Dream Log: Difficulties in Communication on a University Campus

 Last night, as I have many times before, I dreamed I was wandering across a university campus. 

In this dream, I was trying to find my way somewhere. Where, wasn't exactly clear. Maybe back home, maybe to someone else's home, maybe just to somewhere familiar, where I had my bearings again. I was about to say that the university looked unrealistic. But I haven't spent much time on university campuses lately, so for all I know, many of them may have come to look this way, with most of the buildings glass-walled, 

 

with much space devoted to huge indoor lounges where students energetically socialized. I walked and walked, in and out of the buildings. Repeatedly I got too cold, then comfortable again, because, in real life, I was slipping out from underneath the covers, and then getting under them again.

Although I was lost, and there were throngs of students all around, I didn't ask anyone for directions. In fact, I didn't speak at all. I was concerned that my absolute muteness might make me seem even more strange to these young people than I already did. But I worried that if I said something, I might make things even worse. And I was finding it very hard to get a feel for how these young people thought. I was worried that they might be somewhat right-wing. I was worried that they might not wish me well.

At one end of one of these glass-walled buildings, a bank of monitors and consoles rose well over ten feet high. I couldn't figure out how to work any of it. And I looked at the videos playing silently on the many monitors, looking for a clue to the students' orientation, and/or the orientation of other people who might be trying to shape their minds. I couldn't tell whether there were ports somewhere, where the students could pay, or scan their ID's, for greater levels of access. 

After a while I turned away from this wall, about as clueless as when I had gotten there.

I saw that PC's were wired to tables throughout the building. There didn't seem to be any charge or ID verification to use them. I was almost broke, and didn't want to spend money on a computer session which I might soon need very badly for a sandwich. 

I sat at a table next to a PC and fumbled through some videos, uncomprehending. A cheerful-seeming young man leaned over me and pressed the lower Left hand corner of the screen of the computer I was using, several times. It seemed to work like changing channels on a TV. 

My first reaction was anger, taking the young man's action as aggressive and/or disrespectful. But then I noticed that I was suddenly much better able to understand the video content on my PC, and that it was politically progressive. I nodded in silent thanks to the young man. He certainly seemed to be progressive, and perhaps he wasn't alone in that. I suddenly felt much safer. I felt on the verge of speaking, and explaining my situation. It was around then that I woke up.

The Old Man And The New Phone

Okay. I bought an LG Stylo -- I think that's what it's called -- *googling* -- yep, I bought an LG Stylo at Radio Shack today and got a $30/month Auto-Boost® unlimited-data plan from Boost mobile while I was there. Just now when I googled lg stylo I saw that it comes with a stylus. I found the stylus. After I got home from Radio Shack I had to call Radio shack again to ask the guy to tell me again where the power button was. Then I looked for an owner's manual, didn't find one and thought, Oh well, I guess I can figure this out without a manual.

Then I found the manual. The first thing that caught my eye was the advice to charge the phone. After a while I found where the battery-charge info is (not sure I'll be able to find it again first thing next try. This is a learning experience), saw that the battery was around 30%, looked around for the charger, and thought that they didn't give me a charger. Oh well, I thought, I can use the charger from my Motorola Droid, right? That's what the U in USB means. So I plugged it into the Droid's charger. No prob, I thought, I can charge them both with one charger. I plugged the Stylus into the Droid's charger.

A little while after that I found the charger that came with the LG.

I'm autistic, and for an autistic person, generally speaking, Change Is Wrong. It's difficult. The LG is much larger than the Droid, which makes me uncomfortable. I don't know if it will tell me with a blinking light that someone has called or texted or emailed me. This makes me uncomfortable. I really like that blinking green light on the Droid, a lot. It has been life-changing.

So you see, I see, change is not always bad.

This phone is about change. (And about another phone line which is going to be disconnected.) The unlimited-data plan is about change. I don't know what to do with unlimited data, but I want to find out. If you know some of the things which are done with unlimited data, please tell me. Don't assume that any information would be too elementary. Pretend that I just arrived from another planet yesterday. When it comes to mobile devices, that's not such a big assumption about me.

I wonder what that stylus does except make me think of the only time I've seen a mobile phone with a stylus, which was in an episode of "The Big Bang Theory," in a flashback, and the stylus, apparently, was so out-of-date that the audience found it hilarious. What was old is new again. Although C-Net sez that the Stylo's stylus is... just a sec... "more of an afterthought." They also refer to the Stylo as a phablet, I word I had never encountered before owning a phablet and bringing home from Radio Shack and googling its name.

Old man in outer space, that's me.

Oooohhh. Owww. Arrrghhh.

