mikeShriver

I have been keeping this journal poorly so far on this trip. Now that I have a chance to sit in a B.A. Cafe, a few moments, I will scribble a few words. The basic overview of the last few days goes thus:

Three nights in a Mendoza hostel, we managed many cafe hours, a winery tour by bicycle, a directionless walk in an endless park, and countless conversations with strangers that never seem to go anywhere.

The days in Mendoza felt different from most of the other international trips I have taken so far. They were more relaxed, for certain, than the days I spent in India. Probably a lot of it has to do with hostel culture- which is inherently laid-back and friendly.

Since coming to Buenos Aires, though, it has gotten more frantic. There is much to see here, and so far we have spent much of our time walking or riding the bus.

Yesterday we stumbled upon a passover festival in Palermo, the neighborhood where Cash and Kristen’s apartment is located. There was a live demonstration of B.A.’s prominent street artists. B.A. is known for its street art scene, and I am going to try to take a tour of the street art here on Wednesday.

I realized in my last entry that I was boring myself, so I stopped writing. Since then I have found it difficult to pick my pen back up, and my journal has thinned out.

Tags: South America, Travel Journal.

Joe’s parents opened up their house and his mom made us a corned beef meal. Here I slept in the most comfortable bed of this trip so far.

Joe’s friend from high school threw a birthday party and it ended up being a lot less of a drunk fest than I was anticipating. We drank homebrews, talked food and gardening and completely blew my initial perception of Joe’s hometown friends into another plane.

Sunday was a day of close deadlines. we missed one Metra train into the city and that put me in a rush to catch my flight. I ended up alone halfway across town with 2 hours to my flight and only a vague working knowledge of the Chicago transit system. With a nearly constant sprint, I ended up making the flight with a few minutes to spare.

Once in Mexico City, I found that my connecting flight was delayed 7 hours and had to spend an uncomfortable night in that airport. I arrived in Buenos Aires after dark, and got a very limited idea of what the looked like only from the shuttle that took me from the airport. When I arrived at the shuttle terminal, I was immediately rushed to the bus terminal where Cash, Kristen and I boarded a 14 hour bus to the Argentine city of Mendoza.

Argentina is a beautiful country. It is more laid back, less hectic than India was. It is nearing Autumn here, and the weather is temperate and pleasant, with lot’s of sun. Once our bus had reached Mendoza in the morning, we settled into our hostel and spent a nice lazy day wandering the city square, drinking coffee and hanging around in the lovely cafes here.

Tags: South America, Travel Journal.

Yesterday we purchased used bikes and we have spent the last few days cycling around the fictional city of Chicago. It’s great to be on a bike, I’ve got to get as much quality cycle time in as I can before the 5 week bicycle famine of South America.

The weather has been unseasonably warm here. The last few days and today made it up into the 60’s, perfect for leisurely two-wheel tours of the city. So far we have hit a few of the major tourist spots, and Today we took the yellow line out to Skokee to check out a violin making school that Joe is interested in attending.

Cornelius’ sister lives in an apartment int he shadow of Wrigley field, directly on the Brown line. L trains roll directly past the windows all night long, casting every shifting geometric shapes on the plaster walls. It’s like something of a great American working-man’s play.

St. Patty’s day was relatively mild. We did get some green beer, but the expected partying never materializes as the major celebrations this city is famous for happened last weekend, just before my arrival here. The streets in this area contain a large number of Irish bars, though, and the streets at night have been pretty rowdy. Usually this happens after we have turned into bed, and is mostly drowned out by the trains.

Tags: South America, Travel Journal.

Joe got in today. We spent a few hours in old town. I picked up a chai spice mix, walked to the Ukrainian village section of town for dinner/lunch.

Tags: South America, Travel Journal.

The first leg of my trip is domestic. I fly to Chicago to spend a week in that city in celebration of St Patty’s day. This portion has been planned for several months, since Cornelius and Shauna left Seattle late last year.

