The Indianapolis airport is not the most exciting place in the world: an ultramodern, sterile, echoing barn of a building set in the middle of an endless sea of cornfields and light-industry warehouses. Possibly realizing this, the designers added a centerpiece to the large open area in the middle of the building: a bar.

It says something about the life of the modern business traveler that the bar had regulars. The bartender greeted several passing travelers by name as they walked by, clutching their rolling suitcases in their tired hands.

One of the guys sitting at the bar was in his late 40s or early 50s, with the lean build of a distance runner and the craggy face of a drill sergeant. Not long after he sat down, his Blackberry beeped at him.

I didn't hear the beginning of the conversation, but everyone in the airport heard the end.

"It's been a long day of travel, my phone is almost out of charge, and I'm very tired. Why are you calling me?"

"Absolutely not."

"This is the third time he's quit this month! Every time he does this other people have to pick up his slack, you understand me? HE'S GOING ON THE FIRST GREYHOUND TOMORROW MORNING AND I'M TAKING THE BUS FARE OUT OF HIS LAST PAYCHECK! AND I'LL..."

"Per diem? PER DIEM? I'LL TAKE HIS PER DIEM AND HAVE MYSELF A NICE STEAK DINNER WITH IT! WITH A BOTTLE OF WINE! AND I'LL BE THINKING OF HIM **THE WHOLE TIME!!!**"

After a few more screamed repetitions of the words "GREYHOUND BUS" and "LAST PAYCHECK," he hung up with the air of a man who missed the days of handsets that he could slam into a phone cradle.

One of his other co-workers called a few minutes later.

"Yeah, I heard. His mother just called me." [His mother?]

"I told her he was going on the first Greyhound tomorrow morning. He's just.... yeah, he's just a fat lazy kid who doesn't want to work."

"Yeah, well, I've been in three states today and I'm a little tired."

Really? No one in the airport had noticed.

"So," a friend asked on Facebook this morning, "anyone got a great way to lose weight that does not involve eating less and lots of walking?"

Er. Since you asked: no.

You can, however, take it way too far.

I've been accused of looking fairly skinny these days, but I have nothing on one of the regulars at my gym. She reminds me of a wooden toy I owned as a child, with dowels tied to string for limbs and a narrow cylinder for her chest. She has very little visible muscle; it's all been worn away. Her skull shows through her face as she moves. Her limbs look like they've been stretched on a rack.

Every morning, she's in the cardio room for a long while, slowly climbing a Stairmaster or jogging on a treadmill or riding one of the bikes.

Just about every gym I've ever been in has one or two of these people: someone with a genuine, obvious eating disorder. They're usually, though not always, women. They're on the cardio equipment because they don't have the muscle mass to be able to lift weights, even light ones. They have phenomenal endurance, but not a lot of strength or flexibility. When they're not on one of their machines, they move extremely slowly and painfully.

The worst I ever saw was a woman who carried a pair of crutches with her into the cardio room. When she was done, she needed them to walk out. My current acquaintance isn't that bad, but she's getting there.

I never know what to say to people like this. You're a stranger, it's none of your damn business, but it's so obvious that they're hurting themselves.

One of the ways you can tell a good gym is if they've got trainers roaming around who will say something to these people. The Pro Club, Microsoft's gym, was fairly good about it. UW's gym is understaffed, so the trainers aren't around to notice.

Good luck to her. I wish she had someone she trusted in her life who could tell her to get some help.

There's something a bit startling about looking out at what normally is a peaceful, quiet bay and finding a cruise ship the size of a skyscraper moored in the middle of it.

Friday Harbor gets cruise ships, but small ones. This one is a monster, 650 feet long, the kind of cruise ship you see looming on Seattle's waterfront in the summer. It's far too big for the harbor. They've moored it in a nearby bay and are letting people off the boat by using odd lighters-cum-lifeboats that look a bit like oversized greenhouses with outboard motors.

The ship is called The World. It's a residential ship. You don't buy a ticket, you buy or rent a condominium aboard. (They have everything from small studio apartments to six room penthouses available.)

