Welcome Back Rant

As my last post indicated, I tried moving my blog to Wordpress. I got it in my head that I was going to build a more robust site with "how-to" pages and other resources, but it turned out it was just too much work. I have little interest in taking on more commitments, especially ones that are technology-dependent. I also got sidetracked by Facebook for awhile, but I got sick of people posting about the mundane things in their ordinary lives. No offense to them, I'm just not interested. I suppose my life is plenty mundane, or at least odd and incomprehensible, to most of them.

Blogger gives me a release, without the complication of building a resource, and without the distraction and even greater complication of Facebook.

So I guess I'm back, and though I do try to avoid all-out rants, today I think is going to be a rough one.

Why today? I'm at work and wholly depressed, which isn't a big surprise if you've read anything I've written over the years. I have a high-paying job with wonderful benefits that contributes to a cleaner, greener world, my peers respect me, my work environment is low-stress and my employer is generous.

And I hate my job. I hate it in the way that a lover of fine dining might hate giving up juicy steaks, fine wines, crisp fruits, tender vegetables, crusty breads and silken desserts for the futuristic meal-in-a-pill. It isn't that it tastes bad, or that it lacks nutrition (assuming humans could actually achieve this), but rather that it tastes like nothing and leaves the soul malnourished. I feel like a suburban drone, passing the days not by the rhythms of nature but by the wholly artificial ticking of the clock. I feel unstimulated. Unmoved. Unmotivated. Pointless. Wasteful. Sad.

I have to get out.

My coworkers praise my work, my work ethic, and my good-natured personality. But I'm just going through the motions. My body is here earning money to pay everyone else to provide my "living," but my heart roams the forested mountains in search of something real.

I watched a movie called The New World last night. It was a little slow as it was more a love story than anything, but it put me in a mood. It reminded me (as if I needed reminding) just how f*ed up white people and Western society are and always have been. If I came ashore in America in 1607 I would join the Indians and never look back. They had it made. The mere fact that they managed to live on this continent for 14,000 years and not destroy it, and we managed to take it to the brink in just a few centuries speaks volumes.

I despise money and the clock and the calendar. I despise the Western social hierarchy, the greed and the gluttony and the backstabbing. I hate fashion and gadgets and everything that Pottery Barn represents. I hate that we're not only willing, but eager to trade timeless, unspoiled wilderness for a metaphorical minute of suburbia. I hate annual performance reviews and standardized tests. I hate car culture and television and processed industrial calories that pass as food. I hate human stupidity and I hate being part of the whole f*ed up system. I hate religion, especially the "big three."

All I want is to live deliberately. All I want is to hunt and gather and grow my own food, to build my own home, to laugh with friends, to breathe clean air and drink clean water, to walk among ancient forests and to wonder and ponder over the midnight stars. I don't need "stuff" beyond what I can make from what the forest provides. I don't need "culture" or "entertainment." I don't even need to own land. I just need to live with the land, and after I die let someone else walk in my footsteps. That's all. You know, the way most humans have lived for three million years. Is that so much ask? Really? I don't want fame and fortune, I have no interest in keeping up with the Jones', and you can keep your plastic suburban fantasy. I want to extricate myself from it entirely. If I don't do something soon I will go mad.

I've thought about going back to school and becoming a biologist, but even scientists often irk me. As Ian Malcom said in Jurassic Park, "what you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world." I'm not at all comfortable with poking and prodding nature merely to see "what makes it tick." Some things, I think, are best left to the realm of the mysterious. I don't need to know what's happening on a cellular level inside of Clostridium botulinum, or even that it exists. Is it not enough to know that cooking certain foods keeps one from getting sick? Is it not enough to gain wisdom from observing and interacting with the natural world, rather than gain information by dissecting it under a microscope?

Why must I "get a job?" I'm not lazy, not at all. I love work. A few weeks ago I spent an entire day felling, limbing, bucking and splitting firewood in the forest using nothing but a double ax, an antique bucking saw and a maul. I used no fossil fuels except to drive my truck up in the mountains because I don't have and anyway wouldn't be allowed to use a horse drawn cart on modern roads. And anyway if it weren't for the "advancements" of society I wouldn't even need the cart or to cut down trees. Natives had small fires burning twigs and dung that kept them quite warm with no need even for harvesting firewood as we know it. Talk about efficiency!

That said, I'm not opposed to learning a trade. I need to work with my hands more. I need to walk and interact with things that are real, like wood and wildlife, not plastic and suburban cube-zombies.

When the weekend comes and I'm in the Rockies, I feel alive and happy and deeply interested. When the weekdays come I feel dead and numb, like my spirit is broken. Work is an endless procession of pointless days doing pointless work to live a life I don't want in the first place. How do I get out?

How do I get out?

Tell of Woe

Well it seems I'm in full-on blogger mode again, which means I've reverted to my Great Obsession.

It makes me want to laugh. Or cry.

It's finally snowing in Boulder. The wind is howling and we could get as much as a foot by tomorrow morning, along with sub-zero temperatures. Counting today I have four more days before I have to go back into the office. I plan to spend the majority of that time fireside knocking out a few books, doing a little blogging, and working on my novel.

So what brought my obsessive feelings back? Partly I wanted them to come back. I missed them, if that makes sense. I guess it's how I've come to define myself. It makes me wonder how I'd feel if I ever were to achieve my fantasy. I mean imagine you spent your whole life fantasizing of, say, going to Greece. Then you finally get to go. Upon returning home, what then? What comes next? Would you be satisfied thereafter? Or would you find that it was the obsession with Greece, rather than Greece itself, that you actually needed?

Partly my obsession was brought back by just not being at work. I haven't been in the office since last Wednesday. It's now Thursday of the following week. In the past week I've been to the Leanin' Tree Museum of Western Art twice, and that always catapults me back into hardcore Western fantasizing. It's one of the best little museums I've ever been to and the only art museum I've ever loved. It's in Boulder, it's free and open to the public, and it's usually very quiet so it's a good place to meditate on the things near and dear to my heart. And the art collection is amazing. Even my parents loved it. Often I'll go alone during some off-time when I'm sure to be the only one there and I'll spend an hour or two gazing into an intangible world that captivates me. Every sculpture, every painting is a moment frozen in time - yet they all tell a story, however brief, and give one a glimpse of what was and what would be, even if the stories are only based loosely on historical events.

The deep lines painted on an old Cherokee woman's face as she stares off into the desert at something only she can see; the cowboy about to be crushed by his sun fishing horse; the war party in the pale moonlight; the haunting spirit horse mourning the death of his warrior; the epic struggle between hunter and mountain lion; the tenderness of two cowboys at Thanksgiving in a rugged and unforgiving world; the packers after a successful hunt; breathtaking western landscapes with all their minute detail and a thousand things more. These images move me and haunt me; they fill my soul with something I can't get from the daily grind of "normal" life.

And finally, my obsessive feelings were brought back by getting out into the mountains. Rocky Mountain National Park is what keeps me sane, and it's not even the most perfect slice of the American West. That title belongs to Yellowstone, the only in-tact ecosystem in the lower 48 that still looks and functions more or less like it did before the arrival of the white man and all of his destructive ways. I think that when the day comes that I visit Yellowstone I won't want to leave. Wolves, grizzlies, wolverines, bison, untrammeled forests and meadows, snow-capped peaks and untamed rivers - Yellowstone is the last refuge of Wild America outside of Alaska.

For lunch today I sat down with a warm bowl of leftover homemade chicken soup: potatoes, carrots and dried oregano from the garden and chicken from a local farm. I served it with a leftover buttermilk biscuit I made from scratch for breakfast yesterday. In the glow of the Christmas tree I watched the snow falling outside, warmed by my soup and my thoughts. This is heaven for me, this moment.

I'm a philosopher. That's what I really am, no bones about it. I probably wouldn't make for an exceptional cowboy; I'm not reckless enough. I probably wouldn't make for an exceptional mountain man; I may not be tough enough. I don't make an exceptional analyst or businessman; I don't care enough. What drives me is a desire to become enlightened and to be inspired. What thrills me is to enlighten and inspire others. What comforts me is nature. What satisfies me is purpose.

