Airplane!

Just the other day, a friend shot some video of his flight landing at a major US airport. The footage was spectacular, stunning, awe-inspiring and outright beautiful. The video was enhanced by his addition of wonderful, exciting music; something famous, I think. He put his artistic endeavor on his Facebook page and shared it with the world (or, at least people who are linked in as his FB buds). I watched his video and sighed - it was truly magical. Alas, when the screen showed his 'out the window' view of the planes very final descent, I had to look away - my stomach knotted, I began to perspire and I had an insane desire to run out of the room. Yes, you know my dirty secret - I am afraid of flying (Hah! That's putting it mildly!). And, it is TOTALLY a control thing with me. For years, I flew in tiny, laughably small planes, swooping over vast expanses of the southeastern US for my work. As long as I could reach over the pilot's shoulder and take charge of the aircraft at a seconds notice, I was fine. See, in my head, as long as I was watching the pilot and approving their every move, we were good. Case in point: Once, I was passenger in a puddle jumper that STALLED IN MID-FLIGHT. Did I panic when the dash light emblazoned with ENGINE STALL WARNING flashed on and off? Which I could plainly see because I was less than 2 feet away? Did the excruciatingly loud buzzer alerting us that the engine had stalled cause me duress? You betcha. But, I knew I could 'will' the pilot into fixing the situation, or 'yell' the pilot into fixing the situation, or if needed, SMACK the pilot 'upside his head' to get the situation fixed. And, if none of that worked, I could ruthlessly shove the pilot out from behind the controls, and I could take over; restart the engine and safely fly us to our destination. (cue applause: Yippee... Penny has once again saved the day!) Do I know how to fly even the least sophisticated airplane? Absolutely not. Hell, I can't even fly a kite. But you see, that's how I know I have control issues. Because if I am in a small plane, I'm okay. Whereas, if I am a passenger on a large jet, where I can not even SEE the pilot, much less SMACK them if they begin to screw up, I am seriously a mess. So, I don't know how to fix my control issue, but it's pretty bad and getting worse. The other day, my girlfriend was driving us to a restaurant for lunch and she took a wrong turn. It was all I could do to stop myself from smacking her 'upside the head'.

Water, Water Everywhere...

Today is "Blog Action Day 2010". On this day, bloggers everywhere have committed to dedicating their posts to a designated topic we all voted on to discuss. This years topic is "Clean Water", as in billions of people in our world do not have access to water which is safe to drink. Unsafe drinking water and lack of sanitation kills more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Unclean drinking water can incubate some pretty scary diseases, like E. coli, salmonella, cholera and hepatitis A, way worse stuff than what really bad cooking can do. Given that bouquet of bacteria, it's no surprise that water, or rather lack thereof, causes 42,000 deaths each week. So, this a pretty serious issue. The average American uses 159 gallons of water every day – more than 15 times the average person in the developing world. From showering and washing our hands to watering our lawns and washing our cars, Americans use a lot of water. To put things into perspective, the average five-minute shower will use about 10 gallons of water. I personally have NEVER taken a five minute shower, I am somewhat ashamed to admit - mine are generally 25+ minutes. But imagine stretching a measley 10 gallons of water to do all that we 'need' to do!

When you consider more than 40% of our country's rivers are too polluted to SWIM in, or support aquatic life, and 45% of our lakes are in the same condition, and that even now, wetlands are still being destroyed at an alarming rate, it's pretty amazing that we have ANY clean drinking water. But there is enormous cost to render water safe enough to drink. It is estimated that worldwide, pollution of the worlds waters costs the global economy over 12.8 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR! That's a lot of coin, no matter where you're from. Imagine what good could come from using that 12.8 billion for health and human welfare programs. If you want to know how you can help, visit water.org or follow their links for more in depth stuff. Or, for a really cool bit of technology for the environmentally conscious, you can download an iphone application which will allow you to calculate the 'water footprint' of your favorite foods at http://virtualwater.eu/ . I know this is a big departure from what I usually have to say here and I really appreciate you taking the time to read this. So now, I am going to get a big tall glass of water and reflect on how lucky I am that I can just open a tap to get some!

