Going the distance...

OK, second post tonight. It'll be short, since it's 3 minutes 'till its tomorrow...
I bought some skate skis today. Heckavu deal on a setup at Beaver Sports...
I think I'm gonna ski to Nenana sometime...
Maybe the Equinox ultra-ski...
That's probably nuts...
Later...

"I hate this place. It's always cold and everbody sucks"...

"I hate this place. It's always cold and everybody sucks." This concise declaration was flatly dropped after quite a few seconds of dead air between two high-school kids sitting at a table, drinking caffeinated beverages at Barnes & Noble in Fairbanks. I'm assuming the girl in the hoodie meant Fairbanks, or perhaps she was spurning Alaska in it's entirety. The finality of her statement struck me so much that I forgot - when prompted milliseconds later - whether I wanted Venti or Grande. Don't ask me why, but after well over a decade of dealing with those two words, I still can't remember when put on the spot which one is the bigger size of coffee... In any case, this post's is inspired by that evesdrop... The topic I'll explore is Barnes & Noble itself... I'll do this in as much wordy detail and as many convoluted run-on sentances as my own stomach will allow tonight.

First, let me sing praises to Barnes & Noble. The best thing about B&N is that I never waste money there. In fact, the only expenses are the liquid fuels that are required: gas to get there and coffee to drink while there. I did buy some books once if I recall correctly, but if I want to buy books I'll do one of two things. Either... A) support the local establishments (in Fairbanks that means Gulliver's, or my favorite pet charitable cause north of latitude 64: Forget-Me-Not Books, which benefits the Literacy Council of Alaska. Or... B) Support the poor struggling online startup called Amazon.com. A) or B), them's the options, C) is a distant third. Nevertheless, only B&N combines so perfectly numerous elements that feed certain core needs of mine. First is coffee. Yes, you can get decent coffee at Gullivers. And you can get incredibly awful Yuban-ish ("Yu-should-ban") coffee from Forget-Me-Not. The pretty obvious great thing about Barnes & Noble is that it really serves as a hybrid library slash coffee shop (I guess there's some redundancy in my two reasons...). Moreover when reading those books you don't intend to purchase, B&N provides the perfect luxuriance. Neither of the other bookstores has an audaciously sized gas fireplace with a huge faux slate hearth to sit around. The radiated warmth... the seating so plush it's hard to get up from... and a "classic" picked up off the bargain table... this trio of factors will have anyone dozing off in front of a dozen strangers in a matter of minutes. Thus the coffee. Gotta keep those customers rotating through that plush seating area... Well, I'm digressing... the point is that Barnes & Noble is wonderful and horrible at the same time... and this is coming close to my point: the comment I overheard was TOTALLY IRONIC. How can you talk about your geographic location from inside a Barnes & Noble? Unless you're enlighteningly close to the "local/regional interest" section, you could be anywhere. It's a chain. It's that epitome of the industrial society (or post-industrial or post-post-industrial or whatever were in now): the interchangeable part. You aren't in Fairbanks. You aren't in Berkeley. You aren't in San Francisco or Seattle. You're in Barnes & Noble. It's halfway between the parking lot and the internet. It's kind of crazy. Yes, yes, of course, there's more evidence as to true geography than just the "local/regional" section. There's the people. They're of course a dead giveaway: bunny boots and beaver hats are pretty good evidence against Berkeley... In any case, I love Fairbanks and Alaska, don't get me wrong. But sometimes I want to feel like I'm somewhere else or nowhere at all, (and also not be on the internet for crying out loud). To satisfy that urge, I drive to Barnes & Noble... And, I should highlight those people. Sometimes it's just great to surround yourself with people. People that you can look at, but aren't expected to talk too, etc. Barnes & Noble almost rivals Fred Meyer's in this regard, but not quite. I think this strange need originates from my origin in more crowded places like California.
So, what did I read around that big fake fireplace? Three books comprised the evenings reading: Learning Perl, 4th edition, Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway, and Relationships for Dummies. Computer science, geology inspired art, and relationships. All things you could round down my useful knowledge of... well, to approximately didly-squat. So.... although I spent only a couple hours freeloading off those books, I did learn a few things. In order: Perl is a computer programming language that I'm supposed to learn for a class. It has attributes like 'high-level,' 'dense,' and was designed to be easy to use at the cost of easy to learn... = I'm hosed. OK, second book. I learned that Ray Troll kicks butt. He's one of, if not the, all time greatest ichthyo-paleo-artists around. Hands down. Third book. According to Table 8-2 (don't quote me on that, remember, I didn't buy it...) in Relationships for Dummies: a couple should go on 3-4 dates per week for 3-4 months before considering "exclusivity." There were some other vocabulary words too... like serial monogamy... cohabit... and all sorts of other extremely scary and hazardous things that really shouldn't be recommended. One reassuring thing I read is that I have at least another 2 or 3 years until I become "emotionally mature." This happens to men at age 30 apparently. It happens to women at age 27-28, says the book. That gender coincidence doesn't seem too unfairly out of sync I guess... However, this emotionaly maturity doesn't coincide whatsoever with the peak sexual years of 18-21 for men (hmm... it's all downhill from 18-80, that's tragically depressing), but the late 30's to early 40's for women. Really? What the heck is up with our species? Anyway, this is what the yellow and black book told me, and what do I know. I'm the dummy. BTW, there are so many yellow and black books in B&N. Truly unbelievable the range of subjects in which people can lack a basic understanding...
Well, that's about it for this post. I'm definitely going to have to tell my mom about this one so somebody will read it. Self deprecating sure, but I'm proud to say that her emails to me remind me whence this style descended... If you want to know more about that, go to B&N tomorrow and pick up a book from the Genetics section...

