A Theatre Story
My college history was a bit of an aimless wander in search of an unknown destination. I only took classes at five schools, had four majors (five if you count the switch from the normal to the online version of my final major) and I don’t even want to attempt to count the minors..
I recently was invited to join a Facebook group of Wright State University‘s Theatre Design and Technology alumni. In that group, a student who was in the program eight years or so before me wrote:
I might have only been in the program one year 92-93, but I learned a lot in that year. One regret I’ve always had was not finishing, I was a kid just out of high school and I wasn’t ready for the rigors of the program unfortunately. To this day I take a lot of pride in being at least a small part of it. I really can’t say I know of any program of its kind that is better…
I wrote this on the wall over there. (I’ve tweaked it a bit for this blog):
I’ve been enjoying reading this and taking some walks down memory lane.. That comment inspired me to share one of the stores I remember from the two (practical) quarters I was a Stage Management Major. I never felt like I really knew what I was doing in the SM program, and I made the decision to change my major to Theatre Studies near the end of the winter term. I didn’t do this through the theatre office, but instead just went to the registrar’s office and changed it.
The next day I went into Theatre Tech class where we built sets and the like. Tim, the student manager for the class, pulled me off and assigned me to grind down the weld joints on some iron work for Kiss Me, Kate. I forget the conversation around things, but I came out with the impression that this was a bit of “shit work” to just get me out of the way for the last week or so of the term.
The funny thing? I really enjoyed grinding down those joints. I happily came into Theatre Tech the next day and picked up right where I left off, and Tim complimented me for continuing on the work. Looking at it now its one of those things taught me a good bit about myself, and how I do my best work..
Its been an interesting journey over the past twelve years, but I really appreciate my time at Wright State and as a student in its theatre department.
Honoring the Journey
I was a teenager when I came out to my family. I naively expected everyone to jump right behind me and support me unconditionally and fully. This was asking far too much of those around me. Those around me didn’t know who I really was; they’d assumed that I was straight and filled in a stock story for who I was. But, when I came out a different stock story was substituted.
Most people have trouble with change, and when change comes they assume the worst. So in a situation like this people pick out the stock story that scares them the most. Thus when I came out in the late 1990’s my parents dropped in the story of promiscuous young gay men that just have sex left and right with whomever, because that story was one that was reasonably common in the cultural sphere, and due to the potential for sexually transmitted diseases it is scary.
My parents, friends, and family have moved well beyond that worst case set of stock expectations, and now have a realistic view of who I am, because they’ve gone on a journey learning more about me; That stock story has been replaced by the actual story. Our journey took time, soul searching, discussions, questions, and tense moments. But it was a journey that my parents, family, friends and I went on, and we’ve grown stronger for it.
When I wrote Mormons: Standing on the Side of Love my intent was to honor and accept the journey that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints are embarking on. It is not an easy journey that they have embarked upon.
Advocates for equality want to get to equality now, or yesterday if possible. However, the journey is what is more important. People need to go on the journey of having their beliefs challenged and changed. Jane Skrovota’s testimony to Lincoln Nebraska City Council hearing is a bit surreal, but ultimately it is an accurate pastiche of the disturbing unchallenged story that many anti-GLBT activists believe is an accurate description of the lives of GLBT people.
It’s an important moment when individuals or a group realize that the old disturbing story is not correct, and really begin to see people and groups for who they really are. The most important part of President Obama’s interview was not when he stated that gay couples should be able to get married, it was when shared his journey and thought process of why he changed his position. He was confronted with real GLBT people, and this confrontation washed out those false stories. This helped him realize his previous position was wrong.
Arriving at the destination is not the most important piece to celebrate of a when seeking social justice, it is recognizing and honoring that people have embarked upon the journey to enhance social justice, even if they’re further behind on the path than you’d like, at least you know they’re headed in the same direction.
