Information Superhighway

No one really uses that term in 2009. I guess the Internet is too ubiquitous; it's not "Super" anymore. In the shower this morning, I was remembering a time when our principal, during his morning announcements used it in an analogy describing how fast-paced and exciting high school is. Except, he said, "Super Information Highway," and some of us laughed. To be clear, a few of the nerds laughed. It was 1995, and not too many of us knew what the Information Superhighway was.

At the time though, Prodigy and Compuserve were already starting to lose ground to America Online and Netscape was duking it out with Internet Explorer. It seemed like every night there was a news report about the "World Wide Web" and the "Information Superhighway." And a particular hysteria about how, "Pornographic images are now available to anyone with a computer and a phone line!" In retrospect, that hysteria was probably the best advertising the Internet could have gotten. While some people were avoiding the "Interwebs" and all its perverts, everyone else was buying modems specifically to look for low resolution photos of women in bikinis one tiny image at a time. "If your modem downloads at 14.4 kbps, this will take approximately 10 min., at 28.8 kbps, this will take aproximately 5 min."

And that's how it was, really slow and with limited content. I largely used the World Wide Web to look up sports scores I could have otherwise gotten from ESPN, and more than anything else, to feel cool. This certainly wasn't the "wave of the future" everyone was talking about, it was just too slow. But it was exclusive. Among other things, you needed to have a computer, a modem, a second phone line, and the willingness to pay $20 per month to an Internet Service Provider so you could download things really slowly. I cannot emphasize enough how damn slow the Internet was.

Anyway, it was 1995 and the principal had said, "Super Information Highway." Four of us looked at each other and laughed our asses off. Maybe another half a dozen had heard about the World Wide Web on the news, but couldn't care less. The rest just thought the principal talking out of his butt again, something he was prone to do.

I was thinking though, if it had been 1990 and he said that, nobody would have known what he was talking about at all. It would have just been some random jumble of words, "You're a sophomore, riding the Super Information Highway!" barely relatable to our high school lives.

I wasn't in high school in 2000, but I'm going to imagine that a lot more students would have laughed. By 2000, content was finally starting to come around and more people were getting their first taste of high-speed Internet. Moreover still, there weren't any laws preventing the distribution of MP3s yet, so Napster was king.

And in 2009, "Super Information Highway," would probably garner a laugh from the same four nerds. But only because the nerds would be the only ones who had heard this archaic phrase. Everyone else would be too busy texting, or watching YouTube videos on their iPhones to even notice anything was said at all.

Just a thought.

In Conversation Today...

...I heard the term, "Conversational diarrhettic." As in, when I'm talking to her, I feel the need to use the bathroom. I just thought I should share.

Do cats really copy?

On the one hand:
I was writing up a memo at work today. No need to go into details except to say that it had to do with some pension fund's unattributable liability. And when "unattributable" popped up with a little red squiggly line indicating that it was misspelled, I wasn't entirely surprised. Because for one, "unattributable" is as hard to spell as it is to pronounce. For two, no one ever really uses the word "unattributable," so it's probably not in every dictionary. And three, is it really even a word?

I looked it up online to make sure. Merriam-Webster.com. Indeed, it is a word. I didn't read the definition (though I suppose I should have, since I was writing a memo about it), but I was happy to see that I had not, in fact, misspelled it even though I wasn't sure it was a word in the first place.

---

On the other hand:
It is common practice in the company to jot down "Doer Notes" as your tasks unfold. It helps other people who look at your results to understand what you did to come up with them. Also, since we generally repeat the same tasks on a yearly basis, it helps us to remember what it was we did a year ago. Some people take it more seriously than other, writing down every step, "First, I labeled the files. Then, I created a folder on the M-drive, which I named 2009. Then I created a Word document..." Some people are less specific. "Basically, I did what we did last year. The data was kind of a mess." And some people like to insert unnecessary comments, "First, I labeled the files. Then, I created a folder on the M-drive, which I named 2009. Oops, sorry about that coffee blot. I bumped my mug."

Anyway, generally speaking, I am moderately serious about my Doer Notes. I try not to be overly specific, because there isn't anything I can do that anyone else in the office can't do better and more quickly. I mostly just make notes of strange occurrences, like, "Everyone who retired last year was between the age of 57 and 65, except Frederick Buddy who retired at 48."

