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Thursday, 22 October 2009
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Cell phones are stoopid
OK, cell phones themselves are nice to have, but everything connected to them is a pain in the ass of the highest order. Can you tell I've been having a frustrating day? I'm working night shift this week, and it isn't agreeing with me. Daytime sleep feels so unwholesome, like I've been drugged, and it gives me nightmares. Then, since yesterday was my day off, I slept until 3:00pm, having worked all night the night before thinking I'd have to stay up late to stay on a night shift schedule, but I ended up falling asleep at 11:30pm and sleeping all night, so now I'm back on a "day" schedule, but I have to work all night tonight.
Anyway, last January we became a modern, technological family with cell phones for all, and it has been an endless headache. Everywhere, there are receptacles of water--the dogs' bowls, toilets--in which my children have dropped their phones, which causes the phones to act funny or die entirely. Not only that, they're buzzing and lighting up constantly, and I mean constantly. Our first bill showed we'd sent and received 50,000 texts. FIFTY THOUSAND TEXTS. And this month's bill had an extra $92 charge for "data" because Mad Scientist wasn't aware that it's not free to connect to the internet with your phone.
Now, Miss G's phone has died, mysteriously--no water involved--and we went to the Sprint store to see what we could do about it. Only we never got to actually talk to anyone because the associates were helping other customers, but when a customer finally left, the associate who had been helping him, and who had told us someone would be assisting us soon, disappeared. The other customer was having a very long and complex interaction with her Sprint associate, so long and complex that her pregnancy became visibly more advanced while I waited for her to finish. A different Sprint associate appeared on the floor and busily logged onto her computer, but she put up such a strong "don't approach me" vibe, she might as well have erected a force field around herself. It is not an exaggeration to say it was impossible to approach her. When I realized we had been waiting for nearly half an hour, I walked out. The same thing happened the last time we went to the Sprint store too.
Remember when all you did to get a phone was call the phone company? It would take about a day for them to set it up, and then you would call your friends and tell them your new number and they'd write it down in their address books. Remember when phones served solely as a means of communication and not as a device for storing information so no one fussed about losing their contacts, or needing "wireless backup" or whatever to be able to preserve their contacts because everybody had a HANDWRITTEN ADDRESS BOOK? As you did yourself. Remember that?
A while back I heard a story on NPR about how the practice of saving all your numbers on y our cell phone means that you no longer bother to memorize important phone numbers, and that this is becoming a problem for people who are arrested because when it's time to make their one phone call, and they don't know the number because they didn't memorize it because it was saved on their cell phone. I am sure that is a useful lesson for us all.
Wednesday, 21 October 2009
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The Politicians' book club
Election Day will be so anticlimactic, compared to last year. Be that as it may, we are preparing to vote in our local elections here in Charlottesville and people are fired up about various local issues. I like the intimacy of local elections, when the candidate himself (or herself) will turn up on your doorstep, or you bump into him at a neighbor's party, or your kids' school's open house, and you exchange the URLs of your respective blogs. Charlottesville is small enough that the local politicians are truly accessible to the people.
Anyway, our weekly paper does a mini interview of each candidate, and I was happy to see that one question they asked each person was "What are you reading now?" I love to hear what other people are reading--or in this case--what they want us to think they are reading. But who knows, maybe these books are what they are actually reading, although I noticed that no one admitted to Three Nights of Sin by Anne Mallory or even something by John Grisham (who lives here).
I tend to judge people by what they are reading. It's not that I can't forgive the occasional mindless book--I like brain candy as much as anyone--but there are some books it is best to distance yourself from. For example, this same paper once interviewed a man who, at the time, was the principal of Charlottesville's only public high school. He was asked to name his favorite book of all time, and what did he say? The Bridges of Madison County. Eee gads. Of all the books in the world, he picked that one? He couldn't have said the Bible, or War and Peace or even freaking Pride and Prejudice? Luckily, he was no longer principal by the time my kids got there.
So, what are Charlottesville's political candidates reading now? I present a list:
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
Rant: An Oral Biography of of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk
Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement by Patricia Sullivan
The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard
The Bible
Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon by Dan Parry
Thomas Jefferson on Leadership by Coy Barefoot
The Facebook Era by Clara Shih
The Steel Wave by Jeff Shaara
Biographies of Cicero and Winston Churchill
Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train: Errant Economists, Shameful Spenders, and a Plan to Stop them by Brian Czech
Keeping the Faith by Richard McKinney
The Lost Symbal by Dan Brown
The Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed
A biography of Stonewal Jackson
The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed
Game Plans: Sports Strategies for Business by Robert Keidel.
