I’ve always thought that the best thank-you for a donation that a public television pledge drive could offer would be to stop the pledge drive. It feels like punishment, not a reward, to call in your pledge, then sit through six more days of your local station reps begging and begging your fellow viewers. Especially around day three, once the punch drunkenness really sets in and you have to watch that crazy look in their eyes as they try to wax ever more enthusiastic about This Old House, Antiques Roadshow, and More Motown Memories.

There was no getting around this with broadcast television, but I think we could do better now. Why not create a subscribers-only service which delivers the same feed as your local station most of the year, then gives solicitation-free programming during pledge drives? It could be delivered over the Web, through Roku, Apple/Google TV, etc. to anyone who’s pledged a certain amount and been given access in return.

It could even be set up as two “stations” to meet two different desires. One could mirror the actual schedule during the drive with the pledge breaks removed and extra programming added to fill the gaps at the ends of shows (or to fill breaks in live shows, like sticking bits of BBC World News into the gaps in the PBS News Hour). The other could continue the regular daily schedule of the station as though the pledge drive weren’t happening at all. I’d often use the latter service, since PBS and I have differing opinions on what constitutes a program likely to induce pledge-yielding euphoria, and I’ve had enough of turning on the BBC comedies for Glenn at their usual time, only to find Suze Orman’s trying to convince him to fund his 410k instead.

It couldn’t be that difficult to put together. You already have the infrastructure in place for
video.pbs.org. Make the arrangements with the streaming device companies (always happy to have new channels), create user accounts on pbs.org (with all the attendant further opportunities for viewer interaction, emailing, etc.), and when a viewer pledges $x, let the station notify you, and give the viewer instructions for accessing her new, happier PBS home. Set it up as a national service, and let local stations follow with their own feeds to match their programming schedule if they like.

If I were a PBS exec, I’d be on this tomorrow. Run your surveys to be sure, but I feel confident you could sell ten drive-killing subscriptions for each coffee mug and tote bag.

In the course of making a will recently, I asked our lawyer whether I should use it to specify how I want my remains to be handled. He said that what I wanted could be done by first registering as an organ donor with the Motor Vehicle Administration (which I’d already done), then registering for the State Anatomy Board’s body donation program. In Maryland, that’s:

http://www.dhmh.state.md.us/anatomy/html/faqs.html

You have to ask them to mail you a form, then complete it with signatures from two witnesses, and send it back. They also give you a card to keep in your wallet, to make sure the Board is notified as quickly as possible.

Upon your death, the organ donation program harvests what they can use for people waiting for organ transplants. (Please, keep them all as healthy as you can until then!) The remains of your remains pass to the Anatomy Board for use in research and education. On average, they hold onto them for a year to a year-and-a-half. (I’ll admit to a moment of being taken aback at the thought of bits of me lying around that long, but better that they should be kept until everyone’s sure they’ve put them to all their uses.)

After that, what’s left is cremated, and the ashes interred at a gravesite owned by the Board. A friend whose grandfather donated his body said the Board holds an annual memorial service for everyone who donated that year. I wish natural burial were an option, but natural cemeteries are uncommon in the U.S., and, I would imagine, natural burial is more expensive (and certainly requires more space). I’ll write the Board to ask them to consider making it a choice, but at least cremation is far better for the environment than the common alternative.

I hope you’ll consider registering for both organ and body donation wherever you live. It’s a final, invaluable gift to the next generation.

