Author: anthony Page 30 of 72

I had a dream this morning I was a bounty hunter in a futuristic city – chasing a city employee on a motorcycle attached to a sort of “hover ski” through neon lit streets.

My partner and I were in a car and while we were faster, we were less maneuverable than the woman on the motorcycle/hover ski. She zoomed between the cars on the busy road, hovering a few feet off the ground. So, we took a side street, raced ahead, and cut her off.

With the way blocked, we got out of the car – preparing to confront and capture the woman, but not too worried about the danger. She was an older woman and her solid frame didn’t seem spry or threatening. She surprised us by pulling out an energy weapon and shooting me in the neck – leaving me unharmed, but paralyzed. I could breathe and move my eyes, but the rest of me was immobile.

My partner took cover.  I guessed that the woman didn’t want me dead – otherwise, she would have been carrying more lethal weapons and just flat out killed me when she had the chance. So, I pretended the blast was making me hyperventilate. I began breathing rapidly and gasping for air, pretending to be in serious distress.

Our quarry sighed, then pulled out a huge bowie knife and approached me. My eyes went wide with fear that I’d overplayed it and I was going to be gutted, but she instead pressed the flat of the blade against the side of my nose and put some pressure behind it.

“Keep your temples relaxed or the pressure will blow the top of your head off,” she said

I tried to slow my breathing as the pressure in my head skyrocketed. Just when I thought my head would really explode from the weird pressure point, it suddenly  went away and I was able to move again.   She removed the knife and smoothly sheathed it as I slumped forward.  I turned and caught my partner’s eye and gave a slight nob. We would give her a moment to explain herself before we tried anything else.

I was about to start questioning her when I woke up.  It would be interesting to see if this is in the same “universe” as the quantum entangled bullets.

I got my taxes done yesterday afternoon. Mine aren’t really that complicated – relatively speaking – but I just hate doing them so much I would much rather pay someone to do them and save me the stress. Last time I tried on my own, I ran out of swear words and ended up with some stupid and unsatisfying combinations that didn’t make me feel better.

So, Donna and I were going through my taxes. Donna is an older woman who sounds like she’s got about 8 pounds of gravel in her throat.

I “think” she was working on my taxes – the computer screen seemed to suggest that. And I “think” she cracked a couple of jokes. She mumbled quite a bit – might have been talking to me, maybe the computer. And her voice was course enough that – were Animal from the Muppets to hear her – he would have suggested, “COUGH! DROP!”

Finished things up in short order and I was on my way. One side effect of the tax prep was looking at my medical bills from last year – since sometimes that can be taken as a deduction. Mine wasn’t quite enough for that – but the grand total did take me aback.

$2,965.00

All because of a 1/10 of a second as I slipped on the ice.

It could have been a lot worse if I didn’t have insurance. And it wasn’t all at once, fortunately.

But, still.

I was walking from the parking deck to my office by the most direct route possible and it wasn’t covered by worker’s comp because the sidewalk was technically owned by the city – though, I found out later that the university usually plowed it. Just not on that morning.

I wasn’t angry that I fell. But I was angry that the employer who had been given so much of my time and loyalty over the years was so quick to blame someone else. I could have fought it, I guess, but it seems like a bad idea to sue your employer if you want to keep working there.

And I healed and recovered and got over the injury and being angry.

I’m a little angry again now that I’m looking at that grand total – and I’ll get over that too.

I met some great doctors and my physical therapist was really good. My friends and family were amazing and even though my arm will never be the same I got a good story out of it. And I’m part cyborg – so, that’s cool.

But, still.

No matter how many silver linings you find on clouds, they are still clouds.

The adventure for my fourth trip into the lake begins the night before when I dyed my beard blue – to match my Speedos, naturally. It didn’t end up as dark as I would have liked, but still got the job done. I touched it up a little again the next morning and suited up for the day.

