in my own words

For all my real friends, I still need you. Now more than ever.

Snow Patrol
You Give Me Strength
I choked back tears today
because I can’t begin to say
how much you’ve shaped this boy
these last ten years or more

My friends we’ve seen it all
triumphs to drunken falls
and our bones are broken still
but our hearts are joined until
time slips its tired hand into our tired hands
we’ve years ’til that day and so much more to say

You give the strength to me
a strength I never had
I was a mess you see
I’d lost the plot so bad
you dragged me up and out
out of the darkest place
there’s not a single doubt when I can see your faces

My friends we’ve seen it all
when it made no sense at all
you dare to light my path
and found the beauty in the aftermath

Let me hold you up
like you held me up
it’s too long to never say this
you must know I’ve always thought

You give the strength to me
a strength I never had
I was a mess you see
I’d lost the plot so bad
you dragged me up and out
out of the darkest place
there’s not a single doubt when I can see your faces

You give the strength to me
a strength I never had
I was a mess you see
I’d lost the plot so bad
you dragged me up and out
out of the darkest place
there’s not a single doubt when I can see your faces

This is one of my new favorite poems…

Boston
   —Aaron Smith

I’ve been meaning to tell
you how the sky is pink
here sometimes like the roof
of a mouth that’s about to chomp
down on the crooked steel teeth
of the city,

I remember the desperate
things we did
                and that I stumble
down sidewalks listening
to the buzz of street lamps
at dusk and the crush
of leaves on the pavement,

Without you here I’m viciously lonely

and I can’t remember
the last time I felt holy,
the last time I offered
myself as sanctuary

*

I watched two men
press hard into
each other, their bodies
caught in the club’s
bass drum swell,
and I couldn’t remember
when I knew I’d never
be beautiful, but it must
have been quick
and subtle, the way
the holy ghost can pass
in and out of a room.
I want so desperately
to be finished with desire,
the rushing wind, the still
small voice.

Dear Mr. Pellerito:

Thank you for contacting me about the Department of Defense (DOD) Homosexual Conduct Policy, informally known as “don’t ask, don’t tell.” I appreciate you sharing your views with me.

In my view, DOD’s current Homosexual Conduct Policy, which precludes openly gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals from serving in our armed forces, is a disservice to the brave men and women who comprise our all-volunteer force. I opposed this discriminatory “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it came into existence, and I support its repeal.

President Obama has pledged to work with Congress and the DOD to repeal the Homosexual Conduct Policy so that gay, lesbian and bisexual service members can serve openly. I believe any revision to this policy must be done in a thoughtful and careful manner and with a buy-in from the military. To that end, the Senate Armed Services Committee, which I chair, will hold hearings on this issue in early 2010. I will be sure to keep your views in mind as Congress continues to consider this matter.

Thank you again for writing.

Sincerely,
Carl Levin

Here’s the best way that I can think of to pose this argument… Healthy Americans add up to a healthy workforce, which will be more productive, and ensure a stong economy. A sick workforce bogged down by expensive health care is less productive and results in a poor economy. Sick people, or those who can’t afford to get better don’t work as well. People crushed by healthcare debt or spending exorbitant sums to get better consequently have less money to spend on other things. If, suddenly, getting sick and paying for it didn’t run us to ruin (just as we don’t have to worry about building roads… or having a strong military…) and furthermore didn’t remove those people from the economy and workforce, America would have better workers and do better work.

There’s always a lot of talk about how innovation and entrepreneurship drive the American economy. I’d submit to you that people who are sick and can’t afford to get better (or even those who are forced to stay in a job they don’t like or won’t excel in because they need the health insurance) are not going to be innovators and entrepreneurs. How many Bill Gates and Steve Jobs can’t reach their potential because they’ve got to have jobs—working for other employers—that offer health insurance for themselves and their families? You can’t successfully strike out on your own if 1/3 to 3/4 of your income has to be spent on health care costs. There might be another Sarah Palin out there right now, but she’s stuck in an office job for the benefits and day care. How many Rush Limbaughs and Rupert Murdochs are being held back because they’re crushed by hospital bills from themselves or a family member? What if Glenn Beck was one sick child away from losing everything? Fortunately for Rush and Glenn and Rupert, they made their riches back when healthcare was cheaper, and now they can afford a year’s worth of the best rehab or a $600,000 hospital stay for a troublesome appendix.

