• President Obama: about 25%
• Newt Gingrich: about 31%
• Mitt Romney: about 14%
• Your faithful host: 8.5%

BOOM! Suck it all you millionaires! I’m in your bidness not paying your tax rates!

Or something…

Apparently Google is facing some backlash over this. And while it’s tempting to throw my opinion into the mix…well, I just did that. What I had to say about Google+ and social search applies in much of the same way as Google combining my data from Docs and Picasa.

So the reason I don’t have time for much of a blog post is simply that I’m busy deleting anything I can find that I ever posted to any Google-owned site. Over the last six years we’ve developed an extensive partnership. But that ends today.

Goodbye Google. Good luck with that whole don’t be evil thing.

“I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s fear, the same basic fear that you and I have that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it…Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it’s all passing away, and so are we, so am I…

And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we’re remembered, these’ll last what – a hundred years? two hundred? – and they’ll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I’m cremated the trees that are nourished buy my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here…That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.”

That’s from David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, and it hit me rather hard today whilst I was eating lunch alone upstairs at work. First it was the bit about the gravestones, which we think of as the final reminder of our footprints on our place. Then that bit about the slow fire drove it in. Maybe it was the events of last night – really thinking about the other side of organ donation – I don’t know. But when I read this today everything around ceased to matter, to even exist. And all I can think about now is how precious little time we get here, and how even by that measure I get even less precious little time to spend with Ashley…and that comes at the expense of some other family who ended up with even less precious little time with their child than they could ever have brought themselves to even try to imagine.

And I am sad for them. And yet grateful. And while those two emotions mix readily in a person’s heart, it takes the mind significantly more time to catch up.

I never tire of watching Ashley tell others about her transplant. She will tell her story to anyone who will listen. And she doesn’t tell it from a dramatic standpoint; it’s very matter-of-fact and informational. She’s not there to manipulate people into becoming organ-donors. She merely wants the facts of her story and her life to give people a real, live example of the gift that is organ donation.

Emphasis on the live.

But tonight was very different. Before Ashley talked, the family of a donor told their story. The mother cried a couple of times, but her message – that her son got the chance to be a hero, to literally save five lives – came through clearly. And it was a little difficult, to listen to her tell what is a lovely and sad story about her young son’s death, only to sit there next to someone who was there because of someone else’s similarly tragic death. Dylan’s mom even tearfully pointed out that the five people he saved would get to celebrate the birthdays and weddings that they now will never get to enjoy. And so to think about how we’re getting married in a few months was…unfair. To them.

I’ve spent so much time with Ashley, listening to her repeatedly talk about organ-donation as such a great thing – and it is – that somehow until tonight it never really sank in that someone had to die. I mean, academically, I was totally aware of that. But somewhere out there, a young girl’s parents sometimes cry because Ashley is going to have the wedding their daughter will never get.

And I don’t even know how to begin to thank them. Or really to even comes to terms with that.

It’s hard to know that the life you enjoy comes at the expense of someone else’s sorrow. I’m sure Ashley has been more than aware of that for nearly 4.5 years now. But I never really understood what that meant until tonight.

I set a couple of rules for myself, though:

1. The image had to come from real life. No staging. No artificiality. Just something I saw that caught my imagination and my desire to preserve it.
2. Digital adjustments were okay.
3. But no filters.
4. And I limited myself to only using my iPhone for any adjustments.

I took a lot of pictures of a lot of things, but it was something I saw whilst baking yesterday that really caught my eye. After spending some time trying to bring out a certain something in the picture through manipulation, I finally decided to make this week’s entry more of a study in adaptation.⁽²⁾ I simply cannot decide which picture I like best, and they each say something different to me.

So here they are:

The original image.

An adaptation:

Another adaptation:

Like I said, I can’t decide, so I give you all three.

As I’ve mentioned previously, if you’d like to be part of this new-fifty-two thing, feel free. If you’d like to share your creations with others, let me know and I’ll post links if you like.

Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers’ food.

I’ve been a fiction writer since the first short story I wrote in fourth grade, so I know the above to be true. And I also know the following to be equally true:

But fiction writers tend at the same time to be terribly self-conscious. Devoting lots of productive time to studying closely how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come across to other people…The result is that a majority of fiction writers, born watchers, tend to dislike being objects of people’s attention.⁽¹⁾

He goes on, at Wallacian length, to make the argument that television’s benign malice is that it allows for watching without being watched, although of course what’s being watched isn’t an accurate reflection of reality.⁽²⁾ My point isn’t to argue with or refute this claim. My point is that today we have a much better tool to watch without being watched: social media.

Facebook and Twitter allow me to do exactly what television allows. I get to peek into people’s lives. I get these little snippets that I can piece together. It has an advantage over real life in that if I met a friend for coffee I’d have to pay attention to things like body language and tone to divine how that person feels about anything, and I’d have to do it constantly. Using social media, people just tell me how they feel…and I don’t even have to ask.

Furthermore, social media allows me to choose whose lives I watch from a distance. When I find someone to be untrustworthy I can simply un-friend, un-follow, or un-subscribe from that person’s life. I only have to pay attention to what I want to pay attention to.

And, for the most part, people only watch me when I want them to. Were I the creepy guy on the subway, I’d have to constantly watch everyone else and run decision trees on how they might be perceiving me, all while I’m watching whatever it is that’s caught my interest. It’s a lot. But on Facebook, people only see what I want them to see, whether that be my profile or my status updates.⁽³⁾

And so of course I have to be aware that I’m only seeing what others want me to see. In other words, social media is mediated content, just like television. Except that, for the most part, the goal of mediation isn’t simply to make money for some faceless corporation. Some people are obviously out to get as many followers as possible, but having the type of ego – or pathological need – that makes that situation a factor is also part of the reality that I, as a fiction writer, so desperately want to take in. 

