confusion

…and I don’t know when I’ll be back again. No really, I don’t know. In just a little while S██████ will pick me up and take me to the airport and I will be on my way to Singapore. I have a return ticket but I don’t know if I will be coming back next month or next year or ever. It’s a bit scarry and a very exciting. Moving on or postponing life? I don’t know yet. I’ll let you all know as soon as I know.

My grandfather is one of the people who should have been in DC for the dedication of the World War II memorial. He is part of the ‘Greatest Generation.’ He spent 50 months in Europe during and after the war. Helping to defeat the Axis powers and rebuild the infrastructure of the continent. When he returned home he applied for the G.I. bill to finish his studies which the government had interrupted to ship him off to war. He was denied because they said they had no record of his service. So he finished on his own money while my grandmother worked. Then the government did find the record of his service—in time to recall him and send him to Korea to fight.

It is sad that my grandfather fought for his country in two wars and now cannot remember that he just told me that story. Last week I went to Alabama to see him and he told me about the governments selective memory numerous times in the span of a conversation that lasted only a few hours. It was the same with other stories.

I am not as close to my grandfather as I would like to be. I have not seen him in six years and since that time he has had open heart surgery and a stroke that robbed him of his fine motor control on his left side—his dominant side. I grew up too far away to be as close as I would have liked.

My grandfather is the person I most admired as a student. He was the engineer that made me interested in engineering. And it is sad to see he is starting to fade. He never seemed old when I was growing up. Bald, yes but not old. He walked five miles a day and was mentally sharp. Now it makes me really sad that I do not know him better and that I don’t have a chance to get to know him better.
I guess it’s just a reminder of mortality. This whole incident makes me very depressed on some level. Not the kind of overriding depression where you can’t do anything but I find myself thinking a lot about things like growing old, not knowing my grandparents better because we lived so far apart and how well my kids might one day know my family. It just keeps popping up.

The idea of extended family is foreign to me. I’ve known families where the grandparents, aunts and uncles of my friends where virtually a part of everyday life. While to me my grandparents where people I saw every other year or on special occasions. I am reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake right now and I can identify with the main characters since of being lost on encounters with his own family. Every few years his family would pack up and fly to India to see countless relatives that he had not seen or heard from since the last trip.

I’ve never met half my cousins. Aunt’s and Uncles? Seen them two, three or maybe five times in my life. I wonder if this could be part of the reason I don’t form large social groups well? I don’t know, just stuff that has been going through my head while driving 40 hours to and from Alabama. That’s a lot of time to think.

Up to now I had never gotten and ‘blog spam’—comments posted to my blogs by robots either advertising or attempting to solicit an email response to harvest my email address (or other net surfers). But in the past few days I have gotten four spam posts in my [ confusion.cc ] blog.

Somewhere in central Africa there are people who have never seen an ad. They don’t know what Coke is or what a Big Mac looks like. They don’t have cars or cell phones and every time I see an ad for Viagra I get one step further from sanity and one step closer to wishing I lived there. And hopfully no one would ever drop a Coke bottle on my village. [www.imdb.com ]

I got pulled over by a cop this morning in bumper-to-bumper traffic. The reason? My plates (which are personalized) register as belonging on an Isuzu Rodeo—my old car. Not a problem, I did not get a ticket or anything. See I have new plates in my car, and a plate transfer form from the dealership because the whole buying a car in C’ville and having them register it in DC was a fiasco and I still have not had a chance to get down to DMV to finish the transfer. So no ticket just a ‘you need to take care of this.’

Best thing was the realization that this cop was just sitting in traffic running the plates of the cars around her. Good to know my tax dollars are at work, actually working even while sitting in traffic.

So I flew to Atlanta today for work. And lets just say the security while ever present was severely lacking in effectiveness.

I checked in at the desk and got a seating assignment first. No problem. Then I went through the security check point to go to the gate. I stepped through the metal detector and ‘BEEP!’ The agent there said; “step back through… oh, no. Doesn’t matter, your airline selected you for a random screening. OK. So they went through my laptop bag pocket by pocket and scanned my shoes and hand scanned me and checked my pockets. Annoying but OK.

So now I’m waiting at the gate when I hear my name called to come to the desk. I get up there and they are handing out seating assignments. So I tell the woman I already have mine – that I got it from the check in desk. She looks at it and says ‘OK.’ Then five minutes later she calls my name again. So I go over there and she says; “did I call you again?”

“Yea,” I say. Then looking down I said “that’s probably because my name is on that boarding pass right there.”

“That’s your name?”

“Yes.”

“Well this boarding pass has a different name on it.” She says pointing to the boarding pass I was given at the check in desk.

At this point my mind is saying; “you’re fucked. Somehow you made it all the way through security – having like 6 people look at your ID and boarding pass and none of them noticed the names where totally different. You must be a terrorist. You’re fucked.”

But no. The attendant just handed me the boarding pass with my name on it, trashed the other one and said, “I wonder how that happened?”

I feel so secure. Do you?