The Battle of the Seasons: Christmas vs. Holiday

when early november rolled around this year, it brought along with it the first tastes of winter. you know what i'm talking about...

you get out of your car at the end of the day and are reminded that the cold, dry air outside has a sharp edge to it. you pull the two sides of your jacket together and shrink your head into your shoulders in an innate reaction to keep warm. you then smell the smoke from wood burning in a neighbor's fireplace and catch the sun magnifying the golds and the reds of the poplars and the maples as it falls behind the treeline much earlier than you are used to. walking around the corner of the house, from the driveway to the sidewalk, you halfway expect to see a douglas fir illuminated with tiny lights and a james bond movie on Spike through the front window. for a short time, maybe even a split second, smells like, looks like, feels like... must be... Christmas

but its not. its not even thanksgiving. its barely past halloween. why then do i feel like i should turn that corner and see the Christmas lights on the Christmas tree and Christmas in The World is Not Enough? because i skip over it on the radio. i wade through it in the stores. i see it in countless commercials on TV. as far as society is concerned, november 1st is the beginning of the Christmas season. i will take this forum to firmly object and say "nah son."

the title of this post alludes to a discrepancy between the Christmas season and the Holiday season.

wait... aren't they the same? well i guess on some level i always knew they weren't really the same. i just thought that non-Christians (and all schools, places of business, governments and public places who wish to be politically correct) preferred the term holiday. that way they can get Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Eid-ul-Adha in there (just to name a few) without giving special treatment to Christians. wow they really aren't the same are they?

no they are not. this begs the question, how are they different? well that's a matter of opinion. while some people would like nothing more than to equate the two (focusing only on Christmas from mid october to the day their tree dies), i would much rather draw the line at black friday. black friday (among others) is the day after thanksgiving and has earned such a name because it a) is generally the day that retail stores see their numbers move into the black (from the red) and b) is always a friday seeing as thanksgiving is always a thursday.

why draw the line at black friday? why not get into the spirit earlier than that? what's the harm in getting excited about Christmas?

no harm in that at all. its a personal thing. i, personally, choose not to listen to Christmas music until thanksgiving is over. i, personally, would not want my abode (be it with my parents, my own apartment or my future house with my future wife and kids) to be decorated for Christmas before Thanksgiving is over* and certainly not before Halloween**.

don't get me wrong... i thoroughly enjoy Christmas music and i also enjoy a nicely lit tree and the occasional jar of Holiday themed Hershey's Kisses (even though they are colored silver, red, green and sometimes gold which are primarily the colors of Christmas... but see Hershey's is a big corporation and they should play it safe so that people wont get offended that they are Christmas candies. Jews and Muslims like chocolate too...).

i just feel like each holiday that you choose to participate in needs to have its own time frame for build up, execution, and wind down. more specifically, in today's "Holiday Season" there are four sub-seasons: halloween, thanksgiving, Christmas and new years (five if you count NCAA Bowl season). i am all for calling this roughly three-month period of time the "Holiday Season." no problem. but i, personally, impose boundaries on those four (not necessarily five) holidays so that i do not celebrate one before another is over.

keeping these boundaries helps to focus on the holiday at hand. thanksgiving is about being with family, being thankful and giving thanks for the things that you have and have been given in this world. Christmas is about recognizing and remembering the birth of Jesus Christ. notice that nothing (except for Christmas music, not Holiday music) that we see in the media has anything to do with those things. its all about saving money at 4am on friday (Kohl's will be open at 4am in case you wanted to know), eating turkey in front of the TV watching the Lions play, and buying and obsessing over material things whilst sippin' on a little Jack and nog.

i'm not trying to preach to y'all. all i'm saying is that i would like to challenge you to get the most out of the holidays (plural) this season. and i don't mean just going through the motions of thanksgiving or asking for more than you usually would for Christmas. i challenge you to think about what these holidays mean outside of the media. if you do that, i think you'll pick up what i'm putting down.


i am going to start to put a new item at the bottom of every post. it will be my "Jam of the Day." it will not necessarily be a song, although it could be. it will be something during the day or week that i have found to be exceedingly excellent. this thing could also be labeled "Junk of the Day," "Blig of the Day" or even "Dip of the Day." really, it could be anything of the day. just know its a good thing.

Jam of the Day

Rihanna ft. Ne-Yo - Hate That I love You

surprised? i've become a sucker for anything with a good beat and an even better melody. this song has both. don't worry, i'll have some other erich-like jams of the day in the future. just thought i'd start it off with a bang. let me know what you think.

see y'all later. take a nap after the turkey.

