Sarah Jamieson is a metro office worker who aspires to be a writer. She’s 24, slightly overweight, but knows she’s attractive because John at the front desk keeps ogling her chest. Sarah isn’t dating, though, because work is stressful and the hours are long and it’s just too damned hard to find time to go out. The last guy Brian was a jerk focused on unbuttoning her blouse, and Match.com is for losers — so a break is in order. Each evening after taking the G train home she cooks a microwave dinner in her apartment over a Brooklyn grocery, pours a glass of white wine, and retires to a wooden desk, a gift from her grandmother, to write a post for her blog AGirlWithoutAHammock.com. While Sarah types, her Mac’s TweetDeck program flashes updates from online friends every 15 seconds or so — tidbits such as “RT @johnhenry57 Do you remember the first time you fell in love?” — and she feels the warmth of human connection, of belonging to a tribe, of knowing others who know her needs. John Henry lives in Britain, she thinks, unsure and too tired to click to his bio. She pecks out a final sentence, hits Publish Post, tells herself she’ll call her mother tomorrow, and goes to bed.

That story is fiction.

The reality is closer: Many people live two lives, one with a lover or cat at home and another far away in a fictitious corporate environment, a battle of spreadsheets for entities that exist only in legal documents with surnames such Inc. or LLC, in small rooms under fluorescent tubes far from the sun. Hours there are traded for numbers, no more than ones and zeros, that flow like blood into electronic scoring tables called bank accounts, and then can be transferred for goods, food and shelter. Perhaps stunned by the fake ambience of math, these people take recess in online games that pretend to connect to other people, with scoring mechanisms telling them they are growing more popular.

This story is real.

How did our world splinter in two — a home life with flesh and blood, and a corporate matrix populated by artificial-numbered social reality? If veal is disdained by some who would never eat a calf kept in a small bin, not allowed to roam free, trapped indoors for life; then who would eat you? In the United States, 9 in 10 people commute to work by car, spending a collective 3.7 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, only to arrive at job sites that require 9 hours or more of input into devices that lead to numbers in banks. If humans are social creatures, driven by sexual urges to procreate and parental desires to protect our young, how did we mortgage our lust-and-love connections to spend so much time in artificial environs?

Why is that which is closest to our bodies now furthest from our souls?

Social scientist Geoffrey Miller posed in Spent that the world did not have to end up like this; rather, it was series of unforeseen inventions, some helpful — such as trading markets or artificial currency — that allowed us to build and buy self-pleasuring items such as tickets to Tori Amos concerts or Hummers with poor turning radiuses. Unfortunately, Miller suggested, these inventions pushed us away from the bucolic values that once kept tribes cohesive and love close at hand.

Yes, you own a shiny iPod that can pump emotional music into your brain to bathe you in warmth, but you can’t hug your wife or kids at 3 p.m. while flying to Dallas or typing downtown. Technology has expanded our need set; we can fill our lives with near-perfect entertainment tools, the equivalent of 300 plays running concurrently in any hour on our TVs, pre-cooked meals of any flavor, voice transmissions around the globe … and yet most of this time is disconnected from the children who make us laugh or lover who brings us pleasure.

Is this too negative? Look around on the highway in the morning, at the cars crowding you, each with only one person inside its steel box. We have mortgaged our lives, and the answer lies in our drive for loyalty, for the stability of people or places or things that we can count on that will do us no harm. We crave predictability, because it helped our ancestors survive. The best way to predict the future is to find environments that have repeatable events driven by loyal people we trust. As environments have become more artificial, they’ve also improved in stability — and we find that loyalty pleasing.

Consider what loyalty is. Psychology has defined three aspects of faithfulness: emotional attachment (affective), perceived switching costs (continuance), and feelings of obligation (normative). Fear of switching and feelings of obligation are two potential motives for our inertia in staying in jobs, in living the same commute, in not fleeing the business world to go build sea-shell necklaces on a beach in Mexico. The false thrill of numbers in a bank have given us 2 of the 3 loyalty mechanisms we need to stay put in evolving society — we fear switching, and we’re obligated to go on.

But what of the other: emotional attachment? The affective aspect of loyalty is harder to fulfill, because it resorts to such funny stuff as novelty, humor, friendship, compassion and love. You felt this as a child with your mother, and perhaps when dating as a teen or falling for your spouse, the incredible drive to stay forever with another being who is filling your emotional needs. Emotion is the strongest impulse for loyalty, for going on one path and neglecting all others.

About 15 years ago, technology began filling our loyalty gap.

