For quite some time, now, in a bid for greater health and better weight control, I have lessened my going out to eat. However, last night, I just felt like I had to go out for some Mexican food, so went to a Mexican restaurant in North Hollywood on my way home from work.
For some reason, even though the restaurant was far from crowded, I was seated way back in a seldom-used room. Did I look like I might cause a scene? Even the guy who sat me back there apologized for "the long walk"; but I wondered why he sat me there, then. But in my experience, single diners get treated weirdly in restaurants sometimes, quite a lot of times, actually, as if restaurants resent the fact that a diner alone is using up a whole table or booth for four. Maybe they knew that the restaurant was going to get very crowded very soon and so they were starting to fill themselves up from the back? Oh well, I don't know, and that back room is fine and the food is the same, so what's the difference.
When I was first sat down there, there was just one other booth occupied, with two fat young men who looked like they were settled in for the long haul, and I don't mean for eating, exactly, but more for their "writing by committee" "story conference". This is a very common scene in L.A., by the way, although I haven't seen it in a while since I haven't gone out to eat in a while, but it consists of two or more young men working together in a restaurant "creating a script" bit by bit. Instead of sitting down alone in front of a word processor at home or in an office, which is how I would do it, these kinds of people hash it all out in a conversation, deciding together plot points and dialogue.
"I think he should try to pick up a hot chick in a singles bar," said one of the guys.
"A bar in the Valley?" questioned the other guy.
"No, I think maybe in a more trendy location," said the first guy.
"Oh," said the second guy, "he will have to dress better, then."
"Yes," said the first guy, "he should dress better. Well, we want him to pick up a really hot chick, I think his character would want that."
And so then they discuss it a while further, determining what kind of hot chick the guy should go after, blond, dark-haired, tall, short, what kind of dress she would be wearing, etc. They droned on and on as the waiter kept bringing them more chips.
Then the first guy said, "After he talks up the hot chick for a while and he thinks he is making some headway with her, she gets up and asks the guy sitting behind him for his phone number."
"Very sad," said his companion.
Very sad way to write a script, I thought...tedious beyond belief and, again, NOT the method I think I would use. I wondered if those guys ever managed to sell a script, or any of the legions of guys I have witnessed following that same pattern. Who knows, maybe it actually does work. But I hope not. That, to me, would be discouraging, that this kind of boring, tedious method of pushing a heavy stone uphill actually results in a movie.
Then there was a commotion as a group of people were bought into the back room. This group consisted of two women, a little boy about seven years old, a little girl about three years old, and an elderly couple. As they were coming in, the boy was saying, "I want to sit next to Mama Bear," but the little girl was also saying, "I want to sit next to Mama Bear," while the two women were constantly going "Shhhh", "Shhhhh" to the two kids. I thought these two kids were very cute and endearing, and "Mama Bear" was obviously the elderly woman, whom I took to be their grandmother, perhaps visiting them from afar. I thought it was very endearing how the two kids wanted to sit next to their visiting grandmother. As it was, kids being kids, they couldn't manage to sit still for very long, so they kept changing places all over the place and each one managed to have a portion of the meal where they were sitting with "Mama Bear". That's how it sounded to me, although it could have really been "Mama Behr", or "Mama Bayer", and they had mutated into an endearing name that stuck.
I'm actually kind of fascinated by what names children call their grandparents.
For a while, I couldn't figure out what the deal was with the two women. Were they friends, were they sisters, was one woman the mother of the boy and the other woman the mother of the girl, or was one woman the mother of both of them? The kids were quite talkative (which constantly elicited "Shhhs" from both women throughout the whole meal), and I heard the word "Mama," quite a bit spoken by both kids. "Mama, I want to eat a tortilla," "Mama, can I sit next to Mama Bear?", "Mama, do they have French fries here?" And each woman seemed to mother each child equally.
I am very amused watching and listening to children in restaurants or other public places, and here I had a box seat on the proceedings where I couldn't help but see and hear all that was going on, even to the extent that when one of the kids would say something very cute or funny, I couldn't help but give out a little appreciative chuckle. I didn't want to invade this group's privacy (which I think a single diner is wont to do by default, as they aren't there with any other person to hold their attention), but I couldn't really help it.
The two women were perhaps overly-aware that they were in a public place, and they seemed to feel that their kids might be a bother to the other diners, which was why they were contantly holding them down with "Shhhs". I wanted somehow to let them know they needn't have worried on my account (I doubt if the two guys hashing out the script were the least bit aware of them), that in fact I rather liked their kids and thought that the family dynamic was appealing.
The little boy was well aware of the fact that he was in a Mexican restaurant, and considered it appropriate that he demonstrate the words that he knew in Spanish that went beyond mere food names. So he said he knew cabeza (head) ("Shhh!"), nariz (nose) ("Shhh!"), ojos (eyes) ("Shhh!"), pelo (hair) (Shhh!"), and several others (I think these are right!). I thought it was marvelous that he enjoyed so much his "learning", and I wished that the group would have been able to enjoy this boy without having to feel like they had to shut him up all the time.
Then the little girl said she had to go to the bathroom, so one of the women took her. When they came back, the little girl announced in quite a loud voice to the other woman, "Mommy! I went POTTY!", and "Mommy" looked absolutely mortified, said "Shhhhhh!" once again, and then looked straight at me and said, "I am so SORRY!", as if what the girl had said was just so offensive and maybe my whole dinner had been ruined because of it.
I laughed and said, "You don't need to worry, they are so cute!" I think she was relieved to hear that and the two women quieted down on their shushing of the kids while I made a more conscious effort to look like I really wasn't paying all that much attention to them (which I knew was a losing battle). In a time where a lot of parents do not seem to discipline their kids at all, in this case I really wanted this group of people to enjoy their dining out experience without worring about what impact their kids were having, because I thought their kids were wonderful and must have been quite fun to be with, short of this unnecessary social worry. Sure, they were kids and I know full well that children aren't going to behave like adults, they squirm, they ask questions about everything, sometimes they get upset or offended by something and so they cry for a while, they want to get up from their seat, and sometimes they want to interact with other diners--all this is acceptable and understood behavior, I feel, and it is necessary for children to have experiences out in public, that helps them to grow and to learn, and other adults have a social responsibility to accept this and not interfere with it, even if it somehow invades or violate their idea of a "perfect" world. Children, all children, other people's children, should be a joy to others.
I was much amused by the boy's attempt to use Spanish as much as possible with the waiter. Every time the waiter brought them something, the boy would say, "Gracias!", to which the waiter would respond, "De nada." The first time the boy heard that, his eyes opened wide and he said to one of the women, "Mama, I KNOW that word, too! It means 'you're welcome'!" How could someone not enjoy that? And he was experiencing that learning has impact on the world and I was thankful the waiter played along with the boy (I ended up giving him a larger tip, although he wouldn't know why I did).
Finally, when my meal was finished and I had signed my credit card slip, I stopped at that table on my way out and said to the women, "Your kids are very, very cute, and SMART too...am I right?"
Both women looked at me with faces glowing with appreciation and when I said the kids were smart, they both nodded and said, "Oh yes, and thank you so much for noticing." Relief seemed to flood both of their beings, as if some terrible burden had been momentarily unlocked and released. Then as I turned to go, I said to them all, but most pointedly to the boy, "Adios!" The women both made an "Aww" sound and the boy looked at me with astonishment, as if maybe some tiny bit of magic had just occurred.
As I slid into my car in the parking lot and turned the ignition key, I finally had an "aha!" moment--those women were "two mommies" and both children were theirs, which was why they were both mothering them both equally. No wonder they were especially sensitive to public notice.
I was then thankful that what they got from me at that moment had been an even greater appreciation and acceptance than I had known I was expressing. I was also thankful that in general I have the courage, or assertiveness, to tell perfect strangers what it is about them that I see as appealing. I wish people did it more. Don't we all wish for this kind of recognition and appreciation?
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
An Example of Sustainable Architecture
Anyone who knows me pretty well knows that architecture is one of my interests, not as in being an architect, so much, but in appreciating their creations. Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, is one of my favorite people from history. Frank Lloyd Wright seemed to have, for me, a perfect balance in his love for nature, love for the creations of people, and love for spirit, and always sought a harmony in the interplay of those three elements. While his buildings blended beautifully into their settings and enhanced the landscape rather than blighting it, his structures also contained the latest and greatest in technology, often incorporating some technique, system, or creation of his own devising, and at the same time elevated the hopes, expanded the dreams, and amazed the appreciative senses of those who experienced what he built. The house, Falling Water, is a good example of that integration and most viewers of that house understand viscerally what a wondrous creation it is, but a strident environmentalist would be horrified by the fact that Wright's house was built, in, or on top of, or diverts, the natural course of the waterfall--as if anything that man touches is an abberation and only pure and untouched nature is correct, forgetting quite handily that man is as much a part of nature as the trees and all the elements are, and mankind is going to continue to express itself to the fullest extent of its nature.
And man's nature is to use tools, to build, to invent, and to continue technological progress.
This doesn't mean that such building and continuing with technological progress can't involve the design and utilization of systems of sustainability. I am quite sure that if Wright were building today, he would be designing energy efficient structures that made full use of natural forces and the properties of the elements in ingenious, cost-saving ways and with a minimum of waste. He might also see to it that his structures in some way generated their own energy through an optimum use of solar, wind, or water power, and he might have even seen a way to incorporate something like a home nuclear power plant (a system of energy generation that is cleaner and cheaper than any other technological method we have today, and people wouldn't have any more of a reason to be afraid of this than J.P. Morgan was when he agreed to work with Thomas Edison to have one of the very first electrified houses). Wright lived and worked during one of the most optimistic and exciting times in our country's history, the turning from the 19th century into the inventing and technological 20th century. That our own new century (and new millennium) of the 21st century has replaced that optimism and excitement with an all-pervasive fear of technology and industrialism is not so much a reflection of the times as it is a reflection of people no longer thinking and understanding for themselves. But that certainly isn't everybody.
I fortuitously learned today of a pretty fascinating house that was designed for sustainability, efficiency, and cost-savings. This house has geothermal heat pumps that circulate water through pipes buried deep in the ground where the temperature naturally stays an even 67 degrees. This circulating water heats the house in winter and cools it in the summer, using only a fraction of the energy that traditional heating and cooling systems use. Also, rainwater is collected from channels in the roof that, along with all the wastewater from sinks, showers, and toilets, goes into purifying tanks underground and is saved in a 25,000 gallon cistern for use in irrigating the landscaping that surrounds the house. The landscaping of the property makes use of plants that are native to the local ecosystem. The walls of the house provide thermal mass for passive winter heating and insulation from the summer heat. These walls are made of a waste product or a discard of a stone that is quarried locally, a limestone that is a foot to a foot and a half thick and has a green color at the top and bottom, but is cream-colored in the middle. Most people want the cream-colored center, so the green portions of the stone are cut off and discarded; it is this throw-away green stone that clads this house, and apparanty it is very beautiful.
I mentioned in my previous post that Nobel-prize-winning environmentalist, Al Gore, consumes in his house twenty times the energy compared to the national average, whereas the house that I described uses only a quarter of the energy. Whose house do you think that is, that Gore maybe ought to emulate? The President of the Sierra Club, perhaps?
Well, no. That's the house of George W. Bush, in Crawford, Texas.
And man's nature is to use tools, to build, to invent, and to continue technological progress.
This doesn't mean that such building and continuing with technological progress can't involve the design and utilization of systems of sustainability. I am quite sure that if Wright were building today, he would be designing energy efficient structures that made full use of natural forces and the properties of the elements in ingenious, cost-saving ways and with a minimum of waste. He might also see to it that his structures in some way generated their own energy through an optimum use of solar, wind, or water power, and he might have even seen a way to incorporate something like a home nuclear power plant (a system of energy generation that is cleaner and cheaper than any other technological method we have today, and people wouldn't have any more of a reason to be afraid of this than J.P. Morgan was when he agreed to work with Thomas Edison to have one of the very first electrified houses). Wright lived and worked during one of the most optimistic and exciting times in our country's history, the turning from the 19th century into the inventing and technological 20th century. That our own new century (and new millennium) of the 21st century has replaced that optimism and excitement with an all-pervasive fear of technology and industrialism is not so much a reflection of the times as it is a reflection of people no longer thinking and understanding for themselves. But that certainly isn't everybody.
I fortuitously learned today of a pretty fascinating house that was designed for sustainability, efficiency, and cost-savings. This house has geothermal heat pumps that circulate water through pipes buried deep in the ground where the temperature naturally stays an even 67 degrees. This circulating water heats the house in winter and cools it in the summer, using only a fraction of the energy that traditional heating and cooling systems use. Also, rainwater is collected from channels in the roof that, along with all the wastewater from sinks, showers, and toilets, goes into purifying tanks underground and is saved in a 25,000 gallon cistern for use in irrigating the landscaping that surrounds the house. The landscaping of the property makes use of plants that are native to the local ecosystem. The walls of the house provide thermal mass for passive winter heating and insulation from the summer heat. These walls are made of a waste product or a discard of a stone that is quarried locally, a limestone that is a foot to a foot and a half thick and has a green color at the top and bottom, but is cream-colored in the middle. Most people want the cream-colored center, so the green portions of the stone are cut off and discarded; it is this throw-away green stone that clads this house, and apparanty it is very beautiful.
I mentioned in my previous post that Nobel-prize-winning environmentalist, Al Gore, consumes in his house twenty times the energy compared to the national average, whereas the house that I described uses only a quarter of the energy. Whose house do you think that is, that Gore maybe ought to emulate? The President of the Sierra Club, perhaps?
Well, no. That's the house of George W. Bush, in Crawford, Texas.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
The First Premier of the United Socialist Nations of Earth
There is so much more that I could say on this particular subject, but I am "preparing to get ready" to go out to a concert tonight, so I don't have much time at all. Since I have my new Apple iMac (written about previously), I have simply kept my Internet home page on the Apple page, which is how Apple has their browser, Safari, set up. I could easily change it to something else, but I rather like the Apple page, so, so far, it stays.
However, the current page made me send them an e-mail of complaint. On just one news day, FOUR out of their five news stories were about Gore's winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Isn't that a little bit overkill? Going beyond gloating and into cramming it down their readers' throats.
I know that, unfortunately, the Bloated Drunken Frankenstein is on their Board of Directors, as he is on other boards, as well, such as Occidental Petroleum, deceased Soviet-operative Armand Hammer's company. Communist Armand Hammer (who hoped that America would lose the Cold War, and whom President Reagan couldn't stand) was a great financial supporter of Gore's political career. Gore, who owns something like half a million shares of Occidental Petroleum stock, was in support of their drilling for oil in the Colombian rainforest, destroying the habitat and displacing the native indians who have long lived there. Tennesseeans know him as a slum lord (unless I am mistaken, Gore did not even win in his own home state when he ran for President). The rest of us know him as one whose 88-acre estate generates up to twenty times the amount of carbon emissions as the average American (for whatever that may actually matter).
And before somebody says that Gore negates his carbon emissions by "buying carbon emission offsets" (whatever exactly that means), what he really does is invest in a company that he owns part of, so what he is really doing is putting money back into his own pocket and saying "My, what good boy am I!"
And yet the Scandinavians saw fit to award him the Nobel Peace Prize, although whatever seriously divisive politics (and a "science" of lies, manipulations, and fear-mongering) has to do with "peace" I am not sure. Of course, this same body also awarded Henry Kissinger the Peace Prize (and terrorist Yassar Arafat!), and I will never forget the spitting damnation of Kissinger I heard uttered one evening from Geraldine Cox, a woman who had come to a screening in Los Angeles of a documentary about her to raise donations for a large orphanage that she runs in Cambodia. This orphanage houses children who have lost their fathers who have been killed in various wars and also by trying to support their family by farming. Even today, 30 years after the Viet Nam war, Cambodian men are being killed by previously-unexploded Kissinger-ordered American bombs that still pepper their fields. The men get killed and their wives, finding no other way to support themselves, go into prostitution. They will sell their children into prostitution, too, unless this orphanage can take them. According to Geraldine Cox (who really does deserve a prize) who founded the orphanage, runs it, and in each Cambodian regime change (from one dictator to another), BEGS for its continued existence, Kissinger was one of the most evil of the 20th century warriors. I wonder what prevented the Nobel Peace Prize from having been awarded to Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, Lenin, Stalin, or Hitler? Surely one or the other of them talked about "peace" at one time or another, didn't they? Or were they all up for the ECONOMICS Nobel Prize, instead, as the prize-awarding committee seems to run toward favoring some kind of socialism.
Some misguided people have thought that now that Gore has received this notoriety, he now just might be a viable candidate for president. But other Gore supporters think not, saying that now that he has been declared a prophet (oh Lord, please help us all when there are people so dumbed-down that they think like that), he's not interested in the presidency, but something "more".
