Behind the screen, behind the times

This past week, I had the opportunity to attend a meeting with some of the top field leaders on the railroad.  In many ways, I felt incredibly privileged to be invited to mingle with this group of men (I was the one female in the small hotel ballroom in Charlotte) who have acquired more first-hand knowledge of our business than could ever be fully conveyed.  Nonetheless, I opened my ears, my eyes and my notebook as wide as possible so as to absorb and record as much of their experience as the short four hours would allow.

And yet, something peculiar struck me.  I had imagined that this cohort would be the sort that would revel in one another's company, the opportunity to exchange the unbelievable stories that only those immersed in the daily saga of trains could accept as truth.  And yet, the initial scene was one that gave me cause for hesitation.  Had I not check the screen on the door identifying this as our assigned room, I may have turned around believing that I had misunderstood the directions from the young employee working behind the desk in the hotel lobby.  What presented itself before my eyes were several men, generally beyond the mid-point of life, fixed in front of their fruit-branded tablets, connected to the internet and seemingly disconnected from the world around.

So as to interject a little morning cheer, I cracked the silence with a quick introduction and a handshake.  This prompted standard responses which remain predictable, even in a world behind the screen.  I attempted to learn a bit more about my table mates, but soon realized that I should follow suit and pull out my tablet, phone or whatever tool I could use to prolong the illusion of early morning solitude.

As the room's three round tables welcomed other meeting attendees, some abandoned their invisibility cloaks to engage with the others who had most recently arrived to partake in the morning coffee and pastries before discussion of business became the room's primary function.

Once the presentations and discussion of rail activities got underway, the men engaged in the type of banter I would have expected from the start, the kind of interaction the must be more reminiscent of the days when being out of the office on business meant full engagement with the others who had traveled significant distances not only to exchange pertinent railroad information but also to build the kind of relationships that make cross-functional collaboration possible.  While I learned a great deal from these masters of the railroad, I also discovered something unexpected.  I had hoped to be a fly on the wall of a period from the past, a time when machines were accessory and people were of prime importance.   Fortunately or unfortunately, even the railroad has progressed.  What is behind the screen threatens to displace the significance of the here and now.  And yet, perhaps our tablets and phones have been what we've been waiting for.  A chance to escape from the demands of small talk and relationship building and to revel in the comfort of selective and protected interaction.    

The Opportunity Cost of Life

Trade-offs.  Sacrifice.  Compromise.  Opportunity Cost. Scarcity.  All of these concepts can be summarized by the fact that almost every decision that we make in life amounts to valuing one option over another and giving up something to make room for something else.  Some trade-offs are made through conscious, well-thought out decisions whereas others are forced as a result of imposing constraints.  As children, the ultimate winner between multiple options is often determined either through biological necessity or as an imposition of a parent's tastes and preference.  Infants cry and scream to express discomfort which in turn only makes them more uncomfortable and perhaps more inclined to express dissatisfaction in the only way they know how.  And yet, at some point, breath becomes of prime importance over the vocalization of unhappiness.  Young children may want to keep others from playing with their toys so they keep command of all of them.  However, they may then become frustrated by the inability to play with and enjoy one toy while simultaneous trying to hoard and protect all their toys from another invading child.

As suggested above, one difficulty trade-offs pose is that we are forced to make them against our own will.  Making trade-offs flies in the face of "more is better".  If we want to gain greater utility, we should just seek to gain more of whatever makes us happy: more money, more adoration, more stuff, more friends and admirers - the list is endless.The notion of a trade-off is very much the same one that goes into the skill of compromise.  What are you willing to give up in order to get something else that makes you happier?  It goes against our very being to give up ground to another.  Our self preservation instinct pushes us towards selfishness, but our social desire pulls us back towards a more moderate solution.  And yet, even when we think that another person isn't cooperating by compromising, the truth is that they are.  They many not be compromising in a way that satisfies our own needs, but they are necessarily making a trade-off.

