Fun fact: One year ago tomorrow I boarded a plane and began my long adventure around the globe by meeting Patrick in London and heading to Cairo. That's the whole reason this blog exists. And it was completely worth it.
This past weekend was my last full weekend in DC. Friday Paul and I went to a friend’s apartment and then we all split up and went out separate ways for the evening. The two of us, joined by Natalie and Roxana, took a very windy route towards a bar named Madhatter’s. Fortunately, this route led us past a McDonalds, where we made a half-hour pit stop. Upon arriving, the man at the door checked my ID, and then looked at me, and not-so-politely told me to “get lost” because I had “already been there with my friend” and the ID I had given him was the “third one I had tried to use that night.” I gave him a blank stare and assured him I had no idea what he was talking about, just as Paul step forward and proudly reported that we had just come from McDonalds. As if that was a sufficient reason that my ID was real. But, the guy relented, and made a mark on my hand and let me in. Shortly afterwards Roxana ran into another friend of hers, and Paul, Natalie and I decided it was already late and we didn’t really want to be there anyway. Whoops.
Saturday Patrick arrived after finishing his internship in Charlotte. Katie dropped him at my place while she went to go babysit, and I went with Pat to his brother’s place to help him pack up and move. Eventually Pat and I, along with his brother (Stephen) and Stephen’s girlfriend (Suzanne) went to a place named Wisdom. They serve internationally award winning cocktails, so we celebrated Patrick’s work being finished, and eventually Katie was able to join us.
Sunday was a pretty slow day (I did a lot of reading, and I wrote the last post – a fake article about Davidson College club tennis), but eventually Paul, Natalie, and I went wandering around Georgetown looking for a place to eat. After finding a few overpriced places, or ones where the wait was too long, we settled on a crepes establishment. Afterwards we spontaneously opted to see Horrible Bosses, a recently released comedy film. It was pretty funny – worth a trip to the theatre – but not the funniest movie I’d ever seen.
Monday my dad got in town for work, and he took Paul, Pat, Katie, and me to Good Stuff for dinner. It was as good as always. So good that it’s all I really think about for the next 24 hours. This week at work is a bit slower than the last couple, but that’s ok because I’m finishing up my projects before my last day. Anyway, that’s all at the moment, except a quick update on all the reading I’ve done this summer:
Two more books. Done.
In the past few days I have read both Ender’s Shadow and Fahrenheit 451. Ender’s Shadow is the (rather futuristic) story of a bunch of brilliant children placed in a battle school and trained to be the future commanders of earth’s interstellar fleet. It’s told from the point of view of a particularly young, small, but brilliant child who is incredibly adept at taking a bit of information and leaping straight to the correct conclusion. More interestingly, he infallibly reads other people’s expressions, tone, and the meaning behind your words. The premise for all this is that he’s brilliant so of course he can, but it makes you wonder how fast our brains could work if we pushed to take in as much information and process as much as we could all the time.
Fahrenheit 451, also a sci-fi tale, is a bit more of a downer, even though Ender’s Shadow has its low points. In a reasonably bleak future, one man realizes things should be different but doesn’t know where to turn, so he suffers this ridiculous amount of inner torment before (spoiler alert) he kills some guy with a flamethrower. It does, however, provide an interesting spin on the problem of sensitivities in our society, and it was written over 50 years ago.
Freshman year of high school my World Geography teacher had us read both Fahrenheit 451 and Ender’s Game, the sister novel (actually the older sister of the two) to Ender’s Shadow.[1] At the time, I tried to draw meaning from the stories of the novels. And certainly, there’s plenty to draw from. But I think why he had us read those stories was the supposed reality behind the plot, the stage on which the play was performed. It was those worlds – in Ender’s Game the constant threat of worldwide war full of nationalistic pride, rivalries, and back-stabbings, and in Fahrenheit 451 the thoughtless, monotonous existence that included the burning of books – that Mr. Nickels wanted us to see and be repulsed by. By reading about them, I think he hoped that we would subliminally, or consciously, decide that those were not the types of futures in which we wished to live. I think he hoped, and perhaps hopes, that some of his students will be inspired to prevent the reasonably unstable and perhaps catastrophic futures depicted in these books.
[1] Looking back, he taught us plenty of geography, but none of the books we read had anything to do with geography. He pretty much had us read books he thought were good, important, or both. Which was honestly much more fun.
