Broken Foot Redux

I’m having trouble believing it myself: I’ve broken my foot, not only for the second time, but at the same time of year–right before the holidays. And it’s the same foot. This time I sprained my ankle pretty badly, too, but the bottom line is, I’m back in a boot cast and my foot HURTS! Thank goodness it’s not snowy and icy outside the way it was last year–not yet anyway.

This time they gave me crutches and they’re letting me walk on the heel of my foot a little. Last time I couldn’t put any weight on my foot at all for the first couple of weeks. But it was a different doctor this time, so that may account for the different instructions. Whatever the reason, I’m grateful that I can get around to some extent.

I’m taking this a lot better than I did last time, I guess because I know what to expect. I’m going to enjoy not having to go to work at all, even though it will hurt our budget. And it’s kind of nice to have an excuse for not doing anything around the house for a while. One of the things that was stressing me out was the feeling that I have to get my act together about cleaning and inviting people over. Now I can put that off for awhile.

It’s funny how quickly we forget the lessons we learn! Last time I was so happy to be out of the cast and off the walker that I swore I was never going to take being able to do things for granted again. But it didn’t take me long to fall into the same pattern of wasting my time. Acting like I have all the time in the world. You’d think at my age I’d know better!

Anyway, one thing I have a lot more time for is writing so I’ll probably be posting here more often. That’s assuming that I have anything to say. What am I going to write about: sitting on the couch all day?  Taking a lot of naps? I can do a lot of reading, so maybe I can write book reports. Wouldn’t that be fun?

The End of Reading and Writing?

Michael Ridley, Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Librarian at the University of Guelph (Guelph, Ontario, Canada) believes that literacy will eventually go the way of the oral tradition.  For the past three years he has taught a course called “Beyond Literacy: Are Reading and Writing Doomed?” in which he tries to get his students to imagine a world in which most of our communication takes place without the use of the tools of reading and writing. It will take a while for the transformation to take place, just like it took a long time for the oral tradition to lose its importance as a tool of communication.  Some would argue that the process has already begun.

On his web site, Post Literacy, Ridley writes:

Just as the powerful capabilities of literacy effectively displaced primary orality, so too is it not only likely but inevitable (?!) that literacy will be displaced by a more powerful tool, capability or capacity.

“Post Literacy” is the phrase used to capture the possibility of rich human communication that exceeds (and hence replaces) visible language (writing and reading) as the dominant means of the understanding and exchange of ideas.

Post Literacy, as explored here, is not a decline from literacy into some new dark age but rather the beginning of a transformational capacity as yet unimagined.

And, yes, the irony of having to use visible language to explore all this is not lost on me!

It’s not entirely clear what the new tools of communication will be. In his slide presentation, Ridley speculates about things like telepathy and genetic memory. We’re obviously not talking about changes that will occur in our lifetimes. But I can see signs of post-literacy even in my own life–and I’m a writer and avid reader. I can’t imagine doing without the printed word. And yet I have seen a subtle shift in my dependence on the written word. Writing posts for my blogs is an ephemeral activity: the words are “out there” somewhere on the Internet, but if the host I use shuts down, my words are lost forever. (Except that I’ve been having them sent to me–by using Feed My Inbox–and saving them in an email folder. Someday I will get around to saving them on a CD, but who’s to say that CDs will continue to be readable by  future technologies?) Even in my journal writing: I used to write my journals exclusively by hand, now I rarely do. They used to be on floppy disks but now I no longer use those and just write directly on my computer. If my computer crashes or I switch to a new one, I can easily lose what I’ve written. And yet I find that it doesn’t matter to me like it used to that I save every word that rolls off my fingers.

I find that what I am drawn to these days is what happens in interactions between individuals. The words we speak carry as much, if not more, weight that those we read or write.  I may write a brilliant essay (I wish), but if what I write about isn’t a part of me that lies outside the pages of my text, what does it really matter? Perhaps a post-literate society will be based more on human  interactions and less on words that are stored somewhere in libraries and computer files. There may be something to be said for not hoarding our words and instead flinging them to the skies.

What’s In A Trillion?

I can never seem to wrap my head around the concept of a trillion. (I can’t a billion either, but let’s go for broke.) I still can’t but these analogies help:

1. One trillion stacked dollars would reach one quarter of the way to the moon (60,000 miles–which I can’t imagine either).
2. If you spent one million dollars a day from the time Jesus was born, it would take until October 2737 to spend one trillion.
3. A million seconds was 12 days ago. A billion seconds ago was 1959. A trillion seconds was 31,688 years ago.
4. One trillion dollars could pave the entire U.S. highway system with 23.5 karat gold leaf.
5. If your income since 2006 was $58,000, it would take 17,232,763 years to make a trillion.
6. A trillion dollars would give every high school student in this country a free college education.

(See more examples here.)

I used to think that a million was unfathomable. Now I know that even though a million dollars could support me for 10-20 years depending upon my expenses (more, really, because of compound interest), in many parts of the country that would only buy one or two houses. Even in relatively inexpensive areas, it would only buy a little more than four. When I watch HGTV, I’m amazed–and appalled–at what other people are able to pay for their homes. Where do these people get their money?

I get scared when I see projections that say I need $2 million after I retire if I live another 20 years, because no way will I have even close to that. A trillion dollars would support 500 million people at that rate. I won’t have one fifteenth of that.  So how could someone like me even begin to understand the scope of a trillion?

Finally – The End of 2008

A lot of people are saying good riddance to 2008, but I’m not so quick to write it off.  After all, why are people so negative about 2008? One word: money. People are losing their homes, their jobs, their investments, their retirement. They can’t get credit as readily as they used to, so they can’t spend more money. Banks and automakers are failing and big businesses are laying off thousands of workers. Unemployment is up. Health care costs are escalating. Everyone’s  struggling to make up shortfalls. Cash flow is nonexistent.

We all know the bad news. But is that enough to give 2008 a bad name? What about the good things that happened this past year? At the risk of sounding insensitive to all those who had terrible reverses in their lives, I’m going to point out the highlights of 2008.

First, there was the election, and the campaigns that preceded it. Most people professed to be sick of the campaign by September, if not earlier, but you have to admit that it wasn’t boring. There were the historic events of a female almost-candidate for president, a female candidate for vice-president, and our first African-American president. Those are not insignificant happenings. Who will ever forget this election year, for those reasons alone? There was also an unprecedented grassroots response that made the country seem united for a few short months, even if we weren’t united in our politics.

There’s been so much bad news, it’s easy to forget that most of us had good health, secure jobs and our own homes. We managed to weather the economic and literal storms. We celebrated births and weddings, rebounded from divorces and deaths and lived to see another year. Let’s be gentle with 2008. It was what it was.

However, there’s nothing wrong with looking forward to better. Here’s for new beginnings. Welcome to 2009!