really horrendous at a few points
slickitized: what kind of stuff?
odiousbane: one guy was dancing for a girl a chair
odiousbane: taking his shirt off and wiggling around
odiousbane: another guy....
odiousbane: who was rather portly
odiousbane: wore a hula outfit for the beachwear
segment
odiousbane: and he was hula dancing....
odiousbane: *shudder*
odiousbane: the same guy was making jokes about
people who stutter and foreigners
odiousbane: it was pretty awesome :-)
odiousbane: one guy had the worst talent ever
slickitized: heheh
odiousbane: he was singing along with "Girls" by the
Beastie Boys
odiousbane: you should listen to that song
slickitized: heheh
odiousbane: the thing is....
odiousbane: it wasn't even karaoke
odiousbane: all the vocals were in there
slickitized: heh
odiousbane: he only "sang" about half of it
slickitized: pshht
Auto response from odiousbane: Big Man on
Campus. Oh yeah.
odiousbane: like, the whole song but only half of it
odiousbane: it was really really bad
odiousbane: he got eliminated
slickitized: sweet
odiousbane: so, that's what I did tonight
slickitized: POWER OF THE PEOPLE!
slickitized: well, I had dinner at Wendy's with Mom and
Dad
odiousbane: nice!
slickitized: picked up my car from Hueys
odiousbane: what was it doing there?
slickitized: gave them $1200 of my money
odiousbane: oh snap
slickitized: getting inspection and new front struts
slickitized: and ordering 3 new wheels
odiousbane: dang
odiousbane: was that required?
slickitized: for the wellbeing of the car, yes
slickitized: I coulda got black wheels with chrome rings
slickitized: but that sounded cheesy
odiousbane: cool
slickitized: Dude, I'm gonna have NO money left
slickitized: February, another $1000 insurance
payment..
odiousbane: eek
slickitized: that's why I tell people to not get cars!
odiousbane: will you be solvent?
slickitized: not as I stand now, no
slickitized: I've gotta work my donkey off at NOVA as
soon as school is over
slickitized: till then, it's schoolwork like a hound of hell
odiousbane: oh boy :-)
slickitized: yep
slickitized: basically, I literally have 2x more than I have
comfortable time to do
slickitized: so, we'll see how it goes
odiousbane: when do finals start?
slickitized: Symphony is on Thursday, then Process the
following Wednesday, to close out my season of formal
education
odiousbane: wow
odiousbane: that's close!
odiousbane: good job
slickitized: it feels like it's 2 months away :-P
odiousbane: you can make it
slickitized: yep
slickitized: it's funny - times like this, the only way some
days arrive is because time doesn't stop. Otherwise I'd
never be ready for 'em
slickitized: iykwim
odiousbane: I guess so...
odiousbane: school has never been like that for me
odiousbane: not yet
slickitized: it seems to only be like that for very brief
periods
slickitized: a week here or there
slickitized: thankfully
odiousbane: alright
odiousbane: well, I'm going to go over to the Sac....
odiousbane: get a latte
odiousbane: watch It's a Wonderful Life
odiousbane: sound like a plan?
slickitized: sounds like I wish I was there :-)
odiousbane: same here bro
slickitized: dude, we've gotta find that alternate ending
on YouTube somewhere
slickitized: "Let's go get Mr. Pwotter!"
slickitized: YEAH!!!
slickitized: *whack whack*
slickitized: :-D
odiousbane: haha
odiousbane: what was that from?
odiousbane: SNL?
slickitized: Ken showed it to us
slickitized: I think so
odiousbane: wow, that was a long time ago
odiousbane: good stuff
slickitized: fo real
odiousbane: well I will see you later
odiousbane: college night baby
slickitized: yeah man
slickitized: peace
odiousbane: School of Rock is on
slickitized: oh hey - mind if I put this convo up on my
blog?
slickitized: niice
odiousbane: ...why?
slickitized: as a lazy yet rather effective way of
representing what's going on
slickitized: I just don't have time to write about all thIS
S"Tu;ff
odiousbane: alrighty
slickitized: (That was Daisy there)
odiousbane: haha
odiousbane: tell her to get some sleep
slickitized: she says she'll try
odiousbane: good deal
odiousbane: well, have a great night!
slickitized: U2
odiousbane: and pray that I get well, if you want :-)
slickitized: haha! I'm the first person to ever think of
that!!
slickitized: oooh yeah
slickitized: You're still sick? geez
slickitized: that's a downer
odiousbane: yeah...
slickitized: I'll prae
odiousbane: thanks
odiousbane: I thought I was better on Wednesday
odiousbane: since we had volleyball and soccer games
odiousbane: but then I felt like crud again
odiousbane: ah well
slickitized: rest up tonight
slickitized: think of Daisy
odiousbane: aighty
slickitized: peace
Auto response from odiousbane: Big Man on
Campus. Oh yeah.
odiousbane: stay warm
[I started by making a comment on his away message, to the effect that he was now the big man on campus since he was working out and consequently huge.]
odiousbane: noo, not me
odiousbane: it was a contest
slickitized: I pretty much figured so :-)
Auto response from odiousbane: Big Man on
Campus. Oh yeah.
odiousbane: yyyeah
odiousbane: this sweet guy one
odiousbane: Darrius Pugh
slickitized: wawawiwa!
odiousbane: he's awesome
odiousbane: he was in the Maryland Boys' Choir
odiousbane: and he was the best kid in it
slickitized: niice
odiousbane: wow, UK's rig is sweeeeet
slickitized: heheh
slickitized: fo' real man
odiousbane: wow
odiousbane: he's bringing it to our house
odiousbane: that's awesome
slickitized: yeah dude
odiousbane: we should take an overnight when he's
here, or something
slickitized: satellite TV!
slickitized: Mom was thinking that too
odiousbane: wow
slickitized: birding up in Erie or something
slickitized: I think you and I should sleep out there
odiousbane: yeah!
odiousbane: duuude
odiousbane: I hope he would let us
odiousbane: he may want to
slickitized: yeah, I'm not sure
odiousbane: pretty awesome
odiousbane: I wonder how many it can sleep
odiousbane: man, people aren't going to believe it :-)
slickitized: heheh
odiousbane: our crazy uncle has done it again
slickitized: foshizzle
odiousbane: what's up at home?
slickitized: well, M&D are looking at how to reorganize
the basement and put a futon in
slickitized: Daisy is mushed up against my laptop
odiousbane: ooh, nice
slickitized: Jonathan is disappeared upstairs
odiousbane: and you?
slickitized: and the music of Ecuador is farting away in
my ears
odiousbane: mmmmm
odiousbane: the stuff from Ken?
slickitized: yep
slickitized: this one song is hilarious
odiousbane: farty?
slickitized: yep
odiousbane: awesome
slickitized: gratuitious tuba and bass drum/cymbal action
:-)
odiousbane: ooh man
slickitized: it makes me laugh
odiousbane: does it make you feel like un gordo
ecuatoriano?
slickitized: Kinda like that german dude in the
"Magnificent Men and their Flying Machines" movie
odiousbane: haha
slickitized: si si
odiousbane: good movie
odiousbane: we should watch that over break too
slickitized: if we can find it, yeah
odiousbane: it's out there
odiousbane: somewhere out there....
odiousbane: haha
odiousbane: is page 6
slickitized: heheh
slickitized: YES!
slickitized: COOORTIS
odiousbane: what a turd
slickitized: developin'
slickitized: seventeh
slickitized: horsepower
odiousbane: good stuff
slickitized: quality film
slickitized: how's your Friday night progressing?
odiousbane: not bad
odiousbane: I went to lunch with Chris and Sean
odiousbane: dinner
odiousbane: and then I went to the Big Man on Campus
contest
odiousbane: it was really crazy
odiousbane: some of the things the guys did were
unbelievable
odiousbane: like hard to believe they actually did that at
GCC
odiousbane: it was really horrendous at a few points
slickitized: what kind of stuff?
odiousbane: one guy was dancing for a girl a chair
odiousbane: taking his shirt off and wiggling around
odiousbane: another guy....
odiousbane: who was rather portly
odiousbane: wore a hula outfit for the beachwear
segment
odiousbane: and he was hula dancing....
odiousbane: *shudder*
odiousbane: the same guy was making jokes about
people who stutter and foreigners
odiousbane: it was pretty awesome :-)
odiousbane: one guy had the worst talent ever
slickitized: heheh
odiousbane: he was singing along with "Girls" by the
Beastie Boys
odiousbane: you should listen to that song
slickitized: heheh
odiousbane: the thing is....
odiousbane: it wasn't even karaoke
odiousbane: all the vocals were in there
slickitized: heh
odiousbane: he only "sang" about half of it
slickitized: pshht
Auto response from odiousbane: Big Man on
Campus. Oh yeah.
