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Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

Tidying

Posted in bereavement, Bruce Byfield, creativity, grief, Personal, tidying, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on August 18, 2010| 3 Comments »

In the six weeks since my partner died, I have spent much of my spare time cleaning the townhouse. Neither of us were particularly tidy people – although we both placed a high value on hygiene – and we hadn’t done a thorough cleaning in years. She had been sick a long time, and in the last few years, we had had better things to do. Recently, I have been undoing the years of neglect, and finding, somewhat to my surprise, that I am enjoying the process of tidying, and finding it both satisfying and therapeutic.

For a long time, I have referred to reducing clutter as “easing the karmic burden.” That is meant as a wry reference to the idea of not burdening yourself with possessions, but it seems to me literally true. Getting rid of non-essentials feels very much like organizing myself, or perhaps getting rid of distractions.

Then, too, I suppose that creating order out of chaos is one definition of creativity. Organizing my desktop or library may not be actually creative, but it feels like it is. In a milder way, the sense of accomplishment that comes from tidying feels much the same as that when I complete an article or a poem.

In the last six weeks, those feelings have been especially important to me. But, even more to the point, I’ve needed something meaningful or useful as a distraction from grief. I haven’t been capable of much original effort (which makes writing articles painful, let me tell you), but tidying has been something I could accomplish without a great deal of thought.

Moreover, in this case, tidying has been a way of dealing with grief. As I sort through a closet, I remember when something was bought, or who gave it to whom, and what we said at the time. I find parts of our lives that I had forgot about, or even parts of Trish’s that I only knew vaguely, or not at all – something I would have said was impossible after all the years of our marriage. I have even discovered gifts that she had bought for me, but never given. At times, I’ve broken down while cleaning, and worked with streaming eyes, or had to sit down and rest because I was overwhelmed.

I sometimes think that, had I known the scope of the task I was undertaking, I never would have started it. But, mostly, I think I wouldn’t have missed the experience for any reason. In tidying my external environment, I’ve been doing some internal sorting as well. If I finish the process in a few weeks, as I intend, in many ways I’m going to miss it.

I don’t know if I will keep the townhouse as tidy as I’ve already made several rooms and plan to make the rest. I think I will, at least for a while, because the result appeals to the austere side of my nature. But if I backslide, that wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen, because the effort of tiding will have already served its purpose for me.

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Unfriending on Facebook

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Facebook, friendship, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on August 17, 2010| 8 Comments »

The concept of a friend on Facebook is (to say the least) elastic. At its loosest, it can mean someone who might be useful to know, but with whom you have never interacted. At the opposite extreme, it can mean an intimate, or someone with whom you regularly interact online. But, no matter how a Facebook friend is defined, unfriending someone is generally considered a serious step, and I’ve only done it three times.

The first time, I made the mistake of accepting a friendship invitation from a friend of a friend. A few days later, the friend of a friend started chatting with me and tried to interest me in what sounded like a pyramid scheme. I made an excuse to log off chat and instantly unfriended them.

The second time involved an acquaintance who indulges in yellow journalism. They are careless of their facts and their logic is slippery, but they expressed an admiration for my writing, and I thought that maybe if they were taken seriously by other writers, they might evolve into an effective journalist. But then they turned their tendencies on me without any warning or apology, and I decided I wasn’t about to mentor someone who wanted to tear me down in order to build their own reputation. That wasn’t what friendship was about, so far as I was concerned, so exit another Facebook friend.

The third time was more complicated. It involved someone I had known for years. A few years previously, we had quarreled, but they approached me on Facebook and, despite some qualms, I accepted their friendship invitation. I had always admired this person’s brains and talents, and I frankly hoped to get to know them – to become a friend in real life, as I expressed the hope to myself.

However, I had forgot that one of the reasons we had quarreled before was this person’s inability to keep up their side of a correspondence. From somewhere – probably a bad book on business management – they seemed to have got hold of the idea that online correspondence should be limited to two or three sentences. To make matters worse, what they did write was so stiff that it sounded cold and condescending – and I have never been able to endure being patronized. The tone killed all efforts to strike up a conversation, and I soon realized that the development of any actual friendship would require the effort put into the first six days of creation and geological units of time, neither of which I had to spare.