My folks came up for a visit that morning and we got some lunch before heading to the lake. I had pre-checked in the night before and we got there around noon for the 2 o’clock jump. We wandered around a bit before I decided to strip down to my Speedo.

It became quickly apparent that I wasn’t the weirdest person there. Which I think is really saying something.

We staked out a spot neat the lake to get some good photos and I jumped up and down to keep the blood moving. It was 65 degrees out – which is amazing for February but still a little chilly with as much skin as I had exposed.

Finally, it was time. The first wave of jumpers hit the water and I left my folks at the beach with my bag of clothes and headed to the line up.

The moment of truth and I was super excited.

I took a running jump and cannonballed into the 40 degree water.

I surfaced and gasped a few times to try and catch my breath. When I finally had enough breath back, I took a deep one and held it.

Then I did an underwater flip. Why?

Because I’m a badass. Sheesh, how many times do I have to go over that?

I surfaced again and made my way to the ladder. I was a bit in shock as I made my way back to the beach – looking for my folks and my clothes.

Only, they weren’t there.

I wandered back and forth along the beach looking for them – which was a little difficult since I didn’t have my glasses.

I was a uncomfortable for a bit – but quickly air dried. In very little time at all I stopped shivering and wasn’t even cold.

Eventually, Mom tracked me down and said they had gone looking for me – and I’d just missed them.

I found a place to sit and got my warm-up pants and shirt on. I didn’t bother with the changing tent since my speedo was pretty much dry.

We headed out and stopped to get hot chocolate – and a doughnut which I proceeded to dunk in my hot chocolate.  We were at Dunkin Doughnuts, after all.

Back to my place and a change of clothes – then out to dinner before they headed back.
Great weather, crazy day, and a pile of fun. I keep trying to recruit people to jump with me, but so far no takers. Even one of my buddies who jumped last year skipped this time – though it was very cool that he came out to watch anyway.

I don’t know if I’ll jump next year – though 5 years would be a nice stopping point.

The best part? I’m pretty much immune to cold for a while afterwards.

Do your worst, Ohio weather – you’ve got nothing on a full body dip in ice water.

I watched the James Bond movie “Live and Let Die” recently. It’s not the one you watch when you want to see a good film – it’s what you watch to get out of the way if you’re trying to be complete about a James Bond collection.

In my humble opinion, one of the worst. Even worse than “Diamonds Are Forever” and the only thing really redeeming about that one is the theme song.

“Live and Let Die” has terrible acting, unintentionally laughable special effects and make up, and a plot someone should have driven a truck through.

It’s also amazingly misogynistic – even for a Bond film. Yes, I’m talking about you, Pussy Galore. If the women in the film aren’t weak and useless, they are literally objects to be passed around. Poor Solitaire gets tricked into sleeping with Bond and suddenly she’s worse than useless. She’s basically luggage at that point.

The worst, though, is the racism. Blatant and unrelenting, no effort is spared to paint every African american in the movie in the worst possible light. Violent savages and brutish thugs to the last. Even the main villain – who can usually be counted on to have a certain flair – is just a drug dealer with a budget. Throw in some voodoo and a ghetto and we’ve got ourselves a movie.

It’s unsettling to sit through and there’s no way it could be made today. We can really only take a couple of good things away from it:

1. We don’t need to debate who is the worst James Bond. It’s Roger Moore.

2. At least things are better now.

But, are they?
Take, for example, the drive back from my parent’s house. The trip takes me through a number of very small towns that could be transplanted pretty much anywhere in the mid-west and it might be a month before the inhabitants noticed a difference. That’s not a bad thing or a criticism, just an observation. Small towns are pretty much small towns. Hey, I grew up in one. 🙂

One of them, though, boasted a garage on the outskirts of town adorned with two flags. On the right, an American flag. On the left…

The Confederate flag.

I’m sure that the rest of the town is populated with some really wonderful people, but in that location, well…

There might have been a time – perhaps during the “Live and Let Die” era – where it might be possible to make a weak claim that the confederate flag could be displayed as a historical artifact.