Technology today has accelerated our fake relationships, the reinforcement of stability, of loyal beings who will give us what we need. Social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, email (yes), texting, video-sharing, or Flickr all allow us to connect with others who seem to love us. Of course, they don’t, because love requires commitment and true understanding, but technology appeases those flaws by allowing each user to set up self-filters to screen the content most likely to simulate affection. Twitter brilliantly imposed a gaming-psychology device, a number of “followers” at the upper right that each user can track to see how many connections he or she has, a proxy for requited emotion. Facebook has taken another approach, installing an EdgeRank algorithm that pushes only updates from friends it deems interesting into your stream (based on how often you communicate with them, how many others have commented on the post, and how recent it was). The result is a warm flow of material that seems addressed to you by others who care, each item surrounded by popular comments showing a community of interest.

You are embraced by others who love the concept of you.

Yes, this sounds dark. Grave. Abysmal. But consider the deeper question: if we have lived for 500 or so years trading fictitious currency as a sign for the value of goods, instead of swapping real grain and furs, has the new set of follower numbers and social content that emulate real relationships provided an even more compelling fiction, which will further remove us from the real world in our lives? Perhaps that view is wrong. Perhaps you, reading this, think you have your reality under control, that the emerging smart phones and tablets and social network apps are simple extensions of your communication, just as eyeglasses help you see and sneakers ease the pain of your run.

Maybe there is no seismic shift away from physical, flesh-touching, semen-and-tear-and-Band-Aid- stained reality at all. The glowing screens around us are only tools, not encroaching windows ensnaring us in false worlds. We’ll think of that as we turn off this computer and go kiss our kids in bed.

—–

LINKS

Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780143117230-0

—–

Ben Kunz is director of strategic planning at Mediassociates, an advertising media planning firm. He has designed marketing campaigns for 3Com, the Centers for Disease Control, Cessna Aircraft, Gaylord Hotels, Navy Federal Credit Union, North American Savings Bank, PURE High Net Worth Insurance, Segway, SolarCity, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the United States Postal Service. Ben is also a columnist for BusinessWeek, where he covers the intersection of advertising and technology. You can read his mind at www.thoughtgadgets.com or on Twitter @benkunz.

Jamie Livingston took one Polaroid snapshot everyday from March 31, 1979 until the day he died, October 25, 1997. This immense series of images is the richest modern-day autobiography I’ve ever “read.” Literature fans debate the fate of the “Great American Novel.” I think Jamie has written it within the silence of his Polaroids, but it’s not a novel, it’s a memoir.

At the very end of Carl Raswan’s 1935 travel journal, “My Life Amongst the Bedouins,” is an epilogue that describes a vibrant day of falconing on the desert. It’s a brilliant reward for your interest in all of the previous detailed pages on pre-petrochemical life in the Arabian Peninsula. It’s a clear window into one beautiful day, in a far away place, during an era before most of us were born.

At the very end of Jamie’s series is the unplanned, melancholic and honestly natural document of the final half-year of his life. It’s slippery, a hazard, it unbalances you. The clarity of the day-to-day details of his life: friends, food, stuff, are all passively present, aligned, and expected. Then the path shifts. He becomes ill. The world tilts, the vision narrows, and the previously consistent flow of images skip, jump, and come to a jarring rest. Though it’s been fifteen years since the last image was recorded, we witness his life, and death, in a strikingly present way.

Jamie didn’t post his images to a blog or to Facebook, there weren’t any blogs then, no Facebook.  Jamie saved these pictures in small dated boxes, offline, in a case. “Save them all for what?” I ask aloud at the webpage that contains the images from 1997. Ten years after Jamie’s death, his friends posted his images online as a memorial to his life. Could he ever have imagined that we’d be looking at them now?

An old acquaintance, who was really a friend of a friend, was in a motorcycle accident a while back and was paralyzed. I remember learning about the accident when it happened, feeling a gnawing pang about the awful news, and worried sympathetically about her well-being. I continued to hear about this acquaintance in bits and pieces here and there, but she wasn’t really a “friend,” and I didn’t think it was my place to ask about the details of her difficult life.

On Facebook I’m connected to my friend, the one through whom I met the young woman who had the accident. I was checking my Facebook news feed when I noticed my friend wrote a note on the Facebook wall of the woman who had the accident. My friend then posted to her stream that she loved and missed her friend, then uploaded a gallery of pictures of the two of them together. “Oh no,” I thought. I clicked the link and found a stream of status-updates of love and remembrance.

Sometime within the past few days the woman who had the accident passed away, her death caused by her lingering injuries. The messages from her friends and family turned her wall into a memorial of her life. Old pictures, new pictures, found pictures; there she was, as she used to be before the accident, and after the accident. New posts are added every day.

