Yet another benefit

Image via Wikipedia

In working to find a new job, I've found another benefit to not having one at the moment. Because I spend large amounts of time in front of the computer every day in job search mode, I get tired of staring at a screen. As all the ergonomics sections of computer owner's manuals tell us, we should take regular breaks to keep from hurting ourselves and I don't think moving from the computer to watching a movie on the couch really counts.

So it'd be good to break and read a book. I'm currently working on Oakley Hall's Warlock, which is not at all close to Harry Potter. It's a Western set in the fictional town of Warlock. Good book, but with my homework and job, it was hard to find time to read it before and I had to take it back to the library. Now that I only have the job hunt and accounting homework, I can squeeze a chapter or two in to the times I don't want to be staring at an LCD screen.

Now before I sign off today and move onto the daily job hunt, let me make a plug here for your local library. Sure, you can read all kinds of things on the internet, but there's something to be said for getting information from books. And not only does the library have books, but you can also join a summer reading program, get suggestions from librarians (professional book lovers), do homework, get useful community information (bus schedules, tax forms, local news, etc.) and become a better person. For free. If you haven't been to the library recently, you should go. I guarantee they have something that will interest you.

Ooh, dream job

Image by cesarharada.com via Flickr

Yesterday I was playing around online, poking around available jobs at companies I'd like to work for and found a position doing what I was doing before at the company I think I'd fit in stupendously well: IDEO. The downside? It's in Palo Alto, California, which means I'd have to move. Not my favorite thing to do, but to work there, I'd totally do it. The other downside? My MBA would either not get done or have to wait or something.

Of course, the first step would be to get an interview. Then I'll figure out the other things that come up. In the meantime, think good thoughts my direction.

Reward lunch

Because it's summer, the kids had to take swimming lessons. As much as both of them love splashing around in the bathtub and generally making the bathroom a dripping mess of bubbles and puddles, I had expected that given a much larger amount of water, they'd absolutely love being able to splash as big as they could without a disapproving dad saying "Well, this is a mess."

Boy, I was wrong. They both hated swimming lessons, the little girl outlining in detail all the reasons she was justified to hate swimming lessons while she got ready to go, all the way to the pool and even while she was in the pool. Then she analyzed how her reasons were valid all the way home and pouted while she put on dry clothes. That's when Chelsea did what most exasperated parents do—bribe your kids.

"If you go to all of your swimming lessons, at the end, we'll go to Pirate Island Pizza." Well, that seemed to work and yesterday, as all three of you who read this know, was the last swimming lesson. So that's where we went for lunch today and had lots of fun while we were there. If you're tired of going to Chuck E Cheese, do yourself a favor and hang out with the pirates instead. I think you'll be glad you did.

Swimming

Today was the last day of swimming lessons for the kidlings and I got to go with them. I had lots of fun and it makes me sad that I don't have a pool in my backyard that I can just go swim around in. I like swimming and I'm pretty good at it. I swam across the pool, holding the boy and he didn't even go underwater. My rusty lifeguarding skills at work there. Also, once I got across, I turned around, ready to go back and Chelsea said that she was tired and needed to practice swimming more.

I miss playing around in the water for hours at a time in the summers. The one thing I don't miss about swimming a lot is getting water stuck in my ears, which is what I've got going on right now. I can only hear out of one ear because the other one's full of water and I can't get it out. I turned my head and jumped for a bit to try and shake it out; that didn't work. I put some of those nifty drops in and turned my head to let them drain out and inadvertently took a nap on the couch. Still didn't work. I'll give it until about tomorrow and then I'm going to bother a medical professional about it. This happens almost every time I go to the pool and it's completely obnoxious. Maybe one of these days I'll wise up and put in some kind of plug to keep the water out. But when I go swimming so infrequently, it's just not something I think much about. Maybe I should change the frequency I go swimming, since it's something I enjoy and by all accounts, I should exercise more. I'll have to think about that one some more. In the meantime, if I ignore you, it's not that I was trying to, I just have water in one of my ears and I probably honestly didn't hear you.

some thoughts from today

I was looking at some of the books on my bookshelf today and decided to take To Kill a Mockingbird down and flip through it. I've had that book for years and read it a number of times. It also accompanied my sister to her English class in high school where she had to read it too.

As I flipped through the (clearly) well-loved pages, I started getting excited to talk about it with my kids in 10 or so years. Then I looked at the other books on that particular shelf, all of them exciting that I'll get to share them with my little clones.