I know if my appendix burst I’d have my life saved by the what’s probably the best health care in the modern world. But if it costs me everything I own and leaves me in financial ruins for the next ten years of my life, maybe I’d be better off dead. But either way, whether I was indebted to doctors and hospitals or dead and buried, I wouldn’t have much opportunity to start the next Chick-fil-A or Amway. I wouldn’t be able to get the small business loan, for starters.

A healthy workforce guarantees a stronger economy now and in the future. We make no money staying home sick nursing ourselves or loved ones. The less we spend on hospitals and pills the more we can spend on guns and bibles, pickup trucks and snowmobiles.

So why does everyone need affordable, reliable, efficient health care coverage? So we can stay healthy, or if we’re sick we can afford to get better. Because we all need to be at work in the morning.

Since suggestive search is pretty standard now, I though I’d try what the various search engines’ suggestions for “why…”

The results are quite interesting. (click for bigger)

The second lunar landing, of the LM Intrepid was 40 years ago today, manned by Pete Conrad and Alan Bean (with Gemini 11’s Richard Gordon orbiting in the CSM Yankee Clipper). The science and achievement was of course amazing, but the best part (I think) of the whole mission is that the backup crew managed to insert reduced sized pictures of Playboy centerfolds into the mission checklists attached to the wrists of Conrad’s and Bean’s spacesuits.

Porn. On the Moon. Way to go, guys.

Or as Pete Conrad put it: “Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me!”

More: NASA – Apollo 12
NASA’s Apollo 12 Lunar Surface Journal

Still my heart and hold my tongue
I feel my time, my time has come
Let me in, unlock the door
I never felt this way before

And the wheels just keep on turning
The drummer begins to drum
I don’t know which way I’m going
I don’t know which way I’ve come

Hold my head inside your hands
I need someone who understands
I need someone, someone who hears
For you I’ve waited all these years

For you I’d wait ’til kingdom come
Until my day my day is done
And say you’ll come and set me free
Just say you’ll wait you’ll wait for me

In your tears and in your blood
In your fire and in your flood
I hear you laugh I heard you sing
I wouldn’t change a single thing

The wheels just keep on turning
The drummers begin to drum
I don’t know which way I’m going
I don’t know what I’ve become

For you I’d wait ’til kingdom come
Until my days my days are done
Say you’ll come and set me free
Just say you’ll wait, you’ll wait for me

Just say you’ll wait, you’ll wait for me
Just say you’ll wait, you’ll wait for me

For Carl’s birthday, an image he didn’t live to see:

A recent photo from the Cassini spacecraft shows the mighty planet Saturn, and if you look very closely between its wing-like rings, a faint pinprick of light. That tiny dot is Earth bustling with life as we know it. The image is the second ever taken of our world from deep space. The first, captured by the Voyager spacecraft in 1990, stunned many people, including the famous astronomer Carl Sagan who called our seemingly miniscule planet a “pale blue dot” and “the only home we’ve ever known.”

His full quote:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home, That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam… There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

I’ve been scouring the internet for the longest time trying to find the source of the default iPhone wallpaper that depicts the globe of Earth from space, featuring North America:

Last night I finally gave up, and in doing so found it serendipitously tonight, here, courtesy of the TERRA satellite.

Much of the information contained in this image came from a single remote-sensing device-NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS. Flying over 700 km above the Earth onboard the Terra satellite, MODIS provides an integrated tool for observing a variety of terrestrial, oceanic, and atmospheric features of the Earth. The land and coastal ocean portions of these images are based on surface observations collected from June through September 2001 and combined, or composited, every eight days to compensate for clouds that might block the sensor’s view of the surface on any single day.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/BlueMarble/BlueMarble_2002.php

Enceladus is an icy moon of Saturn. This morning the Cassini probe made its closest flyby yet, at an altitude of about 64 miles (103km). Here’s some of the very first “raw” images from the flyby, showcasing the cryovulcanism (per the wikipedia, “rather than molten rock, these volcanoes erupt volatiles such as water, ammonia or methane”) that creates spectacular plumes spewing off the tiny moon as well as the cracked and frozen surface of the moon.

