Category Archives: Stuff

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Living smoothly

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The other day, I imagined myself writing in this space to vent about the resumes I have to read at work and advise on what not to do. I didn’t get around to it.

In truth, my resume, job applying advice is very brief — show empathy.

If your prospective employer asks for your name in the subject line of your email, include your goddamn name. When your naming your attached documents, it’s no longer relevant if the names make sense on YOUR computer, they need to make sense on someone else’s. Somewhere in the kit and kaboodle, provide some kind of clue as to why your applying. I ain’t got the time to mine for your gold.

That’s about it. Oh, and save the crazy for after you get the job. Although, folks where I work are kind of digging your advertisement of the goodness of your homemade jam, we may not be laughing with you.

In my personal case, the job has a glamorously worldwide sounding name. It’s not, it’s paperwork locally for the most part. But, good god y’all everyone who has imagined travel or lived abroad thinks that’s enough to establish global bona fides. Do some research about the job, people.

All of the above is preamble to what I want to write about now, social network anger. I got a dose and realized that a whole lot of people are talking but not listening.

Admittedly, in a less than charitable mood, I Twittered and Facebooked about a job applicant that stated his desire to work among folks of “various socioeconomic backgrounds.” I was amused not just by the thought of someone hoping to rub shoulders in the workplace with the strata of American society, but the fact of the matter that where I work is pretty much no melting pot.

In response, I got an earful from a socially networked “friend,” actual close relative, about his own experience with the paperwork of job applications. Truly, I didn’t get it. It was a conversational hijack with a sweeping generalization that wasn’t matching my own experience or current reality.

It was clearly social networking equaling two simultaneous monologs masquerading as dialog. Somewhere I was told we should agree to disagree, but for that to happen we would have had to have been speaking about the same thing.

Of course, the comedian in me was miffed that my punchline was hijacked by a non sequitur.

I’ve noticed that kind of “conversation” happens a lot online.

M.’s coworker ended up blocking people in her Facebook circle, rather than continue to participate in the non-dialog. In her case, she sometimes throws out affirmations and whatnot from her personal New Age-y perspective. Quite possibly not one’s cup of tea, but harmless enough and her belief system.

She got tired of “friends” criticizing her posts or proselytizing their own beliefs.

I totally can’t relate to her naysayers. In my own feeds, I have plenty of folks who don’t believe what I believe. In particular, thanks to comedy, there’s a good amount of 12 steppers. No way can I imagine shitting on someone else’s call to a higher power.

Pretty much, I keep my snarky counterpoint to those contacts encouraging provocation or political dialog. Otherwise, I guess I live the cliche, if you ain’t go something nice to say, shut the fuck up. (Or the comedic corollary, I at least try for something funny.)

Speaking of comedy, I follow a few Twitter feeds of comedians of various levels of fame or success. Some of them go for one-liners, quick, witty observations and other humorous notes. Others keep it much less purposely funny or a bit more personal.

What amazes me is how repetitive the slamming is. For quite a few of them, it would seem especially the ones who share a bit of the personal, there’s a steady-ish stream of “fans” deciding how unfunny they are.

If you’re fan enough to find some comic and start following what they write, why the insults? I really, really, really don’t understand liking someone enough to seek them out, but being contemptuous enough to shit on them.

Life is short and all that.

It used to be that Internet arguments among Usenet readers with a shared interest in common would devolve into anonymous shouting matches and ad hominem attacks. I think I understand the underlying passion and anonymous safety of a good, old-fashioned flamewar.

I almost understand the trickery and prank sensibility that is trolling.

Angry posting among “friends” is another animal. One I don’t comprehend. In social networking either you know people or feel some kind of connection. How did that devolve into contrarianism?

It’s like all of the shifty dark part of the net is taking over the good junk. Makes me kind of nostalgic for a good Usenet argument and Godwin’s Law.

In the end, I just can’t sustain the anger. Maybe it’s as M. claims, we’re doing alright and life is fine and others can’t see it.

