imdaviddave.com

Ever since January I’ve been training for the Pittsburgh marathon, and raising funds at the same time.

I decided that if I was going to run another marathon, I was going to do a fund raiser while I was at it.  I chose the World Federation of the Deaf.  When it comes to why I care about the deaf, it’s a long and complicated story that you can read all about on the website I set up to raise funds.

It was all a very interesting experience, and maybe I shouldn’t say this, but raising a thousand dollars was surprisingly easy.

The first thing I did was set up the website, and write a good explanation for why I was doing all this.  Then I sent messages to all my Facebook friends, and I sent out emails to all my contacts.  Within a few days I had a couple hundred dollars.

Then a few weeks went by and the donations started slowing down.  Then I had to start telling people about it and convincing them to donate, that got me a few more donations.

The most important thing I did, was get up and talk about it in front of my church.  I got a microphone and stood up there and gave a whole spiel about it, I even made the audience laugh a couple of times.  I seriously surprised myself with how much I’ve improved when it comes to public speaking.  I remember shaking in front of my speech class in high school, and there was only ten people in it.  I went through ten speeches like that, and then I did exactly the same thing again in college, only this time there were twenty people in my class.  I guess it payed off, since I spoke in front of I guess around 100 people and I was perfectly comfortable to do it.

That got me over $500, and put me over my $1000 goal.  If I’d known it was going to be that easy, I’d have set a higher goal.

Training on the other hand, was quite difficult.

I have a pretty poor track record when it comes to training for marathons.  The first time I did it, I took three weeks off right in the middle of my training period just because I went off to college and I couldn’t get myself up in the morning.  I eventually started going out in the middle of the night, since it was the only time I could get myself to do it, but even then I never went more than like 12 or 13 miles.

And then I got the dates wrong.  I thought the marathon was the week after thanksgiving, but it was the week before.  So I had one entire week less than I thought to train.

The second marathon I did, I only had one month to train, and the farthest I went might have been 8 miles.  I finished both, but I don’t brag about my times.

This time, I did a lot better, but still not great.  I ran every time I was supposed to, but not as fast as I wanted to, and not always as far.  and the few runs that I skipped were the most important ones, the long runs.

And I had another problem that I brought on myself.  I changed running shoes.  Not just running shoes, running techniques.

It all started when I read Born To Run by Christopher McDougall.  In it, the auther explains why humans are not meant to run with padding under our feet.  All the corrective shoes are actually causing running injuries, not preventing them.

Now that I think of it, it seems kind of obvious, and I feel stoopid for thinking anything else.  Of course our feet are not meant to have thick rubber padding under them.  Am I meant to believe that my body is only efficient when I cough up enough money to buy corrective footwear? of course not!

Now that I know everything I do about arches and the way our feet are designed, “arch supports” make me sick.  Our arches don’t need support, they’re meant to be unsupported.  When they flatten like they do when you run barefoot (I think its called “prorating” or something), they’re acting like springs that help us run.

I can’t explain it all here, read Born to Run if you’re interested, it was a really good book.  But needless to say, I just couldn’t keep running in padded running shoes after I read it.  I got myself some Fila Skeletoes (cheaper version of the Vibram FiveFingers, which most serious barefoot runners use.  Are they just as good? how should I know.  I can’t afford the FiveFingers.), and I changed my gait so I was running like someone who runs barefoot should run.

And it hurt.  A lot.  Which is to be expected, because I now have to support myself with the muscles in my calves that I previously used for… nothing? not running in any case.  so for the first few runs it was incredibly painful.  Not just when running either.  My calves hurt all day and night; I couldn’t even walk right, I was limping at work.

I decided that even though I know it’s bad in the long run, I had a marathon coming up, and I should just stick to what I know.  Plenty of runners still use padded footwear, it can’t be that bad.  So for the next couple of weeks I went back to my padded Nikes.

But I kept walking past my Skeletoes every day and the temptation was too great.  I put them on and started running in them again.  This time my calves didn’t hurt nearly as bad, and I could run a tiny little bit faster.

I hadn’t quite perfected the new technique yet when I decided to go running in the Nikes again.  I couldn’t do it.  I’m in the middle, I’m not great at the new way and I’m not good at the old way anymore, and I have a marathon on Sunday!

Naturally I’m nervous, but I know I’ll finish, and I’m going to do it in the barefoot shoes, so at the very least, I’ll be using my legs and feet the way they’re mean to be used.

For the past several months, I’ve been fascinated by a single celled organisms called the coccolithophore.

Coccolithophores are photosynthetic phytoplankton that live in the ocean.

They’re at war.  The unfortunate organisms are fighting against a virus that tries to pry them open, get inside them, and eventually cause their death.  And the coccolithophores are losing.  Indeed, trillions of them die every day; the tiny white plates that cover them float around for a while, creating white clouds on the surface of the ocean which are visible from space, until they either fall to the bottom like microscopic snow, or end up on some shore somewhere.

It’s the carnage of this war – the skeletal remains of the coccolithophores – that makes up the White Cliffs of Dover. As Great Britain was threated with invasion from unfriendly european countries, it was coccolithophore remains that acted as a symbolic guard.

There’s yet another reason to care about the coccolithophores and the war they’re losing.  As each coccolithophore dies, it releases a tiny burst of oxygen.  These tiny bursts of oxygen actually account for about one half of the oxygen we breathe every day.

That’s right, for every two breathes you take, you can thank plant life for one of them, and the coccolithiphores for the other.

I was in Washington DC this past weekend, attending the USA science and engineering festival.  I went there with my parents after one of my friends from work told me about it.  The main attraction was Bill Nye the Science Guy, who was going to be signing autographs for everyone who waited in the line long enough.

We didn’t get there until about 11:30, and Bill was only going to be there until 12:30, so naturally I was nervous.  But after standing in line for about thirty minutes, someone told us we could sign up for the “interplanetary society”- which charged a fee of $20, we’d get a free poster, and we’d get to skip ahead to a shorter line.  $20 is a little much, but I was tired of waiting.

I decided that I was going to bring up the coccolithophores when I got up there.  If nothing else, it would be something different for him to talk about.

When I got up there, the first thing we did was take pictures.  My dad was taking pictures on my ipod, and my mom was taking pictures on her camera.  Which means neither of us are looking at the same camera in the same picture.

