Bored by Typing

A Thought

Christians and I agree about one thing: They don't want to convert to my religion, and I don't want them to convert to my religion. I want them to keep to theirs. It suits them.

Meet the Editorial Committee

[Clockwise from lower left are August Mallory, Wes Browning, Jihad Salaam, Joe Howard, Teresa Reeves, Mary T Andrews, and Anitra Freeman.]

Well, meet some of it anyway. People wonder how Real Change newspapers are put together. There's an editorial department, run by our editorial manager Amy Roe, and including two reporters and a production assistant. Many volunteer writers accept assignments and some submit unsolicited work, which we consider. In addition to all that there's the editorial committee, or the "EC."

The idea of the EC is to provide grassroots input to the paper's content. All interested readers of the paper may apply. The principal activity of the committee is to brainstorm story ideas for future issues. So the main qualification to be accepted as a member is an ability to work well with others while bringing ideas to the table.

Currently the EC has 13 members, of which 8 are fully active vendors, 2 are semi-active vendors, and one (me!) is a highly inactive ex-vendor. (I was highly inactive when I was a vendor, too.) In this particular meeting 7 of us were on hand.

Besides brainstorming, the EC also spends a little time in each meeting looking through the most recent paper for errors that might need correcting, or stories that suggest follow-up.

Then, every month or so, we go over those unsolicited submissions I mentioned above. These are confidential sessions. A volunteer has previously blanked out the author's names on the submissions, so that we can vote to accept or reject blindly. Our acceptance is provisional -- the editorial manager makes the final decision.

This particular meeting was almost all brainstorming. Ideas batted around the table involved an upcoming anniversary of the Frye Hotel, a future guide to being homeless for the first time, a death on the street in Ballard, the relationships between panhandlers and vendors, an upcoming "carve-in," activities of neo-Nazi and similar organizations in the area, and the effects of budget cuts on ex-offender services.

Meetings are currently 2:30 to 4pm Thursdays in the Real Change vendor room, 96 S Main St. Guests and applicants are welcome the last Thursday of every month. Real Change vendors have preference and may apply at any meeting.

Serious Work at Real Change

Here at Real Change we take everything we do seriously. One of the things we do is have All Staff Meetings every two weeks. Those are meetings in which all the staff sit around a table and meet. In our seriousness about these meetings, we decided to dedicate one of our recent meetings to the question "What are All Staff Meetings for?"

Our Vendor Staff Director, Tara Moss agreed to facilitate that meeting. To prepare us all for the discussion she sent around a link to a video talking about research into the "marshmallow problem," " -- a simple team-building exercise that involves dry spaghetti, one yard of tape and a marshmallow. Who can build the tallest tower with these ingredients? And why does a surprising group always beat the average?"

The marshmallow problem is explained in the video accompanying the link. As a mathematician, I couldn't resist seeing not only whether I could build a reasonably sturdy tall tower of dry spaghetti, but whether I could build one entirely based upon the three Platonic solids having triangular faces. Would that support a marshmallow?

Yes. The picture, taken just before a tragic accident involving the tower and a coworker sitting upon it, proves it. That's Tara Moss herself in the background.

They're BACK!

This is nice. I wrote about this park and its statues in 2008 in Geese Have It Worse. The statues in the background appeared after a mass killing of geese, show a boy excited to see a Canadian Goose in the park. Yeah, he should be! They murdered them all! Well, not all of them. Here's a couple that WOULDN'T DIE! Call the authorities before they get away! (It looks like the mother is getting ready to take out her cell phone.)

A Sidewalk Feature Takes Me Back

 When Anitra and I walk home from the Real Change office, we regularly meet this, one of my favorite Seattle landmarks. That's the headquarters of the Seattle Fire Department, viewed from the Main St side, looking east toward Second Avenue. From this angle it looks like a joke. Someone decided to split the sidewalk into a high sidewalk and a low sidewalk. So, for fun, when we approach I like to nudge Anitra toward one or the other. Say I nudge her to the high sidewalk. Then I take the other one at the last minute. And see if she breaks into an impromptu travesty of Loch Lomond.

