Tag: welcome to my brain.

“Quick Takes”

Well, it’s a good thing Rachel is awesome and won’t mind that I’m totally stealing her idea… ’cause I am. 😀

Ah, hang on, backtracking a bit:

“Quick Takes” are actually, as far as I know, Rachel’s and my mutual boss’s idea. To fill in the dead air between the longer “proper” weekly(ish) posts on his blog, we typically post a few Quick Takes over the course of the week, usually short responses to other bloggers’ posts (that we also post as comments on the originals).

Rachel adopted the concept for her own blog, but with a twist: not responses or one-offs, rather, sometimes instead of a regular “full length” post on one general idea/theme, she’ll put up a “7 Quick Takes” post, containing seven sort-of mini-posts on whatever seven things are on her mind / going on in her life that week!

Now, I realized, that’s perfect for me. See, as all 4 of you who read this sucker have probably noticed, I’m not exactly the world’s most consistent blogger. >.< I'll be all gung-ho about it for a while, but then silly things like work and even – *gasp* – actually occasionally having a life will keep me from writing for a while, and it flatlines. But the real blog killer isn't lack of time, or even lack of motivation (usually), but lack of inspiration. Scratch that, no, that's not really it either. It’s lack of a single item of inspiration that overwhelms the rest of the inspiration-bits flitting about my head. I always have things I want to write about or share with the interwebs, but I only very occasionally have a thing that I am sufficiently compelled to and have enough to say and think would be interesting enough reading to devote a whole post to. And while (clearly), I could set to rambling and make words on any gorram thing, I can never choose from amongst the 17 half-baked talking points taking up residence in my skull at any given time.

So I choose none, and that’s just stupid. And then I spend the first bit of the eventual post-gap post apologizing for the gap and swearing I’ll be better about it (which we all know just isn’t true), which is even more stupid and pointless.

I’ve tried trying to convince myself that there’s no minimum length for a blog post. I can, and on occasion have, posted very short posts, sometimes nearly tweetable. But I just don’t like it, most of the time. It feels like when somebody tells you they need to tell you something, but not here, drags you down five hallways past numerous perfectly acceptable places to have a private conversation, sits you down, and tells you something like, “I saw your mother in the grocery store last week!” or “You have a hair on your shoulder.” I’d rather not be that person. 😛

BUT. Seven little tidbits of news? That’s more… conversation-esque. Granted, kind of a weird, one-sided conversation, so maybe more like a letter, but still! People like letters. (I like letters. Let’s be penpals?) Seven (or otherwise several) little postlets in one post is great, because I don’t have to come up with a whole post-worth of interesting things to say about any one idea, and I don’t have to prune the idea-sprigs quite so violently!

Well, uh, now that I’ve rambled an ranted an intro long enough to actually be a decent blog post, I think I’ll save the actual Quick Takes for tomorrow or later this week! (I can’t remember what most of them were going to be anyway…) So in the meantime… uh… here, have a random sheep doodle:

May 14, 2013
Gwenny’s Blanket

If you’ve seen me for any length of time in the past year or two, particularly if it was a situation which involved sitting, chances are you’ve seen me working on it, either plotting and scheming with a notebook full of squares and trees, or actually crocheting the little beastie.

The notion was to make a baby blanket, hopefully as a shower gift for Rachel, but the shower(s) came and went, and the baby made her debut long before the blanket did. About a year and a half before, as it happens. But it’s done now! (Well, actually a few weeks ago, but I didn’t want to show it to the internet before showing it to its new owner, and then when that happened I forgot to get a picture, and since I finally did, work has just been using up all my time and brain juice, so there’s been none left for blogging!) Anyways…

The Idea

I’m a nerd and a bit of a crochet rebel, and I knew this kid was bound to be awesome, so when trying to decide what to do design-wise, I knew I wasn’t going to be following anybody else’s pastel baby blanket pattern. It occurred to me that Fibonacci squares would make for a pretty neat blanket. You know, like this:

Each unit would be a single crochet stitch, so I’d start with a 1 (which was actually a tiny little square of 4 single crochets around, so I’d have something with a little substance, but still a side with 1 stitch to start with. Into one side of that, I’d make another little square of side length 1. I’d turn it, and on what was the side of the stack, crochet into those two stitches to start a square with side length 2.

Turn it 90 degrees counterclockwise, and I’d have 3 stitches on which to crochet a square of 3 rows of 3.

Another counterclockwise turn and a 5×5 square:

Turn, 8×8 square.

Turn, 13 square. Turn, 21. Turn, 34. And so on, working outward from the center, following the Fibonacci sequence until the blanket was big enough!

The Actual Blanket

Rachel already knew what crib set she was getting, and it was clear why – freakin awesome hippos.

So I found the yarn to match – the two shades of green, soft brown, buttery yellow, pale sort of sand/stone color, white, and I threw in a nice dusty purple to add a little slightly-more-girly twist… and off I went!

