fine whine

Back in college I once took a class* in which we discussed, among other things, the so-called "routinization" of the consumer experience.

Yes, it was one of those classes. Complete with the guy who prefaces every comment with, "Well, I thought it was interesting that..." and the teaching assistant sitting on the desk, his cardigan sweater casually draped over his shoulders, nodding intently.

Sometimes the discussions were indeed interesting, and occasionally I even chimed in with a choice anecdote (having worked behind the register of an Arthur Treacher's Fish & Chips for some time I'd garnered some relevant, if not contradictory, experience) or, more rarely, a well-timed joke, but I was much more satisfied when able to steer the conversation away from the routinization of fast food interactions to the routinization of everyday life.

Because it is, you see, more or less routinized.

Permit me to apologize for throwing around this five-dollar sociology word. "Routinization", as it was explained to us in one of the books on the reading list, is the scripting of the interaction between, say, a cashier and a customer such that both know their roles, can perform them with a minimum of thought, and could be interchanged with other customers or cashiers or franchises or so on such that a customer can expect the same experience everywhere.

Or something like that**. Basically, the thought was, the whole experience of, for example, walking into a Wendy's restaurant was created for this routinization from the double doors, to the cast-iron line-maze, to the menu board behind the counter, to the "Would you like fries with that?" was all part of the routine.

People write books about these sorts of things, obvious though they may seem. It has the ring of truth, though, when I think about how I know to look up for a menu board when encountering a new, unfamiliar fast food counter because the routine is nevertheless the same. But enough about food.

I'm trying to tell you about garage doors.

As I pointed out years ago, it isn't just our interactions with burger flippers and soda jerks that have become routinized. Our everyday lives also often fall into the routinization trap, well beyond the reach of mere habits.

In the morning, as I prepare for and drive to work, several of the things I do happen almost automatically. I'm conscious of the fact I'm turning off my alarm (at least, the last few times I do it on a given morning) but never of when I turn off the bathroom, bedroom, kitchen or hallway lights. I know they get switched off, and I know it is by my hand that this happens, but I'm not aware of actually hitting the switches.

The cats are too short, you see.

The same applies for closing our garage door as I drive away, except that every couple days I would panic briefly and wonder if I actually had hit the button and closed the door, or if I needed to drive back to check, and potentially close it.

These thoughts would only hit me a mile or two down the road, generally, and I would struggle with the choice of turning back or waiting until I forgot about it to stop worrying.

Generally, I just forgot. Twice, maybe three times, I turned back, and each time the door was closed.

So what to do? These moments of panic did little to brighten up my morning commute, and the backtracking was costly for time and fuel.

Then one day everything changed, and I didn't see the need to worry anymore. Instead of trying to remember if I'd hit the button, I watched the door close and remembered that. Freed from needing to recall the means, my own, more or less automatic, actions, I focused on the end, the actually closed door.

Because, after all, the question was never really, "Did I close the door?" but, "Is the door closed?" and once I could answer that so simply, I didn't need to worry anymore. The act of watching the door close wasn't (yet) part of my routine, and I'm not certain it will become one since it's something I see, not something I do.

So we'll see, you could say.

But what does this do for you? Well, if you find yourself in a similar situation wondering, oh, "Did I leave the gas on?" or "Did I take out the trash?" or "Did I lock the door?", instead remember seeing the gas turned off, or the trash outside, or the door locked. Things are easier to remember than routine actions, at least in my experience. Then when you say, "The check's in the mail," you can be sure of it because you remember seeing the raised mailbox flag.

Unless you're lying.

* Come to think of it, I'm almost certain I took a number of them, because I have a shelf full of far too many textbooks to have dumpster-dived them all. I know some of them were acquired as such, though, because I cannot fathom why otherwise I would have three Macroeconomics books, two even different editions of the same one.

** For another definition entirely, read about Charismatic authority over at the Wikipedia. What was it that Inigo Montoya said? "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Next year, I'm gonna bring shorts*.

* If I recall correctly, I've brought and worn shorts other years. Then again, if I were recalling correctly, I would've remembered to pack shorts this year.

Just like everybody else who I have seen posting these, I don't often fall prey to these so-called memes. However, Skippy tagged me and so it goes.

Four jobs that I’ve had

• computer tape librarian
• fast food cashier
• lawnmower
• power equipment driver

Four movies I can watch over and over

• Starship Troopers
• The Shawshank Redemption
• Robot Jox
• Goodfellas

Four places I have lived

• Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio
• Evanston, Illinois
• Columbus, Ohio
• did I mention Columbus, Ohio?