odiousbane: like, the whole song but only half of it
odiousbane: it was really really bad
odiousbane: he got eliminated
slickitized: sweet
odiousbane: so, that's what I did tonight
slickitized: POWER OF THE PEOPLE!
slickitized: well, I had dinner at Wendy's with Mom and
Dad
odiousbane: nice!
slickitized: picked up my car from Hueys
odiousbane: what was it doing there?
slickitized: gave them $1200 of my money
odiousbane: oh snap
slickitized: getting inspection and new front struts
slickitized: and ordering 3 new wheels
odiousbane: dang
odiousbane: was that required?
slickitized: for the wellbeing of the car, yes
slickitized: I coulda got black wheels with chrome rings
slickitized: but that sounded cheesy
odiousbane: cool
slickitized: Dude, I'm gonna have NO money left
slickitized: February, another $1000 insurance
payment..
odiousbane: eek
slickitized: that's why I tell people to not get cars!
odiousbane: will you be solvent?
slickitized: not as I stand now, no
slickitized: I've gotta work my donkey off at NOVA as
soon as school is over
slickitized: till then, it's schoolwork like a hound of hell
odiousbane: oh boy :-)
slickitized: yep
slickitized: basically, I literally have 2x more than I have
comfortable time to do
slickitized: so, we'll see how it goes
odiousbane: when do finals start?
slickitized: Symphony is on Thursday, then Process the
following Wednesday, to close out my season of formal
education
odiousbane: wow
odiousbane: that's close!
odiousbane: good job
slickitized: it feels like it's 2 months away :-P
odiousbane: you can make it
slickitized: yep
slickitized: it's funny - times like this, the only way some
days arrive is because time doesn't stop. Otherwise I'd
never be ready for 'em
slickitized: iykwim
odiousbane: I guess so...
odiousbane: school has never been like that for me
odiousbane: not yet
slickitized: it seems to only be like that for very brief
periods
slickitized: a week here or there
slickitized: thankfully
odiousbane: alright
odiousbane: well, I'm going to go over to the Sac....
odiousbane: get a latte
odiousbane: watch It's a Wonderful Life
odiousbane: sound like a plan?
slickitized: sounds like I wish I was there :-)
odiousbane: same here bro
slickitized: dude, we've gotta find that alternate ending
on YouTube somewhere
slickitized: "Let's go get Mr. Pwotter!"
slickitized: YEAH!!!
slickitized: *whack whack*
slickitized: :-D
odiousbane: haha
odiousbane: what was that from?
odiousbane: SNL?
slickitized: Ken showed it to us
slickitized: I think so
odiousbane: wow, that was a long time ago
odiousbane: good stuff
slickitized: fo real
odiousbane: well I will see you later
odiousbane: college night baby
slickitized: yeah man
slickitized: peace
odiousbane: School of Rock is on
slickitized: oh hey - mind if I put this convo up on my
blog?
slickitized: niice
odiousbane: ...why?
slickitized: as a lazy yet rather effective way of
representing what's going on
slickitized: I just don't have time to write about all thIS
S"Tu;ff
odiousbane: alrighty
slickitized: (That was Daisy there)
odiousbane: haha
odiousbane: tell her to get some sleep
slickitized: she says she'll try
odiousbane: good deal
odiousbane: well, have a great night!
slickitized: U2
odiousbane: and pray that I get well, if you want :-)
slickitized: haha! I'm the first person to ever think of
that!!
slickitized: oooh yeah
slickitized: You're still sick? geez
slickitized: that's a downer
odiousbane: yeah...
slickitized: I'll prae
odiousbane: thanks
odiousbane: I thought I was better on Wednesday
odiousbane: since we had volleyball and soccer games
odiousbane: but then I felt like crud again
odiousbane: ah well
slickitized: rest up tonight
slickitized: think of Daisy
odiousbane: aighty
slickitized: peace
Auto response from odiousbane: Big Man on
Campus. Oh yeah.
odiousbane: stay warm
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Twosdeh
I thought I'd write a bit about this week so my next post isn't another behemoth. However, if you're like me, you'll look down, see a couple paragraphs, and be disappointed. I almost always like reading long blog posts, especially when they're about SOMEBODY, not some external issue. Which is why I allow such massive posts in my blog.. I guess you could call it doing unto others as you'd like done to yourself?
Today was strange. I keep being unwilling to accept that I have to get up early again tomorrow. What is normally my 9 o'clock sleep-in Tuesday was instead a get-up-at-6:40-go-to-work day. Two aspects of this were good, though: I woke up on the patio with Daisy radiating warmness down under the blankets, and in the time I would have been sleeping or working on a beer pasteurizer transfer function model I made $60 and got a bunch of new assignments from my boss Tom.
..It was in the 50's last night, which is why I slept outside. I didn't collapse in a drunken stupor or anything that :-P
Symphony was good, but I found out I missed one point on my midterm. :-P I listened to Beethoven's 5th all day in the car, and I pretty much love it right now as much as I loved Death Cab for Cutie earlier this year. Which is a LOT.
I had two cans of Dr.Pepper today, but they didn't make me happy. The second one was while working on the Process Control project down in B72. We've been assigned the filter and pasteurizer in a beer microbrewing process, and I banged my head against the problem for an hour or two with paltry results. A cheesy Aspen simulation, some basic assumptions and variable specifications, and a lot of gaping questions.
Then I turned to Process Control, wherein the rest of the afternoon evaporated. It was 8 o'clock by the time I printed off the last plot (showing the instability resultant from a difference between the process model and the control model used to create the proportional controller that stabilized the open-loop-unstable system). I enjoyed once again the fact that it was mild outside as I pushed out the door by the basement loading docks of Benedum, but in general I was in a strangely pissed mood. I HATE that word, but it's honestly how I felt, and I hated how I felt, so it conveys the point well. Don't really know why I was in that mood, but like usual, it passed soon, and now I sit on the couch with shorter hair, no beard, tired muscles, a mostly-eaten plate of food at my left hand, PFR playing at my right hand, and another blog post almost finished. Jonathan's out playing basketball, Mom and dad are long asleep, Daniel's off in Grove City, probably asleep 'cause he's a good boy, Ken is in New Jersey doing who knows what, Grandma and Grandpa are plugging along in Chicago, doing well last I heard, Grandma Sweetie's down in Texas carrying on like the astounding trooper she is, Uncle Keith is in crazy crowded Orlando with his Mustang, his (relatively) new girlfriend, his strange half-dying job and his sweet sweet gadgets, and...
Daisy is curled into a tight ball up against a fleece blanket in the crook of the huggle chair.
Here's the view to my right
,
And here I am!
Something I see a zillion times a day. Set to play from my laptop. Everly Brothers, which I'm randomly loving at the moment.
And here's Daisy again! Don't you wish you could just flop down in the blanket with her? Aye, that'd be the life, for a day or two at least.
Have a peaceful night!
--Clear Ambassador
Today was strange. I keep being unwilling to accept that I have to get up early again tomorrow. What is normally my 9 o'clock sleep-in Tuesday was instead a get-up-at-6:40-go-to-work day. Two aspects of this were good, though: I woke up on the patio with Daisy radiating warmness down under the blankets, and in the time I would have been sleeping or working on a beer pasteurizer transfer function model I made $60 and got a bunch of new assignments from my boss Tom.
..It was in the 50's last night, which is why I slept outside. I didn't collapse in a drunken stupor or anything that :-P
Symphony was good, but I found out I missed one point on my midterm. :-P I listened to Beethoven's 5th all day in the car, and I pretty much love it right now as much as I loved Death Cab for Cutie earlier this year. Which is a LOT.
I had two cans of Dr.Pepper today, but they didn't make me happy. The second one was while working on the Process Control project down in B72. We've been assigned the filter and pasteurizer in a beer microbrewing process, and I banged my head against the problem for an hour or two with paltry results. A cheesy Aspen simulation, some basic assumptions and variable specifications, and a lot of gaping questions.
Then I turned to Process Control, wherein the rest of the afternoon evaporated. It was 8 o'clock by the time I printed off the last plot (showing the instability resultant from a difference between the process model and the control model used to create the proportional controller that stabilized the open-loop-unstable system). I enjoyed once again the fact that it was mild outside as I pushed out the door by the basement loading docks of Benedum, but in general I was in a strangely pissed mood. I HATE that word, but it's honestly how I felt, and I hated how I felt, so it conveys the point well. Don't really know why I was in that mood, but like usual, it passed soon, and now I sit on the couch with shorter hair, no beard, tired muscles, a mostly-eaten plate of food at my left hand, PFR playing at my right hand, and another blog post almost finished. Jonathan's out playing basketball, Mom and dad are long asleep, Daniel's off in Grove City, probably asleep 'cause he's a good boy, Ken is in New Jersey doing who knows what, Grandma and Grandpa are plugging along in Chicago, doing well last I heard, Grandma Sweetie's down in Texas carrying on like the astounding trooper she is, Uncle Keith is in crazy crowded Orlando with his Mustang, his (relatively) new girlfriend, his strange half-dying job and his sweet sweet gadgets, and...
