For the past two months, every visit to a nearby Barnes and Noble either started or ended with a trip to that section of the store where beautifully ornate but overpriced journals are kept, displayed in such a way that even the blind could appreciate their beauty. Some of them are bright, others subtle; some come in hard or soft covers while others seem to be somewhere in between; they’re bound in leather, and plastic, and cardboard; some look as if they were designed to become fixtures upon desks while still others look as if they were meant to be tossed in a small bag and taken on a hike in the forrest, where a writer would note nature-inspired tales and observations.

On a trip to Puerto Rico in 2001, one of these–a small, black journal with a soft-leather cover containing two spots for writing implements and a string to tie the thing shut–became the preferred recording device of thought, conversations, and observations made during the visit. It was a place in which ideas and descriptions and pictures and memories could dance. That journal’s still around, siting in a box in a storage closet, stuffed with post cards, pictures, and other memorabilia.

That trip was eight years ago. Was it time to get another?

During a honeymoon trip to Orlando, just over five years ago, another one of those journals, received as a wedding gift, sat open in a hotel, its blank pages stared upon by eyes lusting for words but without the will to commit them. It was spiral-bound and had a hard cover of red and autumn, with the words “I hope you dance” inscribed in gold lettering. Eventually, the events and thoughts of that day were indeed committed to the pages, but that was the last time that journal would be written on for another four years, when those eyes, now filled with reverence for the notebook, would again gaze upon its still blank pages, thinking of what could be.

That journal now sits inside a desk, less than fifteen of its pages written on. Ironic.

This time there was no trip to precipitate the purchase, and it wasn’t a gift. Instead it was simply a matter of desire, which is why it took two months and multiple trips to that particular store to finally decide that it was worth it. Two months and numerous trips for a $40 purchase. Why?

Someone in a writing group once quipped that it had taken her years of writing before she was finally convinced she was good enough to write on one of those fancy journals. Another person jumped in saying that she had felt the same way, until she realized that the thing wasn’t some magical tome, it was just a notebook–an expensive notebook!–one in which she could write, make mistakes, and doodle if she wanted.

Between two living room chairs, on the floor, sits the “Medici Lions Kraft Recycled Italian Leather Journal.” That, by the way, is a rococoesque, marketing-inspired name for “pricey notebook”. Pressed on to the leather of both the front and back covers, the edges protected by a thin wrapping of leather string, are fanciful patterns featuring plants and decorative lines. These are bordered a by a string of petite, golden leaves. On the center of the front cover is a shield with the Medici lion, a beast on its hind legs, facing right.

When it was first removed from plastic packaging–protecting this notebook from passing hands until ready for use–the relaxing smell of soft leather filled the air as the notebook slipped out. That was followed by some time spent enjoying the thing for what it was, smelling it, touching it, and imagining the words that could be. Pages turned one by one, blank, waiting until the moment when they would be forever scarred and at the same time blessed with the fulfillment of their implicit raison d’être.

The only books written which can often be considered near-perfect the first time around are journals. Thinking about that, it became a possibility that this would be its use. But maybe there was something more. The soft feel of its cover and sturdiness of its pages demanded that more than the trivial thoughts and goings on of an average day be conferred upon it. A novel? A collection of short stories? An outlining of philosophical inquiries and thought experiments?

Ideas for what to write in the journal abound, but fleshing out these before beginning to write is at least somewhat important. Unlike the many tens of legal pads onto which hundreds of pens’ worth of ink have been spilled, this type of notebook isn’t one to be readily discarded. Is it okay to fill it with something trite?

Not surprisingly, a week after its purchase its pages are, of course, still empty.

It is not a holy relic, nor is it some decorative piece meant only to enhance a place by simply existing. It’s a notebook, one in which words will eventually be written, one which will eventually be filled, and one which may eventually be read by eyes other than that of the words’ author. In any case, one thing’s for sure: after a months-long line and a $40 entrance fee, it would surely be a waste to not dance.

One day, when mom was doing the laundry, she looked at the back yard told me, “That grass is so high Tarzan’s going to make his next movie in our back yard.” This was the greatest news any four year old could get: Tarzan would be coming to my house to make a movie in my back yard!

Somewhere in the back of my mind thoughts wondering whether there would be enough room for him bubbled up. I mean really, there were no trees back there, how was he going to swing around? But I pushed those thoughts out as soon as they appeared. After all, mom said he’d be coming to make a movie, so she had already talked to him on the phone, right? And how had he found out about our yard? Dad probably told him. (They knew all the famous people.)

Although those questions still gnawed at me, my excitement never lessened, my faith never waned. He was coming to make a movie: he was the king of the jungle, and our back yard was as jungle as he was likely to get around here. And most of his movies were done just a couple of streets over, like everything else.

For days, I bragged to my friends that Tarzan would come to my house sometime soon. They were excited. I beamed. We all wanted to meet him, all wanted to be in the movie, all wanted to swing on vines. We even practiced our Tarzan screams, much to the chagrin of our parents and the neighbors.

Sometime later, I can’t say when, I heard the sound of an engine buzzing in the back yard. I stood at the marquesina and looked on as dad slowly mowed the grass, cutting it down to a more civil size. Why was he doing this? Tarzan hadn’t come yet! Then again, maybe Tarzan was like Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Mouse, coming and going without being seen. Or maybe he had decided to film somewhere else this time. I never asked anyone about that, thinking that if I didn’t, maybe he’d still show up.

Months passed. Every time the grass grew more than six inches I would get excited: maybe this time he would come, or if he’d come last time, maybe I could see him. Or maybe I’d find a lion in the back yard. Or maybe… maybe…

Justifying to myself why he hadn’t come yet was easy. After all, it wasn’t like the back yard was big enough to swing in, and there really weren’t any trees, other than our neighbor’s lemon tree, which branches that grew over the fence to our yard. Maybe dad and mom decided he couldn’t make the movie in our back yard and forgot to tell me. But the hope lived, and lived, and lived, until one day it left.

I waked to the back yard, barefoot and in my underwear, with woolly hair looking a bit like a jungle boy. The grass was about as tall as my ankles. I looked around yard, at the bushes then at the sides of the house, even the where all the recao grew. He wasn’t there. He wouldn’t be there. No Tarzan, no movie. He wouldn’t come. He didn’t come. Tarzan never showed up.

Edit: P.S…
Years later–only a couple of years ago, in fact–I finally asked mom about what she said that day. She looked at me with as if she’d heard something very strange, then told me she didn’t remember saying anything along those lines.

For years I had wondered whether maybe she used the phrase regularly for things being so wild that Tarzan himself would be involved. (Having four small kids running about, this couldn’t be discounted.) Turns out this she didn’t; this was an off-hand remark, something she no longer remembered, and likely didn’t remember just a few hours after first saying it then. I obviously did.

Quality.

Recent events

I started examining that aspect of my work after a few recent events: a couple of recent posts in blogs and forums, and the cancellation of an appointment.

First, there was a post by my favorite mommy blogger, Melissa, who questioned whether she should keep blogging past this year (and the ensuing followup). There she said something most of us don’t really have the guts to say, to ourselves or out loud, though anyone who’s blogged consistently for more than a few months has come across:

I’m running out of things to say that I think really matter

As a blogger, that’s one of the most important things to keep in mind. What happens when you no longer believe that what you say really matters? (If you want to see where I stand on that, read the first post, then read my overtly verbose comment in that post.)

The second thing that got me thinking was a question asked by Scrivs in the 9Rules Members forum:

This is something that I think about at times and the question basically is would you take yourself out of 9rules because you know that your content is slipping? How many of you know that your content isn’t what it used to be, but convince yourselves that you will pick it back up eventually?

I suppose even Camelot has its errant knights.

Along with that question came this link which asks about original blogging, and why it’s so difficult. Fact is, if you’ve never run a blog you don’t know how challenging it can be to keep content coming on a steady basis. If you have or do run a blog, then I’m sure you can appreciate where I’m coming from. And through all this comes the question of quality.

Speaking of which, recently 9Rules celebrated the conclusion to Submission Round 6, which netted some excellent, phenomenal blogs like Novelr, Dumb Little Man, and Newly Ancient. I’ll be honest, the quality of these entrants made me wonder whether I should re-apply for my membership, in order to ensure that my quality really is to the level it should be. Unfortunately, this type of judgment isn’t one I can always makes subjectively. I am, after all, human, with and ego, with insecurities, with hopes, fears, dreams and doubts. So why didn’t I? Because I still believe I’m good enough. But to alleviate any fears, I started working on improving my quality, not just here, but in all areas of my life.

How much is too much?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a bit of a perfectionist. Mind you, not everything has to be perfect, but I’m always wondering about what I bring to the table in terms of quality. Not just in blogging (though it is supremely important to me), but in all I do. Whenever I write a script, I wonder about it. Whenever I’m working on a Visio diagram, it’s the foremost thing on my mind. Whenever I write a short story, or set up a computer system or do anything which will eventually affect anyone else — especially something to which my name will be attached — I think about quality.

But with all this wondering about whether or not something is of quality, I’m often left wondering “how much is too much?”

The simple answer, I believe, would go something like this: Use the law of diminishing returns as your guide. If you’re working harder and harder to attain increasingly smaller gains, then maybe you should call it quits. But then this raises another question: even if you’re getting diminishing returns, will that extra bit of quality make the difference? Conventional wisdom says “no”: if your work can’t stand without it then there’s a problem with the rest of the work, not with that bit. Unconventionally, one could argue that the extra bit of quality is what makes the difference between great and memorable, between that which is held in high esteem and that by which all others are judged. I suppose that’s why Hemingway was so picky about his sentences. (If you go according to popular folklore, Hemingway would spend days ensuring that a line was just right.)

Between two masters

For the past week, I’ve been working on a project for work, one on which a major contract depends. Due to its importance, I’ve treated everything for this is with utmost import, focusing on both the speed (due to an approaching headline) and, more importantly, the quality with which it is accomplished, to the point where it’s less important for me to go home on time than it is to get things done just right.

The funny thing about quality is that if you’re working hard on something, something else usually has to suffer. Because of this project, during the week I had to cancel an appointment. I hated doing it because it was so very last minute. I despise when people cancel on me last minute, and I despise even more when I have to do it to others, since what suffers there is often the quality of my word. But I couldn’t help thinking — after the fact, unfortunately — that I could have gotten away with doing a little less in the way of quality for the project in order to keep my appointment. On one hand, I had a project which needed to be finished. On the other, I had an appointment to keep. Had I hurried the project, I could have kept my appointment. The work would have been good, mind you. Not great, but good. Instead, I decided to go for the gold, so I sat there, reviewing what I had written and touching up the illustrations which had been made, in order to ensure that whatever work I turned in, whatever was associated with me, would also be associated with excellence. The price of this was, of course, a tarnish to someone’s idea of my accountability. Was it worth it?

In feudal Japan, if a samurai had two masters, and he received conflicting orders from each, he would instead choose death, so that he would not disgrace either, nor disgrace his name or family. I didn’t have two masters, but I can’t say I didn’t feel the convergence of two conflicting orders forcing me to sacrifice a part of myself. Had I a sword I wouldn’t have used it for seppuku or anything, but maybe I would have poked myself with it.

The next day, I returned to find a complement from the project leader on the work I’d done the day before, specifically referencing something I could only have accomplished by staying late. While the complement was good and all, I can’t help wondering whether it really made a difference, and whether the price paid for that was too high.

A search, a hindrance

Often times, when I don’t post for a while, it’s not because I’m not writing. It’s because I’m writing and I’m completely dissatisfied with the product. I write stories, short ideas, little funny quips… none of which satisfy. At those points I can’t help but wonder whether I’m simply writing a lot of crap or whether I’m being too hard on myself. (You know, like when you’re at a forum and want to reply in a thread, but don’t feel you have anything interesting to say, so you write a reply out anyway and then decide not to press “Submit” because you don’t think it’s any good. Wait, does that happen to anyone else?) I’ve seen that happen lately. A lot. And it’s getting annoying. But what can I do?

When does the search for quality become a hindrance? When it brings you to a grinding halt? Could be. Then again, maybe “searching for quality” is an excuse to be lazy.

As for that Fark post, maybe I’ll just post it in a forum somewhere, and if it isn’t any good, then it isn’t.

Did I do an OK sales job? If I didn’t — and I probably didn’t — forgive me: I’m new at that. For now, just enjoy the story. (By the way, this is a pretty long story — 8250 words! — so I’ve made it available on a PDF. You can choose to download it double spaced (33 pages), or single spaced (15 pages). And, of course, you can continue reading on the site to understand a bit of how this story came about, as well as to read it online.)

As before, the way I created this story was by first asking for totally random ideas. These elements are all included in the story, regardless of how wildly divergent they are. I just hope they don’t sound too awkward or out of place. Here were the ideas/themes and their submitters:

• Joe Lencioni: Bears, Beets, Battlestar Galactica
• Carl Holscher: Cats, Croissants, Calligraphy
• Nils Geylen: Delirium Tremens, “Don’t you love my Lederhosen”, “Directory not found, please try again”
• Melissa Garrett: “He won’t even eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich”, “he likes his ham sliced thinly”, “she prefers the taste of beer”
• Rich Dunlop-Walters: “You fucking fiend”, Occam’s Razor, Time travel
• Hrafn Thorisson: The cigarette was broken, “How could he fit all that on one fork?!”

