New York Hiatus

Finish first year of grad school - check.
Propose to girlfriend - check.
find a productive way to spend the summer between grad semesters??

Check.

As many of you already know, I will not be in New York this summer. At Shelley's urging I went searching for opportunities to improve me knowledge in the areas of my graduate studies during the summer break, and through one very helpful university contact, and my practically patent-pending system of dumb luck, I landed a whopper.

Based on my prior experience in radio operations/management, and my current academic/social interest in the region of Central Asia, I was approved for an internship with Radio Attazyk, the Kyrgyz branch of "Radio Free Europe," now re-branded as Radio Liberty. For those not familiar with RFE/RL, it is an international news/journalism organization with certain functional similarities with the BBC or NPR. Like the BBC, it has a strongly international focus for its news content, but like NPR it is actually a confederation of independent news organizations which share resources and content. It is also, it must be admitted, funded by the US Congress as a carryover from its days as a propaganda machine pumping in "free press" via radio to Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe.

Since the collapse of the USSR, the main office has moved from DC to Prague, and the mission has shifted to more generally support freedom, democracy, etc. around the world. Continued US funding of course requires at least a critical eye, though not necessarily skepticism. In addition to radio news, they also support vibrant web coverage from all the countries in which they are involved, and I would encourage you to flip through the articles and judge for yourself. www.rferl.org

As for myself, I'm nominally going as a radio intern, though it seems more likely at this point that I'll be conducting training in radio copy writing (essentially, high-level english training), and also be assisting with a youth (15-20s) radio program. I will find out more when I get there.

That's the long version, now here's the relevant detail:

the (lame) Texpatriot is setup to be a blog about my life, but specifically my life as a Texan Expatriot living in New York. Moving to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, transcends most of what I would usually write in this blog. I will no longer be a Texan - or even a New Yorker - I will now be living as an 'American' representative, dissolving the fun nuances this blog is built to discuss.

Luckily... I happen to have another blog, which predates this one and addresses exactly the issues at hand: what do I experience when traveling outside my comfort zone and beyond the territorial borders of my own prior experience. I started this last summer when I spent almost 3 months touring around Europe, first alone and then later accompanied by my girlfriend. It was a tremendous experience, and I had a lot of time to think deep and write about it on the blog.

I have my doubts about this summer resulting in such ephemeral contemplations, but it's a close enough fit that I'll be documenting my Kyrgyz adventure on this alternate (previous) blog chain. You can follow along at http://weberonthelamb.blogspot.com

The name doesn't make much sense, being both a euphemism for "legal fugitive" and a (not very) comical allusion to a (formerly) recurring segment on the Colbert Report. Since the creation of that blog, Colbert dropped the bit, and I realized that I wasn't fleeing anything, but rather searching for things.

Nonetheless, the blog (and its mis-nomer) took on a life of its own. It became personified, and I've come to think, in a very weird way, about 'the lamb' as my companion in my travels. It is an honest, occasionally brutally honest, confidant as well as a catalyst to push me further beyond my comfort zone when the opportunity arises. In a sense, it has become my 'journeyman's conscience,' reminding me of my purpose to explore and the friends and family who await an update.

Having said all of this, the primary purpose of this post is only to inform you that, in all likelihood, I will not be reposting to this blog until I return from this particular engagement. When I get back to NYC in August/September, and my regular life and TX:NY comparisons again become relevant, the (lame) Texpatriot will return.

Until then, I would love to have you follow along in my digital footprints at Weber on the Lamb, and I wish you the very best wherever your summer may take you.

Weber
:: (lame) Texpatriot

How to be a Badass

Finding the person you want to spend the rest of your life with is a pretty wonderful feeling, conveying that sentiment to the person by presenting them with a symbol of your lifelong commitment is even better.  But if you really want to graduate to the level of 'badass', you've got to take it one step further.

Common options include grandiose proposal circumstances (Jumbotrons, sky writing, name etched into their souffle', etc.), ridiculous diamond sizes, and celebrity guest appearances (yes, Snoop, I'll marry him!).

As with so many choices, this lame texpatriot opted for d) None of the Above.

Besides, how could I hope to choose the right ring for Shelley without letting her know that I was looking?  We've been dating almost 7 years, so certain key features were set: no yellow gold, nothing impractical, no pink stones.  But that's all I had to go on.  What the hell else HAD we been talking about for all those years?

I could have just proposed, and then let her pick out a ring she loved... But I think part of proposing is 'doing the best you can' and then being accepted, whatever you've got, for all your good & bad choices.  In other words, if you really love the guy, and he has bad taste in jewelry or anything else, that's something you'll have to accept if you plan to be with him forever.

So letting Shel choose the ring was out.  Equally, me choosing a ring from a catalogue of several hundred generic rings didn't really sound too intimate either.  What ring says, "Shelley"?  Option 143b or option 338c?  Again, I deferred to option d).

