« January 2002 | Main | March 2002 »
February 28, 2002
Jesus Christ, this is news?!
I can't believe this story on AOL's news ticker. Yes, Nixon wanted to nuke North Vietnam, but this isn't "news" -- I sat in the Hampshire dining commons four years ago and listened to Daniel Ellsberg tell us the exact same thing; it's not new, it's not a revelation at all. If that's news, the next time I pitch a story about the Trail of Tears, the New York Post had damned well better run it in big block letters on their front page.
The way the rest of the article goes is fscking berserk. Nixon planned to nuke Vietnam. He said he didn't care about civilians there. He observed that pandas don't know how to mate unless they watch other pandas doing it. Then he called Martha Mitchell "sick." The writer observes that the Watergate tapes were full of holes and hard to hear. Nixon inquired about George Wallace's health after he was shot. "We can't lose 50,000 Americans and lose this war,'' he told Bob Hope. The narrative is less coherent than your average music video, and I mean the weird kind of music video which has nothing to do with the lyrics.
The lede here, buried in the fourth-to-last paragraph, is that Nixon made some "outlandish remarks" on tape. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: there are some real fscking deadbeats on the AP payroll. To read this, you'd have no idea whatsoever that Watergate changed politics as we knew it in the US. There's no reason to even run this as a historical-interest piece. The remarks are barely "outlandish." Nixon was actually prepared to use nukes in Vietnam; if I recall correctly he talked with Kissinger about it on something like fourteen occasions. That's not outlandish; that's a very real and very threatening diplomatic calculation. Prove to me that Nixon suggested he and Pat should teach the pandas how to mate. Then I'll buy outlandish.
Meanwhile, Reuters reports that some 35,000 cases of cancer around the United States were caused by Cold War atomic testing, and that's far beyond ground zero in Nevada. A friend sent the article to me under the subject line "crimes against humanity." I'd like to see the data backing it up, because I can't help but think heavy pockets of fallout in Iowa and Tennessee might indicate something else going on there, but still, it's chilling to think about.
I've been frightened of nukes ever since I was really small. Lately I've thought at least once a day that our lack of collective intelligence and memory has already doomed us, and there's no getting out of it.
Posted by me at 8:42 PM | Comments (0)
White Collar Crimes
My hands are starting to ache and lose their strength from typing all the time.
gotta be nicer to them.
Doctor again today, first time in over a year. I had a list of complaints. My skin is developing scaly patches at my hips and shoulders; my heart periodically takes big gulps of whatever it’s swimming in and frightens me; I have back pain like someone hit me between the shoulders with a mallet. I didn’t tell him about my hands. I didn’t want to sound like a hypochondriac.
He showed me how to do exercises for my back, and then he sat down and wrote me out a series of prescriptions so long it was almost comical: muscle relaxant, painkiller, EKG, echocardiogram, bloodwork to follow up on the discovery last year that I was anemic, physical therapy. I was glad I finally have health insurance again. I wondered what he’d get out of the deal. The faces of my very good and earnest friends who are going through med school right now came to my mind.
He asked me if I was feeling any stress. Kind of a stupid question to ask anyone these days. He raised his pen over his prescription pad again. I said not really.
The URL will not be ready for the launch of our website tomorrow at work, which means the press release we’re sending out tonight will be wrong. I take the blame, because it was me who panicked thinking nobody was going to do it on Tuesday, and re-assigned it to someone we had already agreed wasn’t going to do it.
It’s like every party I throw: I bollux the invitations, three people show up, and none of them know each other and it’s awkward. I thought I was improving at this because of the event coordination practice I’m getting. The website is not done; viewed from last Friday it appeared to be on the edge of completion, but it’s clear now it’s going to go on for another couple of weeks.
So is the article I’m writing about AmeriCorps. I told the editor today I wouldn’t have time to rewrite it. She knows my boss is at my back when I say this, telling me she needs me to work extra hours, scoffing from a position of some authority at my editor’s methods of dealing with this piece. Still my editor says Listen, just write an outline, and I know she means Write the whole thing. If she doesn’t mean that, I’ll still do it anyway, even though the first two drafts didn’t satisfy her and I know she’s likely to undo all my work again.
