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Question 206 of 365: Where is the open book?

Published on July 26, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
original title page of Jude the Obscure by Tho...
Image via Wikipedia

Every time I put my son down for bed, he sees fit to be totally uninterested without a good amount of singing of songs and reapplying blankets. In between each one of these tries at sleep during which he may or may not actually close his eyes, I head over to the bookshelf with all of my old novels on it. As my son considers sleep for the twelfth time, I open up The Great Gatsby or if I’m feeling slightly more ambitious, Plato’s Republic. I read through all of the passages that I have highlighted or notated, which is quite a bit.

Each of the stars next to a given paragraph is enough for me to jump right back in to the person that I was when I first read the book. And as my son wakes up and goes back down with severe regularity, I keep on coming back to the fact that I have absolutely no way to retrieve those moments of insight without opening up each one of those volumes and reading that exact underlining, with scribbles that only I would understand.

Every time I stumble upon something that meant a great deal to me in a book I haven’t read for years, I feel this pang of regret that I didn’t read it on a digital device with syncable notes and sharable annotations. I look at a lot of the works that I read as an english major and how many of them are in the public domain. Each one of those I could have downloaded as an ePub file and opened up on an iPad or Kindle, had they only existed.

I know the intimacy of books is desirable, but sometimes I just wish that I could export those intimate moments and savor them more regularly. I don’t want to have the parts of me that I left on those pages get left behind. I want them at my fingertips.

And I know I could use Evernote to scan in or take pictures of those notes, but I really think that misses the point. If I am only copying over the pages that mattered then, there is almost no hope that I will read the entire work again and discover new things about the author and myself. I want the whole context of these notations. I want the whole story of why I starred entire sections. I want to search through and find the threads that bind together all of my braces hanging in the margins like unfinished picture frames ready to be hung in my digital memory.

I believe that this kind of work will happen when I am not responsible for digitizing the content itself, but only the annotations. I mean that all of the books I read as a student must be available in Google Books or some other easily searchable format. Then I want q scanner that only looks in the margins and maps it to a page number and a paragraph.

It would look something like the formula that a good friend of mine wrote in high school for knowing what page number he should be on in his very different version of Jude the Obscure. The class set was larger print, but my friend’s copy was an antique. He used his graphing calculator to concoct a formula for going back and forth between his book and ours. It worked flawlessly. I want the same thing for my notes. I want a way to map the words I wrote with the ones that my famous counterparts penned. Only then will I be able to look at the little diagrams I made up in the 9th grade with anything but nostalgia and regret.

If I want my past to live into my ore went I need a way to map it to something living. All of the books on that bookshelf are dead. Without commenting and liking or metadata, those words are not going to assemble themselves into something of value. And I want to find that value again, if for no other reason than to see exacltly who I was and how all of that has changed now that I am reading exerpts wle my son sits in his room, screaming because the door is stuck on the inside.

Because, it has changed, believe me.

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Question 205 of 365: Why don’t we clear the board more often?

Published on July 25, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
Small Price to Pay for the All Clear
Image by MarkyBon via Flickr

I have been to a few emergency rooms, mostly for highly nervous new parent reasons. Near each one is a board with names on it. Ussually this board has ailments, procedures, and where patients are at any given time. It tells of upcoming surgeries that require a certain level of expertise. This type of board has been highly popularized by shows like Grey’s Anatomy and other hospital dramas. It always struck me as a very public way for everyone to know what was going on in the hospital on any given day. No one can hide from the responsibilities that the board requires. The board dictates your schedule. Every day, new patients arrive and old patients are erased from the board. More than once a day, the entire slate is wiped clean and the whole process starts anew.

I wish this board existed for more than just hospitals.

Instead, we lower the stakes. We move the boards into more private areas like meeting spaces and classrooms. We let notices stay there for weeks or months with large “do not erase” signs around them. Or, we digitize the process and make it even more secretive in our email inbox or content management systems. There is no feeling that we must clear the board or people will die. There is no feeling that everyone will know exactly what we have been up to because our names are tied to the procedure to which we were assigned. In essence, the board is inconsequential in our working lives. It doesn’t dictqte order or urgency and we don’t feel the need to clear it nearly as often.

But what if we did put up such a board in our schools and workplaces? What if we put the things that we were doing up for everyone to see and then cleared them away with a medical efficiency? I would like to see the progress and the stories that get told then.

If I had to guess, most people wouldn’t spend their time on menial work. If their tasks were going up on the board, everything we did would become important. If we had to write up there what we were learning about or what we were about to tackle on any given day, we would see just how urgent our procedures can be.

