Fungible Convictions

My aunt and I have been doing some digging to figure out where exactly in DC this photo of my great-grandparents was taken.

But I’m too easily distracted. In trying to find a match for similar buildings in Google Street View, I came across this gem on a photo of 16th St., NW.

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Really, it’s the guy staring down at the dog poop that makes it for me.

And in case you’re wondering where the “Optimum pooper!” post title comes from…

(And in case that video no longer works, it’s also available here: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=117774159573.)

And yet, it’s still more dignified than this:

I’m happy to say the photo at the top, of her under the bed, is a result of being too warm, not of being scared. We’ve been dealing with Gatsby’s socialization with other dogs, specifically that she freaks out, barks, and lunges when she passes dogs on the street. While it’s limited to that—she’s fine with dogs in houses and in parks and off-leash in yards—she’s really uncomfortable on the street.

This afternoon we had a nice breakthrough, courtesy of our friends Jen and Eric and their two Australian shepherds Indigo and Azure. They volunteered to bring their dogs over and have us meet them outside, and after a very brief barking fit, Gatsby calmed down around them. Now, we understand that Gatsby will probably never be the kind of dog that sprints up to other dogs, sniffs, gets into play stance, etc., but with Indigo and Azure as role models, she quickly learned how to be calm around other strange dogs.

We—Jen, Eric, their baby, and our three dogs—walked around the neighborhood, down Mass Ave. to Shepard St. and on to Radcliffe Quad and back, and we came across a total of four dogs. The first one, a small gray guy, started barking at us right away, and Gatsby initially barked back. But in a lesson for all owners, the man walking this dog wasn’t the owner and agreed to stick around for a few minutes while the dogs got used to each other. That’s the key after all: to show dogs that barking doesn’t result in the other dog going away.

Later, walking down Mass Ave., a woman came by with a black labradoodle, and the interaction was completely uneventful! It was the first time ever that Gatsby met a strange dog on our busy local street and simply sniffed and said hi.

Then on Radcliffe Quad, there were two pugs, and the result was the same. They all sauntered over to each other, sniffed, lingered for a minute, and then parted.

So all-in-all, thanks to Jen and Eric! And Azure and Indigo! You helped us and The Gats so much today.

Bain News Service,, publisher.

Fenway Park exterior

[between 1910 and 1915

1 negative : glass ; 5 x 7 in. or smaller.

Notes:
Date based on research by the Pictorial History Committee, Society for American Baseball Research, 2006.
Forms part of: George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress).

Format: Glass negatives.

Rights Info: No known restrictions on publication.

Repository: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

General information about the Bain Collection is available at hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.ggbain

Persistent URL: hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ggbain.11857

Call Number: LC-B2- 2554-7

Our friends Greg and Laila have a very sweet, very hyper Airdale named (Jeff) Buckley, who we checked in on early this evening while the two of them were out of town. We took the Gats with us.

I took a bunch of terrible photos, but out of those came this one, a ridiculously great action shot with a cheap digital camera.

We have great love for Buckley too:

Though no dog can look as dainty as our Gats when her paws are crossed:

It’s spring break at MIT, so my bosses suggested this would be a good time to take a few days off. I’m making the most of this “staycation” so far—getting up with Lindsay at our regular time, and after driving her to work, heading back to Simon’s Coffeehouse for a couple hours of reading (finally) The Good Soldier Švejk.

Yesterday, following Simon’s, I headed downtown for lunch with my friend/fmr Houghton Mifflin coworker Walter at an old favorite haunt, Flash’s. After getting all the necessary dirt on my old industry, I then went to catch up with friends at Emerson College. All-in-all, a great time—except for when my old writing center boss at Emerson, who happens to be my Orthodox godfather, asked in front of strangers “How ya feeling? In remission?” First, he and others need to understand that with Hodgkin’s, you actually get to use the word “cured,” which I am. Second, why ask that in front of the Emerson undergrad you’re in the middle of counseling? Meh, anyway…

Today I followed up reading at Simon’s by taking Gatsby to Fresh Pond. Lately she had been a little aggressive with other dogs, and we’re not sure why. I think it has to do with the confines of sidewalks, because at obedience class and in houses/apartments, she’s fine. And Fresh Pond today was no different. She sniffed butts or ignored dogs altogether—not an ounce of aggression or nerves to be found. She also walked 99% with a loose leash, while in our neighborhood—especially on Mass. Ave.—it’s 50/50 that she’ll start pulling ahead, particularly when other dogs are approaching.

Happy to say that the walk around Fresh Pond left her exhausted, which is good prep for obedience class tonight: she’ll be focused on treats and not excited enough to care about the other dogs.

And lord, has there ever been a dog with whom it’s so easy to illustrate exhaustion?

