The Pioneer Press is running an article today about couples who use Twitter and the different ways they handle exchanging such public messages. The article features several couples including Steph and me, and our good friends Kevin and Abby Hendricks. I think the only way to beat being in a front-page article is having a bunch of good friends in the article with you.
I’ve been given a copy of the article in PDF, and permission to post it here. Enjoy!
I’ve commented in the past on this blog about how much I love the Muppets. For the last six years a rare “Think Different” poster of Jim Henson and Kermit has hung in my workspace. But I don’t think I’ve ever explained where my love of the Muppets and Jim Henson came from, or how deep it once was. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share that story now.
My love of the Muppets started before I can remember, but I’m sure it was due to Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. I grew up watching Sesame Street as a toddler in the late 70s and only very slowly tapered off watching regularly through the mid 80s. I remember Mr. Hooper dying in 1982. I even remember the cast discovering that Mr. Snuffleupagus wasn’t just a figment of Big Bird’s imagination in 1985. Sesame Street characters were in the toys I played with as a child, and their names were among some of the first words I learned.
As if that influence wasn’t enough, my mother owned professionally-made puppets and would put on puppet shows for the kids in our church and in other local organizations. By the time I was six I had joined her (I think my sister had as well). I learned to keep my thumb pointed towards the floor (lest my puppet stare at the ceiling), not bite my words, and on some puppets, operate the rod attached to the puppet’s hand. When I was nine I had a couple of my own cheap puppets (B-list “Chewy Granola” cartoon characters I probably got from a box-top offer) and had tape-recorded my own script for use in my school’s talent show. I performed both characters at the same time. By that time, everyone knew that I was aiming to become a pro, and that I idolized Jim Henson. I loved the way that the Muppets were able to create entertainment that was enjoyed by kids and teenagers and adults, and all for different reasons.
Then, in May of 1990, and at the height of my love of puppetry, Jim Henson died.
I don’t remember where I was when I heard about it or how I felt initially. But one evening later that summer, when I was almost twelve, my family and I were eating dinner at home and chatting. Somehow, a few weeks after it happened, the subject of Jim Henson’s death came up. We had already spoken about it, but not much. They knew I respected him, studied puppeteering, and hoped to join the Muppets, but I think the question of whether my plans had changed had never come up. Perhaps that was the question put to me.
My initial reaction to the question was one of self-protection. I wanted to show that I wasn’t bothered that some old puppeteer had died. I was almost a teenager, and I was supposed to be growing aloof at this point. I made some sarcastic comment like, “Oh, I’m so sad he’s gone. Boo hoo!” and faked crying and rubbed my eyes like a mime.
Then I surprised even myself when my fake tears turned to sobbing. All conversation stopped and my embarrassment grew as my tears splashed down on my dinner plate, and I realized I hadn’t mourned him, hadn’t thought through how my plans might change now that the visionary creator of that world was gone.
I didn’t know it then, but over the next three years I would conclude that they weren’t worth joining any longer, and decide to pursue a career in music. Sometimes I see things they’ve done and feel it was the right decision. Other times I’m not so sure. I love what I do now, but there’s a certain magic and purity to a story like this one that’s hard to resist.
Steph and I have been thinking and conversing a lot lately about how we, as a society, are losing touch with the day-to-day reality of survival. In some ways this can be seen as progress, and in others it’s a dangerous trend. The difficult part is distinguishing which side each outsourced piece of life falls into.
The following list should show you what I mean. I admit, it’s subjective and made off the top of my head, but it consists of the things I believe are the building blocks of society and human growth. These are all necessary things. In other words, if these things went away or were constricted in some way, it would cause serious problems with the development and survival of the human race.
These are things we need as humans. There are exceptions, of course. Perhaps not every single person needs to be involved in making babies, but if everybody stops making babies, we’ve got a big problem. If we don’t educate the young and educate ourselves, we’ve got a big problem. If we can’t protect the stuff we’ve worked to gain and maintain, we’ve got a big problem. You get the idea.
Now, let’s look at how these things were done a few hundred years ago. You probably already know where I’m going with this. If not, see if you spot a trend. (If you see something wrong in my history here, feel free to correct it with citations in the comments.)
The trend, of course, is that people tended to have a deep involvement in the necessary elements for their and their loved ones’ own lives. If you were hungry, you generally had to go out and kill or harvest your own food. You taught your own kids, and cared for your own parents. As a side note, its an interesting trend that the rich were less involved in each of these elements, choosing instead to pay someone else to take care of them in their stead.
