This morning, in the parking lot at Carson Pirie Scott, my daughter reached out and took my hand. That's enough of a blessing--she's going to be thirteen in February and I'm well aware of how fortunate I am to still be allowed to hug and kiss her in front of her friends and that sort of thing. But this moment was especially poignant for me because it brought back a clear memory of walking up those same steps with my daughter more than nine years ago, the summer she was three.
That day, I took her hand because she was three, and we were walking into a busy department store. Newly asserting various independences, she asked, "Why do you have to hold my hand?"
"Because I love to hold your hand," I told her, "so I'm going to do it as much as I can while you're little enough to let me." And she said, "Mommy, you can always hold my hand."
My mother, walking on her other side, laughed and said, "Remind her of that when she's twelve." I agreed, simultaneously smiling at the sweet innocence of a child young enough to think she'd never outgrow holding hands with her mommy and aching with the knowledge that she was wrong.
And she almost certainly was. But somehow, miraculously, that day hasn't come yet.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Sunday, November 2, 2008
I'm Up...and I'm Pretty Unhappy About It
For months, I've been working more or less around the clock, sometimes staying up all night, other nights sleeping from roughly midnight to 3:30 and then getting up and starting work again. Naturally, I've been exhausted, and a couple of weeks ago when I gave notice at my 100-hour/week job and started planning for something more civilized, I started sleeping eight hours most nights.
At first, I wasn't all that surprised that eight hours didn't seem like enough, and that I still had to drag myself out of bed in the morning. After all, I had a lot of catching up to do. By day ten or so, I was getting suspicious, but hey...the weather is changing. It's allergy season, right? Could be any number of things.
Like mono, for instance.
Yep, that's right. At 42, I've got mono...AGAIN. Which means, of course, that I have to limit physical activity and sleep a lot. I don't mind sleeping a lot--I'm generally quite good at that and I love to sleep. But...hello? I've been waiting SIX MONTHS to have time to clean my house. And I just finished a project that left more than four thousand pages of work sorted on my living room floor and my couches. I can't, for instance, lie down and watch a movie--there's only one free cushion on my couch. And I can't do it in my bedroom, because the new television I got for my birthday (in JUNE) is still in the box. My house is just not conducive to resting and recovering at this point--and I apparently can't do anything about it.
Which would, you know, be manageable if I were SLEEPING. But I woke up at 7:30 this morning, and that was it. And it's been like that almost every day. I'm TIRED, sure, but I can't sleep for more than 6 or 7 hours. It's like my body has forgotten how. And I can't do anything else, either. This is not what I had in mind when I decided to cut back. This isn't even a sensible way to go about being sick. I'm thinking about hiring Merry Maids or some such operation to come in and clear these papers out of my living room so I can use my furniture while I recuperate.
At first, I wasn't all that surprised that eight hours didn't seem like enough, and that I still had to drag myself out of bed in the morning. After all, I had a lot of catching up to do. By day ten or so, I was getting suspicious, but hey...the weather is changing. It's allergy season, right? Could be any number of things.
Like mono, for instance.
Yep, that's right. At 42, I've got mono...AGAIN. Which means, of course, that I have to limit physical activity and sleep a lot. I don't mind sleeping a lot--I'm generally quite good at that and I love to sleep. But...hello? I've been waiting SIX MONTHS to have time to clean my house. And I just finished a project that left more than four thousand pages of work sorted on my living room floor and my couches. I can't, for instance, lie down and watch a movie--there's only one free cushion on my couch. And I can't do it in my bedroom, because the new television I got for my birthday (in JUNE) is still in the box. My house is just not conducive to resting and recovering at this point--and I apparently can't do anything about it.
Which would, you know, be manageable if I were SLEEPING. But I woke up at 7:30 this morning, and that was it. And it's been like that almost every day. I'm TIRED, sure, but I can't sleep for more than 6 or 7 hours. It's like my body has forgotten how. And I can't do anything else, either. This is not what I had in mind when I decided to cut back. This isn't even a sensible way to go about being sick. I'm thinking about hiring Merry Maids or some such operation to come in and clear these papers out of my living room so I can use my furniture while I recuperate.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Email Thinking
This morning, my email included four consecutive emails from a local friend, followed by four consecutive emails from a friend I've never meet. Continuations, all of them, of previous conversations--eight subjects, all addressed in the space of twenty or thirty minutes.
It got me thinking about the way that email changes our communications. I don't mean because it's in writing (though we do often express ourselves differently in writing) or because of the delay in response or any of the other things that are obvious to the format. No, the thing that caught my attention this morning was the changing of gears, the quicksilver slipping from a response about the stress I'm under at work or someone else's problem with a friend to a funny comment in a forum or a cute story about my daughter's friends.
