Reflections on Life:

I'm sitting on a balcony sweating in the humid heat of an Amazon evening. In a building across the street, the local band is playing selections from "Star Wars" and "Aladdin", sounding every bit like we must have in High School. It's now 10:00, and the children have gone to bed, while people watching small TVs outdoors tune into telenovelas.

There is only one road to this town, and it's impassable most of the year. I flew in this afternoon on a Boeing 737, but most of the residents can afford only to buy a ticket on a boat that takes more than two days to travel to the next big city--sleeping is done on hammocks because the nights are simply too warm for a cabin.

Santarem, during the dry season, is a remote tourist attraction because of white sand river beaches. But now, with the water 30 feet above that point, the beaches are underwater and the tourists are absent--myself excluded I suppose. There is a riverwalk, well more of a nicely paved floodwall, where dozens of young couples sit on benches and kids play on swings at night to escape the heat of the day. Night comes early here, actually, as it does in much of the tropics. Restaurants don't begin to fill up until well after 8:00 PM.

Before then, the streets are filled with people working, albeit more slowly. Motorcyclists carrying everything swerve in and out of cars driving too fast on streets too narrow. Vendors selling random assortments of things line a couple of squares in the city. No one shouts, no one pushes.

I can feel a palpable desire from nearly everyone to improve their situation. People try to make money virtually any way they can. Some of that money will go toward symbols of wealth: cell phones, dvd players, nice shoes. But most of these people will never know wealth, the kind that means they don't need to worry about money. Poverty and prosperity are next door neighbors in Brazil, and everyone builds a wall around their own lot, so that what they do have remains theirs. Only the poorest, those in the favelas, cannot afford walls.

The language is foreign to me, the food tastes different, the beds are less comfortable, and the spaces narrower. More is different than the same--in fact, nearly everything is a little bit different. I'm sure that's true of international travel, but I've not yet had the chance to do much.

What isn't different, though, are the people. Children play like children, adolescents swim incessantly, teenagers blare loud music, young people sit at bars drinking and flirting, men and women work all day, old women watch their grandchildren and groups of old men sit and laugh at jokes.

But then, the fact that I actually get to see this--that life occurs in public view--is almost entirely foreign to me. In the midwest, life happens indoors, or occasionally in massive soccer complexes. If we are outdoors, we are mostly alone or in very small groups. Life is private. We are embarrassed to share our problems, and unwilling to let others witness our embarrassments.

That seems strange from this balcony, actually. Living our lives indoors is like buying individually wrapped "fun sized" Skittles. Kids can share one with everyone on their next play date! Here, people would want nothing more than to scoop deep into the bulk food barrel and watch the rainbow flow into their bags by the pound. Life happens here. Not some focus-grouped, mass-marketed, anti-bacterial, climate-controlled version, but rather something more chaotic and far more real.

Though I haven't written any new articles for Damninteresting.com lately, pretty much since Lydia came along, actually, I have been actively involved with the site. Over the last six months or so the writers that contribute to the site have been preparing a manuscript for submission to Workman publishing. And this isn't just some shoot-for-the-stars type submissions, we have a substantial advance and everything!

The book will be coming out in Spring 2009, and my contribution is about 1/20th of the total material--not very much, but still enough to be officially in print! Some of the material is new, other parts were from articles I'd previously written.

We just turned in the complete manuscript to the publisher last night/this morning. From there, we still have a lot of work to do. We'll undoubtedly have more edits, plus we have to create artwork/hire artists for the book's many hundreds of images.

I'm not entirely positive what format the book will be, but at about 300 pages of written material plus graphics, it will most likely be a large-format hardback initially.

If this book is successful, which would be at least 10s of thousands of copies sold I'm guessing, we'll soon have a follow-on ready for which I would contribute substantially more material. That's not terribly unlikely, given that the site has 30,000+ regular readers.

Ah well, that's for the future. Today, I have to focus on getting another manuscript finished: my thesis.

