Deadline Doom and Misc.

Sorry! I'm working on multiple deadlines for a few days.... Little time to be thoughtful or witty. Don't know how I will excuse my thoughtlessness and witlessness in the future.

Last weekend my wife and I spent a day visiting our girls in college, where they seem to be doing very well and have their heads screwed on right. I've accepted an invitation from my alma mater--not entirely coincidentally the same university my girls attend--to speak to a group of physics students about their potential futures (no, not the eventual heat death of the universe, although you have to be careful with physicists: they think large-scale and long-term). I've got a "Science Career Day" talk that I've given to high school kids and can tailor for this crowd, and I really enjoy doing it. I've made kind of an interesting career for myself that wasn't really planned and took a couple of decades to pull together, and I think I can talk about some approaches to life and work they may not have considered. It'll be fun to be on campus and see a few of my old professors again.

Kid Sis is in town spending a few days with us, which is very nice. Lots of rain. And now I'm just stalling so I don't have to face my deadlines. Back to work.

¡Buenos Dias!

Remember last week, when I wrote that my website and blog suddenly got an enormous slug of visitors from Germany and I had no idea why? Same thing today, only this time it's Mexico.

Whatever brought you here, I really appreciate your interest in my family's story. Gracias.

Rocket Man

In response to my previous post linking to the "Jet-Man" movie (and how cool was that?), Barry12 left a comment that asked, "But it's an interesting question... Would you ever learn to fly or skydive? I know you like outer space, but would you really go up? I'm honest, not me!"

I love pretty much everything about flying and do have some mild interest in learning to pilot an airplane, but I haven't been sufficiently motivated to do anything about it. I know it's a time-consuming and expensive hobby that I'm not likely to have either the time or expenses to pursue. I also know I'd never get my wife aboard any aircraft piloted by me, which would take a lot of the fun and potential usefulness out of it.

As for whether I'd ever skydive? I might give it a shot....

I jumped three or four times when I was in college. These days, I guess novice skydivers are taken up to 10,000 feet to do a tandem jump with an experienced skydiver strapped to their backs, but back in the good ol' days they started out with several solo static-line jumps at around 3,000 feet before graduating to higher altitudes and longer free-falls.

By the way, if your skydiving school isn't run out of a broken-down VW van, you're doing it wrong.

Skydiving was a pretty great experience but also an expensive thrill for a poor starving student, so I kind of drifted away. Any thoughts I had about taking it up again were quashed a year or two later when my jumpmaster--one of those cool-as-ice Chuck Yeager guys who'd been leaping out of planes since the Korean War--was killed doing it. That sobered me up.

Would I go into space? Not if it were just as a tourist looking for a thrill. I think that'd be too selfish a risk for an adult with a family depending on him. But if I had the necessary skills and training, and most importantly a legitimate reason related to science or exploration to be there, then yeah. I'd do it. Because then the risk would be for a purpose greater than satisfying my own jollies.

I don't have a lot of respect for daredevils who die jumping out of planes or climbing rocks only to leave grieving widows and orphans. When you're young and alone, go for it with my blessing. But deciding to have a family means committing to something more important than your individual desires. If you decide to face mortal danger, it ought to be for something worthwhile that your survivors could at least honor and respect. In my opinion, giving your life for an adrenaline rush is indefensible narcissism; giving your life because you're a cop, firefighter or soldier protecting others--or an astronaut helping humanity find a larger place in the universe--is a much better trade I think.

So based on my own standards: No, I would probably not really fly the jet wing thing in the movie. But I'd like to think there was a time I would have....

Hey, Honey!

I figured out what I want for Christmas!

I also just wanted to mention again that if you ever e-mailed me at any address ending in "momscancer.com" and I didn't reply, I wasn't being rude. There's a fair chance I never got it. My site host is economical (cheap) and does a good job keeping my "Mom's Cancer" website up and running, but I discovered several months ago that it handles e-mail very poorly--letters seem to have about a 50/50 chance of disappearing into a black hole--so I set up the very reliable brianfies[at]comcast.net as my main point of contact. However, I still get a trickle of e-mail into the old addresses and it always makes me worry how much I've missed. If you wrote me and I didn't reply within a couple of days, I probably didn't see it. Sorry.

Ich Liebe Dennis Wagner

Man, this is too good.

Dennis Wagner, the German journalist who interviewed me last July, left a comment in my previous post to which I immediately and enthusiastically replied privately. I somehow missed an e-mail from him in September, about which I feel bad (not really my fault, but I can still feel bad about it). Dennis pointed me to this:



What a sensitive, creative report! When we met, Dennis told me how he envisioned animating some of my artwork and asked my permission to do so. I think he did a fantastic job, both technically and in his selection of images. Very, very cool.

My only criticism is that I wish Dennis had left his Ugly Lens at home. I swear, I don't really have an enormous bobble head with squinty bag-rimmed eyes (all right, maybe I'm packing eye bags--but just little tiny over-night eye bags, not enormous steamer-trunk eye bags). Don't watch this video with small children, easily startled pets, or sensitive houseplants in the room, because I'm hideous.

Many thanks, Dennis. Aside from my face, I thought it was wonderful.