Even so, I might not have bothered unfriending under ordinary circumstances. But my wife was hospitalized and dying, and so was a relative of this person. I suggested (in effect) that we might give some mutual support, and received another cold reply, which indicated to me that I was just another part of their effort to compile the largest possible collection of Facebook friends.

Then my wife died. The alleged friend’s reaction? “That is so sad.”

Granted, their own relative had also died. Yet even the person’s own grief could not justify such a chilly reaction. There I was, facing one of the worst experiences anyone can face, and instead of any real sympathy, what did I get? An insincerity worthy of Dale Carnegie. Anyone else would have mustered a little empathy, being in a similar position.

“Sad?” I wanted to phone up and rant. “Rick and Ilsa’s goodbye at the end of Casablanca is sad. The farewells at the end of Lord of the Rings are sad. This is tragedy, you asshole!”

Instead, I unfriended, and – not wanting to appear a coward – sent a brief note saying that I had done so. I said that if they wanted to talk, I would, adding that they probably wouldn’t care for what I had so to say.

I heard nothing, so I knew I was doing the right thing.

Still, I admit that I regret this third and latest unfriending in a way that I never did the first two. But what choice, really, did I have? I have (and have had) friends of both sexes that have my back the way that I have theirs. I don’t need a hanger-on too egocentric to know what friendship is about.

Or do I make too much out of a word that, on Facebook, no longer retains its original meaning, except by chance?

Maybe. But all I know is that recently I am now much choosier about the friendship offers I accept.

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Mitch Adam’s “January Moon”

Posted in aboriginal art, art, art appreciation, British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, First Nations art, Freda Diesing School of Northwest Coast Art, Haida, indian art, masks, Mitch Adams, moon, moon mask, Northwest Coast Art, Personal, Tsimshian, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 8, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Back in June, I had dinner at the Steamworks pub with Haida / Tsimshian artist Mitch Adams and his wife Diana. Mitch kindly offered me a selection from the giclee prints that he was in Vancouver to sell. Few things feel so luxurious as a choice like that, and I could have selected several from his portfolio. However, eventually I decided on “January Moon,” which was the inspiration for his “Blue Moon Mask,” which was one of the standouts at the 2010 graduation exhibit for the Freda Diesing School of Northwest Coast Art.

The connection between the two pieces would have been obvious even if Mitch had not mentioned it. But the differences are interesting, because they show the evolution from a good execution of an idea to an outstanding one. There is little in “January Moon” that is not improved in “Blue Moon Mask.”

"January Moon" (left) and "Blue Moon Mask" (right)

The most obvious differences are in the shape and color. With its perfectly round shape, “January Moon” feels relatively static, and more abstract. In comparison, the change to an oval face in “Blue Moon Mask” is more ambiguous, as well as more realistic. Just as importantly, the colors are bolder and more glossy in the mask, as well as the contrast between them. In the print, the colors are muted, and the tones are a better match, but the result is that design tends to fade into the paper.

The exception to this general observation is the blue and black design on the rim. “January Moon”’s rim has more contrast between the colors, while “Blue Moon Mask”’s uses a darker blue that is much closer to the black. This change works because it frames the face most clearly; in “January Moon,” the blue of the rim is closer to those of the face, so that the rim frames less effectively.

However, the greatest changes are in the face. Some elements remain the same, most noticeably using the same colors for the lips, nostrils, and eyebrows. But, in “January Moon,” the eyes are also the same color, which is probably one feature too many for the design, which seems much busier than the mask.

By contrast, on “Blue Moon Mask,” the design is simplified. The teeth are gone, whose black outline is mildly discordant in “January Moon,” and much of the complication of the highlighting as well. The eyes shrink from an angry glare to closed eyelids, and the lips are smaller and barely parted instead of scowling.

