Introspective 13 | unobtrusive lucidity

Limits of the Unlimited

Recently, Amazon released an unlimited Kindle plan in which readers can use what’s affectionately known as an “all-you-can-eat” selection of books. As long as you maintain the subscription, you can read these books whenever you like. The books are unlimited…or so, at least, is the illusion.

Now, it’s no secret that I hold no love for Amazon. However, through a series of unfortunate events that would take some time to explain, we have a Prime membership, and it doesn’t look like we’re getting rid of it any time soon. I do not own a Kindle, as I intentionally choose to use Barnes & Noble instead, mostly just to give business to Amazon’s competitor. Even if I did own a Kindle, though, I wouldn’t use this so-called “benefit.”

Why? Glad you asked.

I’ve struggled with a love-hate relationship with e-books since I first bought my Nook. My book purchases are about evenly split between physical books and ebooks. One of the reasons that I prefer the Nook is that, whenever and from whomever I purchase an e-book, I want to make certain that it’s in what’s known as an ePub format, which is the standard for e-books and will work on most devices (unlike Amazon’s proprietary format). When I add a book to my collection, I want to know that I have that book in my collection, because there’s something about having a collection that’s extremely important. I don’t mean this in a materialistic way. I’m not advocating hoarding (we downsize our library by donating books occasionally, at least). I just recognize that there’s something important about being able to go pull the book off the shelf that has that thought or concept that’s on your mind so that you can reference the entire chapter. This is why we still have shelves filled with old undergrad textbooks, which do, in fact, come off the shelf on a somewhat regular basis.

Our bookshelves aren’t unlimited. Space on them becomes a topic of much debate in our marriage at times. Still, we devote a lot of space to bookshelves in our house, and I love the fact that I can retrieve a book from one of them to loan to a friend, to re-read, to reference. The books that are important enough to earn a permanent spot on these shelves are ones that have been of the most importance to us. They’re not beholden to a continued subscription fee. They’re always there, those words and ideas always ready to become a conversation piece when needed, a part of us. I think that an unlimited plan of this nature would cheapen that experience, devalue each book as some possession rather than something that has influenced me, in some ways profoundly.

I actually have enough of a disconnect with e-books in that regard, and sometimes wonder if, futurist thinker though I am, I might leave them behind altogether.

Perhaps I’ll do just that.

Perhaps.

Image attribution: Zaho! under Creative Commons.

Rock N’ Roll Dreams

One Friday night a couple of years ago, Karen and I were sitting in a restaurant, and there was a family behind us. They had a daughter…I’m not sure how old she was, but I’d guess around 15. The daughter was talking about music, and she specifically mentioned the band Skid Row.

Have you ever had one phrase stop all the other sounds around you, so that you could only hear the person who said it? That’s how oddly impactful that name was to me.

You see, I went through my metal phase in high school, and Skid Row was one of my favorites during that rebellious period. I can still scream out the chorus to “Youth Gone Wild” with little thought involved. It was just funny to me that someone of that age would be conversant with 80’s metal (although I think Skid Row released a new album within the last couple of years).

A few days later, I saw a boy, younger than 15 by my best guess, wearing a Guns N’ Roses t-shirt, the one that corresponded to their Appetite For Destruction album. I’m so clearly able to recall the edgy intro to “Welcome To The Jungle,” or the seducing guitar line to “Sweet Child Of Mine.” Again, I was struck by how…out of place…this seemed.

Also, I’m a little disturbed that oldies music for them is what I grew up on. Geez, this smells like a mid-life crisis.

I’ve seen music from that era used with some frequency in video games (relatively) recently, but some of this is a bit of niche in which to be interested in these days, confined, perhaps, to a random Pandora station listened to during commutes by…well, by someone like myself, I suppose. I’ll confess that I’m a bit of a snob in my assumptions that today’s pop music will never manage a resurrection like that, but will only fade into obscurity as music with poetry and emotion continues to take its place in…video games…

Please don’t disabuse me of that notion.

