The Accidental Voice

I am a numbers person. Having studied math in college, I have always found all different manner of numbers, equations and formulas fascinating. There have been a lot of big numbers bandied about lately — usually with dollar signs bolted on to the front — and I got to thinking about how big those numbers are.

During all the talk about the $700 billion dollar bailout package, I wrote about
how big the number one billion is, what a billion dollars could buy and a few ways you could use to visualize such a number. Half that money has been spent (on what, no one seems to be quite sure) and the rest, $350 billion, is now being distributed with anyone and everyone slithering in to try to get a piece of it. I’m not so sure Gordon Gecko was right in the movie Wall Street. So far, greed has not proven to be all that good. At least not for the U.S.

Now we have The Stimulus Package; the $780 billion that’s meant to pull our collective a$$es out of the fire in which we find ourselves since the complete implosion of the economy. Combine that with the $350 billion and you get a number just north of one trillion dollars. But, what is a trillion? Most know it’s “a lot” but the number is so big most people can’t really comprehend it. Here are some things I found that give some sense of just how big this number is. Hint: It’s a whole lot bigger than even the billion I wrote about earlier.

Consider the humble dollar bill. It’s 2 ½ inches wide and 6 inches long and roughly as thick as a piece of paper. I have ten of them in my wallet at the moment and if I laid them together so they made a rectangle, they’d be about the size of a decent non-stick cookie sheet from amazon.com. I could buy six muffins down at The Coffee Stop on South Wilcox, a little over five gallons of gas or three medium drinks at Crowfoot Valley Coffee on Perry Street. Not a bad deal.

Let’s make the gargantuan leap to a trillion. What would a trillion dollars look like?

Considering that a ream of paper contains 500 sheets, if we had a ream of our cookie sheet sized rectangles we’d have $5,000 — Sweet! I could use that. To cover an American football field we’d need 44,400 of our stacks (I’ll let you do the math on the European football pitch of you’re a “soccer” fan.) That makes $222,000,000 — Even better, “hey, boss, I quit!” But let’s say we’re looking down at that football field covered with all that money, the looters haven’t come yet and we really want to get to a trillion dollars. (Incidentally, it’s only a trillion in the U.S. Most other places call it 1000 billion. We just insist on being different with our billions, trillions and funky systems of measurement) Since a ream of paper is 2 inches thick, to get to our goal, we’d have to add another 4,504 layers. You’d be looking at a stack of money the size of the football field
and as tall as a 19 story building. You’d be looking up.

A trillion seconds ago, some cave dwellers were painting on the walls at Chauvet Pont-d’Arc in France. These are the oldest known cave paintings. All they had to worry about was eating and staying alive…ah, the simple life.

It’s the 23rd of February, 2009. If you spent $1,000,000 a day from day zero of the Gregorian calendar, you’d still have 731 years, 6 months and 25 days to go before you spent a trillion dollars. In other words, you’d actually have to spend almost $1.4 million a day to spend your last dollar of $1 trillion today.

My home town of Castle Rock, CO is around 31.6 square miles in size. If I wanted to haul in a trillion marshmallows and spread them around, I’d be able to cover
all of Castle Rock — all of it, not just Castle Rock proper, but Castle Pines, Castle Pines Village, Founders, The Meadows…everything — in almost 8 inches of marshmallows. A trillion marshmallows would cover Denver, CO in two inches of puffed sugary goodness. Break out the chocolate and graham crackers and start a really big fire.

Whether there’s a dollar sign in front or not, a one with twelve zeros after it is a huge number. A billion is a large number. But 1000 billion? It’s really hard to imagine. Regardless of political leanings, I’m thinking we all need to hope like hell that it works.

Essays big numbers, math, money, stimulus package, trillion

It was the early nineties and the first time I saw Cortni, I was blown away. She had eyes like a cat with a regal aire that commanded the attention of the young men in the office. Carla, a co-worker, and I were across the room one day watching this phenomenon. She leaned over to me and whispered, “look at those wolves.” I turned to her and said “I’ll get her.” And I did. Three weeks and three days after our first date, we rode to the Jefferson Memorial on my motorcycle and I proposed to her on the steps amidst the cherry blossoms and white stone majesty of my favorite monument.

Three and a half years later it ended.

Because that’s not a love story. It’s a fairy tale. It’s believing marketers selling an idea as reality, the movies portraying starry eyed fantasies and commercials for diamonds. It’s believing there actually are white knights who can ride in with their trusty steeds and carry the princess off into the sunset. It’s thinking that reality can be sustained on the vaporous dreams of storybooks. But a stone doesn’t have magical power to keep the bonds of commitment strong. It’s a stone no matter how much was spent on it. What creates a real love story are the little things. Not grand gestures or superficial displays of affection. It’s not quality time. It’s Time.