Rock and Roll

So over the summer I went to a concert up in Charleston, SC. I went to see Boz Scaggs. Now Boz Scaggs was never what you would call rock and roll, he's more like jazzy light pop sort of stuff. And now that he is in his advanced years, his music style is even more apparent. Which was good, because just about everyone in the audience was old. I don't mean old like me...I mean OLD! Now old doesn't usually equate to bad or undesirable, but related to "rock" concerts, it does. Here's how: The venue was all wrong. It was all plush and clean...there were cushioned seats that still had the padding intact and the place didn't smell like stale beer, cigarettes, pot or come to think of it, it didn't smell like anything yucky. I am not particularly fond of yucky smells, but they do have a place in a concert hall. In this arena, I felt I could not stand on the seats, drink beer, smoke or do anything I associate with typical rock concert behavior. I sat down in my seat for most of the performance, rising to my feet in enthusiastic and irrepressible bursts of rebellion sporadically throughout the show. At these times, I was corrected by my elders in the seats behind me with "Down in front!" and some outright mean sounding "You. You sit down...now!" Catering to the comfort of the audience, specifically old people, is a Bad thing for a concert. So then there was the concessions. Concerts used to maybe sell beer and a few junky type snack foods, but most of us would go to a concert with full flasks and refills at the ready in the pockets of a jacket for the liquid libation (which is all we ever seemed to need in those days). At this show, the concessions sold not only beer, but wine as well, and, they sold more than ONE TYPE of each! I could have also purchased a mixed drink or, get this, one of those 'frou-frou' drinks like a daiquiri, complete with little PAPER UMBRELLA! I mean, what the heck were the promoters thinking? Most concerts I have been to would never have given out the little umbrellas because they are on a stick, which when hurtled across a concert arena would likely start a toothpick war, and cause at least one very drunk person to stick someone or be stuck badly enough to have to be removed from the show. So again, undesirable catering to old people. I think the final downer of the night was the man a few seats down who scolded me with, and I am quoting here, "I didn't spend a hundred bucks a seat to hear YOU go 'woooooooo' and whistle all night, now shut the hell up and listen to the guy on stage." Verbally spanked at a concert by a man old enough to be my...well, my PEER! Sheesh.

Interview

So, I am hot on the trail of a job. It's a good job - I don't have to know anything about fondue or soccer schedules or laundry soap or when it is necessary to change the vacuum cleaner bag to avoid potential personal injury due to the bag exploding because the dirt from oh, I don't know @2008 has mutated in there and wants out... I interviewed for the position about 6 weeks ago, and it went very well. The secret to my success? Exhaustion. I was unable to sleep the night before the interview, so I was very tired and therefore, totally relaxed during the meeting. I was so relaxed that I said some things, such as "Well, I'm pretty smart, ya know - I could figure that out" and "Well, it's important you pick the correct person to fill this position, because you'll be stuck with them for awhile." I cringe even now. I also shudder at the recollection of how I dressed for the interview. As some of you may remember, my wardrobe is pretty much non-existent unless it involves being on a boat or a beach. I wore my one and only nice white shirt (I even busted out the iron) which still fit okay and seems to have held up to its long solstice in the closet with minimal yellowing, and a pair of brown pants I purchased recently to wear to a funeral. The shoes were another matter. I tried my boat shoes but that looked pretty bad. Then, I tried a sort of new pair of tinnies which were still white and mostly clean. They gave me the appearance of an AWOL nurse. Digging way back into the recesses of a closet, I found a pair of brown sandals, that once I cleaned the dust bunnies from seemed to look okay. Stylish? Definitely not, but functional? Absolutely. So, considering how cocky and badly dressed I was for the interview, I figure I should be hearing about the job any day now!

No Backsies

When I was growing up, all us kids had a 'No Backsies' rule. No backsies was just that - if you gave or traded something, you couldn't get it back no matter what, and if you got something, you hung onto it until you were ready to part with it. No backsies was a very convenient rule to live by, mostly because it gave us a way to get rid of unwanted stuff, with no threat of it returning to us unasked for. No backsies was almost as convenient as the 'Do Over'. The Do Over was invoked when you messed something up and needed another shot at it to get it right. It was particularly useful in stick ball or jump rope or other street sports. The bad thing about the Do Over, though, is that it doesn't have as much of a place in the grown up world. For example...Yelling "Do Over" when pulled by the traffic police does not have any impact on the size of the speeding ticket you get. In fact, doing so might cause the officer to invoke the 'No Backsies' rule with the driver's license you handed over to them. Another time the Do Over rule is never useful is when parenting children. If you have foolishly said in the hearing of children how obnoxious Aunt Jane is, or that Sue really should not be wearing shorts with that skin issue she has...the children will never honor the Do Over. They will not let you live it down and will in fact, share your outspoken thoughts with anyone and everyone sufficient to cause maximum embarrassment and shame. Then of course, when you voice the ultimate Do Over threat to them - "I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it", they smugly reply "No Backsies".