The Robber Barrons

At Beth and Ann's send off a few weeks ago (Labor day gasp!), we (Leslie, Erica, Ann, Ann's friend Christy? and I) were discussing atheism and charity, lamenting that a good-hearted atheist didn't have many options for donating money that wasn't directly linked to a religious organization. We, the good-hearted atheists, want to help, we do, but we don't want our charity or volunteer hours tied to a ideological system that works against many of the things we believe it. It is hard to decide when and how to disclose that you're an atheist to someone. Most people seem shocked when I tell them I am an atheist, inspecting me closer like they will find a tail or the mark of the beast. Note to crazies: I can't worship Satan (God's first fallen Angel) without believing in God.

We moved to the subject of new Atheist churches springing up in urban centers across the country, including one here in Denver. We want a sense of community and a place to turn in times of crisis. We want a place to channel our resources to build something bigger than ourselves. We may even want to attend church picnics or raffles and have a place to take our kids after school. We are moral, decent people who want to be around other moral, decent people, but we don't want that tied to religious doctrine. We do right because we should, not because we believe our reward is in heaven.

I'm reading an NYTimes article about the new golden age of philanthropy. Interesting line - Put them together with Andrew Carnegie, famous for his freethinking, and three of the four greatest American philanthropists have been atheists or agnostics. (The exception is John D. Rockefeller.)

Check that out. Go atheists.

It doesn't take a nucular scientist to pronounce foilage.

Apparently Webster's has caved and added the Palin/Bush pronunciation of nuclear to their website. I am shocked and appalled.

Do you ever think anything you don't say?

Seriously, do you?

Anyhow, in more pressing news, I answered a call today from a former employer (a former library employer). The call was from a guy who once turned me down for a technical position saying the job in question wasn't entry level, implying that my technical skill set was.

Predictably, he asked to be transferred to technical support, since girls don't do tech support. He also needed to be handheld through an extremely easy upgrade that someone with an advanced skill set should have been able to handle. It took all my restraint not to mention, "I applied for a job with your department when I clerked at that place, but it worked out since I'm now the manager of a support department in a way better work environment." Or at the very least, "I applied for this job while on shift at the library."

warms my heart

a big wednesday shoutout to the lady in the nissan who rolled down her window and yelled across the three-way stop about how much she loved my sign (women for obama). she followed that up with a hearty thumbs-up.

it started my day off right.

You are my sunshine

So, last Thursday I replaced my video card to get rid of an annoying, intermittent hum that I was sure was coming from the ailing fan on my video card. I snapped in the new video card and booted up my machine. The hum was back. Crap. That meant it was my CPU fan or my power supply. Given the onboard foolishness of dell, I knew I was in for a long evening. It turned out to go quickly, because as I was messing around with the CPU, I snapped the fan off the processor and bent about ¼ of the tiny hair like pins on the bottom of the processor.

Thursday and Friday night were spent hunched over the box, screwdriver in hand as I tore machines apart, looking to harvest parts from our other retired machines, hoping for a Frankenstein’s monster type solution to my dilemma. I swapped in some new parts but nothing was coming together. Damn it. I had to replace at least my motherboard and my processor. After interviewing a few of the unemployed cases we had in the house, I realized the case would have to be new too. And the RAM. Ugh, the whole proposition set me back about $350 that I didn’t have, but I need a computer for school and the like (WoW).

Saturday was spent in various waiting rooms. The Kaiser visit was too harrowing to recount; I’ve had blood drawn 8 times since May, so you think I would be used to it. The visit to Stevenson Toyota was unplanned, occurring after I heard this clicking noise when I drove. The clicking noise came from the 2 two-inch nails in my tire. I was sinking into the despair that comes when your world feels like it is falling down around you. All the little things go wrong, and you start to prepare yourself for the big things to go wrong.

On Monday, they did. When I went to reinstall Windows on my new hard drive, I noticed that my old hard drive, which had 4 partitions, now only had two and that they were raw partitions. That meant that all of my writing, all my college assignments, my pictures, my MP3s, everything was gone. At that point, I wept.