But after that, I said to him, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Of Course!” he said in his science guy voice.

I asked him if he knows anything about the coccolithophores, and he said no.  Well, it could have gone either way.  Just because he’s a scientist doesn’t mean he knows about single celled phytoplankton who live in the ocean.

so I told him, “They’re these single celled phytoplankton that live in the ocean,” and I started to go in to how they’re being attacked by viruses and as they die, they’re giving us oxygen, and actually half of our oxygen come from dying coccolithophores.  There I was, having a discussion with the science guy himself, and I was telling him something he didn’t already know!

But then… all the sudden he turned into an expert about it.  ”Well,” he said, “here in DC it’s probably half, in Nebraska it’s more like one third.  I wrote a childrens’ book about it a few years ago.”

What? I thought he didn’t know about them? He must have just been confused.  Now all I have to my credit is that I confused The Science Guy.

That childrens’ book was probably ghost written anyway.

After that we enjoyed the science festival for the rest of the afternoon. We got to see the Mythbusters from very very far away, I spoke to a German woman in German for a few minutes, and we listened to Mayim Bialik (from The Big Bang Theory) give a talk about her weird life.  Then we made the two hour drive back to PA, where, the assumption can be made since it’s so close to the east coast, an entire half of my oxygen does indeed come from the coccolithophores.

This past weekend I went to Philadelphia to visit my old friend from Lock Haven University.  We met there when we were freshman, during band camp.  I played trombone and he played bari-sax, so we were in the low-wind section together,* and naturally we became bus buddies on band trips.

Back when he was studying to become a history teacher and I was a confused communications major, we both soon realized that Lock Haven wasn’t going to satisfy either of us for long.  He went to South Korea to study abroad, and then I went to Germany to study abroad, and now he’s transferred to Drexel in Philadelphia to study international studies and I’ve transferred to IUP to study Anthropology (where I start this fall).

Anyway, I got a weekend off and drove the two and a half hours to visit him.  I’ve been to philadelphia about a gazillion times, because my dad is from there and his family still lives there, and I’ve ran through a big chunk of it too during my two marathons there.**

When I arrived, he was in the middle of doing some kind of presenation for his major; there was a whole lineup of presentations going on that day all having to do with the topic of food around the world.  I missed his presentation, but we had to stay to watch a few more because he was required to.

The first one I saw was given by a girl who was an engineer and was presenting the new device that was developed by a team that she was a part of, which was supposed to aid in the planting of rice in Thailand and Laos.

Normally when planting rice, she explained, a worker would poke a stick into the ground to make a hole, and then the next person would drop a seed into it.  But with this new device- which looked like a long pvc pipe with a some kind of metal contraption on the bottom- would poke a hole in the ground and drop a seed into, all in one motion, which meant one person could do it instead of two, and nobody would have to bend down all day and risk injuring their back.

She discussed the issues they faced, like making sure all the pieces needed to make this device were available in Thailand, translating a manual into a language that those people could understand, or not using any language for people who are illiterate.  She also said, rice planting season is around march and April, so this will be the first season that the device is being used. You can read all about it on their website

The next presentation was pretty boring… I think it was some guy talking about genetically modified food.  Then their was a Russian guy who used some kind of gimicky presentation thing, instead of the standard powerpoint.  Rather than simply moving from one slide to another, slides were shrunken down and hidden inside of each other, so that to move to a next one we had to watch some kind of zooming graphic.  I remember his presentation was about ethanol, and he spoke with a Russian accent, but mostly I remember slides zooming around on the screen.

I also remember that because of this weird presentation platform he used, the clicker wouldn’t work to advance his slides, so he had to ask every time for the tech guy to change the slide.  A native English speaker would probably know that in this case it’s ok to just bark “next slide” every time, but for the first several slides he did, he said, “could you push the button please,” but after a while he started acknowledging the tech guy with a nod and making a button pushing gesture.

The last guy talked about using an electrical device to kill the bacteria on raw chicken so that people don’t catch salmonella.  Or something like that.

After that my friend introduced me to a professor who was there who came from Germany, and I got a chance to speak to her in German.  It’s actually easier to get a German speaker to talk to me in German here than it was in Germany.  Here I’m kind of a novelty the way I speak German; in Germany, so many foreigners are learning German, and inevitably making mistakes, that many Germans assumed I’d rather speak English and answered me in English even when I spoke German to them.

Our conversation didn’t exactly exercise my ability to its limit, but I was still glad to speak German again.  We talked about where she was from (East Germany near Dresden) and where I lived when I was there and what I did there and how I loved it and would like to go back.  She said my German was incredible, like everybody does even when I make mistakes, and I told her I’d like to become a German/English interpreter (she said “yes! of course! you can do it!”) but that it’s unlikely because everyone in Germany already speaks English anyway.

After that we went back to my friend’s apartment and hung out for a little while before we went out to eat.  He took me to this Vietnamese place to get “Pho” (pronounced [fuh?] -with an upward tone as if you’re asking a question).  It’s a noodle soup with all kinds of weird stuff in it, mine had pork, “tendon,” and tripe! sheep stomach! I’ve always wanted to taste tripe ever since Squid ate it in an episode of Rocket Power; not knowing what it was at first, he continued eating it even after being grossed out by what it was because it tasted so good.  I actually really didn’t like it… it was wierdly tenticled and spikey.  I also had a creamy carbonated drink with egg yolk in it.  Whenever I go to foreign places like that I always try to get the weirdest thing I can; I’m no wuss when it comes to trying strange and disgusting foods, I’ll eat just about anything just to say that I did.

Then after that we went to go see The Vagina Monologues.  I’ve actually gone with him to see them before once when we were at LHU, but they were sold out and we couldn’t get in.  It was funny enough, a little pointless for me though.  I’m just not interested in vaginas.  If I ever decide to adopt children, which means I’ll be in the unique position of getting to choose their gender, I would choose boys.  There will be no periods or pregnancies under my roof.  But it was still enjoyable.

