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.

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...

In Plain Sight

"I think you live here," Java said.

"That's absurd."

"No, you sleep on the lab couch, you shower upstairs and you eat the food," he pointed to the lab refrigerator, "right there."

"Why shouldn't I eat food which came from academy? Its communal, I brought it here for all of us."

"Do you have an apartment? Like one not here, that you could go back to if you wanted to?"

"Yeah."

"I don't believe you."

"It doesn't matter if you do," I said, picking up a clean ceramic bowl and a package of ramen from one of the bins of food we inherited. Sunlight hits me, first in slivers and then finally bathing me completely as I walk from the lab to the kitchen. Its not a kitchen in the strictest sense with only a microwave and a coffee maker, but for anything more I have to walk a few blocks and get into the short-term housing kitchen. I fill the bowl with water, add the brick of ramen, and put it in the microwave.

"Oh hello Pika!" a friendly voice asks behind me.

I turn to see one of the grad students smiling at me over her cup of coffee.

"You work weekends?"

"When I have a deadline," I smile.

"I saw you earlier in the lab," she smiles. She takes a Britta filter from the refrigerator and pours herself a glass of water, still grinning at me. I'm having trouble taking my eyes off the Britta filter. Has nobody really found it odd that there is a small filter pitcher in the refrigerator in a building that's completely stocked with those giant blue tanks of purified water? "You work a lot of hours," she offered as a chipper sort of compliment.

"I suppose I do."

***

I've never personally read Edgar Allen Poe's The Purloined Letter, but I do know the plot of it from watching Wishbone as a child. I'm not sure which of these facts would slay my mother more. The concept, however, of hiding things in plain sight, is something which remained dormant with me in my mind for many years. It wasn't until a dotted lined boss in college who did not even know of the term's origin became fond of the phrase that it returned to my mind.

The water filter came from Bobby who gave it to me when he moved out of Delta. It, along with many other kitchen supplies, had been dragged into the university "kitchen" and hidden, in plain sight, around the time of the new student's orientation week. The students did not know what did and did not belong, and I assume the professors thought the new students or the orientation staff had brought the supplies. Nobody was going to suspect anything until I moved them all out again into my next home.

My clothes and other blatantly domestic items were hidden as well, in nondescript cardboard boxes with the words "fiscal reports" or "short-term engineering sample, retain packaging for manufacturer return." Many people walk in and out every day, and none of them notice.

***

The building my lab is in was, according to popular legend, once a military base morgue. I'm not sure which portions were the hospital and which were the morgue, how showers appeared on the second floor, or if in-depth knowledge of this would make standing at the edge of the shower any better. I'm trying to ignore the cool slick tile under my bare feet. I'd kill for a pair of flip flops.

I can feel the edges of the tiles and little scraps of the grouting between them against the balls of my feet and my toes. How many bodies have been washed here? Do they even wash dead bodies in the shower? They probably have to wash them someplace. I curl my toes against the floor a little and apply pressure. In karate we use this to grip the floor, but right now I'm mostly forcing myself to touch it and feel it, and get over the skin-crawling feeling this place gives me. Honestly, I should probably be more concerned for my health with the amount of bleach they probably dumped on this place when they converted it to a university. I hung up my clothes and took my shower. It was easier the next day.

***

Its been on the order of weeks since I moved into this life. Java is the only one who seems to have noticed, and that's because he likes to escape to the lab on weekends to do work and always finds me here. If I lived at home I probably would too. If I could do this again from the start I would make a greater effort to leave conspicuously promptly from time to time at closing instead of "working late" and in reality just go off for a downtown bike ride. The rest of the plan was executed nearly perfectly. I told people I was living with an imaginary boyfriend and I got a male friend of mine to agree to receive mail on my behalf. I learned the janitor's schedule for cleaning so that I know which days I can sleep in and which I have to be up and working extra early.

If there is any practical advice I can offer to anybody stupid enough to try this, I'd say don't wear your pajamas ever. Sleep in normal clothes so you can always claim, if found, that you were just working late laying on the couch and fell asleep. You may want to print out a research paper and highlight portions of it, then leave the highlighter and some assorted pages of it right next to your couch as you fall asleep. Make sure whatever you write on your boxes is deadly boring so nobody wants to open them. Wake up earlier than anybody would arrive every day to tidy your space and remove traces of your presence. If you ever do oversleep and somebody comes in and wakes you, you should consider pretending to go home. Take a small bag (which you should always have packed with a spare set of clothes etc) and go to the nearest place with a bathroom that isn't your work. Clean yourself up and change your clothes, then waste about 30 minutes and go back.

