to tell you the truth

Hurting someone else's feelings is not a professional ethics violation.

in communicado

I'm Tweetarded. Sure, I get the concept, it's 140 characters, your absolute minimum thoughts on just about anything you happen to be doing or want to share with your "followers." Let's put aside the realization of every person's superego that they are worthy of having followers; that's a different and more disturbing topic. What I don't get (aside from the hash signs) and what is probably one hundredfold over-done in the ancient tomes of the "blogosphere", is sharing minimum anything. Ironically, what I work on relates to what are known as "the worst buildings allowed by law" as they are, in fact, "code minimum," but in the core of that work lies something so much greater - buildings not falling down on people. Buildings not sucking 75% of the electricity we consume in this country. Buildings, at the very least, not failing. If there could be anything 'greater' about tweeting, it is certainly the fact that it is ultimately about mass communication. We tweet as part of my organization's "presence" (and occasionally, we have staff wetweets on tweeting) and I suppose I must, like most in the knowledge-worker force, bend to that reality and get all hash-signed up in there. But if I must, I'll do so with as little regard to meaning as the medium implies. Please, if you tweet about love, stop.

Patriosymbinostalgafrass

The 4th of July parade that wasn't. Is it a parade if the high school band director and program have been cut? Like so many small towns that rely on levies and the conservative not-in-my back yard set who deny them to maintain certain "optional" programs like art and music, in Sunbury the music has stopped. No band in the bandstand, a less than half-full glass of American lemonade sweats in the July sun. And yet the crowd still stops moving, hands on failing hearts, to witness the anthem, the one piece of music that will endure this sad reminder that small towns have been all but executed by the jingoistic "let capitolism work" lowest of the lowest common denominator. Small towns are all but mythology. Maybe the 260 million dollar lotto winner from this corner of Midwest will save the music. At least that's what would happen if this were a movie. But it's not.





-- Post From My iPhone

Location:Sunbury Ohio

Our Victorian preoccupation

I haven't seen many wristwatches lately, though I think Republicans wear them. In DC at least, Cell phones have become pocket watches, and their plastic and silicon are checked and stroked with as much finesse and care as an engraved gilded heirloom.

I see their ancestors on Antiques Roadshow and I consider gentlemen talking into them with proper diction and great purpose on Lafayette Square. Squirrels were introduced recently to delight and entertain them, but there is urgent business to attend to all alone talking into a gold fronticepiece! It would be ridiculous if it weren't true. They're all mad, mad I say!

Unfortunately though the gesture of time checking on an elegant gadget has returned, the manners that went with the age have disappeared. I've left home, left my baby and on this train have just blown my nose into one of her socks- perhaps there are some people who would still offer handkerchiefs to ladies, if there were still ladies to receive them. I glance around and of course everyone is so absorbed in their pocket watches, no one is appalled at me for soiling a baby sock. Maybe they wouldn't notice a breast pump. Now there's a preoccupation.


-- Post From My iPhone