That night, we wanted to find a club that we could go to; we’re both 20 so it had to be one that was 18 and up or had underage night or something.  We didn’t have much luck… the Shampoo club is pretty well-known and has 18 and up some nights, but not that night, and the only other club was a gay club.  I already have such low esteem for most gay people, I didn’t need it to go any lower, so we just hung out in his apartment and watched TV and YouTube videos, trying not to laugh too loudly so as not to disturb his sleeping Korean Roommate.   We also showed off our language skills, he showed me korean videos that he understood, and I translated German language interviews with Heidi Klum.

The next day, after we went to McDonald’s (side note! the McDonald’s was staffed entirely with African Americans, and we got to watch as the manager yelled at her associates, “It’s CUSTOMERS! it’s not Rocket Science! They pay yo CHECKS!” or something like that.  The girl behind the register I was working sighed and shook her head apologetically before she took my order) we went to the Mütter Museum.

As a German speaker, I know how the word “Mütter” is actually pronounced, with a lip-rounding ü sound, a hard t, and something like “air” with a barely pronounced R at the end.  But since I’m in America, speaking English, I had to call it “the mudder museum” all day.   As if having to pronounce “Voondebah” like “wunderbar” when talking about Wunderbar Balogna all day at work isn’t bad enough.

I’ve wanted to go to the Mütter Museum for a long time.  I don’t even remember where I heard about it, I think on the discovery channel or something.  It’s basically a museum full of medical oddities; they have a line up of fetus skeletons (*ahem* raising the bar), showing the different stages of development, and all kinds of other awesomely disgusting creapy stuff.  Just read the Wikipedia article.

We got to one room that had a girl in it who looked like she worked for the museum, and she asked us if we’d like to hear her lesson.  Well of course we would!  It was about determining the gender of a skeleton.

I’ve actually read all about how to do that in Dr. Bill Bass‘s amazing book “Death’s Acre”, but I had never actually seen the skulls to try it, I’d only read about it.  She showed us on models of skulls the differences in eye brows, jaw bones, and bumps on the backs of the skulls, as well as the differences in pelvises.  I’ve always known that women had wider pelvises so that the baby could fit through it, but actually, saying it that way is kind of misleading.  Men are generally bigger than women, so men actually have an altogether larger and also wider pelvis.  It’s the inside opening of the pelvis, compared to the rest of the same pelvis, that is wider on a female, and also lacks a lump and curved tailbone found on a male, which would get in the way of childbirth on a female.  She showed us on the models of bones that she had for us to touch, and also on the real skeletons hanging up in the case beside her.  It was so strange to think that these were actually people walking around at one point.

After her lesson, we asked her about herself, if she’s going to school for this or what.  She said no, she’s just volunteering here on the weekends.  She’s in middle school.  Middle school! I said, “you must be like… 14 then?”

“yeah!” she said.  What?? but she was so smart! and so good at giving the lesson she gave! What an awesome 14 year old! I would have guessed that she was 22 and in college.  That says either a lot about her, or a lot about the maturity level I expect from a 22 year old.  In any case, I was very impressed.

There was a lot of interesting things in there; the eight foot long colon (I’d heard about this before, and I actually thought it would still have the feces inside of it; actually it was just the colon stuffed with something else), skeletons of achondroplasic dwarfs (who have surprisingly curly humeri), and an interesting model of eyeball conditions, including lazy eyes and those people whose eyes don’t quite point in the same direction

After that we went to the Reading Terminal and got ice cream.  I’ve only been there once before, the time I was in Philadelphia for my first marathon.  It’s kind of a cool place to walk around.  My grandfather always tells me this story about how he had an uncle who was a con artist, and he used to go down there with sunglasses on and hold out a cup saying, “change for the blind?”  and one time when my grandfather was a kid he went there with his aunt or something, and she started beating the old man with her umbrella because he wasn’t blind, and people started hollering, “She’s beating the blind! she’s beating the blind!”

We walked around town for a little while after that and talked about our lives… it’s weird how you can go a really long time without seeing someone, and then when you meet again, it’s like no time passed at all.

Anyway, we went back to his apartment and parted ways soon after that.  I had one more stop before my trip home, my grandparents in Bensalem.

My Aunt answered the door to my grandparents’ apartment, and, true to form, said, “Come in you idiot.”

We talked for a little while about what I had done that weekend and he told me the story about the reading terminal again.  My grandmother has dementia, and she says very little and has gotten pretty frail, but she still has these lucid moments, where she’ll say something relevant to what everyone else is talking about, as if she’s trying to remind you that she’s still there.

My aunt was going on about something, about how my uncle made too much bacon, “I make a whole pound of bacon sometimes, but I’ll only eat some of it…”

“…and save the rest” my grandmother chimed in.

My grandfather also told me about his welsh ancestry, which I’d heard very little about before.  In Welsh He knows how to say “hello, how are you?” and how to answer it with good or bad.  His grandfather wanted to teach him Welsh, but back then everybody was neglecting their heritage and trying to become American, so his grandmother wouldn’t let him learn it.

He also told me not to get old.  I’m getting pretty sick of hearing it too.  Not just from him, from all my coworkers, who are mostly grandmothers.  ”Don’t ever get old!” they always say, or, “What I wouldn’t give to be as young as you again.”  Well guess what, old people, it’s gonna happen whether I like it or not, and you’re not making me feel any better about it.

I drove home after that, and thought about my annoying life.  On one hand, I’m stuck in place, surrounded by people who are learning and growing and becoming smarter, and on the other hand, I’m getting older, surrounded by people who tell me how much it sucks to get old.

Sometimes I hate that I’m wasting my youth behind a deli counter; I should be in school, before I get so old that people start calling me an “unconventional student.”  But weekends like this remind me that, I have to take advantage of every opportunity.  I could have just hung around with my friend in his apartment and gone to eat at Applebees or something.  But instead I learned about ways to help people plant rice in thailand, I tasted tripe, thought about vaginae*** (I guess that can never hurt), I learned how to tell a male from a female skeleton, and I learned about my welsh ancestors.

I’ve thought I was at a low-point in my life before, a couple of times actually, like when I discovered that I was a lousy au pair, when my host mother fired me and extinguished any hope of an amazing European adventure, and when my luggage was stolen and that hopelessness got even more extinguished, and now, when I’m working in a deli instead of going to school, as far away from adventure as I’ve been in a long time.  Maybe I’m not so far away after all.

*in a bigger band there would probably be a distinction in low-winds between brass and woodwinds… but there were two trombone players, one baritone, two tubas, and he was the only bari-sax.  So we were all sort of like one section.

