Life After Grad School

Along with hundreds of other volunteers I spent this morning picking up trash from the banks of the Charles River (a surprisingly hazardous undertaking, as I found out when my friend got attacked by an irritated Canada goose). In two hours I filled a large garbage bag covering a relatively small area that didn’t even seem all that dirty at first glance. Here are some of the things I picked up:

• one baseball hat and one sock
• rusted metal chain and wood with nails sticking out
• random ropes and ribbons
• plenty of broken glass
• cigarette butts, packs and lighters
• lipsticks
• many plastic bottles and bottle caps, plastic candy wrappers, chips bags etc

The most frequent items picked up, however, were:

• plastic shopping bags
• an astonishing amount of styrofoam, most of it undeniably from Dunkin Donuts cups

Luckily, these are also some of the easiest items to avoid as a consumer by bringing your own coffee mug and your own shopping bags. Some establishments will even give you a discount for doing so (and they should, since every bag and every cup costs them money). But how to get the word out to those who can’t be bothered to think about this (particularly not before their first cup of coffee)?

Yes, the death of 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech on Monday is tragic and has touched us all, but does it really warrant the extensive, obsessive media coverage? Let’s face it, while it affects hundreds of people’s lives, the university shooting does not have any relevance on the national or international level. It seemed preventable, but only with 20/20 hindsight, and may point towards some ills in our society, but it was a freak incident executed by one disturbed person. While we’re obsessing over the details of this event, every day more soldiers and civilians die in the Iraq war. These aren’t people who died because of a random shooting. These are people who die because they were ordered to fight a senseless war. Where is the national day of mourning for the fallen soldiers and innocent bystanders? Oh, that’s right, we’d have to declare every day a day of mourning …

To put things into perspective:

• Deaths from Virginia Tech shooting: 32
• Americans died in Iraq war (as of 4/19/07): 3,315
• Iraqi deaths (estimated): 62,000 - 68,000

Enough said.

I’m mad. The US and Canada just approved the use of genetically modified yeast in wine production. As if it isn’t hard enough to avoid genetically modified corn, now I have to stick to European and organic wines. It is inconceivable to me that in a country where obesity, dieting and nutritional science make headlines every day, hardly anybody seems to be concerned about the quality of the food that people ingest and the integrity and safety of the food supply chain. I for my part would like my food to be grown and raised in ways proven successful for millennia as opposed to a way that’s driven by short-term commercial interests (pesticide manufacturers, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, factory farms, food (corn!) processing firms …). Instead of finding a new diet miracle drug, food or surgery, it seems to me that the simple solution would be for people to start eating real food again. Ya know, fruits and vegetables, rice and beans, and meat from animals that aren’t pumped full of meds because they’re being fed corn that they have no way of digesting without getting sick. Just a thought.

As I am contemplating how to make it to Germany this summer in light of rising airfares and my growing carbon footprint, Google once again saves the day. It’s simple, first you navigate through Boston’s maze of one way streets to make it to Long Wharf, then you swim across the Atlantic Ocean to land in France where you pick up the E05 highway and keep going through Belgium to Germany. This should take a mere 29 days and 7 hours. Can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before!

Masters swimmers are a different species from normal human beings. We happily get older because every five years that means we age up one age group and have an advantage over the competition. We actually enjoy staring at the black stripe on the bottom of the pool for hours and getting yelled at by our coach. And some of us can’t think of anything more pleasant to do than get up at the crack of dawn for a swim workout.

At this year’s New England Masters Championship meet - incidentally the second largest masters meet in the country after Nationals - I had plenty of opportunity to observe some of the different subspecies of Masters swimmers. Here just a selected few:

• The sandbagger, who enters ridiculously slow times, then beats everyone else in the heat by several body lengths. Most of us have done this involuntarily. Some of us do it on purpose.
• The 90-year old, who has outlived his competition and keeps showing up and breaking records. We all want to be like him when we grow up.
• The recent Olympian, who doesn’t train, just competes for the heck of it and puts on a spectacular show smoking his (already very fast) competitors. We all wish we were like him.
• The middle-aged swimmer, who started swimming a few years ago, swims every event and then some and keeps getting faster every year. We applaud and wonder what we would have to do to get faster every year.
• The pregnant one, who surprised us with her slower than usual entry time, then shows up with a huge belly and still beats us. We are in awe.
• The former college star, who beats most swimmers, but laments the fact that her times are much slower than in college. We tell her to get over it.
• The family man who shows up with a happy and vocal cheering squad, often cute 3-year olds screaming “Go, Daddy!!”. We pretend they’re cheering for us.

Our team did great this year. Surprising the competition with our strong presence we got 3rd place of the medium-sized teams. We had a large number of outstanding swims, great team spirit, lots of support and a ton of fun. To be repeated soon …