Quiet Declarations

In spite of being one of the least planned trips I’ve been on in a while, these past three days in Washington, D.C. have been surprisingly busy. They weren’t hectic — I did too much socializing to call them hectic — but now that I have a new job what was originally planned as a pleasure trip turned into a somewhat frantic exercise in area scouting and apartment shopping.

A bit of background: since Jacob, Julian and Eric were roadtripping back from Nashville after a visit to Vanderbilt and Rites of Spring I thought I might join them. What ensued was probably the slowest drive to D.C. that I’ve ever experienced thanks to Eric’s $10 breakfast at Hardees, Julian only getting hungry for meals ten minutes after the rest of us stopped to eat, my demand to test Jacob’s new light-up frisbee in 30-degree weather at a rest area, and Jacob’s 45-minute detour to some field in Deliverance-East Tennessee to pick up a hand-carved magic table from some hippie musician he met online who gives elbow taps instead of handshakes, built his own house out of rocks and alumninum siding, and randomly has the original soundboard from the Grand Ole Opry in his back room.

Jacob and Court were kind enough to put me up in their humble abode in Clarendon so I could get a good look at the area from a close and carless distance. I got to hang out with Andy and Eric a bit, and I even got in a little business lunch and happy hour with some my new colleagues. I discovered that jogging is far more fun in Arlington than in greater Nashville due to the reduced smog (believe it or not) and more pedestrian-friendly atmosphere, and I also I learned that credit card roulette is a great way to get a free meal. But most of the trip was devoted to learning that my life will soon be one gigantic cost-of-living adjustment. C’est la vie, no more five nights a week at the Flying Saucer for yours truly!

I departed this morning via my favorite airport. There were precisely five people in my security line this morning, meaning either far more people in the district are reading my blog than I previously believed or Wednesdays at 10 a.m. aren’t the busy time. But hey, great news — I saw the sign for the $3 billion renovation to replace the mobile lounge with an underground tram system! Maybe by the time I need to start seriously using this airport they will have partially gotten their act together.

One final word on this most recent travel experience: Independence Air is weird. My flight was cheap and did not fall out of the sky, thus meeting my only two criteria. However, they offered only Pepsi products, did not carry Dr Pepper (a big whiff for strike two) and then attempted to make up for it by serving everyone warm towelettes with a tweezer. Also, everything at the gate is a strange color of fluorescent blue. Not bad… just weird.

What now? Three days back at work and then on to what promises to be a crazy crazy month of May!

[Update 4/28/05: It turns out that the day before this post was written, unbeknownst to me (because I am slightly less of a blogwhore than is commonly believed), Jacob posted an account of our road trip as well. Feel free to compare our stories for blatant inaccuracies or embellishments.]

A couple of weeks ago (or two posts ago — same difference) I wrote about the atrocious design of Dulles Airport, in particular the “mobile lounge” system. After looking a little further into the airport history and also coming across a bit more specifically describing the mobile lounge I can be a little more understanding. It turns out Dulles was the first airport designed to accommodate jets and there was no precedent so the architects were essentially the pioneers — or, in hindsight, the guinea pigs. I’m not letting them off the hook entirely for the idea, but I’m giving them props for being brave enough to try and enduring fifty years of wrath and ridicule as a consequence.

Now, to all the people who keep commenting on these sites how amazing the mobile lounge is… have you been to Dulles Airport? What part of expensive, cumbersome, time-intensive, detached, complicated, choice-limiting, entrapping, inefficient, and just plain weird do you not understand? Yes the mobile lounge concept was an experiment, but nobody uses it anymore because it was a failed experiment.

I will now stop bashing Dulles in writing for two reasons. First, in an hour I head to Dulles to return to Nashville and I’m a bit superstitious. Second, it occurred to me that Dulles won’t actually be replaced without about a billion dollars of my tax money and the realization has reduced to zero my incentive to start an airport revolution.