**throughout the whole weekend I was recognizing streets that I ran through and was like, “I ran here… I ran here… I ran here…”

***Yes, vaginae is a proper plural form of vagina.  Vaginas is also a proper form, but spell check doesn’t like it for some reason.

I was six years old when my parents signed me up for little league. We lived in Texas at the time, on an Air Force Base in San Antonio, and the temperatures in the summer were sometimes over 100 degrees. I would have much rather stayed inside, but it seemed to make my parents happy, so I probably went along with the idea, not really knowing enough about baseball to be against it.

It made sense from an objective point of view too. I had over six hundred baseball cards. I don’t really know why I took to them, because I didn’t understand all those numbers on the backs, and I used to look at them and wonder, how did such ugly people become successful professional baseball players? I now realize, I just liked to collect things. Baseball season ended and the late 90s came and baseball cards were replaced with Pokemon cards, a more fitting hobby.

It’s hard to remember, when I first started little league, if I liked it or not. My team was the Cincinnati Reds, and I loved wearing my baseball cap. I remember being so shy during practice and games; I never talked to my teammates, and the coach and assistant coach made me nervous. I guess I mostly just felt isolated and confused about the rules.

I definitely was not good at it. I couldn’t catch properly, or throw properly, so naturally I developed a fear of the ball. More like a fear of getting made fun of- which did happen- when I got the ball and didn’t know what to do with it. My teammates took the game very seriously, and they used to get frustrated with me and throw their gloves on the ground.  I was always feeling anxiety because something was really important and I didn’t know what it was, and whatever it was, I screwed it up anyway.

During games I was almost always in the outfield, praying that the ball would not come to me. I litterally prayed to God, “please don’t let the ball come to me.” I remember trying so hard to figure out, if it comes to me, what should I do with it? Throw it obviously, but to whom?? how should I know?? I never figured it out. It’s not like I would have gotten it to the right person even if I knew who it was.  And if I could have made out what the crowd was telling me to do, it would have been too late by then anyway.  To God’s credit, I only got the ball back there once or twice, and one of my teammates usually ran for it and took care of it even though it should have been mine.

I just loved hearing the words “got it!!” being yelled by someone else who was going to rescue me from embarrassment.

I wasn’t good at hitting the ball either, even though my dad practiced with me pretty frequently. We had a machine pitch the balls, and one time the ball came right at my arm, and I just stood there and let it give me a bruise. All those parents were in the stands watching me, judging my poor posture and awkward swing.  I was too nervous to move.

Another time my dad yelled from behind the fence, “Dave! Don’t swing! Don’t swing this time!” and I had no idea why, but I thought, this is baseball. The batter swings. I’ll look stoopid if I just stand here like an idiot and let the ball pass me by, so I swang, to keep up appearances. That’s what I thought anyway. Like I said, I didn’t know- and I still don’t- why I wasn’t supposed to swing, or what I messed up because I did.

Exactly once in my little league career did I get a hit and take a base. I got all the way to third too, but by then we got three outs and were called in.

It was clear to me after the first year that it was not for me; I didn’t fit in with those guys. I liked to do art and make crafts and draw pictures; if I was to get down and dirty, it was going to be with elmer’s glue, not grass stains.

I remember after the first year, when I told my dad- knowing that it would disappoint him- that I didn’t want to do it again next year. He sat me down on the bottom bunk of the bunk-beds in the room I shared with my brother, and told me he really wanted me to give it another try. In the end, it was by giving me ten dollars that he convinced me to join the team for a second season.

I’m trying to think about what it must have been like for him, when he finally realized that baseball was not a pastime that he was going to share with either of his sons. To his credit, he never forced me to play when I didn’t want to, and if he was disappointed or upset that I was no good at it, he never showed it.

What I’m taking from all this is, little league was not the last word on me.

It made me feel like an outsider, like I was somewhere where I didn’t belong. It was good preparation for the future- I’ve felt like that a lot since then. It doesn’t bother me now; it’s forced me to liberate myself from the idea that I have to “fit in,” and it’s allowed me to create my own sense of identity, independent of what anyone else thinks.

I grew out of my shyness and nervousness- not that it was easy or anything- and I discovered other things that I’m good at, making peace with the fact that playing on a baseball team wasn’t one of them.  I discovered that I work well alone, independently and not as part of a team.  And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, either.

I think when my dad convinced me to try little league for another season, he was trying to teach me never to give up, at least not before giving it a fair chance. I did quit in the end, but no one can say I didn’t give it a fair chance. I’ll never regret an experience, even a bad one, if I’ve learned something from it.

It looks like I tried to use my mouth to catch baseballs instead of my glove!

First of all, I want to explain why copyright infringement, in the form of downloading movies or music without paying for them, is not stealing and should not be considered theft.  It’s copyright infringement, and it should only be considered copyright infringement.

Not according to me, according to the law, as determined by the United States Supreme Court case Dowling Vs. United States.

The final ruling was this:

The phonorecords in questionwere not “stolen, converted or taken by fraud” for purposes of [section] 2314. The section’s language clearly contemplates a physical identity between the items unlawfully obtained and those eventually transported, and hence some prior physical taking of the subject goods. Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple “goods, wares, [or] merchandise,” interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.

I’m not even saying (ahem… yet) that it’s ok to pirate movies and  music, just that it should not be referred to as theft or stealing.  Just copyright infringement.  Which is of course illegal.

Which brings me to my next point.  The lovely Swiss government, who recently published a report saying that pirating movies, music, and games, will remain legal in Switzerland.

you can read the enlightening article here.

To summarize, the Swiss government views the internet as an innovation in technology, using the word “game-changer.”  It goes on to explain that the entertainment industry should not oppose this innovation just because they’re afraid that their business would be hurt.

The Swiss government is taking a different approach:

Every time a new media technology has been made available, it has always been ‘abused’. This is the price we pay for progress. Winners will be those who are able to use the new technology to their advantages and losers those who missed this development and continue to follow old business models.

 

Another important issue that the article brings up, is a Dutch Studywhich concludes that the entertainment industry is not actually losing money because of internet pirates.  Those who think otherwise, are under the mistaken impression that everything that is being downloaded, would actually be bought if the means to download did not exist.

