Category — Uncategorized

We just went on vacation with Truman, by which I mean, in one fell swoop we became one of those “weirdest guests ever” stories that the hotel staff will tell for years to come.  Would we have gone on holiday with our paralyzed guinea pig if there was another option?  Of course not.  But that’s the thing: No one wanted to give our guinea pig his 4 twice-daily medications or two nutritional supplements much less hold his hips in place and rock his weight from foot to foot as part of his physical therapy.  So I begged Josh to call the hotel.

It had to be him.  It couldn’t be me.  First and foremost, half the time I’m not even capable of calling the local pizza place and ordering a large plain.  Second of all, if I called them, I would start bawling, and the phone call would take several hours.

They were hesitant, but they said yes.  So we packed up the pig, his hay and medications, the kids, their boogie boards, and a copy of The Cursed Child and headed for the beach.

Truman was a perfect hotel mate.  He was quiet during sleeping hours (which is not always the case), and waited until he saw me sit up in bed before he started wheeking.  He even waited one morning, staring into my eyes, without making a peep until I finished hitting the snooze button and rose.  He liked watching the Olympics.  He was very happy to get extra treats.  And he turned up the charm when one of the hotel staff came in to meet him.  (Her: “That is one large hamster!”  Me: “That’s because he’s a guinea pig.”)  They even let us have a later checkout since Truman couldn’t go on the actual beach and we wanted to go for a few hours in the morning.

All in all, a successful trip.  And I could relax because I wasn’t worrying about him.  We promised this would never happen again.  Probably.

We finished The Cursed Child on the sand.  We actually read most of the book on the beach.  This embarrassed the Wolvog a bit because while he likes the voices I do when we’re alone in the house, he doesn’t enjoy my Umbridge or Moaning Myrtle in public.  Josh reassured him that he couldn’t hear me from his chair a few feet away, therefore the rest of the beach was not going to be able to hear my high-pitched throat clearing for the professor.

A-chem!

But mostly the trip was nice because it was a chance to shut off my brain.  It’s rare to really pull back and close off the noise of life for hours at a time.  And I got to do that, with my guinea pig in tow.

I used to be a pick-up-a-book-and-read-it sort of person.  I could read a description of the book on someone’s blog or in a magazine, glance at the first page, and generally get through the whole thing, happily.  I rarely stopped reading a book in the middle, and because I only started books that piqued my interest in the first place, I almost always had a four-or-five star experience.  I considered myself an excellent judge of a good-for-me book.

[I like to qualify that as good-for-me, because there are plenty of books that other people enjoy that I find unbearable.  And plenty of books that I love that you may find a yawn-fest.  The only person I can accurately recommend books to is myself.]

Recently, I started two books and abandoned them each after a chapter, completely disappointed with the story and characters and writing styles.  These were books that were on the best-selling list on iBooks and Amazon, so clearly other people thought they were readable.   They had received a lot of media attention.

They should have been good-for-me.  But they weren’t.

So was it me?  Or was it them?  Maybe I’m in a reading slump.  Have you ever had one of those nights where you’re hungry, but nothing sounds good when you’re trying to figure out what to eat?  Maybe that’s where I am right now with fiction.

*******

Josh came home with a few books and told me he was auditioning them for the beach trip.  Were they beach-worthy?  Because… you know… you’re on the sand, you’re stuck reading what you’ve brought with you to read.  And while I had never had to audition books before, I decided this was probably a sound idea because I have been a crap judge of books this month.

I grabbed from my to-read list and then scoured the library, building an enormous stack of books.  And now I’m going through them, one-by-one, auditioning them.  Making sure they’re right for a role on my beach trip.

So far, six have made the short list.  One will be given the lead role and two will be brought along as supporting cast.  I’ll file the headshots of the last three books and hold them for the next reading production.  It’s good to have books waiting in the wings.

Do you ever audition a stack of books?  Which books made leading roles in your world this summer?

The same day that I was telling a friend about the Wolvog’s imaginary land from childhood (and she was telling me about the one her daughter invented), I read about Jerry Gretzinger’s map.  Jerry started drawing the map of his imaginary land in 1963, and it is now 3200 panels.  Bright hues, tiny towns, and sometimes spaces eaten up by voids.  It’s a living, breathing space that doesn’t exist.

I also had an imaginary world when I was in elementary school that I still think about.  I kept an imaginary friend there, and we wrote imaginary letters back and forth to each other as pen pals, detailing our day-to-day lives.  My imaginary friend found my life fascinating because it was so different from her own, but… you know… vice versa.  She lived in a fishing village and had already been put to work in the local economy, assisting on a fishing boat.  Hard life for an imaginary elementary school girl.

I think I like Jerry’s story so much and looking at his map because it was created for his own pleasure.  It has since gone on display because other people are interested in it, too, but the project, at its heart, is a private one.  Even if no one ever looked at it — and for the first 20 years, no one did look at it — he would continue drawing it and thinking about it and bringing the world into existence.

I feel like we’ve moved into a time period where most people take a “why bother” attitude when it comes to creation.  If no one is going to see it/read it/like it, why bother making it?  I see posts all the time saying the person is stopping their blog because no one is reading it anyway.

I guess Jerry’s map is a tangible reminder of why we should bother.  Why we should write down words even if no one else reads them or draw pictures even if no one else sees them.  We should do it for the pleasure of entertaining ourselves, of bringing something into existence that would never exist if not for our imagination.

