information storage

there is a cardboard box in my attic that I have moved five times in the last fifteen or so years.  It is stuffed full of letters that long ago girlfriends wrote to me, answering letters that I wrote to them.  The last time we moved I looked at them again and made the mistake of actually reading a couple of them.  They were about what one would expect, I probably don’t have to expound upon them here.  You probably have a similar box or two yourself.  It is touching to look at these folded pieces of notebook paper, to vaguely remember a time in my life when I knew all of the answers and was so sure that I was right about everything I had an opinion about.

The names conjure images of faces and times, and even in this too-connected age I have not been able to find some of these folk again.  Not that I know what I would talk about with them after twenty years.  I hope that I am profoundly different from the person that they wrote to, I hope that I am more patient and more thoughtful and more aware of others and of the world around me.

I wanted to throw that box out when we moved, it seemed to have so little to do with my life now.  I am not likely to get the letters out and read them again, and I doubt there is anything in them that would be of interest even to twenty-year-olds that wrote them, let alone to anyone else.  But I could not throw them away.  I held the box in my hands and I tried to let it and its contents drift out of my life, but then I thought “what’s one more box?” and packed the letters back up and brought them with us.

This whole series of thought came about because the New York Times ran an article about Friendster.

I was not cool enough to understand why Friendster would be attractive to people.  When I first heard came across it I was skeptical in the extreme and mostly ignored it (ironic, as I am now an avid Facebook user).  I had some acquaintances that were on Friendster, though, and when MySpace started up I joined that, which was the beginning of my life on social networks.  I am not interested in making a value judgment about any of these methods of interaction, the article was about something more profound.

Friendster is apparently going to wipe its servers clean of a great deal of information soon.  In the computer world it is ancient, almost ten years old.  It has fallen out of favor and is trying to re-invent itself; as a part of that is dumping a great deal of old information, some of which has not been accessed for years.

But the article quoted a person who met and courted their spouse on Friendster, and who was saying that all of their early correspondence was through Friendster and was slated to be erased.  I would imagine that person was one of hundreds if not thousands who met and courted that way, and who have been trusting the servers at Friendster (or MySpace or Facebook) to be their cardboard box in the attic.  Even though we don’t access those letters often or ever it is important that they are there, that there is a record of our loves and losses, our triumphs and defeats.

The difference is that I am in charge of that box in my house.  If I decide I do not need those letters in my life anymore, I can get rid of them consciously.  I own those particular pieces of paper, I decide their fate.

The analog to this in my own life is the growth of my son over the last twenty months, all of which has been chronicled on Facebook, and all of which lives in some server somewhere in the world.  The source videos and photos live on a machine at our house, but the way that they are strung together, the comments that we and our friends have made about them, the conversations that they have inspired do not belong to us in the same way.  Should Facebook end, so too will we lose that particular way of remembering.  And as impossible as it seems to us in the moment, Facebook is likely to end a lot sooner than a photograph is likely to disappear.

I am not sure what it is that I think should be done about this, if anything.  I was just struck by the poignancy of the story of the person in the article.  This record-keeping, this storing of the past in objects or papers has taken on a new identity.   The memories are no less important, but somehow we have come to a place that we are trusting other people to manage their storage for us.  In surrendering the responsibility for storage and management, we have also surrendered some of our ability to have a say about the fate of one of the most precious things we have:  our memories.

appropriateness

as I age (I am occasionally reminded that I am pushing forty) I am mellowing.  Though there are things that I believe firmly and fiercely, my overall world view is getting more relativistic as I wander farther into my time on this planet, and many of the things that I once felt stridently about are getting harder to parse, with "right" and "wrong" being less abundantly clear.

