Absolute Magnitude

I know I haven't written in a few weeks. While I am not sure if my three followers noticed my absence, I missed my own absence. I am actually writing this as a text file because I am currently somewhere over Canada, about to cross from Quebec airspace into Ontario airspace on my way in to Chicago O'Hare airport. More on this epic journey in a moment.

Last night, I spent a sleepless night in the InterCityHotel at the Frankfurt Airport. I stayed up all night (not really by choice) thinking of things that I wanted to write about. I have probably forgotten most of it by now since I've been awake for over 30 hours so far. But there are a few items that I do remember.

Billy's blog, especially when it involves people that I've known for almost 20 years, reminds me of things that would normally be filed neatly away in the memory banks. I want to talk a little bit about my senior year Government/Economics class taught by (1) Mrs. Salzman (or Mrs. Mosckowitz, as we first knew her). This all occured 9-10 years ago, so a lot of my memories sometimes feel as though they may as well be dreams that I had once, and tend to blur together. So instead of giving a narrative, I will just cover a few awesome highlights. I will not be includinig any last names to protect the innocent.

This class had an all-star cast of characters. In the U-shaped horseshoe of our classroom desk-configuration, one side was occupied by the following people, in a row: David, Jeremiah, Mike, myself, Cameron. If you know/knew any of these people, one could actually start to feel sorry for Mrs. Salzman.

I do not have the penchant for giving 20 nicknames to people. But this is about the time of the year that Jeremiah and Mike (and Matt J, right?) called each other "Bruce" just because it was ridiculous. So Bruce and Bruce were the best at pissing off our J-dating teacher. I wasn't bad either. But she knew that I actually liked her (true story, she really wasn't bad at all considering who she had to put up with daily. The name of the game was to see just how much one could get away with before getting a referral, or at least a good head-cocked, wide-eyed scolding from Suzy.

I never really paid attention, which is funny because I got the highest grade the Economics portion of the class and the subsequently useless "Honors" award. One day I was daydreaming and playing a game where I write the number of minutes until school was over (it was my last class of the day) on a piece of notebook paper and try to see if I can go 1 full minute without looking at my watch. Anyway, Suzy was lecturing and it was something about governmental authority. Her voice went like this in my head: "blablablabla blabla's Power is absolute." Upon hearing the word, I pumped my fist in the air and yelled at an inappropriate volume: "Absolut Vodka, Yeah!" The class waited about 1 full second before the laughter starting, earning the aforementioned look of death from Jared and Eric's Mom (Hell, one of them might have been there too, it was often the case...) Another time she openly mentioned her frustration with my behavior, to which I jumped up on a desk, jumped down to the floor and walked over and gave her a hug to diffuse her anger. She actually hugged me back, earning a wave of "Awwww"s and (as I like to think in my dream-like, exaggerated recollection) a few scattered bits of clapping.

Jeremiah was pretty good too. He earned my life-long respect by using the then-antiquated Apple LCIII classroom computer to "hack" into websites and would turn some off and on. Jeremiah and Mike fed off each other, mostly in trying to make David laugh (definitely a worthwhile endeavor though). One of my favorite memories is when Mike was "seperated" from the rest of us because of his shenanigens, which I believe followed a referral. Suzy and Mike definitely had a love/hate relationship. Anyway, one time Mike got in trouble without saying any words. In fact, it was Because he didn't say anything. He just stared at her with an slack-jawed guffaw on his face, unquivering. Smiling because it was part of the joke, but never laughing despite how much his peers were failing at trying not to chuckle. Upon being asked to stop making the face and to respond to her, Mike continued to stare until she blew her top. It was the most passive-aggressive thing I have ever seen in my life. He sat across the room for a week or more, trying desperate to get my attention (or David's) so he could perpetrate the same "I'm going to stare at you with this dumb grin until you crack" ploy against us. I think it ended with Mike coming back and sitting on our side and nobody ever saying anything about it. Maybe Mrs. Salzman was just tired of fighting when she knew she couldn't win. But then, both she and Mike had been known to make Katie F. cry (admittedly not a hard thing to do. Katie, if you ever read this, you know we love you but I am not lying).

But going back to Absolut Vodka... I also had Mr. Percival for astronomy that year. Considering that was my first major/real hobby/career path, I took it very seriously. I still remember some stars and the constellations and the rest is just a smattering of factoids. I think whenever we had a "constellation quiz" basically 2 tables of people would cheat blatantly off of me in front of Chap. Man, Chap and I deserve a seperate blog post. I'll try to remember.

Anyway, I wanted to tell you about Absolute Magnitude. You see, every star has both an Apparent and an Absolute Magnitude, ranging from -1 (the brightest star) all the way up into the 20s, with each number representing a difference of a power of ten (like the Richter-scale) to indicate how bright the star is. The Apparent magnitude is how bright a star "seems" to us here on Earth, simply. The Absolute magnitude is what the same star would be look if it were 10 light-years away from us. Therefore, a star that is really bright to us, and still much farther away than 10LY (as most stars are) would have a huge Absolute Magnitude.