Special thanks goes out to all of these folks without whom this story would still have been possible, but it certainly wouldn’t be as good.

Alright now, without further stalling for time, here’s the story.

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9

Chapter 1

“So, the kid falls into the pit of laser vipers, and now he has their laser powers. Isn’t that awesome?!” Radley held the copy of ViperKid in front of Carlos, telling him the story of the unlikely superhero as the two eleven year old boys walked home from the Fat Daisy’s comic book shop. They had each gone with five dollars on hand, excited to pick up the new issues of Ultimate Warlock, Condorito 2000, and Occam’s Razor. Instead what they found was Fat Daisy, the store’s owner, just about giving away a box-full of old comics, fifty of them, for ten dollars. This was a once-in-a-lifetime deal. Collectibles, in fact, or so Radley swore.

Radley Cummings was a short, chunky, brown kid whose mother dressed him straight from the pages of the Sears catalog, only three sizes larger, as if she expected him to hurry up and grow into his clothes. Of course, with the way she fed him one would think she was more worried about his girth than his height, and about giving him a size that matched his attitude. He stared at the issue of ViperKid, included in the batch they had bought, with both pride and amazement. This was issue number two, where ViperKid first met SciGuy, the character who would first become ViperKid’s sidekick, and then his archnemesis. He explained this to Carlos like an over excited music teacher would teach pupils not just music, but artistry.

Carlos Andropov, the taller of the two boys, hunched to see what Radely pointed at. He was thin, tall for his age. Cuban and Russian by heritage, he was very light skinned, making the dark Radley look all the darker. Like today, Carlos more often than not wore his older brother’s hand-me-downs, usually jeans and hoodies. When he didn’t wear those, he wore their older sister’s hand-me-downs, at least those shirts and sweaters he could get away with wearing.

Until today, Carlos hadn’t heard of ViperKid, or most of the comics Radley had convinced him to combine their money to buy. But, wanting to eventually call himself a true graphic novel connoisseur, and feeling that Radley already was, Carlos let himself be persuaded by the more outwardly excitable of the pair and went along with deal. Only now, he was getting his first real taste of buyer’s remorse.

“That’s… cool. Yeah, I guess.” Carlos wasn’t sure what to say. He would have rather been reading this month’s edition of Ultimate Warlock, where Ulwar the Warlock was about to uncover the true identity of Pugratlion, the villain who killed all of Ulwar students with army of chimeras that attacked Salem School. Rumors were circulating on the Web that Pugratlion was actually Ulwar’s brightest pupil, Amethyst Crystala, who Ulwar had expelled from Salem School in issue #73, after she started to create transgenic homunculi in the school’s biology lab. Instead, he was about to find out how some ViperKid with laser viper vision would befriend SkyGuy, or whatever his name was.

Already, Carlos had grown bored. He started to walk ahead of Radley when suddenly the boy grabbed his arm and pulled him back. “Hey, check this out!” Radley said excitedly. “There’s a cuss word in here!”

“Nah ah!” Carlos’s eyes snapped back to the comic with sudden renewed interest.

“Yeah, check this out!” Radley pointed pudgy finger at a chat bubble with the words “SciGuy, you fucking fiend!” printed in large, bold lettering.

“Whoa!”

“I told you this was cool!”

“Yeah… Uh… cool…” Then, with unsure voice he added, “You know, I think maybe we shouldn’t be reading these…”

Radley stopped, looked at the other boy and raised one eyebrow questioningly. “Why?”

“Because it has cuss words in it, and my mom says cuss words are bad.” Actually, his mom had always told him that cuss words would get him into Hell. Would he go there because he read the word? No, worse, because he bought the comic which contained it?

“They’re not that bad. My dad uses them all the time.”

“Yeah, and my mom says your dad is a fat drunk.” Carlos’s eyes went wide and his head snapped towards his friend as his body suddenly tensed. “I’m sorry! I mean, that’s what my mom says, but –”

“It’s OK,” Radley said, shrugging. “My mom says the same thing every time I come back from his house.” Radley’s father lived almost eight hours away, which is why he only really got to visit every couple of weeks.

Carlos looked at the magazine in Radley’s hands then took off his backpack, which held half of what they had bought, put the back on the floor, and opened it. “Let’s take these back.”

“No way!” Radley grabbed the backpack, closed it, and slung it on his shoulder. He was now carrying the two back packs, one on each shoulder to even him out. “I’ll give you five bucks when we get to my house for your half.”

“You don’t have five dollars,” Carlos said.

“I’ll get five dollars tomorrow. Allowance.”

“But… what if they’re sold out by the time you get ‘em?”

Radley thought for a second. This was, after all, a very real possibility. It had happened before, last month, in fact, when they missed out on the last copy of Amey Zing. Then, it hit him. “Why don’t we go back to the store and ask Fat Daisy if she’ll save you a copy?”

It sounded like a fair enough idea. Heck, it was a great idea! After all, why wouldn’t she hold a copy for a couple of loyal customers? Had they not already spent months’ worth of allowance buying comics and game cards from her shop? Carlos agreed, and the boys headed back to Fat Daisy’s. He was still a little unsure, but for the most part confident that all this would turn out just fine, and that he wouldn’t be sent to Hell — or worse, be grounded — for keeping a comic with cuss words in it.

Next Chapter (Chapter 2)

A few days ago, someone over at 9Rules Notes asked about the best financial advice others could offer to someone coming out of college. Some of the answers were traditional, some where a bit “out there”, but the one that caught my eye was this one:

Get one credit card (one!) to build credit, but pay off every cent before you get charged a penny of interest.

She goes on to talk about a few items I not only totally agree with, but have started to live and swear by (treating savings and investments as fixed, monthly expenses; treating yourself once in a while). But it was the statement quoted above that really caught my eye, since it highlighted a misunderstanding of the purpose of credit and credit cards. (This is not to say that the author doesn’t understand these, but it does speak of a somewhat limited view of credit which tends to limit the available financial options at the disposal of most individuals.)

Most people think of credit cards as money they can borrow when their funds run low. They also think of credit as something that builds up over time if you take care of your bills on time. While both of these statements can be true (depending on your particular situation), they miss the point of the entire credit score and credit card system.

By the way, before we start, remember this: credit cards are not there so you can spend extra money. They’re meant as short term tools for investment, primarily for business. If you can appreciate and understand this statement (and I hope that by the end of this post you will) you’ll soon realize that credit cards may be one of the most useful tools at your disposal. If you don’t understand this statement, then yes, for the love of God, “get one credit card (one!) to build credit, but pay off every cent before you get charged a penny of interest.”

The Basics of Credit

Your credit score is nothing but the rating financial institutions use to rate how much money they can safely make off of you. Why do I say this? Think about it this way: because letting you borrow their money is an investment for them, which may have a return ranging anywhere up to 32% a year. (If you’re the one lending the money, and therefore receiving the benefit, then this is called “Return on Investment”, or ROI for short. If you’re the one being lent money, and therefore paying the interest, then this is called an “Annual Percentage Rate”, or APR for short.)

Here are a few examples of how your credit — the measure used to determine how good of an investment you are for them — can go up or down.

• If you borrow $2000 on a credit card with a $5000 limit and you pay it all off within a year (with all payments being made on time), then your credit score will increase because the company knows that you (a) will borrow money and (b) are good about paying it back in a timely fashion, with interest. (Remember: the higher your APR, the higher their ROI). You’re tagged as a good investment for them.
• If you never borrow any money and always pay everything in cash, then your credit score will neither go up nor down. In fact, it won’t exist. You will find it hard to get a loan when you need it because you’re what’s called a “ghost” in the system. In other words, you don’t have a credit rating at this point and they don’t yet know whether they can trust you! (This really ticked me off when I first discovered it: I had always made it a point to pay for everything cash, then when I went to get a car loan I couldn’t do it because I had no credit!)
• If you borrow $2000 on a credit card then don’t pay even the minimum payments, you’ve just told the financial institutions that you cannot be trusted. Even if you do make your payments, unless they’re on time, the companies will tag you as someone who doesn’t deliver the returns on investment in a timely fashion. This makes you a risky investment, and as a result your credit score goes down, since they might make money off of you, but they may also lose money on you. You’re tagged as a bad investment for them.
• You have a credit limit of $5000 spread over two credit cards ($2500 each). You max them both out on things like going out to dinner and taking care of miscellaneous expenses, and buying yourself some new furniture that you really shouldn’t be buying. You start paying off the minimum payment at whatever interest

Side Note: Interested in Interest? By the way, ever wonder why interest is so high on your statement? I mean if it’s 21% interest, why is more than half your minimum payment going to the principle?! Interest is calculated as follows:

• taking how much you owe (say, $10,000),
• dividing that into, say, 50 months, or 2% increments (so $200 each — your monthly payments, so a more common number is 60 months for cars),
• figuring out the total annual interest on the entire amount ($2,100 is 21% id $10,000),
• then dividing the total interest by the number of months in a year (12, so $175),
• then adding the monthly payments ($200) to the interest payments ($175),
• and herein we arrive at your total monthly minimum payment: $375, almost half of which is being paid to interest.

If it takes you 3 years to finish paying for this, then this means the companies are making not just 21% on 10,000, they’re making 21% on $10,00 (the first year), 21% on $7,600 (the second year), and 21% on $5,200 (the third year). (Yes, the clock on interest is reset every year, and the interest payment is based on the current amount owed. This is why interest doesn’t go down during the year itself unless you refinance.) Since your payments for the principle were based on the number of months in which you agreed to pay it (and for credit cards I believe the industry standard is 50 months, though this number may be well over 100 months, depending on the card and your situation), the principle statement either stays the same or goes up, proportionally as interest goes down. This is why you get car loan payments of $400 a month on a stead basis, but the principle/interest ratio changes over time.

If you don’t get all this just yet, don’t worry: finish reading this article, then come back to this part. Read it a few times if you have to. Heck, write it down and make up a few examples of your own based on this, but make sure you understand what’s going on with your interest.

So wait, what other evidence is there to support the claim that a credit score is all about them making money off of you?

Have you ever wondered why it was that companies would (a) charge you to view your own credit score, and (b) lower your credit score every time you checked it? (If done often enough, checking your credit score can cost you up to 20% of your total credit score!) It’s because they benefit when you’re left ignorant. What if something happened where they made a mistake on your credit score. Suddenly all your credit card rates rise and you have no idea why! You finally check your credit (which lowers your credit score even more), notice that there have been four checks supposedly bounced in your name (we’ll call this a system error, not identity theft, for simplicity’s sake), and call them to tell them that this is an error on their part. After all is fixed, your credit card rates come back down, so the banks are making less money off of you! Sure, you’re a safer investment, but now they’re competing with other companies which want your business because you’re trust worthy, and so your APR drops to meet the competition. Things would be so much easier (for them) if you weren’t so trustworthy. After all, then you’d be stuck with them, right?

(Of course, it can get nastier than that: some banks will tell you “well that’s just too bad” and keep your rates sky high for someone else’s mistakes. But that’s another subject for another time.)

Only after years of outcries from consumer groups did the government step in and tell credit companies to provide one free credit check per year. To keep their businesses going, the companies capitulated to the demand, but just barely.

Hopefully now you understand the purpose of the credit score. One of the ways to use this knowledge in order to make the score higher (especially if you don’t have a lot of credit) is to take out a credit card and borrow $500 to buy something (or to PayPal some cash over to norb@gnorb.net). Pay it off slowly for a few months (twice the minimum payment is good), then after 3 or 4 months, pay off the whole thing. Do that a few times to show the companies that you’re not frivolous in your spending, and that you can be trusted with money. Later on, when you’re considering buying a car or a house (provided you don’t have the money to buy them cash; yes, people do it all the time) your credit score will reflect that you are a good investment for them a trustworthy custodian of money, and you’ll be able to get a lower APR. (Remember, it’s all about competition for them: they’re competing with other financial institutions for your business. The free market works both ways. Be comforted in this, you do have some power, but it’ll take some work.)

Now, I’ve been talking about the consumer’s point of view, which doesn’t really help you unless you want to spend money. But what if you want to make money? Can you really make money using credit cards? In short yes. In fact, this, my friend, is when the real power of the credit score and the credit card come in to play.

Side Note: How do Investments Work?Now, all this time I’ve been talking about companies investing in you and how this is all part and parcel of your credit score, but you still don’t know how investments work. “I’m not a company,” you say, “I don’t have a stock market ticker symbol!”

Remember: financial companies research you like you research a stock. (Even better, actually, since your finances are a lot more transparent than those of a Fortune 500 company).

An investment is simple: you give Person X money so that he can do whatever he wants to with it, then when he comes back to you he says “Your money grew at this percentage rate, so here’s your money back and some more!” When you buy stocks you’re doing the same thing, except you don’t know what your percentage return will be. When a company gives you credit money, they’re doing the same thing (investing in you) , except they know how much their return will be, since it was part of the agreement.

You invest money in something hoping that it’ll grow, that your money will work for you instead of you for it. If you do you research then your chances of losing money are much less than if you don’t do your research. Same thing with financial institutions: your credit score is basically how they rate you as an investment. A high rating means you’re a good, safe investment. A low rating means you’re not a very good investment. To cover their losses, they’re going to demand a higher return on investment from you if you’re a risky investment, which is why your interest ratings and credit card APRs are so much higher when you have bad credit.

