The Business Writing Life - First Job

When I first started in business writing, I was a mere pup of 22, fresh out of college. That was 21 years ago, and I had the distinct pleasure of writing documentation for statistical process control software. w00t! Not really. hARd! I found the art and science of technical writing very taxing, especially when writing about a product that was so fundamentally mathematically intricate. I felt like A Beautiful Mind with no garage.

The interesting part of this first job was that we had a completely unrelated yet simultaneous business in educational publishing for the Rochester City School District and NYS Department of Education, as well as a kids' magazine division (another division of me and my business partner) that published YOUth Magazine on Long Island.

So what that job lacked was Focus, and I was grateful. If I'd have focused on the SPC software exclusively, I might be either mad or living on Slashdot. Fortunately, each day at work was as different from the one before--I might be photographing and writing a story on the Magnet Program at a city school one day, and disecting user instructions involving teensy tiny measurements the next. From teen fads to widgets. Sometimes in the same day. The only difference was the nature of the copy, the volume of content needed. And the best part of all--I lived 3 miles from my job. Little did I know then, one day I would be living 0 miles from my job. And I'm still trying to figure out which is better...

Second Job--Kodak. To Be Continued...

[It's career review week here on allied: Post about your first "real" job and I'll link to the good, the bad, and the ugly here... Notice, Real means I didn't include my K-Mart Door Greeter Job. You don't have to either. ;-) ]

The Bayou

At a mall, a plaza, running a quick errand with Jenna, me driving her in the van, through winding countryside, curvy roads, to a place I have not known, and then, in a mall of sorts, thankfully up high, looking out a window, on a platform, the architecture feels old, so old, solid and from an era outside of time. I am only eyes, looking out, looking down to the street, which is not there. Instead, a white-capped river, muddy and torrential, flows from right to left, licking the top of the sidewalk that I'm watching on the other side.

On the sidewalk, ugly miracles happen--a wolf is chasing a sheep, the sheep bleets and jumps into the water, thrashing, the wolf swimming after it, and other tsunami images of floating hubris, humans and animals and structures tossed like crutons in a wash of angry river water. These are the new archetypes: 911 burning buildings and Tsunami dreams. We are the first generation to have them. We will pass them down, Jung be damned.

I watch the action as merchants push carts down the sidewalk next to the angry river's edge. Another wolf emerges and charges a german shepherd, domesticated dog no match for the wild dog. I look to the left, where am I, place changes to billboard and I see the sign: Bayou, and another: Louisiana. I take Jenna back into the tourist shop, and we look for trinkets that say Louisian on them because she has never been to this state. Candles. Ceramic bells. Spoon rests.

And then I woke up.

George reminded me of my dream at naptime today.

Just Once...

I would love to see Mena Trott show up at a Your Typical Internet Conference in black face.

Just once.

You know, to prove a point.

Semi-Related Bonus Link:

In a city whose name I can't pronounce, Mena spots a Black Lawn Jockey with a body like a woman, apparently erected to give testimony to the talent of black men on horseback.

Something like this might have been better, but then all the white women would have to stay locked in their million-dollar homes:



I got your black lawn jockey swingin' Tiburon.

Race Mixin' and Assassination Among the Africanized Bees

Apparently the Killer -- AKA "Africanized" -- Bees that were expected in Arkansas have arrived, courtesy of Texas. Just to humor yours truly, let's examine the many adjectives and descriptions the media uses to describe these AfricanIZED bees, kay? We have: aggressive, killer, unwanted, dangerous, swarming, assassinators, and more.

I see then. When you Africanize anything, that's what you get--swarming, crazy, dangerous killers who like to fuck with the Europeans. Gangs, if you will. Made up of large members with big members and a taste for Europeans honeys.



You may wonder, how did we get the Africanized Bees in the first place?

Swarms of the Africanized honey bees have been moving north since the accidental release of some bees in 1957 from a program in Brazil, where they were being bred to improve that country's domestic bees.

Hmmm. Wonder why they're not called killer Brazilian bees. I guess that would take the sting out of the media's subliminal titillation machine, eh?



And then, of course, we have the reason that the well-hung Africanized bees have arrived in Arkansas in the first place:

Africanized bees have worked their way north by mating with European-strain queen bees.

Brings a whole new layer to the discussion around the birds and bees. Mommy, where do aggressive killer babies come from? Well honey, it's time we have a talk about the birds and Africanized bees....



Of course, you may choose to believe the scientist over the media: "The perception is worse than the reality," he said. They "are not coming to get people."

Yes, well, someone better tell FOX News.

Kaneva Beta Fun - You're Invited!

Having recently given beta feedback for Technorati, and for Highbeam, I'm now having beta fun exploring Kaneva.

It's actually fun trying to describe Kaneva. It's a kind of multi-media flickr (pre-fame) meets ebay on steroids, or an online marketplace for folks hyped on digital entertainment. An Intertainment Hub. A platform and host. Kaneva is really an interesting model.

What Kaneva is officially? "The world's first online digital entertainment marketplace enabling customers to watch, play, create, and market films and games." But you know the net--films and games are a start....video blogging, podcasting, combinations thereof, the sky could really be the limit. Kaneva could easily become a one-stop shop for downloading the newest (think blog-post frequency)amateur and indie entertainment. Because Kaneva also deals in currency, it gives new media creators a place and an audience for distributing and selling their work.

What Kaneva says:

The Long Tail represents that the aggregate of the less popular content is greater in revenue than only the blockbuster hits. Amazon and Netflix reflect this in their business models. There is a need for an infinite library of entertainment content available at all times for anyone from anywhere.

I think that's right on. Like blogging is to writing, and like flicker is tophotographyy, Kaneva could be to film, music, video and games.

Kaneva is the brainchild of Chris Klaus, founder of ISS and Really. Smart. Guy. See Chris' interview in Computer Games Magazine, and check out the Klaus Entertainment site for more Kaneva news.

Complete with tags, and a "blog this item" link to push Kaneva content outside the platform, I really like where Kaneva is going.

After watching some of the free movies and trailers, I'm transported back in time when there was no MTV and then there was. And, in college at the time, we watched it every night and felt something happening to our brains -- our visual and auditory sensory skills opening wide. Because most of us in our teens and early 20s watched MTV late into the night, MTV changed the way a generation dreamed. If you didn't know TV and Music before MTV, it's hard to explain. It has nothing to do with what MTV is like today.

But some of the original content on Kaneva feels like that first blush of MTV awakening. That expanding of possibilities.

Anyway, if you want to have beta fun, dig in. I'll see you there.

My House, The Disaster

Whenever George goes out of town, I look at the inside of the house with new eyes. Its as though having one less person here exposes the mess tenfold. What, was all of this shit hiding behind him, or have I just slowed down enough to look around and see the inside of my house as a stranger would. Say a stranger from DFACS. Who might condemn the place and take my kid away.

After all, you shouldn't have seven hamster poops laying on the livingroom floor for five days. Especially when you (vaguely) know they are there. I mean, you saw them, you didn't really want to know because the mess that has taken over the rest of the room, and adjoining rooms, really makes animal feces pale in comparison.

Today I cleaned the living room. Two baby hamsters and two grown hamsters, who must live in separate cages lest they create MORE baby hamsters, are just not helping the cause of cleaning up our act. But as I take the mama out of her cage and she rolls over in my hand to show me her belly, proud that she raised up her babies just fine this time, I'm glad we have them.

When it's quiet nighttime with just Jenna and me, and my imagination wanders to sudden noises and shadows moving, I'm glad for the three hamster wheels, squeaking away in unison, downstairs. No reason for a scare. It's just the hamsters, or the dog, or garbage bag full of old school papers and hamster shavings falling off the chair, or DFACS at the door.

