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.

Better People

The "Help Wanted" sign did not stand out among the peaches. At first I mistook it for one of the price signs. I stand staring at it for a long while, thinking to myself that farmer's markets were nice places.

Exupery waits tables on Sundays in a little Chinese cafe because she's in the same position I am. She is always amused and a little pained when asked if she is working her way through college only to explain that she has already graduated with her degree in Aeronautical Engineering from Stanford, thank you very much. I know other coworkers have been considering things like this.

Curiosity finally catches me and I asked one of the girls working behind the stand about the little red sign.

"Paul!" she shouts, not bothering to turn her head, "We have one for the help wanted!"

Paul looks to be in his early fourties, or at least old enough to thoroughly misjudge my age. He smiles at me like I was a child and my brain immediately clicks into the conclusion that he had one. It was probably one of the other girls working the fruit stand. I smile, this act was never too difficult. Paul fits the description perfectly of somebody who I could manipulate pretty easily.

Paul looks at me like I am a child with a big grin on his face, "Can you be outgoing? Aggressive... but friendly?"

"Yes." I say. It isn't until after I said it that I realize I was probably suppose to say something more to prove I was a good salesman.

"This is a hard job," he returns, "some people really aren't cut out for it you know."

I'm not entirely sure what to say. I want to tell him I'm a professional, that I graduated fairly well decorated, and that this job will supplement a fairly respectable job in a federal agency, but he didn't ask that. If I told him these things I would sound pompous, and I know the only reason I want to tell him is because I'm a little ashamed to be in this position. A very ignorant and selfish part of my mind tells me that I did everything right, and that I somehow deserve something better than this, that work like this is for somebody else.

"You think you can do it?"

"Yes sir."

He hands me a bucket of grapes and a pair of plastic salad tongs, "I'll give you five minutes and see how you do." He nods to one of the girls at the stand, "She will teach you. She is one of our best."

I look at the grinning 20 year old. If she even goes to college I bet she majors in some unemployable bullshit like women's studies. I'm taken aback a moment by the ignorance and irony of my own mental statement.

"Alright," she says to me very sweetly, "All you have to do is smile at the people and give them free samples. Just say nice things and keep their attention, like 'fresh seedless grapes, super sweet!' and 'once you try you have to buy!' and whatever else you can think of."

This is so cheesy.

She assists me in handing out a few of the grapes and then goes her own bucket of Pluots to hand out. I stand there, salad tongs in hand, still wearing the backpack I brought to the market, asking each passersby if he or she would like a grape.

There is a small bubble of people around my teacher, all enjoying the Pluots and talking to her. Pluots (apricot plum hybrids) are larger than grapes and take longer to eat, but there is still a skill in getting people to stand and talk as they finish their food. I should be able to do this at least as well as she can, my mind tells me. The girl looks wholly unruffled and uncompetitive. It suddenly occurs to me that she might have begun handing out fruit as well not to provide a benchmark for Paul to grade me against, but to provide camaraderie in a new situation which Paul thinks might be frightening for me. It occurs to me that by most measures of being human she is probably a better person than I am. I viewed her as a competitor, somebody to be beaten and she viewed me as somebody to be kind to, to be taught.

The next ring of people clears and she smiles at me to offer some cheerful help, "Always keep talking." I smile back at her and tried a little louder, "Fresh seedless grapes!"

People don't go to the farmer's market to be in a hurry. They don't drag crying children or complain about the service, instead they smile at me and thank me for the grapes. I was standing in the sunlight on a beautiful day doing easy work which leaves me plenty of time for my own thoughts. I will not have to wear a suit, there are no meetings, no deadlines, and no overtime. The pay will be abysmal and I know it, but it isn't like I'm quitting my real job. Really, this is not so bad at all.

"And one for you!" I say, holding the tongs above a small child in a stroller. "Open your hands!" He did and I drop the grape into them. While he pops it into his mouth I hand one to his mother.

"Mmm!" he says, waving his hands in the air with delight. His mother, evidently pleased with her son's interest in fresh fruit, reverses the direction of the stroller in favor of the cash register.

This is a pretty good life.

I hand out every grape and bring the empty bucket back to Paul. He smiles at me. "Did you like it?" I nod. He hands me a slip of paper. "Write down your name, a phone number, and that you handed out Pluots."

"I handed out grapes."

"Write Pluots anyway so I remember."

