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 Posted February 10th, 2010 at 2:36PM
This is an account of my weekend trip to the Netherlands the last available weekend during my semester abroad in Freiburg, Germany, fall semester of 2005. I’m able to piece together that it was December 9th through the 12th, although additional details beyond that get hazy. The retelling got long so I’ve decided to split the whole enchilada into several parts, published as they’re completed. Note that no admission of guilt or wrongdoing in any territory should be taken as stated or implied!
It was the middle of December 2005 and I was wrapping up my time abroad in Freiburg, Germany. The following week was final exams, and I would be on a Lufthansa flight bound for the States immediately thereafter. I felt all of the tumultuous, conflicting emotions of a student whose time abroad was drawing to a close. There was relief of some end in sight, being able to see friends and family, and the simple joy of understanding the errant stranger that might ask what time it was. There was trepidation over leaving the former French barracks and surrounding neighborhood that I came to know as home, and the several dozen other exchange students in the program that I had, with varying degrees, grown fond of. I had emerged unscathed from the supposedly unadulterated ‘anti-Americanism’ of a Europe still reeling from Dubya – even given the thumbs up on a train by a Turkish immigrant after revealing my nationality. I had my regrets, but they were mostly of the ‘opportunities missed’ variety.
The study abroad program I entered – IES’s European Union program – nearly finished my Politics degree and included a host of program-sponsored travel throughout Europe, concentrating on EU seats of power and influence. We traveled in groups throughout Europe from west (France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg) to east (Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Estonia). In addition, I had spent a free weekend in Dublin, leaving with the pukey smell of the Guinness factory clogging my nostrils and some disorderly Irish kid’s piss soaking my shoes. By the end of the program, my wanderlust was all but sated. There was a single item left on the proverbial bucket list for my then 21-year-old self, and that was to experience Amsterdam.
Now, one fortuitous result of the European Union has been the slackening of borders, to the extent where travel of persons and goods throughout the Union is practically unfettered by traditional political boundaries. Because of this, and because of some particularly enterprising fellow students who had taken a train northward earlier in the semester, I was already familiar with the exceptional products coming from the Netherlands’ coffeeshops and smartshops. In quick summation for those not aware, the Netherlands has had for decades the clear-thinking drug policy of decriminalizing natural substances you might find whilst walking in the woods (or desert, as the case may be). Any free adult is able to walk into a coffeeshop and purchase small amounts of marijuana, or the equivalent smartshop designated for psilocybin mushrooms, hallucinogenic cacti, or any of the numerous other specimen that might alter perceptions and which the Christian god purportedly gave man dominion over.
Being one not shackled to puritanical ideals of consciousness, I felt a strong obligation to blow some legal weed while giving the DEA the figurative middle finger. (The legality of so-called ’soft’ drugs in Germany is a murkier area, much like the rest of Europe.) Sure, I had some other things planned for my trip to the Netherlands, but then I’d already read Anne Frank’s diary and heard of the unfortunate incident involving Van Gogh’s ear, so there were certain priorities above and beyond the museums and canals.
I booked a flight via one of the budget airlines and looked forward to the Amsterdam experience, still temperate mid-December. I would be missing the legendary flower markets, but giddily I could already imagine the picturesque canals snaking through the oldest de Wallen district of the city, the friendly prostitutes soliciting from their black-light-lit rented cubicles, and the now ubiquitous coffeeshops peppering the landscape.
This trip, however, was almost not to be. My status as rookie globe-trotter glaringly revealed itself after I mistakingly left my passport on top my bureau. I discovered this fact just short of arrival at Frankfurt airport, a two hour-odd train ride, and despite the sincerest regrets of airport staff, I had nowhere to turn but back. So back I went, arriving in Freiburg late at night, playing the dejected fool.
“Soul-crushing” would be proximately the correct term, but after weighing the pros and cons, phoning my parents for solace, and in consideration of the dirt-cheap cost of the original ticket and the (slim) likelihood of getting another chance to go, I booked a one way flight the next day and fervently held onto the passport. It was going to happen. I phoned the hostel where I would be staying and told them I’d be a day late. Even factoring in two tickets to Amsterdam, the cost of flying was ridiculously low, to the point where it doesn’t even make sense for an airline to fuel the damn planes. But they did, and so I went.
Posted December 30th, 2009 at 5:47PM
Post-holiday depression? Middle of the winter doldrums? Job search got you down? Here’s my list of things to turn your mind off whatever and onto zombie cruise mode – here’s to better days far away.
