Privacy

“In a country born on the will to be free, what could be more fundamental?” – Sam Seaborn on The West Wing, in reference to the right to privacy.

I was reminded the other night of why I so loved the early Aaron Sorkin scripts for The West Wing. The right to privacy has taken some hits of late – say, in the last decade or so. And this quote says it all.

The problem is not that John Ashcroft was Attorney General or that the current Supremes are generally not fans of the Bill of Rights and it’s not the half-trained cretins who shout orders at us while looking through our stuff and checking out our virtual naked bodkins while in the queue to take a flight to Pocatello. There have always been badge-heavy cretins who were too ready to become drunk at a little power.

The problem is not cops who feel free to stop and interrogate anyone for any reason or no reason at all and it is not even the cameras they’ve been putting up all over town in so many of our cities. Nor is it social media that analyze our every keystroke so they can sell our habits to…  well, we really don’t know to whom they sell this information now, do we?

None of those things is the problem. Not really. The problem is that so very few people seem to think these problems are problems. The problem is that we let them get away with it.

I agree with that imaginary sage, Sam Seaborn. Privacy is fundamental. And in giving it up without so much as a whimper, we’re abrogating our responsibility as members of a free society. Freedom requires vigilance and so far as I can tell, there’s no one standing on the ramparts.

Sorting

I spent part of the morning sorting. After all the years of college courses and my own teaching, writing for tiny student-run papers, writing unpublished books and this blog, research that I used or didn’t, ideas that I eventually explored in depth or didn’t… Well, you can imagine the piles of stuff I had sitting around. 

In boxes and stacks, folders and files, in old floppies and on crinkled paper, college rule or torn out magazine pages, paper clipped or loose, hand-written, printed, typed - it amazes me how the sheer volume has accreted over time.

Accrete: Grow by accumulation or coalescence.

Accumulation or coalescence: each applies to a particular aspect of my hoarding practice.

I think ‘accumulation’ in reference to the various physical media that carry the record of my ideas. The media accumulate – and yes, youngsters, ‘media’ includes paper and pen and typed documents, no matter how archaic you might consider them to be.

‘Coalescence’ applies to what happens when I review this stuff – typically while sorting but sometimes just thinking at random moments – and the ideas start to flow.  The direction of flow is seldom anything like what I would describe as linear. Because there’s a fundamental difference between sorting stuff and sorting ideas.

Sorting stuff requires me to make decisions as to what goes in the give away box vs. what stays. Then the stream of stuff that stays becomes bifurcated between stuff that will remain in our house (mine and Mary’s that is) and the stuff that will eventually migrate away with Daughters One or Two. A few stray items here and there will make their ways to other family and friends – books for Marc and Sherree, the Shirley Temple stuff to Jen and so on.

Once I’m left with just the things that will remain with us, it becomes a fairly straightforward process of sorting by function and importance. I’m thinking this phase should go quickly but usually it does not. Especially not when I’m sorting paperwork. The trouble with paperwork – especially for a writer – is its association with ideas. And ideas are messy things to sort. Inconvenient, as it were.

 Any neuroscientist can tell you that our neural pathways are not organized into neat little flow charts. The wiring diagram of a human brain, and particularly those parts of it that deal with conscious thought, are gnarly affairs. Our memories are not as well organized as we might like. We can’t know which one will pop up or when or in response to what stimulus.

I rely on memory for my writing, for my sense of who I am, for my ability to relate what I see and hear to what I’ve felt and touched in the past. Where I’ve been, physically or intellectually or emotionally, serves as the framework within which I understand the world and express that understanding back to you. And I have long since learned not to rely entirely on messy, disorganized collections of neurons and dendrites to reliably store my experiences and thoughts. Experiences and thoughts have to be intelligently recallable to be useful.

Hence the stacks of paper and other media.

Sorting today, I came across reminders of ideas for several blog posts, a chapter outline that I’d forgotten I’d written on an airplane some months back, odd little ideas recorded on the mangiest collection of substrates ever to occupy a rec room floor (my main sorting surface). And of course, some of them got me to thinking, sorting through ideas and combinations of ideas old and older. But this sorting was orders of magnitude less linear than the other sort (of sorting, that is).