Daisy is curled into a tight ball up against a fleece blanket in the crook of the huggle chair.
Here's the view to my right
, 
And here I am!
Something I see a zillion times a day. Set to play from my laptop. Everly Brothers, which I'm randomly loving at the moment.
And here's Daisy again! Don't you wish you could just flop down in the blanket with her? Aye, that'd be the life, for a day or two at least.
Have a peaceful night!
--Clear Ambassador
Sunday, October 29, 2006
I remembered to put a title in this little box!
Well, this may be the last homework-free day for awhile (I really don't know), so I figured I'd write up some stuff.
This week was going to be crazy ridiculous. Dr. Enick had 3 progress reports due - Monday, Wednesday and Friday (normally there's one a week, and that's plenty) - so I called off work and Charlie and I battened down the hatches and worked on Sunday to prepare for the storm. And then we finished the Wednesday one, Enick moved the Friday one (finished now) to Monday, and... and.. I didn't know what to do with myself!
Lessee.. so what did I do this week? Hush, Johnny Cash, I can't think. I wish my feet weren't so cold! I can sit on the hearth and get my rear end sore and my back hot, or I can sit on the couch and be comfy, but either way my feet sit on the floor and get icy. Um...
Sunday I went down to Pitt after the Steeler's game at the Harvey's and Charface and I worked on the distillation columns progress report. I wrote about Monday and stuff. Tuesday...I don't remember. My Fall Fitness Challenge Log sheet says I did an hour-long tough workout at home, so I guess I did that. Oh yeah! I did crazy hard stuff on the Elliptical and got my heart rate up to about 180, which is faster than the heart rate monitor can measure, and I was breathing so hard my throat was torn up the next day and I thought I was getting sick. I know I did other stuff Tuesday.. gosh, I can't remember! The day is lost! Seriously. That's why I started this journal - so I wouldn't lose days, or worse, whole seasons and memories and mindsets, to "the faulty camera in your mind," to quote Death Cab for Cutie.
Wednesday was sweet 'cause I worked out for an hour and twenty minutes with no cardio. Which means it was all lifting, which means it was pretty much my longest workout ever. It felt so good to have plenty of time and just get to work whatever I felt like, come back for a second round, and thoroughly work everything. And I wasn't even too sore Thursday, which was quite encouraging. After working out me and Charlie hit the pipes report and I wrote down all the info from our styrene plant simulation to be able to write the detailed description at home.
I didn't write it that night, 'cause.. I think I just got home sorta late and wasted time or did something.. Nate couldn't get together with me and Jonathan, so we just hung around like usual I think.
Thursday was wonderful! My facebook status, posted at 9:04am, was "John is going back to sleep! NO LAB TODAY!!! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh." I indeed sorta overslept, and before fully rousing and rushing to leave by 9:30 I decided to check courseweb on the off chance that I wasn't remembering correctly and it was team set II's lab, not team set I that day. I really thought it was set I, but there was enough of a grain of doubt to make me check.
Ohh, how glorious the feeling when I saw "Team Set II" on the 26th! I could sleep! I had nothing till history of the symphony at 1, and no homework for that class, and no huge load that demanded I rise and work at it! So I slept till 12:15 and barely made it to Pitt in time for HotS :-) That was nice, though I always hate it after I've slept in so late 'cause half of the day is just gone.
_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_
I have returned from my expedition to procure a coat from the basement hallway with which to mitigate the onsetting chill tempered weakly by my white "Life. God's Gift" T-shirt. I have returned bearing snacks: Gruesomely splitered chunks of bulk dark chocolate (and by bulk I mean big honkin' 1-inch-thick blocks that stubbornly resist cutting, breaking or in any way fragmenting), an 8oz. glass of whole milk, half a tube of Pizza-licious Pringles (3/$3 at Walgreens baby!), and violet-flavored candies. I still haven't turned music back on 'cause I'm thinking quite well right now and I think it would just distract me.
Class was good Thursday--typical. I am greatly enjoying the pittance of knowledge I'm gleaning from this class (relative to the breadth and depth of the genre, not the quality of instruction. Dr. Nisnevich is actually fantastic - I like to just "sit at her feet," so to speak, and listen to the knowlege she spits out off-hand as she talks about different composers. Her Russian accent is sweet too), and the XM Radio lets me apply it, since I know the composer and title of what I'm listening to. Hah, bet I threw you a little off guard there with that massive parenthetical section. Eeheehee I'm an evil text genius! Anyway, this chocolate is good and so is History of the Symphony, and after class I barely got symphony tickets in time and then I picked up the CSA farm basket, ate an apple from it, and got home kinda late in the afternoon.
The rest of that afternoon and awhile after dinner I wrote the detailed plant description, which actually went really well. Given my paragraphs and tables, you could fully recreate our plant simulation in Aspen. Yeeah meean, bully for us! Thursday night I worked out, even though I didn't feel like I had to 'cause Kayte was at least 2 days behind. But I did.
Friday I skipped though, 'cause I was gone from 7:50am to 1:30am. I had 5 hours of class plus 30 minutes of watching me and Charlie's Health & Safety presentation with Dr. Murphy (Pretty helpful. I wasn't prepared enough), then 45 minutes drive to work, 4 hours of work, and an hour to pick up Katie Caldwell, hit Sheetz for an energy drink (No Rockstar Juiced! BOOOOOO and waaaah) and find a parking garage near Heinz Hall. Yes folks, we were going to the symphony! Shannon was alllmost late, but barely got there in time, and we plopped into our seats wayyyy up in the gallery 30 seconds before the lights dimmed and Brahms filled the hall.
I followed along in the program with his three choral pieces, trying to pick out enough of the Mendelsohn Choir's German to track where we were and read off the English translation to the right. They were "heathenish" German poems about the ancient Greeks and gods and stuff, and knowing the words really made the music cool and fitting. Pretty miserable view of life though: The god's have it great, and everybody on earth is hopeless and pretty much screwed. The end. Pfft. Yay for Christianity, man. Yay for Jesus! as Steph would say :-)
After the intermission the lights dimmed again, we dutifully clapped for the conductor, and they launched into Beethoven's 5th - a moment I'd been looking forward to for weeks. It was amazing listening to the music with some knowledge (just enough to be dangerous :-) ). I truly enjoyed every second of the symphony, and even arrived at a few critiquing conclusions (like I thought the violins were too quiet in general, especially in the beginning)--a sign to me that I'm listening and processing at a viable level. I marveled many times at how perfectly Beethoven constructed the whole thing--every variation of the themes and motifs, every instrument, all the progressions and blossoming storylines of sound...
Bah, here I am falling into the same grandiose language to describe Beethoven that everybody else uses. Phooey that. It was great music. Just like Jars of Clay, Switchfoot and Relient K's latest albums: so good you can just sit back and marvel at where they take you and how they take you there.
I.. mm.. I was both happy because of the music, and quite happy because I was actually happy from the music; music which before meant little if anything to me. [I have my own convention for semicolons, so don't whine about it please :-P]
I was quite happy to applaud long and loud when it was finished, though I would have preferred the orchestra to take a few bows instead of the conductor walking out again and again and acting like he was all the schnitz and he'd done that all and we were all clapping for him. I don't think he was actually that proud, but that's sort of my reaction to the convention of focus on the conductor. Somebody (Shannon I think) said our orchestra is the 6th best in the world, according to somebody, and that made me pretty proud of our little city.
After the concert we got back to the car through the soaked and gleaming streets and headed to Oakland for some chillin' action. The coffee houses were closed, and all I could think of was Fuel & Fuddle, so we headed there, got some beverages, and hit up the half-price Flying Buffalo pizza after 11pm. Sooo goood! I obeyed Dad's care group exhortations and headed up some conversation about what God's doing in our lives and where we seem to be headed, and that was really nice. Shannon and Katie are great girls, and it was nice to have some time to talk and mull over life. Oh yeah! Before I thought of F&F we swung by Benedum and I gave Shannon and Katie a quickie tour of the ChemE classrooms. That was fun to show somebody else these central parts of my life right now, and maybe it'll help Katie as she evaluates the possibilities of engineering and Pitt. Good times.
