Impossibilities

Ah, so I'm two hours into my current shift and just the right combination of tired and thoughtful that I feel like writing one of these. It's been too long; I'll summarize some of the things that I've glossed over in the past weeks. I'll see what new stones I have to turn over, too, in the process of detailing all this.

First and foremost, I'm still pretty sane. I'll admit that the logistics and timings of this last week have not necessarily been the most conducive to this orientation, but it'll all be over soon enough. The weekend looms just ahead, and now's time for the sprint to the finish. I'm actually surprisingly lucid for how little sleep I've been obtaining in the past week or so.

Leigh hasn't spoken to me in over a month, and by now the spite I felt has faded. Spite born of hypocrisy, mainly, considering the method of her departure - as a key is designed to fit an exact lock, the punishment was clearly designed to fit me specifically. I no longer feel much about the situation, but mainly sit in objective observation. I simply find it curious and a bit amusing that the person who commiserated with me about being abandoned by a friend over a small fight would mirror the exact behavior? I chalk it up to the same syndrome that drives battered children to become more violent with their own offspring.

I bought a pair of toys in the past week, a GPS unit and a new camera. The camera was originally purposed to snap photos of an ill-fated trip to the beach on Friday, but it will serve me well in other endeavors. I'm getting the hang of the GPS, figuring out what it handles well and what it has trouble with. Another daytrip may be in order, if I can convince someone to come with; perhaps to rural Pennsylvania - Centralia's always been a fascination of mine, one of the most famous ghost towns in America, with its ever-burning foundations.

My wanderlust is becoming more and more pronounced with every hour I spend in these windowless rooms at work. I find myself missing the naive plans of the summertime to sojourn halfway across the country to some place not all that remarkable, the only souvenirs long-winded stories of using the last gas fume partway between St. Louis and Kansas City. The promise and potential lie dormant for now. Too far out on that limb.

Checkpoint!

So do you remember that racing game, Cruisin' USA? The one in all the arcades that they released for Nintendo 64? Well, in it, when you passed a certain threshold and you got more time to finish the race, a female voice would yell 'CHECKPOINT!' for no real reason except to inform you that you've been allotted more time to finish out the race. Well, ladies and gentlemen, if life were like Cruisin' USA, that voice would be ringing out in my head in the coming few days.

Six months of living on my own, six months of supporting myself, six months of holding down a steady, great job. I'm pretty proud of myself, I have to say. I'm not dead yet, which is definitely a good sign.

I Blame Patriarchy

So I've been delving into a lot of reading on the subject of gender, feminism, and patriarchy. A lot of very interesting things come up when you really think about this stuff.

Masculine conditioning in our society obviously points males to maintain certain norms. The stereotype of the male condition is, of course, the unfeeling and stalwart being who deals with things on a completely detached and distance level. The effect has been compared to that of Effexor, an SNRI which essentially begins to block out feelings to the point of a person resembling a zombie.

Men are socialized, in a general sense, to be everything that is specifically not feminine. Concepts like empathy, sharing feelings, and addressing emotional concerns have been virtually eradicated between two heterosexual men. Most guys I know would grow really freaked out and uncomfortable if a male friend approached them and began talking about how hard it's been dealing with being dumped, or how concerned they are that the other is angry. Guys are simply "supposed" to be equipped to deal with these feelings alone rather than showing weakness by going to others.

And what do guy friends do when something devastating happens in their life, say a parent or significant other dying? They go drinking. Not only is drinking a social lubricant, but it provides a way for men to actually connect with one another, providing a sort of plausible deniability in their feelings. This is pretty sad, really. The constant drive for competition in the normative male makes showing vulnerability a horrible thing. I've seen this first hand with a lot of my friends; there are some of them that I could never even imagine opening up to, describing how I feel about certain things, etc. It's kind of sad, really. There are some, though, that are a lot more receptive to it, but it's tough to get them to open up themselves. Maybe it's some kind of fear of exploitation?

I've never had a whole lot of female friends that actually open themselves up. Most of the ones I knew in high school, with a few exceptions, fell into two categories: those popular and high-up ones that always carried a peppy sense of "happiness" without ever seeming to show any sort of chink in their armor, and the ones that seemed to expect that I was the normative male, causing feelings to be pushed off the table. There were then the shining few who would open themselves up, to an extent, but it seemed some things still remained buried. It then became difficult to adjust to actually having someone available to speak about what's driving me to do things. In never really having opportunity to open up before, it's tough to move to doing just that.

Honestly, this may be why I'm so intent on making friends who lie on the opposite side of the gender spectrum. I suppose that such societal norms make it a lot more comfortable to open up to women. The strange thing is, though, the person who I spent a lot of time with in the first few months of living out here was a girl, but for all intents and purposes may as well have been a guy. Everything was shut in, guarded. It just felt horribly awkward whenever I tried to ask her how she felt about essentially anything. Maybe that's merely because it's strange to see a male share his feelings, no matter who's doing the listening?

More thoughts on this later, probably. Gender studies is fascinating.

On the Nature of Life

I've been thinking; there's a shocker. I've been thinking about the people who read this, and if I don't know them, what drives them. Even if I do know them, I'd love to know more. I think in these days, people have so little time to be introspective. They're not forced to sit in the dark at night rather than watch television and browse the internet. I'm a creature of consumption, and I'm consuming media constantly.