Four TV shows I like to watch

• 'Allo 'Allo
• The Sopranos
• Family Guy
• Six Feet Under

Of course I only watch them on DVD. We don't have cable and I don't feel beholden to the airwaves or programmers' and advertisers' whims as to when I can watch what.

Four foods that I like

• steamed buns, dipped in condensed milk
• cheese
• lasagna
• my microwave biscuit ring

Four websites I visit daily

• All Consuming to keep track of the stuff I hear, read, and watch.
• Bloglines for my daily feeds.
• Fatwallet, particularly the hot deals forum.
• Sploid, you know, for news.

Four things I want to do before I die

• Build a clock Update my site more regularly
• Build a desk so I don't need to use my computer on the floor
• Get 4 more friends to sign up for me to get a free ipod
• ... and the other stuff I've already listed on 43 Things.*

Four people I’m tagging

• Sandy
• Erich
• Dana
• Janice

Of course, almost to a one that list is filled with people who, if they do this, will preface it with "I don't usually do these but..." and I say, more power to you. Share the pain.

Someday, some interested person with spare time will track these backward to the original person who probably started out with "I don't usually start these, but..." but by then, everybody will have read a hundred and written one and won't care anyway.

* Yeah, so maybe that's cheating there at the end, but what's the point of making a small list when I've already made the bigger one? And I'm always happy to sneak in the 43T links.

Tucked down at the bottom of yesterday's post I mention "the cats", and that is the first that I have written anything about the two new additions to our household.

Meet Silkie and Eddie.

We've had them for a week now. They're both about a year old; she's a tortoiseshell Manx and he's an orange tabby. At the adoption center last week they both just seemed so right for us that we couldn't choose between them. In the store Eddie was quiet and affectionate, content to sit in my lap and be petted or licked*, and Silkie couldn't get enough belly rubs from Jessica.

As soon as we let them out of their carriers (thirteen bucks apiece, but they'll probably come in handy again) they pretty much ran and hid for the next several days.

Silkie, the 'friendly, affectionate, almost dog-like' Manx is very reluctant to emerge from the table, bed, or sewing basket under which she huddles. She's been letting us pet her under wherever, and purrs like a diesel engine, but still hasn't quite emboldened herself to walk freely around the house and us the way that Eddie has. He more or less plops himself in our laps for half hours at a time, expecting petting or at least a warm place for a nap.

Both of them enjoy playing with bits of string, and Eddie's given the laser pointer dot a run for its money as well. Silkie's a little gadget shy (the camera makes her run, and even flashlights seem to spook her) so I haven't tried the dot on her quite yet.

We've got time, though. Lots of time.

* I was doing the petting, and Eddie, the licking, of course.

How am I supposed to follow up a eulogy for a dead cat? With flippant commentary about movies and television shows and books? Though that's about the extent of my writings here lately, it just didn't seem worth it. For a few days I was only reading anyway, and then I couldn't seem to commit to any one given book. I haven't finished reading a book in over a week, not one of the six I've started.

I have finished something else, though. Though I had nothing I wanted to write, I felt the need to do some work on these pages somehow, and finally wrapped up my longtime project of categorizing all of the entries. Back in the beginning I didn't think categories would be necessary, and relied on Google searches to find anything I'd missed amongst all of my posts. Adding categories seemed to be needless work, pigeonholing a neverending bunch of ever-expanding categories.

Or maybe I was just lazy.

Now that it's thirty-four months hence, I find myself unable to find everything I want to recall, at least not easily. Remember thus, these posts and pages are primarily present for my memory and benefit, and only secondarily for anyone else interested. So when I can't easily look back and find, say, all of the books I've read and mentioned, something isn't working to its potential.

So I've gone back and categorized the six or seven hundred posts* I've amassed, and now they are all grouped in a more or less slightly-not-arbitrary manner, and I can once again more easily find things, say, that I've written about music with far fewer clicks. Or license plates.

I still have more work to do. I need to create, for you, not me, easier ways to navigate these categories. For that matter, I need to finish my theme. This colorful mess was meant only to be a temporary thing.

* The exact number is difficult to determine for many reasons. One being that as soon as I post another, the count will be off, unless I use some PHP hackery to pull the real number out of the database. Moreover, Wordpress seems to count all of my drafts, the number of which is too embarrassing to mention.

Or I'm just too lazy to count them.

Jessica came home from work today to find an entirely unexpected, and incredibly sad surprise: our cat had died.

In the year and months since we first adopted her she'd become a member of our household, and she will be missed. We'd spent enough time with her to discover some of the nuances of her personality and enjoyed just spending the time.

Now we just have pictures, and furniture and carpets covered with her fur. I live without the hair, but I'd like to have recorded more of her liveliness and stuff.