The good thing about letting my house go to pot is that I used to NOT be able to do it. It used to be a source of anxiety, me moving things the minute anyone put them down. Trying to make order out of a lifetime of chaos.

Now that I've accepted chaos as chaos, now that I can identify it and at times have begun even to notice the specialness of disorder, to enjoy the free-form world, my life is more peaceful.

At the same time, I think I need a cleaning lady. Because learning to live in the moment can be really messy.

Bacons

I love when I get calls from Bacons verifying what topics I write on, how I like to be pitched, my contact info., etc. I love it because I use tools that contain me in them. I love the twisted metaness of it. (yes, meta-ness, not meatness). Only in a hyperlinked world can you be reporter, source, and subject matter all at once. Weee. What a time to be alive. What a time to be a cat.

Ethnic Tanning

I haven't been blogging because I've been living, which has been nice. At the pool. In the sun. Beautific sunshine water wrap cool breeze summer stuff. Yum! I have now surpassed any need for sunscreen, even 4 oil, and might just gravitate to baby oil and iodine next week. In the mean time, behind all of the #30 sunscreen on the shelves at big lots, I found two bottles of some off-brand Australian oil for $2.49, no sunscreen, no nothing, but shine shine shine and brown brown brown. People, they say, "Where have you been?"

As a result, I'm now nearly the hue of my daughter in the winter, and she is now the hue of a dark-skinned East Indian. What a mix we are. She, the Jamaican-African- Native American-Sicilian-Czech who is East Indian for the summer, and me the Sicilian-Czech who is now Jamaican-African-Native American as well for the summer.

And all from a bottle of Australian tanning oil.

Amazing.

Chris Locke Narrows "How Far Ahead of His Time" Gap by One Year!

Immediate Release

With the announcement yesterday by Ketchum of its Personalized Media Service, Internet Prophet and Micro-Marketing Pioneer Christopher Locke officially narrowed the number of years he is "ahead of his time" by one year, shrinking the gap from five years down to four.

Published in 2001, and noted among Amazon's "Best of 2001" books, Locke's Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices foretold of strategies that would tap into "micromarkets," where people (the artists formerly known as consumers) gather around areas of interest (the antidote to segmentation devices formerly known as demographics, psychographics, buying habits, etc.). Among these online conversation conduits, Locke discussed blogs, blogging, bloggers, and other traditional BigPR Agency Fresh Meat of the future.

"The Internet has always demanded that business read between the lines. Weblogs raise the bar. Now the challenge is to read between the sites."

Or

"Within a few years, many thousands of quality news, entertainment, and information sources will spring up on the Internet to serve highly-specific communities of interest."

--christopher locke, 2001

Having predicted that weblogs and interest-related, bottom-up media would become a threat to the mainstream broadcast model, Locke lent further proof to the well-known adage among Internetziens that Chris Locke is five years ahead of his time.

Unfortunately for Locke, showing up to the party with noise makers and sparklers five years before the pizza gets there can leave a guy kind of hungry.

"Chris has no idea that he's steering all of us in his intended direction--I mean the whole net simultaneously--but he is," Co-Clutrain Author Doc Searls might have said.

"He thinks he's just writing about interesting topics, which right now focus mainly on religion, race relations, the curse of The New Age, Jung v Freud v Alice Miller, and of course some gratuitous sex and violence," David Weinbergermight have said. "But what he's really doing is changing the course of business and humanity--and where we'll be five years, I mean four years, from now. Which is pretty amazing considering he hasn't changed his jeans in six days."

What does Locke say about narrowing the "ahead of his time" gap to four years?

"I felt something happening with the time-space continuum when I let the cat out this morning. Now it all makes sense."

For more information on enlisting the services of Mr. Locke to set your personal media strategy on fire, contact Chris Locke at clocke@panix.com.

Just one thing to say.

If a bunch of older white folks -- especially the elderly women who look like my grandma -- can clear Michael Jackson, then he's pretty much cleared in my book. Next Stop: Get the man some cult deprogramming therapy.

Aggregator Dysphoria Dysfunction Evolution

The TV remote control of the blogworld, aggregators have been fascinating me now for what, two full weeks? That sounds about right.

As a relatively new user, I have passed another milestone this week in the world of Aggregators. I find that I've stopped bothering to click on the various bloggers I subscribe to so that I might find out what the 23 new posts they've written say.

With lightning quick speed, I simply skim through the listings, see how many times my favorite bloggers have posted, and am quite sastisfied with that knowledge alone.

What about actually reading some, you might ask?

Why, my aggregator makes me far too efficient for that. Think of the time savings I'm realizing by reading who has posted rather than what they've posted.

Besides, I've been channel surfing all weekend, and it's amazing, isn't it, that with all these channels, there can still be "nothing on."

A blog-friend and I were talking recently, yack yack yacking away on the phone. (The phone is that medium where you really do LOL.)

"Jesus," he says, "Doc's posted 120 times since the last time I checked--STOP IT DOC, You're gonna go blind!"

Bloggers: Have you checked your eyesight today?

Best of Sunday

The Piano, 2003.

I blog from my couch. I guess if you saw the picture in the NY Times article, you've guessed that. I write on a laptop in what has to be the most unhealthy position for a spine you can imagine. I am the anti-ergomatic. I never had a choice really. Four years of simultaneous child rearing and working from home puts you in some precarious positions. A deadline is a deadline, and so, you work around the the general household insanity until one day you surrender to it, sit down on the couch, and say, Okay, I'll work from here.

Across from the couch is our piano. It was my father's piano--he bought it when i was three I think. An Ivers & Ponds baby grand. And while you may think, hey, nice that you have a baby grand, anyone who has had the responsibility of a piano for more than 20 years as I have can tell you--it's like owning a baby elephant that sings. I don't play--I goof around on it. George, of course, gets much use on it as he sometimes writes on the piano.

But the thing about pianos is moving them.

It's no small task, a huge expense, something you have to plan in advance for, and something you have to design one entire room of your house around.

I have moved this piano no fewer than 9 times since it officially became mine at age 18. There was the apartment it barely fit in. There wasn my English teacher who gave it a foster home for a year because no moving company would take it up the winding stairway framed with stained-glass windows. There was the house where it had a living room all to itself. And many more journeys.

When I think about moving, I think about the piano. And when I think about the piano, I think I'll never move again.

And yet, because it is something that touched my father's hands, because I have tapes of him pulling chords and notes so beautiful from it, I can never let it go. I can get back to that place in an instant, me on the piano stool him kneeling beside me, me stretching my legs down trying to reach the pedals, and finally being able to.

There is something about instruments, especially those made of wood. I have seen and held many, played a few (badly), and I know when an instrument is special. I have felt the presence of pre-played notes, that tingle that lets you know a piece of someone who touched it has been absorbed in the wood. If you listen very closely, you can almost hear the echos reverberating from 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. It is a primal and joyous thing.

I'm tired, it's 5:13, and sleep won't come, my eye keeps driftin gover to the baby grand.

And I swear I can hear something.