But what about you? I have some questions, and if you'd be kind enough to answer them, I'd be delighted. Anonymous or not, go ahead.

What's the biggest risk you've taken thus far in your life? Mine happened very, very recently. I packed up and moved to a place I did not know. A place that did not know me. I began full time employment when I had never been employed full time for more than a three month period. I left something I had never been without for so long; school, family, friends. I knocked down the majority of the castle, and am picking it up again piece by piece. I couldn't be happier with myself, with my adventure.

What do you consider to be your biggest failure? That is, a decision you made that led to a dead end. And, most importantly, how was it good for you? I've had a few. In the past few months I've let people know how I feel rather bluntly. I had a spectacular failure; what was an attempt to take a big step forward took me back to the starting line. I had a wonderful success; that success still remains with me today, and I'm thankful for it. Did I make the wrong choice in either case? I don't think so. I made a choice; every binary choice is half chance. What did it help me with? That's a little harder to pin down, but the events of the past few months have taught me a truth that you never realize as a kid. When you're young, you think that it only goes up from here, that you will be older with more money, more things, more excitement. But there's got to be a climax, a point where you hit your stride, and have attained all you need to be happy. In other words, you can't always get what you want.

How has choice and risk shaped who you are today? I used to be very conservative with choices. I was a kid who would have a crush and never really act on it for fear of taking such a risk. Recently, after rekindling old friendships and creating new ones, I've grown accustomed to taking a diving leap. Of course, it's good to look before such a leap, but you still can't always predict the outcome. I've recently realized that I have to separate things into what I can live without and what I can't. I have to be very picky about what drops into that second bucket; before I would have played it safe and dumped all my thoughts, dreams, and feelings into that category. Now I feel more discerning.

I hope to hear from you soon, readers, however few or many of you are out there. Thanks for reading this.

"Taking a risk, doing things where you actually have a chance to fail... that's what being young is."

- Ira Glass

Conservation of Angular Momentum is Great OR I Miss Physics Class

In other words, I've been listening to music spinning in my chair. Wheee.

I've done some super specific tests (watching a clock and counting rotations) to figure out my angular velocity ω. With my arms held inward, I make five rotations in seven seconds, resulting in an average angular velocity ω1 of 4.488 rad/second. With arms outstretched, I make five rotations in twelve seconds, resulting in an average angular velocity ω2 of approximately 0.417 rotations/second, or 2.618 rad/second.

Now, in both situations, my momentum should be approximately the same - L = Iω, where I is my moment of inertia and L is my angular momentum. To figure out my moment of inertia in the first case, I have to cheat a little and assume I'm a uniformly distributed cylinder. I'll assume the chair I'm using weighs about forty pounds, since it's a computer chair with plenty of steel on it, and seems to weigh about 3-4 times what my ten pound weight weighs. Added with me, that's about 92 kilograms. The me plus chair system has a varying radius, but I'll assume it averages at about fourteen inches, or 0.3556 meters. Thus, the moment of inertia is:

I1 = (mr^2)/2 = (92 kg)(0.3556 m)^2 / 2 = 5.816 kg-m^2

My angular momentum in the first case is therefore:

L = (5.816 kg-m^2)(4.488 rad/s) = 26.106 kg-m^2/s

And I can find out my moment of inertia in the second case by using the same equation:

26.106 kg-m^2/s = I2*(2.618 rad/s)
I2 = (26.106 kg-m^2/s)/(2.618 rad/s)
I2 = 9.97 kg-m^2

The only thing different between the two situations in a practical sense is the radius of my arms; we can find how much I "spread out" my weight with:

9.97 kg-m^2 = (92 kg)(r^2)/2
r^2 = 0.216 m^2
r = 0.466 m

Essentially, it's like my weight was "spread out" by a factor of 1.31 in the second scenario. This seems pretty realistic. Though my arms are a small part of my weight, my "wingspan" is fairly significant and the weight of my outstretched arms can add a lot to the moment of inertia. Think of it like a see-saw, where the further you are from the middle, the more upward force you exert on your partner's side.

Error could be introduced by my shoddy timekeeping, pushing with more or less force in either scenario, and the friction and air resistance differences in the two situations. When my arms are outstretched, air resistance can play a big part. Friction will also obviously have more effect on the second scenario, since I'm spinning for longer. Also I'm not a cylinder. Oh well though, it was just for fun. Need to do some good math here and there, even if it's just a little algebra.

Condolences

Been a hectic day thus far, but things have finally cooled down enough to allow me to post on here, even very briefly. I was running around trying to do things I've never done before, which is always fun, especially when I screw everything up and have to undo and redo everything! Woo!

Anyway, some sad news from this morning. Brian, my partner in crime/mentor caught wind this morning that his father passed away sometime last night. Thus, this week may be a lot more busy than I've been anticipating. Never fear, though, since Kevin will be around and will cover the stuff I won't be here for, namely the 4am stuff that there's no way I can make it in for after working until midnight the night previous.

Hopefully Brian and his family are doing alright after the sad news. At the very least I hope the funeral offers him a bit of closure.

EDIT: Lame. Somebody ate half of the Chex Mix stuff I brought in for a snack today. =(