I think he wants something "more" all right; what he's got HIS sights set on is being made the First Premier of the United Socialist Nations of Earth (what else do people think the whole "global warming solution" protocols are all about?). Whether in his dreams it will actually be an industrial global nation, or more savage/stone age, I am not quite sure. Maybe it would be sort of like the world shown in the movie, Soylent Green, except still somewhat environmentally intact, with certain elites living in splendor in walled enclaves with privileged slaves working for them (envying their masters for such things as air conditioning, hot water, and strawberry jam), all the rest living beyond the enclave walls in vicious squalor and periodically being harvested for food.
I hope to be successful in seeding the "blogosphere" with this concept of Gore wanting to become the First Premier of the United Socialist Nations of Earth. I think in one phrase, it makes a perfect argument. If you hear it from somebody else, please remember who said it first!
However, the current page made me send them an e-mail of complaint. On just one news day, FOUR out of their five news stories were about Gore's winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Isn't that a little bit overkill? Going beyond gloating and into cramming it down their readers' throats.
I know that, unfortunately, the Bloated Drunken Frankenstein is on their Board of Directors, as he is on other boards, as well, such as Occidental Petroleum, deceased Soviet-operative Armand Hammer's company. Communist Armand Hammer (who hoped that America would lose the Cold War, and whom President Reagan couldn't stand) was a great financial supporter of Gore's political career. Gore, who owns something like half a million shares of Occidental Petroleum stock, was in support of their drilling for oil in the Colombian rainforest, destroying the habitat and displacing the native indians who have long lived there. Tennesseeans know him as a slum lord (unless I am mistaken, Gore did not even win in his own home state when he ran for President). The rest of us know him as one whose 88-acre estate generates up to twenty times the amount of carbon emissions as the average American (for whatever that may actually matter).
And before somebody says that Gore negates his carbon emissions by "buying carbon emission offsets" (whatever exactly that means), what he really does is invest in a company that he owns part of, so what he is really doing is putting money back into his own pocket and saying "My, what good boy am I!"
And yet the Scandinavians saw fit to award him the Nobel Peace Prize, although whatever seriously divisive politics (and a "science" of lies, manipulations, and fear-mongering) has to do with "peace" I am not sure. Of course, this same body also awarded Henry Kissinger the Peace Prize (and terrorist Yassar Arafat!), and I will never forget the spitting damnation of Kissinger I heard uttered one evening from Geraldine Cox, a woman who had come to a screening in Los Angeles of a documentary about her to raise donations for a large orphanage that she runs in Cambodia. This orphanage houses children who have lost their fathers who have been killed in various wars and also by trying to support their family by farming. Even today, 30 years after the Viet Nam war, Cambodian men are being killed by previously-unexploded Kissinger-ordered American bombs that still pepper their fields. The men get killed and their wives, finding no other way to support themselves, go into prostitution. They will sell their children into prostitution, too, unless this orphanage can take them. According to Geraldine Cox (who really does deserve a prize) who founded the orphanage, runs it, and in each Cambodian regime change (from one dictator to another), BEGS for its continued existence, Kissinger was one of the most evil of the 20th century warriors. I wonder what prevented the Nobel Peace Prize from having been awarded to Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, Lenin, Stalin, or Hitler? Surely one or the other of them talked about "peace" at one time or another, didn't they? Or were they all up for the ECONOMICS Nobel Prize, instead, as the prize-awarding committee seems to run toward favoring some kind of socialism.
Some misguided people have thought that now that Gore has received this notoriety, he now just might be a viable candidate for president. But other Gore supporters think not, saying that now that he has been declared a prophet (oh Lord, please help us all when there are people so dumbed-down that they think like that), he's not interested in the presidency, but something "more".
I think he wants something "more" all right; what he's got HIS sights set on is being made the First Premier of the United Socialist Nations of Earth (what else do people think the whole "global warming solution" protocols are all about?). Whether in his dreams it will actually be an industrial global nation, or more savage/stone age, I am not quite sure. Maybe it would be sort of like the world shown in the movie, Soylent Green, except still somewhat environmentally intact, with certain elites living in splendor in walled enclaves with privileged slaves working for them (envying their masters for such things as air conditioning, hot water, and strawberry jam), all the rest living beyond the enclave walls in vicious squalor and periodically being harvested for food.
I hope to be successful in seeding the "blogosphere" with this concept of Gore wanting to become the First Premier of the United Socialist Nations of Earth. I think in one phrase, it makes a perfect argument. If you hear it from somebody else, please remember who said it first!
Sunday, October 7, 2007
I Thought I Would Never Buy A Ferrari
I always thought I never would buy a Ferrari. I guess that’s an obvious no-brainer, as currently I doubt I could even afford to get one tuned up, let alone actually buy one.
But what I always meant by that was that even I if could afford one, I thought I wouldn’t get one. There would be just too many other places to spend all that money, such as on a boat or an airplane (or at least entry-level versions of each). I would prefer to open up other avenues of transportation beyond just the asphalt. Besides, where and how in the United States could a person actually take advantage of what a Ferrari has to offer? Surely never in any insanely crowded urban area like Los Angeles, where I’ve always said the only solution for those mean streets is to take to the sky like in a Back to the Future DeLorean.
It would be an improvement, and maybe worth it, if a couple of thoroughfares such as Los Angeles to Las Vegas, or anywhere across Nevada, or Montana, opened themselves up to no speed limits. I know that it used to be that way in a couple of states prior to the mid-70s gasoline crisis which saddled us with the punitive 55 mph speed limit everywhere, a situation which thankfully finally was relaxed again, but still not all the way to “autobahn” status.
And I’ll just bet that with whatever “crisis” we are supposed to have, whether it be “peak oil” or “global warming” or some other anti-technology scare that there will be politicians activating for hobbling speed limits once again. You know, the concept is that faster speeds use up more gasoline, so if you want to conserve fuel you have to lower speed limits, although I don’t get that. I know that with my own car, when I am driving on I-5 from Los Angeles to San Francisco, between the bottom of the Grapevine all the way up to the Tracy turn-off on which 4-hour stretch one can drive 70 mph, when I set my cruise control to 70, I get 30 miles to the gallon. At a slower speed, such as 65, I get more like 20 or 25 miles to the gallon. So it seems to me that a slower speed not only takes me longer to get to my destination, it also uses up more gasoline to go that same distance. Everyone knows that when studying a car’s mileage figures, “city” is a lower number than “highway”. So is the solution to impose “city” type speed limits onto the highway in order to save fuel? I’d say leave us the H alone (and those people who want to be green can voluntarily drive slower if they want, and if they believe that would make a difference—yet you know they won’t).
I have driven at least one fast sports car on Southern California highways. When I was the executor and in pro per lawyer for my uncle’s estate, I had possession of his (the estate’s) brick-red Porsche 911 Cabriolet Turbo (of which admittedly, the price of a Ferrari would buy three or four). It was a beautifully-made, tight, powerful car which earned tons of admiring stares and comments, and yet it was a nightmare to drive in what was usually bumper-to-bumper highway traffic. Only on very rare stretches between Orange County and San Diego was I ever able to experience even a piece of its awesome “spine g-forced to the back of the seat” acceleration. The rest of the time, constantly moving up and down those gears and working the clutch and the brake pedals was like working out on a Nautilus machine. Frankly, after a couple of those trips, I preferred to use the car I had then, a Dodge convertible with automatic transmission, where all I needed to do was sit back and relax. It was bad enough for the Porsche that felt constantly muzzled; what must it be like for a Ferrari? I can forgive those occasional arrogant guys I see coming down out of one of the L.A.-area canyons suddenly gunning their engine and screamingly momentarily taking advantage of any opening in the stream of traffic; what seems like an irresponsible death leap to us plodding along must be a momentary escape from a potential anxiety attack for those guys.
So the Ferrari always seems like lot of money frustratingly spent, and for simply getting around, at least, the cheapest tin can on wheels is probably good enough and better for ones sanity. (For pride of ownership and ego, it’s a different story.)
But whereas the highway has speed limits, there are no imposed limits on the great frontiers of the ocean or the sky. You can freely go as fast as the technology of your boat or airplane will allow you to go. And if one wants to spend money, the sky’s the limit when it comes to airplanes, and the hole in the water into which boat money can be poured is depthless.
However, a couple of days ago as I was helping with the afternoon “kids being picked up after school” detail, a father in a shiny new black Ferrari convertible with the top down deep-throatedly purred in and happened to stop in the circle to wait for his child right next to where I was standing. Normally I only peripherally admire some of the cars that come in, of which there are quite a few admirable ones (top-level Mercedeses, stretch BMWs and Lexuses, Bentleys, even a Maseratti or two and an Aston-Martin), but this Ferrari could not be ignored. The sound of its engine pulled like a pace-maker on my heart. That black color made the normal red and yellow Ferraris I had seen look like child’s play; this one was serious business. And I could even smell the magnificence of the interior. I said to the Dad, “If your child doesn’t come soon, I’ll just have to ride home with you.” He understood what I meant, and responded, “It’s all good.” Yes, it certainly is!
At his request, I went to call his little girl from the crowd, because he said she wouldn’t be able to see his car, which was low and hidden by the line of monster SUVs in front of him. I found her easily and then helped to buckle her into her own little pink child seat sitting on top of the car’s brown leather. As they pulled away, I could see that the engine, which was in the rear, was not covered by a metal boot, but instead the covering was glass, showcasing what the car was really all about, that which powered it (all clean metal, with red-painted pipes). This astonished, amazed, and impressed me, so I had to tell everybody about it (and everybody’s response indicated that Ferraris, due to their price, regardless of design feature, simply were not on their radar).
Suddenly, I could absolutely see why a person would buy a car like this if they could. It tugged at you even while it was standing still and heaven help you if you ever took it for a test drive yet did not have the money for it—you’d helplessly put yourself into hock for life, I’m afraid.
Suddenly, an airplane or boat seemed to pale in comparison. After all, driving a Ferrari (again, if you have the money) is actually available, you merely hop in and go down the street. No special license, training, or knowledge, no heading out to a special location (airport or marina), no checking the weather, no pre-flight checklist, no unwrapping sails or blowing gasoline fumes out of the bilge. And what of the experience? I’ve flown airplanes (in beginning lessons) and mostly the experience felt like whatever was underneath me holding me up (air!) was likely to fall away (turbulence!) and there was the ever-present anxiety of “how will I find and recognize the airport when I need it to get down again?”, not to mention the stress of the landing itself (to the still untrained). Mostly, I imagined flying long distance (as a pilot) to be the exhaustion of constant attention to minute detail spread out over a field of elongated boredom.
Sailing, despite the thrill of the heel and the refreshment of the salt spray, is also a jarring chop chop chop as you plow through waves while half the time you have no control of the rudder that is up out of the water; the wind is shifting and always there is the ever-present thought that out here, you can drown!
Of course, my thoughts of flying and sailing are beginner’s thoughts, learner’s thoughts; for the experienced, these activities could be, should be glorious and less anxiety-inducing. One would probably not enjoy taking a Ferrari out on the highway on the second or third driving lesson. I don’t know if even a newly-licensed teenager would enjoy it—I sure wouldn’t have when I was a newly-licensed teenager. Wouldn’t that be much like jumping from a pony ride at a fair to racing a thoroughbred in a steeplechase?
But a financially successful person who can afford a Ferrari is probably not a newly licensed teenager (there may be exceptions, of course), so that easy availability to the quality and thrill puts having such a car in a separate realm from buying a boat or airplane. The brain doesn’t consider each of those in the same decision-making process, I wouldn’t think.
Which takes us back to me…maybe if I really could afford it, I would buy one after all. Probably pretty lucky that I can’t afford one. I mean, what would I have to do to keep it looking as nice as it should, especially with that window peeking into the engine compartment? Have that engine steam-cleaned once a week?
But please, just keep me out of the showroom…unless you hear that I have come into a surprisingly large financial windfall. Even then, it might be better to guide me back over to the marina or the airport first. Those skies and seas do await. Roads, I can drive over them in anything, even in what I have already.
But what I always meant by that was that even I if could afford one, I thought I wouldn’t get one. There would be just too many other places to spend all that money, such as on a boat or an airplane (or at least entry-level versions of each). I would prefer to open up other avenues of transportation beyond just the asphalt. Besides, where and how in the United States could a person actually take advantage of what a Ferrari has to offer? Surely never in any insanely crowded urban area like Los Angeles, where I’ve always said the only solution for those mean streets is to take to the sky like in a Back to the Future DeLorean.
It would be an improvement, and maybe worth it, if a couple of thoroughfares such as Los Angeles to Las Vegas, or anywhere across Nevada, or Montana, opened themselves up to no speed limits. I know that it used to be that way in a couple of states prior to the mid-70s gasoline crisis which saddled us with the punitive 55 mph speed limit everywhere, a situation which thankfully finally was relaxed again, but still not all the way to “autobahn” status.
And I’ll just bet that with whatever “crisis” we are supposed to have, whether it be “peak oil” or “global warming” or some other anti-technology scare that there will be politicians activating for hobbling speed limits once again. You know, the concept is that faster speeds use up more gasoline, so if you want to conserve fuel you have to lower speed limits, although I don’t get that. I know that with my own car, when I am driving on I-5 from Los Angeles to San Francisco, between the bottom of the Grapevine all the way up to the Tracy turn-off on which 4-hour stretch one can drive 70 mph, when I set my cruise control to 70, I get 30 miles to the gallon. At a slower speed, such as 65, I get more like 20 or 25 miles to the gallon. So it seems to me that a slower speed not only takes me longer to get to my destination, it also uses up more gasoline to go that same distance. Everyone knows that when studying a car’s mileage figures, “city” is a lower number than “highway”. So is the solution to impose “city” type speed limits onto the highway in order to save fuel? I’d say leave us the H alone (and those people who want to be green can voluntarily drive slower if they want, and if they believe that would make a difference—yet you know they won’t).
I have driven at least one fast sports car on Southern California highways. When I was the executor and in pro per lawyer for my uncle’s estate, I had possession of his (the estate’s) brick-red Porsche 911 Cabriolet Turbo (of which admittedly, the price of a Ferrari would buy three or four). It was a beautifully-made, tight, powerful car which earned tons of admiring stares and comments, and yet it was a nightmare to drive in what was usually bumper-to-bumper highway traffic. Only on very rare stretches between Orange County and San Diego was I ever able to experience even a piece of its awesome “spine g-forced to the back of the seat” acceleration. The rest of the time, constantly moving up and down those gears and working the clutch and the brake pedals was like working out on a Nautilus machine. Frankly, after a couple of those trips, I preferred to use the car I had then, a Dodge convertible with automatic transmission, where all I needed to do was sit back and relax. It was bad enough for the Porsche that felt constantly muzzled; what must it be like for a Ferrari? I can forgive those occasional arrogant guys I see coming down out of one of the L.A.-area canyons suddenly gunning their engine and screamingly momentarily taking advantage of any opening in the stream of traffic; what seems like an irresponsible death leap to us plodding along must be a momentary escape from a potential anxiety attack for those guys.
So the Ferrari always seems like lot of money frustratingly spent, and for simply getting around, at least, the cheapest tin can on wheels is probably good enough and better for ones sanity. (For pride of ownership and ego, it’s a different story.)
But whereas the highway has speed limits, there are no imposed limits on the great frontiers of the ocean or the sky. You can freely go as fast as the technology of your boat or airplane will allow you to go. And if one wants to spend money, the sky’s the limit when it comes to airplanes, and the hole in the water into which boat money can be poured is depthless.
However, a couple of days ago as I was helping with the afternoon “kids being picked up after school” detail, a father in a shiny new black Ferrari convertible with the top down deep-throatedly purred in and happened to stop in the circle to wait for his child right next to where I was standing. Normally I only peripherally admire some of the cars that come in, of which there are quite a few admirable ones (top-level Mercedeses, stretch BMWs and Lexuses, Bentleys, even a Maseratti or two and an Aston-Martin), but this Ferrari could not be ignored. The sound of its engine pulled like a pace-maker on my heart. That black color made the normal red and yellow Ferraris I had seen look like child’s play; this one was serious business. And I could even smell the magnificence of the interior. I said to the Dad, “If your child doesn’t come soon, I’ll just have to ride home with you.” He understood what I meant, and responded, “It’s all good.” Yes, it certainly is!
At his request, I went to call his little girl from the crowd, because he said she wouldn’t be able to see his car, which was low and hidden by the line of monster SUVs in front of him. I found her easily and then helped to buckle her into her own little pink child seat sitting on top of the car’s brown leather. As they pulled away, I could see that the engine, which was in the rear, was not covered by a metal boot, but instead the covering was glass, showcasing what the car was really all about, that which powered it (all clean metal, with red-painted pipes). This astonished, amazed, and impressed me, so I had to tell everybody about it (and everybody’s response indicated that Ferraris, due to their price, regardless of design feature, simply were not on their radar).
