consistency of memory

A decade of having a little bloggy notepad of what I’ve been up to means that sometimes my memory doesn’t work totally right. It’s like when you remember things that happened in your childhood that you have pictures of, but not the other stuff. I make an effort, but at this point working on memory tricks seems to be more work than just writing more stuff down.

I got home from eleven days away last night. The memory thing is that somewhere en route from (my amazing friend) Michael’s house in Texas to Logan airport, I lost my Mac’s power cord. I’m pretty smiling-buddha about most of my posessions. I do my best to take care of them but I try to maintain equanimity when something goes wrong. In this case I was sleepy and sort of buzzed-out from a really good time at the SXSW conference and I have no idea where my power cord got to. I called all the lost & founds — after a week of talking about usability, finding out that I could only figure out if someone found my power cord tomorrow was astonishing to me “but I’m in the airport where I lost it NOW…” — but no one saw it. And, to be fair, if I had a job in the airport lost and found and someone brought in one of these Mac power cords that retails for $75, you can bet I wouldn’t be giving it back either. At any rate. I got myself a new one in Massachusetts and promptly forgot that I even lost it. I also lost my long maroon scarf (how can you lose a ten foot scarf?) and that’s bugging me a little more, actually.

My trip was great and included a panel discussion in front of a room of ~800 people, my telling an old bad drug story (never before linked!) at the Fray Cafe, some quality power-eating with good friends who I don’t see often enough, and then a trip back through MA where I saw my Dad and helped a friend move and did a little of the Jessamyn-magic on Jim’s full-o-stuff bedroom. The long quiet bus ride and drive back from the bus station is like a three hour airlock between people-time and quiet-and-cold-Vermont-time. I’ll be turning around in a week and heading down to DC — actually Crystal City Virginia which is a terrible name for a not very interesting place — and in the meantime it’s back to classes, swimming, bird feeding and getting some of my brain back. Here are some photos of where I’ve been: Westport, Austin. They help me remember.

how do I get a job like yours?

I’m on my way to the SXSW Conference in Austin Texas. This will be the third time I’ve gone. The first time was in 2000 and I met my boss and co-worker there, though I didn’t know it at the time. The second time was last year and I gave a little presentation about being a community moderator for a job. As I mentioned in this photo on Flickr — and I’m working on a longer post about the topic for librarian.net — I culturally identify as a librarian, whatever that means, but being a community moderator (or Chief of Operations when I’m sounding fancy) is what pays the bills and is the bulk of my income. It also keeps me in computers and free Internet when I travel but I’m one of those folks who loves what they do so I could probably get paid in sand and still be doing this.

It’s only been lately, really, that you could say “Oh I ‘run a community’ for my job” and have people know what you meant. Back in the day AOL had people who sort of kept track of what was going on in chatrooms and had some admin privileges but nowadays if you interact with any website that allows you to post or comment or rate anything, chances are there’s someone like me behind the scenes making sure it goes smoothly. The panel is going to be talking a little bit about that: what does it mean to do this sort of thing as a job, or even a career? I’ll be on the panel with people from Flickr, YouTube, CurrentTV and Etsy, all big name sites. I’m sort of the small potatoes person. MetaFilter was a community before any of those sites existed, but it’s stayed pretty small (relatively) and texty and off of people’s radar. That said, Matt Haughey who runs the place has been doing some form of community moderation since 1999 which is the Stone Age in Internet time.

People often ask how they can get a job like mine. Sometimes that means running a website, sometimes it means doing public speaking stuff, sometimes it means rural public librarian stuff, sometimes it’s teaching email to old people. The way the crazy swinging mobile of my work-life arrangements work, it would be hard for me to do any one of these things without the other three (though I do think about it) and my advice often turns into some hippie-dippy “follow your bliss” combined with “don’t get into debt so you can work for cheap while you wait to get paid well for being good at what you do” The last bit of advice I have is “You don’t want my life” Not that it doesn’t work well for me, it does, but when I talk about what’s really involved in keeping all these balls in the air (lots of travel, lots of online time, lots of multitasking, lots of new faces and places, lots of diplomacy, lots of apologizing for me and for others, lots of late nights) it’s really rarely other peoples’ idea of a good time.

I tend to re-configure these questions into something more like “How can I live where I want and do what I want while feeling like I’m having some sort of positive effect in the world?” and that’s the question I try to answer. I’m looking forward to hearing what the other panelists have to say about similar questions.

class and classy

It used to be a running joke in college that anyone who called anything “classy” was automatically bestowing sort of the opposite adjective to it; that classy was a word used by a person who had no class. Or used by us trying to be ironic.

