Why garden?

We put in a garden this past weekend. Our friend Daniel worked alongside Alice and I and, in fact, dedicated part of his yard to the effort. We got sunburns and sore muscles and an 8x24 patch of local vegetables and herbs.

Why do it yourself? It's tempting to say: money. Certainly with tomatoes going for $5 a pound--for specimens that would barely pass for tomatoes in a lineup--there's an argument to be made there. But people DIY for a lot of other reasons. Pride and a sense of control and connectedness rank high. Enjoying the process is another.

A big one for gardening is quality. I was stunned by the flavor of the broccoli I grew at our last house. Our neighbor became obsessed with our cucumbers. The flavor of the produce we can buy--even at $5 a pound--has been falling steadily for decades, a victim of the demand for perfect appearance and no bruises. The result is a tomato you can use as a softball.

What is it about the money explanation, though? Some of the guys I know who brew their own beer say that's what it's about ... but who's willing to do the math and then say they drink so much beer that they can't afford to pay for it? And who really stops buying beer after they start brewing it? No, I think it's an attractive explanation because it's the most socially acceptable one. Everybody understands the value of a buck. It's harder to put value on virtues like craftsmanship, being connected to nature, and self-sufficiency. For my part, I think anything I can do to bring this vocabulary into more regular usage is worth doing.

Facebook Fives

Five Things I Like about Facebook:
1. Pithy status updates
2. The clean interface of Facebook Mobile
3. Ditto re. the Facebook app for iPhone/Touch
4. Tagged and commented photos
5. The whole time warp thing with people I haven't talked to in decades

Five Things I Dislike about Facebook:
1. Advertisers that think I'm a cretin
2. Mafia Wars
3. Quizzes
4. Relationship status drop-down menus and associated gossip
5. "Five Things"

Social media vs. the gated communities of the internet

In 1998, I started spending time on Table Talk, an online community at Salon.com. It's a general-purpose discussion forum, and at first, it was free, like almost all of today's "social media". But at some point, Salon had to start charging (at least for the ability to post) and Table Talk membership became slightly exclusive. Exclusivity on the 'net is kind of uncommon, and it creates a community with a very different purpose. It defines what you can and can't do.

After a few years I moved from Table Talk to The WELL, which is also owned by Salon and also fee-based. But in the case of The WELL, the exclusivity is greater. Whereas anyone can read any part of Table Talk without logging in, only a small portion of The WELL is publicly readable, and only members can post.

Over the past year, as I've immersed myself in other social media like LinkedIn, meetup.com, and Facebook, I've realized belatedly that The WELL's policies stand in stark contrast to what people expect on the internet. The WELL, and to a lesser extent Table Talk, is a gated community. It is virtually a castle with a moat and a drawbridge that takes credit cards.

Other social media services thrive on interconnection across their boundaries. Meetup.com encourages you to post your RSVPs on Facebook. YouTube lets you embed your videos promiscuously. According to this perspective, when you write a paragraph or upload a photo, you place no value on the content itself; the value it brings to you is in the conversations it starts. In The WELL's perspective, the content must be protected, either because it has value (it can be copyrighted) or because of privacy concerns. What you're buying with your membership is mutual agreement to adhere to the community standards that provide that protection.

I can see the value in both approaches. The truth is, I originally came to The WELL to be around intelligent adults, and I got that in spades - the level of discourse is high and there's real expertise in many fields there. But it's a timesuck, and now that I'm trying to be more focused in how I spend my personal time, I'm going to have to think hard about it when my renewal comes up.

What a difference a year makes

I started this blog one year ago today. It's foggy in my memory; I was such a different man then. Such gut-wrenching events, and always I reacted, always passive, never acting, envisioning, moving forwards. The measure of how much I have changed is the fact that I had actually forgotten.

This week is also the anniversary of our wedding. It has been eight years. We hope to buy a nice piece of fish to cook, and have a quiet evening at home. I love you, Alice.

...

The title of this post is an inside joke. Bob Guinea was a reality TV show contestant and we handed around his book about his fake experiences for laughs. The joke, of course, is on us for having watched the show in the first place. But it was as good an excuse as any to get together for beers.

Unforgettable food problems

• Deliquescing potatoes
  
• Smoking tar in a coffeepot
  
• Spoiled meat helpfully dragged out of your garbage by a raccoon in July
  
• The hot peppers your translator won't eat
  
• Fernet Branca

Things that Fernet Branca tastes like:

"medicine. You’re going to hate it, I promise."

"Poison"

"the end of a bad marriage, all bile and bitterness followed by a certain sulky relief."

"a mixture of aromatherapy essences and dilute Marmite."

"somewhere between pine-scented lysol and baking-soda toothpaste with hints of anise, molasses and ashtray."

Gender roles and the middle ground

I recently posted about the need for a male coming-of-age ritual. The question of how to be a man in today's society has inspired a fair amount of blogging, the best of which is, in my opinion, at Art of Manliness. Last week AoM's Brett and Kate McKay reiterated some of their blog's principles and motivations.

I don't have much to add, beyond reposting it because I think it's important. But it makes me think of Milk and how the gay/lesbian movement became the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered movement. People fought to be accepted as gays; later, some people found being gay just as exclusive as being straight, and wanted to be bisexual. I'm probably oversimplifying, but this is the nutshell version of history I was once taught.

It's time for men to find a middle ground between being chauvinistic and being nothing. I'm not sure which is worse.

Gaming the system

"Find The Raincoat" is shorthand, in our family, for gaming the system. The source is an anecdote about a business trip, long ago, where the traveler was sent away on such short notice that he arrived at his destination with nothing to keep the rain from ruining his suit. He bought a raincoat, and included it on his expense report. The company declined to reimburse him for it. He then revised his expense report, removing the raincoat but modifying other items, and resubmitted it with the exact same total. And a note reading "find the raincoat".

That traveler had to game the expense-report system to get reimbursed for an expense that the company forced him to incur. My car's automatic transmission forces me to plan ahead and manipulate it to get acceleration when I need it (this is why expensive cars have powertrains described as "responsive"). When people take short cuts across lawns (see The Parsley, a blog about landscape architecture), they're doing the same thing.

Gaming the system is an indication that the system doesn't do what its users want it to do. The designers' vision (or budget) was inadequate. On the other hand, some systems are built without any concrete expectations of how they'll be used. The fractally expanding world of social media is a prominent example. In many social media platforms, gaming the system is the point; the technology has just been thrown out there. It is almost literally a game to explore all the possibilities.

At this week's blogger meetup, Bill Callahan pointed out that a few years ago, the discussion at these meetups was almost all about the content of the blogs--current events, politics--and hardly at all about the mechanics. The expansion of technology has brought a whole new generation of curious users with it. I'm guessing that this is in addition to the political bloggers, but I'm too new to the scene to say.

So there is a difference between a system that's the only tool available for an unavoidable task (like sidewalks or your car's transmission) and a system made available for people to do--or choose not to do--new things. Between rigidity (you might say obligation) and flexibility or choice. Where is the raincoat in this analogy? Probably in the first category.