bubbleblower | Silicon Soapware #242

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                            SILICON SOAPWARE 
       wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway
                        from Bubbles = Tom Digby
                           = bubbles@well.com 

                      http://www.well.com/~bubbles/

                                Issue #242
                       New Moon of August 25, 2014


Contents copyright 2014 by Thomas G. Digby, and licensed under a Creative 
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.  See the Creative 
Commons site at http://creativecommons.org/ for details.

Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback.  
Details of how to sign up are at the end.


                          *********************

I'm reminded of some things from my childhood.  My parents had a feedback 
style that could be summed up as "No news is good news."  Those of you 
who have done design or engineering on things to be sold to the military 
(or certain other government agencies) will recognize similarities to the 
military design review process.

In a design review officials representing the customer give the designers 
of a product a list of things about the product that they (the customers) 
see as defects that need to be corrected.  The customers go over the list 
with the designers, going into whatever detail is necessary.  The 
designers make changes and then another review of the modified design is 
done to see if any problems remain.  Repeat as needed.

The reviewers ignore things that are OK as they stand.  Since no action 
needs to be taken on those items, praising them would be a waste of time.

My parents had a similar approach to parenting.  Anything I did that was 
less than perfect would get their full attention, sometimes with comments 
about how stupid I was to have done such a thing and how I should be 
ashamed of myself.  Things I did well and had a right to be proud of 
would hardly get mentioned.

This may be all well and good when the military is buying computers or 
jeeps or helicopters or whatever, but it's not so good as a parenting 
style.

At the same time I wasn't getting along well with the other kids in my 
school.  Some of them started taunting me or engaging in other verbal 
abuse.  My mother kept telling me that if I didn't react to it they would 
stop, but at that age I didn't have enough control over my emotions to do 
that.

My parents also tried to shame me out of crying.  That didn't work very 
well either.

I somehow got the idea that people couldn't criticize what they didn't 
know about.  So as a form of self-defense I started keeping as much of my 
life as possible secret from anyone who might use it to criticize me, 
especially my parents.  So when they asked me how things were going I 
would just say there was no news worth mentioning.  Getting hired by a 
company on the other side of the country after I graduated from college 
made this easy.

I felt I had to keep my parents up to date on things like changes of 
address, and on a few occasions when I was between jobs I needed to ask 
them for money.  On those occasions I would tell them vague generalities 
about how my life was going, but I kept mum about the details, especially 
things that I felt emotionally vulnerable about.

This also extended to my writing.  I may not have made a conscious policy 
decision on the matter, but I seldom made public mention of things like 
medical problems and financial crises.  I have also tended not to mention 
things that made me feel emotionally vulnerable.

Now it may be time to think about starting to change this.  For one 
thing, I suspect that all this secrecy may have been limiting my creative 
output.  For another, it may have kept me from asking for help from other 
people when such help might have been useful.  And with my parents 
several years dead I need not fear a lecture from them on how stupid I am 
and how nobody cares about me.

This is not the kind of thing one changes all at once by waving a magic 
wand.  It's a gradual process.  But I do think I want to start making 
that change.


                          *********************

We're getting into September, which feels like a time of changes.  Summer 
is ending and schools are starting, tourist stuff is winding down, 
baseball is giving way to football, and in general the world (at least 
the northern half) is getting back to work.

Closer to home, the kitchen disposer broke.  The manager looked at it and 
says the sink needs to be replaced.  And while they're at it, mine is the 
only unit in the building that didn't get renovated a couple of years 
ago, so it's overdue.  So now I'm rearranging furniture and shelves and 
such to clear the kitchen area as well as a path to the door so they can 
replace things like the stove and refrigerator.  Chaos is leading to 
changes.


                          *********************

The manager also said I'm overdue for a rent increase.  He wasn't sure 
how much it would be, but I'm guessing several hundred dollars a month.  
I'm not sure I can afford that, so I'm starting to think of other 
possibilities.  One that seems feasible is sharing a place.  I've done 
that before.  Sometimes there have been problems, but other times it has 
worked well.  The key is finding compatible people.

