And the police arrived at the scene
It’s such a wonderful night for a walk. You could use a cigarette and you need air. Air. Close the door behind you (did you close it slowly, so nobody would hear? Or did you slam it, hoping somebody would stop you?) and just walk, one step and then another step. It’s not that hard.
And here you are, just outside the train station. Light a cigarette. Watch the breeze play with the smoke and feel it on your skin. For a moment you almost forget. But it’s just a moment then the pain is back, all of it, and it’s time.
Walk to the tracks, take another puff, breath it in fully. Step just in the middle of the tracks, sit down, slowly lower your head to the ground. It’s hard, but not that hard after all. Move just a little bit to get more comfortable, put your legs down, close your eyes. The tracks fit you nicely, like a bed where you can, finally, rest.
At 9:47PM of Friday, August 18, the R5 local to Thorndale leaves Saint David station for Wayne. Wayne is where I left my car before taking the train to Philadelphia this afternoon. Just 2 minutes and I will be there; I’ll get into the car, put my backpack in the back seat, and drive home. I’m exhausted, it has been a long hard week.
The politics of language
Clutter is the language of the Pentagon calling an invasion a “reinforced protective reaction strike” and justifying its vast budgets on the need for “counterforce deterrence.” As George Orwell pointed out in “Politics and the English Language,” an essay written in 1946 but often cited during the wars in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Iraq, “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible… Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemisms, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” Orwell’s warning that clutter is not just a nuisance but a deadly tool has come true in the recent decades of American military adventurism. It was during George W. Bush’s Presidency that “civilian casualties” in Iraq became “collateral damage.”
No, it’s not Markos Moulitsas Zúniga at Daily Kos. It’s William Zinsser in the 30th Anniversary Edition of On writing well. And it’s just page 16. Boy, I am going to enjoy this book.
Technorati Tags: writing, politics, Orwell
Misery and delight of a virtual room of our own
A few months ago I wrote about the distinction between vision and reality of online socialization that Russell Beale made in his talk at CHI2006.
The Vision was about what’s good about the digital connected world: plenty of free information and the ability to connect with many individuals in real time. The Reality was about what’s not so good about technology: isolation, bias, and self-centeredness. “Information is selected and filtered out based on preference: we cut out what we don’t like or don’t agree with. Technology enables an ignorance society. Even when we are physically present, we are socially absent.”
A recent post by David Wong on Pointless waste (via Karl Martino) lists seven reasons why living in this wonderful networked world makes us feel miserable. David Wong describes how technology allows us to lock ourself in our own little cozy world and progressively lose the ability to deal with the annoyances and roughness of the real world. The real worlds is not as pleasant and comfortable as our virtual worlds (Second Life, anyone?) but it’s, indeed, real.
The power of numbers that measure (social) performance
In number games and social software, dana boyd observes how we sometimes get obsessed with numbers that represent our performance—think game scores or, in her example, increasing miles per gallon while driving an hybrid car. The effect on our behavior can be even more powerful when these measures are socially determined as for the popularity score on Consumating and—why not?—blog ranking on Technorati.
And then i was thinking about the people on Yahoo! Answers who spend hours every day answering questions to get high ranks … There’s no real gain from getting points but still, it’s like a mouse in a cage determined to do well just cuz they can.
The internet is giving us a sort of social nerd paradise. We can actually measure our popularity with a number that everybody can see, rather than having to rely on fuzzy and contradictory social feedback.
How to make a writer
I’ve almost finished reading Stephen King’s On writing. I love this book. No wonder: it discusses the topic I love reading about—writing, the evolution of a passion, and elements of style—and tells a story with a happy ending.
On Writing is also the story of the support, recognition, and love that are needed to make a writer. Stephen’s mother praises his first story on a big white bunny named Mr. Rabbit Trick:
She said it was good enough to be in a book. Nothing anyone has said to me since has made me feel any happier. I wrote four more stories about Mr. Rabbit. She gave me a quarter a piece for them and sent them around to her four sisters (…). Four stories. A quarter a piece. That was the first buck I made in this business.
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