awards

‘Hindsight Is 50/50’ Sunday

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

[In 1997, the following column, “The New Wave,” won the New York Press Association’s “Best Column: Humorous Subjects” award in its “Best Newspaper” contest. I was the assistant editor, sports editor, schools page editor, and copy editor for a small-circulation weekly in Sullivan County, New York, which means that I acquired a lot of experience for very little pay. It was mostly worth it.

It is one of the very first columns I ever wrote, which is a fact that I hated for years after—”It was only ‘beginner’s luck’ that won me that award,” I complained silently to myself. (For years, I lived my life as someone who could think of an award or reward as a denial or a subtraction. And then I would spend some more time ruefully rueing the things I rued.) I was 27 at the time, and I think I also assumed more awards were coming my way. Until I started this blog on WordPress, there were no more awards.

The date of June 1996 is a bit of a guess from me as to its publication date. It might have been earlier that year. My family found a copy of the clip recently, so I have typed it up and included it here, back-dated and with some 2014 interjections, because I can not help myself. From 1996, “The New Wave.”]

The line at the local bakery for this morning’s hearty breakfast goodness was a long one. Some people arrived after me and were recognized by others ahead of me. These friends were all about the same age, 20 or so, and they politely took turns saying “Hey.” Eight “heys” rat-a-tatted out before they settled into their “what are you up tos.”

One friend waved to another behind me. The wave was one that has become popular in the last year or so [this was written in 1996] in this age group. Instead of the usual “Hi! How are you doing!” side-to-side shake of the hand next to the head, which has satisfied people in all their hand-waving needs since we first noticed there were people to wave at, it was cool, reserved. The traditional wave is too frantic, just another thing mom and dad do to embarrass us.

He raised his hand to half the height of the traditional wave, crooked his index finger above the rest, jammed his thumb into the crook of this finger, and passed the knot of fingers side to side four or five times. It was more of a grip than a wave. The expression on his face did not change.

To picture this new wave, imagine a baby swinging a rattle more vigorously than needed merely to make a noise, but not hard enough to hit itself in the head. Now imagine the baby without the rattle, but not crying because you took the rattle away. This is the wave. Now picture someone else, say your 20-year-old, doing it. He is sullen, but not so sullen that he cannot wave hello.

There are times when I think this is a valid wave. There are times when friendliness feels conventional, like something people do because they are supposed to. Why bother waving if you do not feel like it?

Conversation revealed that these friends had not seen each other in months. Their joy at seeing one another again after a semester away at college was not palpable. The wave, the greetings, and the conversation were all expressed with the emotional intensity of a lawyer representing a slightly unfriendly witness before a Congressional subcommittee.

People cannot commit even to saying hello to friends with emotion. Emotion is so … old. Their only solid commitment us to its non-expression.

Teenagers’ telephone conversations are traditionally perfunctory: [2014 interrupts: “Why ‘traditionally’? Maybe ‘similarly’?” And why telephone conversations? Oh, right, 1996. Life in the land before texting.]

“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“You home?’
“Yeah.”
“You want to do something?”
“Yeah. You?”
“You want to come over?”
“Yeah.”
“Bye.”
“Bye”

But this mode of conversation is extending way past adolescence into adulthood, middle age [2014 again: Ha!], and old age, which is new.

Walk around your town. Notice the other residents doing their shopping and browsing. As you and someone you do not know very well or even at all come upon each other, you may both smile, but it will not involve any teeth. The smiles will instead be grim little grins. You may both even say “Hi” as you pass, but you will wait for the other to speak first, and his faintly whispered “Hi” minus the “i” sound will be returned with your own clipped “Hi” greeting. One of you may even manage a “How are you?” but so inaudibly as to render the question silly.

I have been greeted by, and have returned this greeting to, people I know very well. Family members, even. We both appear to be in such a hurry, even though we are not, and we both know we are not. We cannot commit any emotion to the exchange, because we do not want to look silly. One never knows when interpersonal disaster will strike, apparently.

It seems if we are too warm with each other, we think the other person will walk away muttering to himself, “Drunk.”

A suggestion: The next time you see someone give the new wave, drop him to the ground, pin him, flatten his waving hand against the pavement, and make him greet you. Make him express how truly happy he is to see you. The world should be more friendly, damn it.

Copyright 1996 TRR

[The award citation said some very nice things, as it was an award, about how the column expanded its scope from something small to a larger thought. I guess I still try to do that.]

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 28 asks, “Now that you’ve got some blogging experience under your belt, re-write your very first post.”

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November Thank-yous

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

This is the 30th post for the month of November 2014 on this website. I have not written something every day, but there have been a couple two-a-days, one “in memoriam” poster, and some reruns (yesterday). All adding up to a very special 30-for-30 episode.

I am beginning to feel like a host at a party with this project, and sometimes I want one reader who posts comments to meet another one (where can we all hang out for lunch?); then sometimes I will read a third person’s columns and see that those two faces have clicked “Like” on that other person’s work. “Ah, I see you two have met. Good.”

