Question 335 of 365: Will the future be double spaced?

I used to write research papers in a single evening. I would slog on through 20 pages, even if it meant pulling an all-nighter. To me, it wasn’t a question of sleep or of planning, it was a matter of continuity. I wanted the first draft of anything that I was doing to be done in a single mindset. Surely, it would get better over time, but plowing through a set of research and having a single thesis could only be done in one night. I would write out starts of sentences, I would rewrite the first paragraph 20 times. I would brainstorm behind my cursor for hours. And then I would write. I would write so much and so fast that it seemed there was nothing more important than the next words coming across the screen. All of my fast typing skills from instant messaging my friends on IRC in middle school payed off in these long sessions. When I had a thought, it would almost create itself, coming shooting out of my fingertips across those keys. It was all I could do to keep the momentum and the pressure of my mind on the topic at hand. It was all about the rest of the clean white page. I had to fill it, at all costs.

The one thing I never did, though, was fill it with extra space. I would never double space my work until I was finished. I knew that writing two pages with narrow margins and double spaced paragraphs was cheating. It was letting the length limit dictate my writing. It was letting the confines of the platform tell me when to stop. And stopping wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to write until the ideas would no longer come. Until I proved my point, I couldn’t be done. That moment, though, of selecting all of the text I had just crafted and pushing the lines away from one another was sweet satisfaction. It was made everything right, even if I knew there were still grammatical and logical errors in my work. That decision set more than the type. It made it so that everyone could see just how expansive my arguments were and just how much work I had done in my overnight experience.

And I would print out my essays and reports and short stories so that they could be read and commented on by my capable professors. They required this convention so that each one of them could add their critique within the letters I had cobbled together. They literally wanted to read and write in between my lines.

I wonder if this experience is a lost contentment. Will those in the future of digital submissions and blog post reflections ever know what it is to be done, to double space and set things right with the world? Will they ever be able to write on their own without the distractions of Facebook messages or texts? Will there be a moment in the early hours of the morning where the triumph over a single topic is so absolute that you can grab each line and stretch it out into two?

Probably not.

Probably the future of text is in the hyperlink and not in the format. Double spacing probably won’t mean anything to my children. Hand written comments will give way to metadata. It will be tagged and annotated, not red penned. I think this is overall a wonderful advance into a brave new tomorrow where there is no such thing as losing a story due to hard drive failure or losing a notebook. The blog, though, is no substitute for the quiet victory of typesetting a momentary masterpiece. The moment where content gives way to margin play is one I will miss. It is a subtle loss, but a loss just the same.

Question 285 of 365: When does advocacy become an employment strategy?

Being in favor of things is not so very hard.

I’m for watching TV in the evenings. I’m for laughing with children. I’m for opening up boxes as soon as they come in the mail. I’m for remembering what I’ve done with those I’ve done it with. I’m for being quiet when screaming seems like the only alternative. I’m for screaming through the quiet. I’m for the scary moment in the morning when you realize just how much you have to do today. I’m for arm rests. I’m for spelling things out even when children aren’t present. I’m for innuendo. I’m for exaggeration and hyperbole and overstatement and repetition. I’m in favor of picking things up instead of stepping around them. I’m in favor of spending too much money on a movie and popcorn. I’m for clouds and rain. I’m for staring at strangers without their knowledge. I’m for separating candy from chocolate. I’m in favor of listening the same album over and over when it is just that good.

I can state all of these preferences quite easily and continue the list indefinitely, even as it spirals out of control into tangents and random mentions of my past. This is entertaining and time consuming but these are not passions, they are merely skipping stones across the surface. They are the brail of my life. They are the ways that people know I am me, but they are not the things that will last. They are not what will make someone take notice. They are not what will cause someone to stay tuned to what I have to say or want to hear more from my perspective.

Being in favor of something every day and stating that preference, so clearly and completely that will cause others to take notice. It is why politicians have staying power. It is why companies can execute. It is why people get hired. Being for one thing and showing it to anyone that will listen is the role I am choosing to do. It is the implied job of my life, the one laying just below the surface. Those are how passions reveal themselves over time. It is the diligence to be for something ad nauseum, but never to actually become sick.

I am drinking the koolaid, and I have for some time. I am taking deep and long sips and enjoying it. I am advocating for what I need every day now because I know that it is the only way that it will happen. And if Dr. Seuss‘ immortal words are any indication, it is only a matter of time before I will start happening too.

Question 234 of 365: What is the new mix?

