Notes from a Corporate Life: Thoughts on information and libraries in corporations, music and other things.

I think I first heard of the Guardian's 24 hours in pictures from a blog entry by Linda Skrocki - thanks Linda! I just love taking five minutes each day to see some truly refreshing, sometimes disturbing, always intriguing photos from around the world. And sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised to find something new from places I thought I knew well.

Just a quick note after seeing an article, 6 ways you're wasting gas.  This has some good tips on saving gas while you drive. I maintain that simply driving less - what a concept - is the best conservation. But there's one thing in here that touches on something that drives me crazy: people who leave their car running while they go into Starbucks (or wherever). (I will confess I've been tempted many times to jump into one of these cars and speed off. I've not done it yet. I promise to confess here if I ever do.) The article states: "Idling...burns about a half-mile worth of gas every minute, according to the California Energy Commission." Oy! A handy fact to have next time I see one of these cars.

And of course there's this (which I already knew, but the article brilliantly highlights with only a few words): "And don't go through the drive-through at fast food restaurants. You're already paying enough for the oil in those chicken nuggets." Urgh.

This past weekend, on Easter day, came that awful time when we had to confess to our daughter (10 years old, turning 11 in May) that the Easter Bunny - and leprechauns and Santa, all of the magical 'holiday characters', as she calls them - aren't real. That we, her parents, had actually been, well, kind of hoodwinking her all these years. (Of course, we didn't put it like that, but that's how it feels.)

The impending breakdown of all of this started this past Christmas. More and more of her friends were questioning (or flat-out not believing) in Santa. And I suppose at 10, almost 11, it was still a bit surprising to me that she still believed (or mostly believed) in Santa. But my wife and I somehow kept the illusion up with some fast thinking. What was heartbreaking was that our daughter, more than anything, wanted to know the truth. And to tell the truth, folks, we waffled. We didn't tell her the whole truth. But we also realized that we needed to tell her the whole truth soon.

Of course, when our daughter was born, my wife and I went through some brief agonies around whether we should even encourage the belief in Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and all those 'holiday characters'. We knew this day of reckoning would come, but that day was pretty far off when our cute little baby first arrived.

My wife and I both grew up with all of these things, and we decided we wanted to share all the fun that we had with our daughter. While I can see the advantages in keeping a parent's pure integrity in NOT encouraging belief in these things, it just seems unnecessarily joyless to say to a child, 'There's no Santa', when likely, in the US at least, at least 75% of their friends would be chattering away about Santa for much of their young lives.

(The hard-line parent discussions, I would imagine, are probably fraught with their own agonies. 'Well, honey, your friend Johnny believes in Santa because Johnny's parents lie to him about it and make him think Santa exists. They trick him into believing in Santa. Aren't you glad we don't do that with you? Johnny will feel very sad and betrayed some day because of that. You won't, lucky you!' Ugh.)

After the bomb dropped, it turns out that everyone was rather relieved. Frankly, for the parents, it was becoming harder and harder to orchestrate everything, to keep all the logical and logistical balls in the air. For several years, I dressed up as Santa and visited - coincidentally, Dad was never around when Santa visited. You can't get away with this kind of thing forever, leaving these kinds of clues around for an increasingly clever daughter.

Our daughter said it actually was kind of a relief to her to finally get the truth. It was stressful to her to see these inconsistencies and incongruencies (my words, not hers) in the face of what we were telling her about Santa. Two years ago, I had fessed up that I was the one playing Santa, but that there was still a real Santa bringing presents. Then, how come the presents I brought as fake Santa had the same wrap as the 'real' ones from Santa? (Dammit! I guess I'm not smarter than a fifth-grader.)

So, generally, relief all around.

But, being a dad and being overly analytical, I'm still bothered. The most bothersome thing to me is that we've very abruptly removed and changed part of her world view. She truly believed in Santa, and she still wants to believe. Santa, and the Easter Bunny and leprechauns, were a magical part of her world. When you take away those things, you take away a magical, surprising and joyous part of life. Heartbreakingly, at one point she hugged me and said, 'Can we still pretend that nothing has changed?'

I would love to pretend nothing has changed.

Of course, this process is a little microcosm of growing up. Part of growing up is disillusionment, sadness. The world changes. There's no protecting kids from this process.

But it started me thinking that this is a perfect opportunity to start talking with her about other ways life can be magical. To point out that, if you're looking for it, you can find little pieces of magic, joy and surprise in every day. There are, indeed, gifts, large and small, every day. Santa every day!

My cynical side comes crashing into this construct, this attempt to 'save Santa', so to speak. Maybe I'm just an aging adult who wants to believe in Santa, too. Maybe I'm trying too hard to mitigate the situation, and I need to let it go. Maybe I'm fooling myself with this 'magical thinking' stuff. Maybe I'm brainwashing myself into this naive world view, and I should be more of a realist. And my daughter should be a realist as well.

But when you get down to it, what are the qualities of Santa that are so fun to believe in when you're a kid?

Santa means absolute joy and happiness. A world with Santa in it is a giving, generous, kind, thoughtful, surprising and magical world.

