Huh?

I’m still relatively young (43), but already I’m noticing I’m forgetting shit all the time. Even very common things I use constantly, like, for example certain keyboard shortcuts in Emacs, that I have to type hundreds of times a day, and bash aliases I’ve been using for years, etcx. Lately I’ve just been locking up on them; can’t remember them. Other, non-computer stuff too. I find I go through my daily routine with much less memory of what I actually just did, then II think I used to have, or at least vaguely remember being used to having.

Yesterday I met a Linux-using colleague who is visiting the Bay Area (research at UCB) from Graz, Austria. I sat down to walk him through some of my code for my live music setup (I wrote it 2 years ago and modified it a few months ago), and found that I couldn’t explain to him how any of it worked! In fact, I was sketchy on how my whole system worked, and I was the one who put it together!

It’s not just computer stuff. Words and names too, names of songs, names of musicians and bands. I just lock up on ‘em, can’t remember them, can’t even remember how to remember them. Let’s not even talk about function and library calls… I don’t do much programming anymore and that stuff’s already gone.

Without Google and Wikipedia around, I’m not sure if I’d be useful for anything at this point. Luckily, I still remember how to use those. I hope.

Handshaking

I know a singer-songwriter who thinks handshakes are stupid and refuses to do them.

I’ve never thought they were stupid, necessarily, but I’ve noticed that, in the music world, handshakes are done very often (and very creatively), and it’s taking some getting used to.

When I was in the high-tech marketing world, handshakes were done upon initial meeting and not again. Men and women would use handshakes when introducing themselves or getting introduced. Of course, it was the standard, bland, square, “white” handshake– nobody dared do anything fancier or “hipper”.

I also noticed that engineers and technical people were a lot less enthusiastic about handshakes and tended to want to get them out of the way, and salespeople a lot more enthusiastic about them and seemed to consider them a lot more important. Being part of the “nerd” tribe myself, I’ve never been much for handshakes, but found them useful as a tool to help remember someone’s name when meeting them. I got used to that, and it seemed comfortable.

Then I spent 7 years almost exclusively in the world of stay-at-home moms. I noticed that full-time moms don’t shake hands, even when meeting for the first time. The few (and proud!) of my fellow stay-at-home dads followed the mom’s convention; I don’t think I shook anyone’s hand for years unless it was someone’s husband I was meeting for the first time– following the business convention. So I’d gotten unaccustomed to shaking hands, and also formed the opinion that it was a “guy thing” that remained in the business world as a result of it having been male-dominated for so much of its history.

Then I got involved briefly in politics, and it was back to the business convention: handshakes when you meet someone, and men and women used them. And they tended to be executed with the “salesperson” level of enthusiasm, but again, only on meeting someone.

And, now that I’ve gotten back into the music world, it’s a lot more touchy-feely. Everyone shakes hands, and hugs, at the beginning and end of each rehearsal or gig, upon each casual meeting, even if you’ve just been working together the night before, and often in creative ways– hand slaps, soul handshakes, bumping knuckles, and sometimes combinations thereof.

I don’t know why this is. Maybe it’s because– unlike much of the business world which is more gender balanced– music remains largely a boy’s club. Maybe musicians are just more physical, warmer, and emotive. Maybe it’s because music is a lot more like sales or politics: it’s a people thing. Maybe it’s due to the strong influence of African-American culture in the music world. I have noticed that my use of the square, businesslike “white” handshake seems out of place and even gets odd looks occasionally, so I’m trying to loosen up and get used to the other variations. It’s definitely a different way of doing things, and that songwriter who dislikes handshakes is really swimming against the tide.

Blogging is dead, long live blogging

I find it interesting how much blogging has changed over the last 6 or 7 years.

I think the “dear-diary”-style narcissistic blogging of the LiveJournal variety– publicly venting personal inner dialogue (um, like this blog for example)–, is dead. Nobody wants to read that shit anymore.

But what’s taken the world by storm, is the “Citizen Journalist” and “Town Meeting” style of blogging– like DailyKos. Millions of comments, hundreds of thousands of members, it’s impressive.

Blogging has grown up from being a purely ecocentric, individualistic expression, to being a form of civic discourse, information exchange, activism, and force for social change.

Ironically, I’m going in the opposite direction, and it’s fine with me to be going somewhere that everyone else is leaving.

I haven’t done much with individual expression and have instead spent a lot of time on political blogs in the civic square. I’ve had enough of that, and now I’m more interested in ranting about my own personal thoughts.

Managing expectations

One of the more annoying tasks I have to deal with, is managing people’s expectations.

I always make a point of warning people, ahead of time, that I suck.

I have learned to do this through a lifetime of hard experience. I also have learned to play it a lot cooler when starting any new thing.

