March 1, 2010
Uncategorized
1 Comment
One of the popular things that writers discuss when they decide to Decry The Modern World is how the Internet has made us more isolated and how we don’t have Real Friends.
Really?
How many of you reading this have made a friend on the internet, then travelled more than 500 miles to visit that person? That’s not real?
Then my family growing up wasn’t a real family! We traveled to Minnesota from Virginia for my brother to be a ring bearer in a 1st cousin once removed’s wedding. We went to Georgia to see a great aunt. We regularly traveled an hour or two to see (and often help out) cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and so on.
How does this count, yet when I do the same thing to visit friends I’ve met through a computer, there is this idea that these friendships aren’t real friendships? And don’t get me started on the “blood is thicker than water” canard. I am lucky enough that I have blood relations that are indeed close and mutually supportive, but I have blood relations that aren’t, too. It’s about the same range as friendships I’ve made. It’s more to do with the people involved than the accidents of birth.
What? Face to face time?
I was comparing how often I saw people in person before I was connected to the Internet to now. You know what? I interact face to face in a non-business environment about as often as I did. In fact, I tend to see people socially a bit more now.
Why?
The Internet. It offers better opportunity for me to meet people that I actually have something in common with! Sure, I’m cool with helping shovel Mrs. Next Door’s driveway, or driving Senora Across the Street to the grocery store. But I’m unlikely to be talking politics, science or philosophy with ‘em[1]. So in my case, I have considerably more friends, both in simple quantity and in satisfaction levels, from being able to communicate across distance.
I think people that say the Internet makes them socially isolated might be unskilled in their appropriate use of technology. We hear about people texting all through face to face social gatherings. Now, I spent the weekend with some friends of mine who are even geekier than I am. When we went out to dinner, we talked. Phones stayed in purses, and there was no texting going on. We… talked. Just like people did before the Internet.
[1] In Sra. Across the Street’s case, that’s mostly a language issue. Neither her English nor my Spanish is up to that.
January 21, 2010
Uncategorized
No Comments
One of my favorite working tools is actually an iPod. No, it’s not that I like to listen to music or an audiobook while I’m doing something (thought I do), but that it has a sleep timer. It has intervals from fifteen to one hundred twenty minutes, though I only use the fifteen minute option.
I love that thing. I love it because I’m a busy woman. I have a lot going on – I’m self-employed, have a part-time job, have a household with people going in and out, and a schedule that’s always changing.
There are times when I look at a task and I feel overwhelmed with it. At those times, it’s really hard to get myself going. I am a champion procrastinator. Remember that self-employed bit? I can only procrastinate so much before I’m procrastinating my son out of food[1].
That’s when the timer comes in. You’d be amazed at how much you can get done in fifteen minutes of focus. Now while I got the idea from Flylady[2], I don’t only use it for housework. I use the idea to work. When I’m feeling daunted, I just set my timer for fifteen minutes and work. That sounds goofy, trivial and dumb, but there’s many a project I’ve gotten done fifteen minutes at a time. The time sounds like such a small amount, I know. That’s the beauty of it. You can force yourself to do almost anything for fifteen mintues. If you do that a few times a day, you’re actually accomplishing a great deal. Things often don’t take as much time as we think they will when we focu—
Ah, music stopped. Break’s over and I have to get back to work. For those of you writers who go for word count, I’d written 320 words before the music went off. Now imagine four or five sessions of fifteen minutes while writing. That’s an adequate word count for a day’s work, innit?
[1] And I have a teenaged boy with a teenaged appetite. Oy!
[2] To be honest, except for cooking dinner, no one task ever takes a whole fifteen minutes.
January 10, 2010
Uncategorized
1 Comment
If you’ve ever played any of the Sims games, you know that the characters “speak” in a series of sounds including pitch, cadence and vocal tone to indicate emotion.
muscle_boy just asked me if I speak Simlish[1]. I thought about it and commented I didn’t think Simlish was really a language as we generally define it. While it does convey a rather interesting nuance of emotion, there are neither nouns nor verbs, so one cannot describe objects nor one’s relationship to them in Simlish.