I’ve no useful idea of how this manner of sorting comes about. I read some fragment from the past and find it joins up perfectly with another oddment from who knows where / when and suddenly I’m on the path to a whole new thought. Or I might review something I wrote while in the Navy (yes, that would be forty years ago, what of it?) and suddenly it becomes clear what I’d meant to get across and now have the life experience to complete the thought.

The other night while paging through a stack I’d very nearly fed into the recycling bin without review, thinking it to be only old, o-o-o-old homework, I came across some song lyrics I’d written back when I was a staff singer for a Catholic church. That would be post-Navy but by no more than a few years. Perhaps my most exciting find was an early abstract of the book on which I’m currently working. It was dated way before mere memory had claimed I’d first had the idea.

I’ve had various book ideas over the years and wrote my first in the late seventies but it was a bit startling to be forced to realize that this story has been bobbing about in my brain bucket for way more than a decade. And while the plot and ancillary elements have morphed and morphed again over the many years that I’ve failed to commit the saga to paper, the two main characters have always been crystal clear to me. Which leads me to believe that the overall plot has developed not so much in answer to the theme and plot elements I’ve imagined as in response to these characters about whom I care very much.

So that’s another sort of sorting that spans the gap between the linear and the non-linnear, methinks.

I could go on about this all night. But if I did, you’d soon get bored and be less likely to click into my blog next time. And I would use up time that I should be spending – wait for it – sorting.

(Sorry, I just had to. Sort of.)

Fog

We’ve had a string of foggy days and I love it!

Of course, we’re not talking about the Tule fog we used to get when Mary and I lived in the Central Valley, where dozens of cars and trucks would wind up in one big crash on I-5 or SR-99. Nor do I refer to the huge billowing clouds of the stuff that roll into San Francisco from the ocean side.

Naw, today’s was regular old fog. And I loved it!

It was hugging the hills that border Lake Washington as I rode the bus across the floating bridge this morning and obscured all but the very top of the mountain (that would be THE mountain, Mt. Rainier, doncha know) and it turned the late afternoon a velvety gray while I was walking from home from the bus stop.

Fog eases the edges of everything you see and brings your focus in close. And McKuen was wrong – it doesn’t come on “little cat feet” but rather, just seems to be, a condition of the air that changes the light and the dark, both.

I feel warmer in fog than on a clear, cold day. Maybe that’s where the clichéd term “blanket of fog” comes from, you think?

In the dark of the morning all the cars have their headlights on and quite a few drivers have hit the high beams. How come people don’t know that turning on the high beams actually degrades night vision because of the reflected glare?

Streetlights are cooler in the fog. As a kid, I used to love that halo effect and I feel a bit like that long ago kid when I see it today.

The fog was just off the water of the lake as we crossed the floating bridge on the way home. It looked as though if you ducked just a little, you could kayak the whole three miles across without getting your hair wet. Speaking of which, it always surprises me just a little to get to work and realize my hair is wet when it hasn’t rained.

I like bright, shiny days well enough, I suppose. But a bright, shiny day would never seem so bright or so shiny if there were no foggy days.

We need all kinds. Just now, I’m rather enjoying the fog.

Det's Toyland

If you were a kid in Bellevue, WA in the 60s, you probably remember a store on Main Street called Det’s Toyland. It was a precursor of the big box toy stores we have now but it had a very hometown flavor. We’d swivel our heads keeping the Det’s display window in view for as long as possible whenever we drove down that street. Det’s published a Christmas catalog that – along with the Sears big book – was required reading for any self-respecting kid on our block.

Det’s had their own pavilion at Century 21, the Seattle World’s Fair of 1962. The store was a fixture in the childhoods of uncounted now-geezers like moi and a chance reference to it by a friend earlier today got me to thinking about it.

I remember going to Det’s with Mom to buy a stuffed animal as a birthday present for my sister and another time to get Matchbox cars for my brother. But the time I remember best I don’t remember at all.