I’m ready to admit that I am indeed an internet pirate.  I would say about eighty percent of the music in my itunes library is pirated, and probably like 99 percent of the movies and TV shows I’ve seen in the last couple of years.

But the entertainment industry has not lost any money on it, because I was never going to buy any of the things I downloaded; if they were not free, I would not have used them.

If I no longer had the means to pirate, I still would not spend any more money than I already do.  For example:

My family subscribes to netflix.  A good portion of the movies I’ve pirated, I probably could have seen on netflix anyway, without spending a dime more than is already being spent.

I would probably have a smaller music collection, and the music I had would come from a few different sources.   One would be independent  artists like cults who have given away their music for free in order to get their name out there, and I would buy the rest on iTunes with the gift cards I get as gifts from family members every now and then.

The thing is, I have very little money, and I’m not going to spend the money I have on TV shows and Movies, and if I can’t experience them for free, I would not experience them at all.  The entertainment industry wouldn’t get a dime out of me one way or the other.  So what difference does it make?

And all this is very important to me at the moment, in light of the upcoming Stop Online Piracy Act, which I strongly oppose, and the 24 hour wikipedia black-out protest, which of course I’m excited to support.

I hate to say this, because I usually defend my country. But I will be ashamed if I live in a country that has a bill like this.

Supporters of this bill need to realize that the internet is not America, it’s not anywhere, its the world, it’s everywhere, and everyone, and it should be guarded as the one free and open “place” on the planet. In any case, it should be kept away from the interference of the governent, America’s or anyone else’s. Wikipedia understands this, and I really hope the American government comes around to it too.

Back when I was in Germany, I came across an ebook called “Polyglot: How I learn Languages” by Hungarian polyglot Kato Lomb (originally Lomb Kato… Hungarian  changes the order just like korean and Chinese and I think Japanese? not sure… but kato is her given name and Lomb is her family name… or her husband’s, again, not sure.)

Kato Lomb was a translator who worked with about 16 languages to varying degrees.  She was also one of the world’s first simultaneous interpreters.  So, as an aspiring polyglot myself, I read it.  And then a few months later I read it again.  And then just recently I read it a third time.

Kato Lomb is an incredible person… she’s probably one of my heroes.  She writes very little biographical information in the book, devoting only one chapter to how she originally became interested in languages.

Which didn’t even happen until was in her twenties, having graduated with a degree in chemistry.  She decided to look for a job as an English teacher.  All she had to do was learn how to speak English.

So somewhere in Hungary she found a cheesy romance novel written in English.  and then she read it, with no instructional material but an English/ Hungarian dictionary.  She had no instruction materials, no grammar excercises, and no recordings.  This is probably the reason why, after her first job translating technical material for a pharmacy, her work was returned with a note saying something like, “whoever did this translation has a lot of nerve.”

She managed to get a job teaching English.  I’ve been to Hungary, and I’ve been to Budapest, the capital and the city where she worked, and I can say I’m not surprised that she got a job teaching English with little or no qualification.

She explains in the book, that from there, she learned by teaching.  Having actual instructional material with her this time, she plugged away only one or two lessons ahead of the one she was teaching.

She explained the various other circumstances that led to her knowledge of the other languages.  She found a Russian/ English dictionary and used it to read russian romance novels while hiding out in a bomb shelter, having the books sewn into the bindings of an encyclopedia because she wouldn’t want to be caught reading the enemy’s language, and she learned Polish by enrolling in an advanced level course, even though she couldn’t speak a word. The teacher told her that she’d need to take an assessment test, to which she replied, “Don’t bother, I don’t speak a word of Polish. But those who wish to advance quickly must progress fortuitously;” she claims that the teacher was so overtaken by her ambition that she let her in the advanced class.

Most languages, she taught herself, with little or no help from anyone else.  She would simply start reading a book in a foreign language, look up the words she didn’t know, and focus mainly on the words that she did know.  She didn’t bother with grammar excercises, saying, “you learn grammar from language, not language from grammar.”

She does admit that this method made it quite difficult understanding the spoken language when it was heard.  She could chat fluently (with mistakes and a heavy accent) on the telephone, and be understood, but understand little of what was being said back to her.

This is no surprise, because there were probably very few recordings for language learners available back then, like there are today with podcasts and internet radio and language learning tapes at every library.

After reading this book, three times, I’m intrigued, but unsatisfied.  I want to know more.

She wrote about interpreting for a Japanese embassador, and the Hungarian speaker used the word “Merry-go-round,” in some sort of an idiom; she gave it in the book, and I can’t remember it now, but I remember thinking, it’s really not that important. But she didn’t know the word for Merry-go-round, and instead of doing what I think anyone else would do and just skipping it and moving on, she interrupted the preceding and tried to explain the word in Japanese. I can only imagine what she must have said, something like, “you know, children… riding on fake horses… going around in a circle… creapy music…” but the japanese embassador didn’t understand, so she actually had to run around in a circle and pretend to be riding one, until the Japenese embassador got it, and told her the Japanese embassador told her the Japanese word for it, pronounce “Melly-go-lound.” Then she started talking about something else.

What?? That’s it? Aren’t you going to tell us how the other people in the room reacted? And why you thought it was so important to translate what seems to be such a trivial idiom?

I also wanted to learn more about how she learned Chinese; having studied the language myself, I know that there is no connection between the written character and its pronunciation.  So how did she figure out how to speak and understand it?

French is another example, since there words are also pronounced differently than they look (to most people anyway.)

Someone once asked her, she writes, if it’s possible to speak 16 languages, as she did. “No,” she answered, “It is not, at least if you mean knowing them all to the same degree.” In her signature style, she offered no explanation of her reasoning, or even any proof for that matter. She does explain that she only speaks five of her 16 languages fluently, the others she either only knows through written material, or has spoken in the past but no longer does.

I still need to know how she improved in such a way that she advanced enough that she could perform a simultaneous interpretation, by simply reading a book and looking up words in a dictionary.  She rarely even had a native speaker to practice with! in fact I don’t think she ever did. she never wrote about having one anyway. And how did she get into simultaneous interpretation? without even a single role model?