I used to make music mixes for every occasion of my life. For birthdays, for anniversaries, and for Christmas. There was no occasion too small that it didn’t call for a music cd or at least a playlist. A few years, I even attempted a list of best songs of the year which could be sorted in an Excel spreadsheet. I was ambitious about my mixes because I believed that the held the key to chronicling time and making sense of the world around me.

Now, it seems almost tragic to think that I am no longer making those mixes and my world is spinning out of control because of the lack of coherence and preservation that music provided to me. For the past few years, I have approached music in a more utilitarian way. It is in the background so that I don’t have to listen to other people in my office. It is in the car so that I can think more about what I am engaged in. It is on at home so that my children can dance.

I used to make music so that I could put order to the world, and now I don’t because the order has been dictated to me. My daily life is no longer unpredictable. I don’t wake up thinking about whether or not I will go out that night. We have these things planned weeks and months in advance. I don’t require a series of songs to give me a sense of what my existence is like because at any given moment, my life is a lot like the previous moment. While there is most definitely a progression from one thing to another, the haphazard stylings from many different genres that are put together on a mix would hardly be applicable to what I’m going through.

Which is why I am so keen on the album. The album of familiar or newly unearthed songs that I can listen to over and over again is something that much more fits my current lifestyle. I like to see the progression of a single narrative and know exactly where it goes to and from. The single can get me excited, but it never sustains me like a truly masterful album. I don’t want to put things on shuffle. I want to know what is coming next and to see it coming and feel good about it.

Making a mix feels good when you want to introduce someone to a band or when you feel as though there is something at stake. You are trying to make a statement or figure out who you are. You are trying to decipher the relationship to whom you are giving the mix. This makes sense when all of your life is up in the air. But, as things come together and make decisions that set you on a longer path, the long playing nature of an album sweetly cradles you. You don’t have to worry about the jarring transitions or the awkward filler tracks. You are content with the albums you grew up with and the new standards that you spend months with in your car. It isn’t that you are unwilling to change or to mix things up, it is just that you want the friendship of an album and not the acquaintance of a song. You are ready for commitment to a set of artists, instead of jumping from one genre to the next at a moments notice.

So, the album is the new mix, and it is a shame in the era of iTunes that this form of music is dying or giving up on itself. While the digital media revolution of the past 20 years may eventually get rid of the 10 song CD, it may push us out further into never having to listen to an album for 2-3 good songs. We expect more out of the music we consume. We expect every song to be good. And that is why the albums of today are so comfortable. I won’t tolerate a set of music that is only good enough to be put onto a mix. I won’t let those few moments I have for truly solitary music listening to be soiled by either the schizophrenia of the mix or the unevenness of a bad album.

I want only the good stuff, but I want the good stuff to have a story, an arch. I want it to match who I am right now without having to work all of that out in a playlist creator. I want the artists to be like me and I think that is slowly starting to happen. We are all trying to make our way in life, and it requires an honesty of vision and the relentless pursuit of iteration.

I will be better tomorrow than I am today, and I want music that shows that same level of maturity.

(Any albums you care to share with me on this journey?)

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Problem with Playlists (blogcritics.org)

Question 206 of 365: Where is the open book?

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.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Kindle 3, Kindle 4 vs Tablets – The Next Battle (ireaderreview.com)

Question 190 of 365: Should we be after pure research?

I’ve been rereading Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. recently. I always forget how good that book is until I take another look at it. While the idea that I am most drawn to in the book is that of the false religion (self-proclaimed by the creator itself.), the one that seems to keep on haunting me is the idea that one of the characters was a pure research man. He was someone who didn’t bend to the wants of the people around him for fulfillment of a job. Rather, he studied only what he was interested in studying. Sure, he created the atom bomb and a new way for ice to form, but he didn’t do those things necessarily on purpose. He did them just because he got interested in them. At least for a while.

He was a pure researcher in the sense that he wasn’t required to produce anything of use. He was just paid to think and create.

I sometimes wish for such a job, free from the constraints of a requirements document or a meeting schedule. Pure research sounds like heaven, but then I realize what I would be giving up.

If I never bent my will to those of other people, I would never get anything done. It is only through other people asking me to do things and putting up fictitious deadlines in my way that I have a sense of worth.

I am not one who can toil away and never come up with something great. I have to convince myself that the things I create are great, and then I must convince other people too. Pure research gets in the way of two people having a conversation about where to go from here.