As I scrolled down the pages, I reached the gap where her postings had stopped and the memorial began. In here, in this plain uncomplicated space, she had died. I lingered over the few, simple, unemotional lines of texts. A friend wrote, “Looking forward to seeing you…” Then a day passed, then another day. On the third day a new message was posted on her wall, “Love you.” Then a dozen more, then another dozen. Then notes of loss, written in the present as if she’s still checking her Facebook page, “I don’t think you even know how much everyone loves and misses you…” “Your like family to me, your so beautiful inside and out.” Then more pictures, videos, messages, and remembrances.

I scrolled back to the top and re-read my friend’s message, “My heart aches. I love you so,” and I had to stand up. I walked away from my computer.

I looked out of the window and gazed over the trees, the dirt, the weeds. I looked down at my hands and wiggled my fingers. I looked up at the sky, at clouds and a pale half moon obscured by daylight. I turned off the lights inside my office to see the moon more clearly and remembered a physics lesson a high-school teacher was once wondrously intent about.

He’d pace across the front of the class, rub his hands together and say, “Energy may not be created nor destroyed; it’s ever present and can only change states, it can only transition.”

Our digital traces spill over with the fervent life of people being people, minutely, brazenly, both boringly and with verve. Our energy is the magnet, life upon life, layers of life, sucking us together into the loudest celebrating sirens. In unison we take our paths and seek the joy of things we hold dear: people, findings, and connections. However loose these things may be, we seem to have much more of them in common than we have any differences.

Our digital traces are sparks that flare across the lives of friends and strangers alike. The machine churns, it makes this magic. If you listen to it carefully it tells you its secret. I found these two life-capsules posted by strangers upon the digital sea. They’ve washed up on my digital island. They say, “look at me, you’re looking at yourself, all these things are temporary.”

And I say back, “Time’s got nothing on the energy you’ve shared. It lives; it’s eternal. I can see it. I can see you.”

It’s your energy, my energy, the energy, energy, energy.

—–

Links:

Jamie Livingston’s Polaroids:
http://photooftheday.hughcrawford.com/

Jamie Livingston on Wikipeidia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Livingston

The Black Tents of Arabia: My Life Amongst the Bedouins
http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780710306722-1

NOTE: I am not posting links to the Facebook pages I mention above. They are private. At a time that the family might make a public statement I’ll provide a link.

—–

After working at a handful of start-ups (and before that, 6 years of art school) Jason Moriber helped launch Wise Elephant, a business/marketing strategy and tactics firm. As of October 2010 Jason is now the Director of Digital Strategies for Waggener Edstrom Studio D. Jason has an MFA in drawing, has played in 4 bands, created and implemented programs for auditors, start-ups, and organic farmers, and am in constant awe of the amazing people he learns about, meets, and fortunately gets to work with. You can read more of Jason’s writing at  NewCommBiz. Engage with Jason on Twitter: @jasonmoriber

Teacher’s note: Students, your mental teleresponse is due Friday, June 27, 2249.

In the year 2211 humanologists exploring the wreckage of the Walmart Towers of Manhattan (once used to manufacture plastic goods that people wanted!) uncovered an archeological treasure in the form of a silver hinged apparatus with a strange Apple insignia. The flat box was made of the same aluminum material once used to wrap fish, only less wrinkled. Was it for food? Or planting seeds? Or throwing at animals? No! The device did nothing useful for survival. But our scientific team was able to connect it to a solarelectropulse and — there! — a glowing screen appeared.

Behold! A Facebook logo!

Our scientists has found a digital record of the legendary Inter Net!

The Inter Net until that point had been a fairy tale, a dark fable used to frighten little children, similar to silly stories of carbon pollution or slave labor or the ogre Glenn Beck, except people in this case performed a mind-numbing exercise called online “surfing.” Until this discovery, humanologists were unsure if the ADHD disease that almost decimated our species had actually originated in metal boxes shipped from California. But that hinged aluminum fish-wrap material held the answer, because there — on the glowing screen — was Facebook!

Facebook, you see, was at one point the center of the Inter Net — a human throng virtualization system, empowered by silver-fish-foil Apple machines, that allowed the appearance of social behavior without anyone actually talking to anyone. We now call this behavior “lying” or “masturbation.” Historians had believed Facebook was similar to the Bible or Talmud fads, the recounting of stories that ritualized society’s hope for survival after death, but discovered upon the silver box’s “booting” that it contained an ever-flowing cascade of fictional real-time information from imaginary friends, parents, spouses and ex-girlfriends with large breasts.