She mentions the first time she met a russian after learning the language, but she was too shocked to speak the language. How about telling us why? “nervous” I can understand, because anyone would be nervous to speak a foreign language to a native speaker for the first time. But “shocked”? what’s shocking??

I’ve been studying German for over six years now.  I’ve read novels in German, watched movies, TV shows, listened to podcasts, I even went to Germany.  I Lived there for six months.  That’s more than what Lomb can say, who wouldn’t have had the opportunity to watch movies or tv shows in her target languages, and with podcasts not even existing, and because she did all her learning while she was still in Hungary, and still I don’t feel as qualified as one would have to be to be a proper simultaneous interpreter.  I can’t believe she did it perfectly, but she must have done it well enough.

She must have put a lot of thought into the wording of her title, “How I learn languages,” because I don’t see it as something anyone else can do.  She paints herself as an ordinary woman, just doing her job. She claims that she possesses no innate ability to learn languages, and that anyone with as much motivation and work ethic could do as much as she did, or even more.

It’s a nice thought, and I’d really like to believe it. But after reading her book, and being baffled about the things she finds completely normal- in some cases too trivial even to write about- I’m not prepared to say that she was just a normal woman just doing her job. The way she learned languages and pioneered the field of

Think of you and let it fly… (The final line of Nena’s 99 Red balloons)

It’s because I dislike superficiality, idealism, and meaningless gestures, that I dislike new years, mostly other holidays, and social gatherings/ interactions in general.  This isn’t the first time I’m blogging about it, and it won’t be the last.

But it’s all in an attempt- maybe even a (dare I say it) idealistic attempt, to avoid disappointment.  New Years always reminds me that everyone else is having more fun than me.  It’s just not possible to sum up all the things that happened to me in one evening, that I could really call a “new years celebration.”  So I don’t try.

The new millenium is what really set it off.  That’s the first New Years that I remember; it might be the first time I was allowed to stay up until midnight.  I was only nine, and I didn’t understand what it meant that the ball was going to “drop” from the empire state building: I thought it was going to land in the crowd.

I was disappointed.  It slides on a pole, what, a few yards? I wanted to see destruction! I wanted excitment!! I was part of a select few in all of humankind, that get to see that first digit change.  And what did I end up feeling? nothing.  Worse than nothing: nothing when I expected something.

Still I end up watching Dick Clark every year, last year because Avril Lavigne was debuting a new song, and this year because my brother was supposed to be in the crowd somewhere and there was a very very small chance that he would be on TV (he wasn’t).

This year, as I hear Dick Clark say things like, “This is a night to remember forever.  The biggest party in the world.   I will never forget this. This is the greatest night of my life.” I just think, this guy’s done this for forty years; am I really to believe that all forty nights were the greatest ones of his life? or that he can even really keep them straight?  I’m sure he has lots of memories of hosting the show, but I doubt if he even remembers what year they all happened in.

His statements are certainly at odds with my experience.  The biggest party I’ve ever been to was the Karneval celebration in Cologne.  I’ll never forget crossing the finish line of the Philadelphia marathon.  The greatest nights of my life, were the ones I spent singing Karaoke with my good friends in an Irish pub in Germany.  Nothing to do with New Years.

This year I worked on New Years.  I cleaned out two friars, a rotisserie oven, washed about twenty pans, mopped the floor, and helped a surprisingly small amount of customers.  It was a good evening by my standards.  The last thing I did was heave loads of garbage (food mostly still fit for consumption) into a trash compactor, and then got home about twenty minutes before the new year.

I was scared by fireworks during my 35 minute commute home, which was a welcome alternative to being scared by drunk drivers.

Also when I was driving home, Nena’s protest song 99 Luftbalons started playing in the car, in German of course.  Being able to sing along to the lyrics in German reminded me what an amazing year I’ve had.

I’ve been to foreign countries, made amazing friends, and challenged myself all the way to my limits.  I want to say that I couldn’t have asked for more, but that would be too idealistic.

Actually I did want more.  I wanted to go to China.  I wanted to have more money.  I wanted to visit more places and see more things.  I wanted to be a good au pair, I wanted it to be a good experience, and if it were, I’d still be there, celebrating new years in Germany with my host family.

And when I came home, I wanted nothing more than to go back.  I’ve wanted it every day since I’ve come back.  At work I formulate German sentences in my head, wishing for an opportunity to say them out loud.  I still watch German movies, read German articles online, and download German TV shows.  I dream about shopping in the stores I used to shop in over there, standing in the magazine section, trying to decide which magazine I can learn the most new vocabulary from reading.

To put is simply, I want nothing more than to do anything I’m doing here, there.  I want my amazing life back.  If I’m angry or annoyed or more cynical than I otherwise am, that’s why.

But I soon came to realize, as I drove home and listened to Nena slowing down towards the end of the song, that Germany- at least for now- is my red balloon.  I have to say farewell, and let it fly.  2011 was an incredible year, that is now behind me.  I have to build a whole new incredible life now.

This imagery of letting a balloon fly away is totally at odds with the imagery created by a ball dropping in Time Square, and that’s yet another reason for me to dislike new years.  I’m going to bed.

Because I don’t make new year’s resolutions.  When I want to make a change or start something new, I do it as fast as I can, or as soon as it becomes appropriate.  It just so happens that the end of the year coincides with a decision about the future of my blog.

It doesn’t make sense to continue writing about my life, because when I’m not working behind the deli counter, I’m laying in bed at home with my kindle in front of me.

But I don’t want to stop writing either, because I love it.

And then I figured it out when I watched Anderson Cooper today.  Actually, when I decided not to watch it.

I love Anderson Cooper’s show, sometimes. I love the idea of it anyway.  I’m a big fan of his, because, even though most people think he’s gay, he never says anything about his personal life, because he doesn’t want to compromise his objectivity.  I can admire someone who cares so much about maintaining objectivity, especially in a world that’s pressuring him to come out.  (that is, if it’s true and he’s really gay.)

And his new talk show seemed very promising when he was first starting out.  I though I could trust Anderson to do interesting and provocative topics.

But then I turned it on today and he was doing a show about hoarders.  Yeah hoarders are interesting and everything, but the two other big talk  shows (Dr. Phil and Oprah) have already done episodes are hoarders.  I don’t watch Nate Berkus on his talk show, but I know he too has worked with hoarders on Oprah before.  And there’s an entire series about Hoarder on A&E.  And isn’t there one on TLC too? I’m not sure, but the point is, I know plenty about hoarders.  I know enough about hoarders.

