Removing an ant from your ear canal

 The usually wonderful writer Anthony Lane uses a lazy analogy in describing some lyrics from a pop song.

Trying to get them out of your head is like trying to dislodge an ant that has crawled into your ear canal.

Not that hard I would imagine- I would stick my head under a sink.
More importantly an analogy fails when a reader is asked to understand something they know well by comparing it to something they don't know at all. Everyone knows what it is like to have a pop song that won't stay out of their head. Lane asks us to compare that to something very few people have experienced.

Techcrunch's weird analogy

By extracting data from suppliers, Apple’s chip team has a feedback loop into product planning. All of this collective wisdom adds up, helping Apple decide what to roll-up, buy, license, or outsource. Imagine seeing your competition’s entire feature roadmap, and then planning your own SoC [System on a chip] strategy. It’s like seeing your neighbor’s wife naked, and deciding afterward whether you’re interested, even though you’re already married.

 The SoC statement is completely understandable and the logical conclusion of several paragraphs of clear prose. Then a strange analogy about having an affair with a neighbor's wife is introduced. Analogies are good when they clear up complicated situations. They are bad when they make clear situations confusing.
My guess is the author has been thinking a lot about affairs lately.

Leaving Facebook

I deactivated my Facebook account for a week and it was a very productive in terms of making me think about how I use the service.
There are the potential issues that I see

• Privacy- FB's privacy issues are well known and I have nothing to add about them.
• Communication issues (primarily as a replacement for email)
• FB Bullying
• Attention fragmentation
• Virtual friendships vs. real ones

Communication issues
I want to own my emails- to be able to reply to them in the editor that I choose. For a long time I've been disappointed that FB forces me to use their system but not enough to do anything about it. In the time I have been away from FB my feeling towards my communication has felt "cleaner". It's an odd feeling to have in relation to technology but I think it's apt. It feels better to have one process for replying to people and to have everything in one place. 
It seems to me that FB would like as much as possible to replace my regular emailing with their own system. They haven't made it inconvenient because they aren't good with technology but because they want me using their website.  I respect their desire to earn a profit but it does make me feel bullied.

FB Bullying
When I attempted to deactivate my account FB showed me 6 (?) large profile pictures of my friends and below each it said that they would miss me- "David Charles will miss you" and "Stanley Salazar will miss you" etc. The approach worked well and did what it was supposed to do: it made me feel like I was abandoning my friends.
The problem is that it's not true and that all of my friends have my email. I'm not cutting my friends out. What I am doing is losing the communication that they don't direct specifically toward me. I don't believe that anybody will stop messaging me because I am not on FB but I will stop recieving many messages that people broadcast to the world. 


Broadcast messages
There are the main types of FB posts

• Ordinary snark and cool links- what I post and like to read
• Reaction to world events
• Events in people's lives

The only one I want to  discuss the last one. I have found out that I don't want to know about events in people's lives unless they tell me specifically. Even if it is something minor it feels weird. Let's say I meet my friend Sedgewick and I remember from his FB posting that he saw The Bourne Ultimatum last Friday. While I'm talking to him I might start thinking about whether I should mention it or not and even wondering if knowing it makes me weird. (Then I realize that worrying about it really does make me weird etc.)
It may not be rational to think that remembering a public post is weird but I think that even if isn't weird it is unnatural. It interrupts the normal flow of conversation. Now instead of either The Bourne Ultimatum being discussed or not discussed it's in this half-discussed state until we get to it.

Virtual friendships vs. real ones
I think the main appeal for me about Facebook was the idea of reconnecting with old friends in a non-virtual manner. A few weeks ago I decided to think about how well that has worked out and realized that I had only met in real life one person who I had lost touch with that I had found again on Facebook.
(My results may be reflections of my own circumstances and are certainly affected by the fact that many of my old friends live far away.)

Attention Fragmentation
I've already discussed how knowing events from people's live can fragment a real life conversation. To some degree I think it also fragments my general concentration. When I write I try to isolate myself from other people's thoughts.

A final thought
Last week I went to a book reading where I knew one of the authors. His short story was good and we talked for a few minutes after. The conversation stalled a bit and he asked me if I was on a Facebook. I told him no and it felt right. He was an interesting guy and I will by happy to talk to him whenever I run into him. If we end up having a real life friendship that could be cool too but in no way did I feel that I wanted a FB friendship with him. I don't want to know what he's reading or if he's had a bad day. It's not that I'm not interested in that information- it's that I don't want to get it through FB.

"Grandpa doesn't have time"

My phone conversation with my grandfather today-
Grandpa: You need to get married.
Me: Okay-
Grandpa: Grandpa doesn't have time
Me: I hear that
Grandpa: Grandpa doesn't have time

"miscast"

"Miscast" is an oddly non-judgemental word and somehow appropriate to the theater. It means poorly cast but comes off seeming like there was just a bit of mixup. A miscast play has fundamental problems but "miscast" doesn't capture that.

his honey and his cross

Simon's ability to stand outside himself and to observe the folly of Homo sapiens is both his honey and his cross: instead of working through the emotion he set up in some of his plays, he deflects it with laughs.

from the New Yorker.
The New Yorker often reprints train-wreck metaphors from other publications. This isn't so bad but I think it doesn't work well.

Thinking better without apostrophes

When putting my thoughts down I never incorrectly use homonyms that don't contain apostrophes ("witch" and "which") but I will often use the word when it saves me an apostrophe ("it's" and "its").

When there's some flow to writing I feel like there is a type of split-thinking occurring: one part for the current sentence and the other for the following ones. The current sentence has been completed- it must only be maintained in memory while the fingers catch up. The following ones are where the thinking is going on- the choices of word and flow.

I want this first part of the brain, this secretary, to get the words out and leave me in peace. But but every sentence there he is sticking his head in the door with and bothering me. I bark at him to leave and he goes back and does the most awful job he can.

It is easier for me to write it wrong and then go back through when I hit some lull. It costs more time to do it this way but it that works. The reasons for the problem and this solution are deeply embedded in the process- that I'm tapping a keyboard and using a word processor.

The difference between typing and writing with a pen or pencil is that it is much less brain intensive. After a certain point we are all endlessly experienced with making the curves of letters but it continues to be something we have to do. Typing isn't like that. I have no memory of typing "continues" two sentences ago. It didn't feel different from "endlessly" or "curves". It didn't feel like anything. I thought the words and they appeared. (In this way typing is closer to speaking).

The level of this menial work has been flattened, or nearly. When we get close to the ground level we see that the apostrophes (and the capitalizations) don't quite work the way they should. They require effort. When I get to typing "you're" there's an instant where I'm back at the fingers to avoid "your'e" or "yoUre".

There are two reasons I find all of this interesting: learning about how people think, learning about how people think differently, and how thinking on this may affect technology.
The minutiae of how people think is rarely discussed. We know our friends opinions but not how they got there and that seems to be an exciting bit. I've never heard someone say how they get their words on the page.

Two words

It seems to me that a one word poem, unless it consisted of a made up word, could never be any good. Its meaning would already have been absorbed at another time and there isn't much room for reimagination if it is only done by framing. Of course there is a staggering number of two word combinations many of them rarely if ever experienced. I was wondering if, as in any formal poem, there could be a method of writing a two worder- or is it that the regular lengths of structured poems have lengths that are related to the structure of language.