Yesterday was sunshine in Napa with four friends. We tried reserves, and Pinots and cabs. We sampled Francis Ford Coppola’s Rubicon, which at $145 a bottle was damn smooth and tasty. The afternoon was lunch and more wine,

M. and I ended the day by wandering SF at night. Finally, in lieu of dinner we shared a banana split at the chocolatier’s that lends it’s name to Ghiardelli Square and headed home.

Maybe he’s onto something with this happiness thing.

Very little from very high

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I wrote the following in the middle of the stratosphere on Tuesday night. Alas, no wifi on the plane, and i only just remembered to hit publish now.

******************************

As I grabbed my iPad and headed cross country, I promised myself I would write a little. Here I am, at the veritable end of my journey, writing just a little.

I just don’t have the writing mojo I used to have or thought I used to have or used to think I had. Sadly, reuniting with writerly friends did nothing to spur me on to feats of literary limping, as is my usual style.

To be fair, the friend who is part drinking buddy, part platonic soulmate who generally makes me feel more than I am and better for having tried than not to have done at all, was quite busy. You gotta forgive a guy for not indulging in deep, penetrating faux-intellectual self indulgence and midnight literary aspirations when he’s mid-nuptials.

On a complete side note, this wedding, his wedding to the soulmate who, I think, he really needs, was an end to an era. Many many many units of time and various locations ago, we somewhat boozily, single without romantic prospects and unsure if we wanted the entanglements of another relationship, promised ourselves to each other, provided the planets aligned and deemed it so.

The main condition was that he would have to hit 40, which, a decade my younger, is still years off for him, and by arithmetic I would be a ripe old 50. We would both have to be single without others on deck or in the wings or any other metaphoric closeness.

Of course, being as I moved across the whole of the United States to be with another guy, I arguably fired the first salvo in the dissolution of our pact. Not to mention, we’ve been as good as married for the past six years or so, cohabiting and all, albeit without the legal paperwork.

(Here’s another completely parenthetical, non sequitur diversion. I just had my bodily fluids churn and various muscles clench in fear in the middle of the stratosphere in the middle of this jet in the middle of a flight. I have never heard my name over the loud speaker, and I have never been asked to ring my call button. Until now.

Once I got over my instinctual panic for some kind of horrible announcement, I gave myself a quick frisk and realized my pocket was now unbuttoned. Yup, a new privilege of American Express membership. My name can be read off the card as it sits on the floor of the toilet of an airplane.)

It was a fun wedding especially in that I got to see some folks I rather like. But, I do admit, I’m not a fan of the wedding in general. I don’t know what is missing somewhere in my cerebral cortex, because I simultaneously understand and respect the ceremony, and I don’t.

Why the need for ritual and public promises? I totally get being with someone, and increasingly I now understand the legal rights marriage bestows. Hell, wedding rings even make sense to me, even though I resent their history of marking chicks as chattel.

I have performed publicly. I have performed publicly in a state of undress. I have performed publicly in a few U.S. states and one foreign country. Yet, the idea of standing up there and telling a crowd or even just a smattering of folks what they already know–namely that I planning on sticking with M.–is incompressibly frightening to me. Like stage fright with a soupçon of agoraphobia.

My friends did it twice, once in her home town and then again in his. I think I’d be weakly cowering in the corner if I ever have to do that.

Of course, my eldest brother outed my being the weak link to my uncle. As many might assume, he had thought it was M. who was the holdout. I think it’s a little bit of both of us ducking the party more than the commitment.

Romantically, on phones separated by 3,000 miles, M. suggested that maybe we’d have to do it if only to put the familial nagging on both sides and across two continents to rest.

Is nagging a valid reason? Probably as good as any, like my desire to have M. enforce a “Do Not Resuscitate” order, when my body has started to have enough of this world, or M.’s to have me chuck his ashes into the sea.

Then there’s the nice part of our togetherness and all. Who better to stay with than the one with whom you’ve made a happy life?