And when we needed help for a given procedure, we could elicit help from one another simply by adding one another’s names to the board. We could focus on the collaborative spirit that is required in a hospital in order to keep patients alive. There would stop being a competition between who has harder or more important work because the task for each day is not to complete your own work, but to help clear the board. If you have a free moment, help someone else clear the board. If you have something that needs doing, write it up.

I don’t clear my email inbox as often as I should because there is nothing making me do it. It isn’t life or death and there isn’t any help if I get stuck. But if every one fo my job requirements were up on the board, waiting to be cleared by a team of highly skilled people, you had better believe that I wouldn’t still have an unreturned email from last December just with a draft that has been saved 5 different times and then abandoned because something more interesting came up.

I get that I am not saving lives by creating learning objects or by talking about social media or asking better questions through video. But hqt doesn’t mean that the ambition and pride that doctors feel for clearing the board is unavailable to me. I just have to make my system more open to people walking through my emergency room. I need to allow others to help me, too.

If I simply keep my work as public as possible and not try to own everything, I believe that more will get done and I will feel better about it as well. Or maybe I will jut better be able to put myself in the shoes of someone in ER or House.

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Question 204 of 365: When do we almost die?

Published on July 24, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
rhizoming the vanishing lines . .
Image by jef safi via Flickr

It strikes me that we almost die far more often than we actually do.

Most of the days that I drive to work I think about what it would be like if I made an enormous right turn into oncoming traffic or into the highway median. I don’t think that this is morbid or abnormal, rather I believe that it is a healthy part of me staying alive. If I can envision the crumpled minivan on the side of the road, I can avoid it . If I can see exactly how it would flip and wrap around a tree, I know that my family is safe. I can almost die in my head hundreds of times.

I live in a place that feels safe. The only people I see outside in the neighborhood are kids and parents, playing with toys and basketballs and bicycles. I see people walking and running, too. I see tended yards, except for mine. I see people wave. I’m sure that all of this seeming safety is an illusion, but I take it because it keeps me almost dead, rather than entirely dead much more often.

I am passive when it comes to confrontation. I would take pretty much any route there is to avoid a fight. I stay alive tyhrough this process. To put it another way: I almost die in every conversation, but somehow I manage to avoid it. It’s not to say that I deal with a lot of violent people, but anything can become a fight. Anything.

Whether by accident or intentional behavior, I have managed to stay alive since I was born. It is a streak that is unmatched by anyone younger than me. There are so many things that could kill me, but so far I have managed to escape each one. Sickness hasn’t done it, nor has being impaled on anything overly sharp. I don’t intend on being beaten to death or splattering to the grown after a wrongly orchestrated bungee jump. All of these things will be almost deaths for me and I will treasure them. For as long as they remain as such, I don’t have anything to worry about.

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Question 201 of 365: How hard and how fast should we jump on the ice?

Published on July 21, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
Waterfall in the town of Chagrin Falls, Ohio
Image via Wikipedia

The Chagrin river never froze over completely. At least, not in my memory anyway. It was always halfway frozen in the winter, allowing for a few ducks to sit on the frigid water as it took them closer and closer to the falls beneath the Popcorn Shop in my hometown. Halfway out onto the river, the ice was thick enough to stand on. Or so I thought.

Two of my closest friends decided to venture out onto the river as far as they would dare. I followed with a lot of apprehension, but eventually I was able to join them a few feet away from the bank. At first they were only interested in stomping around in circles and hearing the faint cracking underfoot. Then as they saw the ice hold more and more of their weight, they began to jump . Up and down they went and I did my best to be uninterested. I knew what was coming next. I knew that it was only hubris that was standing between us and the freezing cold water. But I couldn’t help from joining in. I knew that at any moment we would become enormous popsicles, but right then we were dry and warming up from all of our jumping.

I can’t believe it took us more than 5 minutes to break through, but we spent the better part of half an hour trying to prove that we were as dumb as the people watching from the park were beginning to suspect. And as we fell through the ice, I remember thinking that we deserved it. We had tempted the gods of the river, and we were right to freeze to death.

Luckily, one of my friends lived just a few blocks away. So, we ran as fast as we could, the water freezing against our skin. Our clothes were stiff by the time we made it. As we dried off with some of the warmest and most comforting towels I have ever known, I knew that no amount of explaining would ever allow others to see why we had to jump on the ice together and feel it crack under our weight. I knew that it wouldn’t be possible for my parents or my friend’s parents to see why jumping was our only chance to make sure that we were alive in all of the ways we wanted to be.