Tomorrow, day three of days off, Lindsay is taking a well-deserved day off too. We’re planning on lunch at a small, amazing Polish restaurant in South Boston—I took Lindsay there years ago after her GRE and we never forgot how great it was. And after that we’ll head over to check out the Boston Art Deco Show at the Cyclorama.

This is how it looks 95% of the day.

Though I can’t speak for the students taking advantage of the Independent Activities Period at MIT, it’s been a quiet week for everyone in the Comparative Media Studies department.

When things are slow, I turn to two profoundly dorky pastimes: picking out books from the library during lunch and working through programming or design tutorials.

These week I did both, and in one case they overlapped.

My all-time favorite musician is jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, so I stopped by the MIT music library (conveniently down the stairs from my office) and picked up the Thelonious Monk Reader, a well-curated collection of writings by critics, fans, and contemporaries. The book helped me track down some early photos I’d never seen of him:

So for the first tutorial, I used that photo in Photoshop to try some pop art stuff (warning that I’m not good with colors):

Then I practiced some of those same skills—namely, using the pen tool A LOT–some more. I took the Facebook profile picture of my wife’s friend Annemarie, who’s a huge Yankees fan, such a big fan that she work a Yankees jersey at a wedding reception, and put her in left field of Fenway Park with a Red Sox hat on (the hat was originally a Buffalo Bills hat):

It was fun to play with the texture of the Sox logo for that one, though you can see I had trouble with the cloning tool while trying to clean up the gray part of her hat—so now it looks like she was beat up and has a lump on the side of her forehead.

When I try tutorials, though the skills are good for work, I usually try to do something explicitly that can help my office too. So I attempted a “slow shutter effect” tutorial that used my office’s acronym. This came out good but showed why I need to bring my drawing tablet into the office because using the pen tool for lettering looks pretty rough:

Lastly there’s the glowing light painting effect, achieved by using the pen tool to outline a figure and then using a blurred stroke to make that outline glow. For this one I outlined the image of my wife in a moose hat. You heard me. Then I made it glow and placed it in a darkened photo of a river in Juneau. I also added some smoke:

And that about covers my slow day!

One of the great things about my work at MIT is the preposterous level of encouragement the people there give each other. Example: even though I’m not a researcher, I get encouraged to post occasionally to the Center for Future Civic Media’s blog because I have a media background and am (nearly) equal in nerdiness to my formal researcher colleagues.

Since I’m in charge of making sure people post to our blog—which can be tough around Christmas—I’ll keep interviews in the hopper for use when posting is slow. Not only is that typical prudent editorial management, but it’s a really great way to approach people outside MIT that I admire.

Here’s a preview. Going up on the site sometime this week is an email interview I did with Michelle Springer, Project Manager for Digital Initiatives at the Library of Congress. Michelle was in charge of managing the Library of Congress’s partnership with Flickr. I asked Michelle to pick some favorite photos from the LoC’s Flickr photostream and to describe how they speak to what Flickr can do for the relationship between the public and a government institution:

The photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2178249475/ is a terrific example of the personal history and memories that these photos can evoke. The original caption was “Street in industrial town in Massachusetts.” Flickr members quickly identified the location, and the Library changed the title to Sylvia Sweets Tea Room, corner of School and Main streets, Brockton, Mass., both in the Flickr version and in the Prints and Photographs Online catalog. The Library also added a note to its own online catalog record for this picture (http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsac.1a33856) so that people are pointed to the constantly growing rich discussions out in Flickr.

The rest of the interview is great, so be sure to bookmark civic.mit.edu.

Update: the interview is now posted.

A week from tonight, Lindsay and I will be drunk. And also married. The last month—which included the start of my MIT job—has therefore left hardly a breath to be had. So I think it prudent to run through some highlights:

• We booked our hotel and a bunch of activities for the honeymoon in Juneau. Had John McCain chosen Sarah Palin before we chose Alaska, honestly we might not have gone. Which would have been a shame. But such is the election season: I could easily imagine this conversation having taken place if the timing was different . . . “What about Alaska for the honeymoon? Actually, nevermind. Not with all the hubbub about Palin.” That said, as relaxing as the honeymoon will be, I’ll still be the one asking people at the next table what they think about their governor.
• MIT gave me a digital SLR, a Canon. Because I didn’t yet have a safe place to keep it in my office, I kept it at home for a while and got a chance to play with it. The quality of its photos are pretty stunning:

  

• Lindsay and I have had to make about half a dozen trips to Paper Source, as we’re designing and printing our own wedding menus, donation announcements (we’re giving money to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society rather than distribute favors to the guests), and the program:
Wedding Program – Upload a Document to Scribd

But one of these trips to Paper Source led to the awesome impulse buy of adhesive, re-placeable 8.5″x11″ pieces of chalkboard. We stuck one on our freezer door:



