R We

Only kinda listening to each other here?

Who amongst us remembers running to pay phones, getting home to get a call? (Now that was real love.) … waiting a few more minutes with no call, before you went out? Considering making that last call, knowing you wouldn’t be available for awhile, knowing what unavailable was?

Walking around like we had something other to think about

than the every moment someone else was seeing us,
Thinking about what it really meant to be seen,
Knowing what it meant to be seen,
Knowing what it meant for somebody to bother to “wait home” for a call,                                                                                                                                        To be late because you got a call or waiting for a call.

(The number is dwindling, those of us who know what it means,                                                                                                                                                          “I was late, waiting for a call.”)

To have waited, or be waiting, or to have the sense of waiting,
To want to wait to stay home to get that call.

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OWS Question

Because nobody’s owning Occupy Wall Street, doesn’t that open it up to all kinds of copyright intrusion invitations? Is it that it might not “read” well for Levi’s to take over the OWS branding? Didn’t they jump in to fill the void left by Whitman’s behind, with barely a lick of a whipping of public reaction opinion? Maybe Levi’s (which are not really made in America) will do the same once the number of butts in Zucotti Park reaches minimal mote, or surpasses critical mass. What if the localities threaten to shut it all down but one corporation, in the guise of being “different,” offers shelter from the storm? What if it’s the only way to stay viable? Will they go home? Will they be dragged to prisons away? Will they make resolutions to return? Will they promise to send placards?  Will they say they’ve had their say? Will they say they’ve made their mark?  Will they? Will they?

Will they know how much, and what, is riding on this question?

My Junk

Junk the notion of a junk drawer.  It’s plain wasteful, on top of being disrespectful of your space.  Although I don’t believe in these lazy cop-outs, I was not proactively refusing my family the convenience of one, and one therefore created itself in the drawer closest to the kitchen entrance.  This is a predictable spot for one to spontaneously spawn because it’s the easiest place to throw something that has no apparent home.  (Watch out, too, for the entrance to your house since this is where things get dropped off and never picked up – such as bags, boots, mail, children).  But this kitchen drawer nearest the entrance may be the most psychologically dangerous because whenever you enter the room, you know it’s there, waiting to be cleaned out and hiding stuff you’ve probably spent days looking for.  Make no mistake about it, my friends, the junk drawer is a trap.

Ah, the ugliness of clutter.  Not only does it take up your physical and mental space.  It takes up your time.  So tonight on this lovely Saturday evening in late October, when I should be kicking back with a glass of vino, enjoying the smell of bread I made earlier today (Washington Penultimate Multi-grain Granola Bread from the Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread by Crescent Dragonwagon), and getting ready to flip on the telly to catch SNL, or pore over more Tribes submissions, instead I find myself staring at all the useless crap that I have dragged out of the sly junk drawer.  This means that the drawer has zapped me physically, mentally, and temporally.  Curse you, clutter!

My approach to tonight’s combat is three-fold: 1) empty; 2) clean; 3) stock.

The first step is emptying the drawer.  This is easy enough.  Just make sure you put it clear enough away from the drawer that it doesn’t claw its way back in (or conveniently “fall” back into the drawer).  Moving items away from their clutter-corner is always a good idea in clutter busting.

The second step is cleaning the drawer.  This rids it of all that negative clutter-energy, as well as the little bits of paper, dust and debris that have been hiding (and contributing to indoor air pollution).

The third step is stocking the drawer only with what you want in it.  Let me take a moment with this step, since there are alternatives here.

