Watching Icicles Grow

The first thing that I am usually aware of is the brightness of the sun rising between the crux of two houses across the street and stabbing me in the eyes through an unfortunate conjunction of bed placement and and a broken place in the blinds. The shape of my room, the configuration of heating elements and the fact that I have a memory foam mattress that sits on essentially a low pedestal all conspire to prevent me from moving the bed to a different location in my new apartment. After thinking for something like the hundredth time that I should probably do something about that I attend to important bodily functions such as the taking of iron and the brewing of caffeinated beverages. The first real activity I do is the most I am physically active all day. I cycle on my recumbent bike for seventy minutes or so. Sometimes longer sometimes a bit less- it depends strongly on how long it takes me to play a couple days in Harvest Moon. During the loading screens I look out the living room window- the one I can see out of that is as opposed to the sole window we had in the living room of my last place. The position of my bike is such that most of what I can see is the featureless white siding of the building next door but I can also see the tops of a few trees and a bit of sky. Lately though my focus hasn't gone past the icicles. The weather up here in this bitter northeastern corner of New England has been especially conducive to icicle farming this year. We had snow followed by a couple days of slightly mild sunny days followed by bitter cold with the occasional day warm and sunny enough to make the icicles drip. I live on the second floor of an old house that's been converted into apartments and given that two of the icicles outside the window extend as much as a foot below it I estimate as least those two are going on ten feet in length. I think when they finally break (killing anyone will the misfortune of being below or worse- shearing the cable lines) or melt away I am going to miss them.

I follow up exercising with a hot shower. I then absently look in the fridge and the cupboard to figure out what to eat for breakfast as though I do not know exactly what is in both. Am I feeling ambitious enough to go through the great deal of effort involved in fixing myself canned tuna on toast or am I going to dump a can of soup in our small frying pan to heat and have chowder for breakfast? Not that it truly matters as there are fair odds I will eat the other option later on in the day. I then log onto my computer and look for jobs and try to while away my time. I turn on the radio to try to drown out the inconsiderately loud people that live below our kitchen (as opposed to the chick who lives below our living room as this is the way I think of the two first-floor units). You'd think the people that live upstairs would bother me more but aside from walking very heavily for such small people I notice them much less than all-out shouting matches alternating with children jumping and running so hard they shake my whole kitchen followed by several episodes of back-to-back King of the Hill played at inordinately high volume topped off by leaving Mario pause music playing just as loud for a minimum of eight hours (it was still playing when I went to bed at midnight) while they weren't even home. I watch marathons of shows of Netflix I probably wouldn't have looked at the descriptions of if I didn't have so much time on my hands. Eventually after it's been dark for several hours I go to sleep thinking of nothing in particular and unconcerned that my next real thought is going to be about how I should really do something about the morning light stabbing me in the eyes through the broken blinds.

This is the life of an unemployed person. Or at least this is my life while unemployed. I don't know if other people fall into such eminently predictable patterns while undistracted by things like working or if they struggle to remember the last time they actually went somewhere. The most recent time I ventured beyond our steps was this past friday to fetch presents from my parents' car for our Christmas celebration and the last time I actually went anywhere was... Well, the last two times we needed groceries I wrote my brother a list and he went shopping but I did go the time before that so possibly as much as four weeks ago but I don't really remember because there is nothing distinct about my days or weeks. I have been told recently by people I had never previously interacted with that I should write in my blog again and by people that I do know that I should write in my blog again because I have so much time on my hands. I have to say my lack of inspiration lately is strongly linked to the lack of anything to say in response to 'So, how was your day?'. I can just imagine my movie-dramatic response: 'We-eeeell, I exercised for seventy-six minutes today instead of the eighty-two I did yesterday and decided on soup for breakfast after a hot internal debate that lasted possibly as much as a minute and then I cruised the internet job boards to see what new occupations I am not qualified for had been posted today and oh- one of the icicles I have been watching grow developed a fork for some reason and has a little secondary icicle now.'

Getting a Gold Star

I now work at a hotel. One of my duties there is to personally hand over the guest's dry cleaning to a worker from the company we contract. As it happens it is a very nice hotel and so the dry cleaners we contract pride themselves on doing an excellent job. Thus we will call them 'Gold Star Dry Cleaning'. One afternoon their van pulled up in front of the hotel as it often does to drop off the laundry that went out in the morning. The only thing was I knew we hadn't sent out any laundry that morning. But it was slow and I stepped out into the lobby to greet the delivery guy anyway thinking that maybe they were here to drop off a special order of linens for Sales or something. But in came the guy carrying a bag with something not particularly laundry-like in it. I could tell as they always bring things back in clear trash-style bags and this was one of those as well.

"I guess this is yours." Was all he said as he handed it to me before walking back out the door. I brought the bag back behind the front desk to investigate all the while having a kind of sinking feeling since I recognized the pieces of paper that doubtless led the dry cleaners to return the bag to us. Opening the bag I realized it was a black case like you might carry important papers in and two of the hotel's shipping forms that we use when a guest has left an item behind that they want sent to wherever it is they live. Which means that rather than have one of our shuttle drivers bring it to UPS when they went out we sent it out with the dry cleaning. I looked at the form and saw that it was filled out by one of the evening front desk people who must then have left it to be sent out in the morning when UPS was open. Except whoever worked in the morning did not send it to UPS.