Writing Goal: Achieved
My goal to write one blog entry a day for a week was quite a bit easier than I thought it would be. That being said a remarkable number of the entries were written at the end of the day, so procrastination still is strong.
This ended up begin really good for me. I live in my head quite a bit, so forcing myself to get my thoughts out into a fixed form is something that I struggle with. But like anything the more I practice it the easier it gets.
I’ll probably lay off of blogging for a day or two, but I hope to be a bit more regular around here..
On Tipping
I was going to write about something else tonight, but this one percolated to the top of my list.
I have what I consider to be a pretty reasonable philosophy on tipping. 99.9% of the time I leave a tip, and most of the time its reasonable or pretty good. But there are those 0.1% of times that I’ll leave no tip. (No, I won’t leave 1 cent, thats just cruel.)
But, lets backup here, for perspective. I tip service personnel from a perspective of having worked in the service industry. I’ve worked as a waiter, I’ve done more things than you’d like to know with telephones, I’ve “cooked” fast food, and I’ve made lattes. These jobs are hard. They’re not a walk in the park, I get that. But which job out of list this paid the most? Fiddling with telephones. (Err. Sometimes examples don’t work out.) Which job out of this list paid the second most? Being a food server. I’ve waited tables at Chili’s and Denny’s, but mostly at Chili’s. I made good money there. I used to keep track of my tips on a daily basis, and calculate my hourly rate. Of course it varied, but I usually took home $14 to $16 an hour and I did make $22 and hour at times. This was back in 2001 and 2002, and included the $2.13 an hour the restaurant paid me.
I was in Las Vegas for CES in January. I went with my cousin, an employee at Amazon, and for half of the trip we were joined by two of his coworkers. We developed a bit of a pattern where I’d arrive for a meal when they were already halfway through the meal. (They’d get together, decide where to eat, then we’d text each other..)
One evening we went to this BBQ restaurant, and I arrived my usual 35 minutes after the rest of them. (Hey the strip in Vegas is a huge place designed to get you lost and walk farther than you ever thought possible!) I arrived to a mostly quiet restaurant, but instead of ordering when I sat down, my dinner mates strongly suggested against ordering as the service had been exceptionally poor. I myself witnessed empty drinks that needed refilled, slow turn arounds on taking care of the bill, and all sorts of other stuff. I pretty strongly advocated not tipping the server. She had not earned a tip, if anything she had demonstrated that she should not be tipped.
We got into a discussion on tipping, my dinner mates pretty much insisted on tipping no matter what the service, as they too had worked as a server at some point, insisting that servers don’t make much money. I found this laughable as most servers I’ve known tend to do pretty well, although it doesn’t show up on their taxes as such, since servers often underreport their tips. (Cash is wonderfully fungible, and all you have to do to throw the IRS off is keep a diary of “tips”.)
Here’s the thing: if I get reasonable service I give a reasonable tip, if I get great service I give a great tip, if I get poor service I give a poor tip, if I get next to no service, I don’t tip. I’ll adjust for how busy the restaurant is and the type of restaurant I’m at. I don’t expect a five star service at an greasy spoon, and I don’t expect to have the server at my beck and call if the restaurant is crazy busy. But I do expect service to the best of the server’s ability. That is the social contract we have entered into for tipping, and I follow it.
Being a food server is one of those awesome jobs that you get consistent feedback on how you’re doing, but if patrons don’t tip based on service tips mean nothing except another bit of the paycheck, instead of an encouragement to provide the best service possible.
On Accountability
Wherever I worked I always went above and beyond. Its just how I’m wired. My first manager, Mark, said that I cared too much. He was quite right at the time as when I was there I sweated the small stuff. However, I really honestly cared about providing the best possible service, even at McDonald’s. It is also not uncommon for me to essentially create another position from my above and beyond efforts at my various employers.
Given this pattern I figured starting a company would be easy. (Okay, not easy, but something that I could do. Anyone who tells you starting your own company is easy hasn’t done it.)