Although I plan to sort through the items that came to possess my drawer, I have a friend who recommends just throwing it all out.  That’s not quite my speed, since I do go to the drawer on a regular basis for a couple of items I count on to be there.  I’m treating this drawer with special care since it’s not like other drawers with a specific, designated purpose.  Due to its lack of definition, it’s more prone to being a clutter magnet.  Take, in contrast, a cutlery drawer.  The silverware, since it is in a place designated for it and it alone, is less likely to intermingle with the things I have just pulled from my inadvertent junk drawer: spare change, screws, a tape measure, rubber bands, twine, child safety locks (real useful in the junk drawer, you know), Abbey’s heartworm pills (with a calendar note revealing we’re 21 days behind schedule), two flashlights (I was looking for just one the other day), clips from used coffee bags (for an upcoming post on comparison coffee shopping), several mysterious plastic gadgets, a disposable camera – jeez, it really has been awhile since I’ve gone through this stuff – and other items I now see occupying my counter top.

Tonight I’m going to look at the empty drawer, and list in my head the items that I go to the drawer for.  I will place only those items in the drawer, then make a list of the items and put it in the drawer with them, to ward off interlopers.  As for the remaining items (and they are many), my husband was good enough to come downstairs just now, look at the pile of junk and offer to sort through anything I didn’t want to deal with.  To avoid it polluting up his space too long, in a few days I will check in with him; whatever remains I will suggest we throw out.

Hopefully this will work … strapping on my miner’s light now….here we go…

I Swear

I didn’t even touch it. I wasn’t even within three feet of it!

OPEN YOUR EARS and TURN OFF THE NOISE!

PLEASE, please, puhlease, doctors: turn off politically charged, “newsy” stations like Fox in your waiting rooms. Having it on does nothing to assuage dr anxiety, especially in the dentists office.  DOCTORS, PLEASE, turn down the disco, dance stations assaulting your patients’ ears in your waiting rooms. Having it on does nothing to make your patients any less uncomfortable, especially in the podiatrists office.  To my doctors Nadler (my Brooklyn dentist), and my Manhattan foot doctor (who sometimes reads this but is really private and is also kind of a cool person so I’m not going to out him yet), yeah I’m talking about you!

More seriously, to all my readers, once you get out of the doctors office and can hear yourself think, please take a moment to check out some of the recent reports coming out of the World Health Organization about the devastating effects of noise pollution on our health.  For a teaser, here’s a statistic you can sink your ears into…

At least one million healthy life years are lost every year from traffic-related noise in the western part of Europe.

from:

http://www.euro.who.int/en/what-we-do/health-topics/environment-and-health/noise/publications/2011/burden-of-disease-from-environmental-noise.-quantification-of-healthy-life-years-lost-in-europe

Burden of disease from environmental noise. Quantification of healthy life years lost in Europe

Available in:

• English (PDF), 2.3 MB

2011, xvii + 108 pages
ISBN 978 92 890 0229 5
CHF 35.00
In developing countries: CHF24.50
Order no. 13400110

And hear’s a little something worth listening to…

http://www.npr.org/2011/05/14/136288954/noise-pollution-hard-on-heart-as-well-as-ears

Are We There Yet

Sunday. At some point this gets ridiculous. Here’s my second one today. It was of the replacement set my husband bought from Crate & Barrel today.

Not made in China. But not in the U.S. either. Bulgaria, your glass is shattered on my floor.

Again?

And it’s Saturday. My weekday stress=broken items theory doesn’t hold.

MIA: Made In America

When’s the last time you saw this??

MIA: Mourning Jobs

http//ht.ly/6QYwX

I’m glad someone else said it, so I didn’t have to.

After a meeting of the editorial board of Tribes magazine, where executive director Steve Cannon had been stressing the importance of picking what we like and not what we think he likes or someone else would like, I got the news that Steve Jobs died. In a room of six people, I was in the half that was over 25. One of the other half gave the news like he was saying, “coffee’s done.”

News today, in its swift, silent, and soaring reach, gets plunked down in the most unexpected places and ways. It seems the one thing that cannot be calculated by the phenomenal capability of current technology is the precise how and when it happened. This is thanks, in no small part, to Steve Jobs. And the news of his death was delivered in the most appropriate mode: a room where no phone rang, no television was on, no radio was being listened to. No one walked in the door. But suddenly, everyone in the room knew.

