Words’ End

Today is a day off—U.S. Independence Day, Observed—so it turns out that I have all this time to do whatever I want. In reality that’s not exactly true, as Plans are afoot soon enough, but it’s positively glorious to have nowhere in particular to be for hours on end.

An occasionally resurgent meme has been going around on LiveJournal: “comment on this post, and I’ll give you five words that I associate with you. Then you write about them.” I asked, and I received, and so here they are.

Home. Ooh, this is a good one. I’ve been looking for that for a while. Thought I’d found it with Ethan, but that turns out not to be the case. I miss the home we had [in|with] each other in the first year and a half or so of our relationship. This is somewhat, though not even close to entirely, balanced by not missing the relationship in the months leading to its rather abrupt (for me) end.

When I stayed in Boston after graduating from BU, and commuted to Providence for grad school, initially I lived with Colleen. And other people too, but emotionally it was mostly with her When in late 1997 I abruptly needed to move from where I was living and posted about it to the Moxy Früvous newsgroup, a fellow Fruhead told me she was moving up to Boston in the next five months, and maybe we should think about getting a place together? Five months seemed like a long time, but we did meet at a Früvous show in December with the specific intention of finding out whether this was a good idea, and then wrote each other 300Kb of emails a month or something crazy like that, and in February of 1998 we moved in together. With some geographically and head-spatially induced ebbs and flows, Cee has been one of my closest people for longer than anyone who isn’t my immediate family (brother, sister-in-law, nephew, and mom).

(I have the hardest time calling Jo Ann my sister-in-law. It sounds so… remote. Usually I refer to her and my brother collectively as my siblings.)

In many ways, and up until very recently, that was a unique occurrence in my life. We weren’t related but were quite close, without being romantically involved. It was the quintessential Boston marriage. We seemed to have similar ideas of what we wanted out of a living arrangement, or in some cases we worked it out then. Cee had romantic relationships, and I did too, and eventually, when our adorable quirky 210-year-old house got sold, we moved apart because I wanted to move in with my then-boyfriend. I’ve wondered how differently shaped my life might be had we moved somewhere else together, but ultimately it might’ve been good for our relationship at that particular time. I certainly don’t regret the experiences I did have as a result of that move, either: namely, moving in with a boyfriend who didn’t turn all evil on me in three months’ time, being proposed to and accepting, living together for a while, deciding together that getting married wasn’t a good idea, and eventually deciding together that we didn’t want to be involved, and had in fact grown apart.

All of the time I lived with Chris was hugely educational in that almost completely non-traumatic way, but it wasn’t home in the way that it had been with Cee. We gave it a good try, but ultimately it just didn’t work. I think that one of the reasons for that is my desire to live with other people in community. After some years of living with him, I moved to London to live with my siblings and help raise my nephew for a year, as I was applying for the special-studies PhD program at Brown. That was nostalgic in many ways, I missed my people in Boston, but it was in no way lonely. That was another unique experience in that we bonded, the nephew and I, ooh boy, we did. And I’d lived with Zhenya and Jo before, and we knew we all liked it, and frankly, if circumstances were right (which isn’t likely), I’d live with them again in a heartbeat.

Then I lived alone in Providence for a year and a half. That was perfect, some of my favorite time. I definitely had a home then. Found my feet in that way that’s only possible when you live alone, found my professional feet doing the now-approved PhD in humanities computing, found that having Talan living just downstairs was a good reminder of what it was that I liked about living with other people, without actually living together.

Then Ethan moved in from all the way across the country in Pullman, WA. Someday I’ll write about the arc of that as home, but today is not that day.

The day after I graduated in 2007, we moved to Somerville, a close neighbor of Boston that would be one of its boroughs, were this New York City. We were two humans and two cats in a house of seven humans and five cats (and a dog, and a bird). And/Or was and remains a great place, and was good to live in, but wasn’t that default, deep-down home unless I was actively working to keep my own rhythm aligned to the house’s. Ethan lived there for six months, and I stayed for two years; when I started thinking of how, some years from now, I’d like to be raising a child without a primary partner, And/Or didn’t feel like the right place for that.

So in May I moved to Something Completely Different. We’re experimenting, it’s too early to know, but for now it feels like it felt to live with Cee. People drop by and hang out, from the apartment upstairs and from the outside; a lot of cooking and significant communal eating goes on, insofar as our schedules permit it; there’s both a stated intent and an emotional sense of crafting a home. I’m comfortable here, and even if it doesn’t work, I’ll still have had this amazing reminder, in some ways maybe a crystallization, of knowing what I want in a home.