That wasn’t the first time Anderson has done a show about hackneyed topics either.  He’s covered beauty pageant moms, which also already has an entire series about it on TLC (Toddlers in Tiaras), and teen drinking, which I’m pretty sure has been covered on The View. I won’t write off his show yet, because he does come up with original topics (if it’s even him who comes up with the topics, which I’m not sure about) once in a while (not that I even watch it every day).

(ok I’m using parentheses way too much.  reeling them in…)

Lisa Ling’s show Our America with Lisa Ling is a little better, where she travels the country to go to interesting places and bring us provocative stories, but she too has done shows about topics that have been done before, like in the episode Modern Polygamy, where she explores a topic that she personally has already covered. Back when she was a correspondant for Oprah and the whole LDS polygamy compound in Texas scandal was going on.

That’s just one example, others include the episode about transexuals, heroin users, and amateur pornography performers.  These topics have been covered often on Oprah, like when she did that show about the Brazilian transexual model who posed nude; and on Dr. Phil, who has worked with addicts of several different substances -as has Lisa Ling herself- and an entire 2 season documentary series about pornography which aired on the BBC called The Dark Side of Porn.

My point- or my question- is, where are all the interesting and provocative subjects? Why do I continue to be disappointed by lame topics?

I don’t know.  But I want to write about interesting ones.  Things most people don’t think about, but that also matter.  I’m starting a new chapter in my (pathetic though it might be) “blogging career.”  Expository writing! I remember writing an expository essay for my composition class when I went to LHU, about the history of Vampires in pop culture, and it got rave reviews from my peer editing group as well as high marks from my professor.

So now you know that you can expect expository writing from me in 2012.  I will ask my readers to bear with me as I get the hang of it, but I promise to bring you topics that you very infrequently find a talk show about.  Here’s a preview:

Ants! Think you know enough about them? did you know they grow lifestock? and have slaves? and that there are traffic laws in their ant hills that every ant follows, even though they aren’t able to discuss and establish them together?

North Korea- ok so Lisa Ling has covered this already, but it’s entire existence confuses me, and no explanation given in any talk show or documentary has ever satisfied me.  How is it that the entire nation has been convinced of their leader’s greatness? or have they? and what’s normal life like there anyway? is it just people starving? maybe you’re also curious? well I’ll do as much research into it as I can, at least until I’m satisfied.

E = mc^2- You’ve heard of it before, but do you know what it means? or how einstein figured it out? or what’s so special about it? I only sort of vaguely know… something about time and the speed of light and twins in a rocket ship or something.  But I intend to find out.

I went through high school learning very little about European history and that became clear to me as soon as I got there.  Maybe I’ll do some topics about that, or history of other regions or other topics related to social psychology and anthropology, as I learn about them.

Something about deafness, maybe deaf-blindness.  I watched a video once about the type of touch-sign language they use and it was incredible.

Oh, and nodding disease! It’s a disease prevalent in South Sudan and Uganda, that causes involuntary nodding of the head and only affects children.  It’s brought on anytime the child eats, so children develop a phobia of eating and often starve to death.  There is no cure: a child who has the disease, as of right now, will die of it.

I’m hoping some more topics will come to me.  These are all things that I don’t know very much about and want to research, and part of the reason I’m going down the expository writing path, is because I want to learn about them myself, through writing about them.

Sometimes when I’m working at walmart, I feel like if you could listen in on my thoughts, all you’d hear is white noise.  Back in Germany I was exposed to all this culture and foreign language and adventure, and now I’m like Mick Kelly in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, who loves music and dreams of buying a piano, who is always described as hearing music in her head- and who, in the end, leaves school and gets a job in a shop, and no longer hears any music in her head or dreams about pianos.

And that scares me.  So I won’t let it happen.  My mind will stay active during my time away from the classroom, right up until the day I find myself in one again.

Over the last couple of months working behind the deli counter at walmart, I’ve learned a lot about how delis work.  But mostly about how annoying customers can be.  Sometimes I don’t even feel like I’m their for the customer; I’ve got work to do, the customer’s just getting in my way.

We have about 75 different kinds of meat, and a little over 20 kinds of cheese.  So do not tell me “ham.” or “turkey.” or “Swiss cheese.”  Because I’m going to ask you what kind.  Just tell me the brand, and the kind.  Butterball oven roasted turkey.  Russer’s Virginia brand ham.  Alpine Lace swiss.

It’s not enough to say “oven roasted turkey” or “virginia brand ham,” because we’ve got three different brands of each.

Most importantly of all, when I ask you how you want it sliced, do not say “regular,” or any varient of regular.  ”Ya know, like a regular slice for sandwiches.” “how you normally do it.”

If you tell me to slice it for sandwiches, I’m going to ask you how you like it sliced on those sandwiches.  And if you ask me how I normally do it, I’m going to tell you I normally do it the way the customer asks me to.  There is no regular! every customer likes it different!  We make it really easy for you: there’s a chart right on the counter with numbers 1 through 10 and their corresponding thicknesses.

Sometimes someone will tell me “regular,” and I’ll point the chart out to them, and they’ll say something absurd like 4.  Thats like a quarter of an inch.  And that person thought I’d cut it that thick when they tell me they want a normal slice?

There’s also a hot bar at the deli, where we have fried food.  I’ll allow customers to ask me the price of things (I don’t know why there isn’t a sign, but there isn’t.  And why not?? why the heck not?? there’s never not a sign! customers need to know how much things cost!) but it annoys me when people say to me, “cheese sticks… how many of those do I get?”

“However many you want.”

Or they’ll say “an order of onion rings.”

What the heck is an order! Just tell me how many you want!

They sometimes point at the sizes and say “how much does one of these cost?” and then I have to say, “That depends on what you want in there.  And how much of it I put in.”

We have sizes for the wet stuff, like the potatoes and macaroni and cheese and corn, and still people insist on telling me, “a pound of this, half a pound of that.”

Just say small medium or large! The sizes are right in front of you! or do you want me to re-enact that scene from The Wrester?