I don't want to be a scientist; they care only for what makes a thing tick. I don't want to be a businessman; they care only for making money. I don't want to be an adventurer; they care only for the thrill of the moment. I don't want to be a politician; they care only for winning the game.

I think my calling in life is to be a teacher, a writer, a naturalist, a philosopher, and a non-academic historian. These things I am now, as much as I can be. I do want to know about science, I do want to have business sense, and I do want to understand the game. We need professionals in all areas I suppose. Thing is, I don't want to specialize in the activities. I want a bird's eye view of all of them, to understand how they form our world. I want to know who we are, where we came from, where we are going, why we do what we do, or don't. I want to inspire people to think beyond what makes a thing tick, to care for more than just money, and to realize that the game has no value but that which we assign to it. I despise the concept of money and accumulating wealth in monetary form. I despise the corporate ladder and the Western concept of "progress." Alas, this is the world in which I live, so I struggle to find a way to "earn a living" from the things I love, rather than from the unsatisfying activities that I know will work but leave me feeling empty. My body is clothed and nourished by my career success, but my soul is left destitute.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

You Can't Hide Your Lyin' Eyes

So the Fourmile Canyon Fire, which has been burning the mountains west of Boulder since Monday, is now officially the worst wildfire in Colorado history - not for its size but for the nearly 200 homes it has so far burned. They're still fighting it but it looks like Boulder is safe. A rain shower last night even cleared the air of the choking smoke.

I'm suffering from a severe lack of purpose. Big news, I know.

A couple of weeks ago I had another one of those moments where I decided reluctantly that my life is great, my job is great and I just need to settle in and enjoy it. And I did, mostly. For two weeks. Ish. But I knew it was fleeting. One can have everything in the world, but if one doesn't feel fulfilled then it doesn't matter much.

This much I do know: it isn't just the desk job aspect that I don't like. It's also the core of my job function that turns me off. I'm almost as sick of GIS analysis as I am of staff meetings and TPS reports. Surprisingly, however, I have found some spark of interest in web mapping; that is, making interactive , functional mapping applications for use over the internet. That's what's been keeping me moderately entertained at work lately. As long as I'm in the GIS field I definitely want to take my career in that direction for as long as it can hold my attention. Though still I know it's just a smokescreen; a distraction from the things I truly long for.

Anyway I decided to really try and get my mind off cabins and mountains and horses, but I'm like a mountain man junkie: I can stay clean for a little while but inevitably my thoughts start turning back to the things that consume me. It's a constant battle. That's why I'm blogging at 9AM on a Thursday morning instead of working. The blog is my attempt to help me organize my thoughts and get back to work, instead of heading out to the ranch or "running down to Boulder Horse and Rider - just for a few minutes to see what's new." Yeah right.

Gerard spent several weeks in Western Colorado and Montana this summer for an internship. He and some fellow student researchers were camping in remote parts of the Rockies studying pikas. At first, he said, it was beautiful. That gave way to pain and misery after the first day, because he wasn't accustomed to the rigors of "roughing it" and of spending so much time physically working and hiking. But after a couple of days he physically and mentally adapted and sort of fell into it. From that point on, he said, it was just awesome. I know the feeling. Every time I've been on an extended wilderness excursion or even in a physical working environment I've had the exact same experience. Gerard described Montana as the best. "It's very wild," he would say with a dreamy look in his eye. They saw bear, bald eagles, and heard wolves howling at night. The photos are stunning. Gerard lost 15 pounds during his time in the wilderness and didn't even notice. Mind you that was 15 pounds of "cushioning" he'd put on in the last few years since he pretty much gave up the gym. He looks good. He says at home he eats when he's bored. He exercises little and isn't really motivated to hang out at the gym and go mindlessly through some contrived routine. I very much know the feeling. This is a huge problem in modern Western society. Our lives are too soft and entirely too contrived. I despise the clock and the calendar like you can't imagine.

I once had a professor in college who was an archaeologist. He described a project he worked on where he lived in very primitive, stone age conditions for a month, and he described the same kinds of experiences that Gerard had. Even years ago when I was sitting in his class I was dreaming of how awesome that must've been.

I have another friend who was in the Peace Corps in Africa for two years, and he too described these experiences. He rarely got to call home. While talking to his mom on the phone shortly before his return to the US, she asked what he would be most happy to see upon coming back to the US. He said, "I can't wait to have a microwave again so I can easily heat up some water to take a bath." She paused. "Keith, you know we have hot water that comes out of the faucet here." He had to think about it a moment, then realized he had completely forgotten! I desperately need an experience like that.

In a scientific experiment conducted in Australia, a group (all volunteers of course) of older Aboriginal men who had lived the majority of their adult lives in the city, were asked to try living in the wild for six weeks. These men were all overweight, suffered from high cholesterol and high blood pressure and all the usual stuff. For six weeks these men lived in the Outback: no electricity or running water, no grocery stores, nothing. They had to make, catch, cook and gather everything. In six weeks all the men had returned to a normal, healthy weight and their medical problems had vanished.

I'm not saying life in the wild is all roses. It's the fact that it isn't that makes it so appealing and superior. There's a saying that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Modern society certainly offers a lot, but there is a high price to pay for all this luxury and softness, and I think I'm about tapped out.

Sleepless in Boulder

It's shaping up to be one of those sleepless nights. It's a little warm tonight - 72 degrees at the moment - and I think that has something to do with it.

Probably a bigger part is that my brain works hard all day at work and my body gets nothing out of the deal but sitting nearly motionless. I come home mentally exhausted but physically pent-up. I'm working from home the rest of the week. I'll use the two hours a day I'm saving in commute time to get in some morning hikes. I'm also going to do some work in the kitchen "on the side." I have some pork and bison fat that needs rendering into lard and tallow.

Today was my last day in the old office building. Our new building - the LEEDS Platinum certified Research Support Facility - is all ready for us to move in Monday morning. Movers are transferring all of our computers and other stuff over the weekend. It was a tiny bit sad, though the move can be nothing but good. The new building is pretty awesome by any standard, and I'll finally be on the main campus. I also found out today that one of our best GIS programmers, his obnoxious personality not withstanding, is leaving NREL. I was shocked. Can't say I was sad about it. Was an interesting day.

I wish I was fly fishing.

War of the Worlds

I had the most awesome day fly fishing in Rocky. Between me and my buddy Keith we probably caught two dozen or so cutthroat trout, many of which were a good 14 inches or more. It's about a three mile hike up to the Loch where we fished. It's a place of stunning waterfalls and dramatic cliff faces, thick pine forests and clear icy waters. And of course a lot of trout.

The Glacier Gorge area is arguably one of the most beautiful parts of Rocky, and it's the area I spend most of my time in. The hike up to the Loch isn't what I would consider terribly strenuous, but most tourists (thankfully) disagree. It's three miles in with about 1,500 feet elevation gain. And of course it's at about 10,000 feet so the air is a might thin. While fishing, we had the occasional hiker come by and wave, but mostly it was just us fishermen with only the chipmunks and the gray jays to keep us company. For lunch we stretched out in a wildflower-carpeted meadow next to a stream, surrounded by fortress-like walls of sculpted granite, and watched the trout gulp down midges and the honey bees drink up the last of summer's nectar. It was spectacular.

I hadn't been fishing in a long time, but I can see now that this is a hobby that's way overdue. I can't describe the thrill I get from the game. Fly fishing is especially so, because trout are so finicky. One minute hundreds of fish will be feeding en masse, gulping anything on the surface that moves. The next minute, every one of them will stop, drift to the bottom and disappear. Often they'll only be interested in midges, and ignore anything else, then suddenly switch to grasshoppers or flying ants. With trout it's a constant game of trying to guess what the fish want, and then tricking them into taking a fuzzy bit with a hook that more or less looks like whatever is pleasing their palate at the time. Then of course there's the grand finale, the icing on the cake: the moment when a big one takes the fly, and you the fisherman are fast enough to set the hook in the split second before the trout figures you out. The fight is thrilling, and I can't quite explain why. I imagine it harkens back to those hunter instincts our ancestors depended on for millennia before the industrial revolution. I released all of my fish unharmed today, but the thrill of the chase was extraordinarily satisfying.