Best of Sunday

What I don't Remember, 2004:

what I did that night
what I did the next day, or the day after.
the first time I saw his room without his bedcovers turned down.
where I went during the wake.
where his clothes went.
why no one saved me his paisley pajamas.
what my sister said to me about dad being dead
what my brother said to me about dad being dead
what I said to my sister about dad being dead
what I said to my brother about dad being dead
what my mother told me after that thing about mourning
when the next time anyone said his name was
where I went next
what I wore
why they sent me away before the funeral
what they said to me about the funeral
How I got to Illinois
who took me there
Why they slept my older cousin on the porch with me
How he knew about sex
What I said to my grandmother about my father
what she said to me
when I went home from Illinois
how I got home.
the first time I looked at the piano without him there
the first time I looked at the bass without him there
the first time I looked at myself without him there
what I ate that day
what I ate the next day
what I said when other people said, "I'm sorry."
when I stopped liking the attention it got me
when I started feeling guilty
when I realized it wasn't fair
the first time I cried
the first time I wished him back

Best Of Sunday

CDs From 2002

I'm sitting here tonight letting my mind wander, thinking about digital generations, resurrecting the dead through digital technology. Stuff like that. Because tonight I put on a CD my cousin had burned last year, a CD featuring my grandfather on mandolin, my dad on bass and piano, and my great uncle on guitar, playing, like they did every Sunday of every week of every year, while we children danced and played and sang off-key.

I know the CD. I mean, I've listened to it before. But before tonight, I had never listened to it with my own daughter. Here she is in front of me, almost five years old, the age I was day this family session was taped. I'm looking into her eyes, and I see them all. Every one of them gone, gone long before I had a chance to ask questions, to find out everything I needed to know. And I'm explaining to her that this is her grandfather, and her great grandfather--mommy's dad and grandpa. And she's looking at me, again in her eyes I see each of them. There is my dad, her chin is his chin. And there is my grandfather--her stubborn brow.

And I'm realizing that these oak speakers, yep, these right here on the floor, are resurrecting, if only briefly, her great grandfather and her grandfather. Here we are, four generations, gathered in my living room joined by music recorded in 1967. And I hear myself laughing on the CD, and I sound just like her. It's like an echo of an echo of something so familiar. I sound so happy. I was so happy.

It's all the history I can give her--the music. It's all I have. I was too young when he died to give her anything other than sounds, because those are what I remember. So we share them. And she shares them. And we're happy.

More about the Rochester Jazz Scene

It's the scene that contributed to the sound of both my father and my husband--or should I say they contributed to it. I guess we're a family example of what this article is getting at -- the Italian/African jazz dance that's gone on for decades in western NY.

It was just that sort of cross-pollination that got Chris Melito interested in jazz when he was growing up near the Public Market in the 1940s. When he went to concerts, like the one featuring Duke Ellington's Orchestra at the Sports Arena at EdgertonPark, there was a mixed audience. Jazz was one thing that brought blacks and whites together in Rochester. "We just listened," Melito says. "There was no awareness. Back in those days you didn't think black and white in regard to music, just good and bad."

Of course, me thinks the author and Mr. M. might be forgetting how close a neighbor Africa is to Sicily, but anywho... I do agree that there is something entirely fascinating about the genetic makeup and talent level of the Rochester jazz scene.

An amazing historic site here on the area and Jazz--I just emailed Noal to let him know about my father, who played with Mike Arena and Joe Romano, both mentioned on the site.

All in a day's work.

I'm gonna fly

More old Rochester music, circa 1970s, with Don Potter (who a deade or two ago chose to point his powerful voice in the direction of Christian music) on vocals, along with John Labarbera, Joe Labarbera, Mick Guzauski, Chip Jackson, Bernie Heveron, and more and more. So you have to love this version of I'm gonna fly someday.. I still have the vinyl.

Reflecting

What bothers me most about the loss of Mark Manetta -- and I've been trying to figure out why I'm thinking about him so much when I really shouldn't be, you know, using the relative scale of grief that I constructed for myself long ago -- is how much of a reminder it is of traumas past and future.

When someone who makes music dies, their sound disappears with them. And so much of their personality is wrapped into their sound, that it's almost a double loss. Well, no, not almost. It is a double loss. You lose the person, all of those things about them that make up your memories, and on top of that, you lose their sound - that other living being they create with their hands and heart.

Playing--the individual act of fingers on axe--is the thumbprint of the artist. Yes, we have recordings. I have recordings of my father too. But the energy behind the notes, the pain and the release--they take that with them. Jaco took it with him. Joe Pass took it with him. Miles took it with him. They all take it when they go.

There's no way to reconstruct the live-session self, the self that engages and interprets what others are saying in a completely unique way, at the moment of creation and into the future.

If painting were music, we would marvel at how the artist dips his brush in water, or mixes the right shade of blue on the palette -- we would dig all of the technique and vision involved during the creative process, before the piece is mastered. What we hang on the wall, that's the CD version of art. You see?

That's why music is special. That's why losing Mark so young just stinks.

You know you need some

Vinnie Colaiuta - Steve Gadd - Dave Weckl

Three Part Movie - Drummer Showdown from 1989 - where have I been that I hadn't seen it?

http://www.drummerworld.com/Videos/gaddwecklcolaiuta1.html (part 1)

http://www.drummerworld.com/Videos/gaddwecklcolaiuta2.html (part 2) - gadd is a classy mofo

http://www.drummerworld.com/Videos/gaddwecklcolaiuta3.html (part 3)

Your bonus? A video slowdown of a great Gadd lick.

Do not review multiple times. Can cause brain damage.

Have I Mentioned Lately

The James Taylor website is really nice, and it's kind of a blog, but only now and then by James, and with a nice little Flash dashboard on the right that feels just like a cd player. Production quality= excellent. Note to folks: Add a few more songs to the playbox.

Oh and...

I Wish I Had a River too, James.
Oh I wish I had a river so I could teach my feet to fly away. I wish I had a river I could skate away on, too.

In Memoriam, Mark Manetta

We got sad news last night that jazz guitarist (and friend) Mark Manetta died. Far too soon. George would be the one to speak best about Mark as a friend and fellow musician--he played with Mark a lot during the decade+ the two were in Rochester. You'll probably know Mark best from his work as the guitarist on many of Chuck Mangione's recordings. He also played with Ben Vereen, the Rochester and Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestras, and many others.

Mark taught and/or influenced dozens of the gifted guitarists who've come out of Rochester. Even with all the reasons I'm glad I don't live there anymore, Rochester, NY has the most dense population of truly talented jazz artists (especially guitarists, followed by sax and trumpet) of any small- to mid-size city in the U.S. (and a lot of the big cities too).

That's in part because of the Eastman School of Music, and part because the musical DNA of the jazz players in that little patch of the world has somehow intertwined to create a unique sound --and some legends. The guitarists who are Rochester taught have a special sound. You'll notice it most on ballads. They aren't afraid to cry for you. Part of that sound is undeniably Mark Manetta's.

It's been 12 years since I've seen Mark, but he always felt like family to me. He reminded me of my Uncle Tony, with his booming voice, those bright eyes, and big hug. Never mind the curls.

I feel really blessed to have travelled the outer edges of that musical circle for as long as I did.

And I feel really sad when I think of Mark's guitar sitting in its stand right now lonely for his hands.



Peace, Mark.

Mark on Soul Eyes, from Vince Ercolamento's Delightful Eyes
Mark on Say What, from Vince Ercolamento's Delightful Eyes

Mark wrote the following on a Joe Pass memorial site: Thanks Joe, I'll never forget what you did for me. I know God was waiting for you in heaven. Don't show him all the chords untill I get there!

Guess we know what God's doing today. Lucky Guy.

