jrnl: added some to st andrews and some notes on working on this here

thing

1 files changed, 88 insertions, 1 deletions

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@@ -214,6 +214,61 @@ Despite the lovely beach, I was dreading returning to St. Andrews. We had some b
 
 It's not an awful, but to borrow a 60s-ism that I think is worth keeping around, the vibe is not the sort we enjoy. 
 
+Still. That beach. It did get increasingly crowded as we got closer to spring break, but even at its worst it wasn't half as bad as my home town gets in the summer. Considering this is Panama City, hardly anyone comes out here.
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+One day while we were at St. Andrews I went to a nearby gas station to fill up the Jeep. I went inside the building to give the cashier my money, and found several other people already in line. There was only one cashier, but in front of us off to the side there were three self-check out kiosks. No one made any move toward them. We all waited for the person at the register. After a couple minutes a man who'd been over at the soda machine came toward the front to pay. He looked around confusedly at those of us in line, gestured toward the self-checkout and said to no one in particular, "do you mind if I cut ahead here?"
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+The young man in front of me immediately turned and smiled at the man and said, "Go right ahead." "Thanks," said the man and he stepped forward to the self-check out. He turned around as he started to ring up his fountain drink and asked the young man, "do you just not like self checkout or are you waiting in line for a reason?"
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+"Last time I checked," the young man drawled, "I don't get a W2 from Racetrack, so I can't see myself doing their work for them." 
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+The other man chuckled, but didn't say anything. He finished checking out, and went on his way. 
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+I will confess I had never thought of self checkout this way, but now I can't see it any other way. It's become almost impossible for me to use the self-checkout because I just see myself willfully becoming, for a few minutes, an employee of that business, doing their work for them.
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+Something about the whole encounter reminded me of a moment in David Foster Wallace's famous Kenyon graduation speech, *This Is Water*. Wallace talks through how these default thought patterns take over when we're tired, overworked, in a hurry, and so on. But that's the problem he argues, that these default settings are a choice. Not a conscious one, but a choice still and they are robbing us of seeing something more in those moments. Stopping at the store on your way home from work at rush hour doesn't have to be a moment of consumer hell, we experience it that way because our default programming has conditioned us to see it that way.
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+> If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.  
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+I think a lot time I use those self checkout kiosks as a way to avoid having to spend another second in crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situations. That's what they're there for right? To avoid having to add a cashier to what's already *by default*, at least that's the assumption, a terrible situation. But again, that's a choice. And not the only one.
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+I have a note in my journal, written months before the incident above, that reads: "Every little withdrawal you can make not only resists The Machine, but empowers you. Even a tiny act, like paying cash to a person rather than swiping your implant at the self checkout screen is a choice where you can retain your humanity and the humanity of those around you."
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+Not really though. Really I don't need anything. I need less things. It's the time of year when I find myself taking stock of things and seeing what I can streamline, simplify, and do without. It's my form of a new year's resolution I think. Or perhaps some seasonally wayward attempt at early spring cleaning. Whatever the case this time of year is when I go through my life and think, what can I get rid of? What can I do without? What can I improve on? What is no longer necessary? 
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+It's a fun thought process. I always change things up. Sometimes silly things, like the number of spoons in the drawer. Too many damnit. Out spoons, out. Other times I realize a don't need some tool I've previously considered indispensable. Some other tool I hardly pay attention to will turn out to do the job even better and I didn't realize it because I'd stopped thinking about the problem when I found the first solution.
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+The problems is those first solutions are often ugly hacks, temporary patch jobs, but then you forget to go back and redo them. Or I do anyway. It's good to go back and check your old work, make sure there aren't any hack jobs left around.
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+I don't do this annual taking stock to change my life, it's more of a cleaning out. It's a chance to pull off the rutted road for a few days and see what all is going on down there in the grooves. This is especially true when I get past the silly stuff like too many spoons in the drawer and start looking at my thought patterns.
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+Any pattern of thought soon becomes transparent. That's part of what the pattern is for, and for many things that's good. I don't want to think *what should I do?* every morning. I want to make a cup of coffee and relax for a bit, like I always do. Still, I am sometimes alarmed to find patterns I didn't know I had when I step back and detach, and really *look* at myself.
+
+David Foster Wallace has a parable that I think is relevant:
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+> There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
+
+Wallace's whole text is [worth a read](http://bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu/x4280.html) if you're not familiar (it was a commencement speech originally), but the salient point is, to quote Wallace's own explication: "the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about."
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+I think "realities" is too vague. I don't know exactly what Wallace had in mind, but for me "realities" are the patterns of thought that govern my day.
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+These patterns are hardest to see because they are the things that provide the framework in which we live. They're the things we decided way back when we couldn't even conceive of 2021 as a now that would eventually be *now*. They're the things we figured out so long ago we can't even recall exactly what we figured out. Still, they're there in the background informing everything we do. They're the water in which we live.
+
+When you see the water around you, you see yourself differently. Sometimes that means you find a few spoons you don't need. Other times it might mean something more. 
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+So every year, around this time, I take a pen, a scrap of paper, and go for a walk. Woods are ideal for this, there's such a tangle of growth and life all around you that somehow the tangle of your own thoughts becomes less intimidating. From the tangle patterns emerge, pathways of thought through the trees. Somewhere in there I try to figure out what it is I am doing, where I am going, where I want to be going, and which patterns are going to close the gap between those two things. With any luck I find my way home before dark.
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 And problems with the staff came up yet again. We had to move around a lot. We didn't boo a year in advance, so we booked what we could. A couple nights in one site, a night in another, and another, and so on. The park clearly isn't set up to handle that sort of thing. Nearly every park employee we talked to told us something different when we'd go to move camp sites. We were supposed to move whenever we wanted, after we checked in at the front office, not until 12, not until 1, not until 3, as soon as the camp host said it was okay, or as soon as the front office said it was okay. Literally never got the same answer twice. 
 
