Because the streets have no names.
Roach in the box
I recently read about how municipalites and state governments are pushing to have the calorie content of menu items published next to the items themselves in chain restaurants and eventually all restaurants. I first wondered if this would really make anyone change their eating habits, but apparently at least one person has.
So I guess my real beef with this whole thing is that I feel like I am being herded like cattle. When I was in college, the combination of high calories and low price was what I was looking for. Since then, I have begun to yogurt up a little, but it has been easy to educate myself with the current tools available. Is the major retooling that this is going to require really worth all the time and effort? Will chefs have to give up their freedom and variety and make the "daily special" a thing of the past? I hate not knowing what is in my food as much as the next person, but won't this just make it worse? You are not requiring restaurants to teach nutrition, you are requiring them to post one variable of a lengthy equation. Furthermore, it's something that they can easily get around by putting crap like olestra back into our food again. I don't know the answers to these questions, but this is starting to make me hungry for some taco smell...
On service
As I type, it is five in the morning on a Sunday. I am on a unit startup in Baton Rouge, and we have a little bit of downtime as we wait for some furnaces to do their “thang.” Once you get used to it, the night shift is great – the pace slows down, and while you sit in dimly lit rooms staring at graphs with strangers who ultimately become friends, you naturally begin to wonder at the natural variety in life, and what it is that brought you to this point. In other words, it’s the perfect time for a letter. The radio is playing Whitney Houston’s “I will always love you,” which is kind of an odd thing to hear in a control room. I guess it was Saddam Hussein’s campaign theme song, so I guess no scenario can be weirder than that.
I think that both Lorie and I would concur that this week has been good. We are beginning to see a glimmer of progress in the organization of our house and in the garden. This week seemed to pass by in a blur, however, as both of us have been swamped with work and longer hours. Just when I was about to leave for the weekend and bask in freedom, I was given the “Jack Bauer mission,” as Lorie playfully quips, to go to Lousiana. It’s fun, and I love my job, but that just wasn’t the right time to be receiving that news. For those of you that have seen Office Space, you know what scene I’m thinking of.
It wasn’t all bad, though, as Lorie and I still had the pleasure of a date night on Friday. We ended up helping our friend Daniel move a motorized bed out of his home and move another one down a flight of stairs. If you’ve never moved a motorized bed, then congratulations – your back is probably still aligned. That was, hands down, one of the heaviest pieces of furniture I have tried to move, including the piano that I suspect gave me that last subconjunctival hemorrhage.
So today, aside from being tired out of my mind, I feel very sore. But it feels good – it was really a lot of fun. Throughout life I have always felt a very strong conviction that we should seek out the opportunities to serve one another and help in making the world a better and more comfortable place to live in.
I think that I first realized the true value of service while in college. Before college, service meant going to pull weeds on a widow’s lawn. Always. In school, however, I found that there were many ways that one could serve. I cleaned up both disgusting parks and beautiful gardens in the city. I helped kids with their math homework. I gave blood. I helped people with their taxes. And really, I could tell that people truly were grateful.
School really isn’t about the books, and neither is life, so to speak. I only truly enjoyed the practicality of being an engineer when it was applied to service. Oddly enough, the service I gave was what made me want to fully pursue my degree. Service really does give you a new perspective on the world; it can change your day and really lift your spirits.
I feel the following quote by Mother Teresa is applicable: “Do not worry about why problems exist in the world -- just respond to people's needs. We feel what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean, but that ocean would be less without that drop.”
Since college, I’ve found myself starting to focus on the causes of problems in our society and in the world. It’s all too easy. Perhaps it is time for me to bring back the focus to my neighbor, and to bringing a spirit of service back into my life.
Perhaps this is one of the main reasons that we are told to multiply our talents. The more talents we have, the more ways that we can serve. And when we have a greater variety of ways in which to serve, it becomes more fun (reference weeds above). We better equip ourselves with the ability to understand and to respond to the problems of others. Learning and growing is the first step, and applying the knowledge is the next.
Haha, well the song on the radio has changed by now. “This is the world we live in, and these are the hands we’re given. Use them and let’s start trying to make it a place worth living in…” How very timely. 10 points to the first person to identify the song without looking it up.
