What kind of idiot … ?

Reading through my own archives recently (to figure out what the heck I ever managed to write about), I came across this post of clips of guitar that I am reluctant to even link to, because of the transparent crudeness I see in it. Yeah, it’s that bad.

The funny thing is that this is actually the third time that I’ve made that mistake. The first two times, with “Otherside” and “Pointless” are well-documented in my anniversary guitar post, where I even chided myself for such activities. And then a few days later, I do it again. Hopefully, I”ll learn my lesson this time.

I will, however, let the previous post stand, because it’s and interesting record of the raw enthusiasm that my guitar can engender in me. In short, that post is a symbol of why I play.

But also because I realize that the main audience of my blog, GNO, is wholly composed of my elders, who I’m sure are unsurprised at a little immature zeal on my part.

It was actually just such an argument that gave rise to my second-most rousing D&D character yet. Gryffin, the Elven Monk in this 3rd Edition game that is scheduled to conclude this Thursday. He has become a sort of caricature of youth and impulsiveness, to the point of jokingly being said to need constant supervision.

But when I created the character, years ago, I knew that I was a relative neophyte compared to the other veteran players in the group. Since I assumed that my playing would seem childish and unprofessional at times, I decided to make that the character.

Doing debatably unwise things wouldn’t be detrimental, it would be roleplaying! Of course, Gryffin would always tell you that his decisions usually seem to be the strategically optimal maneuver at any given time.

Unfortunately, in time, this backfired when a fellow gamer came under the impression that this was my personality. It wasn’t until I began to DM for them that they realized that it was, in fact, Gryffin who is the really goofy guy. I just pretend to be one every once in a while.

Calculated Response, Part 3

Almost a year ago, while my blog was still in its infancy, I issued an indictment against the responses I saw to what happened at Virginia Tech that past week. Now that we’ve gained some perspective on the event, I don’t think much has changed. Now, in some ways, those earlier words are dated. Fred Thompson had his shot at the Presidency, and it didn’t happen. Life goes on.

However, the above-documented response was echoed once again in the latest incident of college violence. This time, it was only one girl, Eve Carson. However, if anything, having one person as the focal point for all the attention makes her easier to rally around than a number of people who all might have done great things, but won’t.

Over the past weeks, I’ve variously been asked to “wear Carolina blue to honor Eve Carson’s memory” and to do likewise to, I am not making this up, “take a stand”. The first request is a manifold problem, given that not only do I have no Carolina blue clothing, but I have no memories of Eve Carson. The second request is so patently ridiculous that it’s probably best responded to in my father’s words: “Oh, yeah, the criminals will really think twice when they know you’ll change your wardrobe in response to violence.”

On the other hand, I’d like to think that I’m taking a stand, here, in these pages, especially with these more seriously-toned essays. But I’ve never taken a stand in any local public forum, because I don’t think it’ll do much good. Take the local student newspaper, for example. Following Eve Carson’s death, they printed a sidebar that listed a student’s options for self-defense on campus, which pretty much extend to folding batons and no further. I’m sure they thought they were helping the community, but they were also providing authoritative documentation for anyone who wanted on exactly how defenseless students are on campus.

So why don’t I write them a letter to the editor? Maybe even a guest editorial? Because it wouldn’t actually change anything. There is a mindset, a way of not just thinking, but living, where the best response to a criminal with a gun is to have a moment of silence. This is a mindset that casts aside actually effective solutions in favor of things that are easily accomplished and instill a sense of piousness.

You can’t change a mindset with a letter. On the other hand, I do what I can to advocate for calculated responses in long-term discussions that have the potential to shift one’s mindset, such as the Society meetings I attend whenever possible. I’m not sure if I’ll ever actually win any of them over to my way of thinking, but at least I can make them consider it.

And maybe one day, they too will be disappointed in the fact that the best that college can do to try and secure their campus is to increase police patrols. Maybe we should let people protect themselves, instead?

