Welcome to the Machine
"Excuse me. Excuse me, sir. Excuse me, trying to get through. Gotta get this lav fixed before you take off."
I have to laugh. First because this is the second time I've heard somebody use the term 'lav', and second because somebody must have done quite the number on the poor airplane lavatory to require technical assistance. I pray for their bowels.
I don't particularly like traveling. Especially alone. Mostly because I have to watch my bags like a hawk. Please do not leave luggage unattended. If you notice abandoned luggage, or witness a person tampering with your luggage, please contact airport security. A hawk with glasses that do a good job of blurring my peripheral vision, so I end up staring straight at my carry-ons for a good twenty minutes. No, I'm not creepy.
Oh, yeah, and I also don't like it because there's nobody to talk to. I have yet to hold a decent conversation with anybody on an airplane. In all my ten or so hours of traveling today I believe I said the following at varied times and order:
"Thank you."
"No."
"Excuse me, miss."
'Thank you' for all the unhappy security people wondering if I grew a goatee to mask my identity. 'No' for when the stewardess asked me for peanuts. 'No, thank you' for when the girl next to me trying to catch a connecting flight to Cinncinati to be with her sister who just had her baby offered me a piece of gum. And 'Excuse me, miss', for when another girl across the aisle dropped her pillow as she fell asleep. The same girl who hit me in the head with her oversized carry-on trying to retrieve it from the overhead storage bins. I guess I deserved that. I did have to poke her in the arm to get her to wake up.
The tech in the orange suit makes his way towards the front. Away from the 'lav'. Hmm.
I'm in seat C. Seat C means that I have nothing to lean against except air and the occasional drink cart passing by. And considering I'm not much one for timing, I instead nod off, and end up getting my knee damn near sheared off by the cart going by. No I don't want any damn peanuts.
"We're A and B," a man and his son tell me. I'm amicable, starting getting up out of my seat, and realize that there's a younger girl sitting by the window. She's A. This just cannot be. Everybody shuffles around and tries to figure out what's going on. A rat-like child stares at me with a dull expression and wonders why I'm still standing up.
"Oh, I'm four rows back, I'm sorry," the girl admits. More shuffling. Wait, no, no. The guy and his son aren't even sitting there. Its his wife and infant son. Damnit.
We all sit down. I buckle in, signifying that there shalt be no more shuffling. I have my stuff together. I'm ready to fly. I want to go. I've even put 'The Silmarillion' in the pouch in front of me in anticipation of a long night of fitful posturing so my ass doesn't go numb. Why did I wear jeans?
"I'm sorry folks, but it looks like the repairs needed for the lavatory are a bit more than expected..."
Dramatic pause. I know what this means. Some awesome guy a few rows up starts applauding at the flight attendant. He knows too.
"...they're going to have to keep the plane here overnight. We're going to be switching planes here in just a moment."
Panic sets in. The plane erupts with sighs and complaints and cursing and crying. I can't pay attention to more than one conversation at a time, so I simply stop paying attention. I start to wonder how to efficiently use a HashMap to link old passenger lists onto new passenger lists in the event of a mechanical failure like this one. I come to the conclusion that it would just be messy.
-- "It is rare that one is presented with a truly elegant solution."
Among about twenty other equally cryptic lines in my notes, this line stands out. Well, more than some I guess. I enjoy the following as well:
"unidimensionality of language."
"girl at cyranos. and again."
Ugh, programmers. It started out that I'd write a line for every day of the summer. Every day would be different, and it would give me something to write about at the end of it. Instead, I only got through about three weeks worth, none of them dated, and only these few of them I understand.
The elegant solution, in computer programming and probably in other contexts as well, means that there is a single, simple, and easy to implement tool that somebody can use to solve a problem. For instance: it is easy to transfer a list of information from one system to the next. Anything and everything does it, and there are numerous ways to do it. Piece of cake.
The inelegant solution, however, comes when you try and do anything complicated. Lets say you have a "HashMap" (a specialized list), having unique identifiers as keys to some collection of information. But more importantly, the data is ordered, and must maintain its order for it to have any use. In BEA WebLogic, passing a "Map" object between web services is easy enough, but before the programmer can touch the data, the web service protocol strips all order data from the Map object before you can cast it as a LinkedHashMap.
Yeah, you didn't read that part. Don't worry, its really not that big of a deal.
The point is that in order to do what I wanted, I had to come up with my own solution, do my own work, and it was all together more difficult.
I'm sure when I wrote this it was supposed to inspire me to provide a profound analysis on life in terms of programming, and computers in general. How people are merely hardware and software, and that consciousness is merely an abstraction of powerful distributed learning mechanisms and infinitely relational memory. How language, our 'programming', shapes as well as limits our abilities to understand abstract concepts, and reduces our thought processes to a single thread of thought governed by grammar and vocabulary. Yada yada.
I can't decide if I sound more like a crackpot psychologist or a cult member. I need to get a life.
-- "Don't wake me I plan on sleeping in."
I hate flying. My ass is numb. My fingers hurt from carrying around my monstrous laptop case. And I really wish I'd turned around and forgiven her when the girl dropped what I can only assume to be the entirety of her metal objects collection on my ear. Oh well. Now she thinks I'm on painkillers. Oh yeah. My 'Silmarillion' is still on the plane with the broken 'lav'. Damnit. Damnit. Damnit. I was a whole 34 pages into it, including the multiple prefaces as well as a brief skimming through the index of names. Its a freakin' endeavor.
