Category Archives: History

PAD 2/9/2013 – Childhood Revisited

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Sure, you turned out pretty good, but is there anything you wish had been different about your childhood? If you have kids, is there anything you wish were different for them?

Every time I think about this kind of question it brings up the tangled web of the consequences of living. Would you do anything over again? How could anyone answer this question honestly? Could you be anything other than what you are? I think, at least for me, the answer is no. Looking back on everything that I experienced, the good things, and the bad things, that all the things were needful. I love who I am and I don’t need someone outside of myself to remind me of that fact. I get a lot of flak for being who and what I am but I’m very fond of, and repeat to myself regularly one of the best quotes from Dr. Seuss. “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” and I try to live with this great piece of wisdom every day of my life. It’s a figurative life preserver that keeps me afloat when I’m beset by banal trolls who would rather I just be flat, plain, and featureless.

So, back to childhood. Everything that happened in your past all gets added up and results in what you are now. What kind of life would it be if I doubted myself now? It would be fake, and it would do a disservice to all the things that have come before. It would shame all the good things and it would render meaningless all the suffering that I endured. I refuse to accept either of those conditions so in a way, through my own convoluted logic I am who I am and I can’t be anything else. As if anyone could go back in time and change things, which you can’t, so it’s academic. This sort of thing, musing about changing your past is the height of uselessness. Pondering the impossible – and I would say changing your past is impossible, is a waste of effort, time, and thinking. For all the good that happened, I am happy for it. For all the bad that happened, I am happy for that as well. It’s only in enduring suffering and outlasting it that you defeat it and that singular win, defeating suffering, makes the rewards that much sweeter. So live in the now, bless and release the past, and try to do your best – because:

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.

 

 

PAD 2/13/13 – Shoulda Woulda Coulda

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“Tell us about something you know you should do . . . but don’t.”

Generally I don’t think I’ve allowed such a conflict to build up in my life. Things that one should do, at least for me, usually find their way to being done eventually. This is the entryway to guilt and regret and those two feelings, along with fear in general and hate specifically are admittedly worthless and stupid. If you identify things you should do, then you admit to not living your authentic life and then you have to think about why you don’t do those things. Most of what people think they should do is based on the expectations they have from other people. That it’s another’s will that is imposed on you to make you feel like somehow you are missing out or you are bad for behaving a certain way, doing or not doing a certain thing. I’ve wandered through that dark valley in the past and it didn’t do anything for me but leave me very sad and very upset with myself for allowing myself to be led so easily. I find the notion of should to be really bound up with external measures of my behavior and as such, I really reject those. Anyone who knows me knows that I can and often do say unexpected things and I sometimes say things that are blunt and brutally honest because they have to be said. Life isn’t worth living if you don’t have passion for it and if you spend your time fretting over questions of should, then you are spending too much of your time considering those external measures of your behavior and you are not living an authentic life. You are living a mime life based on the whims and guesswork of people who only like to watch you dance to their strings. They don’t care for you, not really, so should is stupid.

Do what you will and be happy in it. Hell is other people.

PAD 1/30/13 – Burning Down The House

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“Your home is on fire. Grab five items (assume all people and animals are safe). What did you grab?”

I would rescue these items from my house:

  • Important Documents Folder
  • Backpack of Data
  • Messenger Bag
  • Antiques
  • Family Photos