I have finally found a solution to commuting to work without my car.

If you recall, last summer I tried the bus for about a month. It worked, sort of. The commute was at least 45 minutes each way, with a transfer in between. That meant it was hard to relax, and almost impossible to work.

Then, early this summer I tried biking in to work. It took about 35 minutes for the actual ride, and I arrived at work sweaty and exhausted. That was okay, because I just stopped at the IM and showered. But the ride home, oh the ride home. That was not fun. I found the flattest possible route, and it still nearly killed me by the end. After weeks and weeks, I'm sure that I could have improved and commuted perhaps 3 times a week. But, since the one-way distance is 7.5 miles, I'm not sure I'd ever get in the condition to ride 60 miles per week.

I had given up for a while, and just committed myself in principle to eventually moving close to my job so only one of us has to drive to work. Then, Cheryl and I stopped over at my Dad's house two weekends ago, and I was reminded that he has an electric bike. This bike is really cool, because the battery/motor doesn't actually move the bike on its own, it simply adds to whatever force you are applying. The best way to explain the effect is that the bike moves as if you are in a high gear, but rides as easily as if you are in a low gear.

Luckily for me in this instance, my Dad averages nearly as much time in China on business as he does at home, so the bike was not being utilized to its potential at his house. I asked him if I could borrow it and he readily agreed.

Yesterday, I tried it out, and it was fantastic. I got to work in just over 30 minutes feeling as if I'd had a nice workout--but I was still able to climb the stairs to the third floor (really, once I actually had to take the elevator after riding my normal bike). Then, the ride home was equally easy. See, the bike provides the most help during acceleration or while going up hills, and then does very little on straightaways. So, the hardest parts of the commute are made much easier.

I figured that the hardest test would be if I could actually comfortably ride to work the next day. The bike actually has two settings "On" and "Eco". "Eco" provides less assistance than "On". Yesterday, I'd ridden in with "Eco" and today, I switched it to "On". It was almost too easy, actually.

I must totally look like someone from a third world country (if you ignore the battery pack, that is), because I modified a plastic milk crate to fit on the rear-tire rack. I stuffed my coffee, lunch, and backpack (with a laptop, not so third world, I guess) in there.

Today, a guy in a truck labeled "Anderson Electric" came up to me, rolled down the window and said "Electric bike, eh?"

"Yup" I affirmed.

"Sweet!" the guy said.

I thought it was funny that an electrician would find my electric bike cool. Maybe he's just a big fan of electricity in general.

So finally, I may have found a solution to not needing a car for my commute. If this continues to work well, it may even be possible to go down to 1 car--I'd just have to ride the bus in the wintertime. But for some reason, I feel not so "green".

Yesterday when I got to work, I told my office mate, Dush, about it. He laughed and told me he'd just heard on the BBC something about an electric bike and had thought "That must be an American invention!" He's Sri Lankan.

Okay, there are literally millions of people worldwide, maybe even more, that have equally long commutes to work on their bikes. Have you seen the pictures of what the Chinese manage to carry on theirs? But, one must not be judged by the standards of others, but rather his peers. After all, we cannot necessarily condemn our historical predecessors for their racist attitudes when they were raised awash in such mistaken ideas.

Judged by the standards of my peers, my (Dad's) electric bike uses way less energy than my car, I get a really decent workout every day, and I stay connected to the world around me because I'm not encased in a metric ton of steel, glass, and plastic. So, bourgeois or not, I'm taking the first real steps to break my reliance on a second automobile. And that, I think, is forest green.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I spoke a few words about my Grandparents Kendall on Saturday. Here are the remarks I prepared beforehand. I didn't give them exactly as written, mostly I just wrote these down to get an idea of what I wanted to say. Nevertheless, what I said was actually fairly close to this.

I'd like to remark about the number of us here tonight. In ninth grade, I had just learned in math about the principle of exponential growth--and I had an interest in powerpoint. Curious one evening, I decided to take on an extracurricular math exercise: I wanted to calculate when the population of Kendall descendants would overtake the population of the rest of the world. So, I looked up a number of world population growth, wrote down a few pages of calculations, and whipped up a quick presentation.