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
An oldie but a goodie, available cheaply. From Bethesda Softworks, Oblivion plays similarly to their newer Fallout 3 title, but takes place in a quintessential fantasy land replete with elves, ogres, and plenty of rats. I missed Oblivion originally (pre-PS3 pour moi), played Fallout 3 last year, and felt right at home picking up the new (old) title. The game occasionally shows its age – fraggy graphics, hang-ups – but is still worth a play for fans of the genre who might have missed it originally.
Metal Gear Solid 4
You guessed it – I’m not one to jump and fetch the latest and greatest game at an outrageous MSRP. But I did recently pick up MGS4. Enjoyable, short on actual gameplay but long on cinematic cut-scenes, and a real eye pleaser. Being the first of the series I’ve played, I was a little lost without knowing the full back story. There is plenty here to make a replay or two worthwhile and it’s as fine a platform as any to show off the graphic prowess of the PS3. I had non-gamers following the storyline for pete’s sake!
R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated
Lest everyone think I’m permanently wired to a playstation, I’ve also been giving my thumbs a workout by turning the pages of Crumb’s illustrated book of genesis. Finally, find out what everyone’s been talking about! Crumb and I might be heathens, but as stated in the intro, this is meant to be “a straight illustration job, with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes.” A faithful reproduction of the King James bible illustrated along Crumb’s signature style? If you get offended, then you’re taking life too seriously.
Dog Hikes in the Adirondacks
This was a pleasant surprise during the conspicuous consumption season, perhaps of little interest to most of you, but just the resource I was looking for. This helpful paperback (published by Shaggy Dog Press in Westport, NY) rounds up 20 trails in the Adirondacks ripe for canine companionship, with the proceeds going to animal shelters and humane organizations throughout the area. It also includes topics like acclimating your dog to the hike, elderly canine hikers, and additional precautions and considerations to take in mind. Don’t ruin a hike by bringing other people – bring your dog!
(Note that I didn’t link a single thing here, as I believe you’re all adept at googling by this point.)
Posted May 19th, 2009 at 12:57PM
The Obama administration’s new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting “a war on drugs,” a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use.
In his first interview since being confirmed to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation’s drug issues.
“Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them,” he said. “We’re not at war with people in this country.”
…
Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, a group that supports legalization of medical marijuana, said he is “cautiously optimistic” about Mr. Kerlikowske. “The analogy we have is this is like turning around an ocean liner,” he said. “What’s important is the damn thing is beginning to turn.”
Nadelmann nailed it. At least things have started to turn around. According to the WSJ article, the White House has also called for a change in the disparity of severity between crack- and cocaine-related offenses, and has ended federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in the 13 states that have legalized medical marijuana. That was one of those inanely simple things Obama could do immediately which I was waiting to see happen. Huzzah.
Posted April 1st, 2009 at 10:03AM
So I voted early yesterday on the way to PA to deal with the passing of a relative. There was a decent number of people milling about our polling place, and the same paper punch voting machines were in use. I checked last night and found the election at 50-50%, with ninety percent of districts reporting, and things haven’t changed much in the past twelve hours.
Dem Scott Murphy enjoys a razor-thin margin of 59 votes – 77,344, opposed to Tedisco’s 77,285 – according to the final tally printed in today’s Times Union. That turnout is better than the expected number of around 90,000 total.
Currently outstanding are 5,900 absentee ballots received, with more expected in the coming days. These have been sealed until a court hearing on April 6th, per an injunction obtained by Republican election lawyer John Ciampola to impound all paper ballots. It appears that registered Republicans have an edge in absentee ballots cast; but considering that they’re the majority party in the district, it shouldn’t come as a surprise or necessarily indicate an advantage.
Libertarian candidate Eric Sundwall was pushed off the ballot in the week leading up to the election. This was also per efforts by Ciampola, as Sundwall was expected to pull a few percentage points from Tedisco.
I did a quick google and found the usual partisan hack commentaries floating around. But ultimately it looks as if either candidate will follow lock-step with their respective party once in office. With the large Dem majority in the House, this one seat makes little difference. Still, I would rather have the guy who agrees with the Obama administration, and not the one cock-blocking it.
