how DO you waste a summer?

One day at a time, apparently. Ha. Waste = not working, not volunteering, failing utterly to make the world a better place or to figure out what I want to do with my life or to prepare for next year in HK. It is the quieter hours that make me realize how much summer has already passed me by, how many days I've spent the majority of in my parents' house, how many mundane, basic tasks I have left undone until tomorrow.

There are some good parts, though, too. I did get to take an amazing trip with an amazing person already, which was good. And I'm going to Boston next week with my cousin and my little sister, which should be a really worthwhile trip. I haven't seen my grandparents in almost two years, and my grandma's 90th birthday is soon (though after I've gone overseas), so it's a really important week for me as far as seeing family. I'll be sleeping on the floor of their living room, most likely, but I think it'll all work out fine. And there's a camping trip planned for the third weekend of July that should be good, one more chance to see the mountains here. I used to be pretty outdoorsy, I used to work at REI, go camping all the time, have a need for backpacking gear... now, it's like I get into the mountains on infrequent occasions, and, worse, I mistook them for being North the other day when I was trying to get around. This, clearly, a cardinal sin: in Colorado, mountains = West; in SoCal, mountains = North, usually. Home is a bed to sleep in, flaky phone calls to friends, flaky phone calls from friends, and a tv, on which I watch too many hours of sports (and tonight, the NBA draft).

I guess I've gotten some reading done, but compared to the real jobs and personal growth I'm seeing from close friends from pomona, it seems clear to me that this marking time I've done comes at the cost of great things, big changes, adulthood. Unfortunately, now that the unease I'm feeling about not doing stuff is rising like nausea, it's a month away from my departure for HK (35 days), and it's not enough time to fix what I think was wrong about the summer. With the Boston trip, the camping, blocked-out family time, there's not time left to find a regular schedule. There's hardly even time left to fit in an extra trip to visit friends with real living situations. Growing apart after college was bound to be scary and jarring, but I think it started May 15th. I'll hope that this time off confers some kind of lucid state of mind for when I leave in august, but all it's done so far is (apparently) made me whiny and short-tempered and emo >50% of the time. It's hard to find a good way to spin it.

a note about basketball

I was reading an article in today's "Denver Post" about my hometown Denver Nuggets, and, lo and behold, it was awful. It was grossly inaccurate, it lacked a meaningful point, and I would have to say it's part of what fans the fires of ill-informed "fans" deluging the sports section and the radio with inane opinions that would destroy our team's chances of competing. So yeah, I don't like most of our writers in general, but this was particularly bad. I wrote the guy an angry email about it, and thought I'd copy it down here.

"If nothing changes, the Nuggets are due to pay around $76 million in salary next season, minus free agents Steve Blake and DerMarr Johnson, as well as forward Jamal Sampson, whose contract expired after last season.

Last season's salary cap was $53.135 million. It will bump up a few million in July, but the Nuggets stand to be over the limit, meaning they would have to pay a dollar for every dollar they are over."

Dear Mr. Dempsey,

I just wanted to let you know that your article in today's paper contains substantially inaccurate information. You discuss the NBA salary cap in conjunction with its luxury tax. While these two provisions of the collective bargaining agreement are related to one another, they are not tied to the same dollar amount, as your article alleges. The salary cap is tied directly to league revenues from the previous season, while the luxury tax threshold (a substantially higher number) is also affected by median team payroll, among other factors. Thus, the Nuggets, along with the majority of NBA teams, are over the cap next year, were over the cap in 06-07, and will likely be over the cap in future seasons, unless we lose substantial assets (as in the "rebuilding" phase of the late 90s).

This means the tax burden on the Nuggets (and on Stan Kroenke) will be much lower than your article suggests, even if they don't trade Camby for role-players. That said, the reason NBA owners want to avoid paying the luxury tax is because of how this money is disbursed. The tax collected from all paying teams is evenly divided among all non-paying teams, and with teams like the Knicks $60,000,000 over the tax threshold last season, the difference between being $1 under the line and $1 over the line (and so losing your share of other teams' taxes) can be a several million dollar hit for a team owner. Some light reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nba_salary_cap