I do as he asked. I find it amusing that he didn't ask for my card. I realize how set in my ways I am, at only 22, seeing only one way to behave, one way to be taken seriously. When I was first introduced to the business world I abhorred it. I claim I still do and tell myself that I would never buy into it, never be a part of it, but here I am as prejudiced as any of them. I am so glad I did not go into defense work. We believe we are strong enough to resist our environment, but in reality we are weak and impressionable things. I never wanted to be that asshole who hides behind her degrees and honors as an excuse to be a miserable and condescending person, but I can see now that that is who I am becoming.

I waved goodbye to Paul and thanked him for the hefty bag of fruit he has given me. No other employer has ever paid me in any form for my interview time. I have one interviewer who has been interviewing me since April and 13 interviews later can not even be bothered to tell me when a final decision will be made. I went to an interview once where they sat 12 of us in a room and announced they would only be hiring one of us in an attempt to pit us against one another. The oddest part was Py was one of the 12. Paul handed me easily 10 dollars of fruit for under half an hour's work, which is more than what he normally pays I am sure.

As I walked down the row my teacher extends an arm with her own salad tong and a juicy Pluot on the end.

"Fresh Pluot?" she asks with a smile.

"Don't mind if I do," I laugh, taking the fruit from her. I realize I feel terrible for not knowing her name.

I won't tell them about my other job unless they ask. I decided, walking away. I will stay and learn from these people. The work is good, and I could stand to be like them. They are better people than I.

My Brother's Keeper

The basement was where my mom did laundry. We could always hear her voice at the top of the stairs but normally she tried to shut the door so my brother wouldn't fall down the stairs.

I found my brother crawling on the edge of the stairway and my mother's voice and grabbed him by his overalls to drag him away. He looked bewildered to be sliding backwards, little baby knees sliding fruitlessly back and forth trying to crawl the other way. Issac looked up at me bewildered, but I didn't let go of the red little overalls.

"I saved him," I exclaimed to my mother when she returned up the stairs.

"Oh?"

"He was going to fall down the stairs and I saved him!"

It hadn't been that near a miss in reality but my mother was immensely pleased with me and wanted to encourage this behavior. She picked me up and hugged me, and presented me with a copy of "Babar and Father Christmas" as a reward. I would still pick up the tattered VHS box years later with pride and remember how I had nobly saved my brother.

"Issac will need a lot of protection and teaching," my mother said, "you will always have to be a good big sister and look out for him...keep him out of trouble."

I beamed. I felt important.

***

"Hugga hugga hugga squeeeeeeeeeeeze," my mother would say, holding my brother in her arms. On each hug she would give him a strong hug and on the word squeeze she would hold him as long as the word lasted and kiss him on the head. My brother found this comforting when the world became overwhelming, which was often. This was the age where firetruck sirens were terrifying and we couldn't play music on our speakers because it was all overwhelming.

Keeping my brother out of trouble had been a great game when I was five and he was two, but as I neared seven I began to understand that my friends did not need to do nearly as much protecting of their younger siblings as I did, and I grew tired of the game of being important because I looked out for him. It became a chore. He worshipped me, and he wanted to follow me everywhere. As time progressed I just wanted to get away from him.

***

Sunday school was difficult: not in an academic sense, but in a behavioral one. I had to wear a dress for one thing, and patent leather shoes which always seemed to come home with scuffs on them, much to my amazement and my mother's distain. I never cared much for my teachers, and I felt like they always taught the same things over and over, but at 8 I was really too young to have much in the way of religious opinions or disbelief in what figures of authority told me was true. Hell, I'm not sure if I had even sorted out Santa Claus yet.

And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth...

Genesis 4:9-11

"That's wrong!" I said. I didn't understand at the time that God was upset with Cain for killing his brother, I thought he was mad about Cain not looking out for his little brother. Its amazing how sanitized the world presented to me at that age was.

"What's wrong?" the Sunday school teacher asked.

"Abel wasn't Cain's problem! What if Cain had other stuff to do? Why did he have to be Abel's keeper?"

The Sunday school teacher shook her head, "we are all our brother's keepers, Pika."

I was cranky the whole way home. When I got home I threw my patent leather shoes in my closet and my littly frilly dress on the floor to put my normal clothes back on. Then I pulled my stuffed animals off the shelves and sulked. God seemed pretty demanding and pretty eager to take the fun out of most things.

My brother's head cracked in the doorway and a big pair of blue eyes looked at me.

"NO!" I shouted, "You can't come in here. This is mine. I'm playing by myself."

My brother looked baffled. I sat there for a moment. I knew this wasn't how I was suppose to behave.

