Thanks extended to the "Money Mike" jury

I should have more faith in our local juries.  I should have more faith in our local society, but at times its collective wisdom gets drowned out by distorted national commercial news media rhetoric that seeks to elevate victimhood into something akin to sainthood.

I was afraid that the jury would screw up the "Money Mike" trial process, but in my opinion, they got it right by correctly weighting and apportioning responsibility.  I was pleased to see the verdict  but I was especially pleased to see the corresponding jury recommendation in this high-profile local prostitution / sexual assault case that involved a number of girls from my daughter's high school and thus was of particular interest to our family.

According to local media reports, the defendant was found guilty because the evidence indicated he was guilty, but the jury recommended probation rather than incarceration - a light sentence relative to what was possible under the law.

While it is literally true that a minor cannot legally consent to sex and that the girls in this case appear to have been genuinely assaulted, it is also true that personal responsibility does not spontaneously tumble from the sky in totality on the occasion of a girl's 17th or 18th birthday.  Instead, it is acquired gradually as maturity is developed. And any 16-year-old female (or even a 14-year-old female) being raised in our society should bloody well already understand the fundamentals of right and wrong.

Quoth the Chron report, "A female juror who refused to give her name said, "We felt [the defendant who paid for underage sex] did have some involvement, but at the same time we felt like the girls were responsible."" She's damned right they were. And if this trial had gone the wrong way and the commercial news media had gotten traction sufficient to sensationalize this incident into yet another boilerplate case of hapless females getting victimized through zero fault of their own, it would only have served to further infantilize young women at a time in our social evolution where the process of victimhood-claiming is embraced with an almost religious fervor. This jury has sent a strong message to all of our local young and middle teens that they will be held appropriately responsible for their behavior and their decisions, and I'm very thankful for that. Because if they aren't taught to accept personal responsibility now, they sure as hell won't be demonstrating it a few years from now when they enter early adulthood.

I personally thank the jury for its service.  A job well done.

But the flip side of that coin is that real girls don't sell themselves, particularly when they are old enough to know better, and particularly when they are financially secure enough not to need to resort to that kind of activity.   

Sam

I am reminded of the line from the old Jesus Jones song "Right Here, Right Now":

A woman on the radio talked about revolution
when it's already passed her by.

There's an extraordinary young man from a little town 13 miles south of here and I believe he has already changed the world.

I think we've hit a tipping point with this one, even if we can't yet articulate exactly what it comprises.  But the signs are there.  There is a little gas baggery on the internet, but given the magnitude of what was represented by the young man's recent announcement, gas baggery is almost completely conspicuous by its absence.

Similarly, there are no negative or even neutral reader comments appended to any of the local news stories on his announcement - I keep checking and they haven't appeared, a development which flies in the face of our well-deserved reputation for hosting a large and vocal fraction of right-wing religious fundamentalists (I use that noun loosely).

Perhaps most tellingly, no critical or derogatory memes appear to have been spawned in response to this young man.  You have to remember that the vast internet community, with all of its wing-nut extremism, makes memes out of defenseless people disabled by conditions such as Downs Syndrome, for crying out loud.  The wing-nuts will stop at nothing to defile and ridicule every person and public interest story that makes the news.  But Michael Sam?  Not a single image out there.  It's as if the entire world is holding its collective breath, and holding its tongue, waiting to see what happens next.

But it has already happened.  Regardless of what becomes of Mr. Sam from this point forward, the thing - whatever it really is - has already passed us by.  We'll only be able to really understand it at some unknown future moment of 20/20 hindsight.

As we wait for that point on the time continuum to intersect with us, please consider devoting two of your minutes to contemplating this unusually powerful video below.  If you don't watch a single other commentary on the Michael Sam situation, watch this one. Good ol' WFAA knocked it way, way out of the park (yeah, I know - wrong sport, but you get the picture).  Here's the URL if you're reading this on mobile device, and the embed to follow.

Right here, right now
Watching the world wake up from history.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Olc5C4SXAYM

Goodwill rising, and what it means

Have you noticed the astonishing recent growth of Goodwill Industries, both in terms of local brick-and-mortar installations as well as their burgeoning online presence?

Goodwill has been around for over one hundred years, but it hasn't been around like this!!  I can remember when there was really only one visible donation location in the Clear Lake area.  Now there are eight...

