Eccentric Flower:201008/Absent Friends

1. Kayak's television and web ads these days all feature the sort of wonderful, beautiful flip-letter signs you no longer find in train stations or airports anywhere because they're a pain to maintain and their format can't easily be changed. This is making me annoyed enough to never want to use Kayak. It's one of the worst tricks advertising has in its books (which, given that assortment, is low indeed): Attempt to lure customers by reminding them of the beautiful things they can no longer have and will never have again.

Oh, sure, I understand the practical reasons why South Station and New Haven had to retire their Solari signs. But practicality isn't everything. Sometimes beauty and grace count, and people seem to forget that a lot, particularly bureaucrats, whose jobs are designed to eradicate beauty from their souls.

Kayak does not use an LED-dot-matrix display in their ads for a reason. That would remind people of all the annoyances of airports and air travel; they're attempting to invoke a period when airlines and air terminals had style, and air travel was still just the tiniest bit exotic. This is the same impulse that drives us all to love and praise and eulogize the former TWA terminal at JFK airport in New York, which - let's face it - though gorgeous, is extremely dated and no longer a great fit for what we see as current ideals of airport practicality. (And Saarinen's original terminal building at Dulles is so small by modern airport standards that it no longer contains any gates of its own; it is used purely for ticket counters and other services.)

JetBlue knew what they were playing at when they renovated and reclaimed the TWA terminal. They knew what they were invoking. And JetBlue has a modicum of style; they play the same horrid game as the other airlines, but they do it with a certain amount of humor and panache. Still, the modern US airline industry is ugly start to finish, JetBlue no exception - ugly at the visual, logistical, conceptual, practical, and economic levels alike - something that no sane person would want to run, no sane person would want to fly on, and no sane person would want to work for. JetBlue is doing a better job than some other airlines at tricking you into forgetting that. I say that as both condemnation and praise. I wouldn't necessarily have quit the way Steve Slater did, but I would have quit; to me the miracle is how he managed to persevere under those conditions for as long as he did. Modern air travel punishes its crews as badly, or worse, as it punishes its passengers.

You might ask (or then again you might not): If everyone hates it so much, why do we tolerate such a disgusting system? And the answer is: because the majority of us have reduced travel to two components and two components only. How fast is it? How cheap is it? We are a nation of short-sighted, impatient, unbeautiful people who judge a travel experience not by how pleasant or interesting or beautiful or comfortable it is, but by how fast we can rush to where we're trying to go, and how little we can get away with paying for it.

I don't mind that the people who have reduced travel to those two questions get exactly what they deserve; my gripe, as ever, is how much the tyranny of the majority penalizes the few of us who would rather have, say, a pleasant ride on the train.

The dot-matrix departure board in South Station that replaced their enormous Solari board has a recorded clicking noise that is meant to sound like the flapping sound made when the letters on the old sign changed. They had to do this because they realized they had lost an audible cue - "hey, go look at the sign again, something is different now." To me this feels like having your cat put down because you hate feeding it, replacing it with a robot cat, and then eventually gluing a cat pelt onto the robot cat in a desperate attempt to try to get back some small fraction of what you had killed.

They were aware enough to realize they had lost something, but not aware enough to have avoided losing it in the first place.

2. I don't want to work today.

You can tell because I'm writing this. It's not that what I have scheduled to do today is any more onerous than what I did last week; it's that I burned myself out last week. I was unfortunately, inexplicably productive last week. Four days in a row I said to myself, "You know, there's no great hurry on this, the boss and half of everyone else is on vacation, just go in to deal with a few bits of daily business in the morning and don't go back to the desk after lunch. Go take a walk. Go home and do one of those long DDO quests you don't have the block of time to do in the evening. Something." And yet, after lunch, there I was, working until a real and legitimate quitting time. All week.

And today I don't want to work. It just all feels like it's too much to even start. The relatively well-contained task I have allocated for these two days suddenly feels huge, monstrous, daunting. I know this has nothing to do with the actual work; it has everything to do with my energy level and where my mind wants to be (telling stories, playing games, doing other things). My poor sleep over the last three nights also cannot be ruled out as an influence.