I want this article to be mine. I don’t want to share a byline. I had some good research in it, enough to feel like this clip could be some kind of ticket someplace. They’ve changed the thrust of this article twice, and I’m starting to feel like all that research was for nothing. I don’t trust myself to do any more interviews. Those quotes felt right on while I was gathering them, and if they don’t amount to anything, how can I trust my instincts?
I have a student I’m helping in the Bronx. She is thirteen and writes poetry, and by my schedule at least that means she’s ahead of the curve. She doesn’t use standard English, mostly, but her prose is lucid and wild. It’s about the fickle attentions of boys, and questions about the purpose of her life, and darkness, which she’s not totally sure is OK. She’s at that age where socialization to literature has only gotten through enough to leak references into her writing, not to impose itself on her form. Her ear for it is keen. She can hear a thesis even if it’s buried a couple hundred yards under. Words stick to her like iron filings on a magnet.
She interrupts my points about the proper form for quotations to ask things like How old do you have to be to write a book? It’s not that simple, I have to tell her. I explain literary magazines and MFAs and workshop circuits, and suggest she think about being a teacher. I don’t want to be a teacher, she says. And she does that thing which terrifies me where she says she doesn’t want to go to college because she’s tired of math and science and all she wants to do is write.
I was talking with her and her friend the other day about their high school prospects. I pushed for Stuyvesant, because I don’t know much about schools in New York but I hear it’s respectable and I have a good friend, a seasoned leftist, who went there. Her friend bobbled her skinny legs and humphed. They give you too much work there, she says.
Nobody at my high school would ever have said anything like this. People might have thought it, but to say it out loud would be taken as a defect of character.
This is not the first time I’ve heard sentiments like this, though. I have a very smart friend who grew up in a part of rural Maine where the schools were obviously crummy. He could have gotten into a boarding school downstate, but his parents, a nurse and a farmer-turned-mailman, would have been sad to have their children be away for so long.
(I don’t think sad is the right word there, but I don’t really know the right one, either.)
When I was in high school there was a rule that teachers could assign you up to one hour of homework a night. It was issued for the sake of humaneness. The scale of my mind is tipped towards a certain kind of justice, so I did the math. Classes lasted fifty minutes. An hour of homework from each class would more than re-create the school day in the evening, keeping you solidly at work until ten o’clock if you started when the last bell rang, and that didn’t count the extracurriculars that were supposed to look so good on a college application. I complained. The teachers looked at me blankly. The students looked at me blankly. My mother shrugged, and my father frowned.
I skipped my first class when I was in college. I took a bus with a friend so we could get books from another college’s library for papers we were writing. Greed and a petty kind of satiety. That was the year I started to feel like I was sinking, and breathing water.
The rule in my house was you do your homework first, and then play. There wasn’t time to play after my homework. I learned to steal time from myself. I met other people who did this in college. We made a ritual out of procrastination. Tonight I’m stealing from the AmeriCorps article; there will be no draft tomorrow. I’m shooting myself in the leg; it may well mean less payment for this article, which already had a dwindling dollars-an-hour ratio.
It makes more sense to steal a little air by sleeping in and being late to work. Steal / From work / Steal, steal from work, my favorite protest chant goes through my head as I add another rubber band to the ball I’m making. Steals the drifting molecules of my carpals back from the keyboard, too. Cease / Production / Cease, cease production.
After work yesterday my boss was holding her breath like she wanted to say something about my performance. In the elevator she told me I wasn’t cut out to be an editor and suggested maybe she’ll just have me continue to coordinate our press clubs. I don’t want to be an editor, I said; I hated being the college newspaper editor and having to be the one who stayed up until dawn because I actually cared that there were commas missing. I don’t like to manage people, but I can’t find a stable writing job which doesn’t require I do so. I need practice, I told her.
I want to play to your skills, she said.
I liked my job when I started it, because I was on top of everything, and got to try everything. I caught things before my boss realized they were slipping off her to-do list. I didn’t mind doing overtime because it was important work. My boss praised me just about every day. I was at least A-, like in high school. I’d rather not be perfect, you know? It offends God.
