Pig Zen

SF Bay Area, July 2008.

Last night I was bored and antsy, so after I finally ate dinner at around 10:00, I went out and took some pictures.  When it comes to low light, I kind of suck — my hands shake.  Yet, last night, I took pictures at 1/8th, 1/6th, even 1/4th of a second, and they’re sharp.  Really!  I can hardly believe it myself, except I have evidence on my screen.

Today, I went on a bit of a walk.  It was a sunny, cloudless day here in the Bay Area.  A couple of planes and a bird passed above my head, and I looked up and tried to shoot them.  As those damn kids on the internet say, EPIC FAIL.  At 1/80 and 1/100, the only thing visible in the pictures is that I can’t hold still.

So, why the suckage this afternoon and the steadyness last night?  There is a technical reason: today’s lens has almost four times the focal length, and I was holding the camera up vs. at eye level.  Of course, being awash in afternoon sunlight, I should have just kicked up the shutter speed.  I was overconfident from yesterday and unable to see that my images were blurry because the sun was washing out the LCD display.  And maybe suffering from a touch of sunstroke.

When I first got a digital camera, there were two things I loved: being able to shoot at different ISO speeds with the twist of a knob, and instant feedback.  Right away I was able to see if something turned out okay and I could tweak as necessary.  I hated waiting for prints to come back or to get time in the darkroom.  Of course that instant feedback meant instant critique as well.

Digital photography is great in so many ways, and awful in just about as many.  On a $15 bit of silicon and metal, I can store 20 rolls worth of pictures, and I don’t have to pay anything to get them printed.  Conversely, I have 20 times as many images to hate when I proof them.

America, July 2002.

Another night of writer’s block.  Here is today’s writing prompt:

If you got into your car and drove until you ran out of gas, where would you find yourself? Could you live there?

So, right now, the car has about half a tank of gas.  It’s also also sort of temperamental when it comes to fuel economy, so that means maybe 140 to 180 miles.  As the bird flies, that’s pretty far.

The circle is at a 150-mile radius.  Using actual on-the-road directions, in 180 miles, I could get to Fresno, Point Arenas, Mendocino, Paso Robles, Orland up I-5, Blue Canyon out along I-80 towards Tahoe, or almost to San Simeon along highway 1.  Could I live in those places?  It’s theoretically possible.

Would I want to?  Nothing in the Central Valley, thanks; it’s damn hot in Fresno this time of year.  In the little towns along I-80?  I’ve never really spent any time there except in the car, but from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t really appeal to me.  I’ve never been north on I-5 past Sacramento, but I don’t have a lot of hope.

So, along the coast then?  I’ve never been near Mendocino, but the stories sure make it sound good.  The coast to the south might be harder; that part of highway 1 south of Big Sur is really rugged and is prone to fires.  Very beautiful, though.

Since I’m a geek, I can work from just about anywhere with reliable power and high speed internet access.  That also means my job can be done by people anywhere in the world with those things, like places without an astronomical cost of living and lots of labor and environmental laws.  I try not to think about that too much.

With the exception of Fresno, all these towns are pretty small. I’m afraid I might get a little stir crazy after a while.  I have a three Chinese restaurant rule: there must be a minimum number of places to get take-away within a certain radius.  For a while after high school, I lived with my aunt and uncle in small-town New England.  That’s when I came up with the rule.  Californians love to corrupt all varieties of Asian food, though, so that may not be a problem.

Personally, I’ve always been a suburbanite.  The closest I’ve ever been to living in the heart of a big city was when I stayed in my friend’s spare room for a couple of months while I was doing some work in Los Angeles.  She lived hood-adjacent, the ATM offered up six different languages, and my car got stolen.

I love maps, so this was a fun exercise for me, even if it did keep me from meeting my publishing deadline for tonight.  They’re always full of possibility.  I kind of wish I knew more about cartography and GIS.  Maybe someday I’ll learn more, in my Copious Spare Time.

Out the airplane window, August 2003.

I never run out of those “two kinds of people” lines.  Two more kinds of people: those that eat to live, and those that live to eat.  This one is more of a continuum, though.

I am entrenched on the live to eat camp.  I love food, and I love pretty much the whole continuum of food, from greasy spoon breakfasts to multi-course feasts.  It is a minor miracle that I do not weigh twice as much as I do, because I can’t stop eating.  It’s an unhealthy compulsion, especailly considering I never had to clean my plate as a kid.