* i may eat those words some day. i am kind of a pushover...
** not that much of a pushover though

a brief update...

its been a week since i have bligged on the blog. a brief update...

i haven't been blogging at work because things have picked up dramatically. they have given me access to the email account where people (mostly engineering firms) email in to ask for the as-builts for a certain section of road or for a specific land parcel. i can now answer those emails whenever they come in which is at least 2 or 3 times a day. the bigger thing at work is that we are now working with the data that the other firm that we hired has delivered to us. we are checking that data against what we know to be true as represented in the as-builts and then flagging errors wherever we find them. CMUD is essentially using a database of those errors as proof of the other company's failure to meet or complete the agreed upon criteria. still waiting to see how all this will play out, but the important part is that i have stuff to do all day at work. no more reading the DTH...

i haven't been blogging at home because i am in the process of repainting my room. i have moved everything out (which is tricky in a small house) and am now repairing a section of drywall that was removed years ago to do some repairs. i will then wash the walls, fill in 25 years worth of nail holes, then paint the room a nice shade of Marsh Green* by Behr from the Home Depot. i am sleeping in the living room on an air mattress (which i am kind of excited about), don't have much free time, and don't even have my computer hooked up. kind of hectic around here...

i am going to stop putting the next blog topics at the bottom of my blogs. i am finding that, in everyday life, i think of things to write about and have started writing them down, but am being stopped from writing about them because i have to write about what i said i was going to write about. I'm still going to write about waiting until black friday and the itouch commercial. a rather unimportant point, but just letting you know.

gotta go - holler back


*looks much worse on computer screen

A Contract With Manish

Manish Patel and I are bound by a contract.

Manish was a friend of mine in high school and he was (and i'm sure still is) a huge movie buff. he could name the director of most any modern movie you threw at him. we would talk about movies and he would always be baffled at the movies that i had not seen. everyone has movies that they haven't seen that most people in the world have, and when you mention that you haven't seen that movie, those around you say "I cant believe you haven't seen that!" Manish said that with nearly every movie.

our senior year ('02-'03) he finally got fed up with me not seeing certain movies. he wrote on an index card some of the movies that he thought i should see and made me sign it certifying that "Before I Die" i would see the movies on this card. we added to the list up until we graduated in June '03. of the 28 movies that made the list, i have crossed off 9.

here are the movies. those in italics, i have crossed off the list.

1. The Matrix (The Wachowski Brothers - 1999)
   
2. Fight Club (David Fincher - 1999)
   
3. Signs (M. Night Shyamalan - 2002)
   
4. Se7en (David Fincher - 1995)
   
5. The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer - 1995)
6. Annie Hall (Woody Allen - 1977)
7. Clerks. (Kevin Smith - 1994)
8. The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont - 1994)
9. JFK: Director's Cut (Oliver Stone - 1991)
10. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (Kevin Smith - 2001)
11. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock - 1958)
12. The Big Lebowski (The Coen Brothers - 1998)
13. Ben-Hur (William Wyler - 1959)
14. The Cell (Tarsem Singh - 2000)
15. Friday (F. Gary Gray - 1995)
16. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarentino - 1994)
    
17. Chasing Amy (Kevin Smith - 1997)
18. Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant - 1997)
19. A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard - 2001)
20. Ocean's Eleven (Steven Soderbergh - 2001)
    
21. Payback (Brian Helgeland - 1999)
22. Brotherhood of the Wolf (Christophe Gans - 2001)
23. Memento (Christopher Nolan - 2000)
24. Training Day (Antoine Fuqua - 2001)
25. Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott - 2001)
26. Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese - 2002)
27. Frailty (Bill Paxton - 2001)

what do you think of these movies? agree? disagree? would you like to help me cross off one or some of these? holler back

NEXT POST TOPICS:
- black friday or bust
- music is my ___ (from the iTouch commercial)

see y'all soon

what i do(n't do) at work

i have told many of you what i do for work. i haven't explained what i do for work but to a few of you because it would be one of those conversations where you just nod along and pretend to understand when you really don't because you have already lost interest. it's ok. i would do it too. also, it is a pretty unusual workplace environment right now. allow me to explain a bit.

