Laodicean

Well, another Indian kid won the National Spelling Bee. Kavya correctly spelled "Laodicean," which apparently means "indifferent to politics." Whatever. Scripps-Howard is just making up words now. I can adjectify proper nouns, too.

The 13-year-old girl from Kansas wants to grow up to be....wait for it...a neurosurgeon. Bet you didn't see that one coming.

Are Indian kids just innately good spellers, or are they innately gifted at beating a given task to death? Winning a national spelling bee goes beyond natural talent. All the championship words, and most of the other words in the Bee, are words that you will never be able to use in conversation or on a job resume. It's like being the world's best thumb-wrestler. Yay! You did it! Now what? I guess it proves that you can relentlessly focus on a mind-numbing task with total disregard for everything else. That must be useful to someone.

The dark side of dessert

Sometimes I find myself, through no direct fault of my own, in the midst
of a conflict between my indomitable near-OCD tendencies and a brick
wall in the form of inviolable physical laws (damn you, gravity!),
social norms (you mean I can't do that in public?), or international
mandate. This sends me into a mini-crisis where I must find a way to
either overcome my desire to do things a certain way, or to try to
subvert the established law of physics or society. Almost always I
choose the latter. Almost always I get crushed. I like to think I grow
a little as a person each time. It makes me feel better.

One such predicament occurred last night. By some fortunate
happenstance, we had at our disposal strawberries, blueberries, vanilla
ice cream, whipped cream and shortbread. In my short list of favorite
non-meat foods, all of these rank in the top ten. Shortbread, berries,
ice cream, whipped cream. It was a dessert for the ages. Such a
dessert deserved to be eaten with care. Every bite should contain a bit
of strawberry, blueberry, ice cream, whipped cream, and shortbread. By
themselves each ingredient is good. Any combination of the five is
excellent. But only all five would be truly magical.

Unfortunately there is a finite amount of yummy goodness that can
physically fit on a teaspoon. Then there are logistical hurdles.
Blueberries are not easily divisible, and when they do split they become
a mess. Strawberries can be apportioned in chunks, but the pressure
needed to cut a strawberry with a spoon easily crushes the soft
shortbread beneath it. And what about proportions? The strawberries
could be tasted in a small quantity, but the shortbread needed more than
a crumb before you could sense its contribution. The solution, of
course, to place the shortbread on the bottom of the spoon to maximize
tongue-to-dessert contact. Then you run into operational nightmares,
like how to cut a perfect cross-section of the dessert with the spoon to
preserve the shortbread-berries-ice cream-whipped cream layers. And
once that first cut is made, you can be darned sure that the structural
dessert integrity will be compromised. How do you deal with that??
With abject terror and bated breath, that's how.

But it was delicious. I am convinced, however, that two, possibly
three, bites had a smidgen more whipped cream than was allowable. This
knowledge haunts me.

FML

I've noticed a preponderance of Facebook status updates with the tag,
FML. It usually followed a short sentence describing the latest
pseudo-tragedy in that individuals life.

I was curious. Having been out of the loop on stupid trends for a
while, I had not idea what this meant. After one "I feel lucky" search
on Google, I discovered that this means F*ck My Life.

Now, I imagine there are situations where you would really want to F
your L. Sometimes the S just hits the F and you're left standing there
with the S raining down on you. But I conjecture that this acronym is
well beyond the point of overuse. You should only be able to FML just
once at the absolute worst, most despairing moment of your life, unless
you can honestly say that some new event overrides even your previous
FML. As FML seems to be fairly young, if you have two genuine FMLs in
that short timeframe I'd probably say that is pretty F'd up.

For further clarification, here are some examples of when FML might be
appropriate:

Appropriate:
My boyfriend of two years invited me over his place for a quiet dinner.
I thought he was going to propose. It turns out he is a serial killer
and wanted to create abstract art with my limbs. FML.

Inappropriate:
I was starving at work today and the vending machine was out of
Snickers. FML.

Appropriate:
I just found out I was adopted. My biological parents are Canadian.
FML.

Inappropriate:
It is eight o'clock on Tuesday, but American Idol isn't on. It was
preempted by tornado coverage in the next county over. FML.

Appropriate:
I was fired by the office manager today. As I was packing up my things,
I saw her leave with the guy who was to take my job. The office manager
is my wife. FML.

Inappropriate:
I was out yachting today and got a particularly painful splinter in my
finger. FML.

Computer Problems

I'm a pretty important guy. I spend my days updating pretty important
documents and sending them to pretty important people, who reply back to
me in a pretty important manner and make pretty important suggestions on
how to fix their pretty important documents. And, since it is pretty
important, it has to be done pretty quickly.

I had one such task yesterday. I received the email, opened the
spreadsheet and pulled out the reference binder. Suddenly, my keyboard
and mouse refused to work properly. Clicks mysteriously turned into
double-clicks. The Start menu wouldn't stay open. I couldn't navigate
Excel. I unplugged my keyboard and mouse, swapped USB ports, restored
default settings on input devices, but it still wouldn't work. I read
help articles online, but no one seemed to have the same problem I had.
Finally, in a fit of rage and sorrow for the pretty important task that
was taking far too long, I shut down the computer and restarted.

