The Traffic Guru At work tonight, covering the convention while watching baseball, I decided to delve into my daily reading for a respite and uncovered this article that has my head all afire right now. This is a fascinating article about a “radical” traffic engineer that decided that the best traffic controls were as little controls as possible. People would generally act more cautiously and intelligently if they were required to do so, and that structurally we can create situations in which people have to act in a better fashion by not prescribing the appropriate behavior in all situation, or as he states it, “”When you treat people like idiots, they’ll behave like idiots.” Today, as I have been for many in the last few weeks, I have been working on an electoral college speculator map. In a presentation of the map I did today, I was asked to make sure we spell out exactly how the user should interact with the map. I think in doing that we fail or users or we fail in our efforts to do effective design, one or the other. I think if you let the purpose of the map be known, users will figure out how to use it, just as you don’t need speed bumps or speed limit signs if the environment is designed in such a way that drivers can figure out the proper...
I walk into therapy today hellbent on not crying like i have the last few weeks (Steve and I are set to discontinue our meetings next week so he can get on with taking care of his health issues and I can get along to whatever it is I will do next), so I don’t. I tell him that am feeling more motivated, getting things done, not feeling like an impostor, not letting the women get me down. He says since I don’t have much to talk about, maybe we should just let today be our last session. I agree, holding back tears. It just sneaks up on you. Then I come home. Down the highway and the parkway, through the detour, and into my driveway. Coming up the steps and along the walk that borders the front corner of the house, right before the dogleg, hidden by those unruly shrubs, I find a man-sized pile of shit: first the smell, then the flies, then the visual. It’s either from a man, a bear or a great dane, and I’m betting on a man. There aren’t that many bear sightings in my neighborhood, and why would a dog find its way to that hidden spot when in my experience they would rather do it in grass where they can scratch? Dogs don’t ever seem to have issues squatting and doing the deed right in front of god and the whole world. The pile is right up close to the exterior wall of my house. Just where a man could’ve squatted and rested his back against the bricks, extending his...
Those of you who know me will think me up all night on a drunken bender, but my life is filled with profound sadness this evening. There’s the one friend whose love of his life is leaving him, and another that just wishes that he had such a love of his life. It’s early and the morning birds are singing and my tongue is...
Tom Waits at the Fox Theatre Okay, this one is not like reading either, but like intake, but listening to Tom Waits is like reading, if your really listen, right? THis is the July 5 concert that I went to here in Atlanta. So excited to find the document. Read it. Love it. If not… you call yourself MY...
So long and not much noise here. My therapist may very well be dying of lung cancer. Not the type of lung cancer that builds and builds, but the little nefarious sonofabitch that gets right in there next to your aorta and tries to take it all out of you. The guy’s skin is turning gray and his hair is already gray and I feel like it’s any day now, and I ask why him and not me. We’ve got two weeks left of this experiment that we started three years ago: three more weeks of therapy and then I got to do something else. He says he thinks it might be good to pursue a woman therapist since that’s where my problems lie, with women, and that she may teach me how to trust the universal her. We talk lots of how I am feeling. I guess that’s what therapy is. We have been especially keying in on how I feel about the separation. He asks if I feel anger, and I guess I do. The adult part of me understands the state of things, the child feels abandoned – the worst and constant fear. I cannot talk to him about it until he tells me to talk to a third person in the room that is not him. I tend to cry a lot during these recent sessions. I guess I feel the whole bundle of emotions that are going on. I guess I am angry on a level. I guess I do feel abandoned just like I have so many times. I guess I want to...
Are you going forward? Then stop now This piece, apparently written for on-air delivery, is pretty hilarious. As one, like many of us, who has spent days upon days listening to the chipper clichés of managers and the like (remember the days of “synergy” and “out-of-the-box thinking”), it led me to believe that all that an MBA granted you was the ability to use, misuse, coin and abuse such hackneyed tropes. This article is a grand skewering of such business speak and a fine critique of modern business languages inability to really say anything at all. Favorite excerpt: If love has no place in the language of business, neither does passion. Passion, says the dictionary, means a strong sexual desire or the suffering of Christ at the crucifixion. In other words it doesn’t really have an awful lot to do with a typical day in the office – unless things have gone very wrong...
I don’t want you to stop saying such things and I don’t thing you want to stop saying them, but the “you’re the perfect size” or some such thing last night made me want to lay you down. I just wish I had, or was, the right size in all the other ways. I have pictures in my mind that cannot and willnot leave. The best ever. You were the best...
What the World Eats This only marginally qualifies as reading since it is a photo slideshow with brief captions. It’s fascinating to see the families in their homes with food piled all around. It’s also interesting to llok at the facial expressions of the people. It’s also amazing to see the differential in the amount of packaged foods from family to family, and how it relates to monetary food expenditure. In the Sicily photo, I am not sure if the husband knows it, but those three kids are not all his. The older man in the Konstancin-Jeziorna photo is not so happy his wife hoodwinked him into participating in this project. For the Melander family of Bargteheide, I have a suggestion: family counseling. Dad has a drinking problem and no one in the famuly is very happy about...
The Chameleon This article in this week’s New Yorker is simply fascinating; the stuff of which movies are made. Don’t want to ruing the plot for you, but be prepared for several twists and turns. The most fascinating thing about the whole plot to me is how persistent the guy has been, even after serving time in an American prison, he returned to the same behavior when he got back to France. His insistence that he was always looking for love and a family is supported by his troublesome relationship with his blood family. There are times when I am depressed that I will look upon children jealously, seeing a simplicity to their lives (that may be an illusion) that do not feel in my adult existence. I don’t think I am alone in this feeling: it’s been written about time and time again. How many books are filled with longings for childhood, to be like a child? Bourdin’s inhibitions just were not great enough to stop him from taking the next step that at least I know I have pondered before: time machines, magic potions, Tom Hanks in Big. I can’t really put my fingers completely on why the story touched me so much. There are plenty of reasons not to desire a return to chidlhood, or to being a child, I guess that’s what keeps me sane, but if the genie granted me one...
Looking at photos tonight with my new roommate. There’s discussion of the things we have in common. I am just looking at all of this history, mostly blurry just like my experience of it is now, lots of you. You don’t look like his soon-to-be ex-wife, but it rings a bell. He says you look happy. Like you and me and we were happy once. It reminds him of what he fell in love with with his wife; something now that has become just a dream; she’s changed so much. I try to tell him that I think it is different with me and you, that you really haven’t changed that much from what I fell for, and that what I fell for was really you. I feel foolish. As if I know? He says you’re beautiful in those old photographs. I say that I...
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