Meanwhile, while I pondered all of that, I got to see parts of my family and relics of my old surroundings. I’m not calling my family relics, we’re all getting older, but not that old.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to see the chunk of family or friends that are stressful. That’s another worry about a wedding. I imagine there is no elegant way to leave out people who’ve seen you as a bare ass naked baby, even if you would like to write on an invitation “only show up if you plan on not being too crazy or a total dick.”

I’m pretty sure Emily Post and Ms. Manners wouldn’t even waste the ink explaining why that ain’t done.

Then, there’s a whole other group of folks that I wouldn’t be able to send an invite to that read, “stay home and enjoy your own life, nothing to see here” to avoid their making a fuss or having to find an outfit or driving or getting a babysitter or having to leave the house at all on my account.

I have thrown good parties in the past and have made myself the center attention, but weddings seem so compulsory. They should be just as optional and more fun than when I used to let people get drunk on my back deck before watching July 4 fireworks from the Cambridge side of the River Charles. Has anyone ever felt that way about attending a wedding?

Better to keep it small. If only I can convince M. (and a passel of other people) that two might just be enough.

Coming home?

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I don’t have a house here. The places I have lived are now occupied by strangers, sold to the highest bidder. Still and all, I was Massachusetts born and bred.

And, now I’m back again. I’m lying in my nephew’s bed, a bed in which I have never slept. He’s away at school, just to clear up that we’re not the sort of family you see in newspapers, shaking your head and wondering how does that ever, ever happen. No, my nephew is safe, and I lack the predatory spirit.

I’ve never been in this bed, because punk ass little sister that I am, when I moved out of state I returned usually with M. in tow. My big sister got this room, while encoupled or ensconced as M. and I are, we got the bigger room, the veritable suite where my older nephew sleeps.

It doesn’t feel like home anymore. I think it’s because I am in a bed and a room in which I’ve never lain my head. Definitely not the familiar surroundings you hear the cliches drop as “home.” I am with family and very comfortable and grateful for their hospitality; it just ain’t home.

As if to greet me, Logan Airport had a special surprise as I landed in the old, hometown airport. I swear to fucking god on high and all of the saints and spirits, that I saw the meanest boy I ever dated on the escalators.

For a split second, I thought about shouting his name, in order to watch him turn his head in my direction. Then, as I rose up on my escalator and he sunk metaphorically and literally downward on his, I could flip him off. Perhaps a double-handed, two middle fingers raised salute with a lot of wagging and emphatic gesturing.

I opted for dignity and not ever engaging with him again and silently rode up the moving stairs.

I sometimes feel badly that I actually, without kidnapping or water boarding, dated him for so long. It’s hard to explain the mental illness to the very nice, polar opposite man and life I have now. There should be an acronym like “AA” for explaining a stage in a woman’s life when her ultimate choice was a bad one.

The acronym would also help provide the evidence that the hatred I feel is unusual but sane. I reserve it for one person. I’m pretty sure any other guy I dated I would have greeting across the escalators civilly. Hell, I later helped one get a job and then was a good colleague at work.

Best of all of seeing this ghost the moment I landed “home?” He was looking overweight, dumpy and old. A look wholly incompatible with the sun, lemon trees, boogie boarding, enjoyment having life I have now with M.

The curse of fine weather

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It’s a gorgeous day outside these four walls. but this time of year, it’s often a gorgeous day. consequently, i’m lazy.

Back in the cold of Cambridge, if there was a day like today, it was almost required to drop everything and soak up some vitamin D. You never knew if rain would inevitably rain on your parade, proverbially or actually, or if another crisis was around the corner. It was almost required to make hay when the sun was shining, and clearly that cliche came from a dank and drizzly corner of the world.

By the way, with that link to Boston’s latest dilemma, I’m beginning to think my old town is becoming Egypt of the Bible days. When will the locusts and frogs descend?

Here I am, safely drinking unboiled water after harvesting today’s lemon crop in my back yard, and I’m OK being indoors. It makes me feel guilty, all the while I know that statistical days of sunshine are greatly in my favor here.

