Friday, April 29, 2011

The Brain Hive Inside Me

A thousand swirling twirling whirling thoughts are in my mind
The rapid planning, goals I'm manning, taking up my time
There's things to do and meetings too and don't forget the donuts
Where's the dog must beat the fog am I actually a grownup?
Days to plan and nights to cook and things are needing buying
Get to work and clean that shirt, house chores are multiplying

My brain is stuck in third gear as we hurtle down the highway
RPMs too high for safety, making burnout rather likely
But I can't stop, can't find the clutch and gear shift in my head
Don't know how to shut up, be myself, or even who I am
There's so much I want to see and do and maybe if I plan it
I'll have it all and be the best, with time to organize the planet

The schedule tells me I'm off track; I don't know what to do
Where do I turn, my brain it burns, cant seem to think it through
The madness grows and grabs my toes, sucking my soul in
Deadlines to meet, bosses to greet, my interest waning thin
I'm start to lose it bruise it fuse it then the music changes
From symphony to screeching frenzied damned angry violins

This is what my life is, here’s a window to my head
You don’t have to like it or even understand
But any chance of getting me means accepting who I am

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Future Reference

Sometimes, writing is the best therapy for me.

In the coming weeks, I'm probably going to be writing about a lot of stuff that's deeply personal. Not like a list of my sexual partners or anything obscene, obviously, but a lot of stuff that I'm still figuring out in therapy and in my head.

I need you, my readers, to remember a few things as these things come forward.

First and foremost, these are my opinions, my memories and my thoughts. They are not perfect. They are flawed and skewed; filtered through the foggy lens of childhood; aged and cracked with time. They will not be rational, they may not make sense, and if you were there for some of them, you may not agree with my interpretation. All of our memories and interpretations are fallible, yours and mine.

But they are real, for me. What happened, what I felt in my moments of memory, they are as real as anyone's memories of the past. They are valid. And they are mine. I make no apology for my thoughts. They are what they are, and nothing can change the way I have felt about certain things, especially when those feelings are associated with memories and idea who define who I am today.

I am sorry if some of these things upset you. (This is particularly aimed at my parents.) What happened, happened, and now I must shake off the mantle of the dusty past in order to claim my bright and shiny future. I cannot move ahead without confronting the demons that exist. Because we all have demons. Most of mine come in two forms: a childhood of being different and an adulthood of constant responsibility.

I am not crying for pity. I do not write for attention, nor pats on the head (which is damnably condescending, anyways, and I'll kick your condescending ass before I let you pat me on the head). I write for release. There will be drafts that don't see the light of the Internet. There will be things that I say that might make you think me stupid and insecure. But I can't let your opinions of me rule my life.

Today, I claim my birthright. I claim myself.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Reading in the 21st Century

I am a child of the Millennial generation. I have seen the invention of reading tablets, tiny laptops that weigh but a few pounds, phones that are computers, capacitive touch screens, harddrives that don't need to spin up or down and external 1 terabyte harddrives that cost $70 (and I bought a 2TB external for $100. I have NO IDEA what I'm going to do with 2TB of storage, but I have it). Technology isn't prevalent. It is rampant.

Part of why I love doing what I do is because I get to play with new toys and ideas (usually on Mommy Yale's dime). About a year and a half ago my previous dept. got a Kindle to play with, and started off my love affair with e-readers. I eventually had to give it back as I moved depts, but I recently bought my own Kindle 3 in a silent auction benefiting my choir. I love the Kindle 3 just as much as I loved the Kindle 2 (plus it's lighter, which is nice). I have Calibre so that I can put my own books on it (and convert them as needed) and I have friends who I exchange files with. I haven't really tried the loaning feature yet, but we'll get there.


Something I don't understand, though, is how and why I can buy a physical book for less money than I can a digital book. Yes, there are licensing fees; of course. But when I can buy a used hardback edition of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters for a penny + $3.99 shipping (yes, you read that right, a PENNY) while the digital version is $17, I take issue with it.

It's not that I don't want to pay for content. I just don't like paying more for content than I have to. Why should I pay $17 for a digital version when I can pay $4 for a hardcover book? Digital is the future, obviously. But my generation knows how to comparison shop. Amazon sort of just bit itself in that aspect: the hardcover book I bought was through one of their resellers.