I personally believe that the Nuggets lack the depth to be able to afford to trade Camby for less-than-equal value. Championship-winning teams are based around continuity--the same players playing together for several seasons, and learning each others' games. When I go to a Nuggets game and take in the sea of baby-blue jerseys (all bought in the last three seasons for $60 each), I wonder who really believes the Nuggets can field a championship-caliber team without a championship-caliber payroll. Although the Spurs are a great example of a team that can win big without ending up in tax territory, they also have been able to use past success to re-sign their starts (Duncan, Ginobili) for less than they would make on the open market (remember Ginobili turning down the Nuggets' offer in 2004?) and also to acquire veterans (Brent Barry, Michel Finley) at bargain prices, because those players value winning. Building a Finals-ready team from the ground up, as we have been doing since the 2003 draft, means we don't get those kind of breaks. So if we have to suck it up and pay the luxury tax because of one overvalued contract--Kenyon Martin's, but remember the desperation the team was feeling at the time we signed him--that we can't trade away, the team should be thankful most of our money is going to pay good players who still play for us (Jalen Rose, Chris Webber, and Michel Finley each were paid over $15 million last year by a team other than their current one).

Camby is a bargain at under $10 million per season, and since the Nuggets are over the salary cap, we could only take on $12,600,000 in salaries in return for him. When marginal centers like Chris Kaman and Adonal Foyle are making around the same money as Camby, and when the Nuggets don't have a young backup primed to replace him, trading Marcus would be the biggest mistake this team has made since trading our other Defensive Player of the Year, Dikembe, in the prime of his career.

Sincerely,
Sam Stromberg

enjoys working with hands

Technical Narrative:
So I've been mowing the lawn again this summer (after a two-year hiatus). Since I last recall using it, our mower--which I remember going with my dad to buy, brand spanking new from Home Depot, a vast improvement over the one I learned how to mow with--has fallen on hard times. The engine now vibrates, painfully, whenever it is in operation. The first time I tried to use it (without work gloves), ten minutes of holding it while it was running left my hands swollen for days. After mowing our front lawn today, I decided that the shaking was unacceptable, and took it upon myself to partially disassemble the engine to try to figure out if the shaking could be easily stopped. After several trips back into the house to retrieve tools, I isolated the problem: the single bolt that is supposed to hold the actual chamber part of the engine onto its mount was loose. It had been designed to fit snugly through a hole in the engine housing, to prevent exactly the kind of vibrational problems we've been having, but was now sitting in the middle of a rather large hole, indeed, one that held the parts together, but allowed a good quarter-inch of play to the engine with every cycle. The other obvious problem was that several of the screws holding the crankshaft/pull-starter piece, the engine block, and the metal engine cover together had stripped out or flat fallen off the mower at some point.

Deduction: the screws stripped first, allowing engine instability and vibration (of very small magnitude), causing stress on main bolt, compressing metal around bolt hole, widening hole, causing noticeable shaking. This leads to irritating noise, swollen joints (unless leather work gloves are employed), and fraying nerves. I reconfigured the remaining screws as best I could to try to hold things together, but it still shakes. At least now I know that the mower is bad because of years of operation and irreversible problems, rather than something I can fix.

*********************************

I really enjoyed this (the disassembly, less so the writing about it). It's the sort of thing I rarely (if ever) had time/opportunity to do when I was at school, working with my hands, tools, mechanical things. It's when I'm home that I start to think about working on my car, building things, tactile, real things. Even cooking, as a transformation of food brought about by labor. Things that seem more real than thought-reflection-response essays, historiographical evaluations, definition-definition-lemma-theorem-corollary. Next project: strut tower bar.

There were times (most of high school) when I thought I would be an engineer, someone who built things, worked with materials, responsible for a tangible product. There were times (years of grade school) when I would come home and read "The Way Things Work" so that I would understand how things, mechanical things, mostly, worked. In a reality close to this one, I would be, already. Interning with aerospace or industrial chemistry or maybe just working with cars.

Vicki and I were in Taxco, Mexico, a mountain town built, not like Colorado mountain towns filling the bottom of a river valley, climbing the side of a mountain, roads so steep and sharp in the city itself that VW beetles had to make three-point turns. We took a combi-bus (a VW van stripped and refitted with extra benches to sit on) up the mountainside to see a statue of Jesus

that overlooked the town. These drivers seemed crazy to me--they took curves too fast, with one hand on the wheel and the other around the shoulders of the pretty girl they let sit shotgun to flirt with. Of course, I realized that they drove these roads all the time, memorized the slopes and intersections, had been in some sense destined to do their work from a childhood spent drawing maps, banking curves for toy cars, watching the dials on the dashboard when their fathers drove them anywhere. I thought, I could have been a pretty good combi driver, if I got the chance. I still don't know (for sure) what I want to be when I grow up, but I know that, if the chips had fallen differently, these are places I could have been. Instead, I guess I'm going to travel to Asia to teach, going to plan on medium-distant-future law school, and hopefully have a car I can tinker with on the weekends. I'll leave it here, cause tonight is cooking dinner and then trivia/open mic standup/bingo night at the bars on Colfax.

talk

I had two really good conversations back-to-back today. One of them was meeting someone for the first time, while the other was with an old friend (this being a relative term, meaning "since the beginning of college") (respectively). I definitely feel less nervous about all of the meeting-people and adjusting-to-life I'll be doing in august, because the first one went so well. The second reminded me of how spot-on "keeping in touch" can be sometimes, and one of the reasons it's definitely worth the effort.