I'm a little frightened by not entirely knowing what road has led me here, aside from turning down military jobs, which we all know will always be funded. People think the feds always have money, but its always about what project you're assigned to really. If the funding stops to your project and your boss is too proud to disband the project and transfer you...well sometimes the paychecks stop coming. Thankfully mine are still only "delayed" although some days I'm not sure what difference it makes in the end. I've been hunting for a new job pretty hard for about a month. I'm very hopeful about some things coming through soon. Still, I would like to derive how I got here so I can make sure to not go here again.

Thank you to Violent Acres for this post, because honestly, prior to reading that I didn't quite have the balls to think like this. I didn't know stuff like this could be pulled off. Even now, I still find it amazing and hard to believe how people can live like this with nobody knowing, right on top of their workplace illusions. I wonder how many empty offices every night aren't empty at all. I wonder how many people there are who are just like me, living completely unseen in plain sight.

Professional

"Tuck up," she says, "we're going to get hit with the sprinklers."

I turn in the sleeping bag and pull the edges up, tucking them under my feet. Through the holes in the mesh I can see the wood-chips on the ground about 8 feet below me, although I can't feel the mesh through the sleeping bag.

We must be quite a sight: three college students and one graduate camped on a children's playground. We could see the lights from the road and hear the cars shuffle past. Most of the noise came from the unevenness of the road.

Drummer was sprawled across a bridge between two of the sections, Jesh had yet to settle down but was enjoying running along the tops of the structures in the dark. Tiffany was curled up next to me. I could almost see the smile on her face in the dark.

At dawn we awoke to a rosy sunrise and two dogs running in the park. The husband and wife walking them had obviously seen us and were skirting the entire structure. My bare feet could feel the grain of the rivulets which made up the structure surface and my blue plaid PJ pants ruffled slightly in the morning breeze. Oh well, this isn't going to get a whole lot weirder no matter what I do...

"Hello!" I called, "Good morning to you both!"

The husband looked a little baffled and puzzled on how to respond but the wife grinned widely and waved to us.

"Can I pet your dogs?" I asked.

"Of course," the wife answered.

In seconds I was down the fire pole and across the mulch into the grass which licked the hems of my pants as I ran, leaving them wet with dew.

"What are you doing up there?" the wife asked as I arrived.

"Camping out," I smiled as I worked to extract a bright green tennis ball from the mouth of an excited golden retriever.

"Why?" her husband asked.

"I don't know," I replied, winding up and chucking the ball as far as I could. The golden retriever streaked out in pursuit, front and back legs together in a bounding gate, "Why not I guess?"

"I know how that is," the woman said turning to me, "you wouldn't believe the half of the crazy stuff I did in college."

The husband's eyebrows crashed together like waves for a moment before he raised one in puzzled alarm and looked at his wife.

***

They weren't in front of the iron gates of the school we had selected. They weren't in the subway station. They weren't picking up their cell phones. They weren't anywhere I could figure out.

The day was cold enough to see your breath, and I was wrapped tightly in a baby blue coat. An equally bright and clashing orange piece of poster board with the words "Free Hugs" written on it in foot high all capitol black letters was rolled up in my hands.

This had seemed a simply grand idea in a group, but standing alone I felt nothing short of absurd on that street corner. I stood alone for nearly half an hour, sign half unfurled in one hand, looking somewhat dejected.

"You're giving out free hugs?" a voice asked me. It belonged to a girl who was probably still in highschool. Black lipstick, black skirt, dyed black hair, some sort of intricate black shoes, and even the obligatory hot topic spiked bracelet made me feel like I had just met the walking personification of people who need to prove their uniqueness by all acting the same.

"Uh...yeah," I said non-commitally.

"I love that video," she grinned, "can I have one?"

"Uh...yeah!" I said a bit more brightly.

I'm never going to be able to explain what exactly happened in that moment when the girl who I was so busy looking down on came up and hugged me, but like so many other endeavors in life, the first step was the hardest and the expression of confidence is often what makes you succeed. I held my sign high above my head, grinning at incoming pedestrian traffic. The people came in streams, they would see one person hug me, and then another person would follow suit, but at no point did interest hold strongly enough to form a line.

"You're doing a psych project?" a man asked tenitively, pointing back to the gates behind me.

"No, just for fun."

"Oh," there was a long pause before he produced a rather nice camera from his coat and extended his hand once more toward the intricate iron gates, "I go there. I need an art project. Can I photograph you?"

A street preformer came up to me at one point and said that everybody walking from my direction was smiling, hugged me, and left. I hugged the photographer, but sadly I never got to see the result of his project (if you're out there Mr Photographer Man, I'm rather curious how that turned out), as a matter of fact I'll never find out if I made much of a difference to anybody that day, and honestly I don't expect I did. It was, however, one of the most heartwarming and rewarding experiences I have ever participated in. People in groups are miserable creatures, but from time to time if you can manage to take them and yourself our of the daily environment you'll find something in them which makes you both smile. It was also really healthy of me to get over my self-consciousness about the absurdity of it all and just enjoy myself.

