i get in these moods sometimes where i start thinking about responsibility, and the differences between what we do every day to keep the wheels turning and what we really need to do in order to be good people. i think, for the most part, that a lot of what we think we need to do is a farce, but we do it anyway because it makes us feel on top of things. i think there are a lot of good reasons for this approach, and indeed that one of the inspiring features of the human condition is that we do some rather amazing stuff just because we can.

we also, however, get hung up on a lot of crap and wade through life with a heavy burden of insecurity. we worry about
and i think these worries often get in the way of our ability to answer questions about

sometimes i have a day where i’m just like “you know what? no. i’m just going to sit here and drink a cup of tea. and

it’s a huge luxury to be able to have days like this and not lose my job, run out of food,
but i think that luxury is actually a part of what leads to the reaction. unfair as it may be, i do not live in a world where i can kid myself into thinking that
and that, i think, implies a new sort of responsibility
if i don’t believe that i have to fit into the slots that culture has carved out for me

over the weekend i took some much needed time to start figuring out how to wrap my mind around the question of what next, and in order to do so i sat down with a piece of paper and started making lists. what are my priorities right now? what regular expenses do i know that i have for at least the near future? what potential sources of income do i have that satisfy the latter while still furthering the former? what steps do i need to take to make those sources viable?

this was a very good exercise. i ended up with a couple interesting ideas and have some tangible things to work on, so i’ll talk more about how those things unfold as they move along. right now, though, i want to take a minute to talk about making lists, because it really is one of the most powerful activities i know, and for some reason i realize this a few times a year and yet still never discipline myself to just sit down and do it with any consistency or regularity.

i know it’s obvious but lately i’ve been really struck by the idea that all these things i know would make my life better but still don’t do? like exercising more or eating better or not letting the dishes pile up or drinking more water? it’s not laziness that keeps me from biting the bullet. it’s guilt. for some reason i think that, if i was really built for such endeavors, i would be doing them already. and maybe one day i will just wake up and figure out what’s holding me up and never look back. like it’s a matter of triggering some secret internal switch, rather than admitting that the only switch to flip is the one that makes me devote energy to looking for switches when the lights are already on.

anyway, when it comes to listmaking, a big hurdle for me is that i have grandiose visions. you see, i happen to believe that computers are enabling an evolutionary shift in our ability to classify and manipulate information. i believe that we are on the cusp of being able to think Better, and figuring out what that means and how i can help it along is the reason i meddle in these things we call HCI and design. i know in my gut that listmaking is a part of the picture, and so i find it very difficult to sit down in front of a piece of paper or a computer screen without coming up with a host of ideas that get me really excited but which i have neither the time nor the ability to implement before dinner, which frustrates the meddlesome intermediary step of writing down what i need at the grocery store.

this is incredibly lame, since i will never get to the point where i can build the tools i want until i get over myself and manage my ideas with the tools i have, so i just need to shut up and knuckle down, which is what i told myself this weekend. then the topic came up yesterday as well, when i sat down with the lists i had made and tried to decide where to take them next, and it was in the midst of this thinking, while on a blogroll break, that i tripped over something i have encountered in the past but never given much thought, and that is the world of text-only to-do management.

the to-do market in web 2.0 land is pretty intense. the good folks over at 37 signals offer tadalist, which suffers a bit because in some ways it’s just an attempt to get you to spring for their not-free content management apps, and it kinda shows. more excitingly, there are remember the milk and gubb, both of which have their devotees and each of which has different strengths and weaknesses. and some folks just hack their way through the to-do jungle using various elements of the googlesphere.

but nobody gets it Just Right for goldilocks, so she keeps trying out new chairs…

meanwhile, back in web 1.9, some geeks staunchly defend the practice of keeping their to-do list in a .txt file, and pundits scratch their heads, because how can you have gradients and rounded corners with a freakin’ .txt file?! avert thine eyes!

said pundits sometimes cough uncomfortably, however, when it is mentioned that one person who is not above this approach is marissa mayer, director of consumer products at google, which always makes its way into interviews somewhere. apparently she has sections for each person she deals with and, i don’t know, different projects and stuff, and she sits down every day and figures out what to do based on some sort of magical system that is never really discussed directly. kind of like pagerank! :)

this factoid has always made me go “huh…” without really inspiring me to jump on board. i mean, i can See the advantages of a digital dumping ground to a paper one because i could theoRetically cut and paste and not have to rip out scribble-filled pages, but… that is a world where theory and practice will never meet, folks. it and the world where i could theoRetically go on a 5-mile run before breakfast every day can meet up for martinis and trade wisecracks, and i’ll just keep living here in the land of things i actually care to focus energy upon.

anyway, what i realized today (with more “duh” than “huh”) is that i have been a bit dense. my inner computer geek has been making up for a lot of lost time over the past few years, and i predict that it has still not reached its mature state, but i still sometimes fall prey to the fallacy of forgetting that my power to sic the computer on a given chunk of information is independent from the existence of buttons and dropdown menus. and in this case that means that i forgot just how much one can do with text if one is not afeared of the command line…

so yeah, geek alert #FFFF00 (yellow), k?

gina trapani at lifehacker, who spearheads a little community called todo.txt, builds her system around a plain ‘ol .txt file full of lines like this:

p:blog @home @computer @offline write about list management

where p:____ denotes a project and the “@____”s denote the contexts in which the task might come up, an approach that is in line with the rhetoric of productivity guru david allen, who founded and leads the cult of GTD (Getting Things Done).

