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Sadness

That’s the only word I have to describe the feeling that completely overwhelmed me yesterday during my afternoon commute.  It came out of nowhere, and by the time I got home I was almost in tears.

I can’t even use the word unhappy to describe it. To me unhappy denotes dissatisfaction. You wanted A but ended up with B. No, this was something different.  There’s a history of depression in my family, so I’m hoping this (thankfully transitory) episode was just a fluke and doesn’t mark the beginning of something more severe.

Frankly, I think my malaise sprang from a combination of many things that simply refused to be ignored any longer: the escalating political stupidity in this country and the ever more outrageous, batshit-crazy shrieking from the right; witnessing the insane police brutality unleashed on the ostensibly peaceful Occupy Wall Street protesters, and the fact that like those out there protesting, I’m literally back to living paycheck to paycheck (and sometimes not even that), earning what I did six years ago. Don’t get me wrong―I’m thankful to have a job, and at a place I genuinely like on top of it, but at this point I have no health insurance, and no possibility of seeing a doctor for even a routine checkup―much less anything more―until (assuming I do get hired on as a permanent employee at the company I’m contracting with) after the first of the year.  Never mind that I’m now officially overdue for my yearly post-cancer throat exam and that I’m wearing contact lenses that should’ve been replaced a very long time ago.  The car needs the front bushings and a leaking power steering hose replaced (thankfully both covered by my mechanical breakdown insurance, but each requiring a separate $250 deductible), and I still owe a dear friend $200 from some money she lent me last summer. Don’t even get me started on the two medications I’m taking―neither of which have generic equivalents―that cost $50 each for a 30-day supply…

Yeah, I think I have a right to be a little sad.

If that weren’t enough, I’m still not feelin’ it as far as Denver is concerned.  That doesn’t worry me that much, because as I remember I went through something similar when I first moved to San Francisco, and it took me well over a year before I started to think of it as home, but it’s still there, tap-tap-tapping at my subconscious.

The same goes for our apartment.  It’s very nice (even with its strange design quirks), but as I explained to Ben the other day, it still just feels like someplace we’re staying; it’s not yet home.  I guess that comes from the fact that I was in my last place three years, and the place before that, a little over seven, and I’m used to being settled.

I also miss my family back in Phoenix.

All I can say is it’s very different to uproot yourself and start a new life when you’re 50 versus when you’re 25.  Very different. At least I take solace in knowing that both my mom and dad did just that when they were even older than I am now, so I know it’s not impossible.

Oh, and one more thing:  Last night, after trying iCloud and deciding it was a waste of time and effort for anything other than Find My Mac and Find My iPhone, I disconnected and the lost all my calendars.  For some fucking reason, when you decide to disconnect from the cloud using your Mac, you’re offered the choice of staying connected or losing all the calendar data synced to your Mac. Seriously.  (“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”) Thankfully, after quite a bit of swearing and being unable to restore them from Time Machine, I was able to manually sync my calendars back from my iPhone.  I sometimes think there are Apple designers who have a severe case of Microsoft envy.

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Now That's Scary!

And proves beyond a doubt that everything on his planet could be blotted out in the wink of an eye…and we’d never even see it coming.

From Dvice:

In August of 1883, an astronomer in Mexico named José Bonilla spotted hundreds of fuzzy objects passing in front of the sun that nobody could explain. A new analysis of these observations suggests that what Bonilla saw was anywhere from a billion to a trillion tons of comet passing as close as a few hundred miles from the surface of the Earth.

At the time, Bonilla had no idea what he was looking at. All he knew was that over a period of about two days, he counted about 450 objects surrounded by fuzziness passing between his telescope and the sun. Contemporary astronomers didn’t see anything, and when Bonilla published a paper in an astronomical journal a few years later, the journal editor suggested that Bonilla must have accidentally been counting birds or bugs or something like that.

As it turns out, it may not have been bugs. It may have been the remnants of an immense comet that narrowly missed completely destroying our entire civilization that nobody else saw because it was so freakin’ close to us. Based on Bonilla’s account of the size and number of the objects and the length of time that they were visible, modern astronomers have been able to estimate what the original size of the comet probably was, and just how close all of its fragments came to Earth. The numbers are shocking: each of the 450 fragments probably ranged in size from 150 feet to a solid mile across, and the upper limit on the size of the original comet (before it broke up) is something like nine trillion tons.

Let’s just put a few trillion tons of fragmented comet in perspective, shall we? We’re talking about an object with a mass that’s equivalent to at least eight Halley’s comets. And if you’re wondering what would happen if a couple-hundred-foot wide comet fragments made it through Earth’s atmosphere, we’re pretty sure it happened over Sibera back in 1908, resulting in an explosion approximately equal to the detonation of a moderately-sized thermonuclear weapon. Nobody was around to experience the blast, but a few trees did get knocked over. And by a few, I mean 80 million.

