Porter Square

Porter Square, the third most confusing intersection in our town hosted a clinic of how rudeness begets rudeness.  It also has much to do with one’s own sense of self rightness, and a bit of “point of self values” which I have written about in the past.

The scene:

I am standing on the sidewalk waiting for the little cold white LED lit person figure to tell me to walk.  I wait because I am damn sure that I have not figured this intersection out.  Every time I think I have the patterns calculated, some two ton chunk of steel and aluminum comes whipping around a corner and I almost become dead.  So I wait.  I stand there with a resolved stance that tries to broadcast to others “please wait like me, because the next worst thing besides me becoming integrated into a car grille is watching you take my place in that gruesome sequence.”

Alas, a very bold and dare-devilish middle aged gentleman who must have a soufflé in the oven, or something, decides to give it a go.  I shake my head and my soul cringes a bit.  On cue, a lovely Honda Accord piloted by a lovely woman turns the corner, sees green light, sees the man striding in front of her, and stops short of hitting him.  She comes to rest halfway into the crosswalk.  He stops in front of her and proceeds to lecture her on how he is in the crosswalk and she is a terrible driver.  She looks stunned.  The light turns yellow as the car pulled close behind her starts honking.  The light goes red.  She looks frazzled.  The man makes his way to whatever was so important, unscathed.

Time passes while some sort of traffic calculus is worked out and then a minute later the walk signal turns white and the wimpier pedestrians are let loose.  A young urbanite in his bike helmet, safety vest, with LED’s blinking from just about everywhere, begins walking his bike across the crosswalk.  This, the walking of the bike, is a remarkable showing of rule following.  He then turns to our stranded Accord Driver and throws his hand up in disgust and pointing to the ground shouting “CROSSWALK, CROSSWALK LADY!”.  The Accord driver frowns, and shrugs.  She is visibly upset.   Finally the pedestrians are stopped by the blinking red figure.

I turn around to watch her as the light turns green, she is so flustered that she pushed the gas and takes what happens to be an un-protected and probably illegal left turn.  Pedestrians are crossing the street she is turning on and she leans on the horn waving her hands for them to get out of her way.  They scatter among much swearing and some single digit hand gesturing.  No one has died, except maybe a little bit on the inside.

The take away:

What happened here?  In my estimation, there was one rude person.  He was the original rule breaker. Mr. Soufflé’.  There were two self righteous thoughtless people who saw something that resembled incompetence or lack of rule following and exacerbated the situation. This was the biker, and honker trapped behind our Honda Accord driver.  Then there was the driver herself, who after being the victim of true rudeness, and confused rudeness, reacted badly and let her own perceptions of what her own rights were get the best of her.  She became rude to another whole group of people who … probably stiffed their waitress, or grumbled at the CVS cashier just moments later.

What really happened here is a whole series of people who are reacting very abruptly to symbols of rudeness and fighting back with rudeness which causes rudeness.  A car pulled into a crosswalk does not always mean that a driver is a pedestrian hater, or a rule disobeyer.  A car not moving when the light is green does not mean the driver in front is texting, or sleeping, or has it out for you personally.  A pedestrian that is walking across the street in front of you when you thought you had the right of way may not be a brigade of people coordinating their action to keep you frustrated and frazzled.

The whole point really is that most of the time.  Really MOST, of the time there is some extenuating circumstance why someone is in your way, taking too long, or breaking the rules.  They are almost never what you think they are.  I guess what I am saying is that we all need to take a breath and try to keep assumption from playing into these situations.  We are too busy looking for simple answers where there are none to be had.  Things are complex more often then simple, and understanding that way might allow us to back away from the feeling of others being so rude.  Taking a second to look around and think of what ELSE might have been going on might have save some sweet broke waitress their tip somewhere in the shuffle.  Give it a try, for her sake.

A family of three

Words will follow in the next few days.  Right now I am catching my breath from an amazing week of watching my son be born, getting to know him, and being taught by him what it means to be a father on a minute by minute basis.  We are starting to understand how each day can be interminably long, but the years will fly by.  We are already dreading the day he goes off to school.  More soon.