GTDisms aside for the moment, you can see the basic idea of a list with tasks and categories, and with a bit of grit this list can be updated directly from the command line like this:

echo '@store @grocery @cooking lemons' >> todo.txt

and knowledge can be intelligently extracted from said list like this:

grep @grocery todo.txt

which spits back the whole line “@store @grocery @cooking lemons”, along with any other lines that have @grocery in them. a bit wonky, but i am nevertheless empowered to fight scurvy with deliciousness, so i might best think twice before turning up my nose at such an offering.

and presto!
you slice it, you dice it, you email it to yourself, you add categories on the fly, and that mess of a .txt file starts to feel “interactive” pretty quick.

there is actually a pre-written script package at todo.txt that makes it so you can just say stuff like:

add @store milk
or
list @store

and also archive and complete items without getting too wacky.

so that’s handy, and with a few basic scripting skills of your own, you are well on the way towards the sort of testing and tweaking that i haven’t been able to find the patience for when it comes to paper or learning to play nice with someone else’s API.

and all while giving the inner geek a little playtime and not relying on someone’s flashy website that might go down because cats are in ur serverz.

i expect that david, as my personal grep evangelist and “what you UI people always seem to forget is that building top-notch UI’s takes energy” foil, will be absolutely ecstatic over this post once he returns from his current mission to decrease international ignorance of the glory of bryce and zion, and to all this i say, work well done, /_\.
:)

but it’s all in the name of expending that energy more efficiently later.
or something…

i know this is all rather rambly, but i think what i’m saying is that i realized, in thinking about all of this, that it is important to grant that it is possible to overlook the experimental value of old skool hackery in the pursuit of the user experience. we design heads get in this place where, just because we wouldn’t be caught dead releasing something into the wild, we think there is nothing to learn from it. in our hurry to put things before the user early and often, we limit the scope of the questions we are able to ask, and in doing this we are in danger of distancing ourselves too much from the creative potential of a good raw geekout.

this is touchy, because i am not at all saying that we should back down from the cause of user-centered design, nor am i saying that all designers need to be computer geeks. i’m just saying that we should remember that the point is to expand the computing family tree, and we don’t do that by severing the roots, or by telling the people who want to climb up a mountain the hard way that they are silly for not taking the new paved trail.

every trail has a different view, after all, and sometimes we have goals other than just getting to the top as quickly as possible.

ok, too much metaphorical meandering.

i’ll read this later and see if it makes any damn sense, and in the meantime, i’ll take a crack at organizing my life from the command line, so that you don’t have to.
;)

i am a rather reflective person by nature, but lately i have been paying even more attention than usual to my behavior in group settings. i think this is because i have become increasingly aware of the level of anxiety that i am prone to carrying around, and i am interested in the ways that it impacts my interpersonal relationships, and in experimenting with ways to shift my behaviors for the better.

if you don’t want to hear me yammer and psychoanalze myself, spare yourself now.

go look at this amusing map of online communities instead.

those of you who remain may or may not know that something i have known about myself for a while is that i can lapse into a rather clingy mode if i’m not careful. it is most common when i am worried about making a good impression, which is annoying, since it tends to sabotage that particular goal rather handily.

which is, of course, it’s self-perpetuating psychological purpose.
isn’t being human fun?

anyway, i become clingy because i am not good at making decisions, which might not make sense at first, but trust me on this one. i developed a habit of deferring decisions in groups because i almost always prefer to follow the prevailing mood rather than risk bickering over little things that mean much less to me than interpersonal harmony, and when there is someone whose favor i am trying to curry this desire is heightened. i hover, trying to decide what the other person wants to do, allowing the conversation to dwell in the land of “oh, i don’t know… what sounds fun to you?” for an interminably long period, and it took a surprisingly long time for me to realize how god-friggin crazy annoying this is. turns out it’s usually considered a feature when our friends have opinions on things, and the most fun happens not when one person leads blindly but when everyone bounds forward with their eyes wide open, letting their quirky energies synthesize to form ideas that could never emerge from one mind alone.