I’m not a complete and utter slug of sloth, to mix a metaphor. I’m on laundry load three, the dishwasher has been loaded, run and unloaded, and a fresh shower curtain now hangs anew. I have not played in the sunshine.

Walt Whitman I am not.

The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields
and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising
from bed and meeting the sun.

I know not of these emotions. Not today.

The anti-Whitman, but not like in an Emersonian way or anything cool like that, I have succeeded in making my iPad into essentially a thin client.

Through the automagic of network computing, I can look at the desktop of one of my home computers, and tunnel into the files and do whatever the hell I want. Better yet, that desktop is connected to my backup disk with pretty much all of my data goodness, files galore I can now retrieve and manipulate iPad in hand.

As an aside, I was a total, arrogant douchebag to a chick at the boxing viewing party we went to last night. Fascinated to play with our new toys, after a while the woman declared the iPad inferior to her Mac Air (sheesh, talk about expensive toy), because it’s all about “access.” So, click click, I showed her my home desktop at my virtual fingertips.

Apart from party douchebaggery and braggadocio along with just seeing if I could actually do it, there is some method to my geek madness. It’s rooted in the black, dark days of my early foray into weblogging bullshit.

You see, one thing my old employer tried to do in trying to show me as the ill-will driven loon they needed me to be was to show I was using their computers and time to fiddle in my shitty craft. I hadn’t been, apart from the odd lunch hour (my time) or quick comment, but they tried, oh lordy-lord, they tried.

(Internet tip # 5,376, if you are going to ‘blog on the company dime, don’t date stamp your entries. I use Splee’s Fuzzy DateTime WordPress plugin. Thank you Lee McFadden and the development community on the world wide web for humanizing my time away from the actual precision my computer could be reporting. Nothing like “wee hours” or “today” to confound the time police.)

This job, therefore, one can’t even get to my website from their network. The IP address is blocked for all and sundry and their peering eyes, myself included.

It’s been a convenient excuse for my general malaise and writer’s block. Despite my boss’s own verbal notice that I SHOULD write in my down time and not to worry about the man’s keeping me down, I have kept off my own playground. No risk, no questions, no complaints, the lessons I took from my last gig.

Now, though, technology might give me a boost and perhaps switch off that writer’s block. During stolen daylight minutes when I am not too tired and eager to doze on the couch lulled by the TV, maybe I can write a little bit.

Tunneling to my own playground on my own equipment located 40 miles from work, I could have an out-of-body writing experience privately. We’ll see how it goes, but the man can’t be keeping my data down.

Hedging toward the forbidden

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Of course, being somewhat educable, i try to learn shit. Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes it even sticks.

In other words, given past experience, I try not to write about work. And with that, you know I’m going to skate near that particularly rice paper thin ice.

Mostly, I like my job, and I haven’t felt the wrist-slitting perturbations that became daily episodes in my last state of employ. It’s a weird little group of people. A collective building heaped from the chief on down with folks who academically achieved even when it meant ass kicking and wedgies.

A nerd’s paradise in some respects. But, it is fucking work, and trials and tribulations there are.

The other day, I was driving there, before my getting old V-dub decided it didn’t want to drive, and listening to the radio. Specifically, I was listening to that solid, quirky voice of public radio, Terry Gross on Fresh Air. She was chatting away with Stephen Sondheim on the occasion of his living 80 years on earth.

Total aside, I love Sondheim in terms of his work, but after listening to this interview I think he must be a dick if you were ever to hang out with him Very old school marm-ish corrections and stuff. I kind of wanted Terry to take a shot back, like “Yes, so what are you are saying is you find other people, such as me, to be plodding and inaccurate clowns, is that correct?”

One thing he talked about has stuck with me for days now. In talking about working with Leonard Bernstein in the early days of his career, he mentioned that Bernstein always failed grandly. He said he learned from him that “the worst thing you can do is fall off a low rung.”.

If you’re going to fail, fail big. Might as well get to the top rung first.