The computer started normally. No problems yet. The login screen came
up. I couldn't log in. CTRL+ALT+DEL wouldn't work. It always works.
Frustrated, I looked up the IT help desk number. I pulled out a pad of
paper to take notes. And I took the same reference binder I had opened
moments before my problems began and moved it off my desk. Off my
keyboard where it rested. Off the space bar, the ALT button, and the
shortcut menu button it was pressing.

My computer issue mysteriously resolved itself.

<sigh>

Star Trek Rule No. 1: When in doubt, eject the warp core.

It is nice to know that, even in the younger days of the Federation when Captain Kirk was my age, it was a perfectly acceptable contingency strategy to eject the warp core.

And they all act like it is some novel idea.

Captain: "We're out of options, what can we do?'
Chief Engineer (thoughtfully): "We can eject the warp core. It should [insert some mumbled phrase about space-time]."

Come on, Geordi, you did that three weeks ago. Come up with something new. I just know there is a Federation acquisitions official having conniptions over this. You can believe whatever you want about money having no place in the Federation. You know those warp cores aren't cheap, and you know there is some paperwork involved for whoever comes back sans warp core.

I mean, really. Everyone knows that the warp core is just the means to control the volatile antimatter reaction. It is like a really big photon torpedo, for crying out loud. Stop showboating and come up with a real solution.

Which House, M.D. Character are you?

There is an app on Facebook called "Which House, M.D. character are you?" Why? Every character on House is smarter than I can ever hope to be, and I would wager that their intelligence exceeds that of 99.99% Facebook users. But House, Cutty, Wilson, Cameron, Foreman, Chase, etc all suffer from some hyperbolic character flaw. That is what this personality quiz is looking for.

So, instead of "Which House, M.D. character are you?" it would be more aptly named "Let us flatter you by playing on your self-perceived intelligence while we identify your most dominant character flaw and share it with all your friends."

We're not in Kansas, but Virginia thinks we are.

I've said before that Virginia is confused. This applies to food, dialects, cultures, education and weather.

In weather terms we get to experience a hodgepodge of everything. We get the occasional blizzard. We get hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, droughts, floods, ice storms, rain, wind, hail, you name it.

Take yesterday. At work I watched as 50-mph winds blew rain horizontally and pelted my car with marble-sized hail (no damage, thank God). Then I went home that evening and saw this beauty off my front porch. My first funnel cloud was in Virginia?? I've lived in Florida and Louisiana. I've spent numerous days on the beach watch thunderstorms roll in. And Virginia is the one that scares the pants off me with this cloud passing over my house. Crazy.

Organization is my own personal narcotic

Dear Blog,

I haven't written in a while. I'm sorry. I have been in a dark place.
Well, a dirty place. I don't want to tell you this, I don't want to
hurt you again. But you need to know. I need to make amends. And you
know me, you know the thing I crave most, the thing that both repulses
and draws me to these dark, dirty places. I have to clean.

But you knew that. You knew I couldn't help myself. As soon as I saw
those precariously leaning stacks of paper, that revolting litter of
dust bunnies, those off-centered posters, that outdated calendar, I was
gone. I was on auto-pilot. I was not myself. Or maybe I was myself.
Every trip to the dumpster was a euphoric high. Every new file in the
filing cabinet was a shot of heaven in my vein. I reeked of sweat and
Pledge. We both knew it was inevitable. Why were you surprised? Why
did I hurt you again?

I am the same kid who at age 8 organized his small but growing library
by genre and alphabetically by author and who fantasized about one day
upgrading to Dewey Decimal. The same guy who tabulated the songs and
artists on every CD he ever burned. The college student who made a
scaled drawing of his new apartment and little scaled cutouts of
furniture. Why would you expect anything different this time?

It started, like most relapses, with a big change in my life. I
switched jobs, and moved to a quiet little base in the country. My own
little Mayberry. You would think I could forget myself here. You would
think.

But my new office was in shambles. My predecessor had adopted the
"boxes on the floor" methodology of filing. I glanced at some of the
documents. A box on top of a filing cabinet held documents from 2001.
I threw up a little in my mouth. The office held so much promise; the
raw material lay around me begging to be molded into organizational
perfection. At that moment I was a sculptor, and I knew this was to be
my David. Without the nudity.

I got to work. At first I was like a fly caught in a jar of jam. So
overwhelmed by the potential that I was drowning. But soon I learned to
control it. I began to reclaim floor space. For the first time in what
I guess to be years, someone could actually sit on the couch. I was
riding my high; I knew that I should stop but I couldn't get enough.
Every moment I could find was spent bending that office to my will. It
would be tamed. I know I neglected you, and I know you spent your
sleepless nights worrying for me. I apologize for that.

But like every binge it couldn't be sustained. I had to crash, and
crash I did. My world collapsed in a pile of paperclips and binder tabs.
It was over. The office was too much for me. I still organized
occasionally, but it didn't thrill me, didn't consume me. I had
developed a tolerance. There are still boxes awaiting their one-way
trip to the dumpster, but it doesn't seem like fun anymore. It seems
like work. They can have those two square feet for now. It's hot
outside.

I'm so sorry to send you this. I know it was painful to read, but I
wanted to come clean. I respect you too much to do otherwise. You had
a right to know, and, at some point later, I think you will thank me for
it. For being honest with you. April was a bad month for both of us,
and I hope we can grow together past it. I don't ask for your
forgiveness--I don't deserve it. But one day perhaps, when I have
proven my devotion to you, you may be able to find a place for me again.

Apologetically,
Bryan