A real love story is something wholly different, infinite and more there.

Diane was stunning and brilliant. She was the opposite of the everyone who had come before. She even intimidated me a little with her outgoing, carefree attitude. Before our first date she was moving a hundred miles an hour in her jean shorts and ripped Motley Crue t-shirt while I waited for her to get ready. But there was something compelling about her. Something underneath. The independence, the eyes-wide-open intelligence and the supreme confidence in who she was. No one could tell her who to be or how to act. She was who she was and she would never apologize for it. I was a goner.

Within a year, it was clear we wanted to spend a life together. Not because of fascination or infatuation, but because it just kinda made sense. We belonged together and everything we believed and how we saw the world matched. Not the same, but like two clues that fit to make a whole picture. As cliché as it sounds, she truly did complete me.

But this love story is not what comes to mind when you think about Valentine’s Day. It’s not flowers, chocolate and jewels. It’s not showing appreciation just one day a year because “you’re supposed to.” It’s kind of plain. This story is about being there any and every time she needs me. It’s making toast and poached eggs every single morning and bringing it to her in bed because for nine months those mornings were hard and she deserved every ounce of energy I could devote. It’s about supporting her when she’s afraid and trusting her when I am. It is a love story in which I make her laugh every day– even if it’s at me– and laughing right along with her. It’s a story about celebrating her triumphs– even if it’s just when the new dish she wanted to try turns out perfectly. It’s a story of listening. My love story is peppered with conversations about nothing or everything and being able to say anything in either kind. In the pages of my book, we are having these conversations still, after fifteen years. My love story tells of believing with all my heart that this one person is the person I find comfort with today, tomorrow and onward. The theme is talking. The plot is small touches; like the tap on my nose to dissipate the static before kissing every time we leave each other’s side.

My love story is not unique, hopefully. And it’s not filled with poetic words. It’s simple. I love Diane with everything I am. Still, and forever. Not because someone tells me to or so I can put it on the bumper of my car. Not because I married her and that’s the way married people are supposed to be. It’s because she has been there for me in my darkest hour and during my greatest triumphs as I have been for her. We have participated in each other’s lives to the fullest; in the truest meaning of “for better or for worse.” We are constantly exploring and there is always so much to know and learn so we do it together.

Diane is my all, my everything. She is my journey and my destination. And after fifteen years, as this story is still being written, whenever she walks into the room or I hear her voice as she approaches, I am breathless.

Essays commitement, couples, love, love story, marriage, valentines day

It happens every year. As we descend into shorter days and longer nights. As the earth’s axis tilts the northern hemisphere away from the sun and the light and radiant heat strike the U.S. at a more oblique angle, things change. The air cools, water condenses and when the temperature gets cold enough, it freezes and floats to the ground robbing the air of moisture and humidity. Dryer means more static electricity. And more static electricity means more getting lit up any time you touch a remotely conductive surface.

Albert Einstein once posited that if we evolved properly we would eventually exist as pure energy. Imagine that, all of us just blobs of light or sparkling spheres floating around. The fashionistas would certainly figure out a way for us to change our colors and we wouldn’t need to drive any more, we’d just float to where we needed to go. Or better yet, we could probably use the theory of quantum mechanics and simple just appear there using super position and time travel. We wouldn’t need to eat (my guess is we could subsist on sunshine), we wouldn’t need our fancy cars or the gas to run them (if we did need cars, we could just jack in and run them ourselves) and we wouldn’t need anything else but energy. So as long as that big fat red giant was shining, we’d be good. No need to work or do anything else, really since the evolutionary process would take us beyond needing to understand the universe, since we’d now be a part of it. We would be everything and everything would be us. Kind of like we are now, but we’d actually be aware of it. We’d just float around, interacting with each other as energy. Some would simply pulse and flash in some kind of highly advance conversation and some would interact as Steve Gutenberg and Tahnee Welch did in Cocoon. That would be interesting.

However, as fascinating as that mental exercise is, that’s not the way it is now. We’re still bags of bones, our skin still gets dry and papery, we itch and turning on the lights becomes a new adventure coming up with all manner of turning on the lights. The back of the hand, a hip, an elbow, anything. Anything to prevent the static shock from striking at the point on where some of the most sensitive nerves exist. I hit the light with my knuckle and try to swipe quickly by, thinking I’ll beat the electricity before it gets out of the thing I’m touching. But that’s folly since my hand is not going to be traveling at the speed of light any time soon. Not until I am a ball of energy anyway. So, as Winter progresses, reaching toward anything remotely electrical is a tentative, apprehension laden affair.

