I don’t see the value in having a mobile phone yet. The two people who call me at odd times and expect me to pick up would prefer it if I had one, but they both eventually reach me. My sister (one of those two) seemed visibly agitated when she came to town and couldn’t talk to me any time she wanted to. A couple other people know to rely on email or call me at work. My last girlfriend (not sure I want another one after that experience…) seemed to have trouble communicating over email, and just had to talk to me over the phone - even though it was clear to me that it didn’t improve the communication any. So, in my limited experience, you can see that I have encountered several different attitudes.
Then there is my attitude: Telephone calls are an interruption. There is never a good time for you to call me. Answering the phone has a tendency to wipe my mind clean. I can’t remember what I was working on or thinking about, and I resent that. And since I’m talking to you, I resent you too. It’s going to take me some time to recover. Okay… I overdramatized that, but that’s basically what happens.
Here’s the formula: When having a phone becomes a valuable opportunity that can outweigh the distraction, then it will make sense for me to have one. I can’t square my memories of housewives getting phones to carry in case they get a flat tire on some West Texas highway with rattlesnakes, hillbillies, and UFOs with teenage girls texting their classmates from the Metro bus. I’m not looking forward to becoming a slave to my pocket phone. Maybe when I get one, I’ll only put the number on resumes - not tell anyone else. That way I’ll know what to expect when it rings. But it hardly matters, because…
If my phone rings when I’m on the bus, or as I’m walking on a rainy day, I won’t be prepared to talk to anybody. This is in itself a pretty good argument for never leaving the house - where I already have a land-line. If I need to be prepared to talk business with people at all hours of the day, then how can I ever leave my desk?
Consider, if you will, my PC: It’s a heavy sucker with good computing muscle. I didn’t choose this model for portability. I wasn’t planning to work sitting in the park or riding on the bus. A PC with my whole life loaded on it takes several minutes to start up and shut down anyway. I wanted “transportability” more than “portability”. I don’t mind carrying the weight. My vision of this computer was exactly how I’m using it today - and pretty much every day: For multi-hour sessions sitting next to a wall plug. At my apartment, in the office, or at a coffeeshop. It doesn’t seem worth it to switch it on if I’m not going to go longer than a fresh battery would last. Working on a park bench would be nice, but I can’t focus on the task if I do that. Sunlight makes the screen unviewable anyway. I prefer to work in a darkened room, where I will not be too distracted by the stuff in the room with me.
All of this complaining would be a serious waste of time if I didn’t have some suggestions:
I occasionally need to walk around with a phone, just as on occasion it might be nice to have a car. Can I just rent a phone when I need one? Aren’t there disposable phones with prepaid minutes? I’m not too excited about committing to an expensive phone and calling plan only to find out that I hate it. Where can somebody test drive these services? How simple is it to have my home number temporarily forward to a rented or throwaway mobile? Is this something that other countries have (I’m thinking of the islands: UK and Japan), but we do not? If I travel somewhere (especially if I were traveling to a job interview) it would be very valuable to have a phone. But day to day? No way.
One of the things that bug me about other people and their phones is: People become stupid when they rely on the phone. Being out on a limb used to encourage people to get the facts straight, but now you can blindly wander toward your destination and call when you get close. “Hi, I didn’t bother to figure out where you are!”… Sounds like an idiot to me.
Phones are the only handy device sometimes when they are not the best device: And texting might be nice if it were not more expensive than calling.
I am engaged in an endless struggle over how to deploy my attention among a range of different pressing needs. But, I also worry that you are engaged in the same struggle, so I am unlikely to ring your phone out of some primal Golden Rule. This explains a lot about why that girlfriend I mentioned was frustrated with me and left - she thought I didn’t call enough. But if you’re anything like me, sitting around gabbing on the phone is not your idea of togetherness. It so often substituted for real planning and communication.
Posted in ontology, relationship-angst, telecom | 3 comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:35:00 GMT
My sister came over to claim things she left at my apartment years ago. I dug through the living room closet, and the big discovery was a box of LP records from when she was married, and a photo album from her ex-husband. We also found the key to open her trunk full of horse-riding paraphernalia. Finally.