I realized that in my startup structure, I had failed to identify one key ingredient in my previous successes: Being accountable to someone else.
While going above and beyond at previous positions wasn’t literally in my job description, once I had made a commitment to do a given task (be it to a customer, coworker, or vendor) I would get it done. This isn’t to say that at times I struggled with those tasks or procrastinated on them, (Oh I procrastinated, trust me, I did.) but the power of having made a commitment to someone and having that accountability to push me is extremely powerful.
When I go after starting a company again the first task will be to find a co-founder. I was having a conversation with another entrepreneur, and he said he didn’t understand how solo entrepreneurship worked; sometimes he needed the kick in the ass and motivation that another person can give. I found that incredibly gratifying have my struggles as a solo entrepreneur validated.
Dreams versus Logic
I believe that the creativity and innovation are under attack and have been for quite a while.
I had an online chat with a friend of mine who is a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft, and he exposed a frustration with people who as teenagers and early 20s year olds didn’t understand “why people don’t make what I see to be the right choices, despite their feelings and likes.”
From what I understand about my friend, he is a highly logical person. believes every decision should be dictated by the information available and whatever is logically the most correct decision.
This is many ways is the dichotomy between a manager and a leader. A manager takes available information and makes the best most logical decision. A leader surveys the environment around an issue, and make their best intuitive decision based on their vision and experience. Being a leader is a creative and innovative endeavor. Being a manager is the exact opposite. (This isn’t to say that people wear both the leader and manager hat, but often they wear one more than the other.)
Favoring management over leadership is short sighted. General Motors pre bankruptcy management believed that they could manage their way out of their market share issues to regain their previous prominent position. Their vision was to go back to the past, instead of leading the company into a new future. If you contrast this with Ford, and Alan R. Mulally’s leadership to remake Ford into a new company to be able to address the future.
More and more people refuse to give artists and leaders the space to actually apply their creative skills, and instead force them to manage and take the most logical choice, however mundane and ultimately incorrect that may be.
Eh, this is about cats.
There are a few meaty topics I want to dig into, but to do justice to those requires more time and attention than I have, thus I will write about my cats.
It occurs to me that while I’ve described various different behaviors of my cats at times, I’m usually describing the outliers, not our normal day to day.
Anytime I’m sitting at home, its quite likely that one of the cats is sitting on or near me. At this very moment Shaun is sitting on my arm. He’s engaged in a well practiced dance where he puts one paw on my arm, then another, and the next thing I know he has migrated to putting himself in the middle of everything. (Apparently this cat can read my thoughts, or I can read his, as during the process of writing this paragraph he has now managed to perfectly parallel what I’m typing.)
Shaun likes to hold my fingers at times, and he has a thing for putting his paw on my MacBook. (The cats aren’t actually allowed to touch my computer. I started this since George managed to brush the side of his face upon my iBook G4 enough that the hinge is off kilter and when the computer screen is closed its misaligned from the rest of the computer by a good 1/8th of an inch.) At times this gets annoying as he wants to touch my thumb, which is right over the MacBook’s trackpad. Now Apple is good at what they do, but their devices don’t yet differentiate between human fingers and cat paws, so the computer does all sorts of odd things.
If George is the one wanting to sit near me, he always wants to be pet, to the point that he’ll push his nose under my hand on the keyboard if I’m not paying attention to him. George is much more direct about what he wants, whereas Shaun is sly and sneaky.
When I come home George invariably greets me with a cloying meow requesting my attention. He’ll follow me around the apartment until I provide some to him, even if it is what I consider to be “negative” attention. Sigh, he as me trained quite well. George has meowing down to a science. I’ll listen to him try to continue to get my attention, and like P&G he’ll constantly vary his output, which I presume is mostly to keep my interest. At times he’s experimented with two and three syllable meows, although at the moment he is going for a siamese type short meow. He’s quite the innovator when it comes to meows.. (He’s not the first cat I’ve lived with folks, there have been a whole clowder of them in my past.) I’ve been telling him for the past nine years to speak english, although he still hasn’t made any progress with that.