What I've learned to do in situations like these is not be annoying. There are plenty of other people that are willing to do so. And these poor airline officials can only take so much. Instead of marching up to the booth and demanding answers I stand by the side of the booth and listen. There I get all my answers.
If the plane leaves within 45 minutes, they can hold the planes in Portland long enough to get us transferred to our connecting flights. Yes, this is the case for Sacramento, Somewhere, Elsewhere, and Phoenix.
Long story short: It doesn't happen. It takes 45 minutes just to board. We take off. We get to Portland. I board the connecting flight to Phoenix. Its tow bar breaks just as we're taxi-ing out. I'm just cursing myself for leaving my book behind. Now I'm in the seats in the front of the plane where you don't have storage in front of you so you have to put everything in the overhead storage bins. Three feet away, two feet stick out of a single leather chair, obviously large enough to curl up in and take a nice nap. Instead the see-through curtain between luxury and commonwealth hangs awkwardly between my legs as gravity and inertia pull it towards the back of the plane.
The stewardess looks at me weird. I just keep staring bitterly at the impenetrable abstract shapes keeping me from leather comfort. My blurry peripheral vision envelops everything and time just stops.
-- "Time is never time enough."
I've been thinking a lot about time. Not too terribly much. Mostly just about how if Reese knew John Connor, but then went back into time and impregnated his mother who then had John Connor, how I failed to see the inconsistency in the movie the first time I saw it.
Ok, really, I've just been wondering if time is just cause and effect happening really fast. I like to think of it like this instead of just seeing the passing of a second as 9192631770 cycles of a Cesium atom resonating. I mean, what's the deal with Cesium? Have you seen this? Have you heard about this? No? Nah, not important.
Time, as we perceive it, is the change from state to state. Things going from beginning to end. Start to finish. Life to death.
Then I get to thinking about Legos. That's right. Legos. Or rather what I used to do with them. I build about four or five spaceships or robots and had them destroy each other in new and interesting ways. Then I'd rebuild them and start anew. Usually my favorite robot/spaceship design would win, considering it would take the longest time to rebuild. And I was lazy.
So you'd have many different combinations, but all the same outcome.
Then I start thinking about patterns. More specifically, patterns in nature. How almost everything on the macro level exists at the micro level. How certain ratios exist in all things. And I can't think of where else in nature appears the phenomenon where the two possible quantum states can exist simultaneously, but then collapse immediately upon measurement.
Then it hits me.
-- "Now as a question of etiquette, do I give you the ass or the crotch?"
I startle awake. My arms go flailing. The lady knitting at the window seat looks over and wonders what the hell I'm doing. Sorry, sorry. I try to think of a good excuse, but all that comes to mind is monkeys falling out of trees. Ugh. Obscurity. Keep staring, keep staring...
-- "Everything looks perfect from so far away."
What if there were many, almost an infinite number of universes where cause and effect played out differently? Where every decision potentially branched into many possible universes?
And what if all of those universes converged upon certain points? At certain key parts to the plot? Where all timelines begin, diverge infinitely, and then converge singly, either disappearing into another timeline, or simply ending at the same 'time' as all the others?
Where it doesn't matter how you got here. Just that you did.
-- "You gotta sink, gotta sink, gotta sink to swim."
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. The third line: "girl at cyranos. and again."
When was the last time you saved anyone?
Not the conventional 'saved', I guess. Not Mary Jane Watson yet again in peril per a convenient comic book plot device. Not saving somebody time, or money, or trouble. Saved, but more in the sense that the other person is changed, and changed for the better. Saving them like when their life is made whole, or their conscience is cleared, or their faith is restored in anything and everything. And saving them when, where, and how they wanted it.
I don't remember, and I doubt I ever have. But that's not to say that I haven't wanted to.
There was a girl at an improv show that I saw. Yes. There were indeed other girls there. Shut up. I thought she was cute. Not sure why, though. She was wearing checkered, or maybe plaid pants that didn't necessarily accentuate her best features. Her hair was messed up and when the improv actors asked for an emotion for one of their games she yelled 'Horny!'
For a reason, and probably not the one that you're guessing, I wrote a line in my notes.
I wanted to save her. I wanted to make everything better and have her know it. I wanted her to understand. I wanted her to change. Silly me.
At the beginning of summer I read C.S. Lewis' 'Mere Christianity', a book containing his thoughts and analysis of Christian thought and spirituality. I didn't like it very much because I read most of it crammed in the back of a Minivan. I think Lewis said that at the heart of every man, woman, and child is the want and need to be saved. To have their faith restored and their life made whole. The basis and proof of his argument, which I didn't entirely agree with.
I'm not so sure that everybody wants to be saved. Not saved in the 'my savior' sense, but where somebody's life is changed, as well as the way they perceive it. That's a big step. The end of a chapter of their life and the beginning of another. The difference between start and end. A change of states. A cause and an effect. Time, and all that.
Nobody wants that confusion. The insecurity of not knowing what to do, or what you will do, or discovering what you are capable of. I think that more often than not we choose to stay the same. And not always because it makes us happy, but because we don't know how to do anything else.
By chance I saw her again one day when I was out to lunch at work. I was wearing my glasses and my geek garb, so I was effectively invisible and she didn't recognize me. This girl was laughing and having a good time. And still wearing ugly pants. Why would I want to change that?
Maybe she wasn't the one that needed saving. She wasn't in peril, not a damsel in distress.
Maybe I thought that she could save me. Yeah, maybe. But silly me, that doesn't work either.
So what do I want to be saved from? And why? Am I contradicting myself, or am I just an exception to the rule?
I don't really know. I really don't know. I guess I'll just have to save myself and figure it out.
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