I showed this presentation to Grandma and Grandpa one evening, and I'll never forget how hard they laughed when I paged through the slides. It turns out that, if all of Grandma and Grandpa's children had as many children as they (which, by the way, you've all failed miserably at) there would be more Kendall descendants than the rest of the world population in about 2400. The best part of it, though, is that we would overtake the world population at about 4 trillion. I tried to find that presentation for tonight, but it's somewhere tucked away on a floppy disk I think.

There are many, many things that I could say about Grandma and Grandpa, but I think tonight I'd like to talk about work. As everyone knows, Grandpa's list of chores is truly never-ending, and I think maybe the real reason he had so many children is so that he has a never-ending supply of below minimum wage labor. I think that nearly every one of us has been recruited to work at Grandma and Grandpa's house, and were always paid, of course. I clearly remember being paid 5 bucks for a whole day's work.

But I really can't complain, because Grandma almost always had cookies ready for us, or candy, or hot chocolate--and later coffee. And lunch was never just a sandwich like at home. It was a sandwich, maybe, but also cottage cheese, pickles, chips, salad, pop, and ice cream for desert. And then Grandma would apologize that she hadn't made us a real meal that day. And often after lunch we could take a nap. All in all, the conditions weren't too rough.

Grandpa used work as a way to teach us all something. He used it to teach us lessons that modern society and media just doesn't stress any more. The value of a doing a job right, not simply quickly. The importance of being on time. And of course, the fact that a board could be crookeder than a dog's hind leg, or alternatively flatter than piss on a plate. And, instead of rain coming down in buckets, it would rain like a cow peeing. I guess growing up in the depression, buckets were hard to come by...and for some reason piss was on plates.

Seriously though, there was one lesson that I'll never forget. During the summer that Tom and I worked on the addition, we had a bit of a tendency to get there a few minutes late. 7 am is rather early, after all. We would often pull in at 7:05, 7:10, and even 7:15. Not too long into the summer, though, Grandpa greeted us curtly, a said "If you can get here at 7:15, you can get here at 7:00". I took that to mean a lot more than simply the value of punctuality. To me it meant that if you really need to get something done, there's no reason to do it partway--do it completely and be proud of it when you're done.

Growing up in a family of generally high-achievers, it can be hard sometimes to distinguish yourself. Cara, my sister, never had that problem--mostly because she made succeeding at things seem effortless. Academically, Cara got the best grades in school. She was a good athlete, and always a tenacious performer. She landed great roles on stage, and seemed to absorb the roles as if they had been written by her for her. And on top of all of her outward successes, she has a fantastic sense of humor and warmth that make her a truly wonderful person.

This weekend, she got married. Her new husband, Travis, is everything that an older brother could want for his sister: he's steadfast and reliable, honest and genuine, but he's more than that too. He's passionate, artistic, and imaginative--all in a manly way, of course. Mostly, though, they bring each other deep happiness.

The Pre-Wedding Party

Friday, they threw a pre-wedding party in Ann Arbor for about 40 of her friends and some family. Cheryl, Lydia, and I arrived at about 8:05, or 5 minutes past Lydia's bedtime. Despite nearly getting bounced because the bar was 21 and over past 9:00, we left at 11:30, with Lydia still going strong. We had great food, excellent craft-brewed beer, and some lively conversation. For most of the night, I just followed Lydia around from one small escapade to another, delighted the whole time by her sheer joy at getting to explore such a different environment. When we finally left, Lydia had fallen asleep within seconds of being buckled in, and slept all the way to the hotel.

Saturday morning, we had a very tasty breakfast in our hotel where Lydia ate nearly as much as I did. I was concerned, though, because she'd only slept for about 8 hours, much short of her usual 12. Our day ahead was jam-packed with wedding preparations. Cheryl got a manicure and pedicure while I tried to get our rambunctious little lady to take a nap.