Well, not really… but some of the years felt fast. I have big news: after ten years in the Nashville area I will be moving on. Beginning May 23 I will join the marketing team at the Institute for Humane Studies, a libertarian public policy institute located in the D.C. area.

Most of my friends relocated great distances to college and moved again for their jobs. I remained in the Volunteer State (a nickname for whose accuracy I can vouch as a Vanderbilt alumnus) doing precisely what I believe I would have chosen regardless of my location but at the same time watching friends experience their lives in chapters while mine has started to read like an overworded coffee-stained essay printed at the library to save money. I love Nashville, but it’s time for a career move and it’s time to get connected with something I love and it’s time for a new adventure and, well… it’s just time.

It’s been a crazy, hectic and unexpected couple of weeks and signs point to plenty more of the same. I’m actually in D.C. for a couple of days taking care of some job paperwork and apartment shopping, after which I expect the already ridiculous to-do list will increase exponentially. And then there’s closing out my current job and attending my brother’s graduation and a visit out to Los Angeles and, as per usual, all that other stuff that just comes up.

It feels a bit panicked, but for the record, it also feels good :)

I was in D.C. today to visit the Institute for Humane Studies, which I enjoyed very much. However, for my return flight I departed via Dulles Airport for the first time — at which I will justifiably direct my wrath for the remainder of this post.

I was curious enough to find out who actually designed Dulles that I scouted around a bit online and came up with Eero Saarinen of Finland. I also discovered this semi-useful history of airport design. In Saarinen’s defense, he gets credit for the unmistakable design of the passenger terminal but is not necessarily responsible for the pitifully inefficient “transporter” design of the tarmac connector. What I want to know is who actually thought having a bunch of huge land rovers shuttle passengers across runways and supply lines was actually a good idea? Is this one of those decisions where the CEO spontaneously threw out the idea in the board meeting and everyone else was too afraid to disagree?

If my experience is anything close to the norm, Dulles was clearly not designed with the actual airline passenger in mind. The terminal itself is basically a long thin rectangle with no directional signs whatsoever, making it impossible to find an airline without walking the length of the terminal and hoping your line wasn’t in the other direction. All passengers of all airlines are subsequently funneled into narrow security openings, forever separating them from Cinnabon and any other restaurants located in the initial building. And then comes the wait of undisclosed length for a bus or “mobile lounge” to take passengers to their concourse. No food, no seats, no merchandise — only the knowledge that you are about to be packed like sardines into what looks like the land version of the military’s amphibious infantry transports.

My flight departed from a “G” gate so I didn’t even ride the mobile lounge, and was instead transported via bus. It turns out that the bus follows a prescribed path indicated by a large paint stripe on the tarmac, but whoever painted the stripe decided it would be fun for the bus to take a tour of the city en route to the gate. Upon arrival, I discovered that G gate is nothing but a large room packed with people who have too few chairs and no personal space. There are no nooks or crannies; people who want to chat on their cell phones just kind of stand around. I thought I might stand outside for a few minutes since it was far less stuffy, but the security personnel don’t let you outside the building. I suspect the lengthy lines for both the men’s and women’s restrooms can be attributed to people using the facilities more out of sheer boredom than actual necessity. There was a small — and I mean small — bookstore as well as a tiny Capitol Hill Bar with barely enough room for a dozen people to stand let alone sit, but it wasn’t until after ordering my $5 beer and $6 slice of pizza that I learned the beer can’t leave the bar area. This room is already half the length of a mid-sized restaurant; where in the world was I going to go?

So, after two solid hours at the airport (of which I needed nearly every minute) I am finally admitted to the gate. Upon entering I discover that I’m on one of the smaller planes that uses a staircase instead of a ramp, and as a result I’m in a multi-use gate servicing G13-G20 or so. Several of these planes were boarding simultaneously, and it turns out that once past the attendant I could have boarded any plane on this section of the tarmac no questions asked. Nice to know they’ve got that process locked down.

