Vacillating Velocity

I’m sort of realizing, while thinking about this here site, that it isn’t the only one to suffer from my “nothing’s interesting” attitude. I probably talk to my best friend a few hours a year on the phone, and most other people, less. that’s sort of silly. if I keep on with it, I’ll end up writing nothing much else but “beloved son, ___, ___ 1978-20XX”. so let’s try and hijack this from its route down the road to nowhere, or some equally strained metaphor.

woke up to: drown – son volt.

More than a half-year flies by, and not a peep from me in the b**g****ere. yeah, well. um, classes went good, then classes went good again, then I got a good job. somewhere in there I moved to a nice new place with bay views. I did a bunch of reading and some homework. I re-learned some unix, snowboarded a bit, played lots of video games. didn’t write much but java and shell scripts. “learned” to ride a vespa, soon a motorcycle too. just got back from Chicago.

this morning’s song stuck in head upon waking: king of all of the world by the old 97’s.

yep, I’m that boring.

Previously, my only experience with AC Transit¹ was as a driver or pedestrian observing their busses. I always found the behavior of the drivers a bit scary, and made a mental note to avoid them. Now, having spent a full semester commuting about an hour on two separate busses per trip to school and back, I have a new perspective: other drivers are assholes to busses. So now, my favorite drivers are the aggressive ones, because the timid ones significantly extend my commute, and let me tell you, you want to spend as little of your life as possible on the bus.

Given all that, I have a couple proposals for new marketing slogans for AC Transit:

“We drive like maniacs so you don’t have to.”

or, more succinct:

“Crazy – for YOU!”

1. The bus company in the county where I live.

The best evidence I’ve seen yet that President-Elect Obama is not just a political figure but a popular one is only a few blocks away. Before the election, in the cute little shopping district near me, there was a table set up outside of Peet’s coffee most days. They sold what appeared to be official Obama / Biden merchandise. Well, now that the election’s over, not only are they still there, not only have they expanded (two tables, baby!), but they have a competitor! Some guy set up a table across the sidewalk and is selling what are clearly low-quality, cash-in t-shirts.

I don’t really have an opinion one way or the other on this, but it’s interesting to note.

So there’s this new (ish?) business on Telegraph a few blocks from UC Berkeley campus – it’s a cereal joint. I mean, that’s the best phrase I can come up with to describe it. As near as I can tell, it’s a place to go and buy single servings of cereal. I’ve never actually been inside, mind you, since that sounds beyond unappealing. Indeed, I remember my first thought being “well, that won’t take long to go out of business.”
Imagine my amusement, today, when I noticed that the vintage clothing store roughly across the street had put, on their marquee:

DUDE, WHAT’S WITH THAT CEREAL STORE?

Oh yeah, did you hear? Barack Obama won the presidency. Not just won. WON. (More on the margins , and more specifically geography, in these neat maps) First of all, I’d like to thank Meantime IPA, which I was enjoying a bottle of whilst watching the election results, and whose sweet and complex hoppiness I credit with the win.

Seriously, though, it was an amazing thing. Many people have spent much time expressing the whole thing much more eloquently than I can in these fifteen minutes before class, but I will say that it was the first time I got a thrill out of the actual act of voting. I almost shed tears. For once, I was voting for someone I believed in, not against someone I abhorred. For once, I feel the possibility of an intelligent, rational, compassionate and pragmatic direction for the country to head in. I admit it, he got me:

I feel hope.

I woke up before my alarm this morning and lay lazily in bed. Upon hearing the creaks and groans of someone shuffling around upstairs, I began to tune my ears to a different kind of noise. Rain. The splatter of the drops on asphalt, the rustling of tree leaves as the water cascades through their boughs. I listened intently, but the sound I hoped to hear wasn’t there.

Since the downpour earlier this week, when I awoke to those familiar sounds, I’ve been hoping every morning to hear it again. It doesn’t make the most sense; one of the first things I do in the mornings is walk a half-mile to an uncovered bus stop. I’ve got an umbrella, though, and I’ve always quite liked the rain, both being out in it, and staying inside from it.

It struck me, though, as lay listening for something that wasn’t there, that what I really wanted, more than the rain, was to hear silence. That eerie lack of sound that comes along with the blanketing of the world in sheets of white. I want to wake up to snow.

It’s the biggest yearning I’ve felt in a while for life up in the rockies. I think about it routinely; riding multiple busses to school every day reminds me of those days when I’d have to hitchhike to work, and the timing is about equally reliable. Also, I wait for my first bus of the day across from a casual carpool pickup zone, where people practice organized hitchhiking every day.

