Movement at the station

Hey, How have you been?
It's been a while, right? So what have you been up to?
Things shifted for me, you know, and in the end it wasn't really working here anymore.
No biggie, people change. I've moved into a new pad though, and I'd love for you to come over sometime and hang.
We should totally catch up.
Anyways, hope you're well.

Confessional

Do you confess?
Does it ease your way?
Do echos of the words and thoughts and deeds linger at all or are you clear and clean?
Offload your worries -burden another's ear.

What does it do, this confession, that makes it enticing?
Why do we only talk about it in terms of guilt?

Listen. You'll hear it everywhere around you.
Is it a meme we're infected with right now?
Maybe we all*  subconsciously feel guilty?
(* Who are "we all" anyway - Australians? Westerners? I don't know what I really meant there.)

Italicise me

I have just remembered how excited I was to get a typewriter for one of my early teenage birthdays. It was sleek, it was modern, it would make all my writing seem implicitly better. And it did, but for one little thing... it could not do italics.  Oh how we take the simplest formatting for granted these days! You want italicised type? BANG There it is! Howabout bold or underline? BANG BANG you got it!

In the early days of my typewriter and privately cherished dream of being a journalist (the only type of writer I thought was allowed in Queensland) twas not so easy. Underline could be achieved by the heavy manual process of retyping over the same line - wonky as it was you could get it done but that was the full extent of formatting options. Even creating an exclamation point required the delicate positioning of  a period and the straight-up apostrophe (which, by the way, worked ok in my modern machine's san serif typeface, but looked bodgy as all get-out on the older machines with ther serif fonts). You had to kindof squint to make it look like an exclamation mark, the two objects barely nodded to each other on the page. It was tedious, and yet one persevered - I had no editor to teach me markups and no typesetters fixing my typos (the source of the phrase of course, being 'typographical error' which I've seen rendered recently as 'fat finger entry'. Look, there's that straight up apostrophe masquerading as quotation marks or inverted commas. But I digress.).

I saw a posh typewriter once - it had a duo tone ribbon (black AND red!) for the accounts so the all important debts could get their visual importance. Then of course electric typewriters started to come in with their crazy spinning balls of decadent font formatting availability. I wasn't sure about those vast, lumbering and even noisier electronic beasts, and for all the wrong reasons, my gut instinct was right because hard on their heels came the Apple 2e. Oh and do you remember that amazing Orwellian ad? It was exciting and bewildering and waaaaaaaaaaaay too expensive and you couldn't do much on it, really, could you?

I kept holding out. The typewriter saw me through a lot of assignments and in senior year the school even had some computers which we were allowed to put our yearbook together on. It was then that I got that all-important  first taste of rework and frustration that only a computer can deliver (thus preparing me me for a lifetime in cubicles swatting ineffectively at computer monitors). Leading, inexorably, to where we are today, endlessly writing and reading on screens and barely ever handling paper. Just for fun, you can translate any text you find into a completely different language - I couldn't have ever imagined that. It took me four years of diligent study to be absolutely useless at reading, writing and speaking German, or 'Deutsch' as native speakers might prefer it. Which made any German produced on my typewriter equally useless. Let alone the formatting issues of all those exotic letters.

Anyway, later when you're tweeting or texting or emailing or blogging or tagging or sharing or pinning, have a little smile to yourself and enjoy all the formatting options we can enjoy, and all of them without tiny little carved letters or manual arms or even ink. How clean we are, how modern, how very very lucky.

Are you docile enough to slip through the surveillance?

I did think of something interesting to share, but I forgot to bring my brain with me. Thankfully, Club Orlov has posted a fairly extenisve rant I think is worth sharing, so we'll go with that. He doesn't normally just free-form like this, and you can either read it for the content or just marvel at the flow and dance of the prose.

It is a bit darker than I had planned on being today, not wanting to follow-up the last post with anything dire. i'm pretty sure I had been going to talk about how nice pets are, or something equally docile (I'm also cautious about assuming that viewers are readers and readers are returners).
Instead I'm making sure I'm on any general watch-list that might be forming in some software somewhere, and now maybe you are too.