Suddenly, I could absolutely see why a person would buy a car like this if they could. It tugged at you even while it was standing still and heaven help you if you ever took it for a test drive yet did not have the money for it—you’d helplessly put yourself into hock for life, I’m afraid.
Suddenly, an airplane or boat seemed to pale in comparison. After all, driving a Ferrari (again, if you have the money) is actually available, you merely hop in and go down the street. No special license, training, or knowledge, no heading out to a special location (airport or marina), no checking the weather, no pre-flight checklist, no unwrapping sails or blowing gasoline fumes out of the bilge. And what of the experience? I’ve flown airplanes (in beginning lessons) and mostly the experience felt like whatever was underneath me holding me up (air!) was likely to fall away (turbulence!) and there was the ever-present anxiety of “how will I find and recognize the airport when I need it to get down again?”, not to mention the stress of the landing itself (to the still untrained). Mostly, I imagined flying long distance (as a pilot) to be the exhaustion of constant attention to minute detail spread out over a field of elongated boredom.
Sailing, despite the thrill of the heel and the refreshment of the salt spray, is also a jarring chop chop chop as you plow through waves while half the time you have no control of the rudder that is up out of the water; the wind is shifting and always there is the ever-present thought that out here, you can drown!
Of course, my thoughts of flying and sailing are beginner’s thoughts, learner’s thoughts; for the experienced, these activities could be, should be glorious and less anxiety-inducing. One would probably not enjoy taking a Ferrari out on the highway on the second or third driving lesson. I don’t know if even a newly-licensed teenager would enjoy it—I sure wouldn’t have when I was a newly-licensed teenager. Wouldn’t that be much like jumping from a pony ride at a fair to racing a thoroughbred in a steeplechase?
But a financially successful person who can afford a Ferrari is probably not a newly licensed teenager (there may be exceptions, of course), so that easy availability to the quality and thrill puts having such a car in a separate realm from buying a boat or airplane. The brain doesn’t consider each of those in the same decision-making process, I wouldn’t think.
Which takes us back to me…maybe if I really could afford it, I would buy one after all. Probably pretty lucky that I can’t afford one. I mean, what would I have to do to keep it looking as nice as it should, especially with that window peeking into the engine compartment? Have that engine steam-cleaned once a week?
But please, just keep me out of the showroom…unless you hear that I have come into a surprisingly large financial windfall. Even then, it might be better to guide me back over to the marina or the airport first. Those skies and seas do await. Roads, I can drive over them in anything, even in what I have already.
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Shiny Pretty Beautiful
Well, I went ahead and did it. Today I ordered the iMac with the 24" screen.
I got tired of sitting around this apartment in a puddle of sweat. It was too hot to even sit still and read, and I am reading a pretty fascinating book right now. But it was just too stifling; my fans were all blowing hot air. I can be thankful that all the customers of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, like me, had power, at least. The customers of Southern California Edison, which seems to be most of the areas surrounding the core of the city, weren't so lucky. Also, of all things, there were flash flood advisories for the San Gabriel Mountains. Flash floods? We're in a heat wave, where is the flooding going to come from?
But actually, not too far from here, they're supposed to be getting thunderstorms. Ordinarily, I truly love thunderstorms as I used to experience them regularly in North Carolina; in fact, I really miss them. But maybe because of some hurricane or other off the coast of somewhere, we've got wierd weather patterns here and thus, despite temperatures in the San Fernando Valley as high as 118 degrees (in Hollywood, it's a more tolerable 105!), most of what is making everybody so uncomfortable right now is the humidity. Hey, this isn't Houston, but we're getting Houston-like weather.
I'd have gone for a ride in the mountains to experience the thunderstorms, except the weather service was issuing serious warnings about getting away from there. Never heard that before, but apparently there was a lot of danger from lightening.
So I went shopping, instead.
I wanted to go to an Apple Store just to look at the iMacs and buy an iPod Universal Dock. I want to somehow build the Universal Dock into a new Kenwood iPod-integrating car stereo system I recently bought. Not too long ago, I bought what ended up being a piece of junk, a Phase Linear 1 1/2 DIN cassette/CD receiver which I needed to replace my broken Cadillac factory cassette receiver. I was very happy with that Phase Linear unit for about an hour. It didn't take me too long to figure out that the cassette player in it was very Micky Mouse, and the CD player was all but useless in that the slightest movement on the road caused it to skip and bounce around unsatisfactorily. However, something good that it did have was an auxiliary input, and thus I instantly moved out of the world of the CD in the car and into the world of the iPod.
With the iPod, I could listen to all the music I wanted to in the car, supposedly all or most of my entire music collection (I bought the 80 GB iPod), and didn't have to lug around boxes of CDs. (I don't really know how much of my collection it will hold because so far, nine months after I bought the iPod, I've managed to load onto it only a small fraction of its capacity.) It was a pretty wonderful music solution for the car for a while, but then the rest of the Phase Linear unit began to bite the dust. First its brilliant jitter-bug Las-Vegas-style lights information panel (not very "Cadillac", but sometimes you have to make compromises) began to become unreliable until now it doesn't come on at all. Makes finding a radio station a hit or miss affair, among other control problems--the whole information panel just stays dark. But even worse than that is the cassette player stopped working altogether. At least half the time I am in my car, I listen to books on tape (which I get like I get Netflix) and now I don't have that ability anymore. For books, I prefer cassette tape to CDs, because you can keep track of your place easier and anyway, the Phase Linear CD player was a skip-a-holic, so I never use it.
Getting the damned thing fixed would cost more than it did to buy it and I don't think it is worth fixing anyway. I realized now that I didn't really need a CD player after all, but I DO need a good cassette player and some system that integrates the iPod into the receiver so that the iPod is charging while it is connected. Kenwood (among other brands) had a system that seemed to be what I wanted: a high quality cassette receiver with an iPod control box that connects through the CD changer connections. This allows the iPod to be charged when used and the CD changer controls on the head unit can (more or less) control the iPod.
Whereas before I had wanted to find a 1 1/2 DIN size unit to perfectly fit into the General Motors opening, this time I figured the standard and more commonly-found DIN size would serve me better, because now there would be room in there to have an iPod connection (instead of stuffing the iPod into the glove compartment). The idea I had would be to install the receiver on the bottom of the opening, and then using the 1/2 DIN space above to have something like a little door or drawer than be pulled open and a horizontal panel holding an iPod Unversal Dock can be neatly slid out. The iPod can be placed in the dock and the rest of the works are already connected to the stereo. The iPod will sit up there, plugged in, and not in the way of anything. Very "professional" and pretty nifty, if I can manage to make it the way I am imagining it.
At Outfest this past summer, I was telling some people in line about a short film I had seen at an Outfest program the night before. This film was about five minutes of one perfect-looking young man giving another perfect-looking young man a haircut. I told the guys in line that this was the kind of haircut that Bruce Weber said he insisted on giving the models for his photo shoots. I said that I didn't know what it was about this particular kind of haircut, but somehow it turned perfect-looking men into perfect-looking young gods.
The mention of Bruce Weber photos turned the conversation to Abercrombie & Fitch catalogues, the loss of which due to religious conservative "blue noses in Ohio" or some such place was really a disappointment to some of the guys. But one of them told us that instead of having nearly naked men (and women) in the A & F catalogues, they now have real life in-the-flesh shirtless greeter-studs at the A & F store in The Grove.
"Really," I said, "shirtless guys in the store at The Grove?"
"Well, I think in all of their stores," the man said. "It's at The Grove that I have seen them, but I am sure they have them at Century City, and at all the other stores, too."
We had a little discussion about that...the concept fascinates me. I wonder who they expect their audience to be for this? Are the actual CUSTOMERS of the clothes, whom I take to mostly be straight high school or college age jocks, drawn to the store because of this? Or is it all just going to be horny, drooling older gay men who really ought to not buy those clothes, which won't even properly fit, either their bodies or their lifestyle? The consensus seemed to be that it works on a "like draws like" kind of basis. "After all," the original man said, "their stores are decorated with huge blow-up photos of these studs, and the stores are full of guys buying these clothes, so it seems to work!" I guess it tells the customer "you belong here, see, all our signage shows people like you!"
I guess my problem was that I wanted to go see this, and yet I didn't know HOW I could. It's not as if these guys were go-go boys dancing on a pedestal in a gay dance club; there they KNOW they're going to be ogled (no matter what their own personal predeliction may be) and no one ought to feel bad ogling them. But at an A & F retail store, it somehow seemed like something you (I) could NOT do.
Anyway, back to my wanting to go to the Apple Store. I figured now would be a good time to not only check out the iMacs at the Apple Store, but also see what was going on at Abercrombie & Fitch.
A little on-line investigation revealed that I had a choice of three different malls that had both an Apple Store and an Abercrombie & Fitch: The Grove, Century City, and Westfield Sherman Oaks. In this heat, the choice was easy; Westfield Sherman Oaks was the only mall of the three that was indoors. I like that mall the best of these three, anyway, because of the parking. Westfield has convenient, easy to use parking, whereas I am too claustraphobic for Century City's tight, crowded, low-ceilinged two-layers-underground garage, and the parking garage at The Grove had been designed in Hell (it's the second most horrible parking garage in all of L.A., the first being the one at the Arclight).
Despite what must have been utterly massive air conditioning, the interior of the Westfield Mall wasn't really all that cool (not as cool as my car), but it was acceptable. And CROWDED! I had never seen so many people there and wondered if it were because of the three-day weekend, or were all those people there to escape the heat? I had never thought of a mall as place to go to keep cool, but it made sense.
The Apple Store was beautiful; a neat, well-ordered, luscious emporium of high-tech entertainment goodies to tempt even the techno-phobic. It was all aluminum, black, blue, white, and blond wood. They were heavily pushing the iPhone, a whole section in the front of the store given over to that, but gorgeous iMacs were on display against both long walls. At first I found it hard to determine which iMacs were the 20" and which were the 24". They weren't really labeled, and both sizes were astonishing large so that my eyes couldn't accurately measure them (my Dell desktop monitor is 15" and my iBook screen is 14"). One really could say that the 20" screen is plenty big, big enough to have two different projects up there side-by-side. However, even though I could see every justification for getting THAT size and saving about $300, a thread running through my mind knew without question that when all was said and done, I would end up getting the 24". It was almost like having a wide-screen TV and I suppose it was perfect for editing movies (its main purpose, I am sure).
All of the display machines were fully loaded with every kind of software, so I could check out the Internet, word processing pages and spreadsheets, photos, and movies, all of which looked absolutely sharp and beautiful. To write on such a screen, I would easily drag the blank sheet of paper into the middle of the screen, but I could have handy open on either side of the page Internet sources, a dictionary or thesaurus, encyclopedia, or any other thing. If one were putting together flyers or other printed pages, various illustrative photos, charts, graphs, or other materials could be kept handy and dragged over into place when the time came. This was more than a "screen" and more like a vertical assembly table. As long as one was going to do it, one may as well go whole hog.
Some on-line reviewers complained about the iMac glossy screens, wishing, instead, for a matte choice, siting glare as a potential problem. But there in the heavily-lighed store, I didn't suffer from glare and, in fact, hadn't even remembered to check for it until I had been there for quite some time. I did not see glare as a problem and anyway, the screen can easily be tipped back or forward a fraction to make whatever adjustment the user desires. There were no problems with any of it that I could see.
I bought the iPod Universal Dock (as for the iMac, I wanted to buy that pressure-free on-line through Apple's discounting Education Store) and talked to the guy who wrote up my sale, asking him how many machines I could load Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac onto (since I will have two computers). He explained that the Standard Edition ($399) only licensed installation onto ONE machine, but the Student and Teacher Edition that was the exact same software, came with three licenses and cost only $149 [with rebate, only $99.99 and no sales tax on Amazon.com]! I would qualify for that if, for example, I even WORKED at a school (you don't have to just be a teacher or student), which I do. That sounded like the best choice, although he suggested that I seriously check out iWork 08. (However, later investigation gave me the idea that iWork's word processing package, "Pages", probably cannot do merges with their spreadsheet package, "Numbers", and as that is a function I do constantly at work and would also need to do at home, iWork 08 lost out to Microsoft Office for Mac. But maybe someday I will want to have both.)
This clerk in the Apple Store, incidentally, in his tight lean-body-muscle-revealing t-shirt advertising "College Students, buy a Mac, get a free iPod Nano" looked like he couid have just as easily gotten a job over at Abercrombie & Fitch, which I next sought out.
However, over there, there were no shirtless greeters, nor were there any inside the store, either. Maybe they didn't think that was appropriate for an "indoor" mall. Somehow standing around in a bathing suit or cargo shorts and flip flops might make more sense outside in the sun of Century City or The Grove. I don't know; it's just as well, I wouldn't have known what to do with or say to one of them, anyway. I got my sort of "hunk hunger" taken care of by the hot guy at the Apple Store, with whom I could legitimately have a smart conversation about software.
I was quite impressed by the perfectly-proportioned, sexily-dressed, headless mannikens (all the better for your own imagining) that they had inside the A & F store, though. Not within four decades was that golf-tee-leanness my body type, yet boy do I love it. Does it count as "anorexic" when underneath that leanness they are all sinew and muscle? I've said before that we are all savants when it comes to instantly calculating body ratios, and for these A & F mannikens, as thin and strong as railroad spikes, no one would desire one more percentage point of added bulk. This isn't fashion and marketing sickness, this is a genetic ideal, I think; otherwise I wouldn't have the pattern as an appealing template in my ancient brain.
Going back home was an emergence out of temperateness into a glass-melting blast furnace. At least my car cooled down quickly enough, but I only had the stifling atmosphere of my apartment to go home to. Back at home, I lost myself inside the on-line Apple Education Store and figured out all my computer options. Once I had settled on everything (24" screen iMac, 2.8 gigahertz processor, 2 gigabytes of RAM, 500 gigabyte hard drive, DVD R/W super drive, and upgraded movie software, Final Cut HD Express, plus, of course, the OS X Tiger and i-Life 08 software that Apple bundles in there and keyboard and mouse and extra-cost three-year guarantee), it still took me over a half hour to finally let myself click on the button that finalized the sale. Anyone who knows me knows that I rarely fail to indulge myself, yet spending two and half thousand dollars is not something I do easily. But I get a free Nano! Not that I need it at all, since I already have a barely-full 80GB iPod. What do I need another 4GB for? But it was free (well, after getting a $199 rebate back half a year later) and very pretty--I chose to get a blue one and will have my name engraved on the back of it. Shiny, pretty, beautiful, well-made things--whether an iMac, an iPod, or an I-wish-I-had-a-body-like-that-A&F-manniken, I love them, and when I can, shall let myself have them!
I got tired of sitting around this apartment in a puddle of sweat. It was too hot to even sit still and read, and I am reading a pretty fascinating book right now. But it was just too stifling; my fans were all blowing hot air. I can be thankful that all the customers of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, like me, had power, at least. The customers of Southern California Edison, which seems to be most of the areas surrounding the core of the city, weren't so lucky. Also, of all things, there were flash flood advisories for the San Gabriel Mountains. Flash floods? We're in a heat wave, where is the flooding going to come from?
But actually, not too far from here, they're supposed to be getting thunderstorms. Ordinarily, I truly love thunderstorms as I used to experience them regularly in North Carolina; in fact, I really miss them. But maybe because of some hurricane or other off the coast of somewhere, we've got wierd weather patterns here and thus, despite temperatures in the San Fernando Valley as high as 118 degrees (in Hollywood, it's a more tolerable 105!), most of what is making everybody so uncomfortable right now is the humidity. Hey, this isn't Houston, but we're getting Houston-like weather.
I'd have gone for a ride in the mountains to experience the thunderstorms, except the weather service was issuing serious warnings about getting away from there. Never heard that before, but apparently there was a lot of danger from lightening.
So I went shopping, instead.
I wanted to go to an Apple Store just to look at the iMacs and buy an iPod Universal Dock. I want to somehow build the Universal Dock into a new Kenwood iPod-integrating car stereo system I recently bought. Not too long ago, I bought what ended up being a piece of junk, a Phase Linear 1 1/2 DIN cassette/CD receiver which I needed to replace my broken Cadillac factory cassette receiver. I was very happy with that Phase Linear unit for about an hour. It didn't take me too long to figure out that the cassette player in it was very Micky Mouse, and the CD player was all but useless in that the slightest movement on the road caused it to skip and bounce around unsatisfactorily. However, something good that it did have was an auxiliary input, and thus I instantly moved out of the world of the CD in the car and into the world of the iPod.