I have a definite problem with stuff that isn’t really mine. I don’t feel authorized to throw away things that don’t belong to me. You can see it in the refrigerator at work - people will occasionally leave food as a donation, and it invariably goes bad because I won’t eat something I think belongs to someone else. But we could take this a step further to something else I’ve been worried about recently: I become a different person in any situations with sharing or coordinated activity. When I am alone, I don’t need permission to act on my ideas, but when I have other people to consider, I won’t push my ideas at all. I do what I want to do precisely when there is no resistance - nobody else to consider. As soon as I’ve got others to consider, my ideas don’t sound fun anymore. It’s not an issue of shame, exactly, but that might be the best way to describe it. When people ask me what I want to do, I don’t want to do anything. But I do plenty of stuff when nobody is asking.
This is the working explanation for the startling similarity I encountered between my visit to Texas and my sister’s visit here. When I was driving across Texas, I stopped on a whim. (or I tacitly ‘made plans’ as I drove - an ineffable process where I knew what I wanted to do without any moment of discovery worth recording) I would pass towns on a map, feel the pull to discover balanced by the push to continue, and once in a while I would pull off. I found a place to eat without deciding or discussing. I found coffeeshops, gas stations, and Dairy Queens, all based on a vague heuristic. I felt the balance of my need, and found the moment. With each passing opportunity, the balance shifted. My intuition kept track. But put me in a room with someone - a person who should know their own personal intuitive balance, and I try to accommodate them. I rather enjoy companions with a strong idea of what they want. But what I get is people who will not communicate their needs to me. With that information I could determine a solution. But without it, I am in the dark - with few constraints and many free parameters.
Posted in ontology, relationship-angst, Texas | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 30 Oct 2007 14:10:00 GMT
Set to the tune of Broken Social Scene’s “Bee Hives”
- The language of potentials upsets me.
- I also don’t want to hear about how difficult anything is.
Mountains are not climbed by talking about either a) How many great mountains there are, or b) How steep the cliff face is.
If you believe in my abilities (and, please stop it with the “You can do anything!” talk), then it hardly matters a) what I choose to do, or b) how difficult other people think any of it is. If you really believed that I could do anything, then you’re in no position to judge the difficulty. It’s as simple as that. It’s no coincidence that I dazzle people with easy solutions to hard problems, and then I get scared when I try to map out my future. Look at what has happened to me: I’ve taken that kind of talk seriously. People who I thought knew better than me, had my interests in mind, or were friendly, were all - as it turns out - poisoning me for life. Sure they had good intentions in most cases, but I believed their unwitting lies. They steered me wrong. The lesson seems to be that I should have ignored all that advice.
Does any of that even count as advice anyway? “Look at all these mountains!” and “Wow, that’s a really steep rock face!” I don’t suppose it does.
Now given all that, let’s have a second look…
Something I read in the Warsh book triggered all this: The job search for economists. The eternal need to show off to people what you have done. I started thinking that I haven’t done anything worth showing off because of the contradictions in what people told me about the world. Their fear infected me. I expect that isn’t what they intended. I expect over the years all those artificial self-esteem builders people are exposed to as children will wear off. I certainly never got anything from the “You can do anything!” bull. Maybe I should just concentrate on doing a few things well, then being proud of the results, huh? Confidence sounds great, but it doesn’t do any good when you’re wrong. But neither does fear serve much of a purpose. Because when fear surrounds an enterprise, it suffuses every otherwise manageable facet - subgoals you’re better off not fearing, since they bring you closer to accomplishing what seemed so fearsome in the first place.