***

The big lab with the best toys in it, naturally, is the one which I must share with a variety of characters. One of them is standing in front of me wearing a suit.

"You have to wear shoes in here,"

I want to ask him why, but I already know why, and its not something he's likely to say out loud. There is no heavy machinery here, no serious danger, Florian just believes its unprofessional to not wear shoes at work. Nothing has changed since I started doing this more than two years ago, Florian is just new and believes he can help me by teaching me to grow up. Maybe he can.

I find this interesting. Personally I define "being unprofessional" as "not doing a good job," but in reality the act of "being professional" in this day and age seems to have taken on a significant amount of unrelated baggage. I understand that sometimes we need to put our best foot forward to impress guests and potential sponsors, but why must we keep up this facade with one another? Why are we trained to be so fearful of the judgement of total strangers we will never see again and will have no impact on our lives, and of our own teammates who are suppose to be our allies? Perhaps this insistance on stupid and trivial childish behavior is stupid, but this other option of a culture just slays me.

***

"Punch buggy green, no punch back," I tap Corey on the shoulder. Corey is a professional, both in my eyes and in Florian's, and ten years my senior. If I am where he is when I am his age I will be very proud. He looks at me for a moment slightly bewildered, then smiles and shakes his head.

"Pika, are you ever going to grow up?"

"I was considering maybe starting on that in like 10 years..."

Broken Mind

The street is absolutely packed. At first I was darting between the openings in it only to find that I had inadvertently dodged through several groups taking photos. Slowing down I begin skirting these events only to be caught by the photographer of one.

"Excuse me, can you take a photo of us?"

"Of course," I respond taking the camera. I hold the viewfinder up near my face and watch the last face slide into the camera.

It occurs to me that I can outrun any of these people who I am photographing, especially in a crowd. People stretch out nearly too tightly packed to move for blocks and blocks. There are easily a million people here, and almost no cops. I could take this camera and pawn it for about 100 dollars, and there would be effectively no consequences. There is literally nothing stopping me.

"Say cheese!" I smile and click a picture. "Alright, hold on, let me get a second one for you."

"You're so sweet!" the camera owner grins as I hand it back to him.

***

"Yeah I slept on the grass here my first night here before my dorm opened," he shrugged.

"Yeah, there's like no security here. You want to climb that tower?"

"What?"

"You know," I pointed to the top of the nearest clock tower, "see what's at the top."

"There's something wrong with you."

I laugh and put one hand on the back of my head and laugh, running my fingers through my hair nervously, "Oh, well I wouldn't say..."

"Those people you hang out with have broken your mind. All you see now are ways to break society."

***

When I was 17 I considered retroactively getting myself a second birth certificate under a fake name. I was going to say I was 14 (I looked young enough). With a second certificate I could get a new passport and driver's license, and from there I figured I could get anything else I wanted. I'd take the exam to get a GED, and then I wouldn't need to attend a second high school to be a credible person. It was going to be a whole second me, just in case I screwed up and really wanted to start over.

It was also because I realized how absurdly easy it would be at a young age such as that to legally speaking become two or more people. Until you are 18 there is little to no record of your existence, and few consequences for messing around are fairly small. I knew it was a very bad idea, but I was just itching to do it, just because I knew I could.

***

$57.67, got one two three of these...

I flip the checks over to sign them, then copy the amounts onto the deposit slip.

Why is a check secure? Does anybody check my handwriting? I have friends who sign their credit card receipts with stick figures and dicks and nobody ever seems to notice that. Does anybody even know what my handwriting or signature even look like? How could somebody tell if I forge it?

This thought brings me to the front of the check. How hard would it be to make a fake birth certificate, show it to the DMV to get them to print you a fake driver's license, use it to open a fake bank account, scan and photoshop the checks, print a whole series of them, and write yourself 100 dollar checks until they start bouncing. There's no real security in checks, and everything I'd need to print fake ones is on a single check.

***

"This country need stricter gun control," she says.

"Why,"

"Because people can't be trusted."

We already trust people on a very basic level. Our society is drastically insecure, and all that really keeps it going is a combination of the ignorance of some and the good faith of others to not dismantle it brick by brick despite the abundant chances around us.

***

I'm holding two silver dentist-tool like implements. The pick has a smooth handle which narrows to bulb out again into a small circle on the end. The torque bar was a thin piece of metal which was twisted into an L.

"These," Colo says, "are what I started with."

"What now?"

"Now you practice."

In the short time between Magpie's graduation and the beginning of my internship that year I learned to melt through a whole stack of masterlocks. I think if people realized how little was put into these locks they would not have such faith in them.

