Secondhand Smoke Shakes Firsthand Experience

In spite of all the negatives that tarnish much of the advertised allure, there is at least one societal benefit to the existence of smoking as an activity. That it is an intangible benefit and is consequently difficult to quantify should not be interpreted to mean that its impact is negligible. After all, many of life's most meaningful aspects are priceless.

Each day, the world over, one of the most repeated questions between strangers is "do you have a smoke?" If the person questioned replies in the affirmative, the ensuing act of generosity transforms the entire exchange into an invisible thread that weaves the participants into transient amicability. Given that a chemical dependence is involved, I'd guess that, while active, this thread is stronger than the fiber woven by random acts of kindness. The cigarette provider is arguably as happy to give help as the receiver is to accept it. This is chemical dependence related, too: the provider has no trouble sympathizing with how the receiver feels because they have often felt the same way, and knowing that they are enabling the hunger to be satisfied is like taking a drag themselves. Meanwhile, the receiver looks forward to inhaling cloudy poison and gratefully thinks "during my darkest hour a stranger came to my nicotine fix rescue." Similar effects result from the "do you have a light?" query. And even though these interactions are fleeting, their sheer number, combined with their biological-addiction-attributable strength, must surely mean that they have an influence on establishing the norms for how the world's populations interact.

For the pessimists among you, I offer the paragraphs below. They detail two escapes from the bonding of strangers happening in the paragraph above.

Rather than seeking to alleviate the smoker's nicotine cravings, the cigarette provider might only be handing over the cig because they want to passively help the smoker die. The idea that a non-smoker would carry a pack of cigarettes in order to contribute to the early demise of those who request cigarettes of them is both twisted and unlikely. It's an idea, however, that's deserving of its own quotation. "A smoke? Sure, I would be happy to withdraw from my pocket and hand to you something that will increase your likelihood of developing cancer."

The larger threat to the stability of the strangers are kind assumption is that the person seeking to bum a cigarette will believe they are being lied to when the person they've approached claims to not have any cigarettes in their possession. For symmetry, a quote, representative of what the liar (if they are really lying) may be thinking to themselves, follows. "While it is in my power to do so, I do not believe that alleviating your suffering is worth the price of even just one of the many cigarettes I have tucked safely away in my jacket. Your present condition warns me of how I may feel in the future, and I should like to have the necessary tobacco resources to be self-sufficient when that time comes."

Don't Fuck Yourself Like A Narcissistic Benefactor

Priceless inquiry overheard in the workplace: do coffee, chocolate, and cocaine all come from the same bean? How appropriate that it was a Central America native in an adjacent cubicle who set the sorely misinformed employee straight.

Being put on hold after dialing a military base building phone number, the soundtrack is a cross between a brass marching band and the orchestral backing of a 1930s Disney cartoon. This differs from the music of choice for private sector phone holds: the same soul-less jazz and lobotomized pop that is favored by airplanes waiting on the tarmac.

To the productivity-minded question "what are you working on?" one of the most underrated answers that satisfyingly conveys the semblance of work being done is "I'm on hold."

Instead of completing in bulk all of the day's tasks that require walking, skilled desk jockeys spread these out over the eight hours to promote blood flow, the same way you're encouraged to periodically get out of your seat on a trans-atlantic flight.

Chunky peanut butter exists so that after you finish a jar of smooth peanut butter you are afforded marginal excitement when purchasing a replacement jar of the other variety, and vice-versa.

Remove from the processing line all of the peanut pieces that would normally have been destined for a jar of chunky peanut butter. Crush them into a smooth paste and add this instead to the jar, such that a purchaser would be perplexed at the discrepancy between the labeling and what was inside. Is the resultant level of peanut butter in the jar higher or lower than the level in a jar of identical dimension filled with smooth peanut butter? In other words, does a jar of one variety require more peanuts than a jar of the other? I'd guess that smooth pb requires more peanuts, but any difference is evidently insignificant enough to allow the same nutrition facts to apply to both varieties. Or, possibly more accurately, the difference in nutrition information isn't great enough to warrant the investment required to print a second set of labels. That's a weak argument, though, since most labels are single wrap-around sheets which have already undergone significant redesign to differentiate them from the other variety. Relative to a color scheme change and the replacement of the large script word 'smooth' for 'crunchy', a new number for milligrams of sodium costs pennies. Of course, none of this shite matters, and I've written about it more as a cautionary example of why food should only ever be eaten in places where you're afforded clear views of the outdoors.

Bitter Wind Blockade

What's scarier: unexpected turbulence or turbulence announced before it strikes? That the latter will be severe is suggested by the fact that cockpit instruments could measure it and that the pilot considered it worthy of mention. If the former is severe, one wonders why an announcement beforehand wasn't made, i.e. what sort of undetectable air pressure system anomaly is this?!

Bed & Breakfast with eggs benedict in the morning. Average quality.

The wind was strong on base, maybe 25 mph. It howled through a crack in the door for the duration of the charrette's first day.

Attendance: approx. 20.
Equipment: projector and screen, nearly as many laptops as people.

There was a lot of talking. The attitude was positive, with light laughter occasionally elicited when PG-rated humor colored the discussion.

Two people were flown up from Seattle to perform value engineering and be facilitators. It became clear to me that their presence was hardly necessary.

Notable examples of the emptiness of their function:

1. The enthusiastic outburst by one "That's an action item!" followed by their jumping over to a large presentation-style paper-leafed tablet to write down something in big letters.

2. The outsider-status-betraying and seemingly verbatim extract from a course text on facilitation tips "Do we need to make an assumption in order to move forward?"

I wouldn't be surprised if half of the justification for their contracted hire was that it reflects well on the project manager. Still, maybe it's worthwhile to have a charrette organized and led by a semi-independent 3rd party. I don't really know, and I don't really care.