Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

Is There a Doctor in the House?

If there’s anything that marks the age in which we live (does that make me sound as old as I think it does…?), its the pervasiveness and ease with which we can access whatever information we choose. Random questions can be searched and answered on the spot, weather forecasts can be immediately known, music and books instantly available. And, while we’ve come to take it for granted, I can recall when being able to have a phone conversation in my car was a new and wondrous luxury, and I really appreciate the amazing progress we’ve made as a society.

That said, reading this today gave me pause. Its not that the concept of crowd-sourcing one’s medical condition isn’t a really phenomenal idea…it is. And, certainly, this writer seems to have received positive results by doing so. What’s more, I think that its the natural evolution of (dare I use such a cliche term as) the information age. Though I’m moving out of the health care field, I’ve seen the constant movement over the last decade of transitioning all record-keeping to digital format, and I don’t think that one must be a futurist to see this as an easy extension of that.

Pushing aside for a moment how privacy laws will struggle to evolve at a reasonable enough pace to accommodate something like this, though, I had a moment of strong push-back after my initial positive reaction to reading this. While certainly none of us are islands, I also think that there’s such a thing as too much input from too many people. With the thought of publicly airing my medical history, I reach that thresh-hold pretty quickly in my head.

Part of me sees this as a great use of our technological capabilities to seek expert advice from those that we would not otherwise be able to contact. Part of me screams in fear that this will become yet another privacy-wrenching expectation of the “extrovert ideal” that dominates our cultural functioning.

And, part of me wonders if, God forbid, I ever were to receive similar news, I wouldn’t pursue any option available, including some version of this very strategy.

This brave new world of ours just keeps getting more interesting, doesn’t it?

Parkinson’s Law:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

“Angel”

Almost since I first began placing words on paper, I’ve been struck by how stunningly beautiful the word “angel” is in it’s sound. Something about the way it slides from the lips of the speaker to grace the air and our ears with its sound…the way it points to something so peaceful…makes it possibly the most amazing word that I can imagine.

That Creeping Blackness

I’ve written a lot about the uniquely American tradition that is Black Friday over and over again here…I doubt my opinion on the consumerist pseudo-holiday is any secret. Usually I’m inspired to write about it just after the insanity has ended and the stories begin to run about the atrocities that were committed in the name of getting a bargain. However, it appears that “Black Friday creep” is all the rage among big retail businesses this year, so I guess I’ll let the posting begin early, as well.

It’s so comforting to know that our national ethics are in such a strong state. After all, profit is the most worthy of goals, and thus must supersede the basic treatment of employees as human beings as all worship at the polytheistic altars of money and consumerism. Don’t you agree?

I’ve avoided Black Friday for a long time, and this year will be no different. I certainly can name the stores that I will intentionally not visit this Friday, thanks to the media coverage of their poor decision to rob employees of their dignity of being able to spend time with their families.

The irony of the situation is that Thanksgiving is not currently a holiday with any religious affiliation, so, were we to choose a holiday that culturally could be universal without regard to the religious affiliations of many citizens, this would be the day. Yet corporate profits are so precious that we can’t allow even that one day with family to be guaranteed. And, honestly, it’s not like the basest of our human desires don’t already cause all of these retail stores to make a proverbial killing in profit on that day. Moving sales up a few hours is simply the underbelly of greed.

My sincere hope is that the retail stores that are open tomorrow in anticipation of beginning Friday’s sales early find themselves in a deficit of customers, as that is the only language that they appear to speak. I earnestly hope that they lose money this year, and are able to trace it to the fact that they didn’t care about the family lives of their employees.

And, unfortunately, I’ll likely be doing yet another post about someone being injured or arrested or in some other way humiliated as people fight for a deal on Friday morning. Or perhaps tomorrow. I don’t look forward to hearing about it.

And I certainly won’t be any sort of participant in it.

A Socially-Acceptable Identity Crisis

While this may not be any huge secret, I’m one of those people who could never decide what he wanted to be when he grew up.

The issue with that is that…well, apparently, I’ve grown up. It happened when I wasn’t looking, I swear. You wake up one morning and all of the sudden you’re eating breakfast and going to a 9-5 job. I mean, who knew?

In case you missed it, I’m in school. Again. This time, an arts school, just a quickie, to do some technology certification work. This harkens back to my New Year’s goal of changing my day job, because I needed something more creative. While I’m having a bit more difficulty than I had anticipated in adapting back to the life of a full-time student, I’m noticing that I have the flexibility to be very creative a lot of the time. I’m juggling two writing projects, brainstorming design ideas for two different websites, and doing theatre work with students who are on the Autism spectrum. Life is hectic (as you may have guessed, what with my writing a Friday post at 12:30 on a Sunday morning, and all), but its good.

The problem with my having so many interests is that there’s always stuff for which I don’t quite have time. I wish I had more time to read fiction, to study theology, to get back to my two-books-monthly reading schedule (textbooks and technical manuals on things like Javascript not included).

Ultimately, though, I need to learn to be content with where Karen and I are in life’s adventure, and to focus on doing what I do have time to do well. That’s a hard lesson for me to learn, because I don’t do contentedness well…and I say that much to my own chagrin.

The good thing about the stressful life of a student is that stress forces you to grow. So does paring down your lifestyle for a while. If I can learn these personal and spiritual lessons along with what I need to learn for career-change purposes, I’ll be really have come out of this situation a better person.