More:
Enceladus Flyby Overview
Main NASA/JPL Cassini site
NASA’s Solar System Exploration page about Enceladus
A really spectacular picture from 2007
Enceladus in the wikipedia

Here’s another map using a .kml overlay from cleardarksky.com using Google Earth (click for bigger/better):

here’s a map of the nighttime lights in Louisville, KY. I suppose if I wanted clear, dark skies I should’ve moved to somewhere in the middle of Arizona. Oh Well. About an hour’s drive to dark skies, which isn’t so bad. Now if I could find a nice boy with a nice telescope to go with…

(click for bigger/better)

Here’s my trip
Michigan Trip October 2009

The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to 97 individuals and 20 organizations. The Prize is awarded annually by the Norwegian Nobel Committee to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses. The award is administered by the Norwegian Nobel Committee and awarded by a committee of five people elected by the Norwegian Parliament. Only four American Presidents have received the award:

Theodore Roosevelt 1906 [in office]

• “for his successful mediation to end the Russo-Japanese war and for his interest in arbitration, having provided the Hague arbitration court with its very first case”

Woodrow Wilson 1919 [in office]

• “President of United States of America; Founder of the League of Nations”

Jimmy Carter 2002

• “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development”

Barack Obama 2009 [in office]

• “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

More:Norwegian Nobel Committee: The Nobel Peace Prize

I didn’t really make an announcement or anything here, but I got a job. My friend Angie’s boss was super interested in hiring me ever since he caught wind that I might be coming down here. So now I work for EFillRX, an innovative concept in pharmacy. We have two locations in two big doctor’s offices in Louisville. You can get your script right there at the office or we’ll mail or deliver it to you. I think it’s a really great idea and from a business standpoint it’s pretty awesome, too. We have hundreds of patients built in, and easy access to the prescribers. Also, people tend to be on their best behavior when going to the doctor’s office, so no one treats us like dirt.

The downside is I had to take a pay cut initially (but I get a company car for deliveries, which is really really really nice) and I’m only getting about 30 hours a week. But my boss is fantastic, the stress level is like 0.1% that of Meijer, and I work in a professional setting where people are respectful and there’s not a box of cornflakes or a bakery manager with too big of an ego in sight.

I sent this as an email to my friend Brad, but I’m posting it here because it’s an interesting round-up of some current space missions.

Planck/Herschel
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/planck/
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/herschel/
The Planck spacecraft will survey the entire sky and measure the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation: the heat left over from the big bang. It, along with the Herschel Observatory, orbit the Sun-Earth L2 point.

The Herschel Observatory is a space observatory that covers the far infrared and sub millimeter wavelengths. It focuses on four areas of study:

• Galaxy formation in the early universe and the evolution of galaxies;
• Star formation and its interaction with the interstellar medium;
• Chemical composition of atmospheres and surfaces of Solar System bodies, including planets, comets and moons;
• Molecular chemistry across the universe.

The Kepler Mission
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/main/
Kepler trails behind Earth in solar orbit. The Kepler telescope has the largest mirror of any telescope outside of earth orbit (1.4m, Hubble’s is 2.4m). Kepler is a planet hunter that’s permanently pointed to stare at a small part of the sky, but surveys a huge sampling of stars. Kepler’s goals are to:

• Determine how many Earth-sized and larger planets there are in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of different types of stars.
• Determine the range of size and shape of the orbits of these planets.
• Estimate how many planets there are in multiple-star systems.
• Determine the range of orbit size, brightness, size, mass and density of short-period giant planets.
• Identify additional members of each discovered planetary system using other techniques.
• Determine the properties of those stars that harbor planetary systems.

Kepler’s preliminary results are forthcoming, but it will be a few years until we get much news from its observations.

