A Little Bee-Hind
…and full of bad puns. I have a back log of Gabi photos to cross post here that I hope to get to in the next couple of days.
Tag Archive for 'Life'
This is a case of too much yet not enough.
I tried, really tried, but this weighted tome dragged me under and held me until sputtering and choking I put it down for bright skies and fresh air. Melville could have used a good editor as the liberal use of semi-colons left me eyes bulged and teeth gritted waiting for the sweet relief of a period. Coupled with the near worthless expositions of natural history, metaphysics, and self-congratulatory displays of knowledge about biblical and ancient myths the worthwhile parts are stretched too far apart like so few of those whaling stations he wrote so fondly about.
I dashed that out late Saturday night after tossing the book aside in frustration but is it really a problem with the prose? After some honest self reflection, I’d say no. This is a classic “It’s me, not you” situation. Too put it in perspective my time and resources are over taxed, over allocated, and poorly invested. I subscribe to over 200 RSS feeds, participate in dozens of online communities, chase after my year-old, work a full-time job, consult on the side, and try to cook a decent meal. When I carve out a moment to read, like I have been trying to do for over two years with my reading list, the most I can concentrate on is linear fluff. Melville is too dense and while wandering around the woods with Gabi I came to the conclusion that I need to carve up my life and discard those pieces that are superfluous.
200 feeds, seriously I would wake up in the morning with some 1800 unread items and after skimming 200 items I would just make the whole stack as read. What is the point of that? Wasted time, wasted energy, and the whole process left me feeling both mentally fatigued and scatterbrained. After hacking my feed list up and sanding it down it now stands at 53 feeds and when I wake up I have around 80 items unread.
Online communities? Paring it down as I type with the goal of abandoning nearly all with the exception of where my co-workers and friends hangout: Facebook/Twitter/Geezeo for work and a private site for my friends. I’m still following the blogs of friends and will chat there but gone are the days of commenting on Digg, Reddit, eMusic, Last.fm, ad nauseum. One thing that I have learned is that soaking in it can be mentally toxic; how many Ron Paul stories can you read and how many posts can a lonely divorcee make while drunk to what was once my favorite music destination? Really, I don’t give a fuck how much Chardonnay you drank or how horny The National makes you and Ron Paul? Get serious, he is a Class A fuckwit. A post or two might elicit a chuckle, but any number beyond that makes me want to hurl my laptop right out the front door. The noise is overwhelming the signal.
Getting back to basics. It is really more like reconstructing my pre-Internet life: time to read and listen to music, time to work, time with family, time to be creative, and time to be active. While I might not be able to drop everything and hit the trails for an epic ride like I did some 10 years ago I can carve out time for a walk. Better yet, we signed up at a local community center which has everything you could wish a health and fitness center could and would: daycare, playscape, Olympic sized pool, exercise classes, free weights, cardio room. It will give us a chance to spend time as a family as well as provide us a place to maybe get a little less doughy.
So what does this have to do with Moby Dick? My life as I have been living it is keeping me from being able to really read it and that is a symptom of a bigger issue. If I cannot put forth the time to read a book typically assigned in a high school English class what else am I missing out on and who else is getting shorted when it comes to my attention and energy. So, while I’m putting it down and picking up something a little more trashy, I am not willing to give up on it completely. Maybe after I put things back in perspective you might find me banging out some sets on a recumbent while polishing off the closing chapters of Melville’s love letter to the semi-colon.
Not just a measure of time but an indication of what an emotional and physical drain it has been. Quick itemized list, some important, some trivial, all easily digested…
- Gabi
- 22 lbs
- 29 1/4 inches
- Battling a cold post flu shot
- Management’s Mom
- One broken femur
- Pulled back
- Four days in hospital,
five to gotwo weeks in a rehabilitation center
- Work
- Me
- New EC2 instance sizes that boost the operational specs through the roof
- Working hard to rebuild and redeploy
- Still love my job
- Management
- Politics galore
- Working harder than ever
- Talking more and more about wanting to be a SAHM
- Me
- Music
- Heavy into my Autumn Jazz phase
- (Davis + Coltrane) * Live set in Copenhagen = Heaven
- Robert Mazurek’s playground is my new bliss
- Ahmad Jamal’s Poinciana, how the hell have I gotten by with out it?
- Baby Elephant is a tad disappointing, could be me though
- Japancakes continue to rule my world with there two new ones
- Heavy into my Autumn Jazz phase
- Reading
- Behind two months on Linux Journal
- Reading a paltry 10 pages a week of Blue Mars
- Unloaded nearly half my pile of old paperbacks on Book Mooch and Paperback Swap
- Blogging
- CSS rebooted a couple of weeks ago
- Completely missed on the Blog Action Day
- Going to try and get back into it with some write ups about the new EC2 products
- Ubuntu
- Gutsy Gibbon, mmmmm, nice!
