Voices from the dashboard

Last Friday I had the classical radio station on in the car as I drove to work. In the middle of a Mozart sonata I suddenly also heard, over the music, the calm voice we all know as the GPS lady, quietly announce, "Lane reduced on the I290." I went, "Huh?" This is my first car with GPS and I hadn't thought about the fact that just because I hadn't pressed the navigation button didn't mean it wasn't on. My car knows where it is. At all times. In some ways that is comforting, but it is also disconcerting.

On my way home from errands on Saturday, a segment of a Ted talk on WBEZ focused on a computer program designed to analyze thousands of facial expressions. Again, I went, "Huh?" The scientist programmer explained how helpful this will be to therapists or to those on the autism scale who have trouble reading social cues. While that made some sense, she then talked about how in five years, our cars or phones will be able to say to us, "Marilyn, you haven't laughed in three days. Would you like to hear a joke?" In no way do I find that comforting. I was reminded of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

All the options on the dashboard have made a car as much an entertainment center as a means of transportation. Yesterday I pressed a button and returned a call to a friend while I was driving home from the City. We had a nice chat as I zoomed along at 60 miles an hour. It still amazes me that we are able to do that. But making a call that could have waited 20 minutes until I got home, made me realize a couple of things. I think the ability to control so much of what is going on inside a car gives drivers a false sense of control of what is going on outside their car as well. Maybe it is having a new car, or maybe it is getting older, but I'm giving up chats and will only make calls that are necessary. The road will be safer.

I also realized that I rarely drive in silence. I usually have on an audiobook or music of one kind or another. How much I actually pay attention to what is being broadcast depends on what else is on my mind. If something or someone comes on that I really don't want to listen to, I press another button. These days there are a lot of people I don't want to listen to and a lot that I don't want to hear coming out of my dashboard. I could hibernate, in fact, I want to hibernate by pressing a button to avoid all the sad, confusing and immoral news, whether the newscaster is citing real or alternative facts. But more, I want to understand what is going on, so I may be giving up books and music for more NPR.

Given the complexity of today's dashboards, new drivers might be surprised to know that we used to pay extra to have a radio. In the mid 1970s, my job at Illinois Bell required me to visit customers, so I was authorized to drive a company car. My location had a dozen lined up in a row behind the office building. Of those twelve, only two had radios and they were AM. Those cars were always the first signed out, and you could tell who had the car last by the station tuned in.

As much as I appreciate being told to turn left in 200 feet to get to the destination I typed on the small screen, I somehow long for those simpler, quiet car trips with no choice than to be alone in the car with my thoughts. Or just an AM station playing the oldies.

Marilyn

Goldilocks and the Three Bears

If you do a little research on this fairy tale, you'll learn that it dates back to the early 1800s. The themes, characters and interpretations have evolved from a woman who longs for, breaks or takes what belongs to others, to the contemporary text that focuses on what is 'just right.' That phrase came to mind this week because there are so many things in my day that are just not right. 

I could fill pages with lists of things to follow "it is just not right that..." It is just not right that one friend of mine cannot catch a break. That women still earn 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man. That vital medicines are expensive. But, when I get past the rants of those therapeutic pages of naming things that are not right, I am forced to write the things that I do or do not do that are just not right. A lot of the things on that part of the list relate to what I do or do not do to impact what I'd written earlier. I don't reach out to that friend enough. I didn't go to the women's march. You get the idea.

While I recognize that major issues will not shift just because I start participating, it comes down to a sense of balance and making conscious choices. I'm reminded of an exercise I mulled my way through several years ago. It involved thinking about my life in terms of 'too much,' 'not enough,' and 'just right.' 

That's what I'm going to concentrate on this week. Well, at least I'm going to make a start by looking at all the too much-es in my life - the closets, the pantry, the bookcase, the apps, the anger and despair at the headlines. I'll pick one of the them and figure out what is just right and how to get there. Let me know if you want to join me in the effort and which part of too much, not enough or just right you decide to tackle first.

Marilyn

Calls in the night

Perhaps you, like me, remember laughing with friends as you made one of those childish prank phone calls. 

"Hello. Is your refrigerator running?"

"Yes."

"Then you'd better go catch it!"

Back in those days, in our random dialing, we were usually interrupting a housewife going about her daily chores. If we were daring, we tried the number of a classmate. It was extra funny if they were the one who answered, and we chortled even more as we took them by surprise with our linguistic humor. As long as we did it only once, the grownups shrugged their shoulders in a 'kids will be kids' kind of manner. Our trickster technology was a black rotary phone.

I remember getting my first disturbing call. It was a Saturday afternoon. I had just moved in to an apartment, settling in to be on my own. Not many people had my new number, so when the phone rang, I figured it to be one of a few friends or family wishing me well. My excitement was destroyed after the second "Hello?!" with no response except for heavy breathing. The technology that time was a green touch-tone phone.

Daytime calls like that were bearable, but the calls made in the night were really meant to intimidate. If you are of an age, you may have experienced them, when technology was a blue Princess phone on the bedside table. You knew that most of the time the perpetrator was simply dialing random numbers, but if they got a reaction that titalatted  them, they kept calling back. I was working for the phone company then, and went through training to help our customers deal with these situations. Log dates and times. Have a whistle by the phone. If the nature or frequency of the calls escalated, we would work with the police to put a trap on the line to trace the calls. We were glad when answering machines became one technology that helped, and later when caller ID became the norm.