Luckily, this time I actually had an option d): NewYorkweddingring.com

This is a small business run by a goldsmith named Sam Abbey in downtown manhattan, just a block or two from the World Trade Center site.

It's a simple setup: 1 room live-in apt, tons of specialized jeweler's tools, a few precious metals, and a computer.  After a few planning meetings to discuss design elements, materials, and to purchase a diamond together, you show up early in the morning, and 

over the course of an oh-so-brief 16 hour day, the two of us made Shelley's wedding ring.

That's right.  

I made Shel's engagement ring.  

From scratch.  Like a biscuit.  

Because she deserves it, and I was being bonafide badass.

Here's how:

Take the band material (a solid platinum cylinder) and cut it down to the appropriate length.

Flatten to the desired width.

File the ends.

Annealing with blow torch - basically, super-heat until it glows orange (pretty!); this makes it more pliable.

Bend into a ring, then shape & bend more and more until 2 ends touch.

place on a cone to set size/shape; hammer until ring is a circle.

Annealing again, this time to "lock" the ring shape.

File more.

Torch-Solder (actually, brazing)the 2 ends together (now a complete ring).

Practice engraving on a silver dud piece.

Engrave decorative elements onto platinum band.

Cut an "x" into the top of the ring for the setting to fit into.

File the X smooth.

Drop in the Setting.

Torch-Solder (again, braze) the setting in place.

File / sand / polish the interior.

Super-polish the exterior, especially the setting.

File down interior of setting (to "catch" diamond).

test diamond fitting, remove, re-file setting, test, re-file, etc etc etc.

Once diamond is snug-fit into setting, gently bend-over top of setting arms.

Submerse the ring in quick-hardening plastic.

Put ring+plastic in a vice, let cool/harden.

Use hammer firmly bend/lock setting arms down on top of diamond.

file/sand/polish setting arms, reduce size as desired.

remove plastic in boiling water.

polish polish polish polish polish polish polish.

POLISH.

P-O-L-I-S-H.

Buff it.

Box it.

Badass.

You can find more photos here (if you're still interested after all that!)

The proposal, pre-proposal plans, post-proposal happiness; all of these are good and perhaps even more impotant than all the sillyness outlined above.

You can find Shelley's perspective of the actual proposal on her blog

Everyone's fiance is special - if they weren't, no one would bother with all the work of proposing. So when I say that Shelley is special to me, that she's one of a kind, this should be no surprise given the time we've been together, me proposing, etc.

But we now have a lifetime together, and it's a life we're going to have to make together.  And I got it off to a good start by making the symbol of that commitment with the same two hands that (sporadically) type this blog.

I haven't rebuilt her a car.  I haven't constructed her dream house.  I don't have any idea how to go about sewing her wedding dress.

But I did make her engagement ring, and that's at least a good start... 

at being a badass.

Weber

::(lame) Texpatriot

Nature Strikes Back

Another Earth Day has come and gone, and while some of us may have celebrated by participating in a recylcing drive, a carbon emission boycott, or a polar bear rescue excursion, the vast majority of us just sent a few virtual plants on facebook and called it good.

Here's a reflection for the day: 

When you hug a tree, 
it never hugs you back, 
but when you kick a tree,
you're left with the bruise.

I for one am a great appreciator of the Earth in the way that I appreciate my family: it's the only one I've got.  That doesn't mean (either one) isn't amazing, but it's not really the quality of the entity that earns it my respect/love/patience.  Rather, it is (structurally), that encapsulating conceptual and physical space that literally circumscribes everything I know.  I'll admit the comparison drops out eventually; some families are easier to escape than others, but with the continued development of space travel perhaps someday we can all be bratty teenagers and leave Earth in a huff too.

Until then, we're stuck with it, so we'd best make the most of our situation.  To what degree the Earth needs our 'protection' I remain quite sceptical.  Let me be clear: I don't generally question the 'science' of global warming - I do believe that in the past 250 years the exploitation of (non-renewable) fossil fuels has elevated mankind as a whole to a new level of existence known as geologic force, and correspondingly I allow that we now live in the anthroposcene era.

BUT, I also recogize that the mass exploitation of those carbon resources is not just a, but perhaps, the defining characteristic of our modern lives.  I'm not even talking about modern comforts, the discoveries of plastics, techno-electric societies... go back further.  If England hadn't been a small island (lacking the primary resource of food/fuel competition - land), and if that island hadn't happend to be sitting on top of a giant pile of accessible simple carbon (coal), then the 'industrial revolution' as we conceive of it may never have happened.  Ever.  Not 50 years later, not 100 years later.  Progress would have happened, but it wouldn't have brought us to where we are today.  Period.