And when I say big I mean BIG.  Somewhere on the order of what is the nature of humans, and what the future or our existence is going to look like.  Somehow I cannot help but think about these things in the strangest of moments.   Take the conversation with my wife the other day about what we are going to do about health insurance.  You know, should we overpay and stay on my insurance, or overpay and stay on her insurance?  We are hashing out some of the unknowns and this concept floods my head and it makes it very hard to have a real conversation with any real meaning.  This thought of how interesting it is that we as humans are really good at making thought models in our head of how things seem to be.  We do this even though the reality of the situation does not look like that.   At some point the reality of the situation shows itself and we have this moment of panic because the picture we have in our brains is suddenly warped and grotesque.   It’s a bit like when someone does that morphing thing in the movies.   The original looks like something recognizable (beautiful woman), and the end result looks different but recognizable (snarling homicidal beast), but the form of the thing in its morphing stages fall into the what-the-hell zone and our brains go a bit wacky.   I am sure everyone’s brain reacts to this sort of thing differently but mine get initially angry, and then sad, until the truth is made clear and then I am reticent.

Example number two is a thought that was posed to me while listening to a TED talk about memes and how ideas and thoughts act on the principles of evolution.  Not only that but it was posed by the speaker that physical objects do the same thing.   My best original example of this is the number keypad.  The form of the number keypad is not patented, and it is not copy-written intellectual property.  It would be great for the person who first thought of it.  If it was patented, that person would be wealthy beyond belief because you almost never have a device the uses a number keypad in any other form than the one we all can picture right now.   How did it end up like that?  Evolution.  Just as ducks evolved to have webbed feet to best be used in water, the number key pad took many forms producing many branches on the evolutionary tree.  It is becoming clear that the 3×3 square format is the STRONGEST, and most FIT format and thus has survived in the world and continues to “reproduce itself” billions of times over.   Just like in biological entities there are still mutations of this form.   Look at your phone, the 1 is at the upper left.  Now look at your keyboard, the 1 is in the lower left.  Moreover, just think about how many different places the 0 ends up.  On most phones it is centered at the bottom of the 3×3, just under the 8.  On the keyboard I am typing on it is two buttons wide and occupies the space under the 1 and 2.   Sometimes it finds a better spot for the task at hand, but all-in-all the format is standard.  I am amazed that the Apple iPhone, which has no physical buttons at all, and could have chosen to do any kind of number pad.  Heck, they could have made it like a rotary phone (which someone has of course), but there it is, the little comfortable box.  Fascinating no?  Well maybe not, but yet this is what take up my processing time these days.

The last example might actually be more useful on a day to day basis.  It first emerged when having what one might call a passionate discussion with my brother-in-law about the government’s efforts towards new heath-care policies.   The conversation was not from polar opposite sides of the political spectrum, it was being had by two people who hold exactly the same political views.   The disagreement was simply about what can be expected when big changes in big systems are desired.   He was very upset because he saw our President compromising on things that he had told us that he was going to accomplish.   He felt let down and disappointed.  He felt that he put his trust and hopes that this person could make big change quickly.  My take on it is, no matter who you are or what your skills are, big change never happens quickly.  It cannot.   It will fail. Like Charles Babbage and his difference engine.  Like so many other things that change paradigms.  Humans do not seem to be able to ever leap across rivers.   We need stepping stones.  Sometimes they are close together, some times they are far apart.