Even though our skin seems as if it’s made of paper during this time of year, the inside is still about 80% water. The dryness in the air makes it harder for electrical build up to disperse and within that paper sack that’s 80% water are the same salts that are in sports drinks. Electrolytes. There’s a reason they’re called that. High school chemistry class taught us that when NaCl (erm, salt) is put in water, the Na and Cl separate leaving the Cl part with a negative charge and the Na part with a positive charge. We all happen to be electrically charged because there are a whole bunch of other salts that do the same thing and they are in there, too. This makes us all really excellent conductors of electricity. And because of that we’re pretty good at collecting that electricity up. The more charge we have, the more that charge wants to get out. What better way than to jump from us to something connected to the giant battery we call earth. Zap!

When I was a kid, I liked to mess with electronics. Mostly it was pulling things apart and looking at all the miniature cities rising out of the circuit boards. But I learned some things, too. I learned was that capacitors were components that store up certain amounts of electrical charge. They are often what make a light blink, releasing energy each time they becomes charged to some specific limit before charging up again. I watched a friend use a pair of pliers to cross the two leads on a capacitor that was the size of a soda can. They spot welded to it! Capacitors store energy. Lesson learned.

My friend and I also figured out that if we carried a capacitor around the house holding one lead, shuffled our feet and then touched the other lead to a lamp or other grounded metal, the static shock would go into the capacitor, not us. After a few times doing this, depending on the size of the capacitor (and never with one the size of a soda can), the capacitor would start crackling which we correctly assumed meant it was “full”. But that charge had nowhere to go since the two leads weren’t connected up to anything. At least not yet.

That’s where my sister came in. Or when we weren’t feeling ornery, we’d have a duel. Like a knife fight with the leads of a tiny electrical component as the knife. Once both leads made contact with skin all the electricity we’d stored in it would be released and all the tiny static shocks would become one big shock. SNAP! It would light a person up or just make a cool blue light. Electricity is fun, Mr. Wizard! Here, hold this.

So I am a giant capacitor. And in these cooler, darker days we ourselves become more efficient capacitors, storing up energy in our electrolyte ridden bodies. Storing it up for when we reach to turn on a lamp or switch on an overhead light.

Since I’m not leaving the beautiful, but dry, climes of Colorado any time soon, I have resigned myself to swinging my hand quickly by a light switch (like a fool), leaning my leg against the bead on the corner of two walls (the paint, texture and my pants leg seem to lessen the blow) or simply gutting it out and going for it, watching to see how big the blue light it this time. I have resigned myself to being an excellent conductor of electricity. I have resigned myself to being a human Tesla coil.

Essays colorado, human tesla coil, static electricity, static shock, winter

I’m not a big fan of branding. I have a tendency to try to remove, cover or otherwise erase the brand names and logos that appear on the things I have, wear or buy. I’m not a big fan of items that do just one thing either. What if that one thing is something you only do once in a while. That appliance or tool or whatever is just taking up space the rest of the time. Seems a waste to me.

So, there are very few items in our kitchen that do just one thing (despite all those infomercials telling me I need this or that that does just this one thing, allegedly, the best and only way it can be done.) I remove the little plastic plate or sticker that has the car dealer’s name on it. I remove the license plate frame the dealer automatically puts on my car. I’m not being paid to advertise for them, why would I do it for free. I have also removed all the branding (except the stuff etched into the plastic cover) on my cell phone. I hacked into it and changed it so it did what I wanted it to do, not what they told me it should do.

I have not read the fine print on my phone so am not totally sure, but it seems right that I can mess with my phone and if I “brick” it, well, that’s my problem isn’t it. My little borg ear piece I used on another phone now works, I can download images from it and upload my own rings tones to it without having to go through their systems and paying for the data usage. And I like it that way. My boys’ had the first Nintendo DS systems before the light was put in a later model. They couldn’t be played in the car if it was dark outside. So, we put one in ourselves from a small kit we got online. Why? Because we could.

After all it’s mine right? Possession is nine tenths of the law. Isn’t it? Some would argue that I don’t really own that phone since its use is dependent on the network to which it connects which I definitely do not own. Intuit once told me I don’t own the Quickbooks software I use for my business. I begged to differ and offered for the nice customer service rep to come and try to get it from me.

