I found the sequence ‘penitent, turbulent, multiplex!’ in a spam email some time ago, and I really liked it for reasons that are probably only apparent to me. For a slightly better explanation, see the ‘About this Site’ snippet.
Anticipated reaction to this: In the words of Jimmy, parroting some television show, “OK: You’re weird.”
Lately, I’ve been thinking more than usual about my affluence relative to the average inhabitant of this Earth. On Tuesday, two unrelated happenings jumped out at me as being particularly symbolic of my good fortune.
I observed the first as I was in the park doing some sprints for my morning exercise. (The fact that I take time out every morning to burn excess calories is itself a powerful symbol of having more than I need, but let’s ignore that for now.) As I was dashing back and forth, I found myself irritated at all the noise the park custodians were making as they cut the grass with their noisy tractors and weed wackers. To me, good old Kentucky bluegrass is one of the most glaring symbols of Western affluence. In my opinion, the grass lawn is one of humankind’s stupidest inventions. We get a perfectly good chunk of land, and cover it with a weed that requires constant cutting and watering. We then expend a huge amount of gasoline to perform this maintenance, because we don’t want to waste all our time cutting grass, do we? My question is: If you don’t want to waste time cutting grass, then why plant sod in the first place?! I find it patently ridiculous that we put so much time and money into this sort of thing. It’s like asking for a huge patch of body hair that one then tries to keep neat and trim for the visual enjoyment of one’s peers.
The second symbol came to me as I was chatting to some folks at work. A coworker of mine showed me this really nifty software package that one can use to organize all of one’s books, CDs, and other shareable media, so that friends can easily peruse one’s collection. You can then keep track of who is borrowing what, and so on. The coolest part is that it uses the built-in iSight camera that ships with many Macs to scan the barcode on the book or CD, so that you don’t require an external barcode reader to input all of your stuff into the database. I played with it for a while, and had a lot of fun with it until I realized what the existence of this software implied; That enough people in our population have enough stuff to require software to keep track of it all.
This is admittedly not a very profound realization, but so many of our everyday interactions implicitly underscore my wealth as a Westerner that I felt the need to write this down just to remind myself. Take from it what you will 
A couple of phrases that caught my attention recently, and I want to scribble down before I forget:
Rank and File: In case you haven’t heard it before, ‘rank and file’ refers to the people that compose the ‘main body of members of an organization’ (thanks to google define). This one bothers me because I still haven’t really been able to figure out where it comes from. In military parades, ‘…a rank is a line of troops standing shoulder to shoulder and a file is one in which they stand one behind the other’ (ref). But, this doesn’t tell me how the terms ‘rank’ and ‘file’ originally came to take on these meanings.
Piecemeal: This one comes up a lot in Easterly’s book, since he’s so fond of initiatives that do their work in several small steps. The ‘meal’ part of the word supposedly comes from the Germanic ‘maelaz’, which means ‘measure’. So this literally means ‘measured piece by piece’. See this site for a terse explanation of the whole thing.
I guess this doesn’t quite qualify as an adventure… I think I’m going to have to tinker with these topic headings.
I didn’t have anything planned for this past weekend, but stuff ended up happening anyways, which was cool. It’s nice to be able to get out without actually organizing anything.