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Old-world skillz

Cassettes of varying tape quality and playing time
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I do not know how Michael Leddy finds so many great items for his Orange Crate Art blog. I was struck by his link to this column by The Providence Journal’s Mark Pantinkin on certain specialized life skills we (of a certain generation) accrued growing up that aren’t needed in this day and age. There’s a hint of grumpy old man in his tone, but not too much.

Some of the skills on Pantinkin’s list overlaps with mine: the high-beam toggle on the floor, the rotary dial phone, threading the film in the camera, using coat hangars (and aluminum foil!) to improve TV reception, and dropping the phonograph needle on a turning record.

My own modest list would include:

  • Black and white darkroom skills, especially threading the film, in the dark, onto wire reels that I then dumped into the fixative. If the film touched itself along that spiral, the outcome was just ugly.
  • Using a pencil to re-wind slack cassette tape onto its spool.
  • Affixing labels to 3.5-inch floppy disks.
  • Creatively naming computer files within the 8.3 scheme.
  • Using a proportion wheel to size photos for a newspaper page — and keeping your distance from the hot wax machine.
  • Inking and running my dad’s offset printing presses, and then running the pages through the collator, folding machine, and stapler. I can still hear and feel the loud, mechanical rhythm and sounds of those machines.

But that said, some skills have not passed away from this ever-progressing world:

  • The Frugal Liz prefers her $20 Whirley-Pop over any microwave popcorn.
  • I still write letters and cards to my friends, and Simpsons stamps are preferred.
  • Banjo strings still go on by hand one peg at a time.
  • A safety pin keeps paired socks together in the wash.
  • The Sunday funnies, even in their sadly depleted state (the News & Observer only has 4 pages of strips run really small), still make fun birthday gift wrapping in a pinch.
  • We still have two-stroke lawnmower engines, shoelaces, eyeglass screws, and other physical artifacts of the daily world that will require specialized skills for a while yet.

I would add, though, a few new skills I’ve picked up:

  • Working with blog software
  • Using Snopes.com to sniff out urban myths forwarded to me by well-meaning people
  • Navigating Gmail using the keyboard shortcuts only
  • Seeing Netflix movies over my wi-fi connection (instant gratification — though I do miss the Mom and Pop video stores)
  • And, alas, becoming better than I want to be at troubleshooting Windows and Macintosh computers
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2009 07 01 brownstudy Oddments
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Momentum, Inertia

Rubber band (Elastic).
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My loyal fanbase (Rani and Cassidy) have asked when I would start posting again, after a pause of some months. I stopped in April because the semester was getting pretty intense with a big paper for the research methods class, a workshop I was helping plan and execute, ongoing angst about the PhD, and, oh yes, the day job.

My especial hell week started May 4 and proceeded thusly:

  • Woke to find my MacBook’s hard drive was dead.
  • To UNC to take the research methods final exam.
  • Tuesday: take the MacBook to the Apple Store. Thank you, Applecare warranty and Time Machine.
  • Wednesday: go to Chapel Hill traffic court to take care of a speeding ticket, or as a lawyer friend says, “fund-raising day.” Fortunately, I had gotten excellent advice from people who’d gone through this before, so I was prepared with my driving history from DMV and sailed through, only $171 poorer and with no points on my license. Extra tip: although court starts at 10 am, get in line at 8 am. It’s a lo-o-ong line.
  • Thursday: to Duke to have a small squamous cell skin cancer removed from just above the tip of my nose via Mohs surgery. The center of the face is tricky because there’s no extra flesh to fold over the hole that’s made, so the dr. basically carved up to the bridge of my nose, essentially creating a flap that he tugged and pulled to cover the hole, pushed some tissue from the bridge of the nose down toward the tip, and then sewed up the flap. It took all day, mainly waiting on test results, punctuated by these moments of high intensity with the doctor.
  • The dr.  advised me to take it easy for the next few days, don’t bend over or increase pressure in the head, clean the wound, etc. My nose looked as if the Joker had carved an upside-down question mark, circling the tip and etching a jagged path around and up. My nose had also swelled to WC Fields proportions.  Fortunately, I didn’t experience any black eyes (pretty common with surgery in the facial area), only a little bruising.
  • I took his advice to relax seriously and gratefully and spent the next three days in the house, in bed, walking slowly, sleeping a lot. I think I had accumulated a lot of tension from this semester. The good part about tension is, it provides energy to keep you in motion and keep all the balls in the air. The bad part is, when you stop, you STOP. My coach uses the analogy of a rubber band that needs to relax after being stretched. And this is what happened to me: those three days off turned into three weeks away from school-related obligations. I can’t remember what I did, except go to work (without school to  deal with,  simply going to the office is like a vacation), come home, surf the web, spend time with Liz, and relax.

I had the sense to recognize I needed this rest, so I didn’t interfere with it. I had taken an incomplete on an independent study because life was getting hairy for both me and Carolyn, and I promised to finish the lit review this summer. (More on that in a later post.) Part of me was feeling guilty for not working on it, but another part of me replied that I’d do better if I was rested. And in that weird way my brain has of punishing me, I made a rule that I couldn’t do “fun stuff” on the blog till the lit review was done.

The lit review still isn’t done, but it’s underway. Inertia has yielded to momentum and I’m rewarding myself by writing some posts and clearing my inbox of blog ideas.

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2009 06 28 brownstudy MeMeMe Comments (2) Permalink

My future is assured

Vaynerchuk tells anecdotes, but his main activities veer more into the uncool profession of teaching. In the above-linked interview he admits to being a “class clown,” and I have found in my twenty years of teaching that that one characteristic is a better predictor of who ends up a teacher in life than any other.

The class clown seems to be the opposite of the teacher– loud, disruptive, dismissive, and seeming to want to be anywhere else but class– but in reality, I’ve found, the clown feels completely at home in class, envies the teacher’s ability to hog all the attention, and secretly wants to be the one in front of the whiteboard with the dry erase marker, telling everyone what matters.

Breakfast with Pandora: Gary Vaynerchuk, storyteller?

2009 04 05 brownstudy Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Great words

From the final Hold this Thought broadcast:

“In East of Eden, John Steinbeck writes:

‘A child may ask, “What is the world’s story about?” And a grown man or woman may wonder, “What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we’re at it, what’s the story about?”

I believe that there is one story in the world…. Humans are caught — in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too — in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well — or ill?’ “

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On acting and life

By then, the veterans had developed an informal set of rules for themselves: Take the craft seriously ([Judi] Dench: “deadly”). Don’t take yourself seriously ([Patrick] Stewart: “That’s death to creativity”). Never think you know it all (Dench: “Absolutely fatal”).

Ian McKellen: The Player – TIME

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