The Birthday Roast

Saturday evening we took a break from the weekend of wedding festivities to throw a reverse-double-surprise 50th/80th birthday party for my Aunt Ann (50) and Grandparents Kendall (80). Some months back, Mom had the idea of having a Roast for our grandparents. During the roast, we would tell stories about them that were both humorous and touching, and try to tell them some of the things that we all felt.

As a bit of background, my grandparents had seven children, all of whom have had at least 1 grandchild. So, we had more than 40 people at the party, all immediate family. We rented out a room at a local restaurant and arrived at 6:00. Cheryl had prepared a 10-minute slideshow of family photos dating back to the 1940s, and one of my Dad's cousins brought a wireless microphone system for people to use for their speeches.

After a delicious meal, and cake and presents for Aunt Ann, my Dad announced the 80th birthday surprise, of which my grandparents were completely unaware. After the slideshow, which they absolutely loved, Mom stood up and said a few words. She told a couple of stories from when she and Dad were courting (as they did back in those days), and then made her best attempt at telling Grandma and Grandpa how much they have meant to her--but choked up and had a hard time getting the words out. I think they knew what she meant.

Then, for the next two hours, from youngest to oldest, at least 20 grandchildren, children, and children-in-law stood up, came to the front, and offered something about Grandma and Grandpa. Most people told funny stories in combination with more serious ones. I can't describe how much laughter there was that evening, and how truly wonderful it was to see my grandparents respond to each of the speakers.

At the end of the night, which most of us had managed to get through without crying thanks to humor, my Grandpa turned to my Grandma and said something like this:

"You all have said a lot about me, but I just wanted to say that I would be nothing without this woman. As you all know, I had a tough childhood, and was a troubled teenager. The good things I've done as an adult have been because you are my moral compass. Every day I went to work, you provided me with a hot meal at night, and raise seven wonderful children."

He said more than that, but I don't remember the words exactly because nearly everyone--including myself--was fighting back tears at that point. Grandpa had choked up, something that I have never personally seen him do, which caught us all by surprise. The sincerity in his voice is what I'll remember the most, though. I have never heard words so honestly spoken.

The Wedding Day

My sister's wedding ceremony and reception were being held at my Grandparents' home. Their home, a log cabin, was built primarily by my parents and my Grandpa--with lots of help from other family and friends. Then, twenty years later, my brother and I, along with my cousin Erin, built a new log addition to the house to handle our now much larger family gatherings.

To say that the house has memories is a vast understatement. Despite being built after most of the kids were grown and off to school, nearly all of them lived there at some point. I even lived there for a summer while my parents built our house on the river. I spent some of my most defining childhood days working with Grandpa, as did all of his grandchildren who lived nearby.

The ceremony would held on their front porch, after walking down a wooden boardwalk that I had helped build when I was much younger, and had helped to re-build just last year. They would take their vows in the shade of a tree that I remember decorating most Christmases, until it grew too tall. That tree stood within 30 feet of the burial places of my two childhood dogs, TC and Penny. That very porch offered me countless hours of shade under a hot summer sun during construction of the addition. Their reception tent was set up in a hollow that until last year held the pool that I learned to swim in, behind the small outbuilding we lived in for four months in 1988. The caterers set up in front of a woodshed that once housed the logs for their wood-burning furnace. Many, many cords of which I had helped split.

I could go on, and on, but I can't really capture how much it meant to me for Cara to have her wedding there, to imbue a whole new set of shining memories into the soil of that place. The wedding was beautiful, and Cara looked so happy. The smile on her face when she said "I do" is still infectious when I think about it. The catering was delicious and the weather was fantastic.

The wedding started at 2:00, and we left at almost 10:00. I spent much of the day chasing Lydia around. She was in her element, with 100 people to greet, and little cousins (once removed) to play with. When her energy started to lag near 6:00, she had most of my ice cream and caught a serious second wind. But, after three days of partying in a row, she conked out 6 minutes after we left. Not only was Lydia fantastic and happy for all three of those days, she made our time there more fun. I was so happy to have her with us.