The Credit Card: Your Silent Business Partner

I was listening to a speaker on a television program not too long ago talking about how he buys and sells real estate. Of course, he was trying to sell his own real estate system, so he started talking about the almost mystical “no money down” techniques he uses to buy real estate. Ever wonder what those real “no money down” techniques involve?

Allow me to burst the bubble: there’s always money to be put down. There’s always money to move around. How much money comes out of your own pocket and how much comes out of someone else’s is what determines the real “no money down” situation. While there are a number of ways of looking at this (partner investments, owner financing, down payment assistance programs, etc.) the most common “no money down” technique involves using credit cards.

Now, before you get all uppity and self righteous about how stupid people would have to be to use credit cards to pay off real estate (or any business, for that matter, something I’ll discuss later), let me make another shocking, bubble bursting statement: it’s actually a pretty smart idea, and to an extent, this is why credit cards were created in the first place. Here are few very simplistic examples:

• You see a house for sale for $150,000. You know for a fact that the houses in this area sell for $300,000 (even in a down market), and that it would take only $15,000 to fix, so you decide to buy the house: you want to either fix it and profit, or flip it for an immediate profit. The down payment on this house is $15,000, which you don’t have. Here are some options:
  1. You find a partner who will give you the $15,000, plus he’ll fund the fixing of the house (another $15,000). You do the work, he puts down the cash. He’s asking for 30% of the profit, however, in addition to his $30,000. If you sold the house for $300,000, then your profit would be $150,000, 30% of which would be his, in addition to his initial investment. In short, this means that out of your $150,000, $75,000 would be going to him (his original $30,000 plus 30% of the profit, or $45,000). Total profit to you: $75,000.
  2. You decide to use a credit card (or multiple — it doesn’t matter for this example) with an APR of 21%. You try to flip the house, but no one buys it, so you finish fixing it up, paying the next $15,000 with other credit cards at the same APR. You’re able to sell the house for $285,000 in 6 months. Your gross profit is $135,000. Presuming you paid 21% interest for 6 months on $30,000, your grand total to pay the credit card companies is about $37,000 (I’m using round numbers to be clear; mathematicians, please don’t stab me with your protractors). Your net profit is then $98,000.

  Which is the smarter choice, the partner, or the credit card? (In either case your ROI is not really measurable because you never actually invested anything. Now, this won’t always be the case, but if someone else is funding this much into it, expect to pay a good percentage. The advantage of a partner is that if for some reason the house didn’t sell for two years, then yes, you would end up owing more to the credit card companies. But for business investors (and not speculators) this is seldom a problem. Business investors and business owners who know their business know how to manage these kinds of risks. (And in real estate, the rule of thumb is that you make your money when you buy, not when you sell: if you can’t run the numbers and know you’ll come out profiting, you shouldn’t get into that deal. But I digress. Remember also that you shouldn’t use credit cards to put the down payment on a property which won’t produce income for you. For that, go and get yourself a down payment assistance (DPA) loan.)

• You own a business selling jewelry. You’re about to put on a sales show. Last time you were at a show, you sold out of your jewelry before the end of the show, costing you sales. Based on past response, you decide you need to spend $35,000 (wholesale) in pieces, which you expect to sell (if all of them sell) for a total gross profit of $135,000 ($100,000 net profit). Right now, however, you don’t have $35,000, and you can’t pull out a business loan (for some strange reason I won’t explain). You decide to use your credit card and buy the jewelry. The show, one month later, is a total success, and while you don’t sell out of your pieces, you still make $120,000. After you pay the credit card, you still have made $84,400 in profit (with the rest going to the credit card, $35,000 for principle and about $615 going towards interest), and to take care of the left over stock, you sell it for 50% off the retail price, which still makes you a small profit.

In both of these cases, credit cards were used to make money. Sure, you paid interest, and the interest rates could be considered high, but what would have been the cost of NOT using the credit card? In the first case, it would have forced you to lose over $20,000 in profit money, while in the second case it would have cost $85,000!

In neither of these cases were credit cards used for consumer expense, they were used for business expense, and as such were making money for both the credit card company (in the form of interest) and the business person. This is the classic win-win situation. This is also the original intent of credit cards, to extend and make convenient general lines of credit. Furthermore, they allow financial institutions to make standing loans which accrue interest for them every time they’re tapped. In fact, think of a credit card as a general loan, which you can use for whatever you want. The loan amount is your credit limit for that card, and you can get another loan by simply getting another card. The higher your credit score, the more they’ll trust you with since they know that you can be both trusted with the money, and that you’ll make money for them. In short, you’re a good investment.

The question, as far as you’re concerned, is what you use those loans for. Do you use them to buy a television (and therefore pay for the television AND for the interest, or you use them to invest in a business that will give you an ROI (therefore making more money than you’re paying out)? Do you use them to help yourself, or do you use them to hurt yourself? (This, by the way, is where money management comes in. I’m not talking about the software, I’m talking about the discipline.)

The mistake most people make is to think that credit cards are there so they can buy things now and pay them later, or they can buy expensive things and pay them over time. While this is true, treating credit cards like this is like treating a fever by trying to bring the fever down, instead of by resolving the root cause of which the fever is a symptom: it signifies a misunderstanding of its actual purpose. Believing this is how you hurt yourself.

OK, I Think I Understand… but Not Really

Alright, with everything we’ve covered, I’m going to show you how you can use credit cards to make money. Before I tell you any of this, however, remember that you’ll probably need at least OK credit to do this. Also, you’ll need to be extremely disciplined. If you’re not, for the love of Visa, don’t even try it.

Suppose you have a credit card (we’ll call it CC1) with a $3000 credit line and a 13.99% Annual Percentage Rate (APR). You get offered another card by another company. This card has no transfer fees and a 0% interest on transfers for the 12 months (we’ll call this CC2). Here’s a simple way you can make some money with it: Open up a high-interest savings account with the bank of your choice (we’ll presume the ROI is 5% on this account). To open this account, do a cash advance from CC1 to the savings account for $3000. Apply for CC2 and immediately transfer the $3000 balance from CC1. When you get CC2 (and unless you have bad credit, you probably will), CC2 will have a $3000 balance at 0% APR for the next year. (Note that you’ll still need to pay the minimum monthly payments.) The $3000 now sitting in a bank will earn you 5%. This means that at the end of the year, you’ll have made $150 (actually more, since interest is compounded), all without spending one dime. This is what’s called making money with other people’s money (OPM). Right before year’s end, take the $3000 from the savings account and pay your credit card balance, pocketing the rest. (And yes, taxes will have to be paid on that money, but think about it: how much work did you really put in for that? Was it worth it?)

Of course, this example runs with fairly small numbers as far as the credit game is concerned, but it’s OK: the principle is what matters here. If you’re smart, credit (and credit cards) allow you to borrow money from one entity in order to make money for yourself. In the long run this is in their best interest because it means that they can capitalize on your skills to make money: they lend the money, you do the work, you walk out with the bulk of the cash. Sound like a good deal? It is, if you’re careful and understand these principles.

The problem with most people is that they never actually set up any sort of financial action plan, at least not a stable one. What I mean is this: too many times I’ve met people who focus so strongly on one strategy (owning a business, owning real estate, investing in stocks and mutual funds) that they forget to actually set a plan in motion that will protect them in case things don’t work out as they’d expect.

Here’s an example: suppose you start a business and in two years find yourself making $150,000 a year. Awesome, right? You buy yourself a nice house, a nice car, and stick some in savings just in case. ($10,000 is enough, right? I mean, it’s more than most people have.) So what if you have a little debt, you can take care of it!

A year later a shift in the market causes your business to tank. (Make up a reason for this: real estate? Market turns sour; Network marketing? Company goes out of business; Franchise? new road construction takes all your traffic somewhere else.) Your income goes bye bye. Your debts amass and the bill collectors come calling. What’s your financial picture like now?

The sad part is that most people, even those making a lot of money, don’t have a proper financial plan, mostly because they somehow rationalize they won’t need one. “My business is going great,” or “I don’t make enough money to need a financial plan,” or “That couldn’t possibly happen in this market, or in my business” are some possible excuses. Yet all of us know that one event outside our control — a stock market crash, a hurricane, a drop in the value of the dollar, another Enron — can take everything and wipe it out. Depressing thought, no? No wonder people don’t like thinking about it.

Instead, most people put their faith in specific products or procedures, like investing in stock, real estate, municipal bonds, mutual funds, 401K’s/403B’s, tax lien certificates, network marketing, franchises, businesses, gold, currency trading, life insurance… the list goes on. The problem is that all of these have down sides. Not one is 100% guaranteed! And unless there’s a financial plan in place to account for the various “what ifs” then the risk to the person relying on these products and procedures is multiplied by a factor of their ignorance.

Feel insecure yet? You should. I certainly did when I started to realize all this, when fiscal common sense (or what should be common sense) finally started to dawn on me.

With all this in mind, this past weekend The Wife and I finally got together and sketched out a financial plan. (We actually started by going out to the Davie Ale House and doing it there while splitting one of the huge appetizers they give there. Total time required: about 2 hours, although we still have a little work to do.) Until now, believe it or not, we didn’t really have one! Our “plan” — or what we called a plan — was to make money, put it in savings and our 401K’s, pay off our loans and any credit card debt, maybe invest in buying a home (or some rental property), and starting a business that could develop us passive income so that we could go from where we are to being wealthy, if not rich. (Remember: rich is measured by money in comparison to others; wealth is measured by time, or how long you could live at your lifestyle if you couldn’t draw an income from your own efforts. You can be rich and be broke. You can’t be both wealthy and broke.) Needless to say this plan needed re-tooling. Badly.

Our new plan, while not yet finished, is a lot more comprehensive, and it’s something which we’re confident will give us the footing we need to feel first and foremost safe and secure. Why “safe and secure”? Why not comfortable, wealthy, or rich?!

The simple answer is this: if I’m rich and something happens to my income at that level, do I have a safety net? More than just a big savings account, I mean. Or am I always going to be scared of something happening? A “safe and secure” plan is that safety net. In case all else fails, this plan will ensure that you and your family are taken care of. You may not be comfortable, but you’ll never go without food and shelter, no matter what. After a “safe and secure” plan has been created and put in motion, then should you create a plan for comfort, wealth, and eventually riches.

With this in mind, our new plan involves the following:

• First, we make sure that no matter what happens we’re both financially secure, that we’ll never be without, no matter what happens during our life or after it. (A good financial plan should take into account such details as what happens in the event of your death.) We call this the protection phase of our plan. It includes stuff which protects what we have now. This includes car and home insurance (neither of which is particularly inexpensive in Florida), including a liability umbrella to protect us in case of lawsuits (not planning to get sued any time soon, but with our sue-happy culture, one never knows; this is really in the grounds of the insurance, however, and the various deductibles); disability and health insurance (we’re covered here, for the most part, though I think we could be a bit safer), and finally life insurance appropriate to our needs (there are a bunch of these out there — term, variable, full-life, universal, etc ad nauseam).
• Second, we begin working on our savings. This also includes paying down our consumer debt, such as any credit cards we may have balances on and our car payment. (Not every debt needs to be paid off, but the fewer the liabilities, the easier things will be.) Additionally, this also includes putting at least 3 (though preferably 6) months worth of expenses in a very safe, ultra-low-risk account, such as a money market account. Low yield, true, but the purpose of this account is to have liquid funds, just in case. Finally, we have to maximize our forced savings, meaning our 401K’s. (For the record, the 401K and 403B accounts are savings accounts, although you may invest the funds in mutual funds, stock, and even real-estate. Yes, you can buy real-estate with your 401K.)
• Third, there’s the growth component. This is where we begin investing in things such as property (like, say, buying our first house, or buying a small multifamily rental property) mutual funds and stocks, and municipal bonds. (Tax liens and purchasing debt can also go into this part of the equation, since they give you a better rate of return, backed by real estate.)

Once all this is in place, once we’re “secure” — and we expect it to take about a year to put everything in place like we want it — we are ready to step into the comfortable planning stage. The only difference in this versus the previous is the way we deal with the various products I just mentioned.

For example, in the Protection phase we can move from Term life insurance to whole life, variable, or universal. In the savings phase, we move from 3 months to 6 months and even 1 year of expenses in the bank. Additionally we’ll be able to put more into money markets and retirement plans. Finally, for the growth component, we can begin investing in more properties, buying businesses, and individual stocks. (Note that you can start a business in any stage of the game, but what’s available to you changes according to where you find yourself.)