Seriously, though. Isn’t that funny?

Flipping Through the Pages

I’m in the process of giving unobtrusive lucidity a new look and a new home. Hopefully by next week, things will look a lot spiffier around here (I’ve neglected this blog in more ways than this lately, but I’m trying to get things moving again). Because I’m migrating to a new platform and a new host, there’s a decent amount of work involved in cleaning up content after the transfer, handling re-directs, and that sort of thing. During this process, I’ve seen a lot of posts that I haven’t seen in a long…and I mean a very long…time. The thought has actually crossed my mind a few times to just archive the first couple of years, and only keep the posts from the time I altered the focus to “faith, art, and culture” forward. I can’t bring myself to do it, though, because one of the things that I’ve always wanted this space to be was an honest, open record of what I was thinking about. I read my first movie review here, the first of many, last night. I read posts from just before and immediately after Karen and I were married. I was surprised to see that, though I have intentionally avoided writing about anything political here for some time, I actually wrote quite a few political rants back then. I’ve been recording and offering my thoughts for just short of a decade here, and, even though I’m embarrassed a bit by some previous posts as I’ve changed through the years and found my voice, I’m not going to let any of them go.

Something that struck me about many of those old posts was that I was more free then, more impulsive, in a way, in what I wrote. It’s almost as though, when I found my niche and chose to focus the blog on “faith, art, and culture,” I became more formulaic in the style of post that I wrote. More confined.

That’s something that I’m planning to rectify now.

As we’ve been renovating this house in North Carolina and preparing it for sale, we’ve been sorting through old excess and downsizing. We’ve come to appreciate how valuable a spiritual exercise this is, how much freer one can feel without so much stuff. As we now have, for the first time in our marriage, all of the stuff from our childhoods under one roof, there’s been a decent amount of sorting and paring down from both of our pre-high-school days, among other things. It goes further than that, though. Last week, we found an archive of physical media that had been hanging around from grad school and our early married days (back when we actually burned our photos and movies to DVDs…remember that?). I stumbled upon an un-marked copy of our wedding video, discovering what it was only upon clicking “play.” It was so much fun to re-live that day, to watch the events unfold. I remember them so clearly, yet they have paradoxically faded into some level of obscurity as the years have passed. I watched Karen, a glowing bride, and fell for her all over again as the day played out, as we took our vows, as we danced with friends and each other. As we smiled. As we laughed. As we couldn’t get close enough to each other.

I had to buy flowers a few days ago. It was an apology because I had lost my temper and said unkind things.

Even when you enter something with your eyes wide open, with no naiveté about just how hard life can be, life can still be harder than you anticipated. The wonders of two lives becoming one, of having a daughter, of all of our travels and adventures together, can also give way to the suffocating pressures of making it through life. Those pressures, while not making you forget things, can allow things to fade into obscurity periodically, cause one to act on them less.

While I remember those posts in this blog from years ago so clearly, they’ve drifted to the background.

While I remember that day and those feelings from over eight years ago so clearly, they’ve drifted to the background.

All have been drowned out by the noise in the foreground, and the result is that I’ve been less true to those thoughts and ideas, less passionate about those promises.

That’s also something that I’m planning to rectify now.

Degrees of Separation

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I made my living in the behavioral sciences. My workday revolved around seeing people face-to-face. While it was quite exhausting for an introvert to spend most of a workweek conversing with others, I found that I knew the team with which I worked every day. We knew what was happening in each others’ lives, we celebrated career milestones with each other, we had each others’ phone numbers. In some cases, I worked in high-stress situations keeping very odd hours, and I knew what it was to see my colleagues more than I saw most of my other friends. We were, after all, the only ones who could really appreciate what the other was experiencing.