Language wonks? I’m curious about your opinion of this. Can a language be a language if it only conveys emotional state, but cannot describe the physical world?
[1] He knows I pick up languages pretty easily, even invented languages from movies. Yes, I understand Huttese, Elvish and Klingon. By the Return of the King, I did not have to read the subtitles to understand the Elvish.
January 4, 2010
Uncategorized
No Comments
In Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, one character scolds a young woman for bowing clumsily and then blowing on her tea to cool it rather than to wait for it to cool before drinking it. The scolding involved a caution that a geisha had to be conscious at all times of the image she presented.
We live in a far more transparent age than Kyoto of the 1930s and if we are going to have an Internet presence, we need to be conscious of what we put out there.
If you have a presence on the web, especially if it’s linked to a legal name <cough>Facebook</cough> you might want to consider what you put out there. Can employers see it? Can colleagues? Can employees, clients or potential clients? Are you a teacher? If so, are you careful that you only put publicly online Facebook things you’d want your students to see?
I’m not saying that you have to be totally stiffnecked, or that you shouldn’t have any personality to what you’ve got online. My own online image is quirky as hell. It’s also quirky on purpose, as that’s what differentiates my work from others and makes my classes and talking interesting. So for me, being kind of weird is actually a business asset. If you think I’m don’t consider carefully what sort of weirdness I make public, you’re fooling yourself.
That’s really the point in the long run. Have a clear idea about what sort of public image you want to have, then be very careful that anything you let appear online sticks to that.
January 2, 2010
Uncategorized
1 Comment
Ah yes, what an adorable Facebook group.
I’ve almost no sympathy for this one. We often get all high and mighty about people learning another language for our convenience. Coming out of an American’s mouth, it’s appalling. Chances are good anyone joining the aforesaid group is fluent in exactly one language –English. Chances are equally as good that they’ve not traveled enough to know what it’s like to try to get by in a day to day situation in one’s non-native language.
Unless and until you’ve followed complex instructions in a language that is not your native language, you don’t get to have an opinion on this.
I’m saying this as someone who does speak more than one language by the way. My French is good enough to do minor tech support[1], I can follow a Karate class taught in an Okinawan dialect[2] and can understand Spanish well enough to follow a movie without reading subtitles.
Those are easy languages/situations, I have a talent for languages and it’s still rough. My bank account, credit rating or legal future are not involved in a fine understanding of any of those languages. To expect someone to “just pick up” English well enough to handle this is absurd and self-righteous. Especially out of people I expect don’t have any talent for languages themselves.
Show a little imagination and empathy people!
[1] try it sometime on four years of high school French learned at a time before most computer terminology was even
invented
[2] Ya, body language and visual cues to help!
January 1, 2010
Uncategorized
No Comments
I’ve trained myself to hyperfocus for a few minutes when necessary, but because I don’t like to do it for long periods of time, I tend to do it in fifteen minute chunks. I’ll put my sleep timer on my iPod to play music[1] for fifteen minutes then just dive into whatever I need to do until the music turns off.
I made a bit of mistake in my playlist today. I had the theme from Jurassic Park in the playlist. That did not help my concentration, as it sent me into a reverie.
The first career I ever considered was paleontologist. I was that annoying kid who would correct the museum guard or guide about them. There’ve been millions of us over the years. To this day, I could not tell you why I loved dinosaurs so. I’ve known of few children who were that into the monster aspect of paleontology. Most of us who loved them did so from a very scientific standpoint. Maybe that was it. Kids love logical puzzles and paleontology is all about learning to construct logical theories. It was many of our introduction into many sciences[2] – from geology to biology to forensics… You could branch off into so much.
For those who are misguided enough to think that emotions and intellect are polar opposites, I’m sure the sight of someone sitting in a dark movie theater watching Jurassic Park for the first time with tears running down her face at THAT SCENE[3] with the brachiosaurs would be a bit of a shock.