And I put it to you that I still cannot explain it. I still cannot decipher our total lack of understanding for what it was we were attempting. What I can say is this: Every risk I have ever taken is some version of that day.

Every risk, so long as it is worthy of consideration, but be two things: a collective act and have the possibility of catastrophe. Solitary risk isn’t of interest to me. It doesn’t hold my imagination at all. Without friends around to watch me fail, there is little hope that I will ever be able to learn or have any kind of humor about that failure in the future. I also believe in total catastrophe as a kind of performance art. I often tell my wife that taking two trips from the car to the refrigerator to put away the produce is much more fulfilling than taking one. I say this because there is a much higher likelihood that I will stumble my way into something interesting if I can take my time with each bag. I am just clumsy enough that the practice of taking two trips doubles the possibility of me falling headlong into the refrigerator, or better yet, a good idea.

I am not interested in advocating for jumping on thin ice, however. What I am advocating for is a kind of free will that doesn’t disallow jumping on thin ice because it is a monumentally bad idea in the eyes of pretty much everyone. I am recommending that we all, from time to time, embark on some hideously bad ideas in the hopes that we can gain insight. Oh, and we should write about them and share stories, too. That way, anything so absurd as to cause each of us to thank our lucky stars that we weren’t involved will be the push we need to go out and try something truly insane, and perhaps spectacular.

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Question 199 of 365: When do we stop asking for medicine and band-aids?

Published on July 19, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
A Band-Aid bandage
Image via Wikipedia

I had a favorite medicine growing up called Triaminic. It was the wonder cure-all. Pretty much anything that was wrong could be fixed with a little Triaminic. It had this syrupy sweet cherry flavor that wasn’t overly thick. It didn’t have the aftertaste of a Robitussin or the fleeting quality of a Tylenol. It was what I asked for by name whenever I stayed home from school. It was an elixir, a special potion which could give me back both health and confidence with a single spoonful.

I eschewed band-aids, though. They were for kids that couldn’t handle the wonderful sensation of picking at a scab. I don’t know if my kids will ever know how much I loved to pick at the places on my elbows and knees that the sidewalk had found and rubbed up against only days before. They won’t know because they love band-aids. Every time they get hurt (and many times when they do not), they ask for a new band-aid. Many times we go through several for every cut. It is almost as if they continue to get hurt just so that they can get me to put the sticker with medicine on them. Almost.

They too are magic. Band-aids for my kids instantly turn crying into thanks. They instantly cause the world to once again be in its right place. My children find the littlest wound or oldest scab and find it detrimental to their continued play, but as soon as the Band-Aid enters the equation, there is silence. The smiles return and off they are, bounding through to the play room. They are ready for the next adventure because they got patched up.

At some point I stopped asking for Triaminic and my parents stopped offering. At some point, my children will too stop begging for hello kitty Band-Aids. These wonderful fixes will lose their luster. They will no longer be good enough. But, what is that point? How long can I keep the quick fixes in circulation. How long can I keep the illusion going that anything can be solved with a simple capful of medicine or a few easily removed adhesive tabs?

And once that simple trust in these remedies is broken, it is all we can do to try and get it back. I think that our entire lives are spent in figuring out ways to make Band-Aids and Triaminic work again. We search for quick results and a simple answer to the most complex professional and personal problems. We try the same things over and over in the hopes that some of the magic will return. We “sleep on” our biggest decisions as if the mere act of sleeping will somehow provide insight. We have recurring meetings as if the fact that getting the same people together will produce innovation. We make budgets as if the fictional numbers will somehow keep our wants in check.

I know that there is no cure-all. That it is all snake water and workarounds. I know that time and working toward a better life is the only medicine at all for the present. I’ll take them, but they taste much more bitter than my Triaminic ever did.

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Question 198 of 365: When is sleep inappropriate?

Published on July 17, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
GDR "village teacher" (a teacher tea...
Image via Wikipedia

I observed classrooms for years before I became a teacher. Sometimes I would observe the interaction between students or the way in which a teacher would discipline others. I would watch the passing of notes and the distracted looks of those who longed to be outside. I could see the worst anger boil up within a student who received a bad grade.

There is only so much you can watch, though, without taking part. You can’t sit back and watch alliances form without becoming a part of the warring factions. It doesn’t do to stay aloof, waiting for the discussion to come around to what you are interested in. But there are times when observation is your job, so you must. For the sake of objectivity, I would watch the teacher drone on and the students sit and stare.