The first few squares were each a solid color, but I didn’t want to do just giant squares of solid colors, so I decided to make them striped. And to up the nerd ante, I decided each stripe had to be a Fibonacci number as well. I’d do a “random” looking assortment of stripe widths (either 2, 3, 5, 8, or 13 rows), but they had to add up to the right number for that square’s total! So it kind of turned into a puzzle for me as I made it, and I ended up with this (plotted out on graph paper and then MS Paint!:

The crocheting up to that point went pretty quickly, comparatively. I mean, it was a large area all in tiny single crochet, but except for the first row of each square (which took a bit of concentration since I was working into the side of previous rows) and remembering to change colors every so-many rows, it was all just long rows of single crochet – requiring abosolutely no concentration. So I’d just tote it around to work on while listening in church, chatting with a friend, watching tv, sitting in a cafe, whatever. And thus, good progress was made.

When I’d finished crocheting that chart – up through the 89 square, it’s long side was a pretty good width for a little kid’s blanket, so adding one more square (144) would make the blanket big enough, give or take a border around the whole thing, maybe.

However, a square of 144×144 single crochet, even striped, was just too boring for this blanket…

So I decided to put a tree in it!

…uh, sure, why not?

So I spent the better part of the next year trying to draw the tree I saw in my mind. Eventually, I came up with a decent sketch, and gradually shrunk, converted, re-colored, pixel-by-pixel adjusted, begged, pleaded, and beat it into a 144 pixel by 144 pixel square (one pixel per stitch) in MS Paint – a rather elaborate 8-bit tree, with the two shades of green strewn among the leaves – and in a fit of lunacy, even arranged the striping non-pattern pattern to continue as the backdrop, trying not to the greens or browns muck around too much with the visibility of the tree:

Frankly, at that point, I was pretty darn proud of myself! …Until I got a few rows into crocheting the leaves (working top down, since I obviously wanted the tree upright, and decided the smaller squares should be the top of the blanket). I still just kept toting it around everywhere I went, but now also had to tote a giant, taped-together, blown-up printout of the chart, and mark each tiny little square so I knew what came next!

It was a little absurd, but by this point its intended recipient was almost a year old, completely adorable and funny and sweet and smart and absolutely worth it. So I didn’t mind at all. 🙂 And then I finished it! Wove in a thousand little yarn ends, added a border, gave it a good wash so it’d be nice and soft, and gave it to lovely Gwenny!

The Finished Product

Gwenny inspects her new blanket

Gwenny dances on her new blanket

Its funny, the design is actually more fitting than I realized (until it was very nearly done. Gwenny’s full name is Gwendolyn Shiloh which means “beautiful peace” – and so does this blanket, in a quirky, nerdy sort of way! To me, and I’m sure I’m not alone, trees represent both stability and growth. They’re sturdy and strong, full of life, and calming. They represent peace.

They’re also beautiful. But part of what makes them beautiful, visually, along with so much of nature, is – oddly enough – directly related to the Fibonacci sequence and that arrangement of squares!

The way a tree’s branches divide and where they are placed around the trunk, how the leaves are arrayed, flower petals, a sunflower’s seeds, the spiral of a snails shell or a hurricane, even the relative lengths of the bones in your finger, all of these patterns can be described by the golden ratio (the ratio between to adjacent numbers in the Fibonacci sequence – or the length and width of this blanket) and/or the spiral formed by the squares. So much of nature, and so much of beauty, shares this pattern. It’s beautiful. The tree is peaceful. It works. 🙂

The End. 🙂

March 10, 2013
Pushing and Pulling: Part 1
At the suggestion of my lovely friend Nicole, what was going to be one massive, convoluted post, is now going to be a series of three or four, maybe more later on! For now, the basic idea…

I’ve heard it said—or likely more accurately, read it written—that in life, you’re always either running to or running from something.

I’m not sure I entirely agree (mainly because that sounds like way too much running!), but it fits well enough with what’s been running through my head.

There are things in life that pull you—goals, desires, ambitions, interests, affection…—and things that push you—dissatisfaction, problems, circumstances, things you want to avoid, even people (intentionally or otherwise).

Things that pull you pull you toward something. It’s more directional. Things that push you are less directional, just sort of pushing you away. Toward has a destination in mind. Away doesn’t care where you go as long as it’s not here.

Like with magnets! if you have them oriented with opposite poles facing, so the force between them is attractive, they pull to each other. If you let go of one, you know exactly where it’ll end up—right up against the other! If you have them oriented so the force between them is repulsive, they push away from each other, and if you let go one one… who knows where it’ll go?! Maybe directly opposite the other magnet, but it could veer off to either side, or flip around or over…

It works the same way with people. Physically poking, prodding, nudging, or shoving someone is at best an ineffective way to move them (as they can’t tell if you’re trying to get them to go somewhere specific or just somewhere else), and at worst, outright hostile. You take someone by the hand or arm to lead them somewhere, perhaps just to draw closer.

Less concretely, we talk about being drawn to someone (perhaps someone with a magnetic personality), or feeling like a loved one is pushing us away. This pushing and pulling is a notion that’s already ingrained in our language. Words like attractive and repulsive are used far more often in emotional contexts than in reference to actual physical forces!

My thought, though, is that just about everything in life—not just interpersonal relationships, but all the events, circumstances, reactions, etc. that affect our lives—can be thought of as either pushing or pulling. And which one? Depends on the situation.