Now let’s compare the old ways of doing these things with some of the newest developments in each field. Some of these are not the most popular way in which these things are done, but they are new developments which are rising in popularity. (“Rising” is a relative term, and I am not at all suggesting these will be the only way these tasks are done in the future.) Note that when I say “we” below, I’m not talking about individual people, but rather most of the people in a given society that does these things.
Before you jump all over me for that list, let me point out that I’m not saying these developments are all bad. What if we don’t all need to know how to grow our own food? In these more modern times, we have the freedom to spend time doing something besides going to “corn class.” I’ll be the first person here to cheer for the doctors and nurses that helped deliver Caleb. After Steph’s pre-eclampsia had gotten under control and Caleb was born, I asked one of our nurses, “What would have happened a hundred years ago in this situation?” She was blunt: “Your wife would be dead.” Hooray doctors!!
Still, that modern list reveals some problems, too. Depending on your leanings, different things will appear to be a problem to different people. Some think Australia has gone astray and are cheering the US Supreme Court’s recent decision. Some think a committed, hard-working parent would give their own child an education far, far better than any public school could provide. Some think the outsourcing of our food supply has led to less healthy food, obesity, and more inhumane treatment of animals. Some feel that the outsourcing of general consumer goods has lead to more industrial waste, toxic landfills, and higher carbon emissions. Even Pixar’s new movie Wall-E cautions its viewers about outsourcing reality and going on “automatic mode” for general societal functions. When you concentrate your necessary functions at one point (educators, police, industrial farmers, gasoline) it creates one big point of failure. Any engineer knows that’s a bad idea.
My question, then, is obvious. The older way of doing things isn’t always the best. The newer way of doing things also isn’t always the best. So what is? At what point are the freedoms given by modern technology and professionals in every field simply not worth the ignorance those freedoms leave in their wake? I don’t buy the argument that the answer to that question is completely different for each person. It seems logical to me that we, as a society, need to pick a few things that are the most important building blocks of our society, and be very careful to teach those things to all our kids as they grow. Not that we would enforce this as law somehow, but that it would be a general cultural understanding that every person should know how to do X, Y, and Z before they’re an adult. Don’t even bother arguing that’s currently in place. It isn’t.
I’d like to hear your opinions on this topic. I’m still mulling it over. We need rules to define what is important for every person to know and what isn’t. And we need to know whether it is possible to push forward as a society if we’re spending all our time re-learning what the last generation had only just perfected before they died.
Update (6/28/08 8:36pm): Steph recommended that I clarify a couple things. When I said it was a bad idea to “concentrate your necessary functions at one point”, I was talking about the dangers of putting some centralized authority in charge of a basic function like the ones in my list. For example, saying that only the police may have guns means that any criminal who has one can go wild as long as the police aren’t around. If the police can somehow be stopped or significantly delayed, which is much more likely than stopping all citizens, the criminal goes unchecked. If citizens have guns, and thus the power is decentralized, this scenario is much less likely.
Likewise, if we were ever at a point as a society where one mega-corporation produced all our food and no one else farmed, and that corporation were to change the food (presumably accidentally) in such a way that it harmed the population, who could do anything about it? It would be very difficult. Redundant farmers with separated processes and crops keep these kinds of dangers isolated and limited in scope, and keep the power of food decentralized.
Steph also argued that “every person should know how to do X, Y, and Z before they’re an adult” is currently in place although I said it wasn’t. She believes X, Y, and Z are reading, writing, and arithmetic. My point is really that the X, Y, and Z should be a larger number of things on my list. Those three things only fit under the “education” bullet in the list. It seems I’m recommending that our schools broaden their mandatory curriculum into areas like farming and other basic survival skills. I’m as surprised to hear that coming out of my mouth as anyone could be.
(Warning: this is a blatant and potentially boring “Life Update” entry!)
For those of you who haven’t moved across the country, let me give you a tip: even if it’s a good move (as it was for us), realize the amount of work you’re getting into before doing it. It’s a ton of work. Furthermore, when you add buying your first house to that equation, the result is a one-two punch that will K.O. your evenings and weekends for weeks to come. (For an added dose of Lewis-brand reality, add a five-month-old baby to that mix. And a new job. New wardrobe. New church. New commute.)