For Cara, Travis, and her friends, the party definitely did not end then. They were all camping out under and around the reception tent. They had a fire in the firepit, and game of washers (involving throwing large metal washers, creative name isn't it?) going strong, along with music and a resupply of beer after the first keg ran out. You know how the farewell party in Fellowship of the Ring was portrayed? That was a lot like Cara's wedding, just without the wizard, and the hobbit feet.

The next morning, Cara and Travis came over to my Mom's house to open gifts. We lazily went about the day, and took a trip to Bilbo's pizza for lunch. Finally, facing the prospect of heading home, we decided to stop by Dad's place on the lake for a few hours. It's on the windward side of a jewel of a lake, which positively sparkles in the afternoons. Lydia, Dad, and I played in the water a bit, and Cheryl, Lydia, and I took a short trip in the neighbor's paddle boat. Mostly though, we just relaxed and enjoyed the peaceful surroundings. Eventually, after not coming up with a good enough excuse to stay for the remainder of the week, we got in the car and headed home, Lydia sleeping softly the entire way.

In the past two weeks, there have been two tremendous tragedies--Cyclone Nargis and the Sichuan Earthquake. My response to both has been very different. Cyclone Nargis has so-far killed in excess of 100,000 people, making it one of the deadliest of all times. Yet I feel detached, and mostly anger if anything. Anger at the incompetence and corruption of Burma's military junta. But from the moment the Sichuan Earthquake was announced--at 5AM when my radio woke me up, it has affected me very deeply.

At first, until I could pull up the maps from USGS, I was worried for my Dad. At first, it was "Earthquake in China", but then, it became clear that an earthquake in Sichuan Province would have affected him little. I knew that he was in Hong Kong or thereabouts, more than 1000 km away. So, and especially after he called the next morning, I relaxed.

But, that same morning, I heard something on the radio. NPR's All Things Considered hosts Melissa Block and Robert Siegel were in Sichuan province, in the City of Chengdu, preparing for a weeklong series featuring the region to air next week. Melissa Block was in the middle of an interview when the earthquake struck. The audio recording is online here. That recording made the earthquake suddenly seem real to me.

And then, later that day, Melissa arrived at a middle school in Dujiangyan that had collapsed--when buildings around it stood unscathed. Her report that day was grief-stricken and anxious, yet hopeful, and reflected the mood of crowd of hundreds of parents and grandparents that watched as rescuers attempted to save their children. Listening to that report, I immediately pictured a 12-year old Lydia in that school. I couldn't help it. She was with me in the backseat in the parking lot at Family Video when I heard that story. I had to hug her and feel the warmth of life in her to assure myself that everything was okay.

But really, everything is not okay. The Sichuan earthquake has taken an indiscriminate toll on the Chinese population. But, because of lax enforcement of building codes during boom-times, children have been killed disproportionately.

Lydia is our only child so far. But, the children that died in that middle school by the hundreds were the only children of all of those parents. Two parents to every child. Four grandparents. Eight great-grandparents. Family trees in China are sharp-peaked inverted pyramids, tapering down to a single child. A single fragile human life represents the hopes for the future of so very many there.

Some, of course, could have another child. But others, many others, have lost their connection with the continuity of human existence irrevocably. It's one thing to make that choice deliberately. It's quite another to have made the opposite--to have created another life and invested so very, very much in that precious being--only to have your child taken away.

Melissa and Robert's reports have continued to shed light on this tragedy in a way I've never heard, but then maybe I'm really just listening for the first time. If you have some time, listen to this story as Melissa follows a couple who are frantically trying to get an excavator to their apartment to search for their 2-year old son and his grandparents. The story takes place over most of a day, and you can hear the vicious tide of emotion in Melissa's reports as the day goes on. And then, at the end, well I think you can guess. Their son is found, dead, in the arms of his grandfather--his Ye Ye--while his grandmother--his Nai Nai--clung to her husband's back.