***

The crowds of people flow and ebb like an ocean and lap against the stairwells between wharfs. I duck from the crowd and run up a stacked pallet to jump onto the side rail of the stairway, swing over it, and then onto the back of the fence. Somebody shouts "hey" at me but I'm back into the crowd before anybody can catch me.

Funny, that fence is locked with a masterlock.

Good Morning Alpha

Ugh, whose alarm is that?

I wake up in a room effectively lined from wall to wall with air mattresses. Mine is in the middle because Pacem's and Bhop's are the same height and they have no interest in rolling into one another. I wander out into the kitchen to find Phil in his boxers.

"Hey Pika,"

"What,"

"Can I have some of your Nutella?"

"Yeah."

Down the hall speakers are screaming. "You drive me crazy! I just can't sleep. I'm so excited..."

Numbers is standing at the door of his and Roo's room. The sudden opening of the door has made Roo's morning music choice apparent to the whole household.

If I was a man I might have considered rushing a fraternity but sorority life never appealed to me. We got a guitar last night, which brings this atmosphere as close as I ever think it will be to living in a frat house.

***

"We don't like that word," my project partner informs me. Its sophomore year of college, and he is glaring at me over the rims of rather square glasses, purple polo shirt with the collar popped. I'm waiting on the Dave Mathews Band reference.

"Its very offensive," he informs me.

"What?"

"Frat. I mean...you wouldn't call your country your cunt would you?"

"What?"

"Then don't call my fraternity a frat."

"Wouldn't I...call my country my count?"

***

Phil may like the taste of this stuff, but he's the only one. Pacem, Numbers, Sempai, and I are sitting in a circle with shotglasses and a can of the yellow can of energy drink in the middle. Numbers and Sempai brought back five cases of it since it was free, and we have become progressively more desperate in our attempts to get rid of it over time.

"Alright," Numbers says, "We're going to drink a can of this together."

"Why did you get five glasses?" Pacem asks

Sempai nods, "We can fix this...hey Roo!"

We can hear the voice from across the house, "What?"

"Come do shots with us?"

"Sweet!"

Roo rounds the corner grinning like a kid at Christmas until he sees the can of brawndo. "Aww hell no, this stuff is plutonium. I'll be pissing green for a week."

The scientist in me is intrigued, "Does it really make you piss green?"

"Yeah," Sempai returns.

"I think your kidneys just scream 'fuck that shit' outright."

Roo chickens out after the first shot, and I have a little bit of trouble with my second. Numbers takes four like a champ and we line the can up on the windowsill an array that makes the white trash in each and every one of us proud.

There are fourteen shots in a can of brawndo for the record.

***

"Womanizer womanizer womanizer oh!" screams the laptop.

"Is that...coming from the bathroom?" Pacem asks.

"Its Roo," Numbers answers, as if this explains everything.

In some senses it does. At the very least the echos off the tile explain why the whole house seems to be a speaker by this point.

Numbers sits down on an adjacent couch with a paper towel and two strawberry pop tarts. He nods in my direction and holds one up, "Breakfast of champions."

"Oh man," Roo says, coming out of the shower, "You know what Sunday is going to be?"

We all turn to look at him. We all know the answer but still somewhat don't believe it.

"Omlettes and porn!"

While I'm not exactly one to turn down free food, I'm also not eager to sit around with my six male housemates and watch porn together.

"Don't worry," he Roo says comfortingly, "I make great omelettes."

Scavengers

White two-person couch for sale. It has seen considerable wear but is still perfectly acceptable by college apartment standards...

I look over the listing for probably the fifth or sixth time. Its a sick part of me that really needs to to prove that I'm a different sort of moron from the other morons on craigslist. I'm the sort who can spell all the words describing precisely what item of trash I am overcharging you for.

I hit send and copy the ad to facebook. One down. All thats left now is the dresser, bookshelves, table, pots, pans, blender, cooking knives, desk, bed...

An IM window pops up, and the same conversation plays out again,

Friend: you're selling all your stuff?
Pika: Yeah, I'll lose less money if I just sell it all than if I pay first to store it then to ship it
Friend: Where are you going?
Pika: back to my old job for 3 months
Friend: and after that?
Pika: not sure

Its an odd feeling to walk around your home, take stock of your possessions, and try to determine which are worth carrying with you onto a plane, and what the rest is worth.

"Its just, when you buy furniture you tell yourself 'That's it. That's the last sofa I'm gonna need, whatever else happens, I've got that sofa problem handled.'"

I'm pretty ashamed to be nervous, and I'm pretty ashamed to have any sort of attachment these material possessions in that I am a little sad to see them go.

Its the next day now. Three men are standing around the white ratty old couch, considering it. I find their presence bizarre. I did not expect this to actually work.