Say you leave your job at an office and go to work at a bakery. Were you pushed or pulled?
- If you made the switch because decorating cupcakes is your passion: pulled.
- If you left because you were fired and the bakery just happened to be hiring: pushed. (Maybe literally?)
I go hang out at a coffee shop for a few hours. Push or pull?
- If I go because I’m in the mood for a lovely cup of chai and a nice place to sit and read or crochet: pull.
- If I go because I’ve been cooped up in my house or office all day and I just want out: push.
You’re at a party, and spend most of the evening chatting with a person we’ll call Sam. Pushing or pulling?
- If you’re hanging with Sam because Sam is cool and you’re enjoying Sam’s company: pulling.
- If you’re just hanging with Sam because you don’t know anyone else there: pushing.
- If you’re hanging with Sam because an ex or otherwise someone you wish to avoid is present: pushing (and you’re pushing back).
Thoughts? More examples? Do share!
November 14, 2012
How I Accidentally Out-Introverted Myself. (And am undoing it…?)
It’s kind of nuts how it seems like everything happens all at once, or nothing happens at all. For most of the last few months, it’s been the latter. But last week was all crazy social, and it was weird.

For the full picture, allow me to backtrack a bit. Up until junior year of college, it wasn’t obvious, even to me, that I was an introvert — but that fall absolutely broke my brain (and maybe my soul?) to the point where I couldn’t stand my apartment or the people in it so hard that I basically moved out without having anywhere else to live. I just… left. (I slept on couches in deserted lounges or on friends’ dorm room floors for almost 2 weeks, until the housing lady hooked me up with an empty room for the last month or so of school, so I retrieved the remainder of my belongings and lugged them across campus, and proceeded to pretty much hibernate, except for classes.)

Senior year was not nearly so drastic/traumatizing, but I got roped into living in an overcrowded apartment again, when I had desperately wanted to just stay in a comfy dorm room with one good friend. The roommates were all people I liked this time, and I made good use of the kitchen and living room in the fall and was reasonably social, but there were just too many of us in not enough space, and there were almost always people who didn’t actually live there hanging around, so it was not particularly conducive to de-stressing this frazzled introvert.

I loved my friends (now that I had fine-tuned the selection of humans I was willing to spend time with) and really enjoyed my classes, but I was absolutely thrilled to graduate and move back home and have a whole room all to myself! Between my church friends (a handful of whom I consider close friends), three jobs (including Borders and a temporary office gig), and a whirlwind of NASAtweetups and such, I had plenty of human interaction, and was happy to retreat to (/ hide in) the bat-cave in whatever time remained.

However, eventually, my contract at the office job — and Borders entire existence — ended, there are lulls in between NASA adventures, and my friends are busy people. The third job stuck around, ramped up to pretty much full time, and moved to an actual office, but most days it’s just me and my boss. I’d see church friends at church and occasionally manage to hang out otherwise, and NASA funs do pop up now and then, but after a while, I realized that the vast majority of days, I don’t see anyone but my boss and my parents.

I gradually realized I had pared-down my social life a little too well.

As I embraced my introvert-y-ness, I had given up on maintaining friendships that weren’t worth it. I sort of released myself from feeling obligated to spend time with people I just didn’t really like, but had put up with because of mutual friends or because I used to enjoy their company — and I stopped clinging to old friendships with people who didn’t seem to reciprocate.

This was good. Like weeding the friendship garden. (Holy pants, that was corny!) But, to continue this slightly terrible metaphor, having weeded and pruned, I did not plant anything new, so once a few other things were removed, it was just a little too empty.

And at that point, I realized I didn’t really know where to go to find new [plants]. The friends I have and have had in the past, I met through school, or church, or work, or some church-or-school-related trip/event. Now that I’m not in school, the folks at church in my age group are both limited and remarkably constant, and there aren’t exactly hordes of new faces at work… well, that’s not particularly helpful.

I asked my handy dandy internet, and the consensus was basically, “Go do/to things your interested in, and you’ll meet people who share that interest!” Good advice, but as far as I knew, all that fit the bill were NASAtweetups, and at those I mostly befriend people who live far away. Awesome people, but not particularly helpful when you want to hang out at the spur of the moment. I didn’t have any other things to go to to make friends, so not so helpful. So, I remained a bit befuddled.

But then I wasn’t anymore.

It occurred to me that the problem probably wasn’t that there weren’t other events/gatherings relevant to my interests, but just that:
I was used to incrementally expanding my social circles, not randomly jumping into new ones.

So I decided to just go to things. Do things. ALL THE THINGS.

Between finding a few random things to go to, and plans with existing friends coming together, last week was the most ridiculously social week in probably at least a year! (Minus NASAtweetup trips, of course!)

On the way to work the other Friday, I saw a sign announcing a church coffeehouse concert thing that night. So on the way home, I decided to stop, and heard some good music, and ran into some folks I knew from helping with kids’ musicals a few years ago (apparently longer ago than I thought, as their teeny children are now basically grown men… weeeeeeeeird! o_O).

An email from Bethlehem Brew Works informed me there was a knitting club called “Pints ‘n’ Purls” which meets there on Monday nights, and sounded mighty intriguing. Turned out my boss was going away on Tuesday, so I didn’t have to go into the office, creating the perfect opportunity for a later night in which I could drive up and check it out. I did, and it was quite fun! A little far to be a regular thing for me, but I met some cool people and was sort of inspired by the phenomenon!

