Question 288 of 365: Are we picking fights?

I am offended by the things that might happen. Not the things you are saying or doing, but the the things that you might say or do if allowed to continue. I will argue with you now in the hopes of not having to argue with you the next time around. I am trying to help you. I’m trying to convince you that it’s going to be better in the long run. I’m trying to lay the groundwork so that political paranoia doesn’t spoil every decision we make. And you aren’t listening.

This is me choosing to pick fights now. I am going out of my way to be contrary. I think that I might be proving a point, but it seems as though I am doing nothing but losing face and momentum. As much as I speak about collaboration, I’m worried that I’m choosing to be difficult with some. I push my own agenda and I am afraid of what will happen if I stray.

I am also afraid of the fights I pick, or at least of the people I am picking them with. I am afraid of what they will say and where I will end up if I lose control of the conversation. I am afraid of losing my workflow and my identity simply by agreeing. I have decided that because they are wrong, I must develop a counter opinion. It is a sick game I am playing across the table. Every move is about trying to move into a stale mate, a cats game.

The pressure I feel is not unlike when I was in 7th grade choir class.

We couldn’t start the rehearsal until everyone’s back was straight and away from the back of the chairs. I always slouched in those days and I had made a point of telling people about this. I thought that I could sing perfectly fine in that position and I would stake my reputation on it. On one particularly strong-willed day, I stayed in the slouching position for 10 whole minutes while everyone in the classroom from the teacher to other would-be slouchers were trying to convince me to see the error of my ways. Some called me names and others simply rolled their eyes. I was going to wait them out, or wait for the teacher to break. I didn’t have any trouble being sent out of the room. I wanted to take my own position, quite literally. I made no friends that day.

I sat the way I wanted, just as I sit across the table and debate the minutiae.

I want to prove something, but I’m not sure what.

I want to collaborate, but on my terms.

I want to frame change, but I want to decide what goes in the frame.

Question 241 of 365: What is a unisexual?

U is for unicycle.

I know because a toy told me.

My daughter asked me about the validity of that statement. She wanted to know about unicycles. She couldn’t quite understand why someone would want want to ride on a means of conveyance that looked like that. More than anything, though, she wanted to know why they called it a unicycle.

To that question, I said this:

“Uni means one, so its a cycle with only one wheel. Bi means two, so a bicycle is one with two wheels.”

Innocent and unassuming, but I could have gone even further. I could have spoken about the immense amount of balance it requires or that clowns ride them quite often. I could have also called her attention to the boy who was riding one outside of the drug store in Aspen. Instead, I just made the simple delineation between two and one. There are so many things that can be made simple through the means of a good prefix. By adding a few words to the beginning of the words we use, we can be so descriptive and precise. The problem is in when we use the wrong ones.

Monocycle sounds incredibly strange. And yet, why not? We say Monocle and Monorail when there is only one and yet we use Unicycle instead. Uni somehow implies independent and freeing; it is universal and unidirectional . Mono is monotonous or monomaniacal; it stands for the worst of being a single one.

Entire debates are framed about prefixes. The debate over homo or hetero is quite serious and intrusive into our lives. The most troubling part of the debate is that there seems to be no middle ground. One prefix means same and the other means different. And yet, a bisexual is someone who is attracted to both sexes. With the logic required of a four year old to understand the differences in cycles, why isn’t a unisexual those that are attracted to only one sex?

Wouldn’t it just be easier to describe those that are engaged in singular relationships to have a singular word to describe it?

Sure, unisexual doesn’t exactly have the same entitled tone that homosexual or heterosexual has, but I think that is only because of all of the baggage that those two words have had to carry for so long. The common ground here is in the fact that a great many people are attracted to one sex over the other. If that is something to celebrate, do so. By categorizing people with only the straight or gay prefixes, unisexuality has no ability to take hold. We are caught up in trying to find ways to slice up demographics and drill down to who likes, has done, or is passionate about what. We should be looking to the unicycle for inspiration.