I feel as though we may be setting one another up to lust after pure research, always reaching further into the isolated extreme in order to attain it. We may be so much after the sense of freedom that comes from not answering to anyone or anything for your thoughts and whims that we make believe we have already attained it from time to time. What I mean by that is that we get lazy because there is only so much passion that people can devote to the next big thing. We become entrenched in the drama of offering solutions to other people’s problems. So entrenched that we become complacent in getting ourselves out of bed. We believe that just by thinking after something and experimenting within ourselves that we have created something of value.

But we haven’t.

Pure research creates some of the most interesting and useful products and projects, but on the whole it is a mirage. The beauty of creation is in making it useful and relevant. The conversations and implications of what we create are often more important than the things themselves. If we ever forget that, we will slip into the position of head quack of our organization.

We can’t become what we can become if we only want to follow our own interests. It takes two to tango, you know.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Careers for Pure Mathematicians (ask.metafilter.com)
• The Hundred Martyrs to Democracy (teabreak.pk)
• Kurt Vonnegut and Drama in Stories and Life (kevinwmccarthy.com)

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

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.

Question 162 of 365: When does a voice hold us close?

Kurt Vonnegut is the first author that I ever truly loved. It started with Hocus Pocus and Slaughter House Five, but it really matured when I read his short stories in Welcome to the Monkey House. In each one of his longer works I could see him building the characters and the twisted plots over an entire book. In his shorter works, he had to do all of his development and cleverness so quickly. It was wonderful reading each short story for the first time and being surprised with each one that the last line would draw me in and make me question my assumptions.

I recently purchased an audio version of Welcome to the Monkey House, and I have been listening to them diligently as NPR is on a pledge week. Each turn of phrase that I admired is back in front of me. I never get tired of hearing about The Handicapper General in Harrison Burgeron or becoming Amphibious in Not Ready to Wear. Each character comes back me as clear as the first time I knew that they existed.

The erodes themselves are unnerving in their ease at creating something old and encouraging within me. It is as if these people reading the stories were the original ones in my head and I am just now hearing them outside for the first time. I am entranced. I hear those words and I am transported back to a time without responsibilities and nothing but free time. Vonnegut always had just enough satire and just enough punch lines to keep me conjuring up new images and metaphors that he could call at a monpment’s notice.

And so I think about what makes the words so special and my first instinct is to call upon nostalgia as the full answer. But in reality, it is simple bending of my body’s will to fulfill what my mind wants. You see, I am perfectly still when I am listening to these stories, at least so long as my gross motor movements are concerned. My body can’t get in the way of the words and neither can anything else. I listen and I obsorb. I wonder how often we let that happen?

The key to letting a voice affect you (and the things that the voice was saying, I sup lose) is to simply stop moving the rest of you long enough to let the voice bring you in. While the story should be good enough to hold your attention, it is all in the act of not moving that will translate from something that is good to something that changes lives. Putting my body in a vulnerable position(we are all vulnerable when we are still) let’s my ears and my mind become receptive.

It is in this spirit that I would like to sit with you. No questions asked and no unnecessary movements.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Video Interview: Kurt Vonnegut (gointothestory.com)
• “Who Am I This Time?” by Kurt Vonnegut (gointothestory.com)

Question 137 of 365: What is our mass pike?

I loved the smell of show on my pants. The mix of smoke, sweat and other people’s energy. My pants told the tale of a lot of good nights. I had friends that told me to wear the pants the day after the show for good luck, but I was always a little worried that other people would think I was a bum. You see, I went to a lot of shows when I was in high school, mostly punk and indie bands that most people hand’t heard of. I thought I was being cool by attending the underground music scene.

At one such show for the Get Up Kids, I was getting my pants sufficiently stained and odiferous. I invited a friend of mine to come along and she obliged. We got their early enough to stand next to the stage in the packed club, the kind that really should only fit a hundred, but was stuffed with something more like 2 hundred.

It just so happened that as the music started a strong willed boy pushed his way up to the front and started to crowd my friend. With every song, he would push harder to get into her space. He didn’t want to stand where she was standing, he just wanted to push. About halfway through the show I put my leg up on the three foot stage and made a barricade for my friend, using my leg as a fence.

I tried to talk to the boy, talking some sense into him about just enjoying the show, but he would have none of it. He just wanted to push. He wanted to make sure that no one had a good time but him, and he succeeded for the most part.

That is, until the song Mass Pike came on. It was the song that took me by surprise and made the experience worthwhile. When the first chords started on the keyboard, I didn’t even notice that I had to hold back a sea of drunk muscle.