Now, there’s pretty much no way around just flat-out racism.

So, as I drove past that garage and saw those flags, I was struck by anger, disappointment in my fellow Ohioan, and sadness. And whatever pride I saw in the American flag was quashed by its companion.

And the irony. A symbol for freedom and pride next to one for slavery and shame.

So, not better – but perhaps more easy to recognize and separate out from the background. And knowing that we, collectively as a nation, still have a problem with racism is as good a first step as any to doing something about it.

Is there an AA for racism on a national level? A 12 step program for a country? Do we all need to crowd onto a psychiatrist’s couch and talk about our collective childhood?

How do we fix this? How do we reach the owner of those two flags and get them to take down the flag on the left – and take real pride in the one on the right? Because if we can’t reach that one person, how will reach the rest of the nation?
It’s got this one middle class – and middle aged – white guy, thinking.

I made some progress the other night with the punching bag. I got into a good rhythm and felt pretty confident. And powerful – which for all my bluster I’m not really used to feeling. I paused for a moment to catch my breath and adjust the hand-wraps when I noticed that there was a little pink color on the cloth.

Frowning, I investigated further – thinking I hadn’t wrapped my knuckles properly and was bleeding. But, my hands were fine – no blood.

The pink color was coming from the red bag.

I had punched the color off it.

More likely is that I had sweat a bit and the moisture had leached a little dye off the canvas.

Still, I felt a little bad-ass. Which is entirely the point.
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That bad ass feeling didn’t last, though. I wasn’t feeling great at work yesterday and then got stuck in all kinds of traffic when I foolishly decided to run some errands after work. My last stop was to the drugstore for something to help with the sinus pressure.

The were about 17 million different varieties of medicine on the shelves and a couple more million represented by cards you had to take to the pharmacy to buy.

I stood there, scanning the labels and boxes for a bit – growing more frustrated. Finally, I picked up one of the cards that looked promising and took it to the counter.

I asked if this would help with sinus pressure and the clerk at the counter had to check. She then went looking for the box, had to ask about that, was told the box was red and replied that all the boxes were red.

I waited.

She came back, asked for my driver’s license – which I already had out, naturally – and proceeds to scan that to start ringing up the sale.

But, of course, I had to “prove” that I wasn’t going to take this home and make meth out of it.

So, a couple of screens of text, a check box, and a signature. Then discount card questions, a couple other things I can’t even remember, and finally the actual payment.

When I was done getting through all that and had completed the transaction, I raised my hands in victory and gave about a 1/25 volume shout – all I could manage. The clerk smiled and I told her I should get a sticker just for getting through all that.

As I headed out, it occurred to me that this could have been prevented by having a button the clerk could select labeled:

“He looks terrible, but I don’t think it’s meth.”

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I took the day off today and spent most of it asleep. Just me and the cat, curled up and trying to rest.

I think I’ll fix myself some dinner and spend the evening not checking my email.

Ah, bliss.

A large chunk of my professional life has been tech support.  I started full time at UA on the Help Desk and if I’ve got a calling, it’s been in helping people with technology.

We’ve still got a couple of gaps in the switchboard schedule and so on Friday mornings I grab my laptop and answer the main phone for the university. I usually work on my emails while I’m on the calls – they don’t take a lot of brain power usually and I can switch gears pretty easily.

On one recent Friday, I answered the phone with my usual “Good Morning, University of Akron, how may I help you?”

An older woman – I could hear it in her voice – responded with, “It’s nice to hear a man answering the phones,”

She went on to ask for a department and I transferred her over.

And… I wasn’t quite sure how to take that.

I guess, yea for me in bucking traditional gender roles in the workplace?

But, why does it matter?

My female student operators would have done just as well answering the phones  – my only advantage over them is that I’m so freaking old that I know everything about the University. I’ve been told I have a pleasant voice and it kicks into a deeper range in the early morning. My female operators have ‘brighter’ voices, but either gets the job done.