I think it’s a life philosophy into which I could swan dive and feel at home.

Arguably, in the many employment failures I’ve had, I’ve failed big. Mind you not Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein big. Just big enough for little old me.

Maybe to them, it would be bottom rung junk. But, for me, it’s from the perspective of a micro-millimeter long ant and a conventional-sized ladder. For an ant, I’ve dropped some dizzying distances from what felt like a pretty good rung of achievement.

Sondheim talking about failing big struck me this week, because I’ve been feeling a familiar fear and loathing.

Like in my last gig, I’ve been a reliable workhouse. The higher up types have given me sufficient strokes to make me feel like there’s a corporate future in which I just might feature in some way. And, now, word on the street is that we might be reorganizing.

It’s a road so familiar, I still got the dust on my shoes to prove it. The strokes, the good positioning, the reliableness, the work ethic, the dealing with team dynamics, the helpong to make change happen and reorganizations possible. I have seen this movie before. I’ve lived the scenes, memorized a whole lot of dialog.

Yet, it is different. I gotta hope it’s different. Different folks, different gig, different job, hell, different fucking state. And, maybe, just maybe, I learned something last time at the rodeo, and I’m a little different too.

If not, if my pit of the stomach fears come true. It’s a higher rung and potentially a better failure. I just fucking hope it’s a good story, if the road turns down that same hill.

Very little of interest

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No one should really care but me, but I’ve spent the past week moving this website from one hosting site to another. So while no words have appeared in this space, I have been working on the behind the scenes of this weblog.

By way of review, my website was hosted on Bluehost.com, because eons ago WordPress.org, the software on which this page runs, had a promo partnership. It seemed like a good buy, and they were the scrappy new comers in webhosting.

Now, they have grown into suckitude. Once upon a time, if they did an upgrade or wanted you to reset something, the email would be friendly and clear. The other day, they sent one telling me to update my spam protection, and, boom, I deleted a bunch of email that may or may not have been spam based on their instructions. Thanks guys.

When I called the tech line, they offered nothing. Even their “sorry” wasn’t forthcoming, as they went through the steps to determine it was all my fault. There was barely any acknowledgement that their own email lacked pretty crucial information – before doing as we ask make sure everything is all cleaned up over at Postini, because as soon as you do like we’re telling you, you’ll never see that data again.

I think that is what was so frustrating. They turned off my Postini account before I could go through it. Presumably, there my data still sits somewhere in Postini’s servers, unaccessible to only me. I can’t imagine that canceling a subscription equals – POOF! instant data gone.

An email to their founder, Matt Heaton,who implies in his blog that he’s happy to hear from customers, is to date unanswered.

Since my website subscription with Bluehost had only just automatically resumed, I looked around. One thing I found was that I was not alone in my lack of being happy or impressed with their customer service.

The other thing I found, which falls under the allegedly category, and I’m not sure whether it’s fact or bigotry, is that Matt and/or Bluehost may have written some checks in support of California’s Prop. 8, banning gay marriage. He is a Mormon, and the company is based in Utah.

It could just be anti-Mormon rhetoric making the Prop. 8-Heaton connection. Or, it could be true, in which case I’m perfectly happy not giving more dollars out of state that comes back to fuck up my laws.

The only thing people might notice with this change is I’ve added a basic home page at http://dee-rob.com and a new face to my photo gallery.

Other than that, it reminded me that working on websites is a little bit of dorky fun. So, there may be other changes afoot.

Oh, and I’m finally sorting out how to use WordPress.org’s iPad app, so maybe I’ll write more. Pictures like these, look amazing on Apple’s new toy.

The undisciplined life

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M. has learned martial arts. I have not. In point of fact, it’s not even a realm of activity in which I have ever considered participating. The fighting arts lie somewhere between spelunking and coloratura soprano in my world, which is nowhere.

Until I met M. I hadn’t realized that there’s a whole lot of worlds in the world of martial arts. How the breakdown translates in my head (and i’m sure I’m missing an esoteric nite or nuance about which M. will correct me) is that there’s your spiritual, intense, disciplined, quasi-religious stuff and then there’s fighting. Except that’s not right, because it’s all fighting.