The only element that is added is the tear tracks from the eyes, which I suspect originated in an accidental trickle of paint, but which works brilliantly, helping to emphasize the elongation of the face and suggesting an undercurrent of suppressed intense emotion beneath the surface appearance of serenity.

Somewhere in the middle of all these changes, the gender changes as well. “January Moon” registers as masculine to my eye (and that of those who have seen it), perhaps because of the mouth and bared teeth. “Blue Moon Mask,” however, seems female, or at least sexually ambiguous. Added to the suggestion of intense emotion being controlled, this ambiguity makes most eyes keep returning to “Blue Moon Mask” in a way that they do not to “January Moon.” Despite “January Moon”’s aggressive expression – or perhaps because of it – the eye has a hard time lingering over it. Its anger has nothing of the mystery found in “Blue Moon Mask.”

None of this is to dismiss “January Moon.” Its non-traditional eyes with their crescent moon and the creation of the nose through a clever use of negative space are admirable in themselves – so much so that I could wish they could have somehow been retained in “Blue Moon Mask.” But in the end, “January Moon” could be described as a first draft for “Blue Moon Mask.” Although “Blue Moon Mask” is the superior work, very likely it would not have succeeded if “January Moon” had not been created first. Together, they show an artist taking a leap in his development – and, I suspect, learning a lot in the process himself.

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9 Ways That Others Make Grief Harder

Posted in bereavement, Bruce Byfield, death, grief, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on August 5, 2010| 4 Comments »

Having someone whom you love die is difficult at the best of times. Not only do you miss them a dozen times a day, but you are struggling to continue without them. But, if that is not enough, you have to deal with people – all of them well-meaning, but many of them annoying regardless of their motives.

If my experiences of grief are any indication, here are the sort of encounters that may tax your patience as you grieve:

  • Suddenly, your life is one continuous conversation about the deceased. Facebook and email can reduce the repetition, but people will still want you to repeat basic information about what happened many more times than you care to give it. You may find yourself longing to have a normal conversation, and escape for a while.
  • We are such a death-denying culture that at the first indication of it, everyone descends into cliches and euphemism. “They had a full life,” people will tell you, and, “At least they didn’t have any pain” if the person died unconscious (as if they could somehow know). Oh, and it’s no longer a memorial service – now, it’s a “celebration of life.”
  • When you break the news of the death, almost everyone will ask, “Is there anything that I can do?” Probably, you will be unable to answer this question, because you don’t really want anything, unless it is for a miracle to restore the dead to life.
  • People with religious tendencies will hand you copies of cheerful and cheesy poems about how the person who died is happy in heaven and you shouldn’t grieve. These offerings are supposed to console you.
  • The employees of funeral homes and similar businesses often seem to think the way to cushion your shock is with an unctuous sleaziness, full of insincere concern and sympathy, and a setting with a conservative grandeur that is reminiscent of the movie palaces of the 1930s – and almost as shabby.
  • If you hold a religious ceremony, avoid clerics who didn’t know the deceased. While they may do their best, often the results are embarrassing. You may not get someone like Father Movie Critic, who turned my father-in-law’s funeral into a review of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, but don’t be surprised if you do.
  • Don’t be surprised if a service is seen by drama queens as their personal stage, as though the service is really all about them. Given any chance whatsoever, they will monopolize the microphone, and throw themselves sobbing into any arms that happen to be nearby. Often, the intensity of their grief is in inverse proportion to how well they knew the dead person.
  • People will promise or propose almost anything in the aftermath of a death. Much of what they say will be said without much thought and they will soon forget it, so do not remind them of it.
  • After the service, people will expect you to be ready to carry on with your life. Since services are generally held within a few weeks of the death – often, within ten days – you almost certainly will not be ready for anything, but there is nothing you can do except try to cope.