OK so.. speeding up 'cause I've made another HUGE post for crying out loud, we come to Saturday. Slept till 11:15 'cause it was rainy so I couldn't mow the back like I was gonna. Did some minor yardwork for Mom, ate some brunch, arranged for Mike and Matt and Jonathan to come with me to visit Heather and Waynesburg, and then did that. Yay for finally getting to visit Hezz! It was a lot of fun goin' on a road trip with the brothers Q and the brother Hughes, and even though it was cold, rainy, soaking wet and lots of people were gone from campus, we had a pretty nice time. Heather's dorm and room are sweet - nice and homey feeling, which is unusual for dorms IME*. We flopped about there for awhile, walked around the hillside campus for awhile, and kinda killed some time sittin around like the vultures in Jungle Book. Eventually we hit up "The Lamb Garden" for dinner in *woooo* Downtown Waynesburgh!! :-P It's a funny tiny little town. But the General Tso's was good, and we had some nice talkin' amidst the raucous humor :-) After din din we hung around the lounge in some cool building and played pool and watched some MIB and generally lolled around by ourselves in a place that would normally be full of people, which is always fun and funky. We ended up rolling down the dark wet roads to Sheetz with 7 people crammed in my car--pretty much the thing to do in Wburgh :-) That wrapped up the evening, and Hezz, Brian and Doug walked back to campus while we headed off into the night watching Strong Bad emails on my iPod. A pretty unusual day. I might be back to Waynesburgh in awhile to play for a coffeehouse if Heather follows through with her idea, which would be SWEET SWEETNESS. Gaaah, that'd be perfect! Hopefully it'll work out.
Today, Sunday.. I played electric guitar at church and many people said afterward that it was great, and most said that it also helped them worship, which is always amazing and gratifying and hard to believe God would let me do something so fun and actually have it serve His people in a nontrivial way. Joel preached an excellent sermon on 2nd Peter 3, continuing our series on Heaven and eternity. Mr. Calano is done leading children's ministry now, which is amazing since he's been doing it for eight and a half years. That's really cool that he can be freed up to lead his care group, and also that Mr. Graham is leading children's ministry now. He'll do a great job :-) It's cool to see people stepping up in new ways in the church--Tim McCullough is taking the function support team, Rob's taking children's ministry, Joel's got a team (including me!) for the upcoming college ministry.. Good stuff.
Mom, Dad and I swung by Iva Mae's to give her some CD's and got to catch up on her post-op condition. She is doing quite well now, and literally seemed to radiate light from her face. She is such a woman of God, and so full of genuine, simple joy in Him! She's a foshizzle saint :-) And Lisa is definitely a sweet pea, as Iva called her :-)
Then it was to the picture framers, where I got a short, deep nap in the car. Then, at last, to Taco Bell! Cheesy Gordita Crunches, talk about eternity, and sunshine on our shoulders all made us happy. And the Mountain Dew made me high. Yes, it's a Baja Blast Mountain Dew hi-igh. I've seen it rainin' soda from the fountainnn... oh nevermind, I can't make this fit with John Denver.
Steeler's game at our house with Mike, Shannon, Steve, all 3 Hugheses, Nate Sarah and Katie. Terrible loss to the Raiders. Loss of hope, but still fun times with cool people. Now I'm tired of writing, I've made another monstrous post, and it's gettin' close to 1am. The Pringles are good, and I still haven't had a violet candy.
School starts back up, and the week moves on. They're goin' fast man, and graduation is I think only 6 weeks or so away. Yikes.
Have a good week all yous peoples out dere! Big up yo'self, future self.
Scratch that bit about the violet candy. Mmmmm . . . .
--Clear Ambassador
*In My Experience
This week was going to be crazy ridiculous. Dr. Enick had 3 progress reports due - Monday, Wednesday and Friday (normally there's one a week, and that's plenty) - so I called off work and Charlie and I battened down the hatches and worked on Sunday to prepare for the storm. And then we finished the Wednesday one, Enick moved the Friday one (finished now) to Monday, and... and.. I didn't know what to do with myself!
Lessee.. so what did I do this week? Hush, Johnny Cash, I can't think. I wish my feet weren't so cold! I can sit on the hearth and get my rear end sore and my back hot, or I can sit on the couch and be comfy, but either way my feet sit on the floor and get icy. Um...
Sunday I went down to Pitt after the Steeler's game at the Harvey's and Charface and I worked on the distillation columns progress report. I wrote about Monday and stuff. Tuesday...I don't remember. My Fall Fitness Challenge Log sheet says I did an hour-long tough workout at home, so I guess I did that. Oh yeah! I did crazy hard stuff on the Elliptical and got my heart rate up to about 180, which is faster than the heart rate monitor can measure, and I was breathing so hard my throat was torn up the next day and I thought I was getting sick. I know I did other stuff Tuesday.. gosh, I can't remember! The day is lost! Seriously. That's why I started this journal - so I wouldn't lose days, or worse, whole seasons and memories and mindsets, to "the faulty camera in your mind," to quote Death Cab for Cutie.
Wednesday was sweet 'cause I worked out for an hour and twenty minutes with no cardio. Which means it was all lifting, which means it was pretty much my longest workout ever. It felt so good to have plenty of time and just get to work whatever I felt like, come back for a second round, and thoroughly work everything. And I wasn't even too sore Thursday, which was quite encouraging. After working out me and Charlie hit the pipes report and I wrote down all the info from our styrene plant simulation to be able to write the detailed description at home.
I didn't write it that night, 'cause.. I think I just got home sorta late and wasted time or did something.. Nate couldn't get together with me and Jonathan, so we just hung around like usual I think.
Thursday was wonderful! My facebook status, posted at 9:04am, was "John is going back to sleep! NO LAB TODAY!!! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh." I indeed sorta overslept, and before fully rousing and rushing to leave by 9:30 I decided to check courseweb on the off chance that I wasn't remembering correctly and it was team set II's lab, not team set I that day. I really thought it was set I, but there was enough of a grain of doubt to make me check.
Ohh, how glorious the feeling when I saw "Team Set II" on the 26th! I could sleep! I had nothing till history of the symphony at 1, and no homework for that class, and no huge load that demanded I rise and work at it! So I slept till 12:15 and barely made it to Pitt in time for HotS :-) That was nice, though I always hate it after I've slept in so late 'cause half of the day is just gone.
_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_
I have returned from my expedition to procure a coat from the basement hallway with which to mitigate the onsetting chill tempered weakly by my white "Life. God's Gift" T-shirt. I have returned bearing snacks: Gruesomely splitered chunks of bulk dark chocolate (and by bulk I mean big honkin' 1-inch-thick blocks that stubbornly resist cutting, breaking or in any way fragmenting), an 8oz. glass of whole milk, half a tube of Pizza-licious Pringles (3/$3 at Walgreens baby!), and violet-flavored candies. I still haven't turned music back on 'cause I'm thinking quite well right now and I think it would just distract me.
Class was good Thursday--typical. I am greatly enjoying the pittance of knowledge I'm gleaning from this class (relative to the breadth and depth of the genre, not the quality of instruction. Dr. Nisnevich is actually fantastic - I like to just "sit at her feet," so to speak, and listen to the knowlege she spits out off-hand as she talks about different composers. Her Russian accent is sweet too), and the XM Radio lets me apply it, since I know the composer and title of what I'm listening to. Hah, bet I threw you a little off guard there with that massive parenthetical section. Eeheehee I'm an evil text genius! Anyway, this chocolate is good and so is History of the Symphony, and after class I barely got symphony tickets in time and then I picked up the CSA farm basket, ate an apple from it, and got home kinda late in the afternoon.
The rest of that afternoon and awhile after dinner I wrote the detailed plant description, which actually went really well. Given my paragraphs and tables, you could fully recreate our plant simulation in Aspen. Yeeah meean, bully for us! Thursday night I worked out, even though I didn't feel like I had to 'cause Kayte was at least 2 days behind. But I did.
Friday I skipped though, 'cause I was gone from 7:50am to 1:30am. I had 5 hours of class plus 30 minutes of watching me and Charlie's Health & Safety presentation with Dr. Murphy (Pretty helpful. I wasn't prepared enough), then 45 minutes drive to work, 4 hours of work, and an hour to pick up Katie Caldwell, hit Sheetz for an energy drink (No Rockstar Juiced! BOOOOOO and waaaah) and find a parking garage near Heinz Hall. Yes folks, we were going to the symphony! Shannon was alllmost late, but barely got there in time, and we plopped into our seats wayyyy up in the gallery 30 seconds before the lights dimmed and Brahms filled the hall.