It could be that it really breaks down as hypocrisy versus honesty.

The above is a long-winded introduction to the adventure of M. signing us up to check out a class in kendo, the way of the sword, the modern Japanese art of stick fighting. We watched as three sensei (senseis?) and some veteran warriors led various levels of students through drills, rituals, some fighting and a lot of bowing.

My favorite part of the evening was imagining what brought everyone to that gym. Like the overweight, bald white guy with the scruffy, but intentional, goatee and the other white guy with the modified prince valiant hair in a shiny silver flow and fashion glasses. Each of them threw themselves with concentration into the repetitive exercises. Each of them looked like a greater than 100 percent chance that they participate in some kind of sub-cultural activity or lifestyle. Ren faire maybe or “live action role playing” or maybe just bondage and discipline.

One squirmy little guy, maybe 8 or 9, looked like there were a dozen places he would rather be doing a dozen other things. Drill after drill involved slipping feet across the gym floor in a controlled glide. He snuck in extra skips with random hops whenever the senseis weren’t looking and often when they were. He had a drummer inside his head that was playing his own song, and his wooden sword waggled in it’s own, non-warrior orbit.

The backstory for him in my head was that given his apparent mixed heritage, someone in the family decided maybe he could get some much needed discipline while basking in his Japanese history.

He was in marked contrast to the other little boy in line with him for the drills. Lower to the ground, maybe a couple of years younger at an age when a boy starts looking like a boy not a baby, the second little guy was battle ready. Every drill he maintained the dead-eye, stone stare of a warrior. His movements were controlled, precise. I imagine his parents have always wanted a Navy Seal or other Special Ops in the family.

He scared me.

An earnest but not soldier strong blond girl kept looking up at the ceiling to a sensei’s admonishment that there were no ninjas there ready to jump her from above. For her, I think maybe she’s adding some activities to her youthful resume to entice college admission to her well-rounded soul.

We, M. and I, were both drawn to an older gentleman, the aforementioned ninja-evoking sensei. He was Mr. Miyagi in a gym of chest puffed arrogance. To be able to watch, M. had gotten emailed permission from one sensei who was probably about our age, maybe a little older. After a few minutes of watching it was clear that he’s a complete dick.

The old guy, the Mr. Miyagi figure, was different. He had the skills, knew the traditions, the sensei title AND had a fucking sense of humor. He invited us back next week, told me I had a strong kendo build, intimated that women needed stick fighting to keep men in line and wanted us to spontaneously join the exercises.

The dick sensei, on the other hand, snapped at a clear newcomer as he crossed the gym floor that he should say excuse me. I didn’t get it, but think it was just because he had dared walk in the shadow of the great sensei himself. Power trip much?

We spent an hour or two watching exercises to promote muscle memory in the heat of fighting, stick drills, foot work, warm ups, and finally two-person interactions that looked like choreographed smacks to the armor and bashes to the helmeted head. We also watched repeated cycles of bowing and prostration along with identical movements for everything from sitting to wrapping s rag around your head.

It was exactly too formal for our go with the flow selves. I think some martial arts to me would be like AA meetings are to people I know who don’t believe in a higher power. Too much emphasis on bullshit.

I would gladly show respect to the older gentleman full of ninja jokes and samurai sword skills. Bowing to the cranky, testosterone laden sensei and paying him ritualized homage would get fucking old extremely fast.

The quest for a joint activity moves on, despite my desire for a teacher-sanctioned or encouraged stick beat down for M. by me sooner rather than later.

Writing the modern way

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Early adopters M. and I are, so here I sit with Apple’s latest gewgaw on my lap. I have to say this little thing is something.

Now, me, I’ve gotten all sorts of portable devices over the years. I had Motorola clamshell phones that let you download weak, little Java or Brew applets. Chunky pixels of solitaire games or calculators that required a whole lot of clickity clicking.

