I just discovered that my bank does not have weekend hours. I had literally never noticed this, because I’d been working at home since we moved here almost three years ago, and it’s never been a big deal to pop over to the bank and run some errands at lunchtime during the week. My bank is open Monday through Thursday 9-5, and Friday 9-6, which, coincidentally, is almost precisely when I am in the office 30 minutes away.
There is a new bakery in downtown Apex. When I say downtown Apex
, you need to realize that I mean half a block
, so a new bakery is a big deal. The bakery is directly across the street from a large Baptist church. I mean literally, you walk out of this church and you have to intentionally turn away in order to avoid walking right into the bakery’s front doors. The bakery is not open on Sundays. Customers are apparently not their most valuable asset. If this were a James Bond movie, it would turn out that they were actually a front for a heroin ring, but I suspect they’re just stupid.
This reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon: PHB comes in to the meeting and announces, You know how I’ve always said that employees are our most valuable asset? Well, it turns out I was wrong. Money is our most valuable asset; employees are ninth.
Apex would be much more interesting if life were more like a James Bond movie.
I’ve been talking to my officemate and floormates, and some of them have heard of weblogs, but nobody really understands why you would bother. Although that could be a front; I suspect at least one of them is a closet weblogger. Someday I’ll go into work and discover that my officemate is actually Atrios. I’ve crossed paths with some other IBMers who’ve tried blogging, and most of them don’t see the point either. This is not a reflection on IBM; I think the failure rate for blogging in general is extraordinarily high, in terms of people who try it and give up quickly.
If the only people you interact with are bloggers, of course you’re not going to notice this. It’s like when I smoked, and all my friends were smokers. If someone quits smoking, you stop socializing with them, not because you hate them for quitting or they’re actively avoiding you (although both are probably true), but simply because all your socialization happens around cigarettes. It’s not even something you necessarily notice, until you quit, and you realize you have no friends to hang out with because all your hanging out happened at smoke breaks.
Why do people give up weblogs is interesting reading. I think that the weblogging community is highly self-selective, consisting of people who have lots of free time, have excellent internet access (probably as part of their job), and who either:
Of these 3, it is the second group that bothers me the most. I naturally gravitate towards good writers, they’re easy to pick out of the crowd, and reading them inspires me. I’ve written one or two things I thought were pretty good. I go back occasionally, re-read them, get a little smile on my face. Then I go read Paul Ford and I just want to fucking kill myself.
I grew up being taught, believing, and teaching others to believe that there were only two things you needed to do to become a good writer:
But now we have thousands of webloggers who read other webloggers every day, and who themselves write every day, and they’re not getting any better at writing. Some people become better writers through weblogging, but if you look around you’ll have to agree that many don’t. They may fancy themselves as writers, or even journalists, because after all they’ve been writing every day for years. But their latest stuff is just as immature and nonsensical as their old stuff. They can’t put words together. (What’s so good about putting words together? It’s traditionally considered advantageous for a writer.)
This bothers me enormously. First, the mind-boggling lack of self-knowledge required to write every day and not realize that you write badly. But more important, the fact that there is obviously a secret third ingredient required for becoming a good writer. You need to read every day… and write every day… and X. But I don’t know what X is, and obviously my teachers didn’t know either. They had it, but they didn’t know it. Daily writing is not our most valuable asset. So what is it?
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim