Leaving the Material Girl

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Sitting in a hospital waiting room isn’t my idea of a good time. But that’s where I found myself earlier this week, waiting to have my eyes examined. I riffled through the stack of magazines on the coffee table, found one that wasn’t too old, and took a seat. The Rotarian. You don’t find that in a waiting room too often.

Waiting rooms are on par with riding in elevators or waiting for subway trains in big cities. You look around subtly, but you don’t really want to make eye contact. And that’s what I was doing until someone I knew came into the room. I was recognized—and caught. I was no longer anonymous. Within seconds I was introduced to everyone in the room, within minutes I was in the middle of a conversation.

Almost everyone in the room looked to be on the far side of 70 years old. I quickly learned from my former coworker that the elegant white-haired woman sitting across from me lived on the same street as I do, and knew the previous owner of our house. In fact, everyone in the room had known the woman who’d owned our house—except me. She was famous around town, I guess. I’d never met her; she passed away a couple of years ago.

As for me, I was introduced as the person “who fixed up the old McKenzie house a few years back.” On hearing that I was interested in old houses, the elegant woman perked up. She was getting ready to sell her house. Downsizing. “Perhaps I was in the market for a bigger house?” Within 30 seconds the whole room was in flat-out sales mode, trying to hook me up with a great new house. I wasn’t sure if I was being teased, or being sold. All I could do was laugh as I felt my face turning red.

The funny thing is, I’m always in the market for a new house. I love houses, mostly old ones. And it runs in the family. My parents were big on old houses, and owned a few. And Sharon’s parents were the same. But frankly, since moving here, the prospect of fixing up another old house is wearing a bit thin.

As the conversation rolled on, I realized that my elegant friend was serious about selling. She said that I might even be interested in some of the furniture in the house, which brought the conversation around to antiques. She’d been an avid collector over the years, and her house was chock full of things she’d picked up—fine china, cabinets and dining sets, the usual sorts of things. She’d been trying to give some of the more valuable things to her nieces and nephews (she has no children), but they were more interested in some dilapidated old pine furniture she’d tossed in the garage. Finally, in an effort to liquidate her things, she’d called an auctioneer in Saint John who told her that there wasn’t much interest in antiques like hers any more. And I knew that to be true, as I’d called an auction house a year or so ago to get rid of an old Victorian couch and chair, and was told the same thing.

It all reminded me of a line a friend tossed out a couple of years ago. He lives in southern England, about a half-hour’s drive from London. For some reason the subject of cars came up, and he said that no one there wants an old car. Antique cars are passé. New is preferred. And the newest exotics are the most preferred. Of course, this is the “Jag-belt” of London, so this would be expected. But still…

It occurs to me that anything to do with the outside world is less appealing these days. Sure, houses still have appeal, despite the recent housing–mortgage meltdown, but there could be a reason for that. Home is where the virtual world begins.

A great many of us spend most of our waking lives in front of screens. At work it’s the office computer. At home it’s the Internet, the TV and the PlayStation. Even when we’re on the road, there’s the iPod to keep our virtual selves engaged—or at the very least our 3G phones with texting and e-mail and soon even movies— while we’re busily trying to tune out the analogue world.

Naturally enough, we’re happy to tune in. But our family members can often resent us disappearing into the Matrix—when they want to do something analogue. Yet when the keyboard is on the other hand, and they’re hooked up, it’s a different reality. “Wait a minute. I just have to check this out…answer this one e-mail…see who just IM’d me… We’re all caught on the same screen.

Kids see this as natural. With cyber-games like The Sims they can create entire worlds of their own, with friends, lovers, live-ins, custom houses, whatever. All 12-year-olds can run fully adult lives, unsupervised, in the privacy of their own screens. And that’s not even considering what stuff they can key in to while they’re on-line, even accidentally. YouTube is a great site for that. You can find the best of the best or the worst of the worst, just a few mouse clicks apart.

Okay, so here we are. This is the end of history as we know it. Not the end of history of politics and wars, as Francis Fukuyama wrote, when citing the defeat of communism as the end of history. It’s the end of everyday history to which I’m referring. Why on earth would our children want any of the old garbage that we’ve collected? Who would want our frumpy furniture? Or old stereo sets? Or book collections?

The real question becomes “Who in the future would want to collect anything?” When the actual world of experience is virtual, collecting goes digital. Digital collections are light and portable. They can even be stored on-line, so you can access them from anywhere in the world. Why on earth would anyone want to collect heavy analogue stuff like cars and furniture? Really. Or even real friends for that matter. It is so much more convenient to meet virtual friends and lovers on-line.

So, Madonna, the days of the material girl are almost gone. And so is the material world. I know that my elegant friend will miss it. I will miss it, too, I think. But I have to wonder if our kids will.

What gets you out of bed

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The alarm went off. I heard it, phased it out and went back to my dream. When I finally woke up an hour or so later my neck was sore, my front of my brain felt numb and I was still tired. I wanted to stay in bed but I had work to do, and a meeting in an hour.

Or at least that’s how I remember the days starting when I was in a “down” phase. But nobody wants to hear about depressing stuff—especially about something as trivial as not wanting to get out of bed. Yet, as a symptom, not wanting to get out of bed is a pretty good indicator that something ain’t right.

On the other hand, I can also remember times when I couldn’t get to sleep at night, and in the morning I’d be up and running at first light. These periods were hectic, sunny times, with lots going on—especially on the job.

What we do has a lot to do with how we feel, and even who we are. When we’re doing stuff that suits us, we’re different people—happier and more focussed. And it’s not only about employment. Hobbies can get us up in the morning, too. So can being with people we love, especially when we’re “in love”. Even buying something special like a new car or a boat or a new house can lift us up.

For me, wanting to get up in the morning is a litmus test for my level of creative expression. If I’m on a creative roll, say, starting a new writing project, or a unique development project, I can’t wait to get the day started. It was that way when I started my first design company. I felt great when I was doing the development gig in St. Stephen. And I feel that way now, with several good projects on the go.

And it has nothing to do with the money. (Although money is good, too.) Back in my mid-twenties I was unemployed for a short time and the only job that came my way was a training job at Ontario Hydro. It should have been a wonderful job. The pay was great and all I had to do was wander around a generating station learning how to become a stationary engineer. And for a nightowl like me, even the prospect of shift work should have looked good. But I hated it. The generating station was off-line for a year, so there was no real work to do. The crew took turns looking for places to go to sleep, or bringing their cars and trucks inside the huge workshop for repairs. This working on your own stuff on company time was euphemistically called “government work” or a “government job”. Indeed.

But to me the place was agony. I quit the job after exactly one year—the time it took to pay off a farm I’d bought. Quitting that job seemed like a stupid thing to my coworkers, most of whom were planning to stay on with Mother Hydro for life. I heard a couple of years ago that one of the guys I started with died there. Heart attack. I don’t think I could have taken the combination of sedentary working conditions and the stress of driving a 100 megawatt gen set, either.

After I left one job a few years ago, I went to work for a law firm. They were a great crew of people. I was well paid to do marketing for them two days a week, so it was an easy gig. But I soon found out that “one of these things is not like the other”. I was a marketer in with a bunch of lawyers. At first that was interesting. But while they worked together on cases, I was the odd person out. After a couple of months in isolation, I found it harder to get out of bed. My built-in morning meta-filter was telling me it was time to find something different to do.

I’ve noticed that teenagers seem to display the sleep-in symptom bigtime. Our teenager, who’s turning 17, can sleep on weekends until noon or later. It’s not that she’s feeling down, she doesn’t have anything particularly exciting on the go on the weekends. We’re sometimes tempted to roust her out of bed on Saturday mornings, but we don’t. Let her sleep. There’ll be plenty of sleep-deprived weekends ahead.

Our younger kids are the opposite. They’re up earlier on the weekends than on school days. For them the weekends are the best. There are cartoons, video games, Legos and snow outside. Why sleep in when you’ve got that going on? The problem is, when they get up—they wake us up. They seem to think we’re just waiting to join in on their fun. And ho wouldn’t want to jump out of bed to play video games at 6:30 a.m. every Saturday morning?

But the kids do demonstrate the point. Enthusiastic people like to wake up in the morning. And by that reckoning, I suspect that drug users and alcoholics have a bit more trouble in the morning than the rest of humanity, all things being equal. That’s just what happens when the morning after is never as good as the night before.

As for me, I think the “up early in the morning” theory is the key to world peace. Among other things. If we all steered our lives toward doing those things that make us want to get up in the morning, the vast majority of us would be doing more of the right things—and less of the wrong things.

Pick your dream. What if you knew that you could work on your dream tomorrow with nothing else getting in your way? Would you be happier? Would you want to get up as early as you could, so you could hang out and do your favourite thing?

Sure, most of us work at less than a dream job to pay the bills. But we all have the ability to make the job we have a lot better than it is. If our job is boring, or menial, we can get up in the morning with a mission to bring more excitement and dignity to our work.

Having a purpose in life is the ultimate wakeup call.

Failed Machines—Techchronia

©Planned obsolescence or just old age

A few weeks ago an evil green line appeared on my laptop screen. I tilted the screen toward me a little, and the line disappeared. But the next day it showed up again. Now it comes and goes, but seems to be staying longer each time.