I haven't, on the whole, been sleeping poorly, but I'm on a diminishing trend again, which may either mean I need to flip the mattress, or it may mean that I spent too much time sitting in a chair in front of a computer the last four or five days - or it may just mean I'm worried about August.

I am always worried about August. August is when, without going into specifics, an enormous number of things absolutely must happen within a very short block of time. That block of time is almost upon us - and the fact that I got a very nice head start on it by being unexpectedly productive last week does not in any way decrease the stress levels involved. Apparently.

I don't understand how normal people can go to a job every day and work eight hours every day, more or less without fail, and not go insane. When I say I had a productive day I mean that I got in four hours of heavy, solid work with no distractions. I suspect that many people working steady eight-hour days get the same four hours of real work in that I do on productive days; they just space those four hours of work out into twice the time. I prefer to work short heavy intense bursts and then have more time to go out and play.

The problem - and the counterargument to my method - is that starting those short intense bursts really takes a lot of cajoling and gritting of teeth. On the other hand - I write code the way I write fiction. If I'm interrupted while I'm in that mode, I may never get it back. Or if I do, I lose a lot of time trying to get my brain back into the correct state again. "Work while you can" is an extremely important principle to me. So once I do manage to start, it will of necessity be an intense burst of high heat. It will just happen that way. It always does.

3. On Friday I went to some trouble to bring home last week's Economist and this month's Harper's. By "some trouble" I mean that I bothered to carry them home at all, because I don't like carrying things around that don't go in my pockets - I carry a bag only when necessary and in general prefer to make my daily transits as unencumbered as possible.

I carried them home because there were any number of articles in both magazines that I wanted to note and comment upon. But even before I took them home, skepticism for the whole process had already begun to set in. Every time I write one of my entries talking about recent Economist articles, it takes me at least an hour - to look up articles, to find an appropriate block to quote, and then to write the things which I actually want to say.

I pondered, in my head, a sort of condensed version:

• Article URL
• Two lines about what it's about
• Who I'd like to read this article (it is often a surprisingly specific set; for example one of the articles from this last set was basically for Robert's attention and no one else's, which is not to say that other people wouldn't have been interested in reading it, just that he was the person who came to mind when I read it)
• Why I would like them to read the article

Then they could ignore the article the same as ever, but I would be out far less time linking them, by leaving out the pull quotes and my own reactions.

I'm not planning on doing this either, because what occurred to me sometime around mid-Saturday was that the part that I most want you to go to is the part you don't go to, and the part you seem to be interested in is the part that I was planning to leave out. So if I was planning to leave out the part you were willing to read, and you weren't willing to go read the part I was planning to leave in, the point of the whole exercise collapses. So I said "feh" and went to play DDO instead.

I've come to realize that other places, other people on the web, can get away with "Here is a link I think is interesting, go see it," and other people will actually follow their recommendation and go there. That doesn't seem to work here; anecdotal evidence suggests the link-following rate here is extremely low.

This sounds like it's bitching and moaning but it's actually relief. I have solved the problem. I have worked out the equation - a long row of figures on the blackboard of my mind - and realized that all terms cancel each other out; the answer resolves to zero. Having done this, it is a great load off my mind; now I can recycle the Economist issues as soon as I read them, and not suffer any more setback of time and effort than the occasional wistful thought about, "Wow, I really wish Robert could read this" or some such, which will pass quickly.

I'm not sure Harper's has linkable content online anyway. But if you do get your hands on the August Harper's, note that both the Karzai/Obama story and the concealed-carry story are things I would like to sit everyone down and make them read. Also note that the section of various fragments and excerpts they always run at the beginning of the magazine is especially good this month.

I can make a recommendation like that with Harper's because there's still time for you to go out and buy it. It's more complicated with The Economist, because by the time I talk about an interesting article there, the magazine is already gone.

4. The other night, amid intermittent and fitful sleep, I dreamed of a co-worker, L., from back at The Institvte. I haven't seen her in a long time.

She was sort of a friend. That is, we didn't "see each other socially" as the quaint old phrase goes, but we were comfortable enough around one another to trade gossip and chat sometimes and exchange bottles of Scotch on occasion (when we found out each other liked it). We were united by a reasonably grueling long project which we were essentially the entire crew for.

