Swimming in the Earth

I just realized that in the course of a normal day I no longer have to deal with cathode ray tubes (CRTs).

Over the weekend while relaxing in my hotel at my family reunion in Branson, Missouri, I found the worst CRT television set I had heard in quite a while. Every time I would change the channel, the set would emit a piercing high-pitched noise that my parents could not hear. My brothers and I felt tortured by it, especially my youngest brother Jon.

At Olin, Prof. Gill Pratt taught me that the high pitches associated with CRTs are horribly annoying to young people but are impossible to hear in old age due to a lifetime of overexposure. But I think that may change in the near future.

CRTs are not a wonderful technology. They have created a worldwide chemical disposal problem and they eat up energy in a wasteful large form factor made of shatter-vulnerable glass. But finally they have started to get replaced by better technologies like plasma, LCD, and organic LED (OLED) displays.

Every day, the only displays I usually interact with my Apple monitor, Dell laptop, and my parents’ new little HDTV, all of which are LCDs. Thus, I haven’t heard that infernal high-pitched whine in some time. Now I find that I have fewer headaches and often feel more relaxed.

So my challenge to you is to find a CRT monitor in your life and consider transitioning it to a better technology. You just might make your life a little more pleasant.

I spent a few hours today walking up and down Venice Beach and reminiscing on life. I’ve always preferred heat to cold and so I appreciated being out of the Boston weather. I doubt I will ever choose to live so far north again after I graduate.

All of my friends out here are hired for jobs that last a few weeks, a month, or just a couple of days. My mom has also recently picked up this style of employment. Being raised by a salaried father, I realize I haven’t been exposed to the contract worker lifestyle, which is a lot different. Each week brings something new and the days off might be the weekend one week and weekdays the next. Not sure if I would prefer the randomness of this style or the regularity of a salaried Monday-Friday job.

Either way, it’s looking like I’m headed toward the entrepreneur lifestyle, which seems to be some weird mix of the two. Each day during the day I ought to be expected to contribute some real value to the company, anywhere from product design to keeping on top of everything else that’s going on. But when something big hits outside of the normal hours, there’s still work that needs to be done, sometimes on really short notice.

In a way, it’s a lot more work, but I love the diverse challenges, the freedom, and the do-it-yourself attitude, so I should be fine.

Lately I’ve been checking out a lot of books from the library. I used to be quite a book person when I was young, especially in elementary school. Most of my fondest memories from when I lived in Enid, Oklahoma, and went to Hoover Elementary School involve me in the library reading a book on language or music or computers or something else that I’m still interested in today.

At the time I had no idea that I was probably seeding ideas and thoughts that would recur throughout my entire education. The ideas that have come most readily to me over the years often involve pieces of my experiences from a few key times in my life in which I immersed myself in some sort of media, such as all of the digital stuff my friends and I toyed around with in high school.

Reading all of these books lately has gotten me thinking about how I want to keep up after I leave Olin. With Wikipedia to whet my tastebuds, I have found countless subjects that I want to learn more about, but each thing I find leads to three more. I’m a bit overwhelmed with the sheer amount of stuff I want to know about.

I think once I graduate this May I will initially fill most of my newfound free time with books and music and perhaps some documentaries. Fiction doesn’t interest me much, so I will probably spend only just a little time with my Thomas Pynchon books.

If I had all of the money in the world, I would buy music all day long. Of all of the songs I’ve heard, there are far too many by artists whose other music I have never heard.

I don’t know if I can really portray how I feel about all of this stuff out there. I know that on her radio show Dr. Laura always says she doesn’t know how people can ever get bored with so many books in the world. I think that people get bored when they lack social stimulation, and books don’t really solve that. But I’m pretty happy with my social situation, so I feel I can heed her advice and dive in.

There’s this certain depth at which I used to immerse myself into books that just cannot be duplicated on the Internet and in flashy video games, movies, and television shows. I think what has happened is that I’ve rediscovered it.

Hello everyone.

Welcome to Swimming in the Earth, my new blog. I will be posting anything and everything here. My other websites are linked at Grant Page Central.

I bet you’re wondering how I chose the name Swimming in the Earth.

A couple weeks ago, I was in class here at Olin College. The class was SCOPE, our team-based yearlong engineering capstone project, and we had a guest speaker talking about ethics.

To make a point about what words people associate with good ethics, the speaker asked, “When you die, what epitath would you want written on your gravestone?”

Without skipping a beat, I thought to myself, “He swam in the earth.”

I was really taken aback by this random thought. I knew exactly what it meant to me, but as an image I’m not sure it fully conveys its point. Indeed, it invites the joke that my dead body would be “swimming” in the earth of the grave.

But I’ve gone off-topic.

Swimming in the earth is my way of explaining the concept of living life to its fullest. This planet has a lot to offer me in the short time I have here. If I don’t break some rules and get my feet wet I’ll have missed out on a lot of experiences.

Thus, I should go swimming in the earth. Right through the dirt. Through the sky. Through the water too, but that’s too easy. I should run around and sit still. Get comfortable and catch myself off guard.

And I’ll be writing all about it here. Technology, humor, politics, language, music, society. Anything is fair game. Please leave this blog better than you found it; comments graciously welcomed.