Of course the first thing I did was check it out on the Net. And of course my laptop had a lot of company. Apparently old Mac PowerBooks and Dells were susceptible to this malady a few years ago, and the best advice I got was “to just live with it”, and “hang on and buy a new machine, the screen fix is too expensive”. I guess I’ll live with it, unless I can find some better advice on the Internet.

This bites because I do like my machines and really take care of them. The laptop in question is eight years old, looks great and ran flawlessly up ‘til now.

It’s the same with my cars. And wouldn’t you know it? A few weeks ago I took my 15-year-old Mazda in for an oil change and air filter cleaning, and when I picked it up the idle started surging up and down every time I stopped. Naturally, I took it back to the garage, but no luck, and then to two other places, and still no luck. Sure it’s still drivable. But it’s irritating. So there it sits in the front yard under two feet of snow. I’m making do with the family minivan.
My car and laptop aren’t the only casualties. Since moving here I’ve had my stereo in storage, and finally took it out and set it up last summer. It was great to have big sound filling up the living room again. But when I pulled the grilles off the speakers to get that ever-so-slight improvement in sound, with the first I remembered my young kids pulling pieces of the foam off the edges of the speaker cones. So, I packed up the speakers and carted them off to Saint John for refoaming, which they did quite nicely. But after a week back on the job the left side woofer let go, and developed an annoyingly faint rattle-buzz that comes and goes at certain low frequencies. After a few weeks of trying to ignore the buzz, I packed up the stereo, and started half-heartedly surfing eBay for some replacements. I decided to stop obsessing, and started listening to iTunes on the computer, instead. Definitely not the same quality (what do you expect from a 2” speaker?), but at least there’s no buzz.

It wasn’t a week after I had the speaker foam replaced that my son wanted me to get my bike out and go for a ride with him. Easily done. I lifted the bike down from the attic, hand-pumped the tires and off we went. For, oh, about 10 minutes, when the front tire developed a slow leak.
Now this particular bike is a bit special to me. It was one of the first Canadian-built racing 10-speeds, weighing just 21 pounds with Dura-Ace components, lightweight frame, pearlescent paint and sew-up racing tires. And therein lay the problem. The sidewalls of the tires were shot, and even though the tube could be repaired, the tires themselves were not long for this world. So, off to the local bike shop for new tires. Except that there are no new tires for my 10-speed. The new bikes have a totally different rim size (one that won’t fit my 20+ year-old bike), and the manufacturers no longer make any old tire sizes at all—especially not sew-up racing tires, which were rare to begin with. Seems I’m in the market for a new road bike.

This pattern, unfortunately, is becoming familiar. Over the years I collected (and used) a whole lot of Nikon camera equipment. Toward the end every time I opened my favorite camera, an old 1972 Nikon F2, black dust would drop out. That black stuff was the dried remains of the light seals to keep the light out of the camera. Sure, I could have sent it away to have it repaired, but even finding 35 mm slide film out in this far corner of New Brunswick is hard enough—let alone getting it processed. And now it’s easier just to grab my rapidly aging digital camera. I may as well get some use out of it before it becomes a relic, too.

Perhaps the saddest example is a beautiful Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera Sharon found for me in a junk shop a few years ago. Here’s what the autospeed.com website has to say about it: “Released in 1972 and discontinued in 1977, the SX-70 was in many people's opinions Edwin Land’s masterpiece. It was the world's first Single Lens Reflex folding camera—let alone, instant photography SLR—and it packed into its sleek lines a simply awesome amount of technology and brilliant design.” What the website doesn’t say, and what a whole photography cult is mourning, is the fact that Polaroid stopped making instant film a little over a year ago—so nobody can use these things, no matter how beautiful they are.

But the very worst example of this slow decline is—me. I’m just not what I used to be. And just to prove it I went to see a doctor last week. The trouble is, there are no doctors here—at least no doctors taking new patients. So, off I went to the emergency room at the local hospital. After checking in I sat around for two-and-a-half hours before I saw the doc. And yes, something not-so-serious needs further investigation by a specialist. It could be worse, I suppose. And I know I’m not alone. Lots of people across Canada are ailing—and have no family doctor.

Ultimately, I want to think that if I really looked after everything—my car, my computer, my camera, my bike, even myself—that these things will last forever. But no matter how well we take care of stuff, the basic materials just keep wasting away, passing through the hourglass.
Mountains turn to sand, sand turns to dust, dust rises in the air, binds with ice and forms snow. The snow melts and the dust is washed into the river bottom. The river mud piles up over the eons and turns to stone. The stone rises into mountains. And so it goes. Life and technology be damned.