Apparently this Facebook illusion had become a network insinuated deep into the bowels of the entire Inter Net, collecting data as users hit blue “Like” buttons unveiling their preferences for biased news, dancing cat videos, and pornography. (On the archived colored page of FoxNews, users could find all of these in the same location!) Researchers believe the Apple device had belonged to a marketing businesswoman who luckily documented the Facebook “Open Graph” on a blog, recounting its launch as an “application” enabler (clever software given away for free to lure consumers into sleep modes) and subsequent morphing into a vast database of consumer preferences used to create email, direct mail, television and telepathic prospect lists (See chapter on “Experian, Equifax and TransUnion: the Ironic Transition from Financial Transactions to Social Graph Unprivacy Laws”).

Facebook, students, became the nexus of all marketing information! It combined self-submitted profile data with Inter Net observations and mapped the connections between humans! It observed everyone and used that knowledge to help advertisers sell everything anywhere! (See chapter on “Terms of Service Rebellion War of 2013 and Robocalls of 2014”). And as we now know, Facebook’s launch of artificially intelligent avatars in 2019 who passed the Turing test while aiding unhappy divorced men release sexual tension led to the development of blow-up robotic companions who today keep us all warm and comfy.

Unfortunately the silver-fish-foil-wrapped Apple device froze after 47 seconds of evaluation and our scientists were unable to capture the entire history of Facebook’s world domination. The last blog post uploaded into the Telecloud recounted 7.37 billion users interfacing on mobile devices in 2023 while avoiding Google pay-per-click ads (See chapter on “Search Engine Demise: The Shift of Consumer Modality following Chatroulette”). We will never know what our ancestors really did with Farmville or their old girlfriends, or if they knew the prophet Charlene Li was right, that social media would become like polluted, acrid, unbreathable air. It is our good fortune that virtual social media congregations are now behind us and those radiation-emitting mobile phones have been banned like cigarettes. Thank goodness after the head mutations of the 2100s, we all still have our left ears.

Special credit study guide: What color was Mark Zucker Burg’s hair?

(A) Red

(B) Brown

(C) Silver-fish-foil-wrapped with Apple logo on back

Answer: (C).

—–

About Ben Kunz

Ben Kunz is director of strategic planning at Mediassociates, an advertising media planning firm. He has designed marketing campaigns for 3Com, the Centers for Disease Control, Cessna Aircraft, Gaylord Hotels, Navy Federal Credit Union, North American Savings Bank, PURE High Net Worth Insurance, Segway, SolarCity, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the United States Postal Service. Ben is also a columnist for BusinessWeek, where he covers the intersection of advertising and technology. You can read his mind at www.thoughtgadgets.com or on Twitter @benkunz.

This is the first “funny pages” we’ve added to Sundayed. I appreciate Ed Cho’s interest in being part of this project and adding some old-school Sunday fun to our editorial-oriented essays. In tandem with Katy M. Carter’s recipes, we hope to keep diversifying our offering over the next few months.

On that note, I welcome Ed Cho to the Sundayed posse…

“Grooming Interrupted”

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Ed Cho is a cartoonist living in Indiana with his wife and newly born daughter.  He is an active member of The Indy Web Comics Group often referred to as IWG.  Al and Scout is a comic strip he updates weekly about his mischievous cats and can be read at www. alandscout.com. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/edcho7000.

I was younger, more joyfully naïve. I didn’t look at my watch, or check the weather. I was teaching college, living on my own, and burned through my short paycheck before the month ran out. Glee.

Somewhere within the blur of those days I told a student I wanted an old car. My alt-punk roots, bred on the milk of the era before disco, looked to the inherently cool boxy rides of the early 60s as the antidote to the boring family orbs of contemporary sedans. This student said he knew of an old Plymouth Valiant, with the highly durable Slant 6 engine, clean, and with low mileage. It was his grandmother’s car, bought for her by his grandfather, garaged for decades; she drove it a few times and then stopped. (When I used to tell this story, I would say it was his grandfather’s car. Now that I’m older, I don’t care if it was a grandma car. It was still cool.)

I said I’d buy it sight unseen. In a few days the car was parked outside of my school office, down a short unloading zone covered by pine needles. I think I paid less than $600 for it. I couldn’t get over how cool it was AND how affordable it was. I drove it for a month, joyed over its push-button transmission, the low clack of its engine, the way it would wildly fishtail around corners. I drove it all over the Northeast, from CT to Philly, from NYC to the Jones Beach.

Then one day I got my winter-wool sweater caught in the door. I pulled on my sweater and the door mechanism broke, locking the door shut, leaving a chunk of my sweater somewhere inside. Later that evening, as I was easing into a parking spot to check the damages, my turn signals failed. It cost me over $1500 to fix both issues.

So what that my car now cost more than I thought it would. I still loved it.

A year later I was living in NYC. I was driving on the BQE, turning off from the LIE when my brakes failed. Pressed the pedal all the way to the matt, pure silence of gliding along without the engine but not slowing down. The car rolled up a hill, and slid down the next. I pushed carefully on the pushbutton dash, shifting down gears to brake the car, then quickly flipped the joystick style emergency brake with a “whack!” I had the car towed to the street outside of my apartment. It cost me another $450.