It's also possible that I won't be staying in Silicon Valley.  I have 
ties to groups like science fiction fandom and Paganism that extend to 
other geographic areas, so I won't necessarily be landing in a strange 
place alone.

People have suggested that I check mundane forums like craigslist.  But I 
have a bad feeling about that.  It just feels like I need to keep it 
within the various subcultures I'm connected to.

Nothing is definite yet.  I need to explore the possibilities.  But it 
looks like I'm heading into a time of more changes.


                          *********************

Writing the starting piece in this issue was something of an emotional 
hurdle.  It somehow reminded me of a time back in high school or college 
when our phys ed class did a sampling of track and field events.

One of those events was hurdling.  When I saw the track with the hurdles 
all set up on it, I expected the instructor to give us some sort of 
explanation of how to run and jump so as to get over the hurdles without 
tripping over them.  But they didn't go into that.  They just lined us up 
and gave the start signal.  And lo and behold, I sort of subconsciously 
knew how to clear the hurdles.  I barely saw them going by beneath me, 
but some part of me was able to synchronize everything.  Everybody else 
seemed to be doing OK as well.

I was rather surprised at this, but didn't ask about it afterwards.  Is 
that the normal experience with high-school or college-age people running 
hurdles?

The Wikipedia article on hurdling goes into lots of details about how the 
runner's legs should be bent a certain way when clearing a hurdle, but 
that may be for higher hurdles and more serious contenders, such as in 
the Olympics.  Be that as it may, I don't recall any mention of any of 
that stuff back in that phys ed class.  It was pretty much just "There 
they are.  Ready, get set, Go!"  And somehow, we went, even if we didn't 
really know how.

There have been occasions since then when I've found myself dreading 
something off in the future, only to find, when the time came, that I 
somehow ended up doing the right thing.  Is there some cosmic meaning in 
this, or was it happenstance?

Were I the type to write and promote self-help books I might cook up an 
argument to the effect that there's some kind of meaningful analogy 
between events in one's life and hurdles on a race track.  It may be pure 
baloney, but even so I might be able to make a good enough argument to 
sell books.  But I'm not that type of author so I probably won't.

Even so, there may be a lesson in there if we look at it right.


                          *********************

YouTube has a series of videos about how various things are made.  You 
can find them by searching YouTube for "How it's made".  I found one on 
manhole covers.  It showed steps such as making a sand mold, pouring in 
molten iron, and so on.

But unless I just happened to miss it it made no mention of chocolate.

Then again there was more than one video on manhole covers, and even if I 
were to try to watch them all no documentary can cover all the myriad 
ways they can be made.


                          *********************

The summer tray liner at Wendy's had a theme involving ants at a picnic, 
and as part of that they had a cartoon of an ant colony.  It included 
ants greeting one another by name.  What I noticed as odd was that they 
were using male names like Jimmy and Bob.  I thought worker ants were 
female, as is the case with bees.  The picture of the inside of the ant 
nest also showed no trace of a queen.

Now maybe the queen was hiding somewhere, and maybe some female worker 
ants were using male names for political reasons or something.  If ants 
are aware of human sexism they might want to use male names to reduce 
discrimination.  Or maybe they don't think of names in terms of gender at 
all.  But if that was the writer's intent shouldn't they have explained 
it better, perhaps with a footnote linked from asterisks next to the male 
ant names in question?


                          *********************

                           September Dreaming


September. 
The party's over.  
Although my school days are long past,
Thoughts of school and studying and homework
Seep into my head
Like smoke from burning piles 
Of old summer dreams.  

In a sudden burst of movement
A squirrel grabs one of the many acorns
That lie scattered all around.

Is each acorn a future dream?  

In years to come  
When the new seedlings start to tower over my head
I will see that some of them were 
Even if there is no way to know beforehand
Which ones those will be.  



                            -- Thomas G. Digby
                            -- Written  2011-09-01 14:51:51


                          *********************

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