it’s also a helluva lot easier to figure out if you play well with someone if they are willing to lay their cards on the table now and then. it’s a risky concept for our tender egos, but oh so simple if we look it in the face, and it still boggles my mind how hard it is for so many people (me among them but not me alone!) to grasp…

anyway, for the longest time i thought that i truly didn’t care about most decisions, be they group or solo, but at some point i realized that i am actually just very easily crippled by the desire to find The Right Answer and so it rarely seems worth it to bother much with decisions unless they are necessary and unavoidable. if, however, i let go of The Right Answer and instead focus on listening to what the information at my fingertips is best able to recommend at the moment, it turns out that i am actually very good at making decisions. i am a very observant person, and i think well on my feet, so if i trust my instincts and am honest with myself, i come up with a lot of neat things to do and say and think about.

as a special bonus my anxiety level also plummets, leaving me freer to truly consider the options and implications, and thus freer to change my mind, and thus more likely, in the end, to find a choice that makes me happy.

this is a concept that is revolutionizing my life.

to return to the point of my cling potential, though, it is interesting to watch my revolutionary self butt heads with the conservative habitmonger of vulnerability when i find myself in a group where there is someone to whose opinion i am particularly sensitive, for whatever reason. i feel myself bouncing crazily from one extreme to another. i throw out wild ideas. i use lulls in conversation to assess the mood and try to react. i shake my head at myself in the bathroom mirror and take deep breaths. i laugh and say to hell with it all and dive in and collapse and sit back and arch my eyebrows as the mood strikes me.

this process is both exhausting and invigorating, and it leaves me wondering what it’s like to meet me right now.

sometimes i feel like i shouldn’t seek out any long-term relationships for a while because so much is in flux, and there is so much that i am germinating in the window box of my independent self that i want to give things the chance to root a bit more deeply before exposing them to the more tumultuous ecosystem of the wider world.

sometimes, though, i feel like the opposite is true. like this is the best time ever to walk into my life and stay a while. like i have more to offer than ever before, and also more willingness to truly listen. i’m scoping out the land to start a garden, and i need help, and it’s going to be fun.

the truth, of course, is that i should keep my mind and eyes and heart open to whoever and whatever comes my way, and make decisions as they present themselves, and let go of worrying about clinging so that i can be relaxed enough to master a light strong loving touch.

and, all things considered, i actually think i am doing pretty well.

i know it’s always tempting to end discussions like this on an upward note, and i know that sometimes i feel less confident than i do at the moment, but it seems worth putting on the record that, by and large, one of the defining characteristics of this year in my life is that i feel like i’m experiencing a real shift in the level of my game. maybe it’s my saturn returning or maybe it’s just a coincidentally timed convergence of lots of things i have been working on as i crest the ridge of true adulthood.

whatever is to credit or blame, i feel myself making progress, but i also still laugh at myself a whole lot. i still fumble and giggle and squirm even as i become better and better at dancing and opening up and looking the people i meet squarely in the eye with a twinkle and a smile that says “i am ready to both teach and learn.” i still worry that i am missing something, even as every fiber of my experience teaches me that the only way to miss things is to spend your energy looking for what you expect instead of what’s actually there.

i breathe in anxiety and attachment.
i breathe out wonder and embrace.

i’ve been reading more i blame the patriarchy lately, largely because of erik, whose own blog is becoming one of the most heartfelt explorations of the responsible pursuit of gender equity that i know.
just in case he wasn’t already securely within the ranks of the coolest people in the world.
;)
*mwa!*

and yes, i recognize that i just introduced a post with a feminist theme by not only praising a man, but also by engaging in a cutesy display of girlish affection therein.

get over it.

i do not believe that the way to empower women is to exclude men from the conversation, nor to refrain from praising them when they step up, nor to shun all girlish impulses, and if convincing me otherwise is your goal, best stop now, for i am a lost cause to you.
please don’t shed too many tears for my soul.

whoa, this topic makes me snippy before i even start talking about it!
yikes!
:)

anyways, the last couple of days at ibtp have been intense.

stop reading now if you don’t want to be exposed to some rather radical feminism.

seriously. i won’t be offended, and i’ll be sure to send out a memo later if i change my mind.

…

ok, so some dude wrote in to ask whether he was raping his girlfriend because she didn’t ever initiate sex, and the ripping of the proverbial new one ensued in the comments.
summary of consensus: yes. and the fact that you wrote in to ask about it gives us the womanly willies.

which is an interestingly gendered term…
should i say the wilhelminas?

anyway, i haven’t decided yet what my short response to that discussion is, and i haven’t felt inclined to ramble through a long one publicly.

yesterday, though, there was a post that i took as a progression of the discussion, and it put forth the thesis that all heterosexual sex should be considered a criminal act by default, and therefore any time any woman felt inclined to bring charges against any man for sexual misconduct, the default conviction would be guilty.

if you are not glazing over and switching to lolcats already, you should read the post.

now, it should definitely be understood that the suggestion is not intended to be a stab at judicial fairness; it is more like an experiment in redistributive injustice, with the idea being that right now the cards are stacked so heavily against women because of the ease with which “she consented!” can be used to dismiss sexual assault charges, that it would do the patriarchy some good to have the tables turned for a while, with full vials of their own bitter, bitter medicine beside plates of their own scraps.