Now, you may be wondering why I mentioned the products I mentioned. Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages (from what I’ve learned) of the items I’ve mentioned here:

• Stocks: This is usually the first think people think of when talking about investing. It’s also one of the most volatile of investments, since you don’t really control it (unless you’re buying millions of dollars worth of shares.) On the up side, these can have some of the biggest gains thanks to things like speculation and buzz. Rule of thumb: never put anything into the stock market unless you’re prepared to lose it. Of course, seasoned day traders are another breed entirely, but I’m talking about me here, and seasoned day trader I am not.
• Mutual Funds: Think of these as beginners kits for people getting into stocks. They aren’t as risky as stocks, but because of the almost complete lack of control you have over what the fund buys, these are also fairly risky, almost gambles. Overall, a well researched fund will likely give even a beginning investor some return.
• Real Estate: The great think about real estate is that it usually goes up. The bad part is that an uninformed person can lose a lot of money very quickly. Someone who’s studied market cycles, however, and can call up on the appropriate strategies at the right time will usually be able to make money in any market, so real estate actually offers a great deal of control, even if the market in your area tanks.
• Network Marketing: This is probably one of the safest investments out there. The problem is that because they’re usually so easy and cheap to start, most people don’t take network marketing businesses seriously. Big mistake. The down side here comes in the area of control: if the company you’re working with tanks, what are you left with? What are your customers left with? The thing with these companies is that it’s not the product which really matters, it’s the education system. Find a good system and a good mentor within that system and you’ll be able to learn more about business quicker than most any other way, and with far less risk than any other business venture. The Wife and I are involved in a network marketing business for that very reason: the system we’re involved with is great. In fact, I count that association as one of the best moves I ever made.
• Franchises: Like network marketing, franchises are more valuable for their system than their actual product. Ever see a McDonald’s go out of business? Not many, right? Why do yo think that is, because they have the best burgers and milkshakes in the world? Hardly. It’s because they have one of the best training systems in all of business.
• Municipal Bonds: These are good because they’re pretty much guaranteed. The only downside is how long they take to mature, and how much money you’re actually making in these.
• 401K/403B’s: These are actually savings bonds, but for employees these are also the last real tax-free shelters available. (Self employed persons and business owners have a lot more in the way of tax advantages and can move their money around quicker.) The biggest bright side with these is the fact that they’re essentially forced savings, and as such call for a certain level of discipline. They’re also fairly flexible, since money here can be used in various forms of investments with taxes deferred until the point where money is withdrawn. Not bad, eh? And for most employees there’s also the “free money” aspect: many employers match dollar-for-dollar what employees put in. Not a bad way to give yourself a 3% or 6% raise (since that’s usually what’s matched). The biggest disadvantage is that you can’t actually draw anything from this fund until you’re almost 60 years old, not without penalty at any rate, except under very specific conditions, and even then you have to pay that money back. At least you’re paying yourself, right?
• Gold: I don’t know enough about gold or other precious metals to say why they’re bad, save maybe for value fluctuations and requiring a lot of study. Of course, there’s what whole “history” thing which puts Gold as being a fairly steady investment. That is, until someone does what they did for aluminum in the mid-1800’s. That’s when synthetic aluminum was created and the metal went from being worth more than gold to being worth almost nothing overnight.
• Currency Trading: Same issue as gold: lots of studying required, and an event like war could take whatever reserves you have and drop them like a rock int he ocean. Imagine if you had bought Iraqi Dinars in the mid 80’s, what would they be worth now? They were almost on par with the dollar at one point, if I recall correctly.

Anyway, these are some of the products. Talk to your financial adviser about these, or get online and do some research. Tons of info available to you for free.

Speaking of financial advisers, through this entire process, it will be of immense importance to us to work closely with a financial planner who is familiar with ourtype of situation. As such, we plan to interview at least 10 financial planners in the areas and ask the following questions:

• What’s your expertise? (This will be asked up-front, before we tell him/her what we need, since the last thing we want is to say “we need A, B, and C,” then have him/her say “Well, I’m an expert in A, B, and C.”)
• What does your typical client look like, what’s their financial situation?
• What does your typical client make annually?
• What type of asset base does your typical client have?
• What’s your favorite advice to give people?
• What do you like for people to do? (And just as important, what do you like for people to NOT do?)

This will be the first addition to our financial and planning team. After this, an accountant (or at least a bookkeeper) will likely be the next addition to our team, since they can help us leverage any assets to improve our overall situation (as well as teaching us to read and scrutinize balance sheets). Additionally, during this time we’ll also be interviewing lawyers who can help us with the asset protection side of things. Obviously, we’ll want to take advantage of vehicles such as LLC’s (Limited Liability Corporations) and Trusts, but that will depend entirely on our need(s) at the time. Finally, throughout this process we’ll be talking to people who we consider mentors in our lives, people who we’ve seen what they have in life, their relationships, and finances, and who we respect in those areas. One thing we’ve learned is that if you’re going without a mentor you should be ready for some hard bumps, because you will get them.

The more we study this, the more The Wife and I realize how much we don’t know, and how much we’ve been leaving to luck with our financial picture. With a plan in hand, we now feel like we’re on our way to ensuring our financial independence in the long run.

By the way, this plan was created using notes we took by listening to one of the CDs in Robert Kiyosaki’s “THINK IT” “LEARN IT” “DO IT” – You Can Choose to be Rich set (CD 8, I think). (For the record, I borrowed the CD from a friend — a mentor — who recommended it to us.) I plan to get the rest of the set fairly soon. The information in this one CD may have saved us months of ambling around, trying to figure things out on our own. I can only hope that this post can help you.

The press — newspapers, reporters, investigators, and yes, even blogs (well, some of them) — is, collectively, like the “Maintenance Required” light on your car.

Once in a while — for what reason no one can really determine except to say that it varies from occasion to occasion — the maintenance light on your car’s dashboard lights up. When this happens, there are two courses of actions which one may take. The first, and most prudent, is to pay attention to it, to take the car to a mechanic or someone who truly knows how to work with the car, and ask them what may be wrong. It may simply be that the light went on for some formulaic reason, some pre-programmed time in which maintenance is required. At other times, the light may simply go on accidentally, not really indicating that there is anything wrong other than the maintenance light itself requiring attention. Finally, there are those situations in which there is something actually wrong with the engine, requiring immediate intervention by an experienced mechanic. It is during these times that the light “earns its keep,” to use an old adage. Of course, there are times when there is something wrong with the car which requires immediate attention which is not reported by the check engine light, perhaps due to a malfunctioning of the light itself, or more commonly, because it is outside the scope of the maintenance checking system which activates the light. In these cases, only after the problem has arisen will the problem be known to exist, and only afterward can it be addressed.

The second course of action involves gambling by inaction, when the light, instead of being heeded, is ignored. At these times, the light is treated only as a bothersome cricket chirping away as as your retina listens, with no actual purpose to its existence other than to annoy. While it may be that the driver by ignoring the light is taking the correct course of action — that the light is merely on because it is malfunctioning, or because it is flagging something so small as to be inconsequential to the functioning of the vehicle — to do so is nothing short of a high stakes gamble. After all, if there is something actually wrong with the vehicle then ignoring the light is no wiser than putting a sticker over it or smashing it with a hammer in order to make it go away. If left unheeded too long, may cause the engine to be damaged, sometime irreparably, leaving the car usable again only after the replacement thereof. To ignore the system when it indicates that there is something wrong is to invite disaster, in the same way disaster is invited when the driver hears an unfamiliar sound emanating from the vehicle, and instead of taking it to a mechanic, decides to turn up the radio so that the sound is drowned out. The radio can only play so loudly before the driver notices that the car has stopped, and by this time it is too late: the car will need major repairs.

The lesson of all this, of course, is to pay attention to your car’s maintenance warning signals by inspecting the vehicle whenever an issue arises. This ensures the longevity of our vehicle. Of course, the question remains as to what this has to do with the free press. I will explain:

The free press, for all intents and purposes, serves as the vehicle’s engine checking system for a government of free peoples. When it is working properly, the function of the press is to oversee the government’s actions and delve deeper into anything which may be cause for concern, raising a red flag if necessary. Some times — many times — some ambitious, young investigative reporter will uncover what he believes to be government corruption at all levels, his only evidence being that the town’s elected dog catcher has just added shrubbery to the dog park next to his house with funds intended for the welfare of dogs. (It could be argued that the actions are related, but I digress.) While serious enough that the issue should be investigated, the issue can probably be safely ignored, with no serious long-term harm done to the system.

If, on the other hand, that ambitious, young reporter discovers that the government has been using funds intended for the welfare of the public as a no-interest loan to a multinational corporation, or using the funds to give himself and a select few some “bonus” money, or found that the government has been fabricating evidence in order to propagate the idea that an unnecessary war is actually necessary, then it is the responsibility of the people to press on and investigate the issue more closely, by taking it to the vanguard of our constitutional republic itself: the system of checks and balances. If that system is not properly working, then it is the responsibility of the people to find a way in which to properly investigate possible improprieties and determine whether or not there really is something wrong, usually by firing the members of the group that isn’t working and bringing in new members who will perform the duty asked of them, like one would fire a mechanic who was looking at the engine and insisting nothing was wrong and to ignore the light, only to have the car breakdown a day later. A good mechanic would make sure to look through the car with a careful eye, performing tests which will tell conclusively whether there really is something wrong with the vehicle. Likewise, good public servants would investigate their own in order to ensure that the governmental vehicle is functioning properly. To do otherwise would be to invite disaster.

Currently, there are a number of investigations going on involving possible corruption by people in the highest levels of our government. Many are calling these witch hunts, and calling for the press to discontinue their relentless investigating of these officials, even if the answers for their actions are antithetical to the spirit of the law. These who call these investigations witch hunts would do well to remember that it is the job of the press to not only make sure everything is running as it should be, but also to report on and flag situations where not all is quite as it seems, and that it is the job of the different branches of government to find out why the maintenance light on the government’s vehicle is on. To do otherwise would be to invite disaster, and eventually lose the vehicle.

Freedom loving peoples all over the world will forever know intrinsically that it is the job of their press to flag even the smallest impropriety for further investigation, to be the maintenance light in the vehicle of their system of government. If this press is instead found to be serving as an arm of the government, to work only at the beckoning of the mechanic, then the people must realize that it is no longer of any real use and must be discarded, as must the system of government itself.

I am thankful every day that we live in a society in which free press still exists, where reporters write not propaganda for the government, or even one political party — at least not on the whole, despite what some who follow political parties blindly believe — but instead write what they see. It is the job of our elected officials, like our mechanics, to ensure that the vehicle is working properly, and that any issues be addressed immediately if necessary. And it is our job as a people to be the ultimate check and balance, to ensure that our vehicle runs at optimal performance, and to verify that the mechanic is really doing his job. If either the maintenance checking systems on the vehicle or the mechanics are not doing their job, then it is our job to fire the mechanic, replace the maintenance requirement checking system, and if necessary discard the vehicle (and the mechanic) and acquire another more suited for our needs.

• No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.
• The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.
• Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.
• I am… for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents.

All of these are quotes by one of history’s most ardent supporter of the free press: Thomas Jefferson, a man who thought far ahead of his own time. You can read more of Jefferson’s quotes, including those involving the responsibilities of the press and his criticisms of it, online. The lesson here is that no one side has a lock on fairness, not even the press itself, and it is ultimately the job of the people to ensure that their freedom is protected by protecting their vehicles, and taking action as necessary in order to ensure that their needs and wants are met.

It was Monday morning. The 20 minute drive from home to work through the crowded interstate and cluttered local roads was accompanied by the book-on-CD version of Issac Asimov’s I, Robot, instead of the usual political talking heads and local news chatter. Calm drive, really, just full of traffic. Got there around 8:30 AM.

By about 10 I had already settled down, checked my email and started on some work which I knew would eat up the better part of the week. That, of course, is what they pay me for, so no complaints there. In fact, I was still playing out some of the nuances from I, Robot in my head. At about that time, I started feeling a sharp pain in my chest. At first I thought my shirt got caught on a couple of chest hairs (yes, I have chest hair. Not much, but it’s there). I scratched it thinking it would go again, but it didn’t. Suddenly, I felt tingles going through my chest and making their way into my arms and hands, which had become numb. I started feeling dizzy and as if I was about to black out. Suddenly, my heart misfired and started speeding up:

Thump… thump… thump… KAthump… flump…………………. flump……………………. thump..thump..thump.thump.thump.thumpthumpthumpthumpthump…

I stood up. This can’t be, I thought. Was I having a heart attack? I needed to walk around.

I got out of my office and walked up and down the office building, thinking that if I just walked around a little my heart rate would calm back down. Maybe… maybe if I got some water…

thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump…

I had always been able to control my heart rate to an extent. Unlike most people, I can feel my heart rate by simply concentrating on it, and with a little controlled breathing I could usually speed up or slow down my heart as needed. Not today. My hands felt cold, numb, and they were trembling wildly. My tongue felt as if it had grown in my mouth and was now trying to choke me, I felt short of breath, as if having an asthma attack, and I felt disconnected, like if everything I was seeing was part of a dream.

Something is definitely wrong, I finally admitted to myself. I didn’t want to go to the hospital, didn’t want an ambulance called, but if this really was a heart attack then I better just admit it.

It couldn’t have been a heart attack, could it? I’m too young. Sure, I’m overweight, but I’ve lost a lot of weight recently. I’d been eating healthier than I had in years, and exercising more. This couldn’t be happening to me now, could it? And if I went to the hospital, if I admitted something was wrong, would I die?

I went to the office manager, still trying to convince myself that if I could just get my mind of whatever I was thinking this would all go away. “I’m not feeling too well,” I said. I then asked her to talk with me. Scratch that, I told her to talk with me. After a minute the realization had grown in my mind that I should be going. Apparently she felt the same way.

“You want to go ahead and go home?” she asked, in her light Brazilian accent.

“Actually,” I said, struggling with the words, “I think you need to call an ambulance.”

While calling 911, one of the other workers stopped by. “Are you OK?” she asked.

“Uhm… no,” I said, with a shaky voice. I was now sitting in the office manager’s seat with my legs on another chair, raised, parallel to my hips.

The worker then left and came back with another person, an ex-nurse now working as a computer programmer. She did a couple of minor checks on me and talked to the 911 operators. After a minute she told me, “I don’t think you’re having a heart attack, but I don’t know what’s going on.”