What's wrong with that in a world view - even without a real, live Santa?

Mother Jones released a list and sampling of what is allegedly some of the music that guards and interrogators use in American military prisons to 'induce sleep deprivation...and disorient detainees during interrogations'.

A visit to this site is not complete without looking at the comments. People have contributed their own songs to be used as torture, question the validity of the list, and praise or discredit the choices ('I would gladly be tortured by those songs' 'DEICIDE!!!').

Whether or not this is a 'real' list, it's fascinating in many ways. One of the interesting things about this list is the 'genres' it includes. Sure, we've got the hard-core stuff that is intimidating just in itself (Metallica, Dope, etc.), but you've also got the Sesame Street and Barney theme songs, the Meow Mix commercial, The Bee Gees, Don McLean (American Pie), Neil Diamond, David Gray (Babylon - interesting choice) and Prince.

A few of these are good 'torture propaganda' songs, I guess, for want of a better word - Eminem's 'White America', for example. ('Born in the USA' is, of course, misused as it always is.) The Deicide and Dope stuff - and I'm guessing the Christina Aguilera - is obviously on the list because the music and/or topics are inherently offensive to most people, but probably thought most offensive to Muslim prisoners.

Let's face it, if you listen to any song at high volume over and over again without sleep and food, you'll go crazy. This kind of activity is, indeed, torture. Beyond everything that's wrong with any kind of torture to begin with, it's especially perverse to use music to torture. (As a side note, what does this say about music and power?)

But here's what's interesting to me. This list is so subjective. Barney and Sesame Street and Neil Diamond and the Bee Gees are a comment on the music itself: 'I hate this, so I'll impose it on you'.

With AC/DC, Deicide and Dope, though, these are very likely from soldiers' own personal playlists - stuff they listen to all the time anyway.

What does using one's favorite music to torture say about its effect on the listener who WANTS to listen to it? We go back to 'I would gladly be tortured by these songs.'

Are we torturing ourselves with our own music?

I'm not against free expression - you can listen to what you want to. In the film 'High Fidelity', the main character Rob wonders whether we're miserable and so listen to pop music, or whether pop music makes us so miserable. I wonder about this sometimes for myself - why am I listening to this? What am I getting from it? How is it affecting me?

When someone surrounds themselves with music like Deicide and Dope, how does that affect them?

Granted - these soldiers are in one of the most horrific man-made situations ever, all the time, every day. Anyone in that situation needs some support, often in whatever form he or she can get it. For me, I know, I use music as a refuge. But why surround yourself with more hate and horror through music? What good can that possibly do anyone, in the war or outside of it?

'Must have ability to multi-task'. Remember seeing that in job descriptions a while ago? It seems to have disappeared - at least it's not in the job descriptions I've seen recently. I think to a large extent people are simply expected to multi-task these days.

What does multi-tasking really mean? Are there levels of multi-tasking? Is juggling projects considered a level of multi-tasking?  There's checking email while on a conference call - heck, everyone does that, c'mon, admit it - but then there's 'continuous partial attention', now being touted as a admirable quality in the younger generation. This means, at a minimum, listening to your iPod while you text your friend, watch TV and do your homework.

Linda Stone, who seems to have coined the phrase in 1997 while working at Microsoft, states that continuous partial attention is not the same as multi-tasking: 'that's about trying to accomplish several things at once. With continuous partial attention, we're scanning incoming alerts for the one best thing to seize upon'.

I guess I would argue that there are times when it's not possible to separate the two. When I'm deep into research, for example, I love listening to music, but I'm also constantly switching over to and monitoring email. It's the best of both worlds: I'll research for a while, then check email quickly for anything new coming in, switch over for a half-minute and really enjoy a passage I'm listening to, and then I'll delve back into full concentration on the research. When I'm multi-tasking at my highest level, it's like dancing - it's effortlessly coordinated and totally engaging.

It's like a really well-made movie - your focus can change from the music to the characters to the dialogue to the color to the cinematography. None of this change of focus takes away from the movie at all, but enhances it all the way around.

I realize I'm not bringing much new to the conversation. Quite a few folks have blogged about this topic. Perspectives on this range from considering this an evolution to considering it a syndrome. As I've described it above, I would almost call it 'continually shifting engagement'. That sounds a lot better than 'partial attention', doesn't it?

But I've also seen the people (myself included) who can't stop checking email, who talk on their cell phone while playing (well, partially playing) with their children, who interrupt a perfectly good dinner conversation with a phone call or a quick BlackBerry email.

I do believe there is an art to attention and concentration. It takes practice and discipline. It's not unlike meditation; in fact, all this stimuli coming into my attention surely feeds and hypes up my 'monkey mind' that disrupts my limited attempts at meditation. I sometimes wonder why I need all these things streaming in for my attention, what it is I think I'm getting from it, what need it fulfills for me. Does it make me feel needed? Does it make me feel productive? Do I look busy?

Or am I just squandering some good concentration?

In any case, it's been a while since I posted, so I'm glad I did - I managed to listen to and weed out some of my podcasts while I was writing the post.