as you might expect, once again the comment floodgates were opened, and while i was thinking about what i might say this time, erik beat me to the punch.

this post started out as a comment on his post, actually, but then i decided to claim it as my own.

you know, given that it IS my own.

and i have been at a loss for substantive matter lately.

and it seems a bit funny to use my digital space as a platform for chip commentary while voicing my thoughts on feminism within the reactionary regions of a male slice of the blogosphere, albeit a male slice i deeply respect…

but i begin to digress too verily.

if you’re interested, read the original post, AND erik’s reaction, AND my reaction (it’s coming, i promise!), and contribute to the multitudinous pathways of discussion as ye will.

then we can be as an octopus that just keeps sprouting legs until it can’t move anymore and starves to death while tripping over itself and looking silly.
yay blogging.
:)

ok, so here’s what trips me up about twisty’s suggestion:

heterosexual intercourse?
not a crime.

if you’re going to disagree with me, i realize that it’s going to be there, right from square one.
i realize that the whole point is to consider the implications of the idea that this assumption is fundamentally flawed, and you don’t have to believe me when i say that i gave it some thought, but i did, and i will likely continue to do so, but right now i am documenting my intuitive reaction.
and i’m not buying it.
i’m not buying it enough that i think it’s worth sticking a stake in the ground and saying “nuh-uh. don’t Even go there. not even for fun.”

you see, i wholeheartedly believe that it is possible for an intelligent, aware woman to view the act of heterosexual intercourse as something other than the violation of the female body by the male body, and given that this is the case, criminalizing the act would not only perpetuate injustice against men, but against many, many women who choose to view sex as a joyous expression of intimate union.

and it is from that perspective that i am motivated to enter the conversation.
to figure out what respecting the feminist argument means to me.
so here we go.

but for right now, even if we can’t agree on the basic premise of criminality, let’s just take the fact that we all seem to agree that some level of injustice would remain a consequence of the new law.

countering injustice with more injustice?
bad form.

coopting the criminal justice system in order to make bold political statements intended to prompt reflection on the patriarchy?
there be dragons.

yes, the patriarchy results in many, many situations in which justice is doled out unequally based on what’s between our legs, and yes, it does us good to admit that, and i embrace creative means of jolting us out of our bubbles of privilege, be they gendered or otherwise.

and yes, it could be said that i am resorting to a cloud in the sky from where real action is impossible, and i should be challenged to provide alternative ways of bettering the situation.

but that’s a challenge i want to embrace.

i say we hold our standards higher.

i say we don’t fight back by oneupping the current rules of the game with smirks on our faces, but by figuring out new games entirely.

at the end of the day i want to put my energy towards the proliferation of happy, healthy human beings who are committed to a society of mutual love and respect, and i just don’t think the desire to feed people their own poison is a part of that picture.

the journey is the destination.
the means is the end.
the way is the way is the…

ahem

ok, lest i ascend too far into my pretensions, here’s a kickback to the old skool craig kilborn era moment of zen, because man, i would give jon stewart three camels a week and a giraffe on sunday, but sometimes i still misses me some o’ that slap me in the face zaniness, and that there be one of the best slaps i know.

that’s enough for today.

reading the syracuse post-standard on my porch in skaneateles with a cup of coffee, a muffin, and an unexpected morning off:

state trooper shootings shake up the community, suspect found dead “in the wreckage of a house destroyed by a towering fire after a police raided it [sic] Wednesday evening.” Cause of fire unknown. “I cannot tell you whether he was dead or alive when the fire started.” … an art student who makes mock meth labs and pipe bombs and then displays them on end tables or inside teddy bears to provoke thought on the everyday nature of their components runs into trouble with his university public safety division … Stephen Hawking gets a complimentary ride today on a commercial “zero-gravity” flight, expects weightlessness to be “bliss” … a drunk German man is found sleeping in the foyer of his bank at 4:15 am with his horse standing nearby – “Aside from an undesirable deposit made by the horse inside the building, the man – who has an account at the bank – had not breached any bank rules.” … a man in a Captain America costume was arrested for disorderly conduct after groping a woman during a costumed bar crawl – “Several patrons who had also dressed as Captain America were asked to step outside so the woman could identify the suspect.” … the veracity of the civilian death toll in Iraq, as reported by Iraqi officials, is questioned … the House passes an Oct. 1 pullout start date by 10 votes but a veto is expected if it passes the Senate … the Dow breaks records … the country grapples with the VT shootings … the death penalty is proposed in NY state for killing law enforcement officers … a one paragraph nod to a Harvard professor with a new book on terrorism that includes the advice: “Addressing the demands of terrorists should not always be dismissed as appeasement.” …

I stare at the lake and marvel at how we take so much comfort in our ability to scoff and tell people to grow up as we hurry past the headlines and flip to the sudoku.

I think we don’t want to admit that our lives are becoming a daily devotional to a series of gimmicks that we hope will keep the pane of glass between us and the enemy opaque enough that we can pretend we never even knew it was there.