I think about a horse I read about when I was little, who powered a mill by walking around and around on a track, attached to a big crank. When the horse got too old they put it out in a pasture, where it nearly died of depression. Instead, it started walking a circular path in the grass.
I am your horse, I think when the boss speaks to me sharply. I walk in a circle, but it is a damn perfect circle and I don’t stop. I wish you’d recognize how thin the grass is.
James wrote to me tonight saying his tango teacher had been encouraging him to relax his upper body. “relaxing has an immediate emotional payoff,” he wrote. “it's amazing.”
You’d think it was obvious, but it isn’t, to us. Is it right to send my student to Stuyvesant?
Posted by me at 1:14 AM | Comments (2)
February 27, 2002
Stuck Together Like A Ready-Made
LED posters. Sylvie alerted me to their existence. She's right -- they're tacky. I would recommend them to an updated Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, should one be produced. (Dad gave me the book upon my graduation from eighth grade; I don't think he had any idea what a seminal -- pardon me, germinal -- influence it would prove to be in my life. Since moving to New York and under the wing of Kim Edel and other self-styled defenders of the people, I've started thinking about how classist the book is. Still a hoot, though.)
The whole Rental Decorating site is rather strange. There's a certain home-improvement feel to it, but it's home improvement for people who are going to have to scrap it all and move in a few months, and know it. Bathroom fixtures and shelves are all mounted on suction cups. The water filtration systems are not the kind you install under your sink.
The rugs look like the kind they sell draped over cyclone fences by the freeway, and the bathroom accessories are all bland frosted plastic stuff of the sort you could easily pick up at K-Mart (well... if K-Mart wasn't a sinking ship). Who's their audience? College kids, sure (notice all the sheets are twin, extra-long), but going off campus is one of the great reliefs of college life, so why buy online?
One curious redeeming quality: the "Americana" LED posters all have to do with diners, not flags and soldiers and Norman fscking Rockwell.
Posted by me at 9:58 PM | Comments (0)
February 26, 2002
YOU SEEM TO BE HAVING AN ALLERGIC REACTION TO MANNA
Somehow I thought the market for stupid cartoons had dried up. I mean, before September 11th we had a nearly-inexhaustible reservoir of postmodern angst. I didn't think anyone was buying Family Circus-style comics for anything aside from camp value. But Reverend Fun claims to have been "too popular to remain on the Internet," and actually asked readers to buy the comic in book format.
OK, so that frame isn't so much stupid as it is personally offensive to me. This one is stupid. And don't you love how every "punchline" is delivered in cold unfeeling machine-type caps?
Posted by me at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)
February 25, 2002
I'm becoming the person my geek friends hate.
This morning Lee Spector, best-quality-finest-kind artificial intelligence professor at Hampshire, sent out a note requesting that alumns working in technology drop him a line. Apparently, the college wants to list its techie alumns on its website in order to convince the young people they are trying to lure into wasting four years that Hampshire is a fun place to study computer science. This will be one of the few accurate claims they make this year. (Hopefully, it won't be drowned out by spurious ones about the college's diversity, the favorable standing of its academics in comparison to the Ivy League, and its ownership of sheep that aren't dead.) Hampshire is doing an increasingly better job every year of letting its students participate in the running of its technological infrastructure; the program is well suited to the kind of autodidacts that the field turns out. Not to mention Lee, whom everyone raves about.
Annnnnyway, it occurred to me that I am actually working in technology -- I'm developing a database, managing the web design team, and I finally know what to do with switches and hubs, because I'm handling the office network. It gives me a kind of warm fuzzy feeling. I've been working with computers since I was seven, and I'm proud they're really starting to dance for me. It makes me feel closer to the world a lot of my programmer-friends inhabit.
But the warm fuzzies, alas, are short-lived, because the truth of the matter is I am becoming exactly the kind of person my geek friends hate.
I don't actually do any of the coding work. I'm not even writing any html. I'm violating just about every tenet of the Hacker Ethic, bossing these guys around by dint of position, not skill. I don't know how you'd set up any of the things I'm asking our consultants to do. Worse yet, I know just enough jargon to be dangerous. I'm throwing around phrases like "dynamic" and "spoofing," and I'm not totally sure I know what they mean. I know exactly what I want, but I explain it like I just learned English.
