Pig Zen

So the future.  In the future we’re all connected, all the time of course.  I’ve carried a Blackberry for a few years now.  I disdain those Crackberry addict people, but I probably one of the worst.  I’m very fidgety, and I have an interactive distraction right at my fingertips.  Since I don’t wear a watch, I check the damn thing constantly, and usually twice in rapid succession because I never remember what time it was on the first check.  When herself and I are apart at non-work times, I text her regularly, like a teenager would with his first crush.  I need help.

The principal drawback to having that level of connection is that work is always there, seemingly waiting for someone to do it.  At my old job it was horrible because every single problem that came across, I could probably fix.  Since I’m fidgety, I had to work really hard to ignore the little messages about things being slow or down, and I usually failed.  The new job involves the occasional interaction with someone from across the world, so email requests at 2 am aren’t from an insomniac, but from someone really just starting his/her day.  It would only be considerate to respond in a timely manner, right?

The person I feel the most bad for, though?  My physician.  She gets no rest from the tedious.  I have the cholesterol levels of a 45-year-old Beef Council member. I went and blood drawn on Thursday afternoon, and since this is the future, just like everyone else, she can work from anywhere.  She reviewed my counts and posted an admonishment this afternoon.  She probably wanted to get into medicine to help people, not to have to tut-tut me about a health problem I (and rest of the country) should be able to manage without her direct intervention.

Ubiquitous connectivity: making sure people can’t get a break from life’s little annoyances.

There are two kinds of people in this world:  those that get songs stuck in their heads, and those that don’t.  I am most certainly in the former category.  It doesn’t take much for some vintage tune to lodge itself firmly between my ears.  I wish I knew what made me so susceptible to that kind of suggestion.

The songs are almost always deplorable, like “Guantanamera”, “Don’t Stop Believing”, or The Diff’rent Strokes theme.  Sometimes the origin is simple: seeing John Mayer accompany Dave Chapelle on his show resurrected the sitcom theme.  The Journey classic is a preferred method of torment used by herself.  The old folk tune is my form of reciprocity.

I think the worst part of any of these songs is that I only know the chorus, let alone the whole melody or all of the worlds.  With “Guantanamera”, I don’t even know that — I have to fake it.  Thus it makes it almost impossible for me to get any kind of closure organically.  I either have to be completely distracted so that part of my brain can quiesce, or I have to hear the song.

The same phenomenon happens with food, too.  If someone else says, “I had a yummy doughnut for breakfast,” I’m probably going to start salivating and want a yummy doughnut, too.  While getting a fried dough craving at the drop of a hat isn’t convenient, that can’t compete with when someone mentions they had some inaccessible regional delicacy that I can’t get here.  I’m not sure if that’s a by-product of my suggestible nature, or if it’s a symptom of my rarely in remission wanderlust, though.

Somewhere in my adolescence, my mom decided to drop out of the corporate world and go back to working in restaurants.  At the time I couldn’t understand why — she always came home tired and smelling of a mix between the daily special and dish sanitizer.  We also ended up in a different tax bracket.  While I could tell she was generally happier, it wasn’t until many, many years later when I had to deal with corporate politics of my own that I could understand what drove her away.

On the weekend nights when she’d have to close, I would try to stay up and wait for her.  The consequences of this were two-fold: I was pushed further down the dark path into becoming a night person, and I learned to love the questionable cuisine of all-night diners.

After spending all day around barbecue or pasta or beer, the last thing she wanted was to eat what was on offer at work, and even worse, cook.  Our options were limited, so we became regulars at Denny’s, Village Inn, and the independent place that had good onion rings.  This was our bonding time, the time that kept us from growing apart in those troubled teenage years.  The foodie in me regrets those patty melts and home-fry and egg skillets, but the dime store psychologist in me knows that if every mother and child could share just a few of those meals, fewer very special episodes and interventions would be shared as well.

I really couldn’t tell you what we talked about now.  Sometimes it was important, but most of the time it was old fashioned kibitzing.  One thing I do remember though: the Asian Amway meetings.  I think they were just after midnight, going from Saturday into Sunday.  We would go to the restaurant down off the highway, and our food would have just arrived when a big table — 8- or 10-top — would get sat in the middle of the restaurant.  All Asian, all in business attire; ties for the men and skirts/dresses for the women.  We usually sat pretty near them, and I don’t think we ever paid attention to what they said — we just decided it was the post-Amway meeting pancakes and pie.  They were there as often as we were.  I wonder if that group noticed us and made up stories to explain why we were eating the same thing and re-hashing the same questions.

I always thought you were supposed to become more mellow as you got older.  More time on the planet meant you had more perspective.  You’ve been through and survived more, so you’re less likely to spin yourself and more convinced that everything is going to turn out okay, since it pretty much has so far.  It’s not working like that for me.  My politics is getting more extreme and my patience is dwindling.  The most notable thing, though, is that I’m getting more fearful.

