Security Theater

Yes, I am one of those assholes who brings everything as carry-on on the plane that she isn't suppose to. My most frequent candidates are a set of lockpicks which I have in the past three months carried through no less than seven different airports (props to Flagstaff Arizona for at least removing them from my bag to look at them before permitting me to carry them on board.) Other frequent fliers are the more mundane large bottles of shampoo and conditioner, tubes of toothpaste, wires, electronic pieces, breadboards, and various other oddities. The only things I have ever had confiscated were a pair of cans of Rockstar, and a part of me thinks that might have been mostly because the TSA employee was thirsty. I did have a pretty near miss though when those same Flagstaff employees took a long hard look and an extra scan of my copy of The Little Prince. I guess you never can be too careful with those terrorist French and their mindless propaganda.

For a long time I attributed this to the fact that I would intentionally wear clothes to the airport which marked me as working for the feds. I learned the power of flying with a federal logo stamped on you once when confronted by a slightly baffled TSA employee who had recently extracted a cast-iron wok from my carry-on luggage (long story).

"What is this?"

"That, sir," I slid my thumbs along the top of the zipper of my ratty hoodie to flick what would have been the collar forward, emphasizing the federal logo on the right breast, "is a wok."

"Oh," he said, but I watched his eyes catch the logo.

"Will that be all?"

"Uh, yes," he said and handed me the wok. I took it and walked before hearing one of the last calls for the boarding on my flight, at which point I bolted down the terminal, still carrying the cooking implement in my left hand, trying to hold it as little like a club as possible. The TSA employee never said a word, he had probably gone on to the next customer by that time.

The "official-looking" hoodie was out of the gift shop. It wasn't like there had been a whole lot of other places to buy clothes when you're stranded on a federal base.

After I was given my uniform jacket I felt comfortable pushing the limitations much further to almost no resistance. Eventually I decided to forgo the effort of donning the jacket, as while it is very comfortable I dislike the stares I collect when wearing it in public.

It seems I am not alone in this activity. In this hilarious and rather well-written article one Jeffrey Goldberg describes bringing scissors, multiple large bottles of anything he pleases so long as they are labeled to be contact solution, a false beer belly of beer, a knife, and various other things as carry on. To make this more amusing he did it while also carrying things like a three foot by four foot Hezbollah flag and wearing shirts printed with lines like "Osama Bin Ladin: Hero of Islam." His article brought up another fun issue in the ID triangle: namely that you can fly if you are on the no fly list. This is done in a few simple steps.

1. Buy a ticket that isn't in your real name. This is where the name is checked against the no-fly list and so your fake name will not trigger anything.
   
2. Print your real boarding pass.
   
3. Print a fake boarding pass with your real name.
4. Go through security with your fake boarding pass and your real ID. All that is checked here is that your boarding pass matches your ID. It is not checked against the master no-fly list.
5. Present your real ticket at the gate. Since your ID is not checked here, nobody will notice the name does not match. Since it is a real boarding pass it will pass the barcode scanner, when your fake one would not.

The article recommended using photoshop but Christopher Soghoian made a wonderful little tool which will generate passes for you automatically for Northwest Airlines flights. While the FBI eventually shut him down the mirror of the code was left. He also wrote a neat little paper on it with plenty of information about how these loops might be closed. It has been available two and a half years now and ignored by official channels quite efficiently aside from their attempts to bring him to court for publishing it.

More disturbing are the words of Bruce Schneier (of crypto war fame) from 2002 warning (summarized by another author: Mann) about these large scale systems, which have also been primarily ignored.

The argument that a system which relies on secrecy to function (as our airport security system does) is inherently ineffective because such secrets are not well kept is part of what has made modern cryptology what it is today, and considered a well-beaten dead horse by many.

However, some other concepts pulled from the article I found quite novel. For example, if a piece of facial recognition software is accurate 99.32% of the time as claimed by certain manufacturers, and if good-quality photographs of all the terrorists are available, and if an airport had 25 million people go through it a year (such as Boston according to 2001 statistics) then you flag up to 170,000 people each year as terrorists from a single medium-sized airport. Consider that we have had well under 100 terrorists on airplanes nation-wide over a span of about 10 years and that this alarm would go off approximately 500 times a day per airport of this size. This is an alarm which would get rapidly downplayed or ignored by stressed-out TSA employees who are just trying to contain a small mob of people who are all frantically trying to make their flights. What does this mean? It means the enterprising young hacker will still be in an environment where a little charisma will get him through the gate, and the same of a terrorist.

Biometric information suffers many of the same abuses in the article: that as long as we continue to put our absolute faith in imperfect technology (as all technology always is) and have no proper situation to handle its failure, we will be left disappointed in the results. Inattentive guards in the Mann article permitted researchers to game the fingerprint and other biometric readers in any number of ways in the middle of airports. This included doing things like holding masks up over their eyes to fake a retina scan.

Part of this we have fed ourselves. To admit that our systems are fallible or downright ineffective would be to admit a mistake. Every time something bad happens the public wants to believe that Something Is Being Done, and as time passes we are putting more into making sure that our "corrections" are highly visible than that they have impact. Here's a great example:

Special measures have been taken to make it impossible for a terrorist to repeat the Detroit bombing attempt. Mr Abdulmutallab had emerged from the toilet, put a blanket on his lap complaining of an upset stomach, then tried to set off the bomb. Passengers and crew restrained him as flames leapt from his clothing.

In the final hour before landing in the US, passengers are now banned from standing up, using toilets and holding blankets.

Aside from the ACLU which I am sure is already drooling over the fact that use of a lavatory is generally not considered something you can reasonably deny a person in need (it is not legal for things like schools to operate when the bathrooms are broken for this reason) comes the general point that causing a four year old child to piss themselves will not make America safer. Small children (like most sane people) hate plane bathrooms. They are renowned for holding it in as long as possible, and for disregarding parent's warnings that "if you don't go now there won't be another stop for a while." Ask any parent who has taken a small child on a significant car ride. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure whoever gets to sit in a wet seat next flight won't feel America is a whole lot safer either. What will, for the most part, happen? When people have to go, they have to go, and the attendants will probably let them go if they beg hard enough.

What does that mean? It means this is a rule we will put our faith in, but that people will not keep. This is a common security problem: take offices where password changes are mandated so often that people have trouble remembering them. Instead they just slap an incrementing number on the end of the password or write it on a slip of paper on their desk. Other examples are the numerous recorded times when government officials have taken restricted information off of the protected government networks to unsecured computers. They do this because doing work on the secured computers is made slow and tedious by the oppressive security measures.

As long as our government continues to take this heavy-handed blanket approach to our security in airports people will keep adding loopholes, where formal (such as permitting people to print their own boarding passes) or informal (such as using tha bathroom), to keep the system functioning. These gaps, combined with our absolute faith in the technology which is meant to prevent them, provide fantastic exploratory spaces for hackers. I genuinely hope to see many published exploits in the coming months from clever young minds, and I hope they are found, made public enough to be an embarrassment, and corrected before anybody malicious takes advantage of them.

Happy hunting.

Related Posts:

• What happens to what the TSA actually does confiscate
• Security theater in locks
  

Blood

It is a warm Christmas morning in the Torii when a kid with sandy blond hair comes in to find me playing my guitar.

"What are you doing here?" I asked him.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you live with your family right?"

"Yeah."

"And it is Christmas..."

"Yeah..." he sighed.

"So... they let you live there for free... surely you're on good terms for a holiday..."

"No, my mom asked me to move back in, I think she was lonely, but now that I am there she takes every opportunity to look down on me and try to push me around. My sister too, it starts with the little things like 'Dusty, pass me a fork,' but it escalates on as long as I put up with it. She just wants to see how much she can push me around."

"Huh, your family too."

"And this year, it occurred to me, as they were doing all this garbage, that I didn't have to put up with it, so I left."

***

I went to the beach with her yesterday, but she looks really tired today. "Family," she explains when I ask. I give her a little verbal hug and she brightens, "but I'm off to see my made-family now."

"That's wonderful, tell them Merry Christmas."

Billy, who came with us on our beach trip, looks about the same and won't say anything about it except "Family is tiring." He is usually one of the most cheerful of us but today he is worn and wants to do nothing but zone out and watch TV.

***

I think the portrayal of the biological family as the epitome of goodness is one of the silliest habits of our society. We'll all admit that there are some people in this world who just don't know how to be decent and respectful to one another, but we never admit to ourselves that they are probably somebody's parents or siblings.