...including this relatively new one right behind our neighborhood in the old HEB strip center at FM 518 and Highway 3.

BTW, how many local people do you think still refer to this as "the old HEB strip center"?  Yes, believe it or not, that corner used to be anchored by one of the original HEB grocery stores.  Years ago, I can remember driving down Highway 3 from north Clear Lake to get to it.  

What's remarkable is that there's a large and thriving Goodwill at FM 518 in League City, and another one just three miles south at the Victory Lakes shopping complex, at 2840 Gulf Freeway South in League City.

And the trucks are everywhere.  Here's one I recently photographed next to the League City Library.  

Their initiatives include forays into online book sales, particularly through retail giant Amazon.

I read constantly, particularly on issues of social policy, and I'm almost to the point where every single book I buy is a second-hander obtained through one of the Goodwill online retailers.  Different branches of the charity independently engage in these sales.  Here you see Goodwill Industries of Denver and Goodwill BookWorks.  

Goodwill's own reporting corroborates what is clearly visible on the ground and on the internet.

With growth like that, it would be a rare darling of the stock market if it were a public company rather than a nonprofit organization.  Screengrabbed from Goodwill's 2012 report.  

Here are the reasons why this situation catches my interest:

1. I am a staunch believer in donating to charity, and I vet each of those nonprofits in which I participate.  Growth of the type shown by Goodwill tends to be a big-time corruption magnet, and so I took a quick look at third-party assessments of Goodwill's current cash flow.  While there have been some disclosures suggesting significant regional abuses, particularly in the area of excessive executive management compensation, Charity Navigator's current profile of the Goodwill Houston group suggests that significant financial abuses are not occurring.
2. I am a staunch believer in bullsh*t detection and elimination to the extent attainable, and Goodwill's unprecedented growth rate speaks to the potential for public propaganda on issues of national economics.  Literally every day there's a new claim about "the disappearing American middle class", the continuing impoverishment of our country, and other perceived socioeconomic atrocities.  Two days ago, the headline rang through most major news outlets that 44% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.  Well, the proof is in the pudding (although I will concede that the devil is in the details).  How do we reconcile the stratospheric increases in charitable donations, particularly of hard goods, with this claim of growing poverty?  Walk into any Goodwill store and you'll immediately get the impression from the quality of the stock that those donated goods are not deriving from the proverbial 1% or anything remotely resembling it in terms of socioeconomic status.  Those donations are coming primarily from ordinary working people who can afford to upgrade their furniture, household goods, and clothing with new purchases, people who donate their old goods after doing so.  

We have our news headlines, and then we have what's actually happening, as verifiable through direct observation of phenomena such as this.  Investigation and reconciliation of those two diametrically opposed ideas, that we are collectively getting poorer even as we are at financial liberty to donate our material goods at record high rates, is beyond the scope of this blog.  But I like to throw questions like this out there because they are routinely picked up and pursued by entities for whom such work is not beyond scope.  Let's hope that this curious question catches the eye of someone equipped to evaluate it.  In the meantime, know that you can probably donate to Goodwill Houston with the assurance that your surplus goods and the value they represent are likely being managed with continuing integrity.

The memory tree

Here's a creative and potentially meaningful idea for those of you, especially you younger people just starting out in your lives, who would like to develop a Christmas tree tradition that's a little deeper than the typical practice of simply buying a chopped-down tree and tossing a bunch of generic plastic and glass ornaments on it. 

It looks pretty and it's very traditional, but does a thing like this have any personal significance whatsoever??  Christmas is supposed to be a time of reflection, humble gratitude, and goodwill.  What do these brand new $2.99 fabric bows have to do with that? 

Screengrabbed from Wikimedia Commons. 

When I was a young woman beginning my post-graduate-school adult life in the early 1990's, I decided that my Christmas tree would be a memory tree, and that I would build it incrementally, year by year, just as I was building my life. 

There would be no cheap garlands and made-in-China shiny tinsel.  There would only be symbols of important rites of passage.  I myself would acquire only one new ornament each year, plus I would add gifts from other people that held personal significance. 

Once I settled on this idea, the obvious thought hit me:  Maybe I would live long enough to see my tree achieve decorative completion, or maybe I would not.  There was only one way to find out. 