Whether or not a children’s game told me that U is for Unisexual or not, I don’t mind. A unicycle is independent and crowd pleasing. Unisexuality can be too. We can go anywhere and support tiny changes to the creations of the world around us. We can explore the language of us and leave behind the language of “you.”

Question 192 of 365: Where is the crazy?

Crazy people are everywhere. Not just the run of the mill crazy, either. I’m talking about completely out of their head insane, unable to reason their way through modern daily life, wringing their hqnds of all connection to reality, playing the fool way too well for it to be considered acting.

The reason I mention this is simply because I don’t think I have been doing a good enough job of rooting out the crazy in my life. Not for years, in fact.

When I was about 14 or so, I realized that being bored was a choice. I realized that I didn’t have to sit through whatever someone was talking about without letting my mind wander on to more interesting and productive things. Whenever I was alone and had little to do, I would just start writing. Whenever I was in the presenence of a boring subject, I would read or doodle. People who kept on complaining of boredom just weren’t interesting to me. Whqt I realize now is that they are, in fact, crazy. Or, they are about to become crazy.

It is my belief that crazy is a result of not thinking enough or not being able to find something engaging to occupy your time. Not having passion is just plain crazy. And it leads people to do the worst things imaginable.

Like blaming folks for how they try to experience the world around them. Like shaming others for grieving or for feeling or for thinking about much of anything at all. Passionless people are incapable of perspective, and that is what makes them crazy. It is also how you can pick them out of a lineup.

Sitting in a meeting or even in talking to a relative, if you get the sense that someone else can’t consider another point of view, you may want to check their crazy level.

We used to play this game called colored eggs on thenplayground in elementary school. It was a type of tag, where everyone would line up and think of a color out of a typical crayon box (64 crayons being the max that we thought was okay to try for) and then one person would stand opposite of the line and start to guess all of the colors. If the person guessed one of the person’s colors that was standing on the line, the person whose color was guessed would have to run to the other side of the playground without getting tagged. If the person was caught, they would become one of the taggers until there wasn’t anyone left on the line.

There was one boy who never chose any different colors. He always picked the same one: goldenrod. He thought that he was so brilliant in his choice that he would brag to everyone else at lunch about it. He would say, “you are never going to guess what I’m going to be today.” and then when we got out on the playground, the guesser would inevitably go through the more common colors first to try and get as many people off the line as possible. And there this boy would stand, completely confident that he was going to outlast everyone.

He never did, by the way. To my knowledge he never technically won the game. More of the time, he would claim victory because we had to go in from recess and he would still be on the line. We never guessed goldenrod because we didn’t much care about capturing him. We didn’t understand why he didn’t pick a different color so that he could play the tag part of the game. That was the fun part. Thqt was the part that got your heart pumping, that actually helped you to make friends.

When I look back on it now, I can tell that the boy was crazy for choosing goldenrod every day. He was crazy because he had to have his way rather than to join in. He had to have the obscure color rather than learn what the game was about.

The crazy is in each of us, when we find we are in a rut. It is in us when we are stubborn. It is in us when we stop looking around and seeing the differences between us that make us interesting enough to want to sit down and talk to. It is us when we allow ourselves to be bored.

I need to do a better job of rooting out my crazy, whether that is within myself or in the people around me. Otherwise, I might as well be choosing the same color for every day of my life.

Question 180 of 365: Are we selfish?

I have never liked cavorting. I find the nimble act of careless frolicking to be unnerving. Done within the snow is even more scary. You have to dress for the occasion and know that the people you are with will not laugh at you. The mood is almost never right for frolicking. I can’t have just settled down with a book or ready to go to work. I certainly can’t be half-asleep when it starts to snow and be asked to frolic by my girlfriend in college and feel an amazing need to leave our dorm room with heavy clothes on to go and cavort at two in the morning.