That's me groaning in pain. I'm a 53-year-old man and I've owned my first smartphone for about 48 hours now, a Motorola Droid mini, and I don't know how to work the damn thing. (I'm not exactly sure what PowerPoint is.) I've spent hours on the phone with tech support, I've looked through online support pages. This thing is really cool, but, for instance, I'm not writing this post on my new phone, I'm writing it on my PC as usual, because I don't know how to do it on my phone yet. (Maybe it can't be done on my phone. I don't know.) I have written a couple of things on my phone, like the names of some contacts I put on speed-dial -- you can't imagine how long and painful the process of sort of learning how to do that was -- and I wrote the wrong monkey in the Google search window and saw my blog on my phone, just don't know how to post on my blog from my phone yet. And even if I did, it's going to take a while to get used to using those teeny-tiny keypads. I think I've got them set as big as I can. They're set on "huge." If I can find a way to make them bigger than "huge," that would be great. Cause if you ask me, "huge" is still pretty frickin tiny, and I still hit wrong letters a lot. Machete don't text!



I didn't get into computers at all until 1997. I had had opportunities to familiarize myself with IT before that -- a professor comes to mind who, during my most recent failed attempt at grad school, in 1991-92, frequently urged us grad students to avail ourselves of a certain room full of computers. I think it may have been called a computer lab, I don't remember for sure. I have no idea what I missed by never visiting the place. At that time I was still going out of my way to avoid all computers, and I was proud of it. I'm not proud of it now.

My brother went the other way: got awards for programs he wrote in high school, which he graduated from in 1981, as valedictorian. Got 2 degrees from MIT in the 80's, the first one a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering with an emphasis on computer applications. He's literally a rocket scientist.

I took a much more Luddite approach until I first saw the Internet in 1997. Most of my interaction with computers since then has involved -- see, I don't even know now the correct terminology for it. There's online and the WWW and the Internet and email and I don't know what the exact definitions of all of them are and how much overlap there is, but most of my interaction with computers has involved all that stuff. I started this blog in 2009 because 2009 was when someone who had asked me why I eschewed a blog explained to me what a blog was and that Blogspot was one of the user-freindly ways of publishing one.

And now, late in 2014, I cross the smartphone Rubicon. Or drown trying to cross. I'm in pain.

Writing

I've been writing a lot of stuff since the age of 11, if not longer. I believe that was when I wrote my first short stories. I turned 11 in 1972. Not much more than a decade ago, I was still writing mostly with a pen on paper. Then, in 1997, I started to become curious about this Internet thingy, and everything changed... In January 1st of this year, I started writing with pen on paper again, in Moleskinenotebooks with a PilotGS-2 Pro, on pretty much a daily basis. I enjoyed that. I found out that it was Bruce Chatwinwho had given Moleskines their name; I browsed through one of his books and didn't think it was for me, although that remains a very cursory first impression from which no-one should draw conclusions. Anyway, in May of this year I pretty much stopped with the Pilot and the Moleskines, because I had started with this blog, and I'm doing here very much the same thing that I was doing in the Moleskines, except that I'm trying to be more careful here, more polished in my prose style and more reserved with my judgements, and more discreet, because this is going public right away and that wasn't. Some of what I've written here I've copied from the Moleskines. I miss writing in the Moleskines, they and the GS-2 Pro have aesthetic qualities which this keyboard and monitor completely lack, but this blog has pretty much replaced them, whaddya gonna do. After this blog makes me a multimillionaire, I will have the option of writing in nice notebooks with nice pens again, I will be able to pay someone well for typing and data entry, right? Right. Since starting the blog, I've written a page and a half in the Moleskine. A page and a half in a month and a half, noting when I started using a new disposable razor, when I set a new personal best in the number of reps of the Upward Dog I could do in a set, and not a whole lot more than that. [PS, 15 March 2022: I thought they were called Upward Dogs, but what I was doing was going from laying flat on my back, going to a fully extended bridge, then all the way back down. That was one rep.] A page and a half. I was averaging more than that in a day. I used to be downright hostile toward computers, in a way which seems to me, in retrospect, quite neo-Luddite. I used to say that I wanted to chisel my writing into granite, rather than enter it into a database via a keyboard. (I never have learned to chisel granite, despite those repeated blustering pronouncements.) It is clear, in retrospect, that my hostility was based in ignorance, and in the frustration of having tried a few times to use computers, and failed, a frustration familiar to many of us not that IT has spread so wide. I eventually learned to do a few things with computers and with the Inner Tubes, as have so many of us. I can't be objective about the quality of my own writing, I never have been able to do that. It's very often painful to look at things I've written. Kurt Vonnegut'scomment about how he felt lousy about all the books he'd written, and Samuel Beckett'scomment about how to write is to fail, both resonate strongly with me. So I just get through each piece of writing as best I can, hope that it's not too much of an affront to my readers' taste and intelligence, and then get on to the next one. I can say of myself with some confidence that I'm a good reader, and I think there's often a connection between that and writing well, and so that gives me hope that it may not have been fully futile, all the time I've spent writing so many different things, two unpublished novels, large chunks of several more which I may or may not ever finished, who knows how many short stories, essays, letters, journal essays, emails, Internet forum posts, blog posts. Queries... Reflections on the pleasures of well-made notebooks and pens, on the frustrations and ironies and trade-offs of life.