The lesson that comes from almost every situation, interaction, entanglement is the same: no one owes you an explanation. Likewise, you owe no one an explanation.
Explanations
randomness
When The Economist is Your Greatest Pleasure
“Nonetheless it is clear that pot is… a ‘performance-degrading drug’.”
Unlike many, when I want to reward myself or give myself a treat, I don’t buy a bottle of wine or a new pair of shoes. I buy a subscription to The Economist.
I find myself falling a couple of weeks behind because I devour these weekly publications from cover to cover. I cannot even explain why I devour it this way. It’s not casual. It’s like an overdose, multiple weeks saved up to take in all at once. Does not matter if the current event news is outdated. Maybe it is the sometimes tongue-in-cheek delivery and play-on-word titles and subheadings in articles. Maybe it’s the topics. Sometimes it’s just the slightly annoying way the magazine prescribes “solutions” and offers up its opinions (I don’t always agree with its assessments but appreciate that such a thing is churned out weekly).
I could have taken a digital-only subscription, but I like carrying the magazine copies around with me to read whenever I am stuck waiting or flying or what have you. And I am never disappointed. There’s always something – even in a slow news week.
A few weeks ago it was an entire special report on Turkey and its move toward being a “sultanate” under Erdogan. Then it was an entire briefing on legalization of cannabis. When David Bowie died, which filled me with unreasonable, irrational grief, the magazine dedicated not one but two pages to his obit and titled/subtitled articles throughout the entire magazine with his song titles and lyrics (and even did this a few times weeks after he had died). Small touches here and there, small things that give me a chuckle. It feels like a strange indulgence, but there are worse, more destructive pleasures to indulge.
regret
i don’t regret what i’ve done
as the blood rolls down my leg
doesn’t mean i won’t grieve
the fox comes out and bears her teeth
and tears the bird apart
“How can I move to Canada?”: Innocent question, unintended consequences
StandardIt’s been all over the news – the question (or some variation of it): “How can I move to Canada?” was one of the most searched Google queries during the US primaries’ Super Tuesday events. At one point, a Google data editor posted to Twitter that this search query had spiked 350%, which eventually hit a 1,500% spike.
And who could possibly have predicted that this innocent question, borne of the fear, frustration and panic brought on by the possibility of a Donald Trump (or a Ted Cruz!) presidency, would lead to the Canadian government immigration website being overpowered by traffic spikes? I think a lot about these kinds of unintended and unforeseen consequences – fascinating for sociological as much as technical reasons. I have been a frequent visitor to the site myself as a maniacal citizenship collector and lover of Canada (Canadian friends have even named me an honorary Canadian in the past). I have followed the changes in Canadian immigration laws/rules, which turned more conservative and closed during the Harper years. These will probably be revisited under the liberal Justin Trudeau administration. As I visited and revisited the Canadian immigration site, I hated seeing Canada become, well, less Canadian and less aligned with the values that the whole world associates with Canada.
Anyway in all the time and all the years in which I had visited the site, I had never been greeted by this:
Every day, it seems, another website falls victim to its own success or demand.But in this case, a little-seen (unless you are trying to move to Canada, which is probably a high enough number but doubtfully website-breaking numbers on normal occasions) government website is not necessarily the kind of site you’d expect to be overpowered by stampedes of would-be Canadians. (Get it, Stampede?)
Sure, many government websites are not the most heavily trafficked web spaces, and an unexpected spike is just that – unexpected. Some such issues are quite predictable (referring here to the US government’s Healthcare.gov debacle, which US President Obama called a “well-documented disaster” that nevertheless led to a better government understanding of how to handle technology). And eventually that disaster was fixed. Big, small or somewhere in between, even public sector entities (in fact, sometimes especially public sector entities) are responsible for fairly high-stakes information – public safety, public health, economic data – you get the picture. For that reason, they should always be prepared. Not every flood of traffic is expected, but when it does happen, you hope – and they hope – the site is ready. I mean, uninsured Americans were required to use Healthcare.gov to sign up for insurance. Yeah – how, if they can’t even get into the site? And you’d really hope that when the time comes to escape the Trump demagoguery, Canada and its government websites will be ready for you!
For now, though, in the heat of the Super Tuesday returns, the Canadian immigration website, apparently not ready for the influx of potential immigrants from the US (or at least not ready for their website visits to the Great White North), struggled to keep up with demand, posting the warning pasted above to all its visitors (and today, several days later, the warning is still there).
Now if only anyone had heeded the months of warnings about Trump/Drumpf.
Gender on Ice
Yesterday I wrote about getting locked out of a building when it was -5C, and likened it to be left out on the ice, which kicked my memory into high gear, leading directly to a book I had to read during my master’s program. It was called Gender on Ice, and it was one of the few books in the program that I just could not get into. I barely remember it, and I am not even sure that I finished reading it at all. I recall clearly the seminars I had to attend, listening to all my classmates discuss the book, and several students being quite impassioned about it. At the time I could not imagine why. Now that I am almost 20 years removed from that (dear god – 20 years!), I wonder what I would make of the book now. Its theme – two polar explorers whose accounts of their feats were laden with self-congratulations and declarations of pioneering heroism and analysis of “the particular imperial and masculinist ideologies that each characterized” – held no appeal to me at the time. While I had no doubt that the “white man hero/trailblazer” story, excluding the contributions of anyone else, including a black man who accompanied one of the explorers, was entirely true, I think I was tired of the constant analysis of race and gender and all the things that drove my higher education.