I went out back into the office to tell my manger what had happened. The general manager overheard and came out of her office. "They called last night looking for a tracking number and we looked all over for that thing. Call and tell them we'll be sending it out today at our cost- fastest shipping available." She said. Great, I thought, so I get the lovely job of trying to explain that we screwed this up entirely. I thought for a few minutes while I called the shuttle driver on the radio so we could send the case right out. I took a deep breath and called the guest. I can't tell you how relieved I was when I got their voicemail. I left them a message in explanation and said if they wanted to call back later in the afternoon we'd have the tracking number for them. I gave instructions to the driver to send it the fastest shipping available at our cost and to make sure they got a tracking number.

The other front desk person, by this point aware of the situation, asked me what I had said. "Hello, this is Jace from the Fancy Hotel. I'm just calling to let you know that unfortunately there was a return to sender shipping error with your package but we corrected your address based on our records and will be sending the package out today via the fastest shipping available at our cost because of the inconvenience. If you would like to call back later for the tracking number our number is (777)-555-9999. Thank you." My coworker raised their eyebrows and said: "Shipping error, huh? That's what you went with?" To which I could only respond: "Well, I certainly wasn't going to tell them we sent their passports to the dry cleaners!"

A Serious Post About Privacy

If you are serious about keeping your personal information private and want to prevent corporations from using your personal data or taking advantage of anything you post on the internet all you have to do is post a note that states that you're not going to put up with this shit anymore. After posting the note you will receive all the peace and privacy you could ever want when you go and live in the woods without internet or human contact as this is the only way to achieve true privacy. You may be laughing but I am being completely serious (hence the title of this post) about the very important matter of privacy on the internet. Lately there has been a social virus infecting Facebook status updates across the globe. Those afflicted have been mindlessly posting copy and pasted 'legal' statements declaring sole rights to the things they blab on the internet or upload in the form of visual media and so on and so forth. These poor afflicted souls, whose symptoms present with apparent cerebral damage, ironically were most likely infected due to a lack of activity in the left cerebral hemisphere and frontal lobes. To guard against infection by this social virus you only need to spend a few minutes exercising your left cerebral cortex and frontal lobes. I recommend learning about privacy on Facebook as a means of not only exercising those portions of your brain but also immunizing yourself against viral panic that so often spreads through status updates.

You may have heard the anecdote about the picture-perfect family that discovered that their gorgeous family portrait had been taken from Facebook and used on a European billboard. These people did not have any sort of privacy notice up to protect their stuff- but they didn't have to. The company that made the decision to use that image made the conscious decision to steal from that family. The company was not in the right and is legally liable for theft. The family that was stolen from has every right to file a personal lawsuit against the company. No, short of not posting pictures at all, you can't prevent everyone from potentially stealing photographs or other media from your social networking page but you can easily limit the number of people who have access to that data by changing the privacy settings on your account or even on each individual post. If you want to make sure pictures of your toddler taking a bath are viewed by no one but family members you can easily adjust the settings to let you do that. I recommend you try messing with the settings for a few minutes of both permanent and per-post privacy selections.

But it's not just your pictures you want to protect. You want to protect your personal information as well. You don't want any random person armed with nothing more than Google to be able to dig up that you are a forty year old male living in the Denver area who checks into the local park via Foursquare every day when you walk your dog and that you're into both the Twilight Saga and competitive eating competitions and oh- this ten-digit number looks like a phone number. Change your general privacy settings so that only friends are privy to such information. You also don't want the company you work for to know that you weren't really sick on friday? Well, the easiest way to do that is to not post anything incriminating. But that can be difficult to sort out so the next best thing would be to not be 'friends' with or make links to the company you work for or be friends with other people that work there. You could try to exclude them through privacy settings but I wouldn't recommend it.

You may have also heard that Facebook steals data such as your likes and dislikes and sells it to advertisers.   Or that Facebook uses your information to customize things for you so they must just have a big database full of information that they can look at all they want and do whatever they want with. That's not true. Facebook does collect data- but only in the ways explicitly stated in their Privacy Statement. I recommend reading through it. If you find something that you are not okay with them doing then the only way to prevent that is to delete your account. If you want to be informed if they change the privacy statement simply 'like' the Facebook Site Governance page.  But despite what the fear-mongering stories you have heard would want you to believe people at the Facebook HQ are not looking at a list of stats next to your name telling them everything about you. The guys at the Facebook HQ are looking at aggregate data encompassing millions of users of which you are only one small plot point. Because the truth is that you're not special enough for anyone to want to spy on you specifically.

You may also have heard that Facebook is now a publicly traded corporation. You likely heard this in the context of: "Oh my god! Facebook is publicly traded that means they're going to be even more evil now!" In fact, the opposite is true. Facebook is now a publicly traded company and that means they now have shareholders that they must answer to whenever they do anything that might cause public backlash.

