todd’s posterous

Tuesday: Me Today

I let a couple weeks go by between posts. It felt more appropriate to let our vacation sink in... last week shortened by vacation leading into this holiday-shortened week. A couple of times, now, we've scheduled a vacation in such a way that we return a few days before another holiday. I don't know why I haven't done this more often, but I like it a lot. If the holiday merely prolongs the vacation, that's great, but there seems to be some kind of psychological boost to ending one vacation only to get another.

Or it could be that I'm gullible enough to believe anything I tell myself. Well, I'm sure I'm not the only one who suffers from that problem. That's about a third of the human condition, isn't it?

I've tried very hard to avoid politics, and I have to say, I've succeeded admirably since about 2004, even though my job makes it very hard to do. I used to follow politics closely, but the last few years have been demoralizing. Not merely because some politicians whom I don't like have been in power - that's always been the case. It's a combination of the tone of today's politics, its positioning as a sport suitable for play-by-play, the proliferation of lighter-than-air talking heads on TV and elsewhere, the shear weight of millions of people expressing their opinions about things about which they haven't bothered to learn a single thing. (There's another third of the human condition, huh?)

This is our god-given right, as Americans, to categorically take sides on issues about which we know nothing. But the Internet has changed the scale. Before, it was just the two loudmouths at work; now it's about 5 million loudmouths coming at me every time I open my notebook. This isn't a sickness of politics alone. About 80% of Friendfeed content consists of people commenting on posts they haven't read. After a while, you wonder how it can be that so many people derive such an intense feeling of self-worth by offering thoughts such as, "FAIL."

This seems an appropriate time to pile on a bit, by including Merlin Mann's priceless description of Friendfeed: "... the platform of choice for the web’s least interesting narcissists — and the slow-witted woodland creatures who enjoy grooming their fur."

I use Friendfeed. I like it. I like it so much, I bought the company. But, while the key to maximizing the effectiveness of the app is selecting the right friends and then weeding out the irrelevant content, sometimes I grow concerned that nobody is going to share something interesting and thoughtful; that everybody is going to port all their delightful cat videos into the service, or make pointless statements, hoping lots of people will comment back to them, and maybe add them as a friend. Thank goodness not everyone is using it as their own live puppet show.

Well, there are worse things in this world. Which brings me back to politics, doesn't it? I'm kind of starting to get into it. My subscription to The New Republic, which has languished since 2005, now gets my attention again. I've started reading a couple political blogs. Wow, that's intense, Todd. Why so deep? Maybe because I think Washington stands a fair chance of getting smarter, come January.

We can hope.