In real life--or, I should say, in the flesh--that slippage would never take place. I'd never look at someone who had just expressed grave medical concerns to me and say, "I heard the best joke this morning." I'd be taken aback if I said to someone, "You know, I'm under so much pressure at work that I actually think I'm going to quit without another job" and she said, "What do you think of this color for my kitchen curtains?"
But we do that all the time in email, shifting from religious philosophy to political debate to dinner plans to pictures of our kids to anecdotes to financial problems and back again every time we click "send" and move on to the next. There's a big advantage to this format, and one I've always valued--it allows time for reflection, to digress and return to the core point, to expand a conversation in different directions without losing the original thread. That doesn't happen when we sit down to talk--if we branch off in a particular direction chances are that the original thread is lost, or that it has evolved significantly enough that we never return to follow any of the other possible offshoots and sideroads it could have invited. Not so with email; I can go back in a day or two or even two weeks later and answer again with a new thought or a different side-route. I can digress and easily refocus just by going back to the original email.
This morning, though, I started to wonder whether that very thing that allows us to dig deeper somehow keeps us shallower, if revisiting something in small bites over and over again just isn't the same as immersing in it. When a friend tells me that she's worried about her marriage and I respond with the best thoughts I have, but then immediately respond to another comment about her horseback riding lessons, am I really giving her issue my full attention, really feeling it instead of just thinking about it? When I intersperse theological analysis with plans to meet up for lunch and the frustrations of chaperoning a high school football game, am I really opening myself up to as much insight as I otherwise might?
I think not. And maybe it's not all about the format--maybe it's just as much about the way the world is moving so fast that everything happens on the fly these days. But whether it's a cause or an effect, it suddenly seems to me to have the same effect on conversation that hyperlinks had on our ability to read and digest longer, more in-depth writing, and it's a little alarming to me.
It got me thinking about the way that email changes our communications. I don't mean because it's in writing (though we do often express ourselves differently in writing) or because of the delay in response or any of the other things that are obvious to the format. No, the thing that caught my attention this morning was the changing of gears, the quicksilver slipping from a response about the stress I'm under at work or someone else's problem with a friend to a funny comment in a forum or a cute story about my daughter's friends.
In real life--or, I should say, in the flesh--that slippage would never take place. I'd never look at someone who had just expressed grave medical concerns to me and say, "I heard the best joke this morning." I'd be taken aback if I said to someone, "You know, I'm under so much pressure at work that I actually think I'm going to quit without another job" and she said, "What do you think of this color for my kitchen curtains?"
But we do that all the time in email, shifting from religious philosophy to political debate to dinner plans to pictures of our kids to anecdotes to financial problems and back again every time we click "send" and move on to the next. There's a big advantage to this format, and one I've always valued--it allows time for reflection, to digress and return to the core point, to expand a conversation in different directions without losing the original thread. That doesn't happen when we sit down to talk--if we branch off in a particular direction chances are that the original thread is lost, or that it has evolved significantly enough that we never return to follow any of the other possible offshoots and sideroads it could have invited. Not so with email; I can go back in a day or two or even two weeks later and answer again with a new thought or a different side-route. I can digress and easily refocus just by going back to the original email.
This morning, though, I started to wonder whether that very thing that allows us to dig deeper somehow keeps us shallower, if revisiting something in small bites over and over again just isn't the same as immersing in it. When a friend tells me that she's worried about her marriage and I respond with the best thoughts I have, but then immediately respond to another comment about her horseback riding lessons, am I really giving her issue my full attention, really feeling it instead of just thinking about it? When I intersperse theological analysis with plans to meet up for lunch and the frustrations of chaperoning a high school football game, am I really opening myself up to as much insight as I otherwise might?
I think not. And maybe it's not all about the format--maybe it's just as much about the way the world is moving so fast that everything happens on the fly these days. But whether it's a cause or an effect, it suddenly seems to me to have the same effect on conversation that hyperlinks had on our ability to read and digest longer, more in-depth writing, and it's a little alarming to me.
Friday, October 3, 2008
An Interesting Thing about High School Football Games
I know what you're thinking. I know. But there is something interesting about high school football games, something of which you may not be aware if you haven't been to one in a while.
They've expanded.
When I was in high school, I went to a football game nearly every Friday night. Some nights I worked at the concession stand, and others I sat in the stands inhaling the fresh fall air and the smell of burning leaves in the distance and drinking syrupy Coke from a styrofoam cup. They said those games were about three hours long, but they weren't. Not really. There was just barely time for a candy bar, a whisper to a friend, a shy smile at a cute guy, a couple of laps around the bleachers with gravel crunching underfoot, and then we were in the car, my head on the shoulder of a man who wasn't yet a man, headed for Pizza Hut.