She stayed with me for what seemed like a long while. In reality it had only been about ten minutes since I first started noticing the symptoms, but every minute lasted for an hour.

Just before the EMTs came I called The Wife.

“Hello?” she answered.

“Hey, hon,” I said in my still-shaky voice. “Listen, I’m not feeling well, I need to go to the hospital.” As I said this, the EMTs walked in. “I want you to know I love you. I gotta go.” Click.

As I got poked and probed by the emergency medical technicians (EMTs), an EKG revealed that my heart was healthy. Pumping fast, but healthy. My blood pressure was high, 151/73, but that, I was told, was expected after whatever I had just gone through.

I was taken to the hospital which, lucky for me, was right across the street. There I was again poked and analyzed, turned and x-rayed, and poked again. (Blood was drawn six times, from six different places during my time there. By students. I’m still sporting some of the bruises.)

A few hours later, after The Wife had come to the hospital, after a visit from my boss who observed that my shoes had not yet been taken off (“That’s a good sign,” he noted), and after trying my best to extract information from whoever was looking at me at the time (including the x-ray technicians, who let me look at my x-rays, see my heart, and commented that I had “huge lungs,” after revealing that at least one of them was a deep-sea diver), I was let go. By now it was 2:00 PM and all I wanted to do was rest, and enjoy the fact that I was alive. (In fact, the original name for this portion of the story was “Yesterday I Died. I Was Born Today.” This seemed a bit too melodramatic, though vis-a-vis what I discovered next.)

For the next few days I took it fairly easily. I worked from home, slept a good amount, and made sure I had nothing to worry about. I opened the windows, spent time out in the porch, smelled the air, and tasted my food with a curiosity that can only be attributed to someone who’s appreciating life for what it is.

I had a meeting with the cardiologist a couple of days after the incident, as well as a meeting with my family practitioner. Nothing new came from any of those meetings.

The cardiologist — a surprisingly attractive Brazilian woman who looked like she was in her late tweens/early 30s and therefore almost too young to be a cardiologist; I felt as if in a television show — took another EKG and scheduled an echocardiogram, but said that neither the blood work nor the EKG revealed anything abnormal. (“Your EKG looks good,” she said to me. “Phenomenal, in fact.”) She ordered another blood test to check for thyroid problems, which I had revealed to her run in my family. I don’t know much about these, however, only that my grandmother has problems with her thyroid, and that she’ll fall asleep in the middle of telling you something. By this time I didn’t fear the sting of the needle any more: I had apparently been downgraded to pin cushion, and a pin cushion need not fear piercing. I was also ordered to pick up a 30-day heart monitor to record any future incidents. Aside from caffeine-induced heart palpitations, I hoped this thing didn’t record anything else.

The family practitioner — Dr. MK I’ll call her, since I’ll likely be referring to her in the future — said something along the same lines: EKG looks fine, bring back the blood test results, and keep wearing that heart monitor.

The days following the initial incident I had felt fine. In fact, I felt better than fine. I felt great! Better than I had in… years? Certainly seemed that way.

As I studied this another possibility arose, one which had been mentioned by a few people, but which I didn’t want to accept: that what I had gone through was a full-blown panic attack. I went to the usual sources for information about this sort of thing — WebMD and Wikipedia — to see what they said about it. Here’s the Wikipedia description:

A panic attack is a period of intense, often temporarily debilitating, sense of extreme fear or psychological distress, typically of abrupt onset. Though it is often a purely terrifying feeling to the sufferer, panic attacks are actually an evolutionary body response often known as the fight-or-flight response occurring out of context. Symptoms may include trembling, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, chest pain (or chest tightness), sweating, nausea, dizziness (or slight vertigo), light-headedness, hyperventilation, paresthesias (tingling sensations), and sensations of choking, smothering and dreamlike and disconnected sensations. During a panic attack, the body typically releases large amounts of adrenaline into the bloodstream. Many first time sufferers of a panic attack believe they are dying, going insane or having a heart attack. Many say panic attacks are among the most frightening experiences of their lives.

This sounded exactly like what I had gone through, almost to the letter. In fact, the list of symptoms on the page was almost verbatim what I had told the doctors I was feeling. This looked promising, although frighteningly so. Still, the more I read the more I began to be convinced that this was it, especially in light of what was now quickly becoming the second choice, Hyperthyroidism. Hopefully that first panic attack would just be an isolated incident.

It wasn’t.

I was at a meeting that Friday, again at work, when suddenly there it was again: the tingling sensations, the pain in the chest, the racing heart rate — the works. I took my chances and instead of calling another ambulance I went outside for a while to walk, quickly, up and down the sidewalk. Luckily, my office is in a medical office complex, so if something went wrong I could get to a door quickly enough. I was hoping to burn some adrenalin by walking and stop some of the other side effects of the panic attack, if that’s what it was. For all I knew, I was having a heart attack.

After a few minutes, and after being joined by someone willing to talk with me during the ordeal, I felt myself calming down again. My heart rate came back to normal range, I stopped trembling, and my skin was no longer numb or tingly. Yet, I was scared now, very scared. What if these things kept going on forever ever time I came to work? The racing heart, the moments of pure fear, the need to run away from wherever I was, the vertigo, the nausea, the fainting feelings, the numbness, the choking… Would these things just keep going all the time, everywhere?

That weekend I had a few more episodes, none as bad as the first, or even the second, but bad in their own right. I could no longer tell what the trigger(s) could be. On one night, I had them for so long I eventually just passed out on my bed. After every attack I was hungry and very, very tired. That night I simply could not stay awake any more. Thank God for that. I didn’t want to stay awake.

The next week I had the echocardiogram. Pulse was around 58, which seemed right. I have yet to hear from any doctors about it so I can only presume that if they found something it wasn’t too bad. I remember when I had broken my knee a few years ago. They called me back that night to run a more invasive test, to make sure no veins or arteries were pinched. These guys, thankfully, don’t take chances, which in this case made the old saying “No news is good news” a truism.

I also had a meeting with Dr. MK wherein I revealed my latest findings. She suggested Zoloft if I wanted a pill for it, especially since the attacks were not isolated, but were now becoming somehwat commonplace, but I told her I didn’t want a pill. She then wrote me a referral to go see a psychologist to see if we could get to the root of the problem. Even if it was biological, the psychologist could help put my mind at ease. The fact that this may be panic disorder has not escaped me.

During this time, a conversation started up in itazuraßeau’s blog in which the topic of panic attacks came in. (If you click on the link you can see part of our conversation, the public part at least. You may want to turn off your speakers. By the way, Beau, a.k.a. itazuraßeau, is an old friend of mine from college who I spent time with when working on the USF music school computer labs. Oboe player. Very good. He’s now living in Japan.) He has helped me understand the issue a bit better and as served as a bit of a sounding board for me, one which talks back and offers useful advice, some of which I may share later here. Most of this advice revolved around medications and why not to take them, advice which The Wife, a psychologist by training, echoed loudly.

Anyway, so to the point of this post: now you understand why my posting has slowed as of late. I just haven’t felt like writing and frankly, for the moment I’m not going to do things I don’t feel like doing. Might sound childish and amateur, but frankly all I care about now is getting whatever issues are causing the attacks resolved. I have a few suspicions, but I don’t care to go into them right now, mostly because they’re just that: suspicions. If I start attributing stuff to them I may be doing something detrimental by building up walls which would later have to be torn down.

You may also be wondering why I’m letting all this out in public. Mostly is to bring light to the situation. Also because the original purpose of this blog includes it being a way in which I can learn of myself better. If you’re wondering, no, I’m not going insane, at least not any more than most other people. I’m just, apparently, dealing with a bunch of stress, stress I didn’t know was there. (That this happened now is surprising because the past two years have made for one of the calmest periods of my life.) Then again, if you’ve known me personally for any amount of time, you probably know stress something I normally feel that I thrive on and enjoy. Guess I got that one wrong.

So, will I keep my writing going? Yes, but on my own schedule, something I haven’t always felt at freedom to do. I’ll try to continue posting at least twice a week, and depending on time constraints and other considerations I may post more, but for the time being, until I get all of this sorted out my posting may be a bit erratic. My apologies in advance.

Take it easy. I’ll work on doing the same.

How many of us have actually picked up a pencil — on purpose, and not because there wasn’t a working pen around or because it was the first suitable writing utensil in the vicinity — in order to actually enjoy the art of writing?

Until yesterday, I, like many of you, hadn’t. Not since college, anyway. In fact, until recently, I for some strange reason felt that writing with pencil, instead of pen, was somehow juvenile, that it was beneath the dignity of most people to actively choose a pencil over a pen. This, of course, was a remnant of my elementary school days, when writing with a pencil was mandatory for kids, while writing with a pen was something only adults did. (I went to Catholic school, was very observant, and had an overactive imagination. This is a recipe for many unfounded childhood myths.)

All of this changed in high school. While in every school before then pens were pretty much banned from use by the studentry*, some teachers in high school went ahead and gave the OK to use pens in class. Of course, like almost every student, I ceased that opportunity to grow up a little (or pretend I just had). After all, upgrading to a pen meant that, somehow, I was now a grown up. It also made me feel better because pens were more technologically advanced than pencils. Heck, I could even go get a job! (People who use pens get jobs, right? Right?)

* Note: “Studentry” is a term coined by William Strunk, author of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, used to describe the students of a school, much in the same way “citizenry” is used to describe the citizens of a city. He used this to substitute for the much more morbid term “student body.”

The only exception to this was Math class, where apparently there was no such thing as growing up, since we were always required to use pencil. Only once was this not the case. In my 10th grade geometry class, the teacher — a morbidly obese, rotund creature who made it a habit to eat doughnuts during class, then cry when she got too stressed out (which was quite often) — didn’t particularly care about what we used for writing, so long as we wrote legibly. “Pen, pencil, crayon, blood, magic marker, eye liner, lipstick,” she would tell every class at the beginning of the year. “Use whatever you want, I don’t care. Just make it so that I can read it.”

It didn’t take long for me to figure out why I should never use pens while doing mathematics: I tend to erase a fair amount, and scribble marks all over your paper don’t do you any good when you’re trying to crunch numbers. (I was never much a fan of calculators, so I actually wrote out all my work.) I attempted to reach a compromise by using erasable ink pens. Sure, they wrote like crap, but made me feel all adulty and stuff. After all, it was ink, wasn’t it? But is (somewhat) erasable, so that was OK. It was the best of both worlds!

Not really. Eventually I went back to using pencil during math. But man, when I got to history, it was time to break out the ink! Woooo!

In college, things were somewhat different. I had to use a pencil, but it was OK, because that was what I wanted to use. After all, if you’re going to scribble notes on your music you don’t want to do it in pen.

Then, of course, there was music composition. When writing music, Dr. Reller drilled into us that we should only use pencils, and that they should be #1 pencils, which have a very very soft lead. Unfortunately, this meant that the pencils needed to be sharpened fairly often. The reason for using this type was because of their soft lead: the tip in #1 pencils can be shaped by putting a bit of pressure on it, which is important when it comes to the calligraphy of sheet music.

For the record, if this is the first time you hear of a #1 person, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Until I got to college, I didn’t know there were such things as #1 pencils. I thought the #2 was some kind of a long-lost historical reference understood only by very boring people.

By the way, here’s a little side note: Not only are there #1 and #2 pencils, there are also #3 pencils, which have especially hard lead and are used primarily by engineers and in construction sites where people need to write on various surfaces without braking or completely annihilating the tip of the thing.

Of course, we could get into all kinds of conversation here about the history of the pencil (with carbon being used by cavemen, with the modern pencil being used first during the time of Napoleon at Waterloo, and rubber erasers being invented much later on, before which little bits of bread were used to erase pencil marks) and the pen (with the ball point pen having been invented during the 1950’s, with the first ball point pen costing something like $3,000 in today’s money), but I’d rather leave that to all the sources I learned those factoids from: the History Chanel and the back of cereal boxes.

Once I got out of college, things got even stranger in the writing front: I was using highlighters and pens to write notes in books, felt-tip pens for writing on yellow paper, and permanent markers to write on CD’s and dry-erase markers to write on whiteboards. It looked as if there was little room for the pencil, which was just fine with me: by this time I hated the things, using them only sparingly, while playing Dungeons and Dragons.

Even with all these technologically advanced, grown up ways to write things, I was still considered a luddite in some quarters: I’ve worked in offices where the next technological step was used almost exclusively, and writing on paper — even with pen! — was berated and angered the boss to no end. (“He’s probably still writing stuff on that paper sh*t,” I remember him once saying.)

For some reason, lately I’ve been wanting to go back to pencils. Maybe it’s me trying to find a bit of my own past. (I don’t like to spend a lot of time there because even though I find it comfortable, I find the future much more exciting.) Whatever the reason, I wanted to use pencils.

Yesterday I stopped by one of the local CVS (They. Are. EVERYWHERE!), where I picked up a notepad with both line rule and graph paper, and a regular pencil sharpener. (I have about 3 electric ones in the house, but they’re all extremely noisy and I hate it.) As for pencils, we have almost 100 pencils left over from when The Wife was a teacher, so I’m in no short supply.

Last night I started writing on the pad and something interesting happened: I started getting ideas and writing about things which I never have with a pen. I don’t know what it is, but the feeling of the pencil in my fingers, as it glides across the page, the smell of the wood… I’m not sure whether to say that I was inspired or that a part of me woke up which had for too long been dormant.

