Welcome to the Paperless Future

26 Feb 2010, 21:54

I’m leaving on a week-long business trip on Sunday.  So, at the office today I gathered together the papers that I’ll need in the next week.  Here they are.

And I wonder why my bag is so heavy.  I need to get better at reviewing and editing documents without killing trees, apparently.

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Giving It Up…

21 Feb 2010, 22:19

As I did my internet ablutions, which lately have involved checking Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, and Email, early last Wednesday morning (Ash Wednesday), I found that a friend on Facebook had announced on Tuesday night that she was giving up Facebook for Lent.  It immediately struck me as a good idea.  I gave myself a few hours until noon to decide whether or not I would do the same, but ultimately decided to give it a try.  (Honestly, the only reason I could come up with to not do it was that I wasn’t sure if I could.  A sure sign that I needed to try.)  So, I announced that I was giving up Facebook and Twitter for Lent in both places, moved my Twitter client to an inaccessible location on my hard drive (to prevent accidentally opening it; it wouldn’t actually stop me from opening it if I was determined to do so), deleted my Facebook and Twitter bookmarks from my Bookmark Bar, and deleted the Tweetie and Facebook apps from my iPhone.

Since reading Infinite Jest last summer, I’ve been a bit obsessed with the idea of addiction, both in our culture and in my own life.  I’ve also realized, though, that I already know a technique for dealing with addiction: take a break.  It’s something I’ve done many times, not always for Lent, and usually with good effect.

I gave up television in August of 2007.  My original plan was to give it up for a month.  But I’ve never really gone back.  I usually watch This Old House when they are producing a new season.  But otherwise, I only watch the occasional sporting event or special event.  This was one of the most positive life changes that I’ve made in years, and it started with giving something up for a month.

I’ve also given up sugary beverages, caffeine, and eating mammals at various times.  None of those produced effects as dramatic as with television, but all of them raised my awareness and changed some habits for the better: I once loved sugary sodas and drank at least a Coke a day.  Now I rarely drink any sugary beverage except sweet tea.  I couldn’t give that up, though; I’m a Southern boy at heart.  The caffeine experiment went completely bust around the time our second child was born.  At least I’m fairly aware of my consumption and keep it moderate, though.  And some day I’ll probably try to dial it back to one caffeinated beverage per day.  The mammals thing is still a long term goal of sorts, but one that I haven’t put much emphasis on lately.

I love Facebook and Twitter.  Twitter keeps me engaged in an interesting conversations throughout the day, without usually being too distracting.  I already limited my Facebook access to evenings and weekends, but Facebook largely functions to keep me connected to my “roots.”  It’s where I stay connected to people that I grew up with, many of whom I like and respect, even if we don’t see eye-to-eye these days.

I realized, though, that I had become addicted.  I was checking Twitter a gazillion times a day.  Even though I don’t generally find Twitter to be too distracting to my work, at some point it became too much.  And while I generally didn’t check Facebook during the workday, I was still obsessive about scrolling back through the entire day’s posts in the evening.  Just like a rat in a cage, I was pushing the lever over and over again, hoping for a pellet.  So, I’m taking a breather.

My four days away so far have been fine.  I have certainly missed the connections, and I’ve noticed that my awareness of local happenings has dropped precipitously.  But I’ve already confirmed for myself that forty-six days away from Twitter and Facebook isn’t going to hurt me.  It might actually do me some good. I will definitely be returning to Twitter and Facebook.  But I’m hoping that some time away will give me a better, less obsessive, approach to them when I return.

(My triumphant return to Facebook and Twitter will probably be sometime on Easter, this being a Lenten effort.  But I have the odd situation of flying to Singapore on Easter Day.  By the time I get to Singapore, while it will still be Easter morning at home, it will be nearly midnight local time.  I don’t know what the internet situation will be upon arrival, or if I’ll even feel like trying to get on Facebook or Twitter.  I do know enough about jet lag, though, to know that what I should try to do upon arrival is go to sleep.  So we’ll see.)

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Infinite Jest

24 Jan 2010, 22:03

Before David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008, I didn’t even know his name.  After his death, though, wails of mourning went up amongst several people that I read and admire on the internets.  So, I started poking around the edges, reading some of his essays, many from this great “in memoriam” page that Harper’s Magazine put up.  I started discussing DFW and some of his essays with a friend, who had read Infinite Jest the previous Spring.  He pressured me to read the novel, but I demurred.  I don’t read much fiction these days, although I’ve been doing better the last couple of years, and Infinite Jest seemed like such an undertaking.

But when the Infinite Summer project came along, I could no longer deny the attraction, and I signed up.  As designed, the Infinite Summer project was to take its adherents through the novel before the end of Summer 2009, but being on an academic schedule, I accelerated my reading schedule to finish before the start of the Fall semester. Infinite Jest is a long novel, and I won’t deny that at times it was a real grind to force myself through the day’s pages.  But I made it.

