Iceland Here I Come

In about 22 hours I will be on a plane heading to Iceland for my post-thesis holiday trip. I am un-employed and using more than a bit of my savings for this trip but I want it, I think I deserve it, and this is the best chance economically I will have in a long time to make a trip to Iceland. (Thank you Great Britain for plunging the Icelandic economy into turmoil and chaos. Your account holders were going to get their insured deposits paid back. Now . . . maybe not.)

So, my plans for the trip are rather full but I will not make it to the north, the interior, and to the eastern fjords of Iceland. There just isn’t time. My schedule (so far) is shown below. It looks busy but it really isn’t. (If I don’t have this stuff on a calendar, I will forget what trips I have planned/reserved and where I am staying.) I will have 3 or 4 days in Reykjavík, including New Years Eve. This should be one huge party and if I am lucky I hope to meet some nice Icelandic girl and “get lucky”. (We’ll see if the American accent will get me anywhere or if they hate us now as much as they do the British.) I’ve given myself one empty day to recover from New Years Eve and another day just to wander around Reykjavík.

I’ve got two guided tours planned. One is an ice-walking tour—you spend several hours walking about a glacier in crampons. The other is an ice climbing trip—you spend several hours doing roped ice climbing on the face of a glacier. I have never done any rock climbing, let alone ice climbing, so let’s hope they have good gear and I don’t die. I plan to spend a day-and-a-half on the island of Heimaey in the Vestmannaeyjar Islands. It’s got an active volcano, some hiking, and thousands of nesting puffins. This is the part of the trip I am most excited about so far. How cool will it be to hike (a strenuous walk, really) up an active volcano? The answer is: Really freaking cool.

My last full day in the country will be spent at the famous Blue Lagoon and then I will have a leisurely half day to pack up, check out, say goodbye to my Icelandic honeys, and head back to the airport. Then it’s back to the States and my life of unemployment and job-searching.

 

Iceland Trip Itinerary

 

 

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My previous posts on this trip are below.

Plans For Iceland Trip (02 Dec 08)
Getting Psyched For Iceland (10 Nov 08)
My Winter Holiday Plans (29 Oct 08)

Another Reason Why Religion Sucks

So, on the BBC News website today there is an article about why the Pope sees humanity threatened by homosexuality and transsexuality.* The Pope talks about needing an “ecology of the human being, understood in the proper manner”. Well, their proper manner of understanding sees any type of human relationship outside of male-female unions as leading to “self-destruction” of humanity. Bullshit! What happened to the message of love, charity, and compassion we find in the gospels? I guess those are good traits to have until being loving, compassionate, and charitable conflict with other man-made beliefs of the Church.

Logical inconsistencies like this are why I find all organized religions to be a waste of time. I know that the intellectual framework for religious thought must differ from the intellectual framework for other types of thought (scientific, rational, philosophical, etc.) but when the intellectual framework for religious thought can’t even have logical consistency internal to itself I just have to say “Why bother?” You know what would be nice, a religious movement that treated its adherents as complex, thoughtful beings as opposed to an agglomeration of specific traits like race, gender, sex.

Who cares if a person is attracted to someone of the same sex. Is that really more important than what kind of person they are? than how they treat their family, friends and strangers? Is a person’s sexual orientation a more significant factor in defining an identity than the extent of their commitment to living a generous, compassionate life? Seriously, who cares if a person is gay. I don’t. When I meet someone I care more about their personality than who they have sex with. I am going to be much more bothered by someone I meet who is loud and obnoxious than someone who is gay. If you’re gay, that manifests itself in just one part of your identity, but if you’re loud and obnoxious that manifests itself in every part of your identity.

And if I have to deal with someone being loud and obnoxious that just makes me want to call them stupid and punch them in the head. And I don’t like having to think about telling people they are stupid or fighting the urge to punch someone in the head.

 

 

*You can go here on the Vatican website to see the English translation of the original Italian.
(I don’t know which to trust less, religious groups or the press that reports on religious groups.)

Winter Wonderland

So, we got our second storm of the week here in Syracuse.

Tuesday we had 3 or 4 inches that accumulated slowly and covered up the one or two inches already on the ground. My cousin did my Mom’s and my aunt’s driveways in the morning—my Mom and one of her sister’s live next door to one another—but I had to give them a second pass in the afternoon. It was a wet heavy snow so I did it with the snow-blower to make quick work of it.

 

Snow - Mom's House (16 Dec 08)

Snow - Kath's House (16 Dec 08)

 

Today we had a proper snow-storm with lots of fast-falling snow. I didn’t get out of my pajamas and go out to clear the driveway until almost 3:00PM. This snow definitely required use of the snow-blower. There was a good six inches on the ground. It took almost two hours to do the two driveways (my Mom and my Aunt next door) and follow-up with the shovel for some clean-up work. I had a good three pipes while I was out there but with the wind blowing so hard the pipe needed regular re-lighting. When I came in the house my exterior clothes were covered in crunchy, frozen snow but my interior clothes were quite damp from sweat—You really have to fight the snow-blower to get it to go where you want in thick or heavy snow. Tonight, after dinner, I went out and re-shoveled the path between the two houses and re-did my Mom’s driveway. We had probably seven or eight inches of total snow-fall but because of the way the wind moves around the house snow tends to pile up in the driveway.

 

Snow - Mom's House (19 Dec 08)

 

Tomorrow morning I should need to do a quick shovel of the driveway and then I am going snow-shoeing. Yippee! This will be my first time snow-shoeing in two years. I am so excited. I might stay here in the Syracuse are or head up north towards one of the state parks near Watertown. I’ll post some pics of that adventure tomorrow.

Consumatum Est

I am done with my masters thesis. YIPPEE!!!!!!!!