Now that I make my living in the digital realm, I mostly work for myself. I do work with clients from multiple states, most of whom I haven’t seen in person in over a year. In one case, I did a project for a client that I had never met in person. I’m currently doing work with a team that is spread out all over the world, from both coasts of the U.S. to Europe. As everyone in the world of digital content has the freedom to work from wherever they choose, I regularly have “meetings” with people that I have never met face-to-face. I speak with them every week, and know their personalities at some level, but I cannot say that I really know any of my colleagues on this current project.

That’s not to say that I never keep office hours in this line of work. I actually do on many projects, and, on the occasions that I have, I feel that I’ve gotten to be very well acquainted with my co-workers. On each of those occasions, I’ve kept in contact with those co-workers and carried at least some of those professional relationships forward.

This isn’t so much an issue of effectiveness. I’m an introvert, so I’m perfectly content to be alone with my work for long periods of time. I’ve found, though, that I feel more satisfied with the projects that I’ve completed alongside people with whom I’m connected, colleagues that I’ve seen in person and whose interests and personalities I’ve gotten to know.

It’s interesting how the human factor to doing our work is only effective up to a certain level of abstraction. Beyond that, while not, at least in my experience, a point of diminished returns, there’s certainly a point at which the work becomes more robotic, less…meaningful…in nature.

And we all want to do work with meaning, to not be subjected to drudgery.

Ultimately, we’re doing our work for people, for each other. I think that our work is done the best when keeping that in mind.

Photo Attribution: mark sebastian under Creative Commons

Flurries of Change

Screenshot of weather forecast on iPhone: 64 degrees in February

There was a time when I hated snow. Detested it. Loathed it.

Having grown up with more than my share of ugly winters, I jumped at the chance to move south for grad school. I still remember my first January in Virginia, driving around my new city with no jacket on and my sunroof open. I felt as though I had arrived in a paradise.

You see, somewhere around my sophomore year in college (the best that I can remember), I began to struggle progressively more with each winter. The grey skies brought with them a deepening depression with each year of my life. That’s why a southern move was such an enormous relief to me. Instead of attempting to cope for months on end each year, I was now faced with this struggle perhaps once each year, and then only for a day or two. This seemed like a good situation in which to be.

Fast forward several years…getting married, having our daughter, moving to the Boston area, and now having landed back in North Carolina. These moves and events have been a whirlwind of occasionally contradictory experiences. My first New England winter was brutal, but I learned to cope. I bought the gear, and I re-acclimated with the rituals of my childhood: shoveling, scraping, and leaving early (at least, in my new career, working from home is sort of the norm). You see, if you grow up living with winter hardships, it’s sort of like riding a bicycle. You never forget how to drive in these circumstances. You may be rusty for a few minutes, but when the white stuff starts falling, you just sort of know what to do. I found that these sorts of things aren’t things that many people know about in the South (like brushing off your car halfway through a storm in order to significantly lighten the workload when it’s over, or keeping a steady momentum at all costs when going up a slick incline).

That said, this has been a good winter to have spent in the South, as my friends back in the Boston area tell me about the six feet of snow that they have (with more coming each weekend, it seems). Last weekend, though, I had one of those moments in which your brain sort of…short circuits. In February…a month in which I’m used to wearing base layers and heavy wool…I was wearing a t-shirt and no jacket as I walked into our Sunday morning worship service. That day came in at just short of 70 degrees.

Now, as I write this, we’re in the grip of an ice storm, and life is forced to slow down a bit. This is the exception, though, not the rule at all. Life doesn’t slow down here. There is no season of rest, no season of early darkness in which to drink cider and talk with friends and family, no easy time to catch up on your reading by the dim light. All of those things that I never thought that I would miss, I now do. And, while snow is not among them, the quiet that results from it is.

Perhaps it’s an overly positive recollection of an area with which I was quite enamored. I miss New England so much it hurts some days, and I remember the times that we had there during the harsh winters…much harsher than the ones that I experienced as a child. It’s a season of life that’s important, one that I didn’t truly miss until I had experienced it. There’s much to be said for slowing down, for pausing, for appreciating the seasonal flow of the life around us.

Could it be that I miss the snow?

I should probably stop just short of admitting that…