So there may be rocket fuel on Mars. It’s in our drinking water and now it’s on the Red Planet.

What would we be more likely to find as the remains of a past civilization, a past effort, than this explosive ingredient? Maybe from the rockets that left when things got too bad. Maybe from the rockets whose red glare signaled the end. Maybe from other explosives. Maybe from fireworks to celebrate on the way down.

Could there be a more profound time in our species’ history to discover the remains of Mars? To give us just enough clues of past life now departed, past trappings of destructive civilization now broken down into dust? Sure, October 1962. Maybe even August 1945, now just 63 years in the rearview mirror. People said it was a miracle that we discovered space travel just after, made it happen on the vision of the same President who nearly ended it all before we got the chance.

Maybe it was a miracle. Maybe it’s time.

Humans have a hard enough time paying attention to their own history. Even though the species is the same and the people sometimes occupy the same land or speak the same language, something seems wholly irrelevant about time long past. That was then and this is now.

But what could be more now than space discoveries? What could make history more relevant than it being brand-new? What could make experience more powerful than it being experienced by those we can only imagine, those we never met, those who killed themselves before we began to be?

It’s far too early and already, since this post idea came to mind, the internet has run away with the idea of life and been lambasted for it. NASA is trying to reign in science fiction imaginations with cold hard science. Water isn’t life. Perchlorate isn’t rockets. Conjecture isn’t evidence.

We have to dig deeper, further. We have to excavate. We will probably need to send our own species to look for the last one. We will probably need samples and endless debate, theorizing until one piece of evidence stands so irrefutable that it changes our view of the universe overnight.

But make no mistake, it’s there. We have never been less alone. We have never been closer to the edge of our collective ego. With apologies to Jake, the space program has never seemed more relevant.

In time, we will likely find that our obligation, our debt of gratitude to the long-gone beings of Mars, is to not repeat their mistakes.

If we have time.

Oh, Chicago.

It’s been eight full years since my last visit to the Windy City (outside of one of the worst airport stopovers in modern history). The city of my almost absolutely ideal weather (could stand to be a little drier in the summer, but otherwise perfect) and almost absolutely horrible everything else. Past visits to Chicago have been almost universally bad, marked by high turmoil and tension, argument, and almost unending apprehension. Something about the length of time spent seems to correspond to the extent of the badness, or at least the fallout. The one decent visit was in late ‘97, where my Dad and I flew to a debate tournament in Florida via Chicago, with a few hour layover. We didn’t really have time to check out either of the city’s colleges I’d applied to and they put massive amounts of milk in my coffee without asking and it was bitterly cold and we were both a little grumpy toward the end. But nobody got hurt.

And that was by far the best visit. Maybe it’s no wonder that I didn’t give much consideration to either of those colleges when I’d gotten in.

But still to come was the last visit, eight years ago and change, which still stands out as one of the worst trips of all-time. It didn’t help that I’d been anticipating the trip with a wildly inexplicable sense of foreboding that proved as prophetic (though not as seriously so) as I’d feared. I was going into a Model UN conference that I’d been guilted into attending, nearing complete exhaustion with the politics and format of collegiate Model UN. This trip, which proved to be my last lifetime MUN conference, cemented my feelings while just seeming to waste my time. From the 20th day of Introspection ever: “Never been so bored in a MUN committee in my life. That’s 6 years of effort there.”

The trip was not without upside. Chicago is not only a place of bad feeling for me, but of incredibly intense feeling. The severity of emotional spurring gives it a vague potential that I would be more inclined to pursue if the downside tendencies of my state in the city didn’t just scare me. I spent the first night of the trip wandering around the city by myself, lost in reverie that culminated in me literally yelling at myself as March was about to cross over into April…

Sometimes I think I should walk around with a tape recorder. Walking back from that convenience store, I swear I figured everything out. Well, not everything, but more than I’ve had a handle on for a long time. Talking out loud works so much better, especially in cold night air. If I could maintain that focus for days on end, life would almost feel easy. Instead, I end up blinding myself to clarity & getting crowded by my frustrations. I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve, I wear it on my tongue. & I don’t consider that a problem, if only I could express myself as well to others as I can to myself. Seems like they’d be easier to convince anyway.