Also, I picked some stuff up at the library today, incl some movies I want to watch, a couple books, and two Nelly Furtado albums. Since my laptop was stolen, my music collection has amounted to nearly nil (although I want to give a shout out to Mary Rose for helping to remedy this). And, honestly, the time and distance I'd put between high school me and present-day me almost led me to believe that my tastes had changed, that I should/do repudiate things I liked then, because after all I've changed so much, etc. But then I had a chance to listen to "Whoa, Nelly" (the one from like 2000) again, and it was still really enjoyable. I admit, I was a little rusty trying to sing along with the verses, but half the songs on that album are great. It felt good to drive on the highway this afternoon and sing "I'm like a bird" for the first time in probably years. The only problem I'm having is that the mix of one of the tracks (particularly the instrumental backing) is completely different from the song I remember, and I feel like it suffers for it. I guess I'll have to do a little internet snooping to try to figure it out once I have computer space to actually start to rebuild a library.

who ARE you?

This is less about introspection... who ARE you in the sense of shock/awe/ironic horror at the existence and/or life situation of some people. In the last day, I shook my head at:

--Prominent local newspaper columnist, who consistently includes at least one sentence-paragraph that makes NO SENSE when read the first time, and only sort of seems to be a coherent thought by the third reading or so. In fact, I find myself having to re-read sentences and even whole articles in the newspaper for NOT MAKING ANY SENSE or NOT SEEMING TO HAVE A POINT. I don't know whether to blame the writers or their editors more, but I, former high school newspaper editor, would feel uncomfortable publishing a lot of what goes into the Mountain Time Zone's Most Influential Newspaper(s). (the parenthetical plural is because Denver has two major papers, but they have this weird joint operating agreement where they share classified ad revenue and only release one combined edition on weekend days)

--People who write letters to the editor. I know they're selected for being controversial and all, but most of them make me wish I could resolve policy debates by smacking people upside the head. After reading missives on immigration reform, for example, I wonder if maybe there are people out there who have no idea how the world around them functions and have no curiosity or desire to understand anything or anyone around them. Grr.

--Some of the people doing open-mic standup comedy last night. Tuesdays at the Squire, a bar on Colfax, feature a parade of aspiring comics; after Punk Rock Bingo Night at the Lion's Lair was a no-go, we made it to the Squire in time to catch probably a dozen acts. Some of them were funny, some of them bombed and left the stage after two minutes, it was a generally good time. There was a guy who had apparently been on the Tonight Show, who bombed horribly, a guy who was apparently touring the country, who was pretty funny, and a guy who went to high school with my cousin Will, who was the end-of-the-night headliner. We didn't see any woman perform, although that's another conversation we can have later. Except for some of the jokes, which were awful and offensive to a nearly jaw-dropping extent. I recognize (and have defended) the role of offensiveness in humor, but I guess we all draw the line somewhere. Let's just say that the guy "I have like fifteen abortion jokes, and we've only really made it through three... should I talk about something else?", the guy who attempted to address "the Mexicans" of Denver, and the guy who explained his first line with "It's OK, my wife is Chinese" weren't high on my scorecard. I guess, at least most of the stuff that was awkward for me was awkward for everyone--two of the three acts I just cited were received with silent stares--but I know that as long as society places boundaries on what can be said in polite company, those boundaries will be pushed in spaces like that. In the balance, there were enough funny people that we'll probably come back next tuesday, but, damn, open mic brings out some awfulness.

--On the drive back from crashing at my cousin's this morning, I was sitting in traffic on a pretty major street, but a street in a nice residential neighborhood, with a park-like median, large trees shading the road, and expensive homes on either side. The woman in the SUV in front of me throws something indeterminate out the window into the median. A piece of bagel? A cigarette butt? A clump of hair? I have no idea, but I was stunned by how trashy that was. Like really, who does that anymore? I kept trying to rationalize it as not-exactly-litter, but...