In any of these situations, you might be tempted to rant or verbally flay those around you. For instance, when someone told me that the death whose aftermath I was enduring was sad, I wanted to phone them up and scream, “Sad? The ending of Casablanca is sad. King Lear entering with the dead Cordelia is sad. This is a bloody tragedy!” Instead, I just unfriended them on Facebook.

The truth is, most of the people who do the things I mention here mean very well, and will only be hurt and surprised by such outbursts. The behavior I describe here are just some of the things that you have to endure and get past, day by day. Still, it is bitterly ironic that so much that is meant to be sensitive and caring only ends up picking at you like a shirt in which a hundred mosquitos are trapped between you and the cloth.

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Patricia Louise Williams, 1955-2010

Posted in Bruce Byfield, memorial service, Patricia Louise Williams, Personal, Trish Williams, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on July 25, 2010| 2 Comments »

The text for my partner’s memorial service, held 23 July, 2010:

(A memorial service is supposed to be a serious occasion. And, of course, it is. However, in re­membering Trish’s life, it is impossible for me to omit her own quips. I hope that no one will be of­fended by my inclusion of these quips, and instead look at them as a reminder of her personality).

Patricia Louise McKinnon Williams was known by many names through her life, including Louie, Pat, and, in medieval recreationist circles, Morag Nic Fhingon. But she preferred to be known through most of her busy life as Trish. The last name she was less careful about, since nobody except strangers ever used it – and even most of them were calling her Trish after the first ten minutes.

Trish was the youngest of the six children of Francis and Doris McKinnon of Cloverdale in Surrey. The age gap between them was so wide that the eldest had left home before she was old enough for school. It was only in middle age that she got to know most of her sib­lings, although she was always close to her sister Marion Crook.

She attended the Cloverdale Catholic School and the Convent of the Sacred Heart, experiences that made her what she called a “recovering Catholic,” meaning one who no longer considered herself Catholic, but would fulminate against the misbehaviour of priests or the pope’s pro­clamations. Later, she attended school in Switzerland, where she ob­tained a knowledge of French that she later claimed was just good enough for her to read Asterix and Obelix books in the original.

Returning home, Trish studied drama at Douglas College, then trans­ferred to Simon Fraser University. At the drop-in center, she met David “Corky” Williams, whom she married in 1977.

A year later, Corky died of an epileptic seizure. A month after he died, Trish attended an SFU Medieval Club meeting, where we met and started dating. Afterwards, she would inevitably tell people that she had picked me up in a bar. Her mother tried to encourage her to find a law­yer or doctor to marry, but within months it was too late – we had already decided to marry.

Delaying only until Trish found work in the SFU Accounts Payable Department, we married on May 17, 1980. We honeymooned briefly at my parent’s cabin at Whistler, driving there in a car loaned by her brother Ron, and the journey was much delayed by us pulling over every five or ten miles to open another wedding present.

In our early life together, much of Trish’s interest was in various medieval groups and science fiction conventions, where we became friends with a number of writers. However, Trish – who was always proud of her charter Greenpeace membership card – soon found her political conscience awakening. Together, we served several years on the executive committee of the Burnaby North NDP, and for a nearly a dec­ade Trish was active in her union local, serving as Treasurer for several years, and for a month as Acting President.

Later, Trish was to become involved in countless other groups: The Coquitlam Needleart Guild, The New Westminster Historical Society, the Pacific Rose Society, and, of course, her anonymous Monday night stitchery group are only the ones that come immediately to mind. She also became known in local exotic bird circles, as we quickly established a reputation for people who could take on Nanday conures, one of the noisiest and most demanding of parrot species. Eventually, our living room housed four: Ningabuble, his mate Sophy, their sons Rambunctious and Jabberwock and, later – after Jabberwock died – a rescue bird called Beaudin.

Just about the time we were thinking of having children, our lives changed drastically when a routine gall bladder operation in 1995 resulted in Trish spending most of the summer going in and out of hospital. She continued getting sicker, and, in the next fifteen years, was in hospital at least twenty times. In 2000, she had to quit to work. However, it took another three years before she was diagnosed and obtained her pen­sion: She had carcinoid syndrome, a rare cancer-like condition untreatable by chemotherapy or radiation.

