Panic Attack

21. December 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: chaos, fear, noise, winter blues

HIP_312491832.420444Every single cell in your body feels as if it will explode.

Your heart beats faster than seems possible.

There is at once a feeling that you are falling from a great height combined with the sensation that you are being hurtled through thin air in the upper levels of the atmosphere.

Your shoulders tighten and jaw clenches.

Something in your stomach feels like it’s swirling around rapidly, like the blue water in the stainless steel toilet bowel on an airliner at 30,000 feet when you flush.

Limbs tingle, and feel like they might move uncontrollably.

There is a sense that the blood in your veins to flare up and rage in a violent boil at any moment.

Your breathing becomes short and quick.

A tingling sensation starts in your stomach and rises like the bubbles in a bottle of seltzer water, up through your throat and neck. Some of these bubbles seem to be released just below your nose — the rest rise up through your skull and are released out the crown of your head.

This is a panic attack.

Anyone who professes love

11. January 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: daily life, food, lunacy, noise, rants, travel, work · Tags:

Anyone who professes to love big conferences is immediately suspect in my mind.

I’ve been at our global sales conference here in Las Vegas since Sunday and while there have been some great moments, the bulk of the time is tedious and tiresome.  My days are filled from 7:30 AM until 9:30 with planned sessions.  There are two breaks and lunch planned during the day for a total of — get this — 2 hours and 15 minutes of “down time.”

And even that isn’t really down time because, well, we’re in Vegas and even if the sensory overload doesn’t get you, the resort is so big that getting from the convention hall to your room is a 20 minute walk.  So, rolling back to the room for a quick power nap is a non-starter.

There are over 2000 of us here in Vegas and that presents some real logistical problems when it comes to food.  I’ve not had a proper meal since I go there.  Every meal has been eaten standing up and has consisted of mostly appetizers.

On the upside, since it’s on the west coast, they are serving Fat Tire.

One more poem from the vault

25. August 2010 · 2 comments · Categories: creativity, culture, daily life, disgust, entertainment, frowns, frustration, lunacy, music, noise, nostalgia, poems, rants

Back in college, there was a popular class called “Arts 15: Introduction to the popular performing arts” — otherwise known as the history of rock and roll.  The professor was, shall we say, opinionated.  One test question that is still stuck in my craw follows:

The greatest rock and roll band of all time was:

  1. The Who
  2. The Beatles
  3. The Rolling Stones
  4. Queen

More »

What is “Social Networking” anyway?

10. February 2010 · 1 comment · Categories: community, computing, culture, daily life, entertainment, facebook, information, internet, lunacy, noise, slowing down, smiles, social networking, thoughts, twitter

What is social about social networking? That is a question I’ve been asking myself for a while. There is a lot of interaction with the computer and by extension other people who are using their computers but it is far from truly a “social” experience, right?

I don’t really know where I stand on these questions. I have used electronic communications as part of my everyday existence for so long that I really cannot imagine a life unplugged. Much of that communication has been for business but a substantial portion has been with friends and family. That sounds like the very definition of social to me. And yet there is something distinctly unsocial (perhaps even antisocial) about relationships that are purely based on electronic communications — the complete lack of physical face to face human interaction.

When TWTTR first emerged it was an SMS service with the simple idea of enabling friends to let each other know what they were up to. But that was geeky and boring and unprofitable and so now a significant number of tweets have nothing in them about what a person is doing. Most of them have a url and a lot of them are intended to sell something. That is Twitter in 2010. (And yes this blog uses twitter to get traffic too.)

Facebook was fun at first — catching up with people who I’d not talked to in nearly 20 years was cool. Finding some people who I was sure I would never hear from again was awesome. Even the games were fun at first. But then it settled down and the games and apps began to get old. There was a growing sense that the lil green patch couldn’t possibly be doing anything to help the environment. And gradually there was a realization that maybe the reason I’d lost touch with some of those “old friends” was because we really didn’t have all that much to say to each other anymore.

Suddenly I find that most of my facebook time is with people that I do have real relationships with. But that we are no longer calling each other or even emailing each other. Suddenly online social activity is replacing REAL social activities! And that doesn’t seem so social.

And one more thing…I was not a fan of my high school when I was 17 why on earth would I become a fan on Facebook?

Snow Days: Another Legacy Concept

03. February 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: america, Baltimore, daily life, facebook, incongruities, information, internet, lunacy, media, noise, nostalgia, snow, technology, twitter, weather

Most days, I’m firmly in the camp of people who believe that technology makes our lives better.  We have access to information in unprecedented ways in human history.  And make now doubt about it, information is powerful.  It can enrich our lives.  In some cases it saves lives.  Sometimes, I wonder though, whether we are living richer lives in this age of technology.

I really do count myself lucky to live in the age of information, partly because I can remember when information did not flow as freely as it does today.  When I was young, we lived in a small town in the country.  It was easily 12 miles to the nearest town and 15 to a town with a movie theater.  Our town was so small that we didn’t have a local newspaper, there was one that was geared toward the whole county, but not a local paper.  We got most of our news from Baltimore, either in The Evening Sun or on WJZ 13 news.  We had two black and white television sets.  One had a 13 inch screen and one had a 19 inch screen.

If I wanted to learn about something, I went to the library and scoured an archaic set of drawers called a card catalog.  Then I would locate the book on a shelf by the reading a set of codes on the spines of the book which helped me to find that single book in a room full of shelves.  Then I would take the book to a counter, and the librarian would stamp a due date in a card that was kept in a pocket pasted to the inside back cover of the book.

If this sounds like something out of the 1950s, well, it is, but this was also my experience in the early 1980s.  We got a color TV when they laid cable in our neighborhood, in 1986.  When I was in college I did not have an email address.  I graduated in 1994. More »

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