the free-for-all friday shoutouts (and a quick aside)

hola! tis friday, tis friday, tis friday! woohoo!

plans for this weekend: read some journal articles, come up with awesome plan to sedate and perform non-invasive surgery on fish (take that good dr. carr of guam! ooh... you work on people! that's easy! let's see you intubate a 35-cm long (forked length) mutton snapper, insert a 8Hz 7mm long sonar tag, and have the fish in the outpatient clinic in 10 minutes. didn't think so!... anyhoo, watch usc/nebraska, don't take advil, and finish up formerly wicked awesome powerpoint slide show for a presentation next thursday for a professor i'm trying to get onto my committee for a class he's not going to be present for. WEAK END is right!

anyhow, here's the aside: so i've been doing the school thing for about 3 weeks. and guess who's already been invited to give a guest lecture to a freshman-level class for geography 203? if you guessed "the cooked goose" you sir, would be right! yeah! me! and stuff! of course, the trick will be to avoid advil, as i accidentally (stupidly is a better word) decided that i could take an advil gel-cap. let's do the logic on this one: all gelcaps give me hives. advil gelcaps is a gelcap. therefore, I TOOK STUPID ADVIL GELCAPS! and now my body recognizes former wonder-drug advil as an allergen and i had a nice little outbreak of hives today. whilst proctoring an exam. wonderbar. just your typical friday for what i'm calling "the worst week of class ever".

now i know i promised that i would abstain (mainly for reasons like "if someone actually reads this and figures things out and i say something untoward, maybe i'll get booted...") from discussion of class-related things, but i have to say this: if you are a teacher/professor/education professional/class leader and you say something along the lines of "ok, just a quick overview of the work today and then we'll get down to business so you have time to get the project done", please, for my sanity and the sanity of others (who have to hear me B and M) don't proceed to lecture for 1.5 hours, killing said time allotted for class work. as that kid who always tuned the teacher out and got going on the workbook in elementary school, ignored the intro to the chemistry lab assignment in high school, blew off the teacher's feedback on the biochem report in college, and told an idiotfreund named Helmut to go die in a fire while in grad school, i'm not one for long, drawn-out intros to a computer project that, all told, took me, on my own, about 2 hours to complete. without any teacher's assistance. this, by the way, is the class i "didn't" want to take, but it sets me up nicely down the road for some other classes. but, for those of you keeping score at home, the total "ooh! glad he said that!" moments in this class are at 1.5... total. oi!

so anyhoo, that's the aside and why i'm glad it's the weekend. and why you may have heard someone over the horizon singing, "beer me, doctor!" sometime thursday evening around 11pm.
--goose

on to the shoutouts!

SUPERBONUS EXTRASPECIAL SUPERCHUNKY SHOUTOUT TO: my cousins Patti and Paula M. of Falls Church, MD for their wonderful care package of 3 (three) jars of Skippy superchunk peanut butter! the awe that said package inspired caused the following overheard comments around the geography department: "you're 30 and you eat peanut butter like a 5-yr old." "skippy? your cousins got any boxes meant for me?" and (from a total MILF): "my son eats peanut butter all the time too. i don't know what i'd cook if he didn't like it." which of course got me wondering how many different ways you can include peanut butter into cooking. obviously, the PBJ and PBJB (bananas) are the gold standard use for peanut butter. equally enticing is peanut butter chicken, sometimes hautily described on fancy menus as "chicken satay". i'm not fooled. then there's the excellent, if hard-to-get-ronny jockitch's-to-make-it-right: peanut butter burger. YUM! ask the T3 of newark, nj. he got me on it whilst in tacoma. of course, the muhas at ronny jockitch (please say you know the restaurant by it's proper name...) will then add mustard, ketchup, mayonaisse (BLAGH!) and the rest to the burger too. or, if you tell them the precise order (burger. buns. lettuce. tomato. peanut butter. that's it...) they'll put on such a tiny portion of PB that it's like they're afraid of it. and then they'll all stand agape watching as i power it back with a vanilla coke and chili cheese fries.... i'm getting hungry! anyone else up for a quick drive to mohegan sun and a little late night burger? or any of the other 10million places johnny rocket's exists? so, i got 3 items that are "meal"-oriented. then there's apples, carrots, celery, chocolate, ice cream, cake, cookies, and PB-sculptures (that's right...) if anyone knows a nice lamb or fish recipe incorporating said skippy peanut butter, let me know. i have eugene to test drive all dishes.

excellent shout-out to the good dr. carr, formerly of st.louis, mo and briefly in houston, tx. i hear the boards were passed? nice! next time you're in houston though, do call me. it's the closest town to college station. oops! and pea-sized whoopwhoops to the little girls. they are taking to beach and island life, as the photos can attest.

