Signal to Noise

Wikipedia uses this alternate definition of signal to noise:
Signal-to-noise ratio is sometimes used informally to refer to the ratio of useful information to false or irrelevant data in a conversation or exchange. For example, in online discussion forums and other online communities, off topic posts and spam are regarded as "noise" that interferes with the "signal" of appropriate discussion.
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Multiple media outlets are the most effective way to get your message out, from what I am told. If you want something to be heard through the "noise", you need to hit all angles. The problem is, that creates more noise and more need for virtual shouting. After all, one man's signal is another's noise.

The cycle continues. Think of a high school cafeteria. One table has a loud conversation and the others need to elevate the volume of theirs just to be heard. Finally, even the normally quiet chess club is screaming like a bunch of banshees about their allergies to milk and peanuts and wondering if Bobby Fisher ever kissed a girl.

And we all lay claim to the importance and necessity of our specific message. Who is to say the chess club has less right to carry on than the cheerleaders or football team? What's more, our capacity for this method of communicating seems to be increasing. Day by day we spend more engery filtering the noise and wading through minutiae just to get to the message.

I personally feel a little overwhelmed by the situation I have put myself into. I have this blog, the occasional "Blah Blah Blog"" posts, Facebook, and now Twitter, (because apparently I feel as though the world should pay attention to what I am thinking right NOW... and NOW...). None of these outlets are employed to hawk my professional wares. For that I have Linked In and a couple others I don't even remember their names.

This all adds up to a great deal of my time spent "maintaining" these aspects of my life that didn't exist when I was younger. Hell, they didn't really exist for me prior to 2007.

Now my car has total integration of phone and text and social networking and media connection and god only knows what else. I can't hide. There is not aspect of my life that is not "connected" somehow to the noise.

And I'm an amateur. I have friends that are infinitely more savvy and connected than I. They revel in it. They will be the ones who at 60 will still be relevant. If I am still alive, I likely won't be relevant. I can see my elder self as a disenfranchised archetypal Vonnegut character, being both central to my own life and story and totally unnecessary to it at the same time.

Scary.

As I write this, the reggae song "Message to Rudy" is playing in my headphones. "Stop your messing around... better think of your future..." it implores of Rudy. Maybe Rudy was just sick and tired of it all! Perhaps we should all be messing around a little more.

I have seriously contemplated the purchase, (or time share of some sort), of a little place out of the way so I can get away. Maybe all I need to do is toss all my electronic obligations and take a nap. It's a lot cheaper, that's for sure.

I'll start tomorrow. Right now I have to post this to Facebook. And Twitter.

A Thank You to My Teachers

My lands but haven't I been a busy beaver! I sit at my desk, head spinning, (actually spinning!), after crunching numbers and building spreadsheets and doing all sorts of comparative analysisesiss for a project I am working on. They don't give you much time to pull all this stuff together. They also don't give you a lot of information, either.

Interesting equation, that. Not much info + Not much time = X. In this case, X surely can't be an accurate and well-reasoned result. Except that it indeed, X is where the answer is and it is my X on the line if X isn't pretty much "the spot". As in X marks the... Am I being clear?

I can see smile on the face of the long suffering Mr. Hanson, my middle school math teacher as I lay all this out. Bill Uebbing and a spreadsheet that is fully 15 pages, cross-referenced, self-checking and all sorts of other things. The mathematically inept Bill Uebbing who had to be painfully guided through each and every principal of numbers no matter how basic.

I had really good teachers. Mr. Hanson was as patient and kind as they came. While I went on to learn statistics and chemistry in my later education, I owe it all to Mr. Hanson of the ALPS program at Crestwood Middle School who taught me that no matter what, I could not give up.

I am no genius, but today, I am also no dummy.

I reminisced a little about my educators this morning during a conversation I had. I realized, (as I have realized countless times before), that I had wonderful educators all throughout my school years. I remember fondly all my elementary teachers and their nurturing. I remember the great, inspiring college professors who forged my compulsory involvement in class into a love of learning. And I think of all those good and patient teachers in the puberty years.

God bless you all, especially. There is a special teachers' lounge in heaven for you, filled with bottomless coffee and all the tater tots you could ever want.

I don't really have a point other than to say in a public way, I thank all my teachers for never giving up or labeling me as stupid or not worth your time, even when I was both of those things. And if you did label me as stupid or not worth your time, thank you for having the courtesy to never let me in on the secret.