Back in May, I flew to the Old Country.  It was a wicked early morning flight (anything to save a buck in this modern world, right?) and I was amped up on caffeine.  I was lucky enough to be on an empty flight and I had the whole row to myself.  I was looking out the window when I suddenly realized: both the engines could fail and we could PLUMMET from the SKY right NOW.  I’ve logged my fair share of miles over the years and been through de-icing (really no big deal but I hate the smell and remember the various crashes that brought about the modern de-icing rules), sick passengers, and landings when people clapped after we touched the ground.  This was a clear day on an empty flight and I was creeping up on losing it.

I took some deep breaths, played my favorite movie on the iPod, and took it one mile at a time for the rest of the flight.  We made it just fine, just like on the hundred other flights to which I’ve been a party.  As Linda Richman would say, “no big whoop.”

Why did this happen?  Why do I think more about germs on doorknobs, contaminated food, the collapse of the economy, and four more years of a Republican in the White House more often than a reasonable person would?  Do we live in more fearful times and it’s justified or am I just overly sensitive?

When I was sitting on that plane, I suddenly felt a connection to Mr. Monk from TV and all the real Obsessive-Compulsives in the world.  Thankfully, my laziness still extends into my neuroses, so I’m unwilling to spend a lot of clock cycles on this stuff.  Otherwise, I would spend a lot of time wondering: how can everyone else *not* be afraid?

I have a weird sense of place.  I was lucky; we didn’t move around a lot when I was a kid — I guess four times, and never very far.  I haven’t really moved around a lot as an adult either; again, four times so far.

It doesn’t take a lot of stuff for a place to feel like home to me, either — as my BBS era friends always said, home is where the computer is.  One thing I have figured out, though: a place has to be “mine”.  I lived with my aunt for a couple of months right out of high school, and that was Not Home.  Same with the week or two I stayed with my mom when I was between apartments after I’d been out of the house for a year — she hadn’t really changed my old bedroom any, but it wasn’t mine anymore.  I also don’t enjoy staying with her when I’ve been back to visit since moving here.

I don’t know if this is because I hate imposing on people, or I’m a control freak, or some other pile of neurosis.  I do have a thing about wallowing in my own filth vs. someone else’s, but that’s just an excuse.  I stayed with herself’s mom when I first got to California since I had a hell of a time finding an apartment and while she keeps one of the cleanest houses around, I was still on pins and needles — the carpet felt weird under my feet.

Sometimes hotels are okay, and sometimes they’re not.  The lighter, more contemporarily decorated ones seem to work better for me for some reason, and of course they’re more expensive.  I don’t honestly believe they’re any cleaner than the Motel 6 at half the price, but the new paint makes them seem cleaner.

I don’t really miss my stuff when I’m traveling since I carry my computer with me, but bizarrely I miss my clothes.  I don’t even have that inventive of a wardrobe, but I like to have all my options open, and I especially like having a different t-shirt to wear to bed.  Overpacking is a constant struggle for me.

When I was looking for apartments out here and I finally settled on this one, I just kind of knew this was the right place.  I don’t know why, and this apartment has been far from perfect, but it resonated with me.

So, yeah.  I don’t know what all of this means.  I guess I just need a big suitcase, high-speed internet, light-colored carpet, and a bill at the end, and I’m good to stay as it were.

When I first started reading stuff like this on the web, there was no such thing as a blog.  We called them online journals, they tended to be long form, and, seriously folks, there were probably under 500.  Livejournal didn’t exist yet, Blogger would launch after that and required you to have your own FTP space, and Matt Mullenweg was 14 years old.  Neither Jason Kottke nor anyone else got paid to do this since those little text ads hadn’t been invented yet.  Amazon affiliations were borderline scandalous after they became available, and asking for donations could be even worse.  Corporations with any sort of first-person content on their web sites except for the occasional letter inside an annual report?  It was to laugh.

Other related trivia:  Google was still the underdog, most households in America were still using analog modems (it’s only been in the last two years that we passed the 50% mark on broadband penetration in US homes), and domain names cost $35 a year direct to Network Solutions, down from $50.  I remember looking up my first name dot com in 1997 but not being able to justify that princely sum.

So, ten years later, give or take, what’s different?  Not many of those original folks are still around of course.  While there are a just-barely-countable number of individuals with blogs, this form has moved past the personal — some of the best writing is organizational, advocative, or promotional.  That’s the change we’ve seen all over the web, though.  The citizen journalism we dreamed of back then has come to pass, though, and is now sponsored.  YouTube came out of nowhere, however; it makes perfect sense now but anyone that remembers what a pain in the ass it was to share a video, even as late as 2003, never would have dreamed we’d be able to watch so many useless clips on a daily basis.