We put up with rude, selfish, and harmful behavior from these people that we would never tolerate in a boyfriend or girlfriend, in a coworker, of a friend. If any of those people treated us like this we would have no problem advising ourselves to steer clear of those people, but when our own flesh and blood treat us like this we feel an obligation to go back to them, year after year, for another dose.

Family, they tell us, have known us all our lives and will be there for us when all else fails but why would we want them there in the worst of times when they do not know how to treat others with respect and decency at the best of times?

This is not to say that I do not love my family. I love my family with all of my heart. I understand that they are doing their very best to be accepting of me, that they are never intentionally mean, and that, for many of them, this is simply how they were either born or raised and how much work it would take to change. What I am saying is just because you love your family doesn't give you an obligation to show up every year, nor them a license to treat you like shit should you choose to. As a matter of fact, I would almost say you have an obligation to yourself and to them to take a stand and explain that their behavior is not alright and that you won't be participating until everybody can be civil. I can not tell you how many people, myself included, I have watched completely dread the holidays and waste so much effort and time trying to salvage the truly demolished family structure.

If you have one of those wonderful families that really is all it is cracked up to be, I really hope you appreciate them. Send them a hug for me.

And if you don't have one of those families: accept that some people just don't win the lottery and move on with your life.

***

"You'd better be grateful," my mother sneered, "because nobody will ever love you like your family loves you."

All I can think is, "I most certainly hope so."

Eric

My room was a funny toothpaste shade of green and the closet door was white. Inside the closet was a tupperware tote which my mother encouraged me to store various artifacts of places I had been: movie ticket stubs and the like.

I was balanced carefully on the edge of the tote, leaning out as far as my short arms would permit while still holding on to the closet rod and not knocking any of the coat hangers off it. One of my mother's shirts formed a dress with a tie from my dad's closet as a belt, and my little pink toes curled around the rim of the tote as I waved a stick like a magic wand.

"Onward!" I shouted, and then, holding my wand in my teeth jumped from the tote to a chair in the middle of the room. The chair lurched from my inertia then stood still. Mime jumped on my bed and ran from end to end of it.

"Come on!" I called, waving the stick, having now regained my balance, "We have to escape the lava before the bad guys come back!"

"I can't. I'm locked in the dungeon."

"Well then I'll save you."

"Prince Eric has to save me."

"I don't want to be a prince, princes are boys."

"Fine then, but I'm going to get saved by him."

"Why?"

"Because he is my true love."

"We don't have anybody to play Prince Eric."

"He's like the bad guys, we don't need anybody to play him."

I was thoroughly unconvinced and so we played in the same room with the same story but not together. While I hopped around from unstable furniture item to unstable furniture item battling henchmen and solving puzzles that the evil genius had trapped us in, Mime paced her cell anxiously awaiting her savior.

***

We were playing approximately the same game again downstairs with me jumping from place to place. Mime was jumping on a couch.

"Are you waiting for Eric still?"

"He is my true love, he's going to save me."

"That's a really stupid game, it is always the same."

"No, it is fun, you should try it."

"Fine."

So we stood on the couch and paced and fretted, and she called "Eric, come save me!" so I shouted "Eric, come save me!"

"Eric can't come and save you."

"Why not?"

"He's my boyfriend, you need your own."

"He can't free both of us? We're in the same cell."

"That isn't how it works. My true love frees me, and yours frees you."

"That seems silly."

"It is how love works, now what is his name?"

"I don't know, I haven't met him yet."

"You are not doing this right."

"This is lame!"

"What is his name?"

"I don't know!"

"Fine then, his name is Ken."

"I don't want to date Barbie's boyfriend!"

"He's a different Ken."

"That's a name for an ugly boy!"

"You have a better name for him?"

"No."

"Fine then, now we wait in our cell and call for our true loves to rescue us. They are brothers you see... and they are battling valiantly to save us..." She paused for a moment and then added, "and mine is more handsome than yours!"

"This is STUPID."

So we paced back and forth on the top of the couch for a while until I got bored of it and saved myself by climbing from the arm of the couch to the doorknob of the closet to the top of the piano and over the banister, (but more importantly, out of the way of the lava). Mime was pretty irritated about it, and that was the last time we ever tried to play dress-up together.

***

Our mothers were always closer than we were, and so while Mime and I continued to grow apart over the years, we continued to hear about each other a lot, even when she moved a few states away.

We spoke once on 9/11. She wasn't doing a lot, and said that I always had been the one with the brains, and that she needed to find another path through her life. She also said that 9/11 wasn't a big deal and wanted to talk about clothes. We had a big fight, and we've never really had much of a real conversation since.

She ran though a large number of "Erics" in highschool, all of them far older than her, and most of them in college. A part of me is surprised her mother never separated them on statutory rape charges.

By the beginning of her senior year of high school she had selected a particular Eric and was obsessively attached to him. He was an engineer at Georgia Tech, and Mime would tell me about how much money he was going to make when he graduated. I asked her why she didn't just become an engineer herself, like I was, so she could have her own money, or, if she still wanted to marry her Eric, twice as much money. She got angry with me, and told me that wasn't how it worked.

Forgoing college, she moved to Atlanta and played house with her Eric, who, as it turned out, had a drinking problem and a nasty temper. He would beat her, and God knows how else he abused her. He finally tried to drown her in a pool at a party. Thankfully he was slow and drunk, and some of their mutual friends had time to intervene and save her life. That was when she finally realized it was time to leave him for good.

I saw her three years ago. She drove a nice car, had just come from the bar after a few drinks, and wore a little black dress. She reeked of cigarettes, and her face felt worn and dead. There seemed to be nothing genuine or alive left in her, and certainly nothing left of the little girl who had run around my green room playing dress up with me, who had been imprisoned by wicked sorcerers and escaped lava-filled traps with me, who had been one of my closest friends. Apparently, she still stops by her family's house if she thinks what they are serving for dinner is good enough.

"Pika!" she stumbled up in heels and hugged me, "oh look at you! You're all famous now, working for the feds..."

"I... I guess so."

"That's so good. You know, you always had a knack for making your own way..."

"Thanks."

"Come on," she gestured back to her car, "we have to get out of here before mom catches me smoking..."

"Have you been drinking?" her sister Plato cut in.

"Only a little..."

Plato nodded to me, "I'll drive."

***

Eventually I did meet an actual pair of brothers named Ken and Eric, and while I found great humor in this, I never shared it with them.

I still have a strong aversion to calling anybody in my age range Eric. All it reminds me of is the image of what is is left of my friend: drunk in broken heels, sucking down cigarettes, and still waiting someplace... waiting for him to save her.

Appeal to Authority

The police man looked down at Py.

"You've got to stop that."

Py looked up, still holding the fireworks, mildly bewildered.

"I've gotten three complaints about you from parents who want you to stop..."

"Really?" Py asked, not cheeky but genuinely bewildered, "Nobody has said a word to me."

***

Lines and lines of feds sit glassy-eyed in an auditorium while an African American woman paces up and down the front to continue our Prevention of Sexual Harassment Training. Personally, I liked it better when they called it Sexual Harassment Training because I could respond that I did not require any further training in how to sexually harass people.

"We have to be," she says, "understanding of the comfort levels of different people. For example, some people might not feel comfortable with something you consider harmless, such as a miniature of the statue of David..."

For a split moment I considered the image of my laboratory decorated with dozens of miniatures of the status of David. To distinguish them I could put little feather boas and ill-advised flamboyant hats...

"But you have to realize it is wrong even if nobody says anything. Your coworkers might not feel comfortable confronting you, so you need to be considerate on their behalf and think of how other people might feel."

***

I understand that sexual harassment is serious business, but I can not agree to see it as a reason to automatically stoop to the lowest common denominator.

***

"Mom!" a seven year old me stomped into the room, "Why does Amy always go first and chooses everything when she comes to visit us?"

"Because that is proper manners. Amy is our guest."

"But when I'm at her house she always gets her way because her mom says it is her house and her rules."

"What does Amy say?"

"She says what her mom says goes."

***

This pattern became familiar to me over the next few years: my peers, who were either unable or unwilling to advocate for their own needs, appealing to figures of authority to enforce a system where they would be catered to as much as possible.

***

"SHARPIE!" I shouted the first time I saw him in the cafeteria. He was year older, but still the same shaggy looking kid. His eyebrows raised and then his face cracked into a huge smile, "Hey Pika!"

"It is so good to see you!" I ran up and hugged him. Sharpie flinched and stood stiffly when I reached out to hug him, and then, as if to not to rub in my foolishness, extended his arms to offer the most contact-free return of my gesture humanly possible. I stepped back a little puzzled, when I lived with him and Carne I always hugged him hello.