A carved cat ornament, hand-made folk art from the deep American rural south, which I received as a gift.  This was my very first Christmas ornament. 

The other decision I made was that I would not kill a tree each year.  I bought a small Norfolk Island Pine, so that it could grow with me and the family I created.  By this time, we have cycled through a few of them, as they outgrew our house!!  One of those is now planted just outside our front window. 

That first Christmas, only that cat hung on my tree.  He was all alone there with his wide-eyed stare.  How could there be anything else on the tree??  I had not built my life yet.  To have a fleshed-out Christmas tree at that point would have felt false to me. 

But then came the relentless passage of time, with all of its extraordinary events.  Here's a small sample from the years that followed. 

From a year when Enron passed out hundred-dollar Swarovski ornaments as if they were candy canes.  And I went to one of those legendary Enron Christmas parties and I wandered around feeling completely helpless, wondering how on earth I would ever be capable of comprehending the essential mechanics of business, because money seemed to be raining down from the sky, and I couldn't for the life of me identify the source of it. 

And the rest, as they say, is history - not just mine, but every Houstonian's.  I stare at this ornament today and I am transported back to those moments of helplessness in the face of hollow grandeur.  And even now, I become as breathless as the now-lifeless corporation whence this expensive bit of glitter derived.     

A sterling silver ornament that was attached with a bow to the outside of one of the many baby shower gifts I received.  It is now tarnished, but to remove the tarnish would be to strip away some of the authenticity, because it's been a long time since I gave birth to that baby. 

A gift from a family member in 1999, because elephants never forget, and I am known for having a very good memory. 

More gifted folk art:  Santa on the half shell.  My extended family likes to support local microbusinesses just as I do. 

As my baby grew, so did the collection of ornamental art projects that she produced. 

A S'mores ornament which we selected to commemorate 2005, because we did a heck of a lot of camping that year!

From more than a decade ago, a twin ornament commemorating the last Christmas visit we had with a close friend's family before she died of cancer.  There's an inscription in the center (redacted here) and the other family has an identical ornament with the same inscription. 

Our chosen ornament for 2010, the year we brought our dog home!!  We had a heck of a time finding this one, and then we had to take a fine-point Sharpie marker to it in order to simulate her brindle coat.  But it's a pretty good resemblance, wouldn't you say? 

The answer for me was yes, I did, in fact, live long enough to see my tree completed - and completed with a richness that exceeded my wildest early-90's dreams. 

May your holiday be deeply meaningful to you according to whatever your personal traditions comprise.

Why traffic lights sometimes sag

Have you ever driven through an area where the traffic lights spanning each intersection are slung so low on their guide wires that they look like they're dangling from the bottom of a hammock?  And you wish you could say to the municipal authorities, "Bubbas, hitch up your signal lights - they're sloppy!" 

I'd show you what I mean, but every time I Google 'sagging traffic lights', I end up with a bunch of hits about sagging pants.  Butt it's a similar idea with traffic lights. 

Screengrabbed from this site. 

Well, it appears that there's actually a method to that madness, a fact I learned only yesterday when I encountered this bizarre scene on Clinton Drive in Houston:

The guy in the oversized Toyota was partially blocking my line of sight, but lo and behold, two guys in bucket trucks had jacked this particular set of loose lights up into the air for reasons that weren't immediately clear. 

But those reasons soon became clear, and so did the mystery of the sagging lights. 

Holy crap - look at the size of that thing!!  I have no idea what was inside Pandora's epic box, but it was headed into the Port of Houston. 

Jacking job done, the bucket trucks folded themselves back up again.  These particular lights are not slung as low as some that I've seen, but it's clear that, if the guide wires had been any more taut, there wouldn't have been enough slack in the system to raise them to a height sufficient to let this thing pass. 

Indeed. 

Before yesterday, it never occurred to me that those lines may have been left loose for a reason.  More than two decades after I started working in Houston's vast and fabulous industrial sector, I'm still learning new things on a daily basis. 

The number ones

This post is intended for other bloggers. 

Tag line:  How to run a noncommercial blog which successfully reaches its target audience.