A lot of times though, the quality of Doer Notes are greatly affected by the amount of time we have to do them. The fact of the matter is, sometimes we need to get a project finished, typed, reviewed, typed again, final reviewed, and sent to the client before the end of the day. So there isn't much time for extensive note-taking.

More to the point, lately I have been occasionally throwing in made up words. When I'm trying to get a point across and all I can think of is how my assets aren't matching my liabilities, I have trouble getting the right words off the tip of my tongue. So I just make something up. Why not? It's just an internal, unofficial compilation of notes. It doesn't even qualify as a memo.

And that's why I wrote, "I basically copycatted last year's data log." Nevermind that I couldn't think of the word, "copied". I figured whoever was reading it would know what I was trying to say, and I had to get my results and memo out by Noon. The thing that got me though was that "copycatted" didn't have that red squiggly underline, but "unattributable" did! Nevermind the deadline, I had to look the word up on Merriam-Webster online.

"Copycatted" is a real word! Before, I got the red squiggly when I used the word unattributable, which while I didn't know the definition, I was pretty confident was a real word. Now here I am completely making up a word because I had fallen on a few seconds of near complete vocabularilessness (not a word, I checked), and it turns out it's a word after all.

Which means a sequence of three things:
1) A term that I've always assumed to be a child's term, "copycat", became a commonly accepted noun.
2) Then, somebody, probably American (because American's have a way unlike any other culture for bastardizing their own language) started using copycat as a verb, and it became accepted.
3) And naturally, as a verb, it must have a past tense, so it became acceptable to use the word, "copycatted."

That's my guess anyway. (Upon further research, it turns out it's not a child's term, and it's been around since the 1800s.)

And seriously, what do cats copy anyway? Cats are too independent; they do their own thing. Chimpanzees copy. Parrots mimic. Dogs sleepwalk. Cats don't copy.

Just a thought.

Holy Matrimony

I think it's funny how many things are so ingrained in our common vernacular that we've never really bothered to consider the meaning. Like, *incredible*. Like, "That was a fantastic catch. Just incredible!" Or for that matter, *fantastic*.

For the record, *incredible* doesn't mean good, or even exceptionally good. It describes something that is not credible. Something implausible. Something that cannot be believed. So when you say, "That was incredible!" you're kind of actually saying, "That was not credible! That thing that just happened cannot be trusted!" You know? I mean, in practical terms, it makes sense. It's the same as "I can't believe it." But it's an exaggeration. When you say "incredible," most of the time, you don't actually mean *incredible*.

And *fantastic*? Same, but different. Again, fantastic doesn't necessarily have any relation to the word "good". It means, like a fantasy. So, when a teacher writes, "A+ Fantastic!" she's really saying, "This must be a fantasy! I must be imagining this! You can't possibly be that intelligent!"

It's not really about the misuse of words. The thing is, we're not really using those words wrong. We're stretching their intended definitions a little, but more than anything, I think it's funny that we live with this language, but we don't really pay attention to it. It lives without us. All the time, new words and phrases are spawned; old words are reborn with new definitions.

Anyway, this morning, when Onaona and I were talking about the inclusion of certain religious elements in traditional weddings, I was totally confused. She mentioned, "Holy matrimony." And I was like, That's religious? Ohhh. Because it's holy. No kidding. I've heard that phrase dozens of times in my life and I always just thought of it as 'that wedding phrase'. I never thought it was religious.

And 17 hours later, I'm writing a blog post and I'm like, Wait, what's matrimony?

No Books in the Bathroom

I'd imagine it was a little less than two hours into my flight to LA. I'm only guessing. In reality, it felt like hour hours, but Secret Life of Bees was still playing, and since I've heard no one talk about this movie as, "Epic. A tour de force," I will imagine it is of the two-hour something mysterious happens, then something bad, then everyone feels good genre. Anyway, there's been a row of my fellow passengers lining up to use the one and only restroom in the back of the plane.

I wouldn't even have noticed this if not for the regular and inevitable bumps in the head I receive. Either this is the narrowest plane ever or EVERYONE has vertigo.