I also am frustrated when there are books I want to read that aren't available in a digital format. I'll pay for the damn book; just release it to us! Certain books, like my crochet books, I don't want on the Kindle. I want nice big pages with color illustrations for those. But things like Harry Potter? Kindle. Please. (I do have a digital Harry Potter; I just used that as an example.)

While nothing can compare with the tactile experience of a book (am I a kinesthetic learner, so I definitely appreciate that), I have to appreciate the fact that I don't have to carry around several books at once. I remember carting around POUNDS and POUNDS of text books in high school and college, and thinking "OH DEAR HEAVENS I AM GOING TO DIE" at least once from the weight. How much does the average e-reader weigh? 8-10 ounces? Yeahhhhh... that's a huge difference.

I hope that schools get on the e-reader bandwagon. Reading all of my HUST books on a e-reader would have been SOOOOO helpful, especially now that you can do things like share comments and highlighted portions these days. It would have made citation a pain in the ass, but I have a feeling that eventually that will be addressed by the MLA, the Chicago Style people and both the APAs.

To the naysayers and people freaking out about the demise of the bookstore, I'd like to point out that history is full of these things. Let's look at the horse and cart, for example. People freaked out that cars were coming in, and protesting, and angry. And now we have an estimated 600 million cars on the road, world wide. Progress is going to keep marching on, and we have two choices: make it work for us or get left shaking our fists in its wake (and then you get people/characters like Umbridge who spout off gems like "progress for progress' sake," which was a delightful commentary by Rowling on the conservative agenda sweeping many of the political bodies across the globe, in my opinion).

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Email and family management

We have a slight problem in my family. Especially with the baby boomers.

Certain people like to send me email. Great! I'm glad you're thinking of me. But I really, really don't like getting chain mail/spam.

It's one thing when it's genuinely funny. One of my cousins sends me stuff fairly often, but I actually laugh at it. So it's OK; we have similar senses of humor and we will email back and forth entertaining comments about the funny. So she knows that I'm cool with her highly amusing forwards.

My grandmother, on the other hand.... Well, we've already had one discussion about how getting religious-toned pro-American military everything was a bit offensive as a humanist, pacifist and atheist. And she took it quite well, and I haven't gotten anything from her in that vein lately. But I still get stuff from her and other older family members. And it's so OBNOXIOUS.

I think the biggest issue that we are using email for different things. They are using it as an occasional communication tool that is capable of holding files, pictures, words, and ideas. I, on the other hand, am an email power user. I use my work email to communicate with hundreds of people on a daily basis. I use my personal email to stay abreast of community issues, what's going on in Facebook, what my friends are up to, to manage choir business and to inform my friends and family as to what's going on in my life. Yes, amusing and funny things make their way into both my work and personal email, but for me, email is not an optional thing that I log into occasionally. I am in my email inboxes at least 10 hours a day. I have three active email accounts, as well as specialized email aliases that forward to my personal and work accounts, the 20+ email lists that I'm on, or the separate email accounts that forward to my main accounts (such as ResNet, choir and Parker's).

On an average day, I read about 200 emails. I send at least 40, if not more. A lot of them are quick responses, that take seconds to compose and send. But I am an email power user: I use the keyboard fairly exclusively once I start working in Apple Mail, and I type FAST. Email is not some fluffy thing for me. It is an integral part of my job and responsibilities, and when someone sends me crap about The World's Biggest Hug or "RE: Love SPell - Pass it ON OR ELSE!!1!" it makes me upset. Because they've now stolen 5 seconds of my time. It's my time, dammit. It doesn't matter that it was seconds. What matters is that people are not cognizant of me and my needs. And that as family and friends, I expect more of them.

So, a plea to my older relatives: stop sending me spam. I appreciate that you think of me, really, I do. But I would rather you put the time and energy into a proper email, or even an e-card, than you hit "forward" and make me deal with something that I probably won't find that funny. If I want to look at funny pictures of cats, I know the web address of lolcats.com. If I want to listen to sappy music, I'm pretty sure that I have Frank Sinatra somewhere on in my iTunes Library. And if I wanted to read/listen/watch anything to do with conservative "values," pro-military agendas, and paranoid Republicans, I would just go to Fox News. Out of those three, the lolcats are the only ones I am mildly interested in.

In case you're wondering, I do have an email policy. I email people back politely the first time, asking them to not send me stuff. The second time I threaten to mark their address as "spam" in my email. And the third time I do. So I have no idea if a couple of family members ever try to email me. If they can't respect my (very basic) email wishes, I probably don't have much in common with them, anyways.