"That's a pretty nice dresser," a different voice says at a different time today. This one belongs to a young woman standing in my home in denim shorts and flip flops with a friend. She's making light condescending conversation between noisy chomps on her bubble gum. I can tell she doesn't care much, she has already evaluated the beaten up T-shirt and shorts I'm wearing as PJs, my lack of makeup, and the fact that my room is strewn with computer guts, and decided I'm not really very worthwhile as a person.

They had already loudly informed me they attended the local liberal arts school. A lot of kids here do that, as if this will excuse them if they say something stupid later.

"So you went up the hill?" she asks, pointing at the wall of the room nearest to my former university.

"Yeah"

"What did you study?"

I stand there a split second with a momentary brain jam. What sounds light, and makes easy conversation?

"Computer Science. What do you guys study?"

"Oh," the girls giggle and look at each other, then inform me again that they attend the local liberal arts school. I wasn't previously aware that precluded having a major. There is a pause before the girl with the gum pointed to my dresser.

"Where did you get it?"

I consider for a moment trying to explain snapping my cell phone shut in the warm sunlight as I sat on top of this dresser on some city side road. The free sign formerly attached to the dresser was in my hands and my feet bare swung over the edge in the summer breeze, making little thunk thunk noises as they bounced against the wood which made up the back. I put my cell phone back in my pocket and just lay there on top of the dresser on the sidewalk enjoying the sunshine until my friends came to help me move it. I wonder if the sight of a grown woman doing that amused passers by.

I had originally planned to strip the ugly white paint off it and re-stain the exterior. The inside of the shelves showed the piece was made of nice quality wood that somebody had covered over in a bad paint job. However, the paint job was botched enough that removing it would make it look funny and I resigned to sell it for something less than the original target of $150 because of that.

Where did you get it?

The girl's bubblegum clicks loudly and I snap back to reality.

"Around," I shrugged. It doesn't matter that my answer doesn't make sense because the girl did not honestly care what I had to say. This is the art of small talk. You should hear some of the absurd things I say when people's minds go on autopilot and try to have these idle meaningless chats with me. God knows they never do. The girl just hands me my money and walks off with her new furniture.

I look at the 20's in my wallet and I wonder how far this money will go toward re-buying new replacement belongings when the time comes for me to have them again. I realize I have no grasp for what my belongings are actually worth. I know what replacement ones cost new in a store, I know what competitors would sell the items I sold for, and I have a pretty good estimation of what people will pay for them, but I have no real grasp to their actual value. This is because I took them from a curb where they had no value. My discussions with buyers have given the items a potential value. Sometimes the illusion is strong enough for money to change hands. If, instead of having a discussion, I was to put them back on the street they would have no value again.

I took one microeconomics course in college. I should have taken more. I remember being taught that items are worth precisely whatever people will pay for them but it had never previously struck me quite on this level.

I wander around my home. When was the last time I bought something? I got a laptop for 200 dollars in December. I paid money to get a desk, a table and some cooking supplies the April prior to that.

For the past few years I have lived a very simple life in the anxious anticipation of a real job which would afford me new clothes (which are the one thing I have not mastered salvaging) and the privilege of turning the thermostat as high as I dared in the winter. I cook most of my food from scratch on a rotating meal plan with some friends. The time spent making meals on your night from scratch is offset by not having to cook more than 1/3rd of the time. We make most things ourselves when we need them: shelves, desks, whatever.

I live a very comfortable life. My house is full of belongings. All of them are scavenged from the streets or dumpsters. Nobody can tell, as a matter of fact I did not realize I was living almost purely off of other people's trash until today. Sometimes I polish it up and sell it, and sometimes I live using the object for a few years before I sell it.

I realize now that I never realized how good I had it, that I enjoy this lifestyle, and that if I had paid a little more attention to things here and there that I could have easily lived with both of those things which I wished for and lacked.

There's an email in my inbox from a news reporter who met Magpie and me at a swapmeet where Magpie was selling some very high power RF equipment scraps. He pulled them with some friends from an item they bought on craigslist. If they sell a single piece of the item it will cover the cost he bought the whole thing and leave us lots of scrap to, in the worst case play with, and in the best case sell as well. He already has interested buyers for two chunks. The reporter is fascinated.

The fact of the matter is, I live a very good quality of life due to other people's trash, both using it and making a profit off it.

I walk up to the edge of Magpie's room, head full of thoughts, rounding the corner lean against the doorjam. Magpie is happily typing away at his keyboard on a large home-made desk which covers much of that corner of the room. He faces three identical LCD monitors which he does his work on: all of them taken from dumpsters with bad power supplies and repaired. A fourth monitor which was unrepairable hangs from his ceiling facing down as a work lamp. If there is anybody who epitomizes this lifestyle, it would be him. Magpie bought his car off craigslist for a very small sum. We spend long weekends wandering the junk yard pulling out scraps to bring home. You can call us nuts, you can tell us that our time is worth money and we're not actually saving anything, but I am not sure I will believe it anymore. For one thing all of us work on salary. Secondly, I'm pretty sure that if we were not living like this we'd be buying stupid expensive gizmos to play with and clogging our homes with them instead of ripping things from the trash and making them useful.