Answer:  Check your premises, the very first one being, how do you define success?   Prevailing internet wisdom will tell you that success and clicks are positively correlated, but that's a strictly commercial paradigm.  You don't want to maximize total number of clicks - anyone can do that, but it's a mirage because most of the clicks landing on any given website don't mean very much (they just look like they do because they're so easy to measure).  What you really want to achieve is the best possible ratio of high-quality clicks which, depending on your application, might actually mean driving traffic away from your website rather than toward it.  Kinda counterintuitive, eh?   Like swimming upstream against a surging torrent of bytefish. 

Number ones are a proxy measurement of click quality.   If you can hit a number one topic ranking anywhere in Googlespace, you know you're getting somewhere meaningful. 

In my case, because this blog was developed as a noncommercial tool to help people with many of life's more mundane challenges, some of my number ones are pretty dull, as content goes.  But again, one has to re-think the definition of success.  I'd rather reach one person who genuinely needs pay-it-forward guidance on some daily homeowner irritation than reach a hundred people who really don't need anything but are just messing around with internet surfing because they like looking at pretty pictures. 

Of the sixty thousand pagehits this blog has received so far, about 98% of them appear to have fallen into the former category.  Every once in a while, there is a minor blip in comment spam (which is the internet version of graffiti) or bot traffic, incidents which are thus far manageable using embedded tools such as those supplied by fight-back groups including Project Honeypot.  But almost all of those 60,000 hits to date are real enough to result in very high Google rankings.  For grins, here is a subset of this blog's number ones to date:

Yes, absolutely - attic cords are pretty darned dull, as topics go.  But you'd be surprised at how many people are seeking input on what to do with them. 

I am by no means the only homeowner whose carbon monoxide alarm was triggered unexpectedly by carpet cleaning. 

Gardening posts remain popular...

...with the expected strong regional correlation. 

Don'tcha hate it when that happens?!  Me, too!!

And ain't it curious when that happens?!

It's easy to be number one on the topic of stacked stone landscaping in Houston, because nobody does stacked stone landscaping in Houston.  Not yet, anyway.  Except us, of course. 

Reaching a #1 status for a topic like this is really quite cool, because unlike attic cords, this is not an obscure issue.  Many, many homeowners have electrical transformers or utility boxes in their yards that they wish to disguise.  If you were to calculate the amount of money devoted annually in America to the concealment of exterior utility boxes, it would probably equal the GDP of a few small nations on earth. 

Also cool for this topic because, again, it's a subject that a greater number of people are interested in.  And a lot of vendors attempt to attach content to the selling of their floor tile, so having a non-profit, non-traffic-enhanced (read: non-pay-per-view) piece of content snag that ranking honor is not an automatic process. 

And of course, the posting piece de resistance where ranking is concerned.  This isn't just a Google number one - I think it basically dominates the entire known universe on this particular subject, Cherenkov or no Cherenkov. 

By far the biggest change I've seen in the past three years of blogging is the breathtakingly-rapid migration to mobile devices.  That stuff you read about the perilous decline of MSFT's market share?  In my experience, it's true.  People are not sitting at desktop computers any more - they're accessing almost everything they read on phones and tablets (which is why you'll now see me use the word "tap" instead of "click").  I'm to the point of inferring that up to 95% some of my post access is via mobile devices.  This change has been so rapid that those of us who are restricted to blogging freespace are losing our ability to track traffic because technology hasn't kept up (e.g., StatCounter either can't or won't compile details on mobile sources).  So I'm enjoying my ability to identify my own number ones while I can, which may not be for much longer. 

The donation challenge

It's looking better for the Deer Park prairie preservation effort.  When I last mentioned this initiative, it appeared that the clock would run out before enough money could be raised, but the donations continued to flow and the deadline was extended in view of the reported financial momentum.

Status as of August 31, 2013, with about ten more days available for fundraising. 

Screengrabbed from this site. 

If you're like me, you have trouble deciding which nonprofit causes are worthy of your hard-earned money.  There are so many of them and they all need funding.  I have an extended family member who is involved with philanthropic pursuits within one of greater Houston's core counties.  I am told that, just in that one suburban county, there are over four thousand registered nonprofit organizations. 

And a lot of them eventually make their way into the pages of your newspapers or to your front door to ask for support.  And when you tell them that you cannot donate because your charity budget has been max'd out by your existing pledges, their last-ditch persuasion is often, "Well, could you maybe just spare twenty bucks one time for a good cause, then?!"

