Of the Refrigerator and Handmade Items

Why do so many of my ideas come to me while I’m poking around in the fridge?  Some people think their greatest thoughts in the shower.  Some people come up with the theory of relativity or write Huckleberry Finn while smoking a pipe.  Neither of these pastimes really does much for me, though.  No, I’m stimulated by the sight of food—or the lack thereof.  If the fridge is full, my mind immediately goes into gear:  what do I eat?  In what order do I eat it?  Will I cook it or devour it raw as MEN ONCE DID?!

On RAW MEAT

If the fridge is empty, on the other hand, my mind goes into overdrive:  look deeper!  There must be something there to eat!  No?  Well then, my hunting reflex is activated.  My mind immediately begins churning out outlandish schemes to lie in wait for an

Rawr. Snack Food.

unwary piece of fruit, to stalk and viciously dispatch whatever animal(s) lunch meat comes from, to set a trap for a pudding cup and then scoop out its innards in messy, tasty victory.  So, with my mind working this hard, I’m all warmed up.  Of course a few other things will pop out while I’m so furiously calculating.

I’m eating right now, actually.  Pretzels (which were not in the fridge) and a piece of coconut chocolate (which was).  The thing that hit me was brought on by the chocolate.  I discovered the box while suppressing the urge to fly into a feeding frenzy and down a few salad dressings.  As you may have guessed, my refrigerator is not terribly food-enhanced at the moment.  The chocolate box has been in there since my birthday a few months ago, which is a miracle deserving of mention in and of itself.  You know how piranhas can strip a cow to the bone in less than a minute?  Well, my family can make any given item of food disappear within seconds of sighting.  It’s not pretty.

But I triumphed this time.  I hid the chocolates behind several jars of old relish and five or six Samuel Adams beers that nobody will ever drink, but we keep around anyway because it’s some kind of rule.  I hid it so well that I forgot about it myself.  It was a gift from my confection-wild grandmother (hereafter “oma”, because it’s what we call her and because it’s only three letters).  She’s first-generation Dutch, so you’d better believe that she knows her candy and chocolate.  Oma, let me take this moment to thank you for one of your great contributions to my life: sugar.  I will never forget your ability to sneak my siblings and I candy when Mum wasn’t looking.  (When I was younger, my mum was a little bit on the “You want something sweet?  Have an apple!” side.  She’s loosened up since, perhaps due to the clandestine efforts of Oma.)

Now, please don’t count the segues between the first paragraph and this one.  I went down so many bunny trails that the bunnies are starting to complain about the traffic.  Here’s what all this has been leading up to:  the box of chocolates said, “Hand-crafted in small batches” inside.

They wrote this as though it was a good thing.  As though I’d feel better knowing that there was the possibility that my chocolate had gone through some lackadaisical chocolatier’s unwashed fingers.  And you know, they were right.  Handmade things are good.

There are plenty of reasons to like machines, and most of the time—all right, some of the time—you can’t complain about the chocolate you make.  And I like machines too.  Things are cheaper, more readily available, and the world has made a lot of

Perhaps a love affair, even....

progress upwards since mechanical devices really gained a foothold in our culture.  And they have definitely gained a foothold.

If people can be replaced by machines, they usually will be.  Employers have a soft spot for machines.

Sure, they break down once in a while, but they don’t complain, they don’t require disproportionate amounts of food, don’t need to be beaten when they slack off in the tobacco fields, don’t convert to other religions to take advantage of obscure religious holidays (Sorry—I’m following Celtic Druidism now.  Odin’s Day is coming up.  Hm.  Thor’s Day, too.  Is that Freya’s day I see on the calendar?  Well, can you believe that?  Another five-day weekend!  Fire me?  I don’t think so.  I’m the only druid in your whole company right now.), and always wash their hands—mixing attachments, whatever—before handling chocolate.  Plus, when they take smoking breaks, it’s usually because they’re on fire.

I’m writing this on a machine right now.  If I tried to get a person to do this job, it probably wouldn’t work out.  He could take dictation, but I’d like to see him save a sheet of paper in rich text format.  Instant messaging would be a hassle.

