Trumpets

The usual grueling international travel experience started off with a challenge at the Paris airport where the ticket agent said that miles hadn’t been pulled for my upgrade and I didn’t have enough miles left in my account to do it, and I would have to fly coach class even though I had a little piece of paper saying I was assigned to seat 8A. I don’t really mind traveling coach since I fit fine in the seats and I usually just read and sleep the entire time I’m on a plane. But on a 9 hour flight it’s really nice to be upgraded. I was really polite and spoke as much as possible in French and asked if maybe we could pull miles from my husband’s account. Oh, no, madame, that would be completely against the rules since he’s not here to witness and sign and you have no proof he even knows you and you don’t have his account number anyway. So then when I was able to rattle off Brad’s account number from memory, the agent actually laughed and said he’d see what he could do. And I did get to sit in seat 8A.

Getting from the plane to the customs checkpoint in Chicago must have been a mile long walk. It was at least 20 minutes at a brisk walking pace. Maybe you’re observed by Customs and Border Patrol the whole way to see if you look furtive or something. I was already exhausted, which was exacerbated by having to transfer my own 67 pound suitcase (just under the 70 pound international limit!) and my 56 pound suitcase and my roll-aboard and my laptop case through customs without my usual Brad sherpa companion. By the time I got onto my flight from Chicago to Denver I felt pretty shaky and sick from all the adrenaline and being awake for hours and hours. I’m not really at my best between say 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., which is what time it was in Paris. I even pulled my little air sickness bag out of the seat pocket and had it ready in case I didn’t make it, and then fell into a deep deep sleep as soon as my stomach calmed down. When the pilot announced that the snow had stopped falling in Denver and we would arrive early, I was really happy.

I went to baggage claim where Brad and I had agreed to meet, and he was looking for me in the wrong direction so I got to completely sneak up on him, which was fun. While we were hugging, I noticed that he was standing really close to someone else’s luggage, not a suitcase, but some kind of instrument case, which is when I finally saw the man with the trumpet, who proceeded to play a trumpet fanfare in my honor! Brad and I have an old, good joke between us, which is that when he’s working and I come into the room, I’d like a flourish of trumpets since I’m a human and therefore more important and interesting than the computer (a topic we continue to actively debate). So he sings a little trumpet call for me sometimes. And in celebration of my return home after being gone for six weeks, he arranged for a musician from the Boulder Philharmonic to come out to DIA and give me a real welcome. Pretty special, really thoughtful, and since I was one of the first people off the plane and scurried quickly to baggage claim, not many people saw/heard, which is just right for introverted me. Brad really puts energy into keeping the romance alive, after almost 15 years together. Thanks for the trumpets — I’m happy to be home.

Wikipedia Rocks!

So I’m probably the last person to discover Wikipedia, but now I’m a true believer. I was just having trouble with the official site for the Musee d’Orsay here in Paris while working on my Museums of Paris blog and clicked on the Wikipedia listing for my first experience with this amazing place. I may never leave this site. Reading, reading, reading.

Atlas Shrugged: Cigarettes, Billboards, and the Rational Actor

I just read Atlas Shrugged again. This is the book that I always have with me when I travel. It has certainly been the most influential book in my life. I thank my mother for loaning her copy of it to me to read in high school. I remember that one day in AP English we had a substitute teacher (whose name I remember but shall remain nameless here) who made the period a free reading period and when he saw that I was reading Atlas Shrugged he said, “That book is poison.” He later became a school principal. I thank my parents for encouraging me to read whatever I wanted without censorship. My sophomore year Algebra II / Trigonometry teacher, Don DeWitt, handed out copies of the following Atlas Shrugged quote to us:

No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth — and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity….A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest — but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes responsibility for thinking. (Signet 35th anniversary paperback edition, p. 943)

There are two major incongruities in Atlas Shrugged for me. The first one is the use of the cigarette as a symbol of man’s mastery over the element of fire. (See p. 65 for relevant quote) It’s an anachronism. The copyright on the book is 1957. Given what we know today about the actual effects of cigarette smoking that weren’t widely known then, I don’t think this language would be used if the book were to be written today. Leaving room to acknowledge that better information is likely to come along (where is my teleporter machine?) is a core value of this philosophy. During the confrontational scene in Dagny’s apartment between Francisco and Rearden, Francisco says, “Within the extent of your knowledge, you are right.” (p. 599) And really, that’s all that’s possible for any of us in our thinking.

The other thing that always jars me is that I have never wished to see a billboard while driving or hiking or living in the mountains. Never. When Dagny and Rearden are taking their first vacation together during which they find the remnant of the motor there is the following exchange. “What I’d like to see,” said Rearden, “is a billboard.” (p. 266) and then on the next page Dagny says, “…think how often we’ve heard people complain that billboards ruin the appearance of the countryside….They’re the people I hate.” (p. 267) When I sit on my patio and look down Eldorado Canyon, I don’t think, “Oh, I’d love to see a copper smelter right there and some open pit mining right there next to it.” Never.

Cold

Wednesday, January 5, 2005

When I started the Rover this morning, the little digital outside temperature readout displayed -2 degrees. That seems cold. Feels cold. It’s unusually cold for Boulder and the Front Range foothills, where the average high temperature in January is 46 degrees and the average low is 19 degrees. I had my gloves on and my head covered and it still felt cold. I remember waiting for the school bus in Fairbanks wearing no hat, even in temperatures colder than 30 below zero. It’s very important to be cool in high school and not mess up the fluffy hair that takes such attention and energy to create. I guess I’ve outgrown the need to be cool. I think I’ve accepted that I never was cool, never will be cool, and that it really isn’t worth caring about. I’d rather be warm.