With the iPod, I could listen to all the music I wanted to in the car, supposedly all or most of my entire music collection (I bought the 80 GB iPod), and didn't have to lug around boxes of CDs. (I don't really know how much of my collection it will hold because so far, nine months after I bought the iPod, I've managed to load onto it only a small fraction of its capacity.) It was a pretty wonderful music solution for the car for a while, but then the rest of the Phase Linear unit began to bite the dust. First its brilliant jitter-bug Las-Vegas-style lights information panel (not very "Cadillac", but sometimes you have to make compromises) began to become unreliable until now it doesn't come on at all. Makes finding a radio station a hit or miss affair, among other control problems--the whole information panel just stays dark. But even worse than that is the cassette player stopped working altogether. At least half the time I am in my car, I listen to books on tape (which I get like I get Netflix) and now I don't have that ability anymore. For books, I prefer cassette tape to CDs, because you can keep track of your place easier and anyway, the Phase Linear CD player was a skip-a-holic, so I never use it.
Getting the damned thing fixed would cost more than it did to buy it and I don't think it is worth fixing anyway. I realized now that I didn't really need a CD player after all, but I DO need a good cassette player and some system that integrates the iPod into the receiver so that the iPod is charging while it is connected. Kenwood (among other brands) had a system that seemed to be what I wanted: a high quality cassette receiver with an iPod control box that connects through the CD changer connections. This allows the iPod to be charged when used and the CD changer controls on the head unit can (more or less) control the iPod.
Whereas before I had wanted to find a 1 1/2 DIN size unit to perfectly fit into the General Motors opening, this time I figured the standard and more commonly-found DIN size would serve me better, because now there would be room in there to have an iPod connection (instead of stuffing the iPod into the glove compartment). The idea I had would be to install the receiver on the bottom of the opening, and then using the 1/2 DIN space above to have something like a little door or drawer than be pulled open and a horizontal panel holding an iPod Unversal Dock can be neatly slid out. The iPod can be placed in the dock and the rest of the works are already connected to the stereo. The iPod will sit up there, plugged in, and not in the way of anything. Very "professional" and pretty nifty, if I can manage to make it the way I am imagining it.
At Outfest this past summer, I was telling some people in line about a short film I had seen at an Outfest program the night before. This film was about five minutes of one perfect-looking young man giving another perfect-looking young man a haircut. I told the guys in line that this was the kind of haircut that Bruce Weber said he insisted on giving the models for his photo shoots. I said that I didn't know what it was about this particular kind of haircut, but somehow it turned perfect-looking men into perfect-looking young gods.
The mention of Bruce Weber photos turned the conversation to Abercrombie & Fitch catalogues, the loss of which due to religious conservative "blue noses in Ohio" or some such place was really a disappointment to some of the guys. But one of them told us that instead of having nearly naked men (and women) in the A & F catalogues, they now have real life in-the-flesh shirtless greeter-studs at the A & F store in The Grove.
"Really," I said, "shirtless guys in the store at The Grove?"
"Well, I think in all of their stores," the man said. "It's at The Grove that I have seen them, but I am sure they have them at Century City, and at all the other stores, too."
We had a little discussion about that...the concept fascinates me. I wonder who they expect their audience to be for this? Are the actual CUSTOMERS of the clothes, whom I take to mostly be straight high school or college age jocks, drawn to the store because of this? Or is it all just going to be horny, drooling older gay men who really ought to not buy those clothes, which won't even properly fit, either their bodies or their lifestyle? The consensus seemed to be that it works on a "like draws like" kind of basis. "After all," the original man said, "their stores are decorated with huge blow-up photos of these studs, and the stores are full of guys buying these clothes, so it seems to work!" I guess it tells the customer "you belong here, see, all our signage shows people like you!"
I guess my problem was that I wanted to go see this, and yet I didn't know HOW I could. It's not as if these guys were go-go boys dancing on a pedestal in a gay dance club; there they KNOW they're going to be ogled (no matter what their own personal predeliction may be) and no one ought to feel bad ogling them. But at an A & F retail store, it somehow seemed like something you (I) could NOT do.
Anyway, back to my wanting to go to the Apple Store. I figured now would be a good time to not only check out the iMacs at the Apple Store, but also see what was going on at Abercrombie & Fitch.
A little on-line investigation revealed that I had a choice of three different malls that had both an Apple Store and an Abercrombie & Fitch: The Grove, Century City, and Westfield Sherman Oaks. In this heat, the choice was easy; Westfield Sherman Oaks was the only mall of the three that was indoors. I like that mall the best of these three, anyway, because of the parking. Westfield has convenient, easy to use parking, whereas I am too claustraphobic for Century City's tight, crowded, low-ceilinged two-layers-underground garage, and the parking garage at The Grove had been designed in Hell (it's the second most horrible parking garage in all of L.A., the first being the one at the Arclight).
Despite what must have been utterly massive air conditioning, the interior of the Westfield Mall wasn't really all that cool (not as cool as my car), but it was acceptable. And CROWDED! I had never seen so many people there and wondered if it were because of the three-day weekend, or were all those people there to escape the heat? I had never thought of a mall as place to go to keep cool, but it made sense.
The Apple Store was beautiful; a neat, well-ordered, luscious emporium of high-tech entertainment goodies to tempt even the techno-phobic. It was all aluminum, black, blue, white, and blond wood. They were heavily pushing the iPhone, a whole section in the front of the store given over to that, but gorgeous iMacs were on display against both long walls. At first I found it hard to determine which iMacs were the 20" and which were the 24". They weren't really labeled, and both sizes were astonishing large so that my eyes couldn't accurately measure them (my Dell desktop monitor is 15" and my iBook screen is 14"). One really could say that the 20" screen is plenty big, big enough to have two different projects up there side-by-side. However, even though I could see every justification for getting THAT size and saving about $300, a thread running through my mind knew without question that when all was said and done, I would end up getting the 24". It was almost like having a wide-screen TV and I suppose it was perfect for editing movies (its main purpose, I am sure).
All of the display machines were fully loaded with every kind of software, so I could check out the Internet, word processing pages and spreadsheets, photos, and movies, all of which looked absolutely sharp and beautiful. To write on such a screen, I would easily drag the blank sheet of paper into the middle of the screen, but I could have handy open on either side of the page Internet sources, a dictionary or thesaurus, encyclopedia, or any other thing. If one were putting together flyers or other printed pages, various illustrative photos, charts, graphs, or other materials could be kept handy and dragged over into place when the time came. This was more than a "screen" and more like a vertical assembly table. As long as one was going to do it, one may as well go whole hog.
Some on-line reviewers complained about the iMac glossy screens, wishing, instead, for a matte choice, siting glare as a potential problem. But there in the heavily-lighed store, I didn't suffer from glare and, in fact, hadn't even remembered to check for it until I had been there for quite some time. I did not see glare as a problem and anyway, the screen can easily be tipped back or forward a fraction to make whatever adjustment the user desires. There were no problems with any of it that I could see.
I bought the iPod Universal Dock (as for the iMac, I wanted to buy that pressure-free on-line through Apple's discounting Education Store) and talked to the guy who wrote up my sale, asking him how many machines I could load Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac onto (since I will have two computers). He explained that the Standard Edition ($399) only licensed installation onto ONE machine, but the Student and Teacher Edition that was the exact same software, came with three licenses and cost only $149 [with rebate, only $99.99 and no sales tax on Amazon.com]! I would qualify for that if, for example, I even WORKED at a school (you don't have to just be a teacher or student), which I do. That sounded like the best choice, although he suggested that I seriously check out iWork 08. (However, later investigation gave me the idea that iWork's word processing package, "Pages", probably cannot do merges with their spreadsheet package, "Numbers", and as that is a function I do constantly at work and would also need to do at home, iWork 08 lost out to Microsoft Office for Mac. But maybe someday I will want to have both.)
This clerk in the Apple Store, incidentally, in his tight lean-body-muscle-revealing t-shirt advertising "College Students, buy a Mac, get a free iPod Nano" looked like he couid have just as easily gotten a job over at Abercrombie & Fitch, which I next sought out.
However, over there, there were no shirtless greeters, nor were there any inside the store, either. Maybe they didn't think that was appropriate for an "indoor" mall. Somehow standing around in a bathing suit or cargo shorts and flip flops might make more sense outside in the sun of Century City or The Grove. I don't know; it's just as well, I wouldn't have known what to do with or say to one of them, anyway. I got my sort of "hunk hunger" taken care of by the hot guy at the Apple Store, with whom I could legitimately have a smart conversation about software.
I was quite impressed by the perfectly-proportioned, sexily-dressed, headless mannikens (all the better for your own imagining) that they had inside the A & F store, though. Not within four decades was that golf-tee-leanness my body type, yet boy do I love it. Does it count as "anorexic" when underneath that leanness they are all sinew and muscle? I've said before that we are all savants when it comes to instantly calculating body ratios, and for these A & F mannikens, as thin and strong as railroad spikes, no one would desire one more percentage point of added bulk. This isn't fashion and marketing sickness, this is a genetic ideal, I think; otherwise I wouldn't have the pattern as an appealing template in my ancient brain.
Going back home was an emergence out of temperateness into a glass-melting blast furnace. At least my car cooled down quickly enough, but I only had the stifling atmosphere of my apartment to go home to. Back at home, I lost myself inside the on-line Apple Education Store and figured out all my computer options. Once I had settled on everything (24" screen iMac, 2.8 gigahertz processor, 2 gigabytes of RAM, 500 gigabyte hard drive, DVD R/W super drive, and upgraded movie software, Final Cut HD Express, plus, of course, the OS X Tiger and i-Life 08 software that Apple bundles in there and keyboard and mouse and extra-cost three-year guarantee), it still took me over a half hour to finally let myself click on the button that finalized the sale. Anyone who knows me knows that I rarely fail to indulge myself, yet spending two and half thousand dollars is not something I do easily. But I get a free Nano! Not that I need it at all, since I already have a barely-full 80GB iPod. What do I need another 4GB for? But it was free (well, after getting a $199 rebate back half a year later) and very pretty--I chose to get a blue one and will have my name engraved on the back of it. Shiny, pretty, beautiful, well-made things--whether an iMac, an iPod, or an I-wish-I-had-a-body-like-that-A&F-manniken, I love them, and when I can, shall let myself have them!
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Heatwave
Labor Day: This is supposed to be the last hurrah of the summer, but I now find myself yearning for winter. Maybe I ought to rethink my belief that I like it hot. My dreams of paradise are always tropical, but then, tropical is always experienced neck deep in blue water or lying in a hammock holding a tropical drink in your hand. Not exactly real life, or all of real life.
I didn't really plan to go anywhere. I did do a way-too-late cursory Internet glance at various beachfront hotels to see if anything really grabbed me (San Simeon, Cambria, Ventura, Carlsbad, San Diego) but naturally everything was fully booked and beyond high-priced anyway. The truth is that I am globally-spoiled enough to not get too excited about the California coast or think it is worth a lot of trouble or expense. My beach dreams are Hawaii or the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean, or the Caribbean. Or Florida. I'd gladly pay $400 a night to be in Fiji, but $200 a night in Cambria seems too expensive.
But suddenly with this heat wave, I found myself yearning for cool mountains. Unfortunately, this weekend, there are none. Anywhere on a three-day weekend I could drive beyond Los Angeles would only take me to places that were going to be even HOTTER--various deserts or sweltering inland locations. Being right along the coast ended up being the coolest spot available, and even then, temperatures would still be on the cusp of 100 degrees.
At the school all week, it was over 100 degrees. My car's "outside temperature" gauge was probably exaggerating due to having been parked on an asphalt parking lot under the direct sun all day, but it said "111". My body agreed. This was the hottest I had ever been since I made the mistake of going to Las Vegas for July 4, 1976, the "bicentennial". In Las Vegas in early July, it was what I call "brain damage" temperature (what a dog is subjected to if you leave it in your car with the windows rolled up). Los Angeles at the end of August this year wasn't quite brain damage weather, but just one step down. "Pre-Alzheimer's weather," perhaps.
While I did accomplish all that I HAD to do (concerning start of the school year and new hire insurance deadlines), I really wasn't able to accomplish a whole lot more. We suffered continual power failures and brown-outs, so that most of the day we spent with our lights all off, our windows wide open, and various irritating non-stop "power's out" fire alarm tones beeping. The various air conditioning units kept blowing fuses until we had no fuses left. Also, anything that fed through a computer was non-functional, due to too-hot temperatures, power failures, or both. That included server-accessed computer files, e-mail, Internet, network printers, telephone voice mail, fax machines, and even some of the xerox machines that are also scanners and printers. I managed to do some filing and a little xeroxing, that was about it. Spreadsheets, memos, data updates, et cetera, forget it. I kept trying to do stuff on various computer systems that seemed to be working, but that was an illusion and ultimately I gave up on it, to try again next Tuesday.
Fortunately due to this heat we didn't have to dress up, at least. Ties for the men may as well have really been nooses, but we were saved from that. Still, I couldn't keep from sweating as if my office were a New Orleans sauna bath in August; I was a walking flash flood.
I have no idea how the teachers managed; I'm sure the kids were thinking this was the school's punishment for starting so soon. It not only WAS still summer, it was the hottest day of the year. By Friday afternoon, they gave up on trying the teach anything. The kids were let outside to run around through the sprinklers and play on the waterslides that were still left from the summer's camps. I thought they should have let everybody into the pool (I volunteered to be one of the lifeguards), but I guess liabilities blah blah blah prevented that. See, this is what happened with only P.E. teachers taking the lifeguard training last week. I'm the only extra they've got to call on at times such as this. I know they had hoped that several other teachers would have wanted to do it, too, but I suppose if you are going to let the whole school into the pool, you'd have to have about 20 lifeguards (instead of 7), so ultimately I guess it didn't matter. Too bad.
I felt like it was a bad time for computers all the way around, because not only did none of the school's computers work, but I finally got a call from the computer repair shop where I had taken my Dell desktop nearly a month ago (meanwhile, I have been using my reliable iBook laptop). They told me they had given up on my computer. I had tried myself, and failed, to install a new 200 GB hard drive and upgrade my operating system from Windows 98 to XP. But there was nothing I could do to get it to work (it could never see the new harddrive, or even see the old harddrive with the new one in there, even with the addition of a highly upgraded ATA166 controller card, and XP would not load) and now the shop had that same trouble. They thought that perhaps the motherboard was damaged and figured a computer this old (7 or 8 years) wasn't worth the time and expense to keep working on it. I agreed.
They felt bad at keeping my computer so long and never solving my problem and told me they wouldn't charge me anything. In turn, I felt bad about not paying them anything, but told them they could keep the new Seagate 200 GB harddrive and the brand-new Windows XP software that I had bought; I had no use for them, now. I knew by then that I was going to buy a new desktop with at least 500 GB on its internal harddrive and that stupid new Seagate had left a bad taste in my mouth, and my computer certainly would NOT be a Windows machine, so I had no use for the XP software. Ultimately, all of it was going to be taken to the dump, anyway (to be more accurate, to the "Hazardous Waste Site" at the dump). The guy at the shop said he was happy to have the harddrive and the XP software.
I'm pretty sure what I am going to buy will be an iMac, but I think I ought to look at one of them in person, first. Also, I am tempted to get one with a 24-inch screen, but that seems HUGE to me, perhaps too huge (even their other model, the 20-inch, seems huge), so I want to see one of them first. Frankly, I'm not quite sure why one would want such a huge screen (the very first computer I ever had, a rented KayPro, had something like a 5" screen!), but for editing movies I can see it and maybe for having various document windows open, it would be like having two monitors side by side. We will just have to see.
But today it's too hot to go to the Apple store, so I will save that excursion for later.
Meanwhile, the fans are blowing on high and I'm contemplating a cool-off dip in the pool. At least for this holiday I didn't plan to go to Mexico. I understand that striking Mexican teachers (and by this I mean citizens of MEXICO, striking along the border IN Mexico) had planned to block all the tourist road entrances into Mexico. That's a wierd one, Mexican citizens working like "Minutemen" to keep AMERICANS from crossing the border INTO Mexico. I don't see how a move like this will help their cause at all, and in this heat, this just might be what finally sparks a pent-up race war between Americans and Mexicans. I'm awfully glad to be keeping well clear of it. Anyway, Mexico never lured me for this holiday. But the Yukon, I wish I had thought of that one before.
I didn't really plan to go anywhere. I did do a way-too-late cursory Internet glance at various beachfront hotels to see if anything really grabbed me (San Simeon, Cambria, Ventura, Carlsbad, San Diego) but naturally everything was fully booked and beyond high-priced anyway. The truth is that I am globally-spoiled enough to not get too excited about the California coast or think it is worth a lot of trouble or expense. My beach dreams are Hawaii or the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean, or the Caribbean. Or Florida. I'd gladly pay $400 a night to be in Fiji, but $200 a night in Cambria seems too expensive.