I am trying now to remember the last big piece of bad news that might be my generation’s Kennedy moment — a “flashbulb memory” of our time. Although I, of course, remember where I was on 9/11 (I was, as they now say, “there” on 9/11, so that doesn’t count since it would be like being in the crowd at Dealey Plaza when Kennedy was shot, and my flashbulb memory would be more of a stadium lights memory). I remember where I was when I got the news that Michael Jackson died. It was a few summers ago. I remember I got off the phone with A (my oldest daughter who was in Minnesota at the time and, since she led with the news, I thought it was some kind of a joke – you know, “Hey, Mom, did you hear Michael Jackson died?” – a pause – “No,” I said, anticipating the punchline, but there was no ba-da-da to follow). After hanging up with A, who had no more details than that he was dead, I turned and told Karen the news. “Oh, yeah, I know. Can you believe it?” We watched the TV coverage, finished our drinks at the Edge, and headed back to Brooklyn to see what was being said on the more reliable pages of our Facebook friends. When John Lennon died, I was too young to form a clear memory of the moment. What I don’t remember about that time, or after, is people talking about it the same way they exchanged stories of where they were when they got the news Kennedy was shot. Oddly, what I remember about the day Elvis died was hearing that some woman was so upset upon hearing the news that she got into a car accident and died. I don’t have a flashbulb memory at all of the Challenger. I watched it fall apart in the sky, on the TV screen, as we sat gathered in Miss Knipschild’s Home Ec class at Parkview High School in Orfordville, WI, with the lights off and the TV on to watch the historical event. But now I’m not even sure of that, since there’s no flashbulb action to that memory — just having a vague sense as I watched it that “well, that was kinda weird,” and, “hm, that couldn’t be good,” but I don’t really remember the magnitude of it registering, not the way it did when I watched the first tower fall and thought to myself or maybe said out loud, “Oh my God. There are people in there.” The lights got turned back on. I think the TV was turned off, and she went out in the hall, while the students sat stunned, not knowing what to say. A few days later, the whole school had a moment of silence like we had many Christmases earlier when my politically savvy Uncle Eddie, a cabbie from Chicago, came for a visit and we stood outside under a starry sky before a vast field of moon-reflecting snow and shared a moment of silence with the rest of the world for the hostages in Iran. Although Jobs’ death probably will not be my generation’s flashbulb memory, the impact was felt far and wide. Evidence of his ability to inspire was all over Facebook and old media alike. And I think I’ll remember it, if for no other reason, than it bore witness to the impact of his work.

Steve Cannon, now 77 and an icon of New York City’s literary underground, black since birth and blind since the ’90s asked one of the younger crew what he thought about Jobs. The young black man was painting the wall white. He worked on one wall, while a white woman his age painted the wall on the other side of the room. I sat between the two of them, with the rest of the over-thirty crowd. I think the conversation got twisted and now we were now talking about Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, and Steve was demanding to know in his amusing but annoyingly persistent way, whether the young man thought he was funny. The young man was saying he didn’t watch TV. Steve was asking what this person mattered then if no one was watching him. I said that I watch them both and think they’re funny, but tried explaining to Steve that kids don’t really watch TV. I then had to explain to the ones in the room who didn’t know that I have a 21-year old daughter, and that she doesn’t really watch TV- she just watches whatever she wants to see online. The young woman, who was painting walls for the upcoming photography show, said that her hippy liberal parents watch TV but that she doesn’t. But they love him, and she loves them. So there’s my flashbulb memory of the death of Steve Jobs — trying to explain why, if Jon Stewart is funny, the kids don’t watch him on TV but I do.