• I’m falling behind (again) on Identity Theory work. Typically I sit down for a couple hours on a weekend and read through all the fiction submissions and then distribute the better ones to assistant editors for their thoughts. But wedding planning has pretty much spoken for every recent weekend. That and home improvement—receiving wedding gifts has necessarily forced us to throw some old things out, pass along nice things to Lindsay’s sister, or generally reorganize
• MIT work has given me a really good opportunity (among other good opportunities there) to make good use of a ton of tools. Since I shuttle between different offices throughout the day, I use Brightkite so people know where they can find me. My colleagues and the grad students love to network, so that ramps up my use of LinkedIn. Evernote is becoming key to keeping track of links and documents, and now that it syncs with del.icio.us, I’m bailing on del.icio.us. And people have pointed me to some ridiculous design resources: CSS Beauty, Best Web Gallery, Most Inspired, Creattica Daily, PSVibes, Fuel Your Creativity, Tutorial9, Web Designer Wall, PSDTUTS, Online-Photoshop Tutorials, I Love Typography, Fontfeed, and Digital Photography School.
• Lindsay had her bachelorette party last weekend. The various husbands and boyfriends got together to play Rock Band all night while the wives and girlfriends took Lindsay out. It was far and away the worst hangover I’ve ever seen in someone. I shouldn’t have laughed so much.
• The Red Sox are in the playoffs again. And I’m sad to say I barely noticed. That fact is probably the best illustration of how I’ve lost track of time during the wedding planning and job change: I’ve always measured out the year with the rhythms of the baseball season—April through October is the meaty part of life, while November through March is just Christmas and cold—but this year it’s been about countdowns. The countdown to August 25th (my first day at MIT), the countdown to October 4th (the wedding), and of course the countdown to November 4th (the election).
• Speaking of the latter, another reason I’ve missed the baseball season is Countdown. At either 8pm or 10pm each night, we take a break and watch MSNBC, and now that Rachel Maddow has her show at 9pm, that’s two hours Lindsay and I are spending on politics. We may very well stop watching after the election—we’re very aware that Countdown, for us at least, is there for cathartic reasons, to watch Keith Olbermann call people out on lies because we’re so tired of being lied to by people in government. Being lied to isn’t new, and Olbermann very much plays favorites and distorts the truth himself, but the stakes are so much bigger this time of year and the lies come so much more naturally, disturbingly so, and are in some cases so petty, that at the end of the day just before bed we need to watch someone fluent in the language of indignation.

My guess is I won’t post again until after the honeymoon. So if anybody has questions you want me to take to Alaska, let me know. And when I post again, my left hand will be a few ounces heavier.

A lot of people have been asking—now that the end of chemo is just a few weeks away—how my memory is doing. I’d be asking the same thing in their position, but I’ve learned over the last months that memory comes in different forms. Not short-term versus long-term, which is how my doctors even talk about it. I’m thinking about a memory for facts, for events, for names and faces, for locations. My memory has returned to something near normal for facts and events. But for names and locations—not so much.

Where it’s most pronounced is my sense of direction. I used to think of sense of direction as, yeah, a sense. But it’s really about memory, about being able to call an intersection to mind, or a neighborhood layout, or a storefront that somehow gets associated with all the metadata of the roads and stores around it. I prided myself on being able to get anywhere in the places I’ve lived—Boston, the D.C. area, Winston-Salem. I was the person others asked for short-cuts, who guided cab drivers my first night in a new city. But when I was in D.C. over Christmas, I couldn’t remember how to get anywhere, not even in the direct vicinity of my dad’s house. The mental map of the area I had grown up in had faded, and I had no idea how to get to the very bar my friends and I had been meeting at every trip home for six years.

In response, I did what I’ve been doing a lot lately: finding a technological crutch. In this case, I fired up Flickr and started placing a backlog of photos on a map so that I could remember those intersections, those neighborhood layouts, those storefronts, with some help.

It had a great side-effect. It reminded me of how many things about Boston I love and how much fun I’ve had over the last five-and-a-half years.

There was my first job out of grad school, at Houghton Mifflin, where I made some of my best friends in Boston and had the chance to be in Back Bay five days (and a few nights) a week:

Related, there’s the Houghton Mifflin corporate box, tickets to which the execs would give away several times a year in a free raffle (I won twice):

There’s my introduction to Orthodox Christianity and my confirmation—and the public worship on Good Friday when my entire church walks through/blocks the middle of Central Square, confusing the heck out of every driver who’s never seen it before:

And I met my fiancee in Boston, while she was living up the street from the North End’s Purity Cheese Shop, a front business for a long-time reputed mob underboss. (Her Italian landlady, by the way, is the most remarkable Bostonian I’ve ever met. Nancy was single-handedly responsible for making sure the North End wasn’t crushed under the weight of the Big Dig.):

Having photos and a map as a memory aid—it’s just another thing that I can be thankful for.