After the conference concluded, there were then plane delays trying to get out of the city and it felt like that place just had me in its clutches. Note to self: Plane delays where one has incredibly impatience and anxiety about getting out in time are usually a warning sign. Proceed with caution. Or, as I told myself at the time (day 21 of Introspection): “I’ve got to learn to start trusting my instincts. I might hate my intuition, but it’s always right.”

In my memory, I think I’d folded the two days that followed my return into nothing, or transplanted them as being prior to the trip. But that’s only how it seemed in retrospect, because the trip was so awful and everything crashed to pieces 48 hours after my return. But those were a pivotal 48 hours. A very good 48 hours. Until Ben Brandzel caught me reveling in the downstairs portion of the Usdan cafeteria and uttered the worst joke I’ve ever heard in my life:

“So, has she told you about her book yet?”

Though I felt like he’d just winded me with a sucker punch, I refused to be fazed at the time. In less than 36 hours, though, it was all over. With less warning but as much seeming foreknowledge, I had been felled by this comment just as Lisha’s “Doomsday” Prophecy of ‘93 had unwittingly unraveled that situation. Of course the comment had nothing to do with anything, but it sure made it feel like the events had more to do with fate than anything I could control.

I went into freefall. A good bit of this is discussed in my recent post about April. There’s no need to hash out more details and I really should wrap this up anyway. In the swirl of retrospect, the trip and everything that followed were inextricably bound with each other and a sense of powerful, living destiny.

Was there destiny? I don’t really believe in destiny, but it’s hard to argue with what transpired. The wake of the events of March and April 2000 convinced me to start “The Streak” and I never missed an APDA debate weekend thereafter. I decided that I might as well continue with my resolution at the advent of the millennium that I would devote myself to the one thing that was going well in college. The relationship that ended in such a crushing fashion turned out to feel more and more like a dodged bullet than a sincere loss. All of these things led directly to fuel everything that happened in the next two years: staying at Brandeis, debate success, and Emily.

This time around, I don’t feel any sense of foreboding at all. It’s almost uncanny how calm I feel despite the history, despite it being April. Another rejection of destiny, perhaps, or just an openness to change. It’s certain that even the slightest inkling of bad feeling would get blown up in my perception given the context, so it’s really all good. I can’t wait to see Fish, meet his new girlfriend and other friends, see Wrigley, give this city a fourth or fifth or sixth chance.

Forty years after “something very extraordinary died there, which was America,” I’ll be heading back toward the city named for wild leeks once again. My baseball streak is at 3 games, after a beautiful complete game by Felix Hernandez last night. I have a busy day at work, made somewhat more challenging by a mild migraine. I’m getting on a vessel of one of the plane companies that has still managed to stay solvent. Life is mixed, but life is good.

We’ve come too far to leave it all behind.

I don’t think I could possibly encapsulate what the last week has looked like in my life, but you can tell it looked like something with the absence of all the posts. It’s like someone going quiet in a room for an extended period of time, but still giving clear indications they’re awake… when the posts go dry for awhile, you know something’s brewing and bubbling, but it doesn’t even bear expression yet.

On Friday, I return-guested on the Mep Report, so keep an ear out for TMR #101 if you like that sort of thing.

Early in the weekend, Emily’s last surviving grandparent, Thelma Garin (1911-2008) passed away at four in the morning. She had, for a while, been unaware of people as specific identities, but we had spent a last hour or so at breakfast with her before leaving Fresno in early January and it was a nice farewell. We should all be fortunate enough to see 96 (though I’m not convinced that I want to… as I told Fish, as me when I’m 94), but it is always quite sad to see someone move on to the next step of existence.

