Christmastime in Toronto
Palos Verdes peninsula
We left town on a 7:00 a.m. flight today - first the plane raced westward off the runway towards the ocean, westward towards the Channel Islands. Then it curved towards Catalina and eventually looped back over a grand view of the Palos Verdes Peninsula and Long Beach’s docks. Downtown Los Angeles’ skyscrapers became a mere outcropping of concrete sticks in the distance. Beyond those sticks, the Mount Wilson observatory was a mere blip in the San Gabriel Mountains, and beyond those mountains the desert sprawled out until I decided to slump back in my seat, fall asleep, and then awaken to find ourselves above some snow-dusted red-sand canyons outside the Grand Canyon.
I can never tire of looking out the window on planes. Even the vast plains of the landlocked states were beautiful under their thin blankets of snow. Snow subdues, chastens, purifies, forgives, soothes, hushes, awes. I have a lot of emotions tied to snow despite having hardly ever encountered it in real life.
After the spectacle of the so-called flyover states, Lake Michigan and then Lake Huron blew my mind. We crossed the edge of Lake Michigan somewhere near Milwaukee or Racine, WI and we found land again right at Muskegon, MI. Then, Saginaw Bay in Lake Huron, our plane flying over at such an angle that we could see both fingers of the lake - the Saginaw Bay finger and the other finger that has Sarnia at its tip.
The Great Lakes in particular (and bodies of water in general) have some kind of mythic, unreasonable power over my imagination (a fictional Lake Superior had played a substantial role in a very recent dream and flying over a body of water at once so vast and distinctly finite just takes my breath away). These bodies of water are so huge that they really make me wonder how man could have conquered their cartography so many centuries ago. Just - how??? They’re so immense, and we’re so small. How??? Wow.
On the other side of the existential coin -
So I’ve completed two more Rails applications and a tic-tac-toe game in the last couple months. Bloc is nearly over, and as I tarry, hem, and haw over my 3rd application (the to-do list API), I feel a certain existential unease and a lack of grounding. OK, I’m slooowly reading a guide to the CLI brought to you by Launch School (né Tea Leaf), and I’m slooowly reading Marijn Haverbeke’s Eloquent Javascript - because I feel these texts provide some needed filling to the gaps in my knowledge. But what am I doing? I don’t quite know and I feel fairly restless to not be doing or making anything lately. It would be nice to work on some more Project Euler problems and Codewars katas, but I guess that these just feel like snacks in comparison to what I hunger for - something like a three-course meal. And reading the texts feels like drinking liquid meals or eating astronaut food - they deliver nutrition, but not satiety.