But suddenly with this heat wave, I found myself yearning for cool mountains. Unfortunately, this weekend, there are none. Anywhere on a three-day weekend I could drive beyond Los Angeles would only take me to places that were going to be even HOTTER--various deserts or sweltering inland locations. Being right along the coast ended up being the coolest spot available, and even then, temperatures would still be on the cusp of 100 degrees.
At the school all week, it was over 100 degrees. My car's "outside temperature" gauge was probably exaggerating due to having been parked on an asphalt parking lot under the direct sun all day, but it said "111". My body agreed. This was the hottest I had ever been since I made the mistake of going to Las Vegas for July 4, 1976, the "bicentennial". In Las Vegas in early July, it was what I call "brain damage" temperature (what a dog is subjected to if you leave it in your car with the windows rolled up). Los Angeles at the end of August this year wasn't quite brain damage weather, but just one step down. "Pre-Alzheimer's weather," perhaps.
While I did accomplish all that I HAD to do (concerning start of the school year and new hire insurance deadlines), I really wasn't able to accomplish a whole lot more. We suffered continual power failures and brown-outs, so that most of the day we spent with our lights all off, our windows wide open, and various irritating non-stop "power's out" fire alarm tones beeping. The various air conditioning units kept blowing fuses until we had no fuses left. Also, anything that fed through a computer was non-functional, due to too-hot temperatures, power failures, or both. That included server-accessed computer files, e-mail, Internet, network printers, telephone voice mail, fax machines, and even some of the xerox machines that are also scanners and printers. I managed to do some filing and a little xeroxing, that was about it. Spreadsheets, memos, data updates, et cetera, forget it. I kept trying to do stuff on various computer systems that seemed to be working, but that was an illusion and ultimately I gave up on it, to try again next Tuesday.
Fortunately due to this heat we didn't have to dress up, at least. Ties for the men may as well have really been nooses, but we were saved from that. Still, I couldn't keep from sweating as if my office were a New Orleans sauna bath in August; I was a walking flash flood.
I have no idea how the teachers managed; I'm sure the kids were thinking this was the school's punishment for starting so soon. It not only WAS still summer, it was the hottest day of the year. By Friday afternoon, they gave up on trying the teach anything. The kids were let outside to run around through the sprinklers and play on the waterslides that were still left from the summer's camps. I thought they should have let everybody into the pool (I volunteered to be one of the lifeguards), but I guess liabilities blah blah blah prevented that. See, this is what happened with only P.E. teachers taking the lifeguard training last week. I'm the only extra they've got to call on at times such as this. I know they had hoped that several other teachers would have wanted to do it, too, but I suppose if you are going to let the whole school into the pool, you'd have to have about 20 lifeguards (instead of 7), so ultimately I guess it didn't matter. Too bad.
I felt like it was a bad time for computers all the way around, because not only did none of the school's computers work, but I finally got a call from the computer repair shop where I had taken my Dell desktop nearly a month ago (meanwhile, I have been using my reliable iBook laptop). They told me they had given up on my computer. I had tried myself, and failed, to install a new 200 GB hard drive and upgrade my operating system from Windows 98 to XP. But there was nothing I could do to get it to work (it could never see the new harddrive, or even see the old harddrive with the new one in there, even with the addition of a highly upgraded ATA166 controller card, and XP would not load) and now the shop had that same trouble. They thought that perhaps the motherboard was damaged and figured a computer this old (7 or 8 years) wasn't worth the time and expense to keep working on it. I agreed.
They felt bad at keeping my computer so long and never solving my problem and told me they wouldn't charge me anything. In turn, I felt bad about not paying them anything, but told them they could keep the new Seagate 200 GB harddrive and the brand-new Windows XP software that I had bought; I had no use for them, now. I knew by then that I was going to buy a new desktop with at least 500 GB on its internal harddrive and that stupid new Seagate had left a bad taste in my mouth, and my computer certainly would NOT be a Windows machine, so I had no use for the XP software. Ultimately, all of it was going to be taken to the dump, anyway (to be more accurate, to the "Hazardous Waste Site" at the dump). The guy at the shop said he was happy to have the harddrive and the XP software.
I'm pretty sure what I am going to buy will be an iMac, but I think I ought to look at one of them in person, first. Also, I am tempted to get one with a 24-inch screen, but that seems HUGE to me, perhaps too huge (even their other model, the 20-inch, seems huge), so I want to see one of them first. Frankly, I'm not quite sure why one would want such a huge screen (the very first computer I ever had, a rented KayPro, had something like a 5" screen!), but for editing movies I can see it and maybe for having various document windows open, it would be like having two monitors side by side. We will just have to see.
But today it's too hot to go to the Apple store, so I will save that excursion for later.
Meanwhile, the fans are blowing on high and I'm contemplating a cool-off dip in the pool. At least for this holiday I didn't plan to go to Mexico. I understand that striking Mexican teachers (and by this I mean citizens of MEXICO, striking along the border IN Mexico) had planned to block all the tourist road entrances into Mexico. That's a wierd one, Mexican citizens working like "Minutemen" to keep AMERICANS from crossing the border INTO Mexico. I don't see how a move like this will help their cause at all, and in this heat, this just might be what finally sparks a pent-up race war between Americans and Mexicans. I'm awfully glad to be keeping well clear of it. Anyway, Mexico never lured me for this holiday. But the Yukon, I wish I had thought of that one before.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
20,000,000 Shares, 200 Pages, 20 Laps
After the intensity of the past week and half (which I will explain a bit later), I gave myself permission to be utterly lazy this weekend. No obligations whatsoever. I could just stay in bed and read or watch DVDs if I want. The hardest activity I was going to give myself was deciding between continuing to read Michael Crichton’s thrilling anti-global-warming-scam novel, State of Fear, or watch one of the Peter Sellers movies that recently arrived from Amazon.com in a four-movie set, “Peter Sellers: MGM Movie Legends Collection”, The Pink Panther, Casino Royale, What’s New Pussycat?, and The Party. If I choose Peter Sellers over Michael Crichton (for now), it will be The Party, a movie I remember as being one of the most hilarious movies I have ever seen, but for the life of me, I can’t currently think why. It must be because of Peter Sellers, himself, and “birdy num-num”. Anyway, I can use losing myself in outrageous, helpless laughter.
But I was waylaid by getting my mail and receiving another incomprehensible stockholder information booklet from Magna, a company I bet no reader of this blog will have ever heard of. I certainly hadn’t heard of it before it became touted by an investment newsletter I subscribed to (but will not renew--I’ve proven to myself that I do much better picking my own stocks than listening to these self-claimed “experts” no matter how good their hype sounds). Magna is a “car manufacturing company” based all over the world, but primarily in Canada. They either assemble entire cars, or sometimes portions of cars (such as interiors) or sections of cars, like installing sunroofs or dashboards or whatever. The automobile business has changed dramatically since the simpler days of the fifties, say, when you understood WHO manufactured what car, and in which country. Now they are all global hybrid affairs where so-called Japanese Hondas can be made in Ohio and German BMWs can be made in South Carolina and American something or others can be made in Mexico or Australia or wherever...or pieces of them are assembled in Ontario. I suppose all this makes economic sense to somebody, although NOT to the average consumer...or auto worker.
I’ve been reading about the impending bankruptcy of General Motors and maybe Ford, too, and Magna was touted as the one company best positioned to pick up the pieces of those dying companies, and now Magna is best known as the most likely company to buy Chrysler from Daimler, which is apparently eager to dump it as a white elephant. Why somebody would want to buy a company that the maker of Mercedes wants to dump I can’t fully understand, but apparently Jeep (primarily), but also Dodge (secondarily) are valuable brands that Magna would love to own. The brand of Chrysler, itself, will possibly disappear.
By the way, a quick aside...the 17-year-old boy who was in my sailing class last weekend was a huge Stanley Kubrick fan and I got to impress him (one small advantage of my now ancient age) with the fact that when I was approximately his age, I got to see Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey when it first came out, in CINERAMA (as it was intended to be seen). (Actually I was 20 when it came out.) He was suitably impressed and agreed that that was truly the way to see that movie. My ancient age also gave me the perspective that allowed me to understand the irony that all of the corporate brand names mentioned in that film and expected to be around in that futuristic time are now GONE, which I told the boy. (For example, the airline that had the space craft taking people from Earth to the Moon was “Pan Am”. While we DON’T have commercial travel to the Moon even now in 2007, Pan Am as a brand didn’t even last to the real year of 2001.) Something that Kubrick would have thought of as unlikely, if not impossible. For the boy’s part, he simply might not recognize any of the brands and might assume that they were likewise a science fiction creation, not major and presumably long-lived fixtures in everyone’s life at the time.
So yeah, I don’t think it is strange at all that someday there might not be a General Motors or a Ford or a Chrysler. And even some of the brands that we still have today really AREN'T the original, despite the adoption of the name. “AT&T” is really (wait while I vomit) “Cingular”, which is really “SBC,” which is really “Southern Bell”. “Bank of America” is really “Nations Bank”, only now yet somebody else bought them out but I forget who; Citibank, maybe? And going back to cars, Rolls Royce only makes airplane engines, whereas the Rolls Royce car is made by, who, Volkswagen, I think? Or Audi...either Audi owns Volkswagen, or Volkswagen owns Audi, so I mix up who is really the owner but either way, that’s where Rolls Royce now comes from. So enjoy your $450,000 automobile purchase.
I really (unintentionally) insulted a snotty man one time who proudly bought himself a very expensive model of Jaguar. I said, “Now that it’s made by Ford, maybe it will be reliable.” He didn’t like that all. But my uncle used to say, “If you want a Jaguar, buy two; one to drive and the other to have in the shop.” So while there are those who feel that Jaguars are so beautiful they may as well be made by Lalique, I’d rather have a car that I could actually drive somewhere and know that I would reach my destination.
So an investment in Magna seemed like a good bet, but about a month ago I got a multiple-paged booklet from them explaining that they were going to get involved with a horribly named Russian company called “Russian Machines” (maybe in Russian it sounds better), entirely owned by one man who wants to buy a billion and a half dollar’s worth of their shares of stock and Magna wanted to have this happen because somehow this would give them entrance into the “rapidly growing Russian automobile market.” We stockholders had to vote whether we agreed with this plan, or not.
I read that and thought, I own stock in a company that is getting involved with a Russian gangster! Well, I don’t want to libel the man, I really have no idea whether or not he really is a gangster, but what would you think? Forbes Magazine’s expose of the world’s top 100 billionaires (can you believe that there are now over a thousand billionaires in the world?) that pegged him very high in that list didn’t ease my mind about him at all. For example, Homeland Security won’t let him set foot in this country. The Forbes biography said something cryptic, like “after the fall of Communism, when he was 24, he acquired Russia’s aluminum industry at the end of Russia’s ‘aluminum wars’ which left hundreds of dead bodies in its wake.” Just HOW does a 24-year-old former Communist “acquire” a country’s entire industry? (With a machine gun, apparently.) And now he owns that nation’s largest automobile manufacturing company and whole bunch of other industries, too. He is now one of the richest people in the world. Pretty good for a person who used to receive his share of rubles along with all the other “comrades” in the worker’s paradise.
So I thought about it and thought about it and finally decided that if we attempted to avoid doing business with gangsters, we’d keep all our money in a sock under our mattress. I mean, this very computer I am writing on (an Apple iBook G4) was made in China (remember, Communist China), and there was one twentieth century regime crueler and more bloody than Hitler’s, and that was Stalin’s, and there was one twentienth century regime crueler and more bloody than Stalin’s, and that was Mao Tse Tung’s. So this “Russian Machines” man is probably a Gandhi compared to them. This may sound like a hypocritical self-serving justification on my part, but so be it. It’s not as if I am making a ton of money on this stock; so far, it hasn’t really been all that great of an investment, believe me.
But today, I received another long and incomprehensible booklet from Magna, this time an explanation of an offer to buy MY stock. Oh, I see, WHERE the “Russian Machines” man is going to get his billion and a half dollars worth of stock is from people like me who already own some! But he’s not going to buy it on the normal stock market (I guess a former Communist but now multi-billionaire isn’t going to participate in capitalism whole hog)--buying 20,000,000 shares on the open market just might make the selling price go through the roof! So they’re going to see if they can get it from little guys like me through a peculiar system called a “Dutch auction”. Now I ask you, doesn’t that sound suspicious?
Apparently how it works (although perhaps somebody who understands it more can further enlighten me) is that we are supposed to say that we are willing to sell it at any price we choose between $76.50 and $91.50 a share. So why wouldn’t somebody simply say they want to sell it at the higher number, $91.50 a share? Well, for one thing, the Russian Machines man wants 20,000,000 shares, but he is going to pay no more than $1,536,600,000 total for them, which divides out to be $76.83 a share. But gee whiz, I originally paid $80.58 a share for this, so I’m not going to simply volunteer to take a loss. And right now, that stock closed at $88.99 a share--a small profit for me, but very near the high end of the selling price that the Russian will pay. What they are going to do is tote up all the selling price “asks” and if they all average out to $76.83 a share, then fine, your stock will be bought at the price you asked for it, but if not, then they won’t buy it at that price. So I suppose if you REALLY want to sell this stock, then you would ask for the average price, or below. I guess. Or, there is yet a more cryptic choice, and that is to simply say you will take what they decide to pay for it, which I THINK is figured out this way: $1,536,600,000 minus the total of all the specific ask prices divided by the number of shares of non-specific ask prices equals the price they will pay per share for your stock. Which is bound to be somewhere near the lowest price of $76.50 share, a loss for me.
And the damned investment newsletter than recommended that we buy this stock in the first place (due to its likelihood of picking up the pieces of a bankrupt General Motors) has been totally silent about this whole Russian Machines affair. So they spew these recommendations out there and then leave you high and dry when it comes to future developments. So thank you very much, Stansberry & Associates.
Well, I said I did better on my own anyway, so I thought this one through and decided to simply keep the stock. After all, I don’t HAVE to sell it to the Russian and didn’t they just last month go through explaining why this Russian deal was so good? So why wouldn’t I want to stay on board? If the Russian involvement was going to make the price of my shares of stock collapse, why would the board of directors want to go along with it in the first place? Maybe there’s much more to all this than meets the eye. And I said today was supposed to be a lazy day. I just wanted to laugh with Peter Sellers.
Okay, so what all happened this week?
Well, it was the first week back on the full work schedule and this was the week that ALL employees would be back, including our huge number of new hires whom I will be paperworking and orienting and explaining to them complicated insurance benefits and enrolling, and so on (next week, but the preparations for it had to be this week). However, in the middle of it I decided to take two whole days of water safety training, something that ended up being very worthwhile, helpful, and I am very glad I did it, but it was also stressful.
These courses were offered to the P.E. department, but anyone was welcome to take them, if they wanted.
The water safety training was actually two different courses leading to two different certifications, intensified into one full day each. Remember, only last weekend I had taken the American Sailing Association’s first level of sailing training condensed down into one 16 hour weekend, so I was a bit sunburned and brain fried. But I figured that these YMCA water safety courses presented at our school were an opportunity too good to pass up, and, while my training in it might possibly be of some benefit to the school, it especially would be of benefit to me personally for the sailing, in which class we had spent quite a lot of time training for “man overboard” (not with actual people, thank goodness, but with buoys that we’d throw overboard and then turnabout to come rescue) and one thing I learned was that you did NOT want to fall overboard off of a sailboat and the likelihood of such an occurrence was not at all beyond the realm of possibility. So I felt that an uptick in my water safety skills might truly be lifesaving, and for myself, especially, should I ever be the one who was overboard! (Panic is the major cause of drowning.)
The first course, Tuesday’s class, was for the water safety assistant certification, and our school requires all P.E. teachers to pass that certification. Since I had already had quite a bit of swimming training in my youth, having earned my way through American Red Cross lifesaving and water safety instructor ratings to the extent that I taught swimming one summer when I was in college, I was pretty blase about that course, expecting it to be easy and fun. Well, it was fun, but it wasn’t really that easy. For one thing, we had to take a written exam, but I had never been exposed to the 200-page manual, and while the lecture portion of the course was a great summary of the material, it couldn’t really cover every single testable point. However, all of us did pass, thank goodness, much of which required logical thinking, although some of it actually required specific knowledge that the average person would be unlikely to know. For example, do you know how deep a pool has to be before you can allow diving off of the deck? (Nine feet.)