Happy Birthday, Johnny Depp (and me and a lot of other people)

JUNE 9 BIRTHDAYS

from answers.com

1686 - Andrei Osterman, Russian statesman (d. 1747)
1768 - Samuel Slater, US industrialist (d. 1835)
1810 - Otto Nicolai, composer (d. 1849)
1812 - Johann Gottfried Galle, German astronomer (d. 1910)
1882 - Angus Walters, schooner captain (d. 1968)
1843 - Bertha von Suttner, novelist, pacifist, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace 1905 (d. 1914)
1845 - Gilbert Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, 4th Earl of Minto (d. 1914)
1849 - Michael Peter Ancher, Danish painter (d. 1927)
1851 - Charles Joseph Bonaparte, politician (d. 1921)
1865 - Albéric Magnard, composer (d. 1914)
1882 - Bobby Kerr, Canadian sprinter (d. 1963)
1891 - Cole Porter, composer and lyricist (d. 1964)
1900 - Fred Waring, bandleader, inventor (d. 1984)
1916 - Robert McNamara, United States Secretary of Defense, former president of the World Bank
1916 - Les Paul, guitarist
1922 - John Gillespie Magee, Jr., American poet and aviator († 1941)
1931 - Jackie Mason, comedian
1937 - Harald Rosenthal, biologist
1939 - Ileana Cotrubas, Romanian soprano
1939 - Dick Vitale, sportscaster
1956 - Patricia Cornwell, author
1961 - Michael J. Fox, actor
1961 - Aaron Sorkin, director, producer, writer
1963 - Johnny Depp, actor
1964 - Gloria Reuben, actress
1975 - Andrew Symonds, cricketer
1977 - Peja Stojakovi?, Serbian NBA star
1978 - Miroslav Klose, football player, National Team of Germany
1981 - Natalie Portman, actress

And let's not forget, this one day a year is also set aside for the United States' Race Unity Day!

As to the other 364 days of the year, you may resume your disunion.

feels flip floppy

I think that the turning point in your 40s is the point at which you realize you know more dead people than living people. I mean more people gone than here. Maybe that's not 40s for everyone, maybe it's 30s or 50s or 60s for some, but for me I think 43 is the pivitol year, the year that I realize I know more people below ground than above ground, and that's a strange damn feeling, like you're stepping on your past wherever you go. In blogging I met a whole world of living folks, which has been interesting for sure, and maybe it's making us all younger because it adds to our balance of living people we know.

Stepping on the dead is something you learn about when you spend a lot of time at cemetaries as a kid, and since I was a kid staring at my dad's grave, I know something about that, not knowing where the edges are, where it's okay to step or not, where does my dad end and the soil begin, the least they could do is put a chalk outline on top of the grass, and the other thing is the tombstone, that most of them have two sides and there's writing on both sides, and it makes you feel like you're not sure if you're coming or going, if it's talking to the dead person or to you, the visitor, about the dead person. Then there are tombstones that are messages FROM you TO the dead person, "Our loving mother...You graced us for 87 years...Now you walk with God," and in the end, I never understand who the audience is. Kind of like the edges of the grave and where not to step. Somewhere it's about marketing, about making mistakes that no one notices, about turning 43.

I always thought my dad needed a bigger tombstone. Leastwise it could have mapped out the parameters for the placement of my feet.

There are rules about flowers too, live and dead, what you can leave and can't.

It gets tricky is what I'm saying.

I think of these sometimes when I'm trying to fall asleep.

Secretly

Secretly, I don't want you to find me here. Secretly, I don't want you to read me. Well, a little, but not too much and not too closely. Secretly, I don't want to know you. Secretly, I want you to know me if you find me, but I don't want you to find me. Secretly, if you find me, I REALLY want you to know me, all of me. Secretly, I want to move in secret circles where we don't have to talk, write. Just sit breathe. I come here for quiet. Honestly? It's so damn noisy here.

Was a house party, a gathering, talking about what you talk about when you sit in garage-sale couches drinking beer from a can. What kind of fool would punditize there, on a green-cushioned chair, among friends? What kind of fool would talk outside of their own body, telling you to read so-and-so, to look here, look there, what he said, she said, what the Wall Street Journal said.

Would you get up and leave--a pundit at your party?

I would get up and leave.

That's what I run up against every time I betray myself here. In writing. Who's the jerk in the green chair with the can of Coors talking about journalism and PR, about clients, about aggregators, about people who talk about those things? Who invited her?

Secretly, I want to bounce the pundits from this gathering. Especially the pundit pieces of me.

car stuff

First of all, the keyboard on my Acer Travelmate seems to be tiring of my constant abuse. Especially the "A" key, and suddenly too there is a lag keeping up with my typing. I hope it's just crumbs. From Starbucks the other day. I remember when my Dell started to wear out, the keyboard went first. I spent as much time backspacing as typing forward. I get all squeegee when I remember those days.

Then I was thinking to tell you about my car stuff that took all day to do. That's been the hardest adjustment in moving to a wide-apart metro area like Atlanta for me---if you can get one thing done in a day, that's all you can expect from yourself. It's not the grocery store, the doctor, AND the school function. It's the grocery store, the doctor, OR the school function. Whereas in Rochester everything is 20 minutes away, no matter where you are, here in Atlanta, everything is a circumnavigates everything else and there is just no getting from point a to b to c to a. Only a to b to a.

Right, so today I beat my personal best: An emissions test at one location, and oil change/brake-light/air-filter at another location, FOLLOWED BY a stop the the bank AND a drop off and pick up of Jenna from Volley Ball Camp.

Of course, what that means is that I didn't work at all.

That's what I get to do now.

After this post.

I've been uninspired lately. I like to blame the Aggregator 2.0, which takes the blood out of the process. Remote control blog viewing -- no going back. No I'm not going to get up and change the channel. So I guess I just won't turn it on.

Oh yah, in other news, I turn 43 Thursday.

woot.

some blogs I want to chew on

Engadget is a blog with nice roundy edges and always these delicious latest shiny tech gadgets I want to touch so badly, and while I scroll, I get all tactile and just shivery because I can't touch the inside of the blog.

It needs a big sign from a museum warning parents to keep their children's hands off the priceless possessions.

Let me bite you, engadget.

working since 9 a.m.

without break and am now growing very giddy/tired.

too many animals. too little time.

clients want to know what bloggers say.

tracking the conversation takes work--listening with our eyeballs. Interpreting. Instinctive hyperlinking.

thank you for stopping by.

my neck hurts.

And what gall does T-Mobile have charging like $30 a month or $9 a day for its starbucks hotspot connection? What kind of anal product marketing effort is this?

Blog Note to T-Mo:
Dawgs, I sat in yer hotzpot zone all day and leached off the gymnasium across the street. It's a hotspot-licious world. I'll pay you $1 a day to make it easier than refreshing my wireless connections once an hour. That's my limit.
Peace Out.

summmmmmmmmmmmer

After a week of rain, we got to spend the day at the pool today. weee!!!! The pool we go to was built in 1952, and when it was built it was the largest pool in the U.S. A little-known fact.

It has 32 separate filters, about four-foot square, underneath the pool deck. I forget how many gallons they told me it takes--but something like 30 gallons of chlorine, would that be right?



It's Olympic-size AND with a week of rain and no sun it had to be maybe 59 degrees, but that didn't matter one bit. We swam and dunked and swam and screamed out loud at the frrreeezingness of it.

air bags

safety first!

8888 Originally uploaded by dream_boy_1811.

Maximize, Optimize, Rasterize, Jazzercise...

Tom accomplishes quite a bit thanks to a crummy ISP.

Talk about making lemonade!

Dig.

"You have to dig deep to bury a father."

That's a proverb attributed to Gypsies that Neil Chethik chose as the epigraph for his book "FatherLoss." According to Freud, becoming fatherless is "the most poignant loss." It was one of the reasons Michael Jordan quit pro basketball in 1993. Chethik, a writer from Lexington, Ky., explores the depth of that loss for sons of all stripes. A worthwhile father/son loss book, it is but one of many that try to tackle the tough task of explaining what it is to grieve.

A relevant article in American Scholar called Work of Mourning describes several 'works of mourning' of our day -- evaluating how authors are trying to -- and whether or not they are succeeding at -- wrapping words around feelings of utter devastation, as well as the author's own experience.