I followed along in the program with his three choral pieces, trying to pick out enough of the Mendelsohn Choir's German to track where we were and read off the English translation to the right. They were "heathenish" German poems about the ancient Greeks and gods and stuff, and knowing the words really made the music cool and fitting. Pretty miserable view of life though: The god's have it great, and everybody on earth is hopeless and pretty much screwed. The end. Pfft. Yay for Christianity, man. Yay for Jesus! as Steph would say :-)
After the intermission the lights dimmed again, we dutifully clapped for the conductor, and they launched into Beethoven's 5th - a moment I'd been looking forward to for weeks. It was amazing listening to the music with some knowledge (just enough to be dangerous :-) ). I truly enjoyed every second of the symphony, and even arrived at a few critiquing conclusions (like I thought the violins were too quiet in general, especially in the beginning)--a sign to me that I'm listening and processing at a viable level. I marveled many times at how perfectly Beethoven constructed the whole thing--every variation of the themes and motifs, every instrument, all the progressions and blossoming storylines of sound...
Bah, here I am falling into the same grandiose language to describe Beethoven that everybody else uses. Phooey that. It was great music. Just like Jars of Clay, Switchfoot and Relient K's latest albums: so good you can just sit back and marvel at where they take you and how they take you there.
I.. mm.. I was both happy because of the music, and quite happy because I was actually happy from the music; music which before meant little if anything to me. [I have my own convention for semicolons, so don't whine about it please :-P]
I was quite happy to applaud long and loud when it was finished, though I would have preferred the orchestra to take a few bows instead of the conductor walking out again and again and acting like he was all the schnitz and he'd done that all and we were all clapping for him. I don't think he was actually that proud, but that's sort of my reaction to the convention of focus on the conductor. Somebody (Shannon I think) said our orchestra is the 6th best in the world, according to somebody, and that made me pretty proud of our little city.
After the concert we got back to the car through the soaked and gleaming streets and headed to Oakland for some chillin' action. The coffee houses were closed, and all I could think of was Fuel & Fuddle, so we headed there, got some beverages, and hit up the half-price Flying Buffalo pizza after 11pm. Sooo goood! I obeyed Dad's care group exhortations and headed up some conversation about what God's doing in our lives and where we seem to be headed, and that was really nice. Shannon and Katie are great girls, and it was nice to have some time to talk and mull over life. Oh yeah! Before I thought of F&F we swung by Benedum and I gave Shannon and Katie a quickie tour of the ChemE classrooms. That was fun to show somebody else these central parts of my life right now, and maybe it'll help Katie as she evaluates the possibilities of engineering and Pitt. Good times.
OK so.. speeding up 'cause I've made another HUGE post for crying out loud, we come to Saturday. Slept till 11:15 'cause it was rainy so I couldn't mow the back like I was gonna. Did some minor yardwork for Mom, ate some brunch, arranged for Mike and Matt and Jonathan to come with me to visit Heather and Waynesburg, and then did that. Yay for finally getting to visit Hezz! It was a lot of fun goin' on a road trip with the brothers Q and the brother Hughes, and even though it was cold, rainy, soaking wet and lots of people were gone from campus, we had a pretty nice time. Heather's dorm and room are sweet - nice and homey feeling, which is unusual for dorms IME*. We flopped about there for awhile, walked around the hillside campus for awhile, and kinda killed some time sittin around like the vultures in Jungle Book. Eventually we hit up "The Lamb Garden" for dinner in *woooo* Downtown Waynesburgh!! :-P It's a funny tiny little town. But the General Tso's was good, and we had some nice talkin' amidst the raucous humor :-) After din din we hung around the lounge in some cool building and played pool and watched some MIB and generally lolled around by ourselves in a place that would normally be full of people, which is always fun and funky. We ended up rolling down the dark wet roads to Sheetz with 7 people crammed in my car--pretty much the thing to do in Wburgh :-) That wrapped up the evening, and Hezz, Brian and Doug walked back to campus while we headed off into the night watching Strong Bad emails on my iPod. A pretty unusual day. I might be back to Waynesburgh in awhile to play for a coffeehouse if Heather follows through with her idea, which would be SWEET SWEETNESS. Gaaah, that'd be perfect! Hopefully it'll work out.
Today, Sunday.. I played electric guitar at church and many people said afterward that it was great, and most said that it also helped them worship, which is always amazing and gratifying and hard to believe God would let me do something so fun and actually have it serve His people in a nontrivial way. Joel preached an excellent sermon on 2nd Peter 3, continuing our series on Heaven and eternity. Mr. Calano is done leading children's ministry now, which is amazing since he's been doing it for eight and a half years. That's really cool that he can be freed up to lead his care group, and also that Mr. Graham is leading children's ministry now. He'll do a great job :-) It's cool to see people stepping up in new ways in the church--Tim McCullough is taking the function support team, Rob's taking children's ministry, Joel's got a team (including me!) for the upcoming college ministry.. Good stuff.
Mom, Dad and I swung by Iva Mae's to give her some CD's and got to catch up on her post-op condition. She is doing quite well now, and literally seemed to radiate light from her face. She is such a woman of God, and so full of genuine, simple joy in Him! She's a foshizzle saint :-) And Lisa is definitely a sweet pea, as Iva called her :-)
Then it was to the picture framers, where I got a short, deep nap in the car. Then, at last, to Taco Bell! Cheesy Gordita Crunches, talk about eternity, and sunshine on our shoulders all made us happy. And the Mountain Dew made me high. Yes, it's a Baja Blast Mountain Dew hi-igh. I've seen it rainin' soda from the fountainnn... oh nevermind, I can't make this fit with John Denver.
Steeler's game at our house with Mike, Shannon, Steve, all 3 Hugheses, Nate Sarah and Katie. Terrible loss to the Raiders. Loss of hope, but still fun times with cool people. Now I'm tired of writing, I've made another monstrous post, and it's gettin' close to 1am. The Pringles are good, and I still haven't had a violet candy.
School starts back up, and the week moves on. They're goin' fast man, and graduation is I think only 6 weeks or so away. Yikes.
Have a good week all yous peoples out dere! Big up yo'self, future self.
Scratch that bit about the violet candy. Mmmmm . . . .
--Clear Ambassador
*In My Experience
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Addendum
As usually happens with learning problems, things cleared up the morning after. We just finished Process Control for the day, and I clearly understand what he was talking about yesterday. There's one last question in my mind, but I think I could figure it out if I wanted to think hard enough, and it's not necessary for implementation, just for thorough baseline understanding (something I'm a big fan of).
Now to sleep, eat, repark, symphonize, exercise, homeize, and finish-progress-reportize.
--Clear Ambassador
Now to sleep, eat, repark, symphonize, exercise, homeize, and finish-progress-reportize.
--Clear Ambassador
A Day
Today was a day.
At first I was going to type "Today was a great day," based on the last half. But then I remembered missing the alarm, missing the bus, sleeping through a class, and the frustration of not being able to comprehend the control setup for a system with delay. But I certainly wouldn't write "Today was a pretty lousy day," 'cause I read some of the Bible (!!!), slept for almost 2 hours after eating a delicious sandwich, worked out for more than an hour, and spent 5 hours of wonderfully balanced homework and fun stuff up in the computer lab doing tomorrow's process control assignment with Charlie and Joam. Does anybody else realize how wonderful relationships are when you're working on something with other people? It's like you can just interact, joke, hang out together, and not be concerned with any of it 'cause you have to do it 'cause you're working. The focus isn't the "relationship," it's what you're doing. Charlie and I have been having a blast this semester doing process control, safety and design together. But if he just came over to the house to hang out, we probably wouldn't have much to do, and it would be kind of strange. Last semester with Jenna as my homework partner was great, too. Sports are like that too: they're great for getting to know people and building some familiarity without sitting around talking - every word having no purpose but conversation, every action having no escape but to indicate something about yourself, the other people, or what you think of them.
More generally, being forced to do work can be quite nice. It removes self-reflexivity. You have to think about less. You have no choice! The more free time, and the more free your time, the more culpability you shoulder as to your use of it. This may not be coherent to others, but it's one of those I feel rather strongly and have been enjoying a lot at an elemental, "I wouldn't do this voluntarily" level this semester.
Oh, and today was good day too because I hit up Fuel & Fuddle after the computer lab at 11:30 and got a Magic Head and a Flying Buffalo, both of which were exquisite. It's hard to believe how good their pizza crusts are.
In other news, I'm gaining weight.. but my waistline is shrinking. I'm staying over 145, but I keep wishing I had one more hole in my default belt (thrift store, baby!), which used to fit perfectly. So I guess that means I'm gaining muscle weight, which is sweet. I noticed an improvement in my karate kick height, too, which means my hours of hamstring stretches are paying off. Today I walked up the stairs from the basement to the 12th floor of Benedum twice (282 steps, 2 at a time) and it wasn't that big of a deal (whereas typically I'm sucking air in like a positive displacement vacuum pump by the 10th floor and my quads feel like stiff, burning steaks). I'm putting 2 45's on each side of the bench press machine, and I can do three sets of pullups without weight assist. All of which is to say, it looks like there's some progress on the exercise front. Which is thrilling to see, 'cause exercising is basically like throwing a bottle out on the ocean -- you do what you do, but you have no direct control over what actually happens. It's an amazing thing to see your body actually responding and getting more able to do things. Muscle growth is the coolest, because it's adding to your very frame - the limbs you carry about everywhere and see in every mirror. I could never *will* my body to make more muscles or lift more weight, but it has come about to that effect on its own, due to the conditions I have imposed through working out.