In NYC they have this routine called “alternative side of the street parking.” The idea is the city needs to clean the streets with truck-style street scrubbers. The brave citizens, who cannot afford private parking spaces, have to shift their cars from one side of the street to the other at least once a week, to leave room for the street cleaning trucks.

I couldn’t afford to fix the brakes. I figured I’d save up for a few months and in the meantime I’d push my car back and forth. Youth. My roommates heroically helped me push the Valiant from one side to the other month after month. In the rain, snow, and the rain again.

One night I heard some light clinking sounds out on the street. I went to my building door, opened it slight enough to see what was going on, but it was too late. The external details, hubcaps, trim, roofline, headlights, taillights, bumper, everything that could be stripped from the outside of my car was stripped. No! I yelled into the shadows. No! I went back to bed, covering my face with my hands.

The next morning as I exited my building, walking to the subway on my way to work, another Valiant drove up, and tailed me for half the block. I stopped and turned to face it. This guy parked his car and handed me his card. He happened to be a Valiant collector, saw mine on the street, and would pay me $1000 for it. “Slant six engines never die,” he said. His card advertised his asbestos removal business, “The Best-os Asbestos Destroyer.” I said, “Ok. $1000, and you can have it.”

We agreed to meet the following weekend, he’d bring a tow truck, and we’d move the car to a lot he had. He asked if I wanted to tag along as he had other Valiants and maybe, if I was interested, we could work on rebuilding another one of his cars. He said, “Maybe you give me $500 and I’ll store this car for you and we’ll work on fixing it up?” My stomach sank, I knew this was going to end badly. But I was in his car, my car was on the tow truck, I went along for the ride.

When we arrived at his lot there were at least two dozen Valiants, all in different states of repair. I asked him what his plans were for all these cars. He said he was going to corner the market on the Valiant, to fix them up slowly in order to get the highest dollar in the collectors market. His goal was to buy up all the Valiants he could find, keep them, and sell one when he needed the cash. All those cool cars just sitting there, in a lot under the rain, rusting helplessly. On my right was a pile of aluminum trim, shiny bumpers, and headlights that were obviously the missing parts from my dear Valiant. My heart sank deeper. I now knew for sure he wasn’t a good man and I was in a bad place. Take it easy, I said to myself, no fast movements, and you’ll get out fine.

As his crew unrolled my Valiant, sadly naked, wronged from the stripping it received the week before. He turned to me and said, “So what do you say? $400 for the Valiant.”

“No,” I said, “I want my $1000.” His crew stopped, turned to look at me as if to say, Dude, he’s the destroyer, the best-os Asbestos destroyer, don’t be stupid.

“Well,” he said, “its on my property now and I have to go to work, so you can arrange to have your own tow crew come here to get it next week sometime, but that will cost you at least $500. So, I’ll be fair. Let’s say $500. I’ll buy it from you for $500.”

Ill, ashen, irritated and stuck, I said,  “ok.”

“Great,” he said as he reached into his pocket. Then he reached into his other pocket. Then his pants pocket. “Man,” he said, ”I’m sorry kid. I don’t have any cash, no check.

Will you take an IOU?”

—–

After working at a handful of start-ups (and before that, 6 years of art school) Jason Moriber helped launch Wise Elephant, a business/marketing strategy and tactics firm. As of October 2010 Jason is now the Director of Digital Strategies for Waggener Edstrom Studio D. Jason has an MFA in drawing, has played in 4 bands, created and implemented programs for auditors, start-ups, and organic farmers, and am in constant awe of the amazing people he learns about, meets, and fortunately gets to work with. You can read more of Jason’s writing at  NewCommBiz. Engage with Jason on Twitter: @jasonmoriber

Faces are infinitely interesting topo maps contoured by bones, fatty bits, orifices, and sensible sensory inputs that create an phenomenal ecosystem for flooding or farming, all within such a remarkably small surface area compared to the rest of our body.  We have amazing heads. And, that’s why I love pumpkins so much.

Pumpkins are the perfect canvass to translate your ‘inner face’ onto a very big fruit. I love diving into our pumpkin heads with disgust and vigor, and somehow, I muster the courage to scrape and save all of the seeds and then eat them all in one sitting. With resplendent goo all over our hands and kitchen, we begin to contemplate the perfect place to plant our face. Who will we be this year? What inner-face is dying to come out?

In thinking about my past year, and the plethora of so-called merit badges I should have earned, my inner face should be the opposite of a girl scout – maybe it should be a bit messy and twisted, like the drag version of Christine O’Donnell. That could be freeing. It’s expected in our house, when my kids who are pretty good all year want to be something dangerous and scary. Or when my boss, who’s concentrated perdurable charm manifests into Dexter, I understand.

