Deprecate

Two years since I've been a serious programmer. In the interim, I've done some toy programming, a little perl grease for the wheels of an otherwise working website for example. But no real programming, no real projects. Such is life when you're writing your dissertation. Anyway, I dusted off my Java IDE today, got the latest version of everything, and was ready to dive in to my latest idea.

I should have looked before I dove in. I nearly broke my neck on all the new stuff. I mean, aspects, annotations, generics, unit testing, oh my. Back when I started my graduate student career I did not understand how my advisor could become so behind the times (she has a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT, and shared an office with RMS, surely she'd never let her coding skills slip, right?). But now I understand. I'm going to let myself go. This next generation of my ideas will likely be implemented by someone else, a snot-nosed know it all, I hope. One that will never understand how I could let my skills lapse.

But that's the circle of life. Right up until I eat that know it all for being a little too snide. Then it's more of, say, an ellipse of life.

Traffic

I'm cruising home, along the interstate. We're all moving along at a pretty speedy clip. So I don't have time to deal with what's happening. There's a huge, enormous, beyond words large flock of birds flying over the freeway. It stretches from one edge of my windshield to the other, and goes on for the two or so minutes they're in sight before I drive under them. I want to stop the car, get out and just ogle it. It is beautiful. I don't know what kind of birds they are, they're smaller than, say ducks. But they're beautiful.

The next night, they're there again. And the next. At some point, I stopped noticing them.

Lift

I jumped onto my desk. Just now. Just to prove I still could. It was a standing leap, maybe about three feet. Let's see, it seems like my desktop is just a little below hip-level on me. Not bad, not bad at all.

Lyric

I have high expectations of my music. I want the words to evoke, invoke, and revoke. I want to be transported to another realm by the poetry involved in good songwriting. That's why I like Ani diFranco. She's got a good voice, but if you listen to what she's saying, it's a whole other level. "I'm going to get my feet wet until I drown", "I used to be a hero ... you are like a phonebooth that I somehow stumbled into". Seriously man, it makes me feel all inadequate that I cannot express myself so cleverly. But that's why I'm not a famous singer.

That and I cannot sing. I have been told that singing with me is great and low pressure, since you don't have to worry about the right notes. But you do have to worry about my made up, in-between notes that are neither sharp nor flat.

Number

I love this time of year. Autumn, Fall, whatever you want to call it. The leaves turn colors, there's a chill in the air that puts me in mind of pumpkins, turkey, mulled cider. This time of year, I'm a sucker for themed foods. Take coffee, for example. Normally I turn my nose up at flavored coffees. Vanilla hazelnut coffee? No thank you. No thank you very much. Stuff tastes like butt. Vanilla hazelnut flavored butt, but butt nonetheless. The problem is they use lousy coffee and then add a crappy flavor to it. No surprise it tastes that way.

Anyway, even I cannot pass up the pumpkin spice flavored coffee this time of year. I buy it in cafes when it's offered, and I just bought a pound of it at the store. I love that pumpkin spice flavor, which is applied to the coffee beans in the form of an oily substance, which causes the beans to glisten in an appealing manner. It also causes the grounds to stick to the side of my grinder in an unappealing manner.

Of course, the coffee still tastes like butt. Pumpkin spice butt, mmmm, Autumn even makes butt taste good.

Ridiculous

fading in, coming out of commmercial. We see a replay of the last few seconds of last week's episode.

"Stop it." There's a voice behind me, recognizable but unexpected. "You're being sophomoric. Both UD and MSU are land-grant schools, it only makes sense that they would be near agriculture. Agriculture smells bad, that's just the way it is."

I don't even need to turn around. "How the hell did you get here?"

We see DARRYL standing behind me, looking serious. He speaks.

"It isn't enough for you to move. You are still the same person you have always been. More to the point, you're still a sophomoric pissant who needs the occasional slapdown in order to stay focused. I mean, so what. You're thirty now, you going to make some big philosophical treatise about how things change but really stay the same. This whole diatribe is trite, but you know what I mean."

And then he hits me in the head with a stick. I think back to my days as an undergrad when things seemed much simpler. Or maybe that was the alcohol. Who knows. Without turning around, I say, "Maybe people do change. I won't be seeing you again." Trudging toward my office.

"You won't see me, but I will be there nonetheless."

He's such an asshole.

