Sick thoughts

So, I have had a pretty terrible chest-and-head cold since Thursday morning and have been sticking pretty close to home, taking a lot of naps, and not venturing far from home. So it was a comparatively great treat in a relatively dull routine when, on an expedition to the sidewalk mailbox, I discovered that our phone book had been delivered.

It was a pale imitation of the tomes from the glory days of  what we just called The Phone Company. Back then, everybody had two of these - a White Pages for residential listings and the Yellow Pages for commercial listings. Back home in Brooklyn, each was the size of a library dictionary, and even in smaller cities such as Portland and Seattle it was still a sizeable volume. Now it's barely bigger than comic book and hardly thicker than a dime is tall.

I'm not even sure who sent this to me - who these Frontier Communications people are. They're certainly not my mobile phone provider, and I don't have any kind of relationship with any other telecom company. How'd they pick me?



I opened it up and leafed through it to let the memories come fluttering back. It looks the same - tiny printed names in alphabetical order, last name first, first name last. Some with addresses, some without. I recalled looking up the name of a girl I was interested in without having even a quantum of the courage necessary to actually call her; somehow just looking at seven digits printed on the flimsy pages made the possibly more solid.

I wanted to look up someone I knew, but no one I know now has a land line.

Since the edition had the White and Yellow together, I checked on another tradition and was happy to see it survives, if again in a diluted form. Businesses like exterminators and locksmiths always vied to be first in their category listing, figuring that people in dire circumstances needing their services would just call the first number they found in the phone book; I believe there was an AAAAAAAAA All-American Exterminating Service in Portland in 1979; A Allied Exterminators and A A ABCO Locksmiths seem demure in comparison to that brass.

Who's still listing in the Yellow Pages anyway? When I started a small business in 1981, our Yellow Pages listing was critically important. The listing was excruciatingly expensive, but we had to have one - the thought of running a business without a Yellow Pages listing was inconceivable. And timing was critical - the book only came out once a year; opening up shop right after it came out meant eleven months of invisibility. Now, someone using their tablet can build a website complete with e-commerce functions while they are sitting in Starbucks, and sign up for a dozen online directories before finishing their latte. Is the market share of "people who still use the Yellow Pages" vitally important to some businesses?

Well, it's just another dimension to the way things have changed, but one tangentially related to my current reflection on social media. Thinking about the phone book made me think about phone calls: what the sound of  a busy signal was like, how we would make person-to-person calls to a fake name to avoid long-distance charges as we let family members know that we had arrived somewhere safely, how I would call my mother every Sunday because long-distance charges were cheaper on Sundays, and what it was like before answering machines or voicemail to vainly call and call again trying to reach someone.

Communication now is so different and so instantaneous; half a dozen channels can reach me, most of them coming right to my hip pocket. Friends live-blog football games on Twitter or Facebook, sharing their every cheer and groan with the rest of the fans in the city and in the world. We drop clever remarks into other friends' feeds and each Like or RT both confirms our wit and connects us the way only shared humor or subversion can. Is that so bad?

Cast back in the other direction, before phones and phone books and answering machines, back when we lived more on Pastoral Time and less on Industrial Time. Pa would go to town; maybe be'd be back in two days, maybe three; you'd know when you knew. Junior would head cross-country; maybe you'd hear from him in a month, maybe in a year, maybe never again. Communication was slower and more sporadic. Was that better? Was the long-distance call too connected?

Maybe now we're on Information Time and this is just a natural progression. Maybe the feeling some of us have that this is all just too much stems from the same unfamiliarity that caused our parents to shout whenever on a long-distance call. Maybe the silliness that accompanies so much activity on social media stems from the same fascination with the new that made us think for a few years that elaborate, comical answering machines messages were a good idea. Maybe I just need to think about it a bit more.

Now I think I'll put this phone book into the garba -- excuse me, into the recycling.

Just another pic dump

So, I know it's kinda cheating and not exactly "long-form," but these photos have been kicking around my computer for a while and lumping them all together seems to be a better idea than dribbling them out. Anyway, here they are.

This is picture of the best idea I ever had back when I was a dean. Not the packing peanuts, that was Maurice Laverne Zweigle in 1960. I mean hiring Alex as the (de facto if not ex officio) lead in the instructional science labs at my college. She is smart, thorough, dedicated, endlessly innovative, and in this picture totally adorable. The lab techs at Cascadia are the best in the business and Alex is a gem.

You had one job...



Seattle formal wear: how many flannel shirts are at the typical restaurant table where you live?



I saw this hanging at Sea-Tac, and all I could think of was this.



That backwards __15cl on the wine glass there caused a bit of consternation. Two questions were raised: Is 15 centiliters (a little over 5 ounces) a decent pour for a classy place? and Is putting a pour line on the glass a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? I'm the guy who still drinks Two-buck Chuck out of a tumbler and likes it, so I didn't have much to offer, except another question: How do you know it's really 15 cl?