I am the kind of person Scott Adams draws with a blank look in his eyes and his arms stretched out in front of him.
When Kellan and Evan were working at their startup, they used to complain about people like me. They used to play nasty jokes on people like me, putting little easter eggs in a page that would make all the icons on a page float around the screen when the CEO tried to click them.
Alack! I am the kind of person on whom Eric Raymond declared jihad! I am the anti-geek! I have joined the ranks of the administorturers, that damnéd race of no personal aptitude bent on squashing the fruits of others' labor under the jackboot of functionality!
* * *
What with the recent blog travails, my servers floating around like ice in a Chickaloon thaw, and Microsoft finding unprecedented ways to reduce my productivity at work (a new cartoon dog prompts me to put on my headset and adjust my speech preferences every time I open a program, then expends precious RAM doing lord-knows-what, probably sending all of my personal data to Microsoft's "marketing associates"), I'm beginning to feel like I'm actually losing tech skills.
I hate to say it, guys, but I think it's time to shed this little vestigial tail. Computers are great and all, but I don't like being This Person, the Scott Adams person with the pointy hair, and I think it's all I'd ever be. Once the tech projects let up a little at work, I'm handing them off to someone else. It's time for me to stop pretending I'm ever going to seriously code. Or make the kind of money you do.
Posted by me at 9:03 PM | Comments (5)
February 20, 2002
Sucks To Be You, Andrews!
So yesterday James asks me why my blog is blue and white... knowing full well it wasn't, I duly freaked out. Turns out all my files were moved to yada, and thus into the maw of my formerly dormant Moveable Type blog.
So here we are, in a sterile layout I won't stick with if I can help it, subject to the whims of a system which still gives me an error message every time I post. sordid, no? but it has such sexy archive systems I can't resist. ah, the long, dragging tail of the codependent relationship. all the screeds in the world won't guarantee you get out of it.
Posted by me at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)
Object Lessons
The Story Of My Knife
My knife is red with a cross-and-shield logo that serves as a switch for a tiny red light. It has the usual complement of blades, plus a pen which, combined with the light, makes it so you can write in the dark. It's an urban version of your usual Swiss Army knife. Sometimes I use it to cut fruit. It comes in very handy. My father gave it to me for Christmas some years back.
My knife was hiding. It was in the lower corner of my shoulder bag, buried under all the things I was taking home for the holidays. I felt for it before I checked my bags; didn't feel it; presumed it wasn't there. Sneaky little thing.
At the metal detector, they asked to search my bag. The day before, a passenger had tried to ignite explosives in his shoes, so their vigilance was unsurprising. But the woman said, I don't need to search your whole bag. We see you have a knife in there; could you take it out?
We're going to have to confiscate that, she said. Can't it go in my other bag? I asked. No, she said; it's already been checked. Can I mail it home? No, she said; there are no mailboxes left in this airport.
It was the end of a long, frustrating day. There was some rational argument that would get my knife home with me, but the only thing that occurred to me was It's my knife; it belongs to me.
Rationality doesn't enter the picture. Later that week at the Norton Simon, a small museum in Pasadena, a teenage girl in a uniform asked to check my bags. She found the knife. You'll have to put this in your car, she said. Can't I leave it with you? I asked. No.
I put the knife in the car, and asked her, What are you worried about? The museum is a low-slung building at some remove from the crotch of two freeways, and probably not a major terrorist target.
We're worried that you would damage the art, she said, and then, We don't want anything bad to happen.
When they process you into jail, they take all sorts of things from you so you can't hurt anyone. Hair ornaments. Shoelaces. It takes some creativity to come up with a way you could hurt yourself with some of the things they take.
My knife was with me when I was jailed for "parading without a permit" a few years ago at a protest. The woman processing me in asked if I had any weapons. I gave up the knife so as not to get in trouble. Other than that, I said, no weapons.
She found two shards of lavender-colored glass in my pocket as she patted me down. What's this? she asked, as if I was trying to trick her. Art, I said. Their color had caught my eye. I was going to use them to make a necklace.
* * *
A soldier carring an automatic weapon as long as his torso came over when I started crying at the metal detector. Look, he said, go back to the ticketing counter. They'll put it in an envelope and check it with the luggage.
