Archive for June, 2005
Retirement and Other Ramblins
Posted by smokingpen in Odds-n-Ends on June 30, 2005
I had the opportunity, and I use that word rather loosely, to go to Boston and the Logan International Airport last night. Andy, Debbie, and the girls flew home and were getting in after I got out of work. My part in that was as chauffer, the guy driving the car and making sure everyone arrived in once piece. Their role was to come home.
You don’t know what you miss, or grow used to not having, until it arrives. In this case before I even laid down for sleep last night one of the two girls started crying and screaming. Before we’d even crossed the border into New Hampshire they’d fallen asleep. The excitement of being home and having flown on a British Airways airplane fought off by fatigue and tiredness. They were, in effect, awake much later than they were normally allowed to be and this was almost as exciting as having been on a blue (it was actually white) airplane and flying, “…above the sky.” (Sarah)
However, having them home immediately poses some personal struggles for me. I have grown used to the quiet and solitude that living alone affords me. I have grown used to the ability to come and go and the distinct lack of responsibility that comes without having to worry about ‘little people’ or what I am saying and doing around them. There are other concerns that were revealed last night and this morning, expectations that were never set and yet, after repeated requests on my part for the expectations, seem to have me bound to them. I am bound to things, apparently, that I was not made aware of.
On top of that, as I was cleaning the house, the vacuum died on me. The fact that I was cleaning house before the Fam arrived seemed to surprise Debbie. Who wants to come home to a dirty home? I certainly don’t (and even though I now have additional information in regard to other changes, the advice to clean was good advice).
In truth, the outcome of having this additional information hasn’t really helped me in my quest for closure. I am planning on moving on. Moving back to Salt Lake City, back to Utah. I am planning on releasing myself from the responsibilities associated with what I have been doing here, and many of the relationships built over the past year, and starting up again in the West.
“Go west young man, haven’t you been told, California….” Yeah, I’m not heading to California. Been there, done that.
What I think I am announcing, though, as I want to announce something, is that I am retiring from Technical Writing. I don’t like it anymore. I am not exactly certain that I ever liked technical writing. There is a part of me that says yes, but that part is really quiet and not very direct; there’s a larger part of me that says “no” and means that I was fooling myself into believing I liked it because I love writing. The truth of the matter is that I will probably store that idea on a shelf for a while and see what time does to it. Did I like technical writing? Or was I seduced by the money.
That is one thing I can say about living on the east coast for a year: clarity. The east coast isn’t necessarily the predecessor to clarity, but I have received some interesting impressions and had some personal beliefs changed as a result of my being here, now. Friendships have changed. Relationships have changed. Directions and goals have changed. In short, I have changed because change is a part of the human, life experience. We must always be in a state of flux or change and adapting to new environments, begetting new ideas, understanding new people and new places. We must grow as a result of our experiences and if we haven’t grown then what were we doing in the first place? What was I doing out here?
On an almost related side note: I finally got the credit report fixed to the point where it looks as though my ability to get the student aide to help pay for the semester of school I almost attended (last spring) for more than a month paid off and credit card companies are now sending me pre-approved applications for a new credit card. I haven’t had that experience for a very long time and am not sure what to think or do about it. Part of me believes that I need to have a credit card and begin using it wisely to help build up the credit score, and part of me screams to run in the opposite direction as fast as possible. At the very least it should be interesting to see which side wins.
That’s it for now. Y’all have a good day, y’hear?
Team Armstrong
Posted by smokingpen in General Essays on June 27, 2005
The Tour De France starts this Saturday. People wonder what sports I follow, and to tell the truth, I don’t follow too many of them. I find it personally difficult to sit through an entire sporting event. I just don’t imagine over-paid men and boys beating the crap out of each other as worthwhile entertainment. To me it’s not enjoyable. I don’t like it.
With that said I do enjoy volleyball and I do enjoy cycling. I will pretty much play volleyball almost anytime the people around me suggest they want to play (as long as there are enough players for a couple of teams) and I have grown far more interested in cycling over the years. Not to the extent that my dad was back in the sixties, but I am pretty interested in cycling and am further interested in acquiring a road bike for use in the evenings and over the weekends.