Since we decided some weeks ago that we would probably move, either to Colorado (if that job is offered) or to Florida, my outlook on life has darkened considerably. While I'm excited for the new opportunities offered by those places, I am afraid of losing so much more. In the last couple of days, I've found myself suffering through vivid day dreams of getting calls in the night delivering terrible news, and worse.

I guess this stems first from the realization that, if I only come home 1-2 times per year, then I have probably no more than 10-15 more opportunities (once I move away) to see my grandparents again. This year, three out of four of my grandparents are turning 80, and there's too high a chance they won't be here at 90.

My grandparents are all tremendously important to me, but my Grandpa Kendall has been one of the most important people in my life. I feel like he is the person most like me on this planet, the one that understands who I am, and who I want to be.

It has been very hard to go from seeing him at least every few weeks to seeing him about 4-5 times per year as I do now. Especially in recent years, this has meant that I see him so infrequently that I can tell he's getting older. I am very, very afraid that if I leave in August, the next few times I come home will make that change seem more rapid. And with it, the distance that I am from my family will seem to grow ever greater.

I am extremely lucky, I know, to have experienced so few losses during my 27 years. With few, but still tragic, exceptions most of my closest family members are still alive and currently healthy. Perhaps because of that, I feel completely ill-prepared to handle the loss of a close family member.

My Grandpa Kendall told me, on the day that Aunt Sally died, that "the very fact that our grief for lost loved-ones is so intense means that we were given a wonderful gift by them in life." Our love for them is what makes their death so difficult to bear. But in remembering how comforting those words were to me on that day, I'm struck by how completely inadequate they would seem facing the loss of the very man who spoke them.

Without encouraging such thoughts, I've begun to imagine the loss of my family members when saying goodbye to them after visits. It seemed very unusual to me, but was not unnerving until Sunday when Cheryl and Lydia drove to Flint for Cheryl's cousin's wedding shower.

I stayed home to clean the house and work, and waved goodbye to them--blowing Lydia kisses and smushing my face up against the glass as she left. Within minutes, I was near tears from horrible visions involving car accidents that I nearly called Cheryl and asked her to come back and pick me up so at least I could be with them.

Several times this week, I've almost cried when seeing pictures of sick children in the news. On Tuesday I looked at a set of pictures from after we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and have since become mildly paranoid about nuclear war. Today I clicked on a story that seemed completely innocent, but turned out to be about how a woman lost her bright, happy, wonderful 7-month old to bacterial meningitis and then experienced terrible grief afterward.

That was what prompted me to write this entry, actually. It appears that I have an acute fear of loss, and I think that it's being aggravated by knowing that I may soon be moving 1000 miles away. Is this my mind trying to tell me that I'm making a terrible mistake by leaving? Or is this just a phase, something perhaps natural for people my age that are facing their first experiences with mortality?

Cheryl, Lydia and I spent all of last week in Florida visiting her parents at their condo south of Tampa Bay. They live about 5 minutes' drive from the beach, and the weather was 85, sunny, and relatively low humidity every day of our visit. We had a wonderful time on our trip, if you'd like to read about and see some of the things we did, visit Lydia's journal.

All week long, as I sat on the beach, sipped drinks by the pool, or even as I helped build a deck for my father-in-law, I thought about Gainesville vs. East Lansing. If I were not to be offered the Colorado School of Mines faculty position, which postdoc would I take? Over the past two months, Cheryl and I have discussed the ins and outs of the decision from nearly every angle. But, now having visited Florida twice in two months, I have a much better perspective on what living there would actually be like.

It would be like starting over.

Not only would we leave behind all of our remaining local friendships, nearly all of our family, and all of the professional contacts we've established over the last 9 years in East Lansing. We'd leave behind the place we both know: Michigan.