It seems so weird to me that there are gender traditional jobs – when gender is so irrelevant. Plant a tree, pilot a rocket, stock a shelf, design a building – gender doesn’t matter in the least. I’m happy being a guy and being able to pee standing up is pretty awesome – but there’s not much of a job market for that skill.

For my part, I hired one female and one male operator to add to the schedule. He had experience and a pleasant voice – and that was good enough for me. As we have turn-over in the schedule, I’ll do my part to hire a better gender balance for that role. Maybe, in a small way, I can do a little bit to bring some gender equality to our workforce.

The past few weeks at work have been very stressful. Not enough hours in the day to even stay caught up, much less get ahead. Add in the new responsibilities to my job and I was starting to cook in my own skin.

On a particularly rough day, it occurred to me that I was spending 8 hours on a computer at work and then coming home to another computer where I would “unwind” by blowing up and hacking apart monsters in a video game.

This is clearly not the best approach to de-stressing.

Years ago I had a room-mate that owned a free-standing punching bag and I enjoyed wailing away on that to de-stress. I was a little worried about how my arm would do, but decided to give it a try. So, I set out to buy one of these for my house.

And that simple trip turned into an ordeal of inconsequential depth. From the moment I left work until I finally got home was one tiny slight after another. Traffic, parking, sales clerks, other customers, that accursed woman at Wendy’s who couldn’t decided if she didn’t want tomatoes or mayo on her sandwich.  “MAKE UP YOUR MIND!”

Over and over again, I felt myself get angrier and angrier. For really no reason – on their own, each slight was very nearly meaningless.

It was the cumulative affect – like radiation poisoning – that just kept building up. Several times, I took a deep breath and by force of will slammed a new perspective in place.

It didn’t last.

I was reminded of a form of torture and execution called The Death of A Thousand Cuts. This was from China and was legal up until 1905 – it was inflicted on only the most heinous offenders.

The accounts vary, but in most cases the guilty would be cut many many times by very sharp knives – death was usually by bleeding out.

A merciful executioner would make the first cut fatal and the rest of the cuts were to disfigure the body. The point of this was the belief that a person would enter the afterlife looking like how their body was. So, disfiguring the corpse would torment the person for eternity as a reminder of their crimes.

And each tiny slight in my day, each meaningless disruption, felt like a tiny paper cut.

Or a cardboard cut, those are worse.

I was mentally exhausted by the time I got home. I did get the bag set up and while I was filling the base with water I finally got myself settled down. I went after the bag for a bit and then took a shower and went to bed.

The next day I went from work to home to the bag and the physical exertion did way more for me than blowing up zombies on a screen.

I guess comparing a “day of being annoyed” to “execution by disfigurement” is not really the best analogy, but it sure felt like it at the time.

Things have finally settled down a bit at work – as I knew they eventually would – but I’m going to try to make the punching bag a daily thing.

When I worked on the computer help desk way back when, I imagined my patience was like a bucket that would get slowly drained over the day. Over-night I would refill the bucket and start the day again with a full amount of patience.

Now it feels more like I’ve got a bucket of annoyance that starts off empty and then fills up over the day. And the punching back should help me empty that bucket again.

I know – objectively – that I’m doing fine.   I have friends that have much more stressful jobs or are facing job uncertainties and in the grand scheme of things I’m making a big deal out of a lot of little nothings.   I guess what I need to learn how to do is to just as quickly get myself calmed down after getting worked up.   Or maybe just not get worked up at all – though that seems unrealistic.

Until then, I’m going to show that punching bag who’s boss.

I’m a fan of quantum mechanics and though the math is beyond me, I really like the idea that things in the universe are deeply weird.

One of my favorite parts is the idea of quantum entanglement or Spooky Action at a Distance. To sum it up, the idea is that if two particles are allowed to interact and then separated, they still behave as if they are connected or part of one system. What happens to one instantaneously affects the other – no matter the distance. They are still – in some way that can’t be explained yet – connected.