I exist on Facebook therefore I am

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The kid’s trampoline was sagging under the weight of three big snowfalls. We hadn’t taken the time to disassemble the thing before winter, so there it sat in the front yard—with its stretcccccccccched underbelly almost resting on the top of the snowdrifts.

Until yesterday, that is. On my way out the front door I noticed it, took pity on it and decided to shovel it off. What I didn’t bargain for was just how much snow a trampoline could collect. I think it’s something like 16 or 18 feet in diameter (or about 5 meters for the metrically inclined), and the snow was at least two feet deep (about two-thirds of a meter). And even more surprising was the amount of ice that built up under the snow. It had frozen into a huge solid puddle in the middle.

It took the better part of a cardiac-arrest-inducing hour to clear it off. That was just the snow. The ice took another half hour, during which I climbed up on the trampoline and used the shovel to hack as I jumped up and down—hard—on the giant ice block. I wondered self-consciously—as I bounced with the big block of ice—if the people in the cars driving were having a laugh at my expense. But I was too far into it and too out of breath to care. Given the weight of all that snow, plus the ice, plus me, I don’t know how the trampoline survived. It’s just a marvel of modern engineering I guess.

Just as I was finishing up, I glanced back at the house and through the window I could see my daughter getting up from the computer. Facebook again, I thought.

Within minutes of finishing up and going back inside the phone rang. I picked up the phone and sat down in front of the computer. It was my mother reminding me to call them for their wedding anniversary, and asking me if I knew of some economist she’d seen on TV. I hadn’t. As we talked I googled him and fed some information about him back at her. Although I never thought of her as old, I can see the signs. She’s never used a computer, let alone the Internet, and she found the instant feedback amazing.

I gave her a computer once, and tried to get her hooked up to the Net, but it didn’t take. I think she mentioned something about it being the devil’s work. She kept flying the mouse off the table to follow the cursor on the screen, and wondered why the damn thing wouldn’t work. The whole experience was really odd, because my mother is not a ditsy woman, and in matters non-computer-related she’s quite rational. So after a couple of months collecting dust on her desk, the computer was duly removed, and donated to another victim.

Within minutes of saying goodbye to her, the phone rang again. This time it was my sister in Vancouver, calling to remind me about the anniversary. She and I hadn’t spoken for about a year, so it took a while to exchange all the news about our kids, our houses, jobs, the weather and all the rest, before comparing notes on India. Coincidentally, both of my sisters travelled to India not more than three weeks before I had, so she wanted to compare perceptions. She’d been to the east coast, while I’d done a north-south sweep from Delhi to Bangalore. As big as India is, there are striking commonalities—the chaos, the dust, the poverty, the sacred cows, the scams and corruption, the colour, the friendliness of the people, the booming new economy and the creaky old economy running side by side—it’s all there.

When we were done she put my brother-in-law on the line for a quick hello. He and I have been friends since high school. He does music and audio engineering out there, and is a very wired guy. He got into digital recording early on, and has been teaching audio technology in college for more than a decade. Naturally the conversation turned digital and then to the Internet. It turns out he and I have been checking out the same kind of sites—economics, globalization, world poverty, weapons proliferation—lighthearted stuff like that. Not more than an hour after we spoke he e-mailed me a bunch of links to some of the more interesting websites, plus a video of his latest recording.

So within the space of two hours I’d reconnected with family. The minute I got off the phone, my daughter sat down in front of the computer. Facebook again. I don’t know what it is about Facebook, or the other social networking sites for that matter (MySpace, YouTube, et. al.), that I find off-putting. I mean I can see it for kids. But for adults? Why would any adult want to manage an on-line personal profile page, complete with inviting and deleting friends? And yet there they all are, from construction workers to bored housewives to high-level academics.

Just to test the thought I went to a science website at random, looked up their CEO, then went to Facebook to see if he was there. Sure enough… So what is the fascination? Is there some underlying need being met?

You bet there is. I remember getting a call from an old colleague a couple of years ago. He said that he’d googled me to find out where I was, and eventually found me. I remember feeling a little sheepish about my lack of virtual exposure and the faint hint of worry about becoming digitally irrelevant. That was my first clue that the Internet had become very real.

To belong to the 21st Century means existing within the collective mind of the Internet. You can’t be validated unless you’re on the Net. And so it ends—I’ve somehow crossed a divide and joined my parent’s digital-free generation. I guess existing on the Internet doesn’t really matter to me, which is why you won’t find me on a blog or on Facebook.

But I have to admit virtual life is a whole lot easier. Ten minutes after I got out of bed this morning my back gave out. Digging out the trampoline had taken its toll. In the real world life is hard and short and then you die. But back on planet Facebook you can live forever.