That's when I had the realization that I'd been kind of looking for. Every time I've gone through a job search, and this is probably true for most people, I think a little bit harder about what I'm passionate about. What kind of work would get me out of bed in the middle of the night because I couldn't sleep? What do I feel passionate about to the point where I would actually try to convince someone who didn't like it that it's wonderful? I feel that way about books. I have very few emotional connections with things, but books are one of the things I'm most passionate about.

I know some people say it's a dying industry, replacing these piles of paper and ink with digital text files you can read on a low-power device that'll hold thousands of books. Amazon even announced that they've started selling more Kindle versions of books than they have physical books. I don't think books are going away any time soon. No one has the same emotional connection to a digital file as they have for a physical object. Pictures of your family seem more real when they're printed on glossy paper than they do on a computer screen. Don't they? People have no compulsion about deleting old MP3 files but we hang on to the old LPs we have because by touching them, seeing them on the shelf, we reconnect with that person we were and the people we were with when we put those records on the turntable years ago. Never mind that you don't have a turntable anymore or that you have a digital version of the album. The same thing goes for books. By thumbing through the pages, you remember the journey you emotionally went on as you smell the same pages and feel the paper in your fingers. You see the notes you wrote in the margins, the highlights you made years ago and smile at the things you thought were so important. It's like a flash of vacation pictures from the trip where you floated on the Mississippi River with Huck and Tom in an instant.

The other reason I don't think physical books are going away is that there's a status attached with having lots of books. Some people pay big money to have libraries full of matching, leather-bound volumes just for the symbol of having lots of fancy books. So what if my shelves are full of paperbacks that I've had to masking tape back together? It doesn't change the fact that there are books on shelves. What's better, I've actually read mine. In any case, there's a social currency in having lots of books and I don't think that's going to change soon either. It's much more difficult to show off your collection of digital texts when you have people come over to your house. You can't have your digital copy of Ulysses staring at people from the shelf in the corner while they admire your Ayn Rand collection of text files.

I'm realizing that I should probably be looking for something having to do with books, since they affect me so much. And apparently Kanye says he does just fine without them. Exasperating.

Business cards, part 2

I've been thinking about them for a little while now and had just recently asked a designer friend of mine to help me come up with something awesome so I can sound like this guy.

Not really. No one should sound like this guy. But I'm still pulling together ideas for a contact card. I don't want my cards related to a specific business or job, just something I can hand out if someone wants to find me somehow. Not that I don't have an online presence, it's just that physical reminders help me remember things better. That's one of the reasons I'll never get rid of my 14th Edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, but that's another story for another time. I realize that business cards seem to be moving into obsolescence, but if they're done well, they can be really great. Progress on my cards isn't coming quickly, but so what? I'm not in a rush. Also, it gives me a chance to work on getting that job title I really want.

So while I'm collecting ideas, what kinds of things have you seen on business cards that you've liked and what things should I absolutely avoid?

My thoughts on Twitter and food

One of the most common complaints about Twitter from people who haven't used it much is that it's mostly completely banal things like "best ham sandwich ever" or "Who doesn't love ice cream?" You'll also find the same thing on Facebook with people's status updates. After thinking about it for a bit, I've decided it's because most of us don't have completely thrilling lives. For most of us, the delicious food we eat is the most exciting thing that happens all day. Most people like the food we eat and we generally like to share food that we enjoy. It's one of the ways we bolster our relationships. How many parties do we go to that don't have some kind of food or tasty treats? Not many.

It's also a safe thing to send out to the world. It's a form of self-censorship. Not many people are going to send things out to all the internet things like "I totally drank myself stupid and have a wicked hangover. I need to stop doing that," or "my girlfriend did some crazy things to me in bed last night." Not the kind of thing most people want to share in polite company. Or on the internet either. The internet has a long memory and it can resurface any time, usually at the wrong time. So by posting about culturally safe things like food, people can still have a presence without posting things that may come back and bite them.

The last thing I thought about posting about food is that it's one of the regular things that happens to us all that has relatable emotions attached to it. We may not be in a relationship, not have kids, don't share the same political views, have the same hobbies, but we all have to eat and whether or not you want to admit it, we all have emotions connected with what we eat. That's why there's even a term for "comfort food." If we didn't feel anything about our food, it wouldn't comfort us.

I, for one, am fine with people posting things about their food. It keeps me from having to see uncomfortable posts about "I did something with the thing and it was fun!" or getting way more information about people than I ever wanted to know. As Robert Frost said, "Good fences make good neighbors," and in the case of the internet, I think that information left unshared makes good relationships.