However, the Tour starts this week. It goes from July 2nd through July 24th and will cover a couple thousand kilometers throughout France. I’m excited for this.
Some people want Lance Armstrong to stop winning tours. There are people around the world who claim he isn’t a world class cyclist. He is a world class cyclist. The problem with the rest of the world is America. It’s the United States. We are this little nation out in the middle of nowhere, okay we separate the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, but at the same time our football is the rest of the worlds soccer. Soccer here is a sport that is a second class sport, football is a lot like rugby, for whimps, and cycling wasn’t popular, in this country, until Lance Armstrong came on the scene.
I was reading Outside Magazine today and they have an article an up and coming cyclist, Craig Lewis. This kid has many of the same attributes and traits that Lance Armstrong was showing at the same age, the same energy output, and the same potential. This kid was hit, during a Tour De Georgia race head on by a geriatric driving an SUV. All he could think about was getting back on the bike and in the end the pain of training, the pain of riding was nothing compared to the pain of multiple fractures, lacerations, cracked and broken ribs, broken bones, vertebrae, and other body parts. This kid is an up and comer.
The Tour starts Saturday. Granted, I will spend most of the Tour at work, occasionally checking in as call volume allows, and rooting for Team Discovery. Go Lance.
Keggers and the Things We Say and Do
Posted by smokingpen in Odds-n-Ends on June 26, 2005
Truth be told, I’m a lush. Okay, I’m not really a lush and I’ve never had even the hint of a drop of liquor, but the other day, yesterday, I went to my very first kegger. For those of you who don’t know what a kegger is, basically, it’s when someone buys at least one keg of beer and everyone donates a percentage of money toward the bottom line, while everyone drinks to excess, gets drunk, and starts to do things that, normally, they wouldn’t do.
After the kegger I went to a bookstore, talked to a couple of different people (on the phone) and acquired one more movie that I am going to have to review, eventually, Vertigo. I watched Vertigo last night. Stars James Stewart and follows him, as an ex-police detective, as he is hired to follow a friend’s wife (to whom he falls in love).
As I was watching Vertigo I started looking at different websites and something occurred to me. Sometimes the things we say and do, whether intentional or not, have an effect on the people around us. I don’t really think that the things I say or the words that come from my fingers or out of my mouth will have any lasting or noteworthy affect on those to whom they are directed. And yet, as I spoke to friends in Utah updating them with my life, and surfed different websites I occasion, I am discovering that some of the things that I have done or will do with my life influence other peoples life.
One of the most noteworthy things that have been shared with me was a Sunday School class I started back in Layton, UT. That class was designed to teach the students how to interact with potential, future, spouses. I’d figured that the class would be a one-time thing that would go the way of the wildebeest (I apparently like using wildebeests as an example) after I left. The thing is, it didn’t. Not only is that ward still using that class, but they’ve moved it in the direction I’d set up when I was there. I had suggestions that, for various reasons, couldn’t be acted upon. Apparently, they are now in effect.
Regardless, I am amazed at how something I could do would influence someone else – and hopefully for the better. What we say can affect someone. What we do can affect someone. We affect the people around us whether we realize it or not. The responsibility can be heady.
Review – Blowing My Cover by Lindsey Moran
Posted by smokingpen in book reviews on June 26, 2005
Okay.
So, I finished reading Blowing My Cover by Lindsey Moran. I really liked this book. It did two things for me. The first was to realize that my personality is conducive with the personality that is necessary to succeed with the CIA. Second, that the CIA has problems that are so deeply rooted that it will probably take years and the destruction of the CIA – as an Intelligence body – before those problems are taken care of.