At bed time the cats usually cuddle up with me on the bed. Shaun is consistently to my left and George is consistently to my right. Its one of those wonderfully regular things in my life, and part of the clowder that I’m an honorary member of.
Good and evil can be nurtured.
I wrote Mormons: Standing on the Side of Love because when I watched It Gets Better with Mormon Family and Friends, I was moved almost to tears.
The day after I wrote that I was having an online chat with my friend Casey:
Casey: re: your most recent blog post. I have not yet watched the video, but you are a much better person than I. I carry a huge grudge against the Mormons, Evangelicals, and Catholics for Prop 8 and anyone who funds those organizations.
Me: well — I separate the people from the organization.
Casey: The people empower and monetarily fund the organizations, I can’t separate them.
Casey: Might as well “hate the sin but love the sinner”.
Casey: Seriously, I admire your ability to make that separation.
His thoughts stuck with me, because Casey is an awesome guy and holding a grudge doesn’t seem to be his style. I’ve spent quite a bit of time pondering why I can make that separation, and I’m discussing this here with Casey’s permission.
I don’t condone the Mormons, Evangelicals, and Catholics who supported Prop 8, quite the opposite, I despise that people poured money simply to prevent two people of the same sex from having their relationship recognized in the same way as two people of the opposite sex.
I used to think that all Christian faiths were bullshit, and destructive. Then one Sunday morning a few months after I started going to my church I was sitting listening to a group who had gone to a Central American country describe the social services that the catholic church provided. Here were people I trusted providing evidence that directly contradicted my believe that Christian faiths were bullshit. I’m not quite sure I knew it at the time, but a little bit of dynamite had gone off in my head and started to take down that opinion. For a more recent example of the good that Catholics do, take a look at Nicholas D. Kristof’s opinion piece, We Are All Nuns, I told another friend when I read it that I needed to go find a nun to hug.
Does the sex abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests, and then covered up by the organization negate the work of the Catholic Nuns? One could make an argument that it does. However, if you accept that argument then once an organization or even an individual does something that rises to a certain level, you must discount whatever good work they have done.
I learned this past summer that one of my coworkers was engaged in producing child porn during the same time I worked with him. At that time I wrote:
What Matt has done is inexcusable.
I hope one day he will ask for forgiveness and find someone who can grant it to him. However, his current unwillingness to provide the password to decrypt the files on his computer makes it unlikely that he is ready to ask for forgiveness, nor is he worthy of it.
I’m reminded of a story of the redemption of a drug addict that stole from our church when he was younger. I’ve put the story up for those who are interested.
I was stuck at that time reconciling the fact that the generally good guy I worked with was also a pedophile. One of the Unitarian Universalist Principles that UUs affirm and promote is “The inherent worth and dignity of every person.” This is not to say that I would not take a 2×4 to Matt’s head if it would have prevented him from producing child porn.
A few days after my initial blog entry and my conversation with Casey this quote showed up in my email box:
If you’re out watering your flower garden by hand, you naturally concentrate the flow of water to benefit your beautiful flowers. If there’s an area of weeds, you don’t waste water there. As best you can, you avoid watering the weeds. It’s the same with your consciousness. You can learn to selectively water the positive seeds and flowers in you by attending to them. There are enough weeds. You don’t have to encourage them. – Thomas Bien, “Water the Flowers, Not the Weeds”
It doesn’t quite have literal application to this situation, but I believe that I should highlight and celebrate the characteristics I’d like to see in others. I can either focus on the evil things that they do and encourage them, or I can focus on celebrating what good they do, and encourage that.
I purposefully kept my late entry, Apple should bring iMessage to Android, on a general level, without bringing my personal specifics into it.
