Log of Damocles

I took the weed trimmer to the grass on the creek side of the house this afternoon. The grass had grown unchecked since, well, last fall. When we moved to the woods, I was really happy and thought, “Yeah, this is great! I’m never gonna mow the lawn again!” Except that knocking the grass down does make for a nicer view. Also, it helps keep down the bur chervil. Given how long it took for me to get around to it, the grass was tough and it took a lot of whacking and I had a lot of time to think about stuff. I started wondering about why I so rarely get around to cutting the weeds down, or pulling blackberries, or prune the trees or…the list goes on. So then I figured, well, it’s because I’m doing other things. Sure, obviously, I’m always doing something and only one something at a time. So then I thought about logging it.

What about some kind of social network enabled device, like a BodyMedia Fit or something, that you logged what you were doing and had the list of all the other things you want to do or could be doing, and it would tweet for you, “I chose to spend the past hour doing laundry and washing dishes instead of reloading Facebook.” And you know, that mostly exists already. Consultants already use software tools to track which jobs they’re working on and when. The big deal really comes in setting up all the job codes and recording your context switches. Do I want to track “brushing my teeth” separately from “showering” or is “personal care” granular enough? And I’d need to have the darned log on my person all the time so I could switch.

And this reminded me of software development. One always sticks logging messages in code, just to prove that a given subroutine executes from time to time, or to emit state information for later analysis. And people sometimes complain that the cost of logging is so high that it impacts performance. Sure, that’s possible, but I know from actual experience that it is possible to log very verbosely without having the program’s performance slow down — but the systems have to be in place. Carrying around a notebook and pencil and a watch all the time to record what I’m doing and for how long would certainly give me some valuable insight into how I’m spending my day. On the other hand, it would slow me down and it’d feel really onerous. I bet I’d spend a noticeable amount of time on the logging!

Our house is falling apart, it’s messy, and there are a zillion things we’d like to do but we can’t because we’re already over-committed. For the moment, I’m just going to trust that what we’re actually getting done is more important than the things that aren’t getting done. We live indoors. We have electricity and food and propane. Our cars work. We have clean clothes, clean dishes, and fresh food that we prepare ourselves. That’s what’s up with us.

Practice Makes Better

I’ve just spent the past hour and a half practicing on my Deger pipes. I’m tired but feel like I’ve just made significant progress on several pieces of light music. I’m also now completely in love with the crunluath a mach.

It Smells Branded in Here

Things go in cycles. I know this, and yet I’m always a little surprised when the entrepreneurial cycle comes around to me again. Yesterday, I was at a St. Patrick’s Day party as my genius wife’s plus one, and I wound up having several conversations with people who are working hard on their new projects. I love that people are building things, are working out new solutions to problems, and are excited about getting their solutions out into the world. I especially love that some of these people are in my area code. And then…

Then today I got an email introducing me to a local entrepreneur. The fellow making the introduction is familiar with me via TechRaising, and he remembered that I have experience with high performance and highly scalable middle-tier and back-end systems, but he didn’t go beyond that in making the introduction. I thought I’d point the other fellow at my LinkedIn profile to let him see more of my resume before taking the conversation further, but when I went over there to get the link I got distracted by this post. Suddenly, I felt catapulted back in time to the early 90s.

Branding an entire generation is a pointless exercise. Or rather, it’s pointless unless you’re selling something. I’m feeling very Lloyd Dobler about the whole buying, selling, and processing exercise.

When I go shopping at Safeway, I often hear pop hits from the late 70s and the 80s on the in-store sound system. “Heart of Glass,” “London Calling,” I mean, is there nothing from my teen years a retailer won’t use to convince me that I should stay in the store and spend a little more money there?

The last thing I want is to be lumped into a demographic package and sold to whoever’s buying. I know, it’s kind of too late and it’s already happened (see above) but that’s just the same realization that every generation has made. Still, what kind of crazy person wants to be boxed up and sold like that? Resist!

 

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My brilliant and lovely wife offered this insight while reading my rant, and I think it’s important to share:

But this started with the Baby Boomers. That’s why all the music we hear at Christmas is the Christmas music from when they were little. The first big wave of nostalgia TV was in the 70s, when we were all idolizing the fifties, and that’s when they figured out they could repackage everyone’s past and sell it back to them and make a mint. But you know what? Fuck that. Fonzie has moved on.

What Globalization Means to Me

In 1995 I decided to stop eating animals. As I was living in San Francisco it really wasn’t hard to find good food made by someone else and which didn’t contain meat. Traveling inland even a couple of hours, though, was traveling to a world where “vegetarian” meant, “eats alfalfa sprouts and avocado and, um, cheese.”

In 1996 I stopped eating dairy and eggs. This necessarily meant that traveling to anyplace without large populations of hippies or Buddhists meant I needed to be prepared to make all my own meals. The American South is particularly fond of gratuitous meat, for example, but even Fresno was a trial.

Today, I’m eating lunch at the food court at a mall in Boston. I’m eating a burrito with grilled vegetables and no dairy, without alfalfa sprouts and without gratuitous meat broth. Globalization has plenty of critics but today I ate lunch in a town distant from my home and I didn’t have to make it in my hotel room.

