Personal
Personal reflections, comments about things I've been doing, etc.
Living The Great American Novel
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/28/2011 - 12:20The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for jouissance, l’objet petit a.
The words of Emerson, Ginsburg and Lacan rattle around in my mind as I confront the blank page of a blog post yet to be written and the discussions on Facebook of my high school class mates from over a billion seconds ago.
One of them wrote, “Is anyone (else) having any sort of mid life crisis?” and we all shared stories of the difficulties we’ve faced, the broken marriages, bankruptcies, frustrations with our careers, and other struggles that those of us who have crossed the half century line have confronted.
In another post, there was a mention of a play a bunch of us had been in back in high school.
You see, she was gonna be an actress
And I was gonna learn to fly.
Well, I did take flying lessons in the years between high school and where I am now and I sure my classmates have had their successes as well, but
Dreams have lost some grandeur coming true.
Ah yes, grandeur. I always used to talk not about having delusions of grandeur, but aspirations of grandeur. I still dream of writing the next great American novel.
I’ve often been told that you should only write what you know about, so until I get ready to write that great American novel, I guess I have to live out parts of it. Yet maybe, that is the best we can do, live our lives as if we are living the great American novel.
It is great to be back in touch with some of the characters from the early chapters and to wonder what the next chapter brings.
Another Personal Update
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/26/2011 - 21:57It’s day. My mind is full of things to write about, but I’ve just gotten home and I don’t have the time or energy to write as much as I would like.
This evening, I went to the CHC Annual Meeting of the Nursing Staff. Hopefully, I will get some time at work tomorrow to write about it.
I also started playing with a new site, or at least new to me called Mood 24/7. It is a site where people can easily, via a text message, or a form on the website, self report how they are feeling on a scale of 1 to 10. You can share it with your doctor to see if you are depressed (or perhaps bipolar or manic-depressive). You can share it with friends.
It seems like there could be some really interesting information gathered and analyzed, if they set things up right, to track how the national mood, or perhaps the mood of various states. It could be interesting to track the mood of an organization, especially as it explores organizational change.
I don’t know how open they will be with aggregate data or if it makes sense to pursue some other system that will do the same thing and provide aggregate data, but the prospects are intriguing.
Complicate Joy
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 05/22/2011 - 08:36In a little over an hour, I will be sitting on a hill watching my second daughter, Miranda, graduate from college. She is only seventeen but has excelled in the Program for the Exceptionally Gifted at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, VA. It is a time of great joy, yet it is complicated joy.
When she was much younger, her mother and I divorced. It was a painful time for me. Later, I met Kim, whose mother was dying of cancer. As I tried to make sense of things, I took an online college class in grief counseling. It was an interesting experience for me. I had dropped out of college two decades earlier, and this was long before online education had become as prevalent as it is today.
One of the things I learned about was “complicated grief”. There are times that we grieve someone or something that we have unresolved issues about. We grieve things that we may feel disenfranchised from, that others might think we have no right to grieve about. There are many things that can complicate our grief, but we grieve nonetheless.
So, today, I celebrate Miranda’s graduation with complicated joy. I did not get to give her all the things I would have liked to as a father. I did not manage to hold my family together, although I did manage to help create a new, more complicated family structure for her. I did not get to contribute as much financially to her education as I would have liked. I did not get as much time to talk with her about the struggles and successes of her education.
Yet, in spite of my failings, she has excelled, and I have every reason to believe she will continue to excel. There is a great relief in realizing that our children can excel in spite of our own shortcomings. It is an important part of them gaining their own independence and sense of self worth. Yet it is also hard to see them fly the nest.
So, today, I’ll hold back tears of joy, and perhaps a little sadness, as my second daughter heads boldly out of college deeper into the wonderful adventure of her life.
Congratulations, Miranda.
Rapture Road Trip Diary - ShakeDown BBQ
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/21/2011 - 11:01As we started our trip to Virginia yesterday, we listened to various tunes appropriate for a pre-rapture road trip. First up was Freebird, “If I leave here tomorrow, will you still remember me.” At various points along the trip, we listened to other songs that fit the trip. Somewhere in Pennsylvania, we pulled over to switch drivers so Kim could search on the cellphone for restaurants while I drove. The restaurants we had chosen before we left didn’t seem as promising as we had thought. One was about fifteen minutes of the interstate and had mixed reviews. The other was in the middle of a college town that is having graduation today.
Kim spent some time using Yelp’s app, and we finally got off the road in Grantville, PA. There were three choices. One was a hotel restaurant that got good reviews. However, the hotel had some crowd in it and the idea of eating in a hotel restaurant didn’t really fit the bill. The second choice was a dive bar that sounded promising, but perhaps not with Fiona. We ended up using the GPS to find our way to ShakeDown BBQ. It was really good, with a nice smoker and pile of wood out back. We need to go out and give it some good reviews, especially for people heading down I-81. Afterwards, Kim asked what the implications of location based restaurant review sites for national food chains might be.
Why do people stop at McDonald’s or Waffle House? They know what they are going to get. Stopping at The Farmer’s Wife’s Country Kitchen could provide something really good, or something really disappointing. As more people start using location based restaurant reviews, we could see a return to the local mom and pop restaurants that serve up great food the way we used to see before the branding and malling of America.
Of course, a lot of people don’t use location based restaurant reviews on their smartphones yet, so we may not see it as a disrupting technology all that soon, but in my mind, the sooner the better. Oh, and if you’re ever traveling on I-81 around Grantville, PA and looking for some really good food, be sure to checkout ShakeDown BBQ, but check in on your smartphone so you can find it and be sure that they’re open when you are passing by. And yes, they take plastic.
Another Random Day
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/19/2011 - 20:45At work, the AmeriCorps members are biking across Connecticut as part of their service week. Today, the arrived in Middletown. Check out the Facebook page for more details.
I’ve also been working on getting our CRM up and running and sharing ideas with others about CRMs. Do you use a CRM? I’m especially interested in talking with people about nontraditional uses of CRM.
I had a very interesting discussion this evening about the use of QR codes in real estate and on badges after someone contacted me about QR codes because of a previous blog post I wrote. We did some brainstorming about interesting things to do with QR codes. More interesting stuff to write about.
Meanwhile, I’m preparing for my trip to Virginia and trying to avoid getting to wet from all the rain we’ve been having. More later....