The problem is that I tend to enjoy learning new things and jumping into totally new fields. I can hide my enthusiasm for a little while but not too long. After a while it comes through. And then, despite all my warnings, people decide that I’m much better than I am. They mistake enthusiasm for comptence, or even aptitude, when I have neither. As soon as I start to get a clue what I’m doing, the inevitable disaster is set to follow. Because then everyone’s expectations start to rise. Even though I told them I couldn’t meet them.

And then, finally, every time, the awful moment eventually comes when they realize, hey, this guy sucks. He has no idea what he’s doing. He shouldn’t be doing this. He’s totally wrong for this. What were we thinking?

It annoys me every time this happens, because, I warned them. I suck. I’m not meant for this. I can’t really do this; I’m just faking it because I happen to be good at faking it. And I told everyone I was faking it. But every time they are surprised. Stop being surprised! And don’t dare be disappointed either. I told you I suck.

Where I fit in this model

In this world, there are leaders, there are followers, and there is roadkill.

At this stage in my life, I’ve discovered I’m definitely not a leader– though I tried for a long time. And I’ve never been, nor will I ever be, much of a follower.

The remainder explains my lot in life, nearly all of my history, and presents a future with a level of inevitability that makes me feel surprisingly comfortable and content.

A future that fits

For quite a few years, I’ve been railing about the evils of “consumer plantation” society, how foolish and immoral it is, the waste and pollution, the idiocy, the march of corporate feudalism, and the terrible problems all of the above will present for individuals and for society as a whole, etc.

But nowadays I’m a lot more serene. First of all, many more people are losing their naivete, and finally waking up to what is going on. Secondly, there’s little need to rail against the system, because it’s coming down on its own. All I have to do, is sit here, and wait. Global corporate “free-market” capitalism is creaky, corrupt, disconnected from the people. It is broken, and it is about to go away. As best as I can reckon, the future is coming to me, and it will fit me and my anarchist-socialist-hippie-treehugger-D.I.Y. kind, like a glove.

It will be, as it’s been said, “human-scale”.

Americans will no longer be consuming cheap plastic shit like drunken sailors on leave, and throwing away perfectly good and usable things just because they’re not “upscale” enough. The global economy will not be a giant game of Lotto or a huge Vegas table, riggged by the casino. Corporations will not buy and sell Congressmen, Senators, and Presidents like so many baseball cards. People will live close to the land and to each other. We will produce more than we consume, and do both of those locally.

Actually, it’s been said better:

“In the world I see – you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center.

You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life.

You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower.

And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn; laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.”

Actually, I’m not convinced that civilization will collapse as completely as Tyler Durden predicted. I don’t think that’d be either possible or beneficial. Momentum counts for a lot, as does human nature and human desires. We’ll always have technology, specialization, cities, and complex social structures. But all of the above will be smaller, more distributed, more “people-powered”… more “human-scale”. That’s a positive thing.

Civilization is in for a long-overdue (and probably very dramatic) “correction”. At the end of it, the world will be the kind of place in which I, personally, will feel much more comfortable.

While somewhat more serene, I’m not yet optimistic, because I’m not at all convinced that the transition will be peaceful. Things could get very ugly before they get any better. But, then again, maybe not. Either way, I think we’ll survive it

At least, I can hope so, and try to do my part, and that’s all.

Vegetables

For almost a year, I’ve been gradually removing meat from my diet, and eating vegetarian.

I noticed something amazing: after snacking on a bunch of raw green vegetables (peas, green beans, broccoli, whatever), I’m not hungry anymore. I feel completely full. This surprised me. I always thought that meat was the only “real” food that could fill me up and make me feel like I’ve eaten, and I’m notorious for being able to gorge on carbs (bread! huge plates of pasta! crackers! bread!!). But after only a little bit of peas/beans/etc, I’m done, I’ve eaten.

Another nice thing is that I don’t have to cook much anymore. Unlike meat or grains or fish, vegetables don’t actually have to be prepared in order for humans to digest them. They are safe to eat raw. So I do. This saves a lot of time.

Finally, I still love wild-caught fish, and whenever I buy, cook, and eat it, I do so enthuiastically. And when I get the rare opportunity to have a burger or some chicken or steak, I take it. Pizza with pepperoni is goood. So I’m not a purist by any stretch. But for the first time in my life, I can actually imagine living off of lentils, rice, and green veggies.

Time sink

This blogging thing looks like it'll be a tremendous time sink.

Turns out I'm the kind of person who endlessly tweaks and edits stuff. Obsessively rewriting, condensing, etc. Blog posts are supposed to be one-off, forgettable stream-of-consciousness things, but I can't write like that. I could spend all day rewriting the same blog post… yecch.

Finally figuring out WordPress's UI though. Each web app– indeed each sub-module of some web apps– seems to invent its own GUI metaphor. I'm sure I'll compile a long list of reasons why Web GUI's suck, and that'll be one of them.