I also love the smell of a live, squirmy fish, and the way it feels in my hand. Cutthroats are among the prettiest and most vivid of fresh water fish, and I'm always dazzled by their colors. There's something thrilling and primal about going out into nature and having a close encounter with a wild creature. I think that's especially true today with so many of us living such disconnected, ignorant urban lives. I've blogged before about the simple thrill I often get at touching the bark of a tree or of hearing the sound of a stream after being subjected to cube life for an extended period of time. To go out into nature and see something, some beautiful form of life, that lives all on its own and needs nothing from man to survive but to be left alone still amazes me and fills me with delight. Going into the mountains reminds me that I am alive. It reminds me of the real world - the world beyond the artificial urban world - the world that created us, the world in which we have lived for millions of years, and only very recently have forgotten because of the illusions we've created with our cities and our nifty techno trickery. The cities and all they contain could not exist without the green, living world they, like a tick, have imbedded themselves in. How quickly most of us have forgotten our roots.

On the hike down from the lake this evening, I noticed - I always notice - that the trail gets busier and busier the closer one gets to the trailhead and parking lot. The people get fatter. The kids get more numerous. The attitude (mine) gets worse. Just hundreds of yards from the trailhead one will see fat suburban women wearing flip-flops, smoking, and screaming at unruly children who are literally climbing over the "stay on the trail" signs. One will see teenagers with their headphones on and people of all ages pecking away at their iPhones. One will smell a thousand different perfumes, deodorants, fabric softeners, shampoos, cigarettes and other toxic aromas from "real life" in the city. One will find cigarette butts and trash on the ground, and a hundred other signs that the ignorant, uncaring masses have descended upon the "easy" parts of the park to get their snapshot on the family vacation. I push through, and I keep my mouth shut. What, after all, can be done? Why can't these people switch off the city for a day? Why can't these people come into nature with the reverence these wild places deserve? Nature is not some playground for dumping your kids in. In my mind these are sacred spaces, not just that overgrown area outside of your suburban shithole.

It's always like this. All of the prettiest places I've been are being loved to death, most especially by the people who can't come into the country without bringing the city with them. It's always a nasty shock for me after I spend time in a relatively pristine wilderness and then step back into the urban machine. Most people are like predictable, selfish little drones. If you build it, they will come. Give them their iPhones and their fast food and their artificial lives and they will flock to you by the millions. They are mesmerized by shiny things, things that whirr and beep and give offer instant gratification. They like the illusion of material wealth, and the superficial trappings of a civilization that can never have enough.

As for me, if you build it I will leave. A more perfect system cannot exist than that which nature designed. The Earth in all her complexity is a perfect system that constantly creates, destroys, and recycles so that new things may be born: mountains, oceans, rivers, life. Here in the mountains can be found all of the things I could ever need to be healthy and happy: deer, elk, rabbit, bison, pronghorn, fish and turkey for food, shelter and ornamentations. Meat is for eating. Bone is for making tools and weapons. Hide is for shelters and clothing. There are edible and medicinal plants such as service berries, wild raspberries and strawberries, currants, cottonwood, mariposa lilies, yucca, mushrooms, and hundreds more. There are plants for making string, rope and dyes. If one has good food, clean water, a warm safe place to call home and loved ones to share it all with, what more could one possibly want or need? How could an iPhone or a shopping mall really enhance these most basic of human needs and comforts? Instead of sitting alone typing my thoughts on some lifeless, glowing box, I could be sitting around a cozy fire talking with real people; perhaps telling stories or talking about what a great day I had catching fish, and perhaps sharing a good haul of roasted fish with my loved ones. But that is not our world. In our world, some of us step into reality when the weekend comes and we are granted a reprieve from the Matrix. We are allowed, for a short time, to tiptoe through the unadulterated system that truly sustains us. Then on Monday we must go back into The Machine, back into the artificial world where we are told what to eat and how to live and what's fashionable, where we live by the clock and calendar under artificial light, eat toxic "food" and sit mesmerized by television and all it's mind-numbing power.

And now I must go to bed. The Machine is expecting me at 8AM.

Good Day at Work

I had an unusually good Monday, considering I was working at a computer instead of fly fishing, hiking, camping, gardening or hunting.

More amazing still, it was a good day despite conducting interviews for a new hire.

Why was it such a good day? I solved a problem that on Friday I had no idea how I was going to solve. I've got temperature at depth data for the US - that is the temperature below the ground in 1 kilometer intervals all the way down to 10 km. I had a list of several thousand oil wells and the depth to the bottom of the wells. I needed to figure out the temperature at the bottom of the wells. With a little linear interpolation and some Python scripting, I made it happen. I was quite proud of myself and my client was ecstatic. Not that I'd put this on my top ten list of favorite things to do on a gorgeous spring day, but it pays the bills and it always feels good to accomplish a complex task.

It's Wolf Month, but Not For Me

I'm so in the wrong career field.

April is Wolf Month, at least at the University of Colorado. It's a full month of lectures and exhibits about the biology, ecology, history and politics of the gray wolf in the United States, which is a really hot topic here in the West. Tonight was the kickoff. It was good.

I didn't actually learn anything though. I've read so much about the subject I could have given the lecture. In fact, questions were asked that the presenter didn't know the answers to. I knew the answers. It's funny, because after three years at the lab I still wouldn't be able to give a decent lecture on renewable energy. It's just not my thing. It's a paycheck. The natural sciences are definitely my thing. I know (and care) way more about my hobbies and personal interests than I do about my own career field. It's sad.

After the lecture I walked around the exhibits. I felt a stirring of emotion for my long-ago dream of being a biologist, which I sacrificed for the "easy money." I've blogged about this before.

Stuffed, dried and preserved specimens of wolves and their bones were on display. There were stuffed birds common to the Rocky Mountains, and you could push a button to hear sketchy recordings of their songs. There were panels of pinned insects and butterflies, boxes of "touch and feel" bones, dioramas, murals, fossil casts, informational plaques and all the other stuff you'd expect to find in a museum. I was in my element.

When the kids and housewives and other curious non-scientists were asking their questions: How many wolves are in Yellowstone? How many wolves does it take to kill a buffalo? Why aren't there wolves in Rocky Mountain National Park? I wanted to tell them. I didn't want to just answer the questions, I wanted to engage them. I wanted to paint the answers in their imaginations, and stir something within their hearts. I wanted to tell them a really good story.

I was in San Diego last week for work. I was part of a team from the lab who met with the Navy. They're interested and highly motivated in getting renewable energy on their bases. (It's an energy security thing, not a "green" thing for them.) All told it was me and seven really smart engineers. I have great respect for them and for their brainpower and dedication. But they're engineers. I'm not. I don't want to be. We met at their engineering headquarters, where all the "brains" of the Navy work. These people are mostly civilians who are employed by the Navy. It looked like a warehouse outside, and the inside was much worse. It was a maze of cubes with pictureless, windowless gray walls and dark, navy blue carpeting. The walls were gray. The ceiling was gray. It was dark. It was oppressive. It was very, very quiet and still - not in a peaceful way, but a sort of dead, joyless, soulless way. It was a prison. What furniture there was was all particle board and old. It smelled like a cube farm. It was your typical suburban office space, but with every trace of life and color drained from it. The only evidence of "fun" in the whole place was a sad little half eaten tray of mini cupcakes - chocolate, hastily frosted, plain, ignored - that looked like they'd been there a week. As I walked between the cubes I saw the cube farmers. Everyone looked the same: middle aged, a slight paunch, glasses. No decor to speak of. No color. No lively office clowns or brash secretaries. Everyone was quietly pecking away at their standard black PC's. It gave me the creeps just being there. There's no telling how much money these guys make, but personally I couldn't be paid enough to work in that mausoleum.

This, too, got me thinking about my own cube farm. While I have windows and sunshine, and there are some colorful people in my office, I'm still in a cube. Still attending regular staff meetings and filling out TPS reports. Still chained to a computer. Still manipulating numbers and shapes that I have a hard time associating with the real and tangible things they sort of represent. And while I quietly peck away at my plastic keyboard, frying my retinas on a hot computer screen, there are wolves roaming the wilds of Yellowstone. There are researchers following them, tagging them, writing papers about them and giving lectures on them. Their office carpet is yellow monkeyflower and Wyoming paintbrush. The walls are lodgepole pine, Engleman spruce and 1,000 foot slabs of limestone. Their ceiling is an endless blue sky, and their office mates are the wolf, the grizzly, the elk and the deer, the fox and the beaver and the coyote. As I peck away, there are kids wondering how many wolves are in Yellowstone, and why they can't see them in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Something has to be done.