We were hindered in our getting to know each other by one factor on each side. In her case it was her natural reticence about her personal life - it is still, even to this day, even at The Institvte, not necessarily a good thing to immediately divulge that one is in a long-term same-sex relationship - and I never told her that I knew about her relationship from mutual friends long before I ever met her. In my case, it was my extreme reluctance to open any sort of channels of social contact, beyond office friendship, with co-workers. I prefer to keep those areas of my life very much separate, and in fact I have only one good friend whom I've ever worked for the same employer as simultaneously - and that was possible because we worked on entirely different things when we were both there, and our paths never crossed.

It struck me - as I was waking up to linger in a sort of uncomfortable half-awake state before I could induce myself to go back to sleep again - that as it stands right now I haven't even gotten an update from friends on L's current situation in a long time. For all I know - and this is not hyperbole, I mention it because it's the exact thought I had that night and it disturbed me - she could be dead. (I doubt she is, but the point is I have absolutely no idea.) She has effectively vanished from my sphere of knowledge.

I thought this morning of A. who I knew reasonably well from Baton Rouge and who married a former co-worker of mine, K. and moved to Oregon with him and then last year reappeared in my sphere of knowledge after I hadn't heard of/from her in ages. (I thought this because I saw a pickup truck in a peculiar shade of teal; K's truck was, I swear, the only truck that color in all Baton Rouge, and thus many of us knew exactly where he was in town at any given time.) It was far more pleasing and heartening to hear from A. last year than I would have expected, and I'm sorrier than I would have expected to see that her Twitter account is so quiet; I find that I'd like to hear more from her.

I'm getting to the point where my reluctance to resume any sort of real contact with the two or three people I called friends in high school is being stomped on by my desire to hear and see and know more about what they're doing. I see glimpses, very occasional glimpses, of the rest of their lives in the photos they occasionally post on Flickr, and those glimpses intrigue and frustrate me - I want to know more about who they married and their kids and their daily lives and what they're doing. I just don't know if I ever want to be in a room with them again.

I've long since passed a point where I have more people whose lives I am interested in keeping up with online than I know in person. I was not, am not, and never will be very good with people in person. I'm very difficult to interact with and talk to in person, or at least I think so, and no amount of anecdotal evidence from people that they actually enjoyed face-to-face contact with me will ever fully convince me otherwise. (*I* almost always enjoy the face-to-face contact; this is very one-sided. The problem isn't that I don't like being around you, it's that I'm convinced that you are gritting your teeth when my back is turned because I'm so obnoxious to be around, and that when you leave the restaurant at the end of the visit and see us off down the street, you turn and say to your spouse/partner/lovethang, "Let's not do that again for a while, okay?")

What I've learned is that, while I'm never going to be comfortable with seeing most people in person more than once or twice a year, there are some people I want to see in person more often than I actually do, and deeply regret that I can't see them more often; there are some people for whom the amount I physically see them is just about right; and there are some people whom I want to stay in the loop about, to know what's going on in their lives, to keep in touch - but not really do anything more than that.

Modern electronic social media does not give us adequate words. There's a certain number of you I want to "friend." If I were speaking the Queen's English, and were not talking about modern electronic social media there, I would say "befriend." But that's exactly the point. "Friending" someone isn't the same thing as "befriending" them. "Befriending" them implies a real connection, not just a social but a personal connection. I do that extremely rarely. "Friending" them is essentially a matter of following status; yes, I want to keep up with what you're doing, I am interested in subscribing to your newsletter, but nothing more than that.

The sad points come when you realize that you have friended someone but you'd really like to befriend them. When you realize there is something missing, and you're not going to be able to get it easily, not even the once or twice a year that is almost all the social contact you can stand; because the walls are too high and the distances are too great.

If you built some of those walls yourself, that just makes it worse.

This isn't really as sad a reverie as it sounds. We all have lives to live, after all. Suffice to say that right now I feel like there are several of you I'd love to see more of and/or hear more from, and that's making me a touch wistful - exacerbated by the fact that I feel you're all probably hearing far more from me than you ever really wanted or asked for. It feels one-sided to me, this electronic place, in a way that doesn't seem like it can ever possibly be very satisfying.