Interestingly, I learned how lucky in many ways I had been to have been a youth in my era rather than now (although in many ways, it is better now). While I generally was not athletic and hated P.E., where I was bad was mostly in team sports (football, softball, basketball), but I did manage to excel in individual sports (swimming, trampoline, and boxing), most of which are NOT ALLOWED nowadays! Because of liability issues, many schools don’t have swimming pools anymore, and those that do, have very shallow pools, so they can’t have diving boards (that is true in home pools, too, most of which nowadays aren’t deep enough for a diving board). A regular one-meter diving board requires a pool to be at least 11 1/2 feet deep; I don’t know the required depth figure for a HIGH dive, but the high school I went to had a high dive (and our pool at home had a regular diving board; we also, by the way, had a trampoline at home, too). While I wasn’t by any means a great diver, I was able to do some dives off a high board and I can’t imagine people nowadays not even having had that experience at all. That was one of my tests of courage as a child, 8 or 9 years old, being able to climb up the ladder of a high dive and then actually execute a DIVE off of it. I wonder what kind of stuff like that tests a child’s physical courage nowadays? (Diving off of a high dive is not a protected activity--you CAN get hurt and therefore it requires some skill, so the test of courage is meaningful.)
At least at our school, team sports is taught better nowadays than it was when I was young. If you didn’t start out good, you never had a chance to GET good in P.E., because the good players made sure you NEVER had a ball passed, tossed, or thrown to you (winning was what mattered over every other thing). All I ever did in football or basketball was “block”, and in softball, it was “you go way out into right field”. Nowadays, you would be put on a B or C team with players whose ability (or lack of it) matched yours and then you had a chance to develop some skills (and confidence).
But I didn’t have this problem with individual sports and therefore could do well in them.
Getting into our pool at school last Tuesday immediately brought back to me all the happy memories I had of being in big pools like that throughout my childhood. For almost all of my adult life, I have been swimming in only small home or motel pools. This pool here in my apartment building I can swim the length of with just about three crawl strokes. Not so the pool at school! It’s not an Olympic pool or anything, it’s 25-yards long, but that puts us more in the class of high school pools and public swimming pools.
There was a swimming test required for this water safety assistant certification, and that amounted to four laps of the pool. Well, it wasn’t as easy as I had assumed, because I was now so used to three-stroke-laps at home! I figured I would just bang these four laps out lickety-split, but suddenly that wall seemed to be very far away as I kind of struggled through the four laps, and completed them with a little bit more respect for this test! I COULD say that, well, I am a few months shy of being sixty years old, I’m not eighteen any more. But I didn’t like feeling that, or seeing it from that point of view. I refuse to allow age to be an excuse.
Another physical test that I thought was going to be a “phtt” was another lesson in humility--treading water for two minutes. Treading water? Gee, I could do that forever! Well, what made it hard was that we were supposed to do it with our arms up in the air. Uh oh! I am very much an “arm” water treader; using no arms and only kicks was a real test of my endurance; those were a long two minutes. But I passed that, too.
After we (all the P.E. teachers and me; I was the only non-P.E.-teacher to sign up to do this) passed all the qualifying tests, we then had the in-pool lessons, one of which was the back-boarding lesson for injured swimmers for whom we suspected spinal injury (which could occur after a fall from a height, or after diving or coming down a pool slide, or if the victim were found unconscious). I volunteered to be the first victim (ultimately, everybody in the course had to play each of the three roles, victim, lifeguard, and assistant). Uh oh, another “test” for me. I border on claustraphobic and as this exercise progressed, I slipped closer into panic mode.
The gist of it is that you are floating on the water and then held up with a rescue tube, and then a back board is pushed under you (held up by the assistant) and the rescue tube is moved under the foot of the board to help hold up that end. So far, so good. But then you are strapped to the board with a waist strap, then a cervical collar is installed around your neck, then your arms and chest are strapped to the board, then head immobilizers are squeezed tightly to either side of your head, then a forehead strap is installed and a chin strap is installed and second rescue tube is placed underneath the board and finally your legs are strapped down to the board. By now you are thoroughly and helplessly immobilized and strapped to this board from head to foot and I didn’t LIKE it at all. Yet there was still one more major operation left to do, and that was get the board up out of the pool and lying down on the deck. Since this was the first time we did this, everything was done incredibly slowly. I almost succumbed to full-on panic and actually did complain to the instructor, but she calmed me down.
After having gone through this, I have amazing empathy for some poor person who actually DOES have a spinal injury and while I could finally be freed from the backboard after I was safely up out of the pool, the real victim will have to stay mummified on that thing until the paramedics get there, and probably will still be bound immobile all the way to the hospital. It’s nearly unthinkable to me...although I know of something much worse (which thank God, we didn’t have to experience). When I went to take my final open water dive test in order to get my NAUI scuba diving certification (in the late 80s), the dive shop in Mendocino where we got our air tanks had an ominous-looking pipe outside next to the parking lot. This rusted iron pipe was about seven feet long and possibly two-feet feet in diameter, or thereabouts. One end was completely closed, and the other end had a round hinged door on it with a large wheel-valve, like a hatch on a submarine that would be screwed closed. There was a little glass window in the pipe about a foot and a half or so down from the valve-door.
“What the hell is this?” we asked our dive instructor.
“Oh, be glad they have one of those,” he told us cheerily. “That’s where they put you if you get the bends. It’s a pressure tube; they close you in it and pressurize it to equal the pressure of the depth of the ocean you just came up from, and you are transported inside that in a helicopter to a hospital that has a pressure chamber.”
Not me, they aren’t! I’ll just die from the bends, thank you very much. Or put me back in the water and let the sharks eat me. No way could I stand being stuffed into an iron tube the edge of which would be one inch away from my face and with there being no way to even move an arm and then have the door screwed shut and keep me in it for a undeterminably long helicopter ride.
Maybe the bends is so painful that it just knocks you out; maybe you are entirely unconcious and have no idea where you are until you wake up in the hospital. I don’t know, but just the sight of that thing made EVERYBODY suddenly truly UNDERSTAND their dive tables (that tell you how long you can stay under water at what depths in order to avoid getting the bends, which is what about 80% of scuba diving training is all about).
Being strapped onto the backboard wasn’t anywhere near as bad as that bends tube looked, but it was in the same realm. The major difference was that I was willing to be strapped on the backboard. But it WAS potentially dangerous, by the way. One thing that led to my being so uneasy was that it constantly felt like it was going to tip over, leaving me helplessly face down in the water. The instructor told us afterwards that instructors are not allowed to serve as victim in a lesson, because one died doing that. That instuctor was strapped on and the board DID turn over and the whole arrangement with the instructor face down sank to the bottom of the pool. The students didn’t know enough to know how to undo the straps to get the instructor free or get the board back up to the surface, so the instructor, bound there on the board, was unable to move and therefore drowned. I’m glad she told us about that afterwards.
So I passed all that, and when the course was over, I heard myself say that I would come to the LIFEGUARD certification course that was next. Why did I do that, I asked myself later that night. For THAT course, which was optional for our P.E. teachers (but all but one of them went for it) and certainly entirely optional for ME, had a much longer, harder, and much more serious written test (with some fill-in questions, not all multiple choice) and a swimming test that consisted of TWENTY laps! Didn’t I struggle through the four laps of this first course? What made me think I could do twenty? The test was actually four laps each of five specific strokes, which you could perform in any order: four laps of crawl, four laps of breast stroke, four laps of sidestroke, four laps of sidestroke with one arm up (like you are pulling a rescued swimmer in) and four laps of elementary backstroke with both arms up (again like you are pulling a rescued swimmer in). This time, at least, I would have a chance to read the textbook, but that meant that that night I had to read (and learn) 200 pages of the YMCA lifesaving manual. But something in me just wanted to do this and I justified it by saying “if I don’t pass it, it’s no different that if I didn’t do it at all except that I will learn some things.”
But that justification did not work for me when I was home that night reading those 200 pages. There was no way that I could go into this thing without passing it, and yet it seemed hopeless. I was worried about the written test, yes, but what really stressed me out was the 20-lap swimming test. All of the P.E. teachers were worried about the swimming test, too, and that added to my worry, because they certainly were in better shape than I was. Fortunately, I discussed this with one of the P.E. teachers (who happens to be a national tennis champion, but who was also worried about the test) and when I told her how I planned to do my strokes, getting the hardest one, the crawl, over in the beginning and then relaxing into the easier strokes, she said that my plan wasn’t good and she told me HER strategy, which was opposite of mine. She said that I should do the easy strokes first, that way I would bang out the numbers without exhausting myself and would mentally be more relaxed because the majority of the laps would then be done and then I could concentrate on the crawl, which would be the hard stroke. I honestly wouldn’t have thought of doing it that way, but fortunately I have FINALLY gotten to the point in life where I am willing to accept the advice of people who know better than I do, instead of thinking that I know a better way or am otherwise somehow “different”. No, I right away figured she knew more about such an athletic endurance test and I would follow her strategy.
I mentally rehearsed the swimming test at home that night several times in the pattern that I decided to do it that worked best for me, following the P.E. teacher’s strategy: four laps of side stroke with my arm up, four laps of elementary back stroke with my arms up, four laps of side stroke, and then alternating restful laps of breast stroke with the hard laps of crawl until all four of each had been done. I figured I would do them slowly and meditatively, thinking of “pumping” these muscles the way the heart pumps, in which the muscle of the heart is resting more than it is pumping. The heart goes “pump”, “reeeeeeest”, “pump”, “reeeeeest”, “pump”, “reeeeeeest”, eternally; I imagined myself swimming like that, “stroke”, “gliiiiiiiide”, “stroke”, “gliiiiiiiiide”, “stroke”, “gliiiiiiiide”.
I didn’t succeed in reading all 200 pages, but got too tired somewhere around 11:30 at night. Okay, I figured I had done enough, read the majority of the textbook and would pick up the rest in the summary lecture and use my still-somewhat-rested brain to figure out the rest if I could. Also, I needed some sleep in order to have good energy for the 20 laps.
The next morning at 6:00 when I woke up, I did one more mental imagining of the swim, then got up, took my shower, and ate a large protein and fat breakfast (two pieces of bacon, two ounces of turkey, and three eggs, all fried in coconut oil), because I knew that the body’s fuel source for sustained energy is fat.
At school in the course, we had a couple of hours of lecture and review, and then the written test. I was the first one finished with the test, so I turned it in and the instructor began to grade it. The questions were in textbook chapter order, so she was able to check the questions, chapter one, chapter, two, chapter three, all the way through. Then she said, “I’ve corrected the first nine chapters and you haven’t missed ONE question. I have never seen that before.” Wow. As it so happened, the first nine chapters were all that I had read, whereas chapters ten and eleven I had not read. But this beginning seemed good!
It ended up that all told, I missed a total of three (you could miss something like 20 and still pass). Well gee, I had been worried about the test and now I wished that I could have gotten a 100%, which maybe I would have if I had been able to read the whole book. But I’m not complaining! I passed the written test. And, fortunately, so did the others, as well.
Now it was time for lunch (which the school was providing, since this was in-service week), after which we would have the swimming test. Everybody said, “Aren’t you coming to lunch?” and I said, “No, I can’t eat, not with this swimming test right after.” But the instructor said, “You HAVE to eat. If will help you with the test.” So, once again, I followed the advice of someone who knew better. I didn’t eat a HUGE lunch, just half a tuna sandwich and some salad. I skipped the fancy-looking chocolate dessert. I finished lunch in fifteen minutes, which meant there was now 45 minutes of digestion time before the swimming test.
Then it was time to go back to the pool. One of the P.E. teachers said, “if anyone vomits an egg-salad sandwich, that will be me.” We all laughed, and I wondered if I would add my tuna to his egg salad.
I slipped into the nice clean water and admired the sparkling blue beauty of the pool. I told myself, “remember you are a heart, pumping and resting, easy does it, no worries, enjoy the smoothness of the water and shining sun, you are as smooth as a dolphin, gliding effortlessly through the water.” And that’s what I did. Four laps of sidestroke with my arm up. I paid no attention to the distance, but as I reached each end, I’d add to the count: one, two, three, four. Then I did four laps of the elementary backstroke. That one was harder than I thought, I had to frogkick my legs harder than I wanted to just to keep myself afloat. I thought I was a better floater than that, but maybe I have a greater lean body mass than I thought. However, I didn’t let it bother me. If I got a little tired, my next stroke would be an easy one, the side stroke. One, two, three, four laps.
The side stroke truly was easy, compared to the others I had done, it was almost like resting, it was the first stroke of the test in which I was able to use both arms. I moved slowly but breathed fully. However, I was conscious of how I was struggling for air, I definitely wasn’t the same as fully rested. But I kept going and kept my good attitude up. One, two, three, four laps.
Now the majority of the test was done, just like my friend the P.E. teacher said. I only had my easiest stroke and my hardest stroke left to do. I had to do the breast stroke first because I really felt like I needed to breathe; without a whole lap of full breathing, I don’t see how I could do the crawl, which I planned to breathe on every third stroke, as is taught in swimming class.
So I did my first lap of the breast stroke, breathing as fully as I could. All too soon, I got to the wall and now had to do my first lap of the crawl. I turned at the wall and started doing the crawl. It was immediately clear that I couldn’t wait three strokes to breathe, it had to be every time just before stroking with my right arm. Okay, so that’s what I’ll do. I really felt how hard it was to do this, it was a struggle and I had to gulp very hard each breath, but doing this now instead of at the beginning WAS so much better, because now all I had to do was use whatever I still had left in me. If I had started with this, I would have been too fresh and therefore would have put too much energy into it. However, amazingly, the pool's wall came up very fast. I realized what a fast stroke this really is, that even though it was tough, it made up for it by being quick. That was a great revelation.
I turned and did my second lap of breast stroke. Such a nice rest, almost like napping on a soft mattress! A great opportunity, again, to breathe breathe breathe...fill up those oxygen tanks, clear out that lactic acid, fill me with energy. Then the wall came up and I turned and was now in my second lap of the crawl, breathing prior to every right arm stroke. My arms ached. All I knew now was that somehow I just simply had to do it no matter how I felt. Just keep those arms churning and don’t let anything stop me. I knew the wall would come up quite fast, and it did, and then I had the pleasure of the third breast stroke, which was time to rest, breathe, and recouperate again.
I’m the kind of person whose mind can stop my body. I remember the first time I went skiing and I was successfully flying down the hill. It was glorious, but then suddenly my mind thought, “hey, you are a beginner, you’re not supposed to be doing this so well," so then suddenly I fell, sabotaged by my reasoning mind. Or I will try to jog and my body will feel the pain, feel exhaustion, and my mind will say, “this pain is bad, you don’t like it, you really don’t have to do this,” and I will stop running, with my breath pounding and my heart fluttering.
This did NOT happen to me while swimming. Just the opposite. Somewhere in the third crawl lap, my mind just slipped away. I don’t remember it, or remember my fourth breast stroke lap. My body simply swam, executing the plan that I mentally rehearsed several times the night before and then early that morning. This is something that as machine age humans we don’t normally get to experience (or I certainly don’t); movement is natural to the body and it actually likes it and knows how to do it. How else did nomadic tribes cross the veldt on long hunting journeys that lasted for weeks, if not much longer? How else did soldiers march from continent to continent? How else do marathon runners, triathletes, iron man participants succeed in multi-hour-long prodigious feats? My body moved into that realm and my mind didn’t interfere.
I completed the third crawl lap, and then filled my lungs and muscles with the fourth breast lap, and then turned into the fourth and final crawl lap. I honestly didn’t even really know where I was until my hand touched the far wall and as I turned in the water, I heard the instructor call out my name and say that I had finished it.
I had finished it. I had passed the test. Twenty laps. Almost a quarter of a mile.
There are far worse swimming tests. I know that. There are triathlons out in the open water, the ice cold, frothy ocean, competing for space against hundreds of other churning racers. Or Jack LaLanne, swimming to freedom from the impossible-to-escape-from-Alcatraz across swift San Francisco Bay currents towing a rowboat. Somebody swimming across the English channel in fog and no sight of land. Or The Iron Man, what is that, swimming completely around an island in Hawaii?
But this was amazing. I, an almost sedentary, nearly sixty-year-old non-athlete who will think twice about going up three flights of stairs in my apartment building and mostly will just use the elevator, I did this. That young person that I once was, bad in sports but I WAS a good swimmer, I could feel that self was still inside me, and it felt really good.
Time went on and one after another, the other swimmers completed their laps, too, so that ultimately, every one of us completed the task and passed the swimming test. It wasn’t easy for anybody, but we all did it. That, for me, became another part of the test. It wasn’t good enough for just me to pass it, everybody had to pass it.
Then we had the in-water lessons and practices of all the lifeguarding skills: how to rescue active and passive swimmers from the front and from the rear, how to rescue those who were partially under water, how to rescue those who had sunk to the bottom of the pool, how to rescue multiple swimmers, all the various ways to get into the water to rescue somebody, and all the ways to get rescued people OUT of the water. A full day of lessons.