Let me explain…  I had gone to Det’s with my Dad and since he had me along, most likely it was a trip to purchase a gift for one of the other kids. I don’t recall exactly the mission, nor do I recall actually shopping with my Dad. But I remember the day as though it was yesterday.

My memory of that day begins back home later that evening with my Dad noticing I’m playing with a new stamped metal train that he didn’t recognize and asking how I’d come by it. I recall in detail the shiver that went down my spine. I couldn’t tell you exactly what he said next but I know I sat alone in the bedroom I shared with my brother while I waited for sentence to be passed. Seems like it was forever and I spent the whole time trying to figure out a way to just disappear before Dad came back. I thought I heard him talking on the phone to someone and I imagined the police showing up at my bedroom door, handcuffs and truncheons at the ready.

Next thing I know, Dad’s telling me to get my coat on and bring the toy train and meet him at the car. It slowly dawned on me as we drove that we were heading back toward downtown. I wanted to ask but I didn’t dare and my father said not one word the whole trip. Didn’t even look at me.

When we parked in front of the toy store, the marquee lights were off and I had a fleeting moment of hope that I’d been reprieved by the simple expedient of closing time. But then I saw the front door open and the store manager looked out gravely and waved us in before stepping back inside. I looked up at my Dad and he looked at me and said five words that changed my world, “You know what to do.”

I gathered up the now-hateful toy and opened the car door. I remember stepping down, turning back to close the door, stepping up onto the sidewalk and advancing on the store entrance. The manager had gone back to the sales counter and was leaning his rump against it, his arms crossed in front of him. I felt like the Cowardly Lion advancing toward the Wizard. Let me just say that walking up to that man and confessing that I’d swiped the toy train was not a peak experience. I was so scared I can actually remember precisely how dry my mouth was, and that my throat squeaked when I took my first run at making my confession.

I put the cursed thing in his hand and I apologized and then the oddest thing happened – it seemed odd to me at that moment, that is. He reached around and put the toy down on the counter. Then, with the same frown on his face that had occupied it since we’d first arrived, he reached out and shook my hand.

I must have gone back and got in the car, must have ridden home with my dad. But the last thing I remember is my hand being swallowed up in his bear paw.

I was about seven that year, so now it’s been about fifty-three years since I stole anything of any description from anyone. Dad’s disappointment and the disapproval of the store manager weighed pretty heavily on me that day and for a long time after.

These two men worked out a solution that taught me a life lesson. I don’t suppose that’s how folks handle such things these days. Wish it was. That was one good lesson.

Some wisdom from Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou posits that you can learn much about a person through observation of how they deal with three situations: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights. I understand what she’s getting at and even why she chose these three conditions. Most people would find each or all of them at best annoying and at worst, maddening.

The thing is, none of these situations is particularly troubling to me. We get enough rainy days where I live that dealing with precipitation is more a matter of deploying long-practiced technique than disruption of plans.

Lost luggage just doesn’t happen that often. Speaking as someone who flies on average thirty times a year and whose luggage has failed to arrive in place and on time  maybe three times in the last twelve years, I have to say it’s not the huge problem people would have you believe. And frankly, anyone who puts anything irreplaceable in checked luggage is simply not planning ahead. Okay, so yes, I did once attend the first day of a conference wearing jeans and a printed tee shirt. I lived through it.

Tangled Christmas tree lights are also not a problem I encounter. Mary and I put up enough lights to guide astronauts back from the moon and we’ve long since devised a method for wrapping them that leaves them pretty much tangle-free when it comes time to put them up again the next year.

I’m not trying to gloat here. Lots of situations do send me off my nut. Just not this three. And it doesn’t matter which three you choose because Maya is on to something. You truly can tell a lot about a person by how they manage in untoward situations.

 

 

Manastash Ridge and other sights

I was driving to one of our agencies today and found I just could not drive past the observation point on Manastash Ridge without stopping for a notice. I can’t recall a time when I drove this route without at least swinging through the loop road for a quick gander. And for good reason – it affords a fantastic view.