If we look at it from further out, we realize that it's really a wheelchair-ramp to an unmarked blue-green door of the Fire Department.

It happens I remember that the door used to be marked as the entrance to a public restroom, that is now no longer accessible. I always find it locked now. But that's not the triggered memory that I'm talking about in the title. The game I play with Anitra reminds me of an obsession I had when I was 6 or 7 years old

I was caught up with the idea that I had a trajectory. As a body in motion I leave a track. If I pass through an opening, and then later, upon return, choose not to pass through that opening in the reverse direction, then I have wound my trajectory around one side of that opening. In the case of the wheel-chair ramp, if I take the high side going east, and take the low side coming back west, altogether I will have wound my trajectory once counter-clockwise around the railing.

Imagine I was leaving a string behind me, everywhere.  One long, long, string, like the drag line of spider, all the way back to the hospital room in Greenville General where I was born, where it would be anchored. Every time I were to wind it around an obstacle, it would be that much harder to pull the string straight, if I ever wanted to.

That's exactly what I imagined when I was 6 or 7, and it horrified me then, that I might be in that fix. Not to be able to straighten out my life path! It would be like being caught in a trap, ready to be devoured by some monster. I wouldn't be able to run freely, my string radiating freely, pivoting around South Carolina.

Fifteen years later I was an undergraduate discovering my own personal proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra (which says that complex polynomials factor completely) and my proof ended up being the winding number proof. It's an approach that derives the theorem by studying the way polynomials map circles in the complex plane to curves, with particular attention to the number of times the curves wind around zero. Discovering that proof drew me further into the mathematics of properties of space that stay the same when you straighten wrinkles, and so I ended up being a topologist. But my original fascination with the subject was rooted in fear of being trapped in a tangle.

I'm now utterly over that childhood fear. I still imagine the drag line behind my life trajectory. The difference is now I love the tangles. Now I deliberately wind myself around things. If you see me walking down the street and I weave first right then left around various sidewalk signs, light posts, and such, you'll know that's what I'm doing. I'm tangling myself in everything, because I've figured out who the monster is, and I'm quite happy with being devoured by her.

Brace for a Return to Posting, Part 2

OK! That last return to posting went nowhere! This time, however, I believe a have the magic formula that will get this enterprise going again. I now have an alternative to the Photoshop I lost when my last computer crashed. (I'm using GIMP.) Also, I finally got Adventures in Bloggery, my column bucket, up to date. One of the ways my procrastination proliferates is, if I procrastinate on something of high priority, then I feel bad about spending time on something of lower priority, so I end up doing neither. How could I justify posting here while the columns weren't up over there? Now I don't have that argument in my head anymore.

Novel Hints

Hints as to how the novel is developing (re previous post).

Genre:

Satire, Humor, or Parody.

Synopsis:

A satiric Ugly Duckling story of a man born homeless to housed parents, rejected and therefore out to seek his own kind. Told by his personal Genius with little regard for truth, consistency, or coherence.

Excerpt:

Gene was conceived in the master bedroom of a two bedroom brick house at the end of NE West Parkway Place, off of West Parkway Way NE, Seattle, to Professor and Mrs Charles and Lola Feldman. Charles was a professor at the University of Washington in the history of engineering, who specialized in the history of the non-electrical development and utilization of wire, such as steel wire rope, wire fencing, and barbed wire. He dreamed of some day writing a wildly successful popularization of his beloved subject so that he would have other people about him who would want him to share it with them, other than visiting professors from Switzerland. Lola collected porcelain bunnies, taught Xtreme Unitarian Sunday school, had three children from a previous marriage, and was not very enthusiastic about having a fourth with Charles, but the condom broke, so it was God's Miraculous Will.