Whatever happened was irrelevant: I instantly fell in love with writing again, and I proceeded to write a few stories almost without thinking. At one point The Wife commented that she was amazed at all the ideas that had come to me. I guess I was as well, somewhat at least. As you probably haven’t noticed (because I’ve chosen not to write too much about it) I’ve had a lot on my mind lately. Combine that with the feeling I got from writing in pencil and the sudden outpouring of thought was bound to happen.

So… does this make me a luddite, or simply someone who enjoys getting back to the basics? Whatever that makes me is inconsequential: I love pencils. And not mechanical pencils, but wooden pencils, the type you have to sharpen from time to time, the type that’s fun to bite.

Now, if you will excuse me, I’ve got to go blog write. On paper. With a pencil.

If you’re like I was just a few weeks ago, you’re probably thinking “It’s a mug that looks sort of like a flower pot with a handle.” But isn’t it funny how if you walked into someone’s house, asked for a drink, and got it in that mug, you would probably take special notice of it? (Especially since it can hold over a pint.) Maybe you would even go as far as to ask your host a question or two about it, especially if it looked hand made, and even more so if it was the only one of its kind in the house.

This story is about just that, the fact that unlike their mass-manufactured counterparts, handmade items each have a story to tell. It’s also about going pottery shopping for the first time. In essence, this is that cup’s story (with a few addendums).

Last week The Wife and I took a week-long trip to North Carolina, where we got to spend a couple of those days with Third-Child (TC) and Peacecraft (PC). (For the record, Third-Child is a lady, Peacecraft a guy, and they’re married.) While it would have been all too easy for us to simply stay home and chat about anime and sci-fi, or to tease and feed Moo, TC and PC’s pizza loving cat. Instead, Third-Child and The Wife decided it would be fun to go explore the community. Third-Child and Peacecraft just recently moved to North Carolina, so things were almost as new to them as they were to us.

Their first thought was to walk around the city’s Historical District. Since the entire district was about four blocks total, we thought it would be a good idea to also find something else to do. That’s when Third-Child discovered (or rather, mentioned) an area known as Pottery Highway, which was somewhat near their place. The Wife and TC figured it would be fun to go check that out, so we decided to go there instead.

As you can probably guess, my vote consisted of a “Hey, whatever y’all want to do,” since going pottery shopping wasn’t exactly my idea of a good time. Walking around exploring a little town in the middle of nowhere, however, is always potentially fun. If nothing else, this would be relaxing.

For those of you who’ve never been there (and I’m guessing that’s most of you reading this), Pottery Highway is a small area in central North Carolina which houses the oldest and largest pottering community in the United States. In the span of about 16 miles of road there are over 100 independent pottery shops, all of which feature hand-made pottery made by artists in the area, most of whom are the shopkeepers. Unlike megastore-bought pottery, most of this stuff is one-of-a-kind (and not made in China), so if you see something you really like, you’d be well advised to take it, should funds be sufficient.

We headed out at about 11am. It had been an unseasonably warm winter in the area, so most of the time we did quite well just wearing light sweaters, at least when in central North Carolina. (The mountains were another story entirely.)

Pottery Highway was actually further than we expected, since (as we quickly figured out) the map being used wasn’t to scale: a span of 8 miles on one side of the map was about 1/5 the size of another span of 8 miles on the other side of the map. Still, the drive was fun. The cool, fresh air was a stark contrast to the polluted, hot Fort Lauderdale air, and the semi-mountainous terrain featured more curves than almost any landscape in Florida. All the homes seemed to be surrounded by at least a couple of acres, which is again in stark contrast to South Florida’s copious zero lot-line houses.

Our first stop was at a little place called Fireshadow Pottery. To find this place, we actually had to turn into a dirt road, then into a gravel road, followed by another dirt road, then finally second (curvy) gravel road. Our first impression of the place was that we had just entered into a horror movie: surrounded by woods and found only via dirt roads, this was the sort of place where hot, young (and usually nubile) 20-somethings came to die. Luckily, Peacecraft put gas in his car beforehand, so if we got in trouble, he was confident we could get away. (Noting that we were riding around in a Ford Focus, I wasn’t quite as confident.)

Despite our first impressions, the shop was actually surrounded by an array of beautiful pieces, including a Japanese-style gateway and a number of large vases. (In fact, the whole shop had an Asian theme going.) Going into the shop, we saw a number of smaller pieces, including everything from cups and plates to lambs, vases, and wall decorations. At first I wasn’t exactly digging the scene, since I felt like an elephant in a china shop, but Third-Child and the Wife loved it. (The shopping, not the me-feeling-like-an-elephant-in-the-china-shop part.) With the help of their contagious excitement, it didn’t take long for Peacecraft and I to get a bit more interested in the pottery. (Actually, I think Peacecraft already knew how to appreciate pottery, making me the only dolt in the group.) Each of the pieces seemingly had a life of its own: each could be admired for hours, and every one told a story. While there, we got a chance to chat with the creator of some these pieces, Mo. He would tell us about how he made a piece and about living in the area. We, in turn, couldn’t do better than this:

TC: “…Yeah, [because of all the moving around] we have enough beds to choke a horse.”
Me: “Uhmm… so, how many horses have you killed that you know how many beds it takes to choke one?”

He seemed to like that one. Maybe instead of knocking off 20-somethings he gets his kicks choking horses with beds, I don’t know. Anyway, Third-Child picked up a couple of pieces from the shop as we left. She was seriously eyeing a cup from the shop, but decided to leave it for another time.

We stopped at a couple of other places before we went to our next destination of note, From the Ground Up. Unlike Fireshadow, From the Ground Up had bit of an Irish flare to it. This was obvious when we stepped in the shop, since many of the pieces were decorated by Celtic knots. As we walked around the shop, which was divided into three rooms, we took notice of the stylistic differences in the pottery. After walking into the first room, I also took notice of the mug pictured at the top of the page. It was sitting on a shelf next to a stein with similar coloration, and it caught my interest almost immediately.

Nevertheless, after a few minutes of admiration I walked away in order to see a few of the other items. It wasn’t long before I was back again, admiring the cup.

“If you like it, get it,” insisted the Wife.

“You back on that cup again?” asked TC.

“Yeah,” I said, “but I’m not sure I really want it.”

After about 20 minutes of walking around in the shop (during which time I made several visits back to see the mug) The Wife picked up the mug, walked up to the counter, and bought it. My concern involved the cost of the mug: $22. Her concern was for the feeling and memories which would now be attached to the mug. She was right. Since then, every time I’ve looked at that mug I’ve been brought back not just to that shop, but to that week. You would think I was looking at a photo, from the way it reminds me of the place.

Yet, my foolishness regarding the issue of money vs. memory (where money was an available resource) got in the way: The Wife gave up a mug she wanted in order for me to feel good about getting mine. Hers cost $14. I would end up paying for that later, in both guilt and cash.

As we left the store, we heard an Irish flute in the air. At first we didn’t know whether it was a recording they had outside, but with its crisp and clear sound, I figured it couldn’t be. A minute later we saw the artist, the guy responsible for making the mug, sitting out on a tree stump in the back, entertaining his dog with an Irish tune.

By this time we started feeling a hungry so we stopped by a small restaurant in town, the Dairy Breeze. We found out from the shopkeeper at From the Ground Up that since this was their low season (the time after Christmas), most of the restaurants were closed. Aside from a Hardee’s at the edge of town, this was the only place open.

I don’t want to talk much about the place, suffice to say that it proves why when you’re on the road (and even at home) you should try to eat at locally owned restaurants. Good atmosphere, reasonable price, and most importantly, great food.

After lunch we stopped by Uwharrie Crystalline Pottery. Aside from returning to Fireshadow Pottery to pick up Third-Child’s cup, this was our last major stop.

Uwharrie Crystalline’s specialty is in making crystalline pottery, which means they make the pottery and then crystallize part of it via the baking process. Something like that, or maybe nothing at all like that. I wasn’t listening closely enough to she shopkeeper’s explanation. I don’t believe any of us did, although I think everyone else already knew how this kind of stuff was made. We were all entranced by how beautiful some of these pieces were.

Third-Child fell head over heels in love with a bowl she saw. The Wife was also eyeing this piece, and figured if TC didn’t grab it, she would. She grabbed it, along with a vase that just happened to match the bowl well. The vase, however, was a bit of my doing.

TC had been eyeing that vase for a while, but she couldn’t justify the $135 price tag. When she found the bowl, she thought to get that instead. The vase, however, kept a place in the “desired” list, but now she really couldn’t justify getting the bowl and paying for the vase, mostly because she just started a new job and hadn’t yet gotten paid (“Otherwise,” she confessed, “I would have already grabbed it.”) Knowing that The Wife wanted the bowl, and seeing how TC really actually wanted the vase more than the bowl, I talked to TC to try and convince her to get the vase instead of the bowl.

The shopkeeper overheard us talking and on the spot offered to sell TC the vase for $85. In the blink of an eye, that vase went from the display shelf to the sales counter. Along with the bowl. Sorry, Wife. Still, this played in our favor, as we got the couple of pieces which better matched the current decor of our living room and which, I admit, I preferred. We also got a bit of a discount, paying only $40 for pieces previously priced at $38 and $14.

I’ll be the first to admit, it would have been pretty hard to justify buying the vases had we bought that cup. But see, this is what guilt makes you do: I felt guilty for not getting The Wife a $14, so I was trying to get her a bowl you couldn’t really even eat cereal from — it was too big — for God only knows how much, and ended up getting her two vases. Maybe I should have bought her that cup, though something tells me we would’ve bought the vases regardless.

Our hands full of pottery, we left the shop and meandered back to Fireshadow. We stopped at a couple of places, some very nice (and tempting), some which smelled like dog food, and some displaying giant, red clay pigs, but it was mostly to see what was there: we’d already had our fill. We got to Fireshadow — traveling those same dirt roads we traveled before — and we picked up the cup Third-Child had been eyeing (and talking about ever since).

Mo, one of the owners of Fireshadow, said that if we had a bottle of wine or something with us, we could spend some time with him and his wife over at a lake in their property. (Remember that whole “murder movie” scenario I talked about at the beginning of this piece…?) Had we gone the day before, we would have stayed, since we had just picked up a few bottles of Biltmore Estate wine, but we had dropped it off at their place, and The Wife and I also had to head back to Florida that night (a 10-hour drive from their house to Tampa).

We said our goodbyes and headed back to Third-Child and Peacecraft’s, where as soon as we got there, TC and PC were already putting the pottery up for display, The Wife was admiring the vases, and I loaded up the mug with soda. (If I drank beer, this is the type of mug I would drink it in.) We finished the day by watching anime before our seemingly infinite 10-hour drive, a drive in which the GPS decided it would be much more fun for us to drive through the backwoods of South Carolina than to simply take us to 95. Hurray for the “Most Use of Highways” option! (Of course, it did spare us from having to go anywhere near that cesspool known as South of the Border, which I guess made the hour-long detour worth it.)

All in all, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the experience. I plan to go pottery shopping more often, provided I actually have money to buy, if something should catch my eye. Heck, if nothing else take that last bit with you: pottery shopping is fun if you either (a) love pottery, or (b) have money you can spend. I may not know much about pottery, but I know what I like. And I like my mug.

Side Note: I will be adding pics of this later. I just haven’t had the time, but I figured I’d go ahead and publish it anyway, since it’s been sitting in the backend for about 2 1/2 weeks.)

When I was brought in to the… uhm.. operating room (I guess), I was told to sit in the oft dreaded dentist’s chair. As usual, the dentist was off finishing another appointment, so I had a few minutes to contemplate not only the impending pain-staking experience, but also also to get bored. Normally, I find the controller for the operating chair, lay it back, and make myself comfortable. (Might as well take a nap while I wait, right?) This time around the chair was turned off, which meant I was stuck in the quasi-upright position the chair defaults to, or as I like to call it, the most uncomfortable position for a chair possible.

Looking around for something to do (other than read Fark on my phone), I noticed all the equipment used was out and, frighteningly, within my reach: the little spritzer of water and air, the suction vac used to suck up all the blood and spit, something that looked like a vacuum cleaner hose with an oxygen mask attached inside which you’re supposed to spit in when you’ve rinsed, a that big light that hovers above your mouth when it’s being worked on, the X-Ray cannon they shoot at your cheeks, and even some of the doctor’s sharper tools, like that mini hand mirror, that pointy scraper thing used to scrape out plaque and poke at your gums, and of course, the dreaded drill. Being curious by nature, I picked up a few of the items and decided I should learn how to operate them: flip a swich, suck a bit; Press a button, water shoots out, etc, etc.

It wasn’t long before mischievous thoughts entered my mind. “What if I stuck a ball of paper inside the suction thing?” “Can the suction from this thing hold up that tray with all the tools?” “Would this cup’s bottom get crushed if I put it here?” “If I poured water into this vacuum thing, would is just suck it all up, or would a tank somewhere eventually fill and back up?” (Ewwww…) Of course, I decided not to try any of those, or to play with any of the readily available sharp objects all over the room for that matter. I figured that being bored and trying to find something fun to do is one thing. Being bored and being stupid — well now, there’s the recipe for a Darwin award. After all, the last thing you’d want to do in a dentist’s office is screw around with the equipment that will eventually be used on you.