When Marian Call was here the week before, she highly recommended I attend the upcoming Ladies of Ragnarok concert in Norristown on Wednesday, so I thought I’d check that out. I did, and it was awesome! Molly Lewis and The Doubleclicks are awesome, talented, nerdy musicians (instant fan!), who draw a pretty cool and geeky crowd! (Who happened to mention some sort of game gathering at the bar/restaurant I pass going to/from work, that I look forward to checking out soon!)

Note the cat keyboard. <3[/caption]
I got to hang out with Rachel and sweet little Gwenny on Thursday afternoon, which happens semi-regularly and is always delightful.

…As well as Lisa on Saturday, which has been a gorram long time coming!

And then Sunday, I went to see Looper with a random guy I befriended at the Marian Call show! See? The plan is working already! A new friend! Victory.

Of course, my reward for all this socializing? A cold. Figures.
October 17, 2012
Not Quite Writer’s Block…

More like… Writer’s Banana Peel?

“Banana Peel” by Black Glenn, on Flickr

Yep, that figures! While this little blog was in transition, I had so many things I wanted to blog about. I finally get it moved over to its new home (here!), all spiffed up satisfactorily, the epic backlog of posts and photos posted, so I’m finally feeling free to blog regularly… and I suddenly have nothing to say.

Then I’ll be driving to/from work, or in the shower, or something – anywhere i can’t type or write anything down – and remember everything I wanted to post, and come up with six new great ideas… but as soon as I stop the car or whatever, nothing. My mind is instantly blank, void of any eager scrap of creativity or inspiration! Of course!

In the last week or so, I’ve been through this cycle so many times that I at least can remember the topics I had in mind, broadly, but still have nothing to say about them! Or I just, at that moment, think they’re incredibly stupid, uninteresting ideas no longer worthy of being bloggified.

So after musing on that predicament for a while, I decided that it was, itself, decent [if viciously meta] blog fodder, and here we are. (Yes, it now seems kind of silly and stupid and not nearly as interesting as it did ten seconds before I started writing. But hey! Words.)

September 18, 2012
MarsRoadtrip Part 1: Mars or Bust!

Two tweetups in one week? Yes please! 😀

Okay, so technically one was a “Social” – NASA decided to start letting Facebook and Google+ followers in on the #NASAtweetup awesomeness, so they changed the name to #NASASocial – but Canada’s was still #CSAtweetup!

Two days after Thanksgiving, NASA launched the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) “Curiosity” rover on an 8.5 month journey to our dusty red neighbor – a journey we knew would end, one way or the other, around quarter after 1am (EDT) Sunday night/Monday morning. In June, as we spacetweeps suspected/hoped, they announced there would be a NASAsocial for the Mars landing, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (where Curiosity was built)! I registered, of course, but didn’t get selected.

I don’t know if it was the plan all along, or if they were just overwhelmed by the response, but a couple days later they added 5 more NASAsocials, all at the same time (Friday, August 3rd) at different NASA centers! (The first multi-center NASAsocial!) Soon, the Canadian Space Agency announced they’d have a tweetup too, during the landing and the following day.

I, of course, registered for everything, figuring I’d probably worn out my welcome/luck by now and wouldn’t get in to any official events, but was fine too since there were epic #RogueTweetup plans in the works…

But then I got one of those lovely confirmation notices… from Canada! So the question was if I could get my passport renewed in time! …and then, I got ANOTHER confirmation notice, this one from NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio!

Cue a moment of panic as I tried to decide which I’d rather go to – be part of the first multi-center social, or be in a space agency for the landing itself? (Surely I couldn’t go to both… two tweetups for the same landing?!)

But then the “Why the heck not?!” sector of my brain kicked in with the realization that this wasn’t exactly trying to be in two places at once (there’s a whole Saturday in between!), and neither NASA nor CSA had said anything to the contrary, so theoretically, I could do both… It was just a matter of sorting the logistics.

Sorting the logistics

I looked at flights, but then remembered I’m not quite old enough to make rental cars a viable option, and the thought of trying to mooch rides between airports and hotels and space centers in two different cities (countries!) when I wasn’t sure who I’d know where, plus getting home from the Philly airport at the end (since my family’d be on vacation by the time I got back)… well, it sounded like it would be less exhausting/stressful to just drive!

A quick consultation with the GoogleyMaps confirmed each leg of the journey would be a full-but-reasonable-day’s drive (about 8/10/8 hours, respectively), and I like driving and traveling alone… plus, I mean, what’s the difference between my typical work day, in which I spend 8 or 9 hours sitting in a chair staring at a screen, and spending those hours sitting in my car staring out the windshield?!

So I declared it a plan, and surprisingly, though they didn’t see the appeal, neither parent tried very hard to dissuade me. My dad informed me that my uncle’s house is within a reasonable commute to NASA Glenn, so I called him up and made plans to crash there for the first stop, and thanks to recommendations from CSAtweetup’s lovely organizer, Magalie, I found a nice and very reasonably priced hotel near CSA HQ, so I had the “somewhere to sleep” thing covered.

The only other question mark in this nutty plan was whether I could get my passport renewed in time for Canada to let me in at all, much less to a secure government building… an extra $60 and applying in person will get you a passport pretty quickly, but the earliest available appointment was Monday morning the week I’d be leaving, so I was a bit nervous, but it turns out, the Philadelphia Passport Agency is seriously on their game!