The terrain falls away in front of you and across the wide valley, the wind farm marches into the distance with the snow-capped cascades beyond. Ellensburg is in the middle distance with the towers of the university in plain view if you know what you’re looking for.

As you pan left to right, you’ll want to traverse slowly lest you miss any detail of the farmland that fills the bowl of the valley. Then, more wind farms on the ridge to the far right just before the high ground ends abruptly as the Yakima Fold Belt is cut through by the Columbia River Gorge.

Beyond the Gorge, Eastern Washington is a totally different animal. But that’s a story for another day trip.

Breasting the ridge and continuing south, there’s so much more to see. A somewhat scary bridge (for those of us who don’t appreciate high structures) spans a canyon whose breadth and depth doesn’t seem it could possibly have been cut by tiny Selah Creek.  

Coming down the retrograde, one can hardly miss the view of Mt. Adams to the southeast and Mt. Rainier to the Southwest. They are two of the ten volcanoes in Washington State.   Adams hasn’t erupted for over 1,400 years. Rainier has produced massive lahars much more recently (about 1,000 years ago) and geologists estimate that the next big one will easily make it to Puget Sound, thirty-some statute miles away. That’s as the crow flies; as the slop slurps is a somewhat greater distance.

Seeing these two behemoths in the same view reminds me of how tiny we are and how vast the stage upon which we play out our lives. It occurred to me, looking at Rainier, that the mountain is utterly oblivious to the ant-like humans who regularly ‘conquer’ it with their crampons and oxygen bottles and ice axes. One medium-sized shrug of its glaciated shoulders and the volcanic detritus would drown tens of thousands in a steam-temperature mud slurry. Of course, the mountain won’t care. It’s not paid to care. The mountain’s job is to hang out and every now and then, spew death. It’s our job to care. Not that we can do anything about it…

The drive continued through the vineyard and tree fruit farms from Wapato to Richland and of course, this being Fall, the colors were to die for. (I didn’t want you to think I spent the whole remainder of the drive worrying about spewing mountains.)

It was a good drive.

Self-refection

So, as I turned the corner into the men’s locker room, I stepped to the side to make way for a couple of guys who were just coming out – hm-m, make that ‘leaving the locker room,’ ahem – and glancing to the right, caught sight of an upper middle aged, fat, sweaty jasper with a weekend beard, plastered hair and a thoroughly exhausted mien.

Then I realized it was a mirror.

Those of you who laughed are not my friends.

The "Tea Party"

I tend toward fiscal conservatism, socially more liberal but of course, those are just labels. What I would prefer to be described as is reasonable, thoughtful, and well-informed.

The thing is, it’s getting harder every day to be well-informed but still maintain a reasonable stance.

The current political climate is making my head spin and not because of what’s right or wrong, what’s smart or not, even what’s good or bad for the nation. The argument these days revolves around who can make the electorate believe the “other side” is evil.

We have a potentially disastrous situation facing our nation in the confluence of two terrible truths: first, the electorate has degraded over time to the point that these days, most citizens seem more interested in reacting to sound bites than in observing actions or thoughtfully analyzing arguments; second, leaders of a new group, the so-called Tea Party, are intent on applying a scorched earth approach if they don’t get their way. And their ‘way’ is elitist, racist, and wholly misaligned with the intent of the Constitution.

The Tea Party, it seems to me, has two goals that overarch all their political calculus – the ascendancy of powerful, moneyed interests and the destruction of a truly pluralistic society. This group is intent on preventing the full deployment of the first comprehensive health care reform legislation in my lifetime. They are dedicated to taking any action that will prevent a positive legacy of the first non-white-male chief executive. They care not one whit for the fact that they are a minority or that poll after poll indicates that most Americans disagree with their aims. And their elected members are willing to shut down the government – the effective and efficient and fair operation of which should be legislators’ primary objective – in an attempt to prevail by tantrum.