Heritage. I’m Russian by birth, grew up speaking Russian in a Soviet Republic capital where, like in all of the USSR, the predominant language was Russian. I also grew up in Moldova, where people speak Moldovan (pretty much Romanian) and have Moldovan culture and holidays and food and way of life—and all of that was alongside me, not part of my primary experience. So that’s weird. And it’s weird, too, that I am Jewish (ethnically if not religiously), but didn’t even know my dad spoke fluent Yiddish until I was thirteen and we went to visit his home village and his parents’ graves in the Ukraine before emigrating to the U.S. So I grew up with the Barry Sisters, but still don’t have most of the holidays straight, and don’t like gefilte fish. So that’s weird too.

I was never able to refer to myself as an American, though more than half my life (and therefore part of my heritage) has been spent here. It just didn’t feel like that’s what I was. Oddly, the entire last presidential election season changed that. Then again, I’m a fully vested citizen of the internet, so U.S. national boundaries are about as meaningful as other places in the world.

Dark. A place of introspection, and introversion. A season that’s difficult for me. A time when fun things happen. A time when, and I’m accepting this in stages, I need to take care of myself above most other things in order to remain functional. Also a time when having responsibilities to others (like small-girl-sitting once a week) gets me out of my head and supplies a kind of joy that’s unavailable elsewhere.

Curious. I am! Curious Vika is curious. This sort of gets me in trouble, though not in the way I’m making it sound. I ask people questions and listen to the answers more than I tell stories. In conversation, I tend more toward learning than toward teaching (unless I’m thinking my way through an issue by arguing, which can be great with the right conversation partner). There was just so damn much to learn from Ethan that I fell into this odd and stupid learned helplessness, looking to him for information when I should have relied on myself. When there’s stuff to be learned by talking to someone, I vastly prefer that to finding out on my own. It’s more fun. Unfortunately, it can get on a partner’s nerves.

These days I am re-discovering my curiosity, and pay more attention to balancing out asking questions and telling stories.

Joy. Something I feel quite frequently, in short intense bursts, usually unrelated to any one thing but being rather a confluence of thoughts coming together in my consciousness. Perfect moments, like sunshine and Davis Square and ice cream, or walking under the flame umbrella in pouring rain, singing along with the stuff in my headphones, feeling the air that smells of ocean. Or even snow shoveling during the quiet, voluminous snowfall, under the night streetlights. Or that rare occurrence of having hours on end to do with as I please.

This has been sitting in my blog as a draft for a couple of weeks. It’ll be old news by now, but healthcare is a long-range political issue, and Lawrence Lessig and Joe Trippi‘s latest project Change Congress is still pursuing it, and I think it’s worth a read.

In short: Nebraska’s Senator Ben Nelson opposes to Obama’s health care reform work. Obama is all, hey, we got a broken system. Maybe we should rethink children’s health insurance and also how completely unaffordable COBRA is and what we can do about it, and, you know. Health. It’s one of those most precious resources.

And Nelson is all, Obama is trying to hurt private health insurers by making health insurance public! Socialized medicine! What next, THE FROG PLAGUE?

…Huh. What do you know, Nelson has received quite a bit of fundraising money from private health insurance companies. The article I link to here has Nelson attacking back, but he doesn’t seem to refute the donations.

Healthcare is a tricky and complex issue, and I’ve got no rosy sunglasses on about socialized healthcare. But this isn’t about public health insurance, it’s about elections. Frankly, anyone dismissing an organization run by Lessig and Trippi as a “special interest group” running “a fundraising gimmick” is automatically suspect in my book. And the vehemence of Nelson’s language combined with his considerable extremely-special-interest funding makes me want to go march somewhere and put flowers in these people’s fountain pens. It wouldn’t help, though.

So, how about changing election rules? How about entirely publicly funded election campaigns? Can you imagine how things might go when advertising time is roughly equal and people have to really think before they hurl insults at each other? What if no special interests got to financially contribute to a campaign? Wouldn’t that be nice? I think that’d be nice.

(Edited Friday 12 June to add this update from Lessig on the Nelson thing.)

So, I’d like to write more, but that would involve writing from home, and there’s this problem. My computer (and only my computer; this isn’t a network problem as far as I can tell) just won’t see this site. What it sees is the old site, on the old server, and with the default WordPress styling to boot, not with my customized styling.

