Orchestra at square dance in McIntosh County, Oklahoma – from the Library of Congress

As I walked home with some friends from a Radiohead concert in 2006, I asked a girl what she thought of the show. “It was great!” she said, “I love live music.”

Her answer bothered me, and I never forgot it.

The concert was great, but I wondered if she would have said the same thing if we were walking back from a Matchbox 20 or Pussycat Dolls or Animal Collective concert. I had to wonder if she “got it.”

The next year I went to the SXSW music festival. I was walking down 6th street with my friends Paige and Kevin when we heard a hackneyed blues solo float from the windows of a nearby bar. It prompted me to exclaim “This is great! I love live music!” and we all had a good laugh. Paige and Kevin got the joke—they both have a deep understanding and appreciation for music, and they know that some of it is better than the rest.

I don’t know how many times I’ve made the “I love live music” joke since, and I’m writing this essay largely to explain that I don’t keep repeating it just to get some laughs (in case any members of my vast readership are getting bored with it). I keep pulling it out because it’s the safest way I’ve found to reveal my particular brand of snobbishness—that is: I admire quality, I believe that quality is rare, and I like it when people recognize quality. Inversely, I’m leery of people who don’t seem to care about quality, or even know it exists.

The joke is a litmus test that tells me if I’m talking to someone as snobby as myself. When people get it, I know I’m in good company. When people don’t, I’m simply embarrassed and slightly ashamed by my pretentiousness—it’s a small price to pay, but I think it’s worth it.

P.S. I acknowledge that taste in music is relative. I know and respect people for whom listening to Radiohead is a form of torture. I’m glad these people acknowledge a preference for something over something else. I’d be just as leery of a person who claimed to love movies, restaurants, or paintings, etc.

Earlier this week, Chris clued me into Carl Malamud’s campaign to be be appointed Public Printer of the United States. The first thing I noticed upon visiting his campaign site, yeswescan.org, was his “committee to reboot .gov”—a short list of people including a few of my personal heroes: Lawrence Lessig, Brewster Kahle, Ellen Miller, and Adrian Holovaty. Below the list is a link asking me if I want to join the committee. I can’t imagine a more effective way to get me involved.

So I did some research. It turns out that I really like Carl, and no matter the results of his campaign, I’m eager to participate in the conversation he’s starting.

It is, of course, not a new conversation. Countless people are trying to influence the sea change affecting government domains across the country (a bunch of my colleagues are talking about it right now at Transparency Camp). However, what I like about Carl’s version of the conversation is, for lack of a better term, his style.

He’s a printer

He might not be a trained printer, but the fact that he’s running for National Printer indicates a healthy regard for the craft. As an amateur screen printer, I am obligated to recognize the value of a good printer: a person dedicated to a complicated craft, who does a job requiring exceptional attention to detail, who produces the media that educates, informs, and inspires us.

There is evidence of a printer’s touch on Carl’s various websites, all of them easy to read and elegantly laid-out. This isn’t trivial. I wish more websites were built with the care of a printer.

He gives librarians the props they deserve

The #2 issue that Carl wants to address in his campaign is librarians, saying that “librarians are the bedrock of the public domain and the defenders of our fundamental right to access knowledge.” I almost fell on the floor when I read this. Ever since my tenure trying to wrangle the world’s event information at Eventful, I’ve been convinced that librarians hold the key to the future. There is no way the Internet, .gov or not, is going to reach its full potential without tapping into the long-term and profound thinking of librarians.

The rising generation of Internet librarians are the people who are going to guide the world through the necessary changes required to organize our data and make it useful. Adrian Holovaty gives an excellent explanation of what kinds of changes I’m talking about in his piece A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change.

He’s doing the right thing

Carl’s been publishing government information on the Internet for over 20 years, but he got some press recently by mobilizing a small army of volunteers to download roughly 19,856,160 of federal legal papers from the Federal Judiciary’s outdated Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system for him to repost for free at his site, Public.Resource.org. He didn’t do anything illegal by doing it, but it freaked out some people at the Judiciary and, more importantly, it got some press.

The solution on Public.Resource.org is not ideal (it raises some important privacy concerns), but his work highlights the fact that voters are beginning to expect a lot of the Internet, and the government needs to rise to meet those expectations. Imagine how much more he could do at the helm of the Government Printing Office!

What really has me convinced that Carl’s doing the right thing, however, is this quote: “If [appointed as Public Printer], I will certainly serve. But if not called, I will probably serve anyway.” I consider myself very lucky to be able to work as a pseudo-public servant (are consultants public servants?), but Carl’s work is an inspiring reminder that I can always serve no matter what.

Let’s get to work!

I went surfing on Sunday. The water was cold, but it didn’t hurt. The waves broke long from far outside, beautifully shaped, and fun to ride. A few puffy clouds with shadows the color of the pale sky filigreed the horizon, and there were no clouds overhead. I saw a small flock of little birds skirt across the water. The air was cool, but the sun was warm.

Nothing seemed to move in the sky. Then I looked up and saw the Metlife blimp. It appeared out of nowhere, like an apparition. It said “for the if in life.” It was disappointing to see an advertisement in the sky over the ocean on such a beautiful day, particularly an advertisement encouraging people to worry.

I buy insurance. I think it’s a good idea, and it’s paid off for me. It’s a way to buy peace of mind. There’s another way to buy peace of mind though, and that’s to have a peaceful mind. You can pay to not worry, but you can also just not worry so much.

