"You wouldn't trust a Baptist with a nuclear weapon, would you?"
Once again, I have suffered the wrath of the Airport Gods. I purposely scheduled a 5:00 flight home so that I would arrive Westtown in enough time to pack and get a decent number of hours of sleep before I had to get up and drive down to LaGuardia for my flight to Baton Rouge tomorrow. When I got to the airport, I quickly found that my flight was delayed…badly. My 5:00 flight was now an 8:30 flight… which would bring my into Philly around 10:30, and who knows what time I would get to NY. Luckily, I was able to get on an 8:00 flight that goes straight to Newburgh, so that was a little bit of luck there.
So yesterday was Valentine’s Day, and I got to hang out alone. It was rather depressing, but I was in remarkably good spirits not withstanding. After a grueling day driving 2.5 hours out to Birmingham Alabama and back (for work), I quickly stopped into my hotel room and bolted out to Taco Mac, a great little (actually it’s huge) beer bar near the hotel. I was sitting there, drinking my beers, minding my own business, when the guy next to me struck up a conversation. For anyone that knows my father, you’ll know that he can strike up a conversation with anyone anywhere… it’s just a gift that he has. It was actually fairly embarrassing growing up when he would start talking with random strangers, but anyway… I didn’t get that gift, so usually, when I am alone, I stay alone, but that was not the case last night.
The conversation opened up with a modest conversation about the college basketball games that were going on, and quickly, after I mentioned my disdain for basketball, morphed into a in depth discussion of the coach changes in Miami (Dolphins NFL Team) and how that was going to effect their QB and RB situation. He happened to be a huge Miami fan, so that was nice considering how there aren’t very many of them in NYC. After we exhausted that, I don’t really know how we were able to do it, but we moved our discussion to President Bush, how terrible he was, and the “War on Terror”. After taking my terrorism class at Columbia during my last semester, I have felt that I have a pretty good idea about the motivating factors that play a role in the Islamic Extremist mindset, and how that is played out in the political arena of the United States….well, this guy, not only was he also familiar, dude knew more names of terrorists and Islamic leaders than I could shake a stick at. One thing that caught my off guard was his distaste for Baptists… at one point we were talking about how in 10 years or less, terrorists will probably launch a nuclear attack, and I agreed, and said that our best way to combat that was to improve out boarder controls and security screen processes… and he says to me “Would you trust a Baptists with a nuclear weapon?! No! It’s just like that… you wouldn’t trust a Muslim with one either!” I didn’t really know what he meant by that, but I attempted to stand up for Islam, but it was no use. Overall, he believed that if the US were ever attacked with a nuclear weapon, then it was our obligation to slaughter every Muslim in the world…. I didn’t really know what to say to that, so I just switched the topic… Other than his wacky extreme view on Islamic genocide, it was a good conversation.
Today was the end of the second week of working in Atlanta, and things are going pretty well. My project manager is a really cool guy, and just happens to drive a 2002 BMW M3, which is just a beautiful blue color… ugh. Needless to say, he and I shoot the shit about cars and driving fairly often, so that’s good. Today I had to do some data verification on these reports that we built. In order to do so, I had to check the data in the reports against the data in the database, using SQL queries… unfortunately, my SQL skills are a little sub par and it was an exercise in futility. Eventually I loaded our database up in Access and was able to build the pseudo queries through there, but it was a little frustrating to not be able to solve the issues that I was having. It’s times like that that I wonder if I am in the right profession. I mean, there is just so much to learn and so much to get used to. It’s just overwhelming at times. Then, I think back to how much I HAVE learned and how far I’ve already come in the 8 months that I have been working there, and it’s reassuring that in time, I’ll be more comfortable with things. It’s reassuring to say the least.
Anyway, I don’t have much else to say, so I’ll end it here. Wish me luck during the next 24 hours of travel hell. Ugh…