25jun07

Well, it's been almost exactly a month since I last posted. (Ironically enough, I picked up my [official] copy of Legacy, the topic of my last post, just a couple of days ago.) I've started posts several times, but besides being busy, wondered why I should bother---I taught the kids kumi again this year, but already wrote about that last year; I went and saw the Peony Garden at Nichols Arboretum again, and it was splendid this year, but I posted it two years ago. We're onto Phase II of home improvements, converting the garage to a shop, and incidentally installing new cabinets and some other improvements in the studio ---but I haven't even documented the last round of studio improvements yet, because they didn't seem all that exciting.

---We moved 4 years ago, and our life is falling into new rhythms: looking at our battered car, all the stickers before we moved were for state parks; the four annual stickers since, for the local metropark system. So I felt my stuff was getting dreadfully repetitious. Of course any magazine on a particular topic faces this challange, but they manage; surely I could too. But it's taken to nearly June to pull out of the winter malaise that strikes every year, despite my efforts to get outside and get on with my life.

Part of it was taking a class, with newly found progressive sensibilities: my typical life shelters me tremendously from other people's foibles, some of which were in fact illustrations of the bad behavior I've been reading about. And some was the fear that I'd never get some of these home improvement projects (yes, only I would be afraid of screwing up a paint job in a closet) done. Now the class is done and the closet is scheduled to be finished by the end of this week.

But it's been rather daunting to see the failures in my own life replicated in the various upheavals going on in the blogging world. One, of course, was about a harmless tech blogger who was reviled with death threats when some taunts on another techy blogger's site ``got out of hand''. Death threats and vile sexual harassement for, so far as anyone could see, the horrible crime of being a female tech blogger in the male-dominated computer field. Reading Doc Searls' opinion piece in the wizard's Linux Journal was depressing, cuz on the whole, I respect this guy and think he's a nice fella; but, like so many other men out there, simply doesn't get it when it comes to the kinds of calculations women make. Every day. All the time.

He said he felt there was no point in his writing any more on the topic, because he couldn't make it better; that nothing that could be said, could fix it. And I thought, oh yes there is: you could start with an apology. There was absolutely, positively no excuse for what happened to this woman. And then you could call on that fellow blogger who let his site get polluted with these horrendous posts. And most of all, you could express your extreme displeasure at the inexcusable and unacceptable behavior exhibited.

Instead of basically shaking your head, and saying, oh, how regrettable.

And I thought, this is what those bloggers of color, the disabled, the various other minorities want. To be acknowledged that their concerns are real, and to be apologized to when the mainstream makes ignorant, obnoxious statements.

In a way, it's even more disheartening to watch two co-bloggers on what is obstensibly a feminist blog blow up at each other---more or less over this same problem: one says, that other person was offensive; the other says, that other person was being sarcastic. But the issue is so sensitive they tear each other to shreds.

Someone with more equanimity than I would simply pass it off, as the series of storms that rattle any community, controversies that replicate, fractal like, on an ever smaller scale, down from nations to states to communities to clans to families...

Searls' thesis was that blogging is reaching the limits of what it can do; that as a tool for community networking, it's showing its limitations, in much the way the old usenet boards eventually were replaced by weblogs. He reminds me of the days back when we lived far enough away from the wizard's employment that, in order to avoid long distance charges, we'd communicate by means of an old unix program called chat. Anybody remember that? It divided the screen up into two halves, and you really could only see a couple of lines of text at a time, as it rapidly overwrote itself, having been invented long before GUIs. And while you typed, the cursor stayed with you; when the other person typed, the cursor jumped to them.

Now my f2tE communicates almost exclusively with far flung friends via IMing, which allows multiple conversations at once. It's a more powerful tool. ---So maybe something better will come along. And just as Searls' site grew with the initial boom of internet blogging interest, then shrank back to its original core readership again as the big expanding mainstream wave passed by, perhaps this will once again simply be a website, with the occasional pages documenting stuff primarily of interest to me, that I put out there in case someone else cares.

We'll see.

In the meantime, my garden is doing well; I'm even having success with hanging pots. I first saw splendid examples of these in Seattle (?) ---somewhere in the Pacific Northwest where it rains all the time: the baskets were so covered in blooms they formed a ball of flowers, with trailing stems hanging, a beautiful inverse teardrop shape so appealing and so voluptuous that when I saw them I thought for the first time all that watering required for outdoor container gardening might be worth the bother. But the post is not about hanging baskets, but instead about a wedding giftwrap, with a new-baby giftwrap thrown in for good measure.

New beginnings, yet very much a part of the cycle of life.

Seems good to me.