Enter Dimitri:
"People now tend to communicate via cell phone voice calls, text messages, emails, posts to Facebook and tweets, all of which are digital data, and all of which are saved. Relationships between people can be determined by looking at their Facebook profile, their email contacts, and their cell phone contacts. If your phone is GPS-enabled, your position can be tracked very precisely; if it isn't, your position can still be determined fairly accurately and tracked once your phone connects to a few different cell phone towers. All of this information can be continually monitored and analyzed without human intervention, raising red flags whenever some ominous pattern begins to emerge. We are not quite there yet, but at some point somebody might accidentally get blasted to bits by a drone strike while texting when a wrong T9 predictive text autocompletion triggers a particularly deadly keyword match."

and
"Thanks to vastly increased computational power, the emphasis is now shifting from enforcing the law to flagging as aberrant any sort of behavior that the system does not quite understand. That is, it is not looking for violations of specific laws, but for unusual patterns."

Thanks Dimitri.

I don’t know what that is, but I wish I hadn’t touched it

Curiosity has a funny way of rewarding action sometimes. Normally people only mention the highlights of curiosity – the exploration, the quirky discoveries, the interesting facts gleaned from odd experiences and strange people met along the way.

What doesn’t get mentioned so much is how hard it can be to live with. One gets bored with an otherwise perfectly acceptable life if there is not at least a trickle of curiosity-worthy material. Being bored with one's life is a slow poison. It is an ally of depression and they are both distant cousins (in my case) to eating binges. Ah, potatoes.

But I digress.

The main difficulty I find in this yearning to know about things, is that although it is easy enough to find out, it is then very very hard to keep quiet about the picture eventually drawn by all these points of data. Generally other people are not interested or they would have already googled it for themselves. Take as an example the methane plumes in the Arctic that are in the news this month. That sounds interesting doesn't it? Sounds also a bit like bad news too - isn't methane a greenhouse gas? Yup, twenty times more so than carbon dioxide. Oh shitbags. What will that mean for sea levels and polar bears and weather weirding??  Well probably a lot but no-one has a guaranteed divination method for anything other than "maybe this, maybe that" (all of which are sobering enough). Still, at last we're having the conversation.

Oh no. Wait. We're not are we?
New Zealand might be.

Maybe it is because we live so far away. If we lived closer we would care.

Oh wait, the Earth is a globe, all that water up the top is connected to all our water down below....

See what happens? One question leads to another. And thence to another and so on until my mind if full and I spin out of my chair and trip over my feet falling into fevered-dream sleep. Perhaps I exaggerate that loop a little for narrative tension, but you get my point.

Lots of data. Lots of consequences. Not a lot of ideas about what to do with this knowledge or (one step further) what to do in response (well actually the established ideas all involve individuals using and consuming less, and no-one wants to be the first to blink). Instead our news is filled with predicable politically flavoured blandals (like scandals only really really bland) and circus gossip.

This isn't the first topic this little pattern has repeated itself on either.  You'd think I would resist the urge to scratch the curiosity itch. I've tried. It doesn't work.

Curiosity killed the cat but a life unqueried is unlivable.



 

Wilbur's worries

Today I chipped in $25 USD towards Patricia in the Philippines for feed for her pigs.

I don't think too closely about the conditions Patricia's pigs might be kept in, and I know full-well what their early and inevitable end will be, but that's my problem, not hers. She's trying to feed a family and keep body and soul together. The fact that my world view was deeply effected by Charlotte's Web is yet another of my first world affectations and luxuries. Some of the people who loan money through Kiva have complicated and detailed moral guidelines about their loaning philosophy. I just want to help people (it turns out that I favour loaning to women, that wasn't a deliberate thing initially).

Patricia looked tired and a little bit sad in her photo. She was a little bit out of focus and is a bit thin. She really looked like she could do with a hand. Plus pigs, although smart and often interesting companions, really do have stinky stinky poo. If you're choosing to farm pigs, you're automatically and obviously short on options. Really. Nearly anything else is better from a day-to-day operational stink factor.

I was reading someone clever the other day (maybe it was Chris Guillebeau, but if it wasn't, well, he is clever so check him out anyway) who said that when in doubt about the next step to take for your own projects or in your own life, then help somebody and make something.
Help somebody and make something.
Genius.

So good luck Patricia, and somebody is going to get some woolly socks.

Emily Dickinson, "Forever — is composed of Nows —"

Forever – is composed of Nows –


‘Tis not a different time –

Except for Infiniteness –

And Latitude of Home –



From this – experienced Here –

Remove the Dates – to These –

Let Months dissolve in further Months –

And Years – exhale in Years –



Without Debate – or Pause –

Or Celebrated Days –

No different Our Years would be

From Anno Dominies –



- Emily Dickinson, "Forever — is composed of Nows —"