The Cost Of Money

I've written several times of my interest in becoming a certified EMT, the intrinsic rush of pulling a damaged body away from the alluring blankets of effortless death that would smother and asphyxiate.

I would also like to substitute teach high school math and physics. In anticipation of the inevitable lament "When are we ever gonna have to use this in real life?", I came up with an application of math that I hope will be of interest to most students. The answer to their question is, of course, you'll never have to use math if you don't want to, but there are lots of fun and worthwhile things you can do with it if you choose to.

It was obvious early on that I should incorporate money into the example, since many people assign money an inexplicably high value in their lives. I decided on paychecks; specifically, the non-linear nature of taxes. This topic not only meets the money criteria, but is also something that the students would hopefully be somewhat familiar with if they had had summer jobs and had looked at their pay stubs.

By the non-linear nature of taxes I mean, for example, that a person's after tax income (ATI) for 80 hrs of work is less than twice as much as their ATI for 40 hrs of work. FICA and Medicare combined are a fixed 7.65% of gross, but federal withholding introduces the non-linearity.

The example I worked out here is for a non-married person paid $15/hr bi-weekly who declares 1 on their W-4. The picture below has two graphs of the same plot, where the top graph has a linear trendline to visually verify the non-linearity and the bottom graph has a trendline defined by the 3rd order polynomial given, which matches the plot far better.

It's necessary to obtain such a polynomial equation through some kind of curve fitting algorithm in order for the data to be mathematically workable and useful. Using this equation, which serves as a model of good approximation, you can find the point on the curve where its slope is highest (about 50 hrs). This point could be significant in terms of max gain for least effort, but I'm hesitant to come to any conclusions about it after not having looked through a functions textbook since 10th grade. A more straightforward graph is shown below.

Here, the after tax wages are graphed vs. hrs. After tax wages are simply after tax income divided by the corresponding number of hours. Yes, the terminology is of my invention.

As you can see, for a single person declaring 1 on their W-4, for any less than 28 hrs worked in the two week pay period, no government withholding is paid. This is why, for a $15/hr wage, their after tax wage is found simply by subtracting the FICA/medicare 7.65% of their gross from their gross and dividing by the corresponding number of hours:

[$15 - (7.65% of $15)]/1hr = $13.85

for 10 hrs:

[$150 - (7.65% of $150)]/10hrs = $13.85

At 28 hours, deductions for government withholding begin and the straight line succumbs to an exponential decay. I was curious how many extra dollars a person could earn if instead of a single full-time job they contributed 26.67 hours per pay period to each of 3 jobs, thereby avoiding government withholding. Contributing 20 hours per pay period to each of 4 jobs would be an equivalent option, you get the idea. The result, in this $15/hr case, is:

3 or 4 jobs: $13.85/hr * 80 hrs = $1108
1 job: $12.44/hr * 80 hrs = $995.20
difference = $112.80 = 11% of single job after tax income.

Elliot brought up a point that likely forces this gain to remain in the short-term domain: from the point of view of the IRS, working 20 hours for 4 jobs is probably the same as working 80 hours for 1 job, so that even when none of the checks from your 3 or 4 jobs ever have government withholding deductions, you'll be handed an annual bill for all the money you owe, instead of receiving what normally is a check from the IRS. Still, I see no harm in withholding this information from the children if it gets them interested in mathematics. Given the itinerant nature of the substitute teacher, I'll be out of the scene before any turmoil resulting from the telling of the half-truth develops.

I Like All Of This That Is Happening Now

The process of moving can be likened to an archeological dig. I've uncovered many forgotten artifacts of times long past. Some of these point to interests I had that waxed and waned: basketball cards, skateboarder clothes, drawings of weapons inspired by a sci-fi radio drama, books with addresses and contact numbers for places to send short stories, floor plan design and 3-D rendition printouts from an architecture software program I received for a birthday.

There were also pages of schoolwork, some with comments from the teacher. On the grading sheet of a report rough draft, they write "The last sentence is a let down." I turn to the last page to read that I ended the biography with a statement of his date of death.