These are things that I cannot easily replace. Everything else would be a matter of homeowners insurance. While much of the things I would rescue, such as the Important Documents Folder may not be exactly irreplaceable it does hold some things that I have an emotional connection to, the real physical things that I have earned – like my High School Diploma and my Bachelors Diploma. I am sure I could get reproductions of both, but these are originals and they are important to me. Antiques may surprise people, that I have some which I do, and that they are on my list. Some things, even if they aren’t worth very much have an irrational value because they are physical threads leading backwards through time to people I never knew but revere because without them I would not exist. I list them as “antiques” because I do not want to cover what they are. They are important to me, and that’s good enough for me. I’ve taken the concepts of readiness that I did for my professional life at work and extended them to my home. There are some habits that I have like placing certain things in bags, like a backpack where all the hard drives are kept and my trusty Messenger Bag which stores the lightweight but vitally important objects in my life, like my Nook HD, my iPad, my Laptop, that sort of thing. Photos of family would be rescued as well. Again, almost everything can be reproduced but I am guilty of ascribing extended properties to physical objects in an irrational capacity. Photos are just chemical marks on paper, but these are of my loved ones, my family, and so they are more than the sum of their chemical marks, in many ways they carry a piece of that family member with the photograph. Looking at my family in photos brings their memories back and help me return a part of their existence to my life through the blessings of memory. Very much like how the Prophets discussed the flow of time to Benjamin Sisko on Deep Space Nine – “You exist here. Why?” and I like the idea of memory in this way, that the past, present, and future all exist at the same time. Our consciousness and bodies move forward in time, but parts of us exist in other times and we can access those by the act of remembering. That the sheer act of remembering in a way helps us to return to when our loved ones existed with us and so, they can again, in a fashion.

If people are safe, and my pets are safe, and these objects are safe then the rest can burn. I think that over time this list will get smaller as some of these objects are stored in places where disaster cannot strike like safety deposit boxes and the like. More and more of life, I think, will end up being digital and stored on the cloud – so much of the material that is digital becomes proofed against loss, against burning, against flooding, against everything.

Administrator’s Eyes

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Working in IT in Higher Education for the past 14 years has taught me many key survival tactics. Life in Higher Education is special because of the unique specialness of the needs that many of my coworkers have. I don’t want to call anything specific out, I’m not here to hurt anyones feelings.

One of the first things you learn is that no matter what the patina is that people do their level best to project, right underneath it is some of the most kinky, clever, sneaky freaks you will ever meet. I hate to be picky but there is quite literally a 10 out of 10 chance that the truly kinky will be the boys. Perhaps this is higher education, perhaps not, but gentlemen, you are filthy. Damn.

When I started working in my profession I made some basic decisions which have saved my bacon more times than I care to even contemplate. First and foremost of those is cultivating “Administrator’s Eyes” which is the very state that I enter into when I help anyone with their technology. I started it as a habit and now it’s become a perception-altering meditative practice, nearly. When I am helping a client (I don’t call them customers, that’s inappropriate, they are clients) and I am sitting down where they normally sit I will focus my entire attention on the parts of the screen that contain only those pieces that enable me to render assistance. I do not let my eyes wander. It’s not out of some lofty sense of propriety that I picked up over time but more specifically battle-earned knowledge. I cannot, I will not handle the kinky freakish things that my fellow human beings get themselves into. Often times people will say “Oh, certainly nobody does that in a professional setting!” and I point them to teenage boys that spend way too much time in the bathroom with flimsy Scientific American magazines that appear to be on their last legs to keep their covers from falling off… these boys grew up into men and being a boy who grew up to be a man, I can say with authority that the only thing that honestly changed was that our hair started to thin or fall out.

It’s a habit that I recommend every IT professional adopt. It saves you from social embarrassment, even by proxy, and at the core of it stands this central question which each one of us in the IT field must eventually answer: “Can you handle the answers?” This is the first thing I consider before I even allow the questions to occur to me. Almost always the answer is no. A huge orchestra-blaring no. I can’t handle knowing anything. I can’t handle knowing usernames, passwords, websites, or anything at all beyond the thin border of a web browser. It’s not that knowing would endanger my professional life, but it would change my relationship with my clients and I simply cannot risk that. I have relationships that I must preserve, beyond everything else. I cannot perceive porn webpages, anything blah-Tube, even if it’s just online banking, trips to Amazon.com, or the stray Solitaire game being played. I have a deeply rooted and vested interest in knowing as little about my clients as I can manage beyond their presentation to me in the professional setting at work. It really is self-preservation. I do not perceive anything that would naturally be upsetting to anyone else so that the material in question does not change the fundamental relationship between IT professional and client. I suppose in a way, medical doctors take a “Do No Harm” oath, and I suppose I am advocating for IT professionals to take a similar oath “Do Not See”. Help with getting whatever it is up and working properly with sample data or bogus Lorem Ipsum if you can manage it, and even if you can’t and you have to look directly at the entire screen, once you engage the habit of “Do Not See” hard enough you might be able to pull off maintaining this state of blissful ignorance the entire way through your day.