Despite the sorry state of the GOP nationally, this election was Tedisco’s to loose. He had the large early lead and name recognition as an elected official, and the 20th is a Republican district – but making the election an early referendum on the Obama administration wasn’t a smart move. The stink and political fallout from corporate bonuses and the still-miserable economy haven’t stuck to the White House yet. Meanwhile, nobody in the 20th really has any bearing on how either candidate stands on issues unrelated with Obama’s handling of the economy. Murphy defused extraneous issues by supporting civil unions (“Not marriage”) and gun control during the televised debate, and in recent days self-describing himself as an “economic conservative.” All of this mirroring Tedisco.
For what it’s worth, Murphy handled himself well during said televised debate, and appeared more capable of going off-talking point and responding to the question at hand. I believe he’ll be a capable representative, pending a longish, drawn out process to choose the winner. I say they just draw straws.
Posted November 3rd, 2008 at 1:46PM
PRO: My techie side loves the attractive design, unique display, and slim profile. The resurgent luddite inside me loves the simplicity of it all.
CON: Unorthodox menu and messaging take getting used to; some limitations if you text message heavily.
I don’t remember the exact series of events, but the other day I stumbled upon information about the Motorola F3 and got the hankering to buy one. The F3 was released late in 2006 and meant for developing countries like India where the cellphone market is just beginning to explode. The US version followed shortly. $33 off of eBay and a few days later my shiny new phone arrived. So far, I love it. Excerpts from its wikipedia entry:
Motorola FONE F3
physical size: 47 x 114 x 9.1 mm
weight: 68 g
“The F3 is the first mobile phone to use electronic paper in its screen. Motorola uses the term ClearVision to describe the new display, which is manufactured using E Ink’s electrophoretic imaging film. The electronic paper main display allows for the phone’s thinness (no glass), longer battery life, and outdoor viewability (paper-like reflectivity). It has a backlight for the keypad and a slit that projects the backlight onto the screen so the display can be seen in darkness.
The characteristics of the display are fairly restrictive. The text display contains only two lines of six characters each, making the use of data services and text messaging (SMS) less practical than on standard LCD displays.
Since the F3 has only two lines of (fixed) stuff icons on the top and bottom of the display, as well as one line of six 14-segment characters and another line of six 7-segment numbers available on its display, the user interface is very different from the usual menu structure normally found on mobile phones. The only thing resembling a (flat) menu is accessed by pressing left/right on the central button: It allows writing an SMS, reading a saved SMS, call history, choosing the ringtone (out of seven melodies), setting date and time, and setting the alarm clock. The menu is visualized by fixed icons in the bottom row, following the left/right pattern of the navigation button.”
To do anything besides making a call, using your address book, or what’s displayed in the menu mentioned above, you must enter a 3 digit code surrounded by asterisks (for accessing rarely used settings). Want to play games, access the internet, or take crappy 2- or 3-megapixel photos? THIS PHONE CAN’T DO IT.
Long-time readers will know I occasionally get sidetracked by slick advanced smartphones with tons of features I don’t need or necessarily want (iPhone *cough*). I’m somewhat of a halfhearted techie, after all. But truth of the matter is, I’m comfortable with a sub-$50 cellphone and my prepaid AT&T account (which has averaged about $100 a year for the past five years). Using the internet on a phone sucks, and so do the games. I don’t need mp3 ringtones, themes, a camera, or any of the extraneous capabilities they throw into phones these days.
I just want my phone for making calls and the occasional text message. And my dog might want to chew on it, too. OK?
Up to this point, I was stuck with ugly obnoxious phones, as the entry-level / prepaid market isn’t particularly innovative or courted by phone companies. The F3 changes this, sorta. None of the technology is particularly new, but it’s well used. The F3 was, when released, Motorola’s thinnest phone – and it’s still far from clunky. The electronic paper display is attractive and easy to read in any light. The fixed “digital clock” style is retro-cool. Reception and battery strength are clearly displayed up top at all times.
Text messaging is simplified and easy to send / receive – with an important caveat. Messages are restricted to one line and you must scroll right / left to read them, which works out intuitively enough for short user-to-user texts. However, with a long enough message (say, automated ones from your provider with a lot of addendum like “reply to this message”), things can start to become a chore.
Design-wise, the F3 fits in with Motorola’s other slim (literal sense) offerings. In fact, the F3 might be thought of as a baby RAZR. The notable differences being the display and the fact that it’s a candybar design, not flip (spin, slide, or whatever the RAZR does these days). I have always much preferred a candybar-type phone since they’re typically more rugged. The F3’s dimensions are svelte, but the weight belies a sense of sturdiness. The one piece front prevents dust and grime from being trapped between keys or underneath the display. There are four colors available (affecting the face only, the sides and back remain black), I went with blue. Very attractive. The flat face makes the F3 look more like a prop than a functional phone. You know the cardboard computers and TVs found in furniture stores?
