On "Reading"

People who say that they are interested in "reading" or that their hobbies include "reading" or that they "love to read" should have dry scratchy papyrus paper shoved down their throats until they asphyxiate and die. Anyone who is at least half-way literate probably enjoys at least something they read. What, do you especially love the process of reading? Why not put down "semantics" or "contextual linguistics?" Or perhaps you like reading about "anything and everything." No worries then, since that only makes you a vacuous and pliant tool.

"Reading" is a basic skill most of us master in order to learn about other stuff. Really, you probably just enjoy the particular subjects and ideas about which you read. So cut the bullshit and be more specific: "I like comparative politics" or "I'm into contemporary art." We'll assume you can read; there's no need to announce it to the world like an asshole.




snowy mountain trail near Grenoble, France

Why TheTrayTiger, you ask?

So for the IB program back in high school, we had to complete 200 service hours during the course of our junior and senior years. For my requirement, I chose to work in the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen in downtown with my friend Mark during the summer. Our first day was Monday at 7:30 am. When we arrived a bunch of 60-something year old grandmothers looked over at us, "OHH Estelllle! It's the two young men Abigail was talking about! You boys ready to help out?" "Um, yes, that's why we're here" "Great! You can start by slicing those carrots over there [hands me an enormous knife]." So the next hour or so was occupied by slicing and dicing various fruits and vegetables, fruits et légumes, frutas y verduras, Obst und Gemüse-- you get the idea.

After that hour, Estelle could tell I was a little bored with the affair and wanted to move on. "Mike! How about you show this young man around, maybe show him the food line!" Mike was sort of a shady character you weren't quite sure if you trusted the first time you saw him. He talked real fast, but didn't look you in the eye, and he had been in Vietnam... Anyway, he was the guy who did all the dirty work around the place, like cleaning the bathrooms and stuff... "Hey, kid, what's your name." "Edwin." "Alright Edward, lemme show you around. Right here we got the foodline, you know, that's where we serve'em the food." "Cool." "You gotta keep hot water underneath to keep it all nice and hot." "Right." "And over here to your left is our dish washing station." "Alright." "Actually, the only dishes we wash are the trays, cause they sort of double as plates. I used to have to wash all the trays by hand with soap and water. It got to be pretty tough keeping up with the exit crowd."

He directs me over to a large square metal contraption. It has a old crusty piece of tape on the front of it with the phrase in all caps "THE TRAY TIGER!!!". "So about two years ago we got this here tray-washing machine donated to us. This guy at McDonald's showed me how to use it... hm, he's dead now. Anyway, so it has three stages, the first washes with soap and water, the second hits it with bleach, then the third.. I dunno what it does, but the whole process takes less than a minute." "Why is it called The Tray Tiger?" "I dunno, it's been there awhile. I guess we were so happy about getting the machine."

I ended up working as the tray-washer for two and half months that summer. I got to be pretty efficient and I was subsequently nicknamed The Tray Tiger myself. When my tenure came to a close I decided I should leave some kind of legacy for myself. I went around to a few office stores and finally found one that would stamp out onto an acrylic name plate "THE TRAY TIGER!!!" (yes, I did get a "wtf?" look from the guy at Office Depot). It was a black lacquered finish with bold white font. My last day at the soup kitchen, I went and affixed it to the tray-washing machine with this permanent supertape. I hope it is still there to this day.

Following this experience, I had been trying to decide on a good screenname. The one I had at the time was wholly inadequate and relied on numbers after the name to establish its uniqueness. TheTrayTiger was my solution, as it was a combination of letters so singular that it had been hitherto never created as a screenname, nor did it return any Google hits. It was perfect. My screenname was distinct. It required no numbers. I was THE one and only... TRAYTIGER.



St. James Park, London

That Kid Every Professor Secretly Wants To Strangle

Slouched in his front-row seat, he assumes a coolly relaxed position as his beady eyes peer with feigned attention through two crooked panes of glass. He lounges with one arm crossed across his chest and the other propped up by the first so that his hand reaches to support his pimple-ridden chin. He sports his daily uniform: an extra-large Stairway to Heaven t-shirt drapes his awkwardly gaunt frame and faded Levi's. Wait, he speaks. In his first proclamation of the day, he sagaciously observes that our professor of differential equations has forgotten to carry over a meaningless constant term from the previous line (never mind that the term was to cancel out anyway). He has barely finished settling into a self-congratulatory stupor when again his astute mind strikes again with yet another useless correction. He deserves to be stabbed in the face.