I heard someone talking the other night about rising above the obstacles in your life, recognizing the hard times, and using them to lift you higher. He was a comedian on the radio and in a serious sensitive moment – he was talking about watching an eagle fly into a huge headwind, a storm was approaching, the bank of clouds were ominous and the eagle kept flying at it, not fast, but enough so that he got a lift above it – the bird used what appeared to be a wall of a storm and flew over it.  Maybe that’s what Halloween is about – recognizing an inner face, so that we can rise above it. We dance and fill ourselves with sweets, because that’s what our inner ghoul loves, and before we head into winter, we’ve made amends with ourselves – inside and out.

If you kept your pumpkin out in your garden, watch it wither and sink back into the earth, just in time for winters first coat of snow, wrapping us in a blanket of satisfaction – that another year of challenges and triumphs will come again, with new faces to explore.

—–

Having stumbled upon In the American West by Richard Avedon in the ‘80’s, Leslie Edelman’s casual life on a central valley vineyard became less ordinary. Since then, Leslie has seen the lights of NYC, written poems to the winds of Morocco, and has worked in Advertising on some pretty big brands; Yahoo!, Gap/Old Navy, MSDW, Nike, Kodak, SanDisk, Wired, MTV.  More recently she was the Associate Publisher for Workbook, a strategic marketing partner for commercial artists. Home in San Francisco, she is happily married with two children, two dogs, two cats, two guinea pigs and one fish with a view of the ocean.

It’s been unseasonably warm where we live, and while this fact would’ve caused great disgruntle for me in previous years and locations, I’ve been thankful for a longer spell of mild temperatures before the frozen ground of winter sets in for the long-haul.

But, it is the end of October. Halloween, even. I’ll be making a large pot of simmering spiced cider on this day, in anticipation of chilly weather. The calendar says it’s time to bundle up a little, maybe even sit by a fire. I’ll raise a mug of spiced, sweet-tart cider to that scene.

…………………………..

Spiced Cider
(adapted from a recipe in Everyday Food)
8-10 servings

• 8 cups (half-gallon) apple cider
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• 1 tsp whole cloves
• 1/2 orange, thinly-sliced
• 1 piece (2″) fresh ginger, scrubbed and thinly sliced

Combine all ingredients in a large saucepan, and bring to a boil. Cover, and remove from heat. Let steep for half an hour, then pour through a strainer into cups or 2 quart-sized jars. Enjoy immediately, or refrigerate and reheat later.

—–

Katy Marquez Carter is a recovering graphic designer. After thirteen years of ad execs, faculty meetings, and freelancing, she decided to close up shop and redirect her creative energy to things edible. A self-taught cook, she now experiments on her family (and anyone else who walks through the door), blogging about the results at Thought for Food: http://katymcarter.com.

My love of fall began as a kid with the anticipation of costumes, trick or treating and the subsequent sugar highs. Carving jagged-tooth jack o-lanterns with my family, turning out all of the lights and chasing each other around the house by pumpkin candlelight. The vegetable soup my mom made every year on Halloween, a perfect meal to share post-candy jag. And a yearly tradition not to be missed – watching the Charlie Brown special with Linus’ futile quest for the Great Pumpkin.

During my annual viewing, I was struck by how much of Charles Schulz’ writing would have been over my head as a child. Lucy mentions that a document isn’t notarized. Charlie Brown, in refuting the existence of the great pumpkin, says that he and Linus obviously have denominational differences. And I’m not sure I would have had a concept for sincerity at so young of an age.

Fall is less about candy and costumes now that I’ve grown older, more about the colors of leaves and changing. It wasn’t always so, but something about this time of year makes me more reflective. After watching Linus and his hunt for sincerity, I’ve been thinking a lot about character. Sincerity, a good character trait by any measure.

When I think of the the type of person I’d like to be, the qualities I admire in others, I come up with patience, grace and humility. I’ve told just a couple of people about these personal character goals of mine, and the response has been surprise. When I first registered the surprise it made me question my efforts. Maybe I’m laughably far from these goals? But, no. I think it was something else. We design our lives, plan who we’d like to be in more material ways.

It’s more usual to define ourselves by job titles, degrees we’ve earned, the type of house and neighborhood we live in, things we do and buy. When I hear people talk about  five year plans, it usually involves career or weight goals, whether to have a family or not, where to travel to and so on. Though I have reflected on character goals for myself, I don’t often bring it up in these conversations. Does everyone have secret character goals, and we’re just not talking about them?