I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to get there, park, find it, and get through security, so I left plenty of cushion time… and ended up arriving at 9:05, when my appointment wasn’t until 10. Despite warnings that they wouldn’t let you in more than 15 minutes early, and you could be waiting several hours regardless of your appointment time, they let me in right away, checked to make sure I had everything I needed and gave me a number, I waited about half an hour, had my “appointment” (through a bullet-proof ticket window), and was walking back to my car before my scheduled appointment time, assured my passport would be ready to pick up on Wednesday morning! (which it was, and the return visit took all of 3 minutes.) Solidly impressive for government bureaucracy!

Passport in hand, I *finally* felt free to get excited! I loaded up the iThing with music and audiobooks, threw some clothes and my toothbrush in the car, and roadtripped the heck out of Thursday!

August 9, 2012
It's official, I live in the future!

I was in middle school, I think, when I read Ender’s Game and the rest of the series…es (there are two distinct but intertwined storylines in Ender’s universe – one following Ender, the other following Bean). Anyway, the story is set in a future in which exceptionally bright kids are recruited to go to “Battle School” on a space station, to train for a war with an insectoid alien species usually referred to as “Buggers,” but aside from that, everyday life on Earth doesn’t seem to be too different. Besides living in a space station and playing war games in zero gravity, the one thing that stuck in my mind a brilliantly futuristic were the “desks” that everybody had.

“Desks” were basically small, portable, internet-connected computers with a touch-screen. I remember thinking that was very nearly magical, and pretty much the coolest thing ever. When I was reading that, tablet PCs did exist, but were fairly new still, and bulky, awkward, expensive, and not very powerful. Even laptops were still something I only dreamed about having, the internet was slow and texty, and WiFi (as far as consumers were concerned, anyway) didn’t exist yet. So, this fictional always-connected computer with the form factor of an Etch-a-Sketch became my benchmark for the future.

And I just got an iPad(2) for Christmas.

I can take notes, send email, read books, take pictures, draw pictures, watch movies, look up information, play games, and easily access the whole of the internet, any time, anywhere, from this screen thing in my hand, roughly the size of a college-ruled notebook (thinner than an Etch-a-Sketch)! Mission accomplished. Clearly, I am living in the future.

(Further proof, also based on juvenile fiction: I remember watching the Disney Channel movie “Zenon, Girl of the 21st Century”, and they had little discs that stored data or music or whatever – basically CDs, except they were the size of a quarter. I was storing my school papers on floppy discs, so had a little nerd aneurysm at the thought of fitting all that data on something so tiny… 12 years later, I have a 16gb micro SD card in my phone, full of dozens of CDs-worth of music, a bunch of photos, full TV episodes, and other data, on this little flake of plastic the size of my fingernail. *brainasplode*)

December 26, 2011
134 TweetUp, Take 2!

On the Monday the 9th, they announced the new launch date would be Monday the 16th, around 3 in the afternoon. Daddy said he had to help the sistercreature move home from school right around then, so wouldn’t be able to go. (Somebody got their priorities on wrong! 😛 )

I still wanted to drive back down so I’d be able to get around without begging my aunt/uncle or the tweeps for rides, but the parents were none too keen on me roadtripping with other tweeps, (even though I had been talking to them for ages, spent a few days with them in person now, and everyone had to pass a Federal Government background check to get into the tweetup!) and even less amenable to me driving alone, and no friends from home were available for a random vacation that week, so I talked my aunt into letting me borrow their extra minivan once I got down there, and started scrounging for cheap flights.

The plan was to fly down either Sunday evening (or super early Monday morning if it was significantly cheaper), since I’d been co-planning a “baby party” for Rachel and Elliott, to be held Sunday right after church, so wanted to stick around for that. (You’re not hallucinating, the last post did say I rushed home from the first one for Rachel’s baby shower, and now I’m talking about another one… sort of. That was a small family-and-close-friends sort of shower, this one was a bigger church-wide celebration for almostMama AND futureDad.)

This is the invitation I drew (pretty adorable, if I do say so myself!), which we snuck into church bulletins on a Sunday we knew they wouldn’t be there:

Conflict! D=

Then, we tweeps were informed that we might be able to have another shot at seeing the RSS retraction (well, re-retraction!)… which was scheduled for noonish the day before launch – AKA, exactly when the party was happening! The real trick was “might”. Being there for RSS retraction and getting to be that close to a shuttle on the launch pad would be an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, if it turned out we could, especially since there will literally only be one other space shuttle on a launch pad ever again… but did I want to miss a party I helped plan for my best friends for a maybe? A long-shot, even? Dilemma! (And we didn’t even know when we would find out if we could go, to at least decide if I could wait to find out before finalizing plans!)

The more I thought about it, the more I was leaning towards taking the chance that the maybe would pan out, skipping out on the party to get to Florida in time to make the RSS retraction if we were allowed to go. I mean, logically, seeing RSS retraction up close and unobstructed would be a literal once in a lifetime opportunity, while baby showers are clearly not, and in this case, not even limited to once for this baby! And I did technically fly a thousand miles to make it to that one…

Besides, Rachel is almost as excited about all my crazy NASAtweetup adventures as I am!