"Uh, so they just hired you recently didn't they?"

"Erm, yeah..."

"Alright let's get some food."

***

"Look," I said, pointing to the mini roller coaster we had hastily erected on my new boss' desk when he was out for a day.

"Where?"

"There," I returned, still futilely pointing.

The man down the hall turned his head and still missed the obvious point.

"Here," I said and grabbed his wrist, carefully by my thumb and index finger, and took two steps away, dragging him along with me to a better view.

"Woah!" he said, "You can't do that."

"What?"

"You touched my arm, that's sexual harassment."

I looked at him as blankly.

"No physical contact man..."

***

I would like to tell you that Amy grew up and eventually learned to advocate for herself and make reasonable compromises, but I haven't any idea what happened to her. I do know that by the time I moved away she, like so many of the little girls I spent childhood playdates with, was royally fucked up.

The scarier part is that I know that there is absolutely no reason she should have grown out of this trend. We have created a society where appealing to authority to force others to cater to you is a wildly successful tactic, and if done right, requires no compromise at all. This is opposed to confronting people with your issue, discussing it rationally, and seeking a compromise.

People have all but completely done away with person to person conflict resolution. Now you always need a mediator, or so many top-down rules that you have completely rewritten normal human interaction.

This constant appeal to authority and top-down thinking means that everything eventually gets boiled down to a series of rules which are made to handle all situations. The reality is that our world is far more complicated than these rules can handle, and that you can not lawyer morals into a society. The rules enforced on us tend to swing from extreme to extreme depending who is winning the appeal to authority, and they make an awful lot of people spend time doing very stupid things.

"Pika." Gadget had a fantastically wicked grin as he walked out of the Sexual Harassment Prevention Training, "Do you think I can order miniature statues of David online?"

Join the Circus

I almost literally walk from the blood donation table to the cafeteria to the bus where I promptly fall asleep.

I wake to be pulled along with the crowd which streams toward a separate tent. Somebody places a red tag and a lanyard about my neck and the crowd flows into an area labeled "VIP," dotted with tables. The tables contain glasses of wine or small food items which appear to have required significant assembly and application of cholesterol.

"Isn't this nice?" somebody to my left asks, raising a crimson glass of wine.

"Yes," I nod, understanding my cue.

"Is this," he asks, turning to another, more senior member of the company, "as good as it use to be in the good old days?"

"Well," the man looks uncomfortable, "In the really old days we use to just have BBQs and relax..."

"No, not then... you know, before, when they paid for really legendary parties... there use to be really nice things I hear..."

"Crab cakes?" a voice asks behind me. An approximately 27 year old woman stands in black clothing offering us a tray of bite-sized cakes. I smile at her and she returns the favor out of politeness but her eyes are glassy. I'm the "them" in "us and them" to her. The more senior man is looking edgy.

"I like BBQs," I said, taking a cake.

I make things for a living, and I planned to for the rest of my life. It occurs to me, however, that even if I invented something so efficient that everybody who currently works 8 hours a day only had to work 6, that within a few years people would be complaining of how hard it was to work a full 6 hours, and dream of a day when they would only have to work 4. The reality is, that despite the vast improvements in the quality of our lives over the past several thousands years, that humans as a whole are not any happier. We are healthier, better cared for, longer lived, and less of us do hard backbreaking manual labor for sure, but we are not particularly happier people for it. What then, is the point of all of this? What then, would actually be worthwhile?

If it is making people happy, what does make people happy? There is no way to explain this without dabling in cliches, but the idea of learning to be happy with what you have is not far off the mark. The power to remind people that their lives are wonderful and the world is beautiful would probably do more for a person's general happiness than a new iPhone, especially when you consider how rapidly the iPhone will be outdated.

I've sobered up now from the party (and received numerous stern lectures about donating blood then drinking) and I feel rather foolish. On the one hand my idea sounds completely laughable, and on the other hand my sober mind is unable to refute the logical conclusion I came to there, drunk and dehydrated, watching the acrobats dance in the cascading lights and bright costumes, watching something that really touched people and made them smile.

Perhaps if I want to do something truly meaningful with my life, I ought to quit my job and join the circus.

Old Perceptions

The man just inside the door of the Torii beats his hands against his upper arms and stomps his feet. "It's cold!"

"Yeah it is," I laugh. A few days ago I was giving Dreamer shit for complaining about the weather, but I've had to abandon the flipflops myself recently for a pair of sneakers, and I rarely take off my hoodie anymore to run around in a T-shirt, "I can't wait for my winter stuff to arrive."

"Oh?" Billy asks, straightening is lab coat.

"Didn't I tell you? They threatened to impound it and left it all in New England."

"What?"

"Yeah. The state wouldn't let them bring it in because they thought I was importing moths."

"Moths... like ugly butterflies?"

"Yeah it's totally absurd. I stayed home the day they were suppose to deliver and when they missed their dropoff appointment of my crate I called... and that's when they told me it was still in New England."

"That really is absurd," Billy laughed.

"Can't you have them spray it down?" the man in the doorway asked.

"There are no moths in it! Just old computers and clothes!"

"Well to convince them?"

"I filled out some import forms stating there weren't any moths. My stuff is suppose to be here in another 2-3 weeks... unless the shipping company messes up again."

"I have a women's coat in my car," he said.

"Oh...well um... I don't need... I have mine coming you know... in the shipping crate."

"I'm not going to use it."

"I don't want to take your things..."

But Chris was gone again in a gust of cold air which ripped in the doorway, and a few seconds later he handed me a warm heavy jacket.

In college I wore the same light coat all four years through the New England winter, with various layers of sweatshirts and hoodies underneath it. Heavy winter coats were expensive.

The embroidery on the front of the new coat said "The North Face." I remember kids in Waldorf, and rich girls from high school having coats like this.

"I don't..." I said, "want to take your things..."

***

I got paid last week, my first real paycheck. It was combined with my relocation bonus, and even with taxes the amount made me laugh because of how much of a year's cost of living it represented.

It will not be my entire yearly living budget, however. The knowledge of this permits me the luxury of buying things like a single coat which will replace many layers of other clothing.

I dress a lot better than I have in years. There are no tears in any of my clothing, and all of it is relatively comfortable and moderately fashionable; yet I still come across as that kid who is too broke to get herself a winter coat. That's not the person I want to be. There isn't a lot more despicable in my mind than a person who projects a need with isn't real, and which is filled by the charity of others. Charity should go to the people who need it most...

***

I am most certainly not lamenting the change of my financial state, but I find it puzzling at times.

"Atom," I ask, "I'll make more than I need this year. What should I do with it?"

"You need me to tell you that?"

My head filled with the image of filling my home with playpen balls.

"Ok," I corrected myself, "What would a responsible adult do?"

I could hear him grinning through the text box, "You're asking me?"

"Answer the fucking question..."

"Invest it?"

"I don't want to play the stock market."

"A wise choice,"

"But you said..."

"Invest...yes, forex, bank CDs..."

"Whats?"

Atom sighed, "Well, it looks like we have some studying to do, don't we?"

I guess I'm not quite as prepped to not need parents as I'd like to pretend I am.

Real

"Pika," she asked, "Tell me a story about my life."

I am always amazed at how the very old and the very young are similar. Firefly use to ask the same things, "Tell me about when I came from China," "Tell me about when I was little and we drove to the beach."

Grandma is dying of Alzheimer's, but she has an usual variety. She can remember recent events well, but her early life has become a blur over the years.

"You were a total badass Grandma!" I exclaimed, "You went to Rice at 14 for mathematics. It was completely unheard of! Then you kept getting all the A's in the classes until the professors told you you were ruining the curve for boys who needed those A's for their career, so you got a degree to be a schoolteacher."

Grandma smiled.

"So then World War II happened, so you became a spy in the Navy. Not like a secret agent, but you listened in to tapped phones to see if anybody in Hawaii was conspiring against America. That is where you met grandpa. He was working in the army as a Rabbi.

Gramdpa was an amazing man. I never met him, but I wish I had. He was a Rabbi who did not believe in God, but his family had put him in rabbinical school when he was quite young and so that became his profession. He came to terms with it by decided that even if God did not exist, that belief in God was an amazing and powerful positive influence in people's lives, and that by helping other people believe in God he could make people's lives better. They say he died 5-10 years early because he kept sneaking out of his hospital bed to do last rites for other patients."

Grandma chuckled a little bit, "Oh Pika, you don't need to make up things like that to make me feel good. Why don't you tell me a real story?"