After the doctor came in, she quickly got to work. Numb the gum, poke a bit. “Hurts? No? Let’s start.” Then I heard the ever familiar whir of the drill.

As the drilling progressed, I came to a realization: both my doctor and her assistant were women. Mind you, I had noticed that they were women before, but I never really realized it until at one point during the procedure, both of them had their fingers in my mouth, along with two suction-type devices and a spritzer/air thingy, and neither tried to rip my cheek off or cause me more pain than I otherwise would have to had endured.

I guess that’s why I prefer female dentist over male dentists. Same goes for dental assistants, despite the fact that I’ve never actually seen a guy at that type of job. Aside from it fulfilling what I’m sure is every man’s dream of having multiple possibly beautiful women bending over him and sticking their fingers in his mouth (not that I want that or anything), I find that female dentists are usually a bit more liberal with the anesthesia, and seldom use pithy, patronizing statements like “the rest of this won’t hurt”, “that didn’t really hurt that much, did it?” and “don’t worry, we’re almost done” as responses to requests for more anesthesia. Of course, another bonus is that it real easy to cop a feel with the more attractive ones, especially when they’re bending over you. Don’t worry, I’m not speaking from experience here. For those of you considering this, however, let’s think it all the way through: would you really want to try a and cop a feel from and likely piss off women who (a) outnumber you, (b) are currently holding sharp objects inside your mouth, and are (c) drilling at your teeth? Probably not, at least not any more than you’d try to cop a feel from a nurse right when she’s about to draw your blood, or more accurately, during the process.

As the procedure went on an odor began to arise out of my mouth. Was that… smoke!? Actually, yes. Since I’m not a smoker, this development was a bit disconcerning, but I figured the dentists was probably just using a blow torch to melt my tooth or something. No biggie. I surprised was, however, when I heard second drill type being used. Most people know about and hate the drill type with the high-pitched “whirrrrrrr” sound, the one the dentist generally uses to do in 1 minute what it takes cavities years to accomplish. Most people, however, haven’t met with the second drill, the one which causes crunching noises to come forth from your mouth as it grinds into a tooth. This is a much slower, much more violent drill which I can only presume is responsible for not only digging through old fillings, but also punching tunnels through redwood trees and excavating mountains. The sound was scary, true, but imagine how much more fearful I felt at seeing chunks of stuff formerly attached to my mouth fly out.

After using their brute-force excavation techniques on me, the doctor left the assistant to patch me up by sticking a blow dryer in my mouth. I should try that once in a while, you know, just for kicks. “Hey honey,” I could ask The Wife, “where’s your blow dryer? I need to superglue something to my teeth.” I have a feeling, though, that there’s a Darwin award waiting to happen there, too.

She finished, had me rinse and spit into the oxygen mask/vacuum hybrid, and sent me on my merry way — $110 dollars poorer.

As you can probably tell, I’m not a big fan of dentists. Sure, they’re usually nice people, even if they are a bit sadistic. Still, if the best way to describe the experience of meeting one usually includes drills, vacuums, and crunching sounds — all of which involve your mouth — I’m sure you can see where I’m coming from. Frankly, I wish I never had to see one again. Paradoxically, however, the way to see less of a dentist of to see more of the dentist. Go figure.

In high school there was this teacher who almost no one liked, not staff nor students: Poly “Demon” Demma. Depending on who you talked to she was either the most self-righteous, annoying, and power-tripping teacher to ever walk the halls, or (in rare cases) the most just and fair teacher you could ask for. Like most, I was of the former opinion, even though I started by being of the later.

I’m sure you can guess some about her attitude and how people felt about her based on the nickname alone, but the urban legends which roamed the school regarding Demma revealed exactly how deeply the dislike (I would almost say “hatred”) ran with the students:

• She walked with a limp. Two reasons were given for this. One legend had it that a student had once pushed her down the stairs and broke her hip. The other said that a student had once thrown a desk at her, breaking her leg and hip.
• She once had a bird die in school. Demma loved her parakeets. So much so she once brought them to school. Legend had it that a student killed one of her birds, dressed it up in a tiny suit, taped its wing to its crotch, and stuffed it in her purse.

Both of these, of course, were wishful thinking on the part of the students, most of whom gleefully passed on the legends to any incoming freshmen and sophomores, especially if they were unfortunate enough to be in one of Demma’s classes. However, these were still only legends: while she indeed got hip replacement surgery, it wasn’t because of a student, it was because of arthritis. As for the bird, she had once brought her pet parakeets to school, where a student opened the cage and one flew away.

To her credit, she was a good English teacher. Very good. The problem was that in order to be as good as she was, Demma felt it necessary to be demeaning to anyone who didn’t believe as she believed, did exactly as she asked. (“Commanded” may be a better description of her edicts or requests, whatever they were.) She was sort of the Richard Dawkins of teaching: it wasn’t good enough to feel you were right, you had to be a jerk to anyone who disagreed with you. (This is an unfair characterization of Dawkins, but it should get the point across.) She was also very much into the crony system: you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Of course, her idea of you scratching her back (as repulsive a thought as that was and still is) was to always do all your homework and do it right. Do things right, and you would stay on her graces, even be showered with random extra points for no apparent reason that counted towards your final grade. Fall from her graces, however, and you were on her shiat-list permanently.

As you can probably guess, not many people could stay on her graces.

My problems with Demma started when we started with our reading assignments. One of her requirements was that we should be reading an approved novel every day. Since no fantasy or science fiction books were allowed, I asked her for an opinion. She recommended Tom Clancy’s books, and I got to reading. Surprisingly to me at the time, I loved them: The Hunt for Red October, Clear and Present Danger, The Sum of All Fears, Without Remorse… all of these were novels I raced through, at the pace of more than 100 pages a night, 50 on a bad night. At one point, Demma also bought a Tom Clancy book for me to borrow and read.

This was all well and good, until one week I started coming in with having read at most only 50 pages per night. “You’re slipping,” I remember her saying. All I knew how to do was apologize, since I didn’t think she would really care that I had been ramping up my violin and double bass practice to three and four hours a night. By the end of that week I had gone from being one of her golden boys to the bottom of the totem pole. I stopped receiving the extra points she would randomly toss around to those she thought deserved the extra points (regardless of their grades in the class), was insulted regularly, and those led to ever lowering grades. While at the first quarter I had received an A in the class, with a 99% overall grade percentage, by the time the third quarter came about my grade had dropped to a D. I eventually finished the class with a C.

To a certain extent, I understand now why she did what she did: she had seen what my level of excellence was and when she saw me slipping to a lower level — 50 pages a night instead of 100 — she began to give me a hard time in order to get me back on track. Unfortunately, she never really explained this, and instead of trying to help me or even find out why my production had dropped, she told me that I was lazy and should work as hard as Chan, the Vietnamese girl who sat next to me. Apparently, the fact that I was now performing with two orchestras and a band in the middle of the high season for music — Christmas time — was of no concern. Her class was of utmost importance.

This incident revealed to me why people thought so badly about her. Of course, this wasn’t the only incident to reveal so, just the first.

I took English with Mrs. Demma during my sophomore year in high school. This was the same year the University of Florida played Florida State University at the Sugar Bowl. Demma had been invited to the game, and while she didn’t know who to root for — before she went, she couldn’t have cared less about football — she still went. (Not liking football is no reason to turn down a free trip to the French Quarter in New Orleans, right?)

The Monday after she returned from her trip, we walked in to find the words “Sugar is Sweet” written in large letters across the whiteboard. At the beginning of class, she explained what the words meant by asking a simple question: “Did anyone see the FSU game this weekend? Do we have any Gators fans in here?” She asked that last question with pampas spite usually reserved for Democrats. (Politics and the classroom mixed quite often that year in English.) All of us knew right there and then who she ended up rooting for. As it turned out, some UF fans sitting near her were a bit drunk and unruly. This led her to presume that all UF students were drunk and unruly, so out of her need for a sense of moral superiority, she instantly became an FSU fan. Lucky for her, FSU won the game.

Personally, I can’t say I even remember the game. I was never really a fan of either school’s football team (although I pretended to be became one when courting The Wife, a UF alumni), so I didn’t bother watching it. Nevertheless, I made the unfortunate mistake of wearing my sherbet orange Tampa Bay Buccaneers jacket and a pair of blue jeans that day. Orange and blue, as you may know, are the school colors of the University of Florida. A kid sitting next to me had also worn orange and blue, but his came in the form of a UF Gators Football t-shirt. After her little victory speech in front of a class of mostly confused (and thoroughly annoyed) students, Demma moved to stand in front of both me and the other kid.

“Oh,” she said, “what do we have here? A couple of Gator fans? How does it feel to have lost so badly?”

She turned to the first kid, waiting for an answer. “Eh, it’s a game. It was close.”

“Close?!” she said in total surprise. “My dear, you obviously didn’t watch the game. Three times the Seminoles made it towards the end zone. Three.” She put up three fingers. “Sure they didn’t score, but they didn’t need to. They proved that had they needed the points, they could have gotten them.” (Years later, I’m still wrestling with that logic. If you’re near the end zone and don’t score, it’s because you can’t, not because you simply let the other team have it easy.)

“Eh, whatever. I still like my team,” he replied.

She turned to me. “And what about you? What did you think, hmm?”

“Frankly, I didn’t really care,” I told her. “This is a Bucs jacket, see?” I pointed to the large picture of Buccaneer Bruce on the jacket, and the words “TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS” emblazoned on the arms. I continued, “I’m also a [University of Miami] Hurricanes fan. I like neither the Gators nor the Noles.”

“Of course, Miami. Another losing team,” she replied. (The Hurricanes lost the National Championship that year to Nebraska.) “Still, orange and blue… those are Gator colors, you know,” she said as she walked away.

“Yep, I know,” I replied. “Doesn’t change the facts.”

She continued, “I guess I wouldn’t want to associate myself with them either.”

Right then I thought about becoming a Gators fan, purely out of spite. (Remember that in the American South, football is not a sport: it’s a religion.) I couldn’t, but I did start hating FSU even more. That’s just as good, right? Funny thing that even to this day, no matter who FSU is playing, I’m almost always rooting for the other team. (Unless they’re playing the ‘Canes, when instead I wish for a meteor to strike the field and obliterate both teams. Nuke them from space: it’s the only way to be sure they both lose.)

“By the way,” she said from her desk, “have any of you ever had gator meat? It tastes just like chicken.”

For the next week, Demma kept on with the game, eventually changing her official mailing address to include the words “Florida State”, instead of the postal code “FL”. From that point on, in her class, wearing a University of Florida shirt was reason for insult, unless you were one of the few on her graces by that time.

Later on in the year I came to school a few minutes late, so I had to get a late pass from the office. My being late to my first class, Orchestra, wasn’t exactly an uncommon occurrence, so I wasn’t new to the process. Still, the fact that you’re reading this should tell you who was manning the tardy desk that day.

By this time, I had started to work with my violin teacher on training for my auditions to various music schools. I only had two years to prepare, so time was short. This morning, however, my passion for music came under fire as the Demon side of Demma came out.

“You play the violin?” she asked in her usual snide manner.

“Yeah, I’ve been playing for five years. I’m the concert master of the orchestra.” I grabbed my hall pass and started walking away.

“You know, unless you work on your English you’ll never get anywhere in life. Don’t count on doing anything with music unless you’re a Mozart or Beethoven.”

Of all the pampas, self righteous, demeaning things to say! I tried to hold it in, but I lost it. “You’re right,” I yelled, “I won’t be as good as them. I’ll be better.” I stormed out of that room determined to prove her wrong.

In later years, ironically, it would be my music which would lead me to my career as writer. On the one hand, the fact that I have become a fairly successful writer at a relatively young age proves that I was able to do something in spite of Demon Demma’s damning grades, which makes me want to tell her “Suck it, Demma!” On the other hand, the fact that she was right about my dependency on English in order for me to succeed career-wise makes me wonder whether I should be thanking her. (That last one, though, feels a bit like thanking Saddam Hussein for teaching us how bad dictatorships are.)

I guess the lesson here is that no matter how good you are at what you do and no matter how right you may be, unless you work on your people skills, people will hate you, especially if you’re a jerk. Still, if I ever see her again I might actually thank her, since I’ve used a lot of what she taught in my carreer, or at least at the beginning of it. Then again, I might just push her down the stairs. Heck, I may do both, so long as no one’s watching.

When my family still lived in Puerto Rico, one of the things all of the kids in our neighborhood grew fond of was playing cards. Usually, card games happened whenever the power went out (which was somewhat often), or whenever it was raining and we couldn’t go out and play in the rain (usually because of lightning). They also occurred whenever we were under the care of someone’s grandparent and a set of dominoes was unavailable. For some reason, it seemed as if every grandparent was an expert at both of those games, cards and dominoes. Later on we figured out why: having decades of experience behind them, all grandparents were skilled cheaters, at least when it came to cards. It seems all grandparents all over the world have at least that much in common.