Tuesday Night on the Town

I don't think I've had this much to drink on a Tuesday night since college.

Patrick, a 28 year old brilliant scientist and co-worker who just returned from his latest stint in Vienna presenting on his integrated assessment model, invited me to The Kitchen for their monthly community beer and wine tasting. It's by reservation only, and everyone gets seated at a big community table. Over 4 hours, we're served multiple courses, each with a beer and wine, that fits whatever theme they're featuring that month. Tonight it was something about the Ides of March, St. Patrick's Day and some other nonsense, so the food/beer/wine was Roman and Irish. Strange, but it worked. The food at The Kitchen is really good. It's one of my favorite Boulder restaurants. It was also the first time I'd ever been served wine by a sommelier. It was pretty cool. I actually learned just a little bit about pairing wine and food, though I have to say I still think it's mostly bullshit.

Boulder is such a weird and fun place. At our table, there was a 25 year old girl who was, by her own admission, a gold digger. She likes to date rich older men. She's also smart. She has a degree in biology and works in biotech, and she's missed only one of these events in the past two years. There was a nice woman who has her own PR company, and her likable but incredibly crass husband who kept insisting in a good natured way throughout the evening that Patrick and I were going to fuck before the night was over. (We didn't of course. It was never a question.) There was the German woman who apparently ranks third in the US among women runners, and who talked incessantly about running. There was the 55 year old fat married man wearing high heels and a blouse who, apparently, just likes to "shake things up" and kept hitting on the 25 year old biotech girl, which she clearly found exasperating. There were two strapping young men, dressed almost the same, who I couldn't figure out if they were gay or straight, and a few other couples at the other end of the table I didn't really get a chance to talk to very much. Then of course there was me and Patrick, and our really fun beer and wine experts who just circulated telling us all about our many beverages and being good natured despite the table they were serving. We were also visited in regular intervals by the chef, who explained where all of the food items came from, how he prepared them, and how he came up with the combination of flavors.

It was quite an awesome night. The conversation ranged from integrated assessment of renewable energy, to running, to sex. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. At one point I found myself separating from the moment, just sort of stepping back and looking at the big picture of my life. On the one hand I want nothing more than to have my ranch, my monster F350 and to spend a whole lot of time running the roads and traveling. But on the other, here I am, a "scientist" by title, with an awesome (albeit desk) job having a $75 per head meal at a table full of the most eclectic mix of strangers in this freaky fun town. Life can be so weird, and despite my complaints I recognize how lucky I am. I'm lucky to be able to experience just a little more of the weird, wild world than most of the rest of my family. I'm lucky to have choices in life.

Most of the people I've met in Boulder have been to far flung places. They've traveled the world, they speak multiple languages, they've got multiple degrees and have so many crazy stories to tell. Compared to them, I'm plain as vanilla. But compared to my roots, I'm the one with a the wild adventurous life. I guess, again, it's all about perspective. Relativity. I sat at the table tonight drinking my beer and smiling, and thinking how very lucky I am just to be out in the world.

It just sucks that I have to go to work tomorrow.

The Rat Race

I'm two days into my coding bonanza and I feel like I'm dying. Seriously.

There's a guy at work I've mentioned before. He really truly seems to get off on this stuff. I mean he goes home from work and continues to work. It's as if he wouldn't know what to do with himself without programming. He's hyper active, always loud and running that mouth a mile a minute, and completely consumed with his little web apps.

So he spends days - weeks - working on something, typing strings of incomprehensible letters and symbols. When he's done, he clicks a button and neat things happen on a computer screen. Whoopty-freakin-do. That's how I feel about it. It's like watching a magician. He does a card trick, everyone oohs and aahs, and then everyone goes home. At the end of the day it means nothing to me. There's no miracle in code. You can't eat code or clothe yourself in code. It's nothing more than fancy card tricks. I can't make myself love this. I can make myself learn it, but I can't make myself enjoy it or care about it. It's like being trapped in a loveless relationship. It sucks.

How long can I keep this up? My life is slipping by one dull throbbing day at a time. I don't want a new job. I don't want a new life. I just want to take a different path. There must be one that doesn't cut through a cube farm, that won't leave me a homeless drifter, or won't work me like a slave. No, that's not asking too much. There are people in this world who do what they love. Maybe our programmers really are fulfilled, though I have my doubts. I think his overzealousness comes from a need to be the best at something, but this isn't about him. I need to be one of those people whose life revolves around his passions. I don't mind hard work. In fact I like it. It just needs to be something I believe in, something real, tangible, meaningful. Something, perhaps, a little more natural like building a home or carving up an elk carcass as opposed to frying my eyes and working up a nasty case of carpal tunnel behind a godforsaken computer.

I shouldn't be quite so hard on computers. I like mine pretty well when I'm recording my thoughts. Maybe writing for me is like programming for others. And composing an essay or writing a book is a hell of a lot nicer to do on a computer than with pencil and paper. I really shouldn't be hard on programmers either. I need to figure this out and get a grip. I need to make something happen.

I need to write my book, buy my ranch and live happily ever after.

Technobabble

Did you know you can geocode on a Mac with just a few lines of Python script? It's true. I just did it. No ESRI and no Windoze necessary.

I'm not a programmer but I'm being forced by peer pressure to learn it. The lab has been on a balls-to-the-wall hiring bonanza and everyone we hire is young, idealistic, brilliant and loves coding. Damn it all to hell.

It's actually not all that bad. The thought of programming on a Windoze machine makes me want to jump off a cliff, but somehow doing it on my Mac is almost appealing. Almost.

I just spent the last 24 hours, minus a few hours for sleeping and eating, working through an entire 400+ page "classroom in a book" on Flash. I've also been learning Python, and soon will dive headlong into Flex, and I'm going to have no choice but to pick up some Javascript along the way as well. Oh, and all of this is besides my full time graduate work doing Google mashups and studying environmental applications for GIS. I'm literally chained to my computers. Just plug me into the Matrix and be done with it.

Cartography these days is a whole new game. Everyone wants pretty, functional, interactive web maps, and if I can't deliver then I get left behind. It is kinda fun, I admit. I never would have dreamed I could make the kind of money I make these days and get to do it playing with Flash and Illustrator on a Mac. And you should see the way peoples' faces light up when you show them their data in a gorgeous web map that they can pan, zoom and turn things on and off. They think it's magic.

I'm trying to tell myself that I might as well give in and try to cultivate some real passion for this because it pays the bills and lets me live quite well. Being a mountain-man-cowboy won't pay the bills, although being a published author certainly could, and writing is the only thing I love as much as my mountain-man-cowboy fantasy. But I have no time for writing much of anything these days. Even this blog is cutting into my sleep time tonight.

Born in the Wrong Century

We've been doing a lot of snowshoeing lately. This is Emerald Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park.

A couple of years ago I bought an old straight razor for shaving, but I never could get a nice edge on it. I came across it today and did a little research. It's a Joseph Elliot, and this particular model, with a wooden handle, was manufactured between 1820 and 1850! How many faces this little instrument must have shaved in the last 160-190 years!

I found a service that can restore old razors like this one. I'm going to mail it off tomorrow and hopefully in the next 4-6 weeks it'll be good as new! I'm pretty excited about it.

I also took the liberty to hand write the letter I enclosed with the razor. It's so rare that I hand write anything these days, and when I do it's never more than a word or two. It felt good to write sentences and see what it looked like. I even wrote it with a pencil - not a plastic, disposable mechanical pencil, but a real wooden pencil by Forest Choice. Supposedly these pencils are manufactured from trees in "well-managed forests" and don't contain paints or other toxic materials. It's not as green perhaps as a quill pen and homemade ink (which I know how to make and am waiting for this autumn's walnut harvest for the raw materials for my ink) but it'll do for now.

I actually spent the entire weekend chained to my computer. My classes this quarter are particularly time consuming, and work is kicking my butt too. There's just a lot going on. I've noticed that the more the modern world tries to tighten it's grasp on me, the more I resist it and long to escape it. Maybe my 190 year old straight razor or homemade pen and ink aren't going to save the planet or mean anything at all in the grand scheme, but they bring me comfort I can't quite explain.