In the last five years, her healthy and activities declined steadily. Even so, she managed to assist her sister Margaret Pedersen with the care of their widowed mother, and (when travel became impossible), to be­come an avid collector of Northwest Coast art. Her medical support team, all of whom inevitably became personal friends, remember her for her determination and cheerfulness as her condition left her prematurely aged.

By 2010, Trish had survived so many illnesses and operations that we assumed she had years left to come. But she caught pneumonia at New Years, and five courses of antibiotics were not enough to cure it. In June, she spent three weeks in the hospital, and returned home on oxy­gen for a week. Her nephew David Crook and his family visited her twice at home, the first time worrying about her condition, and the second time reassured that she would pull through.

But two days later, her condition worsened, and I took her to hospital in the early hours of the morning. She died at 2:55PM, surrounded by me and her sisters Margaret and Marion, and her brother Ron.

Right up to the end, Trish kept her determination to fight and her good nature, reassuring those around her and making friends while in hospital. For thirty years, she was not only my spouse, but also my best friend and an example to me – and everyone else. I miss her more than I can say, and I am sure that I am not the only one. – Bruce Byfield


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A funeral absurdity

Posted in absurdity, Bruce Byfield, funeral home, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on July 22, 2010| 1 Comment »

My sense of the absurd must be one of my dominant traits. How else to explain why, when entering a funeral home to arrange the cremation of my life partner, it arose like a gag reflex – and was almost as hard to suppress?

I admit that I was put off from the start by the air of unctuous, decayed conservatism with which the place was decorated. Neither the wallpaper nor the carpet, I am sure, was really red velvet, but both seemed designed to make you think they were. The impression I had was a striving after grandeur that I had sometimes seen in classic theater palaces, or in some hotels that are trying to convince tourists that they are glamorous, but cannot hide the fact that they have seen better days.

Nor did it help that the meeting room was decorated with prints of cute children looking coy in Edwardian costumes. Norman Rockwell would have been a major advance in taste.

Some, I suppose, might have found the décor comforting – assuming they were over eighty and never had much taste to start with. I found it a mockery of my purpose, and would have preferred a starkly minimalist modern décor that, although soulless, would at least be unobtrusive.

Still, I had a reason for being there, so I did my best to ignore the furnishings. It wasn’t easy. My eyes kept sliding to the prints or other details so that I could control my annoyance as the funeral home representative half-heartedly tried to nickel and dime me to death.

Only, it wasn’t nickel and dimes she was after, of course – it was two hundred here, or five hundred there.

Somehow, though, we ground on through the process. All went well until I thought to ask about the home’s reception facilities.

First, the representative showed me the non-denominational chapel. To me, “non-denominational” suggested a space that was designed to be spiritual without being specific to any religion. But, to the funeral home, the term meant “generic Christian.” Not only was it filled with the sort of narrow, stiff pews that require your body to do penance while the service works on your soul, but one wall had tiles in the shape of crosses.

“How lovely for your Hindu and Muslim customers,” I wanted to say, but with a surprising surge of will, I managed to refrain. Instead, I asked about any alternatives.

“Well, we have a reception area, but I can’t show it to you now,” the representative said. “It doubles as the garage for our second hearse.”

Thinking that I must have misheard her, I asked if she could show me a picture. She showed me a room with small round cafe tables with red checkered table cloths. Sure enough, one wall was a sliding garage door of corrugated aluminum.

With an even greater super-human will, I managed not to succumb to a fit of giggling. I couldn’t wait to tell Trish about what I had just seen.

Then I remembered that I wouldn’t be there if not for Trish. And somehow, that was the most existentially absurd moment of all: me wanting to tell her about absurdities that I never would have encountered if she were still alive.