This is something I encourage in all my assistants and people who work with me on IT tasks. I try to impress upon them that their coworkers may not be as pure as the driven snow and that through the adoption of Administrator’s Eyes they can learn a way to avoid the awkwardness that comes when you accidentally stumble onto a terabyte of stored data that people ought to keep at home, under a blanket, probably with a hot shower at the ready. It saves you from ever having to ask yourself that most torturous question “Can you handle the answers?” because I know I cannot. Therefore not only do I not ask the questions, but I don’t even consciously perceive anything that would lead me down that dark alley.

If there are any IT admins that read my blog, what are your thoughts on Administrator’s Eyes? Do you agree or do you think differently? Please comment here or on Facebook, I would love to know, as long as you’ve washed your hands in hot soapy water for a count of twenty. 🙂

PAD 1/12/2013 – Inside vs. Outside

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“Run outside. Take a picture of the first thing you see. Run inside. Take a picture of the second thing you see. Write about the connection between these two random objects, people, or scenes.”

2013-01-30 10.02.022013-01-30 10.02.26

These two images are from my workaday world. On the left is the view out of my office window, as the weather is quite awful outside I chose not to just dash outside. The picture on the right is inside my office and features one of my favorite things on my desk, my very evocative Edison bulb desk lamp. It’s cold outside, the weather is just beginning to demonstrate how surprisingly variable it can be, thanks in no small part to climate change. It’s not that the world will actually warm up, although it very well might just do that very thing, I rather suspect we’ll see more variability in the weather patterns instead.

Cold and Hot, as well, perhaps even impersonal and inviting. Once you start spotting dualities they can sometimes just carry you off. It’s not that there are just a finite set of dualities either, and I’m sure including more pictures would just add to this particular sense of contrast that we see here. I don’t really find the outside to be that compelling except during the spring, or I should say the true spring and not the false springs that appear now midway through winter on accident. There is more stability and comfort in the Edison bulb. This simple and anachronistic bit of technology emits a very warm yellow glow that in the early mornings and late evenings gives my office a very subtle old-world atmosphere. I’ve written before about my affections for both the bleeding edge of technology and the anachronistic throwback technology of the deep past living contemporaneously together and I will always posit that the very old and the very new belong together and that there is wisdom in keeping things that are throwbacks around because you never know when something that has been well-tested may become all important when conditions change and the newest technology cannot cope with changing environments. The classic example i use is how an electromagnetic pulse could render all my bleeding edge technology useless but my Edison bulb and my mechanical hand-wound pocket watch will continue on. This mixing of the newest and oldest makes a lot of sense and speaks to infinite diversity in infinite combinations, something that everyone should take away from Star Trek if you are as earnest about that series as I am. That respecting diversity, even when it comes to levels of technology are vital for survival because you may not have the neat whiz-bang working all the time while the older bits of tech continue to chug along. I keep a fountain pen in my bag because I trust the classics more, as there are no moving parts to a fountain pen other than it’s ink. Older items, or items that harken back to the bygone days are also important to remind you that the world still has room for elegance and simplicity and that complexity, while dazzling isn’t the pinnacle of living.