All of the local knowledge that we'd obtained would become stale and obsolete. Our familiarity with weather and temperature patterns would be lost. Our understanding of the local flora and fauna, and their behaviors, would be largely useless. No longer would the sound of August cicadas stir such deep and meaningful memories of the past. Instead, that sound, and the sound and sights of geese flying south in their V's, would become itself a memory.

I would lose my knowledge of the geography and geology of my home. I wouldn't know where to go in the state on a long weekend. I wouldn't know where people were from when they told me about the small town they grew up in. I wouldn't know the best way to get to a city across the state using old US highways. I couldn't look at a hill and tell you anything about why it was there, and how long ago it was formed. I couldn't see a tree and tell you something about what kind of soil it sits on.

Moving to Florida would leave me only three things of great importance: my wife, daughter, and the knowledge I bring with me. (Of course, my cats are important, but not in the same way, and neither are any of my possessions). With only those three things, can we somehow achieve a future that is more meaningful and better than the one that we might create here in Michigan?

In Florida, there are new opportunities for us. It's a chance for both of us to mature professionally. It's a chance for us to explore a new place, and discover our new environment along with our daughter. We can learn the backroads, discover the weekend vacation spots, and pull up Google Maps on our iPhones when we talk to the locals. In a few years, the weather and temperature patterns would seem normal. The trees with their spanish moss drapery would become our native flora. Best of all, perhaps, without winter we can enjoy our new place all year long.

Perhaps starting over wouldn't be that bad. It's not as if we'd truly be leaving Michigan behind. I suspect we'd come for long visits at least once a year. And of course, we can always make new friends, and still keep in touch with the ones we leave behind. As long as I am starting over with Cheryl and Lydia, I have a feeling that anywhere we choose to go will become our home just as completely as Michigan is to me right now.

Since I wrote a few entries back about job prospects, there has been only one major development. In November of last year, my advisor and I submitted a grant to fund a two-year postdoc position. The position was in some ways an extension of what I'm working on already, but involved some new and very significant research areas. We found out a few weeks ago that our proposal had been funded! Absent the offer from the University of Florida, which is a very generous one, this would have been wonderful news. It still is, I suppose, but now it presents a distinct conundrum.

If there were a distinct advantage in either place that somehow trumped the other, the decision would be simple. Since I have yet to hear back about any faculty position interviews, I have to assume that I will not be receiving any offers there. As it is, however, there are tradeoffs personally, professionally, and otherwise.

When facing a tough decision, advice is always welcome. So far, I've received advice from both of my potential postdoc advisors, numerous faculty, other students, both sets of parents, grandparents, and friends. Everyone has something to offer: a unique insight on the decision. But, when it comes to summarizing their thoughts, each offered a predictable response. Their recommendation was colored by their relationship with us, and their stake in the decision.

I've had a small amount of education, formal and otherwise, in the art of decision making. Faced with dozens of independent parameters, the decision maker must list them and apply weights to each item. If individual list items are capable of "trumping" others, then tiered-weighting systems should be employed to further improve the system. At each step, the decision to weight each item must be made independently of ones' initial inclination. Once complete, the degree to which each possibility satisfies the weighted criteria is determined, the weighted scores are calculated and a winner is declared! Ah, the beauty of objectivity.

The critical failing in all such systems is that the winner is nearly always the one initially favored. The weighting step is so heavily influenced by prior judgement that faced with an identical list--as have the many offerers of advice--no objective weighting could be determined. Nor, in this case, could Cheryl or I achieve the same set.

Even if such a system were both elegant and infallible, a life-altering decision is not one to be decided objectively. Subjective experience is the ultimate arbiter of our longterm happiness. We have each our independently-decided emotionally-influenced decision. Unfortunately, we decided differently. We've talked about our respective feelings, recognized our respective points, and failed to come to any sort of mutual conclusion.