In 1997, as I was in my final year of my second undergrad, I took a class from a teacher and mentor and friend named Bland Wade.  He runs the Theatrical Properties department at my alma mater, and in addition to being a great teacher (one of the highest compliments I can pay) is also a great designer and craftsperson.  Though I have not seen him in a few years now, he remains present in my life in a number of ways, not least in this little footstool:

I took a class from him in my senior year called "furniture for the stage," in which one of the projects was this footstool.  We carved the cabriole legs ourselves, assembled the stool, upholstered it, and finished it.  Though it was built for the stage, I have kept mine all these years and it has seen some hard use, always being paired with a chair that belonged to my great-great grandfather, even wearing the same upholstery fabric for many years.  But the legs have gotten loose, and the upholstery is sagging, it was clear that fifteen years later it was really time to attend to this little workhorse of our living room.

So I took it down to the shop and started to disassemble it.  One of the first things I noticed was my signature:

I remember being so proud of this stool when it was finished, and thinking that it would last forever.  In a way, I was right, to a twenty-two-year-old fifteen years is functionally forever, isn't it?  I remember thinking that I now had the secrets to making furniture, and that this would be a family heirloom, and that my great grandchildren, whom I would never meet, would have this stool.  See, I thought this way even fifteen years ago.  No wonder I can not escape it now.

This is how this stool was put together:

Lag screws and drywall screws.  Not a "for the ages" construction methodology, really.  Wood, as I think I have written about before, expands and contracts with the seasons.  In humid summers it absorbs water from the air and swells, in the winter when the air is drier it loses the water and contracts.  When you put metal fasteners into the wood (which do not expand and contract with the seasons), they crush the wood fibers that expand around the fastener, so that when the wood shrinks again the hole is too big for the fastener.  Over several years this can make the hole permanently too big for the fastener, and in this case makes the legs loose.

The important thing to remember here, though, is that this was intended to be a theatrical prop, not a piece of heirloom quality furniture.

Everything in the theater has what can be an interesting dual life:  they are simultaneously used much harder than normal objects and used for a much shorter time than normal objects.  There are no forces more destructive than an actor in the throes of a scene or a careless stagehand rushing to complete a backstage task in the dark.  So objects get beaten up, clothing gets torn, doors get slammed much harder than in real life, even in a house with a toddler or a teenager.

So when we built this stool, the intention was to make an object that would stand up to that kind of use over the run of a show, not to the slow and inevitable wear to which the seasons subject it.  Subtle difference, maybe, but important.  Thus the lag screws.

Disassembling this object, seeing its guts again after fifteen years, has inspired me to think about these intentions, and about the ways that we choose what is appropriate.    The construction and lack of refinement (there are bandsaw marks and file marks on the cabriole legs, for example, something I would not normally allow to remain on a piece I made now) were completely appropriate for the intended use of that object, and only seem out of place when looked at in a different context.  In the same way, the methodologies that I now apply to my work would be completely inappropriate in a theatrical context, as they take too long and are too exacting for that milieu.

Which of course also gets me thinking about the relativistic nature of so many of my other beliefs.  Obi-Wan reminds Luke that "you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view," which I find true more and more.  With the exception of rules about hitting and hating and stealing, there are often more than one way to look at a lot of the issues in my life just now, and I am trying to be more mindful about the fact that alternate approaches are worthy at least of a thoughtful ear and patient consideration, even if they seem at the outset to be misguided or inapplicable.

nails

so i was thinking about nails. Not the kind on your fingers, but the kind you hold things together with. Specifically, I was thinking about trunnels. "Trunnel" is a colloquial contraction of "tree nail," which is the name that was given to the wooden pegs that used to be pounded into post-and-beam houses to hold them together. They were of two varieties, either split out square from a tree branch or trunk, or formed round. The square variety used to be pounded into a drilled hole (which was round, of course), and the parts that did not fit sheared off, so that the trunnel completely filled the round hole. This is where the phrase "square peg in a round hole" came from. It's modern meaning is something that dos not fit, that is in the wrong place. The original application, however was using a context (the round hole) to make an existing situation(square peg) applicable. I like that idea more, myself.

