Manual Transmission

One of my high school friends -- really, only one, as far as I can recall -- drove a manual transmission car.  It was a green Kia Rio. Kat loved that car. She love tapped my also green Jeep Cherokee once, and I was pissed about it.  She’d probably have to be going 25 miles an hour to do any real damage to mine, but I loved my car, too. I made a trade with her that I would give her a copy of my Led Zeppelin cd collection if she’d teach me to drive it.  It was the first and only time I have driven a standard, and I remember thinking that it was pretty easy, except for first gear. I really want to get a standard transmission in my next car, but I cannot say how much faith I have in my memory from 20 years ago in her Kia Rio, especially since first gear comes up a lot.

She was a great sport about it.  We were, among other things, music friends, as my offering suggests.  I remember watching my Who concert dvd that day with her. We shared the bass solo in 5:15 melting our faces off.  It gets me everytime; I am not sure how many times I watched it.

She was coming off her first real breakup around that time.  We talked about that, how much she felt like it would be with her forever -- which is basically true of everyone’s first love.  I had gotten George Harrison’s Brainwashed for Christmas that year, and we listened to that, too.  There’s a song on it called Never Get Over You.  I remember her saying, “That’s how I feel about Ryan.”  She did, in fact, get over him.

I also remember her saying that she felt like would have a handful of very intense relationships like the one she had with him, but I would basically only have one, and that would be it.  I would find Her -- and I would just know.

Kat was one of my best friends, almost like extended family, but looking back, it is one of those things that still weirds me out to think that I project enough of whatever it is that I am for her to absorb it, synthesize it, analyze it, and return it to me in a way that I would not have sorted out on my own.  I still cannot say how she did it.

I had encounters with other girls before I met Her, of course, and sometimes I thought one of them might be Her.  But once I actually met Her, I knew Kat was right. When we first met, it took some effort for me to get her to realize what I had already realized, but honestly, in the scheme of things, it was nothing.  Not compared to what I got in return.

Our first date I asked Her out for coffee, and She said, “How about ice cream instead?”  Ice cream is way better than coffee!  That is how my life has been since.  We went to Dairy Queen and we sat outside.  We talked about ourselves and football. We are fans of semi-rival teams, so there is a natural conflict all the time on the subject.  We have been married for seven and a half years now and still talk about football and eat ice cream. The last time our teams met, they split the series.  It was not fun for either of us.

It became clear that both of us were thinking the same thing around Christmas time when we watched Step Up 2: The Streets at my place.  The thing is, it would not have mattered what it was that we watched.  You see, the gears just shifted right into place, like that is how they are supposed to fit.  Even the first one.

Happy Fourth of July

I made it to the White House and the United States Capitol for the first time earlier this year.  I was traveling with my family for a long weekend to Washington, D.C.  I must admit that I was pretty taken with the imagery and architecture of the seat of our republic.

I had been to the city once before, but not to those two buildings.  I had seen and entered all of the memorials on the National Mall and stood in awe of the American Ebenezers to Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, all under the watch of the Washington Monument, of course, and the reminder of what kind of men built this country -- and the missteps along the way to get here. 

It was the right time for me, though, because I was consuming a lot of media about history, in particular the American and French Revolutions.  When considering the historical context of what political theory was like in Europe in the 18th Century, the United States of America is a gigantic human leap forward.  The mission statement captured in the Declaration of Independence set a goal for us all to strive for -- that all of us are equal and made that way by powers greater than any earthly institutions and any governments that interfere with those rights are illegitimate.  It was, of course, also fraught with internal contradictions.  Just like all of us still are.

Without that historical context, it is easy to overlook how significant the articulation of these ideas were.  The American Revolution was revolutionary in many senses of the word, since the major powers on the European Continent were still ruled by monarchs invested by divine right (and so were those across the world in Asia, for that matter).  The failures of the French Revolution that looked to ours and reached out for the same liberty we now enjoyed showed how fragile those ideas are and how lucky we were to have the men named on the Mall.  The expression "the Revolution eats its children" comes from this period in France.  The sins of America were different ones than the French, but our guiding principles at least identified a North Star for us (and those for whom the promise of the Declaration was cruelly and immorally excluded) to sail towards.  There was no Reign of Terror to devour our own.  At least, not in the same way.  Our Reign of Terror was an issue of our ideals not being shared with all of our sons and daughters; France's was about which ideals should actually count.