How to learn to play guitar (or, how I learned to play guitar)

“Awwwright, man! You totally nailed that Dragonforce guitar solo and five-starred that song. You finally beat Guitar Hero, which means it’s time to get a real six string!”

Sound daunting and expensive? Well, it is. But the good news is that in six years, when your XBox 360 is obsolete garbage, your then-very beat up guitar will still be quite serviceable. Assuming you have good strings to play it on, and some picks left, and haven’t blown out your amp at the time. But that’s really getting ahead of the game.

The first step to learning to play guitar is to upgrade the locks on your door. Once you start ripping out mad riffs, the babes are going to begin attempting to force entry into your Place of Rock (PoR). Unfortunately, the only state that allows the use of lethal force to protect yourself in such a situation is Texas, under their castle doctrine. And, if you weren’t aware before, if your music is “killer” as in “coroner”, you’re doing something wrong. Opening fire on fans is always wrong.

The next step is to decide who you like more: Gibson or Fender; this will determine which brand of guitar’s cheaper version you get. For Gibson, you’re looking at Epiphone, for Fender, head on over to Lenovo.

But what about actually choosing between the two of them? I mean, Hendrix played a Fender Strat, but that short dude in AC/DC plays a Gibson SG. Well, there’s your answer. If you want to live to a ripe old age and enjoy your money like AC/DC, then get a Gibson. Otherwise, go with the Fender. It worked for Kurt Cobain.

Depending on how much you want to pay and the quality of guitar you want, you’ll next need to figure out where you are on the value-crappiness curve. If you’re looking for a crappy guitar and want to pay nothing for it, start hitting up your buddies, to see if they have one sitting, gathering dust in a closet. If you’re lucky, some other gamer-turned-rockstar has already given up the dream so he can five-star Green Grass and High Tides on Expert (good luck!), meaning you can probably swipe his axe without him so much as knowing.

Otherwise, try hitting up specialty music boutique shops. This is important because, unless they are owned by the RIAA, they will let you try the goods before you pay for them. This leads us the next problem: putting the f***ing thing on.

Yes, the strap will become tangled. No, don’t mess with it, just try and act cool. Eventually, roadies will deal with this crap while you eat out of your bowl of brown M&Ms. Now, you’ll notice something immediately: it feels like you have a very large skillet strapped to your body. This is natural. While it may look cool from ten feet away on some other dude, when it’s actually occupying the space normally reserved for your fanny pack, it’ll seem kind of like grappling a hovercraft. (Unless of course you are grappling a hovercraft, or you’ve accidentally picked up a steel guitar, in which case you actually do have a very large skillet strapped to your body.)

Now comes the fun part. As a way to implement a backdoor licensing program to use guitars, the government has mandated that all guitars that you pick up will have unlabeled knobs. Just turn them all to ten and see what happens. But first, make sure to turn the knob on the amp labeled “Metallica” to ten as well.

However, now you’re really in a pickle. You really need to play something or risk looking like Former President of the United States Jimmy Carter being attacked by a “swamp rabbit”, but you have no idea to play a guitar. You could either pick blindly at the strings and hope something cool comes out (which, given the four thousand possible frettings on a standard guitar, is statistically unlikely), or just play Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple. It’s the middle two strings. Start playing and you’ll see what I mean.

The downside to this, of course, is that by doing so, you will piss off not only everyone in the store, but the owner too. Of course, you should always be sure to obey any signs he’s posted such as “No Stairway” or “No Smoking”. If you see the latter sign, it means he’s had it with Deep Purple and will likely treat you like Pete Townshend did his guitars. (You know, the ones they glued back together after a show so he could smash them again the next night.)

And now that you’re in the ambulance after insisting that it wasn’t legally justified for him to beat you up for playing three chords (it is, read the Patriot Act), you should really consider the fact that you’re still medically uninsured.

And once you’re out of surgery, if you wish to remain that way, under no circumstances inquire of your doctor, “Can I play the guitar anymore?”