One more test--swimming under water for fifteen yards. We didn’t even know they HAD that test, but it was easy for all. I’m an underwater swimmer from way back, so that was like going back home.
Then we each had to do several final “mystery” rescues. We’d have to scan the pool and other students would decide what kind of situation they were in and we’d then have to recognize who needed help and choose the correct pool entrance for that rescue, rescue them properly, and then get them out of the pool.
And then we were done. We all qualified for the YMCA lifeguard certification. I felt utterly exhausted physically and utterly exhiliarated mentally; an odd combination of feelings. I went home and felt like I would sleep for a week. But the next day was still a working day.
The next day there was a moment at the beginning of the in-service meetings when the headmaster asked each administrator if he or she had an announcement. When he came to me, I said that I had no announcement, although I FELT like saying “Guess what, I passed the lifeguard certification course!” But there would have been no point in saying that, that was only a personal achievement. However, he kept asking me, “Are you sure you have no announcement?”, as if he knew that I really did have something to say, but I don’t think he knew. Anyway, I said I had no announcements.
Later, several people said, “Oh, you should have said you completed the lifeguard training!” But it wasn’t part of my job. It COULD help my job, I can imagine a scenario where it would come in handy, but still. However, others in the P.E. department really appreciated the fact that I did this...in fact, I think they were very disappointed that NO ONE ELSE did it. But I don’t blame anyone for not doing it. It was a very busy week and this swimming stuff really was a P.E. thing. It was intense, that’s all I can say, intense, which has become the word for the week.
However, after that morning with the headmaster asking me if I had any announcement, several in the P.E. department must have felt the same thing I did, that this was WORTH that announcement (as was their getting certified, too). So then for the rest of the day, I couldn’t walk into the auditorium or sit down to lunch or pass a group of people without one of the P.E. teachers announcing, “there he is, one of our new lifeguards!” And then I responded with something along the order of “me, and ALL of us!” So for sure the word did get out.
Two other cool things happened this week. One of the parents was on campus and she ran into our staff accountant, whose office is next door to mine. The parent was so happy to see her, this being the beginning of the new school year, and the parent said to her, “You are my children’s FAVORITE teacher!” The staff accountant teaches a wonderful and innovative crafts class after school that quite a few kids love to death and some of them take again and again each trimester. And they will even come up to our offices just to see her, they like her so much. But for her to hear that she is considered some kids’ favorite teacher, to even be considered in the same category as the other “real” teachers, is a very gratifying accomplishment. She said to me, “you know most people on campus don’t even know that we up here are involved with the students at all. They think all we do is juggle figures all day.”
Later that day, when the mail came, I saw that a wonderful student that we all know and love had sent a postcard from a foreign country he and his family visited this summer. He sent this postcard to three people whose names were written in three lines above the school’s address: to the person who was his teacher last year, to a school administrator who is from the country they were visiting, and to me. I showed it to the accountant and said to her, "Look at this, see the people in this school he thought to send this to." And my name was the first one on the list.
The staff accountant was right; most people on campus don’t know that we are involved with the students and the educational process at all. But the students know. And we are greatly rewarded by their recognition of that involvement.
But I was waylaid by getting my mail and receiving another incomprehensible stockholder information booklet from Magna, a company I bet no reader of this blog will have ever heard of. I certainly hadn’t heard of it before it became touted by an investment newsletter I subscribed to (but will not renew--I’ve proven to myself that I do much better picking my own stocks than listening to these self-claimed “experts” no matter how good their hype sounds). Magna is a “car manufacturing company” based all over the world, but primarily in Canada. They either assemble entire cars, or sometimes portions of cars (such as interiors) or sections of cars, like installing sunroofs or dashboards or whatever. The automobile business has changed dramatically since the simpler days of the fifties, say, when you understood WHO manufactured what car, and in which country. Now they are all global hybrid affairs where so-called Japanese Hondas can be made in Ohio and German BMWs can be made in South Carolina and American something or others can be made in Mexico or Australia or wherever...or pieces of them are assembled in Ontario. I suppose all this makes economic sense to somebody, although NOT to the average consumer...or auto worker.
I’ve been reading about the impending bankruptcy of General Motors and maybe Ford, too, and Magna was touted as the one company best positioned to pick up the pieces of those dying companies, and now Magna is best known as the most likely company to buy Chrysler from Daimler, which is apparently eager to dump it as a white elephant. Why somebody would want to buy a company that the maker of Mercedes wants to dump I can’t fully understand, but apparently Jeep (primarily), but also Dodge (secondarily) are valuable brands that Magna would love to own. The brand of Chrysler, itself, will possibly disappear.
By the way, a quick aside...the 17-year-old boy who was in my sailing class last weekend was a huge Stanley Kubrick fan and I got to impress him (one small advantage of my now ancient age) with the fact that when I was approximately his age, I got to see Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey when it first came out, in CINERAMA (as it was intended to be seen). (Actually I was 20 when it came out.) He was suitably impressed and agreed that that was truly the way to see that movie. My ancient age also gave me the perspective that allowed me to understand the irony that all of the corporate brand names mentioned in that film and expected to be around in that futuristic time are now GONE, which I told the boy. (For example, the airline that had the space craft taking people from Earth to the Moon was “Pan Am”. While we DON’T have commercial travel to the Moon even now in 2007, Pan Am as a brand didn’t even last to the real year of 2001.) Something that Kubrick would have thought of as unlikely, if not impossible. For the boy’s part, he simply might not recognize any of the brands and might assume that they were likewise a science fiction creation, not major and presumably long-lived fixtures in everyone’s life at the time.
So yeah, I don’t think it is strange at all that someday there might not be a General Motors or a Ford or a Chrysler. And even some of the brands that we still have today really AREN'T the original, despite the adoption of the name. “AT&T” is really (wait while I vomit) “Cingular”, which is really “SBC,” which is really “Southern Bell”. “Bank of America” is really “Nations Bank”, only now yet somebody else bought them out but I forget who; Citibank, maybe? And going back to cars, Rolls Royce only makes airplane engines, whereas the Rolls Royce car is made by, who, Volkswagen, I think? Or Audi...either Audi owns Volkswagen, or Volkswagen owns Audi, so I mix up who is really the owner but either way, that’s where Rolls Royce now comes from. So enjoy your $450,000 automobile purchase.
I really (unintentionally) insulted a snotty man one time who proudly bought himself a very expensive model of Jaguar. I said, “Now that it’s made by Ford, maybe it will be reliable.” He didn’t like that all. But my uncle used to say, “If you want a Jaguar, buy two; one to drive and the other to have in the shop.” So while there are those who feel that Jaguars are so beautiful they may as well be made by Lalique, I’d rather have a car that I could actually drive somewhere and know that I would reach my destination.
So an investment in Magna seemed like a good bet, but about a month ago I got a multiple-paged booklet from them explaining that they were going to get involved with a horribly named Russian company called “Russian Machines” (maybe in Russian it sounds better), entirely owned by one man who wants to buy a billion and a half dollar’s worth of their shares of stock and Magna wanted to have this happen because somehow this would give them entrance into the “rapidly growing Russian automobile market.” We stockholders had to vote whether we agreed with this plan, or not.
I read that and thought, I own stock in a company that is getting involved with a Russian gangster! Well, I don’t want to libel the man, I really have no idea whether or not he really is a gangster, but what would you think? Forbes Magazine’s expose of the world’s top 100 billionaires (can you believe that there are now over a thousand billionaires in the world?) that pegged him very high in that list didn’t ease my mind about him at all. For example, Homeland Security won’t let him set foot in this country. The Forbes biography said something cryptic, like “after the fall of Communism, when he was 24, he acquired Russia’s aluminum industry at the end of Russia’s ‘aluminum wars’ which left hundreds of dead bodies in its wake.” Just HOW does a 24-year-old former Communist “acquire” a country’s entire industry? (With a machine gun, apparently.) And now he owns that nation’s largest automobile manufacturing company and whole bunch of other industries, too. He is now one of the richest people in the world. Pretty good for a person who used to receive his share of rubles along with all the other “comrades” in the worker’s paradise.
So I thought about it and thought about it and finally decided that if we attempted to avoid doing business with gangsters, we’d keep all our money in a sock under our mattress. I mean, this very computer I am writing on (an Apple iBook G4) was made in China (remember, Communist China), and there was one twentieth century regime crueler and more bloody than Hitler’s, and that was Stalin’s, and there was one twentienth century regime crueler and more bloody than Stalin’s, and that was Mao Tse Tung’s. So this “Russian Machines” man is probably a Gandhi compared to them. This may sound like a hypocritical self-serving justification on my part, but so be it. It’s not as if I am making a ton of money on this stock; so far, it hasn’t really been all that great of an investment, believe me.
But today, I received another long and incomprehensible booklet from Magna, this time an explanation of an offer to buy MY stock. Oh, I see, WHERE the “Russian Machines” man is going to get his billion and a half dollars worth of stock is from people like me who already own some! But he’s not going to buy it on the normal stock market (I guess a former Communist but now multi-billionaire isn’t going to participate in capitalism whole hog)--buying 20,000,000 shares on the open market just might make the selling price go through the roof! So they’re going to see if they can get it from little guys like me through a peculiar system called a “Dutch auction”. Now I ask you, doesn’t that sound suspicious?
Apparently how it works (although perhaps somebody who understands it more can further enlighten me) is that we are supposed to say that we are willing to sell it at any price we choose between $76.50 and $91.50 a share. So why wouldn’t somebody simply say they want to sell it at the higher number, $91.50 a share? Well, for one thing, the Russian Machines man wants 20,000,000 shares, but he is going to pay no more than $1,536,600,000 total for them, which divides out to be $76.83 a share. But gee whiz, I originally paid $80.58 a share for this, so I’m not going to simply volunteer to take a loss. And right now, that stock closed at $88.99 a share--a small profit for me, but very near the high end of the selling price that the Russian will pay. What they are going to do is tote up all the selling price “asks” and if they all average out to $76.83 a share, then fine, your stock will be bought at the price you asked for it, but if not, then they won’t buy it at that price. So I suppose if you REALLY want to sell this stock, then you would ask for the average price, or below. I guess. Or, there is yet a more cryptic choice, and that is to simply say you will take what they decide to pay for it, which I THINK is figured out this way: $1,536,600,000 minus the total of all the specific ask prices divided by the number of shares of non-specific ask prices equals the price they will pay per share for your stock. Which is bound to be somewhere near the lowest price of $76.50 share, a loss for me.
And the damned investment newsletter than recommended that we buy this stock in the first place (due to its likelihood of picking up the pieces of a bankrupt General Motors) has been totally silent about this whole Russian Machines affair. So they spew these recommendations out there and then leave you high and dry when it comes to future developments. So thank you very much, Stansberry & Associates.
Well, I said I did better on my own anyway, so I thought this one through and decided to simply keep the stock. After all, I don’t HAVE to sell it to the Russian and didn’t they just last month go through explaining why this Russian deal was so good? So why wouldn’t I want to stay on board? If the Russian involvement was going to make the price of my shares of stock collapse, why would the board of directors want to go along with it in the first place? Maybe there’s much more to all this than meets the eye. And I said today was supposed to be a lazy day. I just wanted to laugh with Peter Sellers.
Okay, so what all happened this week?
Well, it was the first week back on the full work schedule and this was the week that ALL employees would be back, including our huge number of new hires whom I will be paperworking and orienting and explaining to them complicated insurance benefits and enrolling, and so on (next week, but the preparations for it had to be this week). However, in the middle of it I decided to take two whole days of water safety training, something that ended up being very worthwhile, helpful, and I am very glad I did it, but it was also stressful.
These courses were offered to the P.E. department, but anyone was welcome to take them, if they wanted.
The water safety training was actually two different courses leading to two different certifications, intensified into one full day each. Remember, only last weekend I had taken the American Sailing Association’s first level of sailing training condensed down into one 16 hour weekend, so I was a bit sunburned and brain fried. But I figured that these YMCA water safety courses presented at our school were an opportunity too good to pass up, and, while my training in it might possibly be of some benefit to the school, it especially would be of benefit to me personally for the sailing, in which class we had spent quite a lot of time training for “man overboard” (not with actual people, thank goodness, but with buoys that we’d throw overboard and then turnabout to come rescue) and one thing I learned was that you did NOT want to fall overboard off of a sailboat and the likelihood of such an occurrence was not at all beyond the realm of possibility. So I felt that an uptick in my water safety skills might truly be lifesaving, and for myself, especially, should I ever be the one who was overboard! (Panic is the major cause of drowning.)
The first course, Tuesday’s class, was for the water safety assistant certification, and our school requires all P.E. teachers to pass that certification. Since I had already had quite a bit of swimming training in my youth, having earned my way through American Red Cross lifesaving and water safety instructor ratings to the extent that I taught swimming one summer when I was in college, I was pretty blase about that course, expecting it to be easy and fun. Well, it was fun, but it wasn’t really that easy. For one thing, we had to take a written exam, but I had never been exposed to the 200-page manual, and while the lecture portion of the course was a great summary of the material, it couldn’t really cover every single testable point. However, all of us did pass, thank goodness, much of which required logical thinking, although some of it actually required specific knowledge that the average person would be unlikely to know. For example, do you know how deep a pool has to be before you can allow diving off of the deck? (Nine feet.)
Interestingly, I learned how lucky in many ways I had been to have been a youth in my era rather than now (although in many ways, it is better now). While I generally was not athletic and hated P.E., where I was bad was mostly in team sports (football, softball, basketball), but I did manage to excel in individual sports (swimming, trampoline, and boxing), most of which are NOT ALLOWED nowadays! Because of liability issues, many schools don’t have swimming pools anymore, and those that do, have very shallow pools, so they can’t have diving boards (that is true in home pools, too, most of which nowadays aren’t deep enough for a diving board). A regular one-meter diving board requires a pool to be at least 11 1/2 feet deep; I don’t know the required depth figure for a HIGH dive, but the high school I went to had a high dive (and our pool at home had a regular diving board; we also, by the way, had a trampoline at home, too). While I wasn’t by any means a great diver, I was able to do some dives off a high board and I can’t imagine people nowadays not even having had that experience at all. That was one of my tests of courage as a child, 8 or 9 years old, being able to climb up the ladder of a high dive and then actually execute a DIVE off of it. I wonder what kind of stuff like that tests a child’s physical courage nowadays? (Diving off of a high dive is not a protected activity--you CAN get hurt and therefore it requires some skill, so the test of courage is meaningful.)
At least at our school, team sports is taught better nowadays than it was when I was young. If you didn’t start out good, you never had a chance to GET good in P.E., because the good players made sure you NEVER had a ball passed, tossed, or thrown to you (winning was what mattered over every other thing). All I ever did in football or basketball was “block”, and in softball, it was “you go way out into right field”. Nowadays, you would be put on a B or C team with players whose ability (or lack of it) matched yours and then you had a chance to develop some skills (and confidence).
But I didn’t have this problem with individual sports and therefore could do well in them.
Getting into our pool at school last Tuesday immediately brought back to me all the happy memories I had of being in big pools like that throughout my childhood. For almost all of my adult life, I have been swimming in only small home or motel pools. This pool here in my apartment building I can swim the length of with just about three crawl strokes. Not so the pool at school! It’s not an Olympic pool or anything, it’s 25-yards long, but that puts us more in the class of high school pools and public swimming pools.
There was a swimming test required for this water safety assistant certification, and that amounted to four laps of the pool. Well, it wasn’t as easy as I had assumed, because I was now so used to three-stroke-laps at home! I figured I would just bang these four laps out lickety-split, but suddenly that wall seemed to be very far away as I kind of struggled through the four laps, and completed them with a little bit more respect for this test! I COULD say that, well, I am a few months shy of being sixty years old, I’m not eighteen any more. But I didn’t like feeling that, or seeing it from that point of view. I refuse to allow age to be an excuse.
Another physical test that I thought was going to be a “phtt” was another lesson in humility--treading water for two minutes. Treading water? Gee, I could do that forever! Well, what made it hard was that we were supposed to do it with our arms up in the air. Uh oh! I am very much an “arm” water treader; using no arms and only kicks was a real test of my endurance; those were a long two minutes. But I passed that, too.
After we (all the P.E. teachers and me; I was the only non-P.E.-teacher to sign up to do this) passed all the qualifying tests, we then had the in-pool lessons, one of which was the back-boarding lesson for injured swimmers for whom we suspected spinal injury (which could occur after a fall from a height, or after diving or coming down a pool slide, or if the victim were found unconscious). I volunteered to be the first victim (ultimately, everybody in the course had to play each of the three roles, victim, lifeguard, and assistant). Uh oh, another “test” for me. I border on claustraphobic and as this exercise progressed, I slipped closer into panic mode.