Because I simply had to be at work on Tuesday (many others’ schedules had been altered so I could preview databases that last work day before leaving for India) and the service for Em’s grandmother was in Fresno on Tuesday, I had to miss it. So Em went down there on Monday morning while I stayed by the Bay and tried to take care of things for the trip and not think too much about it. I’ve tried to remain rather tabula rasa for this most exotic trip of my life so far, not anticipating any specifics or experiences since (A) I know I can’t and (B) even if I could, I’d rather be bowled over with the full force of surprise than to anticipate. It’s rather the way I see movies, or idealize seeing movies (one can’t always manage it).

Yesterday was sort of a mess. We got to preview the databases without a hitch and then I had a farewell party at FYCC, where I will no longer be working directly within Glide. Some peeps were clearly more broken-up than others, and I don’t know to what extent people believe that the trip down the block to the main building will be a short and accessible one. Psychologically, it’s almost like moving across the Bay. But I intend to hold people to visiting and I will definitely be back, to deliver deadlines and train on databases at minimum, and likely to just say hi as well.

My (now former) boss that I dislike (I think I can start talking a little more liberally about this since I no longer work for him) gave me what I thought was the best goodbye present of all of not showing up for my party. But then he waltzed in 50 minutes late (standard operating procedure, really), making me wonder if he’d intended to sandbag his arrival so I could have a little fun at my party or if he’d just been himself. Most likely the latter, but the impact was the same for 50 good minutes, so so it goes. I managed not to say anything tremendously rude, despite thoughts of lines like “I am just so glad to not be working for you anymore” coming to mind.

Meanwhile my boss that I like remained stoic as always, though he seemed to confide in others that he was concerned. It was sort of cute. And a bunch of other folks were appropriately sad, which was nice. I think it’s perfectly fine to be happy that people are sad to see you go. I feel like many people resist this concept as perhaps self-serving or just inappropriate, but deep down you know we all feel this way. It’s the only real confirmation we get, other than from blatantly sincere people, that we were ever worth our salt in the first place. Now this doesn’t mean I was gloating or rubbing it people’s faces (and in fact I was reassuring people that they’d be far more fine than they thought), but it’s just sort of nice to be missed.

And then my supervisee managed to slip a note into my coat on my way out that I didn’t discover till dinner, and that pretty much made me cry. It was tough to not reconsider some of these decisions to take the promotion and switch things around, but my need-for-challenge-brain looks forward to not starving for awhile. And my boss-I-dislike showing up was a good reminder of what’s at stake as well.

Meanwhile, the world at large of economics and politics and such was aswirl with the upheaval and change that seems to be becoming the norm. The stock market was poised to plunge 500-1000 points and then Bernanke swooped in and again sacrificed every other economic interest in favor of saving the market. At this point, it feels like a legitimate concern that my bank will be drawing money away from my savings account at a rate of 0.5% by the time I return from India. If anyone has any solid schemes or things they want to start up (Jake, I’m looking at you) that seem likely to return more than a penny a day that savings accounts will be making soon, let me know.

I guess that’s the theory, right? That I’ll say and do things like the above concluding sentence? And that will jump-start the economy? I’ve never really had money before, so I’ve never quite grappled with these things. A little secret, though: unless Jake specifically (or someone else I believe in) comes up with a really good scheme, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to do something risky. I’m far more likely to invest in the Bank of Mattress. And I’m sure as all get-out not moving it over to stocks or property or something insane right now. So good luck with your theory, Fed, it requires a lot of people being a lot stupider than I can imagine.

But this is America.

And in America, the coronation of Queen Hillary I is back on track after some early snags. I can’t really predict South Carolina, but I’d imagine it’ll look a lot like Nevada or maybe a little closer. But given the polls in Florida, it’s hard to imagine that SC will matter for doing anything other than knocking John Edwards completely out of the race. He will make his withdrawal speech the night of the SC primary, yielding a little more support for Obama, but certainly not enough to move the 20-point deficit Barack’s running in Florida. And Florida will be just big enough and long enough before Super Tuesday to swing the table toward Hillary and end it.