FRIEND:  So then Alfred Lord Tennyson says to Robert Burns, “Look, are you sure you aren’t taking this mouse a little too seriously?”

ME:  (to my “computer”)  Here’s the address in Canada.  Use your bike—I’m not paying for gas.

Two weeks later, the message arrives:

LOL

And if my computer got a virus, chances are I would get it too.  To summarise, machines are good.

But I like the human element.

First of all, it shows that somebody cared enough about what they were doing to actually do it, and do it right.  Maybe they didn’t care a whole lot, but they did care.  Machines stamp out product after product.  If a machine is set to producing, oh, I don’t know, small statuettes of Elizabeth I and Martin Luther King Jr. lovingly holding a duck, and something malfunctions which causes Elizabeth I to turn into Malcolm X, the machine will continue to churn out statuettes symbolizing two civil rights champions and their differing views on duck-holding.

Elizabeth I

NOT Elizabetth I

A human will try to stop making Elizabeth I look like Malcolm X, because he cares about getting it right.  He’ll learn and progress, and the more he learns, the better his product gets.  Meaning you’ll no longer be stuck with some inscrutable civil rights symbol, but be very happy with a nice new statuette of an English queen and a man with a dream.  So if you’re lucky enough to get something made by a veteran, it’s likely to be some good stuff.  Elizabeth I might even start to look cute.  Machines can be upgraded, but they rarely learn.

Building off that, the fact that something is handmade is automatically indicative of the fact that someone, somewhere has put actual time and effort into making their product.  This time it’s a combination fedora and baseball cap, and I don’t know what that would look like either.  (Edit:  It would look like the following picture.  Oh my word.  I can’t believe this EXISTS.)

I do know, though, that somebody had a vision, and somebody did something about it.  A machine has no sense of time.  It’s losing nothing valuable by just running and running day in and day out.  A human, though, when they’re making the hat, is taking time out of their lives to do this thing.  Very personal.  It’s easy to forget how interdependent we are, because machines are replacing human contact at breakneck speed.  I like to think of that as a good thing, until I remember that, like it or not, I depend on other people to make my fedora baseball caps.  My time often goes towards affecting other people in some way.  Machines make it pretty easy to forget that you actually are affecting other people.  Another pro for handmade things—you’re part of a grand tradition of interdependence.

Also, when you use something handmade and you notice that it’s handmade, you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

I do, anyway.

I’m a computer geek, so machines are part of my life.  All right, let’s be honest with ourselves—I spend most of my life with a machine.  I like machines.  Boon to mankind, I say.  All those lovely little gears and cogs and circuits and fiddly bits… but I hope that some things will never grow out of being handmade.  Every now and then, we need a little reminder that somebody cares.

The Bloody Verdict

After reading a few pages of Brandon Sanderson‘s blog, I became convinced that I should have one of my own.  After all, we’re both famous authors who need to reach out to our public.

Well, one of us is.

So I went to wordpress.org and tried unsuccessfully to be enough of a  geek–technology geeks have all the luck; renfair and general geeks like me get ripped off–to be able to do the whole fancy FTL and PHP thing.  Then I found wordpress.com.  That was much easier.

I probably won’t blog much about social and political issues.  There are enough dang bloggers doin’ that gig already. And I probably will not blog about the mundane details of my life, unless something non-mundane happens, or unless the mundanity becomes interesting.

Not that I won’t do social commentary, of course.  I like ripping on society now and then.

What’s left, you ask?

Well, despite being a middle-class white kid, I have a few interesting things up my sleeve.  This site will probably end up being the repository for any poetry and stories that get rejected one too many times by magazines.  And I’ll probably also put up anything that gets published but allows me to retain the electronic rights.

I’m big on grammar.  You can expect to see some grammar-related things up here.  And book reviews.  Proclamations of impending doom.  A profuse collection of verbose, yet witty thoughts and nonsense.  Dreamy things when I’m feeling spaced out, idealistic, or sleep-deprived.  Mythological things, historical things, fantasaical things, literary things, musical things, writing-related things, geeky things, whimsical things, philosophical things, and just plain stupid things are all likely to find their way onto this: my blog.

We’ll just see what happens.