I’ll meet with them today and stay the week at Cornelius’ Sister’s flat in Wrigleyville. I haven’t seen either of them for several months and I expect to spend most of this week in a drunken haze. Joseph Arrives tomorrow, and will serve as my party tour guide for the week. I expect there is no preparing for this.

I don’t feel as if I am traveling internationally and this leaves me worrying about whether I should feel more unprepared for the Journey ahead. It’s also my first time traveling semi-solo. I feel as if I don’t yet know what I am missing for this trip. I’m also starting to think that is a normal part of traveling.

Tags: South America, Travel Journal.

I have a lot of respect for crafty people. I like the kind of people who own sewing machines, or buy darkroom chemicals from ebay; the kind of people who hammer old silverware into jewelry, and paint; and who make music, and make musical instruments, and fix everything first before buying new. I’ve never considered myself all that crafty. In fact, I kind of write myself off as being too lazy to really get into something long enough to really learn it.

A friend mentioned that she is taking a cheesemaking course from WSU, recently. This is strange, and awesome and made me want to try to learn my own craft. I’ve had an idea that I wanted to try homebrewing for a few years, now, and I think that comment gave me just enough of a kick to try it out. I nabbed an old kit from craigslist for fifty bucks, got the ingredients a week later, and brewed everything up last weekend:

This is what beer started out as: Malt extract, specialty grains, hops, and yeast (that white package is actually corn sugar used when bottling. Just pretend it’s yeast, and let’s move on).

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Tags: Beer, Hobbies, Homebrewing.

Some more of those “I thought that shit only happened on the internet” times:

Living in a house of eight unrelated people is always going to be an adventure. Keeping common areas clean and resolving conflict when they aren’t gets overwhelming. Everyone falls on a spectrum that seems to range from being unconcerned with a few dirty dishes, but stressed by indirect confrontation about mess, to those who can’t stand the mess, and have no direct way of communicating their discomfort.

In my current house reside eight people that had never met before the current housing situation. Previously, I have always lived in houses with friends, and while the dish situation was rarely better in those houses, communication was better, and so conflicts tended to raise to the surface faster, as opposed to boiling unnoticed until someone moves out.

Probably the best situation I lived in had 5 guys in one space, but we regularly shared meals together. In fact, we made it a point to have a dinner with just the ‘family’ once a week where we shut out the rest of the world and enjoyed each other’s company. Seeing each other regularly led to complaints about cleanliness problems coming out in normal conversation. They weren’t kept inside until agreed upon times. It also prevented dreaded ‘house meetings,’ which amount to times specifically scheduled for complaints. We looked forward to weekly dinners, no one dreaded our house get togethers.

The kitchen sink seems to bear the brunt of the cleanliness complaints everywhere I’ve lived. Anyone with workable ideas about how to manage sink cleanliness and avoid the associated negative communication needs to write a damn book. I am completely out of ideas.

Our house whiteboard has become the de facto forum for airing complaints:

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Tags: Eastern House, Roommates, Whiteboard.

…A man who can still find awe in the bigness of things.

On Mission India and the Size of the Universe

During our conversations, you expressed a rare wonder at the expanse of the universe. My whole life I have been confronted by astronomical charts, and the enormity of the universe has become familiar idea. After I got back from my trip to India, I looked up some information about out place in the universe, and I think you might be interested in some facts I have taken for granted. This stuff always amazes me when I stop to think about it.

A few years back, an astronomer with some spare time on his hands took the most powerful telescope that we have available to us, The Hubble Space Telescope, and pointed it at a completely black patch of the night sky. He was curious about what he would be able to see if he left it focused on the blackness of space, and the image he came up with is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field:

It is an incredibly striking image by itself, but just seeing it doesn’t really reveal all of its implications. To fully understand it, you need some background information. The relative sizes of the objects in our galaxy can provide a good starting point.