As I was riding the elevator down from the computer lab I was thinking about this general (yes, we're making a bit of a jump here :-) ) topic: I just love it, way deep down, when I find myself arriving at a conclusion that I read or heard about elsewhere before or when I find myself experiencing something I heard about and couldn't really imagine at that time. Like when I get to know a piece of music enough to reach criticisms in my own opinion that I read about somewhere. Or like when I found myself wishing I had a multiband compressor to de-ess vocals in my recordings after reading about de-essing dozens of times in my compressor research. Suddenly it was right in front of me, not because I read about it but because I needed it. This semester is like that. Whenever somebody talks about being "Oh man, soo busy!" I just don't know how to picture that. When seniors talked about living down in the computer lab for design, I just couldn't imagine it. But here I am. I drove down to Pitt Sunday after the Steelers game at the Harvey's and spent a couple hours down in B72 with Charlie working on distillation columns (and Walker Texas Ranger clips on YouTube :-) ). I spent 5 hours in the computer lab tonight, and I spent something like 7 hours down in B72 a couple weeks ago. It's happening just like they said, but not 'cause it's what's supposed to happen, but because it has to happen. Not because it's what seniors do, but because it takes that long. And as long as I'm sitting here in a sea of deep black with the screen filling my view and the fire flickering to the left, I might as well get REALLY abstract and deep (And also make some declarations and generalizations beyond my solid knowledge yet held firmly by my mind and thus representative of my thinking, flawed though it may be):
I really really like it when things come about naturally. That's part of what frustrates me about modern America, and much of the modern world. Why do we have a State of the Union Address? It's not 'cause we need the President to tell us what's happening. Everybody knows way too much already. It's just an old tradition that we do 'cause the Constitution says we're supposed to do it. When we're forced to function at a level different from that dictated by basic principles such as survival and, shall we say, "primal" desires/needs, I just find it frustrating. Which is one of the reasons I'm getting fascinated by football.
Step back and look at it, people. The entire nation of America, from the time its children are old enough to understand words, is grooming them for football. From pee wee football on through all the years of childhood, the thousands of schools across the country are a giant farm training almost every guy how to throw and catch, and gradually lifting up those who are good at it, till in high school and college thousands of kids spend most of their life for football--lifting, practicing, playing, and watching. And all for what? For a few teams scattered around the nation and among them a handful of stars that get most of the glory. Nobody is telling us to do this. It isn't something like a Fourth of July parade that's sorta just done for form and not many people come to and you almost feel sorry for the veterans and avid community people out there on the street. It's a vibrant, "primal" system that literally engulfs our entire nation. Traffic was drastically light Tuesday morning after the Steelers' Monday Night Football appearance this season. See how cool that is? The nation is acting as one, not 'cause somebody's tyring to convince us to all get together on this football thing, but because we all love it and it has the vibrancy of a successful, popular thing. (We are sheep, after all). The football stadiums of America, with the cars gathering and parking for miles around, the pulsing roar of the crowd, the blimp floating overhead, the dozens of TV cameras hovering around, the coaches and trainers and docters and beer sellers and painted fans and uniformed players are no different from the Coliseum and gladiators of old. It's just that now things are clean and we watch it on TV, and it's all run by ad money and team owners instead of Caesar and soldiers.
I didn't really intend to write about all of this, but it's one of those things that occupies my thoughts fairly often and that makes me sit and wish for a different life in a different time sometimes, and those are the kind of things I want to record and remember, so I can see how I change and recall how I was and thought during these years.
Today was a good day. Regardless of the rough morning (I was truly unhappy for a few minutes in process control class as I was falling asleep despite my frantic efforts to follow Parker's lecture and desperately trying to understand what the HECK he was doing and how it all fit together), when I walked out of Fuel & Fuddle at 1:21am I felt on top of the world. I had slept far far longer than planned in the afternoon, but I had used that rest to work out long and well and get the process homework all done before coming home (where distractions make work very hard). I stepped out of the door and into the cold breeze coming down Oakland Avenue, and just loved it. My cold tolerance has gone quite strangely high this year; I'm almost trying to keep summer going on by not getting out the huge clumsy leather jacket of years past. I let it blow into me and relished the crispness. There were snowflakes falling thinly in the light of signs and streetlights, melting on the windshield. A few people walked along the sidewalks. I had read the Bible and worked out, and the time in the computer lab sat in my mind as such an eminently pleasant time--sipping perfect Dr.Pepper from the can, munching some snacks, dealing with Charlie's quasi depression and intensity over the homework (in his always good-natured Charlie way), helping him and Joam with the homework, doing snippets of Facebook and AIM inbetween making real progress on the problems, finding them doable but not trivial (unlike health & safety), and looking with satisfaction at the as-expected plots turned out by my complex Simulink process simulations. Jenna was working at F&F and we got to catch up a bit when she wasn't busy waiting tables. I had been gone since 9 that morning - 16 and a half hours. One of those things I used to hear about and not even be able to imagine doing. It was fall, headed towards winter and the warmth and richness Christmas, and the cold felt good. It was a good day. It's a wonderful life :-)
Thank you Lord! I should and could be happy in an unpleasant and difficult life, but You've given me rarely-disturbed bliss. I don't expect it to go on for the rest of my life like this, so I'm very grateful for every day that continues so pleasantly, and I pray that when true trials come, grace will come with them and I'll take it.
And here, relative to this entire post, is the thought and prayer of last night, as I paced the famly room and laid sleepless on my bed battling the thought of eternity:
Another insipid masquerade
Another deceptively pleasant day
All of the trophies on my shelf
I'm tired of looking at myself.. and all of these boring things
So open my eyes
Open my eyes..
Blow my mind
I want to see God..
(I want to see God)
I want to see miracles today
I want to see change I can't explain
There's got to be more to life than health
More than just looking at myself.. and all of these boring things
So open my eyes
Get the balloons and ticker tape
I'm having another self-parade
Look at all the floats I've made
Is this all my life can say?
..open my eyes
..blow mind
..I want to see God
--Clear Ambassador
At first I was going to type "Today was a great day," based on the last half. But then I remembered missing the alarm, missing the bus, sleeping through a class, and the frustration of not being able to comprehend the control setup for a system with delay. But I certainly wouldn't write "Today was a pretty lousy day," 'cause I read some of the Bible (!!!), slept for almost 2 hours after eating a delicious sandwich, worked out for more than an hour, and spent 5 hours of wonderfully balanced homework and fun stuff up in the computer lab doing tomorrow's process control assignment with Charlie and Joam. Does anybody else realize how wonderful relationships are when you're working on something with other people? It's like you can just interact, joke, hang out together, and not be concerned with any of it 'cause you have to do it 'cause you're working. The focus isn't the "relationship," it's what you're doing. Charlie and I have been having a blast this semester doing process control, safety and design together. But if he just came over to the house to hang out, we probably wouldn't have much to do, and it would be kind of strange. Last semester with Jenna as my homework partner was great, too. Sports are like that too: they're great for getting to know people and building some familiarity without sitting around talking - every word having no purpose but conversation, every action having no escape but to indicate something about yourself, the other people, or what you think of them.
More generally, being forced to do work can be quite nice. It removes self-reflexivity. You have to think about less. You have no choice! The more free time, and the more free your time, the more culpability you shoulder as to your use of it. This may not be coherent to others, but it's one of those I feel rather strongly and have been enjoying a lot at an elemental, "I wouldn't do this voluntarily" level this semester.
Oh, and today was good day too because I hit up Fuel & Fuddle after the computer lab at 11:30 and got a Magic Head and a Flying Buffalo, both of which were exquisite. It's hard to believe how good their pizza crusts are.
