A n n a r c h y

A few weeks ago, I had some time to kill at Boston’s Logan Airport before a flight to Denver, and eventually to Santa Barbara. It was a quiet Tuesday in the terminal, and nothing there (a sundries shop, a TBCY staffed by a yawning clerk) seemed to hold much in the way of a half-hour’s entertainment. But as I cased the concourse, the guy who operated the shoeshine stand called out to me, “Hey, Pretty Lady!” he said. “Look at those boots! You need shoe shine!”

If you’ve been in a major municipal airport, in a larger, older US city like Boston, New York, Chicago or D.C., you know what I’m talking about: those ancient wooden platforms with two or three seats in a row and a series of brass foot rests beneath, lined up like gold teeth in an old man’s jaw. The chairs themselves are usually old and carved, too: In a different context, they’d look like the sort of perch a courtroom judge would rule from.

Today, the structures seem quaintly out of place, their old oak forms solid and unchanging even as the terminals around them unanimously get a fresh update with modern glass and tile surfaces. Most of the stands were likely set in place when the terminals were first built in the 1920s, when commercial air travel started to become viable, anchoring them in an era when most travelers wore the kinds of shoes that regularly needed a good, stiff shining.

Only I wasn’t necessarily thinking about that as the shoeshine man called out to me. Instead, I looked down at my boots, which were – he was right – quite scuffed. I thought how that emphasized their mannishness, with their flat soles and battered, rounded toes, and I decided to march my scuffed boots over to him for some shoeshine magic. [Read more →]

The fabulous Toby Bloomberg solicited this from me more than a year ago for a site she was publishing, Blogger Stories. I asked her to let me reprint a modified version here to answer a question I’ve been getting a lot lately, “So how’d you get into blogging, anywho?”

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When I was a kid growing up in the ’70s, and my parents’ friends would ask me the inevitable question, “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?” I would look them square in the eye and say definitively, “I want to be a blogger.”

Well, that’s not entirely true. I did go through a period, when I was about 8 or 9, of wanting to be a vet, until my mother pointed out the inherent limitations of a veterinarian who accepted appointments only with cute, healthy dogs under a year old. That, and I was rather shy—so I never actually looked an adult square in the eye. Truth be told, I never spoke to them, either.

But other than that brief diversion—I had always wanted to be a blogger. In fact, I invented blogging. It’s just that it took 30 years for the technology to catch up. So while I waited, I spent hours every day writing. But unlike my friends who kept diaries stashed under their beds, I needed an audience. I needed interaction, feedback, community. [Read more →]

I got an email from my friend Sharon this morning. She had recently signed up for a Facebook account and had just been “friended” by someone she didn’t know very well. Actually, she didn’t know him at all. She asked something like, “So who is he? Is he a creep? What does he want?” Then, she added, “And since when is ‘friend’ a verb?”

For those of us who work in the digital space and have readily embraced online social media tools like Facebook, it’s easy to brush off Sharon’s condition as Neophyte Nerves. But, in truth, the essence of her concerns about privacy and access to her personal life has been clouding my wizened brow, too. And by “privacy” I’m not talking about access to my data—where I’ve been on the internet, or what I’ve bought, or what I’m emailing about.

I’m concerned with something more fundamental and frailer than that: a sense of having my emotional privacy eroded, and a sense that the level of intimacy I have with my Facebook folks—and they have with me—is not in my control. Facebook has changed the rules. [Read more →]

Over the weekend, my friends Peter Kim and BL Ochman independently tagged me “It” in two blog games (called memes). The object of each is for the tagged writer to reveal personal bits about themselves that you wouldn’t know otherwise, and then to tag other blog authors to similarly spill their guts.

BL (who had been tagged by Toby Bloomberg) asked for “8 secrets,” and Peter (himself tagged by Shiv Singh) asked for four details about four topics of esoteric “things about me”; Peter called it a 4 x 4, which I kind of liked.

Truth is, I’ve been tagged lots of times in the past. But I’ve rarely played along, in part because I didn’t have the right forum: I feel a little weird talking about myself on the MarketingProfs group blog.

Or so I thought. Now that I have my own blog here, I’m surprisingly just as uncomfortable. [Read more →]

Two or three years ago, I found myself on a list of people who take turns cooking in a soup kitchen. And so, every few months, I do.

I can’t say I particularly look forward to it. But to beg off the list at this point would require a phone call to the organizer. I imagine the hypothetical exit interview: “So in what other ways do you help the homeless?” And then I imagine my lame stammer—so, when my number comes up, I again show up at the shelter.

As much as my turn behind the stove never seems to come at a good time, once I’m there, with my hands as two of the several helping to knead 30 pounds of ground beef into 10 meatloaves, it’s not so bad. Actually, it’s pretty gratifying, and it makes me appreciate the basic necessities that I and those around me take for granted. Which is the point, of course.

This month, as always, it was me and retirees: Two older women, whom I’ll call Betty and Wilma, and an older guy, Fred. I was a little rushed getting there—late, typically. And the trio—early, typically—were already in the swing of it when I arrived. [Read more →]

Being a parent for the better part of two decades, I’ve gotten used to accepting the fact that my kids are attracted to things that I don’t like.

When my son Evan was about four, he was shopping with me in a second-hand children’s shop. Rummaging in the forgotten bits at the bottom of one of those boxes of toys that shopkeepers sometimes keep in the corner to keep kids occupied, he eventually unearthed a shopworn plastic figurine of Hulk Hogan.

It wasn’t for sale, but we bought it anyway, and the minuscule Hogan, which innocent Evan sweetly named Kimby, instigated a love of larger-than-life heroes, rangers and comic book characters that has stayed with him in various expressions, even now, as he enters the downside of his teen years. In other words, no matter how much I advocated early on for Pooh Bear, he had his own ideas.

The truth is, we all want our kids to like the things that we like, to have the same sensibility, character, and good taste. But they are their own people, which some of them make clear more strongly than others. And, eventually, all parents need to get over the disappointment; we can only shape so much. [Read more →]