Vacation and Electro-Sabbath

I just got back from a week with some college friends on a yacht one friend's parents had rented in the Virgin Islands for her college graduation -- which is pretty much as awesome as it sounds. I caught up with old friends, swam with a turtle, learned some sailing, drank piña coladas, and many more adventures.

Another remarkable thing about this trip was that I had no laptop, no cell phone, no blogs, no webcomics, no email, no TV, for a week straight -- a distinctive experience for someone who's accustomed to spending hours tied to a screen every day. When we were first planning this trip, I was worried about being forced to be not working and out of contact with clients for so long, but you know what? It was fantastic. I even uncharacteristically declined the opportunity to check my email when it was available at some places we pulled into port -- and since I'd warned my clients about my vacation plans and worked a little extra the week before, nothing urgent had piled up when I got home.

In some ways, this email-less week was similar to the "Electro-Sabbath" that Jesse and I instituted a few weeks ago: on Wednesday nights after 9pm, we don't check email, use the internet, or watch TV or movies. The idea is to clear our heads from the addictive and attention-fraying 20-open-tabs lifestyle of the everyday and free up time to dedicate to non-electronic activities we want to pursue (reading, painting, chatting, going for walks). It's relaxing to do this once a week, but an entire week without the electronic tether is unbelievably refreshing -- obviously something I can't do often in my profession, but something to keep in mind for the occasional vacation.

More T Stops, More Studios

I furthered my plan of visiting new T stops this weekend -- we went to the open studios at the Distillery in South Boston by way of the Andrew T Stop. The Distillery was about a mile from the T stop, so we got to explore South Boston on our walk, which was pretty interesting and cool (though not literally cool -- Boston's 3 weeks of nice spring/summer weather seem to be over, and it's oppressively hot and humid). Southie wasn't quite what I'd expected -- with colorful, close-together houses on hills, some streets looked surprisingly San Francisco-esque, but the Irish pub we stopped into definitely didn't (its decor tended more toward Irish nationalist propaganda).

Later, after walking downtown post-studios, we also hit up the New England Medical Center T Stop to get home -- I hadn't realized that the FAO Schwartz Bear had a new home!

This was the smallest of the three open studios I've seen in the past year, and the artists skewed the youngest -- one friend commented that it seemed like college art, which I agreed with. In contrast, the Fort Point studios from last fall were full of mostly professional artists, and the Somerville studios from earlier this spring seemed to have a lot of adult amateurs (a demographic that I think produces a lot of interesting work!).

A Movie Without Enough Male Presence?

The NYT has a fairly unfavorable review of the Sex and the City movie; while I haven't seen the movie, have no desire to do so, and am sure several of the criticisms are valid, part of the review rubbed me the wrong way:

Unlike the show, which allowed the men to emerge occasionally from the sidelines with lines of actual dialogue, the male characters in the movie stand idly by, either smiling or stripping, reduced to playing sock puppets in a Punch-free Judy and Judy (times two) show. I’m all for the female gaze, but, gee, it’s also nice to talk — and listen — to men, too.

Uh, right. Men don't have enough screen time?

Not according to another NYT article by the same author (!), xkcd, Jezebel, or indeed, anyone with half a brain who watches blockbuster movies (or even their advertisements). It's nice to talk and listen to men in movies, sure, but you have every other movie coming out this summer for plenty of that.

Urban Biomes

One of the things that I like the most about living where we do is that we're within walking distance of so many urban and suburban "biomes" -- different population levels and feels, from dense forest to downtown skyscrapers.

Our apartment is in a neighborhood that's reminiscent of suburban residential areas (though the houses are closer together). When I go running, I can go to the commercial-suburban-feeling strip malls and highways near Alewife and feel like I'm in the sprawling exurbs. Or I can go to almost the opposite extreme, the parks surrounding Fresh Pond, where I can be surrounded by trees and water and out of view of human-made structures. The Cambridge and Somerville squares have almost a small-town downtown feel. Stretching "walking distance" to a few miles, Allston is a bustling urban neighborhood. And then there's the financial district, full-scale city.