There are two places on the National Mall that made me cry both times: the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam War Memorial.  The Lincoln Memorial stands as a testament that this project, imperfect in execution as it was, is worth preserving, at the expense of blood.  Engraved inside the classical temple are Lincoln's two greatest speeches -- among anyone's greatest speeches -- defending the virtue of republican self-government and advocating magnanimity to the enemy, our own countrymen, at the conclusion of the bloody surgery of exorcising part of America's fallen nature.  The moral stain of slavery was not completely cleansed after the conclusion of the Civil War, but the sails of the ship of state tacked closer to Jefferson's North Star.

The Vietnam Memorial is different.  While the Lincoln Memorial is theoretical and high minded, the Vietnam War Memorial is clinical in its groundedness. It is a relentless reminder of just what war costs as after each step the names just keep coming, the wall getting taller, and deeper.  It is taller than you are before you reach the halfway point.  It also serves the aching realization that there is no Second Inaugural Address, no end of slavery, no clear hard won prize purchased with the dearly spent lives.  It is a reminder that "progress" does not necessarily trend in a one to one ratio with the axis of time, as much as our optimism (and etchings on our hero's monuments) wants it to, without effort.  The arc of the moral universe is long, but there is no gravitational center without principled people bending it.

At the same time our states were warring against themselves, France had slipped into a Second -- Second -- Empire; their republican ideals did not stick.  Let us not forget this Fourth of July what we have been bequeathed by our forefathers.  It includes all of us, of every ethnicity, creed, and sex.  All men, endowed by our Creator.  It is our birthright.  Those values are worth preserving.  They are worth advancing.  They are rare.  And they are easy to lose.

She blinded me with logical fallacies

I know this may be hard to believe, but I once got into a silly and unnecessary argument with a former boss over the word "utilize" in a presentation.  I knew it was silly and unnecessary as it was happening, but I only have so much control over my pedantry.  I am only a man.  I ended up giving up, because he was my boss and kind of difficult to work for.  Even though it was silly and unnecessary, I still feel bad about it because the meanings of words matter, and utilize is a frequently abused word.  It shames me to this day.

Even though I caved in the face of middle-whelming opposition, I still feel strongly about use of words, as you can imagine.  I even got into an internet argument in the comments section of The Atlantic once when I was "working from home" (different boss) about inappropriate use of the word socialism.  I do care about that, too, but man, correcting randos on the internet about definitions of political philosophy is an uphill battle.

Another word that has been bugging me for quite some time now is how people say the word "science" but rarely seem to know what it actually means.  This tweet came across my feed recently and it filled me with that same urge to explain why everyone else is wrong all the time again.  The word science has had a sort of quasi-political, semi-chic renaissance.  I do not exactly know when or why it started, but its invocation is typically about smugness.

Science is a process by which an hypothesis is identified, an experiment defined and executed, then tested.  It is important that the hypothesis is stated before the experiment is defined, to try to expose and prevent bias.  The data from the outcome of the experiment is then compared to the hypothesis, and depending on the significance of the experiment, applied in some way, published or just filed away for posterity.  The details of the experiment are also defined, so that it can be replicated to be sure that the information is valid.  Science is not a body of knowledge.  It is a technique to build knowledge.  It is not a world view.

One of the places that exemplifies this smugness, besides Neil deGrasse Tyson's twitter feed, is ieffinglovescience.  I know that is not its name, but I do not like to use the f word. Looking at the website, it has science memes news, which is nice.  Nowhere on the website does the explanation of the Scientific Method appear.  The shop is pretty easy to find -- and it supports real science causes!  Whatever that means.

NdGT recently tweeted "a subject is scientifically controversial when actively debated by legions of scientists, not when actively debated by the public, the press or by politicians."  That is kind of nonsense, because scientists are not priests.  There's no magic cape you get to put on (or Van Allen Belt?) when you graduate with a science degree.  While my degrees are in Mechanical Engineering instead of physics, I am not a scientist either.  But I am at least as qualified as Bill Nye.

This particularly bothers me because it reflects poorly on my profession and associated professions when these people act like insufferable jerks using the logical fallacy Appeal to Authority to support a position they already believed.  Which, is antithetical to what science is supposed to be.