Full belly, empty mind
January 24, 2007
When you have certain habits on specific days of the week, it does both good and bad things for you. Good: you don’t necessarily sit around wondering what to do. Bad: the opportunity to be spontaneous fades a bit. Good: days pass more quickly. Bad: days pass more quickly. I’ve found when I have regular habits on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, my weeks tend to pass a lot faster than they normally do.
My regular Wednesday night plan is a few drinks and dinner at Barley Mill since it’s all-night Happy Hour, though since I’ve been seeing Hanne I’ve omitted my reading of the “Willamette Week” at the same time since she’s usually accompanied me.
I tried to watch the State of the Union address last night, and thought I managed to completely finish it I wasn’t sure what I had just seen. It was an hour-long speech of utterly unremarkable comments. The State of the Union shouldn’t be an opportunity for the President to pat himself on the back, but rather a time to say “Here’s what’s broken, this is what I want to fix.” I’m happy that environmental issues were towards the beginning of the speech, which means that maybe for the first time in six years the President has finally started listening to a few environmentalists. God knows someone needs to. I don’t care about his reasoning to cut oil reliance and explore alternative energy sources–he could have stood up there and completely denied the existence of global warming, for all I cared–as long as those steps are taken.
Frankly, the debate over the very existence of global warming–and not its potential impact–has muddled the debate surrounding the “green” movement and its political supporters. Why focus on the specifics, as long as what needs to be done gets done? Millions of non-religious people celebrate Christmas every year by carrying out its traditions, why shouldn’t those who don’t believe in the full impact of global warming not take steps to switch to energy sources that don’t pollute? I mean, it doesn’t matter in the end what you think or suspect might or might not be happening to the planet, any fool can see that the crap being pumped into the air by all the cars and coal plants is staying there. It looks bad, it smells bad, and we shouldn’t be dumping it into the air, whether it’s for those reasons or because it’s trapping the sun’s heat in the atmosphere and gradually raising temperatures around the world and causing sea levels to rise.
Call me a cynic or a fool, if you will, but you don’t have to believe 100% in a cause to act on it. I don’t know what to believe when it comes to global warming, but I’d rather err on the side of caution.
Tomorrow night there’s a Beloit Alumni event across the street at Jax Bar. I’m going to go for a run at Bally and then stop by for awhile afterwards, though I don’t know how long I’ll stick around. The event goes from 6-9 with jazz music afterwards, but I’m usually pretty beat from my run, and to be honest, I’m pretty broke at the moment and I don’t want to spend a whole lot on drinks while I’m there. Sure, I don’t have to drink, but c’mon…I’ll be in a bar that serves beer I like. There’s just no sense in not having a beer or two. Plus, it might be interesting to see if anyone I know shows up.
Speaking of alumni, I rode the elevator down to the ground floor with one of the partners last week, and he noticed my Catlin Gabel duffel bag that I’ve been using as a gym bag. He asked why I was carrying it, and so I told him that I had graduated from there…er…now ten years ago, I guess. That long already? I know my reunion is this year (though I haven’t received an invitation yet), but I’m having trouble wrapping my brain around that. He remarked that the campus was nicer than his college campus, and also that a friend of his had been trying unsuccessfully to get a child into the school for a couple of years now. Sounds like the waiting list has grown pretty long in the last ten years. Thank goodness for past opportunities.
I went to a Microsoft event yesterday afternoon, much like the one I went to in September, though this one was more of a product overview than a demonstration and technical information. I was more interested in the latter type, since instead I got four hours of “Rah rah, Microsoft!” type videos. It was more for managers than IT professionals. I did get a free copy of Office 2007 out of it, but I was hoping for a copy of Vista. Maybe at a future event. I did get to leave work for four hours, though looking back on it, I’m not sure if I would have had more fun at work alternating between bored and busy, or at the event where it was boredom interspersed with fits of discomfort thanks to the wonderful hotel chairs. 90 or so people crammed into a ballroom that went from frigidly-cold to boiling hot for four hours? How could that not be fun?
Oops, almost time to go. My favorite part of the day. Bus home, walk to McMenamins, and thus ends Wednesday.
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