The Tea Party would have us accept the outrageous assertion that this country was founded on – and should hew to the canons of – the Christian religions. Never mind that many of the founders and the clear majority of our current citizens are not adherents to this particular belief system. They question the legitimacy of a freely elected President born in Hawaii but talk about a national office in the future for a guy born in Canada (note to TP’ers – not legal; not gonna happen).

It seems to me not particularly surprising that the power basis of this group resides primarily in states south of the Mason-Dixon Line and in pockets elsewhere with overwhelmingly white populations. Let me be clear – I DO NOT believe that membership in this group is proof prima facie that one is evil or racist or elitist. But I do believe that the organizers of the group are precisely those things. This is a latter day John Birch Society, made infinitely more malevolent because they’ve assumed the false mantle of respectability.

The Tea Party is intent on redefining some terms we all thought we understood since childhood. A ‘patriot’ is now someone who believes as they do and everyone else is anti-patriotic. ‘Compromise’ means browbeating the rest of us until they get their way. Even ‘Tea Party’ is redefined – it no longer refers to an act of civil disobedience against unreasonable taxation by a foreign king. Now, it simply refers to their ‘us,’ with the rest of us, the majority of us, redefined as ‘them.’

Too bad we’ve come to this. I love discussing politics but to do so these days frequently means damaging longstanding relationships. I don’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat or even a Tea Partier – we should at least be able to talk.

I have friends and family members with whom I can no longer discuss politics or even current events. That’s tragic. Adams and Madison and Hamilton were able to talk and debate. Reagan and O’Neill were both respectful and friendly even when their view of the world was most at odds. I guess those days are gone.

Damn.

Education

“(Education gives) children something that can never be taken away.”( Julia Stiles’ character to David Walton’s character in The Makeover. )

The movie, one of a multitude of takes on Pygmalion, is not exactly a masterpiece but it’s entertaining enough if your primary reason for watching it is to have some sort of excuse for not going outside to mow the lawn. And a good quote is a good quote (or “Truth is truth,” as we learned in Enemy Mine) so I’m going with it.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve a passion for considering the best nature of education and as I may have mentioned in previous posts, I understand that transforming that nature will unavoidably mean revamping the structure of our educational enterprise. On a macro scale, this will involve a massive and excruciating effort to turn the ship around. And that’s assuming that we can come together as to what education should look like. And unfortunately, government will be involved. Recent ‘discourse’ regarding affordable health care does not fill me with hope in this regard but heck, I can dream, right?

There are all sorts of discussions going on in various nooks and crannies about how best to educate ourselves and the next generation, and the next… And lots of those discussions question the fundamental definitions we’ve assumed we all understood. Questions like, what is education?

For at least a half-dozen generations, we’ve drawn a line between ‘education’ and ‘training’. Training means preparing people for work and has traditionally been the province of technical schools, apprenticeship,  in-house job training and preparation for untoward events (safety training, etc.). Education, on the other hand, has been designed to prepare us for lives driven by higher order thought. Or so the story goes.

As the world is changing, the line between the two is becoming less bright and probably, less useful.  Ascribing this change to the emergence of an Information Age does little to describe the sea change we are currently undergoing. Education and training are necessarily interweaving as we struggle to keep up with the phenomenal burgeoning of both knowledge and the dissemination of it.

Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, ETH Zurich et al are great schools but they may be on the brink of losing their pre-eminent status – the Times rankings notwithstanding – not because of any diminution of the quality of their teaching but rather by a loss of relevance of both their approach and their target audiences.  Certainly, a lot of the change is driven by the explosive increases in both information and interaction through the Internet. But the voices currently claiming that the Web is the sole driver of change in how we order the acquisition of knowledge miss the point by a wide margin.

The Web is a tool and a very important one. But the change in our ways of knowing has everything to do with how we make use of the tool. And this fact both encourages and worries me.

I am encouraged by the serendipity created when minds can readily find each other across distance, time and disciplines through the power of the web search. Where in the past a researcher could only be found through a sort of Old Boys network of those who considered themselves and each other eminent, now the construction of search criteria is more likely to be centered on content than an eminent author’s name.  