On the Republican side, Fred Thompson just saved the hung convention. John McCain was almost garnering enough momentum (crazy as it seems) to start charging toward the lead, but Thompson dropping out swings Florida to Huckabee. The problem is that Giuliani, McCain, and Romney are all competing for the exact same kind of voter and that person is very different than a Huckabee voter. Thompson single-handedly kept Huckabee from winning South Carolina by a solid margin (without Thompson, he probably would’ve won SoCar by at least 40-35), and I thought, since he’s friends with McCain, he would stay in for Florida to do the same thing.

Florida will be razor-close and really difficult, but I think Huck will just edge Giuliani and McCain will run third. This will be result #1317398543 that “stuns the pundits” and it will turn everything on its head. “Can Mitt Romney survive a fourth-place finish in Florida?” “Can John McCain become a comeback kid again?” “Is Huckabee now the front-runner?” “Why won’t Rudy drop out since he hasn’t won a single delegate yet?” But all four will remain, and Ron Paul will be not talked-about but continue to post 8-12% everywhere (except maybe Florida). And then each of those four will win at least two states on Super Tuesday. And it will be a Mess.

And I will be in Delhi.

But first, this morning, I will be voting in the primary that actually matters. I watched the bulk of the Green Party debate the other night and concluded that by far the only candidate who had the whole package was one that apparently dropped out at the end of the debate. And I really wasn’t impressed by the person he dropped out in favor of, Cynthia McKinney. It’s not that McKinney isn’t well-spoken and doesn’t have a history of standing up for good things… but the only thing she’ll be known for on the campaign trail will be her outburst with Capitol security. I’m also not wild about someone who was a Democrat to get elected and then switched affiliation to the Greens after leaving Congress. If you’re going to jump ship, at least do it while you still have some voice and influence. This kind of move just seems more self-serving than anything, and I don’t think it serves the party well.

And while I still like Ralph Nader a lot, I think it’s best for the health of the Greens to move on from his perennial candidacies. We need a candidate who isn’t going to just throw up a white flag and encourage voting for sell-out Democrats in swing states, but as long as we’re sure of that, then Nader isn’t doing the party a lot of favors by running again and again. He’s visible, but low on credibility at this point, and is risking associating the Greens as a platform for his personality instead of an actual serious and ongoing party. For the overall good of the Greens, it’s time to move on. And to be fair, he hasn’t even announced yet (he has a proxy running in the primaries), so maybe he recognizes these arguments already.

Say what you will about what this says about me, but this all means I will be casting a protest vote in the Green Party primary, for Jared Ball. The only wasted vote is a vote for someone you don’t fully believe in.

And I get to vote this morning in the February 5th primary because Berkeley at least (and probably much of California) opens in-person balloting early for just this sort of thing. If you’re curious, here’s a schedule of the Green Party primaries and then the convention is in Chicago in July. If Fish were still going to be around then, I’d seriously consider going. But I doubt he will be. And if McKinney or Nader are the nominee (and really, no one else seems to have much chance), it will probably take the wind out of my sails a little. Not that I won’t probably support them, but you see my reservations above.

But the real thing I have reservations for is India.

Again, I have no expectations for this trip, no thoughts, no anticipation. I know what a whole lot of flying looks like (~27 hours each way), but that’s about where it begins and ends. I’m going to let India wash over me, lap up and take me under. I will be armed with a composition notebook and pens, but no internet or way of accessing. I’m going to be off the grid for the longest time I can recall since going on the grid of this series of tubes. I intend to pretty much post my whole account of the trip upon return (depending on length and possibly edited for some people’s privacy concerns), so don’t think the accounts and descriptions of the event will be withheld without expressed written consent or something.

Take care, everyone. Don’t let the country collapse too much faster than the current pace. Not that you really have control over that, but the illusion of control is what this country is all about. I’m going to go find out what another country is all about. I may just be impressed.

We’ll find out.

As I’ve often been known to say, change is the only constant. This has perhaps never felt more true than this week, which is simply over-brimming with upheaval and possibility. Forget ungainly metaphors about baby steps and windows and doors. Every door and window in the whole house has burst open and is flooding. Equal parts elation, nervous apprehension, and general anticipation.

As I told one of my assistants today, “I am an emotional ocean.”