This was how I observed myself to sleep.

I watched a facilitated discussion on a book that i had never read, and i slowly laid my head down on the teachers desk at the back of the room, pretending to read on my lap. This is a move I had perfected in middle school, but I had never used it as an adult. At least, not until I was under the drug of observation. It was the constant lull of disinterested students who were forced to speak about a book that they hadn’t read either that relaxed my muscles and lowered my eye lids.

I woke up and realized what I had done as the classroom was staring at me. I apologized and everyone laughed. I never felt so much like a kid as I did in that moment of being caught in my disinterest. And feeling like a kid without your permission is awful.

I am not okay with observing myself to sleep anymore. I’m not okay with letting a situation be responsible for my stupor. I’m not okay with being disinterested in life to the point of losing conciousness.

I obsessively participate. I wring out experiences until there is nothing left. I pluck every moment and listen as my life screams with pain and pleasure and hope and failure.

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Question 191 of 365: What is the skeptic’s option?

Published on July 11, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
Skeptics
Image by wburris via Flickr

Everyone who asks questions is a skeptic in one way or another, which is to say that everyone is a skeptic.

I once found my bicycle up in a tree in the woods. It had been placed there by some naughty older kids. They wanted to play a trick on me, although I am quite sure that they had no idea who I was. They just saw my bike in the woods behind my friend’s house and decided that it belonged in a tree. They carefully perched the handle bars on one branch and the back wheel on another. It hung about 8 feet up in the air, which was pretty far out of my 5 foot height at the time. So, I walked home.

I was skeptical about whether or not I would be able to convince my mother that this wasn’t my fault, that I hadn’t been careless about leaving the bike in the woods in the first place. I asked myself questions about who could have done such a thing, all the while cursing both the people who had done it and myself for being so trusting of an obviously hostile world.

If Twitter and smart phones and Fail would have exited back then, you can bet that the entire escapade would have been chronicled first by the older kids as a viral video contender and then by me so that I might chronicle the improbability of my bicycle in the tree. I would have tweeted something like “So, my bike decided that the beaten path (or any path) wasn’t good enough for it.” I would have put the twitpic in there too, just for good measure. There would not be much skepticism just then about what had happened or disbelief by my mother. We could have looked up the whole thing and probably gotten a geotagged play by play, complete with facebook profiles on each of the perpetrators because their faces would be tagged.

I tell this story not so that you can pity my former self, but rather so that I can outline just how little skepticism there is for the things that we can see, and how this is bleeding into ideas well.

Right now, it is very easy to like something on the Internet. It is easy to share it and to link to it. It is easy to do pretty much anything except for be skeptical. Sure, there are contrary opinions and lots of snarky comments on Twitter, but don’t really found those and true skepticism. Skepticism is looking something directly in the eye and stating for everyone to hear that you don’t believe it.

I want the ability to not believe again.

Now, all of my choices are to either support or not support (and most of the nonsupporting options are burried in comments). I want the ability to not believe as well. I want to be able to stare wide eyed at the things that hold untruth and disbelieve them. Imwant q universal skeptic button.

This button will be the equivalent of the Facebook “like” button, but instead of converting to page promotion or demotion, it will have the effect of allowing me to highlight the most offensive portion of whatever I am looking at and call it to account. Any time that someone hovers over that text in the future, it will have my record of disbelief and whatever comment I cared to make on why it was untrue. The button will be in ebooks and blog posts, on videos and podcasts too.

The skeptic button will finally make the process of making a case against an idea easier because it will cobble together each and every comment offered and aggregate it for a common purpose.

In the end, I dint want to like/dislike things or even merely comment on them. I want to believe them or disbelieve them. The things that I believe in should be shared in all of the spaces that I inhabit and the things that I do not believe in deserve to connect me with all other nonbelievers. I feel as though we would have a common bond, a network of skeptics.

Right now we are scattered. Someday soon, though, we will rise up and state our intentions for making belief a part of our metadata. We will make asking questions a part of every online interaction.

We will look up at the bicycles in the trees around us and we will start to walk home together to tell someone else the story from memory.

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Question 189 of 365: How can other’s words say what I mean?

