Tuesday, May 18, 2010

For Duke alumni, the basketball court may very well be hallowed ground, a gleaming stretch of floor covered with the blood, sweat, and hopes of students from decades past. I’ve seen it on television, of course, but never in person until last Friday, when I had a chance to step onto it. There wasn’t a game happening, obviously. Far from it. Instead there was a convocation, and the holy plot had been covered by a massive tarp and rows of chairs, upon which sat the friends and family members of graduates. My sister had earned a master’s degree in something or another, and I was attending the ceremony.

The academic sector was fascinating to witness. I’ve been committed to the private sector, which has its own host of anthropological curiosities. I’m still trying to understand how nightcaps correlate with better business dealings, for example, or why certain meetings are called. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been away from the game for a while now, but the university setting was just plain strange. Arbitrary, in many respects. Consider graduation attire: according to the convocation pamphlet, the cap and gown were based on monastic traditions, with certain designs conceived to ward off cold weather. Except we were on basketball court! Not a monastery. And the only chill present was self-inflicted, pumped from the numerous air conditioning vents.

Maybe the idea of monks congregating and reading is just that appealing. I don’t know. Practically speaking, the cardboard used to make those funny-shaped hats would’ve been far more useful as, like, shipping boxes–possibly for the gowns themselves or something. Tradition, however, dictated that the paperboard be wrapped in cloth, then attached to a tassel, for headwear that–let’s be honest–is far more likely to invite a punch in the face than guard against the cold. It was the same deal with the diploma frame, which set me back just under 200 bucks. 200 bucks! The market decided, at some point, that diplomas needed to be encased in 1.5 pounds of wood, some glass, and a swatch of suede, and overvalued accordingly. Completely arbitrary, right? I imagine the cow in question would’ve gotten far more mileage out of the suede.

I have some other thoughts on the ivory tower, you may recall, though I certainly wasn’t going to voice these opinions like a douchebag. This was their day, after all, and fabricated or not the time belonged to them. It was also my day, in a way, because it was a chance to redeem myself. You see, a few years ago, during my sister’s undergraduate convocation, I offered to take her picture as she collected her degree. I made good on my offer. And took a picture of the wrong Asian girl. Goddamned end of the alphabet with its cluster of Asian surnames! This time, my execution was flawless. I snapped the right person. I think.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Secondhand Rants will return on Tuesday, May 18.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

At the risk of sounding like a cut-rate afterschool special, I had set out to teach this blog a thing or two–and ended up learning far more about myself. Segue to heartwarming music. I’m just fuckin’ with you, naturally. A more accurate recap would read like this: faced with the monumental headache of migrating a website, I reclaimed an important skill and bent the very gigglebits on the server to my will. Here’s what happened.

Initially I was paralyzed by how much there was to do. I had installed WordPress easily enough, but before me stretched a widening morass of tasks. Diving into the mess with gusto only worked for so long, because I would start revising a single post, then veer off to edit the main index file for a minute or two, before searching the WordPress codex for pearls of PHP wisdom. I would do a little of this, a little of that, and effectively accomplish jackshit.

I needed to focus, and to this end I deployed pen and paper and began parsing my outstanding items into groups of three, then banging them out, one item at a time. Disable commenting. Repair the permalink structure. Clean up the header. Bam! Reroute all my legacy links. Delete tag references. Remove categories. Pow! Streamline the sidebar. Rearrange widgets. Set post count. Shazaam! The list steadily shrunk, group by group, and by day three the site had regained most of its original functionality, with a little extra.

Multitasking, I realized, is a grotesque, artificial conceit, and if it does occur in the natural world, it’s certainly hidden well. Birds don’t make nests and simultaneously preen themselves. Dogs don’t mark their territory while digging for bones. They mark, then dig. Nest, then preen. You’d never find a woodchuck chucking wood and whipping out, like, a Blackberry, even if a woodchuck could chuck wood or thumbtype. These are all animals, of course.

People can think beyond the moment. We project and plot, aspire and calculate. But I don’t think this means we should apply makeup while driving, chat on the phone while paying for something at the cash register, or juggle five instances of Internet Explorer to counterbalance the six active windows of Excel. Something feels inherently off about these situations, and I wonder if to focus and dream should be the extent of our multitasking. Change color scheme. Repopulate blogroll. Make the parrot clickable. Shalom.