Reception is an important consideration since I’m on the fringe of service at home, and fortunately the F3 is as good if not better than my previous Nokia, which as a brand is reputed to have strong reception.
Cost, as stated, was $33 shipped, off of eBay. New and unlocked. I swapped my SIM from my previous phone. One slight grumble here was that the F3 uses its SIM code to save all contacts, while my previous phone used its own internal memory. This meant I had to swap the SIM card back to my old phone so that I could use it long enough to write down any contacts I wanted to save (about a dozen all told). Not the phone’s fault.
In a nutshell, the F3 is an attractive back-to-the-basics phone for anyone, savvy or otherwise. It can also make for an excellent second or starter phone. The unorthodox menu and way of messaging can take some getting used to. But after about half a day, I was comfortable with all functions – all BOTH of them, calling and messaging!
Posted February 4th, 2008 at 5:42PM
All philosophical beliefs and ramblings boil down to a few fundamental concepts. You have your individualism versus community, belief in a religion and belief in the terrestrial, pessimism and optimism (often – evidenced in a belief of the inherent evil or good of mankind).
Et-cetera.
Along the lines of “everything has been thought of; there is nothing new.” If we allow this, then the question becomes: When was the last time man thought something truly profound?
It might be said that moments of clarity are rare, and vary in magnitude. Small ones occur more often, to many. (The smaller price on a tag showing the price per lb allows us to be savvy shoppers at the supermarket, for instance.) But truly profound moments might be considered a dying breed. How many times can man discover gravity?
The assumption here is that our moments must be on display to the world to be profound. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If a lucid dream explaining life, the universe, and everything comes to us, but flirts away from our consciousness, then what consequence does it have?
I spent the day hauling firewood across our yard, piling it close to the basement door. Afterwards, I collapsed onto the wood and surveyed the view from atop my new pile. All day it’s been dreary and overcast. But I was warm and content: watching the cars roll by down the valley on Route 74, listening to a noisy squirrel across in the woods, enjoying the cold, flat surface of the wood. The smell of the wet, split wood. I leaned back to watch the sky. It was a uniform gray, punctuated only by a wispy thread of smoke from the chimney of our house.
The moment felt profound, not for anything that might have happened, but for the physical exertion and feeling of contentment, clarity. Another dreary February day. The state of mind of a low dose of LSD. A break in the seasonal affective disorder. A moment of profundity.
The lucid dream, the moments of clarity, are lost if we’re not watching for them. Are we? I’ve come to the conclusion that profundity doesn’t need an audience, and that expanding on these small moments is the best path towards a healthier life. How to go about doing that is the challenge!
Posted December 21st, 2007 at 12:17AM
“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies – all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”
I’ve been in love with this Aldous Huxley quote since reading The Doors of Perception last year.
On the other end of the philosophical spectrum (and that’s a false juxtaposition if I’ve ever heard one), I’m currently slogging my way through Lama Surya Das’ Awakening the Buddha Within. Every few years I’ll pick up a book dealing in Buddhism and briefly “get enlightened.” But after putting the book down and sleeping on it, I invariably realign myself along humanist lines a la Huxley.
Most don’t realize it, but Buddhism is an incredibly optimistic belief system. Everyone has the ability to realize the root causes of their suffering, and to put an end to it by removing wants, desires. Or so the spiel goes.
I just can’t bring myself to be so damn optimistic.
Of course Nirvana properly defined is attainable, but is the removal of suffering really the end goal? Most of us act and react according to desires. And if happiness is the goal, then Nirvana is the solution. But I wonder whether happiness (or the absence of its opposite) is anything other than “yet another state of mind.” Achieving Nirvana doesn’t change tangibles. Tangibles are mostly irrelevant in such a mind-state.
Should they be?
Now, I’m not going to actively pursue misery. Even though, on an abstract level, it might be much more interesting. But I’m still trying to figure out what end goal I have in mind. What would satisfy… Satisfy this deeply unsatisfying existence. I’m not looking for Nirvana. Just contentment.
This has been an incredibly unfulfilling late-night stream-of-consciousness ramble. Tune in for more, later on!
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