On Being Ten, as a 33-Year Old

I think a part of each of us will always be ten years old. When I was ten, I’d look up at HealthNet’s BK-117 as it flew over Morgantown and say, “I’ve gotta do that.”

Last week, I landed on the roof of Ruby Memorial, Morgantown’s main hospital, as a HealthNet pilot.

Helicopter landing at hospital helipad

My personal 10 year old is pretty darned thrilled right now. :)

Warm Fuzzies

While I was waiting to pull into my parking space tonight, a woman who looked familiar but who I couldn’t quite place walked up to the car and (re)introduced herself to me. It turns out she was the mother of student I recently tutored. By way of jogging my memory, she said: “You saved my son’s life in trigonometry last year.” I don’t think I can even claim that from a year and a half of being an EMS helicopter pilot.

It’s a good day to be a Jonathan Mack.

Just Bad.

The legacy of the George W. Bush administration is one of fiscal irresponsibility, reckless foreign policy, rejection of reason, and violation of human rights. Bush was either too incompetent to stop his underlings, or too unbalanced to think anything was wrong with what he was doing. Either way, he was completely unsuitable for the job of President, and no amount of jokey last-minute interviews will change that.

Thun! Dar!

I submit to you that AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” is one of the rockingest music videos in the history of the world. From the Drumstick-Cam that starts it off, to Angus Young’s exhausting song-long riff to the literal wall of fist-pumping “Thun-der!”-shouting fans that surround the stage, this is a video that grabs you off the street, beats you up in a back alley, and leaves you, dazed and bleeding, wondering the last time such a smackdown was that awesome.

The Usefulness of Bad Economic Decisions

It appears that our economy was based on people making poor economic decisions (buying on credit, getting loans they couldn’t afford). We appear to be stuck; either people make bad decisions and screw up their personal financial situation, or they make good decisions and all the industries that benefit from bad decisions (which appears to be most of the economy) are wrecked.

It’s a sobering thought to consider that my relative frugality, if applied to everyone, would almost surely cause national economic meltdown. I wonder if someday the President will implore people to spend beyond their means, to please max out their credit cards as part of their patriotic duty…

Star Wars

There’s a new Star Wars movie coming out in August, as you almost undoubtedly know. I almost undoubtedly know that, like almost every other Start Wars movie before it, the plot will be haphazard at best, the dialogue will be cringingly cheesy, and that these make me gag in almost any other movie. I also know that I’m going to see it, maybe even in the theatre, so I can get an even greater effect from it.

What I’m wondering is, why? And this is actually something I’ve been trying to figure out; on a purely cinematographic level, most Star Wars movies just aren’t very good. (Empire is excepted, of course.) And I hate watching bad movies. So why do I (we) keep going to them? The special effects, of course, tend to be great, but there’s something deeper. The best I can come up with is this: Star Wars taps into very fundamental desires/wishes that many, many people have, especially guys, and even more especially guy nerds. Here’s my best guess as to what they are they are:

  1. Good and evil can be clearly differentiated.
  2. It’s possible for one person to make a difference in the conflict between the two.
  3. Flight. Especially in the service of (2).
  4. Unlike the religions we have now, a spirituality (connection to something greater than oneself) exists that provides tangible, consistent benefits to those who follow its path.

All wonderful fantasies, of course, but they don’t help me when I’m standing in line to get in to the theatre, wondering why I’m giving George Lucas yet more money to wreck a story.

Metallica + Exercise

One of the nice things about summer internships is the break they give from the academic year’s nonstop studying. I’ve been using some of my free-er time to work off late-night studying flab at the local YMCA. I’ve also been trying to lower the pile of unlistened-to CDs I’ve gotten from the past couple of birthdays and Christmases. Happily, I can combine the two, ripping CDs directly to my Treo and listening to them while on the elliptical.

A couple of weeks ago, I was doing just that. Metallica’s title album was next on my list, and I did my usual routine: get on elliptical machine, program elliptical, turn on Treo, start first song on CD. Depending on how you select the CD’s worth of songs on my Treo, the first song is either the first song on the CD, or the song that appears first in alphabetical order. Without realizing it, I loaded them in alphabetical order. I hit Play, and kept on (running? striding? ellipticalling? Our exercise machines outstrip our abilities to describe them…)

Going by alphabetical order, “Don’t Tread on Me” is the first song on that album. The song started. The thumping, punishing opening rhythm guitar/drum riff (dundundunnn dun dun) hit. Then the lead guitar, with its jarring variation on West Side Story’s “I Want to Live in America”. Then more a few more bars of punishing guitar/drum. (Few bands, of course, do punishing riffs better than Metallica did in the 80’s and early 90’s.) Then the start of a different guitar/drum riff, the one that drives the rest of the song. And then, finally, the opening words “Don’t tread on me”.

YEEEAAARRRGH!

Energy coursed through my body, my arms and legs suddenly on fire. My baseline 800 calories per hour pace skyrocketed to over 1000. And stayed there. Through Lars telling me So be it/Faith no more/Just a few pieces/To prepare for war. (War! War against a normal exercise pace!) Through more punishing guitar/drum. And more preparation for War. And even more guitar/drum. And finally, one last time: Don’t. Tread. On. Me.

My rate eventually went back down to its normal level, but there’s no doubt I burned more calories that day than usual.

I now know one of life’s true Lessons:

Metallica + Exercise = Endorphin Rush