Call it the geek's regrets: had the cat and the gadgets, and hardly ever put the two together.

She loved stalking the elusive laser pointer dot, and would launch herself across the room in futile attempts to catch it. I'd discovered that she would leap up against the curtains of our patio door, and would bounce on her hind legs attempting to reach her luminous prey. Then she would tire, somewhat, and I'd aim the beam lower, giving her an easy 'kill', and would turn it off appropriately. Then, for her troubles, she'd get a cat treat. I'd meant to capture this with my camera, it being capable of reasonably sized movie clips of good quality and length, but I never set it up and took it. The two times I'd shot any video of her at all was just a proof of concept, and have long since been deleted from my memory card for their seeming mundanity (and obvious display of amateur cameraman-ship) at the time. I hadn't taken many good photos of her, or even gotten much practice at bad to decent ones. Her eyes were always facing the flash, or the shutter set too slow, and the results were never quite up to what I wanted out of my pictures.

And the sounds she made. Even before having a cat in the house I'd wanted to hear (and record) the sounds of the odd pidgin bird-language they 'speak' whilst perched on windowsills, watching their feathered friends outside. I'd heard her once or twice making the noises from our windowsills, but any time we took her outside (moments she always seemed to relish with great abandon, or at least she did the grass she'd eat while out there) she would ignore the birds and squirrels and other animals, wanting only to stroll around the yard and nibble on the grass here and there.

For years her former owner had, from what we had heard, kept her inside. De-clawed years before, she had little reason to spend much time outside anyway, but times we'd had her near doors she'd made it obvious that she was interested in getting some fresh air once in a while.

Of course, it was, again, probably the fresh grass that she so eagerly wanted, but either way she wanted out. Within a week of her first bold forays into the back yard, we'd procured a leash and collar, and determined that they could easily be attached to a garden weed-puller to create an impromptu hitching post, around which she would sometimes make a circle, the radius her leash, chowing down on the grass at all points along the circle. Other times she would use her leash to create a veritable obstacle course for Jessica and me as we tried to do gardening or yard work, with the ever moving trip line attached to her neck that would trigger a surprised yelp and quick apologies with a snag of the toe.

But other than then, she was relatively quiet while we were outside, except when she was outside alone and wanted to be let back into the house. Inside she could be loud or soft, depending on her whims and whether we were mimicking her back.

For a time I'd try to preempt her "meow"s with ones of my own, and she seemed as confounded as she was apparently determined to out-meow me. Other times we'd be in one room of the house and she'd be in another, and we'd hear yowling that seemed to be some form of echolocation, as though she relied on sonar to find us. I never once was able to see her making these sounds, so I have no idea how these big, otherworldly noises came from such a small cat.

And then at nightfall, once we were in bed and had closed the bedroom door, she'd often plead with us to open it to let her in, so she could walk around our heads and sleep at the foot of the bed, or lying under it. She wasn't the sort of cat to curl up on top of our bodies, or faces (thankfully); she just wanted to be near us.

Which is a big reason we'll miss her. She wasn't always looking for outright affection and the display thereof, she just wanted to be nearby. And sometimes to rest her head up against one of our legs. And when she couldn't do that, well, she'd cry out. I'd often considered leaving a microphone running at night to try to capture these odd sounds, but never had. Again, the regrets.

I'm going to miss her. We only had her for just over a year, and she'd become part of many a routine and ritual around the house. Playing with, and tormenting her had become an always-present entertainment option, and we had no shortage of new toys to try on her, milk cap rings and ribbons and yarn and laser pointers and flashlights and toys and radio controlled cars, among other things*.

Old as she was, she didn't stop learning. She picked up on a lot of stuff around the house, such as the sounds of every possible food in the kitchen (and treats elsewhere), and how much of a pushover I can be when a cat wants to go outside, or down the basement stairs. I had no reason not oblige her, after all.

The house was happy with her in it, and now it's quiet. Rest in peace, Yantar. We'll miss you.

* One fall day Jessica came home wearing a pair of Holloween cat ears, and as soon as Yantar saw her her back arched, her fur stood on end, and she started hissing. Jessica cracked up as she realized that Yantar thought her to be another cat, and we spent the next hours (and days, and weeks) donning and doffing the ears to see the reaction we'd get. I hypothesized that the ears had the correct silhouette to trigger Yantar's intense dislike of any other cats, and even though Jessica was obviously not cat-sized, the cat-shaped ears were enough to trigger that instinctive reponse. I further hypothesized that she'd likely not get over this reaction, but was proved wrong as time passed and Yantar's response changed to almost meek "meee-ehhh" of some surprise but nothing stronger. She'd gotten used to the ears.