Day 3

The old guy in the grocery store.  He interrupted me, while I was carefully considering the number of grams of fat in the Vitamin D, 100%, full flavored and extremely sweet whole milk I had just put in my basket.  He looked at me and said, "What you rrreally want is this."  He yanked down a smaller bottle with a green label, and turns it over in his hand.  "This goat's milk is much better than the stuff from cow's, and it's naturally homogenized".  Turns out the old dude is right.  Of course my first reaction is to pretend to be interested in what he is saying, because what I really want to do is get my milk and leave.  I ended up sticking with the whole cow's milk,  but what I learned is that not all random people are crazy, and I really should give people the benefit of the doubt sometimes.  

Firm handshakes.  I spend a lot of time listening to people at work.  During meetings, during lunch.  I read their emails, and try to respond promptly and effectively.  Email, presentations with computers, and text messaging have really destroyed the everyday personal touch.  Today I shook a person's hand at work following a briefing that made me realize how weak and exhausted he was.  It was kind of shocking actually, it was a real softie.  This guy's hands felt like they hadn't touched anything harder than a piece of cheesecake for his whole life.  I found it hard to believe that someone who had an image of being so much more together and powerful had one of the most weak, awkward, and pitiful handshakes I'd ever had the joy of experiencing.  Personal touch and confidence is important to me and I hadn't really given much thought to how important that is, so here's to a firm shake.

The ingenuity, perseverance, and curiosity of children.  Take this little guy for example.  If you asked any person with reasonable knowledge of what conditions would be like outside a jumbo jet at 35,000ft (that's roughly six and a half miles) and traveling at Mach 0.8, that person would tell you there is a reason why you can't open the windows for a little fresh air.   And maybe you should wear this if you were going to attempt the feat.  But you didn't ask a reasonable person.  No instead you asked a child who wanted to go home to see his parents, so he didn't consider all that, he just wanted to go home.  Among the challenges of such logic (or lack thereof), the air temperature (about -60 degrees F), the sheer speed of the air hitting your skin (about 500mph) and the lack of oxygen (your brain would receive ~5x less oxygen at that altitude).  But nonetheless, little dude crosses the tarmac of an international airport, in plain sight of the tower, security, tucks up in the belly of a skyscraper with wings, flies for 5 hours in aforementioned conditions and then rolls out of the landing gear hold like nothing special just happened after the plane lands.  Turns out he just wants to know where his Mom is.  While unfortunately (or fortunately?) he traveled to Hawaii instead of to Somalia (where his Mother was), its the thought that counts.  And if I was a parent, I'd be stoked if my kid tried something like that to get home.  Hopefully there are other kids out there with these crazy ideas and maybe someday kids with this kind of perseverance will get us to Mars.