To this day, I cannot hear that theme without recalling the power of seeing the dinosaurs living and moving for the first time. So it’s a bad one to play when I’m trying to concentrate on something else.
[1] Usually classical, but almost invariably instrumental.
[2] Though not mine. I was introduced to computer science before I could read.
[3] Anyone who has had the experience knows the scene.
December 31, 2009
Uncategorized
No Comments
Okay, I’ve got one for you.
Why in hell do people flip out at a rumor that Facebook is going to start charging for its services?
A) Aint’a gonna happen, my little chickadees. Facebook’s business model is based on you donating time to market research playing Farmville, favoriting products for free advertising, and writing book reviews, ‘kay? This is an order of magnitude cheaper than advertising on a sitcom and the audience is much more specifically targeted. As far as revenue? I assure you they get more money off of advertising than they could out of charging you.
B) Even if that weren’t so, why does a company owe you an expensive service that’s a pain in the butt to maintain?
Do I mostly go for the free services? Yep. I use Pandora, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yahoo, Gmail, Google Docs and Wikipedia. Shoot, several of the former I even use professionally! But there are services I pay for. My Livejournal account is a paid account, because I like the lack of advertising. My blogs are hosted on a server I pay for, ditto.
Are there a lot of free services offered on the Internet? Yeah, and a lot of them are pretty cool. I think it’s a neat development that we can do so much for little money. If a service isn’t worth me paying for, I don’t. I have a free Pandora account because I don’t find the ads that annoying, and I never have it playing for more than 40 hours in a month.
But it seems kind of silly to me for people to think that sysadmins and programmers are supposed to work for free or something so people can post about what they had for breakfast, ya know?
December 13, 2009
Uncategorized
No Comments
A favorite passage of mine from Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather:
‘All right,’ said Susan. ‘I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.’
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
‘Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—’
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
‘So we can believe the big ones?’
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
‘They’re not the same at all!’
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET— Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME… SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
‘Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—’
MY POINT EXACTLY.
She tried to assemble her thoughts.
THERE IS A PLACE WHERE TWO GALAXIES HAVE BEEN COLLIDING FOR A MILLION YEARS, said Death, apropos of nothing. DON’T TRY TO TELL ME THAT’S RIGHT.
‘Yes, but people don’t think about that,’ said Susan. Somewhere there was a bed…
CORRECT. STARS EXPLODE, WORLDS COLLIDE, THERE’S HARDLY ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE WHERE HUMANS CAN LIVE WITHOUT BEING FROZEN OR FRIED, AND YET YOU BELIEVE THAT A… A BED IS A NORMAL THING. IT IS THE MOST AMAZING TALENT.
‘Talent?’
OH, YES. A VERY SPECIAL KIND OF STUPIDITY. YOU THINK THE WHOLE UNIVERSE IS INSIDE YOUR HEADS.
‘You make us sound mad,’ said Susan. A nice warm bed…
NO. YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?
December 5, 2009
Uncategorized
No Comments
Tastes and smells can be highly evocative of memory. I think science has pretty much proven that these senses are hardwired into your memory.
I had an experience of this today.
Snow used to be special to me. I grew up in Virginia, where it didn’t snow often and when it did, it meant a holiday from school, sledding, an icy butt because few people owned water-resistant snow pants, and…
Toll House Cookies
A snow day meant Toll House Cookies. Looking back, I realize it was a way for mom to keep us occupied when we were sick with excitement from the snow, and chilled to the bone from being too wet and not wanting to come in from the cold1. She would get us to go down into the basement and strip out of sopping wet cold snow things, hang them in front of the wood stove to dry and we’d change into warm dry clothes. Being quick and efficient about this meant a reward of a spoonful of raw cookie dough.