It has no fixed route. The ship goes wherever the managers and residents decide they want to go. You live aboard full time, disembark whenever you think they've arrived somewhere interesting, get back aboard and go somewhere else. They almost never stay anywhere more than a day or two.

They're going to spend the rest of the summer wandering up the inside passage to Alaska. Then they're off to Russia, Japan, Australia and God alone knows where else.

I met a couple of the ship's residents in town today. Well fed, prosperous, decadent. Proud. And very, very tan.

A fellow doctoral candidate and I were sitting in the sun near UW's Drumheller Fountain last Friday, commiserating about the joys of graduate school, when a couple of young punks walked by.

I say that with complete affection. They were maybe 17, 18 years old, dressed in tattoos and ripped leather and Value Village clothes, hair done in Manic Panic colors never before seen in nature. It was like reliving the late 1980s, or a good day at my alma mater.

As may be, they were fascinated with the fountain's murky pond.

"HOW DEEP IS THIS SHIT?" yelled one of them. Not waiting for the answer, they hustled off towards class or possibly a ska show.

Jerrod and I looked at each other.

"How...deep...is this shit?" he repeated.

"Yeah, that's the most succinct summary of academia I think I've ever heard," I said.

Often, when I'm waiting quietly in a crowd, I end up playing the "guess the stranger's background" game. The rules:

1. No direct questions. If you strike up a conversation, that's a different game.
2. Never be rude. Never stare. Never interrupt.

Take the woman standing in front of me on the rental car shuttle, for instance. Late 40s, standing alone, carrying just a small overnight bag. Silent, with sharp eyes that missed little. Very casually dressed, wearing a Nike jogging outfit under a loose and not-terribly-flattering shirt. Minimal makeup. Aging, good looking but not intensely so. Over her shoulder, in place of a purse, she carried a free convention bag advertising the American Association of Neurologic Surgeons.

Hm, I thought. Neurosurgeon on vacation?

Then I glanced at her hands, at her long, slender fingers and her half-inch-long, manicured fingernails.

Nope. No surgeon has nails like that. Neurosurgeon's wife. Might've even been his first. In the Phoenix area, the trophy wives tend to dress the part.

---

For those who've asked: I'm feeling a lot better. Thanks.

I watched last night's Biden/Palin debate in a packed, standing-room-only pub.

The Montlake Ale House, our local watering hole, has a long tradition of playing host to partisan politics. It's been the preferred meeting site of the local chapter of Drinking Liberally for several years now. As expected, the crowd was noisy, passionate, and overwhelmingly Democratic.

Except for the couple next to me.

( The Quiet Republicans )

He must have been a ladykiller, once. Even with messy grey hair, Goodwill cast-off clothes that hadn't seen detergent in awhile, and the odor of someone who uses malt liquor for deodorant, he still had the square-jawed, blue-eyed look of a man who could once have starred in TV commercials. If Bruce Boxleitner's life had ever gone to hell, he might look like this.

He spoke to the bus driver with a careful, grave courtesy that you almost never hear these days. Even the driver looked a little surprised.

He sat tall in his seat, with a look of remembered pride and dignity from a long ago day.

You had to wonder what his story was. It obviously had a blues soundtrack.

Toshio--no, that's not his real name--was one of the graduate school old timers. He'd been working steadily, first on a masters degree and then on doctoral research, for close to eight years. Finally, he was persuaded to wrap it up and submit the dissertation to his committee. It's a fairly simple process, at the end:

- The committee (hopefully) reads your dissertation
- You present your dissertation to the committee
- They ask you questions. You answer.
- If they like your work, you've graduated. If not...let's not go there.

( but sometimes academic politics rears its ugly head )

The old man's voice was gravel in a cement mixer, and his long beard an unkempt tangle. He had a small wound on one hand.

"Big D," said the young guy behind the counter, "how you doing? What's with your hand?"

The old man snorted in weary disgust. "Some broad bit me last night."

Mercifully, the gas station jockey managed to choke down his laugh. "No shit!" he said. "Did you tell her she was in the wrong place?"

"Yeah," the old guy said, collected his cigarettes, and went on his way.