Have you thanked a teacher today? Why not?
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Next in my series of unappreciated professionals, The Janitor... No, he's not leering at you because he wants to kidnap you and wear your skin, it's because you're a slob and he has to clean up after you!

Monday Moring Miscellani

Black Marks

I managed to stay away from the computer yesterday, September 11th, 2011. I had a lot running through my mind, especially in the morning and I thought I would give it awhile to maturate a little before committing anything to the blog.

Then, church, breakfast, football, youth group and a race later on the DVR and before I knew it it was past bed time. So, no touching tribute or moving thoughts on September 11th from my blog and me.

Which I think, is fine. People much more talented and intelligent than me have weighed in ad nauseum and I don't wish to pile on. Needless to say it was an emotional day filled with though and introspection and not a few moments of misty eyes.

All of this was punctuated quite effectively by sports! God bless sports! Now, well into my 30's I can see why men and women really get into sports. It is so much better than focusing on the hand basket the world is riding straight to hell.

The politicians are going to ruin the place anyway, why not enjoy the ride blissfully drowning in beer and peanuts with our elbows sticking to a mysterious goo at the bar watching sports? The Tigers are in first place and on a tear and the Lions don't suck. These are headlines!
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Mama, I'm Coming Home

We call it Homecoming... the first Sunday after "Summer", the vacation, (not Summer, the season), is officially over. Labor Day is the marker we use as the official end to the unofficial end of summer. Not at all confusing.

The kids are back in school, church resumes it normal schedule and classes and education begin again. This means Youth Group has begun anew. Lots of fresh faces and lots of returning faces all still sporting healthy brown tans and shorts and flip-flops.

Too soon, we will all be pasty-faced, baggy-eyed, dough boys and girls in so many layers of clothes it will be well nigh impossible to tell the two apart.

Youth group and football combine to make the death of summer, (that season Hallmark calls Autumn to mask its true purpose to reign cold death upon us), bearable. We had a great time and played games and ate nachos and shared stories of summer trips and travails.

Welcome back, FUMC youth! Here's to a great new year!
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Travelin' Man

I am traveling more again. Nothing more to say about that. It beats working for a living.
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And Finally

I have opened a Twitter account. I so far haven't had anything worth Tweeting, but it is there in case you are interested. My handle is @Bald_ego.... get it? Come check it out when you get a minute. If you are on Twitter, I would be interested in following you, as well. Let's get together, eh?

Thursday Travelog and Miscelaneous Ramblings

It is nice when I come to the east side of the state to be received so warmly by my many coworkers, especially since we rarely see each other. Perhaps, on the other hand, this is why I am so warmly received. Absence does indeed make the heart grow fonder. At least to a point.

Through rain soaked highways filled with distracted drivers who are unwittingly trying to kill you through apathy toward the very thing they are supposed to be doing, (namely driving), I find myself in my adopted home town for the remainder of today and all day tomorrow. The occasion? A gold outing.

Mon Dieu! you correctly exclaim. I do not golf. No, I won't be doing anything that exciting. I will be instead, working a hole. As a sponsor. For my company. Can I get a woot?

No, you are right dear astute reader. It is not woot worthy and so no woot shall be issued. I predict no woot eliciting moments tomorrow, either. The woot is moot as it were.

But I got some cool tchatchkies all golf themed with logos and such (tees, divot fixer and ball markers). I hope those go over well with the golfers cum prospective customers. Tracy, with whom I will be working asked what we do if we run out. I told her plan B is to show some leg. She said she didn't have nice legs. I told her we should hope for a high hole, since the higher the hole the less it matters. Beside that, I was talking about me.

I stopped at a place called "Giant Jersey Subs" for lunch. It is attached to a gas station. Seldom have I walked away from a meal that has been purchased from or eaten at a venue attached to a gas station feeling like it was good decision making that led me to that moment. The one exception is Fowlerville Farms, a family restaurant right off the interstate that makes honest to god fried chicken. You have to wait for it. It's worth the wait.

Unfortunately, Giant Jersey Subs has left a weight right on my chest that feels a lot like New Jersey itself is lying across me. Not good. The sub was good going in, it is just being difficult now that it's there.

What else happened? Not much. nothing, really. Just a drive across the state to work do a non-woot worthy task and a drive back. Such is the banality of existence.
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Em continues to paint. It is going well, but taking a lot more materials than originally conceived. We both want to be done. This weekend we will make a big push. Let's hope Saturday is a good productive day.
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Yes, I am ready for some football. Thank you for asking.
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A Letter From the Prophet Thornton Mellon

After my school years were past me, I would, without fail have a dream round about the beginning of a semester that I was supposed to be in school. I had mislaid my schedule, I hadn't any books and I didn't know what buildings I had to be in or when. Somewhere around mid semester, I would have a similar dream, studying for midterms and realizing there was a whole class I hadn't been attending all semester long!