Precisely!

Last of the break

So, normally this might just be a Facebook album, but in consideration of the current Month of the Month initiative, I am turning it into a blog post. As an additional part of my re-negotiation with social media, I have set up an RSS feed for my Facebook notifications: they will come to my Feedly, like the blogs I read, instead of my having to visit Facebookland. We'll see how that works.

So here's the last photographic bits and bobs from the California trip.

Embrace The Light

I tried to do a forced-perspective Coco-grabbing-the-sun thing on Venice Beach... not entirely successful.

Macho Man

This reminded me of one friend in particular...  let's see if he'll read this. This item was actually one of the more tasteful examples of T-short art available on the Venice boardwalk.

His Beak Can Hold More Than His Belly Can

This pelican was hanging out on the roof of the shops at the Redondo Beach Pier while we were having an ice cream cone. Man, they are way bigger than Green Lake herons. I was surprised the photo came out so well.

It Hit The Spot

Old-school vegetarian goodness - this place was awesome. Apparently it's been going strong for 38 years - through the evolution from the days it was called health food to just vegetarian. Everything we had was fantastic. It's enough to make me want to move to L.A. (as if the sun and the warmth and the sea and the sand weren't enough).

Month of the Month Club: January

So, as I recalled yesterday, I am not in the habit of making new year's resolutions in any traditional sense. But, as anyone who has followed WARMER and Around Walaka in Eighty Days knows, I do like me a Structured Self-Improvement Plan. That's Thread One of the current Big Idea.

Thread Two is a growing sensitivity on my part to the half-life of enterprises that I engage in. Specifically, this awareness came from thinking critically about tabletop RPG campaigns (like Dungeons & Dragons) that I have been involved with. I have become persuaded that open-ended or extremely long-term commitments are less successful than mid-length arrangements: those long enough to develop depth and breadth, but built with a specific end-date and exit plan. It seems to me that these shorter agreements are more likely to avoid the obligation fatigue that sets in when players' circumstances or interest have changed but their social commitment is ongoing. I think the same sort of principle applies to personal endeavors; saying I will commit to do X forever can be foredoomed, having built-in land mines of obligation fatigue.

Thread Two informs Thread One and leads us to the idea of short-term commitments rather than absolute resolutions. Of course, if within the the short-term program an activity or disposition becomes hexis, that is all to the good. In the meantime, we are more freed to engage robustly for the specific duration of the activity. Hence, the Month of the Month Club. I am going to take one project or practice to concentrate on each month this year. The notion is that focusing on one primary objective for 30 days (give or take) may be be more illuminating and ultimately more productive than attempting to hold onto a whole string of initiatives simultaneously.

The January Month of the Month Club Selection: Social Media. I need to re-adjust my relationship with social media. It's been just shy of ten years since my first-ever blog post and just over seven years since I showed up on Facebook (I think Carole Vacher was my first "friend"?). Besides these, I have got all sorts of channels through which I can express myself and keep up with people I care about and get the news and stay on top of geek culture and do all sorts of things. I just need to figure out how and how much and when to do all this.

I like to follow my tribe, but I want to avoid the time-sink that is Facebook. Heck, I'd like to avoid FB altogether, but so many of my peeps are on it that dropping out would mean a big loss of connection. (Unless I can somehow get them all to move to Twitter.) I also want to continue to develop my online platform and focus on what I call long-form blogging (like this post) rather than brief updates.

Besides the give and take, there's a real behavioral aspect. My days usually start with me at the computer: checking Facebook, reading blogs, catching up on the news while I have my coffee. I need to get back to early morning exercises and walking, and that's a habit that may need to be broken. Where do I slot my onlining into my day? There's an appeal to being totally connected all the time - feeling like I'm living in a Star Trek future with my smartphone - but there's a downside to it, of course.

I know I am not alone in considering this issue; just recently my RL friend Elinor Appel announced that she was taking a Facebook Break, and there's an article like this one every so often. But it's not just Facebook; I'd like to try to make more order of how I get my news (since all me news comes from the Internet) and get back to "real" blogging more frequently. I have recently been exposed to the Federated Wiki concept by my buddy, e-maven Alyson Indrunas; here's a recent article about it from NYU. How does all this fit together? I'm not exactly sure yet.

Well, I'll let you know in 30 days or so what I come up with. But it'll probably be through this blog... or someplace else.

Happy New Year!

New Year's Day 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009.

New Year's Day 2011.

New Year's Day 2012.

New Year's Time, 2013.

New Year's Day, 2014.

I think it's time to out this tradition to bed; we may have reached hexis. In place of reiteration, I offer this favorite: Woody Guthrie's resolutions from January 1, 1943.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Wake up and fight!