Home Alone

Call me "Macaulay", because for the next four days I'll be home alone.

Liz and Robbie are using Robbie's Spring Break to go to Florida to visit Liz's sister. They left at 4:00 a.m. this morning to take advantage of a great 7:00 a.m. airfare. Robbie was an absolute trooper, getting up at 3:30 for the trip. They made it to the Sunshine State in fine fashion, but not until my Lad had charmed the pilot on their regional flight from Atlanta into an extensive cockpit tour. He got to play with the yoke and talk on the intercom. I guess the skill of dealing with pilots is a genetic trait.

I say I'm alone, but actually I have for company a mostly annoying cat (who frankly was a candidate for the animal shelter until Robbie renamed her "Mrs. Love Cat"--I mean, how do you get rid of "Mrs. Love Cat"? (no seriously, how?)). I also have our geriatric English Bulldog, Sunshine, for whom I am currently cooking a week's worth of breakfasts and dinners (it's a long story).

Once up this morning I stayed up. Good busy day at work. One of the best things about working where I do is that I get to work with really smart people. It is my favorite part of the job.

Yesterday I went for my weekly blood test, after almost forgetting that I was supposed to do it. Woke up and was in the shower planning my day when I thought "Oh Crap! I've got to go get stuck!" There are wonderful phlebotomists in the world (phlebotomist: one who draws blood professionally). There are phlebotomists whose touch is so delicate and sure that you feel almost nothing at all, whose needle feels almost like the tickle of a butterfly landing on your arm. Those phlebotomists were not at the lab yesterday. Instead I got Helga the Vein Jabber. She was not delicate. I believe she learned her craft at the "Sharks and Jets" School of Phlebotomy [ed. note: for the engineers, this is a reference to a classic stage and movie musical by Leonard Bernstein]. I hope the other lady is back next week. No results back from the blood test yet. Now on to my new theory.

I've recently been pondering the topic I promised myself not to ponder: "Why Me?" There are two common approaches to this question. The first posits that God has chosen me personally and specifically to inflict this upon. Either it's a punishment (if you're a "Sinner's in the Hands of an Angry God" kind of person) or like Lot I've been chosen by God to be an exemplar of how a trial like this should be borne. On the other hand, there may be no rhyme or reason: like the lightning strikes one tree in a forest, like the tornado that destroys one house while leaving the house across the street untouched, this 'gift' has been given to me without purpose or intent.

I'm not happy with either paradigm. The first lends me more importance than I believe I rate, for either good or bad. The second is a little too cold, a little too chaotic [For the non-engineers, this sentiment is captured beautifully in Thomas Hardy's poem "Hap"]. I've decided to pick a different metaphor. Bear with me.

Say you have a factory that produces flourescent light bulbs. Your factory produces 100,000 flourescent bulbs a day. You want to make sure you are producing a quality product, but you know it would be cost prohibitive to test each and every bulb you make. So instead, you opt for a classic quality control measure--the random test. Every day, out of every lot of 10,000 bulbs, you randomly pick 12 bulbs for testing. You throw 10 of them into a 110-volt test fixture and throw the switch. If they light up, they pass the test. The remaining two bulbs get put through a more rigorous regiment. You hit them with twice the normal voltage. You cycle them on and off over and over again. You shake and vibrate them in your "Vibro-Shaker 3000 Bulb Tester". If the first ten bulbs worked, and the other two survived, you can safely assume that the whole lot of 10,000 bulbs is good.

Well, I like to think of myself as a test bulb. In my theory, God doesn't feel the need to set up special tests for all the bulbs--he randomly selects a few representatives and gives them extra tests. He doesn't love those bulbs any more or any less than the others. But he does pay careful attention to how the test bulbs work under strain. He derives some inscrutable data from these tests and uses the many centuries of this data in some great cosmic analysis. This appeals to me on two levels. First, it doesn't require the ego trip of presupposing that I am a Chosen One. I'm just not that important. Secondly, it does imply that there might be some purpose behind all of this. It takes a middle road down which I find some solace.

Sure, it's just a logical construct, but it gets me through the night.