Alone With the Books - Night One (12/9/14)

I am so jealous of people who take the time to reflect.

Last year, I declared that I *would* reflect on two momentous endings in my life, one much more personal and significant than the other, but both with the potential to provide insight.

And here I am, almost a year later, without much to show for my declaration. I scribbled down a few thoughts here and there on scraps of paper that are now at undefined coordinates.

But tonight I am alone with the books.

As we pack up my mom's condo, and throughout the last year whenever we discussed the prospect of packing it up, discussion always comes around to the books.

It is kind of heart-wrenching to think of disseminating the books. There are thousands of them and so many of them have a story to tell.

My mom was a life-long scholar. Her collection spans the ebbs and flows of the tides of her interests. Romantic poetry, visual arts, philosophy, Jungian psychology, Eastern mysticism, counseling psychology, feminism, modern poetry, Buddhism, and above all William Blake. Always and forever, Blake.

And tonight, when I look at certain books, memories flood back. Many of these books were shelved in my father's study 45 years ago. I would sit on the carpet on the floor and ponder them, deciding what I might want to read. That is how I came to read, at a rather tender age, volumes such as The Bell Jar, The Turn of the Screw, The Hobbit, The Wizard of Earthsea. When I look at the color of the book jacket of The Complete Poems of Robert Frost, I am a child again.

If I allow the books to slip away, does my childhood slip away? Do I dishonor my mother and the supreme reverence she afforded her library?

Ten Years Ago Today (oops - was supposed to publish back in April - doh!)

Throwback Thursday: Musings on Internet Privacy

 

My IT guy just told me to delete a folder I had called "personal music - move to Google". It was really old and I had forgotten all about it but it was hogging up 3GB. Well, that led me down memory lane to all kinds of crazy files I have here at work. One of them appeared to be the draft of a blog post I wrote on November 25, 2003 but never posted, probably because I couldn't strike the right tone and wasn't sure if I should post it at all. But it's Throwback Thursday so what the heck, here goes:

Photo Credit: Jim Barker, flickr

Recently I came across an article Peter Miller of CTCNet wrote called Requiem for the BCS and NPTN [note from 2014: the URL I had for this in 2003 has been taken over by a junk wordpress blog, but thanks to the Wayback Machine, it was easy to find the article. Goddess bless the Internet Archive].

I was instantly transported back to High School when I read the part of the article that mentioned one of my classmates, Jonathan Rotenberg, who founded the Boston Computer Society (BCS)in 1977. 

He was not someone I actually spoke to, as far as I know. He was an always smiling, often suit and tie wearing, unfathomably intelligent, certified geek who was nearly always having a bad hair day (or do I just think that because our High School yearbook photo features him grinning while touching the van der graaf generator, hair sticking wildly into the air?). 

The BCS went on to become the largest computer user group in the world with 23,000 members. All started by a crazy geeky pipsqueak with a passion for computers before most of us knew they existed. After noticing his name in Peter’s article, I was surprised that his Google hits were only 78. That seemed low for someone who has been immortalized in various histories of personal computing.

Thanks to Google, I was able to figure out what he’s been up to. I almost feel like I was able to figure out more than I should. One thing I noticed was that he and a fellow named Marc donated money to Fenway Community Health in the year 2000. I seemed to have unearthed his sexual orientation. I only mention this because I later found an article, Gays at Home in High Tech, that clearly confirms he’s out and proud. 

It really makes you think about privacy. Google makes it a lot easier to be a private detective nowadays. 

I also determined he got his MBA from Harvard and was active in the Gay and Lesbian Student Association there: “A year earlier, in 1992, then dean of the Business School--the Business School--John MacArthur chose not only to fund the Harvard Business School Gay and Lesbian Audiotext Hotline, but to single out Jonathan Rotenberg, M.B.A. '92, its creator, in his commencement address” 

And that's it. The blog post was never quite finished, but clearly my thoughts were about the sheer power of Teh Google, which people did not quite understand so well in 2003. The phrase "digital footprint" had not been coined yet.

Peter's article is really quite lovely, by the way, and reminds me of the writing I am supposed to be doing here, when he says of the BCS, "let us first acknowledge the passing and loss." 

Jonathan is trucking along, as amazingly accomplished as ever, but has long since shed any traces of the awkward teenage geek. 

Two Cars: What if We Could Empathize With Earth?

Today on my way to work, I was missing my cushy car. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I drive our old Toyota truck. It's a manual, with manual steering and no radio. As I was missing our comfortable new automatic Camry and the radio, I thought: What if driving our cars made us as uncomfortable as climate change and fossil fuel pollution makes the planet? What if we got unusually hot or cold in our cars as we drove along? What if the air quality inside the car gradually filled with ozone, carbon monoxide, and carcinogens? What if the sea level inside the car began to rise, and the fresh water supply diminish?

Maybe then, we would drive our cars a lot less. Maybe cushy isn't such a great thing after all.

Endings and Beginnings

The last few months of 2013 were filled with some very intense endings for me. My mother was in the final stages of her terminal illness, and my grant-funded project at work, something I worked on for 13 years, was coming to an end.

Generally, transitions like this in real life do not have fairy tale endings. If they did, our funder would have lovingly taken over our project and given it the same attention our team gave it. I would have communicated eloquently to the grantees what a privilege it was to serve them for 13 years and how much I would miss them. My mother and I would have exchanged our most heartfelt thoughts, feelings, and perfectly worded goodbyes. But I don't live in a fairy tale.

Photo Credit: Flickr: penelopejonze

What I'm left with is the thought that I want to reflect on these two major pieces of my life, even as I have moved on to new beginnings. Even as I have not had a chance to clear my office of those 13 years, nor my mother's condo of her 81 years.







Reflection is so important and yet, so hard to make time for. I owe it to myself to process the endings, so I can free up all of my energy for the new beginnings in my life.

I hope that by blogging once a week with some insights on one or the other of these endings, I'll be able to truly say goodbye to my project, and to my mother. I don't need fairy tale endings, but I do need to feel a sense of closure, and a sense that I have learned from these two major life experiences.