This connection between the new and the old also is playing out in another part of my life, as I am using something very new, my Day One app,  to do something that at least speaks to the past, which is journaling. I write everything in the journal and then selectively share either on my blog or on social media, depending on the level of security and privacy that my writings require. I’ve discovered that over the past few years I’ve accidentally logged every day of my life in Twitter, at 140 characters at a time and including these bits in my Day One journal is cementing my past so that years from now I won’t have to ever wonder about what I’ve experienced and when it happened, there will be a log of it. I’ve found journaling to be a very mixed bag of motives, right now I feel like a digital squirrel bounding all over collecting and burying bits of my past in a safe place – but eventually I will browse this resource and think about what has happened to me and perhaps I’ll learn more about myself or at least remember more of what it was like to be me during that time in my life. On an expanded tangent I sometimes wish I could include journaled stories from my parents and their generation. The things they experienced and the feelings they felt, shared with the younger ones amongst us. I’m very enamored of the idea of learning this way, not from prepared texts that have been curated and vetted, but from personal experience with all its rich colors and opportunities for interpretation and even its foibles and pitfalls. Much of this resembles the StoryCorps project, where the stories of the past are recorded. This is a wonderful place to start browsing, if you are engaged with this idea, and I think the power of journaling speaks to this and maybe someday I’ll get enough bravery to publish all that I have written, maybe some of it will be useful to someone else in the future.

WOT: Matrim Cauthon’s Theme Song

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I wrote about this years ago when I first started reading Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series of books. One of the main characters of the story is Matrim Cauthon and he plays a central role throughout the entire story. I’m currently reading “Memory of Light” and just finished a rather well-written section early in this book featuring Mat.

That section got me to thinking about an old LiveJournal post I wrote all those years ago. Thanks to Spotify I can embed the music right in this post:


After reading the lyrics and thinking about Mat I really think this track from Coldplay has Mat nailed down pretty well. I thought everyone else might enjoy it as well.

PAD 1/8/2013 – Teachers

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“Tell us about a teacher who had a real impact on your life, either for the better or the worse. How is your life different today because of him or her?”

Mrs. Fitch. She taught high school chemistry at one of the high schools l attended. In fact I took New York Regents Chemistry class from her and I remember her fondly to this very day. She treated the kids with a no-nonsense style that I appreciated. She wasn’t alone, as she was the middle between biology and physics teachers who were also very memorable. The most entertaining thing I remember was when she used denatured alcohol to surprise a sleepy student. We all watched as she snuck up to him, prepared the surprise and then set it off. He never fell asleep again, at least during her class. As for what I learned? The material from the chemistry class is pretty much gone. If you don’t use a tool eventually it rusts, and for me, what I learned in high school, for the most part, has rusted away. I do remember some lessons, especially on significant figures when doing calculations and all the many botched experiments. Funny what stands out in your memory, but I distinctly remember hearing a story about how one student who I knew was tearing down an experiment and didn’t consider that a metal stand holding a bunsen burner rig may have had some residual heat stored in it’s stand-ring. I wasn’t there to witness it, but I heard that she grabbed the ring thoughtlessly and the metal wasn’t cool to the touch.

As it is, the town that high school served was wiped off the face of the map by a once-in-a-lifetime flood of the Susquehanna River. I don’t know if it still stands or if Mrs. Fitch is still alive. It’s been many years. If so, or if not, I’ll always have those memories and smile when I remember them.

Who might run for President in 2008? Hindsight Lulz!

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If only he’d run…

I’ve been thinking about 2008. Who I’d vote for and who I’d like to see run… I’m registered a Democrat, one look at my blog and that’s painfully, and quite obviously apparent – so I’d first vote in the Democrat’s Primary.

So who do I really want to see as both the primary winner and ultimately the final winner?

Senator Barack Obama from Illinois.

Commenter 1:

I dont forsee that happening.

Reason #1: TOO INEXPERIENCED – I’m not doubting the Senator’s capabilities, but as a junior member, I dont think he’ll receive a lot of backing. This is unfortunate, because somebody who might truly be very capable is likely to be glossed over for somebody with considerably more voice/mind share (ie LOLLary Clinton).

Reason #2: NOT WHITE – Spinning off from being too inexperienced, I dont think the majority of the Democrats will be behind a minority candidate they dont know.