The young guy looked over at his friend behind the counter, both trying desperately to smother their amazed giggles. "That was my friend's Dad," he said. "Stone-cold crazy. I once watched him rip one of his own fingernails off, no lie."

"There are rednecks," said his friend, "and then there are rednecks."

Canada -- and most other major western nations, with the notable exception of the US -- have an official called a "Privacy Commissioner." Among other things, their job is to investigate privacy complaints.

(Why doesn't the US have one? Short answer: there's no legal basis for one. The EU, Canada and Australia all have comprehensive data protection laws. The US doesn't.)

I met a few of the privacy commissioners briefly at various industry conferences about five or six years ago. The Canadian privacy commissioner back then was a gentleman named George Radwanski, a former newspaper editor, political operative, and longtime crony of Jean Chrétien, then Canada's prime minister.

( Radwanski had his quirks, though. )

The Dalai Lama came to Seattle and the University of Washington awhile back, and for the most part was greeted with rapturous applause. Not by everyone, though.

"You have to understand," said the earnest Chinese graduate student in the TA office, "that a lot of Westerners don't know the history here. They don't teach it in your schools. Tibet has never really been an independent country. It's a province of China. Tibetan propaganda says otherwise, but it's not the case. There was no invasion. China was merely reasserting its sovereignty rights."

The two Americans in the office nodded understanding if not agreement.

"It's really scary," she continued. "People don't understand the Dalai Lama, who he really is. He's a terrorist, not a holy man. What scares all of us is the possibility that he might tell his followers to set off a dirty nuclear bomb in the middle of Beijing during the Olympics."

Both Americans muttered something non-committal and escaped.

rollick and rednikki may be the only two people who find this news as sad and depressing as I do, but as Nikki points out:

Janet Kagan died.

Kagan wrote one of my all-time favorite novels, Hellspark, an SF romp (complete with an utterly wonderful Mary-Sue character) through anthropology and linguistics, with a tasty side helping of mystery. I wasn't quite as enamored of her Star Trek tie-in novel, "Uhura's Song," but it was and remains a major fan favorite.

She never wrote another novel, sticking with short stories, mostly in Asimov magazine, occasionally for collections, and not at all since 1997. She did win a Hugo for one of those short stories, "Nutcracker Coup." I wish, I wish, she'd been able and willing to write more.

She'll be sadly missed.

Around five this morning, my cat Grover decided to wake me up by climbing onto my pillow, purring uncontrollably, and rubbing something unspeakable into my hair. An immediate shower ensued, and I've been up ever since. Awake, no. Up, yes.

This may explain why, when I sleepily glanced at the front page of the paper this morning, my first thought was, "Why is Ralph's picture on the front page?"

Oh. The plane he and his skydiving friends were on had an unexpected air-to-ground collision. That's why.

I worked with Ralph Abdo for a few years back at Microsoft. He was what my grandfather would have called a "tall drink of water," one of those super-athletic guys with legs long enough to sit in multiple ZIP codes simultaneously. His voice was an unidentifiable but charming blend of Canadian/European/surfer dude, all delivered in a gravelly basso profundo that might have turned into the second coming of Orson Welles, if he'd had a few more years.

I can still see him folded up in one of those office chairs, squirming through another long conference call, his mind on the next time he could get the hell out of the office and breathe some fresh air.

Ralph loved, loved extreme sports. He lived for the adrenaline. And in a weird way, I can almost imagine him enjoying the final moments of the plane ride, spiraling in from an impossible height with a dying engine and no hope at all: the last, greatest rush he'd ever have.

Neil Gaiman wrote awhile back about events that tragically happen to Other People. You read the newspapers, and you think: Poor Other People. And then you recognize a name, he said, and you get a brutal reminder that "there are no Other People. It's just us."

Rebecca, my officemate, is living in Kyrgyzstan this summer while working with Mercy Corps.

atonal is still around, but having more fun with new camera lenses than is strictly legal. He took a lovely photo of my cat Sandy awhile back.

Somebody else on my Friends list just announced a trip to Russia (in a locked post, sorry.)