It’s in the Air

Junglemonkey and I are in Boston for a few days. She’s here for the AWP conference, and I’m here as her plus one. I love that she wanted me along. I would absolutely have missed her if I’d been at home all week while she attended the conference, never mind that she’s going to be busy nearly all the time and I’ve got lots of practicing to do since I’ve got several competitions coming up. What this really means is that I’ve already spent several hours walking around Boston on my own. As I walk through crowds, I wind up overhearing snatches of a zillion different conversations. It’s always interesting to me what the gists of conversations in a locale are. For instance, in Santa Cruz the conversations I overhear tend to be local politics or technological, tending to be design or marketing. (There are a lot of folks working in Internet-related jobs in Santa Cruz.) In San Francisco, there’s a lot of tech, mostly web development, and of course people are talking about their plans for what they’re going to be doing later on — which clubs or concerts or whatever. Here in Boston, it’s been financial snippets — lots of people talking about investments and business plans with time horizons in days or months — and men talking about women.

But here’s the weird thing, the thing that makes me write this. The conversations about women are all weird and kind of objectifying. Example: the guys behind me in line at Starbuck’s this morning. They sounded like stereotypical frat boys; very materialistic (luxury goods purchased or used, padding corporate expense accounts, partying) and objectifying women in a way I haven’t really encountered personally in many many years. The way these guys were talking about a particular woman — her breasts, her suitability as a status symbol — I was really surprised. I had to tell Junglemonkey about it just because I needed to talk about it to figure out if they were really as obnoxious as I thought. But then I walked around for a couple of hours and heard other snippets of other conversations and these guys were not different. Holy cow!

You know, I’m sort of accustomed to keeping my trap shut as women I know talk about male privilege, patriarchy, and sexism. Let’s face it: there’s not a hell of a lot that I can bring to that conversation. Even so, that doesn’t mean that I’m not paying attention. Guys in Boston seem, upon cursory inspection, to be far less considerate (because I have a hard time thinking that women in Boston are any less bitter about it). Dudes, step up your game and stop being dicks.

Postscript

So, here’s a joke I know about feminism:

Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: That’s not funny!

If you think that joke is really not funny and you’re mad about it, then that joke is about you. If you think that joke is not funny because feminism is about freedom and the joke presumes the teller and the listener have a perspective on feminism that doesn’t include that notion, then a) that joke is not about you and b) you can probably (95.2% likely) provide one or more personal acquaintances whom that joke is about. If you think that joke is funny then you’re a) a man and b) you live in Boston.

The Early Wish

I forget which science fiction writer talked about time travel stories as an expression of that regretful wish of a child who’s done something wrong: “Make it didn’t happen!” Maybe Larry Niven, maybe Frederick Pohl, I read a lot of SF and can’t keep it straight any more. Anyway, I’m currently reading The Demon Under the Microscope and over and over I’m wishing for a time machine. Sometimes we fantasize about going back in time to get rich from some insider knowledge of the future (as, for example, in Replay) but this time I want to go back in time and tell the chemists at Massengill, “Holy cow, don’t use antifreeze in medicine that’s to be taken internally! You’ll kill people!”

Oh yeah, and I just finished reading The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler, a book whose subtitle reads like an SRL performance (e.g. “A Calculated Forecast of Ultimate Doom: Sickening Episodes of Widespread Devastation Accompanied by Sensations of Pleasurable Excitement”). That book, while also fascinating, has reset my context for the Nazis. I was thinking about that this morning when I read this story about the pope, comparing his resignation to Nixon’s. I mean, are these people serious? Nixon broke the law and tried to subvert the political process and then tried to cover it all up. The pope, as CEO of the Catholic Church, has certainly tried to keep the lid on scandals, but did he direct all the pedophile priests to go forth and molest? His Holiness doesn’t have a G. Gordon Liddy to do time for him. Will young Catholics be urging him to resume his role in fifteen years, wearing T-shirts emblazoned, “Benedict for Pope: He’s tan, rested, and ready!” I doubt it. He’s not like Nixon. And: the idiot you’re arguing with on the Internet? He’s not like Hitler, either.

Make Room for Love

I got an email from the Sundance Institute suggesting six films for Valentine’s Day. This is the marketing blurb from the email:

What better way to perpetuate the quixotic romantic desires that reside in our partners’ minds than by watching films that validate those delusions of love? This Valentine’s Day, we’re offering a short list of Sundance-supported love stories as a remedial to such lofty figments—unfortunately, the reality is not quite as attractive. From an idyllic summer love that concludes with an acerbic breakup in 500 Days of Summer to a lingering, albeit passionate romance that traverses drug abuse and other pitfalls in Keep the Lights On, these six stories of (not always mutual) affection will jolt even the most deluded lover from their reveries…

You know what? I think this is terrible. I reject, with blasphemous obscenity, this assertion that love is something to be destroyed. I get that there are single people out there who are unhappy that they are single and bitter about messages of love. I get that there are people who resent marketing messages telling them how to celebrate love (frankly, I’m one of them). I get that there are sad, angry, bitter people in the world, people who see romance and professions of love as things to mock, to deny, to tear down. I am telling you, though, that that is not the way to feel better. Anger, resentment, bitterness, and cynicism are not desirable states of being. They are instances of suffering. Don’t cling to suffering, relieve it. It’s one thing to feel hurt and betrayed and angry and sad because your life is not going the way you’d hoped; it’s another thing entirely to reach out to other people and suggest to them that they, too, ought to feel cynical and hurt and alone.

I want to reach out to people and say that hurt and anger and cynicism aren’t final states. You can move away from them. It’s okay to celebrate love. Love doesn’t make me want to belittle people, it makes me want to embrace people. Love is good. Stories about love are good stories.