i work for the City of Charlotte in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities Department (CMU or CMUD). i am an intern; a temporary employee. they (we, i guess) are currently in the thick of a very large and state-of-the-art project. this project is called the CMU GIS* Foundation Project. it is currently in Phase IV. the goal of the project is to convert our old data on water and waste water utilities into a new, more computer-friendly and spatially accessible format. what the boof does that mean? therein lies the problem of me trying to explain it to you in person...

the old data for these projects (by "projects" i mean every water or waste water line, sewer, manhole, valve, reducer, meter, and fitting serviced by CMUD... think about that...) are housed in paper documents called as-builts. an as-built** is a blueprint-esque document which is made to represent on paper exactly what the project looks like as it is built underground. as you can imagine in a constantly growing, expanding and transitioning city, there are thousands of these as-builts, some dating to the inception of utilities in the city.

the as-builts are scanned to the network using a huge scanner (as they are about 2' x 3' and are stored rolled up). then me or someone else will draw into the GIS (the computer program which is essentially a virtual map with layers such as parcels, aerial photographs, streams, roads, etc.) where the pipes, etc. from the as-builts go in the real world. to simplify that a bit, we digitize the paper map and use that image to draw into the computer the water and sewer lines that are on the drawing. all of these lines and attributes for the lines are stored in databases on servers on the network.

the vast majority of this work was already completed when i got here (as it was part of a previous phase). like i said before, with a changing and updating city, new projects and repairs are always being completed. when they are completed, the as-builts for those new projects need to be processed and added to the existing virtual map. so that's what we do... when we are given as-builts. right now we have no as-builts and haven't had any in days.

so why did they hire you when there are plenty of other people who can take care of this task?

the 4th phase of this project is happening now. that phase is a bit complicated. the as-built drawings don't contain nearly the amount of information that is available on water and waste water utility projects. for example, as-builts do not always list water meters for each house, sewer service lines for each house and do not list GPS coordinates of anything. therefore, when the as-builts are draw in by us here, they aren't necessarily correct because we just kind of eyeball where the lines go.

CMU has contracted with an outside company to go around the county and collect GPS data on all of the utilities along with a long list of attributes for those utilities. these are examples of a few attributes which would be collected: intake and outtake elevations (above sea level) for manholes, manhole cover diameter, water and waste water pipe material, and in-field availability of manhole covers (ie covered over or not). lots of detailed stuff. and that's just a sampling.

this company specializes in going out into the field and collecting raw data. they do not yet specialize in manipulating that data into special formats, such as the format CMUD needs it in. they think they have the ability to specialize in such data manipulation, and being able to put a successful conversion project with the City of Charlotte on their resume would effectively prove that to future clients.

they do not yet have such abilities.

CMUD has rejected the data that they have delivered (for only the very first section of the county) twice now and is starting to wonder if it is even a good investment of time and money to continue to do business with them.

i was hired, along with another intern, to work with this data that has now been rejected twice and has an ominous future.

so, erich, what do you do at work?

the internet is my friend. this is what i do at work (seriously):
- Ace & TJ on Kiss 95.1 until 10AM
- Gmail
- Google Talk
- Pandora
- ESPN
- CNN
- FOX News
- The Daily Tar Heel***
- Tar Heel Blue
- Inside Carolina
- The Weather Channel
- NOAA
- Intellicast
- i try really hard to avoid this one and this one
- anything that you suggest i read

that's usually a pretty good day's work right there.

am i frustrated with not having any work to do? yes. i get bored very easily there. i would gladly do something other than stare at two very nice LCD screens all day like filing, organizing, moving boxes, running errands or anything like that... anything to be productive short of custodial work. but they don't really have anything for me to do. it is to the point now that no one in my area has anything to do.

hey... i'm getting paid for it...

NEXT BLIG ITEMS:

- A Contract with Manish
- Why I Wait Until Black Friday

see y'all soon and thanks for reading the long post


*what is GIS?
** here is an example of an as-built. this is not one from CMUD because i am bound under a confidentiality agreement not to release any of the files i have access to because, understandably, they are sensitive materials.
*** for all you Carolina alums out there, i read the 2007-2008 UNC Basketball Preview in the DTH on friday. good stuff. and yes i know i can use other symbols as footnotes. i choose not to.

how to experience a life

much like the song "How to Save a Life" by The Fray, i will now present you with thoughts which will probably not help you experience a life.

the people in the Blogger department at Google need to change something. when signing up for a blog, the second step requires the would-be blogger to choose (1) what the blog will be called and (2) where the blog will be located, or the web address. as someone who has decided to try his hand (or hands... because typing is much easier that way) at this bloggin' stuff on a whim and has established the precedent of being less than creative, these were tall orders to be undertaken all at once.