He hasn't been posting much lately because he's on vacation in the US, but I should again plug nomadicshiner, my cooler-than-me cousin who works for the UN in Africa. I'd give a shout-out to my other cooler-than-me cousin who's headed for Australia, but she won't admit to keeping a blog.

Me? Same old, same old. Why do you ask?

I'm taking a class over in the Communications department this term. It's a great class, a workshop on how to put together cogent research papers on Internet-related subjects or data. The professor is wonderful too.

I'm a bit of an oddity in the class for two reasons. I'm one of only two men in the class. (The other one is frequently absent or so quiet it's hard to remember he's there.) I'm also the only professional nerd. Everyone else comes from a traditional communications or journalism background. This leads to occasional moments of hilarity, as I try to attempt to explain proxy servers or Second Life avatars to an audience whose eyes are steadily becoming dull and filmy.

Whatever geek knowledge I may possess, it's apparently not nearly as interesting as my wardrobe.

The ladies in the class have developed an obsession with my shirts.

I'm not quite sure why. It's the same collection of button-down collared shirts I've been wearing for years. Fine, I have a few whimsical short- sleeve shirts -- I've always liked the shirt with the Mandarin writing and the ones with the embroidery, myself -- but we're not talking about high fashion here. They're all perfectly unexceptional silk or cotton shirts. Most of them don't even have a pattern. Today's was a plain, light blue collared shirt from Brooks Brothers.

Still, this is the level of recurring joke it's become:

PROFESSOR
OK, let's reflect on things we've learned this quarter.

GRAD STUDENT #1
I really like WoS' shirts.

WAYSOFSEEING
::applies head to desk::

GRAD STUDENT #2
Yeah, you're going to have to wear something special for the last class on Wednesday.

GRAD STUDENT #3
How about no shirt at all?

WAYSOFSEEING
That wouldn't be special, that would be terrifying.

GRAD STUDENT #2
You could always get a new tattoo or something.

PROFESSOR
Okay! Moving right along....

There were always a few of us in the tech industry who sought out jobs that were about something more than just building the Next Cool Widget. Technology at its best is about opening doors, allowing people to solve a problem or do something new and unique.

Heather believed that too. She was my predecessor as Office's resident guru on accessibility for people with disabilities, a woman with an easy laugh and a streak of patience wider than Microsoft's whole campus. I owe her a lot for showing me the ropes of being a Microsoft program manager, a job that in the early days I thought might literally kill me.

She moved back east to the Carolinas with her husband a couple years ago, so I don't see her very much any more. But she was in town for meetings this week, with the glow of a five-month pregnancy and a huge smile. I joined a big party of her friends for dinner with her tonight.

Except for Heather, I didn't know anyone else in the party. Almost all of them were Microsoft people. And for the first time in nine months, I found myself back in a tech industry conversation.

Work talk was tacitly off limits, but it didn't matter. You can always predict the subject matter at those parties.

There was the woman who'd brought along her sixteen-year-old daughter, charming and sophisticated and worldly beyond her years. We compared notes on hotels in Montreal and Ireland ("I really like the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal," the daughter told me) and laughed over stories of trying to squeeze into tiny European hotel rooms.

There were the three Microsoft people from the east coast who were fascinated by Seattle's food culture. "It's all because you can get so much fresh fish and produce here," said one. "How cold is the water in Puget Sound, anyway?" Wine always comes up too. "I lived in Germany for a couple years, and just learned to love riesling! I'd never tried it before I was there."

There was the obligatory teasing of the woman from Nintendo. "Hey, can you get some games for us to test?"

And then there was me, the doctoral student. "Hey, you must be a genius," said one woman, "you figure out the bill." Lots of teasing and shaking of heads. What do you do with a guy dumb enough to give up a good tech job to go back to school one more time?

You can never go home again. Even if your home was work.

Very rarely, I've run into someone famous, rich, or important enough to have a bodyguard. The guards seem to fall into three types:

There's the bouncer, also known as the side of beef. Consider James Hetfield's bodyguard Gio, seen briefly in the Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster. Gio is all solid muscle, no neck, and a fierce expression. He's about as subtle as an axe to the head. He'd be great in a crowd or a bar, but probably not much help against anything more devious than a drunken fan.