I think my last girlfriend left me because she was tired of hearing me complain. It’s too bad, because I think I can see the use in complaining - as long as you’re careful to hear yourself. She was young, and I don’t think she had developed the same bitterness as I have. And besides, complaints are the mental space where I solve problems. I’m never just complaining - unless for some reason I decide that I’m complaining too much and should stop, which makes sense while being wrong - I’m sharpening the details of my problems - That surely calls for more complaining! I have to deal with the world, so when I say something is wrong with the world, I am inherently talking about something I might change about myself. Nothing is ever that simple, because it constitutes an interaction. I might change something about myself, I might find I can’t change that thing, and I might find a ‘third way’ to exist despite my complaint about the world. Furthermore, I might actually figure out how to change the world - or just my little corner of it in a temporary arrangement.
Posted in employment, ontology, relationship-angst | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 08 Oct 2007 15:39:00 GMT
You know, maybe I’m starting to see the light. Somewhere in the midst of all this complaining I do, the pieces are starting to fall into place. Nevertheless, when they do fall in, I’ll still be right at the beginning, with a long way yet to go. I know that it’s counterintuitive, but I really prefer to understand something first - before I try to do it for real. You could easily argue that I would never get started that way. Point taken. I hope.
My girlfriend Christina was working at the Tenleytown Whole Foods yesterday. They had some staffing crisis, so she took a shift. After last Sunday’s disaster, I wanted to get this one right. We planned to meet up for dinner once more. At work I managed to do some schoolwork (and it’s never enough), including the Web Design midterm. It was a piece of cake. Now I just need to catch up to three weeks of the website project. At 4pm I started on several hours of wasting precious time. Come to think of it, it wasn’t particularly relaxing. When do I get to relax?
Sean & Elizabeth, both no longer at Olsson’s, were having a get-together at their apartment in Takoma Park, and I had already conceded that it would be ridiculous for Christina to come that far after 7pm, so I had also given up on going myself. Tenley was much closer to where both of us needed to wind up. Well, the plan was to do some schoolwork in the office until six, then head over to meet her after work. Instead, I threw caution to the wind and went over to Takoma to spend an hour there. It was a good group of people - S & E have a balcony over Carroll Avenue right there in Old Town Takoma, so there’s a lot of watching the world go by with a beer in your hand. After an hour of that, I had to split, so I said my goodbyes and it was back on the train. The Tenley Whole Foods is being remodeled, and it’s a big mess in the store. There are tarps over walls, and the flow is interrupted. It’s always been a bit claustrophobic, and I don’t see how they intend to fix that aspect. Maybe they don’t.
I arrived with a 15 minute margin of error, so I had to wait while Christina worked on a rack of greeting cards wedged in between produce stands and an elevator to the garage. After she finished up, we went to Guapo’s. She spent a lot of money on frozen strawberry margaritas, ceviche, and seafood soup for the two of us. I did the best I could, but it was hot on the patio, and it was my second dinner. I guess I ate more than I thought I would at the party in Takoma. We sat around watching the sunset and unwound a bit. Christina’s friend Maluzka was in town for the weekend, and they were planning to get together. So instead of a quick trip to my apartment, we rode the train to Arlington to meet Maluzka. It was getting late, and I needed rest if I wasn’t going to get work done, so I hung out for a little while with those two. We said we’d meet her at Murky Coffee in Clarendon, but it was closed, so we waited out front until she arrived. The three of us walked over to Galaxy Hut, and discovered they were charging a $5 cover. Since none of us had cash, we kept moving. We wound up at a little Irish Pub on Wilson. Not the nice one by the Courthouse. This was a sports bar a while back, and its roots are showing. While Christina and Maluzka caught up, I watched part of The Big Lebowski on a TV above the bar. I’ve never seen it before, and I still haven’t, really. But, it was disturbingly fascinating. Someday perhaps, I’ll watch the whole thing. Eventually, I got booted out so they could talk about me. It wasn’t as if I were paying any attention, but bed is a much better place for me to spend that time, so off I went.
Posted in relationship-angst | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 29 May 2006 13:18:00 GMT
So I was overreacting about Christina. She called me on her lunch break today. She was afraid that I was still mad at her. I should’ve known. That’s clearly a danger. I almost never get angry with her.
I’m still falling apart, though. I need to really work on the group project, and suppress my nagging doubts about everything.