***

"I wasn't always old you know."

"Of course not Grandma!" I said, "Everybody was young once, and you were so cool too!"

Grandma smiled that smile which says she thinks I am humoring her again. I suppose some people can not be convinced...

"Tell us a story grandma!" I said. Grandma never brings up being young unless she remembers something.

"I use to ride horses. I use to gallop across the fields..."

"That's wonderful!" I said, "English or Western?"

Grandma tapped her hearing aid, "What?"

"I said English or Western riding?"

"What?"

"Did you jump?"

"What?"

"Did you ride the horse over jumps?"

"No."

The room gets quiet as the debris of my attempt at polite conversation settle. Grandma looks ashamed at having to ask me to repeat myself so many times.

***

Three years after my attempts to tell Grandma about Rice, Grandma barely ate in front of us anymore. She had trouble using a fork to put food in her mouth, and she was very ashamed of it.

"Nathan liked this," she says as she passed time rearranging the food on her plate with the tines of her fork.

I catch the cue and ask loudly, "Tell us about Grandpa!"

Grandma smiled, "Well, Nathan was a very interesting man. He proposed to me on the very first date."

"No!" I say. Grandma finds it easier when I talk more in emotions than words, and with very few words at a time.

"Yes, yes he did." She smiles one of the first genuine smiles I have seen in a while, "He really did." She paused and then laughed, "I thought he was crazy."

"Well," Mom asked like you might ask a small child, "What did you do?"

"I went home to my father and told him about it."

"And what did he do?"

"He said that sometimes in life you just have to take a chance."

"And you were happily married until he died!" Mom finished.

Grandma nodded.

"That's beautiful Grandma," I said, but Grandma was done talking. I could tell she was having problems with the subtleties of what Mom had said, but she didn't want to go into a "what" cycle again. I'm never sure if Grandma can catch the horrendously condescending tones of voice Mom uses on her, or if perhaps I'm just sensitive to her because I have seen a great deal of her interactions with very small children.

If our culture had stories like The Fox and the Bear, maybe they would tell us that old people lose their hearing but not their speaking because they don't need to hear as much anymore, and because it is their turn to be heard instead.

I wonder if I was to tell her this story again later if she would not believe this one was real either.

***

"But it’s the truth even if it didn't happen."

I'm awkwardly balancing my books on the little L which forms the armrest of my seat, unable to move my feet very far because I'll kick the person in front of me. High school and air travel both sometimes seem to be the fine art of getting people to accept being treated like cattle.

"What did Ken Kesey mean by that?" My American Literature teacher is pacing the front of the room.

"Wasn't he high all the time?" one girl asked, twirling a chunk of her hair in her fingertips, "Maybe it is just nonsense."

Junior year of highschool meant I had already had several experiences of hallucinating from the medication I was being fed. Perhaps that is why this book was probably the only piece of literature I was forced to read that year that I liked.

"Maybe," I said, "These things seemed so real that they impacted him and had effects on him as if they were real things."

"Ah," the teacher asked, "So that makes them real?"

"Of course not," I said, "Real things are real, fake things are not, all I'm saying is it doesn't have to be real to be important." I'm sure at the time I was nowhere near as eloquent.

"Yeah," another student said, "Otherwise real things could be fake if everybody forgot them."

Fireflies

My sister has adopted her peer's habit of attempting to use youtube as her own personal music library. She's a legitimate thirteen year-old teenager now, complete with a smart phone grafted to her hand, horrendous spelling, and the belief that capitalizing every other letter makes her cooler. We've settled upon some music we can both enjoy, and now the computer screen is filled with a man at his keyboard and a series of whirring mechanical toys.

	Owl City - Fireflies
	Found at skreemr.com

I smile. Before I left I had trouble enough grasping that she was eight, my clearest memories of her are when she was closer to five or six, before I got sick.

You would not believe your eyes
If 10 million fireflies
Lit up the world as I fell asleep

Cuz they'd fill the open air
And leave teardrops everywhere
You'd think me rude
But I would just stand and stare

I can remember running through fields at that age where long grass licked my ankles and tugged at my bare feet, chasing fireflies. My grandmother brought me a jar from the kitchen and we tapped holes in the tin lid with the point of a Phillips screwdriver. I remember the sheer joy of seeing them hovering in the twilight over the quad at college for the first time, that fantastic feeling of coming home to something familiar.

"You remember fireflies," I ask her, "from our old house?"

She doesn't hear me, she's absorbed in her texting. I go back to stirring the rice pudding on the stove.

***

Even at 9 I had known something very big, and probably very bad was happening when my mother had taken me to my favourite restaurant for "special time together." I could normally count the times we ate out on one hand in a year.

"Pika," my mother said gently, "I have some very big news."

I dug into some ice cream with a spoon. If mom was going to spring bad news on me I was going to at least get a chance to eat desert first out of it.

"Our family is going to be a little bit bigger soon."

"You're pregnant?"

"We might adopt a little girl from China who hasn't got a family."

I remember being overwhelmed by two thoughts. The first was that at the point where my mother was telling me this there wasn't really any actual "might" involved here at all. The second was that my mother was in her mid-fourties and dad was scraping fifty. I couldn't think of anybody that age with a newborn child, and couldn't figure out why that was.

"We're going to be about 10 years apart?"

"Yes."

"Are you...expecting me to help raise her?"

"Only as a sister."

I took another scoop of ice cream, thoroughly unconvinced.

***

By mid-high school my sister was calling me "Mom" by mistake more often than I was comfortable with. I remember doing the same thing in early elementary school with my Waldorf teacher, first calling her mom once by accident and then repeating the "mistake" because a part of my head really liked that idea.

***

My memories of being sick are blurry, but I distinctly remember finding and watching Grave of the Fireflies. More friends than I could count had told me I would bawl like a child at the end, but instead I couldn't remember being more enraged at a film. The boy had an obligation to his sister before his personal pride, and no matter how wretched his aunt was being I felt he should have stayed there until the food stopped, in order to try to provide for his sister. At 10 years apart he needed to care for her and put her above all else, as she'd never be able to look after herself at that age. Just looking at that little tin of candies in the grocery store made me mad for months.

***

Leave my door open just a crack
(Please take me away from here)
Because I feel like such an insomniac
(Please take me away from here)

***

I went to college more resentful of my parents than you'd believe, and every time I thought about them I worried for my sister. Issac and I were too close in age for me to protect, and my mother had always gotten along very well with him, but my sister I could do something about. All I had to do was graduate well-decorated, land a steady reputable high-paying job in a very good school district and get a chance to take care of her during her high school years. This desire stemmed from very simple logic: either my parents were not as bad as I thought they were, or I would be a terrible person to leave my sister to the same fate when I had the capacity to do something about it.

***

But I'll know where several are
If my dreams get real bizarre
'Cause I saved a few and I keep them in a jar

***

"Why don't they light up?" a six-year-old me asked, shaking the newly-re-purposed peanut butter jar.

The jar was hastily steadied by my grandma, "Don't shake it, you'll hurt them. I guess they just don't feel like lighting up right now."

My cousin Tom taught me how to kill the bugs when they lit up and smear their color on the pavement, but this was not what I wanted. I wanted a living, breathing nightlight which I could care for and in return could light my room.

Leaves, sticks, more air vents, I even once opened the jar after mom tucked me in to let them roam my whole room, but the results were always exactly the same. The next morning I had nothing but dead fireflies.

"Well, maybe they are just fragile," Mom offered.

Almost fifteen years later I am standing in the Torii lobby asking out of the blue if anybody ever mastered this.

"I just don't think they survive the night," Jen offered, "they are probably short-lived..."

I sighed, "I just probably never knew how to care for them."

***

There are curling irons mixed in with the rockband controllers. She's fooling with the wires and a little upset.

"There was a man outside when I was walking the dog," she informs me. "He was smoking and drinking."

I smiled a little bit. My sister was still untangling the cords.

"He asked if he could pet the dog and I was scared, so I said no because she bites and came back."

Thirteen. What does a good parent of a thirteen year old do? Certainly no drinking, no hardcore partying, limited going out late, having to stay out of trouble, and forget doing any serious dating... I'd essentially skip the lifestyle of my early 20's for four years, followed by another four years of being careful and financially stable to provide her a good college education. I'd need to move into an apartment with space for her and shift my work hours so I could be with her. Would the company feed her like they feed me? Otherwise I also need to make meals for her...

Even if I could do all that, could I provide her a good home? Would it be any more realistic or do her any more good than the stick and some leaves in a jar with air holes did for the fireflies? Single working parents have to be nearly heroic to raise children well...and here I've barely figured out all the stuff I have to not do, let alone be sure to do.

