Velveteen Mind

Hot Spot Hopping

Today, I collected coffee cups like a hipster collects nightclub hand stamps. 

After dropping off the boys at their preschool, one of two days during the week when they are both there, if only for a few hours, I decided that I would load up my gear and get some work done at our local Barnes and Noble.  I have always envied the oblivious laptop users I would see in cafes, so it was high time that I tote my new laptop to a local cafe and get all oblivious-like in my work, too.

Apparently, there is some secret among said oblivious-laptop-users in these cafes that they are none too interested in spilling...  and that secret involves how you access the wifi connections.  Ah, wireless Internet!  How you escape me!

After being assured by the barista (no matter how many times I read that word, it still sounds pretentious) that all I had to do was open my browser and I'd see what to do, I was hesitant to return to her and say that, in fact, I did not see what to do.  Something about the smirky tone in which she delivered my "instructions" suggested that if I didn't get it, I shouldn't be allowed to breathe their French-roasted air.

Maybe it's all the times customers give fake names to be written on their cups like "Chewbacca" or "Spanky" that make them lose patience with customers.  How many times can you call out, "Tall half-caf Pumpkin Latte for Magnum P.I.!" before you crack?

In any case, after an hour of trying to hack the secret code embedded in the AT&T wireless site, I gave up and moved to the next cafe.

By the way, AT&T, I was absolutely willing to pay $3.99 for 2 hours of your lousy Internet connection, so how about making it easier to take advantage of the desperately relieved to be out of the house?  Like, a big blinking button on your front page that says "Click here to pay an unreasonable amount of money for a very brief amount of access. Because who are we kidding?  You just paid $4 for a coffee."  I would totally click that.

Nevertheless, I was off to the next cafe.

Which didn't have wifi.   

A fact I was informed of as the barista was handing me my "I'm not here to take advantage of your free wifi connection" coffee.

Hm.  I need to get the order of my questions down better.  First ask if they have wifi, then order your coffee.

I now have two coffees, have consumed about half of each, of which I really wanted neither, and I can feel the coffee-sweat-jitters setting in.  Clearly, I would need to buy a $12 muffin at my next stop to soak up some of this caffeine.  Clearly.

Next stop, the cute new coffee house I've been meaning to try but whose exterior suggested that I would need to be wearing eye makeup if I wanted to feel comfortable.  As it happens today, I have on eye makeup, so here goes...

I've got the system down now:

Barista:  How can I help you?

Me (scrutinizing coffee board as though I'm dying for an obscure dessert drink, while holding in my sweaty armpits so she can't tell I'm OD'ing on caffeine already):  Hmm, let's see...  Oh, right, do ya'll have wifi?

Barista: Yes, ma'am, we do.  You should be able to just open a browser and see what to do.

Me (experiencing déjà vu but feeling optimistically wicked smaht): Great, right, so I'd like a tall white chocolate mocha.  Er, half caf.

Barista:  Here's your change.  Oh, by the way, when you look for our wireless network, our wifi is AT&T.

Me:  D'oh!

I'm back at home now.  Three dessert coffees poorer.  Three doses of caffeine higher.  On my already-paid-for wireless connection, trying desperately to ignore all of the chores that need to be done and pretending that my now-home kids are just noisy cafe patrons that like to spill things.

Oh, and did I mention that since being pregnant for a seemingly solid four years, I don't usually drink caffeinated coffee?

Yeah.

I'll be up til Monday.

jitter jitter buzz buzz shake sweat jitter buzz

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Facebook is Giving Me an Identity Crisis

Have you ever felt an unexpected shift in the core of who you are?  You are trucking right along and suddenly realize that something has changed?

Imperceptible shifts in your course, happening over time, until you abruptly find yourself in a different place than you planned.  You find yourself a different person than you expected.

Perhaps this is simply growth.  Perhaps this is simply growing up.  Perhaps I'm simply losing my mind.

That last one was a joke.  But I bet you smiled, because I bet you've been there.

I posted a quote from Patton Oswalt on Twitter a while back, taken from Lewis Black's The Root of All Evil on Comedy Central, in which Oswalt said regarding blogging: 

"Bloggers are the root of all evil because they have reduced us to a first draft culture."

I thought that was actually funny (come on, it is!), but let me warn you, this is a first draft and one I plan to hit publish on as soon as I finish typing.  It's one of those things that we might all feel, but rarely take the time to explore, so before I shake it off, I'm going to put it out there. 

I blame this identity crisis on Facebook. 

 

 

Yes, I say that tongue-in-cheek, but on some level it is true.  Facebook has put me back in touch with high school and college friends I haven't heard about in years, laying all of their lives out in an orderly fashion, ripe for comparison.

Half of them have families and jobs and most of the same responsibilities that keep me from going out to a club every other night.  The other half seem to be living virtually the same lives we lived in school, only with legal ID's and fewer grades.

It brings up so many personal questions that I don't generally allow myself to consider.  Questions like, "Um, was it an option to keep partying?"

That is a simplification, but still.

