CuppaGemma

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Richard Feynman said that in the Roger’s Commission report.

It is a facet of human nature to avoid looking at difficult things full on.

Then we see the problem. We face the line of our own limitations. We can roll up sleeves, change direction and make tough choices. We can commit to thinking beyond who we are right now and what we are doing and take a risk. Because we are ultimately deeply invested in solving the problem. The people, the relationships, how we are all interdependent and interrelated matter to us.  We want to find a way to make it work. We need one another to do it.

Or not.

If we don’t face the problem we don’t have to solve it right?  It will become less urgent, or maybe someone else will deal with it. Or maybe it couldn’t be solved anyway and we just did the best we could and well we oughtn’t feel so bad about it. Or we couldn’t possibly understand the complexity without a crystal ball. And if we can absolve ourselves of accountability, well then that’s good since we don’t have to feel bad.

Permission to fail. Houston please confirm?

Houston doesn’t give a rat’s patootie on the outcome. We don’t need anyone’s permission. We are the ones who have to sleep with our actions and decisions. We are the ones who will remember years out what we chose to do or not.

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don’t do that by sitting around wondering about yourself.  Katherine Hepburn

Travel can be a good thing. It is a talisman to the future.

You get in the car and go and go until the bridges have been crossed, the tolls paid and then you are somewhere else entirely. Maybe only for a little while and then you have to loop back on all the roads and return to wear you started from. But friendship dissolves miles. They are tiresome weeds sometime, but nothing an early start and some hot coffee can’t resolve. You make jokes on the number of miles and minutes and predict when each of you is due to hit X or Y spot.

What travel does is show you the next steps.

The odometer goes up a couple of hundred miles and the town is different, the air is different and the stoplights. But it is a place that is there and now you are in it. Is it somewhere you wish to stay, or to simply keep arriving to over and over again.

The Staten Island Ferry crosses a little bit of water and 23 minutes later, after standing out in the crisp of the morning with dollar coffee you are in Manhattan all eager and waiting to be serious and busy with suits and skirts, meetings and haggles. A pulsing knot of people organized in floors organized in buildings organized over the grid that I call “the city”.

Heading back heads are down with the deflatedness of a long day to bills to children, to row houses and garbage collection schedules that may be inconvenient.

But Manhattan is there as much as Rome or Denmark or Owls Head Maine. And the Yamanote pulls my friends around from Ikebukuro back to Shibuya. Places continue without us. You may have token that won’t get spent because the little tram that doesn’t need you and never did. And you have a lovely pile of coins because you know there will be a reason to spend Euro and Yen. The places remain. We are temporary guests, nothing more.

Unless we choose to place ourselves in these locations and weave in its scenerry. That’s the rub of traveling. You realize with the full force of a train coming that there are places you may spend copious amounts of time in and never for a moment be settled, and then others… others are home to you.

Because you know the way to get there is not only in the car, but from the laughter of voices that keeps calling you back and forth to come and see a river, a bench, a train station, or even just the view from the second story.

All hail communication, except when we don’t understand one another.

A letter is a very different thing than a dash off email or a stream of thoughts interrupting IM- ping flow if there is such a thing.

With a letter, you need to sit down and take your pen or roll the paper into a typewriter and get the ideas out. It’s a conversation in the sense that you can only go forward and not revise, but not in the sense you think carefully before you start putting the words down. And the conversations you have in a letter are different since we are always accessible with phones and email in our pockets. So a letter can be a quite special idea to send and open.

IM on the other hand intrigues me since it as once live but two dimensional. So our own pauses or or little tangential thoughts may make the whole meaning unclear. Skype it appears resolves both since you can hear and you can see. If only there were a hologram of you to sit opposite and not drink the coffee I’ve poured.

Each of these means has a time and a place where it is suited. A letter is the sort of thing meant to be reread since unlike bills or soliciting mail it has no desire beyond the want to hold your attention. IM can help if the query is quick or you are in the middle of one thing from which you cannot quite leave. But I wonder about the distraction to both tasks when you are in a state of hovering between things.

For myself my attention does best to focus on one conversation at a time and to be sensitive to other’s obligations. Even on the telephone we can be distracted. A call from a noisy pub means you compete against all the talk of patrons in addition to whatever game happens to be on. It’s sort of like trying to have an intimate conversation while driving on the highway your attention is split.

Perhaps that too is much of what we forget today in all of our bustling. To be wholly present in the moment of a conversation. To look into someone’s eyes and listen so that all other context is cleaved away and you have nothing but one another to understand.

The phrase I’ve been putzing with for a while is “make ideas audible”. But it is multidirectional. Not only about the speaker being precise, but also the listener understanding the words as they come without the shell games of interpretation we often play to speak so as to be accepted in a certain context.

The shell games get more and more complex when you layer in media like IM or email.  What do you mean gets molded into, this is how I think you can hear me in words that I think might be what you would like to hear, so now of course my point- is absolutely lost.

But on the other hand, when the need for an interpreter- or a redesign of your words before you release them to someone else- or a couching against doubt with safe phrases, when these are stripped away, then

Then you have moments where years happen.

And in those with the candle, or the incandescent bulb alight you sit someplace else entirely than where you are literally. You are inside the moment. This is a rare fine thing.