Dream a Little One
Growing obsessed with the hockey lockout. Reading fan opinions, even. “The union must now be crushed… and I for one will dance on the remains.” Cynicism about people in groups working together. Staging notional conversations in the shower the next time some pig would dare imply the players are at fault. “Sh-yeah,” I will say, “and The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, that’s the players’ fault too, right? Since when do labour negotiations exist to prevent owners from overpaying their workers, smart guy?” Arguments are easy to come by in the age of whizzing opinion. It’s better to argue than to present a fact. My stance now—one shared by the blogosphere I should add—is to collect and assimilate opinions and pass the whole glistening ball off as an inscrutable truth. This is Malcolm Gladwell to a T. “Make up your own mind! (and here’s a bunch of convincing anecdotes to help you out with that)”. We all know research is dull and lacks immediate and palpable pleasure. There’s no hope in slugging through a textbook when the Internet is there to short-circuit the work/reward connection.
Right before bed I’ll think of five more things I should have done tonight. The world closes in for a second and there’s spinning dread, advancing and receding dread, dread about not doing the dishes, taking the garbage down. Shoulda emailed Mum back. Tomorrow will be the day for me, yes sir. Then bliss is restored upon proper lodging of the knee-pillow betwixt my oaky legs. Surely you use one of these things? They have fancy, grooved models (Side note on the uselessness: are these grooves in any way incongruent with the ordinary functioning of a pillow, which is to bend to the shape of whatever’s against it? Have you ever used a pillow that didn’t groove when pressure was applied unto it? Seriously. Attach the word “orthopedic” to something and you’ll sell, sell, sell a million units.) but I use an ordinary little cushion about the size of a bag of potatoes. Your body will feel truly at rest, silent, contented for once. And you’ll dream like the Aurora frigging Borealis.
I used to record my dreams first thing in the morning. My computer would stay on overnight, and I’d rush right to the keys first thing and fire up my little Emacs Lisp script and hammer out as much as I could remember, barely forming sentences, the thoughts piling up and tripping over each other. Seeing people from my past without having any good reason other than my subconsious saying I haven’t thought about Miss R. Bartlett from grade 8 in a while, let’s drum up a fleeting glimpse and try vainly to eroticize it for a second, shall we? Dream memories don’t work like regular memories; they leave your conscious mind and you can kiss those suckers goodbye, so get them down on paper ASAP. Here is an excerpt from early 2003:
There is some kind of cardboard tube throwing contest. I am running it, and people from work are there. Groups of 8 or so people line up and throw a paper tube. whoever throws it the furthest gets to advance to the next round. There are a couple of twins there, Jason and Jamie. They look like Rexdale Matt who works at Mr. Sub.
Marty and I out in the street (constance st), getting ready to drive to work. There is a snotnosed British kid there who is complaining. Somehow we have to make sure he’s okay, so marty tracks him down. Marty is drunk or something. Then we drive to work [ed: Marty and I weren't, and have never been, coworkers], but marty doesn’t remember how to get there, so we drive his car down a beautiful grassy trail and end up near work. There is a red street sign denoting “Spider Street”.
NOTE: this dream was induced by waking up and going back to sleep for ninety minutes. the REM period happened towards the end of this second sleep session.
On and on like this it goes, a whole year’s worth. It is a worthwhile exercise so long as you’re willing to go back over and scrape for symbolism and “dream signposts”. It’s easy to creep yourself out but then the secret is to not let anyone else read the dirty ones.
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It’s Really Fast…Once You Get Used To It
Productivity is a fleeting thing in this household, but productivity tools, well, these are becoming a vice. My reconversion to the Mac has left me vulnerable to the great sweeping wave of hyper-usable applications that crashes over us all. Mac users, it seems, have taken on a great conquest to out-Apple Apple Corp. by cranking out one clever and ostensibly life-saving application after another, and hell, I’m trying them all. I’m holding out on the Cult of GTD, but I’ve Notational Velocity‘d, NovaMinded, Sciral Consistency‘d, iCal‘d, Quicksilvered, and SubEthaEdited with nobody in particular. Many of these apps are selling for cash and certainly a tidy sum is made on a few of them. The trend has legs, and she knows how to use ‘em.
These applications, curiously Mac-only, are being eked out at rates faster than I can consume. OS X is the great enabler of an impulse within its users to slicken that which is already slick, to reduce two clicks to one click to no clicks at all. Software in all its draggable, scriptable, reorganizable glory; is it any wonder we now need filters, curators, digital Martha Stewarts, to help us sort through it all? The sordid truth is…if Merlin Mann has suggested it, I’ve already got three copies.
Behind every trend lurks a great question: will it last? Despite my efforts, I’m not one iota more productive, to which the frequency of blog posts here can attest. I am merely a deranged hobbyist, tinkering until I get tired. I will go out on a rather uncourageous limb—more of a stump, really—and say that the fad will either die, or the best parts of it will be folded into the OS itself and Steve Jobs will laugh a mean, all-knowing laugh and then buy another turtleneck.