For Cheryl and I, this is a new thing. We have been in accord on almost everything so far. To start, we liked each other; she agreed to marry me, then our wedding planning went flawlessly (and I actually had opinions), my grad school decision and Cheryl's teacher-education decision were mutually condoned, and Lydia has been the shining joy in our lives for almost a year now.

I don't know how this will be resolved, but I fear that serious misgivings will arise whatever decision is made. Maybe what's more important here is not the mere fact there there may be misgivings, but rather how those are dealt with. Whatever we choose, our lifestyle will require some rather dramatic changes if those are to be addressed. Neither of us is happy with everything about our lives.

Indeed, I've found that in talking about whether to go to Florida or stay here in Michigan, we are really talking more about our own failures to lead our lives together the way we want to. Of course, that only complicates matters because not only are we talking about a job and a move, we are talking about careers, working hours, spousal roles, number and timing of children, long-term ambitions, and deeper desires. There was a time some years ago when we both agreed on these issues, but that was before we had truly faced them.

Now everything is so very much different, and we are finding that in order to make this decision, we need to rediscover each other. And of course, we have to do it all after Lydia's bedtime.

This year, I made a New Year's resolution, actually Cheryl and I made it together. I've never made one before, not seriously at least, but I have made many--less ceremonious--resolutions in the past. There was that time back in 7th grade when I resolved to quit being such a jerk. And in 8th grade I resolved to quit lying so much when I tell stories. On the heels of those early successes come this: Cheryl and I resolved to consume less this year--much less.

I won't lie to you (see?), we've had some help in this year's resolution. We're really quite poor this year. Poor maybe not like a starving refugee is poor, more like how someone sealed in a time capsule for decades realizes when they come out of hibernation that they should have invested their savings rather than stuffing it under their mattress (damn you inflation!).

But, lack of money doesn't explain everything. For my birthday this year I asked for nothing. Specifically, I asked that people give me nothing. And it worked! Well, I got some summer clothes that I really truly needed from my parents and parents-in-law. I guess I didn't need them like a starving refugee needs clothes, more like how someone sealed in a time capsule for a decade needs clothes when they come out of hibernation.

Seriously, though, our resolution goes beyond that, too. We actually turn lights off now. We've turned the heat a degree-or-two lower for much of the winter. We take our recycling to a place 30 minutes away once a month that happily takes nearly everything we can collect. I haven't bought a book since Christmas, and we even stopped buying TV shows and music from iTunes. But wait, what's the waste there? Without those extra things in our lives, we get to spend more time with each other, and with Lydia (it helps that Bravo has a lineup of reality TV shows: Project Runway, America's Top Model, and Top Chef, that Cheryl really enjoys that come for free through our cheap cable).

In honor of World Water Day on March 22nd, I'd also like to say that I cut my shower times in half. I used to take 16 minute showers during which I would also shave. Now, I shave first--3 minutes shaved (haha). I stopped using hair conditioner, separate face wash and scrub because I don't really need them-- 3 minutes saved. And then, I just decided to take less time reveling in the hot water--2 minutes more. I still take relatively luxurious showers, I just use less water and less stuff, only natural soap and shampoo (which will be natural when our petrochemically-derived massive bottle runs out).

Oh, and I took what I thought was the most radical step of all. I stopped using commercial deodorant/antipersperant. I'd read for quite some time that baking soda works great. So, I tried it. A small dash of baking soda plus a drop or two of water is the best deodorant I've ever used. And it's practically free. I haven't had a single problem with it in almost three months.

Fundamentally, though, these are all just surface manifestations of deeper changes. I have been trying to reshape my mind around this core concept:

Most of the time, most of us just buy extra stuff to replace the loss of real substantive human interactions forced by our busy modern lifestyles.

Few of us get together with friends and family and haul along all of the crap we have in our everyday lives. I've even stopped bringing reading materials like books because frankly I'd rather talk to people I don't get to see nearly enough. I thought this idea was really well captured in a comic referred to me by one of my absolute favorite bloggers, No Impact Man.


Cartoon by Eric Lewis, courtesy of Cartoon Bank.