BABY SHOWER vs. SPACESHIP

Ultimately, no matter how awesome the friends and anti-cheese the shower, that right there should have made it a no-brainer. But, after all, I am the master of making simple decisions way more epic and convoluted than they have any right to be… and then the maybe did solidify into a yes, I saw a picture from a previous tweet-up of how close we would actually be, and I was sold. I found a super cheap flight on Spirit airlines for early Sunday morning, arranged a ride straight from the airport to Kennedy, and told my fellow party planners I wasn’t actually going to be present at said party.

Meanwhile, it occurred to me that I was going to get a new camera. Not so much a decision as a realization – I’d wanted a nice digital SLR for a couple years, but my inner cheapskate would always slap me upside the head, point at the price tag, point at my bank account, and laugh. “Someday…” I’d think, wistfully. And then, an epiphany of sorts:

If you are EVER going to spend THAT much money on a camera,
it BETTER happen in time to take some pictures of that frakking space shuttle.

Instinct had always said wait until I was a “grown up” with an income I could actually survive off of outside my parents house… but honestly, the value of a camera is not in the camera, it’s in the pictures. What makes it worth the money is how you use it, and I did want to get a nice camera eventually, so in a sense, I would be being a bad steward of the hypothetical future camera if I missed my chance to photograph one of the last space shuttle launches and a ton of other cool stuff, just because I waited too long to buy the camera.

I thought about going with one of those in-between sort of cameras, with a decent optical zoom and more manual functions than a point-and-shoot, but without interchangeable lenses, but then my mom agreed to chip in a couple hundred bucks as my slightly-early birthday present, so entry-level legit dSLRs were a bit more doable. So I perused the interwebs a bit, asked twitterfolk for their opinions, and ran around to every store I thought might have a decent camera trying to figure out which to get. It would have been nice to get another Canon, so I could use the lenses on my film camera too, but I was ultimately wooed by the Nikon D3100 (plus 55-200mm lens for some nice zoom), which seemed like a better camera than the Canons in the same range – and then was on sale at Best Buy for a hundred dollars less than that!

And then there was panic.

Spirit Airlines is cheap, in every sense of the word. The ticket price is very reasonable, comparatively, but/because they charge you extra for everything other than getting your arse from Point A to Point B. For a hopefully 2 day trip, with access to a washer dryer if needed, I didn’t need a lot of stuff, and Spirit wanted at least $28 for even a carry-on, so I figured I’d try to avoid that, and just cram everything in my purse, but I needed to clarify that I could have both my rather large purse and camera bag without paying anything. Spirit’s website was not helpful, so I tried calling them, which was less helpful. (Automated menu was broken, no matter which button you pushed, when you finally got a human, it seemed to be the same guy who barely spoke English and couldn’t understand my question!)

So I turned to the rest of the internet… which just made it worse. Not only could I not find an answer to my question, I could not find a single positive review of Spirit Airlines. Besides complaints about nickel-and-dimeing, which I was okay with because the total still ended up cheaper than any other ticket, last minute anyway, there were horror stories about planes getting delayed for days because of weather or mechanical problems and Spirit refusing to put passengers on alternate flights or refund/compensate or do anything to help, cabins being horrendously dirty, seats being even more crammed and uncomfortable than usual, and the staff being generally unpleasant.

Also, in the midst of this, I discovered I didn’t know where my drivers license was, which I’d need both to get on the plane at all, and to get into KSC. Spent the better part of the day before I’d leave looking for it, getting yelled at for not having it with me at all times (it’s not like I need to see it regularly, so I just hadn’t noticed it wasn’t in my bag), trying to pack, and generally freaking out. Eventually my dad found it under a seat in my car, where I had looked, but apparently not well enough.

Getting there: AKA, more panic.

The flight was to leave at 6am, from the Atlantic City airport, so I figured we should leave around 3am to have time to get there and get through the airport… and since I rarely get to sleep before then, just didn’t plan to. That evening, I went over to church to help set up for the baby party I wouldn’t be at, and then came home to finish packing (and conceded to maybe having to pay for a carry-on backpack, if they wouldn’t count that as the personal item in addition to purse and camera bag… the rules were really confusing!)

I knew I had told my dad when and where I had to leave from, so when I went to wake him up and he said we didn’t have to leave for an hour yet, I figured he knew what he was talking about… but when we were getting in the car close to 4:30 and I asked him if he knew how to get there or needed the GPS, and he looked at me like I was a moron, I realized he thought I meant Philly, and had forgotten the flight was from AC, and I had been right with my original time estimate, so now it was going to be a miracle if we got there before the plane left at all.

Thankfully, traffic at that hour is pretty non-existant, the airport was slightly closer than Dad thought (he was thinking of a different one another side of the city, apparently), and I was able to call the airport itself, who had no way of getting in touch with the Spirit people at the gate (???) but did assure me our ETA would leave me enough time to get through security and to the plane in time, which I did. *phew*

Spirit’s lines were confusing as crap, and the lady directing traffic was bitchy and condescending about it, but I had ditched even more of my stuff in the car so I could get through faster, so with just the purse full of clothes and camera bag, I got through security pretty quickly, and ran frantically through the airport, only to discover there was still a frakking line at the gate! >.<

The plane wasn’t nice, by any stretch, but it wasn’t disgusting or noticeably more uncomfortable than other coach seats, and did manage to leave on time and arrive in Orlando in one piece and on schedule. My ride’s flight was not, and rental car confusion added further delays, so I had a nice long while to sit in the parking garage waiting to leave, but we still made it to KSC and the press site a few minutes before we needed to be on the bus to the launch pad!