I kinda lost it today in one of my online classes. There's an ongoing discussion forum on the topic of fire modeling. We're discussing the technology behind predicting the spread of wildfires using GIS. Some goofy girl said something innocent but stupid about how she hopes GIS can help stop all forest fires and we can all live happily ever after. I launched into a multi-paragraph diatribe about the incredible ecological benefits of natural fires, and how today's wildfires are the disastrous result of white man's superiority complex, brought about by his technology and misguided belief that preventing forest fires will somehow be better for the environment and our pocketbook. By stopping the small, natural fires, we've created millions of acres of land with decades of unspent fuel. Now when fires do ignite by lightning or a careless camper, they turn into massive blazes that create their own weather systems and send roiling clouds of ash and cinders a thousand miles into the sky. Rather than grooming forests and rejuvenating the landscape, the obliterate everything in their path. As I pointed out to her, it's our over-reliance, our unquestioning faith in our own technology and presumed brilliance that created the environmental problems we so desperately seek to "manage" today.

Sometimes I really wish I could go back to the year 1750, wander off into the western wilderness, befriend some natives and just do my thing like the early mountain men did. Maybe it would suck, I don't know. But the fantasy sure sounds nice. Insofar as I can guess, the only thing I'd miss is books. I like learning about food and nature, and what's going on in the natural sciences. But I suspect that life might make up for that because if I were friends with the natives I could learn a lot of cool things about the natural world that you just can't get in books. I wouldn't need to read about balance in the natural world because I'd be living it.

Hunger

Ever feel like a fish out of water?

I was sitting in one of our many office lounges at work the other day waiting for a meeting to start. I was a little early. I sat there looking around the room at all of the cheap suburban-style particle board furnishings and kitschy decor and wondered how I ever ended up here. This was not part of the plan.

Since my horseshoeing experience a few months back, I chilled out quite a lot in terms of my incessant obsessing about getting away from it all. I had a terrible hunger - indeed I was starving - for a taste of a more rugged, more deliberate life, and I was satiated by the experience. But lately I've started to feel those pangs of hunger again. My stomach is growling, and I'm starting to search for my next meal.

I hate this, actually. I feel like I'm on a rollercoaster. I go back and forth between intense desire to be packing in the mountains, and a sort of reluctant acceptance, tinged with guilt, for the cushy life I have now. I like the money. Sometimes I like that my job is cushy. But in the back of my mind, and often in the forefront of my mind, is a little voice saying, "Yeah, but you'd really rather be on a horse somewhere in the wilderness, where things like IKEA are just a bad dream."

One of these days I'm going to up and quit, ride off to Montana and never look back.

Have a Nice Day

I rescinded my offer on the house. I hated to do it, but it was for the best. The search continues.

I had my annual review today at work. It went really well. We do this thing we call the 360 review, where current and former clients are asked to confidentially report on the employee's work quality. Their reports are submitted to the boss who reviews them and uses it in his assessment of the employees work performance. Apparently my reviews were stellar, and he read a few quotes to me. They almost made me teary eyed they were so nice. Then the boss lavished me with praise. It really makes you feel good when you realize that people really appreciate your hard work, admire your professionalism, and compliment you on your patience and dedication. It's a fantastic way to end a day, especially when it ends with your second raise in as many months.

This week was particularly good at work for other reasons as well. My first publication finally came out, and I snagged a really interesting project analyzing potential sites for hydrogen production and carbon dioxide sequestration. It's always cool to take raw data and produce something entirely new that no one has seen before. It's also fun to see how excited engineers and scientists get when you do a little GIS magic for them.

I Love a Snowy Night

It's 2AM and I'm wide awake. I'm not prone to insomnia, but I do have a bout of it a few times a year. Maybe it's the snow. For nearly the last month the weather has been clear, sunny and mild, but this afternoon snow clouds rolled in. Flakes started falling around 9PM and there's now several inches on the ground. I always get excited when it snows, especially if it's been awhile.

Maybe it's the holidays. I keep thinking about my upcoming road trip to Texas and how nice it'll be to see family and friends. I love a good road trip, and I'm excited to give my mom her gifts this year. I'm also excited to see Austin again and revisit some of my favorite haunts.

Maybe it's my new toys. I ordered a new photo printer and scanner to do some photo restoration which I've been putting off for a long time. My old printer doesn't print photo quality, and my old scanner is so hopelessly ancient it won't even work with my new OS. Fortunately tomorrow is electronics recycling day at the lab. My packages should also arrive tomorrow and I can't wait to get at them.

Maybe it's my career. Grades were posted yesterday and I got A's in both of my classes. I also got registered for the classes I need for next quarter. I'm kind of excited about it. Work is going well and I sometimes can't help imagining where I'll be in my career next year or five years or ten years from now. Will it involve horses or computers? Don't know, but I suppose I can't really go wrong either way. It's really nice to feel that way.

Maybe it's summer fun. I've been mulling my options for a serious vacation. I'm thinking Spain, summer of 2010. I've got a friend that lives there. Two weeks in Spain with my own personal native tour guide? Sounds fun. Australia? Hawaii? All options are on the table.

Tomorrow is going to suck if I can't get some sleep.

Ghost Rider

This is my 100th blog post. On blogger, anyway.

I went out for lunch today. There was a woman who kept staring at me. When I was paying at the register, she came up beside me.

"Are you a cowboy?" she asked.

I pulled out my wallet and flipped through some bills. Without looking up I calmly asked, "What's a cowboy?"

"Well it's...do you...um...are you...well I don't know!" she gasped.

Nobody ever knows.

There was an awkward silence. Then the lady at the register pointed to my belt buckle and said, "He's from Texas!"

The woman, apparently satisfied with that definition, said, "Oh!" and smiled. She stood there looking at me a bit longer, apparently just completely amused. I paid, smiled and then bid them both good day.

I didn't have my hat with me. I wasn't wearing anything by Rockmount. Hell I even managed to get all the way through lunch without letting out a rip-roarin' YEEEEEHAWWWW!!!!! I thought I was pretty inconspicuous. Must've been the boots and the belt.

I still don't get it. Not once in 33 years of living in Texas was I ever asked if I was a cowboy, "real" or otherwise. Once there was a guy I came across at a parade in downtown Austin who wanted to fight me just because he thought that that's what men with cowboy hats did, but that was something else altogether.

Of course there were stretches, sometimes several years, when I'd retire the hat and boots to the closet and dress like I'm supposed to - you know, wear the current fashion that everyone else is wearing. One such time was during my last year of college and a couple of years right after. I was sitting in class one day and a professor (who was not a Texan) started raging against cowboys, and especially cowboy hats.

"I don't understand why people still wear those things. It's stupid! Nobody needs to wear a cowboy hat. The Old West is dead and gone!"

Needless to say it pissed me off royally. But it also drove home a thought I'd already been kicking around: that I was about to graduate and become a "professional" and should probably start dressing like a cubicle bunny.

I remember the day I moved to Austin. I was renting a room in College Station and I was so ready to get out of that one horse town. I came home and announced I was leaving. I loaded up my belongings, all of which I fit in my pickup in one trip, and headed for the Big A. I was cruising down that Texas highway wearing a cheap black cowboy hat that never quite fit right (it was all I could afford at the time) with the windows down and Redneck Girl blasting on the stereo. I had stickers of the American flag and the Rebel flag on my bumper, and I was as happy as I could be. I had no job, no home and only one friend in the whole city, but I knew there was opportunity. Life was going to start anew. I ended up crashing on my friend's couch until I got things figured out, and the first thing I did when I got my first paycheck was buy that salad plate-sized belt buckle with the Texas seal on it, the same one the cashier pointed at today. That was over ten years ago.

But I digress. After graduation from college I went to the Men's Wearhouse and bought one pair of slacks, one nice button up, one nice black belt with a very fashionable, ultra-modern tiny silver buckle that didn't actually fasten but instead used friction to keep itself closed (some of the time), and a pair of polished black leather dress shoes with a square toe - apparently a statement that said, "I'm professional, but still laid back." It was just enough to outfit me for job interviews. When I landed my first job I bought a few more pieces, but eventually the slacks gave way to Levis, though I still wore the button ups most of the time.

