Skip to main content

Stickshifts and safety belts.

Eleven hours is a long time to spend in a car. It's a long time to spend driving. It's a long time to spend staring at the road with your leg locked up on the accelerator. I hate using the cruise control. It feels like I'm not really in control of the car. Oh well. It was a nice, peaceful drive that I was mostly awake for. You tend to see weird things when you have nothing to look at. Makes for good conversation though. You only need one word to make a joke.
I was certainly anxious about the trip. I think everyone was in their own ways and for their own reasons. I just wanted things to go right. For everyone to have a good time and walk away smiling wider than they were when the went in and I think it worked. And despite my misgivings, I had the best spring break I've had in a while. I was hanging out with good friends and got closer to friends I wasn't as close to before.
No, we didn't do much. What we did, though, was fun. We laughed hard and got sunburned. What more could anyone want? I'm already looking forward to next time, which I'm hoping comes sooner than later.

Being outside is just so therapeutic. It's easy to get caught up in the silliness and trivialities of daily life to the point where you get dragged down by the little things. It's just nice to get a chance to recharge your batteries. I wish I got more opportunities for doing that, but I should probably just take the initiative and do it instead of wishing it. Camping makes me feel like a little kid--I can't stop laughing and smiling. There's so much to look at and admire and share. Who can be cynical when they're watching a sunset?
It's a great world we live in--minus most of New Mexico and the entirety of El Paso.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Past the butterfly wall.

Spontaneous pneumothorax is a collection of air or gas in the space between the lungs and the chest that "collapses" the lung and prevents it from inflating completely.  Spontaneous means there is no traumatic injury to the chest or lung.   There are two types of spontaneous pneumothorax: primary and secondary. Primary spontaneous pneumothorax occurs in people without lung disease. It occurs most often in tall, thin, young people. I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket but I can't answer it. We are in the middle of rehearsal. It is not an uncommon event. We continue to play. The strap of my saxophone cuts into my neck. The nylon is rough against my skin. I look out of place. Everyone else is dressed casually; shorts, shirts, shoes optional. There I stand, a button down shirt and slacks. I'm entitled to dress up a little. It's my birthday. My phone vibrates again. I always used to roll my eyes whenever I saw those scenes in movies. The phone call. The bad news....

Pseudo-science (like psych).

I consider myself a man of science. I try to approach problems and deal with them logically, using observations previously recorded to handle new problems. So of course my interest was piqued when someone I knew posited that men are needier and more complicated than women. An interesting theory. But to properly examine it, one must understand the concept of sexual selection and its two aspects: male competition and female choice. Which brings us to point one: men are needier [in relationships] than women. This is true. In a natural/primal setting, the males are generally love-'em-leave-'em kinds of guys. Their main objective is to reproduce as much as they can. Humans, in their infinite wisdom, have decreased the emphasis on this to the point where it has become a footnote in male purpose. Civilization dictates that, instead of finding a partner for the sole purpose of reproduction, males find females for life companionship. With the effective removal of their natur...

I'm a geologist, not an alcoholic.

I thought I had seen people drink before. Hell, I thought that I had drank before. But, clearly, I thought wrong on both of those counts. I cannot, for the life of me, think of a reason to justify all of the drinking that transpired down there last week. There was no rhyme or reason to it, it just was. Field work just makes a man thirsty. Taking this class was easily one of the best things I've ever done. We worked hard every day out in the field. Wake up at 7, leave the beach house by 8, hit the water by 9. My first three field days were in service on the R/V Acadiana , a 58 foot vessel that towed the CHIRP fish , the air gun, and the streamer to measure all the seismic data--looking at the subsurface of the seafloor we drove over. My second ship was the R/V Itasca using the multibeam , sidescan , and grab sampler --getting seafloor surface bathymetry. They were long, exhausting days and we returned to the docks around 6 or 7 every evening. And then, drinking. So much ...