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The occupants of a four-bed hospital room

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, hospital patients, hospitals, Personal, Uncategorized, Vancouver, tagged , , , , , , on June 30, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Over the last few years, I have spent more than my share of time visiting in hospitals. Visiting a patient in a private room has its advantages – I once marked several batches of essays in one – but can be lonely for the patient unless they have a constant stream of visitors. A semi-private room is better, depending on who the other patient is, but can turn into a nightmare, as happened once when the other patient was from a psychiatric ward and had to be strapped down because he was under the illusion that he was defending the west coast against a Chinese invasion. So, on the whole, a four-bed room is usually the best balance between privacy and company.

For instance, over the past three weeks, the four-bed room where I have been spending several hours every day has presented a variety of people coming and going, some pleasant, some eccentric, but all providing stimulation to one another with their differences.

One was a woman who in sixty years had been both a hairdresser and a prison guard. She was outspoken, and obviously restraining her language, but unfailingly polite to the nurses and everyone else. She quickly became friends with the person I was visiting, and the two of them soon started trading the contents of their meal trays like kids at recess, and watching out for each other.

At the start of my visits, another of the bed was occupied by a soft-spoken man who had recently retired from sales. His wife, a puppeteer, was another frequent visitor. He participated lightly in the conversation, and everyone knew he was a Christian fundamentalist, but it was only on his last night that he revealed his missionary instinct. In response to a few questions, he got out an oversized Bible and a stack of computer printouts and immediately started trying to convert the ex-hairdresser-prison guard. It was a mark of her restraint that she didn’t lose her temper with him, although she complained long and bitterly after he left.

The fundamentalist was followed by a man who kept the curtains drawn around his bed and said as little as possible. He, in turn, was followed by a male nurse who took some advantage of his conventional good looks, but also interceded with the ward nurses on behalf of other patients. After him came a folk singer from Prince Edward Island, hospitalized on the other side of the continent after he had come to sing at a family wedding and contracted laryngitis. He spoke little (unsurprisingly), but showed a strong streak of kindness when he did.

The other bed in the room was initially occupied by a young Vietnamese woman. She would talk, but she spent a lot of her time on her cell phone or watching videos on a portable player with her legs draped over her bed tray. Either her sister or her boyfriend would crawl into bed with her at night, a practice that disturbed the nurses, but seems to me a reasonable way to help lessen the strain of being in hospital.

When the Vietnamese woman left, her bed was taken by a homeless man who worked part time as a roofer. He had the most prehensile toes I had ever seen, and was absolutely filthy. Despite cracked ribs, he was always descending six floors to go for a smoke – and I suspect, to judge from his behavior, for his drug of choice as well. Talking to him, I got the impression that his brains and reality were not quite in sync. However, his brains worked well enough for him to realize that he had a good place to stay, and he only left when it was clear that the next step would be to have security escort him out.

None of these people were extraordinary. You could probably pick half a dozen strangers at random on the street and find an equally interesting assortment. But on the street, of course, you would never learn much about them. In a hospital room, where little happens between doctors’ visits and being wheeled away for tests, people have to pass the time somehow, and while some opt for a portable TV, sooner or later most people talk. And, because they have so little to do, anyone who does talk invariably ends up saying more about themselves than they would in other settings. Probably, it helps that the first questions anyone is asked is why they are in a hospital – a private detail that makes giving more private details easy.

I’m not sure if I or the patient I was visiting will ever see these people again. Both of us took several people’s contact information, but a promise to keep in touch made when you are sharing the experience of being in the hospital is easy to break afterwards. You can’t help suspecting that you knew the other people only in special circumstances, and that in their ordinary lives they might be strangers – and strangers who are not at all eager to see anyone from a time when they were helpless, bored, and far from their best. Still, for the time of a hospital stay, the people in a four-bed room provide a variety and interest that any other form of hospital accommodation cannot hope to match.

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My privacy policy

Posted in Blogging, Bruce Byfield, Facebook, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , on June 20, 2010| Leave a Comment »

If Facebook has done anything, it has helped make users more aware of privacy issues on the Internet. Personally, though, the issue of privacy has always seemed plain enough.