The Symphony of Modern Humanity
I echo the words of Ne-Yo when I say, I am so sick of love songs...I think it is time to turn off the radio! It seems that almost every song on the radio is to the theme of falling in love, breaking up, hating love, or wanting love. If they're not about love then they choose something completely obscure or random to talk about, like "chiggity china the chinese chicken, you have a drumstick and your brain quits tickin'." Mindless lyrices only contributes to a mindless and lost generation of fanatical teenagers sold on any group regardless of their lyrical ability.
I commute for at least 2 hours a day and despite my disappointment in the main stream music industry, I find myself listening to Taylor Swift, Rihanna and Beyonce all day long (these ridiculous song stick to the brain like superglue). One particular day on my commute home I landed on Katy Perry's song, "Thinking of you." As I actually spent a second to listen to what she was singing about, I got to thinking what LOVE means. As defined by her song, it is an obsession of one perfect person that is your "soul mate." According to her, without being in a relationship with that one person we are forced to, "settle for second best." Although she has a man, she is always thinking what it would be like if he, the soul mate, was the one spending the night instead of the one she is with. Really, is that love? NO, that's sick! Get to thinking, Katy, and move on! I know it's not always that simple especially falling in and out of love... but I highly doubt that what she is feeling is actually TRUE LOVE. Same goes for you and your love story Taylor Swift, sounds more like a shotgun wedding.
So this brings me to my point. Why do we let the media tell us how to live our lives anyway. I understand that musicians are merely people trying to blog about their lives and therefore have the right to sing about whatever they'd like. But, that doesn't reduce the fact that I just get so sick of seeing the rising generation stuck on this mumbo jumbo. I've come to the conclusion that life is so high paced and so over stressed that people are too busy to think for themselves. Don't even get me started on the difference in media coverage between Bush and Obama, one can't do anything right and the other can't do anything wrong. When will we find the balance? When will we learn to think and understand for ourselves and turn off the noise?
Sometimes I make the 2 hour commute with the radio off. Manny thinks I'm weird to do this, but sometimes I just can't handle the sensory overload. I hate that whatever I want to think or feel someone has already done and has written a song or book about it to tell me how I need to live it. I know it is good to learn from others, but sometimes I want to EXPERIENCE life for myself.
We is smarter than you think we is
I regularly peruse the findings at http://www.factcheck.org/ simply so I can see what kind of garbage the politicians have been lying to us about lately. It does a great job of exposing how terrible both parties are at keeping the ninth commandment. A recent post was interesting, refuting Obama's claims of the dire situation of our education system. Highlights:
1. He said the high school dropout rate tripled in the past 30 years. The DOE says it declined by 1/3.
2. He said 8th grade math scores have fallen to ninth place compared with other countries. Actually, they have risen to that level, with a low of being in 28th place in 1995. Remember, the alligator eats the bigger number.
3. He said he wanted us to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. Currently we are in second place to Norway, trailing by one percent.
I thought this was interesting because there is actually something good that this nation is acheiving compared to the rest of the world, among with all of the other frog spit that we churn out on a regular basis, and our president doesn't want us to hear about it! He just wants us to be scared so we will spend more. Who do you take us for, a bunch of dummies?
New Blog - Unearthing the functional, the objective, and the ridonculous in life
Everybody clap your hands, and say hello to new beginnings! Did you just think that after we got married, we would vanish from the face of the earth, leaving nary a cyber trail? Not so, our cyber trail is very alive and active. I've decided to keep our blog because:
1) I love getting updates on everyone through blog feeds (I like google reader because it delivers them all to my home page). All of my friends collectively are very interesting on a daily basis. We want to keep all our friends and family updated on the semi-interesting and mundane things that happen to us.
2) The way we've run our household so far is...unique! We want to share it and see if any of our quirks can help others, while we learn from their quirks.
3) Most things in this life have only one word (pioneered by Mr. Jack Black) to describe them...ridonculous. You can't make this stuff up, and you definitely can't pass these things up without writing them down for the world to see. This will be their repository.