An hour and a half, tops. Sometimes less.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when I went to a high school football game twenty-four years after graduation.
Again, they suggested that it would be about three hours long.
Evening came, and morning followed. The first day.
I didn't like to keep checking the time, but by my best estimate we came in just under 17 hours.
The poms were cute.
The marching band was earnest.
The pizza was okay.
The game was your usual mix of kids crashing into one another and time outs.
Pause.
Reorganize.
Repeat.
About the time I was hoping it was almost halftime, I realized that they were just scrimaging and the game hadn't actually started yet.
I overheard some interesting things at the game, though.
I heard that our team wasn't very good this year.
I heard that we had about twelve guys and "most of them go both ways". I choose to assume that has something to do with football, probably playing both offense and defense.
I heard that the gym teacher from my school days who married a student wasn't the only one from that era to do so--but that they're still married.
I learned that you can't run the ball out if it's kicked into the end zone (not sure how I missed that during those four years of Friday night football games).
And I learned that if the weather is nice when you leave your house at 6:30 p.m., it will probably be LESS nice hour later when you're sitting in the top row of the bleachers.
It seems to be important to my daughter and her friends, though. They're apparently big football fans. After the last game, I explained to her what a "down" was. This week, I think we're going to try to figure out what team we played this evening.
They've expanded.
When I was in high school, I went to a football game nearly every Friday night. Some nights I worked at the concession stand, and others I sat in the stands inhaling the fresh fall air and the smell of burning leaves in the distance and drinking syrupy Coke from a styrofoam cup. They said those games were about three hours long, but they weren't. Not really. There was just barely time for a candy bar, a whisper to a friend, a shy smile at a cute guy, a couple of laps around the bleachers with gravel crunching underfoot, and then we were in the car, my head on the shoulder of a man who wasn't yet a man, headed for Pizza Hut.
An hour and a half, tops. Sometimes less.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when I went to a high school football game twenty-four years after graduation.
Again, they suggested that it would be about three hours long.
Evening came, and morning followed. The first day.
I didn't like to keep checking the time, but by my best estimate we came in just under 17 hours.
The poms were cute.
The marching band was earnest.
The pizza was okay.
The game was your usual mix of kids crashing into one another and time outs.
Pause.
Reorganize.
Repeat.
About the time I was hoping it was almost halftime, I realized that they were just scrimaging and the game hadn't actually started yet.
I overheard some interesting things at the game, though.
I heard that our team wasn't very good this year.
I heard that we had about twelve guys and "most of them go both ways". I choose to assume that has something to do with football, probably playing both offense and defense.
I heard that the gym teacher from my school days who married a student wasn't the only one from that era to do so--but that they're still married.
I learned that you can't run the ball out if it's kicked into the end zone (not sure how I missed that during those four years of Friday night football games).
And I learned that if the weather is nice when you leave your house at 6:30 p.m., it will probably be LESS nice hour later when you're sitting in the top row of the bleachers.
It seems to be important to my daughter and her friends, though. They're apparently big football fans. After the last game, I explained to her what a "down" was. This week, I think we're going to try to figure out what team we played this evening.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Okay, That's Not EXACTLY What I Meant...
There hasn't been a lot of productivity around my house for the past week or so. My daughter and I were both sick and then my illness morphed into some weird inner ear thing that has affected my balance to the point that I have to think about walking--and I can't even begin to think about driving. At the same time, I'm on a huge deadline at work, which caused me to decline the doctor's suggestion that she write me an excuse for the week and I not try to do too much until the medication started to take effect and I was able to...well...walk freely about.
So I've spent the past week on the couch with mounds of paper around me, and my daughter spent several days of that time on the loveseat with books and video games and markers and her iPod and such.
Today, she seemed much better, and I saw an opportunity to reclaim a scrap or two of floor space. "I'm not expecting you to jump up and start cleaning the house," I said, "but it would be nice if you could impose some order on all that stuff you have piling up around the couch."
I have GOT to learn that this child is nothing if she's not literal.
So I've spent the past week on the couch with mounds of paper around me, and my daughter spent several days of that time on the loveseat with books and video games and markers and her iPod and such.
Today, she seemed much better, and I saw an opportunity to reclaim a scrap or two of floor space. "I'm not expecting you to jump up and start cleaning the house," I said, "but it would be nice if you could impose some order on all that stuff you have piling up around the couch."
I have GOT to learn that this child is nothing if she's not literal.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Apparently, I Owe AOL $20.11
I used AOL for many years, but nearly three years ago I realized that I wasn't using it much at all. I didn't use my AOL email anymore, and I certainly wasn't using AOL's browser or search. Eventually, my most frequent interaction with AOL was the monthly deduction from my checking account--which was always for the wrong amount.