Priorities

At my place of employment, I recently had to blow the dust off of about 900 lines of Python code I wrote for one-time use (so that I can use it a second time). Joking aside, the process has actually been both cathartic and frustrating. See, the code was built to run once, not to be pretty or maintainable or particularly efficient. (Quote from my boss: “As long as your machine doesn’t smoke, it is not a bad idea to start [the program] up at the end of the day and let it run.”)

But on a geek level, the same geek level that wanted to implement yesterday’s quicksort three ways for kicks, I want the code to be clean. Six different classes all read in file data in mostly the same way; it would be possible to use inheritance to remove the file I/O code that I copied and pasted from one class to another, which would probably reduce the whole project by 100-200 lines.

But it’s really not necessary. The code runs, and the file reading is so dead simple that it will never need to be changed (hah!), and so I never get around to it. In short, to quote myself in a message back to my boss, “It’s kind of embarrasing to see how little best-practices code I used. I might rewrite this on personal time, just as a mental exercise in remembering what fast-and-dirty code looks like and how to avoid it.”

Now, make no mistake, the indication of willingness to do this in off-time makes clear that this is simply trying to write beautiful code. However, I can’t help be reminded of this ordeal when I read this:

Busy	Productive
Rolls their own	Uses someone else’s
Makes it “elegant” and “extensible”	Makes it work
Responds to your email within a few minutes	Responds to your email within a few days
Ready. Aim. Aim. Aim.	Ready. Fire. Aim.
Makes the boss happy	Makes the client happy
Seeks consensus	Encourages creative self-expression
Writes a detailed specification	Implements a prototype
Looks like they’re busy	Looks like they’re slacking off
Finishes it this evening	Finishes it tomorrow
What else can we add?	What else can we remove?
How should we fix this?	Do we need to fix this?
Sees the toolchain as a competitive advantage	Sees the user-kickassness as a competitive advantage
Let’s get everyone’s feedback on this	DO IT

And really, I think I’m just humoring myself. After all, as the man says, the world is full of interesting problems to be solved, and none of them should have to be solved twice. This problem is, quite really, solved. When I have so many other software projects to work on, and ones I’m purposely ignoring, rewriting this “throw-away” code just wouldn’t be right.

Reflections

There’s something real particular about 2 am that makes a fellow such as myself particularly reflective. I’m not sure what it is, but at times like these, you don’t question such things.

Also, I know some readers are particularly keen on gleaning my personal status, and I don’t mind at all obliging them to a little view into how things are going every once in a while.

This past weekend is a paragon of the kinds of times I’ll look back on and wish for more of. A little bit of class on Friday, then to work for a few hours, then some take-out pizza and an evening (until 1am) with my closest of friends, playing D&D Fourth Edition with pre-release materials. We are so eager to learn the secrets of this new system that in a year’s time will be utterly pedestrian and second nature to us that we are taking to scraping together every bit we can of public games to re-create them in our own lives.

But there’s also the larger issue of spending hours with people you’ve known for time periods longer than high school. The bonds will certainly be tested, and often in unexpected ways, but even though you might disagree as to who benefits from NAFTA, you’ll still be able to come to a consensus that Israel is one bad ass country.

And if it had ended there, I might even be content. But that evening, during a dessert run to Goodberry’s, I became wholly consumed in a discussion of computers and their programming. I can remember a time when I was unsure of my career path, and I understand those days. But somewhere during my four last years of public school, I came to the realization that programs would be my living.

It’s certainly easy to posture on such a subject, but I think the most defining moment that tells me I’m on the right path was when I spent a full five minutes gesturing to my good friend and fellow computer scientist while rambling on about recursion. All the while, I was holding a Goodberry’s Carolina Concrete in my hand, even gesticulating with the spoon full of vanilla ice cream and chocolate chips. And I was more interested in base cases and infinite loops than such a delicious treat. That’s certainly a statement.

In short, the future is looking good. But the present, as it so often is, is somewhat disappointing. Unfortunately, I’m finding my programming classes to be rather boring in straightforward, which I chalk up to a combination of previous knowledge of the subject matter and an intuitive learning of the new material.