It’s that kind of corporate “arrogance” (they don’t mean it) that makes me want to do whatever I like with whatever I have paid good money for. Why not? It may say “warranty void if opened/modified/unscrewed” but if it still works afterward and I don’t mess with the stuff they have control of, why not? It’s kind of fun stepping outside the comfort zone of the instruction manual and admonishments you find in the front of it.

Yes, usually, there are rules for a reason. After all, anarchy doesn’t usually end well. But sometimes being “bad” feels pretty good (if it keeps you up nights, you took it too far.) Sometimes making something do what you truly need it to do — above and beyond what the company you got it from says they want it to do; usually so they can make a profit on the “other” things it actually can do once you buy the add ons — is something many feel they should be able to take on.

Have you ever broken the rules? Not broken the law, just broken the rules; actually taken the adage that “rules were meant to be broken” and gone ahead and done it. Maybe you’ve taken a photo where it says no photography. Or maybe you’ve torn the tag off a mattress or pillow (ok, that’s not really a rule, but with all that legalese on those tags it feels a little criminal doesn’t it.) Or maybe you’ve applied Jailbreak to your iPhone (I don’t own one so don’t know about this particular hack but it sounds liberating).

The manual with my heart rate monitor watch says the battery shouldn’t be changed by anyone other than a “qualified technician.” I did it anyway. The outside of some electronics say “no serviceable parts.” Servicable? No. Modifiable? There’s only one way to find out. Look at the first five to ten pages of anything that plugs in, has sensitive parts, is sharp and moves fast or is otherwise associated with electricity, technology or building materials. These pages are usually diatribes of legal spew that were most likely created to discourage the morons who use their vacuum cleaner as a hair brush or their blow dryer as a cooking utensil from suing the maker into the ground.

But what about us regular folks? Those with brains and a penchant for questioning everything, or at least wondering how that hell that thing over there on the counter works?

I say, make it yours. Make it do what you want it to do or additional things beyond that for which it was intended. If it’s safe (for the love of pete, use a fry pan for those eggs) then I say go ahead. Give it a shot. I can tell you first hand, doing so gives you the feeling that you have control of things in your world. It’s a karmic slap in the faces of the marketers and corporate lawyers and whomever else feels the need to dictate what you do, how you think and what you do with your possessions. Make that cell phone do your bidding, take apart something and use those parts to make or fix something else. Or search on the net, find a DIY site and pick something that looks interesting to do. Then do it with just what you have around the house.

There is in fact a whole group of people who do this kind of thing. A relatively new magazine called Make is targeted to those who want to find new ways to use old stuff, or DIY ways of making things only big companies have the resources to make (anything from robots to a wallet made of duct tape…really.) And it’s not really about taking control and being “bad”. It’s more about tinkering and creating and feeling happy in the end that you took that journey to make something with your own two hands. And even if that thing becomes a “sculpture” instead of an automated toaster, it’s really the journey that matters and the success of getting to the end, anyway.

There’s also a website called instructables.com where folks like this congregate. It’s like a catalog of “things to do on a rainy day.” It is full of ideas of how to make stuff out of other stuff. I have made two different kinds of video camera stablizers (one a “steady cam” type apparatus and one a version of something called a “Fig Rig“) out of copper pipe and PVC. They cost me about $30 when professional equipment of the same sort of thing costs a hundred times more. My boys and I once made a model of a light saber out of plumming supplies and posted it on Instructables.com. We had the best time making it and they love them. They cost about $33 a piece which isn’t the $15 you can spend on a cheaper plastic one in the toy store. The way we did it just feels better. (full disclosure: The light saber project was published recently in a book called The Best of Instructables by O’Reilly in a joint venture with Make and Instructables.com. I do not, however, make any money off the sale of Make subscriptions or the book. I just happened to think they’re really cool.)

So if you need something done around the house for which you could easily buy the solution. If you have a few hours to maybe do it yourself, then see if there’s something around that you can modify, open, take apart, rework or combine with something else to do the same thing. You might save money, you might have a lot of fun doing it and you might have a scuplture for the family room. But there’s a good chance you will have fun doing it, whatever it is.

Essays diy, do it yourself, electronics, hacking, instructables, make, void warranty, warranty

Steve is a boy of six. He is a nice boy by all accounts and isn’t one to get into trouble. I don’t know him. I just know someone who does. But who he is isn’t important. What happened is.

It was after school on a typical Spring afternoon. Steve was finishing up his day and getting ready to go. Looking at the clock he realized it was later than he’d thought. He was going to miss his bus, so he darted out of the school toward the bus loop. Just as he arrived, he saw his bus pulling out of the parking lot. Worry stole over him because he knew his mother would be mad if he was late coming home. She might even be mad he’d missed the bus even if it was an honest mistake.