What happens if the work of mourning does not proceed on this detailed and stately course, if the enormous energy available for the labor of grief does not find its proper tools or associations? It can become what Freud calls "pathological mourning." Like those spirits of the dead in Greek literature who, if improperly mourned, return to cause malevolent mischief--devastating crops, destroying whole towns--the psychic energies of mourning, if repressed, can wreak grievous harm. They can turn inward into a dangerous process of self-devouring (as when we "eat our hearts out"). They can metamorphose into what we now call depression, a condition for which Freud preferred the more resonant, tradition-laden term melancholia. And, most tragically, they can give rise to self-hatred and self-destruction. "The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable, he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished.... This ... delusion of mainly moral inferiority is completed by sleeplessness and refusal to take nourishment, and ... by an overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life."

from: The Work of Mourning. by Gray, Francine du Plessix

source: American Scholar, June 22, 2000.

via: HighBeam™ Research

COPYRIGHT 2000 Phi Beta Kappa Society

from: FATHER LOSS AUTHOR WILL EXPLORE FATHER-SON BOND by Bill Dunn The Capital Times

source: Wisconsin State Journal, September 24, 2002.

via: HighBeam™ Research

Dag. How come CBO's links look so nice and neat?

In celebration of sleep

I love bedding. King-size, beautiful, luxurious bedding. I have a thing about it. Because I love to sleep. I am a comforteraholic. I went through a phase as a kid where I would only sleep on 100% cotton sheets. My Italian grandmother supplied my mother who supplied me. They used to iron sheets--do you iron sheets? I don't. But when I can get 100% cotton anything, don't ask me to get out of bed.

zzzzzzzzz.

If you stare at this, it's supposed to make you sleepy.



zzzzzzzzzzz at your own risk.

Always remember and don't ever forget

Fear it.

strj4 Originally uploaded by misterugly.

bass

always like to see this knob.

bass Originally uploaded by virgu..

Remembering...

Almost a year. One month to go. Hello beautiful filter! Hello handsome american spirit! I hope you are well in someone else's hands/mouth/lungs. Know that I miss you, but I am glad you have moved on. signed, waiting to inhale

Remembering... Originally uploaded by Jeneane.

boulderattack

Pics on flickr from back when it was beta were neat, you remember, and you could chat and pop pictures into your chat easy as pie? these early additions we should not forget. they are mostly, well, really funny. And not real pictures at all. Let us celebrate them. Together.

boulderattack Originally uploaded by Chris Locke.

I used to be an angry bat

When I lived in Rochester, I was very used to your garden variety Seattle day--overcast, 50s, drizzley, gray, motionless, there. With a decade in the south in my hip pocket, I am No Longer a Bat. I used to be a bat. I used to LIKE being a bat. I was a happy bat. I kept my cube at Kodak dark. I mean very dark. Living in the dark makes days grey brilliant. I liked my comforter days, under the downy sweetness, everyday feeling like football season.

I don't like being a bat anymore. It's been five (six?) days now of rain, gray, dreary, nothingness. And I feel like an angry bat.

I am a very angry southern bat.

Call on me.

Lying here in bed. Cloudy day. Missing the sun for five days now. The blinds are drawn. I'm waiting for a client to call and thinking of ways to delight them today, to give them them something worth paying for. Aside from the laptop here in front of me, what I do bears a sneaky resemblance to the world's oldest profession.

Thanks, Yahoo

Oh my god, they named this after me--Mrs S!

Aggregator 2.0

The Next Generation of Aggregators Has JUST ARRIVED.

Now that you can skim, skip, and ignore the messy parts of weblogs (aka: the weblogs themselves), you're probably wondering what's next.

You know what? Tonight's the night you find out what's next.

And what's next is Aggregator 2.0.

THAT'S RIGHT! With Aggregator 2.0, not only can you subscribe and sort and be automatically notified when that hot content arrives on your desktop, but you can completely ignore all of it in a blink of the eye.

Aggregator 2.0 lets you avoid more than 2,000 blogs in a single frame--several times each day! The more they write, the more you can think about reading and then just skip the whole bloody thing.

What a boon to your productivity! What a morale booster!

The fun doesn't stop there. Aggregator 2.0 comes with add-on features: Buy a basic subscription, and get the email aggregator too. With Email Aggregator 2.0 you can skip those urgent emails in your inbox.

Someone pouring their heart out to you? We know you've got better things to do.

That's why we do the job for you.

We aggregate it. You ignore it. No more wasting valuable energy opening your email client or Web browser. In fact, just can just skip booting up in the first place.

YES! Aggregator 2.0 is so efficient it takes you back to the days before your laptop could play hiphop.

Tonight only, in honor of our launch of Aggregator 2.0, visit this site and learn WHAT'S NEXT in the field of emergent reading.

Watch for Aggregator 3.0 later this year. Among other great features, it completely removes your ability to type--I mean that pesky task of pressing keys, one after the other after the other.

The 21st century is a blast so far, isn't it?

I'll say!

Adult Children of Dead Parents

Like me, Jonathon experienced the death of a parent as a kid. I was six, he was fourteen--the same age as my brother when my dad died. My dad. His mom. We have both written about it.

I can't help but pull out Jonathon's comment on my stepfamily post.

I think I now know why I am drawn to certain bloggers and would rather piss on others.

Those I can do gang signs with all have gone inside themselves at some point in time. Then again I am dark. Thus the gang signs.

Thanks J and frank.

Now, to the story at hand. My dad was convinced I needed to call my step-mother, "mom."

The power of the fist, certain.

She did not want that. He did. It was the first time I told him to go fuck himself. The next time would be 17 years later.

IT was a huge source of tension as the other kids were lots younger and they had no problem swapping nouns. That is until they were older. Then everyone was confused.

Sometimes the words mom/dad were used and others their first names. Multi-personalities in that house. That is what happens when you go inside yourself and yourself stops letting you.

Anyway, amazing how freaky things can get when a parent dies. Does it occur to the living parent that by making you call the new addition mom/dad that you have the unique f'ng pleasure of buring two dads or two moms in your lifetime? How sick is that. I think if they make you call em dad/mom you should have the right to make them call the new addition the same name as their dead spouse.

That would prolly clue em in a bit.

Do you understand that he just told a joke to change my life?
Yes, me the angry kid's life--he just cracked me up by telling me something I never thought of, and believe me, when it comes to this topic, if you've been there, you pretty much think you've heard and thought of everything.

Not this though. THIS IS AN AWARD WINNING LINE. Steparents, listen up. It isn't about YOU.

I think if they make you call em dad/mom you should have the right to make them call the new addition the same name as their dead spouse. That would prolly clue em in a bit.

That is Absolutely The Bomb. Stepkids, listen up. Let me give you the quote, from Jonathon's mouth to your ears, pure and simple:

"Sure. I'll call Ted 'Dad' if you'll call Ted 'Robert'. Does that work for you guys, Mom?

That, in a nutshell, is it.

Another part of what Jonathon wrote that made me jump mental rope was this:

Sometimes the words mom/dad were used and others their first names. Multi-personalities in that house. That is what happens when you go inside yourself and yourself stops letting you.

Hello, yes? Right, let me introduce you to my parents. This is my mom and this... is... uh... my... dadidyouseethegamelastnight? Or, this is my mom (anxiety building) and this is my... Ted. Or, These are my mom and stepfather. AND the one I finally settled on: This is my mom and step-dad. I did get that close. Step-Dad.

But when talking with my step sister, even to this day, it's "Your dad and my mom" (me), and "Your mom and my dad" (her). THAT'S RIGHT, WE NEVER GAVE OVER OWNERSHIP.