On the other hand, when anyone can stand at the virtual bully pulpit, we can’t control or even keep sight of the provenance of what we think we’re learning. Schlock reference sources such as Wikipedia abound and the researcher must go to some lengths to ensure that they’re reading from a legitimate primary source.

So how do we use this great tool? As a delivery medium? As a research platform? As an uber networking group?

Probably all of the above but the truth is that while the Internet will be used to expand the range of possibilities in how we share knowledge, it most likely won’t alter the way education works – people engaging with other people to expand their collective understanding.

Still thinking about where this one goes next so I’ll end here.

Thoughts?

A travel day

I was wandering around O’Hare airport the other day, working out the kinks from three days of mostly sitting and I spent a couple of hours noticing the people who inhabit this, one of the largest and busiest airports in the world.

I had the Rosemary Chicken at Wolfgang Puck’s. I strolled H and K and L concourses.  I watched a young couple who were obviously smitten with each other and wishing they were alone, remembering what it was like when Mary and I first travelled together (to Ohio for my baptism of fire with her family – I survived).

The massage station fascinated me. I can’t imagine allowing a stranger to knead and push and poke my body and it’s amazing to me that people will actually pay to have it done. Different strokes, I guess (pun intended). I moved on when I realized one of the masseurs was looking at me oddly. Probably thought I was a creeper, especially if he’d noticed me the first two times I’d trundled by.

I watched people queuing up for a flight and wondered if I look that stressed when I am waiting to board. One airport employee came up escorting two elderly passengers, pushing both wheelchairs, one in each hand, seemingly effortlessly. I really hope he makes good tips.

A plane landed from Orlando and I chuckled at the parade of kids sporting mouse ears and princess costumes. There’s almost nothing more precious or funnier than a little girl in a food-stained Cinderella ball gown and wearing a plastic tiara, with missing front teeth and well-worn galumphy tennis shoes with falling down socks.

I wondered if these kids had posed with a certain Tigger of my acquaintance or if they’d noticed a particular stilt walker.  Did they meet Mickey and Minnie and have breakfast with all the characters?

Of course, the Disney kids were accompanied by parents who looked uniformly bedraggled and just generally used up. No surprise, I suppose.

They weren’t all vacationers who came off that plane. There was the obligatory workaholic gal with the barely legal roll-on and the phone plastered to her ear. The lost souls who clearly had no idea where to go to catch their next flight which, judging by body language and panicked expressions, was due to depart momentarily.

I saw a whole congo line of emergency vehicles screaming down the flight line toward some catastrophe off stage right. I wondered briefly what the problem might be and hoped everyone was okay.

Soon enough, it was time to head for my gate and as I was about to walk through the ‘MVP Line,’ I was almost bowled over by a middle-aged couple who were clearly in a big hurry to board. The man threw a glare over his shoulder. Guess he told me!

I travel by air a lot and so I sometimes get upgraded to sit in the non-cramped seats. This was one of those times. I was in the last row of first class and the unpleasant couple-in-a-hurry were two rows behind, clearly indignant to see me in First. Whatever….

The guy next to me was a Microsoft exec with a fourteen year old daughter who does not yet know what she wants to do with her life. I assured him that was part of the plan. We talked about TED talks and Randy Pausch and living your passion. And daughters.

Lots of turbulence as the pilots did their best to skirt storms that made the national news. I love turbulence. One thing about riding in the front of the plane – it’s generally inhabited by folks who fly enough not to be bothered by the occasional bump or slump. And the flight attendant was a middle aged pro who did her job without a stumble.

And then we landed, and Mary was waiting in baggage claim.

It was a good travel day.

Unwelcome ampleness

Having just come in from six out of eight weeks on the road, I am more than happy to not eat any restaurant food for awhile. And not the least reason is that I just weighed my ample self.

I’ve been good about using the gym, enjoying it immensely. Unfortunately, I’ve also been consuming fatty road food and conference room treats at a rate that’s clearly not healthful for me.

I have to do better. I want to be around for awhile.