I don’t know exactly what all of this means, but I think that I am holding back the muscle of something much larger than myself at the moment.

I am at the big show, the one that I have been waiting for a really long time. I am excited about being here with someone I love, and I am gearing up to blown away. Up has waltzed a force that has the capability of making sure that I can’t dance or move the ways that I want to. And all I am looking for is the few moments when all of this pressure and undisclosed animosity can melt away in favor of just hearing the music. I want it to flow over me and take us away from the unending push of life.

I understand that pushes like the are what make pants smell the best. I understand that the struggle and the sweat are enough to release just the right bouquet of aroma. I want to be bullied and leaned against, but I also want there to be moments of relaxed extacy. And there will be I just have to know how to look for them.

This is how I knew at the Get Up Kids show, and I’m pretty sure it is how I will know now: I will close my eyes and hear the notes play, just the intro. When those chords come through, the right combination of things that make the back of my head tingle. And I will have a moment of knowing that it won’t last and wanting it to anyway. I work backward from the feeling and tag the moment with every descriptor I can muster so that I can’t possibly forget. And I feel safe in every moment because I know the words and it is my song, our song, being played just for us. That is when I no longer feel the pressure. That is the moment I am waiting for.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Indie Kid-Friendly Bands (time.com)
• Sick of It All – Based on a True Story (thenewreview.net)

Question 127 of 365: Whose hands are we in?

I used to have trouble reading. Not with the words that were on the page or with figuring out the metaphorical language either. I had trouble listening to what the author had to say. I constantly let my world view crowd out anything that was being intended. It can be said, that for a time, I couldn’t read.

Specifically, I couldn’t read Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. I couldn’t understand that there could have been a time when people thought of God as only angry and not filled with grace and love. I kept apologizing for the author. I kept on injecting my evangelical upbringing into the equasion because that is the only way that it made sense. My background blinded me to the truth that was meant to strike fear into anyone that heard those words. When I spoke from this ignorant perspective, my English teacher corrected me, and rightfully so. He wanted me to be able to see what was really there and not what I was putting there in its place.

I would like to think that I can read now, that I can listen to everything that is coming in and respond to it as truth. I would like to believe that my response to the world is not of replacing reality with my own, but in responding to the reality that other represent so that we can all exist without modification.

But, I’m not sure I still can read things while I suspend my own world view. I’m not sure that I can have conversations without my narrow-minded focus getting in the way.

Today, I had a discussion about the virtues of collaboration, as I do on many days. This time, though, I monopolized the conversation because people were looking to me for possibilities. I brought forward options for co-authoring a resource. I put together a collaborative document, and then let the idea fly.

My question is, what didn’t I read by doing this?

What world-view, no matter how steeped in my own experience, is causing me to keep reliving the same event with my English teacher all those years ago. Back then, I was told I was wrong. Today… nothing.

The biggest reason for it is that I didn’t allow allow silence to occur as it naturally would as people are thinking. Akward pauses do not mean that people have nothing to contribute, but I treated them that way. I didn’t allow the pause to mean as much as the note (to borrow one of my favorite musical metaphors). If I was half the collaborator that I am claiming to be, I would have let people not talk for more than 30 seconds. I would have asked people their stories about their own co-creative endeavors. I would have not tried to “push-back” on others ideas, but simply listen and try to absorb what it is important.

Here is one thing that I believe: All the world is a text.

Not a stage or a performance or a game or a challenge. The world is a text, to be read and understood. To be listened to and noted. It doesn’t need my additions in order to be complete. It needs me to underline and annotate. It needs me to put up sticky notes and tell others just how great it is.

And if the world is a text, I need to read it better. The information is there, I just have to try and figure out what it is telling me.

So, here is what I would like to do:

1. Take 1 e-mail a week and try to figure out with other people exactly what is being communicated. I would like to dissect the diction and parse the syntax. I would like to analyze the stories and try and see the significance of the words. I would like to ascertain the author’s purpose and use all of this information to better figure out just what the relationship is between the sender and myself.

2. Take a single meeting a week and not talk. I would like to take copious notes on everything that I hear, but I would like the luxury of not talking in at least one meeting a week. I would like to use this time to hone my listening and contextualizing skills.

3. Draw a lot. I am a terrible artist, but there is nothing that is so honest as a few chicken scratches. I don’t feel awkward about being wrong in a drawing. I can represent the texts that I see around me, and be proud that I am doing my best to represent them alone because I don’t know how to be more artful. In writing, I can make things more descriptive (and perhaps deceptive) than they really are. In a crappy drawing, they are what they are.

