Coming as I do from remarkably hard-working parents, the question “Do I fear work?” has nagged at me for years. It nags at me because my parents are hard-working: their example both makes it essentially genetic that I’ll work harder than other people but as a son means I’ve learned their lesson and will be protective of my downtime.
Thus it means I get into the office first every day and I get an enormous amount of work done. But it also means I block my office webmail on my home computer and take all my vacation days.
This balance has one bad feature in particular. I tend to read books far less than I used to, because reading feels like work. When reading was work, like in grad school, I read a ton.
I dunno, just a fragment of a fuller thought somewhere out there. I just want to figure out why my leisure activities—working on Readsfeed for example—are so much like work, when actual play, whether it’s reading or bike riding or softball, are things I’d like to do but don’t.
I’ve been there only the past two, but what an amazing ten years CMS has had. For the past few months, I’ve been putting together a history of the program, which is available at cms.mit.edu and on Scribd:
On Friday we held an all-day symposium, featuring about 40 alums, this year’s ten graduate students, and dozens of guests from around MIT. But the highlight by far was on Thursday, when we welcomed back former CMS director Henry Jenkins for a Communications Forum, where he spoke of a career at MIT. I happened to be sitting directly behind the Dean, who briefly shrank to almost nothing when Henry’s first words were, “I hate this fucking place!”, not realizing he was citing the old MIT student slogan (since adopted by other institutions, including the military service academies).
I came across that quote today, attributed to beloved former Baltimore Oriole John Lowenstein. Having listened at one point or another to color commentators from half the MLB teams out there, I’m ridiculously lucky to have lived with Lowenstein and, here in Boston, Jerry Remy.
Steiner’s signature moment in an Orioles uniform took place on June 19, 1980 at Memorial Stadium. Baltimore trailed the A’s 3-2 in the bottom of the seventh inning, but had two on with two outs against Oakland pitcher Rick Langford. Up stepped Lowenstein to pinch-hit, and he pulled a single to right-field to score Mark Corey with the tying run as Al Bumbry raced from first to third. Brother Lo’ tried to take second on the throw home, but A’s first baseman Jeff Newman cut the ball off and gunned it towards second base. The baseball bounced off Lowenstein, allowing Bumbry to score the go-ahead run! It proved to be the game-winner, as the Orioles went on to win 4-3.
But wait, Lowenstein stayed down, and replays indicated that the ball had hit him in the back of the neck. A stretcher came out to carry him off the field, and the concerned crowd of 15,491 murmured among themselves. Then, just before the stretcher descended into the Orioles dugout, Lowenstein sat up abruptly and raised both his fists. The fans went nuts! “I had it planned halfway to the dugout,” Steiner admitted later. “You have to acknowledge the cheers of the fans, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to come back out after the game.” He wasn’t hurt badly, and returned to the lineup exactly one week later with run-scoring singles in his first two at bats.
You yell from one room to the other, to your husband, “I was just talking to my mother on the phone. We found out our family history is totally different than what we thought. Our name was changed. My last name is made up. My great-grandfather was actually Polish and not Irish and changed his name to be able to get a job. God. I’m stunned. We’re all stunned. I’m not sure who I am now.”
You hear him yell back, “So, like, where are my genes?”
“Exactly!” you say. You start to continue the conversation in depth as you walk into the other room. You see him folding the laundry.
“The new button-fly ones,” he says. “They didn’t make it into the wash. Now, what were you saying?”
You punch him in the back of the head. Because he’s too awesome.
The wife is all excited because I just published a piece for PBS MediaShift’s Idea Lab blog about how really smart people, like Cliff Stoll, got the potential for internet-based news so wrong. I guess I’m excited too, except that because it’s such a challenge to get my busy colleagues to publish at Idea Lab like they’re obliged to, I know I’ll be the one volunteering to pick up the slack. (But that’s where good opportunities come from.) Funniest part about it–by virtue of working for the Center for Future Civic Media, I get to have “2007 Knight News Challenge Winner” below my name on the site.
The 1995 version of Cliff Stoll can take intellectual, if not actual, comfort in the fact that all of these new methods of access haven’t resulted in greater “source diversity” or better news comprehension. Americans haven’t increased the number of sources they routinely check — and yet they feel overwhelmed by those they do. The study found that:
Despite all of this online activity, the typical online news consumer routinely uses just a handful of news sites and does not have a particular favorite. And overall, Americans have mixed feelings about this “new” news environment. Over half (55%) say it is easier to keep up with news and information today than it was five years ago, but 70% feel the amount of news and information available from different sources is overwhelming.
In other words, rather than Stoll’s predicted “wasteland of unfiltered data,” the Internet today is more like the Big City, where residents can feel deeply connected to their neighbors, while at the same time being wary of ever asking “Who else is out there?” — because the answer is overwhelming.
I respond, “I was born old.” I enjoy going to bed early. I wake up early. I watch 60 Minutes. I wear the same wool cap my sixty-year-old father and ninety-year-old grandfather do. I drink scotch and fret about my retirement fund and can cite 1989 baseball starting lineups better than those from 2009*.
30 is the new 60 is the new prime.
* 1989 Baltimore Orioles, off the top of my head vs. actual…
The last week or so have been a set of downright pleasant days. Shall we count the ways:
Baseball’s position players reported to spring training yesterday
I exchanged awesome emails with the wife of the late jazz great Charles Mingus
We caught my friend Walter‘s really excellent show at the Armory Cafe in Somerville
We hung out with friends at Toad a couple nights later
My wife gave me an early birthday present of a high-priced Invictus wristwatch bought for a preposterously low price
And I wasn’t immediately shot down when I floated the idea of going to Chicago on the Center for Future Civic Media’s dime to present projects to high schoolers who happen to be students of one of my best friends
It’s like I’m Gatsby and life is a squirrel, and we’re just waiting for the right moment to attack and/or spoon each other.
It’s a lot better than the week or two prior, which was capped off by a scream from the bathroom as my wife accidentally discharged a loaded heart-shaped Valentine’s liquid soap:
Lindsay and I are just returning from dinner with an old grad school friend, whom we love but inexcusably haven’t seen in years. There’s not much to say other than, when you’re someone who once lost his memory, it’s great to have people around you that act as a thread to your own past.
Speaking of, Lindsay and I also have an online friend who helped us through our tougher times, someone I have lots in common with by coincidence, and she recently did a very nice thing for us, which has put her squarely on our list of people we want to visit if we can ever get out for a vacation to California. Which would be a heck of a trip: we’d see my sister-in-law, my wife’s best friend, two of my best high school friends, my college roommate, another close college friend, and probably a few other people I’m forgetting. Perhaps it’s even a chance for us to drive cross-country in our 1991 Ford Explorer and push it into the Pacific, except that it has absolutely no sign of ever dying. It would just drive itself out of the sea and say, “That was fun. Can we go back to the snow in Boston now?”
Vietnam vet receives Medal of Honor for valor inâ¦Cambodia http://t.co/9EMHJUQi2012/05/16
Oof yeah, just read any Aust.-Hung. stories MT @pedropizano: 15) Reporting on the Balkans in peacetime can be just as challenging as wartime 2012/05/16