In the early years, I'd had a feature that took messages when I was online, but I'd switched to DSL a couple of years earlier and never been able to get AOL to remove that feature from my billing. So when I moved and opened a new checking account, I simply didn't transfer my billing. I closed the checking account they'd been billing and figured that, while they might not be willing to close my account over the phone (anyone ever tried this?), they'd surely close it when they found out they had no one to bill.
They fooled me though. Not long afterward, I started hearing that AOL was now free. Months after I'd abandoned the account (and stopped paying for it), I logged in and, to my surprise, found my account still active.
That was about two and a half years ago. Every once in a while, for different reasons, I'll log in and find that my account is still active...and that a boatload of spam has accumulated in my absence. I always assumed that it was because AOL was now free, and the account would just sit there indefinitely--or that at some point I'd go too long between log-ins, and then it would disappear.
And then, this month, I got a bill. Apparently, I owe AOL $20.11. They really liked having me as a customer, and they hope that I'll clear up this past-due balance so they can reinstate my account.
And really, that would be quite a deal, if I wanted AOL...2.5 years for $20.11.
Except that I logged in a couple of weeks after I got the bill, and my account is alive and well...and filled with 770 pieces of junk mail.
In the early years, I'd had a feature that took messages when I was online, but I'd switched to DSL a couple of years earlier and never been able to get AOL to remove that feature from my billing. So when I moved and opened a new checking account, I simply didn't transfer my billing. I closed the checking account they'd been billing and figured that, while they might not be willing to close my account over the phone (anyone ever tried this?), they'd surely close it when they found out they had no one to bill.
They fooled me though. Not long afterward, I started hearing that AOL was now free. Months after I'd abandoned the account (and stopped paying for it), I logged in and, to my surprise, found my account still active.
That was about two and a half years ago. Every once in a while, for different reasons, I'll log in and find that my account is still active...and that a boatload of spam has accumulated in my absence. I always assumed that it was because AOL was now free, and the account would just sit there indefinitely--or that at some point I'd go too long between log-ins, and then it would disappear.
And then, this month, I got a bill. Apparently, I owe AOL $20.11. They really liked having me as a customer, and they hope that I'll clear up this past-due balance so they can reinstate my account.
And really, that would be quite a deal, if I wanted AOL...2.5 years for $20.11.
Except that I logged in a couple of weeks after I got the bill, and my account is alive and well...and filled with 770 pieces of junk mail.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
ROTFLMAO...Errr....Not Really
Is it just me? Whenever I see "rotfl" or "lmao" pop up in the middle of a serious discussion, intended to convey how stupid the opponent's point was, I have an almost visceral reaction. I immediately begin to view the author as either borderline retarded or afflicted with anti-social personality disorder, and lose all interest in anything he or she might have to say...ever again.
If you don't share my reaction, that probably sounds unduly harsh, but let's think about the context for a moment. A serious discussion is in progress, perhaps about the legalization of prostitution or Sarah Palin's qualifications for the Vice-Presidency. Both "sides" seem to have strongly held views and have thought the issue through. Then, one makes a point...and the other writes "lmao".
Um.
Yeah.
So there are two possibilities, right?
The first is that the person truly IS laughing, having lost all sight of the actual issue on the table because she saw an opportunity to mock someone and dropped the serious shit like a hot potato.
The other is that she's NOT laughing, but has voluntarily departed from intelligent debate because it's more important to her to try to make someone else feel stupid than it is to convey a valid point.
Neither of those things gives a writer a lot of credibility in my book. It's rather like a child yelling, "I know you are, but what am I?" at someone who has said, "Give that toy back to Kevin" or "It's time to do your homework": a spotlight on all that is weak, childish, defensive, and even incoherent about the speaker.
If you don't share my reaction, that probably sounds unduly harsh, but let's think about the context for a moment. A serious discussion is in progress, perhaps about the legalization of prostitution or Sarah Palin's qualifications for the Vice-Presidency. Both "sides" seem to have strongly held views and have thought the issue through. Then, one makes a point...and the other writes "lmao".
Um.
Yeah.
So there are two possibilities, right?
The first is that the person truly IS laughing, having lost all sight of the actual issue on the table because she saw an opportunity to mock someone and dropped the serious shit like a hot potato.
The other is that she's NOT laughing, but has voluntarily departed from intelligent debate because it's more important to her to try to make someone else feel stupid than it is to convey a valid point.
Neither of those things gives a writer a lot of credibility in my book. It's rather like a child yelling, "I know you are, but what am I?" at someone who has said, "Give that toy back to Kevin" or "It's time to do your homework": a spotlight on all that is weak, childish, defensive, and even incoherent about the speaker.
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