REASON #3: JOHN “GOREBOT” KERRY – I’m not entirely sure the Democrat party will know to avoid a repeat of Algorebot by running a loser two elections in a row. I can’t objectively think of anything that makes John Kerry more endearing to the American public at large than Algorebot. Plus that hideous wife of his. And he’s French.

Commenter 2:

hmm. respectfully, #1 – almost NO ONE is now “too inexperienced” after the current prez. bush has lowered the bar to almost nonexistent. experience has little to do with it.

#2 – “not white” can easily be a huge plus, not a minus, in fact. example – why do u think the Republicans are making noise about Rice? only because her sex and race give her Pluses.

#3 – just because Kerry came up on top of the heap last time around is meaningless to the present. Kerry is a non-issue. and Gore in 2000 got more votes than the “winner” did.

i enjoyed your interesting observations, though 🙂

Commenter 1:

#1 Running somebody as “EVEN LESS EXPERIENCED THAN BUSH!” isn’t going to be a strong rallying cry for Democrats in 2008. Remember how people said that Gov. Bush lacked any experience in foreign policy (HILARIOUS IRAQ JOKES ASIDE, for now anyway)? I do. Foreign policy will no doubt be a major issue in the 08 elections. If Obama lacks experience in foreign policy (and I dont know conclusively, but I’d guess that, as a junior Senator, his experience cant be very high, compared to other more senior Democrats anyway).

#2 It’s not that being a minority is a negative. Not at all. But if the USA is ready for it’s first Africano President, they’re going to want somebody they “know.” This is why Colin Powell was just a strong choice for President for the GOP; he’s got oodles of experience (particularly as a former General) and he’s known on both sides of the political fence and internationally. For all his merits, I just dont think Obama can measure up to the standards that will assuredly be placed on the first serious black American running for President (Carolyn Mosely-Brown nonwithstanding).

#3 Senator Kerry hasnt renounced any plans for running for President in ’08. And, given that the 2004 election was very close, it’s very likely that he could run again if he can make a stronger case than the Republican nominee in 2008. Two years is a long time in politics, but we could be seeing Kerry against Hillary as the Democrat ticket in the primaries. Kerry has a lot of political ambition, so I wouldnt count him out as running again. And Kerry would surely beat out Obama in the primaries, so, for the time being, Kerry is still a contender (although a terrible choice, in my opinion).

Commenter 2:

politics –

u make salient points, but i am unconvinced ANY Senator can be elected, to be honest. Senators – all of ’em, McCain, Clinton, Obama, Kerry, Frist (haha) – all suffer in some serious way from necessary public statesmanship doing their job; they turn off too many pleasing some.

i’d prefer Obama, like Andrew; i really think he’s the shit. Powell is a fascinating topic u bring up – before he totally allowed himself to be used like toilet paper wiping bush’s ass, he could’ve been elected in a heartbeat i think, i would have voted for him enthusiastically. no more. bushies have truly ruined him and he allowed that to occur, so i no longer respect Powell.

i despise Rice because of her lies heading into Iraq, and her incompetency prior to becomming the Sec of State – so far she’s doing pretty well in her new job, and it’s great having a black woman rep us in the world, i like that a lot. still, i’ll never forgive her for her pre-Iraq garbage.

i would be excited about Sen. Clinton as president – there’s history. it’d be fascinating. she is too conservative for me, but so was her husband, but she would at least balance the budget as he did (i suspect). and i think she’d rep us well in the world, as opposed to what we have now.

i’m mad at kerry, he sucks, he ran a poor campaign at best. it’s tiresome that Dems get balls AFTER they lose. this is my problem with Gore, altho i like him more than Kerry. i would be thrilled with a Gore Presidency. and Gore is a hawk, and i hate his wife Tipper who is anti-firstAmendment, but i think Gore would still make a great President once he was in.

Commenter 3:

Commenter 1’s #1 is mine. As many good things as Obama is, I don’t really feel confident that he’s ready for a run for the Oval, nor do I think that he’d pull it off. It may take a decade, but I think that he could become an amazing power for good in that time.

