Category: Simple thoughts

Burned

Jeff

Fingertip

Soldering can be hazardous. A wayward finger found the barrel of the soldering iron yesterday. It hurt for hours, and then as quickly as it happened it stopped hurting. The damaged skin pulled away from my body, and has already started to crack. It will soon fall away, replaced by new skin without a trace of damage. Of course, most people wouldn’t make a big deal about it. But I started thinking about something in the shower this morning.

Drug addiction is inextricably entwined with nostalgia. It’s funny that it captures so many more young people than it does middle aged/old people. The theories I recall hearing most recently have to do with certain pleasure centers in the brain that are stimulated by some drugs, that become scarred by over stimulation so that the user desires more and more of the chemical to replicate the original experience. That’s nostalgia, I think.

In high school, I had a bout with barbiturate addiction. It became fiercely clear that I had a problem during summer school of my junior year when I gave a friend a couple of my pills at nine a.m., and by the break at eleven he had passed out face down on his desk and some friends and I had to tactfully lift him up and carry him outside. I had taken over twenty of the same pills by ten. Not good. It hurt a lot to give them up, and I think it probably helped me avoid similar mistakes in the future. In fact, for all of my messing around, there really aren’t any scars that show from those days. I seldom get nostalgic.

My longest bout with addiction was with cigarettes. I smoked a lot. The biggest revelations upon giving those up around five years ago were that cigarettes were really making me sick. Who knew? I mean, you light up a cigarette when you feel anxious and want to calm down, when all the while it is the lack of the cigarette that makes you anxious to begin with. I’m much calmer now. Smoking is not a weakness, nor a crutch (as many smokers rationalize) it is simply a lifestyle choice— you live in the nostalgia of the last cigarette you smoked. Can we do it again, please?

I decided I wanted to clean up my oft-posted photograph of myself tinkering at the kitchen table so that the edges would be pure white today. It dawned on me, looking at the scan, that a kerosene lamp that you can see behind me in this early sixties photo now resides in my basement:

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I broke the shade about a month ago. I can tell by the vague shapes that it was the original shade, which depicts dancers dancing around the flame. I can buy a new shade, but it won’t be the same. Realizing just how long I’ve been hanging around this lamp makes me much sadder than when it happened. It was just a piece of glass to me then. Now, it’s something more.

Second childhood

Jeff
Building things

Lately, I’ve been trying to learn more about electronics lately, getting genuinely excited about soldering and such. With the state of the economy, it seems like the best thing I can do is just sit still and try not to spend much money. When I was a kid, perhaps my fondest memories were of little project kits like electric motors and magnet kits that my oldest brother David bought for me for Christmas. Before traveling this summer I bought this kit and am now finally getting around to working on it.

The freakiest thing is that I’ve been soldering while listening to Merle Haggard (a Bakersfield phenomenon) and really enjoying it this time around. It reminds me of those times at the kitchen table way too many years ago, only this time I’m not bitching a blue streak about the crappy country music my dad used to listen to. I never wanted to be like my dad then, as far as I can remember, so why am I interested in embracing him now?

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My dad had nothing to do with my interest in electronics, of course— he was not interested in them at all beyond being able to keep the music going in the house an the old style console stereo. But thinking about just what I would like to remember the most, I think the most about his attempts to make things. He wasn’t particularly good at making (though he was really excellent at fixing. There’s a significant distinction here, explored amply in Shop Class as Soul Craft (the book, not this teaser article). I always wanted to make, and my dad often ended up fixing my attempts. He wouldn’t go anywhere near electronics though— if it couldn’t be fixed with a belt sander or a welding torch he left it alone.

Like most kids, I didn’t like my dad (or my home town) most of the time. It took a long time to get over that.

Home Again

Jeff

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We’ve been back home for just over a week, and I just can’t seem to get my fingers to engage with the keyboard. Part of the complication is that Krista will be departing for London in a little while, and we’re trying to get as much accomplished around here as we can before then. It was a productive trip in a lot of ways, but perhaps the most significant discovery was that we do indeed live in Central New York. It felt like home, when we arrived.

This is indeed a good thing. It would be a shame to be “just visiting” for five or ten years. Just before we left, I managed to mount the turntable to the living room wall and hook it up again. The records are still in boxes, but I don’t think I’ll be needing that dashboard record player just yet.

Purdue University

Jeff

The summer travel season is hear again. It’s day 2 and we’re in West Lafayette, IN at Purdue. As with most trips, there have been a lot of technical issues right out of the gate, such as the new computer unlicensing my copy of Aperture. This has made it interesting trying to deal with photographs. But, luckily I have a copy of Adobe Lightroom to switch to. Now, I just have to figure out how to work it.

Krista figured out that we’ve been doing this every summer for about seven years now. The more we do it, the less we plan it. I’m not sure where we’ll go from here. I know I have to present a paper at RSA in Minneapolis next weekend, and Krista just finished hers at Computers and Writing today. So we’re free, for a while now. I just need to finish the damn paper between now and then. It dawned on me this morning when we were talking that writing is always about saying, tentatively, I plan on talking about something but I’m not quite sure what it is. Then, a few pages later you figure out what that thing really is. Then, the hard part– making what you’ve already written sound like you knew what you meant to say all along.

I turned on the old version 1 of this blog from 2001-2002, so it looks weird to see the old entries at the bottom of the page. They’ll scroll away soon enough.  But it reminds me that, ultimately, I still haven’t figured out what I meant to say when I started writing this blog almost ten years ago.

Interesting

Jeff1 Comment

Perhaps the most overused and abused word in my vocabulary is interesting. I’ve been thinking about that word a lot lately, mostly trying to figure out what a suitable definition of “interesting” might be. Overuse wears away the surface of common words making it possible for them to slip chameleon-like into just about any situation; it also reduces them to the category of verbal filler.

Obviously, blogging lost its “interest” a while ago for the vast majority of my online friends, and they have moved on to other social media that better suit their needs. I keep trying to sustain an “interest” in it, although my blog has long ceased being “interesting” to anyone (easily established through the paucity of comment on my updates/return). No one has “noticed” because it simply isn’t worthy of “note”.
So just what is a usable definition of “interesting” beyond the circular invocation of “interest”? I think it reduces to attention. something is “interesting” when it attracts attention; the more sustained and active that attention is, the more “interesting” the something/someone is. This makes “interest” largely subjective, but not entirely so. For example, we would all deem physical threats worthy of attention, and by this definition “interesting”. But not everyone would agree that poetry is “interesting”. Another criterion should be added– something that is interesting rewards the attention you give it. Thus, paying attention to things that can harm you rewards you with survival, and attention to poetry rewards those of a certain disposition.
Each added word to the definition increases the complexity. Attention is base, primal. Reward is far more complex. It leads to a certain taxonomic impulse. What sort of reward are we talking about? Mental? Physical? Spiritual?
Ultimately though, a declaration of “interest” is taxonomic even without the complexity of reward. We must decide what is worth paying attention to, sorting out signal from all the noise. Declaring interest is immediately redundant– why would we bring something up if it wasn’t interesting?