First, our own home. The earth is about 40,000km around at the equator. I know you fly halfway around the world with regularity, and so you have an easy reference point for the size of the blue marble (the flight from Chicago to Mumbai is 12,978 km, and about 16 hours).

In comparison, the Moon is 10,921km in circumference, and about 3,475km through the middle. That is about the distance from the top of India to it’s southmost point in Tamil Nadu. The moon orbits at a distance of about 405,700km. If you were travelling the same speed as that Mumbai-bound jumbo jet, it would take you about three weeks to arrive at the Moon.

The Sun is about 100 times the diameter of the earth and is 152 million km away, which would take you 21 years to reach in your airplane.

Here is where things get really big. We are out of the range of kilometers, and have to switch to a larger unit, the lightyear. One lightyear is defined as the distance that light travels in a single year, and it is approximately 9,461,000,000,000 (nine and a half trillion) km. Which is a way bigger number than I can even comprehend. In comparison, it takes the light from the Sun only 8 minutes to travel the distance from the Sun to the Earth. It takes that same light about 6 hours to get to Pluto, at the edge of our little solar system.

Our sun is one of about 100 billion stars that make up the Galaxy we reside in, known as the Milky Way. The Milky Way is shaped like a flat disk of two outwardly spiraling arms. The disk is about 100,000 lightyears across, and about 1,000 lightyears thick. The closest star in the Milky Way to our sun is 4 lightyears away, a distance that is practically impossible for humans to cross. We will likely never even travel outside our own little solar system, past Pluto.

I have to admit that I have a hard time visualizing the distances that I’ve described so far, because they are so vastly outside my range of experience.

Now, go back and look at the first image. The original of this image is pretty large, but it covers a small portion of the sky. If you walked outside under a full moon and looked up, this image would cover a patch of sky about 1/10th of the size of the moon. The image is so small, it would take 13 million of them to cover the entire sky. There are no single stars in the image. Every single speck in the image is a galaxy like our own Milky Way. That means that thousands of galaxies fit into that tiny little speck in the night sky.

The first time I saw that image was a moment of epiphany for me. I can’t fathom the sheer insignificance that even our own unfathomably huge galaxy commands in the universe, not to mention our own tiny planet.

I hope that this information is interesting to you. It certainly has made me wonder at the enormity of everything. My understanding of it all is pretty limited, but feel free to ask me any questions you have, and I will answer them to the best of my knowledge.

–Mike

Note:  A full version of the Hubble UDF image can be found here:

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2004/07/image/a/

Tags: astronomy, epiphany, rimi, saji, universe.

The vending machine ripped me off today. It alarms me how much this bothered me. I don’t normally buy from machines, but today, I was especially hungry, and therefore desperate. One dollar in, my selection made, but my delicious corn-based onion-themed snack remained lodged in the silver maw of commerce. I had to have this, so I broke a five at the coffee stand and threw more money at the problem, in order to push my previous bag within my ever-desperate reach. Of course, the second bag stuck, as well, and my impotent anger grew.

I gave up on the endeavor, the last the I wanted was 3 bags of Funyuns. Fuck, I didn’t really even want the first bag, it just seemed like the most appealing thing in there at the time. So, now I am out 2 dollars for 2 bags of shit snack-food that I didn’t want in the first place. And, I’m still hungry.

I call the number listed on the machine, and hang up as soon as the phone is answered. To my surprise a living human picked up the phone, and the last thing I want to do is interact with a human being. A machine was good enough to rip me off, can’t a machine be good enough to recompense me?

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I have recently applied for a job at my Alma Mater. Being a Christian affiliated university, there are certain faith requirements for prospective employees, and probing questions that must be answered upon application, prompting (for the first time, really) to actually try to articulate my position on faith. I’ll include the actual essays below.

Note: I have already been notified that I didn’t get the position I applied for. This probably had more to do with the current economic troubles the school is facing than the essays below.

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Tags: christianity, church, employment, faith, SPU.