Episode IV: A New Hope

Barber Violin Concerto, First Movement: Calm, measured, intelligent discourse. Not without justified anxiety.

How I Felt Like a Delegate to a Kind of Global Electoral College

Sure, I've had voter apathy in the past. I can't remember the first time I voted, and I know I've stayed home from the polls for some elections. Not this year. I stood in line for about an hour Tuesday morning, starting at 6:55 am, then cast my vote for Obama. A week before, I had asked someone who's far more politically savvy than me "Why vote in DC, when I know that the city's Electoral College votes will go to Obama?" He said, "Because we need to show how much we believe in him by turning out in incredible numbers. It'll look so much better with a high number of votes."

Or something like that. I agreed. And then I read something in BusinessWeek yesterday:

"Polls showed that in countries such as France and Germany, support for the Democratic candidate ranged between 65% and 80% of the population. The sense of engagement was typified by an editorial appearing early this year in Belgian newspaper De Standaard suggesting that given the stakes—on issues ranging from energy to climate change to the mortgage crisis—everybody in the world should be able to cast a vote in the U.S. Presidential election."
Europe Reacts to Obama Victory, Andy Reinhardt, 11/05/08

But not everyone in the world could vote in this election. Which made my vote count even more, considering the nature of today's problems (and the huge role the U.S. has played in causing a good number of them). So, for a brief moment, I felt like a delegate to a kind of global electoral college, which made my responsibility take on new meaning and weight.

The Scene Just Blocks from the White House

My neighborhood erupted at 11:00 last night, about 10 blocks north of the White House. Closer than you think, since I can see the executive mansion just a few steps from my door. As soon as the California polls closed and the networks exploded with their news, people yelled, whooped, cheered, their voices echoing in the alley behind my building. The noise got louder a few minutes later, as residents left their buildings the bars and restaurants in spite of the rain and car horns blared up and down 16th street. That's what I saw in my head, as I didn't move - the TV kept me glued in my living room - the TV and my laptop where I had the NYTimes, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC open in Firefox tabs. What was it - 15 minutes later - that the report came over the wires - McCain had conceded to Obama. I could see on TV that scores of GW students converged on the White House, pumped by the history and eager to let the current resident know that his terrible occupancy is not only over, it's finished with a blast of everything missing over the last eight years - including eloquence, intelligence, and unyielding hope.

Around 1 am I went outside. The rain was a drizzle, the car horns split the air, people on the sidewalks high-fived each other. I called my brother in New Hampshire, and held the phone to 16th street, in sight of the White House, leaving a message that was mostly street noise.
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Check out these stunning pictures at the Boston Globe's site, which I found thanks to kottke.org.

A Few Moments of Calm

7PM. Polls are closing. I need a few moments of calm:

I Am Jack's Disappointment

I watched Fight Club (again) last night - and this quote stood out, for me, at this mid-life reassessment time in my life:

"We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

So, yeah, I understand a bit where Tyler Durden's coming from. Although I don't believe in taking the film literally - I have no desire to fight anyone, much less support anarchy. The flick is some sort of great movie, but not a manifesto for modern living. Although Making soap sounds kind of fun.

For a more conventional view that mirrors the quote above, and my current state, check out this post from Life Two - The Midlife Resource. I've pulled the following quote that helps drive the point home:

"...one of the great challenges of surviving the midlife transition derives from the sense of profound disappointment that comes when you realize that most of the assumptions that you had about 'success' in your early adult years were bogus. We joke about the portrait of life that we were fed from such 1950's and 1960's TV shows like "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best". It's a picture of life that even now we're digesting with 20/20 hindsight in such period dramas as TV's "Mad Men". We were somehow brought up to believe that, when we retired, life would, at least, be quieter. Also, it would be better if we worked hard and saved up wisely for our 'Golden Years.' Many people still go into middle age believing that, even though slowing down will be inevitable, at least we have some peace and quiet to look forward to."