Everywhere else I've lived, and most places I could live, have a much more homogenous five-mile radius around them -- but variety is just one of many perks of living in the Boston area.

TV Suspense

I've grown enamored of watching TV dramas; I love being excited about finding out what will be revealed in the episode I'm going to watch next. But there are a couple shows that I started watching and grew tired of before the suspenseful questions were answered: Weeds and Desperate Housewives.

I think part of this is due to a split between different kinds of suspense. On the one hand, there's what I think of as forward-looking thriller suspense -- basically, "how will they get out of this?" On the other hand, there's backward-looking mystery suspense, or "how did they get into this?".

Weeds excelled in building up "how will they get out of this" situations. How will Nancy escape the cadre of drug dealers with guns pointed at her? But it eventually grew tiresome, at least to me, because it seemed like there was no "so what" or larger structure behind it. Desperate Housewives built up some "how did they get into this" questions about the past of Wisteria Lane. Why did Mary Alice kill herself? What happened to Dana? Yet with the forward-looking storylines much less compelling, I didn't feel motivated to keep watching.

I think the best suspense interleaves both styles: like one of my favorite shows, Lost. Lost mixes "how did they get into this" questions (why is there a polar bear in the tropics?) with "how will they get out of this" questions (how, if at all, will they get off the island?). The answers to both questions are often intertwined. Who built the hatch in the jungle? What will happen when they open it? Both types of suspense are given more emotional depth with flashbacks and flashforwards that show just enough to keep you curious.

Which is to say, OMG I am so impatient for Thursday night!!

Harbor Islands

It's not a T stop, but today I went with a group for a local Boston adventure -- we took a ferry to Spectacle Island, in the harbor, for a picnic. It was a beautiful day, albeit a little windy, and our picnic, hiking, and beach football-throwing were fun. I was a little disappointed that the island seemed so landscaped (it had wide paths, and few if any trees), since I'd always thought of the Harbor Islands as a crazy wilderness -- but what do I expect from an island mostly made of landfill. It's also apparently one of the highest points in the harbor -- we saw a nice view when we climbed the south drumlin.

Familiarity Now vs. Effectiveness Later

It's a familiar adage that an effective user interface is designed to be familiar; users don't like to encounter systems that make them think on the first try, which usually means they like to encounter interfaces that are as close as possible to the ones they've encountered before. This is on my mind because I'm currently learning the interface for a new music player; it has quite a learning curve, based in large part on its unfamiliarity (not that "File" is the most reasonable choice, in hindsight, for a menu name, but is "Engage" really any better?). But the more I dig into Amarok, the more I realize that it's incredibly full-featured, and it's just not possible to display every feature in a commonly-understood way; once I learn the basic operations, they seem straightforward and natural.

I'm reminded that the high learning curve is a common criticism of Linux -- you'll have to learn the command line, or my favorite text editor (of course! Ctl-@ Ctl-n Ctl-n Ctl-w Ctl-y to copy and paste a couple lines!), or the Gimp, or any number of unfamiliar solutions to familiar problems. But many people, once they learn these solutions, realize that the initially tricky solution can be more efficient in the long run, and that difficult-to-figure-out interfaces are often so because there are so many things you can do with them (Photoshop's advanced features aren't too intuitive to figure out, either).

Building a familiar interface will allow quicker adoption of your product; but a lot of the software people are loyal to the longest doesn't necessarily have the most intuitive interface, but the one that helps you get things done once you've learned it.

Alewife

When I first moved to Boston I decided that before I move away I want to visit every train station on the T -- my rules are that I have to get on or off the T at the station as well as explore the immediate surrounding area.