Surely, no one could say that this was selfish. Hopefully, you see that cavorting under the circumstances was not my first choice. How dare she ask me to do that when all I wanted to was sleep. Her understanding of my needs was lacking, which was much of the reason that we broke up after about 7 months of dating. And yet, this was the moment that I realized that I was inherently selfish. That my own needs were above those of people that I loved.

In everything that has happened since, I have been trying to unravel what it is that would cause me to get up and cavort like I want to do it as much as the one I’m with. And more than that, what would cause me to stop doing whatever I am doing and start working with those that I love toward their priorities.

Last night I went out and spent money. Money my family doesn’t have at the moment, at least not for going out without my family. I felt selfish in the act, and even worse in the aftermath. Explaining away the expenditure seems to be as painful as realizing that I didn’t want to frolic with my ex-girlfriend. I realized that my priorities are not the same in that moment as what my wife wants and what my family needs.

That kind of selfishness is excusable sometimes, but I can’t say that it ever feels okay. I may have needed last night, but it was at the expense of what the rest of me (my family) needed. How can I justify that? How can I allow myself to be separated from who I am to simply go after what I want?

I know I will work it out, but if I am honest with myself, I know that I made the wrong decision last night. I’m okay with being wrong, but this is a bad wrong. I can and will learn from it, but why couldn’t I see it before the fact? I saw the separation, but somehow I thought it was justified. It isn’t.

And it makes me wonder about all of the things that we deny and separate out so that we can be selfish for a moment. Keeping in sync with the people that mean more to me than anything else is the only thing that matters. The conference, the meeting, the blog post, and the unending grind of the public sphere is designed to separate us out into our interests and capacities.

The get together will boil us down to our most selfish interests. We network because we want more than we have, even if that is just a good conversation. We meet to advance the things who will become while cutting of a little bit of who we are. We mask the worst of ourselves much of the time because we are envious of this version of ourselves that doesn’t really exist. And that may be healthy for some, but not for me. At least not after last night.

I am selfish, and I know what it costs. It costs me cavorting and frolicking and enjoying the company of the people that will feed my passion. And this is how I know:

Last night was exhausting. Going out for happy hour with my wife gives me energy. That is the kind of cavorting that I need. Those moments that keep me energized are the ways that I know I am not being selfish because I am completely in sync with the other person’s needs. I want to be in sync with my family because they give me the energy to live. And I want to live, without being too selfish.

Question 170 of 365: What is the benefit of rubber handled safety scissors?

The inconsequential saved my daughter a lot of pain today. It probably saved us a trip to the hospital. It definitely saved us finding out the hard way if electrocution is possible using nothing more than a pair of scissors. Frankly, that is not something I ever care to know, at least not first hand.

Today, my daughter cut the power cord on a lamp that was plugged in.

As I rushed to her to figure out why she and her brother were being so quiet behind the chair, I saw her make the snip and I watched as a spark and a cloud of smoke immediately came off of the metal. She knew something was wrong, that she had really provoked a response from the environment around her. But until she saw my face, she didn’t flip out.

After I started to look her all over for signs of burns or brain damage, she started to wail. I snatched her up and held her as close as I have ever held another human. As I consoled her, I looked at the scissors. They were blackened and a bit had broken off. She had just enough time to cut through the cord without me seeing that it was her intention to do so. She would have been injured if it were not for the rubber handles on her scissors. The purple grips that I found cute when we bought them turned out to be a rather important feature.

I feels it is something they should put on the packaging, actually:

“If your child cuts a power cord clean through, she will not get electrocuted. Guaranteed.”

That, for me, is going to be the key feature on every pair of scissors I buy in the future. I won’t even look at metal only or plastic handle scissors. Those won’t keep my children from this particular tragedy. No. The only scissors for me are the ones within which I can feel their electricity diffusing power. And, as I look at the burns on the metal, where my daughter made her cut, I can feel nothing but grateful that I unwittingly made that choice.