This came to mind because we had a threatening phone call at the office last week. After doing what investigating and reporting that we could, learning that unlike on TV, in real life not all phone numbers are easily traceable, we determined that it was a hoax. I wrote an incident report and will work with our Health and Safety Committee to refine our policies.

A sad thing is these calls have gone from prank to crank, from childish to churlish. It's a troubling comment on our society that one way we decided this call was not targeting the employee, was that the wrong gender obscenity was used and that there was no racial overtone.The technology is now a call in voice mail or an insulting tweet in the night meant not just for one person but for millions.

I'm reminded of one of the standard old prank phone call scenarios:

"Is Sam Wall at home?"

"There is no Sam Wall here."

"Well, is Frank Wall there?"

"No."

"Are there any Walls there?"

"No."

"Then what's holding up the roof?!"

I don't know what to do about the fact that what once held up our collective roof is no longer there. That what we understood as decent is not what we see or hear from civil servants or leaders. That what was once common courtesy is not common. Perhaps we all need to be much more intentional about random acts of kindness to counteract the random discord making headlines.

Marilyn

Question marks

So much of life is looking for answers. We need some answers to shape our perspectives and beliefs. We want some answers so we can connect to those around us and to the world at large. The questions we form, plus those people we choose to seek the answers from, help us define who we are. Unfortunately, we often are not asking the right questions. We ask the 'what' when we should be concerned about the 'why.' We are waiting for the 'how' when we don't yet understand the 'who.' We look for the 'when' and miss the 'where.'

I think there are a few reasons that cause us to mis-ask. Often it is because we simply have not given enough thought to what we want or need to know. The flip side of that is that we already know the answer and do not like it. 

The questions we ask others, and the answers we provide to those asked of us, are a normal part of social interaction that keep societies and relationships growing and maturing. When we ask the wrong - or just the not quite right - question, we can be testing the waters to see where the other person stands. 

In our busy lives we want simple, so we ask closed questions, those that require a 'yes' or 'no,' that imply a right or wrong answer. We ask simple questions because we have learned those are easier to answer, but, as we age, we realize that so much of life is in the grey zone, not in the definitive.

More than at any other time in my memory, we are collectively waiting for answers to some very important questions that impact key aspects of our lives individually and as a people. Perhaps if we are all asking the same question, it might help bridge some of the gaps we feel. I'm proposing that at least an appropriate, if not the right question, is "What am I going to do today to make the world a better place?" You and I may differ on the desired goal or on the steps to get there, but instead of asking and answering questions we might actually have a dialogue.

Marilyn

Turning the page

Using your finger to swipe to the next screen is somehow not the same as turning the page to keep reading an exciting story. There is something about the feel of the paper between the fingers and the actual flipping of the page that engages the reader with the written word in a different way than how it works electronically. At least, that's true for me and perhaps those of my generation who still love the library as much for the books as for DVDs.

During semester break of my freshman year in college I wrote a Dear John letter to my boyfriend back in Buffalo. I wrote paragraphs about the big snow storm and then made him turn the page before getting to the reason for the letter. I still feel bad about it, but have read of instances where fiancés get dumped via tweet. When I bought my new car two weeks ago, there were several documents where I had to turn the paper over to make sure I signed or initialed in all of the right places to ensure a legal transaction. 

As I write this, it is a day where symbolically we turn the page in a big way. It is a New Year. As anxious as I have been to put 2016 behind me, I turn the page with mixed feelings. It was a year when I was really lucky. On January 29th, I had my first ambulance ride after I walked into a glass wall, fell backwards and dislocated a finger as its tendon popped up through my palm. On June 17th, I was told I had cancer which they removed on September 30th. In some sense I will never turn the page on those events. I have scars, will probably get arthritis in my hand and need to be monitored for reoccurrences of the disease. My landlord put her building on the market and I had to move from a home I'd not been in very long. I found a much nicer place in a lovely neighborhood, so, I recognize all those hard things could have turned out so much worse.

But, as challenging and unusual as my year was, it pales in comparison to what others in various circles of my life experienced. I have two colleagues whose fathers died very suddenly on the same day. I know people who knew a bystander who was shot in this violent year in Chicago, so while I, as they say, dodged a bullet several times, hundreds did not. Thousands of people have lost their jobs or access to vital services here in Illinois because of the egos of two powerful men. A friend is losing her father to Parkinson's. A relative, diagnosed with Stage 0 cancer for which we gave thanks, is now undergoing radiation and chemo because of the results of new tests. The national malaise that Jimmy Carter mentioned in 1979, something that he was criticized for, has returned.

There's a saying that goes something like there comes a day when it feels good to turn the page because you realize there is so much more to the book than the page you are stuck on. It's the first Monday morning in 2017 and there is so much more to life than the things that defined you and me in 2016. Whatever you have thought about trying to do differently or better this year, I'm going to ask you to consider one more thing based on my learnings from last year. I was reminded how much we need each other. Yes, a certain part of the bad and the good that life throws at us we must handle on our own. We are able to do so because of our faith, if we have one, our philosophy and outlook, and because of our connections to one another. I am encouraging you, before you really turn the page on the past year, to reach out to one person each day this week and thank them for something they did that helped you get through 2016. That's seven people or one person who did seven small things or all sorts of combinations of people in your life at tiny or big moments. Tell them how they made it possible for you to turn the page and face what today and this year brings.

Marilyn