They did. The next time through the detector everything went fine. They send it? asked the soldier. You should tell people they have that option before you confiscate something, I said. It's my knife, I have a right to carry it. Don't you care about your constitutional rights?
We don't have to tell you anything, said the soldier, leaning back into his rifle.
Paul Simon cannot have known what he meant when he wrote,
Anger and no one can feel it
Slides though the metal detector...
Tolkien Wasn't Kidding
I went back to Aftaschoo the other day to talk to a few former students. I got there around the time parents were arriving to pick their kids up, with the result that most of my interactions with the kids were like being in a receiving line:
Shaliek: Hi Miss Gillian.
Me: Hi Shaliek!
Shaliek: Are you coming back?
Me: Just to visit. You still dancing?
Shaliek: Whaaat?
Me: Weren't you doing some thing where you were dancing?
Shaliek: Noooo. I was -- what was I doing? Oh yeah, I was cooking.
Me: Hey Zayd!
Zayd (with his usual, almost-autistic reserve): Hey.
Me: Still drawing whales?
Zayd: Yeah. Are you coming back?
Me: No, I have another job now.
Ashley: Hi Miss Andrews!
Me: Hey Ashley!
Ashley: Are you coming back to be our teacher?
Me: Just to visit. Hi Jonathan!
Jonathan: Miss Andrews! Are you coming back?
Jonathan and Ashley were with a woman I remembered well, who might have been his mother, or just their babysitter; I was never sure. She was short, heavyset, brown-skinned, and had a benevolent, uneven smile. She was prompting Jonathan in Spanish to ask me whether I was coming back again. I have a present for you, he said. I told him I'd let the director know when I was coming back. They all seemed a little flustered by this response, and asked a few more times when I would return. Then the woman took my hand, and slipped a ring onto my finger.
I tried to protest, but she wouldn't hear of it. The kids tried to explain what was going on. It's gold, said Jonathan. No, said Ashley, it's -- she searched for a word -- white.
Plata, I said. The ring looked silver, with a simple, slightly uneven row of clear stones. No, said Ashley. White gold.
The woman smiled her breathtaking, devastated smile at me again. I noticed she had two handfuls of gold rings herself. I remembered a friend had told me recently about an academic article they'd read recently which outlined how people in impoverished communities, bereft of banks in their neighborhoods, bought jewelry instead of opening savings accounts. Need cash? Pawn a ring.
I felt like I was stealing. Still she wouldn't take it back. This is not the first time the reward for teaching has felt dizzily unsuited to the task. The first time I gave up tutoring was in seventh grade, when a child I was helping in an afterschool program pushed me to give him the answers, claiming his father was waiting outside and he had to leave. He waffled and complained until I gave in, then grabbed my hand, curled a palmful of sunflower seeds into it, and ran out the door. It was so unlike the private school environment I was used to that I figured I was useless, and gave the tutoring program up.
This time I had the small comfort of knowing I had done a good job with her children. Ashley and especially Jonathan made it easy; both of them were smart, did their homework willingly and with great concentration.
I continue to wear the ring on the finger where she put it. At work the other day Dania noticed. You didn't get married over the weekend, did you?, she asked. No, I said. I was wearing it because I figured guys on the subway would stop harassing me. Aha, she said, and flashed a ring she was wearing for the same purpose.
one ring to bind her. one ring to scare them off.
Posted by me at 11:32 PM | Comments (0)
From The Vaults: The Heart's Dandelions
(This has another part somewhere. Check the archives for the bit about opals.)
My roommate came back from vacation outraged about a friend of hers, a boy who had been to her parents' at Thanksgiving and had apparently been flirting with two of her other friends... had actually gone so far, in fact, as to try to hold one's hand as he was already holding the other's, a vignette she repeatedly brought up. He had apparently already slept with one, under her roof. She seemed to think this was disrespectful.
It sounded familiar.
She has told the boy he is "no longer welcome in her house," in those terms. I could sympathize with her one the hand-holding thing, but I had to work to muster even a little tepid agreement about the sleeping together at her house thing. Once I heard her repeat the story a few times it became clear that this, not the bigamous hand-holding, is what she was worried about...