Its hard to explain how I live. I guess Atom summed it up best when he called us "The Techno-Amish." Instead of getting together for a barn-raising, notes go out over the IRC channel for an event to replace Ginger's brake lines. We carpool up to the swap meets, many people split the costs of projects. This life would be nearly impossible to live this life outside a community such as this.

My mind flickers back to the image of the girl in the flip flops and the bubble gum before she left with her new belongings. Chomp.

"The shelf is light. I'm not big and the third floor apartment..."

"My new apartment is on the 3rd floor too!"

Sometimes I feel like I don't even know how to hold a conversation anymore.

There is a slight pause before she says, "You planned pretty far ahead when you bought this stuff I guess then."

I smile politely.

A week later I'm hauling down the freeway riding shotgun in a 10 foot UHAUL with the California sun on my face.

Tha-bump.

The UHAUL bounces over a pothole and everything in the back shifts. Among other things it contains four couches, a desk, and a dresser.

"Not a bad haul," I say, looking at the driver.

Supplies grins, mindful of the steering wheel in his hands.

My phone lights up with a text from Pacem, "Pika, you're a star. I'm buying you drinks."

In the first day we got that load and a second load which contained a leather couch, two tables, five chairs (three leather), a small end table, and a nice footrest that matched the couch and the chairs. All it cost was the 130 dollars it cost to rent the UHAUL. Saturday we plan to go out again, after all, we do have to furnish four houses for free.

Really though, not a bad haul at all.

Making Captain Planet Proud

I was eating dinner with some of my kids. When I say "my kids" I refer to students who I mentor, not as in legal dependents. Normally the kids I mentor are in either high school or middle school. Its a rare circumstance that I have a single group with both ages in it.

I'm not sure why they are called "my kids." My mentor when I was in high school called us his kids, and my peers now who volunteer their time to other teams do the same. I think its just an idiosyncrasy of the league we all compete in.

Anyway, so I was with my kids. We were at a BBQ with easily 400 people at it which was hosted at my university. They had mostly finished their food and so I brought out the bags of candy I had purchased for them and opened them. One of the girls sat down next to me with her candy

"I don't want to put my soda can in the trash," she said.

"If you're willing to walk a bit I know where you can recycle it."

"They are throwing out a lot of soda cans."

"Yes"

"Do you think if I got another shirt from the car and put it on so nobody knew I was from our team...and maybe was really sneaky...that I could pull all the cans out of the trash and put them in a bag to be recycled?"

"I don't see why you would need to hide the fact that you're doing a good thing."

"I've always wanted to do it but I'm too nervous to do it alone. I'm afraid people will think I'm weird if I do it all alone." She looked contemplative for a moment and then turned to me as her face brightened up. "Will you help me?"

"What?"

I was at this point pretty stuck. I'm not altruistic enough to want to go digging through the trash just to make mother nature smile, but this seemed like it was a pretty big deal to the kid. Acting like her idea was childish seemed somehow emotionally the equivalent of stomping on her face. Besides, how many high schoolers do you know who give a flying fuck about anything that isn't themselves? How could you possibly discourage the one kid who does in front of all of her peers, and in doing so potentially even embarrass her for it?

"Yeah," I said, "sure I'll help you."

Two more kids followed us around and assisted with holding the trash bag and various other things while the first girl and I started pulling cans from the trash. It was absolutely nasty.

The kid seemed absolutely thrilled though, and seeing how happy she was doing this pretty much made up for how nasty it was to go through bins of Styrofoam plates and half-eaten burgers. Thankfully they had only been there about...half an hour tops. I'd also like to take this moment to announce that people who jam their napkins and the rest of their meals into the tops of their sodas are dickwads. I was kinda amazed though how much food was in that trash can. It seemed a crying shame that they had taken that food in the first place and not just left it for somebody else if they did not want to eat it.

We filled the better part of an industrial trash bag with cans. One girl stopped and mentioned she had been considering doing the same thing, and by the time we were wrapping up a reasonable number of high schoolers had showed up from various teams and begun asking if they could help us too. The student who originated the idea was pretty much beaming.

"Hah," one of the mentors laughed, "this your new team fund-raiser plan?" The girl waved the bag proudly about for a moment and the mentor laughed. "We can be team 'can do', one can at a time." I rolled my eyes because I loath puns but not an hour later I found somebody had written the new slogan on the back of our team's robot in black sharpie. The students were thrilled about it. They toted their trash bag of cans around with glee. If I had thought I could have gotten a picture of it without wrecking their moment I would have.