Take linked lists for example: I distinctly remember some years ago, during high school, at some shindig or another, asking Greg what this “linked list” that he was talking about was. He explained it to me, and at the time it seemed silly to me, but at the time I hadn’t had to write any data structures of my own, so it doubtlessly would. Then consider the idea of operating on them recursively: recursion was a topic I covered in my high school computer science classes and in my recreational programming. While using it to iterate through the list would not be immediately obvious to me, once it was proposed, it was a straightforward acceptance of the utility of such an approach. The additional half hour of justification for it in class was just unneeded.

Holy crap, that was a tangent. So anyways, Goodberry’s, and Friday evening. Well, that night, after the get together adjourned for 12 hours, to reconvene and carry on at 1pm on Saturday, I went directly home and set to coding, staying up hours longer until a rather unwise hour to be well rested for the following day. And then all of that day, in parallel with the gaming and debauchery, I kept on coding.

What I’m left with is a product which I didn’t know how create when the weekend started, but by pushing into the online documentation and puzzling things out, I produced a useful product that I’m actually quite proud of. Coupled with the satisfaction I gain from such projects at my place of employment, I know that I’m headed in the right direction.

Social Sciences

One singular concept from science fiction has always intrigued me, more so than robots or faster than light travel, and that is the concept of Psychohistory, as described in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. This is a science that treats individual humans like individual molecules in a fluid dynamics problem. Just like you can calculate how an ideal gas will flow around an airplane in aerodynamics, Psychohistory can predict how a sufficiently large sample of humanity will “flow around” circumstances such as the collapse of a galactic empire.

But we’ve already come upon one of the major limiting factors of Psychohistory: it has to be employed on a population that is large enough to minimize the ability of one regular individual to radically alter a statistically significant quantity of others. It also requires clinical-style blindness: the people it’s being used on must be largely unaware of its use, and especially unaware of the corrective actions made under the advice of a Psychohistorian.

I’ve also enjoyed the study of economics, especially on the macro side. I imagine it’s for much the same reason, because it allows the treatment of intelligent humans as a mathematical system that can be tweaked and poked. I never really made the connection before last week, when I realized it while driving to class from work (resulting in “Psych Hist as Econ”) on the back of my hand to remind me. Of course, Wikipedia made the connection ages ago, and links to the macroeconomics article from the Psychohistory (fictional) article.

Now, I’m sure Asimov didn’t have this in mind when he wrote it, but the two are actually strikingly similar, especially when the Seldon Plan is considered. In macroeconomics, and especially laissez-faire economics, certain things escape the effects of market forces: things such as roads, and utilities, which are called “natural monopolies” because it’s not practical to have three different companies all build parallel roads and compete for your business.

But in the Foundation books, something similar happened, with the eponymous Foundation. Through Psychohistory, Hari Seldon found that the collapse of the Galactic Empire was inevitable, so he set aside a backwater world and began building on it a Foundation to act as a repository to all the knowledge that would be lost with the fall of the Empire. Once this was collected, it could be more easily redistributed, shortening the length of the chaotic interregnum by orders of magnitude. Although humanity would eventually piece together the knowledge to return to the stars without the Foundation, it would involve many more years of barbarism and feudalism. Just as the government steps in, outside of market forces, so did the Foundation act to regulate human existence by trusting a great deal of power in it.

There’s also an analogy to be made between, say, the trusts of the nineteenth century and the Mule. See, some time after the retreat of the Empire from the edges of the galaxy here the Foundation was built, a power rose in the sector that was known as the Mule. He was a great conqueror who was forming a new empire by quickly and ruthlessly conquering entire planetary systems in days. But just as McKinley stepped in to break the trusts that were gaining too much power and hurting consumers, so did the Foundation have to step in and stop this threat.

I’d like to think that someone will one day develop something resembling Psychohistory, and use it to better mankind, but I know that I certainly won’t live to see it. Trying to apply the science to a population in the three-bit billions is like trying to apply market forces to a hunter-gatherer community.