Like many middle-aged people, I’m sometimes appalled by what the majority of people seem willing to disclose on the Internet. Many people seem to forget that they’re not just having a one-on-one conversation, but leaving a trace that anybody – or, at least on Facebook, dozens or hundreds, depending on their number of friends – can read. They disclose not only their plans for the night, but even the details of their sexual encounters and relationships.

In some cases, this disclosure may be given because the person giving it is a genuinely warm person. In other, the Tom Cruise Syndrome may be in full play – you know, the idea that, if you declare your emotions publicly enough or loudly enough or often enough, you and everyone else will come to believe it. Mostly, though, I have the impression that people just don’t think of the audience to which they’re broadcasting; I’ve noticed the same tendency to get lost in a private world with people talking on their phones in public. But, whatever the reason, I think the term “overshare” becomes relevant here.

By contrast, I am more cautious about what I disclose. I’ve been using the Internet since 1991, so I’ve had more time to think about such things than the average Internet user. Also, writing is a burlesque-like game of alternately revealing and concealing your person, so writing as I do for tens or hundreds of thousands on a regular basis tends to bring privacy issues into focus. Moreover, I have got myself into trouble with an indiscreet email or two. All of this experience makes me cautious about what I will say online, so much so that there are some topics on which I simply won’t express my opinion. You can ask me in person or maybe on the phone if you know me well, but some things I want to keep off the record.

I don’t mind my contact information being available, so long as spammers can’t get hold of it too easily. It was long ago scattered across the Internet anyway.

My personal rule is simple: I imagine that I am speaking what I write online at a crowded party. Before I post, I ask myself if I would be embarrassed if a sudden silence fell over the party and everybody could hear what I was saying. If the answer is yes, then I don’t post it. Everything’s really that simple.

When I talk about other people (especially those closest to me), I may adapt the rule: If a sudden silence fell over the party while I was talking about them, would they be embarrassed?. But, often, I want to quote someone or mention what they are doing or how they affect me. In these cases, I generally try to anonymize them, removing any reference that isn’t strictly necessary so that the person I am talking about will be hard for most of my audience to identify.

Such a policy isn’t completely convenient. It limits what I talk about online. Often, a story is diminished if I remove the references. Once or twice, people have also jumped to wild conclusions about me because of what I haven’t mentioned; for example, because I rarely mentioned my partner, some people have assumed that I am a loner or accused me of being gay.

But these problems are rare enough that I can live with them. Certainly, they’re less of a problem than leaving a trail of embarrassing comments or photos that can come back to haunt me.



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How I use Facebook

Posted in Bruce Byfield, humor, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 18, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Like many people in the free software community, I feel vaguely guilty about using Facebook. Microsoft’s investment in the site makes me queasy, and Facebook’s privacy problems raise issues that are close to my heart. Moreover, I have no interest in games like Farmville or Mafia Wars (or, rather, I can guess all too clearly how obsessive I would be once I started), or sending virtual gifts, and I long ago exhausted the pleasure of taking meaningless quizzes. Instead, I use Facebook more as an address book with a chat channel attached to it.

You can see how I use the site through the breakdown of my list of friends. As I scan the list, most people on it fall clearly into one of eleven categories, although a few could be placed in several categories:

According to my quick tally:

  • 15% are First Nations artists, or relatives or spouses of first nations artists. The main reason I friended the artists was to see the photos of their work that they post, although some have become personal friends as well.
  • 5% are fellow writers and journalists in the computer field – usually ones who write largely about free and open source software.
  • 5% are editors, about two-thirds of which I interact with regularly and submit articles to at least once per month.
  • 12% are subject matter experts. Although some are friends, the main advantage of being connected to them on Facebook is that when I need a quote or an explanation, I can hop on line and chat quickly with them. This is easy to do, because most are logged in to Facebook during regular business hours in North America.
  • 6% are business experts I’ve met and often interviewed while writing articles. On the whole, they tend not to be on Facebook often, but Facebook is another way to reach them when necessary.
  • 29% are either members of the free software community whose expertise I might need in a story or else professionals who work in marketing, communication, technical writing, public relations, or some other field that I have dabbled in.
  • 20% are people with whom I went to school. Most of these are very light Facebook users and not accustomed to chat, so my interaction with most of them is limited largely to occasional remarks about each other’s status.
  • 4% are people in high-tech with whom I have worked in the past.
  • Less than 1% are friends who have nothing to do with work or my art interests.
  • Less than 1% are actual family members.
  • 1 person is dead (and I can’t quite bring myself to remove him)