The web, I’ve been surfing that thang for years and years. Normal folks don’t remember the magic of pairing an amber screen of text with a zippy 9600 baud modem and discovered words on bulletin board services that were left behind by other explorers. Usenet was a mystical land.

Gopher. I went down some Gopher holes and found treasures of information. I was a member in good standing with Delphi, and that neighborhood of oracles. I had mastered WAIS searches a year or so before I ended up sleeping with a guy responsible for some of the core code.

Yeah, I’m geek girl enough to sleep with a true geek guy. (In those days it also meant a house full of roommates who not only could code, but could gather up the binary files and make “Simpson” episodes and Grateful Dead and Phish bootlegs appear from data strings.)

Hell, I even rocked a Sidekick for long awhile.

But, this, the iPad, it’s not your grandma’s computer. Although, it probably should be.

I think the best thing about it is it doesn’t have much of that computer feeling to it. Not a lot of pesky menus or commands. Just words and pictures that humans might use.

Want a book? Hit the iBooks icon, which looks like a book, et voilà. Want to know what books you have? Tap on the library. Want to buy a new one? Tap on the store. Pretty much the same thing for loading up apps and email accounts and whatnot.

I know for sure if my mother were alive I would buy her one.

Now Pat wasn’t a dumb woman, or particularly fearful of trying something new and different and electronic. Among her computing accomplishments was to not only find on the web a bunch of images of Wyoming when my sister moved there, but to download them and print them up on good photo paper for a collage of framed art. However, AOL and her desktop set up were haunted by various gremlins.

A common call I might get, whilst sitting home alone some quiet evening, was “Help. There’s just a big line or thing on the screen and it won’t go away.” Or, “I click on that thing and it doesn’t make that sound.”

What that generally translated to was an errant mouse drag or two had made a menu bar stretch to half the screen obscuring the menus that could it back under control. Or, maybe in the days of modems, the familiar squeal of the phone line never connected. In later days of cable modems the email window wasn’t crying out “You’ve got mail.”

Hours of our relationship, which ended in one of us dying prematurely, could have been salvaged if Steve Jobs had been inspired sooner and technology had caught up to Pat’s fantasy of how “that damn computer” should have worked.

A lot of people hate the cult of Mac and the messiah that is Jobs. It is in the end a commercial enterprise, and he’s a very wealthy man.

However, I defend him and his products perhaps because of his personal interests and how they are found in his designs. It is the tech company where CEO Jobs stood in front of an image of intersecting street signs – Liberal Arts and Technology. It takes a guy who likes to read books himself to design something a book reader might like.

Mostly, I think computers are designed and made by geeks like me who enjoy clicking around and solving puzzles and don’t mind coded language. For them, and some of the time for me, it’s OK to have to click on and on through a series of Skinner-inspired conditioned responses.

Normal folks, though, and a good percentage of the time myself, don’t want to have to think that hard. In Jobs’ world the computer is a means that should be easy with the hard thinking part reserved for the actual task at hand.

We just want to click on the picture of a book to get there and have the reading be the main event. That the iPad does quite prettily.

Too croupy to write

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Man am I tired. I haven’t written. Haven’t felt like writing. Mostly I just sit and cough. And cough. And cough. And cough.

Apparently, or at least the word on the street from the fine doctor at Kaiser Permanente willing to diagnose me by telephone, the old barking cough that scared many a Victorian mother has never gone away. A virus might get driven underground by good health and good treatment and vaccines. But, then, it can rise again in a whole other host of hosts.

In other words, the croup, which I associate with novels and stories of sickly families and Dickensian tragedy, is currently making a come back in a large way around Northern California. Instead of crying babies under a towel sobbing through a cloud of steam, it’s old folks like me coughing up a lung all night long.

For me, croup is Minnie May not dying and Anne getting to hang out with Diana again, despite having gotten her tanked on currant wine.