We don’t want to think about what causes other people’s glass to break because we’re afraid that if we make eye contact it will sweep across the room, kiss us on both cheeks, and greet us by our first name while asking about the kids and the dog.

The enemy is not terrorism. It is desperation. And we all know its face.

lynn and i saw blood diamond this evening, and it was a sobering experience. first and quickest, there is the disconcerting feeling that comes from seeing leo play a character that is so firmly an adult, and therefore being forced to admit that he, and consequently I (since we are close enough in age that i can say things like it seems like just yesterday he was competing with kurt cameron for the charming badboy title on growing pains), are now firmly in the ranks of the grown as far as the cultural machine is concerned.

another reminder of this occurred the other day while i was washing dishes in the sushi bar where i worked for a couple of weeks to make some spending money before leaving the country, when the ‘safe but stylish’ pop mix on the intercom played nirvana. i know that the beatles and the stones were piped into department stores and arranged for cello and bassoon as soon as their principal audiences acquired enough purchasing power to merit such undertakings, but it still felt a little weird to be reminded that the cycle was continuing by learning that smells like teen spirit can now be lumped in with mack the knife for marketing purposes.

but i digress.

blood diamond, while still in the cloud of first impression, was quite impressive. a fair measure of predictability, sap, and emotional manipulation was surely to be had, but it was deftly executed as such, and the characters succeeded in convincing me that they knew that they were a bit cliched but still believed their story worth telling despite such hindrances, and that is an attitude that i can respect, particularly with a story as important as the abuses of the diamond trade. ed zwick, whom the poster can tell you was the director of glory and the last samurai, and my own early-nineties geekdom can tell you was also the director of legends of the fall and one of the key producers behind my so called life (in case there aren’t enough references to cultural icons of my youth in this post already).

jennifer connelly’s character was a bit too clearly there to fill the love interest gap, but she had some good moments of her own nonetheless, and i think that i am coming to like her.

djimon hounsou was very good, but i feel bad that i know him only from this and amistad, because important as the stories both are, i feel like his africanness is inseparable from my image of him as an actor, and i feel bad about that, though perhaps it’s only

and leo

acting grown up

no diamonds for vday
at the oscars?

last week’s episode of this american life is phenomenal.

apparently it’s a year old, but i didn’t hear it the first time, so yeehaw podcasting. :)

it tells the story of a fundamentalist preacher named carlton pearson, who rose through the ranks of the charismatic movement and led a huge pentecostal church in tulsa, oklahoma that was one of the stars of the fundamentalist christian world.

then, a few years ago, he decided that he didn’t believe in hell anymore, which is a rather startling move for a pentecostal preacher.

he was the kind of guy who thought about things, though, especially when they seemed to be coming from god, and the more he thought about this one, the more he decided that, in fact, the damnation of the pure at heart simply because they didn’t know about christ was anathema to his understanding of god. he had a sort of epiphany where he saw hell not as something that god would ever do to his children, but rather as something that we create for ourselves by not believing in universal forgiveness.

these ideas ran counter to the very foundations of what he had been taught, but he knew that sometimes god had reasons for not revealing everything at once, so it just felt to him as if god was saying that people were ready to advance to the next level, like in mario 3, where suddenly in level 6 it makes sense to use that suit that lets mario turn into stone, but in level 3, where there’s a lot of water, that suit really didn’t make any sense, and actually it sucked hardcore because you just sank to the bottom and sat there like an idiot. but that didn’t mean that level 3 didn’t have it’s place or it’s own wonders. who doesn’t like that frog suit? people just work with what they’re given at the moment, mmm-k?

ok so that’s my analogy, not his, but maybe you get the idea.

anyway, he was used to preaching what felt true to him, so he started talking about changing the charismatic doctrine. he didn’t feel like he should leave the church, and at first, he was just met with disbelief. people did this awkward kind of throat-clearing “how’s the weather?” kind of song and dance because they didn’t Really want to believe that he was serious, and you know, maybe it would pass.

but eventually, his ideas went further and he began to say things like: if you think about it just a little bit, you realize that it’s the Spirit of the word that matters, and not necessarily a literal adherence to the translation that happened to make it into the king james.

round about there he crossed a line, and it wasn’t long before he was shunned and officially branded as a heretic. his church attendance plummeted, he fell into debt, he was asked to leave the board of oral roberts university, and eventually, he was forced to reinvent his church on a much smaller scale.

about 100 of his original members stuck with him through the whole ride, despite being shunned themselves, and today he preaches to about 400 of what may be the world’s only pentecostal universalists, with his numbers slowly growing.

and remember, this is in oklahoma.

i believe that this is an incredibly important story for anyone concerned about the outcome of the faith and values debates that are raging in contemporary america, and it is also the 53839th reminder of why this american life is a great show and i miss out when i forget to listen (so again, yeehaw podcasting!).

it is important because these are people who looked at their long-held beliefs, looked at the world, saw a discrepancy, and realized that they had the choice to either push the discrepancy away as a threat to their way of life or embrace it as a chance to learn more about what they truly believe, even though what they found might be different from what they always expected.

