Thursday, 12 September, 2002
No, I don't really know what got into me tonight. I've been pretty damned apathetic lately in regards to blogging and have been letting it go. I haven't really cared and I've been busy with other things. And lots of other excuses too.
But I guess I more than made up for lost time tonight. Go ahead and read. It's interesting stuff, I think. Then again, I wrote it so of course I think that.
There's a pretty picture I drew at the end as a reward for your patience. 11:49:12 PM 
I have the first 5 or 6 Cerebus books and never got any others. It was really just laziness. I figured I'd get back around to them some day and continue where I left off (Jaka's Story, I think, I'd have to go check the shelf which is upstairs and, as we've already seen in other entries tonight, I'm being lazy).
Anyway, Steve writes about how bad Cerebus has gotten and I'm bummed. I'd always looked forward to diving back in to this nutty yet highly interesting comic. 11:41:53 PM
I've been so busy and also so uninterested in the Internet (me? really?) that I haven't been keeping up with my reading. Andrew has said a great many things in the last few weeks all of which I want to blog. Since that would be silly, just follow the link to his site and go for it. I especially like the bits from Salon he quotes regarding how the disabled community reacts to the usual "pity" approach towards them.
To expand upon that, I have this anecdote. When the folks I work for got selected to re-do the disability.gov website, they tossed design over to me. Not really having a clue about this at all, I contacted various people I knew who might have a clue. Andrew gave me the best advice of everyone. He told me that the most important thing was to lose the graphic of the smiling people standing with the folks in wheel chairs. It was patronizing and just too much of the very thing he quotes in that Salon piece (go to his site and find it. It's late. I'm too lazy to actually put the link here and I'm on a roll with this writing anyway).
I never thought about it like that. I was very surprised at his reaction and then I felt that click in my mind and realized he was dead on right. Interestingly, I'm just finishing up the redesign of my redesign which will be launched on October 16th and I'm looking at stock photography of, you guessed it, disabled people for a montage. Hey Andrew, want to help me keep this one from being just as bad? (I'm not putting any smiling "service providers" in the montage if that helps :) 11:34:14 PM
Chris is in Honduras. The bastard. I'm still home. The last trip I took was to Vancouver in another job and another lifetime ago.
I've been angling to get myself flown over to Jordan to help out on a project we're doing there. Keeping my fingers crossed... 11:25:12 PM
Quote: "If we teachers can agree that it would be nice to do something more than threaded discussions, what is keeping us from doing it? Three barriers come to mind: teachers, students, and software." [Via Serious Instructional Technology]
I did a research project in grad school on threaded discussions (among other online communication tools) as tools in education. It will be interesting to see where things stand today. I have a bad feeling that in the years since 1998 when I did the study nothing has really improved. 11:16:04 PM
I realized something last night in talking to Ann.
In 1986, I was home sick from school when the Challenger exploded. My mother told me to turn on the TV and I saw a repeat of the event. Within 15 minutes my ever-present coping mechanism kicked in and I started making jokes about it to myself. "No! I said Bud Light!" I've always used humor as a way of dealing. Gallows humor or self-deprecating humor, or just plain silliness has long been my method for dealing with scary situations.
I realized that it's been a year since the World Trade Center came down, since the Pentagon was damaged, and since a plane went (was shot?) down in PA and I haven't made any jokes. I can't. There are no jokes to be made. Watch TV and read other people's writings. Even Robin Williams, the man who can make anything funny, only joked about how New Yorkers were returning to normal ("Fuckin' New York!") rather than about the event itself.
It defies humor. It's too big, too personal, to horrible, or maybe just too intimate for jokes. Ok, I did try to make one lame joke once. I noticed that Life cereal looks a lot like those shattered pieces of the World Trade Center. But the blank looks I got quickly got me to shut up about that one.
Why are we able to joke about so many things (why am I so able to joke about so many things) yet not this? I remember all the jokes about Elian a few years back. But I doubt anyone directly involved with that situation is able to joke about it. I remember jokes about Lady Di too. But I doubt the surviving people or her close friends can joke about it.
Maybe we can't joke about 9/11 because it hit all of us. We are all involved. 9/11 did not happen to other people, it happened to all of us. We are all connected to it.
I wonder if this has ever happened to us, to Americans, before. Have we ever been so touched by an event as a people so as to have a shared pain and a complete lack of ability (or willingness, rather) to make light of it?
I've been reading biographies of revolutionary war figures. I've read Joseph Ellis' books Founding Brothers
and American Sphinx
and am now reading David McCullough's John Adams. Next on the list is The First American. I've grown to have a deep fascination for the earliest days of this republic and what it took to get this endeavour started. It's blown me away. But it also made me stop and wonder what events have touched everyone such that no one could joke about it? Did the Civil War do that? Did any of the World Wars do that? I wasn't there, so I don't know. In my lifetime, this is the first time I can ever remember us as a nation being all touched as one. 11:12:15 PM
I got a new WACOM graphics tablet today. I am handwriting this entry using the very Newton-like handwriting recognition system in Mac0S X 10.2. And, as you can see, I also had a little fun in Photoshop. 10:48:30 PM
Last update: 2002/10/02; 23:59:12 .