May 15, 2011
On Decisions, Habits, and Intentionality.
I’ve had this pile of thoughts floating around in my head for a while, but couldn’t peg what they were actually about. Now I’ve figured it out… I think. Pretty sure they’re mostly just an explanation of basic decision making. Well, a really thorough systemization of basic decision making, with a little analysis of habitualness, a hint of philosophy, and a splash of rant. Kind of long and abstract, sorry. If you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, skip the first two sections. The end is what matters.

Consider a choice.

Any choice. Just one. A single solitary decision. What it’s about doesn’t matter. Every choice has a purpose, for lack of a better word, or some set of criteria to be met, and at least two alternatives. (The purpose may not be immediately obvious… it might be the best use of your time, for instance, if you’re deciding whether or not to do something, or it might be a complex combination of criteria. Some or even all criteria may be preferences, what appeals to you, even what appeals to you at the moment.) You need to decide which of those two alternatives best accomplishes that purpose/fulfills the criteria.

You consider every facet of the expected outcome of each alternative– both the positives, like how well it does what it’s supposed to and additional benefits, and the negatives, such as costs (financial, time, or otherwise) and other consequences. You weigh these out, and see which option comes out on top. A lot of the time, it will be a trade-off, so you keep your specific criteria in mind– which are more important to you, and which you are willing to potentially compromise on. One option might be objectively better in general, but another is better suited to your particular situation/criteria.

Sometimes, things come out more or less even. Maybe you started trying to make a decision objectively, the options are very similar or its a fairly even trade off, so they you add in another criterion, perhaps preference, to tip the scales one way or the other. Or the whole decision is about preference, but you weren’t sure which alternative you actually liked, so you tried eliminating that as a factor and look at which is objectively better. Once in a while, of course, it just comes down to a whim.

Now, all of life is a series of these choices.

Everything you do, you make a choice to do, and then you make choices regarding how to go about doing that thing.

People think about the major decisions they need to make as choices, and most would agree it’s best to use this sort of logical reasoning in making those decisions (or at least consider what logic would tell you). Sometimes your heart or instinct might override, but you probably won’t intentionally go for an irrational choice, unless you have some other reason that makes it make sense to you, and just appears crazy to other people.

What is often overlooked, however, are the little choices, especially things you do frequently or habitually. You do them a certain way. Always have. Except not always. Unless you are a pre-existent eternal being not bound by time, there was a time you didn’t exist, so you probably weren’t doing whatever you do however you do it. There was a moment you first existed, and some time later, you did that thing you do for the first time. And at that point, you had to decide how to go about doing it, maybe even learn how to do it.

That first time, the choices, every step of the way, were conscious. They probably were the second time too. You could do it the same way, or try something differently. The decisions may have been conscious the third time too, maybe the fourth or even longer. Sooner or later, though, you probably established the pattern of how you do that, and stopped thinking about each decision.

We live so much of our lives on autopilot.

The thing is, after people have been following a pattern for a while, they forget that they’re just subconsciously repeating the same decisions over and over again. I’ve always done it this way. But does that mean that’s the best way to do it? Not necessarily. Maybe the situation in which you do that has changed. Maybe the information or tools you have have changed. Maybe the outcome you’re looking for has changed. Maybe you have changed, and will think of a better or just different way to go about it.

If you can remember why you chose to do something a certain way, and present-self agrees with past-self’s reasoning, maybe you do want to keep doing it that way for now. But if you can’t remember why you do it the way you do, or some factor may have changed, try thinking through it again.

Set aside your pattern, start from scratch.

Try to “forget” what you normally do, and approach it anew, systematically and comprehensively. Break it down into purpose and specific criteria, and outcomes for each alternative (function and benefits, costs and consequences).
- Establish what the relative weights of your criteria are.
- Now evaluate what they should be– did you miss something worth considering, or let something less important or even irrational take priority?
- Look at the alternatives you’re selecting from. Are there any other ways of doing what your doing, or things you could do instead to fulfill the same purpose? (They don’t have to be good ways, that’ll get sorted out in the next step.)
- Rework your criteria as needed and analyze the elements of each alternative accordingly.
- Make your decision. Which is really the best option?
Work through the decision-making process again, with a fresh perspective, and determine what’s really the best way to do whatever it is you’re doing. Write it down if that works for you. Is it the same as you’ve been doing? If it is, cool, as you were. If it isn’t, are you willing to try the new way? (After all, you’re own brain just told you it’s better.) Or will you be stubborn and stick with the way you’ve “always” done it, just because it’s the way you’ve always done it?

This is not hypothetical; this is a challenge.

I’m serious, try it. Pick something you do fairly often. It can be the way you get to work, what beverage you drink, how you spend your first hour of “free time” in a given day, the way you organize your bookshelf, putting on pants, I don’t care. Just pick something, ponder why you do it the way you do. Actually think through the decision once, instead of going on autopilot. When you figure out the best option, try it that way. See if it works for you. Heck, try a different option even if it’s not better, maybe you’ll discover something interesting.