I’m one of those guys who enjoys tracking things. I do this for fun and to answer the questions that’d just pop up in my head if I didn’t. I track my ORCA Card usage, my telecom bills, and just my general spending. (Unlike I a crazy AOL customer, and many other customers I don’t suffer from decision fatigue in that way, quite the opposite, it’ll bug me if I don’t track this stuff.)
I have a spreadsheet summarizing every month I’ve been with AT&T which calculates exactly what I spent, and what my expenses would be on some other choices. (For simplicity I leave out the discounts I receive after the line items.)
This has served me well. For instance when AT&T started offering 2GB of data for $25 a month, I jumped for it, instead of sticking with my grandfathered plan of unlimited data for $30 a month. Since June 2010 this has saved me $115. Not exactly huge, but not exactly pocket change. My data usage has continued to go up. In the six months before I switched in June 2010 my average monthly data usage was 453 megabytes per month, in the past six months it roughly doubled to 834 megabytes per month, still less than half of my cap, and I use whatever data I want and can manage to grab.
My SMS/MMS usage dramatically dropped for my bills ending in March and April to an average of 120 messages per month. (Why this doesn’t clearly correlate with the release of iOS 5 I don’t know, thats a question that I need to do more analysis to answer.) For various reasons too arcane to get into here, I’m on the $20 unlimited SMS plan, which means for March and April I’m just twenty or so messages shy from hitting break even on a metered billing plan, and after that its all savings.
So being an analysis addict, I pulled the detailed SMS level data and found out that if I converted my top two texting recipients easily accounted for over twenty messages a month, but I also knew that they weren’t going to be hopping onto an iPhone. After much searching I’ve moved them over to TextFree from Pinger, but its a wee bit of a pain. So it’d be excellent if this problem took care of itself by those Android phone users getting onto iMessages.. Thats the thought at least..
Apple should bring iMessage to Android phones.
At first glance this seems like the worst idea: Take a signature portion of the iOS experience (and soon to be OS X experience) and bring it to your direct competitor, thus reducing the differentiation between your product and your competitor’s product, which ultimately reduces the attractiveness of your product.
But iMessage as a product isn’t competing with Android. No, its competing directly with Blackberry Messenger, but indirectly with carrier’s SMS and MMS offerings. AT&T knew this when in advance of iMessage’s release they switched their SMS/MMS package offerings to two options: $20 for unlimited messages, or $0.20 per SMS or $0.30 per MMS. This means that anyone who wants to send more than 100 SMS message should just pay the $20 per month.
iMessage isn’t competing with Android directly, but why would Apple spend resources on bringing a product to their competitor’s platform? Simple, the same reason Apple brought iTunes to Windows: Bring their design aesthetic to a competitors platform to support one of their product, the iPod. iMessage is stronger when it has more users.
But bringing iMessage to Android also supports Apple’s existing customers, because right now iMessage brings only a few benefits: Syncing messages between multiple devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod, and OS X Laptop), and delivery receipts. This is nice, snazzy and cool in and of itself, but it still leaves people saddled with SMS and MMS messages being delivered only on their iPhone. For a customer is great benefit to cancel that $20 per month SMS plan and pay individually for the few text messages that come from feature phones and other sources.
When Apple brings iMessage to Android they open up a platform that has the potential to reach 82% of the smartphone market. But in bringing iMessage to Android it places it as a formidable competitor to SMS and MMS messages, which also forces RIM and Windows Mobile into a market corner. We’ve seen this play out with computer modems, fax machines, ethernet, and Wi-Fi. These connectivity innovations gained their dominance not because each manufacturer had their own proprietary method of connecting, but because they made and generally stuck to an agreed upon standard.
Finally, bringing iMessage continues to push network providers into the role that Apple wants them to be: Providers of dumb pipes. Steve Jobs spent quite a bit of time trying to think through building the iPhone into a platform to synthetically create a carrier using Wi-Fi spectrum. iMessage doesn’t get Apple all the way there, but it chips of a small piece of the wireless carrier’s differentiation from being a dumb pipe, and that brings us a wee bit closer to the future.