• sites with a narrow specialty make material more discoverable, and thereby more useful to someone trying to find it. people find my photos through the google (why such interest in druid hill park? and fleas?), but are even more likely to come to flickr or picassa looking for images. a link tagged on del.icio.us contributes to a global pool of information on a given topic.
• i get the advantage of code from real programmers instead of my own stumbling efforts.
• i don’t have to maintain anything.
• popular services attract many people with many ideas and needs, leading to features i wouldn’t have thought of or would never have gotten around to implementing. (geotagging photos on flickr, for example.)
• it’s far more satisfying to complain about someone else when something breaks.

it hasn’t even meant giving up control. services that want to be used have to allow exportation of data to standard formats, making it easy to switch from one service to another if needed, or to go back to your own creation. i could pretty quickly write a script to make my own links page from my del.icio.us rss backup or generate my own photo gallery from the backup of my flickr photos and their metadata. it’s easy to go back if 1999 ever calls you.

my goal has been to find services which can be automatically backed up by a cron job on my always-on computer (the account at my hosting company). as a result, when i make a spreadsheet on google docs or post a photo to flickr, i know it will soon make its way into ~/backups/ and my own backup system for my files. (do i have to link here again?)

i’ve made a list of tasks, services i use for them, and backup methods for those services. some are personal tasks (tracking todo items), and some are methods of sharing information (videos on youtube). privacy controls allow many to be used for both (a calendar which reminds you of your dentist appointment and helps arrange a meeting with other people). it’s a rather exhaustive list, but i’d welcome your suggestions of other services you use or any answers you have to the questions in the comments.

task	service	backup method	comments
address book management	? (not: plaxo, google contacts)	?	i can’t understand why no one has filled this obvious need. it seems like a natural: make a site where i can record all my contact information (address, phone numbers, etc.) and the same information for people i know. as other people join the site, they can request to connect to me, and i decide how much information to share with them. as i update my phone number, they get a note that it’s been changed in their address books. run it on open standards so it can interoperate with similar sites. let it connect to my email service for “insert joe’s email address in cc:” and to my documents service for “insert joe’s mailing address in this letter”. let me export my address book to various formats and print a copy. plaxo had the right idea, then developed it halfway and made something that doesn’t seem useful in any real way. i don’t know why google still hasn’t done something with their anemic contacts system. why has no one made a reasonable online address book? or is one hiding somewhere?
articles	wordpress?	mysqldump? (i’ve never used wordpress.)	see notes below.
audio cataloging	mp3tunes? what else?	?	mp3tunes is a pretty good idea and a surprisingly good implementation, offering support for mp3, ogg, flac, etc., tools for organizing files by albums, a good browser-based player, and methods for downloading various slices of your collection, syncing them to a digital audio player, etc. if it had anyone but michael robertson behind it, i might be seriously interested. also, its syncing program is gui-only and can’t be run from cron. i’d love to have something like this which lets me organize my collection online, especially if i could share selected files with the world (ones for which i own the copyright). does anyone know of any similar offerings?
book cataloging	librarything	a www::mechanize script to grab /export-csv	a handy way to keep a list of books i want to read.
bookmarking	delicious	wget download of https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all
document editing	google docs	the google docs download python script	painful after vi or emacs, but great for sharing documents, both for viewing and collaboration in editing.
email	gmail	offlineimap	i would prefer one-way syncing, and was using isync (mbsync), but have found that offlineimap runs anywhere, with less fuss. ((btw, a handy tip: i found offlineimap’s two-way syncing helpful in an unexpected way. i have a corporate email address with a certain company and am supposed to read email sent there. unfortunately, they won’t just forward email to my real address because the competition might steal our tps cover sheet design or something. i can’t have gmail fetch it because they only allow imap access, not pop3. i was having getmail fetch and forward mail to my real address, but found another solution in the fact that offlineimap can not only sync an imap account to a local maildir collection, but can also sync two imap accounts to each other. i have the webmail system at the company file everything into a folder named (just as an example) “forcesourge” and have offlineimap sync it with a “forcesourge” label in gmail. this works great because of the way gmail treats labels as imap folders. any new mail at the company is mirrored in my “forcesourge” label collection in gmail, and when i delete a message or remove the label from it there, the message is deleted on the company’s server. a cron job keeps it all together, and i don’t have to bother with checking another mail account.))
financial accounting	mint	download through browser (non-automated)	i just download my transactions file each month after balancing my accounts.
goal tracking	43things	n/a	don’t feel the need for a backup of this.
graphing data	google chart api?	n/a
photo ar chiving	flickr	offlickr	offlickr does a thorough job of grabbing metadata, from comments and dates to sets and collections.
scheduling	google calendar	wget downloads of the .ics files for each of my calendars.
score archiving	mutopia?	a recursive fetch of everything with my name?	it could be convenient to let the good folks at mutopia keep my scores up-to-date with the latest lilypond versions. it could take care off all but the few not worth adding to such a noble project.
todo management	toodledo	wget download of my rss file
video storage	youtube	?	youtube’s a good place for sharing video for quick viewing, but is it a place for storing high-quality video? i assume they throw the original files away once they’ve converted them to .flv. does anyone have a recommendation of a place for storing full-sized videos while sharing small flash versions?