This past weekend was my last full weekend in DC. Friday Paul and I went to a friend’s apartment and then we all split up and went out separate ways for the evening. The two of us, joined by Natalie and Roxana, took a very windy route towards a bar named Madhatter’s. Fortunately, this route led us past a McDonalds, where we made a half-hour pit stop. Upon arriving, the man at the door checked my ID, and then looked at me, and not-so-politely told me to “get lost” because I had “already been there with my friend” and the ID I had given him was the “third one I had tried to use that night.” I gave him a blank stare and assured him I had no idea what he was talking about, just as Paul step forward and proudly reported that we had just come from McDonalds. As if that was a sufficient reason that my ID was real. But, the guy relented, and made a mark on my hand and let me in. Shortly afterwards Roxana ran into another friend of hers, and Paul, Natalie and I decided it was already late and we didn’t really want to be there anyway. Whoops.
Saturday Patrick arrived after finishing his internship in Charlotte. Katie dropped him at my place while she went to go babysit, and I went with Pat to his brother’s place to help him pack up and move. Eventually Pat and I, along with his brother (Stephen) and Stephen’s girlfriend (Suzanne) went to a place named Wisdom. They serve internationally award winning cocktails, so we celebrated Patrick’s work being finished, and eventually Katie was able to join us.
Sunday was a pretty slow day (I did a lot of reading, and I wrote the last post – a fake article about Davidson College club tennis), but eventually Paul, Natalie, and I went wandering around Georgetown looking for a place to eat. After finding a few overpriced places, or ones where the wait was too long, we settled on a crepes establishment. Afterwards we spontaneously opted to see Horrible Bosses, a recently released comedy film. It was pretty funny – worth a trip to the theatre – but not the funniest movie I’d ever seen.
Monday my dad got in town for work, and he took Paul, Pat, Katie, and me to Good Stuff for dinner. It was as good as always. So good that it’s all I really think about for the next 24 hours. This week at work is a bit slower than the last couple, but that’s ok because I’m finishing up my projects before my last day. Anyway, that’s all at the moment, except a quick update on all the reading I’ve done this summer:
Two more books. Done.
In the past few days I have read both Ender’s Shadow and Fahrenheit 451. Ender’s Shadow is the (rather futuristic) story of a bunch of brilliant children placed in a battle school and trained to be the future commanders of earth’s interstellar fleet. It’s told from the point of view of a particularly young, small, but brilliant child who is incredibly adept at taking a bit of information and leaping straight to the correct conclusion. More interestingly, he infallibly reads other people’s expressions, tone, and the meaning behind your words. The premise for all this is that he’s brilliant so of course he can, but it makes you wonder how fast our brains could work if we pushed to take in as much information and process as much as we could all the time.
Fahrenheit 451, also a sci-fi tale, is a bit more of a downer, even though Ender’s Shadow has its low points. In a reasonably bleak future, one man realizes things should be different but doesn’t know where to turn, so he suffers this ridiculous amount of inner torment before (spoiler alert) he kills some guy with a flamethrower. It does, however, provide an interesting spin on the problem of sensitivities in our society, and it was written over 50 years ago.
Freshman year of high school my World Geography teacher had us read both Fahrenheit 451 and Ender’s Game, the sister novel (actually the older sister of the two) to Ender’s Shadow.[1] At the time, I tried to draw meaning from the stories of the novels. And certainly, there’s plenty to draw from. But I think why he had us read those stories was the supposed reality behind the plot, the stage on which the play was performed. It was those worlds – in Ender’s Game the constant threat of worldwide war full of nationalistic pride, rivalries, and back-stabbings, and in Fahrenheit 451 the thoughtless, monotonous existence that included the burning of books – that Mr. Nickels wanted us to see and be repulsed by. By reading about them, I think he hoped that we would subliminally, or consciously, decide that those were not the types of futures in which we wished to live. I think he hoped, and perhaps hopes, that some of his students will be inspired to prevent the reasonably unstable and perhaps catastrophic futures depicted in these books.
[1] Looking back, he taught us plenty of geography, but none of the books we read had anything to do with geography. He pretty much had us read books he thought were good, important, or both. Which was honestly much more fun.
“There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them.”
Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451
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