I took a taste of the cookie dough today as my son and I were making toll house cookies in celebration (for him) or consolation (for me)2 of the first snowfall of the year. When I’m tasting something and want to concentrate, I tend to close my eyes. As I did so today, I was right back in my mother’s kitchen, asking her if the spoonfuls of cookie dough were the right size to make good cookies, smelling the chocolate, sugar and vanilla, and anxiously staring into the window on the oven waiting for the melty cookies to solidfy and be ready to eat all warm and gooey. I remember being glad that Mom’s mixer had two beaters, as my brother and I were allowed to lick the beater when the cookie dough was all mixed up. My Kitchen Aid only has one, so if one child gets to lick the beater, the other is allowed to scrape the bowl.
Toll House cookies were such a favorite in the household that Mom always baked a batch with the other Christmas cookies, so that’s another good memory I tend to have associated with them. In fact, I don’t think I have a bad memory associated with making them. They’ll always mean wintertime coziness with loved ones to me.
1Northerners, don’t laugh. Those snow pants we buy every year for our kids are simply not an appropriate use of money when they’ll be used at most twice before the child is too big to wear them. It’s a considerably different proposition when the kid is walking a mile to school in the snow every day for four months out of the year.
2Snow used to be magical to me, even when I first moved up here. Almost nine years on and the magic has worn off a bit. Now it just means shoveling driveways and dangerous driving to me. I should take up skiing or something to return to a more positive view.
November 27, 2009
Uncategorized
No Comments
My grandmother had four children in four years. My mother is the oldest, then came my uncle Gary, then my aunt Susan, and last my aunt Inkie.
I give this background to help give an idea of the person that Susan was. The family was a bit compressed — not only in age, but in physical space. It turned my aunt Susan into a toughie. In fact, Lil Toughie was how most people referred to her off and on for most of her life. I can’t think of many people that were more appropriately named. The name Susan has become almost iconic for a tough and practical woman. Her middle name, Parrish, was her mother’s maiden name. This set the stamp, I think, on her for a devotion to family.
My aunt Susan had pretty features and all, but that wasn’t the point. She was an amazingly beautiful woman from force of personality — from the way her soul glowed, if you will. It was something neither age nor illness could touch. One of my cousins commented, “Isn’t she beautiful?” the day before she died. What with how wasted her body was, that might sound like a crazy comment. At first, I thought it was. But Sam was right. Susan was beautiful right to the end. Her beauty was never about the perfections possible in youth, even when she had them, but the beauty that comes from being yourself just as hard as you can. She was that right to the end.
Susan was an artist. While she dabbled in various mediums, probably one of her favorite was to make art from the gifts the Rivah gave her. Shells, tops from crab pots and driftwood found themselves in her hands to be turned into painting. The paintings usually incorporated the textural elements and shape of whatever she found. She turned empty crab shells into Santas (like all my family, she loved Christmas), painted beach scenes on crab pot tops, and took her inspiration from the wind and salt and water.
She loved her family. She was deeply in love and passionately devoted to her husband. Her children were the world to her, and I can remember clearly the joy and pride she took in each one when they were born. She loved more than anything to gather her family in close to her. Over the course of her life, she invited people to the family cottages by the river, hosted an enormous Thanksgiving gathering her entire adult life (a tradition her oldest son has started to carry on), had family parties to celebrate her grandmother’s birthday. For Susan, it was all about the family.
For many years she had a business as a daycare providor out of her home. Children she kept still remember the care she gave them and the lessons she taught. When the kids would get to be a bit too much – too rowdy or misbehaving, she’d always send then out into the yard to pick up stick in their tree-laden lot in preparation for cutting the grass. Years later, one of the children she kept came back and told her he does the same thing with his children when they’re getting rowdy and need to burn off some energy. It’s a great lesson on several levels. When your energy and natural exuberence gets too much and you’re not behaving as well as you could, go do something useful!
Susan was greatly loved and will be deeply missed. She made her corner of the world a better place by her life, and there’s not much better you can say than that.
« Previous Entries