In other news, I'm gaining weight.. but my waistline is shrinking. I'm staying over 145, but I keep wishing I had one more hole in my default belt (thrift store, baby!), which used to fit perfectly. So I guess that means I'm gaining muscle weight, which is sweet. I noticed an improvement in my karate kick height, too, which means my hours of hamstring stretches are paying off. Today I walked up the stairs from the basement to the 12th floor of Benedum twice (282 steps, 2 at a time) and it wasn't that big of a deal (whereas typically I'm sucking air in like a positive displacement vacuum pump by the 10th floor and my quads feel like stiff, burning steaks). I'm putting 2 45's on each side of the bench press machine, and I can do three sets of pullups without weight assist. All of which is to say, it looks like there's some progress on the exercise front. Which is thrilling to see, 'cause exercising is basically like throwing a bottle out on the ocean -- you do what you do, but you have no direct control over what actually happens. It's an amazing thing to see your body actually responding and getting more able to do things. Muscle growth is the coolest, because it's adding to your very frame - the limbs you carry about everywhere and see in every mirror. I could never *will* my body to make more muscles or lift more weight, but it has come about to that effect on its own, due to the conditions I have imposed through working out.
As I was riding the elevator down from the computer lab I was thinking about this general (yes, we're making a bit of a jump here :-) ) topic: I just love it, way deep down, when I find myself arriving at a conclusion that I read or heard about elsewhere before or when I find myself experiencing something I heard about and couldn't really imagine at that time. Like when I get to know a piece of music enough to reach criticisms in my own opinion that I read about somewhere. Or like when I found myself wishing I had a multiband compressor to de-ess vocals in my recordings after reading about de-essing dozens of times in my compressor research. Suddenly it was right in front of me, not because I read about it but because I needed it. This semester is like that. Whenever somebody talks about being "Oh man, soo busy!" I just don't know how to picture that. When seniors talked about living down in the computer lab for design, I just couldn't imagine it. But here I am. I drove down to Pitt Sunday after the Steelers game at the Harvey's and spent a couple hours down in B72 with Charlie working on distillation columns (and Walker Texas Ranger clips on YouTube :-) ). I spent 5 hours in the computer lab tonight, and I spent something like 7 hours down in B72 a couple weeks ago. It's happening just like they said, but not 'cause it's what's supposed to happen, but because it has to happen. Not because it's what seniors do, but because it takes that long. And as long as I'm sitting here in a sea of deep black with the screen filling my view and the fire flickering to the left, I might as well get REALLY abstract and deep (And also make some declarations and generalizations beyond my solid knowledge yet held firmly by my mind and thus representative of my thinking, flawed though it may be):
I really really like it when things come about naturally. That's part of what frustrates me about modern America, and much of the modern world. Why do we have a State of the Union Address? It's not 'cause we need the President to tell us what's happening. Everybody knows way too much already. It's just an old tradition that we do 'cause the Constitution says we're supposed to do it. When we're forced to function at a level different from that dictated by basic principles such as survival and, shall we say, "primal" desires/needs, I just find it frustrating. Which is one of the reasons I'm getting fascinated by football.
Step back and look at it, people. The entire nation of America, from the time its children are old enough to understand words, is grooming them for football. From pee wee football on through all the years of childhood, the thousands of schools across the country are a giant farm training almost every guy how to throw and catch, and gradually lifting up those who are good at it, till in high school and college thousands of kids spend most of their life for football--lifting, practicing, playing, and watching. And all for what? For a few teams scattered around the nation and among them a handful of stars that get most of the glory. Nobody is telling us to do this. It isn't something like a Fourth of July parade that's sorta just done for form and not many people come to and you almost feel sorry for the veterans and avid community people out there on the street. It's a vibrant, "primal" system that literally engulfs our entire nation. Traffic was drastically light Tuesday morning after the Steelers' Monday Night Football appearance this season. See how cool that is? The nation is acting as one, not 'cause somebody's tyring to convince us to all get together on this football thing, but because we all love it and it has the vibrancy of a successful, popular thing. (We are sheep, after all). The football stadiums of America, with the cars gathering and parking for miles around, the pulsing roar of the crowd, the blimp floating overhead, the dozens of TV cameras hovering around, the coaches and trainers and docters and beer sellers and painted fans and uniformed players are no different from the Coliseum and gladiators of old. It's just that now things are clean and we watch it on TV, and it's all run by ad money and team owners instead of Caesar and soldiers.
I didn't really intend to write about all of this, but it's one of those things that occupies my thoughts fairly often and that makes me sit and wish for a different life in a different time sometimes, and those are the kind of things I want to record and remember, so I can see how I change and recall how I was and thought during these years.
Today was a good day. Regardless of the rough morning (I was truly unhappy for a few minutes in process control class as I was falling asleep despite my frantic efforts to follow Parker's lecture and desperately trying to understand what the HECK he was doing and how it all fit together), when I walked out of Fuel & Fuddle at 1:21am I felt on top of the world. I had slept far far longer than planned in the afternoon, but I had used that rest to work out long and well and get the process homework all done before coming home (where distractions make work very hard). I stepped out of the door and into the cold breeze coming down Oakland Avenue, and just loved it. My cold tolerance has gone quite strangely high this year; I'm almost trying to keep summer going on by not getting out the huge clumsy leather jacket of years past. I let it blow into me and relished the crispness. There were snowflakes falling thinly in the light of signs and streetlights, melting on the windshield. A few people walked along the sidewalks. I had read the Bible and worked out, and the time in the computer lab sat in my mind as such an eminently pleasant time--sipping perfect Dr.Pepper from the can, munching some snacks, dealing with Charlie's quasi depression and intensity over the homework (in his always good-natured Charlie way), helping him and Joam with the homework, doing snippets of Facebook and AIM inbetween making real progress on the problems, finding them doable but not trivial (unlike health & safety), and looking with satisfaction at the as-expected plots turned out by my complex Simulink process simulations. Jenna was working at F&F and we got to catch up a bit when she wasn't busy waiting tables. I had been gone since 9 that morning - 16 and a half hours. One of those things I used to hear about and not even be able to imagine doing. It was fall, headed towards winter and the warmth and richness Christmas, and the cold felt good. It was a good day. It's a wonderful life :-)
Thank you Lord! I should and could be happy in an unpleasant and difficult life, but You've given me rarely-disturbed bliss. I don't expect it to go on for the rest of my life like this, so I'm very grateful for every day that continues so pleasantly, and I pray that when true trials come, grace will come with them and I'll take it.
And here, relative to this entire post, is the thought and prayer of last night, as I paced the famly room and laid sleepless on my bed battling the thought of eternity:
Another insipid masquerade
Another deceptively pleasant day
All of the trophies on my shelf
I'm tired of looking at myself.. and all of these boring things
So open my eyes
Open my eyes..
Blow my mind
I want to see God..
(I want to see God)
I want to see miracles today
I want to see change I can't explain
There's got to be more to life than health
More than just looking at myself.. and all of these boring things
So open my eyes
Get the balloons and ticker tape
I'm having another self-parade
Look at all the floats I've made
Is this all my life can say?
..open my eyes
..blow mind
..I want to see God
--Clear Ambassador
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Well, if it's better to show rather than tell in your writing, then I suppose I've done some awesome writing this past month to demonstrate the busy-ness of this semester :-) But it hasn't been true business that has kept me from writing. Most nights lose an hour at least to Facebook, and many times when I've had the opportunity to write here I've shied away from the overwhelming task of tackling all that is unwritten. It's hard thinking, too, and that hasn't been the most attractive thing.
SO. This semester. What's it like? How should I remember it when all that fills my attention now is gone from my memory but a few defining points (probably from the last week of the semester)?
I'm driving a lot. Pretty much 9 out of 10 days. And rarely paying for parking. But twice paying tickets, which cost far more than meters, yet somehow feel different than shelling out three bucks a day in shiny silver coins. There are four legit places that I know of that have no meters, two of which also have no time limit (the reason for one of my tickets). Every day I dance the dance with the law, weighing risk against convenience and time, and occasionally landing a sweet spot like a busted meter or a Mazda-long space just tucked in behind a sign.
I sleep a lot. Not a day goes by when I don't find at least 15 minutes to doze somewhere. There's something about facing an entire 18-hour day with no prospect of releasing the pining tiredness that drags at my eyelids and weighs on my chest that just isn't tenable. Sometimes I pay for it by getting delayed or not being able to work out at the Pete. Sometimes I step back and think how odd it is that I'm sleeping all the time during the days and wonder if it's a really bad thing to give in to my tiredness and not push through it and get used to being able to function while drowsy. But even 15 minutes of release can make a world of difference, so on I go. The quiet reading room in the engineering library is the best spot, though at times the floor of the basement computer lab has served :-) That place is seriously my second home. Well third, after the Hoffmans. yay!