I’ve been thinking about class a lot in the past few weeks. We just had our town meeting on Tuesday. I took a few photos. I like living in Vermont because there’s more of a sense that we’re in this together, whatever “this” happens to be. As of a few months ago, Randolph started charging people to drop off recycling at the transfer station. We’ve always paid for trash but recycling was free. I thought this was as it should be, small financial incentives to do the right thing. On the other hand, it was costing the town to get rid of the recycling and the so-called “tipping fees” were actually subsidizing the recycling program as recycling got more expensive to process. There was some discussion of this including one lady who said that she took a bag of recycling and it cost “only fifty cents” the easy implication being if you were going to not recycle over a mere fifty cents, there was something pretty well wrong with you. I think this ignores what it’s like to really live on a tight budget or make tough choices about where your money goes (for the record, I do neither, this is a bit of an intellectual exercise for me) and I have to admit that I’ve been letting my recycling pile up, which is ridiculous.

There was also some back and forth about the Randolph Food Shelf which was asking for something like $1500 this year to help with expenses. A young woman who was pretty new to town meeting was surprised to see people walking out of the food shelf with cakes because, well, she was on a budget and she wasn’t buying cake. She asked about it. There followed a long discussion of how the food shelf system works (cakes are day old, or donated) and who it serves (anyone who says they need it, no questions asked) and it seemed like most people in town were okay with the whole system. In a town of about 4800 people, 350 people had used the food shelf at some point in the last year. Ten percent of Vermonters have used a food shelf at some time. It didn’t look like the food shelf was going to have a difficult time getting their money. Good.

I’ve been travelling a lot on planes lately which is getting more unpleasant as the airlines find ways to save costs. I’m not complaining as much as stating a fact. I’m aware I can stay home. One day, perhaps I will. In addition to charging for checked bags, United now calls the first ten or so rows in the non-first class part of the plane “premium” seating (since they have a few inches of extra legroom) and tries to charge you more to sit in them. It’s not unusual to see a plane taking off with ten empty rows and everyone else smushed into the back part of the plane. After takeoff, people try to move into better seats and they’re rebuffed. Air travel has always come with severe class distinctions: from the order of loading the plane, to the silly curtain in-between first and second class, to additional bathrooms for first class travellers with severe exhortations from the flight attendants to only use your own bathrooms.

The stewardesses on my last flight — as I was smooshed in the back somewhere, but I don’t care too much since I’m short and can pretty much fit anywhere — actually told people it wasn’t fair for them to move forward since other people had paid extra to sit in those special seats. Ignoring the obvious “Well, who created this stupid system?” follow-up question. Then they said something about not using the forward rest rooms because of “safety.” Since it’s pretty well illegal for us to ignore anything they say because of “safety” this is a nice way to make weird arbitrary distinctions and make them unarguable. And yes I know you’re not supposed to gather by the cockpit, but as far as I know, there are no safety ramifications for a non-first class passenger to pee or not pee in a first class toilet. Are there?

Of course, people who can afford air travel in the US are often already in a privileged class, so it’s amusing to get this object lessons in how it feels to be someone who gets things denied to them just because of how much money you have, or are willing to spend. I’m glad I can take it or leave it.

a few people I met, remet, or just enjoyed seeing in SFO

Hey, that photo that I put up yesterday was on Serious Eats, check me out! It may also interest you to know that MetaFilter was one of Time magazine’s top blogs and that I was interviewed for an article on Ask MetaFilter that was in Slate this week. Here’s another AskMeFi story you might like.

The big difference between hanging out up in Vermont and hanging out in San Francisco is that most of the people I met or hung out with have URLs I can point people to that are live active websites. Most of my friends here have websites that are sort of functional. I am somewhere in the middle. Here are some URLs that go to people that I met.

Peter – his website has been the same pretty much since I’ve known him but now he’s married and has a kid.
George – actually a lady, she is looking for work after doing cool things at Flickr for a long time.
Mike – I sort of met at SXSW and now we’re twitter buddies enough so that when I had a few free hours I could tweet “you free?” and he was like “sure” and we chitchatted about drupal and web nonsense and it was totally fun.
Judith – my long time friend and owner of Lyle, who always shows me a good time.
Bryan – probably the person I’ve known online the longest without actually meeting. His indy junior map graced my travel page for a while. Now I use DOPPLR.
Courtney – I met her briefly at Burning Man but got to eat burritos with her She created the cloud bed, she is a genius.
Liz – is at the Berkeley ischool, we talked about library stuff. She knows my friend Aaron.
Mike – used to work at Adaptive Path with a bunch of people I know, we yammered on for a long time about… transportation systems.
Mike – another Mike who, towards the end of the party when I finally said who I was, said “oh, from MetaFilter?”
Erika – went to Dartmouth and is taller in real life than she seems in her headshots.
Molly – I met again at SXSW this year and we talked about academia and Princeton and pneumatic tubes.
Jennifer – gave us a sober ride home from the party for which I am eternally grateful.
Yorvit and Roswell – part of the household that took me home when I was trapped at the airport and fed me snacks and watched the Oscars with me. Wonderful folks, maybe without websites?