So today I either taught some kids a valuable life lesson about doing the right thing when you think you know what it is, or possibly simply exposed them and myself to a variety of communicable diseases. Perhaps both. Whatever, I'd do it again. The look on the kid's face was pretty worth it.

Party in the ECE building

Its 3:30 AM.

I wonder if the couches in the first floor IEEE lounge are actually this comfortable in reality or if I have only ever sat down in them when thoroughly exhausted.

There is no reason I suppose they should not be this comfortable, they certainly are of excellent quality. The pair are matching black leather and comfortably seat three people each. There are not even food stains, scuff marks, or rips in the fabric. How did we get such nice quality couches in a student lounge? We are so spoiled.

Someday if I am rich I would love to have couches half as comfortable as these.

"Its like a bread product scanner," a voice pipes up.

I turn and laugh as Ginger stares at the lightly unorthodox toaster he found in the lounge and plugged in. It has a pair of heating elements at the top. As the toaster works the slice of bread product designated to be toasted moves slowly past the heating elements into a transparent plastic chamber and out again. At first I want to belittle him for being so easily amused but only realize that I too seem to be transfixed by this simple kitchen appliance.

Ginger and I sit down with our now-toasted bagels and spread apricot honey cream cheese on them. We sit them and eat in pretty much silence.

That is one of the things I sincerely enjoy about Ginger. He doesn't feel like he has to be talking to be enjoying something. I think the fine art of shutting the hell up and simply taking things in has mostly been lost in this day and age. Instead we have to make small talk about everything. I have to wonder how much of moments you miss if you are too busy explaining to everybody that they are happening.

We were joined shortly later by a friend Purple's and my lab partner from another class. We were joined shortly later by Purple herself who had a bagel and then invited us into the Women in Electrical and Computer Engineering lounge (which is open to all, just controlled by that particular club.) This offered us the opportunity for caffeinated tea and candy. The couches are not as comfortable but it has a poster on the door with a picture of Captain Picard holding a mug of tea always makes me smile.

Tea, Early Grey, Hot

After that we back to work for another few hours.

It was 6AM. I needed to stretch my legs again.

Wandering upstairs I chatted briefly with the Vex Victim and my friend Playlist. After that I wandered downstairs. The women's lounge was open in it, and Purple and her friend were still there working.

"Hey," Purple said, "you having issues logging into the CS department network from here?"

"Haven't been trying."

"I can't get in."

I was going to go toast myself another bagel but the lights were off in the IEEE lounge and two other friends of mine were passed out cold on the couches. Instead I told my lab partner I was going home for a quick nap.

I appreciate that I can wander a random building at 6AM in the morning and still find many people to talk to, that we can share food and swap stories. They say misery loves company, but truth be told I'm not really miserable working like this: mostly just tired. The work we are assigned is quite enjoyable, its just a lot of work to do. That's how we wind up here I guess. A sad part of me knows I will miss this sort of thing when I graduate.

Perhaps if I do not find a real job instead of opening a place which delivers cookies and milk I'll make a homework cafe. It would be open from maybe 5PM until 8AM and serve dinner, breakfast, and snacks. It would have lab benches on the side so people could do lab work, and internet so people could shell into whatever machines they needed. As a matter of fact it would be designed to be just like working in a lab, except that you can eat there.

Surprise! You've Got a New Housemate!

"Oh, and Gilby moving in tomorrow," Hannalore added yesterday afternoon as she walked past my room.

"Uh...who is Gilby?"

"He's replacing you on the lease."

"I'm paid up until June..."

"Oh, well he is going to live in our living room during May, then he is going to live in your room."

"Uh...were you going to tell me?"

Hannalore looked at me fairly quizzically, "I just did."

You may think Hannalore is the resounding jackass of the century but the reality is she is not. She has a fascinating cocktail of neurological issues, a few of which overlap with my brother's, but she is not nearly as severe. This helps me understand her a little and sometimes translate her issues to the other housemates.

The bottom line is she lives in a totally different world than the rest of us. There are many things about her we will simply never be able to sympathize with: for example, she can not stand physical contact with other human beings in any form. It bothers her deeply. She is one of the most absurdly picky eaters I have ever met. I can probably count all of the food items she will eat on my fingers. These things are just how she was wired when she was born.

Just like we find her bizarre and alien, she finds us bizarre. Everything she does makes perfect sense to her. If you ask her she can even explain it to you in ways that make sense if you can accept her base premises. In her world we are the irrational and bizarre ones. I suppose if you didn't have a sex drive sex would sound pretty bizarre to you too wouldn't it?

The name I use for her here, Hannalore, comes from the Questionable Content character. Its a humorous (and hopefully not considered mean) reference to the fact that another part of her "abnormal wiring" is the fact that she is clincally OCD.