In the end, I want to be in the hands of anyone that is angry. I want to get caught up in the text of those experiences. I want to know them intimately and believe that they are someone’s truth. Those hands are the only kind that matter to me at this point because the hands that I chose to create only support an increibly small amount. I want big strong hands, those that support everything we need to experience the texts around us.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 7 reasons Why MANY smart people have trouble communicating their ideas (lifebeyondcode.com)
• Understand and listen? (thecustomercollective.com)

Question 119 of 365: How can you have everything?

I stood where Bill Gates is standing right now.

I’m not sure why that matters, but knowing that I was previously in the same space as one of the most influential people in the world is downright unnerving. It is as if the universe has now made the comparison between us. Not a connection, but a comparison. Of all of the people that have existed in that space, he is the one that has done the most good for the world health crisis. He is the one who has funded the most schools. He is the one that has made the most money and changed the world with his computing vision.

Today, in the cafeteria of the Science Leadership Academy, Bill Gates took question from high school students that I have met and have had conversations with. He looked through the same windows that I have and walked through the same doors. Now, watching him do these things on a live video feed is nothing compared to the experience of actually being there with him. But, perhaps it is better this way. I don’t have to be embarrassed at my relative lack of accomplishment. I will never have to stand up to him and justify my own work against his.

And I know he doesn’t care, but I don’t need him to. I don’t look up to him as if he were a god among men and I don’t need his approval to make my own small contributions to society. I do, however, want to listen to him. I want to know his story, both of his successes and failures. I want to see that the cosmic comparison continues to weigh everything and come up with an answer at the end of it all, not in terms of who matters more but rather a comparison of two ideas. Because at the end of the day, there is an idea of Bill Gates and there is an idea of Ben Wilkoff. Our ideas intersect and separate at different points. They both have a narrative, an arch, and many plot devices. I don’t think that just sharing the same space is the only part of our “ideas” that cross paths either.

In telling his own story, he said that it you can have everything. He said that all of the world’s knowledge can be found in libraries and online. He said that the basis of getting what you want out of life was a good education. He said these things because they mesh with his story, with the idea of Bill Gates.

They also match my story. I have everything. Everything that I need for information, for connection, and for creation. I had a wonderful education, and I figured out just what it means to learn (although, mostly outside of a formalized setting). I read books and blogs and tweets. I see the world’s information and I incorporate it into the idea of me.

That is why we should listen to people. Whether they are Bill Gates or someone in the supermarket. That is why we have to constantly compare notes on what kinds of stories we are telling to one another. We need to be aware that whenever two people have shared the same space and time, there is a comparison that must be shared. When we see differences, we should recognize them. We should celebrate the fact that our stories aren’t the same. We should also look for those places that our ideas match up. When we find those places, we should feel connected to an understanding that we indeed are experiencing the same reality as one another. We should feel incredibly happy that neither of our ideas are entirely flawed because we have shared something special. When the ideas of ourselves resonate with one another, it doesn’t matter if one knows it and the other doesn’t. So long as someone is making note that there was a singularity of vision for a brief moment, that is enough. It is enough to know that Bill Gates and myself, for the moment that the story was being told and heard, are allowed to let our ideas meld.

I was in Target the other day with my two children and an elderly man stopped me after I paid for our groceries. He told me that he had four children and that for a few years he had to leave them alone with his wife while he was in the War. He said that his entire family had a food budget of $15 per week, and they were able to stretch it and make it work. I had just paid for $150 of groceries that may not even last us the week. That is a factor of 10. He said that the number almost made him fall out of his bench seat as he waited for his wife to get out of the bathroom. In that moment, he noticed that our stories were drastically different from one another. He was both making a note of that fact and allowing me to do the same.

At some point in the future, I may understand exactly what he was talking about. For right now, I can just be thankful for the story. At some point, I may be able to hold the same understanding as he did of leaving his children and wife behind to work toward a cause greater than himself, but for right now I can just listen. Perhaps, that is all that any of us can do.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Author Calls for Action to Stop Bill Gates’ Abduction of US Education (techrights.org)
• Bill Gates Pushes His Foundation’s Health, Education, Energy Agenda at MIT – The Podcast (xconomy.com)
• Bill Gates’s Dad Wants to Tax the Rich (Again) (blogs.wsj.com)
• Bill Gates urges Americans to join ONE on Idol Gives Back (one.org)
• Gates’ college tour in one slide (news.cnet.com)