Anyway, tonight I was thinking about trunnels. A couple of summers ago I was with a friend in a place that is the kind of place that people make things like trunnels. And there was this elderly gentleman sitting with a pile of "billets," which are the square pieces that have been split out of the tree, and a circular chisel, and passersby could try their hand at making a trunnel. Interesting to watch. My friend knew this guy, and he chatted for a minute and then sat down to pound a billet through the circular steel hole. Tap tap tap. Quiet little hits, almost timid. Took a while. eventually, a perfectly round trunnel fell out of the bottom. I was watching him thinking "man, you could really send that through with a couple of good hits. Why is he holding back?"

He looked at me and offered me a turn. True to form, I lined up my billet, and raised the mallet.

WHANG WHANG WHANG!!!!

Out of the bottom falls a sort-of-trunnel, rounded on one side, but only rounded on the other for an inch or so, and square the rest of the way up. My friend looks at me and says, "No, you need to tap it through, so that you can alter how you hit it, depending on it's angle as it goes through."

Oh.

So I was thinking about this today. About how misguided one's actions can be if one does not stop to fully grasp the nuances of a situation. I need a lot of reminding in this regard.

retractions

well, as often happens, my romantic proclivities got the better of me. Instead of doing the research that I know I need to do, I got all lost in reverie thinking about the Erie Canal. The Canal did, in fact run right through the center of Syracuse at one time, but its route is now filled in and called "Erie Boulevard." It now no more flows past the Warehouse than the Suez Canal does.

I hate it when reality trumps poetry.

The water flowing past the Warehouse is, it turns out, the Onondaga creek, which feeds the intensely polluted Onondaga Lake that is in Syracuse. This creek flows past and is contaminated by (at last count) about 40 combined sewer overflow structures and contributes greatly to the mudboil situation in the Lake.

Ah well.

Good news, though, is that this does not negatively impact our ability to get a water wheel there. On Tuesday afternoon I went to an amazing lecture on biomimicry that just blew me away. There was a reception afterwards at which I met the head of an organisation called the Syracuse Center of Excellence, whose mission is to "create innovations in environmental and energy technologies that improve human health and productivity, security, and sustainability in urban and built environments." Their website is http://www.syracusecoe.org/. Pretty good group of folk, and COLAB, which is who I have been working for, has a few projects going on with them.

So I met the guy who runs it, and he is super excited about the water wheel. He was standing there talking to this architect, a fellow Syracusian (Syracusite? Syracusino?) and they started talking about how the Haudenosaunee tribe (which translates into something like "people who build long houses") were the ones who stood there on the sore of that lake a long long time ago and laid forth the idea that they must live so that the land and water and forests and skies would be untouched for their descendants of the seventh generation from then. That is where Seventh Generation came from you know. Those folk standing there on the shores of that now-polluted lake. It was the clan martiarch that spoke. The company that sells toilet paper or whatever the hell they sell got their name from that moment.

Anyway, I am standing there talking to these two guys, and they are all excited about my little project, and the C of E guy says "next time you are up here, come to my office and we will get things figured out and start moving forward." Then he turned around and called this very nice woman in a blue jacket over. "He says this is Dean ________, she is the Dean of the College of Engineering. We need to get her involved. She can tell us how big a generator we need." Turns out her father was a labor organiser, and we started talking about old IWW hymns and organising songs, all of which she grew up with. So she is all right in my book.

The point being, even though it is not the Canal, it may be a reality. And if this can really happen, if we can get all the rights and forms signed in triplicate, and construction documents and environmental impact statements and public safety authorisations and everything else that we need, if it can happen here, there is no reason it can not happen somewhere else. And then somewhere else. And somewhere else again. As Arlo said, "then friends, it'll be a movement!" The Learn-From-Your-Elders Anti-Petroleum Power-Generation Movement.

T-shirts and stickers to come.