Basically, Lindsey grew up wanting to work for the CIA. Her father worked as a Naval Architect and, like many of our fathers who worked for Uncle Sam, really couldn’t talk about the work he’d done. Therefore, as a child you begin to wonder if your father actually worked for the CIA or the FBI or some other organization that specialized in subterfuge. In my case I actually wondered if dad worked for the FBI mostly because I knew that he stayed stateside, we stayed stateside, and the description it seemed we were given to tell people about what he did was, “Federal Agent”. As we got older that meant that he did things, “… like the FBI.”
Most people would say, “So your dad’s with the FBI,” and instead of using all of the acronyms to describe what organization and investigative authority he worked through my reply would be, “Something like that.”
Anyway, as the book begins it drew me into the similarities between my experiences and the Lindsey Moran’s experience. We both grew up wanting to be like what we thought our dads were. We wanted to grow up to enter the CIA.
Like me Lindsey has gone through life jumping from one choice to another. She’s studied at various prestigious universities and taught English in Bulgaria and writing in San Francisco and ended up, before entering the CIA, as a Fulbright Scholar back in Bulgaria. Lindsey gives me the impression that she has a flakey side to her that was, in part, put in line when she entered the CIA, went through all of the training, and eventually had to live under a pretty strict regime of intelligence and paranoia before realizing that what was important to her wasn’t what was important to her employer.
The process of becoming a spy begins when you decide you want to work for the CIA. In her case that happened a couple of times. The first was right out of college (Harvard) and then again five years or so later when she felt that this was her way of giving a part of her life to public service – like serving in the armed forces. She took the Fulbright scholarship, got offered a job with the CIA, and spent time at The Farm learning how to be a traditional spy complete with dead drops and learning how to detect and evade tails and shadows.
Most of the book actually deals with her experiences going through CIA training. Most of her experience, with the CIA, seems to be at The Farm where she developed relationships and excelled at most things. Driving was one exception. She did not excel at the driving course.
The book begins with her trying to get in, continues through her experiences, and then spends the last quarter to a third with her experiences in Macedonia where she worked as a case officer and had taken over several informants that, we are told, were useless and that the CIA paid a lot of money to maintain. As the book moves toward its conclusion September 11, 2001 happened and Lindsey Moran began to wonder whether or not what she was doing was even useful. To answer this question she begins to talk about the experiences she had with the natives of Macedonia and the contacts she was developing for the CIA that had ties to terrorist cells and Al Qaeda. When she began the development process with these potential spies she was informed, from Washington, that she needed to cease and desist contact with them because they had ties to terrorists.
That’s the problem. That was her problem with the CIA. The very people they are trying to protect were let down on September 11, 2001 and continued to be let down afterward because the old boys who had created and run the CIA wouldn’t change their modus operandi enough to take into account the idea that we needed people with ties to terrorists in order to determine what was being planned in the terrorist communities and among the individual cells.
Lindsey Moran also talks about the final experiences with the CIA, her finishing up her work there, her decision to quit, and her meeting and eventually marrying her husband James. In the end, she discovers that what is really important to her, what she needs to be doing with her life, isn’t what she’s been doing.
This is a really good book. At the same time this book shares some of the details regarding what happens once you get into the CIA and what takes place once you are inside, the training involved, and finally what it means to be a spy.
Being a spy isn’t what it’s like in fiction or in the movies. It takes a lot of effort, it deals a lot with staying out late, drinking a lot of alcohol and spending time with people who are somewhat seedy or really seedy, who are trying to make a fast buck, who have nothing to offer but are desperate enough to make you think they do. Being a CIA case officer is not what the James Bonds or the Sams of the world make them out to be.
If you’ve ever been curious to know more about the guts of the United States intelligence community or thought about being a spy then this is the book for you. If you just want a good read then you should pick this book up. It doesn’t take a lot of time and Lindsey Moran is a talented writer whose views and expression of those views help make what she is writing about intriguing and interesting.
Side Notes
Posted by smokingpen in Odds-n-Ends on June 25, 2005
One side note.