tackling the first task, i reviewed some of the blogs of friends or acquaintances to get some ideas. i saw that in some cases, blog titles were smart, witty and said something about the writer*. good stuff. i also observed that blog titles need not necessarily be those things, or anything really, to be good titles.** also good stuff.

these very empirical observations got me nowhere. so i scrapped that line of thinking and decided to make it something about myself or something that i like. my first idea went to my favorite quote which happens to be from a hymn but was first made aware to me through a song by Anathallo. the quote is "all the fitness He requires is to feel your need of Him." so i wanted to do something like "Thoughts on Fitness" but i thought that there would, inevitably, be someone out there who didn't get the allusion even if it was explained and come looking for tips on vitamin supplements.

i also thought about using a favorite song title/lyric (other than the previous) in the title-creation process and since my favorite band is the Dave Matthews Band, i entertained ideas like "Life on Grey Street" or "Under the Dreaming Tree." i discounted those ideas on account of them not being authentic and representative of me.

which brings me to my final line of thinking which began with camping. y'all know i love camping. i have often thought, and recently said, that camping (or doing any activity) is not always fun unless you have the right group of people at the right place at the right time. even still, those people and those circumstances mean a hill of beans unless the experience that you have with them is a memorable one. therefore i believe that it's the experience which we should treasure. so that's that.

oh and it was also hard to pick out what goes before the ".blogspot.com" in the URL. but that isn't nearly as important as the blog title. i was always taught that, in writing, if you have one argument that is stronger than another, you are to present your weaker argument first so that you can end on a strong point. i will have none of that tonight.

see y'all later

holler back

NEXT TOPICS TO HOLLER ON
what i do(n't) do at work...
a contract with Manish
"Christmas" iff "Thanksgiving" = past

*Ben Humphries and Brad Phillis (finding theoPHILUS, by brad PHILLIS... think about it people) are probably totally unaware that i have pubbed their blogs. also, is it me or does the asterisk look awkward inside of the period at the end of a sentence? is that the correct placement?

**neither Jenn nor Casey know i pubbed theirs either. i put the asterisks on the outside this time, just for kicks (on route 66 perhaps?)

Me? Blog? What? An explanation...

i don't usually do this.

i don't count creativity as one of my strong points. i don't keep a journal. i draw stick figures. i am prone to awkward silences and then have trouble breaking them without repeating something already said in the conversation. even though i love to play the guitar, it is beyond my ability to put individual notes together to form a unique melody (never mind my tuneless-bucket syndrome). i took an intro to poetry* class at UNC (to which i had to present clearly sub-par work... it was an interesting semester), and still nothing flipped the creativity switch to the "on" position.

so why start now? why keep a blog? why should i make what would most likely be a feeble attempt at creativity, and do so on such a public medium?

call it me wanting to imitate the maturity of the friends i have who use their blogs to express thoughts and teachings on Christianity, to offer interpretations of the wild world of sports, or to share insight into a time of service for those less fortunate. or call it me wanting to get into one of the fastest growing new internet things. call it me wanting to have yet another thing that i can keep updated. you might even call it me trying to understand how i am now earning a weekly pay check, paying car insurance and no longer relying on a piece of plastic with my face and school on it to eat anymore when i so hugely miss the days spent on a hill with a well and a bell.

i'll call it a mix of all the aforementioned. i will not, at this point, call this a means for me to practice being creative (as if it is a skill to be learned). i aim to serve myself by doing something new and different in keeping this blog.

know that i do not look to "wow" anyone with this blog. if you get something out of it, excellent. let me know. we can talk about it and be happy for one another. but please don't expect to.

i ask that you remember throughout my bloggings that i value your opinion. seriously. be neither hesitant nor timid. i don't know where this blog junk is going to go for me but if it merely serves as a way for me to maintain some form of communication with old friends, then i will be content.

thanks and ill see y'all soon

NEXT POST TOPICS
what "it's the experience..." means
what i do(n't do) at work...


*it must be noted that ENGL 25W fulfilled the upper level aesthetic perspective which provided the sole motivation for me to take such a class. it must also be noted that at the end of the class, after all of my poems were critiqued, edited and recompiled into a final portfolio, i was proud of what i had made... even if it really wasn't all that impressive in and of itself. if you're really nice, i might let you read one of them.