At least this winter, I’ll be able to head to the mountains routinely, and chase after that winter wonderland of my dreams.

I’ve been intending to update in here for the past four weeks or so since school started (perhaps re-started would be more accurate to my case), and talk about my classes, my commute, whatever. But let’s start small: philosophy. I’m taking a course that’s starting with a bunch of historical philosophical foundations of the study of mind. Reading philosophy in general drives me absolutely batshit, because I generally find it to be incoherent, idiotic, or both.

Enter John Searle, a Berkeley professor and relatively famous modern philosopher who wrote the book we’re reading at the moment. I enjoy his style immensely. He’s concise, coherent, and pragmatic, and this sentence, which bade me stop reading to write in here, really captures his essence nicely:

Philosophy begins with a sense of mystery and wonder at what any sane person regards as too obvious to worry about.

Prepping to do some in-between-studying updating of my website (finally!), and after having just backed up all my computer files for the first time in . . . too long, I found that I was running an out-of-date version of WordPress, the software that makes all this yabbering nice and pretty and coherent. DreamHost, my webhosting company, provides a one-click install and upgrade of a variety of popular software pieces, which is how I keep this site and my photo gallery running on up-to-date software with minimal effort.

Well, in the upgrade process somewhere, I jumped the gun, did the finalizing steps in the wrong order, or whatever. The point is, all of a sudden, my website was BLANK. Nothingness. I started searching around, and for a moment, had a wave of nauseated panic envelop me fully. I had chronicled the last three years of my life in these electronic walls, to some degree, and to lose that amount of work and remembrance would be heartbreaking. It’s happened before, and it was awful, but this is a particularly notable phase of my life enshrined in textual form.

Needless to say, my fears were assuaged when I realized that [boring technical explanation omitted]. The first thing I did, of course, was back this baby up.

More later, after my heart-rate goes down.

This one’s been brewing for a while now, so to speak.

Stop shoving your money / credit card at me like it’s some sort of diseased rodent. I’m using my hands to punch in your order at the moment, so not only can I not take your money, I can’t complete the transaction yet anyhow. Wait five seconds. Once you’ve given me your card, here’s another tip – my hands do not process electronic transactions. Don’t grab for your card until AFTER I’ve run it through the swipey-thing. In fact, don’t grab at it at all. It’s rude.

It’s not a huge deal, but when I say “Hi, how can I help you?”, “Good, thanks.” is an incorrect response. As long as you treat me like a person and not a vending machine, though, I don’t really care if you goof up the pleasantries. Honestly, I’m not really paying attention to you, either. But we’re still both humans. Don’t bark your order at me like I’m a robot. And, this is just the grammar nazi in me talking, don’t say “I need.” You want. Everything we sell is a luxury. Speaking of luxuries and poor phrasing, “I’ll take” and “I’ll have” come off as pompous.

Now on to the meaty stuff: bar drinks. First off, and I really can’t emphasize this enough, in a busy coffee shop, the barista is, by far, the busiest and hardest working person in the store. Yes, you don’t have to stand in line to ask them for things. But guess what? Don’t. You know how you don’t like waiting for your drinks to come out? Well, when you harass the barista to do whatever it is you want that you should be asking a counterperson for, you are slowing down the drinks of everyone.

When you order your drink, there are perhaps forty different modifier buttons that we have to choose from. They range from milk types (not a huge deal, unless you think you really need us to mix lowfat and nonfat, because that extra gram of fat is going to make a profound difference in your life) to foam amounts to number of shots to . . . temperature. You can order your drinks “extra hot.” I imagine that the typical person who orders a drink this way thinks that we magically up the temperature on that drink so that it will stay hot for them longer. What the request actually means is that you want us to scald your milk. Which takes us extra time, tends to make a mess and shitty foam, and makes the milk unuseable in other drinks. My favorite is the “extra hot” au lait – which is 2/3 coffee. News flash – our coffee only comes in one temperature. Even scalding your milk by 20 degrees will only increase the temperature of your drink by, let’s get our calculators out, 6 2/3 degrees. Buy an insulated cup, idiot. Paper doesn’t retain heat very well.

And last, but not least, the cappuccino. Clearly many of the people who order these have only heard the name, and don’t have any idea what they are. A cappuccino is freshly steamed milk-foam, that hasn’t had a chance to settle out, poured over espresso. Milk-foam then separates into milk and foam, and the foam dissipates. It’s an extremely ephemeral drink. If you are sending some poor schmuck to pick up coffee for the office, which won’t be consumed by you until five or ten minutes, minimum, after you order it, don’t waste the barista’s time ordering a drink that will have devolved into a shitty latté by the time you get it. You want a latté. Trust me. I’m a professional.