But because I was immersed in it, it seemed the norm. This questioning, this struggle, and by extension, the autonomy and freedom to question and struggle on equal footing with everyone else, seemed a given.
It was only later that I considered more carefully that that was the construct and privilege of being at a left-wing, liberal arts college. I have never had to step or live very far outside that bubble but have become much more keenly aware of everything outside that bubble, which makes me question again the materials I read (or half-read) at the time but gave short shrift.
And, just so you know, a dude named Doug who pretends to be something of a Viking – or something – once said that “ice is evil”. I don’t think so, but maybe under such circumstances.
Locked out on ice
StandardNothing like -5c outside and being locked out of a place in the middle of the night. Luckily my car is equipped with blankets and extra coats and all, but still, it was, let’s say… an irritation.
I like driving at night, quite the opposite of daytime driving, which I hate more than anything. At night, there are seldom any other cars. Just darkness and an occasional wild animal springing into the road. I stopped for petrol (and yogurt) at 3:30 and a man came in and seriously ordered a hot dog. Firewall and I once went to this very same petrol station (in one of its bathroom stalls it even has a rectangular metal plate on the back of the toilet, which looks like it’s been set up for people to do cocaine or something. With the way the youth of today hang out at this place on weekend nights – don’t ask me why – maybe there’s more to that theory than I’d have imagined), and he ordered one of these dubious dogs and spent the next 36 hours miserably ill. Even the woman working there asked him, with great concern creeping over her face, “Are you sure? These are kind of old.” No such caution in tonight’s transaction. Just a man who seemed like maybe he eats these gas station hot dogs all the time.
Today is the first day of the rest of my life… and I was locked out.
The carelessness of contact
I often rail against the idea that our digital world allows us to be too familiar, too casual, to treat people like catalog selections we can discard, disposably. I hate this, but I am equally guilty, placing blame on the platform, on time, on my own inability to stretch 24 hours into more than it can hold. Sure, I am not casual or dismissive in any way with my actual friends, but I have become one of those robots who traipses through online forums and sites, starting halfhearted conversations and dropping them. They, of course, don’t seem real. And most conversation partners engaged in this digital wasteland usually feel the same way.
But not always. (Holding up mirror to my own hypocrisy. No surprise there.)
Tonight, I started going through an old inbox, finding old, unanswered messages. Most of them were of the dull, generic, “Hi” variety. Yet there were some genuinely lovely messages… and I am the one to drop the ball, and there is no way back (“User X no longer has an account”). There’s nothing like the kick you give yourself when you realize you may have squandered a good connection. Carelessly.
Softly into 40s: Where’s the party?
An acquaintance recently turned 30 and fretted mildly about it. A mutual acquaintance and I chimed in immediately to reassure her that the thirties are by far the best decade. You finally know who you are – usually none of the anxiety and trying too hard to please others and finding your footing that shade your twenties. The mutual acquaintance and I are both on the threshold of 41. Neither of us felt one way or the other about turning 40, but somehow we’re both dreading 41 because it’s a nothing age.
I concocted a dream birthday party for 40 – maybe, despite not being a party person, I would invite everyone from all spheres of my life (Seattle, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, work, non-work, the past, the present) to one big event (in Seattle, in Iceland?). But the big trick would be to get 1. some bands I love that are still small enough to be able to do something like a big party (thinking here about stuff like The Wedding Present/Cinerama and Seattle band Tomten, for example), 2.the ubiquitous everywhere-man Tom Skerritt to choose his favorite poem and attend the party to recite it (haha – I know – crazy), and 3. a place big enough to accommodate all these dreams. And of course enough people agreeing to attend. It would be less a 40-year-old birthday for me and more a gathering of people who made the 40 years memorable, for better or worse.
In the end, I did nothing. Not a single celebratory thing. But now that I see 41 on the horizon, I wonder if I should aim for some big thing sometime this decade.
Penmanship and Italian tastes
Growing up – and still – I had a lot of pen pals. It seemed that penmanship was a national trait in many countries. Every French person formed their letters and numbers in the same way. Every German, every Russian, every Italian, too. Unique handwriting for each person, but you could always tell from the envelope and the way the letters looked what country the letter came from.
I wondered the other day, as I watched the surprisingly good (for the most part) Italian TV drama 1992, about the soundtrack. It fit its time perfectly – but I wondered how many Italians at that time were really listening to most of the stuff included? Screaming Trees (the one song on the Singles soundtrack) – yes. Smashing Pumpkins – probably. But Teenage Fanclub and Primal Scream… eh, I have my doubts. There were not THAT many people listening to those bands anywhere, let alone in Italy (a place I perhaps unfairly judge in matters of pop culture). Or did I see this through my own faraway prism, imagining that because Fanclub and Scream were indie/off-the-beaten-path where I came from, they also were for everyone else?
I don’t let Italy fool me and do have many good Italian friends who also have great taste (in music, too), but images of Berlusconi, the ridiculous bimbo-filled TV game/variety shows and crap like Eros Ramazzotti (or other things I cannot identify) always spring to mind. Maybe some of these trusted Italian friends can set my biases straight. Were people really getting that down to the sounds of early 90s Glasgow bands? (I grant you – the show only included the two best-known songs from these bands – but it still surprised me.)
Color me sick – Jargon part 11,012
In further news of corporate jargon, I saw the word “brandscape” today. Someone hold back my hair while I vomit.
Such talk is, as a friend recently said, a shitpile.