I realize this is all probably pretty boring, so I guess I'll get to my point. I guess I have always hung on to this knowledge because I feel like it applies to more than just stars. I think one of the reasons that I always loved science was because it allows one to put things into order, whereas the rest of life is relatively disorderly. I was thinking, wouldn't it be great to meet someone and be able to determine their intelligence, charisma or other character traits in both a subjective (apparent) and objective (absolute) frame of reference? You'd be able to size up people instantly. You'd be the best person at the party in terms of calling people on bullshit. Like that douchbag in Good Will Hunting, at the beginning, who was trying to impress Minnie Driver by spewing facts he had learned from a textbook. Then Matt Damon shows up and gives the biggest and most heroic intellectual smack-down ever, like we all wish we could do (whether or not we ever act on that wish) more than we get to.

Having crossed into United States (Michigan) airspace, I will start to wrap this up. I am currently on my way to my cousin's wedding in Kentucky. Before I get there, I will have taken 1 train, 3 flights (the one I am now is the trans-atlantic 9-hour hell), and I'll have spent the night in 3 hotels, obtained 1 rental car, and physically been in 4 States (Illinois, Georgia, Indiana and Kentucky) JUST to see my family for a couple of nights before heading back to Germany next Sunday. I am so tired. I cannot sleep on planes, something I always wish I could change about myself. I've been awake for so long, and don't get to Atlanta (my resting stop for the night) until around 4:45pm EST (five hours from now).

Remember now, everything has both an absolute and apparent magnitude, even if you yourself can't tell the difference.

Fremdsprachen

(foreign languages)

As of today, I have been in Germany for 1 month. Though truthfully it feels like less than that. I want to write about languages in this post.

I wish that I had been a better student in elementary/middle/high school. I always just did the bare minimum to scrape by. I never paid attention in classes (with a few exceptions, like Mr. Percival's Astronomy class...) I didn't do homework, and put off projects and papers until the last minute. In my defense, I read a lot of books. But they were mostly science fiction or fantasy books, which somehow is less "legit" than reading Shakespeare or Dickens or Tolstoy. [Though I will never apologize for reading every single Piers Anthony book.]

I wish that I had taken Latin. If I had, I feel like learning German would be a lot easier. I think it is more than a little bit sad that most Americans are monolingual. I have written in the past about my experiences with languages. Pine View tried really hard to get us into languages. I took French there for what must have been 5 years, but don't really remember it. I hear they offer Arabic and Mandarin now, though I have yet to confirm that. I took Japanese over the summer when I was 14, but don't remember that either.

The bottom line is, despite exposure to Russian, French, Spanish, Japanese... I never bothered to see the advantages of knowing foreign languages. I sometimes feel like it is "too late" for me. Considering I started German (which I am determined to master) at the age of 24, I feel like a 3 year old toddler here, who can understand the majority of what I hear but cannot respond in kind. It's getting better though, and I've learned a lot over the past month.

At the moment, I've got friends living in S. Korea, Japan, France, and Ukraine. I know at least one of these people reads this blog consistently. I just wonder how long it really takes to achieve fluency, if it is even possible. I am in class with some people who have been learning German for 7-9 years, and thus feel like I am at a huge disadvantage. I can communicate better than I have ever been able to, but still feel like I am mangling my sentences, or forgetting words that I've learned a thousand times before.

This tone of this entry is beginning to smack of self-pity.

So I've been reading Der Vorleser (a.k.a. The Reader, made into a film w/ Kate Winslet) and it is the first full book that I have attempted to read, and so far I'm understanding most of what is going on. If I stop to look up every unknown word, it takes me 15 minutes to read a page, so I just gloss over and try to glean the meaning from the context. It's pretty exciting to me, though the actual story isn't mind-blowing, that I am even able to read to the level that I can.

Speaking of Pine View, our 10 year reunion (if we're having one?) is next year. I often find myself wondering what has been going on for the past 9 years. I went to college [more than once], I've been in relationships, both serious and less-serious. I've made and lost friends, lived in a few different apartments, worked a few jobs. I wonder if my fellow Classmates of the year 2000 ever feel the same as I do. Though I have seen many of these people since 2000, there are those that I have not seen since the night we graduated. I wonder what those people look like now, and what they are doing.

And now I find myself here, in a city that is currently celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of a wall that divided the city (/country/continent) from 1961-1989. I am still beyond happy to be here. I have a future plan, which I am sure will continually change, but that's alright with me.

I wonder how many people actually read this... If you are a regular reader, you should "follow" this blog so I can know how large my audience truly is. I would probably be inclined to update more often if I knew that people are reading these ramblings.