Now, keep in mind that those 450 objects that Bonilla counted over two days only come from a few hours of observations, and extrapolating his objects per hour out over two days, we get over 3,000 cometary fragments. So take that type of fun little thermonuclear-equivalent destructive experience, and imagine it happening thousands of times all over the Earth in a period of a day or two. Yeah, we’re talking the equivalent of global thermonuclear war, except way, way worse. Odds of humanity (or much in the way of any other plants or animals) surviving the bombardment and the climate change that would follow is not good, not good at all.

The really scary part is just how close this comet came to hitting the Earth: since only Bonilla saw the fragments and no other astronomers did, that means that it had to be close to us. Very close. Very, seriously, it’s not even funny close. The minimum distance that the fragments passed was calculated to be about 400 miles from the Earth’s surface, which is nothing. That’s only 150 miles or so above the International Space Station. If the comet had been in a slightly different orbit, or had broken up at a slightly different time, as of about a hundred years ago, our entire civilization might have ceased to exist.

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I Was Really Expecting…

…Denver to be more wet and cloudy than it’s been. But I guess the same commandment that’s in place in Phoenix also extends to Denver as well: Thou shalt have no days where the sky is completely overcast from sunrise to sunset. It is forbidden!

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Why Steve Jobs' Death Feels So Sad

From Lex Friedman at MacWorld.com:

On Twitter and Facebook, in my email, and through IMs, I keep hearing a similar refrain: Why am I so sad? Why am I feeling such a strong reaction to the death of someone I’ve never met?

Many of us feel tremendous sadness in light of Steve Jobs’s death. I can’t speak for my friends about why they feel so affected by his passing, but I imagine their reasons for tearing up mirror my own.

Welcome in my home

I can’t tell you the name of either one of RIM’s CEOs. Though I know his name, I honestly couldn’t pick Google CEO Larry Page out of a lineup, and I don’t know that I’ve ever heard his speaking voice, either. But I know just what Steve Jobs looked like, and just how he sounded. Not every CEO can—or should—show off his company’s products. But watching Steve deliver a keynote or host an Apple Event, I wasn’t struck solely by his much-lauded showmanship. Part of what made a Jobs-helmed event so exciting to watch was his very real, very tangible passion for the products he was unveiling. Steve didn’t just run Apple—he loved it, and you could see that love, that pride, beaming from his face.

You hear people talk about television actors as the people we don’t know who we let into our homes, since they show up in our dens each night. Every Apple event, Steve showed up in my home too, wherever my Mac was. I would read the liveblog first, then watch the video as soon as Apple made it available. I’ve watched countless interviews with the man, too. So part of the reason I think his death hits me hard is because I really do feel like I knew him—even if he didn’t know me.

(continued)

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Mirror Monday

Bears an uncanny resemblance to my friend and previous housemate Michael, around the time I originally met him back in the early 90s. Even he thought it was eerie when he saw this.

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Not Quite So Settled

It’s been nearly four months since Ben and I arrived in Denver. We’re both working, we’re finally out of that horrific hotel and moved into a place of own own, and yet…I still don’t feel settled.

This city isn’t yet “home.”

Ben and I agree that while neither of us regrets the decision to move here, we both have some disappointments. For Ben, it’s been his lead teacher. This program was the sole reason we relocated here, and it’s been an uphill battle for him in trying to gain this woman’s trust and respect. I have a feeling that her participation in the program was involuntary, and since she’s moving overseas at the end of this school year, has basically checked out and sees absolutely no reason to help an aspiring teacher get his career off the ground. She’s told Ben she “doesn’t like men in the classroom,” and has provided precious little positive feedback regarding his performance. After the glowing praise he received while working as a teacher’s aide in his last two assignments, I find her attitude toward him confusing.  I also suppose it’s possible she just doesn’t like him (equally confusing).  How can anyone not like Ben?

Okay, admittedly I’m biased.

My disappointment with Denver pretty much boils down to one thing: my commute. I have learned that I really, really hate traffic.

I know in the overall scheme of things it’s silly, and we could’ve chosen a different apartment complex somewhat closer to my work that would’ve cut out a lot this frustration, but Ben and I both liked this place more than the other options we’d looked at, and since I have a car, I wanted to give him more of a distance advantage since he’s currently relying on public transit to get to and from work and school.

In Phoenix I was spoiled.  I lived and worked on the same street, and my commute was about four and a half miles each way. In Denver, it’s 11 miles each way, and it requires that I take what are undoubtedly the two worst thoroughfares in the entire city: Colorado Boulevard and Interstate 25.

