BakerVillage

Dodgeball Promo 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Baker) — Mon, 11 May 2009 18:38:00 +0000

This year's dodgeball promo is in. Fun for the whole family. You should really watch it.

We Need a New Word

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Baker) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 03:21:00 +0000

The English language has proven to be incomplete for some time now. We have one word for love; making what I feel for my wife indistinguishable from how I feel about Chile Verde. We have no pronoun for the plural second person, unless you count the southern "y'all", which I typically don't. And just recently it has become very clear to me that we do not have enough words for friend.

The problem seems to stem from English teachers and their love of tradition and rules. You are not allowed to make up words willy nilly, even if you clearly define them. And perhaps that is the problem, it's one of definition. We've moved past traditional means of communication in this world. Our relationships now take on different forms. Even before the internet you began to see it in the way we idolize celebrities like movie stars. But we do have a relationship with them. Specifically we have a one way dialogue with no physical interaction. The word "friend" does not apply to that form of relationship. Yet how many of us were affected by the news that Michael J. Fox had Parkinson's Disease? Can you say that you were unmoved by the death of Heath Ledger? It wasn't a mere curiosity, like watching a car wreck, there was something more. It was not particularly powerful, but a relationship did exist that caused a sense of loss when you heard the bad news.

Let's transfer this thought into our current Web 2.0 lifestyle. Applications like Facebook and Twitter allow us to add onto the way we interact with our traditionally defined friends. I can now notify my entire circle of friends of what I'm doing during the day when we otherwise wouldn't be able to communicate, at least not in that kind of detail to that many friends. But it also allows me to communicate with people whom I will never meet like Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the creators of the webcomic Penny Arcade, or Wil Wheaton who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek The Next Generation. I am not friends with people and I'm not delusional enough to over exaggerate my importance in their lives. But we do have a relationship. I hear details of their lives that they allow to make public. I hear their witty banter, their likes and dislikes, and I can even communicate back to them, though my voice is very small in comparison to the many voices that use these channels to contact them. I might consider them more important to me than most actors, but they are still a far distance from even being considered an acquaintance since that usually implies a personal meeting of some sort.

But of course not everyone you meet on the internet is famous, despite the number of hits they get on their blog. Lots of companies are spending a lot of money developing the implementation of virtual worlds. These experiences in gaming are especially unique. People who play World of Warcraft or Eve Online talk with one another on a regular basis. They plan online events together to achieve common goals. During the downtime it is natural to talk about work or your kids. You guild probably has a website with forum that you post pictures on have discussions about everything from what movie everyone is excited about this weekend to the death of a parent. Usually as people get to know one another they move on to also become friends on Facebook and Twitter and they may even IM from time to time. Rarely do they ever meet in person, although it does happen fairly often at conventions and such. They are not friends and I am not trying to convince you that they should be considered so. They will not attend your wedding, though they may want to see photos afterward. They will not cover you when you forget your wallet at lunch. You will most likely never see them laugh at a joke you've made, though they may still laugh you won't see it. You'll only see "LOL" on the screen. What I am arguing is that you do have a relationship and for some people it might be a good deal more intimate that the relationships they share with their "real friends". We just don't have a word for that relationship yet. We should, but we don't, and I feel that as we surround ourselves with media and social networking and virtual worlds and the number of these undefined relationships begin to rise, we will have to create one. Or we could do as English usually does and just reuse an old word to make it's true meaning more vague. In which case we'll just call them friends.

Lucky Breaks

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Baker) — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 09:26:00 +0000

I had a 65 year plan for my life. It started at age one and ended at age 65 when I actually wrote that I planned to die of cancer to which I was predisposed. I was always a bit morbid, but in reality I saw it as liberating. I wanted to complete everything that I wanted to complete by age 65 so that then I could die at anytime satisfied in the knowledge that my list of desired accomplishments had been met. Apparently in my teen years I viewed life as a set of chores that must be accomplished before you can be looked upon with admiration from your peers and your posterity. My plan had many milestones. I can remember giving myself a generous portion of time to earn my PhD. I set the year for 2007, because you know, things happen and I shouldn't rush the experience to finish by age 26. I wasn't supposed to meet my future wife until after age 25 and we were to be married when I was 28. Kids would come at age 30 along with the PhD. Fatherhood and career would have the same starting point. Both were the realms in which adults lived their lives and there was sort of an aesthetic beauty to the idea of accumulating knowledge in your twenties and applying it in your thirties. The age of 30 seemed a natural pivot point for life. For some reason I believed that a zero in the ones position of a number held some mystic power that could be tapped through proper planning. During this time it should also be noted that I regularly rotated the canned goods in my cabinets so that all of the labels faced forward. I feel both these activities are related somehow.