Responsibility and Trust in Computing

In the comment thread for Wednesday’s post, Hazel pointed out how computers in the classroom are often considered — and often are — a distraction to the lesson at hand. This asks the question, then, of how to help integrate computers with education while minimizing the distraction and temptation.

Interestingly enough, this problem is also paralleled in the area of responsibility with cars, since any parent knows that in granting permission for their teen to drive, they are trusting them not to go speeding around or engage in other such irresponsible behaviors. Of course, some parents react to this by installing GPS units in their child’s car, which allow not only for tracking position, but the rate of change of position (cough, cough, derivative) which tells them how fast the car is going.

Coming full circle, a similar solution has been fielded with at the private school Cary Academy (whose yearly tuition exceeds my annual college expenses — but I digress) where the kids are given tablet laptops for use in class. But with these laptops, the child is kept honest by parental oversight via a mechanism that allows the parents to view a remote (which is to say, not on the computer and therefore immune to tampering by the child) log of the child’s internet use in class.

The problem then becomes an issue of boundaries and trust. For example, it is entirely reasonable for a parent to monitor their child’s in-class browsing, just as it is expected that a parent will keep an eye on their kid on the internet at home. It is even socially acceptable for a parent to log every aspect of the child’s computer use in their leisure time. It’s not a prospect that entirely thrills me, but that’s because my parents never tried to do anything like it to me or my sister. I can’t speak with authority, but I reckon that even if they could have viewed school-provided logs of my internet usage there, they wouldn’t have used them.

And, of course, the reason for that is trust. I was brought up to be responsible and and use my judgment.

On the other hand, there is the case of a former girlfriend of mine. Her father used software and hardware to log her keystrokes and take screen captures of whatever she was doing. But in the nine months that I dated her, I never once met him face to face. If he was trying to protect his daughter from strange people, he sure had a funny way of going about it.

And as one further anecdote, I present my first semester of college, for which I first acquired my laptop. There was always temptation to take it out in class and thumb around the intertubes instead of paying attention. And, sometimes that temptation was succumbed to, with the obvious effects. Of course, no one was accounting for my grades except me, and so I learned the hard way what happens what happens when you don’t pay attention in class. And so these days, I don’t use my laptop as a distraction in class. But that’s not because of a prohibitive edict; instead, it comes from a grasp of the consequences of such actions and an inescapable responsibility for those same consequences.

Since it’s impossible to legislate bad parenting — such as not teaching self-accountability, it seems to me that the Cary Academy approach will and should prevail in the lower grades. I’m sure that printing a student’s top 10 in-class visited sites on the bottom of a report card would probably be more elegant and effective — although I would say putting a hit-count next to each site would probably be necessary to avoid a clever kid from just setting up an auto-refresh to inflate the numbers.

I imagine college will continue largely unchanged from the current order of things in terms of student responsibility. That is, aside from a few patently farcical ideas from professors who wish that the magic wand of technology might be waved and to remove this problem. I’m specifically recalling a report of a professor who wished that he had the equivalent of spyware on his students’ laptops, that he might perpetrate them same invasive surveillance that my ex’s dad did.

And let me be clear here: I am by no means attempting to whitewash this issue and state that it isn’t a problem. At least once a week, the guy in front of me in my math for nerds class plays World of Warcraft through class. Maybe he already knows the material and is just zoning out but sitting in his seat because of the University’s attendance requirement for this level of class. But no one — aside from egotistical professors who require rapt attention at all times — is being hurt by his actions but himself. At a certain point, you have to take off the training wheels and let your kid skin his knees a few times.

And doesn’t it seem like a legal adult who lives independently, feeds himself, and washes his own laundry should be given at least that much?

Forward Into the Future

As I stared out at the parking lot at my place of employment, gazing over the sea of cars from my fifth floor vantage point, I thought to myself the supreme majesty of it all. And then I chuckled and thought to myself that Henry Ford would be proud. This was, after all, his dream.