But when talking to my "blood" brother and sister, even to this day, they are "mom and brian."

Oh, and Jonathon--remember trying to phrase sentences so that you didn't have to use pronouns or proper nouns at all!? The implied "you," direct sentence became an important tool. Or, the time-honored, walk into the room with out acknowledging anyone--best to practice equal opportunity avoidance.

NO WONDER WE WRITE.

STEP.
STEP ON MY HEART.
STEP ON A CRACK BREAK YOUR MOTHER'S BACK
STEP ON A BUG
STEP.

How linguistically complicated and panic inducing our lives become when we try to shoehorn love relationships in place of one another and give them simple names. Reduce them to the lowest common denominator, give simple names to the most complex dramas of our lives. And force kids to figure it out for themselves.

How much grief do you think kids like us carry into our 20s, 30s, 40s? You don't want to think so, because blended families are a lot more common now than in the 1960s and 70s. But you know what? Your kids are us. We roll it up and hide it in places you can't see. We find extra places to keep it, or grow some. But we bring it with us. A big stinking package of grief.

Just ask me or Jonathon. We'll tell you.

all nighters no fun at 43.

Today I remembered Vivarin, competitor of NoDoze, which used to help me through my many double-all-nighters in college. These same homeopathological meds also gave me heart palpitations, made me unreasonably irritable, and helped me pump out some killer A+ papers.



Look at all the happy people on the Vivarin website. I was never happy when I took Vivarin. I was very angry and irritable, and Highly Highly productive.

These Vivarin liars don't look irritable. Surely, they have not taken the recommended dose. Especially the PTA mom with 2 kids. Or, perhaps they're not letting on that they also enjoy an occasional Valium when Vivarin puts a bit too much perk in their pecks.

As I was showering, I remembered that old commercial--Do they still run it? I don't think so because they didn't have to run all the disclaimers back in the early 80s--"Revive, with Vivarin!"

Or... Learn how to out-perform your peers in an altered state!

Ah, the things we learn in college.

I get my caffeine in coffee these days. But a hit of Vivarin under my tongue would sure help me out tonight.



For you comparison shoppers, progeny of my preferred college brand, No-Doze Plus, boasts the following anginatical ingredients: 100 mg caffeine plus 10 mg nicotinic acid and 10 mg thiamine hydrochloride (Vitamin B1), which is pretty much like injecting a cup of coffee, ten cigarettes, and a couple of vitamin B pills into your bloodstream at once.

Wicked. Great. Poetry.

Take three if you want your head to explode. That's a great excuse for why your work isn't done.

I'm just observing, really

I've now lost my passion for the topic of the Bloggerati and linking, or the lack thereof, of the growing homogeneity of the "conversation," or at least the visibility into the "conversation" within the bloghole. I'm back to writing what I write. A big valley girl "WhatEVER" to the rest of it.

HowEVER....

I couldn't help think the other week, when IBM made news 'round the net by posting it's IBM's new Blogging Guidelines, that our own A-Lister Bloggers could learn something from the Megacorporation.

In response to IBM's announcement, I posted my IBM's Breathing Guidelines for Air Suckers, which might have gone unnoticed but to my regular readers if IBM had not wanted to PARTICIPATE IN not just ANNOUNCE its news, to which IBM jammed back with its own take on the breathing guidelines, effectively engaging a tiny voice from the blogosphere on the big day of the announcement in a funny aside that drew about 4,000 people here and elsewhere, gathering in comments to play their own word games.

None of those people were Big Bloggers, the Men of Weblogging, better known as Our Own A-Listers.

I started thinking this: If Jeff Jarvis or Rogers Cadenhead or David Weinberger, say, had posted the same breathing guidelines on a satirical whim -- which would be in keeping with their proclivity toward witty banter on tech news -- and if IBM had come back and jammed with them on their first day of official acknowledgement of corpoblogging, would the linky love among the blogworld's Big Blog Guys not have flowed like a fine wine?

Doc's headline might have been: Waiting to Exhale

David's might have been: Turning Blue, or IBM Learns How to Breathe

Jeff's: Suck It Up: IBM Breathes and Blogs

Roger's: Air Suckers Blow at IBM

Scoble's: It's as easy as breathing, guys.

Joi's: Blog Change Is in the Air at Big Blue

Of course, these post titles are all imaginary.

Because, you know, those guys were busy reading each other during those few days.

And, just for the record, these are the fellas I like, some of them I know pretty well, and all of them I read. Still do. Will do.

The More I Work...

Been a long time since I pulled an all nighter. This wasn't a particularly productive one, though. Usually they are. Usually I can get a day's work done, sleep a few hours, and enjoy the "day" part of the day that you don't get to enjoy in an office job.

This all nighter was a complete flop. I waited to long too make the declaration, that's why. I waited too long to commit, to say: ALL NIGHTER, BAKE SOME COFFEE.

Instead, this one involved head-on-pillow perseveraton about a project and a deadline. I tried for two hours to let it go and sleep so I could hit it fresh in the morning, up and down, round the room, back in bed, and then I knew: Better off typing than fretting. So I got back out of bed about 4 a.m. and put a couple hours thinking and writing in.

The thing about writing for me -- format matters. I mean, from the left-right margins to the font choice to the point size, it all adds or detracts NOT from the my ability to write. I think my industries are segmented according to font. Financial Services and Manufacturing/Supply Chain are definitely Times New Roman. But Healthcare? Entertainment/Media? Arial. Deep Tech makes me need columns. I like seeing the same copy in different type faces.

Although I write with the design in mind when one exists beforehand, and I do my best to suggest and direct the designer when one doesn't exist beforehand, the simple fact is, it doesn't matter to me what the designer will eventually choose while I'm writing. My internal design, the one I structure in my head, matters to me during the composition, affects how I say what I say, must echo and mirror my thinking patterns.

So tonight has been an Arial 9 point, space-and-a-half, landscape, .5 left .5 right night.

That give you a hint?

The End of Writing As Usual

You know what I was thinking tonight, this night, with my Word file open, my heart just edgy, just that edgy double beat not sure it's mine weird jumpety jumpety heart feeling in my chest, is this: You know the poetry book I did, over there on the sidebar, no not the first one, the second one, well that was an incredibly fucking brave thing I did, and if live to be 43 in nine days, or if I live to be 99 in some number of days I'm not prepared to count right now, that will still be me, coming online, walking right out here with ya'll, right in the fucking middle of the Internet, not like I didn't know what I was doing, not like I didn't have people out here who could cut me with my own words, and being one brave motherfucker.

And you know what I want to tell you Jenna, one day when you read this stuff? I want to tell you that this is your mom's voice, baby. And it's me showing -- in the only way I know -- how to give your voice permission, how to open your heart and scream until your throat bleeds, to wail and pound your fists, to sing the tapestry of pain backward across generations.

And you know what most of all?

I love you, my Jenna Bean.

Gimme some ever lovin site pals

Squark it, baby.

w00t!

I mean, Kent Is Right.

I have to agree:

One aspect of aggregators that you may have overlooked is the fact that they allow us to do various statistical analysis's-es on the different types of data, categories and tagged nuances of a weblogging population category tagging. We can measure tails, do kurtosis, find modes, subdivide, measure things and look for stuff like Power Laws -- all this is evolving into a new branch of statiscal mathematics and "number figuring" that we call theoretical aggregatology. Let's say we group weblogs into 2 goups -- aggregatoreds and aggregatorees. Don't worry about exactly how they’re defined -- it's a complex process. Next, let’s look at some statistics that we can gather from aggregators such a bloglines. Using the bloglines aggregator, we can see that you have 117 total subscribers. However, only 56 of those subscribers are public. So, your ratio of public to total subscribers is 56/117 or 48%. Your non-public to total subscribers is 52%, or what we call the ratio of nonpubs to totsubs. We can then compare this to Tom’s Improprieties 58% pubsub-toadsub ratio? Naturally, there seems to be some type of anomalous kurtosis in your power law distribution -- which might lead us to question why so many of your aggretatorees tend to remain non-public? Why are they still in the closet? What are they hiding? The statistics don’t lie, Jeneane, the statistics just don't lie, do they?

