Monthly Archives: April 2012

A slurry of crazy before vacation

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I am now officially on vacation for a few days. Michael and I are going to NorWesCon where we will get to goof off, browse the dealer’s den, hang out with some of our friends, and geek out. This is my 25th year in a row to attend this convention. I almost always have a great time. Though I find I spend less of the con actually going to convention events lately. So we have been discussing the possibility of giving it a pass one year. But not this year.

Because of the change in my work schedule while my boss has been on maternity leave, my last day of work before vacation was also a work-from-home day. Which is nice if for no other reason than not having to spend part of the evening getting home from work. On the other hand, it was a little frustrating because I kept seeing things that I should be packing or cleaning or otherwise dealing with, because we’re leaving tomorrow, but I couldn’t really take the time to do. Michael had taken the day off work, ostensibly to spend some of the day getting ready, but mostly so he could sleep in and get some more mental space away from work before the busy-ness of the convention got in the way.

Problem was, we both woke up feeling very run down. It is a rather high pollen count day, so most of mine could be hay fever, but it’s hard to say. I was feeling so out of it at the beginning of the day, that I thought it would be the least productive day of the year.

But several unexpected things came up, including some good news about some of the problems I’ve been wrestling with on the new content management system. It was a little weird. A bunch of things we had been waiting on (some for a long time), suddenly came in today. Often with things like, “can we meet tomorrow to discuss this?” Except that no, I can’t, because I’m going to be on vacation. I guess it’s an instance of Finagle’s Law. But they were all good developments. And after a few hours of work, some conversation with people, and a few big mugs of coffee, I was feeling much better than I had when I’d started the day.

The weather was awesome, and I had worked a bit over the last couple of days, so I was quite amenable to a longer-than-usual lunch. Michael needed to shower and get the rest of the way awake, first, but then we walked up to a local diner. This particular place we almost never get to because they are only open until 2:30 in the afternoon. They just do breakfast and lunch. Until sometime very recently, they also only took cash—no credit or debit cards. Michael wound up having a big breakfast, while I had a salmon burger and salad. It was nice to walk around out in the sun.

Michael napped the rest of the afternoon, while I finished things up on my work day.

Now I need to pack and otherwise get ready for the con. I’m going to attempt not to stay up all night long getting ready for it. I say that every year. Will it finally happen?

Oh, puhlease!

people,

A couple times a year I have an experience on the bus that, when I tell the story, it brings people out of the woodwork to talk about how horrible transit it. This morning was one of those days.

So I don’t want to tell the story. I don’t want to enable people to bash transit by choosing my anomalous experience and treating it as if it is normal.

I’d much rather talk about things like the adorable kid on the bus the day before, dressed in a Batman raincoat (complete with cape!) who was delighted when he saw a dog curled up beneath the feet of another passenger and asked, “May I please pet your doggie?”

Or another kid a few weeks ago, wearing an equally adorable tiger stocking cap, who asked her mother, “When can we go back to the library?”

Or the many times I’ve looked up from the word processor on my iPhone (yes, I have a word processor on my phone; I write scenes to stories while riding the bus to work) to see that most of the passengers sitting around me were reading. Some were reading paper books, some Kindles, some reading on iPads.

Or the time I watched a young man scribbling extremely fast in a thick, very battered looking notebook. I couldn’t see what he was writing, yet even from the distance I could see that his writing was pretty, with sweeping open loops–even though we was writing as if the pen point was in a race to the death against a rocket assisted member of the order chiroptera exiting the underworld.

Or the many conversations that have made me smile.

I don’t want to talk about the two jerks on this morning’s bus (other than this: hon, the 90s are calling, and they want their dance moves back). Maybe I’ll post a version of the tale to I, Anonymous.

“Privacy is only a recent concept”

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A news story I read recently about proposed new rules about when law enforcement agenices need to obtain warrants (and when they don’t) quoted a government official making the claim, “Privacy is only a recent invention,” implying that it can’t be that important since much of human history has existed without the notion of legally enforced restrictions on what information about you is public, and what is not.

Someone in the crowd apparently shouted out,”So is sanitation!” Sanitation is clearly something most of us do not want to live without. In other words, going back to the old days isn’t always a good plan.

I have a problem with the original statement, however. I mean, at least one of the lessons to draw from the old testament story of David and Bathsheba (and Bathsheaba’s ill-fated husband, Uriah the Hittite) is that Kings should not go about peering into the bathing chambers of other men’s wives.

I know, that isn’t what the official quoted above meant, but in a more important sense it is. A great deal of how any society works is an implicit agreement between us all to look the other way about some aspects of each other’s lives. And when we can’t, to pretend we don’t know some things about each other. I’ve known more than one mother, for instance, who admonished their children, “There are some details a Mother has a right to be spared.” In other words, part of the process of becoming an independent, functional adult is to experiment, make some mistakes, and learn from them on your own. And Mom really doesn’t want to know how you figured out what your favorite way to kiss is, for instance.

I wound up thinking about this a lot this weekend beginning with a moment Saturday when Michael and I were still laying about in bed. We had a fairly small number of things to do, and have been feeling stressed and over-busy, so lazing much of the day away seemed a good idea.

So there we were, overhearing some conversations outside, and finding ourselves giggling at some things. Things that weren’t particularly private or personal, and probably not any topics that would have changed if we had walked outside. But we were trying not to giggle too loudly because it could be taken wrong. And it wasn’t about us.

That evening, one of our neighbors, a guy in his mid twenties whose studio is directly below our bedrooms, was playing his electric guitar. He does that a lot. He has asked us to let him know if it disturbs us. It never has (though when he’s trying to learn a new lick, I wind up grabbing my head phones because the repitition is a bit maddening). That night his playing was a louder than usual. And also a bit wilder. I think I even observed to Michael that it sounded angry.

Sunday, we found out his mother had died the previous morning. Even weirder, we found out that the odd lady who had recently moved in with another neighbor was the mother in question. This is the neighbor whose wife recently died. So we had had this rather odd situation of a woman moving in with the alcoholic neighbor of her son, just because he happened to be nearby, and because the neighbor was desperate for a roommate.

I have already shared more details than are mine to share. But that’s what we humans do. We learn things about each other and we share them, whether the people we share them with are involved or not. Sometimes we pretend we didn’t share them. Whether we admit we know some details or not, we also make decisions on how we interact with people based on those details. Even when we believe it was wrong for us to find out in the first place.

It’s one thing if we decide not to be as friendly with the neighbor we hear screaming obscenities at his housemates at odd hours of the night. It is another thing, entirely, if we make hiring and firing decisions based on things we learn while snooping around the pages of their facebook friends. Or if we make search, seizure, and arrest decisions based on searching text message streams for keywords. Or other details that technologies have made it a bit too easy to collect. And often much less accurately than we are led to believe.

In the end, it’s just gossip. And that has been around for as long as there has been language.