bizarre sunset in Strasbourg

Un Destin Nucléaire

Pour mes lecteurs francophones (le français n'est pas ma langue maternelle, alors je te prie de pardonner les fautes grammatiques ou orthographiques):


Tant que je maintiens cette image devant les yeux, je pourrai me souvenir de ce beau paysage expansif sur lequel donne ma fenêtre. Je suis chez moi. Je viens d’entendre dire que la Corée du Nord va nous attaquer. Il est certain qu’elle a lancé au moins soixante engins balistiques nucléaires, chacun à une grande-ville différente. J’habite à Séattle— il est sûr que nous serons annihilés. Bien que les bombes soient déjà lancées, la Corée est loin d’ici, alors elles n’arriveront pas avant quelques minutes. J’ai encore du temps.

Quand il ne restera plus de temps, je m’imagine qu’il y aura un calme sur la ville. Nous deviendrons solennels devant notre destin, comme les dinosaures avant que le météore les ait frappé indifféremment. Ou peut-être sera-ce l’inverse. Il est possible que mes voisins veuillent m’accueillir chez eux pour faire la fête une dernière fois. En retour, il serait étrange qu’ils le fassent parce que, franchement, ces quinze minutes ne suffisent pas pour faire la fête.

Je réfléchis à ce que je ne ferai plus dans ma vie. Il est naturel que je sente ainsi, quoiqu’il vaille mieux ne pas sentir ainsi. Cependant, pour que notre esprit humain ne se taise pas, il faut que nous nous souvenions de tout ce qui nous rendait heureux. Il est probable que je ne jouerai plus du piano ; les ouvrages de Chopin, Beethoven, et Debussy se tairont devant la fission nucléaire. Heureusement, je suis capable d'entendre encore ces maîtres dans le monde tranquille qui est ma tête.

Il est probable que je ne verrai plus ma famille. Elle n’est pas là. La semaine dernière, ma femme et nos enfants sont allés chez leurs grands-parents. Ils habitent en Floride, alors il est impossible que ma famille revienne avant les bombes. Il vaut mieux quand même qu’ils restent là-bas. Je doute que la Floride soit bombardée.

Oui, je suis triste. Mais il faut comprendre que devant une certitude de mort, on ne considère pas la tristesse. En fait, il est intéressant qu’on ne pense qu’à la certitude curieuse qu’on ne pensera plus dans quelques minutes. Ayant cette pensée tranquille, je regarde encore le beau paysage en attendant les petits atomes d’uranium qui arriveront avec une légèreté meurtrière.



La scène du dôme de La Basilique du Sacré-Coeur à Paris

Those darned particle physicists...

Now you have to be careful. Just because electrons and muons are leptons doesn't mean they're hadrons too, although it is true that they are fermions like baryons, which are also hadrons. Mesons, however, are also hadrons, though they are bosons, and they include pions and kaons. Incidentally, protons and neutrons are nucleons that are baryons, which are hadrons that are fermions, made up of quark-quark-quark combinations held together by gluons, and sometimes they can give off photons, which are bosons but not mesons.


Highlights from living in Strasbourg last year.

Église St. Paul, Strasbourg, France

The Infiltration of IM-speak

I am a child of the 90's. I rode the crest of the the technology boom, learning to use Microsoft Works before my parents could even figure how to get out of that damn MS-DOS interface. I only vaguely remember what life was like before cell phones, when portable computers were the size of tuba cases and a play station was the ball pit you played in after you finished your Happy Meal at McDonald's. The significance of one technological phenomenon, however, won't be appreciated but for another 10 years, when the children raised on it rise to positions of relative power.

Instant messaging. Instant messaging changed the way we did homework. Gone were the long nights spent toiling away at your English paper with nothing but the deafening silence of your tiny room and the occasional phone call to an insomniac friend to distract your thoughts. Your productivity plunged as you alternated windows in an effort to maintain eight simultaneously lucid conversations. Social networking grew exponentially as the possibility for impersonal cyber-conversation greatly expanded the circle of potential acquaintances. Instant messaging occupied a middle region-- a notch above email, but below the intimacy of a telephone call. Tellingly, AOL Instant Messenger has become the de facto typing pedagogue for today's children.

Its success, coupled with an increasingly frenetic lifestyle, presaged a peculiar form of shorthand typing specific to instant messaging. Pressed by the need to maintain simultaneous conversations, expressions like "brb" and "ttyl" and "lol" emerged. This was by no means restricted to English speakers. The musings of French IMers massacred their beloved mother tongue as well, producing in extreme cases expressions like "koi29?" to substitute for "Quoi de neuf?" (What's new?). In English, nuanced progressions in expressed amusement appeared; in order, we have: hehe, haha, lol, HAHA, LOL, rofl (rolling on the floor laughing) = lmao (laughing my ass off), ROFL = LMAO, ROFLMAO.