Scary Part 2

More YouTube fun, clips of movies and scenes that scared me when I was much younger. In honor of Halloween and the upcoming election.

drip. drip. drip.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.

Just relax son, everything's gonna be fine, just fine.

In the early hours of June 1st...

Nobody does it better than S. William Hinzman.

This is not a dream...

Scary Part 1

Out of sight prices. Financial collapse. Sarah Palin. Things are pretty scary right now. And right before Halloween. So I went back into my past and found those things that scared me when I was young, when you had to go to the movies for a really good fright. And it didn't matter whether good or evil won, because the movie always ended and the lights came up.

Here are the first six, in no particular order:

Sand isn't supposed to move that way.


Ipod. Upod. Wepod.


Heeeeeeeeeere's Santa!


Wax on. Wax off.


It's not what you see...it's what you don't see.


There's a space - right between the charred corpse and the dead seagull.

Facebook is Easy

Real life is harder. Hal Niedzviecki has 700 Facebook friends he tells us in "Facebook in a Crowd" (New York Times Magazine, October 26, 2008). So, when he planned a get together and sent an invitation to all 700, he figured at a few would show up.

Only one other person came to the bar.

"Was I really that big of a loser?" he asks himself.

"Or was it that no one wants to get together in real life anymore? It wasn’t Facebook’s fault; all those digital pals were better than nothing. For chipping away at past friendships and blocking honest new efforts, you really have to blame the entire modern world. People want to hang out with you, I assured myself. They just don’t have the time."

I think we transfer the ease of sitting at home on our computers into an equal simplicity when it comes to real life. And that's just not the case. Technology only revolutionizes some things. Having a blog won't make you a writer "just like that." These things take time. Would Hal have had a better experience if he had done a bit more research, and focused his event around another reason to get together, other than just to meet each other?

"The Internet has allowed an enormous amount of fake networking to take place," said Seth Godin in a forum that you click here to watch online.

TGIF

Cool Sixties TV Show Theme: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
Strings, winds and xylophones shimmer amidst deep-sea radar pings, followed by a fanfare "call to adventure," then ominous low notes from the ocean depths. The strings take up the call to adventure, with a glissando counterpoint from the piano (or is it a harp?) Then we break for a commercial. To close, repeat above, then insert a standard orchestral flourish bringing us back to boring normality - except for a brief mysterious cadence - THEN a classic sixties fanfare to end.

I Have Too Much Stuff

And maybe this will help: Five classic clutter-busting strategies from Unclutterer.

Most of my stuff I never use. Clothes, books, papers, photos, kitchen equipment, vinyl records. I'm saving some of it because it contains my history. There's a set of books signed by authors that I won't give up. And I'm lazy. But lately I've felt this need to declutter and get rid of stuff, to almost "go minimal." Should I go all out and empty my closets, sell what others might want, and trash the rest? Do I toss old yearbooks into the garbage, and follow them with box after box of pictures?

Malcolm Gladwell May Have Saved My Sanity

Mr. Gladwell's fascinating article about prodigies vs. all the rest of us (Late Bloomers - Why do we equate genius with precocity? in the October 10 New Yorker) made me feel a whole lot better about myself as a writer - or whatever it is I am. I'm certainly NOT a prodigy, and I'm not yet sure if I'm a "late bloomer." My great grandfather was a late bloomer, as noted in a New Yorker "talk story" from 1939. I'm not 75... yet... so perhaps there's hope.

Excerpts from Mr. Gladwell's article that really hit home:

The freshness, exuberance, and energy of youth did little for Cézanne. He was a late bloomer—and for some reason in our accounting of genius and creativity we have forgotten to make sense of the Cézannes of the world.

...late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren’t much good until late in their careers.

On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all.

Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith.