And it is always that way. The feature that seems inconsequential becomes essential.

When camera phones came out, I thought that they were a ripoff. I couldn’t imagine any reason why someone would want a subpar camera in their phone and pay a premium for the privilege. Now, though, they the extension of our brains. They capture what we can’t text. They grab bar codes and do searches. They Evernote the world and do video conferencing. They have probably saved a few lives too, simply by being a witness when everyone else isn’t around.

It is our responsibility to find the things that don’t mean anything at first and then take on life giving qualities. It is up to us to seek out the features that provide hope to desperate circumstances. These are the ones that go unnoticed for years but take on massive importance just as soon as someone figures them out.

I am a feature that is in need of finding too. At some point, I hope to save lives like the rubber handles. I may end up with some scars in the process like the metal blades, but at least I will be of use. I will be essential then, and everyone will know that I have been built this way for a purpose. That I work on what I should day in and day out in the hopes that someone will choose me rather than someone else, someone less prepared for the risky tasks. I’m not looking to be a martyr, but I would step in the way if I knew that someone or some idea I loved was going to be hurt.

I fight to be in the tool drawer for when I am needed. I just hope the people that pick me will be as discerning as we were with our choice of scissors.

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Question 160 of 365: When is something both good and true?

We have been warned all of our lives that things that seem too good to be true, probably are. This healthy sense of skepticism is bred into us at very young age. This is done so that we don’t go home with strangers and so that we don’t believe everything that we hear or read or experience. It makes sense to not get your hopes up every single time something good happens, but it is also not as much fun or as exciting as if we did.

On a regular basis I receive tweets and phone calls that could change my life if I let them. It isn’t so much that I don’t want them to, it is just this skepticism that keeps getting in the way. I can’t possibly make myself as vulnerable as I would need to in order to explore each of the opportunities that have arisen. And yet, if I do nothing, nothing exciting will ever happen.

The truth is that sometimes true things are good and sometimes they are even spectacular. He chain of events isn’t always so easy to follow, but after a while, the events really start to take shape.

I once owned a Nerf basketball hoop that I would play with in my bedroom. It was the kind that even my brother could dunk on. We used to all get on our knees and play a half-court press game for hours on end. At was until it broke at the hands of my older brother.

He paid me back for the present even though I hwd received it as a gift , and for that I am eternally grateful. With that 20 dollars plus some other birthday money I bought my first ever gaming system (a sew genesis). After a few years of Sonic the Hedgehog and friends, I decided to trade in the Sega and purchase my first brand new computer game (Full Throttle, an adventure game). This commuter game hoped to usher in an era of exploration and experimentation with computers that has not stopped to this day.

And while that path may have been assured by many other factors, it was this single Nerf game that was directly responsible for the events unfolding as they did. In this case, the facts were both good and true.

So whenever I see an opportunity, even now, I look at it as if it might be the next Nerf basketball hoop. I know that there was no way for me to make that judgement upon sinking the first basket, but I try to see it anyway.

I try to see all of the possible ramifications of my choices and figure if they have any truth to them, or goodness for that matter. I start talking to the tweets and other opportunities as if they we ere simply plot devices, and as if I am the director of some cosmic play. Some objects are just props, but even those have meaning. All I have to do is figure out what.

I’ll let you kniw what I figure out.

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Question 11 of 365: Why does the world need perpetual beta?

Beta testing used to be something that a few early adopters did. It used to be a big deal to be a “beta tester.” I remember applying to become a beta tester when I was in the 8th grade for Epic MegaGames, the creators of Unreal (although, I was wanting to beta test things like Jazz Jackrabbit and Jill of the Jungle). I went through quite a process of Non-disclosure forms and written interviews. After all, I was getting to see a product long before others were. In fact, the process was so long (about 2 months), that I got fed up with it just as they sent me the final Beta Tester Contract and I never saw a single game before it was released.

