...there's no place like the Turnpike

A displaced Jersey girl who adjusted to life in Kentucky just in time to head back home.

Monday, June 25, 2007

in The Church of Vagueries Part II

That same quaint brick corner church has changed its sign of platitudes several times since last I wrote about it. Now it says "Be quiet enough to hear G-d's whisper."

What???

So, people who make noise can't hear what they need to be a good person?

Does this include making noise about the wrongs we see around us? And standing up for the little guy? That involves noise. So does the making a difference they mentioned back in April.

So the lord wants us to sit quietly by and wait in silence in case he/she/it wants to whisper to us? When we see things that we object to or that we think needs to change, we have to be quiet enough to hear the lord's whisper.

I won't poison your minds by telling you what denomination this church is, but I certainly hope these little messages aren't an indication of the entire faith's opinions.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Sometimes stereotypes exist for a reason

I have spent the week at a scientific conference. It isn't important which one or where or why. They all follow the same pattern. An auditorium full of people furiously taking notes while someone flips through a series of increasingly complex Powerpoint slides only half of which make sense to anyone in the room other than the speaker.

I don't know if it's because the meeting is particularly small, or because it includes a lot of physicists, but it seems to have attracted every bad stereotype of a scientist and, frankly, I'm appalled by my own people.

At every break, everyone seems to crack open the laptops. Tonight, at a banquet dinner, someone actually had her laptop out as the very prominent researcher next to me watched his prime rib get cold and chewy.

I could write a book on the fashion faux pas alone. Socks with sandals. A leather vest with black jeans and an Oxford shirt. Pants actually pulled up to one's armpits. And, one guy, I'm pretty sure only brought one shirt with him for a week long meeting.

Apple versus PC arguments have been breaking out everywhere. A lovely hike through a national park this afternoon degenerated into a discussion of why (one biophysicist swore) riding a bike at the same pace as one is able to walk is actually less efficient work. And this was our leisure time!

All I'm saying is that any room where I'm one of the coolest people around, is a sad room.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Airmail

Today was a day of travel. Travel and airports and hotels seem to lose their sheen at excitement when you're traveling for business and you're all alone and you don't really want to go.

To get from where I live to Bar Harbor, Maine, one has to take three separate flights. The first flight was only 20 minutes long and involved a brief adventure on a small propeller plane all to the tune of a very cute four year old boy with the whiniest voice I've ever heard and unending questions ("But, whh-hy is the bus turning, Daddy?)

After a quick lunch and some time wasting in Philadelphia, it was on to a reasonably large plane to fly to Boston. This one was actually big enough to have a first class.

My punishment for this luxury was the third plane. If someone attached wings and a propeller to a Dodge Caravan, it would probably be bigger than this plane. And to boost our confidence in this alleged aircraft, we were provided with a pilot and co-pilot that may not have been old enough to drive cars. The Junior Airmen then informed us that there was a thunderstorm sitting over our destination. In case we weren't nervous enough about flying in a toy plane with toy pilots.

It was only fitting that the toy plane would land at a toy airport. I've seen some pretty small airports before, but the one in Bar Harbor makes the airport on Wings look like O'Hare. The minivan with wings makes a constant circuit to and from Boston and this is the only flight you can take unless you own a plane. The "terminal" is the size of my living room and the people who have been "screened" by the two TSA agents (required by law) are kept in a glass-walled dog crate. The current homeland security alert level is posted on a nicely laminated sign taped to the wall.

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Nirvana

Some brilliant person has figured out how to combined the two greatest things in the world and create chocolate sushi! If they have peanut butter, I may consider sending this woman some sort of marriage proposal or love letter or something...

Sunday, June 03, 2007

Starting Over

My biggest dream as an adolescent was that we would move. I longed for the thrill of leaving our small town and going someplace where no one knew me and I could be someone totally different. I could leave behind my public humiliations and reputation and start over. I never got that wish.

Maybe that's why I hit the ground running at 17 and didn't stop moving for the next twelve years. I only went about 35 miles away to school, but to my high school friends, it was apparently like moving to another country. I lost a lot of them as some of us grew up and some didn't and some I just finally understood why my parents never liked them.

After college, I moved halfway across the country to Cincinnati for grad school. Despite the fact that by 1999 email was virtually universal, a lot of my college friends had a hard time keeping in touch, or so it seems. I really only stayed in touch with about four of them. Only two of them enough to invite them to my wedding. They stayed in touch with each other, but it just felt like they thought it was too hard to keep up with me. My life was too different from theirs and too far away to try and work it out.

Then I moved to Kentucky. Things were different. I was still close enough to Cincinnati to visit often. Even if they never called or e-mailed, I saw them once a month or so. They were always happy to see me, even if they forgot about me in the interim.

But then I moved back to NJ. I've been gone long enough to lose most of my New Jersey friends, or at least become peripheral in their lives. We haven't really figured out how to be friends as adults yet. And my Cincinnati and Kentucky friends seem to be forgetting me. With a few exceptions, the e-mails are fewer and further between. The phone calls only really happen if I initiate them. They were all happy to see me back in April, but no one really remembered to send an e-mail on my birthday.

Losing peopl is always the hardest part of moving.

Saturday, June 02, 2007

Praise and adulation

I don't normally do this, but I'm going to use this blog to heap praise on my husband.

I live in a world of academics. This means that pretty much no one I know has any really practical skills. When they are drawing up the list of people to allow into the bunker at the end of the world, my friends and I better hope we can pool our collective book knowledge to build an effective bunker really really fast.

My dear husband, on the other hand, has real, practical skills. He's been fixing cars since he was sixteen, and he's smart, so he can translate everything he's learned from cars into other electronic and mechanical devices. He fixed our air conditioning back in Kentucky several times. He figured out how to fix our plumbing on a few occasions. He took apart our washing machine when it broke and figured out how the fix it, but it proved to be cheaper to replace it. Anyone who has ever met him knows exactly where to go when their computer won't work (my sister drove 45 miles for an emergency repair last weekend).

A friend of mine who is going through some rough times lately has recently added the insult of her car making a horrible noise. It sounded like when you were a kid and you put baseball cards in the spokes of your bike tires. She stopped by the house after we went out this evening and my dear husband took her car for a spin around the block. He pulled it back into the driveway, leapt out, popped the hood and pulled out the dipstick.

He sent her off with three quarts of oil (the only person I know who would have that on hand) and advice to call him at work on Monday because she might have a leak. She called later to report that the noise had stopped.

So not only does he have some pretty useful skills, but he uses them for good instead of evil.