"Shit," she says, tugging on the cords.

"You're getting a little gratuitous with the swearing." I add, "It doesn't mean a lot if it's every fourth word."

She looks up at me with an expression I cannot quite fully read, but it definitely says "but you swear."

I'm not sure I can do this.

A Brave New Job

We're being taught how to write and how to speak.

"Never say we would crush the competition, we have only the utmost respect for our competitors..."

The desks of the hall form a large semi-circle and we're all seated quietly, each clutching an identical bookbag, a gift from our new employer. We also each have a laptop, a shirt...

"And now it is time for lunch," the orientation lead smiles and leads the 20 of us to a cafeteria. We're all the people who began work on this day, they call us a class.

"Ribs or salmon?" the cafeteria employee asks me.

I stare at him blankly before finally managing an "uhhh."

The employee looks concerned, "You know...if you don't like..."

"Oh no! I like!"

***

It's a few weeks later and another smiling cafeteria worker is holding a lobster claw in a pair of serving tongs. I'm immediately struck with the realization that I have no idea how to eat this item and that I will be figuring it out in front of a large number of coworkers.

"It's ok," I tell her, "I have enough food, no thanks."

***

"You're so lucky," my friends told me.

"Is it true they feed you three meals a day?"

"Is it true they do your laundry?"

***

I roomed with a bunch of people from this place briefly years ago. Their refrigerator was eerily empty save the bunny food which contented Carne. I worked for the feds, she worked for something similar, and we use to talk about how the way our other housemates were so dependent on their workplace was a little creepy.

One of these housemates, Sharpie, fell off his bike and skinned his arm. The company nurse fixed him up, but he wore the bandage in the shower. Seconds later he came running out of the bathroom in a towel talking clutching his burning injury.

Carne and I laughed at him for wearing his bandage in the shower and expecting any differently. He laughed too once we pointed it out, "you know, I use to know that."

"They all drink some hardcore kool-aid over there," Carne shook her head, "bet you it's something they put in the water."

I laugh, "So that is what the cafeterias are for..."

***

The sign above the ribs says they were cooked in molasses. The meat is tender and falls off the bones, and a touch sweet. I assume that's from the molasses, though I have never had anything like this before so I wouldn't know for sure.

"You'll never be far from food," the orientation lead tells me, "we have snack kitchens..."

***

"Don't you think this is all a little excessive?" Giraffe asks me.

"Yeah, but it is how it is around here I guess."

***

I'm sitting at an awards dinner, courtesy of the feds, earlier this year. Sys's dad is sitting nearby and laughing with us.

"I wonder sometimes," I said, "if I could just hop from company to company on crazy employee benefits and just outrun the rate of reality catching up to these places and them realizing it isn't affordable."

His dad throws back his head and roars, "You missed out on the real chance for that, kid. This is nothing compared to how it was in the 90's."

***

"It's just like A Brave New World," Giraffe said.

"Isn't that about some crazy dystopia where everybody is oppressed?"

"Well yes, but it's completely voluntary and they are all happy."

"Then home come are they oppressed?"

"The book talks about that a lot."

"What?"

***

I'm walking through the halls for what turned out to be my final interview. A perky HR lady is asking me my least favourite interview question.

"And do you have any questions for me?"

My eyes clutch the walls, searching frantically for something which will make me sound smart yet curious.

"You changed the brand of juice in these refrigerators since I was here last, didn't you?"

"Oh," she smiles, "Yes, well we have panels here which study things like this, and if they changed it I suppose that means that the new one is healthier."

There is a brief an awkward pause where the HR woman innocently smiles, and then adds, "You really do learn something new every day here."

***

"When you start work," Doug said, gesturing to the Torii building, "We'll miss you."

"I don't understand."

"Well you'll never leave work there. You'll never come here anymore."

"That's silly."

"Well, why would you want to leave?"

***

I sat down and looked back at the mental list of things I wanted when I was homeless and compare them to the things I want now. While I still want a car and maybe a boyfriend or some other form of social ties to this place, pretty much everything else has been taken care of: food, shelter, medical insurance, free time, and respect for my work. I find it odd to realize that the list is a lot shorter but I am not a much happier person, in fact in some ways the optimism afforded to me when I was homeless of rapidly becoming un-homeless and general excitement probably meant I was happier then in my day-to-day life then than I am now.

***

"Because our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel–and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill... they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave."

The Savage was silent for a little. "All the same," he insisted obstinately, "Othello's good, Othello's better than those feelies."

"Of course it is," the Controller agreed. "But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead..."

The Savage shook his head. "It all seems to me quite horrible."

"Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand..."

"But I like the inconveniences."

"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

A Brave New World, Chapters 16-17

"You're still coming here," Doug smiled.

"Yeah. I think it's not good for me to spend all my time there."

Google Suggest

So, many of you have probably noticed by now that when you type a query into the Google homepage it will suggest queries to you to complete your search. While I'm not sure of the exact algorithm...knowing Google it is probably based on what users type. This means that some of them are curiously insightful and some are just flatly terrifying.

I have, for your amusement, collected a sample of sample query beginnings and the suggested query results.

As you might guess, this isn't probably very safe for work.

"Is it wrong"

• Is it wrong to sleep with your cousin
• Is it wrong to sleep with your step dad after your mom dies
• Is it wrong to sleep with your sister
  
• Is it wrong to like your cousin
• Is it wrong to live together before marriage
  
• Is it wrong to question God
• Is it wrong to be bi
• Is it wrong to cheat
  
• Is it wrong to be strong
• Is it wrong for a Christian to get a tattoo
  

"Is it true that"

• Is it true that the world is going to end in 2012
• Is it true that your heart stops when you sneeze
• Is it true that Miley Cyrus is pregnant
• Is it true that the world will end in 2012
• Is it true that if you die in your dreams you die in real life
• Is it true that when you sneeze somebody is talking about you
• Is it true that lady gaga is a man
• Is it true that robert patterson proposed to kristian stewart
  
• Is it true that if you don't use it you lose it
• Is it true that Rhianna gave Chris Brown herpes

Is there

• Is there anyway I can get this popular guy to get me pregnant
• Is there a god

(What the fuck? Did things really just show up in that order?)

How should

• How should I cut my hair
• How should I get a haircut
• How should a condom fit
• How should a suit fit
• How should we then live
• How should I do my hair
• How should a bra fit
• How should the intergral in Gauss' law be evaluated
• How should I cut my hair quiz

(One of these things is not like the others...)

How can I stop my wife

• From divorcing me

There was actually only one result for that one...

Nice girls

• Nice girls don't get the corner office
• Nice girls finish last
• Nice girls don't have fangs
• Nice girls don't explode
• Nice girls don't get rich
• Nice girls don't date dead men
• Nice girls swallow lyrics
• Nice girls don't change the world
• Nice girls finish fat
• Nice girls images

Why does

• Why does my eye twitch
• Why does my vag smell
• Why does asparagus make my urine smell funny
• Why does poop float
• Why does love always feel like a battlefield
• Why does ice float
• Why does my dog eat poop
• Why does Kim Zolciak wear a wig
• Why does hair turn gray
• Why does google have two l's

Thanks for tuning into this week's edition of "the world's got issues."

Edit: turns out there is a whole website for this stuff: http://autocompleteme.com/

Peter Pan

Its Saturday morning at my grandma's house. She only has probably five or six movies for children, but her version of Peter Pan the musical is the newest so we're watching that again. Mary Martin is bouncing through the woods singing while the lost boys echo her. Issac is on the couch near me singing and dancing along.

"I won't grow up!"

("I won't grow up!")

"I don't want to wear a tie,"

("I don't want to wear a tie,")

"Or a serious expression,"

(Or a serious expression,")

"In the middle of July."

("In the middle of July.")

"And if it means I must prepare,
To shoulder burdens with a worried air,
I'll never grow up,
Never grow up,
Never grow uuuuup..."

I was extremely young at that time and decided that day that I would never grow up either. I was completely determined.

Our parents were painting the house and so my brother and I were sharing the guest bedroom for the time being. As my mother tucked us in I explained to her that I would be leaving to go live with Peter Pan in a few years. I needed to wait a few years so I could always be a cool older kid and able to use tools and know enough to be really useful in Neverland, but I did need to go even though I would miss everybody very much.

"I see," my mother said, "and when will you go?"

"When I'm 13 I'll prop the window open with a stick and Peter Pan will know it is time for me to leave." I said. 13 seemed unimaginably old at that time, and it was about the age some of the older lost boys were to my knowledge. Thinking on it for a moment I asked, "When do children become adults?"

