Momentum

There are currently 17 minutes until I can leave the office for the day. Four more days of work. Four. Seven until I leave for a month long adventure in Europe. There's also a good friend's wedding in between now and then. It's all quite nerve wracking. For the wedding, I am so excited and scared for my friend. She'll be happy, I'm sure and I just want this day to go well, to be amazing for her. The rest of her life starts in a week or so. By the time I return, she'll have moved to another city to be with her husband. That's mildly scary. It's something I kind of expected. Everyone thinks of me as the one who travels everywhere and goes away and does all sorts of things that are away from home, but look at me, I've committed myself to at least a year of staying in the city, when most of my friends will be gone. I saw it coming. I'll be honest though, I do want to stay here and settle here, but I also want to move far away, at least temporarily. There is something to that loneliness of a new city. Maybe some day my job will lead me all over the place. This entry has gone in an entirely direction than I thought.

 

In reality, I wanted to talk about how I'm finally getting excited about my trip, even though I don't know what September holds (still waiting for good ol' grad school folk to tell me which courses to take). It'll all work out, won't it? It seems like it always does. I didn't think I'd get in anywhere and everyone somehow thought I was fit for their different and unique programmes. Didn't see that coming. I hope that I made the right decision and that I didn't just take the easy route. We'll have to find out, I guess. Anyway, that aside, I'm no longer too stressed about my life. I'll find a place to live and I'll find some friends and I won't live at home, even if I can't really afford it. During the first week of classes, I'll be jetlagged because I'm a snob who just came back from travelling in Europe with friends. It seems like this trip will never happen, but it hasn't been two years in the making like the first backpacking adventure. That was hype. We'd planned it since we'd met. The second trip fell together within a month and it was an inspiration for this trip - its chaotic nature and location. Each trip we approach with a new attitude as we both enter different stages in our lives. Trip one, I'd just finished high school and she was nearly done. Round two, she'd just returned from 6 months in Australia and I was in University, this time we're both students and ambitious ones. We'll approach things academically and with hysterical laughter, I'm sure.

 

July 2003, we arrive in Florence, Italy and drop our stuff in a 4 bed room in the most beautiful hostel I've ever been to since, my first hostel ever. There's one bag next to a bottom bunk, it's from Mountain Equipment Co-op, a Canadian, how disappointing. We met her later that day and sure enough, she was from Scarborough, very disappointing. She'd finished her undergrad and was heading off to do a Master's in Psych. I was kind of in awe as I was just about to start undergrad. A Master's? She must be smart, I thought. It was still a disappointment that the first person I met in a hostel was a Canadian, she did not feel that comraderie that Canadians often feel in foreign places. She didn't offer me any travelling advice, she just participated in the regular hostel banter. I hope I'm not that person for someone else.

 

Something I've realised is that now that I'm excited, this week will inch away slowly to the sound of This American Life podcasts from many years past as I work in the warehouse. My life feels now that it should be narrated by Ira Glass.

Comma Down

From: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19762074/site/newsweek/page/1/

 

The Sad Fate of the Comma

By Robert J. Samuelson

Newsweek

 

July 23, 2007 issue - I have always liked commas, but I seem to be in a shrinking minority. The comma is in retreat, though it is not yet extinct. In text messages and e-mails, commas appear infrequently, and then often by accident (someone hits the wrong key). Even on the printed page, commas are dwindling. Many standard uses from my childhood (after, for example, an introductory prepositional phrase) have become optional or, worse, have been ditched.

If all this involved only grammar, I might let it lie. But the comma's sad fate is, I think, a metaphor for something larger: how we deal with the frantic, can't-wait-a-minute nature of modern life. The comma is, after all, a small sign that flashes PAUSE. It tells the reader to slow down, think a bit, and then move on. We don't have time for that. No pauses allowed. In this sense, the comma's fading popularity is also social commentary.

It is true that Americans have always been in a hurry. In "Democracy in America" (1840), Alexis de Tocqueville has a famous passage noting the "feverish ardor" with which Americans pursue material gains and private pleasures. What's distinctive about our era, I think, is that new technologies and astonishing prosperity give us the chance to slacken the pace. Perish the thought. In some ways, it seems, we Americans have actually become more frantic.

Evidence to support this hunch hasn't been hard to find. Exhibit A is a story a few months ago in The Washington Post headlined, TEENS CAN MULTITASK, BUT WHAT ARE COSTS? We meet Megan, a 17-year-old honors high-school senior. After school, she begins studying by turning on MTV and booting up her computer. The story continues:

Over the next half an hour, Megan will send about a dozen instant messages discussing the potential for a midweek snow day. She'll take at least one cellphone call, fire off a couple of text messages, scan Weather.com, volunteer to help with a campus cleanup [at the local high school], post some comments on a friend's Facebook page and check out the new pom squad pictures another friend has posted on hers.

Whew! And remember, she's also studying. Naturally, the story includes the obligatory quote from a brain scientist, who worries that so much multitasking will turn young minds into mush. "It's almost impossible," says the scientist, "to gain a depth of knowledge of any of the tasks you do while you're multitasking."

 

In reality, multitasking isn't confined to the young. It's hard to go anywhere these days—including restaurants and business meetings—without seeing people punching furiously on their BlackBerrys, cell phones or other handheld devices. More mush, maybe. At the least, serious questions of etiquette have arisen. In one survey, almost a third of the executives polled said it is never appropriate to check e-mails during meetings.

 

Next, there's work. Unlike most rich nations, the United States hasn't reduced the average workweek over the past quarter century. In 2006, annual hours for U.S. workers averaged 1,804, barely different from 1,834 in 1979, reports the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. By contrast, the Japanese cut annual hours by 16 percent to 1,784, the Germans 20 percent to 1,421 and the French 16 percent to 1,564. One commentator in the London-based Financial Times calls America "the republic of overwork." A study by economists Daniel Hamermesh of the University of Texas and Joel Slemrod of the University of Michigan argues that long working hours, especially among the well paid, may be an addiction, akin to alcoholism and smoking. (The paper is titled "The Economics of Workaholism: We Should Not Have Worked on This Paper.")

I could go on, but the column's only 800 words, and more evidence would simply reinforce the point: de Tocqueville's "feverish ardor" endures. There's always too much to do, not enough time to do it. The comma is a small victim of our hustle-bustle. If we can save a few seconds a day by curtailing commas, why not? Commas are disparaged as literary clutter. They're axed in the name of stylistic "simplicity." Once, introductory prepositional phrases ("In 1776, Thomas Jefferson ... ") routinely took commas; once, compound sentences were strictly divided by commas; once, sentences that began with "once," "naturally," "surprisingly," "inevitably" and the like usually took a comma to set them apart.

No more. These and other usages have slowly become discretionary or unacceptable. Over the years, copy editors have stripped thousands of defenseless commas from my stories. I have saved every last one of them and piled them all on a secluded corner of my desk. They deserve better than they're getting. So here are some of my discarded commas, taking a long-overdue bow: ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,.

I'm not quitting quietly. By my count, this column contains 104 commas. Note to copy desk: leave them be.

Something to Read

This was found on top of a pay phone. I hate to post it due to its personal nature, but it's so damn interesting. We did try to call the individual with no luck.