Sadly many of the details are not public yet and I do still have to try to play ball with a world that thinks privacy is not an outdated relic. So it goes. What I can announce, however, is the EmStor 2007-2008 Winter World Tour.

I feel like we should have a corporate sponsor. Y’know, if I weren’t a Non-Profiteer and believed in that sort of thing.

The EmStor 2007-2008 Winter World Tour

Yeah, you read that last part right. India & Nepal. For 2.5 weeks. With a stop in London. Oh yeah.

Most all of this (and more things TBA) have just materialized in the last 48 hours. It’s kind of incredible. 2008, you are looking mighty mercurial. But exciting. Very exciting.

The downside of all this is that I have to jettison tentative plans for judging at the Brandeis 2008 debate tourney (8-9 February 2008), as I will still be in India. And I may also have to forgo a President’s Day Weekend jaunt to Chicago, though that can be delayed instead of cancelled since it’s not as temporally tied as a debate tournament. Although, who knows… maybe I’ll be up for more travel just 10 days after return. Chicago, you may make the Winter World Tour yet.

So, I’ll see you when I see you. Not a ton of these have the options of meeting up with people that, say, Boston & Chicago have. But certainly Albuquerque, starting tonight and for the next four days, will be a big opportunity for hanging out. Frontier, luminarias, and Pac-Man, here I come! Only 7 more work hours until almost non-stop holiday fun of one kind or another…

All right. Turns out that this whole “keeping posts long and narrative” idea works pretty well, but seems wholly unfitting for times like the morning before I depart on a big trip. I have a long-standing personal tradition of firing off correspondence and/or public missives before departing on trips, of getting up a little earlier to do so. Deep down, I know that a large part of the reason for this is the heightened perception of the risk of death during travel. Even though it’s absolutely not true, human beings feel this elevated threat level on planes that in someone like me (even though I know cars are eleventy-billion times more dangerous and life-threatening) makes me want to tie up loose ends… or at least give people awareness of what I was considering on the final day. Truth be told, it’s really amazing how much of my life I spend anticipating and preparing for final perceptions like that.

What a wonderfully cheery thought for five in the morning. But hey, if anything, I’m opening up even more with StoreyTelling than Introspection, because long explanations sort of require back-story, and back-story often requires taking a can-opener to those rusty containers that long ago developed botulism.

Regardless, the point here is that I have all these leftover thoughts and ideas that, now that I’m back in the blogging spirit, would normally have found their home in delicious two-liners on Introspection’s format. But there’s no place to put them. So they’re about to go here… periodically I’m probably just going to have to do posts like this with relatively unrelated assortments. I don’t think any of today’s are cryptic… I already have a whole “Keepin’ it Cryptic” category/tag planned too, since there will be inevitably be times when some other person feels they have a right to privacy, or I don’t really feel like forcing the issue with some person I know right here on this blog. But not today. So this will be like the appendix post.

Speaking of which, they allegedly found the purpose of the appendix this week. Nifty, huh? There’s a reason for everything. The proof for God is in the logical purpose, people.

Baseball is clearly something I’ve still been paying attention to, since it’s October and that’s one of the things that makes October great. And I am blessed to be paying Comcast an inordinate amount of money to get channels like TBS, so I’m not missing out on the playoffs. Hosting the baseball playoffs on TBS makes about as much sense as putting Top Chef on the History Channel. Especially since it’s the second playoffs in 465 years to not feature the Atlanta Braves. You could sort of draw a link between the channel and the show (in the same way that APDA draws links to resolutions), but no one who normally watches the channel will want to watch that show, and everyone who wants to watch will be vaguely frustrated to have to find a channel they never watch. Maybe that’s the strategy though, TBS gets to spam adds for their bizarre shows at a whole new audience. In 20 years, the Anime Channel will bid for the baseball playoffs and we’ll be inundated with ads for the latest blend of medieval fantasy themed Japanese characters with crazy hair and soap opera interactions between innings. And I’ll have to debate with Em about the value of adding the premium Anime Channel for 2 months and whether Comcast will respect our right to cancel it even though they’re already taking $746 a month.