I’ve heard that one of the most common Halloween costumes this year is Snooki from Jersey Shore. Wasn’t it Octo-mom one year? I suppose Halloween is the time for fun tricks, a chance to poke fun at these personalities decidedly lacking in character. I’m headed to a Halloween party later tonight and I don’t have a costume picked out. Think I can just tell everyone I’m not quite sure I’m there yet, but I’m trying to be patient, humble and full of grace?

—-

For the inspiration, thank you:
To the anonymous donor to a nonprofit I once worked with for the lesson in humility.
And (don’t laugh, it’s the digital age after all) to the The Sartorialist for inspiring the goal of grace.

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Sara McGuyer works as an account strategist for Wise Elephant, as well as taking on some creative work independently at saramcguyer.com. In the past she has been a book shop manager, an events/pr coordinator and a   nonprofit marketing director. Always on the lookout for spikes in the trend-waves, Sara points out the uniquely effervescent with a diligently discerning editorial eye. Find her on twitter @sara_mc.

“I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.” –Stephen King

Stephen King is a favorite among my students, for obvious reason. His stories are fast and often a little dirty, dealing with monsters and pop-culture. And, his stories are human. When looking at King I’m always reminded about humanity. Each Halloween we read King’s My Creature From The Black Lagoon in my class from his Danse Macabre collection of nonfiction (Everest House 1981) in which King compares and contrast horror flicks with “fairy tales”. This always leads to what is more horribly human, the monsters of Disney films, or the monsters in horror movies like zombies, vampires, and serial killers? In Danse Macabre, King classifies the horror genre into three defined and descending levels; 1.) Terror, 2.) Horror, and 3.) Revulsion.

In discussing the unique nature of terror with my students, I provide a blow-by-blow example as how horror movies reflect the sociology of the past fifty years. In the 1950’s we had the scare of atomic power, leading to radiated monsters movies such as Godzilla, Them!, and Attack of The 50 Foot Woman. Then came The Red Scare, the fear that the Russians were coming for us all with their wicked, alien ideologies and we got Invasion of The Body Snatchers. All of this was terrifying, and horrible, but hardly repulsive. In 1968 George Romero came out of Pittsburgh with Night of the Living Dead, a story based around the old (dead, if you will) eating the young in an era when counter culture politics was at a peak. Even the martyr in the legendary zombie flick is a black man, being chased by dead white folk.

Then, after Vietnam and Water Gate, things changed. The questions of American honor and trust came to play with the slasher flick, the movie about a quiet next door neighbor became the all-to-human-terror, the new horror, and even a little repulsive. In Halloween Michael Meyers chopped sexually active teenagers during the sexual revolution. Friday The 13th had Jason Voorhees and his mother doing the same. What kind of name is Voorhees anyways? In the 1980’s Ronald Reagan called Russia the “Evil Empire” (le Evil Empire in French), and we saw the horror film evolve once again. Then, we saw the larger-than-life dreamy monsters, like Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare On Elm Street, and the supernatural horror of Pumpkinhead, and don’t forget Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. The horror during the Reagan administration had a less than human-fairy tale aspect, like a drunk Disney film. And, once the “Evil Empire” was killed, everything was fine. We had hardly any social problems for horror films to reflect upon, at least that is what our cable news outlets had us believe. In the 1990’s, when the economy was great and the only problem America seemed to have was Bill Clinton lying about oral sex with an intern, and the horror movie became ironic and snarky. There were no creatures from lagoons, or flesh eating zombies. We just had fast talking teenagers and The Fonz from Happy Days in Scream.

Then, in September of 2001, some bad men stole four airplanes and gave the horror genre new life.  As opposed to Reagan’s Nightmare, or the hack and slash of the sexual revolution, everything got repulsively real, and human. Not humane, human. Torture movies became the new horror. Hostel was a smash hit.  Jean Francois Rauger, film critic for Le Monde, named Hostel the best American film of 2006. And, all of a sudden, zombies returned, and they were fast. 28 Days Later ushered in the pandemic zombie, the virulent diseased monster infected with illness that spread like wildfire across the world, like SARS or this new swine flu thing.

When discussing King’s theories on terror, on horror, on repulsion I ask my students “what’s next, what is the new social problem horror films will reflect?” As a kid, King saw The Creature From The Black Lagoon at a drive-in, and the fake rubber-suited actor brought him little fear. But, how human the creature was with his haunting eyes resonated long after the lights came up on the parking lot. My students and I can never agree on what the next Creature From The Black Lagoon is going to be. I think the new terror will be about the repulsive behavior of health insurance companies killing us all slowly. My students say it’s the iPhone turning us into zombies. We’ll never know until we see it. That’s the fun of terror.