I am working out, though sometimes it's crammed in odd places. I'm making the Pete about half the time, but my home workouts are usually pretty solid. I'm stretching every single time, and today I did some kicks and it appears that there is some progress in flexibility, which has been irritatingly lacking so far. My left hamstring is stupid - it seems to just get torn or something, not stretched. Which brings up the point that my legs on the whole are lousy - my knees never quite chill out and become normal, and my hips feel weird sometimes. Quite irritating from a lifetime perspective. Overall I haven't seen a ton of improvement or growth from working out so far, but I'm just starting to pass the 6-week point, beyond which Ryan says new muscle tissue starts to form. I'm kicking it up a notch, too--going for more weight and fewer reps, trying not to be easy on myself. Every time I work out I feel great, which is nice. The Pete is sweet. Or swete, as the case may be :-)
I feel like saying "classes are hard." But everybody says that, and I want to get it a little more meaningfully. Ummm, the work I have to do for classes is throwing me around like a bucking bronco. Last week I just barely held on. Process control can be difficult to understand sometimes, and the homework can take confoundingly long. The average on the first exam we just had was 49.5, which really got Dr.Parker concerned. I got a 75.5, so I was pretty happy. Plant Design is...unlike any class I've had before. In a way it's very open and easy--no "homework" per se, and Dr. Enick tells us basically every little thing we have to do. But practically it's getting extremely hard. Not usually by difficulty of work but by volume and persnicketyness. "Homework" consists of progress reports--roughly one a week--that each cover a step or two in the design of a styrene plant (that is our ChemE senior design project). Heat exchanger networks, Aspen simulations, reactor sizing, plots, tables, discussions, descriptions...each report is a mini-monumental task, and Charlie and I spend lots of hours (like, 6 or 7 straight, 2 or 3 here and there) to get them done. Often the directions are unclear or the enabling information was blustered by us in class and nobody remembers. Then it really gets hard, and the minutes, quarters, halves and hours slip away and you're looking at the clock and it's saying 9:07 and you still haven't worked out or eaten dinner. Such I heard about design ("Ohh man, you live in the labs!"), and now I look and see that so I am indeed experiencing. Um..process safety, compared to the big two, is negligible. Except the honkin' lecture summary report thing that took hours upon hours upon hours of time and is just regurgitating all his lecture notes ad nauseum for only slightly more points than the homework which takes 15 minutes before class in the 10th floor lab. Arg. Yet another poorly-thought-out class. Another reason I'd like to be a professor. But boo grad school. yech.
It's 2:35am, and tomorrow I need to get up at 8:30 and get down to Pitt to listen to a bunch of music and write out essays for the history of the symphony midterm. So I'll can it. I'm dried-sweaty from a short but fierce workout downstairs, I'm un-hungry 'cause I had a roast beef-pear sandwich (Go protein! Go into my little muscles!), and of course, I am not tired in the least. I'm bright-minded, open-eyed, and ready to hit the world. This bio rhythm never ceases to confound me. Even with plenty of sleep (like, 9 hours), if it's before noon, and often in midafternoon, if I'm not doing something actively with mind or body, down I go. Then, after about 8 or 9, I'm up and ready to go. Grr. Stupid body! Or maybe it's all my fault and if I would just do things right I'd be tired at the right times. Whatever.
I've gone to Akron for a concert at the Orange Street, Steph came to town and we visited Grove City, Mom and Dad were gone this weekend and I recorded in the basement, Daniel's on fall break so he's home right now, and I'm in general fairly disconnected from God, church, friends and normalcy. But I pray often and honestly, and I'm not ultimately deserting or ignoring (I don't think) the truth of the Gospel, who God is, and who I am. I don't think. I think reading the Bible more might show that my thinking has changed more than I realized from God's mindset.
Enough for now. I hope to write more this week to catch up a bit. We'll see. Oh yes. Next week we have THREE progress reports due. Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Plus process homework. Go ahead and shoot me why don't you? Geez.
--Clear Ambassador
SO. This semester. What's it like? How should I remember it when all that fills my attention now is gone from my memory but a few defining points (probably from the last week of the semester)?
I'm driving a lot. Pretty much 9 out of 10 days. And rarely paying for parking. But twice paying tickets, which cost far more than meters, yet somehow feel different than shelling out three bucks a day in shiny silver coins. There are four legit places that I know of that have no meters, two of which also have no time limit (the reason for one of my tickets). Every day I dance the dance with the law, weighing risk against convenience and time, and occasionally landing a sweet spot like a busted meter or a Mazda-long space just tucked in behind a sign.
I sleep a lot. Not a day goes by when I don't find at least 15 minutes to doze somewhere. There's something about facing an entire 18-hour day with no prospect of releasing the pining tiredness that drags at my eyelids and weighs on my chest that just isn't tenable. Sometimes I pay for it by getting delayed or not being able to work out at the Pete. Sometimes I step back and think how odd it is that I'm sleeping all the time during the days and wonder if it's a really bad thing to give in to my tiredness and not push through it and get used to being able to function while drowsy. But even 15 minutes of release can make a world of difference, so on I go. The quiet reading room in the engineering library is the best spot, though at times the floor of the basement computer lab has served :-) That place is seriously my second home. Well third, after the Hoffmans. yay!
I am working out, though sometimes it's crammed in odd places. I'm making the Pete about half the time, but my home workouts are usually pretty solid. I'm stretching every single time, and today I did some kicks and it appears that there is some progress in flexibility, which has been irritatingly lacking so far. My left hamstring is stupid - it seems to just get torn or something, not stretched. Which brings up the point that my legs on the whole are lousy - my knees never quite chill out and become normal, and my hips feel weird sometimes. Quite irritating from a lifetime perspective. Overall I haven't seen a ton of improvement or growth from working out so far, but I'm just starting to pass the 6-week point, beyond which Ryan says new muscle tissue starts to form. I'm kicking it up a notch, too--going for more weight and fewer reps, trying not to be easy on myself. Every time I work out I feel great, which is nice. The Pete is sweet. Or swete, as the case may be :-)
I feel like saying "classes are hard." But everybody says that, and I want to get it a little more meaningfully. Ummm, the work I have to do for classes is throwing me around like a bucking bronco. Last week I just barely held on. Process control can be difficult to understand sometimes, and the homework can take confoundingly long. The average on the first exam we just had was 49.5, which really got Dr.Parker concerned. I got a 75.5, so I was pretty happy. Plant Design is...unlike any class I've had before. In a way it's very open and easy--no "homework" per se, and Dr. Enick tells us basically every little thing we have to do. But practically it's getting extremely hard. Not usually by difficulty of work but by volume and persnicketyness. "Homework" consists of progress reports--roughly one a week--that each cover a step or two in the design of a styrene plant (that is our ChemE senior design project). Heat exchanger networks, Aspen simulations, reactor sizing, plots, tables, discussions, descriptions...each report is a mini-monumental task, and Charlie and I spend lots of hours (like, 6 or 7 straight, 2 or 3 here and there) to get them done. Often the directions are unclear or the enabling information was blustered by us in class and nobody remembers. Then it really gets hard, and the minutes, quarters, halves and hours slip away and you're looking at the clock and it's saying 9:07 and you still haven't worked out or eaten dinner. Such I heard about design ("Ohh man, you live in the labs!"), and now I look and see that so I am indeed experiencing. Um..process safety, compared to the big two, is negligible. Except the honkin' lecture summary report thing that took hours upon hours upon hours of time and is just regurgitating all his lecture notes ad nauseum for only slightly more points than the homework which takes 15 minutes before class in the 10th floor lab. Arg. Yet another poorly-thought-out class. Another reason I'd like to be a professor. But boo grad school. yech.
It's 2:35am, and tomorrow I need to get up at 8:30 and get down to Pitt to listen to a bunch of music and write out essays for the history of the symphony midterm. So I'll can it. I'm dried-sweaty from a short but fierce workout downstairs, I'm un-hungry 'cause I had a roast beef-pear sandwich (Go protein! Go into my little muscles!), and of course, I am not tired in the least. I'm bright-minded, open-eyed, and ready to hit the world. This bio rhythm never ceases to confound me. Even with plenty of sleep (like, 9 hours), if it's before noon, and often in midafternoon, if I'm not doing something actively with mind or body, down I go. Then, after about 8 or 9, I'm up and ready to go. Grr. Stupid body! Or maybe it's all my fault and if I would just do things right I'd be tired at the right times. Whatever.
I've gone to Akron for a concert at the Orange Street, Steph came to town and we visited Grove City, Mom and Dad were gone this weekend and I recorded in the basement, Daniel's on fall break so he's home right now, and I'm in general fairly disconnected from God, church, friends and normalcy. But I pray often and honestly, and I'm not ultimately deserting or ignoring (I don't think) the truth of the Gospel, who God is, and who I am. I don't think. I think reading the Bible more might show that my thinking has changed more than I realized from God's mindset.
Enough for now. I hope to write more this week to catch up a bit. We'll see. Oh yes. Next week we have THREE progress reports due. Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Plus process homework. Go ahead and shoot me why don't you? Geez.
--Clear Ambassador
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