I tend to be exaggerative in the morning.

My only real point in bringing up baseball was to observe how completely unlikely it is that anyone could’ve envisioned a Rockies/Diamondbacks NLCS even a month ago, let alone earlier in the season. And yet it looks extremely likely that this will happen. Granted, the Phillies are in the exact same position as the ‘95 Mariners in their Division Series … down 2-0 going on the road. And we all know what happened then. (Or maybe you don’t. The M’s won 2 games in NY, then came home and won the decisive fifth game in extra innings in the greatest game in Mariner history.) And given that the Phils basically are the Mariners from a few years ago (not really, but the pitching staff is… after all, Pat Gillick’s their GM), it’s all possible. But at this point, the Rockies will probably be winning the World Series, so I wouldn’t put much faith in a Philly comeback.

I’m also starting to believe that a 5-game series just might not cut it for baseball. Or if it did, you’d need to have a 1-1-1-1-1 schedule, instead of 2-2-1. But it’s way easier to just go 7 games instead of changing venues for every game. The first World Series was 9 games. You don’t play 162 contests to get ousted by a 3-game losing streak. It’s just too short.

(By the way, the paragraphs directly above will earn this post the category/tag “Let’s Go M’s”. This is not because the M’s were briefly mentioned, but that will be my baseball title in general. I’m trying to limit myself a little here.)

Ack! In finding the link to that series recap on Wikipedia above, I just realized that I’ve been incorrect in my memory about the ‘95 ALDS for years! Apparently they used to do a 2-3 schedule for the ALDS!! Two-three?! So the M’s were down 2-0 going into 3 straight home games, which they won all of. I’ve been recapping that series incorrectly for ages. Wow. That really blows my mind. Whoever thought 2-3 was a reasonable schedule for a baseball series? See, this really proves that it needs to be longer than 5 games.

Hm. Now I’ve gotten myself so hyped up about baseball that I’ve forgotten most of what else I was going to say. So it goes. I should go pack and clean out the catboxes anyway.

I’m going to Vermont, by the way, for Stina & Dav’s wedding, which will be in Octobery fall colors confines near the borders with New York and Quebec. It should be beautiful, and a little chilly. Em and I are changing planes approximately 4,000 times on the way out, so we’re loading up the books. The next book I finish will put me over the top of last year’s total (21), which is right about the pace I’d like to maintain for a year. My commute has been very good for keeping me reading… and I don’t want to read much more than 25 books a year, because then I’ll never write. I can’t quite decide if I like David Foster Wallace or if he’s just messing with everyone (or, I suppose, both), but his imagery is some of the strongest stick-to-your-mind kind of stuff ever.

(Gah, now I have to add a book/reading category/tag too! This is getting to be too much. I’m now believing that the way I really should have approached this morning’s posting is to post 4-5 separate posts, all neatly categorized and separated. But that would sort of be like a strobe-light-blog, wouldn’t it? Hrm.)

Thank you, by the way, to everyone who has written me e-mails in the last few days about this blog and welcoming me back into the communication fold. I really appreciate it and I will respond to everyone individually soon, but sadly not before leaving. But I want to acknowledge how touched I’ve been by your reception… it’s good to know I haven’t alienated all my readers by taking a couple months off.

Also, to delve into the slightest metablogging, I can’t figure out why the second post I made here was labeled as the third, and thereafter all the numbers have seemed to be off by one. This is the kind of thing that really bugs me about using automated blogging software and what I was always afraid of. Having an accurate postcount is one of the things that I was excited about with automation, and the slightest inaccuracy (and what could be more slight than an inaccuracy of one?) drives me crazy. When I return (there’s no time now), I will have to delve into the actual files of this database and see if I can alter everything to restore order to the numbers. So be mindful of permalinking these few early posts. If I restore the numbers and they count properly, I’ll never change them again. As I look at it now, though, it’s possible that WordPress is just terrified of a sophomore slump - category #2 doesn’t seem to exist either. Don’t fear the deuce, WordPress!

Okay, now to clean Pandora’s box.