A Journal of My Mid-Life Crisis

19 October 1997 - What's Old is New

When I was driving to the airport on Tuesday morning, I was listening to NPR news and there was a story about how AOL had just sold their Instant Messaging software to Netscape and that this would bring one to one real time communications to the Internet for the first time. I hate to burst their bubble, but I was using talk (or write or chat, depending on which system I was on) under UNIX to talk in real time over the Internet as far back as about 1985. And those tools existed long before I used them.

It reminded me of the whole fuss over so-called network computers. So it is now supposed to be revolutionary to have just a very basic system at home and dial in to another system to use applications? Didn't these journalists ever hear of time sharing? It is worth rethinking how we use technology and one could easily conclude that it doesn't make sense to be putting a CPU on everyone's desk, but the concept is hardly a new one.

So I've been thinking about how old ideas get recycled and each generation thinks they are so revolutionary. I'm somewhat into what's now called "voluntary simplicity" but I recognize that it's nothing more than what my grandparents would have called thrift. Because I tend to be a naturally frugal person, the whole idea of thinking in terms of whether I get adequate value out of purchases is just the way I think. But even if you bought into the Me generation consumerism of the 80's, don't you realize that past generations didn't need so many things?

While I'm talking about frugality, I actually did a very unfrugal thing this week and went on a minor shopping binge at Borders. It's not a binge in the sense of living beyond my means - I make a good living and save about 10-15% of my income (in addition to putting in the max contributions to a 403B plan) so I can easily afford to buy 4 books, 4 CDs and one toy. But what bothers me is that I went there not so much because I was specifically looking to buy anything but because I was in a bad mood. Thursday was just one of those days - a meeting had been canceled that I had stayed in Colorado an extra day to attend, which wouldn't have normally been a big deal but there were some uncomfortable political currents. I hadn't slept well for two nights and felt like I was coming down with a cold. And then I got home and someone had parked in my space.

All of which is really minor, but if you've got a high level of stress in your life to begin with, it doesn't always take much to push you over the edge. So I just felt like I had to get out of the house and I haven't really been buying books lately, so I headed to Borders. Books and CDs are my shopping weakness - I am far more likely to buy them on impulse than I am to buy clothing, for example - and within minutes I saw a book I wanted. Getting a Life by Jacqueline Blix and David Heitmiller is essentially a sequel to Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, which is one of the "bibles" of voluntary simplicity. Which is what made the buying binge particularly ironic! What I did was tell myself "okay, if I find something I want that is on my "to read" list, I can buy this book too. And I found they had Gita Mehta's Snakes and Ladders which I've wanted to pick up since I had read her interesting, but dated, Karma Cola when I was in India. At that point, I knew I didn't have enough cash with me to pay cash and as I was going to have to use plastic anyway, I went to the music section and found something else I'd been looking for for a while (the soundtrack to A Man and a Woman) as well as a few things I hadn't specifically been looking for. (In case anyone cares, the other CDs were Radiohead's OK Computer, the cast album of The Life, and Fred Small's Everything Possible. And the other two books were Marissa Piesman's latest mystery and a novel titled I Want to Buy a Vowel by John Welter. The latter probably qualifies as buying a book based on its cover - I thought the title had potential for an interesting and amusing novel and the plot summary raised the potential.)

And then at the checkout they had these magnetic poetry journal kits. That was pure impulse buy. Both Mom and Elliot collect refrigerator magnets, so I have tended to stay away from them as a collectible, but I have acquired some odd magnetic variants that I mostly arrange on my file cabinet at home. I have the magnetic David and Venus and clothing sets for them, for example, and a few magnets from various artists. And I recently (well, back in May) got the fairy tale kit the magnetic poetry people put out. But I don't put these things on my refrigerator so they don't count as refrigerator magnets in my mind. Which is why this journal thing appealed to me so much. Besides, unlike a refrigerator, it's portable!

So that's more stuff I have to put into storage when I leave on my trip. Sigh.

As for other activities of the week, at least I had a chance to get together with Marcia and Jim while I was in Colorado Springs. Marcia and I went over to Garden of the Gods, which is a (free) city park with interesting rock structures and walked for a while and watched the rock climbers. Climbing seems to be a trendy sport now. There are so many climbers there that there are permanent pitons drilled into the rocks and climbers are not allowed to drill more, to keep the rock from breaking, I guess. It's not a sport I would ever participate in - between relatively poor upper body strength and massive acrophobia (fear of heights), there is no way I could ever do it. The paved trails that lead around the rocks are more my speed.

I also got to see more of Marcia's toy collection. She told me that her 400 or so Barbies is considered a small collection in toy circles, but I was still very impressed. And she's got tons of action figures, too. It's so different from my doll collection which consists of a couple of dozen porcelain dolls, a dozen or so beaded dolls I made (these styrofoam kits for beading are loads of fun!), a set of about 25 Air France promotional dolls that Elliot bought me at a garage sale, and maybe 30 souvenir dolls from various trips, both my own travels and my parents'.

We also talked a lot about her job search and my sabbatical. This goes back to the whole voluntary simplicity thing - we agreed that the changes in most workplaces are for the worse. My job is not so bad (other than the travel, but that is bad enough) but I see good people at various contractors who are expected to work 80 or more hours a week. People are substituting their jobs for their lives when they do that. And it seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon. My father had a long day because of the Long Island RailRoad, but he was home in time to play softball with us on summer evenings, for example. The backlash against the unreasonable expectations of nowadays seems inevitable to me.

I didn't get nearly as much done this weekend as I had planned to, mostly because I slept a lot more than usual. I did go briefly to the twice a year chamber music party, but only stayed about 45 minutes. And, I came up with the usual stinkers for Punday on the Foundation. And I did get over to the art show in Beverly Hills on Sunday afternoon, where I was seriously tempted by only a couple of things. There are these great soft-sculpture pieces - life size butlers and maids and historic figures - but they are pricey and I don't have the room for them (not to mention not wanting to store such a big piece). There was a Chinese photographer who had some lovely misty lake and mountain scenes. And there was a young guy with computer generated pieces, rather hard to describe. I may yet call him and buy a piece, as I was rather intrigued by his work and I had a nice chat with him about art (and life) in general and how we have to have faith in our own talents. This was just his first show and he had only sold two pieces, so I am not sure if it did any good for his confidence. I probably would have bought one if I could have decided which one I wanted. For future reference, his name is John Leaf and his work is very patterned, as a result of his background in crystallography.

I did manage to get through some of my household paperwork. But the best thing I got done this week was getting back to work on some needlework. I hadn't done any crafting at all for ages but Sunday night I was in the mood to watch bad TV (maybe because we had been singing random bits of bad '70's songs on the Foundation after punning) so I put on the movie of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (a show that I actually like but feel guilty about liking; the movie, which was presumably the pilot, is not nearly as funny, though) and worked on a project I had put aside way too long. I felt renewed stitching away at it - it's exciting when things take shape so well.