Side note: I was not wearing my hat the day Professor Anderson went on her anti-cowboy tirade. If fact she'd never even seen me in my hat. It felt like being secretly gay and having to endure some small minded anti-gay ranting. The fool never realized who she was unloading on. And frankly I'm surprised she could get away with that in Texas. It may be true that the "old west" is gone. Even most modern ranchers use pickup trucks, four-wheelers and even helicopters to round up cattle and wild horses because they're just a lot faster, stronger, more dependable and less dangerous than horses. But cowboy hats, aside from being particularly useful and comfortable in snow, rain and harsh sun, are part of the cultural heritage of the United States, particularly the Western states, and most especially Texas where virtually all cattle drives originated and where that greatest of all American icons, the cowboy, was born. Texas, more than any other state, has clung to this cultural heritage and embraced it. It has always had a presence in my life and I have always cherished it. I may not be roaming the plains and roping cattle, but I'm fascinated by the fact and the fantasy of the old west. I have a special place in my heart for Texas and all that she is, good and bad. And I have an obsession with the lands west of the Mississippi and all of the truth and myth contained by this mysterious, rugged and insanely beautiful place.

Soon after college I found myself dissatisfied with the professional life of a cube dweller and started dreaming hardcore about heading west. WAY out west, which is what ultimately brought me to Colorado. And here, surrounded by a serious western wilderness and living so close to my fantasies of a rustic mountain life, it was only a matter of time before the hat and boots made their comeback in my life. I tried dressing like a professional cube bunny at my current job, but most people I work with don't bother with anything other than typical street wear. So I resurrected my Wranglers, my Texas belt buckle and treated myself to a closet full of new Rockmount shirts which I wear pressed and starched. And to top it off, last summer I bought my dream cowboy hat from Texas Hatters, the official hatter for the state of Texas: 100% top-quality beaver felt, hand crafted by a master hatter, perfectly tailored to my head. I toured his shop and he showed me all of his equipment, much of it over 100 years old. He helped me select just the right felt blank that would become my hat. It took him a week to make it, and then it had to be adjusted and readjusted until the fit and shape were exceptional. Then he sewed a natural leather band in it, hand tooled with my name, and fitted it with a custom leather hat band which I designed. I left that shop just as proud as you please. I don't give a rat's ass what anyone else thinks about it. I love it. And now when I go to work I may not look like a cubicle bunny but I'm damn sure dressed better than anyone else. (There is one other guy who wears a cowboy hat - he's a retired rodeo cowboy who, after a series of debilitating injuries, decided that an office job would be better for his health. He also dresses pretty sharp.)

I can't explain it, though I've tried many times. It just feels right. I'm happy when I'm walking in the rain or the snow, wearing that hat and my boots and my coat and looking out across a gorgeous mountain landscape - no one to keep me company but the lonesome howl of a chilly wind. I'm happy when I'm cruising the back roads in my pickup on a gorgeous summer day - windows down, music up and jaw-dropping scenery all around; with nobody to bug me or ask if I'm a cowboy. I'm happy sitting in the tall grass of a Rocky Mountain meadow in Autumn, watching herds of elk bugling among golden aspen groves, with no human close enough to be more than a speck in the distance.

The sad thing is I really don't want to be alone, at least not all the time. I just want to be with people who understand me. But I guess that's asking too much, considering I don't even understand myself half the time.

I Have No Idea

My mom called me this evening. After a brief exchange, she said, "You didn't go to work today."

"How did you know?" I asked.

"Because you sound happy."

It was true. I'd spent the entire day shoeing horses. I have to say I was incredibly moved by the experience. That may sound like an odd thing to say, but it has affected me in some expected ways and quite a lot of unexpected ways as well. On the snowy hour and a half drive home tonight I felt like I wanted to cry. I didn't, just for the record. But I felt an upwelling of emotion and I don't know why. I didn't feel particularly happy or sad. I just felt like I needed a release. It was such an intense day, physically and mentally.

Shoeing horses is seriously hard work. It was a lot harder and infinitely more frustrating than, say, bucking hay. I didn't actually put any shoes on, but I pulled a lot of shoes off and clinched or finished just as many. I don't have the skill to do the shaping or the shoeing, so I'd clean out the hooves and pull all the shoes on the first horse, then move to the second. The farrier would then shoe the first horse. He'd move to the second by the time I was done, then I'd move back to the first and finish each foot by clinching the nails, filing them off, then shaping the hoof with a rasp to ensure a perfect match with the shoe. And so this was our routine. We did eight horses in 9 hours with no actual stopping for lunch (we grazed on our sandwiches between horses.) The only reason it took us that long was because it was a busy day at the barn. I must've met a dozen cowboys who all had business there, and every one of them wanted to shoot the breeze. One was the manager of the entire equine facility. He was a huge, older man with giant hands. He was a close talker and one of those who likes to grab your shoulder and lean into you every time he says something or makes a joke. I welcomed the breaks, but the farrier didn't welcome the delays.

He's an interesting guy, that Masterson. When I arrived he was all smiles and hearty handshakes, and he immediately set about showing me how to pull shoes. "Now this isn't a contest to see which cowboy has the biggest wiener," he sad. I wish I'd had a way to inconspicuously write down all the phrases he said that made me cock my head. I don't know about wiener size, but I do know it takes some serious strength and technique to wrench a shoe from a hoof. And you have to do it while holding the hoof between your legs and bent over parallel to the floor. And of course the horse will generally humor you for about 30 seconds before it decides it's done. Horses are immensely powerful. I cannot overstate that. It is our good fortune that horses are so amenable to our controlling them. Human history would have been very different if horses had the attitude of, say, bison. Anyhow, my legs muscles were on fire before I even managed to finish pulling my first shoe, but that was nothing compared to how my lower back felt by the time I left.

I didn't talk much today. I was focusing heavily on what I was doing, and any intermittent down time was spent on deep inner reflection. So much was racing through my mind. I was thrilled to be there, soaking up the experience. But I have to admit one low point. I was standing with the back leg of a particularly grumpy old horse wrapped around my waist, his foot squeeze tightly but precariously between my two legs, and my face in his foot. I was trying desperately to get a shoe off. The horse kept wiggling and fidgeting and I kept having to drop the foot, or else he'd just yank it away from me. If he'd decided to kick, I'd have flown across the barn. There's no telling what kind of condition I'd be in upon landing; anything from seriously injured to dead, I suppose. My legs were like jelly. My lower back was screaming. Steaming horse shit was falling past my ear for the fifth time, and the one next to me wouldn't stop farting for more than five minutes (and let me tell you, a horse fart could fill a hot air ballon.) At this moment I was seriously asking myself what on God's green earth was I doing here? I could be sitting in a warm office behind my perfectly safe Macintosh sipping a latte, pecking leisurely at sterile keys and earning a lot of money. And that's when I started pondering perspective and its incredible power. Depending on your perspective, you can justify (to yourself anyway) anything from exterminating millions of Jews to leaving a posh office job to stand in horse shit wondering if the day would end before you were kicked to death or threw your back out. Perspective. It's important.

I also had a lot of incredible flashbacks to my past while I was in the barn and on my contemplative drive home. Masterson is 25 years old, has a master's degree, and has a 3.8 GPA. He just applied to vet school. Another gal in the barn had also just applied to vet school, and the two of them had a conversation which I paid close attention to. For whatever reason I started thinking about my early college years and how excited I was by all of it. I had such big plans to become a scientist and go change the world. Even my original plan to go to vet school was so that I could specialize in marine vertebrates, move to a tropical paradise and do research in a lab. I thought heavily about those days and the excitement and emotion that carried me along. But somewhere along the way I opted for an easier, more certain career path and forgot all of my plans. I suppose today I was ripe for this foray into long forgotten dreams in no small part because of Gerard. Gerard is studying ecology and evolutionary biology, which was my major when I first started college and was aiming for vet school. His excitement about all the things he learns has been stirring up old feelings lately. A few weeks ago he actually got to hold in his hands the fossilized bones of Australopithecus. How freakin' cool is that? He just happened to peak into a lab at the university and saw someone in a white lab coat poring over something in a box. He stepped in and the scientist excitedly let him hold some of the bones (with gloves on, of course.) It reminded me of my days taking science classes and all my big dreams.