Facebook is a perfect example of this notion of trade-offs when it comes to the friend domain.  While I am unaware of any study that has been done to date on this topic (though I'm sure there has been), I would hypothesize that the amount of time an individual spends on Facebook is directly inverse to the amount of time spent building relationships.  Facebook allows us to be more voyeuristic rather than truly facilitating the enrichment of relationships.  The trade-off here is obvious.  We spend time making superficial comments or making others aware that we have seen their post rather than using the tool to deepen or maintain true friendship.  Facebook "stalking" has lost its taboo.  People are becoming less and less shy about admitting that their intelligence on the subject of a particular event or image came from a headline that they found on Facebook.

I have wandered into a horrible digression but one that mimetically represents what happens through exploitation of a natural human curiosity that stems in part of competition and partly from narcissism and a smaller part of genuine interest in the well-being of others.  The latter part mostly relates to the small number of Facebook "friends" who truly meet the definition of friend.  My ultimate interest in the concept and reality of trade-offs is of much greater import than simply the number of inane posts that appear on Facebook and my inability to completely divorce myself from the spectacle that manifests in the up-to-the-second "news" feeds.

As we move through different stages of our life, the opportunity cost of living become more tangible and the necessity of managing the trade-offs more crucial to our own happiness as well as the happiness of others in our lives.  As a young adult from a privileged background, the decisions that we make feel less permanent, less consequential.  Friends, jobs, locations, classes, clothes, images - everything can be modified.  Another option is always waiting in the wings, ripe for the taking.  And yet, it all shapes what we do in the future.  By leaning one way and not another, we set off down one path that may forever change the course of our lives.

The realization of a potential permanence that our decisions can ciment can be both refreshing and frightening.  At certain points in my life, I have either taken a huge leap, relying on inertia to keep me moving forward or restrained myself from taking too many steps down one path without leaving the bread crumbs behind that would allow me to find my way back out.  Perhaps it is ultimately a sign of my own cowardliness.  I'd like to think it's a function of risk-aversion, but sometimes we just need to face up to our weakness.  The trade-off is to never really see ourselves as we truly are.  There is strength is self-reflection and wisdom in evaluating and bearing the costs that come with blazing the most fulfilling path through life.

Sorting

What compels us to sort?  We all engage in some daily organization of thoughts, tasks, time, paper, music, photographs - whatever happens to present the most immediate and tangible chaos in our lives.   Presently as I write (or, more precisely, type), my brain and my fingers grasp to find the most appropriate words and phrases while often settling for those that respond most immediately to the current query.  Of course, in this medium, it is all in the service of expediency.  And yet, perhaps the need to be quick does not really aptly describe the act of logging thoughts.  Rather, this digital recording must, like any other form of sorting, at some point reach its conclusion.  Thus, a response to the question "what compels us to sort?" must resolve itself in the need to create order and to feel that we have, at some point, achieved success in that pursuit.

However, the process of organization is never as clean as your typical type-A personality would like it to be.  For example, when we ruminate on past decisions and periods in our lives, we often find it useful to affix labels, much like hours and periods of time in the day, or seasons of the year.  Sorting through souvenirs, photos and other remnants of the past exponentially increases the size of the psychological chaos, all while putting forth an extra-human effort to ascribe order to that which refuses such artificial partitioning.

In such an endeavor, expediency equates to necessity.  Lingering over fond memories can be permitted for sometime, but not so much as to derail the ultimate task of ordering the past to focus on the present and the future.  Lingering over the more gut-wrenching memories has similar potential for derailment, but is much less pleasant and thus, the desire to keep the train stable is much greater.  In some circumstances, we sort, hoping and knowing that those objects of triage will pass through our fingers and in front of our eyes once again.  When it pertains to others, we have either willfully sorted the painful memories out of the sorting queue, never to be inspected again OR we have simply resigned those parts of our lives, incongruous with present and the foreseeable future, to the nether regions of our memories.  For better or for worse, those scraps may reappear in the subconscious of our dreams or may be buried and stifled under the weight of the more recent past, never to be heard from again.