In December, The Gad About Town will be one year old on WordPress. I started this in the fall of 2013, on another blog-hosting site, and there it still sits: The Gad About Town. I might have acquired readers beyond my immediate family and immediate friends as I proceeded with the website there, but readers other than my immediate family and immediate friends started to respond to this site right here right from the start, hitting “Like,” or subscribing, or commenting. I did not know what I did not know when I moved to WordPress: That my need for instant gratification, my addiction to numbers, would be met here.

Anyway, it sometimes seemed that most of my page views on that service came from spam-generating sources (anything called “vampire” anything is not something that I feel happy about seeing visit my website fifty times in one short hour).

In the month of November, this site has been visited 1677 times so far (by real people), at a rate of 57 visits each day. Neither of those are big numbers; I am certain that many of the blogs I read every day get thousands of visits per day. There were 38 new followers, which is a term that I have decided I do not like. “Subscribers,” okay; “followers”? No. There was one award from a fellow blogger, Aruna, who writes every day at Ripples N Reflections.

A Facebook page was launched here: The Gad About Town. You can find me on Twitter over here: Mark Aldrich. There are some very supportive Twitterers who Tweet my columns to other Tweeting people. (That’s how that works, I think.) I also have Ello invites if you want one.

All of these numbers have increased dramatically since I started participating in the Daily Prompt exercise in August. Before then, I was publishing once or twice a week and approximately one person (other than my mom or girlfriend) would hit the “Like” button each post. Thank you, Susanne Leist; she is the author of “The Dead Game,” and more than once seeing her face pop up on something that I wrote cajoled me into writing a next one. That is the effect a blogging community can have: We egg each other on.

Here are some more thank yous: Judy at Lifelessons, my fellow spoonie Mary at A Body of Hope, Willow at Willow’s Corner, Leigh at Leigh’s Wordsmithery, Melissa at This, Right Now, Rebecca at Genusrosa, Dixie Copeland, The Reluctant Baptist, Lydia at A Lot from Lydia, Swoosieque at Cancer Isn’t Pink, Mark at Joatmon14, Rose Red at Gelatinous, Ina Vukic at Croatia, The War and the Future. There are other thank yous, but this list is some of the people who communicated with me in November.

In December (wait! that’s tomorrow!) I will start playing around with a new layout and, more important, get my big book co-writing project moving towards the door marked “Publish.” Thank you to all the future purchasers of that future book.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 30 asks, “What’s the longest stretch you’ve ever pulled off of posting daily to your blog? What did you learn about blogging through that achievement, and what made you break the streak?”

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A Leet

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

According to WordPress and other services, the number 1337 is important. It is not important for obvious reasons, like, say, reasons that are important, but for more obscure, talismanic ones.

Almost from the start, the online world has been something of a secret handshake society, but a democratic one, in which one and one’s friends can come up with a new secret handshake, and a capitalistic one, in which some secret handshakes become more popular, trendy. Elite. Or, “1337.”

Going back thirty years, users of programming language and speakers of everyday speech started to find places where the two collided. Going back thirty years, teenagers were passing messages to kids in the next aisle by typing on their calculators. Remember doing that? Certain numbers look like letters upside-down, so when one types 0.7734 that is also saying, “hello.” Here is a list of 250 such calculator-words: 250 Words You Can Spell with a Calculator.

I have had only one problem with this from thirty years ago to today: 0.7734 has never looked like “hello” to me. I just do not see it. I was the friend across the aisle from you in school who, when you showed me a secret calculator message, inadvertently said out loud, loud enough to attract the teacher’s attention, “What?”

I also do not see hidden anythings in “magic eye” posters, other than pretty fractals and colors, so I am just a generally all-around evil human being and no fun at all.

In the early days of the internet, in the era of bulletin boards and relay chat, the era in which someone typing on a keyboard in a movie was the height of real drama, those sorts of calculated calculator misspellings became a short-hand way of demonstrating one had inside knowledge about a topic at hand. Some of these terms have entered the culture at large, like newbie or pwned, and many have not.

For all of my life, I have felt like an outsider gazing in at a world of secret handshakes. Further, I am at my most uncomfortable when I try to look like I think I belong with you. Thus, when the kids in school in the ’80s who were “into computers” made it look like a secret society, I lost interest in programming. (Your loss, gaming community!) When the secret handshake society’s special vocabulary filters into the larger society and becomes a trendy lingo for a month or two or a couple of decades, it makes the world look like how I feel when I am trying to bluff my way into fitting in.

(Amusingly, I am composing this rant in a WYSIWYG in which I write my own simple HTML code and do not use a visual editor, a habit dating back to my newspaper work and a blog I started writing [now long lost] in 1997.)

1337-1xWhen one achieves 1337 of anything on a website, it is worth noting because 1337 is a lot of anything. In the case of The Gad About Town, it reached 1337 likes on November 26, when someone liked the column, “Gratitude Week.” In old-school hacker lingo, being an elite member of the community was designated by referring to them as elite, or a leet, or 1337. Again it’s the upside-down calculators that I have never looked at without saying, “What?”

Thank you to my readers and especially those who make the effort to express that they like some of the things I do. You have liked me more than 1337 times so far in ten months, which definitely makes me feel like a member of an elite.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 28 asks, “Today, publish a post based on unused material from a previous piece—a paragraph you nixed, a link you didn’t include, a photo you decided not to use. Let your leftovers shine!”

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