The Hubble Space Telescope
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/main/
Hubble is probably my favorite, because it does a lot of general astronomy stuff in the visible spectrum.
STS-125’s refurbishment of Hubble provided two new instruments and repaired two that had failed. We’re just now starting to see data from after the servicing mission in May. The school-bus sized instrument is still probably the single most important thing mankind has ever built to increase our knowledge of the physical universe. Hubble carries six instruments, most of which are self-explanatory:

• Near Infrared Camera & Multi Object Spectrometer
• Wide Field Camera 3 (covers the visible spectrum, near infrared & near ultraviolet)
• Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (measures the properties of ultraviolet light)
• Advanced Camera for Surveys (the premiere instrument, covers ultraviolet through near-infrared)
• Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph

SOHO
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/
I’m frequently enchanted by the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory’s pictures of the sun. Mostly because from Earth you’re not supposed to stare at the sun and I’ve always wanted to. The Sun is the life-giver to our planet and the most convenient star we have to study. I really just can’t stop looking. SOHO is also the discoverer of over 1,500 comets, keeps track of sunspots, solar flares, and CMEs, as well as space weather.

MESSENGER
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/main/
The MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging probe just flew by Mercury today. MESSENGER has given us the most detailed pictures of Mercury to date. The only other data we have is from Mariner 10, which flew by Mercury and thus only imaged about 1/2 the planet. MESSENGER flew by Mercury today (Sept 29) and is scheduled to enter orbit in March of 2011.

Cassini
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/main/
The Cassini orbiter was launched 11 years ago and has been in orbit around Saturn since 2004. The primary mission is complete, and funding was secured for an extension through 2010. Cassini carried the Huygens probe that landed on Titan and has continued to return spectacular images of the jewel of our solar system. Most recently Cassini has been studying the rings during Saturn’s equinox with the sun.
Of interesting note is that shortly after Galileo discovered Saturn’s rings they vanished, no doubt confusing the fuck out of Italy’s favorite heretic. The reason for this was that Saturn was at equinox and the thin rings weren’t visible edge-on with Galileo’s technology.

New Horizons
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/
New Horizons is the fastest-moving man-made object. Ever. It passed by Jupiter on its way to Pluto. It’ll fly by Pluto in 2015. The people working on the NH team are pretty god damned bitter that Pluto’s not a planet anymore. Once the flyby is complete it’s expected that the probe will go on to study other objects in the Kuiper belt. My name is on a CD on the spacecraft, which will leave the solar system by 2029.

WMAP
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/
The WMAP mission has taught us more about cosmology in 8 years than we’ve ever learned, ever. The Planck mission is similar and has higher resolution.

Voyager
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/
The Voyagers are still working, amazingly 30 years after launched. Their mission now is to study the limits of the solar system, the drop off of the solar wind, and the nature of the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space. One of them will return in a few hundred years and nearly destroy Earth.

“I am so excited about the Kepler mission. This is the second most important thing our species has ever done, right behind inventing the concept of delivery pizza.”

awesome

I’m headed back down to Louisville now. Just wanted to say goodbye to everyone in Kalamazoo. To those who’ve been good to me: thanks! To those who haven’t: I hope you die in a fire.

But seriously, good people are hard to find, and I found some pretty good people here. You know who you are.

Check out the INFO tab on my facebook for my new address & check there for details on when you can see me next.

Keep on keepin’ on…

Guster :: Keep It Together :: Come Downstairs and Say Hello
Dorothy moves to click her ruby shoes
Right in tune with dark side of the moon
Someone, someone could tell me
Where I belong
Be calm, be brave, it’ll be okay
No more messing around and living underground
Or new year’s resolutions
By this time next year I won’t be here
I turn on MTV, the volume’s down
Lips move, they say
It’ll be okay
To tell you the truth, I’ve said it before
Tomorrow I start in a new direction
One last time these words from me
I’m never saying them again
and I shut the light
and listen as my watch unwinds
To tell you the truth, I’ve said it before
Tomorrow I start in a new direction
I know I’ve been half-asleep
I’m never doing that again
I look straight at what’s coming ahead
and soon its going to change in a new direction
Every night as I’m falling asleep
These words repeating in my head
Voices calling from a yellow road
To come downstairs and say hello
Don’t be shy, just say hello
To tell you the truth, I’ve said it before
Tomorrow I start in a new direction
I know I’ve been half-asleep
I’m never doing that again
I look straight at what’s coming ahead
and soon its going to change in a new direction
Every night as I’m falling asleep
These words repeated in my head

Here’s the simple answer, and official statement, for those of you who want to know.