A pretty neat idea and one that bothered Einstein greatly because it would allow information to travel at faster than light speeds. I think it’s a neat analogy for the connections that people have too. Once someone is in your life – even briefly – they are still connected to you.

Anyway, I had a dream that someone had invented a gun that shot bullets that had quantum entangled particles in them. The first bullet shot had one of a set of two particles and the second would be the other of the set. In the dream, I saw someone get shot with one of these bullets and the attacker immediately fired another shot at another person. Neither of the wounds were serious – I mean, they got shot so it was serious, but not immediately life threatening.

Instead of the particles just interacting in the same way, the people that got shot by these bullets were draw towards each other at a quantum level. They fought against it but were pulled together and merged into one being – arms and legs thrashing around sort of like co-joined twins. But maybe more like two people that had been shoved through each other.

I had barely a moment to register this when I got shot in the shoulder. The attacker turned and fired another shot at someone near me and instead of fighting against it, I rushed towards my quantum entangled partner. I embraced them as tightly as I could and they did the same to me. Instead of a halfway merged mess, we instead turned into one complete person – though half again as tall and more structurally dense. We/I were now one person – albeit with two bullets in me/us. Before I/We could confront the shooter, I woke up.

Welcome to the inside of my head. 🙂

My folks, my sister, and her family came up for a visit this past weekend to celebrate my birthday a little early.

We went to the Bomb Shelter in the morning, grabbed some lunch, then went bowling. I got a couple of strikes right in a row at the start before my beginner’s luck ran out. My Dad and brother-in-law did much better, but the stars of the games were my nieces who – with a little help from a ramp and their parents – nearly won the games.

I should have used a ramp too.  Or maybe the bumpers.

In any case, we had fun and that was the whole point. After bowling, we headed back to my place for a bit and then got some dinner before they headed out. It was a good visit and I’m glad they were able come up. I’ll be heading down to see them again soon for my niece’s birthday.

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While they were visiting, we also tried out my Google Cardboard. It’s a cardboard box with some lenses in it that work with an app on my phone to present a Virtual Reality (VR) experience. Pretty sweet. We got to check out some far away places and other worlds – all in my living room. And it was funny watch folks stumble around a bit at the intersection of virtual and reality.

Yesterday, I found the app for the company that handles the campus tour for UA – and they’ve got the VR already set up and ready to work with Cardboard. I tested it out and today I shared what I found with the folks at work. We knew that the company provided this, but this was the first time we’d really tried it. Might be something we can help Admissions with.

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The air in my house is apparently pretty dry this winter. And I tend to build up a huge static charge. Enough to temporarily zap my playstation controllers or see sparks when I touch a light switch. I’ve trained myself to touch the fireplace screen before I touch my electronics and while taking the hit isn’t fun – it’s keeping the devices safe.

The worst was the ceiling fan. The chain has a metal ornament on the end and it hangs down just far enough to touch the bald spot on the top of my head.

The zap was painful enough and scary enough to make me drop. I recovered immediately, but I’m maybe still a little cautious in my living room. Getting hit with a bolt of lightning on my head – even a small one – isn’t much fun.

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Finally, tomorrow I turn 43.

42 was an interesting age – being privy to the secrets of Life, the Universe, and Everything was pretty cool – but I spent a good chunk of that time recovering from my broken arm. So, not much fun.

43 doesn’t seem that significant. Just a day. I’ll most likely go out for a nice dinner, but that’s about it.

Birthdays seem weird to me now. I guess I’m at the age where I’m not so young as to be excited about growing up and not so old that I think about mortality. Somewhere in the middle.

No odd urges to buy a sports car, fortunately.

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Heading for bed soon.  Work has been rough this week already and I’m worn out.  It’s going to get somewhat worse before it gets better, unfortunately.   Just gotta hunker down and tough it out.

At least I’m pretty much over my cold.  So, just need some rest.