The gist of it is that you are floating on the water and then held up with a rescue tube, and then a back board is pushed under you (held up by the assistant) and the rescue tube is moved under the foot of the board to help hold up that end. So far, so good. But then you are strapped to the board with a waist strap, then a cervical collar is installed around your neck, then your arms and chest are strapped to the board, then head immobilizers are squeezed tightly to either side of your head, then a forehead strap is installed and a chin strap is installed and second rescue tube is placed underneath the board and finally your legs are strapped down to the board. By now you are thoroughly and helplessly immobilized and strapped to this board from head to foot and I didn’t LIKE it at all. Yet there was still one more major operation left to do, and that was get the board up out of the pool and lying down on the deck. Since this was the first time we did this, everything was done incredibly slowly. I almost succumbed to full-on panic and actually did complain to the instructor, but she calmed me down.
After having gone through this, I have amazing empathy for some poor person who actually DOES have a spinal injury and while I could finally be freed from the backboard after I was safely up out of the pool, the real victim will have to stay mummified on that thing until the paramedics get there, and probably will still be bound immobile all the way to the hospital. It’s nearly unthinkable to me...although I know of something much worse (which thank God, we didn’t have to experience). When I went to take my final open water dive test in order to get my NAUI scuba diving certification (in the late 80s), the dive shop in Mendocino where we got our air tanks had an ominous-looking pipe outside next to the parking lot. This rusted iron pipe was about seven feet long and possibly two-feet feet in diameter, or thereabouts. One end was completely closed, and the other end had a round hinged door on it with a large wheel-valve, like a hatch on a submarine that would be screwed closed. There was a little glass window in the pipe about a foot and a half or so down from the valve-door.
“What the hell is this?” we asked our dive instructor.
“Oh, be glad they have one of those,” he told us cheerily. “That’s where they put you if you get the bends. It’s a pressure tube; they close you in it and pressurize it to equal the pressure of the depth of the ocean you just came up from, and you are transported inside that in a helicopter to a hospital that has a pressure chamber.”
Not me, they aren’t! I’ll just die from the bends, thank you very much. Or put me back in the water and let the sharks eat me. No way could I stand being stuffed into an iron tube the edge of which would be one inch away from my face and with there being no way to even move an arm and then have the door screwed shut and keep me in it for a undeterminably long helicopter ride.
Maybe the bends is so painful that it just knocks you out; maybe you are entirely unconcious and have no idea where you are until you wake up in the hospital. I don’t know, but just the sight of that thing made EVERYBODY suddenly truly UNDERSTAND their dive tables (that tell you how long you can stay under water at what depths in order to avoid getting the bends, which is what about 80% of scuba diving training is all about).
Being strapped onto the backboard wasn’t anywhere near as bad as that bends tube looked, but it was in the same realm. The major difference was that I was willing to be strapped on the backboard. But it WAS potentially dangerous, by the way. One thing that led to my being so uneasy was that it constantly felt like it was going to tip over, leaving me helplessly face down in the water. The instructor told us afterwards that instructors are not allowed to serve as victim in a lesson, because one died doing that. That instuctor was strapped on and the board DID turn over and the whole arrangement with the instructor face down sank to the bottom of the pool. The students didn’t know enough to know how to undo the straps to get the instructor free or get the board back up to the surface, so the instructor, bound there on the board, was unable to move and therefore drowned. I’m glad she told us about that afterwards.
So I passed all that, and when the course was over, I heard myself say that I would come to the LIFEGUARD certification course that was next. Why did I do that, I asked myself later that night. For THAT course, which was optional for our P.E. teachers (but all but one of them went for it) and certainly entirely optional for ME, had a much longer, harder, and much more serious written test (with some fill-in questions, not all multiple choice) and a swimming test that consisted of TWENTY laps! Didn’t I struggle through the four laps of this first course? What made me think I could do twenty? The test was actually four laps each of five specific strokes, which you could perform in any order: four laps of crawl, four laps of breast stroke, four laps of sidestroke, four laps of sidestroke with one arm up (like you are pulling a rescued swimmer in) and four laps of elementary backstroke with both arms up (again like you are pulling a rescued swimmer in). This time, at least, I would have a chance to read the textbook, but that meant that that night I had to read (and learn) 200 pages of the YMCA lifesaving manual. But something in me just wanted to do this and I justified it by saying “if I don’t pass it, it’s no different that if I didn’t do it at all except that I will learn some things.”
But that justification did not work for me when I was home that night reading those 200 pages. There was no way that I could go into this thing without passing it, and yet it seemed hopeless. I was worried about the written test, yes, but what really stressed me out was the 20-lap swimming test. All of the P.E. teachers were worried about the swimming test, too, and that added to my worry, because they certainly were in better shape than I was. Fortunately, I discussed this with one of the P.E. teachers (who happens to be a national tennis champion, but who was also worried about the test) and when I told her how I planned to do my strokes, getting the hardest one, the crawl, over in the beginning and then relaxing into the easier strokes, she said that my plan wasn’t good and she told me HER strategy, which was opposite of mine. She said that I should do the easy strokes first, that way I would bang out the numbers without exhausting myself and would mentally be more relaxed because the majority of the laps would then be done and then I could concentrate on the crawl, which would be the hard stroke. I honestly wouldn’t have thought of doing it that way, but fortunately I have FINALLY gotten to the point in life where I am willing to accept the advice of people who know better than I do, instead of thinking that I know a better way or am otherwise somehow “different”. No, I right away figured she knew more about such an athletic endurance test and I would follow her strategy.
I mentally rehearsed the swimming test at home that night several times in the pattern that I decided to do it that worked best for me, following the P.E. teacher’s strategy: four laps of side stroke with my arm up, four laps of elementary back stroke with my arms up, four laps of side stroke, and then alternating restful laps of breast stroke with the hard laps of crawl until all four of each had been done. I figured I would do them slowly and meditatively, thinking of “pumping” these muscles the way the heart pumps, in which the muscle of the heart is resting more than it is pumping. The heart goes “pump”, “reeeeeeest”, “pump”, “reeeeeest”, “pump”, “reeeeeeest”, eternally; I imagined myself swimming like that, “stroke”, “gliiiiiiiide”, “stroke”, “gliiiiiiiiide”, “stroke”, “gliiiiiiiide”.
I didn’t succeed in reading all 200 pages, but got too tired somewhere around 11:30 at night. Okay, I figured I had done enough, read the majority of the textbook and would pick up the rest in the summary lecture and use my still-somewhat-rested brain to figure out the rest if I could. Also, I needed some sleep in order to have good energy for the 20 laps.
The next morning at 6:00 when I woke up, I did one more mental imagining of the swim, then got up, took my shower, and ate a large protein and fat breakfast (two pieces of bacon, two ounces of turkey, and three eggs, all fried in coconut oil), because I knew that the body’s fuel source for sustained energy is fat.
At school in the course, we had a couple of hours of lecture and review, and then the written test. I was the first one finished with the test, so I turned it in and the instructor began to grade it. The questions were in textbook chapter order, so she was able to check the questions, chapter one, chapter, two, chapter three, all the way through. Then she said, “I’ve corrected the first nine chapters and you haven’t missed ONE question. I have never seen that before.” Wow. As it so happened, the first nine chapters were all that I had read, whereas chapters ten and eleven I had not read. But this beginning seemed good!
It ended up that all told, I missed a total of three (you could miss something like 20 and still pass). Well gee, I had been worried about the test and now I wished that I could have gotten a 100%, which maybe I would have if I had been able to read the whole book. But I’m not complaining! I passed the written test. And, fortunately, so did the others, as well.
Now it was time for lunch (which the school was providing, since this was in-service week), after which we would have the swimming test. Everybody said, “Aren’t you coming to lunch?” and I said, “No, I can’t eat, not with this swimming test right after.” But the instructor said, “You HAVE to eat. If will help you with the test.” So, once again, I followed the advice of someone who knew better. I didn’t eat a HUGE lunch, just half a tuna sandwich and some salad. I skipped the fancy-looking chocolate dessert. I finished lunch in fifteen minutes, which meant there was now 45 minutes of digestion time before the swimming test.
Then it was time to go back to the pool. One of the P.E. teachers said, “if anyone vomits an egg-salad sandwich, that will be me.” We all laughed, and I wondered if I would add my tuna to his egg salad.
I slipped into the nice clean water and admired the sparkling blue beauty of the pool. I told myself, “remember you are a heart, pumping and resting, easy does it, no worries, enjoy the smoothness of the water and shining sun, you are as smooth as a dolphin, gliding effortlessly through the water.” And that’s what I did. Four laps of sidestroke with my arm up. I paid no attention to the distance, but as I reached each end, I’d add to the count: one, two, three, four. Then I did four laps of the elementary backstroke. That one was harder than I thought, I had to frogkick my legs harder than I wanted to just to keep myself afloat. I thought I was a better floater than that, but maybe I have a greater lean body mass than I thought. However, I didn’t let it bother me. If I got a little tired, my next stroke would be an easy one, the side stroke. One, two, three, four laps.
The side stroke truly was easy, compared to the others I had done, it was almost like resting, it was the first stroke of the test in which I was able to use both arms. I moved slowly but breathed fully. However, I was conscious of how I was struggling for air, I definitely wasn’t the same as fully rested. But I kept going and kept my good attitude up. One, two, three, four laps.
Now the majority of the test was done, just like my friend the P.E. teacher said. I only had my easiest stroke and my hardest stroke left to do. I had to do the breast stroke first because I really felt like I needed to breathe; without a whole lap of full breathing, I don’t see how I could do the crawl, which I planned to breathe on every third stroke, as is taught in swimming class.
So I did my first lap of the breast stroke, breathing as fully as I could. All too soon, I got to the wall and now had to do my first lap of the crawl. I turned at the wall and started doing the crawl. It was immediately clear that I couldn’t wait three strokes to breathe, it had to be every time just before stroking with my right arm. Okay, so that’s what I’ll do. I really felt how hard it was to do this, it was a struggle and I had to gulp very hard each breath, but doing this now instead of at the beginning WAS so much better, because now all I had to do was use whatever I still had left in me. If I had started with this, I would have been too fresh and therefore would have put too much energy into it. However, amazingly, the pool's wall came up very fast. I realized what a fast stroke this really is, that even though it was tough, it made up for it by being quick. That was a great revelation.
I turned and did my second lap of breast stroke. Such a nice rest, almost like napping on a soft mattress! A great opportunity, again, to breathe breathe breathe...fill up those oxygen tanks, clear out that lactic acid, fill me with energy. Then the wall came up and I turned and was now in my second lap of the crawl, breathing prior to every right arm stroke. My arms ached. All I knew now was that somehow I just simply had to do it no matter how I felt. Just keep those arms churning and don’t let anything stop me. I knew the wall would come up quite fast, and it did, and then I had the pleasure of the third breast stroke, which was time to rest, breathe, and recouperate again.
I’m the kind of person whose mind can stop my body. I remember the first time I went skiing and I was successfully flying down the hill. It was glorious, but then suddenly my mind thought, “hey, you are a beginner, you’re not supposed to be doing this so well," so then suddenly I fell, sabotaged by my reasoning mind. Or I will try to jog and my body will feel the pain, feel exhaustion, and my mind will say, “this pain is bad, you don’t like it, you really don’t have to do this,” and I will stop running, with my breath pounding and my heart fluttering.
This did NOT happen to me while swimming. Just the opposite. Somewhere in the third crawl lap, my mind just slipped away. I don’t remember it, or remember my fourth breast stroke lap. My body simply swam, executing the plan that I mentally rehearsed several times the night before and then early that morning. This is something that as machine age humans we don’t normally get to experience (or I certainly don’t); movement is natural to the body and it actually likes it and knows how to do it. How else did nomadic tribes cross the veldt on long hunting journeys that lasted for weeks, if not much longer? How else did soldiers march from continent to continent? How else do marathon runners, triathletes, iron man participants succeed in multi-hour-long prodigious feats? My body moved into that realm and my mind didn’t interfere.
I completed the third crawl lap, and then filled my lungs and muscles with the fourth breast lap, and then turned into the fourth and final crawl lap. I honestly didn’t even really know where I was until my hand touched the far wall and as I turned in the water, I heard the instructor call out my name and say that I had finished it.
I had finished it. I had passed the test. Twenty laps. Almost a quarter of a mile.
There are far worse swimming tests. I know that. There are triathlons out in the open water, the ice cold, frothy ocean, competing for space against hundreds of other churning racers. Or Jack LaLanne, swimming to freedom from the impossible-to-escape-from-Alcatraz across swift San Francisco Bay currents towing a rowboat. Somebody swimming across the English channel in fog and no sight of land. Or The Iron Man, what is that, swimming completely around an island in Hawaii?
But this was amazing. I, an almost sedentary, nearly sixty-year-old non-athlete who will think twice about going up three flights of stairs in my apartment building and mostly will just use the elevator, I did this. That young person that I once was, bad in sports but I WAS a good swimmer, I could feel that self was still inside me, and it felt really good.
Time went on and one after another, the other swimmers completed their laps, too, so that ultimately, every one of us completed the task and passed the swimming test. It wasn’t easy for anybody, but we all did it. That, for me, became another part of the test. It wasn’t good enough for just me to pass it, everybody had to pass it.
Then we had the in-water lessons and practices of all the lifeguarding skills: how to rescue active and passive swimmers from the front and from the rear, how to rescue those who were partially under water, how to rescue those who had sunk to the bottom of the pool, how to rescue multiple swimmers, all the various ways to get into the water to rescue somebody, and all the ways to get rescued people OUT of the water. A full day of lessons.
One more test--swimming under water for fifteen yards. We didn’t even know they HAD that test, but it was easy for all. I’m an underwater swimmer from way back, so that was like going back home.
Then we each had to do several final “mystery” rescues. We’d have to scan the pool and other students would decide what kind of situation they were in and we’d then have to recognize who needed help and choose the correct pool entrance for that rescue, rescue them properly, and then get them out of the pool.
And then we were done. We all qualified for the YMCA lifeguard certification. I felt utterly exhausted physically and utterly exhiliarated mentally; an odd combination of feelings. I went home and felt like I would sleep for a week. But the next day was still a working day.
The next day there was a moment at the beginning of the in-service meetings when the headmaster asked each administrator if he or she had an announcement. When he came to me, I said that I had no announcement, although I FELT like saying “Guess what, I passed the lifeguard certification course!” But there would have been no point in saying that, that was only a personal achievement. However, he kept asking me, “Are you sure you have no announcement?”, as if he knew that I really did have something to say, but I don’t think he knew. Anyway, I said I had no announcements.
Later, several people said, “Oh, you should have said you completed the lifeguard training!” But it wasn’t part of my job. It COULD help my job, I can imagine a scenario where it would come in handy, but still. However, others in the P.E. department really appreciated the fact that I did this...in fact, I think they were very disappointed that NO ONE ELSE did it. But I don’t blame anyone for not doing it. It was a very busy week and this swimming stuff really was a P.E. thing. It was intense, that’s all I can say, intense, which has become the word for the week.
However, after that morning with the headmaster asking me if I had any announcement, several in the P.E. department must have felt the same thing I did, that this was WORTH that announcement (as was their getting certified, too). So then for the rest of the day, I couldn’t walk into the auditorium or sit down to lunch or pass a group of people without one of the P.E. teachers announcing, “there he is, one of our new lifeguards!” And then I responded with something along the order of “me, and ALL of us!” So for sure the word did get out.
Two other cool things happened this week. One of the parents was on campus and she ran into our staff accountant, whose office is next door to mine. The parent was so happy to see her, this being the beginning of the new school year, and the parent said to her, “You are my children’s FAVORITE teacher!” The staff accountant teaches a wonderful and innovative crafts class after school that quite a few kids love to death and some of them take again and again each trimester. And they will even come up to our offices just to see her, they like her so much. But for her to hear that she is considered some kids’ favorite teacher, to even be considered in the same category as the other “real” teachers, is a very gratifying accomplishment. She said to me, “you know most people on campus don’t even know that we up here are involved with the students at all. They think all we do is juggle figures all day.”
Later that day, when the mail came, I saw that a wonderful student that we all know and love had sent a postcard from a foreign country he and his family visited this summer. He sent this postcard to three people whose names were written in three lines above the school’s address: to the person who was his teacher last year, to a school administrator who is from the country they were visiting, and to me. I showed it to the accountant and said to her, "Look at this, see the people in this school he thought to send this to." And my name was the first one on the list.
The staff accountant was right; most people on campus don’t know that we are involved with the students and the educational process at all. But the students know. And we are greatly rewarded by their recognition of that involvement.
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