Failure of bureaucracy? Failure of government? Principal agent problem? I can’t be certain. I just know that I just spent two hours in an airport trafficked by thousands of people every day and watched a combination of unnecessary restrictions, security failures, passenger inconvenience, and inefficient/incompetent resource allocation that I would find unbelievable if I hadn’t seen it firsthand. Moral of the story? There are plenty, but one stands out in particular: fly Reagan National and avoid Dulles like the plague.

I’m trying to devote some time to following the developments in Britain’s general election campaign. Surprisingly, very few of the blogs I read (and I read quite a few) have mentioned it at all — possibly because the number of people not completely ignorant in British election strategy is extremely small. So far, I’ve at least enjoyed the first MyDD election update of what I hope will be many between now and May 5.

Additionally, I received this really cool interactive British electoral map courtesy of Tim Boyd, who is probably the most oft-cited blogless scholar I know. I’m considering starting a “Draft Tim!” movement to get his thoughts online firsthand instead of relying on haphazard secondhand sources.

I just commented on the wealth of state education data now available for free on the web. Now we have a blogging general at STRATCOM attempting to get answers more quickly by communicating via the internet instead of the chain of command. Ingenious? Organizationally stupid? I guess that depends on how it plays out and which superior gets ticked off when their suboordinate fails to notify them prior to posting something that the superior wasn’t previously aware of. My only other comment is that I hope the general isn’t stupid enough to ask — or that his suboordinates aren’t stupid enough to respond to — questions whose answers will post a breach of national security all over the internet.

I’m a huge fan of the internet, a huge fan of communication, and a huge fan of transparent information exchange, but I do see the exchange of daily information pertaining to the U.S. Strategic Command as a dialogue that might not be best left out in the open.

So even though one of my degrees is in education, I rarely discuss education issues for some reason. Maybe it’s because I accurately believe having a M.Ed. in Organizational Leadership does not an expert in major education issues make. But that doesn’t mean I don’t try to stay current on the facts and figures. With that poor segue, check out this fantastic resource for education-related data. You can search by state, or compare states, to learn all sorts of educational scores, statistics, and demographics. I admittedly haven’t vetted it thoroughly yet, but I have explored some of its features and it’s really quite amazing.

When I first saw the title of the article Arkansas nixes offensive pink jerseys I was convinced I would be reading about how using traditionally female color associations to degrade men was perpetuating sexist stereotypes or something. To my astonishment, I find that Arkansas has stopped using pink jerseys as punishment because it’s offensive to breast cancer victims!

No offense meant to the breast cancer awareness movement… but really, let’s get serious for a moment. The movement feels so strongly about its cultural stranglehold on the color pink that it has now decided to use its political weight to keep pink from being used in offensive ways? And not “lilac” or “fuchsia” or “cotton candy” but the extremely broad “pink”, as in one of a mere 16 in a box of crayons! Can any movement that gains notoriety claim one of the basic colors, or is the honor reserved for particularly severe illnesses?

If your favorite color happens to be AIDS ribbon red or Lance Armstrong wristband yellow, my advice is to get down to the patent office and stake your claim… quickly, before another one of these jersey incidents goes down.

Ms. Wheelchair Wisconsin, who has muscular dystrophy, was stripped of her title for being caught standing? I’m sorry, but is there that much of a difference between having a wheelchair-necessary condition and a wheelchair-confining condition?

Do you live in/near Nashville and have an interest in blogging, but don’t know how to get started? You’re in luck — there’s a two-step solution out there for you. First, courtesy of Alex Tabarrok, $97 buys you the Power User’s Guide to Becoming a Super Blogger! Second, Belmont University is hosting the three-day blogging conference BlogNashville. Check out the guest list via InstaPundit, who will be one of the attendees.

Personally, I haven’t decided whether I’m enough of a blogger to attend, but I thought I’d pass the word along just the same.