I found also a painfully touching paper on the subject of intimacy, receiving for a grade a check +.

Many of the things in my possession I neither want to bring with me nor throw away. Still, I managed to fill three landfill-destined garbage bags full of items that were at one time considered important enough to keep. It's a liberating feeling, in the same way that people who have had their house burn down may feel liberated due to losing their physical possessions. Even the things I'm neither throwing away nor taking with me will have a greatly reduced capacity to drag on my conscience, by virtue of their being 360 miles away in Fairbanks.

I'm taking little with me. I'm leaving behind all my audio cds and vinyl records. I'm bringing my laptop, some clothes, a passport, a towel. When I find a place in Anchorage, the government will send me the larger items. I want both of my desks; one for work, the other for play. I want both of my mattresses, the smaller one that goes on top and takes comfort to a new plateau by forming a 4-inch wide ledge for the hand/forearm to rest on on top of the bottom one.

Improved Motor Control Via Blind Vision

On occasion, our eyes will show us things that capture the whole of our attention and render us immobile, fixated. It is possibly an instinctual response to seeing things that we have never seen before and that cannot be classified as belonging to a group of things with which we are already familiar. This latter stipulation is necessary in order to account for how undistracting a never before seen coffee mug would be to someone who was familiar with coffee mugs as a category of objects.

It is, of course, more than unclassifiable objects that can lock our gaze. Never before seen behavior, unexpected behavior, or being abruptly immersed in an unfamiliar surrounding are all capable of having the same effect, keeping our body still so as to allow our mind to devote all of its faculties to making sense of what we're seeing.

Even imagining to great accuracy what we anticipate to see may not translate to fixation immunity when the images flood our vision, if what we're seeing is very powerful. For example, what budding doctor hasn't been paralyzed for a brief moment when assisting in a live birth for the first time? I use doctor instead of father here because, while the father may indeed be mesmerized, his personal involvement in the matter makes mesmerization due purely to being witness to the event less likely. The doctor has also probably spent more time imagining the details of the procedure than the father has.

What led me to write about this? Something I saw, yes, but not something that rendered me motionless (even though I was sitting calmly, I could've moved if I'd wanted to). I looked down at my lap, saw my jeans, the tightly woven fabric, imagined the machines that make them. The factory must always be buzzing; periodic, fast-paced clicks and less frequent but louder noises of steel clanking. A hot atmosphere, some humidity from steam. But what about at night, when the electricity is cut? Some factories run non-stop, but others surely do not. The machines, once whirring at 10,000 rpm, now are still. There is not a sound, the lights are off, the place is vacant of people. If I walked into such a scene, I would be paralyzed for some time. It would be a shock in two ways:

1. An unfamiliar surrounding
2. An atmosphere that is contrary to the non-stop high-energy atmosphere one imagines a factory to have.

Antisocial Until Reading Dialogue

I'm reading Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by neurologist Oliver Sacks. I found it at the library on a shelf of new releases. The new release designation means little more to the library's information system circuitry than that the time between check out and due date is shorter. It needs to be returned Thursday. While in some ways entertaining, I am not so impressed with it thus far. I was expecting more.

Still, the idea of returning it unfinished is agitating like few things are. When starting a book, I feel as though I'm committing myself to it. Opening the cover and reading the first lines has a psychophysiologic analog: the thorn of a rose bush instantaneously sprouts from some location along my spine. While not painful by itself, starting many more than a few books at a time would be uncomfortable; no thorn receeds completely until the last page of its associated book has been satisfyingly turned. This is what compells me to finish even books that don't hold my interest; the diluted ecstasy that accompanies the recession of a thorn as progress through a book is made, the return to a spine that won't draw blood.

