Coconuts

I work at a credit union. Any job where you interact with the general public on a regular basis generates its own series of humorous tales as the foibles of humanity are put on display. For instance, the war vet who regularly stops in, being chauffeured around in his mid-70’s white limo. His driver is an elderly man wearing orthopedic shoes to compensate for his left leg that is 3 inches shorter than his right, and a Grateful Dead t-shirt. At one point the vet told us he had stopped at the hospital for pain killers, and they had denied him drugs because they thought he was mentally unstable. His reply was that he knew he was mentally unstable, but he was still in pain!

Yesterday was another good example of credit union oddity. We have a coin counter machine – a large ATM like contraption that you can pour your loose change into and it will sort and total them for you. This machine is almost always at the center of the CU circus – the kinds of people that hoard large amounts of change are apparently not your usual crowd. We find odd things in the reject bin too – foreign coins are common, along with paper and lint but occasionally stranger things make a showing. A few days ago it was a bear claw, not the pastry but a  real bear claw, once attached to an actual bear.

A man came in to use ours yesterday. This man had somehow used a coconut as a piggy bank, with a way to put coins in but no way to retreive them. I do not know if he forgot how to open it, or forgot to check if he could open it before heading into the branch, but either way this culminated in him asking to borrow a hammer from us and proceeding to attempt to smash open a coconut in our lobby. This man obviously had no prior coconut-opening experience, because it took him close to 5 minutes of pounding, smashing, cursing, and generally scaring all the other patrons in our lobby before he finally retrieved his prize – $4.38 in change.

Adding Insult to Injury

It’s not often that I feel compelled to write about current events, but this one hits particularly close to home.

Boeing Loses Out

Basically, the US Air Force has awarded its $40B contract to a company that is affiliated with the European plane maker AirBus. For shame. What have we come to in the country when we are practically outsourcing our national defense? Granted, the company that was awarded the contract, Northrop Grumman, has agreed to build a manufacturing plant for the tankers in Mobile, Alabama. But the frames they use are manufactured by AirBus, in plants outside the US. Not only that, but how much defense information will they potentially share with foreign companies? And shouldn’t a certain degree of national solidarity outweigh any differences in budgets? Can you imagine the uproar if our police and public servants began driving nothing but Toyotas and Hondas simply because they were cheaper?

Obviously, I have a personal interest in the situation. My father has worked for Boeing for 31 years. Our family has tightened belts through strikes, crossed our fingers through each period of layoffs, put aside our personal needs when he works 14 days in a row, but everything has come out right in the end. I am proud of the contributions my father makes to the largest exporter in the US, a company that is one of the components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. To our family, and any other American manufacturer, this news is like a slap in the face.

Despite all this, it is sometimes hard to reconcile how it feels to be a part of the company that simultaneously builds machines which bring people together and also wage war. I have to remind myself often that machines are only tools, and the purpose to which they are used is decided by humans.  I would be happier if the company my father worked for only made airplanes for commercial purposes, but even I can recognize that a peaceful world without the need for standing armies is a utopian dream probably beyond human grasp.

To Mr. Obama…

Congratulations. Let’s hope this is the beginning of a trend.

Writing

I’ve come to the conclusion that writing is like the ancient Roman tradition of exposing a child. You give birth to this thing, which seems monstrous to you, and are horrified. Then you sort of abandon it on a mountaintop (or blog, editor’s desk, professor’s desk) and one part of you hopes no one ever sees the hideous offspring and that it dies peacefully, but the other part of you hopes that perhaps its not as malformed as you think. Perhaps some poor shepherd will take pity on it and rescue it from a quiet, lonely death. Then again, perhaps it will return to kill you, marry its mother, and destroy your way of life as you know it.

On second thought, writing is much more like kittens. Warm, fuzzy kittens.

Awesome.

If only Christians were willing to understand how ridiculous they sound. Like this: Convert Yourself

And this really great editorial piece in the NY Times…I wish every fundy right winger who had an opinion about gay marriage or prayer in schools or the ‘Founding Fathers’ would read this: A Nation Of Christians Is Not A Christian Nation

I know its not very tolerant of me, and overall I don’t mind Christians…the normal ones. Even if I do think they are all a bunch of lunatics, usually they are harmless. It’s just a few extremists that have to ruin it for the rest of the bunch.