It all got me thinking that, despite the specifics of how things turned out for me, I'm still saving the world inasmuch as any average Joe can. The secret to success, to mastering anything, is to focus on that thing. Bodybuilders get those grotesque bodies by obsessing over it. Scientists get prestige by obsessing over their field of research. Greenpeace saves the whales by literally throwing themselves in front of the harpoons. But what do you accomplish if one day you want to be a vet, then you want to be a cartographer, then you want to be a cowboy, then you want to be... Get the point? I sure did.

Maybe subconsciously I'm just trying to ensure I always have an antelope to chase. Maybe subconsciously I want the world to be like a Disney musical. Maybe I just have a hard time focusing. Maybe I'm trying to define myself. Maybe I'm just never satisfied. More questions that have no answers. I'm good at coming up with them.

What I do know is that I had a fantastic experience today and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I needed it. I'm planning to go back for more. I also know that, despite the host of new questions, I actually feel a whole lot better about my current career. In fact, today anyway, I'm not even dreading finishing my coursework this semester. Isn't that funny. I guess more than anything, today was a big satisfying bite that helped satiate my ravenous appetite to answer, "what if?" It's too early to tell, but maybe farriery will indeed help me with a career change: maybe it'll help me realize that what I've got is really what I need after all - just as long as I continue to let myself explore new things.

Maybe I should either delete this blog or start writing all of my mental crap on an anonymous blog. Maybe I should save this one for short, fun writing and pictures about mountains and the farmer's market, which was what I originally intended.

Ever wish you could just go to sleep for a few weeks and wake up with a clear head and a fresh outlook? Yeah. Goodnight.

A Moment of Clarity?

Today was the last day of the Wednesday farmer's market. The Saturday market, which is the main event, continues through the end of October. I got off the bus just after dark and walked through for the last time until next summer. The air was crisp and the market stands were lit with white Christmas lights. A cold front is bringing snow tonight, and the air always has a certain feel right before a storm pushes through. It's surreal to see the market under the glow of lights. Only the last couple of Wednesdays of the season is it dark before the market shuts down. There wasn't much of a crowd, just a few people milling around. It was quiet and sleepy, and the farmers were just starting to pack up. It kinda felt like the very end of a really big party. I talked to a few friends, and wished my beekeeping, honey bottling, candle making friends goodbye until next year. They were down to their last case of honey and wouldn't be back until next year's honey crop comes in late summer.

I don't know what doctors call it when a normally crazy person has a good day and isn't crazy for a short period of time. I'm in the midst of one now I think. I have them from time to time. I'll wake up in the morning, have breakfast and a shower just like any other day. I'll put on my boots and hat and listen to Michael Martin Murphy on my iPod on the bus to work. But what's different is that I won't be longing to be elsewhere. I won't be thinking of all the reasons why I think I'd be happier doing something else. I'll just think about how good I have it and how grateful I am for it. I might actually spend some time thinking about work stuff in a positive, constructive way. I'll think, "This isn't so bad, really. In fact it's kinda fun. Why would you even entertain the thought of giving up safe, clean, high-paying work, a flexible work schedule and awesome benefits to go pound iron onto horse feet? Are you mad?"

Quite possibly, yes.

Yesterday at my actual job I made a volumetric rendering of the temperature below the surface of the conterminous United States. It's basically a detailed 3D model showing how temperature changes as you go deeper below the crust. You can see very clearly the vast stretches in the east where the crust is deep and cool, and the big bubbles of heat lying just below the surface in the west. I also included existing hydrothermal wells to see how they line up with the modeled temperature data. It's sort of like having x-ray vision and getting to see the temperature inside the earth and the geothermal wells that have been dug to tap that heat. It's really cool and co-workers are impressed. How can you not feel good about that?

Sometimes I see the youthful faces of college students and it's like a slap in the face. Dang, I thought I looked like that, but the mirror doesn't reflect that smooth tight complexion I always took for granted. As mom would say, I'm not a spring chicken anymore. Of course I'm not old either. I'm just a thirty-something, that awkward middle ground between youthfulness and old age. In a sense it's like a less intense but more drawn-out version of the teenage years: not quite young, but not quite not. Is trying to change careers - especially to a physically demanding, unstable one - really what you aught to be doing right now? Do you really want to grow old living far away from town, and therefore out of reach of easy food and medical care? Or are you just taking the easy way out here? Are you one of those people who, in the end, would rather just shop at Whole Foods and be fashionably green living in your perfect little city? That is, after all, exactly what I have right now. I could "throw in the towel" as they say and live it up - just forget about the cabin fantasy and farriery and enjoy the life I have. Why start trying to learn a new career when I could focus on honing the one I have? So it's not perfect. Do you think any other career would be without its drawbacks? There is always a price. Or maybe I'm one of those Americans I always complain about - those who are never satisfied and always looking for the bigger better deal. Maybe my bigger better deal just takes the form of something other than money or house size. Maybe what I have isn't good enough for me. I'm not happy enough having a comfortable, stable life that is far better than any other time of my life. Maybe I'm being a crybaby, a spoiled brat - like a millionaire who throws tantrums because he's not a billionaire, when most people are just trying to make ends meet. I suppose these are normal things to consider.

I just don't know the answers.

I took the day off tomorrow. I'm going to spend it shoeing horses.

"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do is inconsolable."

--Sydney Harris

We'll see.

Cowboy Up

Today I went to the Boulder Horse & Rider to buy a pair of jeans. It's Boulder's version of a feed store. In Texas, feed stores are generally huge and carry all sorts of farm and ranch supplies, clothing, animal feed, hay and some sell tractors and other machinery. Boulder's version isn't quite that. It's a very small shop with bagged "specialty" horse feed, a small selection of grooming supplies and clothes, some books, saddles and a few other odds and ends for the discriminating Boulder horseperson. It's locally owned, and they're one of only two clothing retailers I know of in the entire city that don't sell $200 designer jeans - and they're the only retailer that sells Wrangler (which are made in the USA.)

The owner is usually there when I drop in. She's nice, at least from what I gather in our short chats during my irregular, infrequent visits. She's the outdoorsy type, though I get the impression she's a bit pretentious and probably a gossip. She was there today. I walked in and she immediately started chatting me up. "So are you enjoying this gorgeous fall weather!?" she said with a big grin. I smiled and nodded. She kept talking but I wasn't really listening. I'm normally more chatty but I wasn't in the mood today. Eventually the chatter faded and I found my jeans.

I browsed some art she sells by a local farrier named Andrew. He's a young guy with a gift for painting. When he's not shoeing horses, he paints himself, his wife, horses and his cowboy friends in watercolor. I've been collecting his art, but there was nothing new today.

I browsed some saddles. I know of one saddle maker on the entire Front Range who still makes saddles the old fashioned way by hand. I haven't met him yet, but I'm keen to interview him and get a tour of his shop. These were not those kinds of saddles. They were all shiny, mostly made of synthetic materials, amply stuffed with synthetic padding so that they ride more like a pillow than a proper saddle. They were machine stitched and I could picture them rolling off an assembly line in China. They looked like something you might find in a furniture mega-store; lots of black pleather and chrome-esque bobbles. They were godawful ugly and modern looking and had no personality. They don't even look like they belong on a horse.

I was about to checkout when a book caught my eye. It was a book about packing, and there were several photos on the front of cowboys packing up horses and mules in some dreamy mountain wilderness. I perused the pages for a long while, looking through black and white photos of cowboys, probably in the 1970's, demonstrating the various stages of packing, leading, trail clearing, tracking, camping, cooking. I didn't see anything terribly modern in the photos. From the canvas bags on the mules to the hats on the cowboys, these guys and their equipment looked "all natural." To my great pleasure, I noticed they specifically mentioned what we today refer to as the "leave no trace" philosophy. They may have been just a bunch of horse-packin cowboys, but they had respect for nature and keeping the land clean and minimally impacted. I had to buy it.

At the register the owner asked, "Are you a packer?"

I didn't look up. "Just dreaming," I mumbled.