The thing that I really want...

...is a list of about 200 blogs to read every day in my aggregator. Because then I'll never run out of things to read. Too bad for you and you and you that I might never get to yours. I'm becoming a scrollaholic. It's not good. So, hey, can I save-as YOUR subscription list, o mighty woman of aggregation? ;-)

The Psychology of the Aggregator

Recently, for the first time since entering this funny little space in 2001, I've been using an aggregator to keep up with my blog reading. And what an odd shift in my habits I've noticed since getting all aggregator loopy.

1) I don't feel like I'm visiting someone's virtual house anymore--instead, I feel like they're writing a newspaper that some paper boy slaps on my doorstep.

2) I've moved from community member to consumer. The difference? There is a wanting and an expectation now, not a simple gladness to see that somebody's at home when I stop by.

3) I am no longer surprised by surprises. Usually there are two or three people who toss the same "big story" at me in the space of three or four clicks.

4) My reading has become more linear; there is top-to-bottom structure to my aggregator--not the in, among, and bewteen of hypertext connections among story pieces.

5) The childlike joy of following breadcrumbs is lost lost in favor of having the hubby pick up a loaf of bread from the store.

6) I have to work harder to find new voices. I find myself reading voices that loop.

7) I am never satisfied because I didn't get to dig the ditch myself. There's something about putting forth an effort before enjoying someone else's work that is fulfilling.

8) I want to stop, but I can't. It's too efficient. It saves me too much time.

I'm not sure there's any going back.

Timeless

In 2002, David Weinberger invented a new way to say, "I'm Sorry." Since that day, the Unfuck sign has been used across the planet to say, "Oooo--My bad," making the world a better place.



Thank you Dr. Weinberger!

Stepfamilies - 2

My stepfather had a daughter, who I inherited with the marriage. Stepfamilies usually work this way--buy a parent, get a kid free. When our parents were first dating, Chris would come every other weekend to visit her dad. In preparation for our Looming Future Together, we four would get together, a sort of test drive for a What If family.

The first time Chris was to come to meet us, I wore one of my fancy dresses, and for my cooperation in not throwing mud from my brother’s window over the garage onto the hood of their car when it arrived, my mother let me wear her navy blue, patent leather, zip-up boots, circa 1975.

Thrust into a dating situation with my mom, I was ill-equipped to meet another ten-year-old, especially one who was tall, blonde, and pretty. With a high sense of duty, I did my best. Or, as my Slavic Catholic relatives would say, I decided to "Offer It Up" (eyes skyward).

On our first family date, they took us to the museum, and we’d only made it out of the parking lot when the three-inch heel of my mother’s boots, the ones I had talked her into letting me wear, fell off.

I was going to try to hide the fact, scooping up the heel and catching up with the three of them, but it was hard to blend in with my new walking disability.

I hobbled through the “American Indian” exhibit, one foot normal and one on tip-toe, amazed by how much the Indian men resembled the men of the Pre-Historic Era exhibit just down the hall.

“I’ll be okay,” I said, when Chris asked if I wanted to go sit down or something; she was nice enough to carry my heel.

Afterward we went for ice-cream, and somewhere along the way home, the heel got lost and it was no big deal because we were all laughing about the faulty boot and my mom said that’s fine, she was ready to get rid of those old boots anyway.

That night, I felt as if I had passed an audition—-my mom’s boyfriend’s kid liked me. I found out Chris was born 11 days after me. What that meant, in the long run, is that we both got the same presents on our birthdays – yellow Schwinn ten-speeds at 12 – but that our periods came at different times.

After they were married, Chris started staying over night -- she slept in my brother’s old room, so we strung two disposable plastic cups together with enough string to reach across the hallway and talked to each other until 2 in the morning, making fun of everything we could think of. After a while, the “the folks” (“your mom and my dad” or “my mom and your dad”) told us to go to sleep please and thank you.

I waited for every other weekend to come so that I didn’t have to be the lone kid amidst courting adults. In Chris, I had an ally. I was no longer outnumbered. It was a fair fight, two against two.

She told me, she wanted my mom to die first so that her parents could get back together. I told her I wanted her father to die first so my mom and I could get back together. In the mean time, we decided to make the best of it. An allegiance between the powerless. A forced friendship of the highest order.

This is when my shoplifting began in earnest.


....more eventually....

Priestcasting?

Tell me if I'm wrong, but all AKMA needs -- since Seabury already makes MP3s of their sermons -- is space on a server to store the MP3 files on, then start a blog dedicated to the task, and put the enclosure tag (Lisa--what is it again?) around the a-href code with the URL-address of any given mp3 file name, right?

God, forgive that sentence.

Podcasters?

IBM Blogging Policy #244

James, man, I love what you're writing, but I need to know exactly what I have to do to comment on your blog. I have all this pent up commentary just eating away at me. Don't make me go leave it at Scoble's blog.

When I try to comment on your blog, I get confused. There's the mysterious little comment link that some people seem to be able to navigate, like the guy from ComputerWorld. Yet I end up at this registration page that at first makes me think since I'm not an IBMer, I need to keep my comments to myself. Now I've finally gotten through the email and password registration (EIGHT characters or more on the password, people), and then I find all of this "bequeath your first-born child to IBM" lingo, and I'm like: wha?

Blogging to IBM: Easy access works wonders.

New Blogging Policy Please--don't ask for people's phone numbers, business names, titles, addresses, OR blood types if you want them to want to talk to you.

Tidings. Breathe.

-j.

Stepfamilies - It's Not The Brady Bunch

I remember the day my mother told me that she and my stepfather had talked about it. And that they had agreed.

I remember her saying that if they had to do it all over again, they wouldn't. In the end, it was too much pain for too many years for too many people.

I don't blame them for, at some point along the way, declaring our patched together household a failure as a stepfamily. "It's not like the Brady Bunch," my mom would say to outsiders who wondered what it was like. I'll say.

I used to think, if we only had Alice everything would be better. None of us would behave the way we did if Alice had been in our house. You put on a nice face and nice clothes and behave nicely, and you know that if all else fails, Alice will be there. She'll get you to the game; she'll whip up dinner; and she won't drink your Vodka. Unconditional Alice.

As an adult, I understand that there was no workable way to merge the complex varieties of grief, mostly unresolved, across our two families. Just no way. In retrospect, I don't see it as a failure of us as individual columns, all of us standing rigid in our place, but as the failure of a faulty structure that hardly resembled a house, let alone a home, not even on its best day.

By the time my mother married my stepfather, I was 12. She had been a widow for six respectable years.

By the time my mother re-married, I still didn't know what my father had died of. Or my grandfather weeks after him. It was the loudest silence in our house. I dared not speak of them--they were too precious to name or to form words around. Sacred territory. I imagined them on the communion plate with the wafers of Christ's body.

Amen.

And so, when my mother told me that she and Brian were going to marry, and asked what I thought about it, I said, "I don't think you should." She explained that it was very good, my honesty, but that she was the adult and she would do what she thought was the right thing. I wondered why she had asked.

More than that, I wondered what I was supposed to call him.

A couple of years prior, my best friends, Cynthia and John, had undergone their mother's remarriage. They lived down the street; they were the only thing in my life that made me feel like I fit in at school. Their father had died in Cayuga Lake, a drowning accident while he was on a weekend fishing trip with his buddies.