When I finished, though, I said little about it, because my reaction was largely one of bewilderment.  I had certainly enjoyed many aspects of the novel.  It had taken me through broad ranges of emotion:  The novel is by turns hilariously, side-splittingly funny and deeply, gut wrenchingly sad.   But I was also somehow disappointed.  I’m a traditionalist in a postmodern world; I like my stories tied up in neat bows.  Of course, I had known from the beginning that a neo-postmodern novel could never offer that kind of closure.  And yet, I was disappointed.

In the months since I finished reading Infinite Jest, though, it has remained on my mind. My fixation is to the point that I’m tempted to go back and read it again, just to re-immerse myself in DFW’s bizarro-realistic world. I don’t think I will actually reread it soon, but it’s all but certain that I’ll reread it at some point.  Three things about the novel stand out in my mind as particularly noteworthy:

• A major theme of Infinite Jest is addiction.  And the addiction that DFW describes, I’ve found, is a powerful lens through which to view our culture.  Television, fast food, and RSS readers are, in many ways, just as powerful as the addictions to alcohol and drugs that DFW’s characters confront.  We are a society in desperate search of The Entertainment that will satisfy our wants and soothe our souls, but this very longing has the capability, the tendency, even, to enslave us and to separate us from one another and from our humanness.

• DFW’s compassion for his characters is astounding.  Many of the characters are brutal, addicted, vain, and unlovable. And yet, DFW draws them in a way that allows us to see their essential humanity through compassionate eyes. Given that I believe that seeing people with such “compassionate eyes” is a key part of the Christian calling, I found DFW’s compassion for his characters noteworthy and admirable.  It relates well to the message that DFW conveyed in his now well known commencement speech: Selfishness is the default mode of human beings; we have the opportunity to choose a different mode.

• Finally, DFW’s love for the English language comes through on every page, with masterfully crafted sentences.  The example I’ll cite isn’t from Infinite Jest at all.  Rather, it is a sentence from DFW’s essay about taking a cruise [PDF], subsequently retitled “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” for the collection of the same name.  It is a sentence about people skeet shooting from the deck of the cruise ship.  Thus, it is a sentence about an activity that I don’t care about in an essay that mocks the very notion of a modern cruise as a worthwhile activity.  DFW writes:

  “Finally, know that an unshot skeet’s movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean’s sky is sun-like — i.e. orange and parabolic and right-to-left — and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.”

  I picked this sentence because it was chosen for the dedication page on a recently released collection of DFW tributes [PDF].  I have read the essay from which it was taken at least three times, and this sentence never particularly stood out —because there are such gems on nearly every page of DFW’s work.

Anyway, if you’re up for a literary challenge that might change the way you look at the world, then go forth and read.

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Housekeeping…

29 Dec 2009, 18:31

I made some behind-the-scenes changes to the way this site is run. Please let me know if you see anything broken.

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Thankfulness…

26 Nov 2009, 20:49

Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday. It’s often filled with heaping doses of good things like friends, family, and food. It’s the least commercialized of the major American holidays. And the theme, thankfulness, is one worth spending more than one day a year on.

(The lamest thing that I saw on the internet all day was someone who said that T’giving didn’t mean much to him because he lived every day in a spirit of thankfulness.  Give me a break.  We could all use an extra helping of gratitude.)

I’m thankful for my family.  For two kids that are wonderous in so many ways: healthy, clever, generous, loving, kind, and beautiful.  For their love for each other — more than I ever would have thought possible between a three year old and an eighteen month old.  For a wife who takes good care of them and of me and keeps us all on track.

So many other things to be thankful for, too: A job that provides both autonomy and security.  Friends across the miles and years.  A church family that nurtures and supports us.

I asked Charlie what he was thankful for today.  (They talked about it at preschool this week.)  He said, “My house, my toys, and the playground.  And books.”

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On a Parent’s Love

25 Nov 2009, 20:50

I encountered this quote in the September 2009 issue of The Atlantic.  The quote was almost a throw away line starting mid-sentence in a (rather strange, not entirely agreeable) essay by Caitlin Flanagan titled “Sex and the Married Man.”

“[U]ntil you’ve [had a child of your own] you’re just guessing about love, gesturing toward it, assuming that it’s the right name for a feeling you’ve had.”

Now, let me immediately backpedal from what Flanagan herself is saying here and not presume to tell childless people what they have or have not felt.  But this quote captures, better than almost anything else I’ve read, my experience of love as a father.

When we were expecting our first child, dozens of people, many that I barely knew, told me that it was going to “change my life.”  I found this extremely annoying, almost enraging, because none of them were at all specific about what they meant. What changed, for me, is what Flanagan describes.  The love that I felt for my children from the first moments of their lives was incomparable to anything that I had felt before.

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