diggitydang WTF shoutout to people who manage IPs. that's "internet provider". get this: my internet worked only at home for a week. then only at school for a week. but never both. why? four competing firewalls shut down my computer's ability to talk to the wireless routers that are strung up (metaphysically of course) all around town. does my computer ever say that i got 4 firewalls that are not even remotely working in concert quietly in the background? no. and better yet, with the windows-installed network connections, you don't even get the button to click that would clear that all up. fortunately for me, i had nothing but free time this week (ha!) to spend about 8 hours trying to match the 2 passwords that i had originally put in a week ago. amazing. i want seamless service and possibilities. not headaches and yearnings for our old 2400kbs modem from 1993...

finally, booyah! shoutout to the mom for her on-going efforts to clear up a minor little headache known as the "goose has no place to stay over thanksgiving". turns out, if you make a reservation online, these people expect you to read and click some button on an email they send confirming your reservation request. and turns out, dear old dad, whose favorite hardware is "a dixon-ticonderoga 2.0" and (now this is no joke) uses both a "reverse-polish" calculator and an abacus to balance his chequebook, didn't read said email or reply to it. but the mom, currently in possession of "world's best mom" title for a record 16th consecutive year (don't ask about her "grounded for eternity" campaign platform from when i was 13 and, um... didn't come home from a party on time... turns out, the base didn't like that proposal...)... anyhow, turns out she got the reservation resurrected. hawai'i, here i come! so BOOYAH! mom! BOOYAH! (and don't worry, booyahs are good t'ings...)

Reliving Five Years Ago... and a call to love

It's hard to avoid or miss the fifth anniversary of the 9.11.01 attacks, even when you have your head tucked into books or your eyes glued to football. Everyone knows where they were. And I'm no exception. I still remember hearing it on the radio, all tucked into my blankets back at the Taft House, in that way you hear things when you're half-asleep. I roused myself once the radio station dropped it's usual morning banter. So I headed downstairs and turned on the television. And that's where I saw the rest of it.

I still remember the fruitless calls to Kurt and Alison's cell phones. I still remember just sobbing on the I-95 as I headed to class. I remember thinking "why am I going to class?" and not referring to not being prepared or caring in the topic. I remember walking into the 10am lecture room and finding a class finishing up while everyone else who came to school were downstairs listening to the television or radio or trying to call from the pay phone in the building. I remember heading back to the Taft House with Clayt and watching the lady down the street stare off at the little plume of smoke and haze that drifted the over the horizon. Her daughter. I remember noticing how pretty the sunset was and how quiet the night was.

It's amazing how fast things can change.

Fortunately, Kurt (trying to head down town) and Alison (away from her apartment when it all happened and then evacuated from the market district) were fine. Sadly, there's thousands of sad stories from that day.

But I remember. And I'm caught between wanting to hit back and knowing the people I'm hitting are just as innocent as the people hit on 9.11.01. We've already shown how phenomenally bad we are at getting the bogeymen. They will forever lurk in the shadows of our minds. They will forever pull you from a good night's sleep. That's what they do. As a concept and imaginary figure, they are powerful. And we know they hide behind rocks and mosques and families and children and farms and hospitals and who knows where else so that they stay just out of sight, just out of reach. There is evil in this world. There is no denying that. So we can fight that evil, take it head on, and fight until it gives up. But that's the thing. A concept doesn't give up. It will just appear somewhere else. Someone else takes on the persona and suddenly soldiers are off to Indonesia or the Philippines or central London. So rather than make a mess of every Mid-eastern, pan-Arab nation and neighborhood in the world in our quest to purge terror and evil while destroying thousands of innocent, young lives for every "target" we get, I say we try something different, beyond turning off the talking heads who seem to direct our national policy more and more every day:

Be human. Be human first. Be human last. Be human always. We all take joy at witnessing a birth, we all celebrate our achievements and birthdays, we all blush at first love, find quiet moments when we are at peace, sit with passing thoughts that run through the mind, and cherish friends and family. We laugh in same tones and mourn with familiar tears. We dream. Are we so different really? Then why must we insist so? And why do we let people insist for us? So, dear friends and readers, do your part and be human. Pull the lens back far enough and you'll see the truth in this.

And as St. Francis of Assisi said, "Lord, grant that I might not so much seek to be loved as to love."

"Love One Another."
~Judeo-Christian

"As the source of both internal and external peace, [love and compassion] is fundamental." ~Buddhism

"God loves those who do good."
~Muslim

"Teach me to love all my friends. By loving them, may I find Thy love in everyone I meet."
~Hindu

"To love someone deeply gives you strength. Being loved by someone deeply gives you courage."
~Taoism

--goose
(and a special big shout-out to the good dr. mav, currently of st.louis, on his surgical boards! take names!)