I hate that journalistic ethics don’t apply to people that wield newspaper-like power, especially in the tech world.  Rumors spread faster than viruses and can do as much damage.  Conversely, the transparent-ness is good — things that were far too niche to be picked up by professional news gathering organizations now reach a wider audience.  Something really should be done about WWDC buzz, though.

The overall explosion of content does actually bring along some extra good content, too.  The curves don’t line up — the overall scale is probably logarithmic and the good stuff curve is linear at best — but I’d put down good money that right now, someone out there is writing something worthwhile that each one of us could connect with.  No one has to be alone anymore, as long as they’re willing to look for their tribe.  That is a powerful thing.

The good old days were quieter and slower paced, and I miss being able to have a handle on this whole internet thing.  Even as a big stick in the mud, I can’t say we were better off back then, though.

One of the consequences of moving here meant that we had to go from a detatched house to an apartment.  While I know that the annoyances in my life would be blessings to the rest of the world, I just can’t stop hating the fact that we have to share laundry facilities.

The machines here steal my quarters, make lots of noise, break regularly, have limited capacity, and don’t dry very well.  Also, at peak times, the room fills up and people forget to take their clothes out of the dryers.  After waiting a while, I sometimes have to unload the dryer onto the counter, and that just creeps me out — I don’t want strangers touching my stuff so doing it to someone else is just wrong.  But of course when I leave my clothes in the dryer for 15 minutes too long on a busy night, all my unmentionables are spread out all over the counter, and of course they’re still damp.

Today was the icing on the cake, though.  I left one of my empty laundry bins in front of the dryers while I took the full one back down the hall.  I told the other family that was getting ready to put their clothes in the dryer that the one I had just unloaded worked the best, but there was a language barrier.  The dad guy did start checking it out, though.  When I returned, they were gone, they’d put their clothes in a different dryer, and there was a mess all over the floor.  Their infant had spit up, and of course some of it went into my bin.  It didn’t have any clothes in it, but still.  It was disgusting.  I was raging mad and uttered some choice phrases.  I seriously thought about using their clothes to clean the stuff out of my bin and then putting them back in their dryer.  I didn’t, though; I know the Karmic Boomerang is a bitch and I didn’t want to sink any lower than I already have.  I’m still seething a little bit four hours later, though.  There was enough on the floor they had to have noticed and probably supervised the Exorcist reinterpretation.  Did they magically think I wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t be bothered by the chunks their baby blew?  I went back half an hour later to see if I’d forgotten something and the sick was still all over the floor so it’s not like they just hadn’t gotten to coming back to tidy up.

Living in an apartment is probably the “right” thing to do — I’m much closer to work than I would be if I tried to get a house here and we don’t really need all that extra space.  But there are times when I’d kill to not see people fill up the recycling cans with ordinary trash, to have ignorant people or self-absorbed wankers steal our parking places, or to skip scrounging quarters and fight for a washer.

I’ve lived in California for just a few days past a year now.  I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with this place, and while my way of looking at things has changed, I can’t say I feel any differently.

The decision to move here was both easy and enormously hard.  It was the right thing to do at the wrong time to do it.  Things did not go according to plan.  They still aren’t, really.

Trends usually push people from California back to the midwest.  So why did I move here?  It was, first and foremost, the right thing to do for herself and for us as a couple.  She was not happy in my Old Country and wasn’t ever going to be.  I felt guilty when she moved out to be with me, I felt guilty while she was there, and I felt guilty when she’d come back to visit and have to come back.  While we made that decision together, my ability to internalize really wreaked some havoc on my own cosmic sense of fairness.  She’s definitely happier back here and enabling her to move helped restore some balance for me.

The timing for the move was driven by a professional opportunity that was too good to pass up.  I now work at a world-renowned institution that’s done some great things.  My old job was only significant to the people it served directly, and tended to succeed due to circumstances beyond their control.  My boss there has two very smart children, the eldest of which won a very prestigious and competitive scholarship.  I told him when I visited out here and they offered me this job, I felt a little bit like his kid must have felt when that letter arrived.  It was the first time in a long time that I’d actually felt smart and validated in an affirming way.  Again, while I still feel lucky to be working here, things with my new gig haven’t gone according to plan either — it is a lot like what I thought it would be in both the good and bad ways, with the added bonus of an unexpected budget crisis and restructuring.  However, just having the courage to leave the old job was probably more significant for me than taking any new job could have been.

The climate of California, especially the Bay Area, really suits me in many ways — politically, socially, and definitely weather-wise.  I was born and raised in a place famous for its skiing and I never strapped planks to my feet.  I hate snow and like the ocean.  I’m a pretty liberal and geeky person, so I blend in a little better here — whenever a politician did something I agreed with back in the Old Country, it was usually by accident.  Even members of my own family weren’t all that surprised when I said I was moving; my aunt that’s lived all over the country replied simply, “it’s about time” when I told her.  One problem is that geeky people in the Bay Area tend to be a lot more hip than anywhere else, and I haven’t manage to grow the right facial hair or pick the right t-shirts yet.