That’s who I know off the top of my head. I figured I’d drop this all here in case people were curious.

noisy

I have this idea in my head that the city is noisy and my place in Vermont is not. This is probably true in a general average sense, but I stayed on Vermont avenue in a third floor apartment and it was pretty silent except for the ocean-like noise of distant traffic. Today, because there was a snowstorm over the last few days, Terry the roof guy is here taking snow off the roof any way he knows how. So, my little treehouse is all BANG BANG CRASH CRASH as snow and ice get broken up and hurled a few stories to the ground. Like me, Terry doesn’t get started too early, so this is mostly fine.

This photo is a beef tendon that was in the pet food store near where my friend Judith lives. I’ll do a longer bla bla “what I did and who I did it with” post about my trip to San Fran, but I liked this photo and my alteration of it. When I go to San Francisco I get to hang out with people who laugh at all my stupid nerdish injokes (“oh hey they said Craigslist at the Oscars!”) and always have the “hang with friends or stay in?” option in a more real way than I do here where sometimes friends are not an option due to the short number of people who are a reasonable drive from here.

Every time I visit the city I feel like it’s a bit of an interview process where the question in the back of my mind is “would I want to live here again?” I’m still at the “not really, no thanks” point but I can feel that tipping ever so slightly towards “not yet”

the year of saying yes

Jim and I took a quickie side trip to Burlington because he had never been there. Since I’m not much of a shopper or a money-spender we drove down to the lake to just look at it. Turns out it was frozen sufficiently hard that people were out messing about on the icy surface — skating, sliding, photographing, walking pets, kicking ice. It was a festive and sort of surreal mood. We walked around on it. I, of course, took a few photos.

Yet another of my unstated resolutions is to try to get around my normal cynical overthinking brain and try to say yes to stuff more often. Yes to people coming to visit, yes to invitations to do things, yes to couchsurfers dropping in (hi CJ and Alison!), yes to more work (within reason), yes to “can you help me move?” and yes to “would you like dessert?” among other things. I have a tendency to talk myself out of doing new things because I’m actually pretty happy with the old/existing thing. This is a pop culture thing to do apparently, but I like to think I came up with it on my own.

I’m off to San Francisco tomorrow for a quickie meeting and some burrito eating and by the time I get back on Sunday movers should have gotten all of Kate’s stuff out of Casa Highland. Even though Kate’s move makes all the sense in the world, I think we’re all a little in denial of how great it was to have a clubhouse (and a parking space!) in the city. I’ll miss the old place.

empty! full!

Sometimes I think I have a tapeworm, eating like I do. This weekend I helped cook a 5 lb. hunk of lamb, went out for BBQ at Blue Ribbon BBQ and wrapped it all up with a carne asada burrito. It was a delicious meaty weekend which is just what I tend to be looking for at about this time in February. The flip side to this is that I spent the rest of the weekend running up and down stairs carrying heavy objects.

My sister is moving in a few short weeks. I’m that friend who will always help you move. I’m not so great at being the second person hefting the hide-a-bed, but I’m really great at taking whatever shamehole you have been putting off dealing with and turning it into a few labeled boxfulls and a bag of trash. I’m often modest about most of my abilities but I think I excel at this. This weekend I helped deal with Mount Laundry, the Poison Closet, the dreadful Neglected Closet and a few other miscellaneous spaces. Each time I managed to empty something out — I put aside the ticking timer when Kate had a rather strong reaction to the ticking sound, I find its urgency a little motivating — I put a sticker on it as shown above. Apparently the stickers are a little tough to remove, sorry about that.

I drove home to Vermont today with a car full of stuff. One of the magical qualities of my car is that things placed into the back of it simply … disappear. This is good for people who need to get rid of clothes or old computers. This time my sisters’ disappearing stuff is actually mostly winding up in my house. I took home a few bags of clothes (seriously doubling the bulk of my everyday wardrobe), a fold up spare bed, a few things to eBay, a fruity teacup with my birth month on it, a typing table with a little lamp on it, some placemats, some bubblegum and a great big bookshelf. People keep talking about the recession and I know it’s true objectively, but it’s been a bountiful few months for me.