But it also gave me pause, to stop and consider the nature of the American relationship to cars. (I can’t speak with any authority on the auto patterns of non-co-patriots, of course.) Most Americans are familiar with cars by their first birthday, usually through being driven in them. Around the double-digited grades, we begin to learn to finally drive for ourselves, first in formalized instruction, and later in ostensibly supervised co-piloting with family.

But, eventually, each working adult ends up with their own car, transportation to the various locales of work and leisure that their daily life requires.

So what is the next “car”? These days, cars are an assumption for an adult: an implied consequence of responsibility. As such, we consider a lack of this standard of living as hallmarked by a sort of barbarism. One of the best jokes in Back to the Future III is where an incredulous bar patron is informed by Marty that in the future when everyone has “one of these auto-whatsits” that people run for recreation. For fun. Of course, he replies, “Run for fun? What the hell kind of fun is that?”

But it seems obvious that the next such society-altering revolution will be — and already is — the computer and her inseparable sister the internet. However, since the internet is not a physical object to be owned, nor will its access be non-universal for any significant further period of time, for this discussion, it can be discounted.

Instead, I believe that the most salient and symbolically appropriate comparison is the personal desktop computer. In fact, in retrospect, I see now that in my life, my progression in relation to automobiles varied directly with my relationship with computers. There are actually a number of striking similarities between the epochs and their boundaries for these two aspects of maturation.

As a child, I used the family PC to do tasks that my parents provided for me, like playing Commander Keen, all while being driven places by my parents according to their dictates for my own good.

But as I moved into middle school, things became more proactive. Aided by a schoolmate and neighbor, I installed this enigmatic Half-Life and began to explore the gladiatorial vistas of Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Strike. After that would come Red Alert 2, Diablo I & II, and others. Similarly, but perhaps a few years later, I began attempting to gain some control over my own transport, doing my best to ensure I could have a parent-provided conveyance to weekly D&D sessions.

And then a time came in each thread where my parents, after deeming me requisitely responsible, conferred onto me my own engine for furthering my self-reliance. In computing, the day came when my father ran up the white flag after many struggles with me over computer access and went out and acquired a second PC for the rest of the family. (“Oh, honey, he’s teasing you. Nobody has two television sets.”) Acquiring a car of my own was a more amenable armistice that resulted in my receipt of a quintessential college student car.

From then, I was able to drive myself to the D&D games that were now occurring biweekly, thanks to the responsibilities that come on the coattails of age. In those days, I also took up using what was undisputedly my computer to play World of Warcraft with the same people I was increasingly infrequently playing D&D with.

Since that point, the nature of the personal responsibilities haven’t changed much, although there’s probably something to be said for the image of me loading up my car with my computer to go off to college. It’s also probably worth noting that not only does my family of four have four cars, we have eight computers: three laptops, four desktops, and a server, which works out to 2 computers per capita.

I have no doubt that my familiy is, in this, an outlier — how many homes roll their own file and print server using Linux? However, I think that the statistical correlation, backed by a reasonable conception of the causation, makes it relatively clear that computers are destined to go the way of the automobile, with the TRS80 in place of the Model T.

I can only fantasize what sight will provoke the same reaction in my progreny that the parking lot full of cars provoked in me.

My money is on the public school classroom where every student sits aside a computer in each of their studies, from math to art to history.

A Marketplace of Ideas

College is supposed to be the place that you go off and have your mind opened, as all your small-town values are challenged by worldly professors who teach you the way the world really works. (You know, that world they have live in…)

And when I went off on my own University adventure, I was convinced that I wouldn’t sip the Kool-aid and become some Che-loving hippie. And, while that hasn’t happened just yet, I have been having my horizons broadened. The real catch, though? Luckily, it’s not coming from the professors, but from a student organization. No, not the College Democrats — although there is some overlap — it’s the Society of Independent Thought, a sort of newspeaky term for an informal debate club. Every two weeks, they — we — get together and shoot the shit about issues of the day.

