Category Archives: Reflections

In Too Deep

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I had a vivid dream cycle last night, and though I can’t remember it all, one part of it is still with me.

I was in a movie theater waiting for the show to begin. Behind me was a man and a woman. I thought I did not know them but when I turned to look, the man greeted me by name and I remembered that he had been to the law school for the environmental conference. This person was real, not just a dream character; his visage had oddly and inexplicably transfixed me during the conference.

Between two previews there was a sound from the projection booth, and it appeared that something had gone wrong. The movie began but it did not start at the beginning. After the first reel ended the screen went dark. Angered, I stood up and looked into the projection booth to see a curly haired man with thick glasses attempting to repair the projector. I shouted at him loudly, startling the other theater patrons.

When the movie continued, it was very small, filling up only a tiny portion of the screen. Though nobody else seemed to mind, I got up to leave, only to find myself in a hallway between the theater from which I had come and the open door of another. A uniformed usher asked me what was wrong and I screamed, “It looks like Quicktime!”

Rushing down the dark red stairwell it was too late by the time I realized that I had gone down one flight too many and found myself in the basement lair of the broken down film palace. A black woman rushed from a doorway and I asked here where the box office was. She pointed cursorily and hurried on, but I could no longer find my way back.

Reacting v. Responding

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Well ladies and gentlemen, I am finished with my first year of law school. It has been the most difficult thing I’ve done thus far, but I have made it out in one piece. What I really wanted to talk about, however, is unrelated. I recently had a bit of a blow up with this guy I liked, and think that it was largely my fault. While I was upset at something he said, I do not think I handled the situation well. While talking with my friend Bill about this today, he pointed out that I had reacted rather than responded. When I asked what the difference was, he just smiled and said, “it’s subtle.” Mind you, my reaction was fueled in part by alcohol and a late night celebrating the completion of finals, but I can not use these factors as a justification. Bill went on to explain that a response is something measured, something that doesn’t come immediately, but rather is a product of some deliberation. So my question to the readership is, how do you make sure to respond in situations where your first instinct might be to react in a dramatic fashion. What are your techniques for making sure you don’t do or blurt out what you ought not? In the cold sober light of day it is easy to review where one went wrong, but when passion and pride are involved, the animal instincts often spring into play, often overpowering out better nature.

Facebook for Kindergardeners

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I was recently pointed to an article about social networking that appeared in the New York Times in September of 2008. The author’s focus was the meaning and effect of the new sorts of relationships built via services such as Facebook and Twitter. The whole article is worth a read, but I was particularly intrigued by some of its concluding thoughts:

Yet Ahan knows that she cannot simply walk away from her online life, because the people she knows online won’t stop talking about her, or posting unflattering photos. She needs to stay on Facebook just to monitor what’s being said about her. This is a common complaint I heard, particularly from people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn’t optional. If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are.
…
This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business… “It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” Tufekci said. “The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.”
…
Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.

“If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. “You can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you… She laughed. “You know that old cartoon? ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’? On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog! If you don’t want people to know you’re a dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”

Still a dog,
~WD

The Storm Before the Storm

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I swear that I bring drama wherever I go. When I flew home for winter break (a short two weeks compared to the month-long excursion enjoyed as an undergraduate) I came in at the height of a major snowstorm. Whereas I left New Orleans in weather appropriate for pink shorts and flip-flops, I arrived in Boston to driving snow and biting winds; over two feet fell within a few short hours of my arrival.

My greeting upon arriving in New Orleans the other day was no less dramatic. Though I managed to arrive to clear skies, it was not long until black clouds rolled in, bringing torrential downpours and brilliant lightning displays. After listening to the drum of the rain on the roof, I opened the kitchen door which faces the backyard and sat on the sill, watching as the sky illuminated in great bursts and the rain fell in a staccato strobe. As the gutters began to spill over and the water pooled around the house, I was brought back to summer camp in Maine.

My favorite year there I lived in a cabin adjacent to a large and somewhat inclined field. One July day we sat inside as the forces of nature raged outside. Once the lightning had passed and we received a tentative all-clear from our counselors, we all rushed out into the field and proceeded to play a game of football, quickly becoming drenched and muddy. Word spread, more came, and the game soon became a free-for-all; but we did not care, ours was a divine kind of dirty.

Back to the present the water courses down, down, and I can not help but wonder where its eddies might take me if I would only let them.

INTJ

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Have original minds and great drive for implementing their ideas and achieving their goals. Quickly see patterns in external events and develop long-range explanatory perspectives. When committed, organize a job and carry it through. Skeptical and independent, have high standards of competence and performance – for themselves and others.

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