Fragrance

It's a beautiful day, the sun is shining through the clouds, the storm seems to have washed the air clean. So, on my drive into work, I roll down my windows and try and enjoy the beauty; after all, I will be in my cinder block office with no windows for the next eight hours or so.

There's some kind of funky smell in the air. It smells like, hmm, what's that smell? Dirty diapers, that's it. The air in Newark smells just like dirty diapers. What the heck? That's not cool. So, getting out of my car, I ask someone else in the parking lot, "do you smell that funky smell?"

"Yes", she replies, "it's the smell of Lancaster county. They have mushroom farms there, and that's what they smell like. When the wind is just right, that smell wafts our way."

So wow. At Michigan State, where I was an undergrad, they had these fields they would manure every so often, you could smell that too. Two universities out of three that I have been associated with have the aura of feces occasionally pervading their space. What a coincidence.

"Stop it." There's a voice behind me, recognizable but unexpected. "You're being sophomoric. Both UD and MSU are land-grant schools, it only makes sense that they would be near agriculture. Agriculture smells bad, that's just the way it is."

I don't even need to turn around. "How the hell did you get here?"

The camera pans out and up, going just from a framing shot of my face to revealing more and more of the parking lot behind me. A figure, standing twenty yards back, is still blurry and indistinct. As he comes into focus, the scene goes dark and is replaced by the words

To be continued...

Jamming

Laser hair removal commercial on the radio. "Well, if I had laser hair, I'd want it removed too. That sounds fairly alarming". Whoop whoop whoop, look out, laser hair on the loose! "chhhchrp ... and today, in Chicago, thirty people were balded when a hair laser went rogue ... chhhchrp". Some day, I will go bald. How will I react? Will I do the comb-over? Will I get a toupee? What about implants? Or will I just let it go. I know a guy with a military-style flat top (he's in the military, fancy that (but he can't fancy things, because of the whole don't fancy don't tell policy)), anyway, this flat top has a hole in the middle. Don't get me wrong, he looks fine, but he clearly isn't doing anything about his impending baldiosity. Did you know that "ericaceous" is a word? True story.

Symbols

It's Tuesday. That must be why I'm wearing these weird pants. It's Tuesday, and I'm having a flashback moment. I take a surreptitious look at my wristwatch and note the date. Hmm, the fact that I'm wearing a wristwatch at all means I must be in high school. The calculator-watch stares back at me, reflecting the light from the overhead fluorescent bulbs. Of course the watch knows what year it is, but I do too now. By the state of my pants, it is 1993 and I am in high school again. Or still. Or whatever.

I get up, leave my books near my desk, and walk out of the classroom. My physics teacher doesn't say anything, I remember him being one of those progressive teachers who gives students freedom to do things like go to the bathroom during class. Anyway, I don't even bother with the bathroom. I go out into the hallway, and take off my wristwatch, let it drop to the floor. While I'm at it, I take off my pullover poncho and the Nirvana t-shirt that it covered. Gathering steam, off come the Chuck Taylor All Star Converse Hi-Tops (in purple), the ripped and patched Levi's 501 Jeans and the boxers. All that I am wearing now are socks, and that's because I'm in the wing of the school with tile floors. I walk slowly over to the carpeted area so I can take the socks off too.

A shout from behind me, it's some administrator or another. "What the heck is going on here?" He actually said heck.

So I turn around and say, "Isn't this one of those dreams where I'm still in high school and I'm naked and everyone is looking at me, and I'm about to wake up?".

"No, this isn't one of those dreams. You're just naked, put your clothes back on." I can see in his hands, he has collected all the items I shed back outside my physics classroom.

Talk about embarrassing.

Passage

Some things really cheese me off. People who refer to one-way mirrors as two-way mirrors, for example. They're always talking about them in cop shows and other places. To me, a two-way mirror would be a piece of normal glass, something that allows light to go two ways through it. A one-way mirror would be those things they have in the police station, behind which the trembling witness can point her finger at a wrongdoer. A zero-way mirror would be your average, run of the mill, mirror.

Then again, there's no arguing with the crossword puzzle. Lasonerd is clearly not a word, so two-way mirror it is, which makes lasonerd into lastword. It's like getting a trivial pursuit card with an incorrect question on it. Just really cheeses me off. Or perhaps, should I say, yogurts me off?

No. I should not say that.