4.10

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I started working on an alternate work schedule, 10 hours a day 4 days a week.  This gives me a day off to watch Charlie.  Gina works three days a week: we have a friend watch Charlie two days a week, and I take the third.

Mundane stuff.  But it's a fascinating change of pace for me.  This is the first day I have off, and I'm nearly going nuts.  So far, I've cleaned the kitchen, basement, living room, vacuumed, taken Charlie grocery shopping and out on a walk, given him a bath--and it's a quarter past 2.  He's sleeping now and I'm about to work on the box images for one of my games.

Also interesting, for me, is that each working day, I'm one of the first to arrive at work and almost always the last to leave.  As it should be, of course--I'm working 10 hours with an additional mandatory unpaid lunch half-hour, and with a few minutes on either side, that's almost 11 hours at work each day.  With the shorter days, I usually get there just as the sun is coming up (but a little before), and leave after it's gone back down.  Perhaps one reason today is so energetic for me is that I feel like it's been dark since Sunday evening, and suddenly I'm surrounded by daylight.

Every evening at work, as I'm leaving for the darkened parking lot, I feel a strange camaraderie with those few people lingering in that building.  There's something strange and exciting for me about being in office buildings after dark--some sense of being backstage, if you will.  It's idiotic, of course (grown men don't think these things, I've been told), but there it is.  I like it.

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Speech

The other day, I was lurking in a comment stream online about workplace attire.  Women were complaining about being judged for what they wear; men were complaining about being told what to wear.  Turns out, I don't have much of an opinion on this: when in Rome, I disinterestedly dress like a Roman.  Whatever.  I neither judge nor care.  I have a mild dislike for wearing ties.

But what struck me about the conversation is that unpopular opinions, if not expressed in a sufficiently tentative manner, were immediately shouted down by the crowd.  For example, one women expressed disgust at how all women, regardless of what they wear, are judged at work--either too trampy, or too frumpy, or too materialistic, or unfashionable, etc.  Another person (unfortunately, a man) countered that he thought there should be some standards at work.  This commenter then met with an absolute barrage of opposition: people called him unenlightened, or expressed outrage, or just passive-aggressively responded, "you can't possibly understand."  I'm not really interested in the content of the argument here: what fascinated me was that people were attacking one another, expressing emotional outrage, and taking offense--just for having expressed differing opinions.

Is this free speech?  Because this didn't seem like freedom of speech to me; it seemed like socially-controlled speech.  In my example, the "standards" commenter was backed into a corner and essentially forced to shut up or apologize (he just went silent, of course).  And as I watched the situation unfold, I recalled the numerous times I've typed something out in a public forum, but deleted it without posting because I knew it would be an unpopular opinion.

I suppose it's still free speech, in the sense that it's not illegal.  And yet there are constraints on what we're socially allowed to say--real constraints--that don't make sense to me.  For example, my wife avoids posting anything online about our parenting choices based solely on the rationale that we know some of our friends would disagree with our choices, and just the conversation itself might harm those relationships.  You can scoff and say they aren't true friends, or you could lecture us about just "being ourselves," but we really don't need bullet-point advice from a self-help pamphlet.  Reality is complex and this is a nuanced decision, not cowardice; such decisions are frequently part of maintaining good friendships.  If you have any friends who aren't exactly like you, you know what I mean.

But obviously, this irks me.  What is it in our culture that forces us to hide those opinions and choices from our friends?  Have we become such a petty, small-minded culture that good friends really would be separated over differing opinions?

I suppose social groups in every culture and time period have enforced some level of constraint on speech.  It feels like there are tighter constraints today than there were in years past, but how can we tell the difference?

Or am I just sensing these constraints because they fall on the other side of my own opinions?  Is this really a cultural trend, or do I just have dreadfully unpopular views?

Dialogue in the World of Tomorrow

I read an article today that made me cringe.  It was about wage disparity, and lower taxes, and gas prices.  The gist: the rich are getting richer, poor are getting poorer; low taxes and gas prices are to blame!  Trigger some class warfare!  Everyone rage!

Incidentally, I agreed with some points and disagreed with others.  But what really bothered me was the author did all of his arguing through assumption.