So ok, fossil fuels - specifically the ability to extract radically more energy at a dramatically lower rate of land consumption - are the only reason we've become masters of our own fate.  They may also lead us into self-extinction.  You win some, you lose some.

But even now, big geologic force that we are, the Earth doesn't really need us to 'protect it' as if from some outside threat, but simply to stop killing it; or at least decrease the rate at which we are changing it.  We can't 'kill' the Earth - it isn't 'alive.'  It is a complicated system of many parts - geologic, meteorologic, hydrologic as well as the biologies of flora, fauna and pisces we more often discuss - most of which will change dramatically after the human species becomes extinct, but which would require even more dramatic changes than we can affect to bring about their annihilation.  We can't kill this planet, we can only kill the ants muddling about on the surface.

Still, when a scientist says, with mixed wonder and fear, that the changes we're imparting on a global level have consequences beyond his/her ability to predict even within the current generation's lifetime (not to mention the several centuries/millenia in which we hope life continues on Earth), that should scare at least a small amount of food waste out of you rectum.

I'm no champion of doom and gloom, but let's look at this from a perspective about 100 times deeper than buying a canvas bag just in case you ever remember to use it again (btw - canvas requires cotton, which in the current agribusiness is no eco-friend).

Industrial revolution required an enormous amount of coal to get started, in fact most recent estimates suggest the huge pile of carbon energy that England started with, and depleted in just 100 years, is almost exactly the same as the most trusted estimates of Saudi oil reserves.  It's not renewable.  It will all get used up.

Since the (first) British cultural invasion of steam power and industry, the world has started moving much faster.  More people industrialize, more carbon is needed, and more gasses flood the ozone layer.  But how can one country, whose 'modernity' was only possible by grotesquely 'unenvironmental' methods criticize the use of those same methods by others?  Especially when those others lack of 'modernity' is cited as the primary reason for their political and social subjugation to the 'modern' world?  It's not a lollipop.  We can't lick it first and thereby deny the prize to everyone else who has a fair chance to grab it.

Luckily, when weighty issues such as these set upon my shoulders, I'm reminded of just how small we humans are, and how fragile our toys can leave us.  Asteroids, Earth quaks, Twisters, Tsunamis.  There are a lot of phenonmenon, rare and common, incidental and catastrophic, that 'ole Mother Earth can pull out from time to time.  These aren't punishments - there is no correlation to what we've done and what we reap - it's just irrational consequences.  There may be a cycle of weather activity we call El Nino, but the complexity of factors involved in determining how many people it will kill with mudslides will likely remain beyond our grasp for eons.

Then there are the more down-to-Earth examples.  The harrowing tale of countless heroes following the noble example of a canadian goose patriotically tacking down a US Airways flight, or a pod of whales flexing their Atlantic might against a Volvo-sponsored sailboat armada.

Do we still want to save the whales once they've realized that it's us or them?

It's hard to conceive of a world in which not only the international economic system, but even the chemisty and geology are entirely fluid concepts, but it's even harder to deny the reality - if you're willing to think about a topic rather than be told about it.  So stop reading this, and do some reflection of your own.  We know that our use of fossil fuels changes the world at a fundamental level.  We know of nothing in human ability that can reverse these changes, and more to the point, we seem incapable of even slowing down the rate at which we employ the tactis that we know are making these changes increase, much less begin reducing the amount of change we impart.

Earth is not a static ecosphere, and as great as it is to 'think green' and 'do our part,' considering the ramifications of even the generally acknowledged 'facts' means confronting the serious likelihood of our self-extinction.  While this was a harsh potential we had to face during the Cold War, then it at least relied on human agency - someone had to be willing to push the button.  Was there anyone that crazy?  Yes, there was.  Good job humanity, we survived that one.  What about this?  What about when all x Billion people are contributing to global annihilation?  No matter how many cans you recycle, bikes you ride, or dollars you give to charity, we are all contributing, and we will all be culpable.  On the plus side, there won't be anyone left to sue us. 

So happy Earth day.  

That's sort of where I'm going with this.

Weber

::(lame) Texpatriot

Techno-Transmission

I had a conversation with a friend last week in which he mentioned that his new job required him to learn how to drive a stick shift, and this somehow  sparked in me a tirade about the dangerous side effects of technology as a mechanism by which we insulate ourselves from reality.

Stick with me.

I'm not a car nut, ranking behind both brothers and my father in the zeal, knowledge, and skill of automechanics.  I do know how to work a manual transmission, though all 5 cars I've owned have been automatic (and full disclosure - my next car will doubtless be automatic as well).

But here's the argument.  