The Restorative Practices Handbook: Building a Culture of Community Schools by Costello & Ben Wachtel
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
Leaderless Jihad, Terror Networks in the 21st Century by Marc Sageman
Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Heavy on the non-fiction and a lot of dull business books, but maybe this is what we want our politicians to read. I'm not even sure what use I am getting out of this information. At least no one is reading The Bridges of Madison County. Wouldn't it be fun if Obama had an online book club?
What am I reading?
The Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation by Peter Bernstein
and The Wild Colonial Boy by James Hynes.
The Erie Canal book is good, although I realized--and this fact actually kept me awake for a considerable time the other night--that I have never really seen the Erie canal. This would be excusable if I were from Kansas, but since I'm from Buffalo, it is not. Oh, I've seen it from the New York State Thruway, whizzing past at 65 mph, and when I did crew we used to row down the Black Rock Canal, which I always assumed was the Erie Canal, but I I'm not sure if that's correct. Part of the book's interest for me was the rivalry between the two small villages of Buffalo and Black Rock, NY, each of whom wanted their town to be the terminus of the canal. Buffalo won, and became a great shipping city, and Black Rock was eventually absorbed by the city. My brother lives there. It's a gritty neighborhood of 19th century cottages, railroad tracks, drawbridges, abandoned shopping carts, and weedy sidewalks. The sort of place where you can be pregnant and smoke publicly, and no one will bat an eye.
That's part of the Black Rock canal in this picture. I used to love rowing under that drawbridge when it was up. It's kind of exciting to be in a skinny shell, with a lake barge looming over you.
Anyway, one of the most impressive parts of the Erie Canal is in Lockport, NY where a series of five steep locks haul boats up the cliff down which Niagara Falls plunges. I grew up thirteen miles south of Lockport and I have never been there. According to Bernstein, these locks are still functioning today, much as they did 200 years ago. I think that may be a project for next summer: to take my kids to Lockport and view the locks. Maybe we can take a cruise down the canal, and I can bore my children to death by rhapsodizing about western and central New York.
Wednesday, 07 October 2009
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In which Bono uses the C word
I haven't been to a U2 concert since the 1987 Joshua Tree tour, where I saw them in a muddy football field in Rochester, NY. It was not a good show--Bono had just broken his arm and can probably be forgiven for not really being into it. The highlight of the day was when I successfully swerved to avoid the vomit spewing from the mouth of a drunk girl near us, who had spent much of the concert sitting on her boyfriend's shoulders, directly in front of me. So it's understandable that I never made much effort to see them again, but our dear, dear friends called us back in March to arrange that we all attend the U2 concert here in Charlottesville, and I decided I could give them a second chance.
I'm glad I did because the show was fabulous. Muse opened, and they were awesome too. Isn't it a beautiful symmetry that the best and worst concerts I've seen were by the same band?
Charlottesville is a tough crowd. I know that well, from my twelve years of social interactions here, and now U2 knows it too because the concert crowd was pretty lame. Yes, they cheered, but it all seemed lukewarm. Early in the show, Bono asked if Mr. Jefferson was in the house, and this was the only time that the crowd really went wild. Charlottesville is a college town and the show was held at the University's football stadium, but when Bono talked about the "campus" the crowd gave a collective gasp. I could almost hear the mutterings: What does he think this is, the University of Oklahoma? 'Campus' indeed.
At the University of Virginia, we do not say "campus," we say "grounds" and we don't say "quad," we say "lawn." I'm not even a UVA person, (and frankly, some of them can be insufferable) having gone to college in New York, but I've lived here long enough that I couldn't help wincing every time Bono said "campus." Still, how was he supposed to know? Maybe I'm misreading things, but it seemed to me that the rest of the crowd just wasn't as willing to forgive him for "campus" as I was.
