I had a delightful moment of id today. I’ve been wrestling with a website that wouldn’t let me log in. No email. No password. But I kept getting these messages which said they’d send the requisite information to my email, which they apparently don’t have. (Despite saying they did.) There was also a helpful phone number to call if all of this didn’t work. So, after a few days of this going on in-between other things, I called the number.
A very helpful person finally caught the other end of the line and, after she verified I wasn’t a dribbling idiot and I demonstrated my grasp of erudition and and reason, she set about helping solve the actual problem. This required reciting, several times, the requisite information. Finally, she was ready to create my account — he one that didn’t exist, but which the database was pretty sure it did somehow, maybe a nickname or something, perhaps. Before she could click the final click, she had to read me the terms of agreement.
She said that I could agree at any time. And she said that with the studied patience of a professional. There was a little emphasis on any time. It stood out. It wasn’t declarative. It didn’t sound like a complaint. But she wanted me to know I could agree at any time.
And dear internet, I did this for you. I have never, in my life, been more interested in the terms of agreement. In that moment, you would have felt the same way. So she read them all.
But at the end of it, I could finally log in.
I also had a moment of herculean achievement. Normally, I run my day on email and two or three calendars and some notepads and the crucial points from all of that get distilled into a notecard. Usually a day fills a card front and back. Some days I get to do other creative things with the back of the card, like observations or notes about some item from the front or tic-tac-toe. But the card seems to fill itself up nicely, thank you.
But today I managed, after several tries, to distill the next week onto two cards. A sign of the last stage of the semester. It was a beautiful sequential list, a slug, a time, date, location, day-of-the-week stuff. The only thing left to do was to remember what each slug meant, and what was required of me for each point. One week. Two cards.
It was immediately, immediately, made obsolete by the next email that floated in.
This is a class a colleague is offering in the fall. I am trying to reconcile the clever top line and Topic 1.
I think it is clever. And I know the professor running the course, and it should be a good one. But if it’s a class on social media manipulation someone should really lean into the notions contained in that graphic. Have some fun with it. Make the art such that, if you invert it, or flip it, there are secret messages to let students know you’re in on the joke.
Maybe there’s one in there already, and I just haven’t caught it yet. But I am looking. I’m looking every time I walk by the signage and this image is on the screen. I’m also counting the fonts.
We have an apple tree in the back yard. We discovered this just last year. First year since we’ve been here that it produced fruit. We looked forward to seeing them get ripe, but the squirrels had other ideas. They ate every single apple.
I haven’t found a countermeasure yet, but I’m sure I’ll find something on Google that will in no way be effective.
But at least the tree is blooming now. (In the final third of April, it surely ought to.)
I noticed that when we were sitting on the megadeck this evening. We stayed out there until the sun got too low and the temperatures fell and the fire element went out. I took that as a sign to go inside.