I managed to fall asleep for a while. This never happens on a plane. If I'm really desperate, I might bend over the tray table with the crown of my head jammed against the (reclined) seat in front of me, but I could probably count on one hand the number of times I've fallen asleep upright.

So, here I am suddenly awakened. Like, you're at home sleeping and you sense there is a stranger in the room. You awake with a start, but you don't want to jolt upright alerting the stranger to your consciousness, thus sending him into a murderous frenzy (I can't be the only one who's felt this before). So you open your eyes slowly, maybe one at a time, maybe while rolling over, feigning sleep, to verify that there is in fact no one else in the room.

Sitting there, in 22C, I opened first my right eye, then my left, and without turning around too quickly. Calmly, I determined who had been petting my head for the last ten seconds.

In fact, it was no one. Or everyone. Depending on how you look at it. For some reason, even though there was absolutely no turbulence, everyone was swaying as they meandered to the rear lavatory. Casually brushing against first the left, then the right, then left again seats along the aisle. My scalp was just an innocent bystander. [*On a side note, this never happens on the subway. The train might be jostling back and forth like a rope bridge in an earthquake, but personal space is law.]

But I've diverged. Significantly. I had intended on providing a much less interesting commentary on going to the bathroom.

It was only a few more minutes later that I was overcome by the power of suggestion. I'm not sure I genuinely had to use the restroom, but it suddenly seemed like a good idea. And besides, everyone was doing it. So I picked up my book and headed back to take my place in line. While back there, I might as well get a few more pages under my belt, but as it turned out, the line had disappeared. I only had to squeeze by the stewardess who sort of gave me the After you, sir-Olay-hand/arm gesture.

As I'm passing though, she says to me (I'm finally getting to the point), "No books in the bathroom."

Huh?

No books in the bathroom. Then she smiled, and I realized she was just really poorly delivering an already bad joke.

Oh. Funny. (Awkwardness ensues.)

Obviously, there's an implication whenever bathrooms and reading materials are combined. Now, I brought a book because I was anticipating a wait and not because I intended any in-bathroom multi-tasking. But I can understand what she thought she had the foresight to see.

I was going to poop. I wasn't really, but I was headed to the bathroom. And, I was holding a book. 1+1=going to poop. It only makes sense, and I won't fault her for thinking it. Or for her bad delivery. But I still don't quite understand the joke itself. Is poop implicitly funny? She essentially told me, by subversively telling me "No books in the bathroom," "Don't poop."

Incidentally, I might actually have laughed if she had just come out and said, "Don't poop." But that would have been less to do with the inherent comedy of poop and more to do with the wholly unexpected breaking of social norm by saying "poop" out loud while wearing a stewardess uniform on a commercial airliner.

But it got me thinking. I don't think it was a joke at all. It was thinly veiled as a joke but really it was a serious plea. She was asking me, please, don't poop. We, your stewardesses, sit back here. In 26C and D, right next to the lavatory. If you're in there with your book, inevitably other passengers will converge outside, and bustle and bump and get in our way. And by the looks of you sir, there's at least a 50-50 chance that we will end up downwind of whatever might waft out when you finally fold the door open again. Please sir, don't poop. For us.

So anyway, FYI, if a stewardess jokes, "No books in the bathroom," it's a safe bet, I think, that she's really not joking at all. It's serious. And it's a plea for help.

On Turning 40

It won't be for another 10 years and 17 days before I turn 40, but I don't really have much to say about turning 30.

For some reason, it's 40 that intrigues me. I have an idea already about 30. I've been saying I'm 30 for a while, and I feel at 29 I've already caught a glimpse of my near future.

And 50+... Well, I'm not sure what to expect exactly, but I suspect that I'll complain a lot. Already, I'm complaining about my back, cold weather, and the integrity of people today. As a general rule, I appreciate solitude and quiet more and more. My joys are simpler joys, which I imagine will only become simpler over time.  And I already look forward to the kids moving out of the house.

40 though has got me stumped.  Will it be just like the 30s, but slower and more settled in?  Will the kids have officially driven me insane?  Will there be a house and a second car?

So anyway, as I approach 30, I'm a little scared of what's to come...  when I turn 40.