Humdrum

Morning, walking to work. Mood (yes I do read everybody else's blogs): Humdrum, from Peter Gabriel's car album, including the fact that Humdrum rolls into Slowburn. It's morning, after all, and early morning at that, so the juices haven't quite gotten flowing yet. The staff at Twin Donut is Cambodian, it turns out, and the only customer kept up the kind of overly interested and even a little protective banter with the woman behind the counter that American men always seem to make with southeast asian women. I do it too. Reminds me of Thailand.

We're going to have to start working now. Work is heating up once again and there's weather moving in. Somehow it adds up to put me in a somber mood. Just a few days ago things seemed very different. Manic depression? Maybe, a little. With the heat, I don't need to eat or sleep, and the long days give me energy. Women are dressed sexy on the train and when they walk their little dogs. Parties become more frequent, clubbing makes more sense, and I find myself out on the street with my friends late at night. The idea of love even seems possible.

Then I kinda wake up and look around. The clouds roll back in and it gets cold. I realize how impractical some thoughts can be. Yeah, love especially. Not this spring, I guess, and it's a blue thought. But Slowburn is still just around the corner.

Speaking of Racing

Today I became a race car driver. I took my car to an autocross! You can find pictures of the event here, though I'm afraid they don't do justice to the driving part.

There are a couple of things you should take with you when next you take your own car racing. First you need to understand that the People Who Take Their Cars Racing, like any powerful and secretive organization, have monopolistic tendencies. The more they can take their own cars racing, the better for them, so of course they won't let just anyone join the club. So they freely invite you to join (this avoids any kind of antitrust litigation), and then try to sabotage your effort by not telling you to bring important things.

Important thing #1: sunscreen. You figure, "I am going to race my car" and therefore you will be in your car where the nasty sunshine cannot reach you. Imagine your surprise when you find out you will be spending most of your time standing on an abandoned runway getting heatstroke! Ha, ha - you just went up against the Man - and lost.

Important thing #2: fluids. It turns out even as the Sun is grilling you to a crispy husk, it is simultaneously leaching the very fluids from your body itself! To make matters worse, recent research suggests that the removal of all fluids from the body may increase the risk of pulmonary failure, complicate pregnancy and more importantly, impair your ability to operate a vehicle! So again, I trust you are seeing the long arm of the auto-solar conspiracy in motion behind the scenes here.

Important thing #3: numbers. Now as a computer scientist, I use numbers all the time. I'm not one of these effete snobs who thinks life was better when all we had was geometry and ratios. But you need, in order to fully comprehend my complex situation here, to also understand that today is Sunday, which is part of the weekend. I'm around numbers all day so the last thing I want to do when I come home at night and relax with some ketchup and a tasty bottle of Rolling Rock or a Magic Hat are a bunch of numbers. What I guess I'm getting at here is that you shouldn't be surprised when I momentarily inform you that I arrived at this racing event, completely sans-numeric, as the Japanese say. So the numbers you may see on my automobile were borrowed, as was the tape I used to construct the various additional nomenclature and vocabulary you see liberally sprinkled around the chassis. Obviously you can tell by the state of our school system that the deprivation of numbers is another tactic used by the Bush-Jeff Gordon-Helios axis that we all loathe yet, at another level, respect.

The Rat Race, From Above

People keep laughing at me when I tell them one of the best things about my new job is the view. But really, it's a good view! The skyline of Boston (and of Cambridge, for what that's worth), the landmarks, the big sky that is typically so elusive in hilly New England. I know it's not like I'm working in Switzerland - we've got our share of billboards and ugly apartment blocks in the way of our vista, but by and large it's pleasant. After living in a windowless cube for six months I would have been happy with a skylight, so this is really a treat.

In rainy weather, southern Cambridge looks like a jungle. The fog obscures the buildings of Harvard Square and gathers in the treetops like in some African rainforest. New England always looks like a forest when viewed from above. It's something I like about the place - it reminds me of home. I remember sitting in my dentist's chair and admiring the view of Evanston. His office was in Skokie, on Gross Point, several stories up. The land there is so flat that it doesn't take much elevation to get a good view, and I could see all the way to the lake. But it didn't look like Evanston; it just looked like a forest with a couple of buildings sticking out of it.

From an airplane one sometimes gets even more of a sensation of nature. From altitude the more distant suburbs of western Mass look almost completely uninhabited. Somehow it's only when you get up close that you realize nature doesn't live here anymore.

Nature doesn't live in India anymore, either. But check out the newest pictures, including some from Madikeri, my first stop in the mountains. And don't miss the new wheels I put on my car!