This week I made my first deliberate visit to a T stop I hadn't been to, though in a somewhat anticlimactic way -- Alewife is one of the closest T stops to my apartment, just in terms of distance, but I'd never taken the T there because there's no bus from my house to there and biking to Harvard (which is close to the same distance) is usually a lot faster overall given the extra time I'd spend on the T.

On Friday, I decided to get to Harvard by biking to Alewife and taking the T from there. Alewife is the last stop on the red line and boasts a large parking garage where commuters from the northwest suburbs leave their cars while taking the train into the city; I was pleasantly surprised to note that they also have huge bike racks, which were totally full in the middle of the day. I took the T back around rush hour, and watched a lot of people get out to go to their cars and bikes -- the people in cars probably live in places like Arlington or Lexington, but since Alewife is kind of in the middle of nowhere I'm curious where all those bikers come from.

Gender and Politics: Followup

Seeing the following in Slate (in, of all things, an article explaining why it's righteous for liberals to vote for Obama just because he's black) helped me clarify some of why I think it was important to bring up the issues my previous post:

(The conservative brand identity also doesn't have much room for opposition to sexism, another legitimate source of liberal guilt. But Hillary Clinton's problems, it seems to me, stem less from sexism than from Clintonism.)

Um, what?

Nobody is calling other presidential candidates bitchy, catty, shrill, or emasculating. Nobody is opening an article in a leading national newspaper with a comment on how much skin the other candidates are showing. Nobody is producing novelty nutcrackers modeled after other candidates (and displaying them prominently in places I run errands). Let me guess -- could cultural perceptions of gender be at work here?

Yes, there are a lot of reasons not to vote for Hillary that aren't sexist. If I didn't think so, I would have voted for her myself. But to say that her gender isn't a liability in her political career is an attitude both obtuse and harmful.

A lot of older feminists who voted for Clinton seem to think that young people who voted for Obama are naive about the issues of sexism Clinton and other women in politics face -- but that's not true of all of us. And a lot of young men who voted for Obama seem to think that their legitimate, non-gender-related reasons for disliking Clinton mean their perceptions are totally untainted by sexist cultural mores -- but that can't be true, either. People who support these two candidates are fighting when they should be uniting -- uniting against racism AND sexism.

Gender and Politics

Like many peolpe my age, I voted for Obama this year. But while I didn't vote for the female candidate, it's not because I think we've reached some sort of post-feminist utopia. I'm not choosing any candidate based solely on demographic factors, but I don't think these factors are irrelevant to the effects a candidate's election will have or the way a candidate is presented and perceived.

I've heard some of my male peers say that Clinton "wasn't a good feminist candidate" because she gained political power partly through her association with her husband; I've also heard them say that it doesn't matter whether we elect a woman president, because there are already female governors, senators, and world leaders in other countries. But I think it does matter -- I think there's a lot to be gained in terms of public perception from having a woman elected president of the United States. We still live in a country where men shout "Iron my shirt!" at an accomplished professional woman -- if they think that's funny, they don't get it, and the day we do elect a woman president is one day closer to people like that "getting it".

The New York Times describes some ways in which Clinton's gender may have affected the race:

Mrs. Clinton’s supporters point to a nagging series of slights: the fixation on her clothes, even her cleavage; chronic criticism that her voice is shrill; calls for her to exit the race; and most of all, the male commentators in the news media who, they argue, were consistently tougher on her than on Mr. Obama.

The reasons I have for voting for Obama don't make me blind to these factors -- I very much do think that Clinton's campaign has been presented differently because of her gender and that she's had to contend with obstacles and perceptions that are never an issue for a male politician. This primary has been framed as a divisive, either-or situation, but it's a false choice. Obama supporters and Clinton supporters are painted as people with no common ground, when in fact most of us agree about a great deal. Just because I ended up preferring Obama doesn't mean that I don't recognize the challenges Clinton has endured solely because of her gender or that I don't see the value in having a woman president for the sake of having a woman president.