On those rare occasions when we do have a deep and intricate thought, it'll be posted on my pensive Camacho Libre blog.
We hope you enjoy it and we really hope we can get this thing moving along! Any suggestions to help us?
Proposing: A Dude's Perspective
When people ask how I proposed to Lorie, it’s usually kind of hard to explain. The short answer is: Candles. Gifts. Poem. But for those people who are really interested in hearing the whole story, here it is…
I remember when I realized that I wanted to marry Lorie. It made me happy. I also remember when I realized that she wanted to marry me too. It made me even happier. When I started thinking about the next steps, though, I admittedly became a little nervous. It wasn’t the ring (I mean, all you do there is plunk down a bunch of cash and hope for the best, right?); it was mostly the proposal. My family didn’t usually tell proposal stories around the campfire, but I knew people were going to ask later. I mean, a bad proposal either becomes a family joke (if she says yes) or a sad warning tale to everyone on the block (if she says no) in the end. Best to sit on this, I thought, and let the creative juices simmer for a while.
The idea sort of came to me when we were hiking up Ensign’s peak in Utah. In retrospect, maybe it was the high altitude… Lorie commented to me that when she was in college and went on hikes in Utah, she would always see groups of high school kids going on group hikes before a dance. (This perhaps merits some explaining…Utah has a unique system of guys asking girls to high school dances, which includes a series of creative puns or puzzles that eventually lead to the name of the person asking you to the dance. The answer must be reciprocated in kind; a simple “yes” or “no” would not suffice. The dance is not just a trip to the dance and back, either. It includes dinner and a day-long activity; ergo, hiking. As far as I can tell, it arises from Mormon dating rituals in the 70’s. There’s some more info about it here).
Anyway, the point is she felt like growing up in Texas she missed out on a lot of that because she never did the fun activities beforehand, and she never got asked in the crazy ways. I replied with something trite, like that I would have asked her if we were in high school. She commented that she didn’t like going to the dances that much anyway. Hmm….asking to dances without the dancing…would this work? My mind thought it over and, at the very least, I would get a few points for originality. All systems go.
Back in Houston, I went to work putting everything together. Now, I remembered that there were a few rules that others had told me about proposing. One was to personalize rather than generalize. That part was probably the easiest for me. If you’ve never heard of the short-lived MTV series Daria, I don’t blame you - but Lorie has, and we both loved the show in our earlier years. So I found some DVD’s online and ordered them. I made T-shirts for the band that we had formed with our Guitar Hero characters. I painstakingly made a dorky little picture frame with all sorts of mementos of ours scattered around it.
When the day came, I told her I had a gift that I had made her for our four-month anniversary present. We’re all into personalized gifts, so it’s not that uncommon. She came over to my place after work and the dance “tickets” were all lined up for her – homecoming, prom, etc. Each ticket had a gift, a separate activity, a separate dinner (usually restaurant gift cards), and of course the puzzle/pun. There were secret messages and word searches, basically a panoply of creative ideas. I made sure to include plenty of cheese in there, like the classic “Now that I’ve kissed the ground you walk on, will you go to prom with me?” That at least got a laugh – and the context made it original. Everything was going according to plan.
In all modesty I think I did a pretty good job of not making her too suspicious about it. After all was said and done I wished her a happy anniversary and read her a poem that I had written. The last line of the poem said, “I can’t do anymore than give you this…” “Give me what?” she thought… At that point, I handed her a beat-up old wallet with stickers on it that spelled out her name. Inside was another beat-up picture of the temple and a beat-up card that said “Will you marry me?” Luckily, the sheer ridiculousness of that item had distracted her attention enough to get me on my knee with the ring out in front of me. And then I said it out loud for her, “Lorie Franklin, will you marry me?”
This was what I had waited for – the reply. For those few moments, the tension built like the inside of a volcano. Then she broke the silence with…
“Are you joking?”
“Does…it…look like I’m joking?” I said, not sarcastically, but truly unsure. I furtively glanced at the ring to make sure it was still there. Maybe I had made her a lot less suspicious then I thought.
“Yes, I will!”
The tension was broken, happy moments ensued, and the rest is history. I'm glad I did it, and I'm glad it's done.
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