The article began with a few charts describing wage disparity changes from year to year.  Some of the charts were presented in a really aggravating way--simply expressing changes in numbers, without explaining some of the potential causes.  For example, the top 10% taxpayers earned 2% more this year; the rest of us, on average, earned quite a bit less this year.  Pitchforks out, everyone!  Except it's not a conspiracy: the top 10% are largely people in jobs tied to the financial sector (CEOs, CFOs, Directors, financial professionals).  This year was contradictorily good for business and bad (or so-so) for individuals.  So then, all individuals took a hit--but those individuals whose fortunes are literally tied to the performance of businesses did quite well.  Bam, mystery solved.  Conspiracy averted.

Or not, whatever.  I'm definitely oversimplifying.  But my point is that charts, alone, with naught but the author's snide commentary to accompany and explain, do very little to educate and very much to enrage.  The aggravation for me, however, began a few charts later.

After discussing wage disparity, the author moved on to how the U.S. is doing on the "solution," by which he really just meant tax levels.  His rationale was that higher taxes would provide more money for the government, which would spend the money directly on poor people.  Wealth redistribution to correct for wage disparity.

Let's put aside whether I agree or disagree with the idea.  The point is, the actual argument was never made in the article.  It was all charts: first charts on wage disparity, with snark about rich people; then charts on taxes, with snark about...well, rich people still.  Charts that establish the premise, then charts that follow the conclusion.  No argument made, but readers come away convinced.

Slick move, and it will probably work, right?  Inevitably there will be a conversation in which someone defends their position using this article, pointing to charts and basically declaring that science has proven wage disparity is bad and high taxes are the solution.  But that's not really what happened here.

What really happened is, we avoided the argument.  We skipped straight to co-opted agreement.  And I see that happening throughout our political narrative.  People on both sides of the aisle have discovered that in the age of open dialogue, it's simply easier to win the argument prior to arguing--and so we don't actually open the conversation anymore.  We don't ask whether taxes are the best method for wealth redistribution, or whether redistribution is appropriate, or whether poverty is even what the real problem is.  We don't delve into the issue: we reinforce an assumed--but unexamined--position.  This is dialogue in the age of information and wide-open communication.

It makes me sad, but honestly I understand why we're here.  Real conversations on real positions get trolled out of existence.  Open dialogue becomes a shouting match.  Even if the conversation stays polite (an extreme rarity), everyone simply goes to Google, gets an intellectual pinch hitter, and before you know it you're just having someone else's conversation--usually for the umpteenth time.

So it's depressing to read political stuff on the internet--and now that I say it that way, I realize we could have just jumped to that conclusion a few paragraphs ago.

Fog

Bury me at sunset in the the gentle fog that rolls in on a harvest Wednesday morning, cloaking every distant point in an obscure grey. For fog makes all things beautiful--the nearer things are finer than we realized when distracted by our distant views.

Getting out

The thing about writing is that you have to do stuff in order to have stuff to write about.  At least that's the concept.  And the truth is, I don't do much now.  I get the impression that I spend most of my time in a fluorescent cubicle hell, or driving a mundane car down a monotonous highway, or watching stale TV on my couch.  I grimly diagnose my life as early-onset humdrum.

That said, I actually do move around a lot, considering I'm a human slug choking on apathy.  I work for 8 hours each day and do a lot of reading and talking while there.  My commute is complicated and can contain some curious interactions with other drivers.  I play with my son for a bit in the evenings, and read books aloud to him for almost an hour each night.  And while Gina & I do watch TV habitually, in my spare time I also design board games, write poetry, read the whole internet, and chop firewood.  So I do stuff--I move around and stuff--and that's just on normal days.  I also host a lot of dinners and go to some kinda high-brow parties and play music on the weekends and generally keep quite busy.

But the thing is, I discredit a lot of my life as boring--because it's repetitive.  I-95 is, let's face it, always different but never notable.  Work is just work; any American will tell you that.  My son doesn't do much that's noteworthy, owing to being 3 months old.  I could talk about my hobbies, but that's just sad.  The parties and hosting and all of that--really just a fairly normal social life.  Nothing unusual.