The hate in the love-hate comes from the same things that drives everyone else away: crowds, expense, and earthquakes.  I’m doing okay on the first — I’m generally able to avoid the traffic and I plan around the crowds at public places.  The last time I was back visiting family and friends, though, I definitely noticed how many fewer cars were on the road there versus here.  Money is definitely tighter than it was; when people ask what I miss most from my old home town, I jokingly reply, “disposable income.”  We haven’t had a big earthquake yet, and just like there aren’t atheists in foxholes, I’m not above making incantations and sacrifices to keep it that way.

I always thought I was a misplaced coastal child when I was growing up, and I know I’m definitely not hearty enough to make it in New York or Boston (snow, humidity, East Coast aggro, and roaches!).  I’ve had some bouts of homesickness and I miss my friends and family, but I’ve yet to truly reconsider the decision to move.  I hope I’m not jinxing myself – does anyone know any anti-seismic mantras?

I wish I knew how to feel about my country on this day of celebration.  Should it be based on my own personal standing in the world?  I’m lucky enough to be doing better than most of my fellow citizens, and as a whole, everyone above the American poverty line would be a prince among 80% of the world’s people.  I try to be mindful of this and use it to keep my problems in perspective.

I was serendipitously born into a reasonably stable family in the suburbs in the richest country on earth during peacetime.  That’s just a statistical anomaly, really; it seems like basing any national pride on a fluke would be akin to a statistical fallacy.  So what does that leave?

I was in England in 2003, and my traveling companion and I were eating lunch in a little country inn.  We talked politics with the innkeeper and she seemed very curious as to why the US was doing what it was doing, but she clearly did not hold me or any American layman responsible for what was being done in our name.  The quintessential American tourist Rick Steeves went to Iran recently, and he said all the Iranians he was allowed to talk to were thrilled to meet him and showed him no hostility; they expressed the same sort of curiosity as to why anyone here would think our current foreign policy was a good idea.

The first thing I’m proud of is that we finally made Sting’s song from Cold War days come true:  everyone finally knows that their so-called national enemies love their children too, and that it’s just governments that fuck things up.  I think the United States has somehow helped spread that little kernel of truth around.  That’s kind of like being proud of helping to “adapt” the Native Americans to smallpox and syphilis, but I think it’s important.

In the early days of the Bush Administration, I had the pleasure of meeting some Moroccan people.  They were, at the time, the only people who were really happy with the American government.  Why?  Because they were able to express any unhappiness they might have with it, should they feel it.  From what I recall, they said even expressing a little displeasure with a long line at a government agency could be grounds for a visit from the secret police.  All the adults in the family had first- or second-hand knowledge of the consequences of a truly repressive regime.

The second thing I’m proud of is that I’ve never known an environment like that.  Hand-waving and rhetoric aside, I’m completely able to take the Bill of Rights for granted because I’ve never lived in a world without them.  I’m not proud of how poor of a custodian I’ve been of those freedoms, however, and I have no one to blame but myself for that.  Complacency is an underreported symptom of the western obesity epidemic and a concerted treatment protocol should begin immediately.

So those would be the verses in my version of the Lee Greenwood classic.  I hope I can be a part of writing more.

Does seeing a good movie ever really make you want to go out and gorilla-produce your own masterpiece?  We watched Wall-E tonight and it kind of had that effect on me, although it also made me wish I could work on computing problems that would yield something as cool and as tangible as a feature film.  While I work at a cool place, I don’t often feel truly connected to the cool stuff that we do.  There’s two ways to look at that:  I’m stuck in a backwater or I’m not trying hard enough to get involved.

That comes back to one of those “two kinds of people” generalizations: there are those that let things happen to them, and those that make things happen.  No one can truly be completely one way or the other; even really passive people find food, and the most assertive/agressive people I know still pay taxes, but there are ways to polarize both of those things.  “I don’t know, what do you want to eat?” is a common refrain around my home, so it’s probably obvious with which group I tend to hang.

Knowing how much pressure to apply is something I struggle with constantly.  There may be things I really want, but there’s also trying and pushing too hard.  I often find myself being aggressive-passive, forf lack of the right term; I’ll push really hard to start something and then lose interest or energy shortly after I get started.  Unfortunately, I’ve gotten good enough at it that I manage to build up enough momentum at first that I can coast through.  That can appear really annoying to others because it makes it seem like everything comes easily to me.  Building up that initial momentum is hard and takes a lot out of me, so I naturally want to fall back to my passive state right afterwards.  Of course that also means I end up disappointed — no one ever gets all of what they want by having a great start, a tepid second act, and a phoned-in ending.