Even now, 15 full years since I matriculated, (a word I only know because I matriculated), the dreams haunt me. They do not fail to visit upon me a few moments of unease as I shake the cobwebs of sleep from my head in the morning and attempt to discern the vividness of reality from my very high definition deams. Then, my knees snap as I get out of bed and I get dizzy from stretching and have to fumble for my spectacles because I can't even turn off my alarm without them and I remember just how old I am.

I look back at my college years with a great deal of fondness. It isn't probably a fully deserved fondness. In fact, if I take a minute to reflect, there were a lot of dreadful things that I went through and would never want to go through again, given the choice. But time is like an oaken barrel aging clear spirits into mellow complexity. The very passage of time has allowed me to appreciate all those difficulties. After all, they are what makes me, me. One must endure much in the course of a life.

I am sure a week or two into college, some of my former high school students are realizing that all those movies they watched where regular attendance class is but a tertiary aspect of the characters' lives, mentioned only when absolutely necessary to move the plot, (whatever plot there may be). I found myself indignant when I went to college and received syllabi festooned with attendance policies. The nerve! Don't I pay your salary? I should dictate classroom policy to you, Professor!

In reality, those attendance policies kept me honest. They were there when I needed them as a young student working it all out while I went along. And they disappeared for the most part as I moved onward through my educational journey. It turns out, those English professors know more than English. They know you need their class to graduate and know you don't want to be there. Hence the policy. Although for me that's a bad example. I loved Freshman English. There was a girl named Alice...

But I digress. No, wait, I don't. The T/A was pretty, um, nice, too. I think we actually could have had something there. There was a glimmer.

Now I digress.

It's so easy in college to blow off a class. In some cases, (I imagine a very few), it is possible to only show up to take tests and hand in papers and pass with flying colors. But that really isn't the point, now, is it?

While it is true, we go to college to do more than learn from fancy books and professors whose jackets are rumpled with a pattern mysteriously matching the pleats on the seatbacks of their 12 year old Honda Civics and smelling a little too much like patchouli, a young student finds themselves in early peril if they don't respect the fact they are in school to learn. Not just go to class. Not just get an A. Not just make friends and party. Learn. I think learning requires all those things in a certain balance.

Perhaps this is why I still am haunted by the dreams. Maybe if I look closely, I have the dreams of being a derilict college bum when things are a little overwhelming in my life. Perhaps it is because I have recently blown off some projects or chores to relax or to just not do anything at all. It is the wakeup call, appealing to the conscientious student that lives within the world-weary man.

God, I can't even call myself a young man anymore, can I? I can't believe I am not 19 anymore. It hits me like a ton of bricks every time. Maybe that is the real reason my subconscious frames this particular message the way it does. It is really affective.

To "my" students who are now dipping their toes into the pool for the first time, I leave you with this- You don't have time to read this blog. You have 30 chapters in 4 classes due in a week and 6 papers about stuff that you only knew existed 10 days ago. All this math equals get to work.

Now, get to work. I promise you will not miss anything. I will do really boring blentries until Thanksgiving. You won't be tempted to check in, because it will be terribly disappointing.

Hang up now.

Good, they're gone. I have some really awesome stuff coming up in the next few weeks, now that those college kids won't be here. Stay tuned!

To My Health, An Elegy

I can scarcely remember a time in any recency that I have not suffered from a sinus problem. I am unwell this morning. So unwell, I have had to resort to the drastic measure of switching to the lotion tissue, (which gives me zits), and using chap stick, (one specifically for and not to be used as anything else), on the tip of my nose. Only these two things quiet the burning.

I have gone through more tissue than... well, never mind than what because the only references that come to mind are wholly inappropriate for this or any audience. Suffice it to say, there is a lot of tissue in the trash bins in the various rooms of my house. It looks as if later I will again be coloring my world with a lysol wipe to fend off the germs I am spreading around like... like... Oh, never mind like what.

My left eye is half closed and watering, my left nostril is plugged and my right one is making up for its deficiency with all it's available volume. I have the shakes from sneezing so hard and so often. My body is exhausted. It isn't even 10:30.