His only alternative was to get home on foot and get there fast. So he took off running heading for the corner at the end of the street. All he could think about was that he was late. Plus he didn’t want to get in trouble, so he dashed into the street. At the same time, a pickup truck was turning onto the same street. Steve was struck and dragged under the truck for thirty feet.

Thankfully, Steve is fine. He spent a few weeks in the hospital and there was concern there would be nerve damage in his pelvic region, but there’s not. I have heard nothing else, but the indication last I did hear was that he would make a full recovery. What a great thing the human body. How incredible it is the power it has to heal itself when those on the outside think it can’t.

During his hospital stay and when things were touch and go, a lot of people began to wonder why or how this could happen. And then someone said something that struck me as a little bit odd. Referring to the news that Steve would be OK and would recover, he said “Someone was looking out for him.” Being a fairly religious person, obviously, he meant that someone to be God.

But I suddenly found myself perplexed. If someone was looking out for him, where was that someone when the driver was picking up his keys? Couldn’t He have made the driver drop his keys, or forget where he put them? It would have only needed to be a few seconds of delay. Couldn’t He have created a confusion that caused the driver to return to the house to check the stove. Something subtle. Or remember something else he needed to bring? Why look after Steve *after* he’d be rendered nearly dead? And if subtlty wasn’t necessary, maybe just stop the truck cold a few feet from Steve, the front end crumpling against an unseen force.

It was such a strange thing to me. To hear someone say this and feeling, knowing, that I completely didn’t buy that thought process. That little boy got very badly hurt and no matter how you look at it, it was not at all good. It was a bad thing. Very bad, and no good can come out of it (other than Steve thanking his lucky stars when, later, having more wisdom he can reflect on how lucky he was.) And I also think no one healed Steve but Steve. He wasn’t done coloring. He wasn’t done riding his bike and he wasn’t done dreaming about playing football for the Broncos. Steve deep down was watching out for himself and Steve repaired Steve. That’s what I think.

The next week, more news came of recovery and someone told of speculation by one of Steve’s relatives that the mother was being punished because Steve had been “unplanned” and she didn’t treat him very well. She loved him, but with a young son like that when she thought “she was done”, it was posited that maybe she felt trapped. Who knows, I don’t even know the whole of any part of their lives or story, let alone the inner workings of Steve’s mother’s mind. So I am more speculating than not and simply rummaging around in my own mind to reconcile something unreconcilable. I don’t judge anything…just wonder.

But it was shocking that the conjecture was that Steve was some pawn in a scheme to get the mother to straighten up and fly right. How can this be? Who would use an innocent six-year-old to teach some mother a lesson? That’s just sick!

I asked a friend about this dilemna and she said it’s important to have faith that all things happen for a reason. And in that faith, the reason doesn’t need to be presented immediately or ever. Some might say horrible events like this are tests of faith. Maybe. But it still doesn’t sit well. And I may never know, but I do know all things are connected. Thinking in a vacuum can be a sketchy proposition. It seems folly to just look at a single event and say it happened on it’s own as a singularity. Time is not made up of discrete parts that can be broken up and held out on their own. It is a smooth ribbon of events all flowing into each other. Life doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It just doesn’t. If it’s thought to, reasons tend to get overlaid upon tragic events that don’t make sense in the continuum of time and logic. And for various reasons mostly psychological and based on my own life experiences, I tend to ask a lot of questions and continually evaluate what I’m looking at to make sure I am seeing it as it truly is. Call it situational awareness, to use the vernacular of aviation.

A friend died when some moron flew his plane into the Pentagon and my brother died when I was four due to a hill, a truck and a faulty or unset parking break. No one has ever been able to tell me why. Because sometimes there is no reason. We are not actually bullet proof and ten feet tall, things just are and sometimes those things just suck.

Whether you call it fate, faith, belief, accepting, putting it on His hands, Karma or whatever else, for me (and this is my thought and mine alone), I prefer reasons and processes and cause and effect relationships whenever I can get ‘em. Even if they amount to life just handing me a steaming pile. Some would actually call that faith. So I guess that’s my faith and I will ask questions of everything to understand better.

I suppose all of the explaining and reasoning and rationalization is just a way for us to feel like we’re in control or someone’s at the helm (even if it’s only our own self-conscious.) Because if no one’s driving this train, where’s it going and what, by the way, I am doing on it?

Essays critical thinking, faith, life's answers, questioning faith, who's driving the train