Her and the shit [a certain high-powered friend of mine] have been throwing up lately -- when I said "standards" to this friend, "high standards," she agreed that yes, she did have high standards, and made no bones about the fact that she wasn't about to give them up. She anxiously re-arranged her tofu on her plate, drowning piece after piece in a bowl of murky brown sauce like so many unwanted kittens.
I don't know if it occurs to her that it goes both ways. I don't mean to say that anyone would have standards too high to go out with her. I was trying hard not to tell her that she was looking for a god.
I miss Lauren. I miss the Lauren I have a picture of, in her pajamas and bare feet standing outside the mod with a cigarette in one hand and a seedy dandelion in the other, and her tangled hair spilling over the phone on her shoulder. Even all rumpled-faced as she looked, she still radiated the most holy sex appeal. Imperfection was her best medium, and I loved her for that. She got neurotic and twitchy at times, sure, and uncomfortable with the messes she made of her academics and emotions, but she was never one to hold back on some revolting fact about her body odor or impulses regardless.
I miss being around people who wholeheartedly embrace being human, even its ugly sides. My mother is one, usually. Evan, I think, is another, with his almost autistic lack of attention to other's perceptions of his cross-dressing and sleep habits and mold cultivation. A few of my aunts also hold my respect along these lines, and I should say President Clinton does too. Or at least, that's what I would guess from the way he comes at his most apologetic speeches. How nice to have a president who grew more and more human as I myself began to realize I couldn't live up to my ideals.
Posted by me at 11:22 PM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2002
Purge Cache
It has been one month since I posted anything to this site. One month. Exactly. Unless I'm mistaken this is the longest I've gone without writing. Combined with the scanty month before, I'm totally out of the habit.
To celebrate my one-month anniversary, I'm throwing a temper tantrum. There's been no progress on getting Blogger to work with the server. I checked out other weblog software -- Greymatter wouldn't be compatible; Moveable Type, turgid with all sorts of luscious, promising-looking features, was completely uninstallable if you aren't one of these people who go to sleep every night in the bowels of your own server, and it promised to be just as frustrating to use in the long run.
James tried to help, and Kellan kept at it very patiently, despite my tendency to lash out at him when the software wasn't working, but with every single step I took towards getting a blog up online I had to go beg help from one of them. I was even desperate enough to fall for the seductive pluckiness of Glyph's claim he could whip me up some kind of blog software within weeks. (Why do I rely on this guy when I know d^mn well he's the same one who used to leave me stranded waiting for him at Port Authority for hours at a time?)
Part of the problem here is that sacco, the server the site has been on for most of its life, has been getting the same kind of one-eared attention from the geeks who run it that I've been getting from them and all my other geek friends for the past seven years. I'm sure I'm not the only one out there who's gotten this treatment; you know how it is: you get this image of the blue light of the screen reflecting off your friend's glasses and the slack line of their jaw -- either because you're standing next to them and can see this firsthand, or you're extrapolating as you talk them over IRC, because you, yourself, are doing the exact same thing, plus or minus some absentminded drool -- and you don't realize it at first, but it soon becomes clear in the long pauses and half-assed quality of answers that you're getting about 20% of an attentiveness that is otherwise devoted to an artcle on Wired, a forward from A-Infos, a game of Minesweeper, or a string of Perl. More likely, all four.
At first I thought it was me, that I was just being a nag and people were trying to tune me out. Now I think we're all just trying to do too much at the same time.
Time was leaking away; sacco was slowly descending into obsolescence. I lost email capacity about last June. I didn't notice. I was busy at writing camp. I came back, was using other people's PCs; started using the graphic interface for my Hampshire email and fell out of touch with the shell; FTP went out of style and I lost access to a lot of my files because I didn't realize there was a secure alternative.
There is a dangerous moment when you're using any computer where the sum of your obsolescences reach a tipping point. I remember when this happened on my Mac Performa. One morning I woke up and couldn't access anything on the web. None of the software I could download was going to work with my browser. I had stopped stealing copies of new OSes round about 7.5.1, and now that I was out of college, getting a bootleg disc was going to be hard. I ended up buying a new computer, my current iMac, a year and a half ago.