Whenever we find a late bloomer, we can’t but wonder how many others like him or her we have thwarted because we prematurely judged their talents. But we also have to acccept that there’s nothing we can do about it. How can we ever know which of the failures will end up blooming?
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Odd coincidence: Art News, in a quote I've ransacked my files looking for (and have not yet located), called O.A. Renne the American Cézanne.

There's Nothing Like A Nice, Extended Mid-Life Crisis

"I had to find out where I went wrong. The years I've spent trying to get all the things I was told were important. That I was told to want. Things, not people or meaning, just things."
Rock Hudson, Seconds

I've been lying fallow for close to a year now, and I'm beginning to understand why. The popular term is "mid-life crisis" although I prefer the bland, non-melodramatic sounding "mid-life re-assessment." However, it's not bland to live through. I've been solidly parked in creative paralysis, spurred by the ongoing question "why bother continuing to write, when I still haven't made any money from it?" And there's been part of me, way down deep inside, that has .been reacting to this time in my life quite like the character Arthur Hamilton (played by Rock Hudson) reacts here, in the closing scenes from the ultra-disturbing Seconds. In the film, the 51-year- old Hamilton, a deeply bored businessman, is offered an extreme makeover - not only will he physically change, but "The Company" will set him up with a new life, kind of like the witness-protection program on steroids. Your death is faked, your psyche is probed so your dreams can be fulfilled, and you'll be happy.

Except it doesn't work for our hero. Here, Hamilton (now named "Wilson") has returned to The Company (Yup, that's Grandpa Walton, playing the founder) to get a new identity, after he failed to find self-actualization in Malibu. He's promised a chance to move onto the "next stage." But that promise comes with a horrifying price - and he tries everything in his power to avoid payment.

You Can Find It On YouTube

Reviewing the composer John Adams' memoirs in today's New York Times, Charles McGrath writes:

...you wish the book could have come wired with a soundtrack illustrating his points and sampling some of his hits. Even readers who know Mr. Adams’s music would welcome turning the page and hearing a snippet of, say, “Hallelujah Junction,” a piece for two pianos that gives the book its title, or “Grand Pianola Music,” ...

While the book may not be come wired, one can find examples of Adams' music on YouTube. Here's "Hallelujah Junction":



...and here's a snippet from "Grand Pianola Music":



...accompanied by some interesting visuals and commentary.

The Times has been including these kinds of excerpts alongside a number of their reviews and feature articles more and more. I've gotten to a point where I automatically type into YouTube the name of any piece I read about but haven't heard. Most of the time, I come up with something. Granted, it's often not the entire work, and the depths of sonority are lacking on my laptop. But more and more often, what I'm looking for is there, often on YouTube. And it's amazing what I can find.

For those out there who aren't familiar with this kind of adrenaline-filled, sometimes unbearably ecstatic music, a good, quick introduction is Adams' "Short Ride in a Fast Machine." It's the "Snakes on a Plane" of modern classical music - the title tells you just what you're going to hear. And it's no longer than a pop song...

Hating 2.0

The truthfully funny and appropriately profane Hugh McLeod over at Gaping Void has come up with 10 things I hate about web 2.0. My favorites: well, all of them. I have definitely found that when it comes to blogging, the people into it are REALLY INTO IT, and everyone else is standing on the sidelines, wondering what the big deal is.

Or maybe their not standing on the sidelines at all, but they're out there, doing stuff in the "real" world.

On Usefulness

Since starting my new job in January, and after a couple of months of intense Web work for the organization that hired me, I've been looking at blogging in a different way. Usefulness is now very important to me. And I'm not so sure that the blogs I'm reading are helping me out - their usefulness factor, for me, is running pretty low. I'm not coming out against blogging or anything like that. But I am taking a long look at krooz and wondering if it's useful to anyone. This is a good thing, because it's helping me in my job, and it's forcing me to consider the exact mission of krooz. And that mission may be changing. I don't think I'm ready to change it right at this moment. But I'm taking notes, downloading ideas from my brain onto paper (with a pen, no less), and researching an Idea.

Why Can't ________ Be Better Designed?