The worst part for them was that they never found the body. That's how it was sometimes when you drowned in the Finger Lakes. They couldn't find you. Two words stay ever present in the minds of folks who live or boat on those lakes: "Underground Caves."

Anyway, Cynthia and John's house was my second home. Our mothers were both in their early thirties; our fathers had died in their mid-thirties; and we went to the same school. Not only did that mean we were almost related, but it meant that I wasn't the only kid in second grade with a dead father, and you can't imagine how happy that made me feel.

Their mother was beautiful, a Lebanese derivation. My mother was beautiful, full Czech. They became friends, their own exotic beauty was the only date they needed. But dates, they had many. As a result, we children became bestest bestest friends. Cynthia and I were in the same grade. John was two years younger. Cynthia and I had a fight and didn't talk for a year because she said her mom was prettier than mine and I said mine was prettier than hers. During that year, John and I were best friends. He liked me because I didn't have freckles. "No frecks," he used to say. That was a prerequisite to being his friend.

And the thing I was trying to relate: the story behind the anxiety over what to call my stepfather.

When Cynthia and John's mother found a husband, he was a man with the first name of Dick. I remember Cynthia, John and I sitting by the bushes in front of their green cedar house, talking about the dilemma with the seriousness of a legal negotiation.

"He says once they're married, we can't call him Mr. Morris anymore. That's what he says."

"So, what are you going to call him," I ask. "Not DAD are you?"

"I don't know. He says we can either call him by his first name or call him dad, but no more Mr. Morris."

"Whoa. You can't call him Dick. I mean, DICK?! OH NO!"

"Yeah, DICK!!"

Rolling on the grass hugging our grammar school guts, "Dick, dick, dick, dick!!"

Laughter subsiding, turning again to the serious decision at hand, only I, among everyone we knew, could understand their dilemma. What would I do if MY mother ever remarried. Let alone remarry a DICK.

"I think you should just tell him you want to still call him Mr. Morris."

"He said no, and our mom said no."

"Well then, I guess Dick. You can't call him Dad. I mean, can you?"

"No. I guess we can't. But we can't say, DUH HI DICK! CAN YOU TAKE US TO THE PLAZA DICK!?"

Punching rolling falling over again.

It seemed an answerless puzzle, one we abandoned for the day as we headed down the street to play spud.

After the wedding, they would indeed call Mr. Morris, "Dad." It was a betrayal of sorts to me--a precedent setting event for step-kids around the world.

Their father could be alive on an island somewhere, and they were going to call their mother's new husband, "Dad"?

I never got over it.

So when it came my time for the Big Talk -- the What Are You Going to Call Him" talk -- I said, "Well he better not expect me to call him Dad."

My mother assured me that this was not a requirement for my new role as stepdaughter. But that he hoped in time I might grow to see him as a father.

That day never came. He has always been Brian to me.

I lost touch with Cynthia and John after their new Lawyer Father, Mr. Morris, AKA Dad, moved them to a big new house in the Very Nice Suburb about 15 miles away. In neighborhood speak, for me, that was half-way around the world.

I went to see them two or three times, once for a sleepover, and in the morning Mrs. Morris, AKA their mom, made me Buckwheat Pancakes, to which no one told her I had a deadly allergic reaction, and after a few bites my mom had to come rescue me with special medicine from the doctor.

The other time I went, my mother had already met Brian. I think she had a talk with Mrs. Morris, asking her to soften me up because she really cared for the Dear Man. I think this because Mrs. Morris had a Talk with me. The Talk went like this:

"What do you think of Brian--I mean it's great that your mom has found someone who makes her happy, right?"

"I don't like him."

"Well, that really doesn't matter, you see? It's time for her to be happy. You've had her to yourself for years now--wouldn't you like to see her happy?"

I wanted to stab her with one of her fancy silver butter knives. I wanted her to poison me again with Buckwheat. I wanted anything other than to be having this conversation.

So I said, "Sure."

And went inside myself....

....

If there's a chance it can help: Dave Koch

I know some folks at DM Review, a publication I've written for on and off for over a decade. I don't know David, but I do know Jean Schauer and Mary Jo Nott and others to be among the nicest, most professional people in the tech publishing business. Which made me all the more sad and concerned to receive an email from Renee, and then read this post that David Koch, the associate publisher, is missing. Apparently there has been a search underway, but as it seems to be losing momentum, it might help to get the word out to the press, to folks up in Vancouver, to everyone that help is still needed to find David.

Send your prayers to the search party, family, friends and colleagues of David.

Rich man poor man beggar man thief

It amazes me how I can shift through these roles, personally, in a month's time. When I'm billing beaucoup hours, I'm a rich (to me) man for a month, without a worry in the world. Yet when I'm billing a trifle few hours, I feel like a poor man / beggar man. (See that donation button?) And, well, you all know about my youthful proclivity for (I'll stop short of saying my "excellence at") thievery. So that thief man is never far away. In a pinch I'd resort to whatever I had to resort to. It's a plus that I would be good at it.

Inconsistency breeds mania in me. When I have the money, I engage in the dysfunction-fed art of shopping my ass off. It's not really shopaholism because I don't buy big stuff, just stuff I've been needing. Of course, I guess, alcoholics don't take "big drinks" either. But I see my spending in times of relative affluence as a response to the unpredictability of being in business, trying to grow a business -- not to mention being a mom in the summertime. (What are we going to doooo todayyyyyy, mommmm?)

Today, for instance, I'm sitting here all pissed off that our "lazy Sunday at the pool," which is what the club calls its summer Sunday festivities, isn't happening because the weather stinks. That's the Rich Man part of me, who can manage to summon and express disdain for such a calamity. It's borne from my narcissistic wounding. It makes me kind of sick.

And yet, quite honestly, I do want my poolside lounging today.

Then the beggar-man-thief part of me says, "You just cooked three steaks out on the grill--and you're bitching about the no sunshine and the "club"? We're living large like a barge with all this meat cooked to perfection, Baybeee! Cheer the fuck up."

And I know the beggarman-thief is the part of me I'll always trust, the one that won't do me wrong, maybe get me tossed in the joint, but won't ever do me wrong. I know where my roots are planted.

Steak anyone?

Scoble's Featurelizer

If you have a product and you want to know how to make it better, maybe Scoble can blog it for you. Look at this great set of feature requests for aggregators that are "aggregated" in Scoble's comment box.

These are regular Scoble readers with a passion for a product they use on a (mostly) daily basis. What we see here is a micromarket coup for aggregator/product folks -- and an example for other companies. Want to know what you should do next? Find a blogger with a wide audience of users and ask him or her to ask us.

Blogs can be a one-stop shop for organizations to find out what should be in their next release. Send your product marketing manager home for a month. Scoble's got you covered.

Scoble, can you do one on world peace, or at least whriled peas? ;-)

No Pool Toe?

I can't believe there isn't a single illustrative photograph on Google Images of Pool Toe. Is it a southern thing? Are my friends and I the only ones to use the term to describe, well, you know, pool toe?

Tell me you know what it is. Tell me you know how, when you go swimming a lot - as in every day because the weather is nice here in the south, not like western new york where it's gray and 53 degrees all summer, which lasts approximately three days - and your big toe gets kind of flat, calloused, and the side of it develops that hard, yellow, extra appendage type thing? You know, right: Pool toe.

It's when your big toe gets calloused like you've been playing bass with your feet. Right? And it starts to splay out the callous gets so hard and big. And it itches at night but the callous is so hard you can't make a dent in that crazy itch?

Right? Yah? Well, I've got it.

I know, I know. Cry me a river.