We spend our lives rereading and rewatching and relistening and relearning. We eat the same things over and over. We end up loving people who remind us of other people. We perform these rituals, this spacetime origami, because the basic fact of our n-dimensional existence is this: Most things can be recalled and some things can be revisited but precious little can be relived.
do new things. make good things. experience life, stop trying to box it up.
When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.
They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.
We all make choices about how we live our lives. You can take a paint-by-numbers approach, or you can start with a blank canvas. When you paint by numbers, the end result is guaranteed. You know what it’s going to be, and it might be good, but it will never be a masterpiece. Starting with a blank canvas is the only way to get a masterpiece, but you could also blow up. So, are you going to pick the paint-by-numbers kit or the blank canvas?
Third, discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it. Far too many people — especially people with great expertise in one area — are contemptuous of knowledge in other areas or believe that being bright is a substititue for knowledge. First-rate engineers, for instance, tend to take pride in not knowing anything about people. Human beings, they believe, are much too disorderly for the good engineering mind. Human resources professionals, by contrast, often pride themselves on their ignorance of elementary accounting or of quantitiative methods altogether. But taking pride in such ignorance is self-deating. Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths.
If you work on something for five years, that’s more than 20 percent of your productive work life. Most people don’t think about that, but it’s the main thing I think about. I think about it all the time, much more than money. Because the only thing we can’t make more of is time.
how do i feel? pretty okay. honestly, it’s not bothering me that much. odds are, i’d probably never get much use out of them anyway.
i’m one of the few (or maybe one of the many) who lost a lot of data when ma.gnolia went down last week. it’s looking grim. there are ways to recover stuff by parsing this and digging up that. unfortunately, for me, i’ve got nothing to dig at. none of my bookmarks were public. none. zero. ”did you ever back them up?” no, i didn’t. yes, i’m quite savvy. no, i wasn’t as responsible as i should’ve been with this data. do i regret this? mehhh.
zero out of, probably, several thousand. at least three thousand. probably somewhere around five. these bookmarks had been carefully cultivated since 1993. almost everything i ever wanted to “remember” on the web. for the longest time, they sat on whichever computer i used. when everyone started using delicious, i didn’t. i couldn’t get into it. not necessarily the concept, more the product. i resisted the lucrative social bookmarking scene. from afar, it mocked me with its overly useful community.
when i finally decided to “get social” with my stuff, and after much research, i settled on magnolia as a better product to use. i didn’t care about the community on the site itself. i cared more about the tools at my disposal. they would let me do more of what i wanted to do. jeff croft was a big part of this and, a considered authority, convinced me.
off i went, importing what i had and seeking out new. nothing was public. i wanted to meticulously tag, rate and give descriptions to all my bookmarks. unleashing them on a web like a bag full ‘o awesome. it never happened. i certainly didn’t have the patience to do all of that to thousands and thousands of links. would you? i even considered hiring someone to do it for me. occasionaly, i’d need to find something and i searched for it. i either find it, or i didn’t. if it wasn’t in ma.gnolia, it was in google notebook or google reader or on instapaper or in my e-mail. it was always somewhere.
then, i lost them all. at first, i did an “oh shit.” i felt like i should be really mad. there went all the “important stuff” out the window, and i’ll probably never get it back again. that awesome recipe for the best pancakes ever? gone. the top 10 work-outs for people who never exercise? gone. what would i do. a digital babylon, falling around me.
then, you know what? i was okay with it. still am. i can’t explain it. there is certainly lots of psychobabble i could go into about the connection we have to our “stuff.” the digital infoglut, yadda, yadda, yadda.
maybe someday i’ll wish i had that link. i’ll search for it. the semantic web and search is and will be driving human interaction. i trust i’ll be able to find it. it’s all out there anyway, right?
do i start fresh? maybe. maybe not. i have a few hundred things on google notebook that i’m not overly excited about clearing out before that bites the dust. i have about 1,500 articles on instapaper. it’ll all still sit there. i won’t back it up. i won’t fret about it.
i’ll use it when i need it and life will go on.
The short film The Archive, directed by Sean Dunne, is a 2009 Sundance Selection. The short film is about Paul Mawhinney, the world’s largest record album collector, who sadly had to put his life’s collection up for sale.
this story has been around for a while but watch the video. a lot more poignant than you’d think.
We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.
