What I love

The things we see.

The way we see.

The way she listens.

The way she understands.

The way she sounds, even from the moment I first heard the sound of her voice, on that January afternoon.

The way we read each other.

The way she smiles.

The moments she smiles.

The candid pictures.

The flowers in her hair.

The vintage shoes and dresses.

The way she touches me.

The way she feels.

The way we can communicate deeply without talking.

The eyes...ever the eyes.

The way she absorbs the moment.

The way she loves our children.

The special place we share.

The memories we create.

The road trips we take.

The interests we share.

The music we love.

The colors of her hair.

The goals and dreams we share.

The way I feel, when I go to sleep, knowing that I am loved.

The way I feel, when I think about the whole of my existence, and know that I have found that one kindred spirit, the one that can only come along once in a lifetime, and realize she is mine and I am hers.

The future and what it holds.

Why Star Trek sucks

Because it's not Star Wars, and in my formative years, that was the difference. The vision George Lucas created in sci-fi was far superior to anything Roddenberry and later Berman created, and I'm not just talking about the special effects. Lucas created classic human drama, enhanced and expanded by fantastic technology, but still plagued by the same individual and societal shortcomings that makes good drama. While Roddenberry tried to do the same thing, Star Trek's basic premise of humankind's enlightened societal condition and superior sense of ethics ultimately cheapened anything Kirk or the crew of the Enterprise accomplished. Of course they always prevailed, and in a perfect way. In a universe as seemingly perfect as the Federation, where you can't even find wrinkled clothing, much less a speck of dirt...anywhere...or equipment that shows even the slightest signs of wear and tear, would you expect any less of them? At least Luke Skywalkers landspeeder looked like the typical POS old Camaro a teenager would drive.

Now don't get me wrong...Star Wars took a turn for the worse after the first 3 movies. And it doesn't stack up to really good sci-fi, like Dune or the new BSG series. So it's not perfect. But at least Lucas had a good premise to work with.

Star Trek also sucks because, for the most part, over the years, it just kept getting worse. Flipping channels, I just watched a few more minutes of Star Trek: Voyager and I got that same sick feeling in my stomach like when I try to watch Jerry Springer, Toddlers and Tiaras, or Judge Judy. It's just so campy and unrealistic. Also, as I get older, I have less and less patience with most sci-fi as I gain a deeper appreciation for good storytelling and dramatical narratives, which, except for the aforementioned examples, sci-fi is really bad at.

Alfred Hitchcock said that drama is just life with all the dull bits removed. Good sci-fi is a good combination of drama and futurism. But it's still about the drama first, the futurism second. Star Trek (and Stargate SG-1, for that matter) is too far removed from real life, and therefore falls into the category of bad drama. I can't respect it, therefore I have a hard time enjoying it.

It could be argued that Star Wars is bad futurism. There are no real explanations for how some technology works or even theories it is based on. At least Star Trek tries to explain itself using our current understanding of physics. But maybe that's the point...I can live with bad futurism, because its the drama that draws me in. If I want raw futurism, I'll just watch the Discovery channel.

There are a few more things about Star Trek that bug me:

• Humankind is perfect, now that they are "mature" enough, as a species.
• Aliens all look like humans with makeup.
• Bad guys all sound strangely like Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany.
• In later series, excessive time travel exacerbates bad plot lines
• Given the variance of cultural, social and political habits and practices within our own species and on our own planet, I have to question the casual relationships the humans have with several dozen alien species after only a few hours or years of contact.
• Everyone speaks English.
• The Ferengi.

Interesting how much more appealing the new Star Trek movie from 2009 was. It incorporated many elements that made Star Wars work so well, (the "used future" for example) almost as if Lucas had produced it. This new direction could work well.

Advice to the kiddos

Educate yourselves in something you love, or at least like.

Live your life as you want it first, then get married, if that's what you want, not the other way around. Don't get married to find yourself. Find yourself as preparation to getting married and then maintaining an honest relationship.