My mother's sister is visiting from Victoria, B.C. It's unfortunate that she arrived shortly after I returned from Minneapolis and will be leaving the same weekend I drive to Anchorage; I would've liked to have been here a week or so without her. I don't like that she keeps busy with the same sad activities of baking little dessert things and tidying up the grounds around the property. I don't like that I think those are sad activities. I especially dislike how she makes a point to acknowledge, in a meek, mouse-like manner, everything my father says, as if she's living in a past where men are superior to women in all ways.

I am disappointed in myself for fostering ill feelings towards people who have been nothing but friendly. Mostly, here, I am referring to the aforementioned aunt, though the potential for it to spread to anyone I'm not accustomed to being around is worrisome. Many of the apts I'll be looking at next week would be my own, but a few would be house-share roommate situations. How terrifying if after the initial meet & greet and two week settling in phase I developed irrational and unwarranted grievances against the people I was living with. Solitary is a dangerous normalcy.

Futher Traffic Logix

Of the most distinguished homeless people in this country, one lives here in Fairbanks. I've written about him before, the character who speaks as though reading from a bible of endless passages written by a schizophrenic. And yet, in the midst of his signature style of oration submerged in an ancient grammar and spoken with an almost stutter, he'll drop references to the here and now, so that you can't doubt he is cognizant of at least a version of reality not helplessly different from those of people with a home.

He is between 40 and 50, never asks for anything, but rejects offers of assistance, respectfully declining my father's gift of hole-less shoes because he enjoys the hardship that is afforded him by walking in shoes that are falling apart. He is seemingly always on the move, walking everywhere, miles and miles, and seems healthier for it. In spite of his history of living in the woods, he is hygienically cleaner than many people with money and wears layers of clothing that, while worn, are free of odor. He is the author of such one liners as "A question mark is half a heart." and, with reference to a wounded/dying squirrel "It did not put forth a sound of joy." He goes by several names. I know him as John.

That was a longer introduction than I was intending. Longer, even, than what will be written regarding traffic. I bring him up in the interest of coupling together posts of similar topic.

One of the things John may do when at the corner of a 4-way intersection is illustrated below.


I think you would be hard-pressed to find an engineer who doesn't look admirably upon the choice of diagonal crossing. Based on a 45-45-90 triangle, it's 29% more efficient than walking two perpendicular line segments, as the law would have you do.

I feel like my sentences are running ever-longer, even if they're not run-ons. That I can't refrain from mentioning prison terms are steadfast is terribly frustrating, given my hatred of puns.

Street Walker Traffic Logics

As a pedestrian, I find it amusing how impatient drivers will sometimes use their vehicles as vessels for expressing their frustration at having to wait for me to cross the street. Mostly, this happens with drivers who are going to be making a right turn, as illustrated in the picture below, where the blue line is the pedestrian path and the red line is a trace of what the vehicle will do.


Until I'm halfway across, there's an unspoken understanding that drivers can make the turn, even as I approach, without feeling moral guilt; the distance between metal and body is great enough that my safety isn't questioned. When I reach the double yellow line, however, drivers hesitate in the name of respect, and then, seeing me only getting closer, opt not to make a daringly tight maneuver. From their moment of hesitation to my reaching the curb there may be as many as seven seconds, which feels like a long time to people sitting in an idling vehicle who would have the green light if it weren't for the obstruction of my person.

And then comes the part to which I referred in the opening sentence: they will as often as not vent their displeasure at having had to wait by accelerating with greater fanfare than is really necessary, perhaps even initiating the rolling of wheels before I've stepped onto the sidewalk.

I think it's an example of a larger phenomena: the idea that it's easier to take out your frustrations on others when you're separated from them by an abstraction layer. "No, I'm not angry. That was just the engine roaring." Nevermind that it roared because you slammed your foot on the gas.

Another example: internet discussion boards are notorious for being chock full of foul language and deplorable manners. It's much easier for people to insult one another when their only knowledge regarding each other's location is that they're spaced all around the earth, and when they communicate in as impersonal a way as through a computer interface. It's laughable that many of the same people who accuse each other of being reincarnations of Hitler would go out for a drink if they met face to face, getting along just fine, due purely to the amicable quality that develops as a result of virtual and real worlds intersecting.