The maturity of stability

Returning to the muffled easy click of the flat, rounded-squares of my MacBook, I have come back to familiar place of comfort.  Like snuggling into an old sofa or papasan in the parental living room, I settle in to a place that evokes the coziness of times past but also provokes slight pangs of a lost age.  The rise of the weblog may be a relatively recent phenomenon, but ruminating on the recent and distant past and speculating on the consequences of the present and the future remain strongholds of every era, no matter the recording medium.

Since I began my new, less "movemented" lifestyle, I have considered the possibility of continuing to write.  Previously, I had a greater ability to allocate the hours of the day to reflection, whether  on the move or stationed in a quiet place in front of my computer screen.  A portion of this life is chronicled in the blog jaxord.blogspot.com.

My return to America abruptly ended the Metropolitain portion of my meditations.  I have much less time to reflect on life than I did while wandering around Paris.  Nonetheless, I have resolved to assume this stage in my life as another defining and character building moment.  What can be more definite than purchasing a home with your life partner.

And so, with this life-changing moment as the impetus, I begin a new chapter the way I think and write about life.

Wanderlust

I have often wondered to myself what life will be like when I am eventually forced to stay in one place for more than nine months at a time.  Although we were certainly fortunate enough, when I was young, to take yearly family vacations, we were relatively stationary and our lives relatively stable.  However, since the age of fifteen, I have constantly been on the go.  In college, my roommate tended to joke that I was not actually from one state, but that I was from the United States given my propensity to travel all around the country during our time off from school.

Relative to many families, most notably those with ties to the military, the church, diplomatic missions or large international companies, my propensity to move is hardly remarkable.  And my travels have usually taken me down relatively safe and well-travelled paths.  

Nonetheless, I take a certain pride (perhaps unwarrented) and an enjoyment from having seen many different corners of the US and the world.  I easily recognize myself in some of the lyrics of the Dixie Chicks song "The Long Way Around". And yet, while I still plan to continue to visit and explore new locals, the time of "settling down" is rapidly approaching.  Even as I type those words, I sense the pang of ambivalent emotion that Joanne Harris describes through her main character Vianne Rocher in Chocolat:

"Places all have their own characters, and returning to a city where you have lived before is like coming home to an old friend.  But the people begin to look the same; the same faces recurring in cities a thousand miles apart, the same expressions.  The flat, hostile stare of the official.  The curious look of the peasant.  The dull unsurprised faces of the tourists.  The same lovers, mothers, beggars, cripples, vendors, joggers, children, policemen, taxi-drivers, pimps.  After a while one begins to feel slightly paranoid, as if these people were secretly following from one town to another, changing clothes and faces but remaining essentially unchanged, going about their dull business with half an eye slyly cocked at us, the intruders.  At first one feels a kind of superiority.  We are a race apart, we the travellers.  We have seen, experienced, so much more than they.  Content to run out their sad lives in an endless round of sleep-work-sleep, to tend their neat gardens, their identical suburban houses, their small dreams; we hold them in a little contempt.  Then, after a while, comes envy.  The first time it is almost funny; a sharp sudden sting which subsides nearly straight away.  A woman in a park, bending over a child in a pushchair, both faces lit by something which is not the sun.  Then comes the second time, the third; two young people on the seafront, arms intertwined; a group of office-girls on their lunchbreak, giggling over coffee and croissants...before long it is an almost constant ache.  No, places do not lose their identity, however far one travels.  It is the heart which begins to erode after a time.  The face in the hotel mirror seems blurred some mornings, as if by too many casual looks.  By ten the sheets will be laundered, the carpet swept.  The names on the hotel registers change as we pass.  We leave no trace as we pass on.  Ghostlike, we cast no shadow." (192-193)

The rising cost of information

On March 28, online consumption of the NYTimes enters a new realm.  They will begin charging users for online content.  The question is: how much do I value being able to browse through their news stories at varying volumes throughout the week.

In the new system, users will still be able to access 20 articles a month for free.  Beyond 20, a paid subscription is necessary.  However, articles that are accessed and read via a link from a blog are social network will not be deducted from a reader's 20 article limit.