The night that the news of Steve Jobs’ death broke, my husband was at home with our 18-month old daughter, who we have frequently observed already being adept at using my iPhone and who will be witness to unimaginable technological advances, and who, for now, was fast asleep. He texted me, “A little sad Steve Jobs dies. Innovators inspire.” The soft tone surprised me. He works in computers, programming large displays for a living, and takes the most earth-shattering news in unbelievable stride. I spoke to my older daughter, A, a few days later. I’ve watched in bemused amazement as she has breathlessly waited the latest iPhone upgrades and has tracked online, with OCD attention, the shipping of her latest gadget and has had me drive her to the Apple store in midtown many a late night. I said, “Hey, Steve Jobs died this week. I’m sorry.” She bust up laughing, then yelled into the next room to tell her roommate what I had said. She pointed out that she didn’t know him personally. I was surprised that my husband, who doesn’t usually display a sentimental side, seemed more affected by the news than my older daughter, whose world had been so shaped by this man at the helm of Apple. Then it occurred to me that her world, indeed, had been so shaped by him that she had the luxury of taking it all for granted. I recalled when I was 8, and my father worked for Parker Pen in Janesville. Sometimes when he would pick us up, he’d take us there and let us into the “computer room,” where you could hear the humming and whirring of the big machine that stretched all the way around the room and in its center, and churned loudly, processing massive data. When he dropped us back home, my sister and I would take the punch cards used to feed the computer and run them through make-believe cash registers as we played house.

I wonder what our flashbulb memories here forward will look like. Will they consist of a person, alone in a room, reaching in his pocket and pulling out his phone, glancing at it for barely a second, then putting it back in his pocket, and sitting silently for a moment, aware of the thunderous news reaching all round the globe? The smoke signals and Morse code and megaphones and speakers and broadcasters and news anchors and Paul Revere and the newspaper delivery boys and the barkers and the deejays and all those other rusted out modes of communication will have given way to the single, solitary person, alone in his single, solitary room, not bothering to gasp because there’s no one to hear him.

I gasped. It’s like I completely forgot that Steve Jobs was battling pancreatic cancer for the past seven years. With his regular appearances and apparently enough money or good fortune or fortitude and determination, he looked thin but not bad before the cameras. It appears that until the end he fearlessly led. He made it easy to forget. Just a day before his death, the public was grumbling about the meagerness of Apple’s announcement of iPhone’s latest upgrade – not an iPhone 5 or even an iPhone 4gS (as the latest email scam has been selecting me to test), but just a measly iPhone 4. The public’s dissatisfaction with an impressive but not stunning upgrade is explained only by the groundbreaking expectations Jobs’ company set. Had he only set the expectations as high for his company’s social responsibility as the quality and innovation of its products, he’d have left a legacy that would be worthy of his ingenuity. I know some of you may be saying that his company’s failure to use its status to bring more jobs to the States or bring attention to issues surrounding corporate responsibility cannot take away from Jobs’ legacy. While this may be true, given that technology is moving at a pace so dizzying, even technology itself seems unable to analyze its own reach, my guess is that the technological gains made in the past forty years will seem like baby steps compared to what lies ahead in just the next five to ten years. Our reverence for these baby steps will likely be found amusing by the next generations, who are born taking that pace of advancement for granted.

As it’s been said before, none of this will mean much if that technology isn’t aimed to the greater good of our survival. That man sitting in that room getting that news that’s being spread around the globe in a heartbeat, may be alone in that room not out of choice or as a result of the dystopic isolation endemic to hyper-consumption of electronic media but maybe because the ants won, the scientists were right, the politicians were too busy fighting with each other to care, the protesters got tired and went home, and even if Al Gore had gotten the presidency he won, the last three years have shown us that it probably wouldn’t have made a difference anyway.

This time feels very “now” but soon it will be past. How will we remember it then? As the turning point, after which it all fell irrreparably apart, and nothing was ever the same again (and not in a good way), or the point at which people really woke up and realized we had to act, and fast, and did.

Thursday

A lot fell and broke this week. But not anything that mattered.