For example, if you come to the conclusion that you are most happy crunching numbers and solving complex problems, and that involves living in a big city, wearing a suit to work and carrying a briefcase into a big glass building every day, accept and embrace it. Alternately, you may find that living in the suburbs, preparing lesson plans and teaching eighth graders is more satisfying. If either of these or a million other scenarios appeals enough to you to make a life out of, make it happen early after college. Then, in that circle of personal and professional satisfaction, you may be blessed to meet someone in your circle that is not only compatible, but the one. You don't just have to be what you want, you have to exist in that want and see what the gods provide for.

The 6 pre-requisites of marriage:

-Educate yourself

-Date and be with lots of people

-Spend lots of time with a potential mate. Don't fall in love early, get past the infatuation and see what happens, then think about marriage

-Be over 30.

-Be established in your career and life's pursuits.

-Remember, this is just your Dad speaking.

Don't worry about marriage or sex or having babies. Worry about the relationships you develop by being true to yourself. If you're true to yourself, you will attract those that will stand by you because they value the same things. They will be the basis of your life-long friends, and one of them will likely be your soul mate.

Don't dismiss that voice in your heart. Sometimes it will disagree with what others are telling you or persuading you to do. That voice is unique to you, and the messages it sends are meant for you to interpret. Do what you will, but do not ignore that voice.

If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. The only guaranteed formula for success in life is hard work and preparation... intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and physically...and the rest is luck. But if you're smart, you can stack the cards in your favor.

Don't invest in anything with too much readily available information. Don't expect to get ahead doing what everybody else does. Look at what everybody else is doing, then at least find a way to do it better, or better yet, do something extraordinary. (Example: don't build a faster train. Build an airliner.) If you read something in the Wall Street Journal, and get inspired to invest in something, realize, you're at least 2 million people too late. The early bird catches the worm, and he didn't need the WSJ or some TV advertisement telling him to invest in gold or rare coins. His instincts guided him. (Plus some hard work and preparation that got him there in the first place. See previous paragraph.) Opportunity is when preparation meets luck.

Your parents love you unconditionally, want the best for you, and would jump on a grenade for you. That doesn't mean they know anything about parenting, it just means they are going to do their best, and like it or not, that's all you're going to get. What you become is far more dependent on the decisions you start making as early as you are able. Luckily, some of your parents realize we are raising parents and adults, not children, and are allowing you to grow and experience what it means to be human and are not just an isolated ego-enhancing experiment for mom or dad.

Listen to opinions, but remember they are just opinions, not reality. At the end of the day, you decide.

Respect and use the rules of science. Science is not just a set of tools, it is a way of thinking, rational and unbiased thinking.

Fear absolutes and unassailable solutions. Anyone that claims to have found "the answer" is lying, or asking for money. Don't get ripped off. Scientists and Artists realize that every solution is just a step in the process to perfection. Don't presume the conclusion, you'll end up stale and trapped by others. Rather, embrace the journey there, and accept that there is no destination but the journey. The only truth lies in universal principles, and only a few are apparent. Live by those principles alone, combined with what the gods tell you. Do not listen to the exploitative religions, belief systems, weight loss plans, fast-money programs or other marketing scams that take advantage of those principles and extend them into servitude and revenue streams. At the end of the day, if you want to know the truth in the real world...follow the money.

Be true to yourselves. Make your life what you want it. Know that you are always loved.

Sunrise

I've seen lots of sunrises. At many altitudes...Phoenix, over the Superstitions. Greer, over the pines on the canyon wall. Flagstaff, through the pines on Mt Eldon, watching the light reflect off the face of the love of my life. Tucson, over the Santa Catalinas. Melbourne, over Mt. Dandenong from the 30th floor of my apartment.

All brilliant, but not so brilliant as the one I saw last week on the way to Melbourne from Los Angeles.

Qantas flight 94 left LA at 1120pm on a Wednesday. The big A380 took off, heading west, chasing the already set sun, but would never catch up with it. It's a 15 hour flight to Melbourne on a very large plane with about 600 passengers aboard. After about 12 hours, the sun lapped the earth, and came up from behind us. Sunrise from 38000 feet is a bit different,

It started with a vague light that wasn't moonlight, more like coming from below. There was a good moon out that night and lots of stars were still visible. What startled me was when the sun started to rise it only created some narrow bands of color; orange and yellow color located near the horizon. The net effect, which is where the real celestial brilliance occurred was in seeing the full spectrum of sunrise all the way thru to night,

I could see the indigo blue sky, compete with constellations (like the southern cross:) bright and visible, faded into a pink then orange band of sunrise, emanating from the sun as it moves across the ocean we were crossing.