Published on July 9, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
American writer Andy Greenwald
Image via Wikipedia
I found this book, Nothing Feels good by Andy Greenwald. And along with being beautifully written, it describes so well what it is that I am desperate for (note: I pulled the text from the Google Book by taking screenshots and then feeding it into the Google Docs OCR. While I am well within my fair use rights, I do apologize for any butchering I do of punctuation or paragraphing):

On a warm fall night in Manhattan. kids are buzzing around CBGB. From across the Bowery. it could be any night, any fall from the last twenty years-young discontents and their older. slightly mellowed fore-bearers jacked up on caffeine/nicotine/alcohol/other waiting to get their collective rocks off at the seediest, oldest, and best punk club in New York City. But there’s something different about this night, noticeable from the median and then rapidly more so as one approaches the entrance. These aren’t the violently pierced. mohawked. leathered. pleathered, and glassy­eyed punks of yesteryear. There isn’t a single Ramones jacket or safety pin in sight. Nor are they the dirty-jeaned, big-booted collection of indie-rockers. diehards. and straight­edgers of punk’s more recent milieu. The kids here are different. Shockingly. bizarrely so. The kids. it appears. are all right. There are young girls in powder blue, midriff-baring tank tops emblazoned with the word “rockstar” emerging from idling SUVs. waving goodbye to their parents behind the wheel with a dismissive nod. There are clean-cut high school boys wearing baseball hats and overly long shorts and khakis. Serious looking fifteen-year-olds smile awkwardly and switch off their cell phones. There is backslapping. There are high-pitched giggles.

It’s a young and different crowd. in from the suburbs and out in the big city tonight for a concert. Here to watch their version of punk ascend triumphantly and not notice the differences. To sing along wide-eyed and happy. To feel better at the end of the night instead of bruised. It’s November 2001 and I’m attending my very Dashboard Confessional concert. The city is unseasonably warm and wary-what happened two months before still hangs heavy, but not heavy enough to weigh down the enormous anticipation that’s building inside CBGB’s scarred innards. Before the show. I run into a friend who attends NYU. She laughs when she sees me. “l never figured you for an emo kid,” she says. “I didn’t either.” I answer. just there to keep her friend company-her friend who, at is a good three years above the room’s median age. She seems embarrassed to be there-or at the very least to be asked about it. “Are you a big fan?” I ask the friend. “l think he’s really good,” she says.

Just then. the lights dim and the girls recede into the crowd. Some fellows in white T-shirts to my left climb on the back of chairs and start hooting. I catch a glimpse of a small Asian-American teen in glasses standing just below the stage furiously scribbling in her journal. oblivious to the diminishing light. Nervous applause ripples through the crowd. lt’s the awkward hum of a classroom when the teacher leaves to get help resetting the fraying reel. Just before the juvenile boiling point is reached, a surprisingly short and compact dark~haired man walks out onto the stage alone. He musses with his collapsed black pompadour hairdo. swings his acoustic guitar to the front. squints into the expectant crowd. and flashes a rabbity, nervous smile.

“OK.” Chris Carrabba says. “arc you guys ready to try one? The crowd erupts. and, as the first few notes are plucked. what was once a disparate collection of homework-dodgers is transformed into a head-nodding choir. Carrabba’s voice is a bit yelpy in spots, chasing the high notes like an affection-starved pet nipping at the heels of its owner. He has two full sleeves of tattoos on his arms. one of which strums out chunky acoustic chords. “You look cute in your blue jeans / but you’re plastic just like the rest . . . dying to look smooth with your tattoos / but you’re searching just like everyone.” And the audience sings with him. Every single word. with some lingering behind and some charging forward. lt’s like an extremely successful bout of responsive reading. except the hypercharged and ecstatic look on the kids’ faces says they’re not just echoing-they’re emoting.

When the song ends, everyone screams, as much for themselves as for the shy-looking fellow on stage. The guys next to me are practically falling all over themselves. One of them, baseball hat perfectly molded to his head, arms thrown around his friends’ shoulders, screams oul. “We love you, Chris!” The songs go on and on-and the crowd’s voices never diminish. Halfway through, some of the guys are doing harmonies. lt’s hard to tell whether it’s CB’s notoriously low stage or Carrabba`s small stature, but with each successive number the crowd seems to surge up higher and higher-both in volume and mass-until by the end the two sides are meeting each other from the start of each song. Occasionally. Carrabba builds to at refrain and then merely steps away from the mic. letting the devotees in the blank. Someone walks past me towards the back, retreating from the stage, crying. But there is no moshing. no physical injuries. I’ve never seen such well­behaved teenagers in a rock club. Song after song with titles like “Again I Go Unnoticed” and “This Ruined Puzzle” have the kids around me glassy­eyed with glee and reverence.