"Oh you need to go! I just came back from a packing trip up in Montana! It's so gorgeous! You need to take your horses up there! This is the prettiest time of year!"

Her words grated on me, probably because I don't have any horses to take anywhere. She was a publisher in her previous life. She made a lot of money then decided she wasn't happy, so she sold everything and moved to Boulder and bought herself a million dollar ranch, a herd of horses, and opened this little store for something to do when she wasn't riding. It's people like her that keep people like me out of the running for land around here. She doesn't have to work. I do. But instead of buying her dream ranch out in the wide open spaces of West Texas or Montana or Wyoming or less populated parts of Colorado, she's right here playing in my back yard keeping property prices higher than working people can afford. Consciously I can't blame her, but subconsciously I'm ripping her a new one. I'm just being a crybaby.

Just then a BMW pulled up and a short thin 40-ish woman dressed in expensive synthetic riding clothes came in.

"Babs!*" the owner cried.

"Sweetie! It's been too long!" Babs replied, opening her arms wide. Kissy-kisssy, huggy-huggy.

"Oh Babs, how's the new darling treating you?"

"Oh," Babs exclaimed with a comically dramatic exasperation, "I've been riding Sasha now for what, two weeks? Well, you'll just never believe blah blah blah..."

I walked out the door. These people have every bit as much right to own land and horses as I do, and it isn't their fault or their problem that they ended up with the riches to do so and I haven't (yet, anyway.) I still can't help that it pisses me off, and I can't help feel that I'd make better use of the land and appreciate it more than these spoiled Californians who just come out here to play. That doesn't justify anything and nobody ever said life was fair. I realize it's irrational and wasteful to let it piss me off. These people don't deserve my scorn, so I just brood quietly to myself or let it leak out in this blog. This weekend when Babs is out being frustrated with the nuances of her new $100,000 polo pony, I'll be reading my little book and dreaming that I'm one of those cowboys in those old black and white photos, packing up a $300 mule and a $1,000 horse for a long trek into the serenity of some distant mountain wilderness.

*Babs wasn't her actual name, though it was something equally cutesy and pretentious. I just can't recall it.

Cartographus

Today at work someone called me a mapping god. "Just call me Cartographus: God of Maps," I said. I also got a very nice note from the lead author of the solar paper I was raging against the other day. It made me feel bad for blogging about it, because he loved and incorporated all of my suggestions for improving it.

[sigh]

I don't know what's wrong with me. I've got a perfectly wonderful career working with perfectly wonderful people doing interesting and wonderful work. I live in the best city in the most beautiful state in the most awesome country in the world. Yet I can't stop bellyaching. All I seem to want to do is manual labor and screw around with horses. WTF?

Cartographus. Indeed.

Sunny Days

Last week classes began. I've returned to college to finish my master's degree in GIS. It's an online program. I wrote a blog entry about my "first day," but it was such an angry, negative post I decided not to publish it. I even surprised myself with my overreaction, my incredibly negative knee-jerk outburst. I'm still trying to make sense of it. But I want to go ahead and post an only slightly modified version because my blog is going to serve as my notebook when I start seriously working on my book. It'll be a good record of where I've been, what I've done, and my thoughts on things. I wrote this just days before my experience with the farrier.

Here is the (nearly) original post, which I called Dark Days:

I just logged in for the first time, read over the syllabus and introductions, and I already hate it. I hate it so much that I want to either run screaming from the room or collapse in a drooling heap and stare blankly into the void.

WTF?

Of my two courses, the class I hate the most is GIS Project Management. Even that combination of words puts me on the defensive. "Hate," in fact, is too soft a word but trying to find something to type that would appropriately convey the gravity of my emotion is futile. I had previously started my master's in Texas but it was interrupted (to my great relief) when I moved to Colorado for my current job. It's now painfully apparent that my interests have moved hopelessly beyond anything that further education in my current career field can offer.

Students have already started engaging in the forums. One chipper little overachiever has already posted all his plans for his big GIS management project, complete with acronyms, goals, scope, end users and data sources all glued together with an overabundance of words like "utilize" and "proactive" that makes me cringe like hearing nails on a chalkboard. I f'ing hate those two words. As Elizabeth would call them, "corporate tripe."

But I wrote my introduction just like everyone else did. The prof wanted the usual stuff: career background, future goals, and some personal hobby stuff for good measure. I had three sentences that summed up my career history and GIS aspirations, and then wrote a meaty paragraph about mountains, horses, food and a cabin in the woods.

It was all I could do to stay awake reading through the syllabus. I had to fight the sick, twisted feeling in my stomach as I started thinking about trying to force out a 20 plus page paper on the gloriously un-fascinating subject of the "interdependencies of the steps required for GIS implementation planning" in the form of the most despised (by me) of all writing, the technical report. I mean we're not just planning here, were dissecting the plan for the plan. Seriously, I start trembling thinking about late nights trying desperately to BS my way through something I absolutely could not care one iota less about. It's a black hole on my passion scale.

So what am I doing?

The other day I was at work and I read through a scientific report which I co-authored. I'm a co-author because I did all of the GIS work upon which the paper is based, but didn't actually write any of the material. It took me 4 hours to read 20 pages (which INCLUDED maps that I myself had made!) because I couldn't keep my eyes open. I wasn't even tired! I finished it, even found and marked numerous typos, and yet I can barely tell you what the paper was about. Something about solar resource and consumer buying habits and a bunch of really, really dusty statistics and technical banter that immediately sent my brain packing. The GIS part of this particular project was mildly interesting at the time I was doing it, but once my part was over I pretty
much dumped it from my memory.

Again I ask, what am I doing?

On top of this I feel guilt. I feel guilty because the great majority of the people I work with are much more "into" their jobs than I am. I'm glad they are, too. We need people like that working on the nation's energy crisis. I can do the work, and I do it five days a week (sometimes more) just like I'm supposed to. I've even gotten a lot of praise for the quality of my work. But no matter how hard I try, I'm not ever going to get the least bit excited about regression analysis, databases or the programming of anything. If anything, I'm getting less excited about them with each passing day. I can't even sit through meetings without getting glassy eyed. Hell I'm mentally checked-out before the meeting organizer even gets warmed up. I feel guilty because my heart's not in it. I'm just not interested. It makes me feel like I'm cheating my more enthusiastic co-workers and even the nation to some degree. I feel like a monkey in a zoo, staring through the bars and longing for the world beyond. I keep doing my tricks for peanuts but I'm not really there.

So, I'll ask again, WTF am I doing?

I think this GIS master's idea is kinda like a gay man going out with a woman hoping the experience will somehow make him straight. It makes no sense to anyone but the poor deluded soul who, out of desperation, is just trying to do what he has to in order to feel useful and accepted in society.

And that was as far as I got before I decided to sleep on it instead of doing anything rash like dropping out of the program on the first day. The next morning I felt better. I thought things over and logged back in, and calmly read through all the documentation for each class. They're totally doable if only I can put myself in the right frame of mind. But that's hard sometimes. For example, I was just reading through the lecture notes for my cartography class. Check this out:

Dent describes the cartographic process, the process by which you go from unmapped to map form, in three general steps:

1. Cartographic Thinking - visualization of data looking for patterns or relationships
2. Cartographic Generalization - selection, classification, simplification and symbolization of data
3. Cartographic Communication - making the maps including map design and structured symbolism

Only information that is potentially meaningful to the context should be included in the map. Realize the power of cartography.

Seriously? I paid $2,000 for this class? This is one of the things I really dislike about academia. They can make the painfully obvious seem like they're revealing the deepest secrets of the universe - in step form. I'd rather sit down and start making a map and learn by trial and error, or have an experienced cartographer show me the ropes, hands on, rather than read about the process step by step. I do this stuff every single day of my life, and I read almost a book a week, and yet I can't read a few pages on cartographic basics in a graduate level college course without drifting away.

Still, I'm much less hostile toward my classes today. I think the experience with the farrier and bucking hay has helped. They gave me hope that there could be something better out there, that even if I complete the master's in GIS I won't be, as they say, "educating myself into a corner." I desperately need the outlet of ranch work and the glimmer of hope from a tradesman to keep me sane. And if farriery or the greater plan of my self-sufficient homestead never comes to fruition, then I'll always have a solid formal education to fall back on. That's what I keep telling myself.