Our common method of communication is logic. Basically we both assert the premises by which we live our lives and then explain the logic which makes us feel the way we feel about things. In this way we can resolve disagreements.

This has its ups and downs. One of the major benefits of this is as long as I can explain to her just why something she didn't like happened, and why it won't happen again, she's pretty much ok with it no matter what it is. For example, the first time she met Magpie, our other current housemate, he had accidentally woken her up by drunkenly stumbling into her room (thinking it was the bathroom) and accidentally ripping the doorknob off the door. I'm a pretty tolerant person but Magpie is a pretty big guy and looks rather intimidating until you learn he wouldn't hurt a fly. But if I didn't know him and he had wandered into my room very drunk? I would have punched him and then run. Hannalore was pretty ok with this situation under the condition that I promised to show everybody where the bathroom was previous to bringing out the alcohol at parties.

The downside of her being like this is from time to time she does things which upset me greatly without having the faintest idea of why I am upset.

When she had found Gilby off some department mailing list and announced he would be replacing me when I left...I thought little of it. After all, I would never live with him right? If my current housemates wanted to live with some total stranger from the internet, they were adults, that was their choice, and I wasn't going to question it. Now, however, Gilby was my problem too. A quick call to Magpie (who was on a camping trip/picking up more crap to put in his room trip I had to skip due to finals) confirmed that he was also not expecting Gilby.

"He can't live here," I said, coming back out of my room and finding Hannalore.

"Why not?"

"He hasn't signed papers. The landlords wil be angry."

"Can he put his things here?"

"No"

"Why?"

"Where would he put them?"

Hannalore paused a moment. "I hadn't thought of that."

Bright and early the next morning the doorbell rang and I rolled over and rolled my eyes. Of course. I had explained my issue to Hannalore as "the landlords won't like it" and "we don't have space." She had, like always, taken me completely literally and probably resolved both those issues herself. She was not going to be able to read the meaning behind my words of "I don't want him here."

Wandering down the stairs I pulled the door open and found a tall dark-haired young man holding a printer in a box.

"So, you're moving in now?"
"Yeah."

"Uh..." I stammered, feeling like all of this was getting a bit out of hand and also struggling to remember what the kid's name was, "How is that going to work?"

Hannalore was standing over my shoulder, "I took care of everything. He's going to store his belongings in my room, I cleared a space. He's also going to live in my room during May as soon as finals are done. I'll be leaving as soon as finals are done so I won't need the space. When June comes and you leave he can move into your room.

"...and...you're going to pay?" I asked. Both of them nodded.

A part of me just wanted to scream and stamp "No," but I am quite short on cash right now due to being both a college student and employment impaired. Additionally, if I upset him too badly I would be screwing my current housemates out of a lot of money next year while they paid for my empty room. Besides, he didn't seem too overly creepy.

We cleared him a space in a storage area and he put his printer in it. We also gave him some keys.

"Do you guys drink?" he asked.

"Yeah, sometimes."

"Do you have a bucket?"

"What?"

"In my dorm, we had a bucket. His name was Mr. Bucket."

There didn't seem to be anything good to say in response to that.

Gilby wandered our house for a little while after that, belittled the sanitation of our kitchen, and left. We saw him again at about 6PM. He said he would be back at about 7 with a friend or two who was helping him move in. At about 8:15 he and the better chunk of a freshman floor arrived and situated themselves in my living room. They commented on how small my home was, and how ideal the back porch was for smoking weed. They then left with the living room mostly unnavigatible due to his stuff.

Gilby returned shortly later and sat himself down on the couch. I asked him to please put his stuff in the storage space he gave him so we could walk around the living room. He made fun of how I keep my room. I gave him wifi access. He complained about the bathroom being dirty. He then started eying the alcohol in the refrigerator.

"Can I have some?"

Normally I answer "yes" automatically but he seemed a little too excited about it and his perpetual whining was beginning to eat at me. "Um, if you pay me back for it."

Gilby wandered the house for a moment and retrieved a shotglass with the school insignia on it. "How much of it can I have of the Smirnoff for five dollars?"

"Um...well...a whole bottle is about 20...so you can have a quarter of it."

"Great" he said, emptying the five dollars from his wallet in my hands. He then removed the vodka from the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table to pour himself a shot. I watched silently.

"Man, this stuff is QUALITY, you can see how much better is is than Gilby's just in the glass."

I remained quiet, trying to be expressionless.

"Gilby's," he announced, "Is like State vodka, but its cheaper. You don't want to try it I think."

I nodded and then returned to my room to study for finals. At least he had a nickname now. About 10 minutes later he wandered into my room still holding the bottle of Smirnoff. "Have I had my quarter?" he asked.

"Uh," I said trying to be perfectly fair, "you probably have one shot left."

"Awesome!" he grinned.