My work computer sees the gray-palletted Dreamhost-ed site; my phone sees the same; my home computer sees the old one. I’ve tried emptying cache in all of my browsers, but no dice. What are some other things I might try?

This video—not made by me—is about how I feel when I’m around water. Its power, maybe.

In case it’s not clear, this is a helicopter search-and-rescue training exercise. Read more about the video here.

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

My phone is back. I’ve lost some IMs, some budget updates and… that’s it. Tonight, I back up my computer.

I am so, so glad that I live in an age when I can watch my soon-to-be president’s face as he walks through hallways of walls and people on his way to assume office.

I’ll be telling my children about this day. My goodness, the smiles on people’s faces.

I don’t care if he doesn’t live up to the hype. There’s no way for him to. He’s a person, a politician, a president I want to follow. It’s breathtaking.

(If you’re looking for concise instructions as to how to deal with replacing your own lost iPhone, scroll down to the bottom.)

OK, so I lost my phone yesterday. This is full of suck on a completely subjective scale, but on a grander scale it’s, well. It’s a trifle. It did add an unpleasant dimension to a long, long drive across half of Massachusetts in the middle of the night in the sleeting slush. But it also gave me an opportunity to practice non-attachment, learn whatever lessons I’m supposed to learn, and all those other things I’m slowly cultivating.

(The main lesson, by the way: don’t drive in inclement freezy weather with the phone in your lap, particularly not when you’re tired and won’t notice the phone falling into the snow when you stop to get ice off your windshield wipers.)

This morning I looked through my things again, realized that the iPhone hadn’t magically reappeared, and decided to bite the bullet and replace it. Logged into my account on the AT&T site, checked out my options, and saw that I could get a new 8GB iPhone for $399. Wait, hold on a second. I got it for $199 in the first place, what gives? OH! That wasn’t Apple lowering its price, that was AT&T subsidizing my purchase lo those months ago! New thing learned. Well, damn.

But wait! A refurbished 8GB iPhone is $199, and Apple requires a two-year commitment for that. I’m ok with refurbished, and with the two years. So I call up customer service on Skype, hoping that maybe they’d tell me I can order it and then go to one of the local stores to pick it up, if they have one in stock.

The customer service rep outlines my options, which are different from what I’m seeing on the web. Here are my options as Christopher Estepa (ultimately a great, patient and thorough rep) gave them:

- get a new phone for $399; same phone number, no contract extension;

- get the refurb phone for $199, but that requires a new contract, with a new phone line, and my existing phone line is still under contract until mid-2010, so I’d be paying for two phone lines; or

- get a very basic Nokia phone for $40 and wait until December, when I’ll be eligible for the $199 “upgrade” price.

I’m listening to him outline my options, and I’m furious. First it was completely unclear that getting my phone last year for $199 was only made possible by AT&T’s subsidy. Then they’re telling me that I can pay twice as much for a new phone, but that there’s no way at all to get a refurbished phone for the price the web gives and use it with my existing phone line. There’s no technical reason for this, so I keep insisting that this all feels like a swindle to me.

OK, says Mr. Estepa, let’s have you try to get that refurb online and see what happens. He believes that this will result in my getting a new phone line. But that’s not how it looks from here: last night/this morning when I tried to see if this was for real and started the checkout process, my existing phone number featured prominently on the order form. Like this:

So not only do I have no indication as to this being a contract for a new line, the web is suggesting that I’m still operating within the line I currently use. In addition, while I was still in the shopping cart, the following was part of the disclaimer section: “Your first month’s statement will include a one-time activation fee (unless waived), prorated monthly charge, as well as one month’s charge in advance. If you are keeping an existing plan, the monthly fees you already pay will not be reflected in the shopping cart.” Again, no indication that this is a contract for a new line.

So I add the phone to my online shopping cart, go to checkout. Then we spend something like 45 minutes filling out two web forms.

The first screen I get asks me for my contact info and the shipping info. I enter in various configurations of what they have on file and my work address for shipping, and keep getting redirected to the same page without any error messages. Not OK. Finally figure it out: ALL of the information has to be the same stuff that they have on file for me. I can’t just choose to have it shipped to work. And if it auto-fills in 999-999-9999 for the contact phone number, I should leave that alone since that’s what they have on file and the system horks if I put in an actual number.