To mete my disenchantment in a very loquatious way, I have decided to compose a little ditty:

To My Health, An Elegy

I wonder where you are, I wonder where you've gone
I wonder if you left from spite or something I did wrong
I wonder when in bed at night
If I will live to see the light

I shout through hoarse throat with inflection
Please be gone with this sinus infection
I cannot speak on the business phone
When my voice is but a squeaky moan

Allergies, Sinuses, Colds and Shivers
My body it aches, my body it quivers
I'll cash in my chips and lose my mind
If I sneeze just one more time

I wonder where you are right now
I wonder where you live
My head pound just like a drum
My nose leaks like a sieve

I have but a modest request
So simple at my own behest
The flowing nose is the issue
It hurts to wipe it with the tissue

The tip is red and growing rotten
It looks like a pulsating gin blossom
I fear it will soon wipe clean away
Leaving me no nasal pathway

Come back health wherever you've gone
Find your way through the hoary throng
Come quickly to me and stay long, too
For it is clear I can no longer live without you

The One With the Cow

I asked Em this morning while catching up on her blog if she saw the one about the Far Side. Yes, she said and offered without hesitation, "I like the one with the cow."

Now, Em came to the marriage with at least as many Far Side books as I had and they were at least as well used and well read as mine. In fact, the scan I did of my favorite panel came out of Emily's book.

She is no stranger to the Far Side comic and has been a lifelong devotee. Her ability to recall minutiae about things that have no importance is famous. She knows as do most humans in the western world that many Far Sides have cows. It's like saying the one with the caveman or the one with the pithy caption.

I won't dwell on this as the brain power and storage I have devoted to remembering such things is actually beyond human comprehension. It is a magnificent waste. Em has to spend time thinking about things that would drive me to drink... erm, more.

She has to remember how to fold the towels. I have to reverse engineer an already folded towel in order to remember how to fold the towels in the proper Schrumpfian way. It has been handed down through the years as though God himself bestowed the knowledge onto the first woman in the lineage.

To reverse engineer a towel, you unfold it slowly, fold by fold and then try to duplicate what you just learned. Except the first fold you learn is actually the last fold you make. So you also have to perform a complicated reversal in your head. It's all too much for me. Now I'm staring at two unfolded towels. I am starting to panic a little.

Em does the money. While I am quoting Simpsons lines that no one gets and spouting off trivial facts about what Robert Shaw was drinking the night they filmed the famous "U.S.S. Indianapolis" scene of Jaws, she is remembering the quarterly water bill will be coming in the mail. Better remember to save a couple hundred bucks just to be sure.

I routinely have to call her if I am out. "Hi, do we have money?" My friends find this to be an atrocity of manhood, but she has a system and that system includes me not balancing the check book, so I go with it.

I suggested once to make things easier and more open to both of us, we switch to a Quicken type system, because if you put it on a computer, it is suddenly a game to me and I do it. I am virtually organized and realistically a ticking time bomb. She distracted me by playing the "let's see if you know where this dish goes", game. I still don't know where the dish goes and until now, forgot all about my suggestion.

I can take a hint. The dish must belong to Dave and Greg.

Let's not start on the laundry, eh? I am not to touch the laundry unless there has been an accident or emergency and Emily is more than 60 minutes away. I can't conceive of a day in which I would soil every single pair of underpants I own, but whatever alternate universe Bill is doing to have that much fun, I say go with it. Party like a rock star, dude.

When Emily is gone, I do my laundry the same way I did my laundry in college. I pretend that each load is costing me a gallon of gas or a pack of cigarettes or part of cover charge to get into the bar and I cram the clothes into the thing and bungy cord the lid down. Last time I put some spare pavers on there just for good measure.

When the clothes are done, they are compressed like a form in the shape of the wash drum, dimples and all. The bonus is they are totally dry! Score! I just saved a buck fiddy on drying!

I don't understand her problem with my method. It's efficient and energy conservation minded. Sometimes I don't even use soap! And fabric softener? Fabric softener? That is a myth brought down to us by a money hungry production conglomerate foisting upon a weary consumer an expensive liquid that does nothing! Fabric softener indeed. I have never tried on a tee shirt and said... "Hmm, I like it, but it's just a little stiff... maybe it needs some fabric softener."

I have gotten on a little tangent there; as I am wont to do from time to time. Meanwhile, Em, who just sung my praises for being so helpful to her this week is vacuuming upstairs while I sit here and do nothing. I suppose I should go rectify that. I at least need to get a cup of coffee and go point out spots I think she could have done better. After all, chores are everyone's responsibility.