I visited an aunt of mine in a nursing home on Sunday. It certainly was no "senior warehouse." There were large birdcages with colorful parakeets, sofas and desks and televisions in rooms set up to look like someone's home, and a large sunroom with windows all around that looked out onto gazebos and off in the distance a forest of trees.

But the resident rooms themselves? Small, hospital-like, lacking in privacy.

This was one of the better places. They have a cap on how many residents they allow, so that the staff can provide better service. They're doing a number of things right. Why hasn't that outlook spread to the residential quarters?

Seth Godin has an interesting question today: Things You Don't Understand. When I read it, I immediately thought "I don't understand why nursing homes aren't better designed." I was going to come up with my own list, like Seth. But then I thought, I haven't written anything in this blog in a while. I'll go with that thought.

I don't have any answers. But as I'm getting older, and relatives are once again aging and dealing with various syndromes, physical problems, and illnesses, I'm feeling that aging process myself. And I'm wondering - even with the birdcages and the nicely-appointed group rooms and the sunroom looking out onto a natural landscape, would I want to spend much of my time in a hospital room, waiting for visitors to show up? What would I do if I wanted to get away, and be alone, and have my own space that I know is mine and I don't have to share?

We have a million programs designed to help us save our cell phone messages. We have one nursing home design.

What's Up With Krooz?

I have totally ignored my blog. Hopefully Jimbo hasn't removed me from his blog list. There's a pretty good set of reasons for my absence. The two main ones: I started a new job in January, where I'm overseeing three web sites and creating three separate blogs; and, my laptop died. So I have not been able to surf in my living room while multitasking, my main method of getting ideas for this blog. After deciding I needed to spend the money, I ordered a new laptop from Dell. The laptop crashed within seconds of downloading a program on the first five minutes out of the box. The replacement laptop followed the same path. Dell was not able to a) deliver me a quality product and b) provide me with knowledgeable technical support and sound customer service, and I returned both laptops and let Dell know I would never purchase a product from them again. I've ordered a new laptop from a rival company, and I'm hoping it will work once I receive it next week. I'm also gearing up to re-engage my blog posting. I'm also hoping I can get motivated to start back at the gym regularly. But new jobs tend to monopolize your time as you balance the combination of learning curve, office etiquette, and concentration.

Reunion Generation

I belong to a generation of people who lived their lives going from one social sphere to another. Through the levels of education - elementary, junior high (now called middle school), high school proper, college, then grad school for some. In amongst those social milieus, there were others - various clubs, organizations, sports groups, etc. We moved in a progression through school, and in and out of activities, all the time meeting new people and making new friends. While we would carry some friends onward, and turn some aquaintences into friends, our steady march through school meant that we would have to lose touch with some people as we changed locations. Sure, some of those people stayed in our spheres, but the vast majority did not. It was a badge of maturity to leave high school and everyone you knew and loved and go to college somewhere else. Sure it was scary, but necessary - necessary for growth, we thought. If someone held on too tightly to the past - if they insisted on going to every high school football game once they started college - we saw them as somewhat flawed. It was imperative that we move forward, and a big part of that movement meant separating from one social circle and creating a new, often more diverse group around us.

Still, it wasn't like we wouldn't see our old old friends ever again. That was what reunions were for. Coming back to that homecoming game. Running into one of your best buddies at the mall. Keeping touch through holiday cards. And looking forward to the pinnacle event of them all - the organized reunion. We kept in touch with the major changes, high points and low points of our best friends through these tools. While we knew about computers, none of us had one. The PC didn't exist. Our biggest technical challenge was learning to type on an IBM Selectric. There was no Internet helping our communications fly at the speed of light.

There is a generally-used name for my generation - Baby Boomers (Boomers for short.) We define ourselves by our forward motion, by how many new people we can meet, become intimate with, pull into our ideas, or impress. We always look forward, to the next group of people, consigning those times we look back to those officially-sanctioned reunions.