"When they turn 18."

"Ah, so I'll go right before then I guess."

The next day I selected an appropriate stick from the yard to hold the window open and brought it inside. No use in not being prepared and all.

I thought vaguely of my intentions once when I was 13 and again when I turned 16 and laughed on both occasions. On the eve of my 18th birthday I looked out the window to see a fallen tree branch in my yard. The whole question was framed a little differently in my mind then, as the thought of running away from home was never too far from the horizon.

***

At 14 we can work, at 16 we can drive. At 17 we can see R rated movies. At 18 we can smoke, buy porn, sign papers, vote, and die for our country. At 21 we can toast its victory. At 25 car rentals and many forms of insurance begin treating you as an adult, and at 35 you can run for president. When are we grown up?

***

"So," the same grandma asked, "You're 10 today, a whole two digits! How do you feel?"

My grandma asked me this question every year she saw me for my birthday. The answer was always the same.

"Erm...about the same as I did yesterday."

When I was young this statement made me nervous. Birthdays were suppose to be days of change, but I never felt my growth or maturity was so cleanly marked by the strict regiment of the Gregorian calendar. To be honest, I'm not totally sure it does now either.

***

The train leads to a monorail to a plane to a subway and up an escalator to a bus platform where Ginger is waiting for me. He looks different, even only after not seeing him for five months, in a way I can not quite put my finger on. I think I have changed too.

I hold our spot in line for the bus while he goes to get water. He returns and hands me mine.

"How much do I owe you for this?" In undergrad this was an important question.

Ginger shrugs, "Forget it, we're both adults with jobs, a few dollars between friends does not matter."

The eagerness to catch up spills right into the line for the bus and before I know it we're gathering stares and glares as I joke with Ginger about being homeless and the various other adventures which have filled the past 5 months.

***

In the course of this life I have had a great many encounters with a great many people who have been concerned with matters of consequence. I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn't much improved my opinion of them. ... I would bring myself down to his level. I would talk to him about bridge, and golf, and politics, and neckties. And the grown-up would be greatly pleased to have met such a sensible man.

The Little Prince Chapter 1 by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

***

"Did I ever tell you," I'm still laughing with Ginger, "about the time a policeman tried to throw me out of a tree for supposedly being drunk?"

The man in front of us and the man in front of him are increasingly gaining credibility with one another by taking turns glaring at us less and less subtly.

The bus engine shudders on, and all of our faces snap to look at it. A young man dressed in green is painted on the side above the bus logo of "Peter Pan." I grin and the lyrics from the television set in my grandmother's house so long ago echo back to me

If growing up means it would be
Beneath my dignity to climb a tree
I'll never grow up
Never grow up...

I suppose I found how to live in Neverland after all.

The outside world can keep its matters of consequence.

Engineer Logic

"We're having a party tonight," Giraffe says, "We need to swing by a thrift store for a piece of Ginger's costume, do you have yours?"

"Erm, I will shortly?"

Fifteen dollars later I'm wandering the house as The Cat in the Hat. A significantly larger number of dollars later we are leaving the liquor store ready for a Halloween party.

It began as very excellent party but, for whatever reason, a shocking number of people there did not understand their alcohol limits. Soon people are clustering around toilets, sinks, bathtubs, trash cans, and other receptacles depositing a wide variety of dinner items. The effect cascades, with first one party-goer kowtowing the porcelain throne and then others, either smelling the offering or perhaps just out of sympathy, following suit. The air is filled with the sound of people retching and spewing.

This party is officially not any fun anymore.

I am standing in the kitchen, realizing that the only people currently not throwing up are the hosts, Ginger, and myself.

Sam stands up from the sink, which he has hung to with a death grip for some time, and carefully wipes his mouth. "I feel better," he says.

"Yeah," I said, "well, I think you had a little too much..."

Sam turns to another male who is also clutching the sink, "Go on," he says, "just do it, you'll feel a lot better."

His sinkside companion adds to the mess. I lean over and begin running the water to reduce the smell.

"I do feel better," the second sinkclutcher agrees.

"Throwing up," Sam reasoned, "makes us feel better."

This is where you can tell the difference between a highly inebriated engineer or scientist and a highly inebriated sane person. The sane person might accept this fact, drink some water, and go to sleep. The engineer needs to analyze this data and use it to extrapolate greater patterns.

"If we throw up again," Sam pondered, "We will feel even better!"

"Uhh....no I..."

My words fall upon deaf ears as both boys simultaneously lean over the sink and jam their fingers down their throats. The behavior spreads like wildfire until a large number of party-goers are trying to follow the completely logical assumed data pattern. I'm left standing in a kitchen witnessing another round of retching.

"Pika," Sam calls, "you're sober!" I'm not, but it seems a silly argument.

"You need to go to the store and get us some Ipecac."

"No." We're already reenacting Family Guy here.

"Aww, come on, you want us to feel better right?"

"Uh... I don't think..."

Our disjointed argument continues for some time. Neither side is really making a coherent point, and after enough wasted time I simply leave the room. In Giraffe's bedroom another party sufferer is adding his vomit to a bowl which already contains contributions from two other people and an unfortunate mouse. There comes a point where things get bizarre enough that I feel like my grip on reality is slacking. The kitchen posse eventually realizes that nobody threw up throughout the entire debate and a relatively not-ill party member looks up from a chess board.

"You guys seem good, who wants to do shots?"

Sam and his compatriot look at each other for a second and then simultaneously hurl into the sink at the thought.

With ideas this good, who needs Ipecac anyway?

Unusual

The link below will direct you to [name's] login page, our 3rd party background agency, where you will be asked to enter your package ID, login, and password information to complete an online authorization form. You will be asked to provide the following information, and may be contacted to provide additional details, if needed, during the verification process:

I scan down the bullet points of my background check form. Its a sad fact that a person as innocent as I am in the eyes of the law finds situations such as these a touch nerve-wracking.

• All previous residences for the past seven (7) years.

I sigh and begin counting on my fingers. I had realized previously that I move around often, but I had not realized how often. Even not counting my bouts of sleeping on friend's couches or being legitimately homeless, I have had no less than 18 changes of primary mailing address over the aforementioned period.

"Well," Bobby laughed, "Guess that sucks for whoever has to process your background check doesn't it?"

I find it bizarre to try to reach back in my mind to my freshman year of college and remember which apartment I subleased a room in for a month between jobs. It isn't long until I am pouring through my inbox to try to find old shipping and billing invoices for online orders. A few addresses still evade my knowledge, and it isn't long after that that I am walking my old towns from millions of miles away in Google StreetView, carefully hoping to locate a house number.

I submit the form only to realize I forgot to list my Hong Kong address but the system is locked and can not be edited.

I can't imagine what this looks like. I'm perfectly aware that I live in a society where we are all boiled down to a calculated risk in all facets of life, and that the mathematically correct thing to do for less certain statistical predictions is to plan for the worst. I'm aware I'm an anomaly and therefore there will be less people who they have data on who are like me, and thus less data to use to make predictions about people like me, and therefore the computer will default to a safe bet of me being high-risk. That might be just as well, as I am not sure many people who walk this particular path come out the better for it. At least they don't know definitively that my population segment is high-risk.

You could consider the whole world a genetic algorithm if you wanted to. Ideas which work get passed on for other people to emulate, and people who try ideas that are too outlandish and dumb don't get an opportunity to try them twice.

This model is nearly perfect, but there is a catch. The problem arises from the fact that people are conscious and aware of the fact that unusual behavior is considered high-risk behavior, and we are living in a time where people go through a lot to avoid such "risky" behavior.

At Torii we are beginning outreach efforts to the local community. I keep bringing up a Tinker School model, and everybody is smiling until the photograph of a 10 year old kid with a power drill.

"You can't give the kids power tools."

"Why not?"

"They could get hurt."

"Can you explain to me how a child will do permanent damage to himself with a cordless drill or a hammer and nails?"

They never can, but the discussion is always closed anyway. Nobody wants to get sued, and everybody believes that if their program introduces engineering with popsicle sticks and masking tape that they will be safer.

"I tried to make a genetic algorithm which would play blackjack in online casinos and make me money while I did my undergrad," the man said. He's sitting at the front desk of the Torii late at night, staring off into the distance a little bit.

"Oh?"

"Yes, I taught it the rules of the game and then programmed them to play against a programmed dealer. Each generation I gave the virtual players 1000 dollars of imaginary money and at the end of each generation ranked them by who had the most money. I took the two most successful ones and one which was dead medium and created a next generation from them."