 On average per week, I'm pretty sure that I read 15-20 articles.  Sometimes I read them in their entirety.  Other times I find that reading a couple of paragraphs is sufficient.  If I decided to remain a non-paying consumer of the Times, maybe I would have to be a little more selective in my choices of articles, which would ultimately take time away from actually reading the news.

This change in the NYT online access has appeared at about the same time that House Republicans have voted to end public funding for NPR radio programs.  One Republican called it a "non-essential service".  Although many in the Republican camp consider NPR to have a slight (or more than slight, depending on how far right the thinker is) left-leaning bias, which on average is probably true, the radio and its programs offer an important alternative to print and TV news.  I believe that having some insight as to what is going on in the world is essential to being an informed and thoughtful citizen.  In fact, I believe that it is just as important a civic duty as going to the polls to make one's voice heard.  The notion that it is a "non-essential service" is really just a faulty justification to cover up a right-wing agenda.

It is clear that in a time when State and Federal budgets need revising, some programs will end up on the losing end.  However, many of the programs that are losing against this season of spending reductions are those that help to shape an informed and educated public, like funding for schools and public information.

While I certainly value print and radio news enough to pay something for it, access to news should not be considered a luxury good.  As someone in the education industy whose salary already represents the lack of value that society places on young people's time in the classroom, I am particularly reliant on free or inexpensive news in order to represent to my students the importance of being a curious and invested member of society.

Percolating fears and an emerging personal philosophy

Two of my favorite prolific producers of poignant one-liners are Oscar Wilde and Yogi Berra.  While the former made seemingly pessimistic observations about the world and the latter more paradoxical statements that nonetheless closely ressemble many things people think and say, reading and hearing quotations from both men allow us to look on life with a slight air of humor and irony.

The expression "fear of the unknown" very closely imitates a Y.B.-style pronouncement.  For what is fear but a particular physiological and psychological response to uncertainty.  For me, this fear comes from a lack of understanding of human emotion, which is one of the reasons that I have become such an avid reader of the news and fiction.  In much the same way that a child's lack of awareness of the potential for physical harm in many of his or her daily activities allows a certain freedom of movement, so does this same lack of awareness allow him or her freedom of speech.

One of my favorite movies in a French film called La Faute à Fidel or, in English, Blame it on Fidel.  In the film, a rather precocious, 9-year old girl named Anna is growing up in Paris and is constantly confronted with the changing social and political ideas of the late 1960s and early 1970s, most notably through the reactions of her parents.  While her mother is from a French bourgeois milieu and her father from a formerly powerful Spanish family once friendly with the Franco regime, the parents become stauch advocates of Communism.  Anna and her younger brother try to make sense of all these changes and often ask the sort of "naïve" and yet poignant questions that produce in the specatator a reaction similar to that upon hearing or reading O.W. and Y.B. quotes.  But one of my favorite lines is when the young Anna, after having been told bluntly to keep her thoughts to herself by one of the nuns at Catholic school, asks her mother how she is supposed to know when to speak her mind and when to keep quiet.  Her mothers sets her down, takes her firmly by the arms, looks into her eyes and says "You're a talker.  You talk."

I grew up in the school of "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."  But the world isn't that manichean.  Clear cut lines between "nice" and "not nice" don't exist.  For years, I have feared expressing my opinions or feelings unless I was sure of how they would be received.  I feared offending others or utterly altering relationships for the worse based on a single misinterpreted statement.  However, I'm learning that a small part of this fear is healthy.  It makes us aware that our ideas are not the same as everyone else's and that a particular amount of restraint is necessary in society.  On the other hand, if you want to be respected, you must make yourself heard.  If you never open your mouth, no one hears your ideas but you.  Without discussion and debate, it is difficult to learn and grow.  Reading is a way to test my ideas against other writers.  To learn more about how other think and experience the world.  Both writing and speaking allow me to articulate those thoughts.  They serve as a sounding board both for myself and for others.  Being a writer is a first step towards being a talker.  So here in this forum is where I've decided to work out my thoughts.  To think about and articulate my thoughts and reactions to the world around me, for it is the only world I know.