I rode a wave all the way into the shore and walked up to the parking lot where I rinsed off my board in the outdoor showers. I walked up the hill to our apartment. Shannon wasn’t home, but the cats were just waking up from a nap when I walked in the door.

I spent most of the day this past Sunday doing “admin” stuff, the office type things that we do to keep our household running. In particular, I went through our old files—old billing statements, official looking letters from big institutions, tax things. I gathered a pile of things that I needed to shred, but I decided I didn’t want to shred them, but opted to burn them instead.

Our shredder is loud, and it somehow interferes with the speakers in my office, making them amplify its loudness by emitting a loud chunky static sound. Apparently, I find this sound so grating, that I’d rather do stupid things than have to endure it. I figured I could toss the papers in our little black Weber grill, light them up, put the cover on it, and be done with them (I’ll buy some carbon credits for the greenhouse gas emissions later). This is what I did.

I thought I’d let them burn out before I tossed the ashes in our dumpster and forgot about them.

A few hours later, after dinner and cleaning up, Shannon took some trash down to the dumpster but came right back and said “bad news.” Apparently the dumpster was full of smoke.

We filled a pot and a large mixing bowl with water, grabbed my flashlight, and headed back down to the dumpster. I couldn’t believe how much smoke came out of that thing. Nothing was on fire, but some stray smoldering bits of paper had landed on some polyester clothes and made them smolder. Because the lids were closed, I’d created a smokehouse in our apartment’s dumpster.

We poured the water on the ashes. They kept smoldering. Shannon remembered that there’s a hose just inside the gate by the dumpster, but because we didn’t have our keys, I had to walk around to enter through the gate that we’d propped open when we came down with the water. As I made the loop, walking through the courtyard to the other gate, I noticed that the neighbor who lives closest to the gate with the hose was standing in the dim light outside of his apartment.

I thought I was busted. He’d noticed the smoke. Even if he didn’t, I’d have to explain why I was using the hose so late. Then I thought, why is he standing outside like this? I said hi. He said hi. Then, just as I noticed he was naked, he said “I’m naked.”

“No problem,” I said.

“I’m Ian.”

“I’m Jed.”

“Yeah, I’m naked. Sorry.”

“Not a problem.”

“I’m really sorry,” he said, as I continued past him to the hose.

“Well, I think I just set the dumpster on fire, so…”

“Yeah, we’ll call it even.”

Shan and I hosed down the dumpster until it stopped smoldering and called it a night.

My resolutions for 2009 are the same as they were for 2008.

My mind always contains a jumbled list of aspirations for better discipline when it comes to fitness, diet, reading, work, finances, gardening, cooking, writing, etc, but I don’t believe that codifying lists of tiny goals is very helpful. Last year I tried to come up with a short list of admirable behaviors that transcend everything I do and will hopefully (magically?) make me awesomer at life.

They are:

• Listen more
• No idle chatter
• Live in the moment

Listen more

This one’s easy.

This is how you learn. I’ve got a lot to learn, and I’ve got a lot of great people around me. If I listen to them, I’ll learn a lot of great things. Also, this is how you make friends.

No idle chatter

This is advice from the Buddha, taken from the idea of “right speech” which is a component of The Noble Eightfold Path. It’s also informed by Orwell’s assertion in “Politics and the English Language” that “[our language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

Avoiding idle chatter means not just that I should curtail my own senseless ramblings, but also avoid the endless ocean of frivolity that I swim through on the Internet every day (anyone note the irony that I’m writing this on my own blog? *sigh*). It’s a matter of cutting out the noise, and it seems to become more essential every day.

I got a New Yorker cartoon daily calendar for Christmas, and the first cartoon seems uncannily in line with this resolution:

Live in the moment

This resolution dovetails quite a bit with “Listen more,” but speaks more to the belief that there’s always something to learn from the present, even if someone isn’t talking. And regardless of learning, I can’t enjoy the present if my mind is elsewhere. I need to free up my attention, both from my mind and my senses.

A cursory reading of Getting Things Done last year taught me that—paradoxically—allowing my brain to live in the moment requires a lot of planning. Once I can organize all of my tasks and goals somewhere outside of my head, I don’t have to spend my days thinking about what I have to do, I can simply think about doing it. Then I can get to the wonderful place described by Philip Glass in this month’s Esquire:

“When you’re really working, really playing tennis, lifting weights, playing basketball, or whatever it is—it happens in sports, it happens in music, it happens in everything—when you’re fully consumed with the act, the witness just disappears. And for that reason, when someone asks, ‘What was it like?’ you can’t remember, because the person inside of you who does the remembering was otherwise occupied.”

When it comes to freeing my senses, I often think of a conversation I had with Steve Boyer a few years ago about an art project that I’ve been working on. He shared his concerns about how people constantly separate themselves from their present setting by staring at screens rather than their surroundings. These screens are becoming ubiquitous: TVs in every room of the house, DVD players in cars, TVs at the gas pump, smartphones, etc. I don’t know if this is a bad thing per se, but I’ve developed an aversion to it—I can’t help but think that I’m slipping into the matrix. The goal here is to make sure that I’m not compulsively noodling on my iPhone when I should be playing with my cats, or eating sandwiches with Shannon, or actually looking where I’m going while I walk down the street.

That’s it. Here’s to 2009! Let’s kick it off with some Hafiz!

Every Movement

I rarely let the word “No” escape
From my mouth

Because it is so plain to my soul

That God has shouted, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
To every luminous movement in Existence.