Eventually, I could see day arising and night retreating in one view.

To see a sunrise is amazing enough. But to see one where, in one view, you can see the sun rising and the night retreating, framed by the deep indigo blue of the upper atmosphere, on top of the curvature of the earth is something hard to describe. It looked surreal, almost fake...but I couldn't look away.

Eventually, the sun overtook the moonlight and the starlight and illuminated the clouds below in a bright white, and drowned out any stars still visible. It was day time, and it had snuck up on us.

Interesting commentary

Extreme and bizarre religious ideas are so commonplace in American history that it is difficult to speak of them as fringe at all. To speak of a fringe implies a mainstream, but in terms of numbers, perhaps the largest component of the religious spectrum in contemporary America remains what it has been since colonial times: a fundamentalist evangelicalism with powerful millenarian strands. The doomsday theme has never been far from the center of American religious thought. The nation has always had believers who responded to this threat by a determination to flee from the wrath to come, to separate themselves from the City of Destruction, even if that meant putting themselves at odds with the law and with their communities or families. . . . We can throughout American history find select and separatist groups who looked to a prophetic individual claiming divine revelation, in a setting that repudiated conventional assumptions about property, family life, and sexuality. They were marginal groups, peculiar people, people set apart from the world: the Shakers and the Ephrata community, the communes of Oneida and Amana, the followers of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

– Philip Jenkins, Mystics and Messiahs

The best fruit of religious experience are the best things that history has to show… The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for religious ideals.

– William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it…

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world.

– Bertrand Russell, Why I am not a Christian

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.

– Bertrand Russell, Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?

Both revelation and delusion are attempts at the solution of problems. Artists and scientists realize that no solution is ever final, but that each new creative step points the way to the next artistic or scientific problem. In contrast, those who embrace religious revelations and delusional systems tend to see them as unshakeable and permanent…

Religious faith is an answer to the problem of life… The majority of mankind want or need some all-embracing belief system which purports to provide an answer to life’s mysteries, and are not necessarily dismayed by the discovery that their belief system, which they proclaim as “the truth,” is incompatible with the beliefs of other people. One man’s faith is another man’s delusion…

Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which it is defended, and partly upon the number of people subscribing to it.”

– Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay

Critical examination of the lives and beliefs of gurus demonstrates that our psychiatric labels and our conceptions of what is or is not mental illness are woefully inadequate. How, for example, does one distinguish an unorthodox or bizarre faith from delusion?

Gurus are isolated people, dependent upon their disciples, with no possibility of being disciplined by a Church or criticized by contemporaries. They are above the law. The guru usurps the place of God. Whether gurus have suffered from manic-depressive illness, schizophrenia, or any other form of recognized, diagnosable mental illness is interesting but ultimately unimportant. What distinguishes gurus from more orthodox teachers is not their manic-depressive mood swings, not their thought disorders, not their delusional beliefs, not their hallucinatory visions, not their mystical states of ecstasy: it is their narcissism.

– Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: A people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware: a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time–or even knew selflessness or courage or literature–but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.

– Annie Dillard, For The Time Being

(Fundamentalist movements) are embattled forms of spirituality, which have emerged as a response to a perceived crisis. They are engaged in a conflict with enemies whose secularist policies and beliefs seem inimical to religious belief. Fundamentalists do not regard this battle as a conventional political struggle, but experience it as a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil. They fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identity by means of a selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past. To avoid contamination, they often withdraw from mainstream society to create a counterculture; yet fundamentalists are not impractical dreamers. They have absorbed the pragmatic rationalism of modernity, and under the guidance of their charismatic leaders, they refine these “fundamentals” so as to create an ideology that provides the faithful with a plan of action. Eventually they fight back to resacralize an increasingly skeptical world.”

– Karen Armstrong, The Battle For God

Australia

Or Oz, as it's called. I spent a week in Melbourne in February to scope a project for work. Picked up a little 'strine while down there too, so now I can annoy all my friends with my Steve Erwin impressions. (Crikey!) There is a repair and overhaul site there that needs a new system installed so we can turn off a 40 year old mainframe that costs us big bucks every year. So, they sent me there to go figure it out. Oh, and by the way, it needs to be done by August. 2010.