The game we most often played was a simple game called “War”. If you’re not familiar with it, here are the rules:

War can be played by as many people as you want with as many decks as you want. (The more decks you use, the longer the game will likely be.) It includes all the cards in a deck(s), including the Jokers, which are the highest-value cards, followed by the Aces, Kings, etc. To start, every player gets the same number of cards, face down. Each player then turns the top-most card of their personal deck over and compares it to everyone else’s. The player with the highest value card gets all the cards presented. If two or more players have the same value card (e.g.: two Kings), and those cards are the highest in value from all the players (i.e.: all other players present cards of lower value than Kings) those players have to wage war: each player lays down the top three cards from their deck, face down, then a fourth one face up. (While laying the cards down, the players should each say “I – De – Clare – WAR!”, with each syllable corresponding to the card being dropped.) The player with the highest card at this point gets all of the cards presented for this round, including both the face up and face down cards. (War confrontations are the only way you can really get someone else’s Jokers. A player with at least one Joker is never out of the game.) If another tie takes place, then the players wage war again in the same manner. The player who gets all the cards wins.

The reason we played “War” instead of “Go Fish”, “Crazy Eights” or “Speed” was because it was a simple game which usually lasted for a long time, and was somewhat difficult to cheat on. Mind you, we played the others as well, but dominoes aside, this one was the one game all of us, young and old alike, had in common.

Tonight, while at the Christmas Eve celebration over at The Wife’s parents’ house, the mood wasn’t exactly a particularly festive one. While the family was there chatting it up and laughing, it seemed as if the level of energy and feeling of camaraderie wasn’t what it used to be. I don’t know, maybe it was we were all a year older and just didn’t have as much energy as we had when we were young-uns in the long, long ago of last year. I sincerely doubt it, however. Instead, I think it was because — and this will sound a bit selfish — there really wasn’t any gift giving.

Last year, the family decided to have a “Random Santa” sort of thing, where each guy would bring a gift for a guy, and each lady would bring a gift for a lady. We then put all the gifts on a table and each guy would randomly pick a gift meant for a guy (not the one he brought), and each lady randomly picked a gift meant for a lady (not the one she brought). This worked out well because almost 20 people showed up last year, which offered a bit of variety.

This year, the family instead decided to have everyone buy US$20 in Florida Lottery tickets and put all the numbers in a pool. Officially, 16 people participated, which means that a total of 320 numbers were picked. If one of those 320 numbers wins, the plan is to split the jackpot (currently worth $14,000,000) 16 ways.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but somehow this doesn’t exactly scream (or even whisper) of Christmas spirit to me. Then again, I don’t gamble, so what do I know, right?

In addition to the lack of gift giving, the number of beers that made their way from the fridge to the toilet via human bladders was also a mood killer, since a certain level of argumentation made its way into various conversations and turned a festive occasion into a mundane, almost every-day one. Finally, there was that whole overt attention to football games on the television, underscored by the usual betting pools, and the general lack of family activities, which — since there was no family gifting/unwrapping — were brought down from one last year to zero this year. Combined, these factors aided in the lack of a true Christmas spirit during this Christmas Eve celebration.

By 10:00 PM, everyone had left, save for The Wife and I (and her parents’, of course). After the rambunctious evening we could finally spend a few minutes enjoying the company of her parents. Both her mom and her dad are wonderful people, for the most part. Her mom I love because she’s always been on my side when it came to the relationship between The Wife and I (which I guess counts as an inter-ethnicity marriage, or some such thing). Despite the running joke involving mother-in-laws — that they always hate their child’s spouse — she and I get along very well. (I think its because she knows I like Polka.) Her dad I like because I can just be “one of the guys” with him. This despite the fact that he, for all purposes, forbade the marriage between The Wife and I, on the grounds that he should be marrying a “white guy” instead of a “Hispanic.” Needless to say, this racist leaning seems to have faded away, or at least been buried well enough for him and me to talk sports and… wait, does he talk about anything else? Maybe his friends. Well anyway, we now get along.

As the radio played some Christmas songs from one of the local country music stations, I suggested we play a game of cards. We had just finished putting away the leftover food from the party, and it looked as if we’d soon be watching television together, not really interacting with each other, and feeling just as empty inside. In their own “what the hell, might as well” sort of way, they agreed and we started up the game. In no time, all of us were laughing, chatting, and accusing each other of cheating (as per tradition, of course).

With the music playing in the background and all of us simply sitting there talking, it was clear that the spirit of Christmas finally started to show up. It wasn’t like we suddenly decided to start caroling across the neighborhood (this isn’t the type of neighborhood you do that in, if you get my drift), but for the first time all night, all of us were smiling and enjoying time together, instead of drinking to create an artificial high or silently watching their huge, 60″ television.

After about an hour, we finally decided to stop. By this time, both The Wife and her dad had been eliminated from the game, and only her mom and I were playing. I finally forfeited the game, since I could see I wasn’t the only one getting tired.

As luck would have it, the local CBS affiliate started to play the Midnight Mass being performed by Pope Benedict XVI from St. Peter’s Basilica. While I don’t consider myself a Catholic, I couldn’t resist watching this absolutely beautiful ceremony take place. Indeed, it was the best way to welcome Christmas I could have asked for, since the spiritual was finally unified with the secular, forming the magnificent in the way only those two can. We sat together and watched it for about 45 minutes before The Wife finally decided it was time to go. (Her mother’s sleepy nods were an indication that it was time for us to hightail it.)

We said our good byes in the usual brief manner and were then off to my parents’ place, where we expected to stay up wrapping presents for each other until about 3:00 AM, just to force ourselves to be up in 5 hours in order to open them, act excited, then go back to sleep. Still, on the way home, neither The Wife nor I could help but be amazed at how something as simple as a kid’s card game could turn a day which seemed like any other into Christmas Eve, and how it could so perfectly welcome Christmas day.

First impression: after seeing just the opening movie, I’m… not all that impressed. Don’t get me wrong, I totally dig the story line and seriously liked the movie — I certainly plan to add it to my collection — but I guess after everything I heard I sort of expected this to be better. The dangers of being put on too-high a pedestal, I guess.

Side Note: Did anyone else notice the similarities — in both storyline and scenery set up (particularly when it came to the hangar in the Galactica) to the storyline and scenery used in the old show Space, Above and Beyond? (Can I get a show of hands of people who actually remember that show?) What about the officers’ quarters, is it just me, or do they remind anyone else of the officers’ quarters in some of the Star Trek ships? I’m thinking mostly the design of the walls here. Finally, did anyone else notice that the weapons being used by the Cylons consisted mostly of 50-megaton nukes against cities and 50-kiloton nukes against the ships? Didn’t the Russians have missiles in the 200-megaton range in the 1960’s?

While watching this, I started thinking:

1. Why isn’t it that we see more of the technologies being developed (or thought about) in real life in sci-fi shows and movies?
2. What technologies, if any, would I consider the most likely to come to pass?

To expand on the first question, here’s what I mean: when you listen to speakers like Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil — folks who know a thing or two about predicting the future and inventing the future they predict — you always hear about technologies which would seem to make us superhuman: red blood cell substitutes which allow us to hold our breath underwater for four hours; curing cancer by treating it as it is, a repair mechanism of the body gone awry; the cure for aging and aging-related death; the cure — and I use the term loosely here — for sleep. (Basically, all of the technologies gushed about in Transhumanist and Posthumanist websites.) Yet, very rarely in these shows and movies do we see even a hint that these technologies exist.

Case and point: in Battlestar Galactica, some really interesting technologies are talked about, technologies being at the very least speculated on, if not actually being developed today. Two examples I can think of are uploading of memories into computers in order to continue your existence (the problem of continuity aside) and a technological Singularity (which would be pretty much the only way a Cylon race could even show up, I guess).

While these are interesting inclusions in and of themselves, I can’t help but wonder why people in the show are so “human.” Not once did I hear about possible modifications to increase natural capabilities, such as memory-expanding brain implants, which are being discussed today; Cyberware and brain-to-computer interfaces, which are being developed and used today (and would be very handy in those ships); genetic modification and exploitation, some methods for which are entering human trials now; and better communications systems, such as brain-to-brain communications, which are in the early stages of development today. Call me spoiled, but I guess I was expecting that a civilization capable of near-light speed travel would also have a tendancy towards technological enhancements of biological mechanisms. In other words, why I didn’t see more cyborgs (the non-fiction, real life kind) is beyond me, and was a bit of a dissapointment. (Also, why were these people so comfortable with death? I mean, sure, they had a religion, but wouldn’t their doctors have figured out by now that “hey, you know, maybe this death thing isn’t good, and it isn’t really necessary!”)

To expand on the second question: science fiction has a strange way of feeding the “art imitates life imitates art” loop. After all, how many of the technologies we saw in the original Star Trek series have we seen already developed in the real world? (Hint: if you have a flip-cell phone, you’re using one of them.) Likewise, many of the technologies we’re seeing in sci-fi today are technologies which I fully expect will come to pass. Some of these may seem completely “out there”, but considering the rate in which communication systems evolve (Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns) I would be surprised if these technologies weren’t invented, most of them in our lifetimes (which may be a lot longer than we might think, if the radical anti-aging crowd delivers on their promises).

Here’s a list of some of the technologies I fully expect to see developed and why:

• Virtual Worlds (as in The Matrix): The rise in popularity of virtual environments like Second Life and other intricate MMORPGs will likely continue until we can start interfacing with each other in full emersion virtual reality. How long thereafter will it be before people choose their virtual world life to their real life? We saw a glimpse of what the first truly commercialized stages of this could look like in the movie Minority Report, and this has been featured in various science fiction novels, such as Tek War series by William Shatner. People’s desire for this type of technology has been manifested over and over in films and media. If you think business savvy tech folks haven’t noticed, think again. This is one technology that will, for good or ill make its way into the public.
• Ingestible Communications Devices, Brain to Brain Communications (as featured in Aeon Flux): The movie Aeon Flux was a particularly interesting one to me because many of the technologies presented there, particularly the ingestible communication systems and bio-enhancements, are not just desirable: they are the next logical step if we continue on this path. Internal communications as featured will allow us to continue the path of independence that the Gen-Y crowd is most known for. Imagine being able to hold meetings (at your own leisure) in your head, without having to leave the park where you’re playing with your kids?
• Telexistence (as featured in Dune, the 1984 version): Imagine the ability to physically interface with remote environments while feeling you’re truly there. Doctor’s are currently experimenting with operating on patients hundreds of miles away using robotic arms and videos, but the ability to telexsit, to “be in two places at once” is something which could give people more of a god complex, as well as a few god-like abilities. This could be combined quite well with sense-transferring fabrics (featured in movies like Minority Report and Babylon 5: River of Souls. You can see developmental versions of both technologies at the TACHI Lab project site.
• Bio-enhancement (as featured in countless movies, but I’ll stick to Aeon Flux for this one): I remember reading a book when I was a kid titled something like The Next Millennium, or something like that, in which the authors speculated what the next thousand years of human development would look like. Given that the writers were an engineer and a biologist, it was no surprise that all the advancements they focused on dealt mostly with those two fields. One of the more interesting developments (predicted for the year 2400 and later) would be the wide-range use of bio-enhancement technologies. I’m not just talking about the red blood cells I mentioned earlier (although those are both interesting and very desirable), but rather more mundane things (if that’s the proper word), such as replacing finger nails with a pen-like device and a digital clock; receiving retinal implants which allow for multiple eye colors simultaneously (they emphasized the popularity of the “rotating color iris”, which would present all colors at the same time and rotate them like a weird, optical spectrograph); and adding pouches to different areas of your body. They also touched on something a bit more interesting: bio-engineered humans designed to better live with their surroundings. One example I vividly remember (which was also prominently shown in the movie Aeon Flux) was the replacement of feet with another set of hands. In the book, these were meant for use by people who were living in low-gravity environments who would have little practical use for feet. While tests like this aren’t exactly ongoing (and the technologies for which will likely not be around for another few years) I fully expect to see some level of bio-enhancement taking place, first by making us into cyborgs, then by re-engineering us at the biological level.

I’ll stop here because, frankly, I could go all day with these: invisibility cloaks (Ghost in the Shell, strong AI (The Matrix), space elevators (The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson), improved communications networks, teleportation (Star Trek, but only with information), fully immersible computer interfaces (Johnny Mnemonic), improved portable searches (for real life items, not just Internet things, a la Star Trek tri-corders), cryonics (uhm… everything), etc. There are thousands more technologies I could hit upon but I’m sure these may whet your appetite a bit, if not scare you half to death.

If there are any technologies you honestly feel will likely come about in the near future which others may be dismissive of, or would just like to let your mind roam free on the topic, feel free to share them here. (Or on your own blog, but don’t even mention flying cars: they’re still at least another 30-50 years off and have been talked about to death already. Hover cars, however, are another story.) I’m especially interested in hearing from any self-proclaimed Transhumanists and Futurists, since it seems that you fine folks are the ones putting the pressure on the scientists to develop technologies which would aid us in the truly important technologies, like radical life extension.

Finally, ask yourself this question: 15 years ago, what did you think the world would be like? Did you expect it to be anything like what it is today? Did you expect the Internet, or cell phones, or iPods? Did you expect a cure for diabetes, or ALS, or cancer? Has the future impressed you, disappointed you, or left you with a feeling of “ho hum”? The Wife and I actually talked about this a few nights ago and I came to the realization that, while the future isn’t at all what I expected, I couldn’t have imagined my life now at that time. No way could I realize that I would spend a good part of my day interacting with individuals from all over the world, or having access to thousands of hours of music and speeches in my hand, or being able to communicate with anybody at just about any time from just about anywhere. But then again, I guess predicting the future is a bit of a gamble unless you’re helping invent it.

Note: This article has also been published over at Betterhumans.