The abstraction layer need not be physical, either. A crane operator swinging a wrecking ball is entitled to do so by virtue of it being his job, a very non-physical concept. And yet he can fall back on it as justification when taken to court.

"Your honor, the debris from the wrecking ball impact fell dangerously close to my parked SUV. I have a mind it was the intent of the operator that I should be forced to buy a new vehicle!"

"Nay, 'twas only doin' me job."

Scales of Perception

Drifting on waves towards a solid shore of wakefulness in the early evening, after having let the sleep currents pull me out into the vast open a couple hours prior (read: a nap). Sometimes it is possible to postpone the inevitable waking, just by adjusting oneself into a new arrangement and subsequently sighing for the effort it required, thereby diving deeper into slumber instead of piercing the surface of the glue pool. For instance, moving from prone position to the side, or removing the pillow from under one's head.

It was not to be on this occasion; I could already hear the traffic bleeding through my window, and I was hungry. It was time for the family reunions taking place on the division of eyelids to come to an end. Microorganism mothers asking their children if they were coming home or spending the day on the other hemisphere with the relatives. "The REM tremors have subsided my dears, he'll be waking shortly! Please choose on which half of eyelid you want to remain until he next sleeps. As you know, you'll be feasting on a dinner of dead skin cells no matter your location, but if you prefer them with salt you should stay here on the southern half where his sweat accumulates."

Some of the toddlers were late in choosing sides. I could hear their screams as I broke the seal and they plummeted down the crevasse, finally meeting their demise on my sticky eyeball, where microorganisms of another kind must've devoured them alive.

A black speck of something on my off-white sheet greeted me as I looked out with blurred vision through timidly opened slits. A few blinks to set things right, to recalibrate the 25 year old machine, a routine maintenance job. Back to work, wipe the windows, reestablish communication with the visual input headquarters in the neocortex.

The black speck remained. What are you? I wonder, staring. And then, are you moving? Oh god, I have bed bugs. The fear pulls me once and for all out of my drowsy state and motivates limb movement. With surprising swiftness and dexterity my hand pounces on the thing and I pinch it between my pointer finger and thumb. False alarm, only a piece of lint.

There had been the illusion of movement, of that I'm sure. Why should the eyes and mind conspire to generate such a sight? Maybe too many mushrooms. No, there is never too much psilocybin.

girls girls girls

a collection of romantic sentiments, based on experiences I've had since elementary school, presented in the style of R.D. Laing's Knots:

the type of girl I want is not the type of girl who would want me.

you only want me if I don't want you.
I only want you if you don't want me.
this premise alone would generate enough material for a tragic three-act shakespearean comedy.

when I am myself I exude self-confidence and speak my mind fluidly. she likes me because I'm acting like myself. knowing she likes me, I freeze up. I freeze up because the idea that inaction will pause time and stretch this moment to infinity is such a beautiful illusion. even when I'm not around her, I cannot be myself for as long as she likes me. at length, she loses interest, not seeing any hint of what drew her to me initially. I thaw, becoming myself once more. being myself, I attract a new girl. the process repeats.

you only like me because I like you.
no, that is so false I can hardly conceive of it.
prove it.
I cannot prove it with a statement of words.
then it is true.

I'm anxious because I like you.
as long as I'm anxious, this will never work from my perspective.
the only way this will work from my perspective is if it's effortless for me.
if it's effortless for me, you'll think I don't like you.
this will never work from both of our perspectives simultaneously.

let's be friends.
I want to be lovers.
on average, friendships last longer.
it's worth the risk, a hot flame burning briefly is better than warm coals.
no, I want you in my life forever.
friendship with the desire to fuck is not real friendship. it's the least long-lasting relationship of the three.

incidentally, Laing's father was an electrical engineer.

no parachute

one of the most lasting ways to rekindle enthusiasm for your work is to look round and take notice of all the jobs you would hate to have. how empowering to shift the tiresome paradigm of waking up dreading another day's contribution to livelihood into the consideration of one's work as collateral. watch someone working and think to yourself, smiling, I wouldn't trade my job for yours.