What's amazing to me here is that my life has always been boring in this perspective.  Always.  I never was the most fascinating person, I never lived the most interesting life.  I went to school, and had some friends, and we talked about theology and video games and ate 5-in-the-morning Waffle House breakfasts after staying up all night laughing about things I can't remember.  And after school, I played in bands, I guess--but that was always more fuss than glamor.  Find a place to practice, play the same songs four hundred times, set up shows and bring the equipment--then two hours of stage time, but honestly if you have to pee halfway through it's not that great.  I guess I went to internships and conferences in DC and New York--but mostly, really, they were indoor PowerPoint presentations.  I didn't do anything interesting in the evenings.

But somehow, I had stuff to write about.  I wrung meaning from sidewalk strangers.  I turned over thoughts from overheard conversations and table talk.  I shouldn't have been interesting--but, inevitably, when I look back at what I wrote, I'm interested.

So then: does writing assign value to otherwise awfully mundane streaks of time?  Or were my conversations, my experiences, more interesting in years past?  Is a life, observed, simply more interesting than the same life, just lived?

Death Machine

Recently, a friend of mine found out an old flame had died. I suppose this will happen more often as we all age, and it's never going to be easy news. But my friend didn't hear about it from a third party, or overhear it, or get an email. She was on the road, in his city, trying to get in touch, just to meet up. He wouldn't respond to messages. Then she saw his Facebook wall light up with condolences and had to draw her own conclusions.

No information on circumstances. No consoling messenger. No discussion, no human touch. She had to find out by eavesdropping on electrons.

Our world is getting less human--at least the information is, undeniably so. We have always learned of death from gossip, or firsthand; but always, hasn't there been a human? Hasn't the message been less cruel?

I didn't know my mom's father very well. He played saxophone in San Fransisco night clubs and lived in a universe apart from my academic Pittsburgh childhood. He died when I was in college; I got the message, voicemail, from my mom. I listened to it twice, struck cold with the pain in her voice more so than the loss I felt myself. I remember sitting on the floor, against the window, after I heard, before I called her back; I sensed the loss, dimly, more regretting that I hadn't known him better than mourning his death outright. It was a very human feeling.

Not so, my interaction with the internet. Whether scrolling Facebook or chatting with an old friend in Gmail, these electrons fail to convince. Nothing in a screen can even replace the sound of a human voice; much less a quiet evening out back with a happy fire and a conversation blended well with silence.

I mourn the passing of our humanity, as we slide toward being little more than excuses for the great electron dance. And, too, I pity our future selves, which will be bound in our most human moments to such machines as we can only now imagine.

Amnsmyth

For a few years in college, I wrote a blog on Xanga.  As I recall, I stopped blogging because the password recovery email was a school-based email address, and once you graduate from school, they delete your email address.  I duly forgot my password, and that was that.  College kids everywhere, take note: your school email address, which you probably switched to in order to avoid using "b8rsk8r4evRR@yahoo.com" when emailing professors, will be unceremoniously ripped from your life shortly after graduation.  (Aware of this, of course, I then completely ignored my graduate school email account.  Turns out that's not a great idea, either.)

Anyway, after the blog's inane demise, I wrote in journals.  Then I wrote poetry.  Then I stopped writing altogether.

And then, one evening on the porch as an adult with a wife and a kid, I decided to look up the old Xanga site.  It's gone, of course, but the good old Wayback machine saved a lot of entries from about June 2006 up until the end in June 2007.

I like what I wrote.  I'm sad that a lot of it is gone.  I had some dumb moments, and more than one post was really more blather than thought, but the quality was actually a fair deal better than I cynically remembered of myself.  I had a pang of regret, knowing that there's really probably no way to get back those entries that are gone now--and then a pause.

I'm not dead, or whatever.  Sure, I've quit writing, and it will likely take some time before I write well again.  But I think it's time I quit quitting.  Writing was a significant part of my life, and I think its absurd that I've stopped.  I still do stuff, and I can write about it.

So there, foolishly-limited Wayback machine.  So.  There.  I'm going to create more internet with which to burden you.  Deal with it.