I have a couple of hang-ups though.  The biggest, and probably weirdest, is that I won’t put butter on bread or toast.  Cooking with butter is fine, but I always order my toast dry — all I notice is a sort of greasy texture that gets added rather than flavor.  There was one place that served infused butter and I did smear that on breadsticks, but I think I was mostly tasting the chives or whatever.

The next is sausage.  Meats in casings, or meats that look like they’re in casings, weird me out.  The origin of that is simple: I saw a kids’ TV show where they went to the hot dog factory, and I saw the little sausages getting filled up and tied off in a rapid fire fashion.  Completely creeped out.  Still shuddering a little as I write about this.

I eschew the weird fake meat stuff herself gets from the religious grocery store.  It comes in a can, and some of it is in some kind of sauce.  Tinned meat and meat-like products are a non-starter for me.

I love food, I love hearing about food, I love dreaming about food.  I do not love cooking it.  When I cooked for myself, it was usually pasta.  Easy to shop for, easy to prepare, and easy to clean up.  No planning involved and little multitasking. Anything complicated quickly overwhelms me — I can’t manage two parallel cooking processes at a time.

I have no will power when it comes to food, either.  I indulge my gastronomic cravings more than anything else.  Diets and budgets don’t work for me because food is my drug of choice, and I’m probably an addict.  I dress in lame clothes, do without vacations, and am perfectly fine with an old TV in the living room.  We’re usually out at dinner instead of watching it anyway.

The Old Country, October 2004.

What are Tuesday nights supposed to be like?  I’m not so certain anything is all that different now than from when I was a kid.  I come home from work (school), have dinner, waste time, avoid chores, argue with myself (my mom) about going to bed, and end up staying awake long past a reasonable hour.  The only big difference is that I have to get my own dinner and carry on the conversations of reproach without any help from a parent figure.

I guess I’m always struggling with the fact that I’m a grown-up now.  I don’t feel like I always expected a grown-up should feel, like I’m missing some key component that would legitimize me.  But when I look into the faces of college students, or even worse, high schoolers, I don’t feel completely like them either.  I can’t find that sense of responsibility that an adult should have, and I don’t have any of the naivete, optimism, and inhibition that kids enjoy.

The problem must be that I’ve moved beyond the age when I’m discovering more new things than I’m repeating on a daily basis.  While I still try to learn something new every day, it’s always in a very repetitive context.  School is good for breaking that up; alternating classes on different days and changing topics and teachers a few times over the year mixes things up.

Following an academic calendar also gives a pronounced topography of peaks and valleys that went with the passage of time.  Gearing up for the start of school and being relieved when the end of it is in sight has a distinct impact on one’s mood.  Accountants have this with tax season, farmers have planting and harvesting, and the guy that produces the Academy Awards has a build-up to one big thing every year.  While there’s periodicity in our lives, the rest of us don’t get to enjoy that sort of predictable yet dynamic ebb and flow.

I think I’m just looking at my youth through rose colored glasses.  I hated that I got such a brief period of quiet in the summer and winter when I was in school, and that I could only travel at the same time as everyone else.  But having an outside force create a little irregularity throughout the year has its beneifts when all the days start to run together.

Near Stonehenge on a typical balmy English day, March 2003.

Herself and I had dinner with a former coworker tonight, out from the Old Country to take her son to band camp.  We had fancy tapas and made small talk and gossiped a little.  It was nice.

I miss my old colleagues sometimes, and not in that “I’ll aim better next time” sort of way.  They were personally likeable and since I’d been there so long, I knew them pretty well — that’s important form someone that isn’t good at making contact with others.

I worked there for what seemed like a million years, and that culture is a big part of who I am professionally.  I miss the autonomy I had there; I could do pretty much whatever I wanted, as long as what I wanted to do magically lined up with the priority of the day as determined by some combination of magic buzzword 8-ball and slips of paper drawn out of a hat.  Maybe the randomness wasn’t so much.

My sphere of influence was concrete — when I had a bad day at work, as many as 56,000 other people were having a bad day (to a lesser degree) with me.  It wasn’t the kind of bad day that meant there were power outages or people dying, but it was definitely the topic of mild dinner table bitching and backseat driving at houses throughout the area.  I miss that what I did made a difference, even if people only noticed when things were going wrong.

The list of things I don’t miss is longer, though, and more frought with hair-pulling and bottle-opening.  So I’m grateful for the opportunity to stroll down memory lane because that means I’m not living it every day.