But I can't do it. I simply can't bring myself to type "lol" in an instant message without at least a dose of self-conscious irony. The problem is that there's no real substitute for it. I mean, if I genuinely laugh out loud, what do I say? I want to convey that I really thought what the person said was funny. I guess I could just rely on the old "hehe" for internal smiles, "hahaha" for real smiles, and "HAHA" for a actual laughs. But you know, it's a tough call there. I mean, if someone's being side-splittingly funny I don't want to be typing "hehe" and "haha" all the time even if I truly am laughing. This is a concern of mine.

So I guess I just smile ":c)" and say hehe a lot. I use ":c)" (though I've recently seen the innovation "(:", which has a distinct why-the-hell-didn't-I-think-of-that quality) instead of ":)" or ":-)", because those usually induce emoticons, which are just silly. What if I want to convey a sarcastic grin? I don't want some goddamned cutesy yellow smile or anything. To be sure, it is only through context and judicious word choice can one arrive at the notoriously elusive sarcastic grin.

Anyway, to sort of make a point out of all of this, I recently overheard on the bus a girl squealing into her cell phone, "That is sooo funny! L-O-L!" Yes, she spelled it out. Now I'm all for innovative language and everything, but seriously, come on. Some things are just stupid.

Flip the slice!

Okay, so here's the situation: I'm making a sandwich and I've hastily grabbed two slices of bread from the bread bag and have made the amateur mistake of forgetting to flip one of the slices over to give two mirror image slices. It is of utmost importance that the small half-circles of bread matter at the top of the slices line up perfectly. This is particularly crucial with peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, where the global implications of such an oversight become glaringly apparent. It results in wholly intolerable asymmetries. That is, one may find areas of peanut butter coated bread with no jelly to counter its sticky smackiness, or, worse yet, no peanut butter to insulate the porous bread from the nefarious penetration of jelly! Don't make the same mistake I did. Don't forget: Flip the slice!

Parking lots have feelings too.

So a couple days ago, I got back to the town where I go to school. I needed bedding supplies and I needed jeans, so I went to a shopping center in which Target and Old Navy were nearly adjacent to each other.

Why Target and Old Navy, you ask? Target is the civilized alternative to Walmart. I hate Walmart. Not so much because of how shittily they treat their employees, since I'm thankfully not one of those, but how shittily they treat their customers, since I occasionally become one of those (but only when the circumstances require it). Their stores are either harshly lit or poorly lit, have uncomfortably narrow aisles, have shit perpetually piled up in the center of their aisles, have markedly unknowledgeable "team members," and basically just give you the urge to shop as fast as possible so that you can leave that horrible horrible place. Walmart does not respect you and me, the consumers. Walmart expects you and me to tolerate these affronts in exchange for "Always Low Prices." We are whores to Walmart.

"Not I," say I; "I won't be a whore," I said. "Go to Target I will," I say. And so it was. I went to Target, with its spacious clean aisles and brightly lit smiles.

Then to Old Navy. Old Navy because their jeans are cheap: only $18.50. After all, jeans are jeans are jeans, as far as I'm concerned. It took me all of two minutes to choose and pay for the jeans. I already knew my size and my style; was there more to debate? Decisive shopping is best.

Getting back to my car from Old Navy, I noticed one of those enormous minivan/SUV's had parked within a foot of the right side of my car. Drats! Darn you, insensitive SUV driver! Getting into my car, I started to back out of my spot. Now, I didn't exactly creep out or inch out, but I didn't go out all that quickly either. I'd say that I probably went out a tad too fast considering the gargantuan SUV that was blocking my view to the right.

Anyway, as I backed out, I looked to left first, then, looking right, I slammed the brakes. Shit. Two four-year-old girls and their father had just emerged from behind the SUV. I hadn't really come close to hitting them, but I definitely hadn't seen them. The girls hadn't seen me and were skipping along as if nothing had happened. But their father had seen me. Our eyes made contact in the split second as I hit the brakes. He had struck an instinctively protective pose, with one arm shielding one daughter and another arm grabbing her sister by the waist. His eyes stared piercingly into mine, wordlessly yet unmistakably informing me that he would do whatever was necessary to protect those girls.

Slightly shaken, I waved to him to indicate that I had seen them, and took the car out of reverse for good measure. He hurried his daughters along, then I very carefully backed out of the parking spot. I drove away, wondering if I too would have reacted with such selfless vigilance.