February 1st, 2005
And so I return from Russia.
I tell you, a 20-hour train ride followed by a 5-hour sleepover for three in a Moscow apartment, and then an 11-hour flight followed by another 2-hour flight. And my mental and physical state was absolutely destroyed. Including waiting times in airports and taxi travels, I spent a total of 48 hours--two full days--travelling.
Later today I go to the airport to pick up my wife. She spent three-and-a-half days travelling. She will be so exhausted that I might have to put her onto one of those luggage racks and wheel her out to the car ... carry her into our condo ... :-)
* * *
I changed one of my older rants (November 5th), to include the method to calculating smoking Pack-Years. I did this because people were searching for the method to calculating smoking Pack-Years, and somehow hitting my website ... only to discover that there was no method for doing so published here. So I added it for all those people wanting to calculate how many Pack-Years they have smoked.
* * *
On the way to work this morning, I witnessed something that greatly depressed me. Something that confirms my growing conviction that we humans just aren't worth the trouble Mother Nature goes to to keep us alive.
There is a corner that I frequently queue up at waiting for a green light. It is common for 10 or 20 cars to be lined up at that corner, as it is a left turn following an off-ramp from the highway. Many times, there is a homeless person at the corner, usually a woman with a strange bespectacled bird-like appearance, though sometimes there is a youngish blonde man with a limping schtick (I call it a schtick because he sometimes forgets, mid-stride, which leg is the game one).
Well, this morning I was coming to work, surprisingly early for me, because my schedule is still out of whack from time zone changes (and leftover jet-lag). That woman was still sleeping in a sleeping bag a few meters from "her" corner, and the driver of the car in front of me opened his window and threw an apple core at her as he went around.
<MessageToAsshole>
How unnecessary was that? I mean, whether or not you have no time for the homeless people--even if you think they are the ultimate in lazy scammers, even if you think they are not worth the pennies that some people throw to them ... what could you possibly have gained by tossing your garbage at them? How does that help you in your busy life? How does that improve the quality of your life?
All it does is makes you a little more diminished to others, but also to yourself. There is no pride in being an asshole, is there? And yet, somehow, you thought there was. I bet you don't feel any better for your assholery, and I bet you may have chuckled to yourself or the others in the car (though they didn't seem all that impressed, did they?) but I bet ... no, I am certain that you gained nothing from it that you thought you would when you did it.
</MessageToAsshole>
And for everyone else: It was a darkish-skinned man in his mid to late 20s driving a red Pontiac Sunfire, BC license plate RNG 6##.