I quit my last three jobs. I won't quit this job. I won't.

in my experience, when I anticipate the worst, things work out well. for example, when I fear failing a course or not graduating, I later receive a good mark and am handed a diploma. the most recent manifestation of this dependable relationship came in the form of an envelope that was waiting patiently for my fingers the night I returned from minneapolis. in it was the result of the epic 8 hour fundamentals of engineering exam I took in april.

as you might recall, I doubted that I would pass, was not particularly concerned about completing this first step towards professional engineer licensure, and was only taking the exam because it's a degree requirement that it at least be taken. my failure to attend any of the FE review sessions leading up to the exam, coupled with my single 10 minute cursory glance through a study guide, contributed to my confidence that the letter would flatly tell me that filling in the scantron circles had been a waste of lead. instead, the letter began with 'congratulations!'

given the good things that happen when I fear the worst, I'm watching with a pessimistic outlook the new job I start aug 3rd. the idea is that the work will turn out to be engaging if I expect it to be mundane. of course, this won't happen if I only superficially expect it to be mundane. I've never so blatantly used fearing the worst as a means of securing positive outcome. if I can pull it off, it'll be like passing a polygraph test with lies.

coast dreams of fresh air

of all the dual-width alphanumeric combinations possible, my anchorage-bound flight departed from the explosive gate C4. still, I felt that if death by aircraft was to be my obligatory end, I would rather go out at once in a big bang than plummet to earth in a nauseous descent.

it is important, especially on longer flights, that the people in seats adjacent yours are people whom you immediately respect based only on their appearance and apparent demeanor. no one wants to sit next to:

1. an exhibit of poor hygiene or
2. a person who ignores the personal space boundary represented by the imaginary 2-D plane emanating from the seam between seats

I drew a good card this time around. on my left was the aisle. on my right, a woman in her late 20s. she was attractive, clean, and had an amicable quality about her which enhanced the respectful silence that existed between us. as close to an ideal flight neighbor as one could hope for. her spouse sat in the window seat. the language of the magazine she read betrayed their foreign status. possibly a scandinavian country, definitely western europe. my respect for them grew, mostly the result of a jealousy for their heritage.

plane switch.

as we approached fairbanks, I observed in pained amusement that the city was welcoming me with a blanket of smoke; a silken blanket with holes in places, clumps of spruce trees poking through. an ignorant passenger asks the flight attendant, concerned "what's that smell?" "that would be the forest fires, sir."

just enough carbon monoxide in the air to tempt maniac law enforcement to issue a fine against anyone caught breathing. no threat of a headache, merely an immobilizing lethargy fostering nonchalance towards one's societal contribution.

other direction in the sky

I'll always be apprehensive about the nature of reality and the universe in general, but within this life my greatest fear is that I'm becoming a cold person due to lack of meaningful human contact. my meager warmth is sustained from one day to the next, as oliver with his ration of porridge, by the seldom occasions when I feel connected to the person/people near me.

three groups of words:

words I've never seen before
words I recognize but don't know the meanings of
known words

this last group is so small as to cripple my expression of thought. it's worse than that. it limits what I'm capable of thinking. expanding the 3rd group and, in the process, eliminating the 2nd group is an ongoing priority.

here I need to interject an apology, much like the one I gave over last christmas break, for the content of recent posts being concerned with the unremarkable, personal happenings of my daily existence. my life has lately been characterized by an unusual muffled volatility and I felt the selfish need to document it somehow, but once the seas have calmed, I promise, oh, dear readers, this journal will rise from the shameful hollows of self-centeredness and once again feature entries ripe with the bitter, biting, paradoxical musings you have come to expect.

I'll be back in fairbanks before I next fall asleep. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'm not sure it's necessary to feel any way in particular about it. I'll be in anchorage a short time later.