Fine, I get through that screen. The next screen asks me for my SSN and date of birth for a credit check. Aha! says the rep. We don’t do that unless you’re getting a new account. Um, ok, so what do I do, and what about the evidence above that suggests I’m not getting a new phone line? Well, he says, let’s try this anyway. Fine, so I enter the credit check info (yes, on a secure website, and at that point, damned if I was not going to try to complete the transaction). On the same screen, I enter the billing address and the credit card info. The total is $208.95, including tax.

I place the order. He says something to the effect of, well, what do you know. He claims that he’d been confused earlier, and that the second option above (new contract, new phone line, still responsible for the old phone line) was for a new, not refurbished, phone. We were talking for over an hour, and I’m generally skeptical of this. My short-term memory isn’t that bad. However, refurbs only apparently became available in December, again according to him, and it just seemed that the information as to how they’re handled hadn’t propagated. Not that that’s an excuse, but given how helpful he was in general, he gets the benefit of the doubt here.

I get the confirmation email, which has some ambiguous language: “Your order may be subject to AT&T eligibility and credit requirements. If we have any questions about your eligibility or your order, we will contact you via email.” Mr. Estepa assures me that what they’re actually checking is that I haven’t purchased any additional phones at a discount. They only let you do this once, apparently, so that people don’t keep buying new-to-them phones and reselling them illegally. Fair enough, although have I mentioned there’s no insurance available for the iPhone?

So I’m expecting to receive this in the next few days. Email says it’ll ship in 2-5 business days, and 2-day FedEx is free. I’ll update if it doesn’t work, but at this point it should. To sum up:

Lost your iPhone? Here’s how to replace it with a refurbished one for less money:

0. Please note that these instructions are most useful for those who are not eligible for a phone upgrade. If you are, you can get a non-refurbished phone for $199. Or so They say.

1. Log onto your account at http://att.com/mywireless/

2. In the Phone/Device section mid-window, click on “check upgrade options”

3. Next to the device you’re replacing, click Upgrade Today

4. From the long list of phones, choose the one you want. As of today’s writing, the 8GB refurbs are $199, and the 16GB refurbs are $299.

5. Go to your cart. Make sure that, at the top of the cart, below your name, it says: “Upgrade: [your city/state/zip] | [your current phone number]”

6. Check out. Make sure that the contact info is the one they have on file for you, and that the shipping address is the same address. It seems, if you want it shipped elsewhere (like, say, to work), your input won’t get accepted. If any phone numbers are pre-filled in with all 9s, leave them be like that.

7. If any of that doesn’t work and you have to speak to customer service, you can use Skype for free to dial toll-free U.S. numbers from within the U.S. (Usually it costs money to use Skype to call actual phones.) If the service rep tells you this price isn’t right, invite them to log into your account and look at the long phone price list with you.

That should do it. If there’s something I’m missing, let me know and I’ll supplement.

I lost my phone on the highway. Don’t ask.

I’m getting a new phone shipped to me; given that it’s a refurb I couldn’t just walk in and get one in a store. It’ll take a few days.

No phone until further notice! Email, comment, etc. I love you all. In fact, I love you so much that I’ll write down all the information you need to get a replacement refurbished iPhone for $200 (8GB) without having to pay for a whole new phone line, even though the customer service reps say you can’t. (!!) I will write it after I eat breakfast, at 1pm this glorious Martin Luther King, Jr. Day morning.

So, to go build stuff abroad through Habitat for Humanity costs a lot. Like, a couple thousand dollars, which may or may not include airfare, and… well, aside from the fact that I don’t have that kind of money, if I did (through fundraising or whatnot), there would probably be wiser ways to spend it on others.

Is there an organization that’ll take me abroad to… do whatever, really, as long as they pay for most or all of it? And here’s the catch: it needs to be non-religious. Like, if a church organizes it, fine, good deeds and all. But if they so much as peep to the natives about Jesus (or whatever), or even hold prayer meetings with the already-converted, I don’t want any part of it.

I know there’s a lot to do locally. Right now I’m exploring international options. I’m particularly interested in Latin America, but would consider other places.

Do I know anyone local who has VHS-to-(eventually)-DVD and/or cassette-to-c0mput3r transferring capabilities? And is either willing to loan equipment or doesn’t mind me coming to them?

I know there are Services out there. I’d like to avoid using Services, mostly for financial reasons.