A Manual Transmission is a mechanized aparatus that makes the shifting of gears possible by a human operator, but not without removing cognizance and control of that operator from the process.  As a result, reality - the consequence of the driver's actions - is transmitted through a connected linear process from the wheels on the pavement and the combustion in the pistons to the pedals, feet, knee and brain of the driver.  While the driver may not necessarily understand the exact construction and operation of every link in the chain, the process is not outside his/her comprehension.  Sure, driving stick gets to be 'automatic' in that we stop thinking about it, but no more so than we stop thinking about our fingers when we type - we are still aware of our indivisible control.

Compare this to the automatic, where by pressing one pedal with no concern for other factors the car "goes" - as if by magic.  We could easily replace the pedal on the floor with a button on the dash - the Go Button - or for those of my generation and after, the "a/x" button on most video game controls.

The car moves forward.  It changes its own gears through the undecipherable process of bearings, transmission fluid, and hydraulics.  This causes a schism between the act of driving and the reality of the car's movement (we could even joke that, technically, we lose our sense of auto-mobility).  

My point is that there develops a gap between how a thing works, and how we perceive it as working.  And this I think might actually be a problem.

Without getting too broad, consider other examples.

How does democracy work?  What about the Internet?  We know what both of these things are, and we can certainly describe the results they produce, but how do they work?

These institutions and technologies have become "black boxes," a term developed in the field of Scient and Technology Studies (STS) by people like Bruno Latour and Michel Callon.  We don't recognize how these technologies work; we put in command/item A, and we get result/item b.

When you put a tomato in a shredder, this isn't really a problem.

When you put a tomato in a microwave, the results might surprise you.  

Go ahead and try.  

I'll wait.

I'm not sticking too close to Latour's argument, because this isn't about all technologies, just those that I deem create or exacerbate a rift between reality and cognition.

It is interesting to me that most instances of engineering technology fall into this category.  Again, hydraulics, steam power, even simple devices like gears and pulleys to some degree separate us from reality in that they alter/mitigate the amount of work required to achieve a certain effect.  Yet a pulley is not beyond my ability to recognize and understand as an instantaneous cognition.

On the other hand, the Automatic transmission, which I've been able to operate (legally) for 11 years now, is a complete mystery to me despite opening one up, and then later having the distinction of paying to replace it.

What does it mean to have our actions/control divorced from the reality of their effect?  While I'm sure it's done a lot to make driving easier, it hasn't actually made cars any safer or appreciably more fuel efficient, has it?  It's now possible for us to eat a Big Mac or put on our mascera while we drive.  It's finally possible to get up to an unsafe speed while drunk.  Progress?

The incredible jump in the use of unmanned aerial drones by the US military, originally for surveillance, but now increasingly for offensive strike missions also comes to mind.  We now have 19 year old "pilots" sitting at their desks in Arizona controlling expensive military hardware on the other side of the globe and killing people - hostile or civilian doesn't really matter for this argument.  

We've all been horrified about the "finger on the button" of US-USSR nuclear arsenals - that one man could effect the death of millions from an isolated bunker without directly doing anything.  The scale of nuclear winter is obviously dramatic, but the isolation from the reality of the act it implies I find disturbing, and progressively more available not just in our military, but also in social aspects.

Medicine technology, until very recently, has not followed this trend of anti-reality.  Dissection, EKGs, fiberoptic cameras.  These technologies all seek to either bring the doctor into closer direct contact with what I'm calling 'reality,' or to create a more accurate representation of that reality.  This representation is frought with its own complications (re: 'Virtual Reality'), but for now, I'm just stressing that the point in this technological process is to bring the operator closer to reality, rather than further away.  New prospects in computer-controlled lasers represent one divergence from this trend.

So what's the point?  Clearly I don't think technology is a bad thing (I'm blogging) - in fact I'm quite the technophile.  I think the 21st century is an astounding time to be alive.

But I wonder if maybe we're accepting our drift away from reality just a little too complacently. Maybe it's not a bad thing in and of itself, but have we stopped to consider the consequences, the side effects?  Perhaps there aren't any, then again...

We aren't sacrificing virigns to the Blue Screen of Death (yet - wait, would that work?), but the more we allow ourselves at an individual and social level to become dependent on instruments and institutions that we don't ourselves understand (functionally or historically, to bring it back to Bruno), the closer we come to a civilization of mystics and soothesayers.  

If we accept that just rebooting our computer one more time is going to (magically) make that error message go away, how much better are we than the alchemists of yore?

So learn to drive a standard.  Make your kids learn.  Because when the apocalypse hits, it'll be the MacGuyvers, not the Neos, that keep the experiment of humanity ticking along.

Yes, RFE (and R.E.M.) Are Still Around

It's Official.

Kygryzstan - Summer 2009.

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty Internship

May 25 - Depart for London

May 28 - Depart for Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

                *MAGIC*

July 27 - Return to NYC via London

Future travel-related blogs will be diverted to weberonthelamb.blogspot.com

Weber

::lame (Texpatriot)