Here’s why: as unctuous as these applications have become, customization is never the province of Joe User. Most people simply don’t stray, and are content to work around inconveniences. An awkward dialog box or an extra click never hurt anybody—you get used to it. Take a walk around your office sometime: rows of default blue XP installs, with the grassy hill background and useless left Explorer panel. Personalized Menus inexplicably stay enabled. ToolTips at every startup. Clippy. How my coworkers tolerate this tangle of insistent “help” I cannot say, but I can safely conclude that users obsessed with their UIs are not a common sort.
However, the spate of productivity apps (and surely a snappier name for this category will arise soon) clearly demonstrates a productivity sweet spot somewhere between the default settings and a set of command-reading electrodes cupped to your nipples. I’m along for the ride, but there comes a point where two clicks ain’t so much better than three. The people who defend a clumsy app like vi (”it’s really fast…once you get used to it“) to the death, well, they wouldn’t want all their apps designed like that, would they?
I must say…it is fun to hold a bit of mystery over the heads of others in your computerly doings. Rattling off Quicksilver commands quick as a snap sometimes elicits a, “Whoa…wh…what did you just do there?” from a befuddled onlooker. And I suppose Mac users have vested interest: dropping so much cash on a computer entitles you to a little cachet. It remains my opinion that these applications are far from essential, and can just as easily distract as assist. I believe productivity comes from a deeper place. A settled soul, contentment, resolve, desire…whatever. Writers used to write longhand by candlelight, and the craft of writing hasn’t gotten any better since those days. At least it’s a hell of a lot prettier.
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St. Valentine is Cordially Invited to Consume My Engorged Genitalia
Valentine’s Day. Don’t care! Just another corporate holiday! Another case of the Man grabbing us by the ankles and shaking change loose from our pockets, spinning us around, and then telling us the right way to love one another. Use some chocolate as a tool. It’s a mathematical certainty: spending more and means you love her more. Sit like frogs on the front porch and pass her your gift, a box of chocolates from Laura Secord wrapped up in a scintillating red bow. She can smile and act surprised, hesitating to take the box from your hand in feigned humility. If you love her you’ll do it, and if you prefer watching college football in your undershorts on a Monday after microwaving some chicken wings for dinner, you won’t. But you see this guy here? Doesn’t care! You see, I’m holding out for someone who cares as little for Valentine’s day as I do. Yes, that’s it.
I am back from San Francisco and tired. Very little is up, except that I finally thought to inflict searing pain on my earlobes for a change.
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A Slew of Miscellany
Some shit:
- I have signed up at the venerable Montreal superblog, the YULBlog. While I haven’t quite figured out the “YUL” thing, the blog makes for a wonderfully random read at any time of the day. All the Montreal bloggers ping the YULBlog mothership whenever they make a post, using TrackBack I suppose, and everyone’s post is mashed together into an amalgam and left to set into a goo, much like a warm poutine. A modest proposal, though: since this is Montreal, shouldn’t the technology employed by the YULBlog be called “Tabernackback”? Just sayin’.
- Comment spammers continue to drive me to an early grave.
- I’ve got a trip to San Francisco next week. I’d like to say it’s for a glamourous vacation and some hobknobbing with the who’s who, but alas, it’s for work.
- I’ve started using the full version of VoodooPad as the official Place Where I Write Text. Productivity software and personal databases seem to be the current vogue amongst the OS X set, which is great for a casual observer like me, since there are hundreds of waving hands vying for my attention in this particular arena. I chose VoodooPad because it happened to be the first usable application I found, truth be told, but it has served me well and I had no reservations about registering. Clearly this genre of software, with the amount of attention being given it, will attract a lot of attention and thus developer hours over the next year or so, and I am all for it. We have a severely underdeveloped relationship with the computer as a place of meaningful storage, of context, and of codependency; for all the processing power, we still feel like we’re doing all the work. We shuffle our playlists and dig through forgotten folders for scraps of text. We have an idea and fumble with a text editor to get it down. Applications are everywhere but they sit at an arm’s length most of the time. This article about one man’s personal collection got me thinking about what I’d like to use. Ideally there would be an optimal path connecting an idea, its conversion into text, and the storage of that text in a useful way, and optionally, the publishing of that text to the external world. Zero clicks to perfection. Later, I’d like to be able to find what I wrote by slamming down some words and letting the system deal with it. I should not have to care much about file types, formatting, or basic organization. Also, I’d like a transparent file format so that if you go out of business, I don’t get stuck with a pile of binary slop. This is all I ask. Make this and then we can move onto the next hotness.
- I witnessed a guy smoking in the grocery store the other day. I was pushing my cart around a corner to the freezer section in the back of the Provigo, and he was carefully putting out the cigarette on his pack. He was a tall guy, young with mussed dark hair, spoke an incomprehensible language. The aisle smelled like smoke. I could only laugh. Montreal, ladies and gentlemen…La Belle Province.
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