I quit because someone had turned in stuff from twitter and facebook that store management was questioning me about. The majority of it was from stuff or about stuff that happened when I wasn’t even there, punched in, dressed in my Meijer clothes. The store director said even tho it was not at Meijer it was still “conduct unbecoming” a Meijer employee. She is a miserable woman who’s worked for Meijer for 40 years. If you want an idea of what I was told was “conduct unbecoming” check out this post, everyone I know agreed that it was hilarious, not unbecoming. That happened at a different Meijer than where I worked, on my off time, and I don’t think it’s nearly as outrageous and panty-twisting as she made it out to be. Part of the question was that I’d put it up on the Internet “for everyone to see!”. Well, duh! That’s what the Internet is for! So in that meeting I made the usual obsequious apologies for things, admitted some kind of wrong-doing, etc. But… what I did wasn’t wrong or incorrect, I was simply living my life as I’d always had.

(As a side note to the gas station post, my friend Eric had the best comment: “awww i like a happy ending. you let her live”)

I decided that level of scrutiny into my personal life outside of Meijer was unacceptable, and the fact that someone back there went way above me (instead of talking to me about it) was also unacceptable. And that “conduct unbecoming” applies to places like the military, congress, and other professions that are a lot more important and prestigious than a grocery store.

But I’d seen that mentality before; most of the store management seems to have lost the perspective that their job isn’t nearly as serious as they think it is. I suppose they need that sort of mentality to get anything done. In reality they work in a grocery store. It’s not nearly as vital, serious, and important as being say, a surgeon, a doctor, an EMT or… pharmacist.

I want to digress here for a moment because I’ve never encountered such disrespect for my (former) profession than from people and managers in other departments. I hate to sound overly self important, but the work that Pharmacy does really is important—way more important that putting boxes on shelves or ringing up groceries. People come to the pharmacy sick with all sorts of things and they look for pharmacists and technicians to help them get better. This is vastly more important than selling frosted flakes or fishing lures.

At Meijer I’d been put through several things over the years: denied promotions and job transfers because of things I did when I was 16. There was one point when a store director tried to bring up stuff that I’d done in 1998 when I was 17 years old. I asked him if anyone was looking at how he’d behaved when he was that young. Of course not, but there was never any consideration for that ever taken into account during any review of my file. There was one instance when I was denied a permanent job in Holland, MI specifically because I’m gay. I also had a difficult time even getting to this job in Kalamazoo because they wanted to keep me working 60 hours a week in Grand Rapids. So this stuff was just the icing on the cake.

So I took a few minutes that Friday and looked at all of this. Realized that the single biggest factor in why I’d been so miserable for so long was that job. Decided that to compromise living life on my own terms was not worth any money Meijer could ever give me. I decided it was time to go. Time to take my life back from Meijer. (cf. three robes, one bowl, immeasurable happiness)

I’d given that place 14 years of my life, and was no longer feeling the emotional returns of being an employee there. There comes a point when no one can pay you enough money in exchange for the drain of your soul.
I will blog whatever I want and do whatever I want. That is the destiny of my life. (You can do whatever you want, too! Just give it a try some day. It’s really great.)

I’m also pretty miserable in Kalamazoo in general. I only have a few really good friends here and really feel like I’ve outgrown the place. I have friends who want me to go to Louisville, and as I’ve posted before Louisville seems like a good place for me to be. So off I go.

Previously:
thoughts on moving on
the great upheaval day V
ad astra…
these words are mine
showdown at meijer gas