--Other drivers. Not everyone, but a lot of people (incl. at least one family member of mine); the problem seems to be a difference in driving style. Basically, I'm of the opinion that everyone should have a first car that 1. is a stick 2. has a bad transmission and 3. has underpowered brakes. Not because such a car is unsafe or something sick like that--it's just that my car is like that, and I think the habits that such a car ingrains in you are good ones. The bad manual transmission means you have to pay attention to shifting and that you want to avoid shifting as much as possible. The bad brakes mean that you want to start to slow down earlier and slow down more gradually. Automatics seem to encourage abrupt starts and stops, and I enjoy those neither as a passenger nor when I'm on the road myself. I read on wikipedia that the prevalence of manual transmissions in Europe is responsible for things as big as city planning--ring roads and the like, which favor constant speeds, instead of grids, which favor stop-and-go--and, as someone who prefers a manual (and someone who prefers how much cheaper manual cars are), I gotta say that there's a little resentment toward the US system.

I think that's enough ranting for today.

I definitely update this thing more often when I feel like the last post was whiny. This happens reasonably often, all things considered, so I can only conclude that I am a whiny person who is embarrassed about it.

The other thing I like to try to do with a post-whiny entry is marginalize and dismiss the problem that was the previous subject of complaint, preferably in a clever or creative way. So:

Solutions to boredom: stay busy with stuff around the house, family stuff, etc.; defeat workaholism and be secure/happy with not having stuff driving my time; start volunteering someplace for a few weeks; watch more movies. I have begun to consider all of these strategies. Among all of them, the only major requisite is finding an organization in Denver I would really want to volunteer for.

I do enjoy watching movies, and I've started reserving stuff from the library so I'll have a constant stream of stuff I want to watch; in the last few days, I've seen "La Mala Educacion (Bad Education)", "Ocean's 13", finished "When the Levees Broke" (more on this later, once my thoughts are in order), and, tonight, "Boyz n the Hood." This was how I made it through high school: between free stuff when I worked for the movie theater and DPL, I've seen kind of a lot of movies, including almost everything released between June 2001 and October 2002. There's something about sitting on the couch with the lights dimmed after everyone else has gone to bed, popping something in the dvd player; it may just be the feeling of continuity, reminding myself how it felt to live at home before I'd ever moved out.

summer roundup

I feel kind of restless already, eight days after getting back from Mexico. The main problem, I guess, is that I don't have any Big Thing To Do that will take up most of my time/energy, get me out of the house, give my time structure and obligations to someone (specifically, someone who could fire me).

I've thought about looking for a summer job, but have found a lot of ways to rationalize not actually starting to look.
1. I'm only home for six-and-a-half more weeks. By the time I found a place, started work, learned what I needed to do, I'd be putting in my notice.
2. Even if I'm not doing all the traveling I had originally planned to do, I have a couple weekends worth of places to go in July (camping with Tom and some Denver people, Vail with family for a couple nights), and hopefully some other time that I won't be available for regular-type work, so of those few weeks, I'd have to get time off.
3. Maybe this extended lapse in meaningful activity/self-discipline is a break that I needed to take. Last spring ended with little sleep, caffeine-withdrawl or stress-induced migraines, disorganization. Giving things time to sort of breathe a little can't hurt.
4. Let's be honest: I've been kinda sickly since I got back (and even before I left). Congestion, possible lactose intolerance (uh oh), general feelings of weakness, whatever. Body breaking down = sign that I should honestly just relax a little bit.

On the other hand, the lack of structure makes it really really, really easy to put off the things I intend to do, like organizing the crap I brought back from college. I still have a couple of boxes that remain full of unorganized paper detritus. I know that some of that stuff has been moved around in those same boxes from State College PA to Claremont back to Denver without ever really being sorted through, and I know that a little part of me is willing to ship them UPS to Hong Kong without organizing them if it comes to that. It was a priority for the summer, but since I'm not struggling to sandwich it in between work and school and friends and everything else, it gets delayed from mornings to afternoons, afternoons to evenings, evenings to tomorrows.

The stopgap solution, I guess, would be to more eagerly accept the lists of tasks to complete left by the fam when they go to work in the mornings. It would fill the time, I guess. It's just so easy, though, to put those in the same category as tasks I need to do for me: endlessly postponable.

Maybe this summer's lesson is that I won't be content as a house-husband later in life. That occupation was one often mentioned half-jokingly when discussing plans for the future, but this time, now, is teaching me not to joke about it.