There’s a divide between what we make for public consumption vs. what we make solely for ourselves, and it’s skewed heavily towards sharing.  With limited hours in a day, why make something that only reaches inward if you can use those creation minutes to make something that reaches outward; that may bring accolades or attention or connection?

Do you think you could take real joy in designing your own world, knowing you’d never share it with anyone, or do you get more pleasure from releasing it into the world and seeing how the world receives it?

I was squicked out this week by the Daily Beast article about Glow, a fertility tracking app that had a few creepy features and security loopholes.  Glow has addressed the problems that Consumer Reports found in their study, but at its core there is a really uncomfortable question: Is Glow for the user or are the users for Glow?

I ask because the data being collected by the app is really important to the user.  Knowing your cycle is vital if you’re trying to get pregnant without assistance, and, frankly, I kept charting my cycles even when my cycles were being controlled by the RE.  It’s important to know the first day of your cycle, the length of your cycle, ovulation window… even if you’re not family building.  And if you are, well, again, vital.

But this is what I know: Glow is a free app.  And we always tell our kids that if they’re not paying for an app with money, they’re paying for an app with data.  For instance, my data and content and attention is what I’m paying in order to use Facebook.  It’s not free; it’s just not charging money.  And the same goes for Glow.  If you’re not paying money to use Glow, then you are paying with something else.  And that something is the data you are uploading to the app; data that helps you, but data which also becomes an asset to the company.

In fact, Consumer Reports highlights the mission statement of the company.  HVF is the maker of Glow:

Data is becoming our most plentiful, and most under-exploited commodity. The insights mined from it will unlock enormous productivity gains, create efficiencies where none existed before, and meaningfully improve lives … We are interested in consumer finance, enterprise document security, and disease prevention/wellness industries. But if it’s got data, we want to think about it.

So our own data IS our most under-exploited commodity; meaning, we don’t know enough about ourselves, and we don’t value all the information we can mine from ourselves by paying attention.

But doesn’t it sound like… Glow is paying attention to the value THEY can get from data?  Because they are sitting on a lot of information: Women’s sex habits, medications taken, amount of exercise, alcohol consumed.  Don’t you think a lot of companies would like to know that sort of information so they can market to them?  Data is a valuable asset for any company, and this is a company that is making data its only asset.

The Daily Beast writes,

Glow is an app by men, primarily for women. One woman sits on the company’s six-person executive team. The app is the brainchild of former PayPal CEO Max Levchin. If his career pivot from money-transfer mogul to professional period-planner seems a strange one, consider Glow the way Levchin does: as part of a broader network of data collection companies.

Which is a far-cry from Fertility Friend’s business model, which charges for the service so they don’t have to make their money selling your data.  I am taking them at their word, though I would exercise caution in uploading data to any site.  I’m a big fan of paper and pens.

And this post is not to single out Glow.  I am wary of any free app that has you enter in a lot of information about yourself, including ones I use like My Fitness Pal.  I hand over so much information in order to see my patterns.  It helps me, but it clearly also has to be helping them or they wouldn’t be able to give me the app for free.

It’s an interesting fact to note in this day and age of health tracking.  Jotting down what we eat, how much we sleep, how far we walk, or the date of period: It all comes at a cost.

It’s mid-week, and I’m still mentally turning over River Run Dry’s post from Monday, which means I should probably write about it and get it out of my brain.  Like Karen, I also don’t like to be in that uncomfortable place outside my comfort zone.  She explains,

I have a card that I taped to my office wall which reads: Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. I bought the card a while ago, when I was feeling uncomfortable about all the uncertainty I was feeling about work and this coming fall, because I liked the idea that there’s some good that comes from being uncomfortable.

The good from being uncomfortable.  Don’t we need that?  Because the alternative is that there is no benefit to being uncomfortable; that being outside your comfort zone or going through something difficult is a pointless aspect of life that we all must deal with from time to time, and it serves no purpose other than to fill the reality of chance.  Every life will be filled with easy and difficult moments.

Well, that isn’t a cheery thought, is it?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I am outside my comfort zone.  I’ve zig zagged off paths I want to be on for what amounts to poor reasoning upon reflection, and I’ve ended up outside my comfort zone.  Knowing that means I can move back into my comfort zone; I just needed to get to this place to realize where I want to be vs. where I’ve ended up.  But… returning to that quote, it means THIS is a better place because it’s where life begins.

This uncomfortable place that doesn’t really fit; that pinches and tugs at me.

If you asked me before I read that quote, I would say that the only benefit to being uncomfortable is that it gives you the motivation to change and move forward to get out of the uncomfortable place.  But that quote has been nagging me because it implies that we should always aim to operate outside of our comfort zone.  Even if we do our best work or our happiest work — our best or happiest living — inside our comfort zone.

Three out of the four of us in this house are in flux.  Josh is thankfully our anchor, happily in the zone at the moment.  But the kids are starting a new school and new routines in another month.  It makes me ill when I think too long and hard about it, so I’ve been ostriching this summer and pretending that the start of school is always going to be a month away.  I am in flux with projects and… life.  For lack of a better word, life, because it feels like too many things are all swirling around me, close enough to see but not slow enough to easily grab.

I’ve learned that I don’t like being out of my comfort zone.  I don’t thrive here.  I don’t hum.  Sure, it has helped me to take a step back so I can look at the big picture and think to myself, “Yes, I need to go here, here, and then here to get back to my comfort zone.”  But that, you see, is the goal.  To get back to my comfortable spot so I can do my best work, my happiest work, when it comes to writing.  I want to get back to cherishing and maintaining my friendships better.  I want to read more and better use the hours of my day.

So I keep turning over the quote.