Feeling Lucky, Keweenaw Sledding

As a computer programmer I like to think that I understand reason and logic as well as the next guy and more than most, but I would never claim that those elements are the only, or even the major drives in my life. Case in point, I have been slowed and challenged by recovery of my broken elbow sustained on January 5th, with surgery on the 9th. I've been spending hours per day in various sorts of stretching activity trying to get motion back, lots of trips to the Doctor and bad nights of sleep trying to deal with a brace that keeps pressure on the arm to straighten or bend it.

A couple of weeks ago, I was first able to have enough motion to get my contacts back in, so I decided I was ready to snowmobile again. Anyone that buys a $7K machine that they may not get to use at all in a winter doesn't get top marks for reason, but I suppose taking off riding after surgery, rehab, and lots of lost hours when the arm still is far from 100% could be considered grounds for insanity, BUT, the trails were great, the sled was great, nothing bad happened at all, and it was WAY worth it! There are few things as much fun as doing something "insane" and coming out just fine.

Sometimes we like to think that it would be great if we humans felt the most motivated by what was logical and reasonable and showed the greatest odds of bettering our lives or the world around us all the time. In fact, a scientist thinking of "adaptive behavior" might assume that millions of years of adaptive evolution would produce exactly that outcome ... a very rational and adaptive human. They would of course be wrong.

We feel the best when we feel "lucky", when some sort of risk has paid off and things went well. We are forever cheering the underdog. Vegas and the lottery draw their billions, and like Lake Woebegone, we like to think all our kids are "above aveage".

Riding a snowmobile on groomed trails in the daytime without having any alcohol and staying generally at less than 60MPH isn't really completely "death defying" ... but relative to sitting behind a desk punching keys, it is pretty wild. The Keweenaw picked up 30" on top of the 15-20" that they had on the ground and we had some of the best trails ever, and very low traffic. managed to get the sled up from 160mi to 500mi, so got it broke in a bit for it's first year. It may not have been the most sane way to spend a couple days of vacation, but at least for me, it would have been hard to beat on the fun scale.

Back to Reality

We returned to the real world yesterday, and fortunately the Minnesota weather is in the high 60’s, so we don’t have to deal too much weather depression at least. I’ll have lots to write about the Howard Zinn book I suppose, I’m three quarters of the way through that, but writing about it would just add to the normal post trip blues.

We live in a wonderful country where the combination of political and economic freedom allows tens of thousands of people to be out enjoying life on the blue Caribbean on any given week. At the turn of the century, the capability barely existed, and to the extent that it did, one had to actually be rich to make use of it. Mr. Zinn feels that we live in a horrible country, laboring under a horrible capitalist system, and the world is quite dark, except for the rays of sunshine presented by anarchists, socialists, and communists. He should go check out a cruise, the sun is shining there.

There is always an aspect of emotional letdown after returning from a great trip. The standard feeling for me seems to go back to being a kid when “Christmas is over”. There are lots of good intellectualizations about “being thankful for the memories”, “lucky to have been able to go”, and “now I should be refreshed and ready to take on the world”. All are intellectually true. When I figure out how to tell my emotions to lock in perfectly on rationality with no rebellion, I will be sure share the information on the blog!

I suppose I could improve my life by converting my childish emotion of “letdown” to some “justified envy” for the “filthy rich capitalists” that cruise their lives away on such ships. (There actually seem to be some, see http://residentialvessels.com/residential_ocean_liner_site.htm) That certainly can't be “fair”. I’m not much into fairness though, I much prefer opportunity! 

Some set of folks and businesses are out there making a way that one can “retire on a cruise ship”. Will they make it affordable, and will I be able to afford it someday? No way to know the answer to that, but I’d rather be thankful that the potential is out there to dream about than to just be disgusted that some folks have achieved what sounds like a fun way to live.

Inspiration

No, I haven’t died. I’m at sea on the Carnival Inspiration, and relaxing a bit too much for serious writing on the blog. We steamed out of Tampa Monday night to fairly rough seas with some ill effects to many on the ship, but none to our family. Tuesday was about 6’ seas which the 850’ stabilized ship handles with very little sense of motion. It is very nice to be able to leave the snows of Minnesota (at least when we left) for mid 80’s and a lot of Sun.

Wednesday we were parked off shore in Grand Cayman with four other cruise ships. The Island really took a hammering from Hurricane Ivan, and is still very much in reconstruction. Lots of roofs on houses that are easily worth the multiple millions of dollars still have work to do on them, and huge tracts of vegetation are just flattened and dead. We enjoyed a little outing to “Hell”, a sea turtle farm, and out to swim with the stingrays. The water has that wonderful “fake blue” that is so pretty it seems that it couldn’t be real.

I finished up “The DaVinci Code”. I tend to not to that much of what most consider “fun reading”, although I find most all of my reading to be very enjoyable. The Dan Brown is a good writer and I very much enjoyed the mystery, the ties with history, the codes, and all the twists, connections, and conspiracy. (as he said more than once, “everyone loves a good conspiracy”) What is sad is to see people look at a book like that and consider it “truth” vs “fiction”. In this case, it is identified as fiction, but for those with doubts short consideration of the same paradigm that I use with the works of Noam Chomsky gives pretty good evidence that can’t be true. The book exists and the author is alive.

In cases like the DaVinci Code and Chomsky, if what they said were true, the authors would be dead, and you would be unable to read the book. If the Catholic Church were really powerful enough to keep the “truth” that Jesus was married, fathered a child, never claimed to be more than man, it seems pretty likely that we would know ALL about it by now. In fact we “do”, if we want to read all the books that make those claims (fiction or otherwise), they are available and not suppressed at all.

Noam doesn’t claim to be fiction, but if 5% of what he claims about the US was true, he would have been dead long ago. A nation as much ruled by a conspiracy of the rich, the media, and the military would have very few qualms about having something “accidentally bad” happen to old Noam.

I suspect that Noam, Brown, and Howard Zinn (author of “A Peoples History” of the US that I'm reading now) would all agree that we would be much better off living in a Goddess Worshiping Eden, where there was no private property and no competition. I just wonder if we would have cruise ships in that world?