Take a look at this great post by Seth Godin, which got me thinking about the Reunion Generation. In Facebook's generational challenge, Seth talks about how he's not used to using Facebook the way younger generations use it. He relates a small tale about a college student he knows who was able to contact tons of people in her upcoming class, so that everyone knew everybody before they set foot on campus.

This is, to me, related to information I've read about how the "younger generations" continue to be involved in their friends' lives through My Space, Facebook, and social media on the Web.

They build on their circle of friends as they go along. No need to move on to the next social circle, when you can keep everyone abreast of your life - and they, you - on a daily basis through online networks. I'm guessing that they don't see this continual contact as a negative thing, the way we in the Reunion Generation might. Their definitions of maturity don't involved sailing away from one shore and losing contact with the island altogether in search of the next beach.

Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow. Rrrrrright.

How many times have we heard or read this slogan? How many of us have done what we love, and we're still waiting for the money?

I've pursued a number of passions, and had some great experiences doing so. But the financial return on my investment in each case has not just been nil, but negative.

If we are to believe the "Do What You Love" phrase, then merely practicing a hobby should naturally fill up our bank accounts.

The truth, however, is far different.

For me, the money's always followed when I've done something I didn't particularly love.

However, I find tons of subjects interesting. But "Love?" That's asking quite a lot.

It's time to nuke this advice and and show it for the sentimental platitude it really is! I prefer to revise the phrase into "Do something you find interesting that also offers a salary or other cash renumeration and the money will follow."

While you make up your own newer, more accurate version, consider the potential dangers of "Doing What You Love," as described in Beware of Turning Hobbies into Jobs at Gaping Void.

And for a very effective dismantling of a similarly erroneous aphorism, check out I keep reading the argument that “Money can’t buy happiness.” It’s not that simple! at The Happiness Project.

My Top 20 Tactics for Taming Terrible TV Addiction Madness

I basically made one New Year's Resolution last week: to work on my TV addiction. It's been with me for a long, long time, from my early days when I rushed home from school to watch Dark Shadows, through my higher education years (majoring in Television and Communications - what else?) I've realized I need to do something to curb my nightly channel surfing activities, but I wasn't having much luck in figuring out exactly what to replace the tube with until I fell upon The 9 Step Television Diet (at Think Simple Now, by way of The Happiness Project.)

Tina's list of television's evil effects hit home for me, and her options for battling this particular monkey are simple and achievable. They also encouraged me to come up with my own list of Things To Do Instead of Watching TV and Ways To Battle the Madness. They are:

1. Turn the TV on later in the evening. (I got used to this when I was working at home all last summer and fall.)
2. Cultivate the ability to turn things off. (I turn off the stove after using it - think of the TV as the stove.)
3. Increase my stamina. (This helps with number 15, below.)
4. Replace with working out, a class, a hobby
5. Move to someplace more active all year round
6. Turn on the radio - methadone for TV addicts
7. Call people on the phone
8. Take the laptop to a coffee shop
9. Turn the set on, but turn off the sound
10. Figure out other relaxation methods
11. Go to bed earlier. (This will allow me to Get up earlier.)
12. Move the Tube - to a less central and accessible location.
13. Get rid of cable. (This one's tough, unless I really start thinking about what I can buy with the money I've saved after 6 months - which amounts to a weekend trip to the beach!)
14. Stay longer at work.
15. Move my gym workouts to the evening.
16. Do home improvements
17. Plan out tomorrow or next week (lunches, dinners, work plan, workouts)
18. Allow for some (few) days when I will watch TV the way I used to. (During blizzards. And cold torrential downpours. When I'm sick. Or after a particularly stressful week or month.)
19. Freelance! (Make extra money!)
20. Blog.

(I would put "reading" as number 21, but for me, reading can become an addiction too. So while I definitely think it's better than watching "The Biggest Loser," I also consider it the methadone of TV addiction cures.)