For example, a recent meeting was on the topic of abortion. While my stance on the topic wasn’t changed, I certainly gained some clarity on the issue. Every argument I’m aware of on the topic is based one or both of two things: whether the government has the jurisdiction to regulate such things and when exactly a fetus meaningfully becomes a human. Of course, this is a simplification, but it does help to put the matter in perspective.

But last night, I sat across a conference table from five Obama supporters, with my trusty apathetic friend at my side commenting on the chewiness of the gratis cookies as I defended capitalism, unsocialized medicine, and federalism. But it really was quite fascinating. With all the reading I do in the (Conservative) blogosphere, I find I develop an ivory tower mentality that kicks me in the face when I come across people who oppose my views in real life who are not drooling idiots.

They are, however, idealists, it seems to me. I would like just as much as they to find a system where everyone in America could be happily medically insured. But from the evidence I’ve seen, no such system has been found. I would love to be wrong on this, but just wishing I were isn’t an acceptable substitute. (I actually felt this was the strongest point I made during the whole meeting. With a little help from Messrs Hobbes, Lock, and Rousseau, I turned their logical barbs aside with the point that health care is not in the social contract.)

But perhaps the best part of the meetings are the parts afterwards, when we leave the room and stand, usually, within sight of the place of our debate. But it is an unspoken rule the those discussions are left behind, and this is the time for idle chatter and bond-forging. I’m not much of one for pointless blather, but spreading the word about Audiosurf does, in the final analysis, beat getting to use phrases like “I deny your premise” and “the fallacy you are operating under is”.

A 5 on the Illness Communication Exaggeration Curve

“Now, that’s service,” I commented to myself, taking a long pull on my milkshake.

It was really a muttering, forced out by an impression that had struck me as the Sonic waitress skated away on her cute little size 8 roller blades. Maybe it’d just been too long since I’d eaten at Sonic, but something about the entire experience had been downright painless. But as I sat there, slippered feet propped up on a nearby bench (I’d been too lazy to put on real shoes), I tried to suss out why.

It’s probably safe to say that I was primed to enjoy the experience by my nice stroll down the street to get there, since the restaurant was only a minute away on foot. Would have been less if I had decided to cut through my backyard and cross over the border that my house shares with it. The place was built within a few years of our moving into the house, and had caused quite a ruckus. The first month or so, the place was over-flowing. People parked along the streets in my neighborhood and walked, since there was not a single opening at the many bays of the drive-in restaurant. Eventually, this was quashed with some opportunely placed No Parking signs, and I don’t know how people who didn’t live in the area kept up their walk-up business. But somehow, they did.

Of course, that was all years ago. This particular dusky Sunday had a half dozen cars parked for drive-in service, and the dozen tables for walk-ins were deserted. Except, of course, for me and my slippers. It occurred to me that maybe it was the service by a cute girl near my own age that prompted the sense of well-being, but that wasn’t entirely right either.

That brought to mind the nature of the ordering process, which had changed somewhat since the first time I’d ventured to the restaurant as a part of a gang of neighborhood boys. Being adventurous, when we were asked to give initials so that our identity might be tied to our order, some made up three-character strings, while one boy, with a fit of giggles, spelled out A-S-S. The server would have none of this rugrat’s antics and just kept right on going. Somehow, when the orders came around, no call was ever issued for “ass”.

However, in the order placed just minutes ago no initials had been required. It was a step that had not been missed in the process, likely due to my solitude, and served to make the actual lodging of an order somewhat more convenient. What made it more so, however, was the little credit card slider on the microphone used to order that allowed the card to never leave my hands, as had been necessary before they’d installed the contraptions, an event that went wholly unnoticed by myself.

Actually, as I sit here sniffling and hashing this out, it becomes clear that it was probably, quite simply, my illness. Firstly, this particular flavor of the common cold has the interesting effect of making me quite sedentary, so any opportunity to simply sit and be still was a welcome change. But also, the illness was the reason for my visit to Sonic: for one of their excellent milkshakes. My standard self-medication for when my body decides to give the lining of my throat a pink slip as a part of trying to fight an illness, I knew when I woke up that the day would end, one way or another, at Sonic.