But as you will remember this writing began with the statement that I had a 65 year plan for my life, past tense. Comparing my life to what I had planned, it is hard to shake the notion that I have failed. I have recently turned 32, but I have no doctorate and I am not a professor. I am still working on my masters degree, and doubting that I chose the right path to begin with. I don't write this to complain or to get down on my life, doing so would be an act of megalomania. I have a good life, a wonderful wife and good job. I have good friends and I get to enjoy so many luxuries that are beyond the reach of so many. Only a right jackass could complain about my life, but at the same time others have accomplished so much more it's hard not to compare, even if just for the sake of learning and maybe even a mid course correction.

I have been reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and one of the characteristics that most often accompanies great success is time. Time spent doing what it is that you will be great at. He even mentioned a rule of 10,000 hours, that most people whoa re great at what they do have spent about 10,000 hours doing that thing. But time is something I have never had much of. When I look at my calendar I see lots of different colors. Blue for work and all of it's meetings and deadlines, red for Fresno State and the classes I'm taking and projects I'm working on, green for the community college I teach at, and black for my personal life. There isn't much black on my calendar. I have multiple calendars, but I am only one person. I do so much at the same time because I feel I have to, but it means nothing gets my full time. I can't devote enough time to get 10,000 hours to do any one thing.

People like to view success as being determined only by the individual effort you put into your pursuits. But usually that work needs to be paired by a few lucky breaks. Like a person lucky enough to be born into a family where they can attend school without working. I didn't have that. I have always had to earn money with some of my hours and pursue academia with the rest. Adding to my time shortage is that darned plan. I want to have the things that a successful 30 year old should have, like owning a home, and so we take on obligations that further strain our time. But still, I stick to the plan. And when you look at it, I have not failed, I just live a lessened version of what I planned. I am close to finishing a masters degree, which is not bad for a poor kid of out of the inner city. I do teach at a college, it's just at a community college as an adjunct, where I teach only a couple courses. The wife is spot on, although she did come a little early for the plan. And the kids can wait, I really only put them into the plan because I felt I should. My life is just a discounted version of what I wanted in the areas I wanted. And yet in other aras it's much nicer than I had planned.

Perhaps the problem is that I had a plan. The best chefs in the world all say the same things about their menus. They change based on what is good and fresh in the market. If they chose the menu and then went out to find the ingredients that were needed to make the things on that menu they might get a lucky break, but more likely they would just get a subpar version of what they wanted. Their quail wouldn't be so plump, their produce would be off season and not as flavorful. I think you are already working out the analogy in your head, so I won't belabor the imagery. Maybe the problem was my approach to life in the first half. I was told I could be anything I wanted to be, perhaps I should have been told that I might be anything so I better go out there are find out what I am going to become. That who we become is more about the outside world than our inner desires. It has as much to do with where we are born and the industries that prevail in that region as it does with what we want to become. It has to do with the friends we happen to meet and the parents we happen to be born to, and the teachers we happen to get and the experiences we happen to have.

For the first 32 years of my life I have been surrounded by fresh ingredients for a great life, but have chosen to follow my plan even if only loosely. But while there are many factors of my life which are under my control there exist many more factors that are not. My life, and I imagine yours as well, are the result of the intermingling of those things we can and can't control. It might be that very successful people know this and look to the uncontrollable parts to see where their effort would best be served. Like that great chef walking through the market, they don't know what they are going to make until they begin. I say this knowing full well the potential despair that will be felt by my generation with the near collapse of our economy. This may be a problem that we cannot recover from completely, and it seems unlikely that things will go back to the way they were for quite some time. Those things which are beyond our control have really changed the landscape of what is possible. Plans are being tossed aside with despair. I thought this might be a good time to reassure myself and maybe others that it is okay to toss out your plans, but that is no reason for despair. I just have to alter my mindset and look externally for my cues rather than internally.