Now I'm facing a more personal obsolescence. I don't know how to make a Mac or UNIX system do half the things I used to be able to. Systems have changes, and I'm getting rusty in a number of areas. I wasn't close enough to my geeks to get a heads up on the new file transfer software, SCP, and so I didn't learn to use it until a few weeks ago. I really need to adopt that newfangled OSX, and that promises to set me back quite a few years.
This is not the same kind of obsolescence you hear about people coming to in middle age. It will strike us multiple times, sometimes a couple of years in a row, and it has nothing to do with age, just with the ferocity of our efforts to keep abreast. I have no idea how many times I'll hit it before I reach 30.
I feel like placing the blame (the temper tantrum's still goin' on, everyone's invited!) on software that feels like it has to be "helpful." Moveable Type is "helpful:" it gives you all sorts of features, features which in my experience add up to a bunch of demands for widgetty software plugins I didn't know anything about and options which conflicted with each other. Microsoft Word is also very "helpful." For example:
Me: Copy this piece of text, please, Word.
Word: OOH, let me FORMAT that for you! I will keep some of the formatting but don't you think it would be better if this was in THREE MISMATCHED FONTS with LOTS OF INDENTS YOU CAN'T CHANGE, and maybe in RED? Such POWER I have over your documents!!! Watch as I send a visitation of HORRIBLE LEERING SPECTER OF A PAPERCLIP to provide unhelpful commentary on your EVERY MOVE!
Me: [quits Word.]
OSX is "helpful," or helpful-looking, too. Everything slides and slithers and sashays around the screen as if it was mounted on hover-jets. Program icons bounce in the new "dock" at the bottom of the screen. I end up staring open-mouthed, wondering how much memory is wasted on these parlor tricks. (I think I can feel it. It's slower.) I guess someone decided that the old flash-opening windows put epileptics at risk, and that snaky was the wave of the future.
The thing about "helpful" software is it's not like vacuums, or T3fl0n, or microwaves -- inventions which held the promise of making work go faster with few immediate side effects (of course, we know better now about T3fl0n and microwaves -- but vacuums still seem to be problem-free, right? I like vacuums. So does Robert.) Counteracting the effects of overly-helpful software (damn you, paper clip!) wastes time. Unlearning old systems wastes time.
Even if newer OSes and software packages have a better learning curve, I wish someone would acknowledge that a lot of people have put a lot of effort into learning old systems, and that it will probably be a very long time before someone creates software which is so intuitive as to pose no effort to a new user. Maybe it makes sense to maintain old user interfaces. Change is getting in the way of my motherfsckin' work, you know what I'm sayin'? And OSX is motherfsckin' slow.
Where was I going with this... gadd^mn it, this is not the screed I intended to write -- Blogger, weblogs were my point, and that is this: Weblog software is also a lying appliance. Blogger promises all sorts of fancy automating devices which really aren't much of an improvement over hand-coding a template, slotting things into it, and periodically archiving your pages. Moveable Type promises some real improvements, but you really have to have some kind of sysadmin dark-arts on your side to make it work.
All of this comes back to why I am having a tantrum right now: I am in incredible physical pain. My computer is propped up on a really lovely ca. 1950s Finnish hardwood desk. I love the way it looks, but with the chair I'm using now I can't get my knees under the d^mned thing, so I'm straining my back leaning over my pretzeled-up body to get to the keyboard from two feet away.
Why'm I keeping this desk? Because I'm po', and dependent on the woman I'm housesitting for and her ancestral furnishings. I'm finding myself in a similar dependence on Blogger. It's not just that I liked how it worked, while it was working; I found I was unable to write when I wasn't using that little cramped entry window on the Blogger site. It was totally unhealthy; among other things, if you accidentally moved off that page, you were likely to lose everything you'd written. But my stubbornness about that interface, along with the searing pain in my back, has kept me from writing.
I'm tired of living in a borrowed house. I'm tired of being dependent on other people's software and disinterest in fixing said software. In fact, seeing how emotionally I'm reacting to subtle changes in user interface, I think maybe I'd best do what I can to wean myself off computers for a while.
Posted by me at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)