Norman Rockwell Museum

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We just returned from Stockbridge, MA and the Norman Rockwell Museum. There was a comic book feature artist, Alex Ross and his collected artwork. Alex Ross claimed one of his biggest inspirations was Norman Rockwell. The museum was wonderful, very nicely laid out and the area screamed New England at the top of its lungs. It was so picturesque that it made my eyes ache.

We both picked up a few small souvenirs to remember our trip.

I didn’t take pictures because it would have been tacky and gauche. So it’s just my words that will have to do.

Brightness Knob

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The oddest memories come bubbling up to the surface when you least expect them. While I was brushing my teeth, quite out of the blue, mind you, I recalled a pair of personal experiences that I’ve never shared before. The first memory was when I was in middle school. The assignment was to write a paper on something historical and I chose Hitler, the Halocaust, and I used a complicated word because at the time it fit with the theme of what I was writing about. The word was “schizophrenic” but what really was a surprise to me was the teacher at the time, who I don’t really remember beyond being rather older and probably a sports coach more than a teacher picked my paper to read to the class. I think, as I remember it, he was trying to shame me or belittle me in front of my classmates by singling me out and demonstrating a poorly written paper. I sat back and took it and chuckled to myself, inside my head when he got to that big word and couldn’t pronounce it. My argument was cogent and valid and I was supposed to feel bad because I didn’t use real words in my writing. I think it was this first thing that struck me, that first real strong signal that adults were really full of shit. I was a kid, he was a teacher, so that was that, but it stayed with me. The whole part where I was supposed to feel chagrined but actually what I felt was pity for this older man, that he struggled and stumbled over this one word and since he didn’t understand it, that I obviously just made it up.

This memory carried a very particular emotion with it, which called out to another memory which came on the first one’s heels. I remember I was on a bus, I was in my mid-teens, and I was going on some sort of class field trip. I brought along a book I was reading, which just happened to be Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”. I was making quite a bit of progress reading the book and I was minding my own business when the teacher, a different one from the first in this story, chatted me up. He was curious about the book I was reading and he asked me how much of it I understood. I was taken aback by this as I figured that everyone who wanted to read this book could progress through its contents without too much trouble. That if you were curious about Stephen Hawking, you’d likely have some background ideas about what you were getting into and that anyone in that state could manage just fine. Then the teacher told me that the book I was reading was beyond him. I closed the book and put it away and left it like that until I got home. I felt strange that I was working through a book that a teacher confessed he couldn’t even think of tackling.

It may have been these things, and just life in general as I grew up that I realized that for some, people like me, a little bit at least, just had to go through the motions before I could do things I wanted to do, things I wanted to study, and the only person I had to impress with my wit and intelligence was myself. I kept to myself in grade school, middle school, and high school. I was never included and it was just part of what had to be. It was unpleasant but I knew that it was terminal. The unpleasant students that surrounded me, the unpleasant (except not all of them) teachers, and in general the entire situation was something that I just had to endure.

I used to think that school was a trial by fire and that all kids had to walk the same path. As I grow older I see things with a more mature perspective and I feel now that it was needlessly awful. So much of my potential was ignored or belittled, and I knew I was right and these adults were fools. There is no reason to weep over spilled milk, but now, when I see such brightness in kids I want to stop and clear a space for them to explore and think and blossom in a way that the rigid structure I was in never had room to allow. But these aren’t my kids and I don’t have a place or the power to effect the real change that my impetus calls for. One thing I will take from these memories is a respect for some young kids, that they can wrap their minds around really complicated ideas and to always be vigilant when evaluating the intellectual passion of others. Just because you don’t know a thing doesn’t mean someone who is *supposed* to be a learner and has a firmer grip on things than the teacher should be made to feel small, wrong, or awkward. Kids that carry around books that are, let’s say, atypical, really should get more focus and more to work on.

Just because someone is young and perhaps foolish doesn’t mean they aren’t bright. Sometimes people you never expect shine brightest of all.