A Voice of Peace in Chaos

noreply@blogger.com (Sheri McClure-Baker) — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 19:47:00 +0000

Although I struggle to understand Brian's "clear focus" for our new site, I wanted to share this link with whoever chooses to read this. James Tyner is a guy I met way back in my undergrad at CSUF in an advanced poetry writing class. He was an amazing poet back then and now he just floors me. He has undergone many trials in his life, which you will read about in his poetry, but the most amazing thing to me is that the violence he experienced early in his life made him a pacifist and, for some time, a monk. I wish that they had a voice recording of him reading these works because that adds so much soul and depth to them, but the words alone will leave you speechless. The tension between the life of a pacifist and the emotion he feels is so palpable and so beautifully constructed that you will return to it again and again. These particular poems have earned him the title of Finalist in the 2008 WinningWriters.com War Poetry Contest where all three of them are now published. His writing is simple, but powerful and I hope that you take the time to experience it. Click here to read these three amazing poems.

A Memory of the Motherland

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Baker) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 05:23:00 +0000

Okay, I know I am supposed to be writing great works of wit and prose, but I saw this and couldn't resist. While I was in Scotland I fell in love with a soft drink that is not sold here in the United States. IRN BRU is a cult phenomenon in Scotland. It is incredibly popular there, but no where else in the world. The flavor is kind of tutti fruity with a slight spice, very slight. It's pronounced Iron Brew, in fact that was the original name, but apparently when truth in advertising laws were introduced in Britain before the turn of the last century they had to change the name. Not because it didn't contain iron, each bottle contains a good amount of iron which may be why it makes you "feel phenomenal", but because it isn't traditionally brewed. A warning to the faint of heart, there is some nudity in the commercial. Glorious, good hearted and distinctively British nudity. Also you may need a few passes to catch what he's saying. Having grown up with a Scottish grandmother I kinda forget that people have a hard time understanding the accent. Anyway, enjoy.

New Look and a New Focus

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Baker) — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 07:53:00 +0000

Welcome to the Baker's new blog. The site has been redesigned although is still has the same basic structure. I purged the old articles, we rarely updated and they seemed woefully behind. With all of the changes that have happened in our lives recently, it seemed right to move on somehow, to enter into a new season and do something different. We also didn't really know what we wanted to do with BakerVillage back then. It was a mishmash of personal news and reviews on tech gadgets and such. In other words it lacked focus.

Well I'm not promising daily posts or even weekly, but what I can say is that we have a pretty good focus for this go around. As I interact with people I often find myself going off on these little rants about a wide variety of subjects. Friends tend to find them interesting and I suppose lots of people find them boring, but they usually don't stick around to become friends. So BakerVillage will not be a megaphone to the world. I could care less about the world and I would be awfully arrogant to think that my ideas on anything would be interesting to anyone outside of our friends and family. Instead my focus for this blog (and I think Sheri will be on board) is to make it a collection of conversational ideas aimed at just our small circle of friends and anyone who wants to join that circle.

Blogs with rants are a dime a dozen. People who are not experts will give their opinion in exaggerated and often angry tones basically to make themselves feel better. Maybe they feel special by doing it, maybe they are deluding themselves to thinking that others are actually reading their garbage. But there are lots of them. I don't want to be them. If just four friends read this blog regularly and it sparks conversation when we get together, my ambition will be satisfied.

Of course there is an ulterior motive for the blog. So much of what we do starts with writing. I would love to make little local documentaries, and am excited about learning videography and editing. My taste for such things is very refined and my skills are abysmal, but that is sort of the heart of hobby. It's a journey of watching your skills grow to match your taste. I am okay with that process. I look forward to that process. But that process is wasted if I let my ability to write and edit language decline. It is hardly anything to have a great thought, and even a great thought in a witty wrapper is wasted if the telling of it is awkward and clumsy. For instance, did that last sentence make sense? Did you understand it? Was it compeling? Poignant? The only way to know is by doing. It takes a lot of words written on a page to find your voice. I don't know that I ever found a voice. The meter of my writing is nonstandard. Is that interesting to readers or frustrating. It is conversational. Can that lead to misunderstanding? The only way I can think of to find out is to just write and see how people respond. To write about complicated subjects and make them easy to understand. (Current economic crisis anyone?) And to also write about simple subjects and make them interesting and compelling to listen to. (The human drama of selecting a new pair of glasses.)

So if you are reading this then chances are good that you are somehow already connected to me. Maybe you could bookmark the site and check in every once in a while. If you don't know me already then you might want to move on and read stuff by people who have already been through this process. Malcolm Gladwell is a genius, and Ira Glass may be one of the best storytellers of our time. I think your time would be much better spent with them. But it's your time, spend how you like.