I’ve rounded the numbers, so the total does not add up to 100%.

Even so, this breakdown gives an accurate picture of how I use Facebook. Overwhelming, for me Facebook is a tool for business and for my major pastime of studying Northwest Coast Art. That sounds like I don’t use it for socializing, but that would be deceptive, since I consider many people in these categories friends.

Apparently, though, it’s not enough that I should feel guilty about using Facebook. Now, I need to feel guilty for not using it for completely mindless purposes as well.

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Waiting

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Personal, Uncategorized, waiting, tagged , , , on June 14, 2010| Leave a Comment »

As I write, I am waiting for a phone call telling me to come escort someone home from day surgery. I’ve been waiting much of the day for the call, and the surgery has already been delayed several hours, so I find settling to any work almost impossible. The truth is, waiting has never been something that I have endured with much grace, although I have become better with the enforced practice of years.

I was an energetic child, so my inability to wait is unsurprising, really. Although I stopped short of hyper-activity, I always seemed to have more energy than anyone around me, and I usually expressed it in physical activity. Asking me to wait seemed akin to asking me to stand still; I could just barely do it.

Brief bouts of waiting, such as Remembrance Day silences and prayers, were a torment. As for really long waits, such as the week before Christmas or my birthday, or a family vacation – well, let us obscure them with an embarrassed silence. I really don’t want to remember how overbearing a child I could to be, but if I could travel in time, even I would probably want to drown my childhood self, and let the paradoxes fall as they may.

However, learning to wait is part of becoming an adult, unless you’re a child of privilege, which I certainly was not; I was first-generation middle class, and in my neighborhood that made me relatively poor. Inevitably, I learned how to wait in line, to wait for other people to respond or act, and to assume at least the appearance of composure while I did so.

But what first taught me to wait was being a long distance runner. On practice runs, I learned to fall into the rhythm of covering long distances with little more to do than keep a steady pace. Even more importantly, the night before races and in the hours beforehand, I learned to subdue my impatience and direct it towards reviewing on my strategies, containing myself until I could surge out from the starting line at the sound of the gun. Waiting, I discovered, could actually be a way to channel my energies.

Yet even this discovery would not have done much to reconcile me to waiting if I hadn’t discovered a few tricks that I still follow today.

One of my first tricks was to always carry a book with me. People called me bookish – and I am – but to me it just seemed practical. To this day, I still maintain that no time is ever wasted, so long as I have something to read. For the past few years, I’ve expanded this credo to include having a fully-charged music player, but, to a verbally oriented person like me, that is not quite as satisfactory, unless I’m listening to clever lyrics or an intricate classical arrangement that I can mentally dissect.

A strong memory, I found, was another aid to waiting. At one point in mis-spent adolescence, I had the entire soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar memorized, and could play it back in my head, instrument arrangements and all from the start of any song. To this day, I still have a full repertoire of songs and poems that I’ve memorized that I amuse myself with if I have no other resources. At other times, I compose some piece of writing in my head, going over and over the phrases until I have they sound right and I have them memorized.

More recently, learning to troubleshoot a computer and to train parrots have furthered my education in patience, so I can drift into a half-fugue state of intense observation so that I know what to do next.

Yet for all such improvement, I remain the descendant of that overbearing boy, and waiting does not come naturally. If I had a fast-forward button, I would certainly use it on myself. Learning to cope with waiting, I find, is not nearly the same as being reconciled to the necessity.

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