and they chose to take the chance.

bishop pearson’s former colleagues and friends saw this decision as a failure of faith; a failure to trust the bible without question, even if (or especially when) it might seem to contradict itself. the idea that there are compelling reasons to not believe in hell is seen by them as proof that it is a particularly pernicious temptation meant to test them, and they just need to be strong.

but bishop pearson chose a different interpretation of faith, and i think this is important, not because “follow your heart” or “live and learn” are particularly new ideas in this world of ours, and not because, in this case, the people involved happened to have a change of heart that made their beliefs a lot closer to mine.

whatever we believe about damnation and salvation, and wherever we think faith comes from, i think this story is important because, in general, the idea that, when our way of life is threatened, faith could be what leads us to embrace change rather than resist it, is a Big Idea. the kind of idea that changes the shape of our world.

i know it doesn’t sound that revolutionary, but bear with me here, because i’m not sure we really get it.

the world around us right now is a pretty scary place.

at the end of the day, we are frightened that the way of life that we cherish is being threatened, and, in one way or another, the weapon we wield against this fear is our faith.

faith in god. faith in democracy. faith in ourselves.

but what are we really asking that faith to do for us?

are we saying “give me THIS! NOW! prove that you love me!”
or are we saying “give me the strength to grow and remember that love is never in doubt.”

because big and grown up and developed as our civilizations might be, we’re still pretty young in the grand scheme of things, and in some ways i think we’re just a bunch of kids with superhero suits that we refuse to take off even when we sleep. we wear the suits because they make us feel invincible, or invisible, or strong or smart or brave. we think the suits are part of who we are, and we’ll fall apart or disappear without them, so if anyone suggests that we might actually enjoy wearing a t-shirt and jeans, or a pinstripe suit, or maybe a sari, we just yell at them and run away and hide under the bed, consoling ourselves with dreams of flight or xray vision or whatever other power we are sure we will have just as soon as our true nature is revealed.

now i’m not a parent, or an expert in psychology, but word round the campfire is that the best thing to do in this situation is let the kid wear the suit as long as they want. that 9 times out of 10, if we come to believe that we are safe in our superhero suits, after a while we just wake up one morning and decide to wear something else of our own accord, confident of the fact that any superpowers that we really need are still with us, and always will be.

what i’m saying is that it’s important to remember that, wherever this world of thinning and shifting borders takes us, and however much it might not look like we thought it should look when we were little kids, we have a choice about how to respond. we can either make our decisions out of fear of losing what we thought we were, or out of faith in finding what we know we will become.

i tip my keyboard to bishop pearson and his church for that reminder.

you can stream the episode or pay a buck to download it here, or sign up for the free podcast here or, as lucy was lovely to announce to the world, through itunes. i still have numerous problems with itunes, but right now i am using it to keep up with this american life and this i believe while i’m abroad, and, as a portal for those progams, it brings me moments of joy that almost balance out the overwhelming sense of fatigue that overcomes me every time i think about all the hours i would have to put into organizing and annotating my music in order for itunes to live up to its distant, barely visible promise of flexibility and power.

i said almost.

if you have an hour while you’re making dinner or something, i hope you’ll give the episode a listen, and i’m all eyes if you wanna let me know what you think.

i warned you i was gonna write some this week, right?
;)

this post took a wicked long time.

and that downloading music. it didn’t take any time at all.

nope.

i still want to go work on that paper, but i might just have to sleep a bit first…

one of the best parts of this hotel gig is that, even though we don’t get out much, there is a constant supply of people coming in, and they are fun to talk with.

since my accent gives me away as a non-local, one of the first questions people tend to ask me is where i’m from, followed pretty closely by how i ended up in scotland, and in such a remote hotel to boot.

i have learned that “where are you from?” is actually code for one of the following slightly more complicated questions:

• what part of the states are you from (because your accent is obviously american. what, do you think i’m daft?!)?
• we have a bet going at our table about whether you are canadian, australian, or american, and i want you to prove to my wife that i know what i’m talking about, so please say you’re canadian…

this makes answering the question (in it’s shorter, encoded form) a bit tricky, because saying “i’m from the united states (full stop)” tends to ilicit snorts from the first group, followed by “yes, but what part of the united states, pet?” (in a slower voice, as if i have just made it clear that i need to be treated as a being of reduced intelligence).

assuming that the whole american part is obvious makes the second group feel awkward, however, because they want to do a double take and say something like “oh, really? please don’t take it personally! your accent is really quite mild!”

i have decided that the best course of action is to say “i’m from the united states (comma)” so that i can move right into “i grew up in colorado, but i moved around a bit and have lived in indiana for the last five years” if that seems appropriate. that way the first group thinks that i am just giving the extended answer, and the second group can use the extra information to their advantage by saying things like “oh! my nephew went to colorado once!”, thereby moving the conversation forward.

