Feb 1 2012

well now look what i found

Over the past month some people have been clearing out the space we use at work to store extra library shelving. I went over there the other to see how things were going. All the shelving was gone, which enabled me to notice a couple of large boxes tucked away up high.

They’d obviously been there for a long time, at least ten years. Probably more like twenty. There were labels on some of them, indicating that they’ve been shipped from Holland. Picture if you will my curiosity-meter spiking right at that moment.

So of course it was impossible for me not to pull the boxes down. And once they were down I saw that they were already open. And once I realized they were already open I saw that they were full of…

Little bottles of alcohol. Lots of little bottles of alcohol. From all over the world. Some had labels I couldn’t read, either because they’d faded or because they were in a language I don’t recognize. But the others…Scotch, Irish Whiskey, Gin, Vodka, and even little bottles of beer. None of the bottles I saw were open, but some of them had evaporated. That’s how long they’d been there.

At least two of the boxes appeared full of these. The others were full of little trinkets, incredibly clever devices meant to store – or perhaps secret – tiny bottles of alcohol. Most were ceramic and some were porcelain. They were painted by hand and seemed quite delicate, though I’m sure my impression was more about being worried that I’d break one.

The only one I felt comfortable handling was a tiny windmill that despite its size was capable of housing any of the small bottles of alcohol, and also had a wind-up music box that also made the mill rotate. It was amazing.

I’m not entirely clear why these were in storage or why anyone had sent them to the library. I didn’t want to give them up, though. I didn’t want to tell anyone about the boxes. They were such a cool find, not the alcohol as much as the little trinkets. They were so cool and so obviously not American and it would have been great to really be able to look through those on my own time. But such is the nature of work.

Oh well.

Jan 31 2012

yogging: ostensibly good for the body; questionable-at-best for the spirit.

So I decided that I need to lose weight. Well, really…it wasn’t a decision but more like an acquiescence to the obvious, instantiated at that moment by not being able to simply look down and see which pair of shoes I’d put on that morning. And again later that day when I realized that I’m only guessing that I’ll be hitting the urinal once I let loose.

Like pretty much everyone else these days, I turned to technology to help out. I use an app to keep track of how many calories I eat each day. I had the same realizations as I think everyone else: holy crap candy bars are bad, and who knew pizza really isn’t mostly vegetables, and wow it really is a bad thing to eat a whole bag of potato chips. The app took away my ability to rationalize my diet and gave me a whole new metric by which I could judge myself everyday: The Line.

The Line connects points on a graph that represent how much I weigh each day. I fear The Line because I cannot control The Line. I cannot control The Line because losing weight seems not to be the logical function it appears to be. It stands to reason that if you eat fewer calories than you expend in a given day, you will lose weight. So either this reasoning is completely wrong, or my body defies the laws of thermodynamics. Because that bit above, where I downloaded an app to keep track of my calories? I’ve been doing that for like three years now. And I’m fatter. A lot fatter.

Assuming my logic is correct, that if I take in fewer calories than I burn I’ll lose weight over time, the problem has to be that I’m not burning as many calories as I need to. So, to that end, I’ve taken up something new: Yogging.

Yogging is this: you walk for a little while. Then you jog for a little while, roughly until you feel like you’re going to puke, pass out or die. And then you walk for a while, generally until your body forgets about how you almost made it puke, pass out or die.

Then you jog again while focusing on at least not puking in front of the skater-kids at the park who are like fourteen and have tattoos. And then you also try not to puke – or really even just spit – in the vicinity of the older ladies who’re walking around and you try to smile nicely at them even though your whole body really hates you.

Then you walk for a while, trying not to notice the gasping breaths you’re taking in and not making eye contact with anyone at all. Even though they look really worried about you. Which is understandable given that your face feels like it’s on fire and your heart feels like someone rigged a Ferrari engine to a lawnmower.

Then you jog again for a while. And you also try not to puke in front of anyone walking their dog because dogs always eat puke and just about one of the most awkward things you can think of is having your discharged dinner riding around in someone else’s dog’s belly.

Then you walk home and sit on the porch so that your lovely fiancée doesn’t see you in this state and can go on thinking of you as at least something of a manly man – who just happens to enjoy cooking and cleaning and laundry-day – rather than this can’t-hack-it lame-o who’s seriously done in by what is basically 30 min. of brisk walking interrupted by occasional bursts of lumbering jogs.

As you sit on the porch you question every single meal, snack, ort and treat you’ve ever eaten. You achieve a Zen-like state in which you ponder the mystery of why you can’t ever put the fork down. Once your breathing has returned to something like normal you go inside and tell her that yogging is kinda fun. You do not mention the number of times you nearly puked, passed out, or died.

You can, however, mention thinking ill of all those skinny people out there who run like it’s nothing, as though it requires roughly the same amount of effort as putting on a shoe. Which, by the way, you can’t do without moving either your gut or your shoe to one side. And you can especially think ill of those runners who run in pairs and have enough air to have conversations and tell jokes. You assume they’re telling jokes but recognize that they could just be laugh at you. And you can most certainly think ill of the clothing manufacturers who don’t make work-out clothes for the fat people who really need them so you not only look like a fat bearded guy gasping for air and not making eye-contact, you also look frumpy. You look like you don’t even have the good sense to nearly die in public in style.

And that’s my new program. Yogging: It’s ostensibly good for the body but probably questionable-at-best for the spirit. Nevertheless, it’s exercise, which I hear is good. And might give me some control over The Line, which is really what this is all about. My fear of The Line now outweighs my fear of puking, passing out, or dying right there in the park in front of all the skinny people and tattooed, pubescent skater-boys. And that’s just sad.