Lunacy...

I don't know a whole lot about the moon, really. And by "the moon," I mean "our moon," i.e. the moon orbiting planet earth. It is of course rather... um... terracentric... of us to call it "THE" moon, when so many of our sister planets have far more exciting moons. For example the moons known as Europa - my all time favorite moon - Callista, Ganymede and Io. These all happen to be all moons of Jupiter, which are the only moons I know by name. I sort of wish our moon had a personal name too. I think various cultures and civilizations have called it by names, and of course the root for most moon-words is from the latin Luna, the moon goddess. I think I'll start calling her Luna, just to spice things up a little. See, all of Jupiters moons have fascinating goings-on, giant ice rafts above bogglingly deep seas, active vocanoes, just to name a couple. By comparison, our moon is a real dullard. It's pretty much a lump of cheese, er, I mean, basalt. Once when I was 20 I held a piece of the moon. This lady from NASA brought it into a geology class. It was in an aluminum pelican briefcase with a combination lock on it and the NASA insignia embossed deeply. She took it pretty seriously. Apparently there's not really all that much moon rock on earth, partially because, I think, it's so dang boring. Not a lot of variety to study, like rocks here on earth. I think boring describes our moon pretty well in general. It's telling that from our perspective here on Earth at least, the time we get most excited about it is when we cast our shadow on it. This is what happened last night, and in a pretty visceral way I got excited about it. Actually, it probably wasn't in a visceral way. It was probably in a very cerebral way. There have always been ideas about how the moon affects natural phenomena on earth. Physical phenomena such as tides are pretty indisputable. Biological phenomena such as physiological and mental cycles in living organisms such as ourselves... now those are pretty DISputable... However, I like to think that even if slimy sea creatures and myself are both somehow affected by the periodic gravitational tug of the moon (which makes me rightly feel my kinship with them), I enjoyed yet another benefit of my higher biological complexity last night. The tides weren't affected by the total eclipse. It's just a shadow, duh. The sea anemones in dark tidal pools weren't affected by the eclipse (unless, I suppose, the photon flux change somehow registered with them to crawl out from under a rock or something...). No, this astronomical phenomenon went not to my viscera, but to my cerebrum (I'm a lame anatomist, GI- or neuro-, so excuse me...). I felt the queasiness somewhere deep that only natural aberrations on such a grand scale can impart to sentient, intelligent beings... After the brief goose bumps went away, what did I do? Well, I set up a camera to take a timelapse to post to YouTube of course, which I'll I close this post with. I'm which I'm assuming will set an all time record for factual foibles in my blog, so for your convenience in mending the mis-information I've potentially foisted do feel free to visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon. Maybe I should read it myself. Or maybe I want Luna, that homely goddes, to remain partially mysterious to me...

Hard to Read...

Wow, check this out. Like some serious drug that goes immediately into your brain and rewires it for the better/worse, I'm already addicted to blogging and am now posting my second... er, post... in one day... in fact, in one hour... (I'll make up for this in the future by forgetting to update this blog for seasons at a time). The point of this second post is to burden your poor attention span with all my qualms and insecurities about the future directions of my blog (and by extension my entire life on earth). The problem is this: I think I'm (i.e. my blog) is and will continue to be hard to read. I really do want some of it (me) to be at times intelligible, and I daresay, intelligent. But that's very tough. See, I think that humor is very important, in fact, it seems that's almost the gold-standard for most cheap popularity. Almost nothing is as funny (to me) as ones own self's (is that triply redundant?) foibles (everyone else's is a close second). A major foible of mine that is funny is that sometimes it probably isn't clear when I'm trying to be serious vs. funny. Irony, dry wit, etc. sometimes really make my more serious attempts at communication awkward at best... I do want to tackle some meaty (I love meat) issues in this blog, so, darn all of you who think I'm hard to read! You're right! When I figure out some things, if I find some sort of self-revelatory Rosetta stone, that'll be sweet, I'll let you know (if you're interested... send me an email).

OK, done for the day. Maybe.

What a time to start ... 2008 A.D.

Not sure why I've chosen February 10th, 2008 as the day, my day, to start blogging - but that seems to be the case. I do know that I've chosen Blogger as my venue because Google already so conveniently manages most of the rest of my internet presence/thought...

As to why I'm going to blog at all, well one thing that should set my blog apart as a shining beacon among the brilliant constellations of blogs in the blogosphere is my liberal use of ellipses... and I'm going to pioneer some heavy use of semicolons, but we'll see... also my penchant for mixed metaphors and alliterations... Oh, how long I've been narrowly channelling these skills in infrequent, verbose, misspelling rich emails to freinds and family... now, all that will be available to all... phew, that's invigorating (and efficient)...

I suppose the first order of business would be to explain my title, name, etc. "Anthropocene" is something that has lodged itself in my right hemisphere (disclaimer, I'm not a neuroscientist, so can't verify that is actually where it resides. [Check this out (http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22556281-661,00.html)... She only dances one way for me... to the right. Argh!)] . Lamentably, it's only lodged there, it didn't originate there; instead "Anthropocene" originated in either the left or the right hemisphere of Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene. In any case, Anthropocene seems so apt as an aegis for some of the themes I wish to explore in this blog that I'm using it (before someone else does...) By the way, "aegis" may not be apt here. Another thematic constant of my blog will be my creative and expansionary use of diction, this due to the fact that the ratio of vocabulary words:correct definitions seems particularly skewed in my brain ... always has been ... I'm often close though, that's why I consider my uses "expansionary" ... I of course, in all things not directly related to my Master's Thesis work, do defer to Wikipedia...

OK, with that underwhelming, inasupicious start, let my blog begin! Fiat Blog!