Then there's the agent. Dark suitjacket not really concealing the gun, sunglasses, an earpiece. If the Secret Service guys choose those outfits for intimidation purposes, it works. Even the cops get the hell out of their way. Then again, the agents don't blend very well.

Last, and rarest, is the Polite Guy.

He dresses normally. He's not built like a brick. He doesn't have any obvious hardware. If he's wearing a gun, he carries it well concealed. He stays around the person he's protecting, but not too close.

The Polite Guy is very hard to spot from a distance. Look around the famous person's entourage. Watch for the bland one, the one who doesn't say much and whose eyes never stop moving. That's the Polite Guy.

If you get up close enough, the Polite Guy's chi radiates from them like a blast furnace. But if you're that close, you've probably got other problems.

I've seen Polite Ladies, too.

One day a couple years ago I was walking around an unfamiliar Microsoft office building, trying to find a co-worker's office. I'd been walking in circles with a puzzled look for less than a minute when a Polite Guy walked up behind me, silently sized me up, and then spoke, making me jump. "Who are you looking for, sir?" he asked.

I looked him over. The Polite Guy was calm, centered, bland, a bored yuppie -- unless you looked in his eyes. He was about as safe as a rattlesnake lying in the sun.

I explained that I was lost, and needed to find so-and-so's office.

"Oh, that's just down this hall. I'll be glad to show you." The Polite Guy was too well trained to take my arm, quite, but he stayed in easy reach all the way down the hall. He only relaxed once I was introduced to the co-worker I was looking for. My co-worker treated the Polite Guy like a piece of furniture, but he spared the Polite Guy a nod: yes, I know this guy. It's OK. "Have a good day, sir," said the Polite Guy, closing the door behind him.

If you walk aimlessly too close to Bill Gates' office, you too will likely meet a Polite Guy.

solarbird has been in Harborview for awhile, as many of you know. Her family is keeping a 24/7 watch on her while she sleeps.

Last week I had few obligations, so getting over to Harborview to bring food and an occasional listening ear to annathepiper and spazzkat, and leave some snacks for risu, was easy.

This week, I've got eight thousand things to do around the house, my sister is coming to town for most of the week, and I'm going to have to cook about twice as many meals. I'm just out of time, and it sucks. I don't pretend to be in any way needed to help solarbird heal, but I worry about her and about those who love her most.

So if you know the Murkworks crowd, consider leaving a message with annathepiper or spazzkat to see if they need a visit, or a short walk, or food. And keep thinking good thoughts toward solarbird.

ETA: solarbird is apparently being taken off the ventilator this afternoon, which means the doctors can let her wake up. Halleluja.

Just outside Harborview Medical Center, Seattle's nationally known trauma hospital, there's an old man sitting in a wheelchair.

He's clearly a patient. His head is held in a metal brace. His pasty white skin hangs almost as loosely off of him as his hospital gown. His eyes are weary and full of pain.

Every day he sits out in the sun, a cigarette in one hand, watching the world go by. But if you watch him for awhile, you'll notice that he rarely if ever brings the cigarette to his mouth. He just holds it in one hand, absently.

One day this week it occurred to me that the old man is more canny than he looks.

Harborview is one of the best hospitals in the world, but like most hospitals, they're not fond of letting their patients outside. There are people who have spent weeks or months looking at the fluorescent lights of their wards.

However, if you're a smoker, and you're physically and mentally capable of insisting on the privilege, they have to let you outside to smoke. There's no smoking anywhere in the hospital itself, for obvious reasons.

The old man's cigarette is a prop. What he really wants is to be outside, in the sun, breathing fresh air, even if only for a few minutes. The cigarette is his excuse.

I like him already.

(Why am I hanging out at Harborview so much? A friend is in their neurology intensive care unit after a nasty bike accident. All healing thoughts or prayers appreciated.)

If you're sensitive to stories about depressed people, you should give this one a miss. Dena, I'm talking to you.

( On Wisconsin, courtesy of Bill Janz. Not for the easily triggered. )