I submitted the final version of the thesis to my advisor a little while ago. She will review it and make one last set of corrections and/or suggestions. I will make the changes she requests, send it back to her, and then she will send it on to the second reader. There might be some go-rounds with the second reader regarding corrections/suggestions they would like, but that is doubtful. Once the second reader is done with their review we schedule my oral presentation and then I will be really, completely, absolutely forever done with graduate school. Yeah!!!!
 

I want to extend thanks to the following people for their support.

•    In NYC, my friends Mark and Lara for their regular words of encouragement.
•    In DC, my friends Eric, Allison W., Joanne, and Karen for their regular words of encouragement.
•    In DC, my friends Eric, Allison W., Karen, and Damian and Jenn for hosting me in their homes when I was in town doing school-work.
•    For my mother who provided me a place to live for the past seven months.
•    For my oldest sister Mary who provided endless encouragement and support throughout my entire academic career at the undergraduate and graduate level.
•    For my academic advisor at Marymount University, Professor Lillian Bisson. She has always been a hard-ass, but in the best possible way. As a student in one of her classes or working with her directly on my thesis, she never once gave up on her insistence that I maintain the highest standards of academic excellence. By always insisting on rigorous intellectual effort she never once let me compromise my educational potential even though I often tried to do so.

Thank you all very, very much!

 

As for the title of this post, it is one final acknowledgement of my years spent immersed in medieval literature and the necessary study of the bible that goes along with such a program of study. This post title comes from the Gospel of John (the last of the four gospels written and my personal favorite among the gospels). Near death on the cross, Jesus receives a drink of vinegar on a sponge. “When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, ‘It is finished‘; and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit” (John 19:30). It is finished = consumatum est in the Latin of the Vulgate bible.

I’m Back From DC

It was a whirlwind trip in every sense of the term. The drive down was through beautiful but wintry (and occasionally treacherous) weather. I rushed about from place to place while in DC. And left right after the meeting with my advisor so as to get back to Syracuse and finish my thesis and return my Mom’s car to her. (We are expecting another storm tonight with some heavy snows by the weekend.)

I got there on Saturday and met my friend Joanne and we spent almost two hours checking out the new Ocean Hall at the Natural History museum. It is an object-rich exhibit with lots of explanatory text written in a straight-forward, friendly, almost-conversational tone. This new approach to interpretation was pleasing to both of us and is much better than the Smithsonian’s traditional approach to object labels which usually involves providing bland statistics about an object (what, when, where, how, size). Joanne even noticed they used the term “evolved” in a label explaining how an animal’s feature had changed over time.  Score: Scientists 1 , Religious Wackos 0. We didn’t get to see all of the exhibit but I was impressed with what I did see. They had lots of objects with good individual and collective interpretation for the objects combined with a smattering of media to enhance the object-focused textual descriptions. I hate it when museums use media to supplant text-based object narrative. Unless you have someone on video holding and talking about the specific object on display, words on an object label or reader-rail will always have more immediacy and impact than any video. (In my humble opinion, of course.)

I had tentative plans to get folks together for dinner but everyone had to cancel for one reason or another. The one person who didn’t cancel was my buddy Damian and it turns out he was alone that night as his wife was at the ballet. So, in a happy strange way it worked out perfectly that everyone canceled as Damian and I had a guys night out. We sat around and talked about work—We used to work together and he always fills in me on the latest news and/or gossip with my former co-workers—and went out for good barbecue, talked about the inauguration, and watched a stupid Will Ferrell movie (Anchorman) on TV when we got back to his place. Pretty much a perfect guys night out.

Sunday I had brunch with my friend Allison* W. and talked about her work—She is another friend from my time at the Smithsonian—and her singing endeavors. She sings in one professional chorus and had just come from an audition for a second amateur chorus. She was all excited as her audition went well and she was able to cover a two-and-a-half octave range in her singing for the audition. We also talked a good bit about the new Ocean Hall exhibit and its new approach to educational and interpretative techniques. (It’s hard for people like us to just go to a museum and enjoy it for a purely aesthetic or pleasurable reason.)

Then I was off to GW’s Gelman Library for 8 hours of not very productive writing on the extra section to my thesis asked for by my advisor. I wrote three good paragraphs for my thesis and many bad paragraphs which were all crap and got deleted before the meeting with my advisor yesterday. The meeting was helpful though as I got specifics from my advisor about what she wants me to address in the extra section and we talked about where to put it in the paper as well as possible ways of integrating it with my existing conclusion. So, I should be able to get the extra section written and to her for review by Thursday. And then I am finished with the thesis and can focus all my energies on looking for work again.

 

*I have three friends named Allison through my work at the Smithsonian. I met them all when I was working at the American History museum. Allison W. was literally the first person I ever met at the Smithsonian and, apart from her time at graduate school, is a Smithsonian lifer currently at the Postal Museum. Allison R. was at American history only for a short time but is still in the museum field at a regional art/history museum in Tennessee. Alison D. (note the single “l”) is still in the DC area but left the Smithsonian to work in the museum studies program at George Washington University.

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For those of you statistically inclined, I was gone for just about 65 hours, with slightly less than 16 of those hours (25% of the total time I was gone) spent just driving to and from DC. If you take into account driving around DC to visit various friends and the trip up to Baltimore to see/stay with my buddy Eric, I spent another 5 hours in the car driving (bring my total trip time spent in the car p to about 32%). Total miles driven were 877.7. I forgot to reset the mpg meter in my Mom’s car before I left so I couldn’t calculate what my mpg were for this trip. But, with the slow highway driving—I rarely ever got over 60 mph because of the weather, let alone reached the speed limit of 65 mph—I am guessing it was in the high 20s again. My last trip to DC in my Mom’s car I got ~29 mpg and that was going 60-65 mph the whole way.