Completely Geeked

Day after week after month after year, information floats by, some useful, some benign, some purely malevolent.  The best kind expands our consciousness of the world, the worst kind causes us to focus even more deeply on our basest human shortcomings.  Somewhere in the middle is “news”.  How do you tell the difference?  I look at the aftertaste.  Is it sickly sweet? Salty enough that I need to rinse my mouth out?  Was it a new flavor, something I’ve never experienced before?  Am I emotionally out of control?  Are my passions inflamed or are my curiosities tingled?  Does it feel like this “news” will have meaning in an hour? in a day? Week? Month? Year?  Most “news” doesn’t, which means most “news” isn’t.  Call it eyeball attractor.  Call it ego candy. Call it artificial sweetener.  Call it, not worth my time.

The cadence of my day is almost always entirely up to me. Since I have a persistent curiosity about the world and it’s doings, I can, if I choose, put in regular visits to a variety of “news” sites throughout the day (throughout the hour, throughout the half hour, throughout the quarter hour, throughout the minute). It’s emotional candy, even when I see that no, the major sites haven’t added anything new. In other words, even when my information gathering strategy fails, it feels like success: I’ve verified that I’m reasonably up to date.  This is a frustrating side effect of newspapers’ (pending) extinction: the shared organizing principle around the morning news has been replaced with a constant anxiety that there is something, somewhere, dramatic and important and life changing, that I’m missing because I haven’t taken the time to look for it.

I’ve started to write in Mac’s TextEdit. It’s completely clean. No formatting options, no help bubbles, just text on a clean background — zero distractions. It helps me focus on what I want to say, what I want to think about, instead of how what I want to say looks. What a relief.

I’m a distracted camper most of the time.  Twitter, email (work and personal), Blackberry (shh–I know), Reddit, Facebook, YIM, Skype — they all have their way with me, and having a second laptop on my desk seems to make it worse. So today I’m setting a timer, for 29 minutes at a stretch, during which all of that will be blissfully closed.  I’m optimistic that it will give me a rare opportunity for concentration.  Next: work on the internal monologue.

The last couple of weeks have got me thinking about “Swinging for the Fences”.  As a colloquialism, it’s easy to say, but it’s harder to conceptualize and execute on for a particular context.

On impulse, I asked the hive mind what they thought

I had some great responses**

…and then I started to think some more about how to make the colloquialism concrete for my personal context.

Then I started to wonder: what are fences?

It’s abundantly clear to me that fences are different for everyone.  For me, they’re about what I can’t do, or rather, what I think I can’t do.

It’s a V1, but you get the idea. Swinging for the fences is about taking a bite out of can’t.  But not just a little bite (that’s the stretch zone), but the next level.

I’ve stopped this illustration at the edge of can’t.  Why?  Well, because no one knows what’s after that.

There be monsters,*** as they say.  But that, gentle reader, is exactly why it’s interesting.  Because if you conquer a little bit o’ fenceville, you get this:

Yeah, a bigger dose of can, a bigger dose of known, a bigger dose of safety.

Common sense, right?

One interesting side effect here is the notion of emotional satisfaction which I’ve attempted to capture at the bottom.  The more you swing for the fences, the bigger the “boring” region becomes.  I know this part is true for me — is that universal?

What do you think — what is swinging for the fences?  What are fences?  What’s on the other side?

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** I understand the colloquialism, and was more curious to see how people would respond.
*** yeah that’s my dog yawning.

I’m neutral-curious on Cargill and negative-irritable on Oprah. Imagine my surprise when I see this on Cargill’s homepage:

Which then links to this over on Oprah:

I’m really, really hoping that the link from Cargill has nothing to do with the show being promoted on Oprah.

I ruminate about negative feedback more than I should.

I had a couple of comments on Friday about my stream of consciousness posts on Twitter and their automatic inclusion in Facebook.  The first was that they were tending toward spam, the second than I never respond to comments on Facebook and so shouldn’t link the accounts.

Why do I care?   Does it matter in any long term sort of way?  Does it speak more broadly of my personal worth?

No, of course not.

Plus side: these two individuals’ are apparently engaged enough to feel like it’s OK to share their critical thoughts with me.*

Moreover: balancing these out, I had an out of the blue, completely unexpected note from a college friend, touting my ability to express and stick to my own truth, consistently, regardless of pressure to conform. A trait this friend has seen in me the 20+ years we’ve known each other.

It caught me off guard in the nicest possible way.

Finding, expressing and sticking to your own truth is very difficult, the work of a lifetime.  No, I don’t view my Twitter stream as “the work of a lifetime”.  Posts are more like a byproduct of my current work circumstances.**  The 30-40+ messages I post each day and their responses are an interaction lifeline.

However, I started to wonder, do they represent a form of Creative Leakage?  Do I end up with less interesting things to talk about because I’m Twittering here and there through the day?  Or do they help me shape thoughts?  Do they help me figure out what I’m thinking? Should I just be posting the same links to websites that other people are posting?  Should I stop posting altogether?

Don’t know. I can say what I’m looking for — I want that “truth of a lifetime”.

Twitter, Facebook etc. aren’t it. Sometimes I wonder if, when I’m 84, will I even remember them?  Or will they be vague shadows, something I know I did, but appearing to me then the way I remember kindergarten today?

These posts and comments, while uniquely enjoyable, are fairly temporary in the grand scheme of things.  Their rising tide will ebb, it will be replaced by the next new new in what can only be viewed as short order.***

Finding my own personal truth, on the other hand — well, I expect that to take a while.  I’ve been looking as long as I remember  haven’t found IT yet.  I’ll let you know if i do.

In the mean time, I look forward to your feedback.

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*Not a particularly high bar on the Internet.
**My wircumstances, if you will.
***What if you lived and died and the only personal expression you knew was Facebook?