Maybe you’ll make your life a little bit easier, or better in some small way. Maybe even a big way, who knows? Maybe you won’t, this time, and you’ll go back to your pattern. Try it with something else. Make a pattern of challenging your patterns. I bet sooner or later you find something you can improve on. (;

But maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll keep finding the way you’ve been doing things is the best way, or at least works for you, and never change a thing… but wouldn’t it be nice to know that? To know that you have gone through life intentionally, thinking through and testing your decisions, and are confident that you are living the best life possible?

Try it. Be intentional. Live intentionally. Live on purpose, not on autopilot.

</motivational speech> But for serious, give it a go. (I’m going to!) Ready for this? I DARE YOU. Tell me about it in the comments!
- What are you going to / did you try it on? After you do, what’s the result?
- Did you learn anything in the process?
- Am I a total and complete moron? (It’s okay, you can tell me. -_-)
- How about your ideas, how else can we live on purpose?
April 12, 2011
What's your favorite color that's not a color?
So we’re gonna go around the circle and introduce ourselves. Everybody tell us your name, where you’re from, where you go to school, for what, and what year you are, or where you work and what your job is, and…

Everybody needs a good icebreaker.

Between college, church-related activities, and [what I can only describe as the retarded hybrid test-tube baby of spontaneity, whimsy, the inability to say ‘no’, and an awkward introvert’s varied attempts to be social], I have found myself in more of these self-interrogation circles than I ever would have imagined, much less could possibly count.

The questions asked are remarkably predictable (and alliterative):
- Who: Your name, of course.
- What: do you do? Job and/or major.
- Where: are you from, or where do you work/go to school.
- When: How long have you been doing whatever it is you do?/What year in school are you?
- and finally, Wildcard: You thought I was going to say “Why”, didn’t you? WRONG.
Who makes sense. Names are helpful. What/where/when are smalltalk standards, good to get out early, as a function of our culture more-so than actually being relevant to substantive conversation. The Wildcard question is where things get interesting.

The Wildcard is, as you might guess, at the discretion of the group leader or organizer. They might go for profound (ie: most memorable something-or-other), immediate (ie: highs & lows of the past week), or just silly (ie: favorite breakfast cereal). The more groups you do this with, the more they get redundant, so you try to think of new and interesting questions.

A few years ago, I found myself in one of those recurring events for which the group varies so we were used to doing the go-round each time for the benefit of new members, but on this particular occasion, it was a smallish group and we all knew each other, at least as far as the standard Ws went, so the group leader posed what might be considered the ultimate icebreaker: Come up with an icebreaker. We each thought of a question, and everyone answered each. Some were goofy, some forgettable, some awkward. Mine quickly became my favorite thing to ask people. 🙂

What’s your favorite color that’s not a color?

I couldn’t explain it well enough, so the lousy approximation that came out of my mouth was as much riddle as inquiry. It became as much about trying to see who understood my brain to “get it right” as people actually sharing their favorites, and after a few attempts at explaining it, my friend Elliott seems to be convinced that the question is entirely subjective and dependent on my brain, Jeff thinks we should put it to a vote, and only a few people seem to be catching the general drift of the question’s intent. (I think Rachel knows what I mean.) So it’s time to try to put this into words that are valid outside my brain.

“What’s your favorite color?” is a common enough question, and while interesting, and I love colors, the vocabulary that answers that question is so limited. “Blue”, “red”, “orange”, even “teal” are so vague, and tell me so little about what a person is actually liking.

Even more specific color names like “sky blue” or “brick red” describe only the hue and maybe shade of the color at best. But they’re really just largely-arbitrary labels assigned to a generally-accepted range of wavelengths in the visible spectrum. A sky blue car looks very different than a sky blue t-shirt, and neither actually looks the same as a sky blue sky. Color needs context.

What I’m interested in is not the label attached to the range of hues you usually prefer, but the whole and specific swatch of reality you find most visually appealing. It’s not cobalt blue, but cobalt blue glass… not brown, but the last half-inch of black coffee in a white mug… not just orange, or even soft orange, but Jim’s orange sweater. Big threatening clouds just before a sudden storm. That red plastic water bottle. Antique silver dinnerware. Polished mahogany. Even more complex things that don’t fit into traditional color names, like “Oil slick in the parking lot” or “the tv screen when it’s off” or Royal Stewart Tartan.

There’s depth to it. Texture. The way the light plays with a surface. It’s specific, so that assuming you seen it before too, you instantly know what the person is referring to, and don’t have to wonder “this part? or that one?” (Not just trees, even a certain tree, but the bark, or birch bark, or pine needles, or looking out over a valley of autumn leaves just before sunset. It brings to mind a certain mental picture that you can say, “Yep, that’s my favorite,” and when someone else hears it, they picture essentially the same thing and can say, “Ah, that’s their favorite.”

Blue corn tortilla chips. Copper (not merely “copper colored” but copper metal, like a brand new penny). #FF00FF on your computer screen (I have yet to see that one exist in nature). That greenish edge on a glass table. Orange juice. Tail lights. Blacklight. Black cat fur. Bluejeans. Blue raspberry Jolly Ranchers. Gold star stickers. Red rose petals. Beets.

Get the gist? I think I can rephrase the question better now. How about:

What’s your favorite [specific visual stimulus] that isn’t [an arbitrary label for a range of light wavelengths]?

Or better yet:

What’s your favorite color? Answer with a noun.
April 7, 2011