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On Unraveling the World and Letting the Queue Clear

We spend our lives creating, and waiting in, queues.  We do our best to manage the dead time in line and when we are responsible for the movement of any queue, we oftentimes become impatient with a process that more slowly unravels than the speed in which it tightened.

Sometimes there’s nothing to be done except to stand back and let the queue take on a life of its own and allow it to expire when the momentum of the movement is exhausted.

There are three kinds of basic queues that capture our daily lives: Physical, Virtual and Ethereal. Let’s examine them in kind.

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Recalling Short-Term, Outlier, Cache Memory Loss

We’ve written a lot about memory and meaning and memory on this Boles Blog over the last decade or so — and yet I am always a little bit shocked and surprised when I read elsewhere, on other blogs — revelations of how fleeting and failing memories really are in the execution of rallying a daily life.

The blog post in question was written by a fresh and successful database engineer who, at a young age, was mildly complaining, in the midst of a technical exposé, how his short-term memory was failing him.  He was trying to draw parallels between caching database memory and how his mind would clear, on its own, important, stored information he needed for short-term recall.

The young designer shared with us that if he thought of something while in the midst of working, he had to immediately stop and write down the thought on a piece of paper, or in the next thought, he’d forget what he meant to do next when he had a break in time.

The author didn’t seem to be particularly alarmed by his lack of short-term memory reception, but I felt for him because his letter read as if this were a semi-new experience that he was dealing with in the analytical manner of a software designer and problem fixer. He was using mechanical logic to solve a scientific health problem.

Continue reading → Recalling Short-Term, Outlier, Cache Memory Loss

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Remembering Over Reinventing: Obituaries and the Unnamed

As we creep closer to sliding into our graves, we cannot help but look back over the arc of our lives and be tempted to wonder what is and what might have been.  There’s no regret in the ongoing evaluation of who we are and what we intended to become.

I always found it odd, and a little off-putting, growing up as a child in the Midwest, and having the older folks around me scan the obituaries page in the daily newspaper.

Looking for deaths — sometimes with both hope and regret — was maudlin and a little frightening to me, but the obit page was the final period on the end of a single image forged in sweat and hope against an impending darkness.  You were okay to be forgotten as long as the descriptive bits of you found final ink on a page.

Now that I live in the New York City area, and moved by both time and tide, I cannot help but be driven by my Midwestern DNA to scan the obituaries page of the New York Times.  It’s a wildly different experience reading the East Coast death roll call because these were the famous, and the infamous, and we are expected to remember them longer than the same sort of dead friends reported from the farmlands and valleys of the regular clarion — but we won’t.

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Thirty Years On Today: Burying Oliver Mark Wadey

They say that time heals — I beg to differ. It may cloud and diminish generalities, but on this day, every year, the pain is still the pain that only the gut wrenching sorrow that the loss of a child can bring. True that pain is confined to this day and this day alone and in spite of all my efforts and strategies over the years to cope with it, deal with it, or even try to ignore it altogether, I never quite manage to do so.

Continue reading → Thirty Years On Today: Burying Oliver Mark Wadey

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Remembering Nora Ephron

I’m not sure how old I was when I first saw the movie When Harry Met Sally — it certainly wasn’t when it first came out as I was only twelve years old at the time and not interested in romantic comedies at all. I do remember exactly how I felt after I finished watching it, however, and that was full of hope that one day I would meet someone with whom I would want to spend the rest of my life.

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Knowing What to Look for and Where to Look for It

How do we know what we know?  Do we gain memory directly through experience or through the experience of others?  Is remembering something enough ownership of an idea to give it resonance beyond our own mind?  How do we know what to search for when we don’t yet know what we don’t know?

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Memory Runoff Review

To live is to remember; and how we choose to consecrate our memories is what gives texture and context to our lives as the Panopticon becomes public.  Google is good at creating the instant now for future recall, but The Wayback Machine is the granddaddy of soliciting who used to be.  Today we have — Memento — a new contender for scrapbooking our online lives.  So who is the king of our remembering?  Wayback or Memento? 

Continue reading → Memory Runoff Review