Steve Jobs got to experience this phenomena. In the late 80’s Steve wanted to change the world.  He thought the technology was there to take the very popular Mackintosh and shrink it down to a hand held size.  A hand held computer.  This was unbelievable at a time when the smallest available personal computers where the size of a carry-on piece of luggage but he did it, and he gave us the Apple Newton. Have you heard of the Apple Newton?   Most people have not for a reason.  It did not catch on.  He wanted badly to realize his vision and continued to develop the idea as time passed and technology improved. Finally he decided to try again but this time he needed to make sure that he pulled that next stone closer.   He did that by putting something called an iPod in just about everyone’s hands.   Now people had a tactile feel for what a little computer felt like.  Of course we did not see it that way, it was just music player, right? Everyone was comfortable with that idea, a music player, which had 80 gigabytes of memory and had processors I am guessing were about a thousand times more powerful than the Newton.   Furthermore, Steve took that stone, and instead of making it a leap, he brought it so close you could just saunter onto it.   He recognized that everyone carried around a phone and started to wish it could do more.  Why not make his computer have a phone feature and make his computer have an interface that allowed it to be used as such.  It seems he didn’t want any streaching to be required by us at all.  So, he called it what it is not, but called it what we would understand, a cell phone.  45 million purchases later most people have recognized how large a distance we were brought while thinking we were just taking on tiny step.

So, I say to my brother in law, I know you want big change, but we cannot handle such things.  We must step stone by stone to the other bank and what our leaders are doing, probably subconsciously, is to bring that next stone within leaping distance or closer.  It’s still not where we want to be but it allows us to take the next step.  My brain continues to ponder this.  It continues to serve up question after question.

I am guessing that in the last few moments before I about to meet my son I am trying to get things straightened out.  Maybe I am trying to make sure delusion is removed from the moment, that the importance and inevitability of evolution is presant in my life, and that this thing I am about to experience is not the kind of leap that everyone continues to warn me about.   The fact is that I am in mid- step having left sure footing and am trusting that next stone is stable and sure.

photo by cca

I ride my bike to work most days just as I did on May 18th.  I was starting to feel a bit under the weather but did the ride anyway.  Turns out that the combination of 14 hour work days and sickness is not a good one, and I got full blown sick that day.  It took a long time for me to feel physically better and awake enough to ride my bike back home.

A bit about the bike.  My bike is not much to look at but I do love it.  It was lovingly called a “frankenbike” because of its put-together nature.  It’s a mutt, but a fierce, fast mutt.  All I can say is that I bought a bike that fits me and I have begun to really love it even though it feels bad being parked next to the BMWs, and Mercedes of the bike world here at Cambridge Center.

At my workplace we have a bike locker in the garage and I felt that my bike was perfectly safe being left there for the better part of two weeks.   But … there was always a fear in the back of my mind that someone would complain about the fact that my bike had not moved in a while.  So, last night when I was walking to the garage to retrieve my bike and ride home I started getting a bit nervous.  You know, the nervous you feel when you walk down lane 87 at Target parking lot instead of lane 86 and you can’t find your car?  You know the feeling that “it finally happened and I am a victim of grand theft auto without Lojak”.  So … the butterflies start.

I turn the corner and spot my bike.  Whew, and then as I entered the locker there is a yellow slip of paper tucked into the handlebars.  Oh no! (said like Mike Birbiglia)

The two thoughts I have are that the building maintenance people have tagged my bike for removal and I am going to have to go to them and explain the situation.  I realized that the paper was not official looking so my mind then thought, well, a fellow biker is getting all agro on me about taking up a space.  I take the note, open it and find this …

Nia's Note

This was such a wonderful find.  I love when this stuff happens.  I really feel connected to my network of community.  Just so you know, I am that guy that bought the bike, and I do admit that I am a friend of Bruce Cormack’s (grin).

Nia, if you are surfing the web and happen to find this post, thank you so much for making my day, my week, and possibly my month.  I dream of a day when our lives are filled with little yellow scraps of wonder, just like this one.

So, that is my story.  I hope to be off my deadline soon and look forward to sharing more with you. Take care all.

Shim Grid (photo by cca)

Rigorous process often emerges as pure visual delight.  This work of art was neither designed nor intended yet the results speak volumes.  Add the dimension of willfulness and now you are really getting somewhere.  Enjoy.

Light-Snow (photo by cca)

Although 2009 has begun vastly better than 2008, it still has not afforded me any time to write.  I have a couple of interesting posts on deck.  Lets hope that the baseball metaphor is not an omen of when I will get to posting some thoughts.  For now, I hope you enjoy my favorite image of this winter, thus far.