Musings & Meanderings

In a NYT article titled Questions You Should Never Ask A Writer, Doris Lessing writes of political correctness, legacies of communism, and the “demand that stories must be “about” something”.

This one phrase speaks volumes to me, of people who shun fiction entirely, of others who spend an academic career studying but one or a few works of literature, of people’s fear of human imagination, of how many millions of times someone asked what Seinfeld was about, feeling so wickedly delighted to know that the clever answer was ‘nothing’. Meanwhile, emotions, passions, spirituality, the wondrous mystery of life itself, overflow beyond hope of classification and micro-management, gloriously incomprehensible through logical deduction.

Why, indeed, must everything be ‘about something’? What is this almost compulsive need many people have to identify and explain everything in so minimalist a manner that it can be safely enclosed and, then, put away?

This compulsion applies to much more than just literature. Any artist’s life’s work should be describable in one term or phrase. Any new business idea should be reduced to an ‘elevator pitch’. Many community projects are most likely to gain backing when the answer to what goal is to be achieved can be stated in one sentence. Politicians actually get elected based on a statement of intention to ‘fix’ something with little or no explanation as to how they will do so. This list goes on and on.

Every one of these ‘abouts’, these simplified and symbolic reasons people seem to crave, only has meaning within the full context of a human story, a multi-faceted and dynamic panorama of intertwined moments and lives, about many things simultaneously.

We can be without being about something.
We cannot be about something without being.

I cast my vote today, as I always do, and we wait here in Ontario this evening to find out who our Premier will be. Toronto is my first home, and the effects on it from lack of leadership both here and in Queens Park are something all Torontonians should be concerned about. Watching the political landscape increasingly reduces my hope that small and responsible government can ever be a reality here again.

Hello WordPress.

It’s been a sharp learning curve so far, but even when I’m banging my head against the wall , I still have Louis singing Hello Dolly in the background.

Who knew that I’d enjoy poring over code files in the middle of the night until I figured out what they did or until I found my mistake? (If I’d only known that I should have been reading PHP instead of MySQL manuals first it might have gone a bit faster.) No, this isn’t a gig, just a hobby.

I’d originally thought of waiting to move in concert with other plans, but decided that learning WordPress and joining this community was a wonderful complement to any future development at all, and a perfect place for my personal weblog.

So here I shall muse and meander from now on.

Getting out when you are physically disabled and in pain isn’t easy, and I haven’t done it enough since the major physical setback last December. Attending my first Geek Girl Dinner yesterday evening was great for me in more ways than one.

This was the first time I’ve been in a room full of mostly women with whom I shared work interests and even passions. After a couple of decades in a business where I worked exclusively with men, meeting mostly men in technology hasn’t fazed me much, but I also happen to like being a woman and am always thirsty for more powerful female energy in my life. Combining that with being able to talk about internet and web development topics was perfect.

A few of the people at my table were Sylvia, Director of Client Services at Broadview Software, a company that makes software for the television industry, Heather, who’s with Tucows and who has the coolest tattoo, and Shelley, a web designer with a lots of experience in accessibility. There were many more geek girls to meet… I look forward to being able to attend again.

The highlight of the evening was entrepreneur Leila Boujnane’s talk, followed by an open question session. Leila told her story, of how she traveled halfway round the world and chose technology over medicine, with sassy wit, revealing both a delightful sense of humor and an indomitable will to succeed. Bravo.

The central concept underlying Idée, Inc. is the identification of every digital image to a level of detail comparable in uniqueness to a fingerprint. This concept is, imo, an extremely valuable contribution to the core application processes we need more focus on in harnessing and benefiting from the full and barely apprehended power of the internet. Applications such as Idee’s visual search technology have the potential to support and enable many rich cultural activities beyond traditional media.

One of the things that intrigued me last night was that this gathering represented a truly wide political and ideological spectrum, yet these differences were of no issue in the face of common interests and dreams for the future. This is one of the ways in which women as a group have more power than they realize, in their natural ability to care and connect.

Thank you sponsor Tucows and to my fellow attendees, for an enjoyable evening.

Has anyone posted pictures?

I don’t keep a record of them all, although I remember the dates most important to me.

Jeff’s post on 911 resonated most with me today.

For me 911 invokes, not only the threat to our society which it carried out, but also every brutal slaughter and execution lodged in my memory. I think of most of my family members dying under the Soviet regime, and this, just like 911, re-enforces to me the value of our freedom, and the extent to which I passionately believe in fighting to protect it.

Focusing on freedom today strikes me as a fitting tribute.

I’m reading more today on banned books, including sassymonkey’s third in a series on Banning Books In Schools on BlogHer.

If you want to join in reading about freedom today, here’s another place to start …the ALA Intellectual Freedom Issues page.