Fungible Convictions

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.

October has been the hardest month of my recovery. And that’s saying a lot, considering I’ve made it through memory loss, surgery, and five of twelve chemo sessions. What’s so hard now is, ironically, learning to deal with being healthy.

Or specifically, being healthy after being scary-sick. When you’re sick, it’s easy to let your fight be what you concentrate on—or avoid—all day long. For me that meant talking things out with my family and doctors or taking in yet another Law and Order mini-marathon. Nothing mattered but recovery.

It’s not enough, though, to beat cancer and get back to your pre-cancer version of 100%. Illness makes you feel especially mortal; recovery makes you feel especially blessed. So all of the sudden it’s not acceptable to yourself to be 100%. You have to be better than your previous self, to make the best use of what feels like a second chance.

For me that means figuring out how the hell my fiancee and I are going to be in the financial position to protect and comfort our future kids as our parents have done for us these last few months. That impulse builds into dissatisfaction and a little regret: how do I turn a Communications degree and an M.F.A. into a life for my kids that’s better than what I’ve been given?

On top of this—and part of the same struggle in my mind—is the fact that cancer-survivor Jon Lester is starting Game 4 of the World Series tonight for the Red Sox. The Sox, behind only my friends and family and docs, helped me get through these months. Clay Buchholz’s no-hitter on September 1 is the first vivid, undiluted memory I have since getting sick. And watching every game since then—attending two myself, watching them clinch the A.L. East, sweep the Angels, stun the Indians—has become such an important routine and part of my recovery that for the first time, though I’ve always been a huge baseball fan, I don’t know what I’m going to do when the baseball season is over. Heck, even the end of my chemo roughly coincides with pitchers and catchers reporting to Spring Training next year. . . . with the Sox entertaining me every night, Lester starting the potential clinching game tonight, and chemo ending with Spring Training, I finally understand how wrapped up the life-long residents of my adoptive city gets into the rhythm of the Red Sox. And I really don’t know what I’m going to do without baseball besides going back to the top of this post to address the issue of what more I can do in the meantime. It’s impossible not to feel like I owe my family, my friends, my fiancee, my doctors, my employer, Law and Order creator Dick Wolf, and the entire Red Sox organization not only a full recovery but a better self.

Google offers a surfeit of applications for the information it organizes. There are the practical ways to find things like blogs, driving directions, deals on cameras, your own search history, your own files on a remote computer. But Google also offers ridiculousness: bet-settling, stalking, the illusion of working hard. . . . And I’d like to suggest one more, this one based on a classic sports superstition.

Spectator superstitions are well-known, if not yet fully cataloged. They include periods of not shaving, refusing to change underwear, strange malleamations of hats on heads, incantations at regular intervals, avoidance of certain foods, totems, insistence on listening to a radio broadcast with the television broadcast muted, a team’s performance being dependent on a favorite individual player’s performance, jersey-wearing, ingnoring the urge to relieve oneself, viewing only specific portions of games, and enforcing absolute silence.

However, a most common superstitious conviction across all sports and countries is the belief that a particular person—yourself, a friend, a family member—simply by virtue of their watching the game is enough to guarantee your team’s victory.

With Google, now, we can find out who that person is.

Over the last year or more, Google has been acquiring media assets—unused “dark fibre”, possible interest in TV relationships including personalized ad brokering, etc. We’re not far off from Google’s being able to customize TV advertising so that you only see the ads for products you’re interested in—which means two things: you would have to make your preferences known by providing up-or-down feedback on the commercials you view, and Google would be storing both your preferences and viewing habits.

The latter is key. Say you watched a Red Sox game; Google would know. And since the result of the baseball game is public knowledge, Google knows that too. Thus, Google has viewing history tied to an individual, and over the course of a season Google can provide “win/loss” records for viewers. Willing persons could then allow their records to be published, thereby creating an accurate ranking of the best viewers. Not to stop there, statistics could also be generated to show what groups or combinations of viewers were the most prolific. Should SuperstitiousSoxFan watch alone or with her sister? Should they watch together but on two different TVs? Should SuperstitiousSoxFan stay at home on Saturday evenings but be certain to watch at her sister’s on Sunday afternoons? The answers are there for the knowing—and SuperstitiousSoxFan could hold the fate of the Red Sox in her hands.

In other words, sports superstitions may always be just that, but with Google+TV there’s no need to leave superstitions to chance.