"And what happened?"

"The computer gave up on beating Vegas. All the algorithms always would stay, they would never hit, and they would bet the absolute minimum bet. They were just basically trying to live as long as possible in a losing game."

He paused, then laughed a little, "I guess I deserved it, what was I doing making a whole new generation of solutions from only three parent ideas?"

This fear ruins the diversity of the algorithm, and as any loser computer science master's student will tell you, this will cause the algorithm to believe it has reached the global maximum when it has in fact settled on a random local maxima. Another way to say it might be that if you want to do better than your average peer, you probably need to do something a little different.

I'll get my background check back in about a week. I can't imagine I'm unusual enough to make myself anything other than a funny little curioisity, but I suppose I will find out.

The Most Important Thing

I read an awful lot of books as a child. When I was in kindergarten my first grade teacher-to-be came for my Waldorf interview and was shocked to find me reading aloud to her from a chapter book. She was upset that I was getting ahead of myself, as the curriculum normally believed that such things would inhibit my imagination and creative side.

The habit of sneaking books continued. I have no idea how many my mother confiscated in an attempt to make me go to bed. I'd often keep two under my pillow so that when she came in to take my book away I could give her one I wasn't actually reading. I positively tore up fiction sections of the school library. I hid books in my desk at school and read during boring parts of class, and at points in middle school I deliberately accrued detention when informed I would be serving my terms in the library instead of attending "fun" portions of school.

For a while I completely bought into the concept that is implicently stamped into so many books: that books are the most important thing, that they are what hold society together, and they are what keep us free and permit the transmission of ideas. From The Giver to Fahrenheit 451 books, and storytelling in general, are projected as the foundations of safety and freedom respectively.

About the time when I finished Witch Week and one of the main characters was going to save the world by telling stories, as if the power to explain why everything is would erase the problems, as if all people who were at odds with one another were really victims of some huge misunderstanding and not persons with competing interests, was about the time when I got thoroughly fed up with this concept. It seemed extremely popular but hopelessly stupid.

***

"You guys are my team," I can hear Crash say to his latest group of students for the summer. He's nearly beside himself with excitement, to the point where I believe he is beginning to alarm some of his workers.

"Everybody's relying on us you know. Communications are the most important part of any project you know, you can have the best machine in the world but if you can't get the data off it you did it all for nothing."

There is a slight pause where the new students look at one another. I turn to Crash and smile a little bit.

"Oh course," Crash adds, thinking he has offended me, "Software is really important too you know."

It's a silly thought. We only put systems on the robots which are absolutely critical and the robot won't work without. Why would anybody pay for a part the robot didn't need to function? All our subteams, by this definition, are critical.

***

"Its going to be really hard you know," he says gravely.

"I'm prepared to work hard," the economist says, "I really believe I have thought up the next great business, and if I need to learn to program to do it so be it."

"It has taken me 10 years to learn to program," another voice joins in, "and I'm still not good at it yet."

I look across the Torii and consider things for a minute. The latest speaker is currently on sabatical at Google and has been involved in a wide array of other impressive things. His modesty is wonderful, but severely alarming to the economist who is progressively looking more and more nervous.

"Don't sweat it kid," I say. "Look, we're programmers. This is our life's work. Nobody wants to believe that their life's work is easy, that they are replaceable, or that their work isn't critically needed. We've worked hard to get where we are. That's what all these stories boil down to; but I believe that there isn't any reason you can't get here too with a little hard work."

Neverending Story

"What is a rite?" asked the little prince.

"Those also are actions too often neglected," said the fox. "They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all."

So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near--

"Ah," said the fox, "I shall cry."

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
Chapter 21

Gemini was cranky. He called for my attention but then couldn't be bothered to look up from his notebook of formulas when I responded. His words were brief. Everybody was glad I was going to a more stable place, but leaving was still awkward. I felt like a dog who, despite a loving family, was being sent to a new home because the new landlord didn't permit pets.

Nearly two months ago I am standing at the entrance to what, in a few moments, will no longer be my apartment. VJ swings one of my suitcases into his trunk and looks up the stairway to see me standing there, staring into the distance.

"Leaving is hard," he says, trying to sympathize.

I look at him a little puzzled. While I will surely never live here again, I will be back in town in about a week.

"It...feels good to be on the road again really."

"Oh?"

Its odd to explain side from one place where I lived for 9 months I haven't lived anywhere consistently for more than six months since I left for college.

We're in the present again now.

"We're going to miss you Pika," he said, giving me a big hug.

"Don't worry," I said, patting him on the back mid-hug, "I'll be back tomorrow for class."

In a sense, this "leaving" seems a bit artificial.

Months ago I tumbled out of a white jeep and turned back to look at Magpie. He's not really one for hugs anyway, although sometimes I wish he was.

"See?" he laughed, trying to make light of the situation, "and this time we didn't even need to call the feds because of bad traffic!"

PJ is probably the greatest oddity in all of this. I don't think I have ever said goodbye to him. The first time we were standing there when I shrugged and laughed about how, even though we had no plans of it, we knew the world was so small that we would run into one another again. Since then I see him about twice a year, just like clockwork. The last few times I don't think I even bothered to say "see you later" when I left.

I'm sitting at lunch in a little Mexican restaurant where my (now former) boss loves to go to to discuss work. It's about a week ago.

"I thought you were kidding when you said you had briefly gone homeless."

I shook my head, taking another bite of my burrito.

"Well I wouldn't have laughed if I had known you were serious."

"Its over now, don't worry."

This weekend we had about the same conversation at a former coworker's housewarming party. It really bothered Crash. His eyes puffed up red and he went into the corner to blow his nose a lot. It wasn't my intention to upset him.

I walked slowly back to the lab on Wednesday, now keyless to collect a last few things. Today Java offered me probably the first compliment I have ever recieved from him.

I watch my coworkers struggle to find a definitive last day to conclude things in the world of a sliding scale relationships. Since I am not moving this time I will remain peripherally involved. If nothing else I will still take classes next door to what use to be my lab. My relationship to this place is changing, but I am not leaving.

The sun is coming up through the front windows of the Torii. I have been here too long. Late nights make the dividing lines between days confusing and arbitrary seeming.

As a matter of fact I have recently begun to struggle with the concepts of the beginnings and endings of anything related to time. The reality is our relationships of all varities do not fit so neatly into the concept of starting and ending on dates unless we choose to abandon them as such.

The human impulse to compartmentalize and consider our lives in discrete chunks is substantial: days, hours, minutes, all these things are artificial constructs we impose on a steady flow of time. The same can be said of phases: high school, college, or a first job. The reality is that this world is built on tiny human connections, and that these connections deteriorate when we stop putting the effort in to mantain them.

"Playlist," I asked, passing him a beer as he sat at the desk in his room, "You're never online."

"Yeah, I hate AIM. You could call."

"What's a good day?"

The idea of these constructs having any meaning at all seems increasingly silly to me as the days pass. After all, will even my life be marked as a little discrete slice? The forces that shaped me, and the impact I leave on the world, faded into existance and will fade out again slowly over a much longer period than my own lifespan. It will not be wrapped up so neatly by the engraving of my tombstone.

I wave goodbye to the Bounty Hunters as they pile into cars to drive breakneck speed to the airport.

"Goodbye!" they call. I hear one voice through an open window, "Hope you get your tranfer to come out with us full time!"

"Don't worry about it," I laugh, "I'll be in touch!"

Bounty Hunters

We're coming up on a week since any of us have slept solidly. I'm luckier than most in getting a bed to spend my narrow slice of downtime in. Pizza boxes are stacked next to the trash can, and the trash bag abounds with old hamburger wrappers. I had real pasta last night, but as nothing has arrived for a while everything we eat now has the stale and slightly soggy taste of being wrapped in foil and thrown in the refrigerator for a few hours.

"Jackie," one my teammates calls, "You ready for another run?"

Bounty hunters have found a rebirth in the modern age. We live in a time where open-ended problems abound. Resources just don't exist for the government and various scientific panels to fund each of them individually. Instead, they flash a huge prize purse to the first team to accomplish the feat du jour, and then they sift through the resulting submitted designs to bring back whatever they believe will solve their problems.

The contestants pour in. They are more hacker than scientist; the kind of people who get a little thrill out of an ominous deadline, tremendous challenges and terrible odds. You'll be pressed to find a crowd who takes caffiene more seriously, and you'd be frightened to think of how much money a bunch of kids are chasing. Some years nobody wins at all, and some years everybody exceeds the expectations and it comes down to who does it best.