Hmmm, let's see... doing the math, if I say yes to every local nonprofit who eventually asks me that question, I'll be out about eighty thousand bucks.  I'm afraid that's a bit beyond my reach.  Just a bit. 

It's an epic struggle for a limited number of dollars, and most of the door-knockers don't seem sensitive to the fact that we middle-class suburbanites are faced with an endless stream of heartfelt-pleading solicitors just like themselves.

Microsoft clip art. 

Even when you narrow down the list of those nonprofits that are nearest and dearest to your heart, it's really difficult to determine which are the best investments because the financial representations that you see on the surface are not necessarily the whole truth. 

Here's a prime example from my personal history.  Like much of America, I became enamored with Greg Mortenson's four-million-copy best-seller "Three Cups of Tea" and his efforts to build schools in Afghanistan.  Finally, there seemed to be a viable route by which effective and near-direct developmental support could be rendered to one of the places in the world where it was most desperately needed.

Mortenson's nonprofit Central Asia Institute (www.ikat.org) made it look soooo easy: they associated specific dollar figures with the services that could be provided for those corresponding amounts.  I looked at this list and thought, "Wow - how cool is that??!!  I can work, support my own family, save for retirement, AND pay the equivalent of one or more Afghani teachers' salaries every year!" 

List screengrabbed from this CAI fundraising guide. 

Alas, the situation didn't prove to be anywhere near that simple.  I had done my homework prior to investing in CAI.  I had reviewed third-party assessments including those published by Charity Navigator, which is one of the most prominent nonprofit watch-dogs.  And like the rest of America, I soon became shocked by the allegations of financial mis-use by CAI.

One of the most vocal of the CAI whistle-blowers was investigative journalist Jon Krakauer, who published an e-book titled "Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way".  According to Wiki, it became a number one best-seller on Kindle (web excerpt here).  Mortenson's "Three Cups of Tea" co-author later committed suicide. 

This Google auto-fill screengrab suggests the extent to which Krakauer, who was a prominent American writer long before his CAI expose, has become associated with his allegations. 

The corresponding 60 Minutes investigative footage can be seen here.  Regarding this list above (tap to expand image), are these the kinds of uses to which you'd like your hard-earned money allocated?  Nnnnope - me neither. 

Summary screengrab from Wikipedia. 

Anyway, where did that donation experience leave me?  Once bitten, twice shy, to say the very least.  It's very difficult to vet a nonprofit the way it needs to be done.  It's very difficult to know whether any given donation will be properly applied.  In the case of Bayou Land Conservancy, at this point they seem to be long on appeals but short on contingencies.  One of the most obvious questions that remains unanswered at this point about the Deer Park Prairie is, what's going to happen to all those donations if the $4 million figure is NOT reached??  What will that money be spent on instead, and will the donors approve of that? 

I don't know the answer to that and I don't know the answer to other questions surrounding this organization.  I do know that, in cases where ambiguity exists, I tend to respond by splitting the difference:  I donate, but not as much as I would if instead I had a greater level of confidence in the nonprofit. Charitable contributions are really no different than other forms of investment in which portfolio diversification is key.  By splitting the difference thusly, I can still participate as I would like to, but at the same time if the nonprofit's performance were to tank, I'm not out a large sum of money - certainly nothing approaching a third-world teacher's salary (or two, or three).   

Let's hope that Bayou Land Conservancy can get this job handled the way it needs to be. 

Screengrab from my on-line donation receipt. 

Another man's poison

The content below may not load properly on the mobile devices which are increasingly used to access this blog, but remember Centerpointethemovie, which I published about a year and a half ago?  My husband put it together by image-processing low-altitude aerial photographs, and it shows the progressive build-out of the eastern section of our subdivision over a ten-year period (linked through to this Youtube):

I had to refer back to that in order to launch off a Houston Chronicle piece which, in turn, references an entry by The Atlantic in which some guy imagines that maybe he has done something original and meaningful by creating the same type of image progression, only his version encompasses greater Houston in its entirety:

Oh ye of little technical skill: I can't seem to embed the thing in a frame, so this is the GIF image courtesy of The Atlantic.  The little smudge represented by Centerpointethemovie is somewhere in the lower right hand corner. 

What's striking about this effort is not the content but the judgments rendered in conjunction with it.  The author deems this visible build-out to be "devastating" and likens the resulting image impression to the growth of "slime mold".