You can probably tell I’ve been a tad worn out. And frankly, I haven’t been doing most of the work! Steph has pulled far more than her fair share of the weight, and relatives and friends have pitched in generously (especially Steph’s dad). So it is with great pride that I announce we are done. Yes, done! Our boxes are unpacked. Things are generally where they’re supposed to be. The whole thing took four months from the first box in Cupertino to the last in Forest Lake. For those of you who helped, I greatly appreciate it.
That’s not to say there’s no work left to be done, but the work remaining is of the “individual, non-urgent project” type. We can function day-to-day without any problem now, and that’s a welcome change. The list of home improvement tasks stretches on (and always will), but hopefully it won’t stretch into the majority of our free time now.
In the last month or so I’ve also experienced a totally unexpected side-effect of owning a home: I now find myself automatically caring more about politics, the economy, and news outside the tech sector. (I’m sure having a child also affects this.) Somehow, there’s a tying down of a person that happens in the purchase of a home. Maybe it’s the weight of the size of the purchase sitting on my back that makes me want to be more aware of the realities around me. The heightened risk that loan represents makes me want to be sure to pay attention to the world, in case I’m supposed to see something and avoid a problem. I don’t really like the feeling, but something tells me this is just part of adulthood, and people who deal well with it learn how to not complain about it.
Wordle is a site on which you can make beautiful tag clouds to show the words used most often in any text snippet. I dumped in all the text of my entire blog (minus the comments) and I got this tag cloud:
Apparently I talk a lot about time, people, and Steph.
This blog’s fifth anniversary recently passed. I posted my first entry here on May 28th, 2003, and it’s been an interesting ride ever since. (When I started this blog, I had no intention of ever becoming a web developer. Then I fell in love with web standards and web authoring, and now it’s my profession.)
People routinely ask me, “Why do you blog?” Sometimes they get really honest and come right out and say, “Aren’t you worried about privacy?” Privacy is definitely something I think about and feel strongly about. I’ve been reading (and listening) to Cory Doctorow’s new book Little Brother lately, and it has certainly brought privacy issues to the forefront of my mind. But at least with this blog, I get to choose what’s private and what’s not. That’s not a lack of privacy, that’s perfect privacy: controlled by the individual about whom the information is kept.
There are several reasons I blog. Lemme ‘splain it.
Thanks for taking this ride with me. Here’s to five more years.
Last Sunday, the 25th, we were hit by a pretty severe thunderstorm. Large parts of the Twin Cities metro area didn’t feel a thing, but in Forest Lake, we had some really serious winds, crazy sideways rain, and marble-sized hail. I didn’t get video of the worst of it because I was hiding in the storage room with my family, but I did get a minute or two of it while the hail was coming down.
Unfortunately, just 15 minutes south of our house, Hugo was hit by a tornado, one child was killed, dozens of people were injured, and many houses were totally leveled. Because of this, I’ve found myself comparing tornados to earthquakes, having just traded the latter for the former in moving from California to Minnesota. It’s impossible to know whether or not this was a good trade or not, but it’s an interesting question nonetheless. Which is more deadly?
From the six or so years Steph and I lived in California, I can only recall two noticeable earthquakes. The first happened while I was in my car driving, and I couldn’t feel it. I heard about it from everyone else after it happened. The second happened in late October of 2007, and I definitely did feel it, as did Steph, and as did my parents who were visiting at the time and watching Mitch Hedberg with me on a borrowed Apple TV. (“We don’t have to bring ink and paper into th–KA-CHUGGA-CHUGGA-CHUGGA-CHUGGA-SHUNK-SHUNK-SHUNK-SHUNK.”) But neither of those strongest quakes were strong enough to knock any buildings down or kill anyone. Mercifully, deadly quakes are generally spaced apart by a few decades, and then come in relatively tight clusters.
Tornados, on the other hand, come almost every year, especially in the Spring, and have a bit of a habit of knocking buildings down. I don’t have mortality rate data on Minnesotan tornadoes, but from what I recall it’s fairly commonplace for a few people to lose their lives if the tornado touches down in a populated place or is strong enough. So it seems the real comparison here is whether the few people killed each year by Minnesotan tornados could ever catch up to the several thousand killed every 30 to 50 years by big Californian earthquakes. And based on extremely fuzzy math, the answer is “no.” California’s natural disasters are more dangerous.
Assuming the point of life is to stay alive, which clearly it is (For support, see argument, “I mean, come on.”), we made a really good move. It’s good to be back!