For those who choose not to listen when I speak of my blog it is their own fault and not the fault of the person who has spoken about it, rather openly, in the past. For those who feel they are not talked about enough the responsibility of working on a relationship requires multiples parties to be engaged in the work. I can only do so much and please remember that SW-C is about me. People will also note that I do not talk about numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, or 6 or the parentals either. Number 1 has recently updated his site. Number 6 hasn’t updated his site in a while. If other siblings decide to own and maintain a website I would add links from mine to theirs. That goes for friends as well. However, as I seem to be one of only a handful of people that I know who keeps a regular presence on the web, discovering siblings websites doesn’t seem too likely to me.
Spy Me Simple
Posted by smokingpen in Odds-n-Ends on June 25, 2005
Today is Saturday. I slept in. I like sleeping in, it feels good. All week I’ve felt bad, sick even, and sleeping in helps me to feel better.
I finished Blowing My Cover by Lindsay Moran. It was really good. I will review it in more detail later. I am supposed to go to a party that one of my co-workers is throwing. I’m, at the moment, up in the air about it even though I said I would go.
I got and watched, this week, D.E.B.S. and About a Boy. I am still waiting on some other movies that I’ve ordered: The Man Who Knew Too Little and Band of Brothers. I will review the two movies this week, Oceans 11, Oceans 12, National Treasure, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. I’ve actually got a couple of other Hitchcock films I want to review as well.
You will also note, I hope, that the Currently Reading book has also changed. I am moving on to Sisters by Robert Littell. Yes, I just finished a book about the CIA and one woman’s experience as a case officer; and yes, I am moving on to reading about fictional spy’s and espionage; and yes, several of the movies I’ve been watching of late deal with that; so, it makes sense to assume that I am on some cerebral spy kick.
On to Maypoles
Posted by smokingpen in Odds-n-Ends on June 23, 2005
I planted the beans this evening. After I went for a walk I planted the beans. Debbie e-mailed me to verify some information and to tell me they are coming home on Tuesday. I can recall being told that they were coming back on July 3rd. So, I will see them on Tuesday after work and the beans are planted about a month late. So is the corn. My mind, for some reason, is drawn to the Maypoles.
Maypoles are tall poles that were part of various village festivals. They consisted of men and women, really boys and girls, walking around in circles, the boys in one direction and the girls in the other, as they weaved in and out of each other. As I recall, the weaving was optional. In the end the pole was completely wrapped in ribbon or cloth in a semi intricate pattern as the circle of boys and girls grew smaller and smaller.
I don’t honestly know why the two topics are combined in my mind. They don’t really fit together or than planting and knowing that Maypoles were generally celebrated in… get this… May. May is when you are supposed to plant. Andy started planting in May. But, at the same time, I am certain that Maypoles and planting crops have very little or nothing to do with each other.
It could just be that I am stuck on obscure things and as I have worked the garden (and not very hard) that my mind needed some kind of distraction and that’s where it found itself. Maypoles.
I have not sat down to write any reviews. In truth (I’m gonna share something here) I’m lazy about some things. I want to write the reviews but they don’t take a high priority. Can I tell you that I really liked the Hitchcock films I’ve watched lately and I enjoyed the Ocean’s movie and thought that National Treasure was totally worth watching. At the same time, I haven’t watched About a Boy or anything else in a few days – though I did spend some time last night reading Blowing My Cover. At that, I have been catching snippets of that book any time that I can. I’m finding the descriptions of The Farm interesting.
Yo Quero
Posted by smokingpen in Odds-n-Ends on June 22, 2005
Okay. Quick update.
No. This is not a review of one of the movies I’ve acquired and watched recently. I forgot that I was taking the missionaries out to eat at Taco Bell (sic). Apparently Taco Bell is a real treat to Mormon Missionaries and that’s generally where we go when it’s my turn to treat for dinner. So, that cuts into my evening because it takes twenty minutes to go up that way, twenty minutes back, whatever time it takes to eat, and another forty minute round trip once they are ready to go home.
Now that I am home I am tired.
I did change, this evening, the CD in my car. It’s now Madeleine Peyroux. She has a wickedly seductive voice. I also got, in the mail today, the DVD About A Boy starring Hugh Grant.