Devastating in what specific ways?  Devastating to what, exactly?  Where is the substantiation?  Most importantly, where is the alternate proposal as to how this development should have progressed, in the author's view?  Greater Houston added one million people between 1990 and 2000  - where ought our newcomers have decided to live if not where those newly-developed areas are visible in the photo? 

Decrying a situation without proposing a viable alternative is not an existentially valid process.  Not only does that kind of practice not further the debate, it's actually worse than not saying anything at all, because in producing nothing new while consuming attention, it simply wastes everyone's time and energy which would be far better spent contemplating possible solutions. 

I'm the first one to admit that population growth poses balance challenges - I did that originally with Centerpointethemovie and I did it again just yesterday.  But to liken families with children and hard-working suburbanites to "slime mold" only makes people feel bad and sets our collective social evolution back a small but meaningful step.  When you make people feel bad, they tend to just retreat mentally and emotionally, and as a result of this, less gets accomplished overall, which is a fine result to be cultivated by an author of national visibility (linkback me please, as microscopic as I am) who presumably believes that he cares about "the planet".

From a local perspective, this particular rant couldn't be more timely, because today is the fundraising deadline for the Deer Park Prairie...

...and the organizers have apparently not raised the $4 million needed to save it from a suburban developer's bulldozer and concrete. 

Screengrabbed from this Bayou Land Conservancy site. 

Perhaps if environmentalists didn't have a long-standing inclination to disparage "slime mold" suburbanites to the point of prompting people to tune out, there might have been more public interest in this initiative, which is an important one.  Basically what happened is that amateur naturalists recently discovered a 53-acre remnant of virgin prairie in the City of Deer Park.  Bayou Land Conservancy has been trying to raise the money to preserve it and turn it into an educational center.  You would think that in a wealthy metro area of almost six million slime-molders, a sum like that could be raised, especially given the resulting media blitz (e.g., here, here, here, here, and here).  But if you're a slime-molder, you're already damned, right?  So why bother even thinking about developmental balance? 

Rant concluded for this morning.  Have a slime-free suburban day. 

I did a post on this particular suburban slime mold in February 2012, but its morphological resemblance to Harris County, Texas was purely coincidental.  

Mitigating the madness

This post is dedicated to my wonderful husband, because as soon as Korean Air 214 went down a few days ago, I said to him, "Gladwell is sitting in some Manhattan apartment with his furry head bobbing at his TV set as he's thinking to himself, 'Uh-huh. Yup.'"  And then I forced my husband to sit and listen to me read aloud part of Gladwell's corresponding essay in the same manner as I had inflicted on our daughter just two months ago. 

"Mitigating the munchies" was a post in which I scrounged up a link to a copyright-questionable PDF of Gladwell's "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes". 

My purpose with that post was to draw stark analogy between the crash-and-burn mentality that had previously characterized certain air carriers based in strongly-mitigated cultures, and our own all-American crash-and-burn mentality that characterizes our en masse over-consumption of food. 

Screengrab from "Mitigating the munchies".  We, too, could realize substantial gains if we dispensed with the distorted table manners that have strangely come to see as normal. 

Now with the crash of Asiana 214, there is renewed interest in Gladwell's original essay on the deleterious impacts of speech mitigation.  Dollars to donuts (don't eat too many), the fact that this recent crash involved a Korean airline is not an accident, and the investigators are going to find a speech mitigation component to that tragedy. 

But who'da thunk in the midst of all of this that I might have ever risen to such stratospheric search engine heights as to come in #3 on anyone's Gladwell Google??  I'm a microscopic blog star in my own unmitigated eyes.
:-)

Not just another blogging statistic

In this recent post, I embedded "This Is Water", the amazing new short film based on David Foster Wallace's commencement ceremony address of the same name.  


The partial text behind the actress reads as follows
(emphasis partly mine):

"But if you really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know that you have other options.   It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars  - love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things."  

Film screengrab from "This Is Water" by TheGlossary (as attributed). 