For now, I'm just putting this feeling in front of you.  I'll write more about it later.  Later, being after I finish the relaunch of Blog Nosh Magazine, which is certainly artificially inflating my stress level and causing me to rub my own nerves raw.

But maybe it's also an opportunity to rattle those nerves a bit and see what shakes out.  What sparks to the surface. 

Want to frazzle some nerves with me?  Ask some questions like, "Do I still want to drop it like it's hot?" or "Is it still an option to shake it like a Polaroid picture?"

Hell, let's just listen to some music:

 

(feed readers, if you can't see the music player, you are so missing out!)

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Gravel Paves the Road to The White House

{Audioblog} Listen to or Download 'Gravel Paves the Road to the White House' read by the author

The sound of gravel crunching under slow-moving tires is the sound of the small town to me.  The sound of cicadas on a warm summer evening, while you wave at your neighbors honking as they drive past your home.  That is small town life.

I grew up in a small town of 5,000 in Southern Illinois.  Our town was the metropolis of our county, or so it seemed to me.  We were surrounded by towns whose populations made them more like villages, whose residents came to our town to shop at the Wal-Mart or go out to eat at the fancy new smorgasbord.

Separating those towns from ours were two-lane roads bordered by cornfields, soybean fields, cows, and hay bales.  The only traffic lights were the blinking kind.  You often had to pass tractors on the road or hold your tongue as you followed behind the Amish in their wagons.  It was that kind of small town.

The phrase "small town values" is being thrown around a lot lately.  On one side of the aisle, you hear the declaration "We believe in small town values."  On the other side, you hear the question "But what are small town values?"

Defining "small town values" is as easy as defining what "love" is to a toddler.  You know it when you feel it, but it is difficult to put into words, particularly when you find yourself on the spot facing a raised eyebrow and a smug smirk awaiting your sure-to-be fumbling explanation.

 

(feed readers, click through for video above)

The question of small town values and whether or not they are relevant or important is intriguing, regardless of your political leanings.  The majority of our country, if not our world, is small towns.  Much of the populations of our cities migrated from small towns.  Small-town-America is the root of this country, so what does that mean to us?

There is no one definition of what "small town values" is, but to me it means a greater ability to see the people around you.  Really see them.

Have you ever spent so much time online for weeks at a time that you find your head utterly filled with noise?  You didn't notice it happening, but then you step outside one evening, discover it quiet, and realize that you had cocooned yourself within a wall of static? 

Picture yourself working on your computer, appliances running in the kitchen, laundry running in the next room, kids watching TV, husband listening to his iPod...  and suddenly the power goes out.  After much rummaging around for flashlights and grumbling about how you have so much to get done, you finally submit to the fact that you'll probably be in the dark for at least a few more hours, which no amount of huffing and puffing will change.

And then it happens.  You realize that you've just had an eye-to-eye conversation with your kids that lasted longer than the time it takes to say, "In a minute..." or "As soon as I finish..." or "Tell me about that while I'm..." 

Notice how they cut their eyes the way your grandmother used to when they say, "I have a good idea..." and then that idea is revealed to revolve around candy.  The way they touch their hair when they are thinking of what to say next or tap their fingers together while anticipating your answer on that candy question still on the table.

It's easy to miss those details when you aren't even looking at them.

There is nothing to distract you from them and you find yourself able to see them.  See them clearly.  Hear them without the background hum of your modern life keeping you consistently 20% distracted.

That feeling is what small town life is to me.  It is a simplification, to be sure, but when compared to life in a large city, I think it is accurate.  For me, at least.

Now take it a step further and imagine turning off the TV news and radio talk programs and Internet for two weeks.  No newspapers, no magazines, nothing other than your personal world filling your attention.  You still listen to music and watch movies, go out to dinner and take your kids to the park.  But you aren't necessarily aware of what is going on a world away.  You don't know about every tropical depression forming in the ocean and cease fire being negotiated over some sandy terrain.

I have done that.  I can tell you first-hand how amazing it is to watch your priorities crystallize.  To feel the stress drain away that you never knew was there, held in the base of your neck, stemming from problems that may or may not ever have anything to do with you.

You find yourself living your life, not a million other people's.

That firmly planted grounding of self and family and immediate community is small town values to me.   

I am not advocating ignorance.  I'm not even advocating small town life.  Rather, I am trying to put my finger on what small town values are by submerging myself in the feeling of a small town and reaching down to the core of me, asking "What do you see?  How do you feel?"

I feel compassion on a personal level.  I see community at its root.  I am digging my hands into a foundation that is rich and firm, but that must be maintained in order to remain strong and fertile. 

Without that strong foundation, we can not build our tall towers that allow us to see those that were previously beyond our horizon and beyond our reach.  Beyond our help.

Ask yourself, "What are small town values?"  Tell me why they are important.  Tell me how we can ever help globally if we can not first live a fully realized life locally.

Gravel paves the road to The White House.  I struggle to articulate why that is important to remember, but my gut tells me that it is.

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