To be honest, the morning commute isn’t really all that bad. Traffic moves smoothly down Colorado, and even southbound I-25 is generally easy going. Returning home in the afternoon however, is a little slice of hell. Considering the population of the Denver metro area is actually less than Phoenix, I can’t understand why the number of cars on the freeway actually reminds me more of the traffic found in the Bay Area or the outskirts of Los Angeles.

Admittedly, some days are surprisingly a breeze. I can get on the freeway at Orchard and stay at a relatively constant 65 mph until I get to Colorado Boulevard.  But those days are rare; most of the time it’s a parking lot, creeping along at a speed reminiscent of the opening scene from Office Space.

Colorado Boulevard itself isn’t bad heading north until you reach 1st Avenue, at which point—without fail—traffic comes to a complete standstill. Thankfully (and I swear it’s the one thought that keeps me sane at that point) is that I know it’s only another half mile until I get home.

On a positive note, I love my job. The company wants to bring me on as a permanent, full time employee (with all the benefits), but it appears I am only about halfway through my 640 hour contract, requiring them to pay a early termination fee to the agency I work for if they want to put me on their payroll. I have no idea what that amount is, but I was speaking with the office manager on Friday and she said, “It all depends on whether we convert you in October, November, or December. In any case it’s not an outrageous amount.” Fingers crossed that it’s sooner rather than later.

Also speaking positively, I am finally warming up to the apartment.  We’re still not completely put away and organized, but it’s reached the point where it’s livable and I don’t have a sense of guilt when I get home in the evening and just want to sit and watch television instead of going through the boxes that are stacked in our storage room.  That’s not a task that can be put off indefinitely as a few items are missing that I’d really like to find, but for now I can live with it.

I’m also feeling a little more settled (at least psychologically) because this past Friday I decided to shell out an extra $30 a month and get a reserved parking spot in the garage.  Yes, so far there always seem to be plenty of unreserved spots available, but I wanted the added assurance of knowing that after the snow starts flying there will always be a covered place for Anderson to park when I get home. (And the spot I got, right next to the stairwell, is extra wide, so no door dings!)

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My Thoughts Exactly

Because the “Let them eat cake!” attitude of the French aristocracy monied elite worked out so well for them the last time.

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” We can only hope…

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Three Examples Demonstrate a Proof

Stolen from Bill in Exile:

1. They cheered the execution of an innocent man.

2. They screamed, “Let him die” when told of a person with cancer and no insurance.

3.  They booed a United States fighting man in uniform serving in Iraq.

This is the face of the republican party today.

This who who they are and what they stand for.

And these people are not worthy of being called Americans.

They are, simply put, a disgrace.

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Personal Style

I think you reach a point in life where the obsessions of your youth are no longer quite so important as they once were. While flipping through an issue of Details this morning and seeing the article that screamed “Must Have Looks for Fall” I got to thinking how silly it all is. Fashion, like a lot of things in life, is transitory. What’s hot today is going to be considered dated tomorrow, so why worry about it? That’s why I think it’s important that people find their own sense of style. Find clothes that are comfortable, match your lifestyle, and don’t break the bank—because sooner or later all of it ends up at Goodwill or in the garbage.

For me, my personal style has been T-Shirts, Polos, and jeans for as long as I can remember. Once upon a time they were the official uniform of the clone brigade in the bars and I always felt less than properly dressed when I showed up in a polo shirt that sported an English flag instead of a green alligator.  (Even back in the day the premium paid for that little alligator was more than I could afford. Funny how things never seem to change.)

Out of habit, I still wear most shirts tucked in. After seeing some makeover show several years ago I know that alone has me teetering dangerously close to “doddering old fool” status, but I’m comfortable with it.  When my shirts aren’t tucked in, they look (to me) like they’re hanging down to my knees and it just doesn’t work on this body.  Maybe it would look better if I didn’t have the massive belly in the way. (BTW, weight is something else I no longer obsess about. I found it’s easier to just love and accept myself as I am instead of obsessing over every plus-or-minus 5 pound swing I go through. It’s sad when I read through old journals and remember that I was convinced if I could only lose 20 pounds―while easily fitting into size 33 jeans―all would be right in the world.  To my younger self I say, “Get over it. You’re perfect just the way you are.”

I never used to wear belts with my jeans. Of course, back then I had a butt that kept my pants from sliding off.

There are some things that I wore when I was younger that I won’t wear today: white jeans. Leather jackets. Anything with a “Members Only” label. Frye boots (another one-time seeming requirement for going out dancing).

What about you? Have you found a style that works for you, day in and day out?

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