 One camp host even lied straight to our faces. He told us to go ahead and move sites and then came back and yelled at us for moving sites. This made Corrine quite livid. Do not try to gaslight my wife. I was less moved because I read Kafka in college. I credit this with my ability to see the post-2016 world as amusing rather than endlessly frustrating. If the modern Machine State confuses you, I suggest grabbing a copy of *The Castle* or *The Trial*. They won't help you understand anything, but at least you'll know some people saw this coming and found humor in it.
@@ -222,7 +277,9 @@ I eventually found someone higher up at St. Andrews and learned the actual rules
 
 Two days later we saw the camp host who lied to us pack up and leave. I have no idea if it was because of us, but I can say this: don't lie to my wife.
 
-That probably makes it sound like we had a terrible time, which really we didn't. Most of the time we spent enjoying ourselves at the beach. The circus of moving was relatively minor and the beach is still beautiful. It got increasingly crowded as we got closer to spring break, but even at its worst it wasn't half as bad as my home town gets in the summer. Considering this is Panama City, hardly anyone comes out here.
+That probably makes it sound like we had a terrible time, which really we didn't. Most of the time we spent enjoying ourselves at the beach. The circus of moving was relatively minor and the beach is still beautiful.
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+
 
 
 
@@ -3438,3 +3495,33 @@ Wayland was smoother, less graphically glitchy, but meh, whatever. Ninety-five p
 That said, I did take all of Sway's good ideas and try as best I could to replicate them in Openbox. So I still have the same keyboard shortcuts and honestly, aside from the fact that Tint2 has more icons than Waybar, and creating "desktops" isn't dynamic, I can't tell much difference. Even my battery life seems to have improved in X11, and that's why I switched to Wayland in the first place, was the better battery life I was getting. Apparently that's not true with this laptop (a Lenovo Flex 5, as opposed to the X270, which does get better battery life under Wayland).
 
 pnyway, there you have it. X11 for the win. At least for me. For now.
+
+## How to Get Work Done on a $100 Tablet
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+Fresh out of the box Amazon's Fire tablets are crap devices. All they can do is hook you up to the fire hose of Amazon content, which is then shoved down your throat. That's why Amazon sells them for as little as $75 for the 10-inch model. Technically it's $150, but it frequently goes on sale for around $75. The time to buy is major holidays. To do any work you'll want the Finite keyboard. The tablet-keyboard bundle typically runs about $100-$120 depending on the sale. It's $200 not on sale. Don't do that, it's not worth $200.
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+For $100 though, I think it's well worth it. After a bit of tinkering to get rid of everything Amazon and install a few apps I need to work I have a workable device. The price is key for me. This is what I take when I head out to the beach or into the woods or up some dusty canyon for the day. It don't want to take my $600 laptop to those places. $100 tablet? Sure. Why not get it a little sandy here and there. So far (going on a year now), it's actually survived.
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+And it lets me work in places like this, which happens to be where I am typing right now (picnic tables in the middle of nowhere are rare, but I'll take it)
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+A Fire HD 10 is not the most pleasant thing to work on. The keyboard is cramped and there's no way to map caps lock to control, which trips me up multiple times a day. still. after a year. But hey, it enables me to get outside and play and still get a little work done while I'm there. I also use it trade stocks and options.
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+The first thing to do is install the Google Play Store. If you need it. I don't so I don't bother. Everything I need works find being downloaded through UptoDown.com. In order to "work" on my Fire, I need Airtable, Slack, Vivaldi, and Zoom. With the exception of Vivaldi, which I love, I hate all these apps, but there you go, that's how I stay in touch with editors and turn in stories. 
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+Writing is another matter. Most people would probably be best serviced with some kind of word processing application that syncs to the cloud, something like Google Docs perhaps. I rely on Vim and Git. I prefer to write in a Vim running in a terminal, I track changes using Git and push them to the remote repo. When I get back to my laptop, I pull the work from the Fire and pickup where I left off. 
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+I do all that using Termux, which is available via F-Droid. 
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+You must also install Termux:API, which is a seperate app. 
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+Then I push, pull on the Fire and pick up again. Do I ever forget to push on the laptop, get to the middle of the woods and realize I don't have the latest version of the repo? Yes, yes I do. But that's what Git branches are for.