there are a few people who just go ahead and take their analysis for granted, starting with “what part of the states are you from?” and i appreciate those people for putting themselves on the line. the approach can backfire, though, so i guess i understand why it is used somewhat sparingly. one man asked me outright “oz or kiwi?” and i had to say “um, american, actually…” and then he had to act all embarrassed.

which is too bad, really.

the truth is, it’s just flat out hard to hear the little differences, and despite the fact that i have heard countless stories about how scottish people get angry if you think they are english, and new zealanders hate being confused with australians, and canadians shudder to be seen as american, the vast majority of people whom i’ve met in my travels just laugh it off.

there’s this rather deeply rooted idea that it is arrogance that keeps us from being able to detect regional differences in cadence (because they’re obvious to us, right?!), when actually it’s just a lack of experience, and it doesn’t really make any sense to assume that everyone should just automatically understand the way that growing up in certain parts of the world causes you to modulate your vowels.

the only people who get offended when you make a mistake seem to be the people who haven’t really travelled themselves, so they’ve never been on the other side of the table, and i think there’s something important there, but i’m not sure i’m, um, saying it right.

;)

all reflection aside, though, it really does amuse me that so many people think that i’m canadian. no matter how much i can rationalize it, a part of me still goes “whoa, seriously?” and i get all curious about what they are using as evidence. i mean, do i just say aboot sometimes and not even know it?!

sometimes, i’m tempted to go all fargo on them in the middle of a sentence, just to see if they hear a difference.

but then i start walking around saying “you betcha!” under my breath, and chuckling to myself, and that’s a bit creepy, so i make myself stop.

being in the uk and all, i didn’t really notice that it was september 10th until about 4:00 this afternoon, when i followed a link from schmutzie to an episode of zefrank’s the show from a few days ago.

when i say “i didn’t really notice that it was september 10th”, what i mean is that i didn’t make the association between 10/9/06 (which is how they write the dates over here) and The Day Before The Fifth Anniversary Of 9/11^TM, and when said association clicked in my head, i felt rather grateful for the current distance between myself and mainstream American media sources.

at the same time, though, i felt the pull of the memory and my own process of coming to terms with it. i wondered if i should take the time that i still haven’t really taken to write my own response. i marveled at the fiveness of the years that have passed, and remembered the unborn blog post that floated through my head as i walked around downtown one day on my recent trip to the city.

i had decided i should make my own little pilgrimage to ground zero, and had done so by spending several hours walking in a rather meandering fashion from prince street down to battery park and back up again to nyu, where i was meeting liza for lunch. i made my way to the construction site in the midst of my walk, with more difficulty than i had anticipated, since i had never before had to actually consider what the cross streets were for the world trade center, seeing as it was always rather obvious where to find it.

i stood there a bit puttering around trying to decide whether i wanted to, like, you know, Do something while i was there, and after a couple minutes i realized i was pissed off at the president and the war and the media for how numb it has made me by making it nearly impossible to disentangle my memories of that morning from the knots and snarls of all the other crap that has come to be connected to it. i felt, for a few minutes at least, like i had been robbed of my ability to mourn. as if the animal of my genuine and sap-free feelings was sleeping next to some really loud, annoying yippy dogs that wake up every time you go near and drown out anything of merit and the whole ordeal just makes you pull your hair and run away and wonder why you ever even bother.

that was irritating, but eventually i was like, fuck it, you don’t have to fight that fight, just give the dogs a milkbone and feel what you feel and think what you think and write what you write and remember what you remember and focus on building the future rather than bickering about the past.

so i didn’t worry about the shmaltzy posters. i read some graffiti instead, and watched the new yorkers go on about their business as the wonderfully adaptable human creatures that they are. i walked across the bridges that span the construction site and thought about the ghosts of the walls and desks and copy machines that i was passing through as easily as if they had never been there at all. i stood there for a few minutes with some of these thoughts whirling in my head, and then i went on about my day.

i met liza for lunch at a place called ‘wichcraft, which is an oh-too-clever name, and had a sandwich with truffle-scented trumpet mushrooms and fontina. i got caught in a crazy downpour in columbus circle when i stopped there on the way home to go to the apple store and get liza a new ipod USB thingy as a thanks-for-having-me gift. the next day we saw three movies for the price of one and hung out with a friend of hers who works at mtv. the day after that we used my car to go get kitty litter so she wouldn’t have to have it delivered, and i left the city after an unplanned driving tour of riverside drive as i puzzled over construction detours and let the fates decide whether i was going to leave manhattan by bridge or tunnel.

which is all to say, i made my peace with new york for the time being, and i’m glad.

i’m also glad that i followed the zefrank link, though, and so i hope that you may do so as well.

i think it will serve as a sort of innoculation against anything else i come across tomorrow; a way of remembering not to get either too numb or too huffy; to take time to feel what i need to feel and then focus on the work i want to get done.

and that’s really all i wanted to say in this post, actually.

all that other stuff, it just fell out, so i hope i didn’t contribute too much to the schlocky onslaught while attempting to arm you against it. :)

dum di dum…

now i go to bed.

i’m sorting through the stuff i wrote when i didn’t have internet for a few days, because i want to be done with it, but i keep thinking that i’ll add to it, or synthesize it, or something…

sigh

i never learn, do i?