After a few more rousing choruses. It’s over.

This to me is a kind of sincerity revolution. An experience without snark or sarcasm. It represents what it is that I believe is right about coming together and creating a community within a moment. It is a reset of the disillusionment that came before, and it is better than I could have ever said it.

I have been to a Dashboard Confessional concert, on the very same tour that this exerpt was referring to. It was every bit as sincere and hopeful as these words portray. I didn’t get why that was important until now.

We need some words to all sing together. Not comment on the words and stand back, aloof. We need to all speak in one voice and be carried away by the possibilities of the moment, rather than chase away any possiblity of knowing one another intimately. It isn’t a religion or following a single figurehead. It is a movement away from ego and toward consensus. It is a movement toward belonging and away from being obsessively right.

It is for emotion and connection.

It is against skepticism and stalling.

At some point the things I am passionate about in education, technology and business will have their watershed moments. I just hope they are more like the vignette above and less like the selfish present that seems to deepen within every moment.

You see:

I don’t want to be guarded. I want to sing. With you. About things that allow us to be together. Without parenthesis or ironic twitpics.

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Question 188 of 365: What did we buy?

Published on July 8, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
First 4 digits of a credit card
Image via Wikipedia

Credit card companies are stupid. Not for any of the crazy backwards pricing structures or 0% percent nonsense that they send out 100 times a year in the mail. Not for the hope of fre money or the predatory lending that happens every day.

They are stupid because they haven’t turned spending money into a game, at least not any more than playing with a piece of plastic and getting people to give you objects for swiping it into a machine.

If credit card companies were smart, they would create a virtual representation of everything that is purchased and put it into a virtual house for you. If they really had everything together, they would make The Sims into a carbon copy of everything that we buy.

On the one hand it would make people realize everything that they are consuming because they would have to lug it around their virtual world. On the other, it would allow us to start setting up an economy that is a direct copy of everything our real economy values. It would allow us to trade what we cant trade in real life, to own what we have always owned and what we will own in the future.

Rather than bogus rewards systems, we could be rewarded with the game of life. The real one, the one we pay for every day.

Think of this:

The gas that we buy for our real cars will make the virtual cars go. The fast food that we purchase will show up in our guts in the online game. The electronic devices that we purchase are forever in existence, long after their usefulness is gone. We could see the entertainment costs and the costs of not entertaining ourselves at all. We could see how happy our virtual counterparts are and reflect on the way our real selves feel. We could actually see what our debt gets us and the real affects of our consumption have on the world around us.

Most people still find the idea of purchasing virtual goods to be ludicrous, but purchasing real goods that have virtual counterparts just makes sense. We do this when we buy cd’s and get mp3 files as well. We do this when we buy neopets and farmville slushies. W just need to do this for everything. We need to have a way to publish all of our purchases for the purpose of creating a more intimate relationship with out goods and services.

The way I see it, the first bank to do this will be the one that gets to dictate the price of goods and services from that point forward. Because once everything is both virtual and physical, the virtual economy will become just as important as the one that provides us with sustenance and substance. Once a single bank doubles our buying power by duplicating every line item on a receipt, they will literally be printing their own money. They will own the game and every transaction could me monitized.

The only question I still have, is why aren’t the credit card companies so stupid as to not see this?

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Question 185 of 365: What happens when you just watch?

Published on July 5, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
Firework
Image by andrusdevelopment via Flickr

I saw a twinkle of power and awe in my daughter tonight. She held her first sparkler and threw her first snappers (the little bits of explosives that are wrapped in paper). It created something within her that I hadn’t seen before. A kind of hope for creation and destruction and danger all rolled into one.

When I just stared at her and waited for that look to keep developing, I found that I wanted it to. I wanted her to know more danger and more uncertainty for how things would turn out
I wanted her to see the wonder of fireworks for the first time. And I wanted that wonder for myself too.

I think that watching what you have already seen throughout the eyes of someone who has not is the only way to gain genuine perspective. Sometimes I wish that I could bring my daughter into every meeting and brainstorming session so I can know what it means to be green again, to be unjaded by having seen bigger fireworks before.

If my daughter can be in awe of a sparkler, I can be in awe of my existence too. If she can be cautious about fire and throwing explosives, I can reflect on the risk involved in my every action. If she can be unafraid at trying something new, I can push the boundaries of what is possible.

I’m not sure I ever knew how much I would learn from a 3 year old.

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