This is why, I guess, I'm in a funny place: my parents have basically given me a pass on not working, not paying rent for the summer, so I have the privilege of ample free time. I still have my car, which we plan to sell in August (interested? it's safe, well-maintained, and gets more than 30mpg), so I have the privilege of being able to get away from home whenever, and I don't feel stir-crazy or anything. But I don't, for whatever reason (poverty of imagination?); I sit around, I guess, sleep in, read the paper, do a couple chores, watch some sports on TV or something, read a little. And though this shouldn't be stressful--no pressure from parents to do more, no financial pressure to work, etc--I feel tension, I feel restless, I feel like I'm putting stress on myself because I feel useless for wasting so much time, so many days, being 22, whatever it is.

* * *

Related problem: I have a lot of time to think about things, but I don't make up my mind about them. To some extent, I think I form opinions, convictions, talking things through with someone. I can't resolve contradictions, prioritize among conflicting outcomes, unless I have the added pressure of dialectic (in the Socrates sense, not the Marx or Hegel sense) to compress my thought process and produce a coherent position. So I have a lot of loose thoughts that need to get tied down before I feel prepared to write about them in this space, share them with people.

I also feel like the increased ratio of "time spent thinking about someone" to "time spent with or talking to someone" that occurs when I'm home doesn't strengthen my relationships with people. It just makes my end of things a little weird, overthoughtout. So a major semi-thought-intensive time suck would bring things more into balance.

I've started keeping a journal, which works as a kind of polarizing filter for my thoughts (think polarized sunglasses, if you don't remember The Way Things Work as closely as I guess I do). It helps, but not quite to the point that they're ready to be transcribed here and internet-ed.



on an unrelated note, I'm going to try a couple entries in a serif font to see if that makes them easier to read.

this should be mentioned

So, being sick and lying around the house all day, I'm wearing my old red "i are scientists" tshirt that I got at that We Are Scientists show freshman year. Back then, they were a band of claremont alumni, and so we welcomed and cherished them. It was not an obvious thing that they would go on to play venues larger (and nicer) than Grooveline.

And then I was watching "Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Inferno 3" on MTV (I'm sick, so I think that makes it ok) while eating a dinner of chicken broth, brown rice, and poached eggs. At a critical juncture, whose song should MTV choose to play in order to emotionally and dramatically contextualize a conversation? That's right, We Are Scientists. It made me feel a little bit old inside. I mean, we've all grown up so much in those four years, and meanwhile, that band we used to go to see like four times a year because they could always get a gig at the claremont colleges has gotten signed and become famous. It's funny which little things send us back in time like this, to little crystallized moments that metonymically refer to medium-sized chunks of our pasts.

Oh, and to Carter/David/Jaz, I hope that in four more years, I'll be able to reminisce about how you played class day and now are touring Europe or something.

Dear Mr. Stromberg,

* * authorial interjection: apologies, but details on Mexico trip will come later * *

Dear Mr. Stromberg,

I am pleased to offer you employment as English Teaching Assistant (ETA) of The Hong Kong Institute of Education (the "Institute") on the terms and conditions listed below.

Your employment is conditional upon you obtaining and maintaining a valid visa to work in Hong Kong.

Your "Commencement Date" will be 3 August 2007 or when you are granted a work visa to work in Hong Kong, whichever is the later date.

You will be employed on Non-regular Terms for an 11-month contract (the "Fixed Term") from the Commencement Date until 2 July 2008, when your contract of employment will automatically terminate due to the lapse of time.

You will be provided with a single occupancy of a double bed room in the student halls.

You will be entitled to 14 working days of vacation leave during the period of employment. No encashment will be made for any untaken leave balance.

If you wish to travel outside Hong Kong/Guangdong during your vacation leave, you should seek permission from the programme. The maximum time you are allowed to be outside of Hong Kong for vacation leave during the period of employment is 14 days.

You will be entitled to gazetted general holidays and one rest day in every period of seven days.


Yours sincerely,

***
Human Resources Manager

------------

I will be teaching "future teachers and primary students" as a TA/language lab person, and organizing cross-cultural programming. I will be taking three course modules, in Cantonese, Hong Kong Studies, and Teaching English as a Second Language.

It still sounds really cool to me. And the food situation, and the first-time-in-Asia thing, and the oh-god-I'll-be-so-awkwardly-tall thing... it's a lot to digest, but I still have two months to wrap my head around it. In any event, looking forward to it already with mixture of trepidation and adrenal excitement.

Oh, and Mexico was one of the best trips I've ever taken. But more about that later. It also left me exhausted, congested, pepto-bismol'd, and with some serious tan lines. So I will sit down and try to write everything about it soon, just not at the moment.