Posted in relationship-angst, infogami-blog | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 27 May 2006 20:56:00 GMT
I don’t understand what I’m doing anymore. Why am I attempting this complicated odyssey when I don’t have the basics under control?
All or nothing is NOT my style. I do a lot better with a gradual process. I’m sick of not being able to do things my way; of feeling tremendous weight on my shoulders when I’m trying to break out. Why am I always finding out too late that I’ve signed up for a brutal commitment?
In other news, I don’t think Christina is talking to me anymore. I didn’t expect this to happen. She obviously thinks I abandoned her Sunday. It makes me really angry that she thinks that when I was waiting for her a few blocks away. It’s nice to have a girlfriend sometimes, but the last thing I need is somebody to make more trouble for me when I’m already living on the edge.
Posted in infogami-blog, relationship-angst, school | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 27 May 2006 16:49:00 GMT
We just had a big party in the office for two coworkers who are leaving. So it’s not a normal day at work today. I got throught the work I had to do for the email newsletter, and sent some book orders, and then I was hoping to sneak in a little school work. After this, I have to go to a group meeting for Project Management. Sometimes I’m so useless after a day at work.
Sam, one of the driving forces behind the party, remarked this morning that I should have invited Christina. Funny, that. I was going to invite her Sunday, but as far as I can tell, she’s not talking to me right now. Maybe it’s just selfish of me, but I didn’t really want her to come to the party. She is bitter about some of the managers, and she left the company because she felt shafted. She would have had to get all the way over here from Vienna. And, most importantly, I can’t spend any time with her - I’ve got to go to the group meeting. I don’t doubt that she would have pouted about me running off to school. It’s all academic now. She has free time right now, and I don’t.
I don’t like the chilling effect of hard work. It threatens to invade all aspects of my life and shut everything else down. I don’t mind hard work that I understand, but whenever I take it up a notch to hard work that I don’t understand, there is always some kind of disaster. This is a concept nobody else in my life seems to get. Hard work that I don’t understand is a time sink. My entire life could get sucked down that drain. I don’t have enough time in my busy schedule to put things aside as needed. There is no real break for me - everything I put off is still waiting for me later, in bigger, badder piles. I want to be able to throttle back as appropriate when the stress gets too intense. There have been plenty of other times when I could have handled twice the workload I was given. It just left me soft and unprepared.
I’ve been waiting patiently for a chance to spend time with my girlfriend, and it can’t just be when she’s ready. I have to be ready for it too. She broods about things for a long time, then suddenly when she’s happy, she expects me to drop everything and come out to play. Doesn’t she realize that?
Posted in relationship-angst, infogami-blog, school, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 25 May 2006 20:44:00 GMT
8:35 AM 5/1/2006
It’s May again. There are supposed to be Immigrant’s Rights Boycots today. So far nothing seems out of the ordinary. My South Texas Correspondent has accused me of not knowing any illegal immigrants. She might be right. But if I were illegal, I wouldn’t want to advertise it, so the number might be fairly high. How many people assume that at 34 years old I have a college diploma? Probably all of them. On the other hand, I make it a point not to know that many people.
Christina has another training session at Whole Foods in Silver Spring, so we’re planning on having lunch. Today I’m the only one in Operations, so I have to make sure we don’t spend as much time out to lunch as the last time. She thought they would be starting earlier today, and be done earlier, so that gives us a few more choices.
School has been acting strangely again. Three of my quiz grades in BIS315 mysteriously disappeared. Now on the final grade they show up as zeros, giving me a ‘B’ for the class. It’s absurd! I took all three online quizzes while they were available, and got excellent scores. They were so easy - it was like a free gift. Naturally I took them because I needed insurance against the final, which might trip me up. Of course, I got nearly a perfect score on the final. He didn’t make it as difficult as I expected. When you finish the online quiz, the system auto-grades it. You get to see your answers against the correct answers right away. Unfortunately, there’s no way for my browser to provide any forensic evidence.
Posted in school, infogami-blog, relationship-angst | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 01 May 2006 12:35:00 GMT