Jan 30 2012

sometimes i think time’s healing powers are highly over-hyped

One year ago today, our cat, L.G. Nermal, passed away. What’s remarkable it that, after all that time, I still feel incredibly sad when I think about him. Just picturing him there as he was dying almost brings tears to my eyes. In fact, writing this little post is proving to be just as difficult as writing this one was.

I don’t entirely understand why it’s still so painful for me. This isn’t like me. I understand and accept death and dying. This sort of thing isn’t the kind of thing I hang on to. Yet, there it is.

You’re still missed, Little Guy. I hope you can play out there, wherever you are.

Jan 27 2012

writer’s block

We recently purchased five iPads for use in the library, which I’m quite proud of because I don’t honestly think it would have happened without my pushing for it and figuring out how we can circulate them to patrons. Probably because of this, it’s fallen to me to set these iPads up, train our staff on them, and prepare them for circulation.(1)

For a while I’ve been convinced that part of the reason for the wild popularity of Apple’s devices is because they’re so pretty, and it was easy, in the midst of all the soft angles and curves and lovely screens, to believe that I’m right on that one. Of course, I knew I was going to have to mar these Zen surfaces with barcodes. I was caught between wanting someone else to do it so I wouldn’t have to be the one to incur the Wrath of Jobs and wanting not to leave it up to philistines.

But when my boss asked me to write the name of our library on the backs of the iPads with indelible ink…I thought about just quitting right there. I tried to reason with her, that it wasn’t precisely necessary especially since we have Find my iPad activated on each of them. But it was a losing battle, and I knew it.

She also wanted to write on the front of the iPad, in one of the corners, on the glass but off the screen. I felt the big one coming on. I really did. People everywhere go on about the iPhone’s retina display, but personally I find the iPad’s screen much nicer to look at. So sullying that surface was so unimaginable to me that I deployed a strategy of bamboozlement. I tossed out the assertion that it wouldn’t work – the even indelible ink wouldn’t stay – and used worlds like oleophobic coating and ionic bonds and cations and electron exchange to support my claim. Which of course I have no idea if it was true or not. I finished up with that most flagrant – yet effective – of logical conclusion: “This isn’t regular glass. This is Gorilla Glass.“

Lame as that was, it worked. Whew.

But it still meant I had to write on the back of the iPad. I practiced on scrap paper with the verve of  a jr. high girl with a wicked crush. I tried every variation I could imagine, letter-spacing, font-size, arrangement, until I settled upon what I thought would look best. I reminded myself of my tendency to over-embellish(2) and cautioned myself against it. Then I took a deep breath…

And put pen to iPad.

Or, really, more like right above iPad.

And I sat there like that so long I had to take a picture of how ridiculous I was being about this.

I just couldn’t do it. There has been less hesitation with really poor, life-affecting decisions than the arrest I was experiencing here. One time a buddy of mine asked if I wanted to try a rope to his back bumper and ski behind him as he drove down the icy streets in the (obviously) small town in which I grew up. That happened  - including locating and tying the rope – in less time than this was taking.

I would think: ok…go! And nothing would happen. It was the inverse of so many cinematic comedic moments: rather than my hand doing things I don’t want it to do, it wasn’t doing something I was telling it to do.

And here I am again, honestly five minutes later…

I tried reminding myself that it’s just a device that it’s not alive that an object simply can’t possess beauty on this level. Because this was the same hesitation I experienced literally every time ever I’ve wanted to ask a girl out. I reminded myself that this is not the face that launched a thousand ships.

It wasn’t working.

So eventually I just closed my eyes and made a small dot on the back. The surface already marred by my hand, my only choice was to make the graffiti look as nice as possible. And I did. Slowly. And I thought, if nothing else, it’s at least a reminder that I did this: that I brought iPads to my people. Maybe it’s not quite on par with rescuing Jews from Egyptian slavery, but getting a state-funded university to pony up cash for this type of unnecessary purchase is at least as difficult as parting the Red Sea. And, unlike Moses, I didn’t have God on my side. Though maybe Jobs was.

  1.  The iPads, not the staff.
  2. Yes, I even over-embellish when it comes to penmanship. It’s a way of life, yo.
Jan 25 2012

busy busy busy

Sorry I haven’t the time to write much of a blog post today. After writing about Google+ and social search the other day, I started systemically removing everything I’ve ever posted to anything owned by Google. And it’s a good thing. Yesterday The Washington Post wrote about Google’s new terms of service, that Google plans to follow a user’s activities across all of the platforms it operates, such as Gmail and YouTube.

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.

Jan 24 2012

less than a million breaths away

“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.

Jan 23 2012

gifts

This evening Ashley and I were invited to a small gathering at a local university. A group of students had brought in someone to talk to them about organ donation, and she invited Ashley to tell her story.

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.

Jan 22 2012

my new fifty-two, week three: a study in adaptation

Early this week I decided this week’s new-fifty-two entry would be a photograph. I’m not a photographer by any stretch of the imagination and the best camera I own is my iPhone.(1) The only way I know how to manipulate pictures is digitally. Nevertheless, I thought I’d be able to come up with something pretty good.

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.

  1. Which is actually the best camera I’ve ever owned and the previous statement shouldn’t be taken in any way pejoratively against the iPhone. Or Apple. Which everyone knows by now I heart pretty hardcore.
  2. Even though the class I took on Adaptation Theory ended back in December I still think about it all the time. Like all the time all the time.