The bright spot comes from R-Studio data recovery software. I’m not one for gushing editorials, but this software totally saved my ass. For $50, it found and restored all of the above files, complete and intact. I was able to restore my outlook and all my email. I wept again, this time with joy! Thank you, R-Studio. I heart you and would totally take you to the prom. You restored my files and my spirits.

Confession of perversion

I love seeing the pictures of men crying into their hands when the DOW drops. For the last few days CNN has been a wealth of these photos. I don't know why it makes me feel better, but it does.

GRWWWEAAAAAAAAAAAAR

so annoyed.

an industrial area zoned for blight

People that I read and respect are distraught and upset over the death of David Foster Wallace. I had the decency to look puzzled while reading the heartfelt memorials, comfortable with my ignorance. I hate being the person that only takes an interest in people after they die. I don’t like reading about iTunes sales skyrocketing after someone croaks; posthumous success depresses me. I have a weird concept of ownership with the artists I enjoy (the kind that makes you resent any success they have because you have to share them more). This ownership can also make you childish with other fans, comparing the dates your first encountered said artist, gloating over the ones you beat, deferring to the ones you don’t, wishing for an experience similar to hearing the Beatles rehearse for the first time or proofreading the Bible for a friend. And if that artist should die, your grief is real and you resent the people picking up the artist’s work for the first time: soulless, grave-robbing wretches.

And so, when I came across Mark Morford’s eulogy with links to Wallace’s work, I didn’t want to seem overeager to read his work, like I am encroaching on the ownership of true believers , but one of his famous essays is Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise. Having just returned from an Alaska cruise, I couldn’t resist. It is delightful. Now I will probably go buy Infinite Jest like the soulless, grave-robbing wretch that I am.

*edit*
This passage describes an identical conundrum Villi and I had about overtipping our awesome cabin steward, Francisco, and undertipping our stupid, useless headwaiter Paul (who could never remember if he visited our table already).

Tibor's ambition is someday to return to his native Budapest for good and with his Nadir savings open a sort of newspaper-and-beret type sidewalk cafe that specializes in something called cherry soup. With this in mind, two days from now in Fort Lauderdale I'm going to tip the Tibster way more than the suggested $3 U.S. per diem, balancing out my total expenses by radically undertipping both our liplessly sinister maitre d' and our sommelier, an unctuously creepy Ceylonese guy the whole table has christened the Velvet Vulture.

Unfortunately, Royal Caribbean has instituted pre-paid gratuity packages that pre-define how much each person gets. The night we put our envelopes together, we, regrettably, had no extra cash for Francisco. I'm sorry, Francisco.

continued

1 Picture = 1,000 words = I don't have to write anymore

Me making fun of the chinese gymnasts and their obscene amount of hair clips


The Val Kilmer Mobile made for me by my team at work while I was on vacation (seriously, not kidding)





An interesting sunset

three sets of keys, none of them work

Vacation was…stressful. My recommendation for anyone considering going to Alaska is to just go to Alaska. Skip the cruise. Really, should you pay for the privilege of motion sickness, bad food, a twin bed, and doddering old people with entitlement issues? I don’t think so. That said, actual Alaska was amazing. We saw the Mendenhall Glacier and got in about a 1-mile hike in Tongass National Rainforest. That was beautiful. It reminded me of Stephen Colbert’s White House Press Correspondents Dinner performance (the infamous one), where he tells a glacier joke and follows it with, “Enjoy that metaphor, by the way, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is.”

Now, I am home and have no interest in doing anything. At all. I just want to stay in bed all day and read, and when the reading gets too taxing, I will sleep, and if I don’t feel like sleeping, I will just stare at the ceiling and empty my head of any thoughts.

I’m sorry. Soon I will get my pep back, and I will write lots of interesting things. Instead, I invite you to view some pictures from my vacation.

The lobby art at the Hotel Max in Seattle


Sea, clouds, then mountains


The Glacier


My cool mining train picture


A different glacier, from the boat