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Timothy Braun is a writer living in Austin, TX. He has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi, HERE Arts Center, Edward Albee Foundation, and a Warhol Fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute. He is a frequent contributor to the Austin Chronicle, culturebot.org, and is the founder of Federal Prisoner 30664. He holds an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts and is a Cultural Studies professor at St. Edward’s University. Learn more at timothybraun.com.

I recently traveled to New York City for a speaking engagement.  In preparation, rather than sitting in my hotel room memorizing my speech, I went for a manicure and pedicure at a midtown salon.  The nail technician was a Korean woman in her mid 50’s or so.  I typically don’t talk much under those circumstances.  Soap bubbles, lotion and someone else’s soft warm hands help me relax, meditate on my life and catch a breath.

But New Yorkers are curious about visitors.  She asked me where I was from, why I was in New York.  Since I was dressed casually I think she was surprised to hear I was in town to give a speech to a group of attorneys. That prompted the typical questions about marital status, kids, and job.  My story is not a short one, and so we ended up deep in conversation.

Her story was not a short one, either.  She came to New York from Korea more than twenty years ago but her English was still heavily accented.  We talked about our lives.  I told her I had been married a while then divorced at 35.  She was still married and her children were now in their twenties.

She told me that Koreans have a word and symbol for all of the decades of life.  The word and the accompanying symbol are supposed to embody the spirit for that point in life.  The message is both practical and philosophical. We agreed that 40 is a pivotal age for a woman, whether you are married and a mother or neither, as I am. When she meditated later on the special word for age 40, she had come to a new acceptance of everything that had happened to her before and since.

I was surprised that I had never heard anything about the Name for Each Age. One of my oldest and dearest friends is originally from South Korea and I have recently become acquainted with an American who has lived in South Korea for more than twenty years. Granted, they are men and average men don’t often talk of such things. But most men I spend time with are thoughtful and contemplative and I’m an attentive listener to stories about different cultures.

It took quite a bit of digging by my friend, Bob, to unearth the details behind what this woman had told me. Bob is a former Big 4 consulting firm partner who is an American living in Korea, teaching at a university. He’s just become a Korean citizen. The nail technician had written out the English phonetic representation of the Korean characters associated with some of the ages we had discussed.  This information was scribbled on a product card from the salon. I took a photo of the ad with the scribbling and sent it to Bob via email.

The history of The Name for Each Age goes way back.  It comes, probably from the period of Korean history known as the Three Nations period around 300 AD or even before.  It was during this period that Confucianism and other artifacts of Chinese culture became welcome (as well as political and military alliances).   As such, the Names and their definitions originate from the Chinese language of that period.

Many Koreans know the names but few, Bob discovered, actually know the original meanings.  This led him to the elders in his neighborhood who have had training in both Chinese characters and Confucianism. Bob told me that their translations into modern Korean were difficult since they had difficulty thinking of modern day Korean words to replace the Chinese.

Keep in mind that in the period this originated few people lived beyond age 35 or 40.

AGE      NAME       한글       MEANING

15        Ge Hak       지학       Age where one recognizes the value of education

20        Yak Kwan   약 관      Age when a boy becomes a man  (Sorry. No equivalent for women)

30         I Lib          이 립       Age to begin your life’s planning

40        Pul Hok      불혹       Age when you have enough experience not to be fooled by others

50        Ji Yung       지영       Age when you begin to understand the Gods thinking  (Note: Not religious Gods but forces of nature.)

60        I Soon        이 순      Age where you have the experience to take in the thoughts of others and determine the best and worst

61       Hwan Gap   환 갑    Notable age as you have now lived through one full cycle of the 12 annual symbols (i.e. Year of the Dragon )

70       Ko He         고희       Age where you are filled with happiness  (Because you are not dead, I guess.)

80       San Su        신수      Meaning for this age and age 90 and 100 is as a title only to signify you have reached this age.

90       Chol Su        졸수        See 80.

100    Sang Su       상 수       See 80, and with additional meaning of exceptionally long life.

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Francine McKenna (@retheauditors on Twitter) has more than twenty-five years of experience in a range of industries in the consulting and professional services environment. She is the Managing Editor of the specialized news site, re: The Auditors, that focuses on the business of the Big 4 audit firms. This site provides essential updates on accounting regulation, auditing, and strategy combined with high- quality, independent, original reporting on the accounting industry. She is a freelance writer with credits in the Financial Times, Accountancy Age, Accountancy Magazine, Internal Auditor Magazine and various financial, media, and technology blogs and has been quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Times of London and Chicago Tribune, amongst others. She also blogs at The Huffington Post. She has been interviewed by accounting and social marketing/media sites. Her public speaking credits include private training, university teaching, and speeches for the Institute of Internal Auditors, the Information Systems Audit and Control Association, and the Maryland Association of CPAs.