Life in a cookie-cutter tract home is often parodied as the ultimate "consumer hell-type situation", to use Wallace's turn of phrase.  No, that isn't Centerpointe above - it's a photo of another subdivision, an iconic photo that has come to symbolize everything that's stultifying about such a lifestyle.  But whether or not those homeowners' lives are actually hell has a great deal to do with how they choose to perceive their own realities, and how they decide to work with what they've got.  For instance, they could choose to grow organic vegetables in their microscopic back yards if they wanted to do that.  Or they could choose any one of a number of other potentially meaningful pursuits, such as blogging, for instance. 

Now I'm going to offer you a glass of Wallace's water in order to complete the picture of it on a small, relevant scale.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you might wonder from time to time why on earth I write about some of the obscure topics I choose.  For instance, attic stair cords?!  Really?!  Who writes a blog post about attic stair cords?! 

Quoting both Wallace and the Sydney Morning Herald simultaneously, "But the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance."

Who writes a blog post about attic stair pull cords?  People who pay enough attention to know that some other people need that kind of stuff.  This is a zero-money blog.  I don't pay for anything; I don't get paid for anything.  So I can access hit statistics, but only for a few days at a time, because I only have the freebie version of Statcounter, which is a piece of code designed to capture web traffic information.  But even a few days of data at a time is enough to tell me what's going on out there, and what people need.  In just a few days' time, look what happened, as indicated by the green typeface:

Google rankings are often accessible in Statcounter because Google owns Blogger, this platform.   

Replacing an attic stair code is about the dullest task any of us will ever do.  A person has to have a real need for that kind of information before they'll bother taking the time to Google it.  And who might have such a need?  Maybe one of Austin, Fairfax or Cedar Lake is a newly widowed and frightened person who has never had to tackle home maintenance before now and doesn't have a clue where to start.  Maybe one of them is a newlywed who is feeling overwhelmed by the demands of home ownership.  And do you know what?  They would almost certainly figure out their attic stair cord issue without reading my blog post, but the unmitigated fact is, they were never really looking for technical instructions to start with.  What they were really searching for was an affirmation, however small, that they weren't alone - that someone else was with them in the spirit of humanity as they faced their tiny attic cord challenge.  And if I can write a blog post to meet that need for a fellow human being, that is water. 

Sometimes the search strings are even more revealing than that example.  I write a lot of stuff that is mostly fun and indulgent, and there's nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of one's honest labor by describing the neat stuff that its rewards can produce, but sometimes those same topics can have a much more serious place in other peoples' lives.  Late last year, I wrote a post about installing ceramic tile throughout an entire house.  Most of the search strings for that one have been fairly neutral:

It's cool to score a #1 topic rank on Google, especially if the searcher is non-geographically-proximal (because Google prioritizes rank based partly on distance from the source), but ranking goals were not the reason why I started this gig.

So those above were neutral, but every once in a while, a search string will stop me in my tracks:

I was Dallas' #1 ranked hit as well, but that's not what's important here. 

What's important is the tone of that search string.  Dallas is clearly apprehensive about something.  Dallas is afraid of looking funny, afraid of making a bad decision, maybe afraid of degrading their property value.  Only Dallas knows the reason for that fear, but from the tone, it doesn't sound like Dallas is an average happy-go-lucky affluent suburbanite who is about to indulge in the purchase of some new floor tile.  It sounds like Dallas might be going into this decision somewhat reluctantly.  Maybe Dallas can only afford one kind of floor tile, the kind that's on clearance, hence the question.  Maybe Dallas has a child with asthma and the medical bills that go with it - asthma is probably the most common reason for installing a hard-surface floor like tile throughout an entire home.  Or maybe Dallas cares for an invalid parent who simply cannot manage to navigate their wheelchair through pile carpeting.   

If I can help one person who finds themselves in a situation such as what Dallas might be facing, that is water.  And so that's why I write about a variety of things that might seem obscure, dull, or maybe just plain bizarre.  I don't get many hits on much of what I write, but that same stuff seems to find its way onto the computer screens of people who really need it.  And the way I see it, that is what this is all about.  My consumer indulgences and artistic pursuits are fun, but the only real meaning comes from the opportunity to help a few people like Dallas along the way. 

Welcome to the 'burbs, where our experiences really can be deeper than the pockets needed to fund them. 

"The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to see it.  This, I submit, is the freedom of real education ....  You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.  THAT is real freedom.  THAT is being educated, and understanding how to think.  … This is water.  This is water."

Film screengrab from "This Is Water" by TheGlossary (as attributed).