Wits and Wagers

Listening to: Lullatones, "Morning Coffee."

My Facebook fiance had her baby three weeks ago -- it was due Christmas -- and I didn't even find out until a few days ago. I insist on knowing things when they happen, and in this case I was betrayed! Okay, not really, but still. George and I's favorite question post finding out about something is "Who else knows?" Few things are more important to us than establishing the chain of knowledge/gossip.

Another San Diego friend popped out a baby today too. So since I don't have much to offer new parents, and certainly no frankincense or myrrh, I can give only give my usual standby: music. Every parent could benefit from some Kanye Rockabye Baby, the Lullatones, a few atmospheric Air tracks, and most of all, Kenny Loggins' "Return to Pooh Corner" album.

For a lot of my tween years, I was obsessed with the title track, and when I finally found the entire album, I played it non-stop. Freshman year, Greg and I used to sit in his little dorm room, and have this on in the background while we played video games or waited for the fried chicken to warm up in his toaster oven.

Anyway, if you're about to have a child, I'll have a playlist ready for little whatever his/her name is.

I am finally back in San Diego. I took off on Monday, ready to sail back to California but after forty five minutes on a plane and then a ten hour wait in an airport, I found myself on a train headed back to New York. Heavy fog grounded everything in Baltimore and I didn't want to sleep in an airport, so to Brooklyn I went.

Earlier, when we were playing a lot of Pocket Planes, fog would often be a reason a city shut down. If it was a hub city, you were screwed. I would like to think that a few months of playing Pocket Planes gave me some perspective on how hard it was to re-route all those flights, and so I was patient.

However, due to this long-ish ordeal, I have decided that non-stop flights are the way to go. Thus another addition to my list of "things I used to do in my twenties that I will no longer do in my thirties." Before, traveling was about finding the cheapest flights regardless of number of stops. Now, the potential aggravation of waiting, missing connections, etc. are just not worth it. So for that extra $100, I will fly direct. It's a big step, and hopefully part of my growing maturity into a real adult. Adults fly straight to their destination.

The other day, a friend of a friend, who's a flight attendant, was excited to recruit me for their hiring process. (We met up with her at a super fancy CVS on 14th and 8th Ave. The space used to be an old bank and it's basically the Grand Central of CVSes as the interior has vaulted ceilings and marble columns.) While I don't really need a new job, after hearing her talk about the lifestyle, I would seem to be an ideal candidate. Being a flight attendant would allow me to have a super flexible schedule traveling the world for cheap, and think of the people I would meet everywhere.

On my ride home, I studied the flight attendants, to see if I could stomach being fake nice to so many people. I could probably do it for a few flights a month, but as always, there's no way I would want to fly around and travel without a buddy in tow. So there goes the flight attendant dream. Also, I'm supposed to be putting down roots, not trying to find more efficient ways to be nomadic. I am still going to apply though, because the interview process seems interesting, and maybe I could article it up or something.

I just wrapped up Ender in Exile, which is the book in-between Ender at the Battle School and before he finds a place to settle in Xenocide. For most of Ender in Exile, Ender is traveling with the first human colony, speeding away from Earth. Due to near light speed relativity, he only experiences two years aboard the ship, while everyone behind him slugs through forty years or so.

While I'm hardly on an almost time traveling spaceship, I think that sometimes the feeling is comparable. I leave people for a few months or years and when I return, they're aged/changed. Actually anyone who moves around a lot can relate to this, because friends get married, get kids, get houses, whatever. And you feel the same. Or at least I do. Catching up with a friend via email, she said, "you've moved back and forth enough that there might just be a slightly worn down trail of airspace between us now, with all that flying to and fro.

Reading Ender in Exile made me think about the stuff you miss if you don't stick around. And I wondered which of my friends would choose to leave everything behind to journey away while everyone died behind them. I could probably do it, but I'd need someone to come with me. Ender had Valentine, his sister, but I know George so would not do it. Any volunteers? I can barely go do laundry by myself, so I'll need someone.

In contrast to Ender watching his friends physically age, I tend to more experience changes in people as they shift internally. Like maybe my friend will look the same but their insides will be different now. A shift of perspective perhaps, or something momentous in the intervening months happened that are now hard to explain, unless I was there to live through it. Since I hate catch ups, and am terrible about keeping up, we're kind of semi-strangers for a bit again, as I'm still working off a mental model of them from before. That has to be how Ender feels, as he falls further and further behind.

Another thing about Ender traveling far away. Even if he writes an email a day, his recipients would only be getting updates every few weeks, or months, because communication is not instantaneous. Can you imagine the pressure to clean out your inbox? I guess it's not that different from when mail used to travel by pony or boat I guess. But it seems incomprehensible nowadays, how you would keep up if the time between writing and delivery took months.

Who would bother?