"Alright...you can play with one." I presented him Blue Bunny. He grabbed one ear and a foot and started pulling. I could almost hear the little stitches pop.

"No!" I shouted, "stop that! Blue bunny doesn't like that!" I tugged at the animal in his hands and he held on harder. Eventually I extracted it from his hands and stormed back into my room, leaving my bewildered little brother outside the slammed door. There was a few second pause before he started bawling. I could hear my mother's voice outside the door comforting him, and I felt very bad. Mom said I had to be patient with him until he was older and he could learn better. I felt like I had, but apparently it wasn't enough time.

***

"Pika's little brother is weird," Carolyn said to the group, making a funny face. The bus rattled and clanked off to Girl Scout Camp with all of us bouncing along inside.

"So what?" I asked.

"He acts funny!" she said, "he rocks back and forth and he talks to himself."

"Oh yeah? Well my brother is smart. He can name all the fish in the aquarium. Can your brother do that?"

Carolyn was quiet for a moment.

"That's right," I said, "and your brother is annoying too."

***

"What..." Mime said, looking at my snowpants and big rubber boots.

"My mom made me wear them. She says I can't go sledding without them. I asked not to...I know they aren't cool..."

Mime rolled her eyes a little gesturing to where my little brother was running around a tree shaking snow off the lower branches. He wrung his hands and rocked and muttered to himself in delight. She sighed, "and you brought him?"

"He's ok. I told him he isn't allowed to talk to anybody."

Looking back on it you may fault me as cruel for making this rule for my brother, but sometimes I did not have the patience to explain the complexities of things and did not want to spend all afternoon justifying him to my friends. My brother lived for black and white rules, and this simple one made so much of my life easier.

Mime, her sister Plato, Issac and I all headed for the sledding hill, but when Mime saw that Laura and her cronies were already at the hill she nearly turned back.

"Whatever," I said, "there is room to share."

Things went fairly peacefully for the first hour. Laura and her friends from time to time would say rude things about my brother, but neither of us rose to the bait. After growing board of this she switched tactics.

"Nice snowpants, Pika," she grinned. None of them were wearing big bulky snowpants.

"Yeah, my mom made me wear them."

"Hah, you always do whatever your parents say?"

"Invariably," my brother nodded, "Pika always honors our father and mother. She is the best."

There we go. In one line my brother had demonstrated his habit of reading the dictionary and saying words no eight year old knew, and also quoted the black and white rules of the Bible to win an arguement. It was very noble of him to stick up for me, it just happened to be the last thing we needed.

First she was mocking, then her cronies were mocking, and then my brother was shouting, and then they were pushing him. I ran up and joined the crowd, but couldn't think of anything better to say than "Knock it off!"

Laura was sneering. My brother was theatening that I would beat her up, just like I fought other kids who pushed him around. I was petrified.

Somehow it was agreed that I would fight Laura in a snowball fight. I asked for a moment to build a fort, but I knew it was in vain. Laura would run up, tackle me, and jam snow down my clothing, and then beat the shit out of me. I was weaker than her, smaller than her, and far slower in these God-awful snow pants. The fort was important though because it kept my brother occupied to build it while I tried to figure out a plan.

"I hope you appreciate," Mime said a few hours later when we were wrapped in blankets and drinking hot cocoa, "everything I did to get you out of that."

"You didn't do anything! You sat around with Laura's cronies and you were going to let them pummel me. Plato saved us because she's the only one who threw a fit to stop the fight."

"Plato lay on the ground and cried."

"Yeah! And it worked! And it was a lot more than you did!"

"You are so ungrateful," Mime said.

"Pika, is not! Pika is the best!" my brother shouted.

"Oh will you shut up!" I snapped. "This is how we got into trouble in the first place."

My brother looked upset to hear me shout at him like that for giving me a compliment. He didn't understand.

***

"Is this a bad time?" I'm sitting in a bar with some coworkers in Arizona after another equipment test."

"Uh, no" I said, hastly making my way out with my phone in hand, "What's up?"

"Well I wanted to apologise. We found a lot when we were teenagers, and I... want to make it better. I blamed you for a lot of things which aren't your fault."

"Oh."

"And... I never really thanked you for everything you did for me when we were really little. You tried really hard, and I appreciate that a whole lot, and I never thanked you."

"Forget it," I said.

"What?" he asked, taking me literally, "but it was really..."

"I mean... don't worry about it. Its what a good big sister should do... keep her brother out of trouble. I'm sorry too that I didn't do better sometimes..."

"Its ok Pika," I could hear the innocent smile through the phone line, "You're still the best."