Monday, 28 September 2009
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TV shows will sometimes use the device of allowing the camera to be the eyes of a particular character. It seems this technique is commonly used on hospital shows, so it was fitting that today at work I had the feeling that I was a camera. My new colleagues bustled about, paying me no attention--not out of rudeness, but because they were doing their jobs--so I felt invisible which is a not unpleasant feeling, really. I was a tiny bit disconcerted by the two nurse's aides who look exactly alike. At first, I was like, "Oh, wait, I thought she was wearing a pink top, not a flowered one. Oh, there she is again in pink. What the...?" I even surreptitiously looked at their ID badges, which have different last names, but that doesn't mean much since they could be married. No two people who look that much alike could be unrelated. What am I supposed to do, ask them: "Oh, just to satisfy my own curiosity, could you tell me if you two are twins?" I was taught that it is rude to ask personal questions, and probing people about the possibility of their identical DNA seems pretty personal to me.
Then there's the bike riding. I did go out an buy myself a bike. They say you never forget to ride a bike, but I'm not so sure of that. I mean, I can ride a bike, if my demented careening can be called that, but my skills seem to have degenerated since the last time I sat in the saddle, which was, oh, about 1991. I did, however, successfully bike to work today, although not without mishap. I couldn't figure out how to unlock my U-lock (oh, off to a great start) and then I couldn't figure out how to attach it to the special holder the bike shop guys installed for me, and when I got the the hospital, windblown and breathless, the bike racks were gone! I found them eventually--they'd been moved across the street--and in my intense relief at locating them I blundered across the street in a clumsy manner and almost got hit by a bus. But I was right about biking to work being less tiring than walking. I have to exert myself a few times to get up the hills, but I do a lot of coasting as well.
Thursday, 24 September 2009
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I guess there really is such as thing as too much time on one's hands. With four kids in school and no job, I found myself jealously guarding my free time, falling into sloth mode, where accomplishing a few basic household tasks meant that it was time for a coffee "break." Then I was cranky about spending the evenings picking the kids up from their various activities. And for the first time since Mad Scientist was an infant, I actually looked forward to cooking dinner.
Now I've started working and, strange as it may seem, I feel content with less time for myself. This is just orientation week: sitting in a class room with a group of other new hires, hour-long lunches, and dismissal at 5:00pm, or earlier. I may be singing a different tune after next week. I get just one day off (Saturday) and begin 12-hour shifts on my unit on Sunday.
I think I am going to invest in a bicycle. I've been walking to and from work--it's about a 25 minute walk and up a fierce hill--but the parking situation is so bad, that if I drove, it would take even longer to get to work. My assigned parking lot is past the hospital--a fifteen-minute drive, then you wait for a shuttle bus--another six minutes if you've just missed one--and then the slow drive back to the hospital, which can take twenty minutes. But walking every day is somewhat tedious, and I know that after a 12-hour shift on my feet, I am not going to want to walk home. I used to ride my bike everywhere, when we lived in Buffalo, but Charlottesville is an intimidating city for bikers because of the hills, the narrow streets and accompanying dangerous traffic. I will have to bike a long way around if I want to avoid the fierce hill, but even so, I will probably be able to get there in fifteen minutes, and the bike racks are right near the front entrance.
One tiny book review: The Diaries of Jane Somers by Doris Lessing. Doris Lessing, who won the nobel prize for literature--there's a hilarious youtube of her reaction to it when reporters accost her on the steps of her house--wrote these books (Diaries is two novels bound together) under a pseudonym to illustrate the difficulties that new writers have in getting published. Her regular publisher rejected the novels, which is crazy because they are so good. They tell the story of Jane Somers, who lives what must be many women's fantasy perfect life. She's an editor at a fashion magazine, has an elegant flat in London, and beautiful clothes. Jane Somers has probably never been a burden to anyone, but she hasn't been much use either, at least where there are serious emotional needs. It's not that she's uncaring, just clueless. Then she meets Maudie, a poor elderly woman living ina filthy basement flat. Jane gets ever more involved in Maudie's life, buying her groceries, cleaning her flat, emptying the commode, bathing her. Maudie survived a difficult life at a time when there were no social safety nets for the poor. She is distrustful of the modern British services now available to her so she lives in filth rather than allow "them" to "take" her to a "home." The Maudie/Jane relationship is beautifully written, and is the main subject of the first novel in this volume. In the second, Maudie has died, and Jane deals with an impossible neice who moves in, uninvited. She also falls in love. Doris Lessing's writing is just superb. You can read her as a writer and just be in awe of her gifts, and you can read this book for its story and be enthralled.
Daylily02
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- Gender: Female
- Member Since: 1/30/2005
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