Oddly enough when I first met my teammates I already knew some of them. This world is frighteningly small, and good men are hard to come by. We know each other, we know our competitors: both friendly and the enemy who would sabatoge or disqualify us in a heartbeat. (And if you believe scientists are better people than to try to do so, you have another think coming.) Oddly enough, I'd say the hacker part of us is the more civilzed part. It's what makes us family.

"Its jamming again, that rake we put on isn't long enough."

"Fuck it, cut up this lacrosse stick and bolt it on the front."

Somebody's always asleep on the couch, despite the clamor of the voices and the roar of the power tools in the same room. There's more McDonald's monopoly pieces on the wall than I'd care to admit. Half of us are sick and we're still working 18 hour days. The undergrads are frantically copying homework off one another during breaks or over cold french fries.

...and yet, right now I wouldn't trade this for the world. I have been here before and I truly believe that this is where the magic happens: somewhere between the duct tape, the JB Weld, and the warm flat soda at 4AM. This truly is how the world changes.

"God damn," a teammate says, running a dremmel through the casing of a drill battery pack, "I hate it when they try to make shit tamper-proof." The stops come clear and 10 new cells pour from the battery. He gathers them up and lays them on the mat with a few other dismembered drill packs and begins wrapping the cells in electrical tape. "Somebody get the crimps."

So I'm sorry that I haven't written a lot recently. This is where I am. We've not many hours to go and many miles ahead to cover. In the meanwhile...

See you space cowboy...

Viral Media Rewards Absurdity

"I can't believe Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for intentions instead of action..."

I heard the same sentiment expressed with varying levels of clarity and expletives dozens of times Friday. "What on earth has come over the commission?" "Nobel is rolling in his grave," and "They have officially made this into a sham," and "Why the hell would they do this?"

I'll tell you why. I'll prove it on one sentence.

Can you name the winner of the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize without looking it up. No? It's Martti Ahtisaari. Here's the sad part: that name probably doesn't help you. A good percent of us could not identify this former President of Finland for love nor for money.

That's alright, lets try again. Can you name any winner of the Nobel peace prize in the past five years? When I tell you that 2007 was Al Gore and some other people for some global warming stuff, you might say "man I knew that," but the recognition on Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank (2006), International Atomic Energy Agency and Mohamed ElBaradei (2005), or Wangari Maathai (2004) is pretty low.

So what's special about this? Well, lets consider this: news is a form of media. Media is an industry. Industries seek to make profit. How does media make money? Media makes money from advertising. Advertising pays more when more people see it more. Media wants to make as much money as possible. Media wants as many people to watch it as possible. Media reports the news which people will watch.

This dynamic is as old as the news as a business is (which some people link especially strongly to the development of cable news stations). The issue is: now not everybody gets their news from the news stations. As a matter of fact the majority of the news which I receive is transmitted to me virally either by a friend in an IM or via an IRC channel.

So what gets transmitted? Mostly it's the inane and the insane, in short the absurd. You know the memes as well as I do. I see easily as many links to the likes of Chris Crocker, various forms of Bill O'Riley expressly because he is losing flipping a shit or making an ass of himself, and Reuters' Oddly Enough as I do to "actual news." Try getting the same sort of stories you get off the BBC on Digg. They are probably there, but they are also probably awash in a great deal of other stuff.

Awash isn't a bad word for this whole situation. We're awash in way more information than we can reasonably process. We rely on summaries of everything, from what our friends are up to to the disturbing little bullet points that accompany a one page news article on CNN because they believe we have lost our attention span so badly that we are unable to finish and analyse a one page news article for ourselves.

And what is coming out on top? Well, your diligent readers will probably pick, choose, and not fluctuate but items which actually go viral reward the news site with a huge traffic spike. Spikes like this are very lucrative both financially. They are also psychologically attractive for the same reasons the lottery is.

Check out what is right at the top of the webpage of CNN, which is generally regarded as a fairly reasonable news site. Will the naked burgler that CNN reports as caught change your life? How about that an "ultrarunner" says shoes are the devil? This stuff is not news, its just a light laugh that sells well.

So if somebody is determined to make the news or "have an impact," they are going to have an easier time doing it if they are doing something that will go viral: the inane or the insane, the absurd. The Nobel Peace Prize, like all Nobel Prizes was founded essentially as a form of activism by the man who invented dynamite as an attempt to recognise those who have helped improve humanity. This was to offset the destructive and warlike ramifications of his own invention. The goal is to highlight and reward those who have done something significant to better humanity.

So how can the people who award the prize make sure the prize has an impact? By making sure everybody knows about who won it. How do they do that in this modern age?

They pick somebody who is doing good, but where the statement is just absurd enough to go viral.

Now I'm not proposing that this is some giant media conspiracy. I'm arguing that this is an unconscious algorithm that evolves from the combination of the strength of viral media introduction, media companies trying to make as much money as they can, and the people who are making news attempting to be sure they have an impact. This is the age that rewards Sarah Palin's cutesy folksy gimmicks, and reactionary "opinion pieces" where people completely lose their shit on youtube.

So, in conclusion, stop linking garbage, go read some damn news, and make the world a better place. Hell, while you're at it you might even give yourself an education. :p

The Fox and the Bear

It may be beyond my skill to describe being a Waldorf child for seven years in a way that will resonate with you if you weren't one yourself. CoLo laughed when I first mentioned it, "That explains so much; I've never met one of you who came out normal."

Lets start with something simple: beeswax. Beeswax is an art material provided to children frequently during Waldorf education. It is made (rather unsurprisingly) from the wax of bees and is dyed a variety of vivid colors. In the warmth of your hands it will become soft and mailable, but when left alone it will cool to hold its form. Its given to children in class and used in a similar manner to clay.

The older kids got to use beeswax, so we all were terribly eager for our first chance. I remember our teacher holding a wooden bowl at the front of the class and tipping the brim forward to show us its contents. Inside were about thirty-five pieces of wax. About half of them were vivid orange and half were a dark, warm, and vaguely royal purple color. The bowl was passed, down one row and up another, as I hungrily watched each student select a piece and pass the rest along.

"What is the difference?" I asked.

"They different colors," my teacher said, and couldn't be persuaded to say any more.

The interest was overwhelmingly in favor of the purple wax, so much in fact that by the time the bowl came to the last row there was nothing but orange left despite the fact that there were easily one and a half times as many pieces of wax as there were students. I remember holding the bowl in my hands and looking at both of hues, thinking that they were both very pretty, but eventually deciding that while the orange was slightly prettier, all of the cool kids were taking the purple and that I wanted to be a cool kid too.

"There once was a fox and a bear," the teacher said, and we all hushed to listen to story time.

"And one day the bear found the fox eating many delicious fish. The bear asked the fox how he caught them, and the fox said that it was very easy. He promised to teach the bear how to fish if the bear promised to listen very carefully to his instructions. The bear agreed and they went to the lake where the fox taught the bear how to make a hole in the ice.

'That was easy,' said the bear.

'Oh yes,' the fox smiled, trying to flatter the bear, 'I am sure for somebody as clever and strong as you it was easy. You can probably do anything, but here is the hard part: you must now sit with your tail in the hole and wait a very long time for the fish to come and bite your tail. Then you can pull up all of the delicious fish and eat them.'

So the bear sat with his tail in the hole all day and all night, and when the sun rose the next morning he thought he felt a nibble so he stood up. However, when he stood he found that his long and beautiful tail broke off in the ice, and now he only had a short stubby one. The bear went home very angry because he had been tricked, and whenever the fox thought of him he laughed. This is why bears have short stubby tails. but foxes have beautiful long ones."

I looked down in my hands at the purple wax and thought for a moment but was interrupted by the teacher.

"Now I want all of you with brown wax to make the bears, and all of you with orange wax to make the fox from our story."

Brown? I looked at the wax again. To a seven year old a teacher might as well be the voice of God himself, and so I immediately and wholeheartedly believed that my beautiful purple ball of wax was brown and ugly. What was worse was I was making the loser for the story. I turned to see the back row of the class grinning because they were all going to make the winner.

One student asked to trade her brown wax for orange wax but the teacher did not permit it. Dejected, I formed the very best bear I could from the wax and placed it on the counter along with all of the other student's work.

The figures sat there for almost a week before we were permitted to take them home, and when my mother asked me about my bear I didn't want to talk about it.

I remember daydreaming in class though and looking at the little figurines. If I do whatever everybody else does, I thought, I will only ever be as happy as everybody else is.

If I want to do better, I need to do something different.