Well it used to be that. Now, it’s a pain in the ass cough that kept me up nights with a heaving wheezing chest that now lingers into scratchy annoyance. I’m pretty sure it’s not from my being overfed on potatoes and my bad hygiene, like this old-timey article asserts. Or “protein poisoning.”

Night after night coughing and wheezing is exhausting.

What I have learned most of all, is I better not get anything terminal any time soon. Illness frazzles me. I’ll be saving my pennies for a nice, permanent vacation to Switzerland, if the worst ever happens. In fact, if this coughing doesn’t stop, I might have to off myself soon.

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Pat, the annual tribute

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If Pat had lived until today, she would have turned 81. She didn’t make it that far.

In years past, I’ve had fun thinking about the ways I live my life today that is my antidote to her end while embracing what was best about her. A creative kind woman, with a whole slew of hard knocks and heart breaks. The only antidote I know to life’s grind is living what you can as best you can.

Not to get all power of positive thinking, but the more sunshine I appreciate. The lemons in my yard, the sunsets on the drive home, that kind of Hallmark cliche. The more I remember all that and don’t let the bullshit drag me down to deep, I think I’m honoring her memory. Even in depression, there was stuff that mattered and most of all was keep on keeping on.

Now, I could try to remember another great whacky story from the annuls of Pat. One of my fond memories from fairly late in her life, or at least around the retirement from teaching years, was a gift basket she arranged. Her friend was either having a milestone birthday or a retirement party, something fairly momentous. Pat decided to put together a gift basket. It was no bath salts and cologne and wash cloths run of the mill department store gift basket.

It was mined from months of picking up the weird and interesting and a few actual cool gift items. I only vaguely remember it, because it was like a memory game where a bunch or random, disparate objects were spread out before me and later I would be tested for recall. One item I remember was the Steiff bear.
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The recipient collected teddy bears, or she had an antique from childhood (or the childhood of someone in her family tree), and naturally such a find would have to be in the growing basket. Only, Pat wasn’t really going to lay out large bills for a fuzzy old bear, not when ingenuity and a sense of humor were on her side. Collectors would know that among the things that make Steiff bears unique and prove their authenticity is a button in the ear. Dating back about a century or so, that’s how the Steiff family swings.

Pat, she bought a big old button, and a little, old haggard bear, and voila, Steiff. It’s that kind of fun gift pack that took people by surprise. Other folks just don’t think of that stuff, and, if they do, they don’t carry it out.

In those occasional moments of my own whimsy, I think of Pat. It’s one of the reasons I like the Walsh Brothers. They have an awesome ceramic figurine of a wise, green mentor from the Star Wars movies.
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I think the story goes that their mother made it for them in the height of the frenzy when they were boys in the 1980s. Like many a mom at the time, though, the intricacies of names like Obi Wan Kenobi were lost. So, carefully hand painted on the figure is it’s name — JODA.

Joda and the Steiff bear will end up together in a toy heaven some day.

I didn’t mean to tell a Pat story, though. What I meant to do was write about the issue of the day that is not getting enough news coverage and would have had her muttering for days an days and days and days.

I’ve only seen a bit in our U.S. news, but Germany is having its own Catholic Church meltdown with various scandals. Right now, it’s a lot of what did Pope Benedict, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, know and when did he know it. You gotta figure he knew is brother Georg was a hothead with some anger management issues lighting the choir up at his school.

I saw the stories, and I couldn’t help but think what would Pat’s take be on the whole issue. No doubt, there would be a whole lot of ranting about hypocrisy and priests and their lies. In this case, I think some Nazi name calling would be marched out, and maybe a remembrance of how the Catholic Church doesn’t exactly have an exactly stellar historical record in terms of World War II. Of course, when she was alive she picked out the Polish record during the Holocaust to indict the prior Pope, so a former Nazi youth would be fish in a barrel.

I love that not only did I think these thoughts, but my email box reminded me that my thoughts were not alone. My aunt reminded me of what may have been Pat’s last words to anyone in our family on this earth — “Law should be shot.” Her concise analysis of how the Vatican should have handled Boston’s church sex scandals.

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