- My ZaReason laptop still rules
That’s about it.
This morning I found this waiting in my inbox,
J. added you as a friend on Facebook. We need you to confirm that you are, in fact, friends with Jennifer.
J. says, “You were the first person I ever kissed….”
First let me lobe my excuse out there by saying I have a Facebook account because of work, we made a Facebook app, and I barely use the thing because, well, honestly I am just not very social. Yes, very contrarian in light of all the Web 2.0 hype.
I sat in stunned silence. She was also the first person I ever kissed, and honestly, the only until I graduated high school. I was in eighth grade and she in seventh. I played hockey with her brother and while she came to many of the games I’m not really sure how we even struck up what was the briefest of romances. My memory recalls it was built on that one kiss and maybe a handful of phone calls and that it burned out nearly as quickly as it started.
If the nature of our relationship escapes me that moment lingers in my memory. At the bottom of a stairwell, the buses idling outside waiting to bring everyone home, we shared a quick kiss. Not a peck, or a brushing of lips, but something that had the first ache of passion intermingled with a confused innocence. A teacher came down the stairs and we broke our embrace hastily and attempted a posture of obvious nonchalance which, in retrospect, was laughable. But that was it.
As an eighth grader I was graced with being socially awkward, overweight, and had decided at the time that long hair looked damn fine on me. Not much has changed except that now I shave my head. But the kiss and the bruised feeling when it ended darkened how I saw love and relationships. The bitter taste, something that should have been rinsed out with adolescent living, lingered and eventually festered into cynicism. It is a failing of mine, obsessive tenacity, and I certainly bear no ill feelings because of the fickleness that guides decisions at that age.
Sitting here, some twenty years later, and it is surprising how sharp those feelings can still be, the warmth of her breath followed by the cold weight of rejection. Even stranger how after all these years a single auto-generated email can have those memories surge forward as if that moment had just passed. I wonder what made her think of that moment.
A couple of weekends ago as Management and I slowly shuffled through a Target we passed by the videogames section only to be brought up short. For months I had been breezing by this section with the hope of spotting a Wii and on this day sat three in the display case. Three available for purchase. We stopped and stared.
“Just buy it!,” exclaimed Management with an edge of irritation in her voice, “For months you have bemoaned the lack of stock, extolled the virtues of its games, and basically acted like a whiny twelve-year old. So just buy the damn thing!”
Shifting from foot to foot I hesitated. I stepped forward only to rock back on my heel. Why did I want this again? When was the last time I actually played the consoles we already own? Making a quick calculation, scrunching my face up at Management I attempt to come up with the last time I fired up a game: fourteen months. Gaming has not happened in any shape or form in over a year. We have a Gamecube gathering dust, an Xbox which has been unplugged since before Gabriella was born, and a GBA which goes everywhere with me yet is never turned on and used.
So I stood there with my wife slowly rocking the baby in the carriage. I thought back on why I jumped into gaming in my late twenties and how it ended so abruptly. It was an escape when I needed it the most and like most escapist pursuits evaporates when the impetus moves on. Gaming kept my sanity during grad school but shortly after finishing I found myself playing less and for shorter periods of time. The first usurper was Linux when I decided to go full-time with Ubuntu 4.10, then it was the house, followed by the dog, the baby, then photography, and work. Life pressed in and squeezed things out leaving only the essentials, the people and things I love the most: family, reading, Linux, and learning.
The cliche is true: life presents choices but at times it forces the choice. My choice of Vi over Emacs is just that, a forced choice. Having been a longtime Nano user–its learning curve is like steep downward slope–I was never motivated to learn anything else as I could always pull it into something like Gedit or Bluefish to do something crazy like search and replace. My new job eschews a windowed environment and I found Nano’s quaint limitations to be powerful frustrations. My decision of Vi over Emacs was simple: crontab -e launches Vi. The decision was handed to me.
Like passing over Emacs not gaming doesn’t leave me wondering what I am missing. Standing in Gamestop with my brother-in-law yesterday while he bought a copy of Gears of War I pursued the collection of DS games. There were many that seemed fascinating and certianly looked fun but I found myself questioning when I would play them and how the cost of a DS and a handful of games would put a dent in my lens budget I walked back to wait in line with him.
When we got back to his house he hustled to the livingroom to play the game while I sat outside on his deck in the cooling evening. With my daughter on my knee I talked with my in-laws and the kid who lives next door about first jobs, first loves, and simple pleasures. My wife leaned over and asked I would rather go inside and play a few levels. No, I replied, I’m happy right here and now.