What you probably haven't heard is that it's not Facebook itself that you should be afraid of. It's the games you should be afraid of. You know how every time you decide to check out a new game you get a prompt asking you if they can use data from your page and your friends page and maybe even store cookies and other data on your computer? Have you ever read that particularly closely or even thought anything much about it other than that it was an annoying page between you and playing a new game that only required a simple click to get on with the game and not any actual comprehension of what they were asking? Unfortunately without clicking 'okay' you're not going to be able to play that game. Why? Because the makers of the games don't want to make free games and hope that you deign to give them some money in exchange for 'premium' pixelated items. They want to make money- period. And it's not just the games that want to steal your information. It's those cute little inspirational e-card applications, too. Any application or game that asks for some of your information doesn't just want to take your profile picture and put it on your little virtual farm. They want to know everything you're willing to let them have.

I encourage you to do everything you can to help protect your information and privacy but you have to remember that these are the two most important things: Firstly, if you are worried about other people finding out a particular fact about you- don't post it. Second, if you want true privacy all you have to do is click delete otherwise you have to make due. (But if you're really worried about your privacy you shouldn't just click delete to get rid of your Facebook you should also avoid MSN and Live, Google and all Google products and services, and try especially hard to avoid the worst culprit that is Yahoo and all it's products and services.)

Congratulations! You've now exercised your entire cerebral cortex and frontal lobes and prevented a viral infection that could have caused brain damage. Next time you see some fear-mongering 'pass it on' warning take a minute and use your brain and maybe a little fine motor control to click over to Google and look up whether people are spreading lies and misconceptions again.

Thou Shalt Not Partake of Other People's Cookies

Thou shalt not partake of other people's cookies. Unless you are offered a cookie, purchased a cookie, or baked your own cookies you should not be eating any cookies. Your mother probably didn't tolerate your taking cookies from the cookie jar or the box of cookies or whatever kind of cookie receptacle she had without permission. So when you discover cookies in your cupboard that you did not purchase you do not take them out of the cupboard, eat half of one cookie and leave the other half sitting on top of the box to leave a greasy stain and force someone else to clean the remaining cookie up. Because you know what happens when you do that? The owner of the cookie finds out what you've done, saves the cookie as evidence to show you when they confront you and then throws the cookie out the window because you do not deserve to eat the rest of it.

Thou shalt not taste the sweet nectar of other people's juice. Unless those other people have offered you their juice you should not be drinking it. Considering the fact that you never purchase juice for yourself one would figure that you do not drink juice. Other people should therefore rightly not have to be concerned that you will drink their juice. It will upset them if you do drink it. Especially when other people do not have a car and have in fact carried that juice home from the grocery store using their own two arms and legs while you yourself have a car and can transport as much delicious juice, soda, milk, alcohol, watermellons and large bags of flour as will fit in your vehicle.

Thou shalt not eat of the fruits of other people's labor. If you desire to eat home-cooked food then you must cook it yourself or trade for it in some manner. I do not care if the trade-off is visiting relatives, acquiring a spouse or significant other, or out-right payment in some manner. But one does not simply take the home-cooking of some other person when it has not been offered to them. One does not eat three quarts of a particularly expensive soup which took hours to prepare without giving something to the preparer who also procured all of the ingredients and brought them back to their kitchen by means of their own feet and arms. One does not make a sandwich using bread that someone else bought the ingredients for and baked themselves- particularly not when one already has their own store-bought bread in the cupboard.

Eulogy to Mr. Paperback

A Psalm to Reading

I don't want to hear the empty numbers,
To tell me literacy is in decline.
For the mind is dead that slumbers,
And to that death I would not resign.

Here is the decree: Information is free!
Though genocide is not the mission;
Casualties seem to come inevitably-
One cannot unmake that decision.

Not moving pictures, and not the glowing page
Is the book's predestined end.
But to be read through another age
So that each new generation can comprehend.

Creations live beyond those who created,
And our wits though quick and clever
Without exercizing become outdated,
As they cannot be sharpened with the pull of a lever.

In eddification's field of war,
I fear we've lost another battle,
But today's is not the final score-
And the end is not coming with a silent death rattle.

By rushing blindly to the aid of the meme
They failed to predict the obvious consequence.
They must now mourn the passing of a dream-
And observe the result of action with proper cognizance.

Memories of places now gone remind us,
We cannot turn back an unleashed tide.
But we can hold their nostaliga thus,
And going forth take their glory's side-

So that with them their dream fails to end.
Those to come will know reading's pleasure
And though this all ills does not mend;
It's better than such leisure disappearing forever.

Let us then go forth and read.
And though the bookstore now is dead
Let us in our children plant literacy's seed
So they have the wit to forge the road ahead.

Eulogy is in the style of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 'Psalm of Life'.




Mr. Paperback, a bookstore chain that was in operation for over fifty years is closing it's doors for good in the coming months. Unlike Borders Mr. Paperback wasn't driven out of business by poor business practices or bankruptcy but rather the decision to get out of what is turning into a failing business. It's become clear that the bookstore may be a obsolete model but the book itself it still alive and well.