Without being, myself, observed. Which isn’t sneaky nor creepy. It doesn’t come from a place of harm or, I hope, damage. Let me put it this way: we, as human beings, tend, I think, to think that most people’s desires aren’t different from our own in any fundamental way. How we go about achieving those desires is, of course, wildly different. But the fundamentals are the same. So if I have a desire to watch everyone around me while I hit the little RECORD button of my memory, I generally assume that others are doing the same thing. Which is what makes me terribly self-conscious even while being simultaneously aware that probably no one is really paying any attention to me anyway. And so it’s only natural that I would embrace anything that removes that problem.

This is why, even though I kind of hate the thing that is social media, I simply cannot let it go. It lets me do the only thing I’ve wanted to do since I wrote my second story: record people without myself being recorded.

Which is why Google is now my enemy.

Image Credit: Biggovernement.com

Google’s new Social Search feature, which allows people who have you in their Google+ circles to see things that you’ve searched for with Google, is more than a violation of privacy. More than a violation of trust. It is a violation of the very lure of social media, which is to watch other people without them seeing more of me than I want.

Suddenly now, self-consciousness has entered into my online life. I have to be worried that people in my circles can see what I’ve searched. Because I’m a writer, because I have a curious mind, and because I have a tendency – for whatever reason – to see and learn about many of the more unsavory aspects of human life,⁽⁴⁾ I am genuinely concerned about this.

Furthermore, because Google first touted their service as a network that let you control what other people see, I added people to my circles whom I never would have added on Facebook. And so now I have to worry that people at work know that sometimes I really do try pretty hard to find real pictures of people who have three breasts.⁽⁵⁾

And they did all of this without first telling me. The only reason I knew about it was when I searched something a week or so ago and Google showed me similar things that one of my friends had searched. Self-consciousness set in just as much as if I’d gone naked to the prom.

So I quit Google+ right away. And in the past week, I’ve been divesting myself of all the Google services I use. This isn’t easy, since I’ve had a Google account for five years or so. But I am not willing to risk them releasing whatever other information they have of mine or about me to anyone else, whether we’re friends or not. Forget privacy. Forget trust. I spend time on the internet because it helps me accomplish something I simply cannot do in real life. Google has violated my sense of personal security, not my information, not my emails, but aspects of my very self.

At the very least, this makes me horribly uncomfortable. This is the type of thing that in the real world would cause me to get off the subway at the next stop, even if I had no idea where I was. To leave the party. To never talk to a certain person again. To move to a new town. Not because of the violation, but because I have been made too terribly self-conscious to ever face that situation again. So goodbye Google. And congratulations on becoming the town gossip-queen I’ve always worked to avoid.

1) I’ve reached the bottom of one box of cereal.

2) And there wasn’t enough left to fill the bowl, so I’ve added a second cereal.

The bottom of the cereal box is always the best. The blend of powdered sweetness, which tastes totally different from regular sweetness, and pulverized grain. Usually there’s less sweetness than there is grain, a ratio I prefer. Sometimes I want to smash up an entire box just so I can have daily helpings of this deliciousness. But it wouldn’t be as special if I had it every day.

And mixing cereals has been a hobby – or at times an obsession – of mine ever since my first attempt at college, where I discovered those huge bins on which you pull the little lever to dole yourself as much cereal as you want. They had four or five types, none of which I was all that crazy about individually. But I studied combinations and ratios until I found a blend I could be excited about every morning.

To have both of these events happen by coincidence in the same bowl…well it’s like have the Super Bowl on Christmas.

There are many things I would like to blog about today.

Like how annoyed I am with Google’s Social Search and how I’ve deleted my Google+ account because of it and am seriously considering not using Google for anything.

Like that Rick Perry has dropped out of the race…and endorsed Newt. And how Newt’s ex-wife says that Newt wanted to kinda swing a little bit.

Like Facebook’s targeted ads and how they seem to think I’m a teenage girl who may or may not speak what I think is Portugese.

But all I can think about today – the only thing that’s really using up my mental real estate – is how much this lady keeps talking about her friggin’ kid.

Kids are cute, especially the little ones. And most mothers seem to love their kids, so it is natural that the mother of a cute kid would be inclined to talk about her. But seriously. All this woman talks about is her kid.

It’s pathological. She clearly has zero in the way of excitement in her own life, is the only conclusion I can draw. Which makes me a little sad for her, yes. But even that is hidden behind my desire to scream talk about anything else PLEASE!!!

Me: “Yes…There are several. Which do you need?”

“The one for English 1100.”

“Yes, I know. I have several books listed for that course. Which one is the one you need?”

“I don’t know.”

“Uhm…”

“I think it’s blue.”

“Okay…”

“No. That’s not it. Maybe it’s green.”

“…”

“It’s not the St. Martin’s Guide.”

“Yes. That was the blue one.”

“Well it’s not that.”

“Okay, but it helps if you know which one is the one you need.”

“Well I don’t.”

“Neither do I.”

“Ain’t you supposed to know?”

“Of the two of us, you have a better chance of knowing which book you need than I do.”

“You’re the library. You’re supposed to know.”

“No. You’re in the class. You’re supposed to know.”

“Well I don’t know.”

“And as much as I’d like to help you, there are literally thousands of books here and I simply cannot find the one you need without a bit more information.”

“I said it was the green one.“

“No you said maybe it was the green one. But even then, I need something like a title. An author.”

“It’s about how to write.”

“That doesn’t help me much.”

“Well fine. I just check out that one.”

“The blue one?”

“Yeah. Then when I fail I can say it’s cuz you checked the wrong book out to me.”