Now though, there is almost never even an application to be a beta tester. It has become something that everyone does. The word beta is attached to products for much longer than was ever thought reasonable (gmail was in beta for 5 years). Why has this shift occurred, and more importantly, why is it a good thing?

It is my contention that everyone should be a beta tester and that perpetual beta should be the norm.

Beta teaches us that we are never finished, that there is always something to do better. It teaches us that we are all fallible and that we all make mistakes. Beta asks for a community to be formed to discuss what is working and what isn’t. Beta requires feedback. Perpetual beta means that new discoveries are around every corner. It shows that single contributions can have a great affect on the overall experience for millions of people. It allows us to become better. It also allows us to fail.

So, why not put beta on other institutions besides software? Why can’t we call our schools “beta” and our students, “beta testers”? Why can’t we call our Government “beta”? Doesn’t saying that our educational systems and our systems of government are finished products seem a little arrogant? If we were to apply the label to more than just software, I believe that many more people would feel comfortable to try new things and get feedback for those things.

I realize now that when I was in the classroom, I really did think about my students as beta testers for their own learning. They were trying out hypotheses and seeing what feedback I would give them. They would change drastically from version to version sometimes, but would always settle on who they really were. Their user interface would get reinvented every single day, but their bugs were never so terrible as to get them shelved.

Perhaps the metaphor is stretched a little thin here, but I think that if we could show just how much beta has done for the american psyche (not having to be perfect at every step, learning from mistakes, being innovative), I think that we may just have a chance to create change without having to dismantle entire systems. I think that a big rubber stamp should be fashioned with that iconic word for our time and we should apply it to anything that doesn’t already have the moniker. Because whether we believe it or not, if you don’t say you are in beta, you are just fooling yourself.

The Ripe Environment: Connecting more than two dots.

There is a severe lack of time in the air. It pervaides every conversation I hear on many days:

“No, I don’t have time for that collaboration right now. Maybe after this quarter is over.”
“Are you sure that it has to be due tomorrow. I really think that having the weekend when I don’t have games or practices or school would make more sense.”
“I don’t even have time to think.”

Hyperbole aside, this lacking is palpable. I think it is one of the only times that a lack of something can be more heavily felt and deeply understood than the presence of it. Many people, though, have just gotten used to having no time to connect the disparate parts of their working or waking lives. It has become the film upon our skin that always coats our interactions but can’t be rubbed or cleaned off.

I am not one of those people, however. I believe that connecting the dots and creating time for that process is possible. I believe that it is all about creating a Workflow of Passion (requires a better name, but that’s all I’ve got).

When I say passion, I do not mean that you must be equally in love with every assignment or task that you come across. Instead, I mean that there is something meaningful within each thing that you do. There is some meat there, no matter how hidden it may be in the luke-warm soup of “other stuff.” The only way to craft the time to connect that meat to something else equally meaty is to plunge your spoon in and not be satisfied with the carrot or water chestnut you come up with the first time. (I would like to apologize to both the literary crowd who sees the metaphor being stretched thin and the vegetarian crowd who beleives that no one should be looking for meat within a vegetarian soup.)

So, what does this spoon plunging action look like. Well, I have recently taken to a maxim for resolving the issue of time suckage and distraction in the classroom and out.

“Use the tool that has everything you want, and nothing you don’t.”

Although the different image settings in Photo Booth are cool, the distraction factor is so high that it is nearly impossible to use it as an instructional tool (for kids or adults).

Wikipedia provides a cornocopia of educational resources, but blind searches are still stabs in the soup that lead to less than appetizing results.

The Ripe Environment is anywhere that makes information clickable, that sets the path of least resistance to learning as the norm. The Ripe Environment is a place that doesn’t waste time on stuff that doesn’t matter. It is a place that the workflow always works for the user, according to their needs and passions.