Great.

Fortunately, it's a small-ish site (80 people) and they are all easy to work with. But this being my single biggest objective of the year, it looks like I'm going to have to live there for a few months to run the project. A senior VP that I know and trust "strongly suggested" that there be a full time project manager down there as he doesn't want that site to be the reason we have to re-new a large mainframe support contract in August. That same senior VP "strongly suggested" who that project manager be. It's great to be trusted, I guess, but that's a long time away from the family. In such predicaments I must forge ahead...

I know what you're thinking. Oh darn. 5 months in Australia. I get to miss AZ summer. Can you sense the disappointment? The utter sense of loss that I will miss one of my adult summers in the desert?

Exactly.

In all seriousness though, as much as I will miss my family, this is a good project and a great opportunity from a career perspective. And I will probably fly Amy and Jade down there for awhile to keep me company, so it won't be unbearable. I'll have a corporate apartment in the city too, so I'm already soliciting all my friends and family to come down and spend a week or two, rent free, while I'm down there

But back to the subject...Australia. First of all, right out of the airport, I noticed something significant about Oz. They drive on the wrong side of the road. Even the cars are set up to enable this, with the steering wheel on the passenger side of the car. Crazy, but it did allow me to experience something I never thought I would. Allow me to explain:

When I was a kid, I spent my early teen years riding in the front seat and absorbing the rules of the road. In essence, I learned to drive from the passenger seat. It seemed natural, the right place to experience the open road from. You can imagine my surprise and awkwardness when I got my drivers permit and had to get used to driving from the actual drivers seat. The seat belt was on the wrong side. The rear view mirror was opposite. The door was on my left, meaning I had to hang my LEFT arm out the window. It was all wrong.

But Australia solved all that. And even though I kept turning on my windshield wipers every time I went for the turn signal, I finally got to live out my childhood dream. I got to drive from the passenger seat.

Awesome.

The next thing I noticed was the utter lack of brand recognition I possessed while down there. I recognized nothing at the local strip mall. You know the usual array of signs...Best Buy, Subway, McDonalds, Kinkos, Starbucks, Target, Borders, etc. Down under, with the exception of the golden arches and an unusually high concentration of 7-11's and Safeway's, it was all new. I also realized I had no perception of brand quality. In other words, I couldn't tell if Lowe's Menswear and Casual Guy were more like Banana Republic or K-mart. This freedom was kind of nice, because I realized I could live anywhere in town and not be concerned that I was surrounded by sub-par box-chain stores. When I came back to Phoenix, I still had this sort of "pre-concieved-notion-free" view and as I drove home from the airport didn't have that subconscious perception that I was in a good or bad part of town. It was kind of liberating, but scary that I had those notions apparantly programmed in by US marketers.

Public transit is huge and effective down there. They have a version of light rail that goes EVERYWHERE. In fact, when I go back I probably won't use a rental car. Between the Metlink and the cheap single-speed I plan to purchase, I should be able to get just about anywhere. I may even have time to catch up on some reading while I sit on the tram.

And then there's Aussie-rules football. I went to a pre-season game on friday night and watched St. Kilda edge rival Collingwood 100-99. Aussie-rules is great. It's one part soccer, one part rugby, and one part basketball with a little American football thrown in. And the field is a giant oval, like 3 times the area of a standard American football field. It's less the organized fight that rugby is, with no offsides rules and the players spread out across the field, but faster than soccer and, in my opinion, more entertaining.

My trip back should be interesting, and I'm looking forward to it. It's not every day I get an opportunity like this, and the challenge is intriguing.

More to follow...

Fear

"One reason that the Allies overestimated the effect of strategic bombardment was that they failed to realize that the Germans were much more afraid of their own government than British and American bombs." Good quote. Can the same be said of the Soviets, the Viet Cong, the Khmer Rouge, Saddam Hussein, Al-Qaeda...etc? So what do we do, keep dropping bombs? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results...

It all boils down to fear.

Fear...of change, of others, of loss. Face the change, face the fear...face the fear, face the future.

Evolve, please.