JUST POST IT, KYNTHIA!!

it is interesting for me to read, even two weeks later, because i feel much more settled in now.  making friends, doing some work that feels familiar, and finding a good pub or two will all do wonders for making a place feel more like home.

—–

it took me a while to get up this morning, but i don’t think it’s jetlag. the time difference isn’t all that huge, and i slept a little on the plane, so it was kind of like a weird time warp where we flew all night and i floated in and out of sleep and didn’t really have a sense of how much time passed. i Thought it was only 8 hours, but hey, if they say it was 13? shrug. that happens.

so i was not all that confused when we arrived, and it was 9 in the morning, so i didn’t have much trouble just accepting that it was morning and wandering around the city for a while. it was nice to take a nap in the afternoon, however, and i ended up just staying in my room and reading and sorting through my things for the rest of the night. i had been feeling stressed out and tired by traveling and last minute errands, so i had been telling myself that all i really wanted was a chance to lie somewhere safe and soft and sleep for a while. i have learned over the years that i really rely on having periods of time to myself where i don’t really have to talk to anyone and i can think about whatever i want, and that sort of time is alarmingly difficult to come by when traveling alone, especially if you are trying to save money by not staying in hotels. if you stay with people, you have to interact with them, which is usually a blessing, but it is draining after a while. and if you stay in a campsite or a hostel, it’s hard to fully relax because there is constant activity, and not much personal space, so you have to be a bit more vigilant about your stuff.

because of all this, i am realizing that i may have to get better at being by myself when other people are around, but i haven’t quite figured it out yet, so i was a little worried on the plane because i felt tired, and the reality of my trip was starting to sink in and scare me a little, and i wasn’t sure how long it would be before i could just sit in a quiet place by myself and get my bearings.

this uncertainty made me cranky.
but i had forgotten something remarkable about my accomodations in glasgow – i have my own room. i am staying in a hostel that is converted student housing, so i basically have a very small single dorm room, and then the bathrooms are shared. it is clean, secure, and not that far from the city center, all for £12 a night (pounds are worth right about $2 each right now, so that’s around $24). it is perfect for me right now, for while i look forward to the social aspects of hosteling, i enjoy having this small dose of time where i am truly on my own. i took this very seriously yesterday afternoon, and stayed in my room for the rest of the night. this morning, part of me was tempted to remain cloistered away, but i needed water, and breakfast, and i wanted to explore the city a little bit more and make sure i know how to get to the train station for tomorrow.

so out i went.

i visited the lighthouse, thought about the difference between design and Design, and figured out the train schedule for tomorrow so i wouldn’t have to wander around too much with my bags in tow. i thought about going to the people’s palace, but couldn’t really decide if i could walk there or not, so i decided not to risk it and just wandered around. i went back to the internet coffee shop and wrote most of this post, but decided not to pay for wireless access because they told us we would have it in edinburgh, so it seemed a waste.

last night i dreamed that the summer school was over and i had decided just to go home. it was hard to find work or something, and it seemed like the thing to do. when i woke up, a little of this was still in my head, so it was doubly surprising to remember that i was still in glasgow, that the summer school hadn’t started yet, and that i still didn’t know when i would be going home. i like glasgow a lot, and i feel safe and prepared, but it is very strange to recognize that i am in another country for an unknown amount of time. it is more disconcerting than just being in another state or something, because then it is easy to call my parents and friends, and i can always get in a bus or a car and go somewhere familiar if i need to. now the phone is farther from my reach – i don’t have a phone card yet, and i’m contemplating get a pay as you go cell phone if i stay, but i can’t decide that yet, and since i haven’t had my computer online yet, i haven’t had access to skype. i know i could fly home if i needed to, but it could be really expensive, and there is just something harder about thinking about how to go about it. there are taxis and buses and trains, just as in any city, but that slightly foreign veil is over them, so they take a bit longer to understand, and my instincts about what to do in an emergency are not very strong. i don’t know anyone within miles (or kilometers), and there are both benefits and drawbacks to being that alone.

the internet definitely changes things from how it must have been even a few years ago. i have already chatted with my mom, and i know that i have ways to contact people via email and my blog, so i am far from completely cut off. and being in the UK is definitely helpful as well, since there is no language barrier. i know that i feel somewhat uncomfortable being the typical tourist in countries where i don’t speak the language, but it is relatively easy to figure out how to get by for a few weeks. this process of adjustment would certainly be harder in a more foreign country, however. that half-awake time in the morning when i wonder about what i’m doing would be scarier, and the hurdle to get myself out the door and going would be higher.

but that’s the thing to do – just walk out the door and start learning; give myself things to do and do them.
so away i go.