A little less… a little more…

Which brings me to an interesting point, that customers aren’t really like that.  When they tell us a pound of meat, we have to guess when we’re slicing it; we get the hang of it quickly but usually when we weigh the meet its at like .97 of a pound or like 1.07 pounds or something, and the customer always says, “That’s fine the way it is.”

Usually I just give it to them weather they say it’s fine or not.  If I’m way off and I cut like 1.2 pounds- like if it’s a meat that I rarely slice and don’t have the hang of- then I ask them, “you want a little less or is that alright?” and they always tell me its fine.

The worst part about my job, is watching food get thrown away; buckets and boxes full of it, perfectly good food.

The meat isn’t so bad to throw away, because we put that into a special box, which gets dumped into a special bin at the end of the night, which gets picked up by someone from the zoo at the end of the week, who takes it there and feeds animals with it.

But at the hot and cold bars, we just throw everything away.  Every two hours the food in the hot bar needs to be replaced, because it gets “yuckie” if it sits there for more than two hours, as my coworker says.  I’ll admit it that it does get “yuckie.”  But we don’t sell it all in two hours.  To me, it doesn’t mean we should keep yuckie food there for more than two hours, it means the hot bar doesn’t work, and should be shut down.  Someone should have seen that there’s too much waste and stopped putting those hot bars in walmarts.  Sometimes not a single customer asks for a particular thing in those two hours, or just one or two people do, and I have to throw the entire pan of it out.

And then at the end of the night, everything in the cold bar gets thrown out.  We have a few different kinds of potatoe salad and chicken salad and we have ham salad and macaroni salad and develed egg salad and regular egg salad, and some different kinds of pastas in there… a big bowl full of each one.

And I’d estimate maybe three people come to that counter and order something from one of them during an entire day.  Maybe five on the weekends.  And then at the end of the night we empty every single bowl full of food- which has a shelf life of three days- into a box which we then take to the trash compactor.

Watching the food get thrown away and throwing it away myself, is just as bad as being in the company of the seasoned and desensitized associates who have been doing this for five or six years.  I’m coming to the sad realization as I’m writing this that I’m not really any better as long as I’m working there.  Maybe I should start looking for a new job.  I oughtta go back to retail, no food waste there.

Sometimes when I’m closing the hot bar at the end of the night, when I have to throw all the food in all the pans away and wash them, I snatch some of it and sneak it into the back kitchen where the sink is and I eat it.  I’ll get fat on fried food before I’ll throw it all away, I’ll become obese if I have to.  I’m not the only one; I’ve walked in on the occasional associate sneaking a wing ding or a few slices of cheese that a customer asked for and then changed their mind about.  As if when we digest two chicken tenders out of the twenty we were throwing away- we who are not hungry and who don’t otherwise lack food- it’s so much better than wasting it; as if it’s any different from wasting it.

Anyway, I don’t mind the job otherwise.  It’s a lot of work, but it’s easy.  You hear horror stories sometimes about people who work at walmart and the horrible way they were treated, but actually it’s a nice place to work.  The people are all really nice instead of mean old deadbeats, they give us an entire hour for a lunch break, and they always throw holiday “parties” in the break room… which means they have a couple meat/cheese and vegetable trays and a few people bring in some deserts.

My coworkers in the deli are also nice to work with; they’re mostly women in their late middle ages, and even though I’ve made a few mistakes, nobody has ever yelled at me, and they never boss me around either.  When they ask me to do something, they always ask nicely and say please even though they don’t have to.  If I make a mistake without realizing it, they always tell me in a constructive way and never without also giving me a compliment.  ”It’s just a little thing that you probably haven’t been told about yet, you’re doing great otherwise.”

I’m not very friendly with customers though.  I don’t even really care to work on that either.  I always give them what they want, and I work as fast as I can, and that’s all of me that a customer is going to get.  A lot of them are friendly, but even more are unfriendly.  That’s fine with me though; if you just want to come in, get what you came for, and get out, you’ve come to the right deli man.  none of this “hi how are you” crap.  I just don’t like talking to them or making conversation and pleasantries annoy me.  I prefer to do dishes.  One freak was like, “I bet you see all kinds of weirdos come through here.”

And I thought yeah, It’s happening right now.

Another guy said to me once after ordering corn- and I’ll leave you with this- “I’ve always wondered, if someone only ate corn for an entire week, would their crap be yellow?”

Most people are happy to come home after they’ve been gone for a long period of time, seven months in my case.  I was not.  I was very unhappy.  I did not miss home when I was gone.  Not even a little bit.  It would be nice to say I missed my family, but they were there the whole time anyway, we talked anytime we wanted to on skype or in text messages or emails (it might actually have been nice to get away once).

I was not happy to see my town again, or my house or my bedroom.  It was like going back to jail after having gotten released.  Ok maybe not to that extreme, but I definitely wasn’t happy to be back in the place that I worked so hard for so long to leave.  It’s now december, and that unhappiness has not changed this entire time, and I hope it never does.

I was also not happy with every single person that I knew telling me how glad they am that I was home.  ”That makes one of us,” I always wanted to say, but never did.  I always made some polite superficial response.

I found a job after a few weeks, behind the deli counter at the Walmart in Waynesboro, a town about thirty minutes south of here.  It’s not ideal because it’s so far away but I get a lot of hours and it pays good.

I applied to two Universities, IUP, where my brother went, and Bloomsburg, for their Anthropology departments.  I got accepted at both, and planned to go during the Spring of 2012, but since I’ve been making so much money and been getting so much hours at walmart, I decided to take online classes from the Community college and continue working at walmart, and then I’ll start at IUP in the fall.  Meaning I’ll graduate when I’m like 24.  An old man by undergraduate standards.  I had teachers in high school who were 22.

I will also be studying Deaf education.  I don’t know why, but for the last couple of years I’ve really wanted to teach Deaf people.  I can join the peace corps an teach the deaf people in third world countries, that would be hardcore.  And then when I’m done with that, I plan to go back to school, get a masters or phd in anthropology, and become a professor.  I want to be hardcore, and I’m going to be.

So that’s where I am now, working at walmart, giving away half my life and soul to a pursuit that doesn’t interest me in the least, watching the life get sucked out of me with every sliced meat or cheese.  A few months ago my head was filled with foreign languages and culture and knowledge.  Now it’s filled with white noise and customers asking me