i hope there’s something useful in there.

i want to ask one last bit of advice, concerning my personal website. aside from offering bits of news about what’s happening with me to far-away friends, it’s been a place to stick things i want to keep which may be useful to other people (musical scores, hatt-baby videos, etc.). it’s the public side of my home directory. with the moves described above, a lot of this is no longer necessary. i don’t need photos here and on flickr. i don’t need scores here and on mutopia.

when i strip away everything that can be as well or better-hosted elsewhere, all that’s left are articles like this one, so i’m thinking of turning jeffcovey.net into a hub for my material spread around the web, leaving just the articles here. i’m thinking of wordpress for this. yes? pros/cons? alternatives?

i’d like to start using something new right away and gradually migrate my old material. how would you do this? my first thought is to make a cms-run new.jeffcovey.net so the links to jeffcovey.net continue to work, adding 301 redirects as i move things off jeffcovey.net, and finally resetting dns to point jeffcovey.net to the new site when finished. any better ideas?

thanks for reading! i hope you found something useful in this and are putting the ever-expanding world of online services to much better use than i am.

i’m sitting in shelter #92 in patapso state park on a glorious cool spring day. the sunlight makes the leaves glow as the breeze tosses them, and the pair of does grazing the hillside next to us have finally wandered off. the picnic remains are back in the trunk, and glenn sits across from me, reading the paper.

it’s a simple outing, but, until recently, one that would have been hard for me to take. at the very least, i would have been sitting here anxious about getting home, instead of committed and engaged in being here. the woods would have been wasted on a mind full of all the work left undone.

the culprit, as i’ve gradually realized this year, is the computer. last year, i would have brought my laptop with me. i would have done what i could here, then hurried home and put it online. for my day in the city saturday, i would have broken my back lugging it onto the light rail, where i would have brought it out of suspension to get 15 minutes with it before i had to close it down to take it over to the subway, repeating the process all across the day. last year, i either had my fingers on my laptop, or i wasn’t working.

the problem is that a computer, especially the big computer we call the internet, is infinite. i can turn on a computer at 7:00 am, and it instantly becomes 11:30 pm, and i’m looking back on a day of youtube and wikipedia and chasing this which reminds me of that which makes you stop and wonder whatever became of those and what was i doing and why does my back ache? enough days like that, and you’re looking back on a life of wandering the electronic sinai.

i was spending long hours each day glued to a screen and brief, almost guilty ones in the physical world. the world is better and healthier, and i’ve worked for the last few months to flip the time i spend in each. i’d like to share some of the ideas and tools in my arsenal and invite your suggestions and your own experience.

how to live without a computer

millions of people today still go through lives untouched by lcd screens and laser mice, and all the bachs and shakespeares of history did reasonably good work without them, so it must be possible. is it preferable? i hit techno burnout recently and took a nine-day no-computer break to recover. what i noticed most by midweek was that the days had become much longer. they expanded and opened to me as they hadn’t for years, until they reached a natural length i’d forgotten they held, and there was plenty of time to be spontaneous, cook a good meal, listen to some music, sit on the deck awhile. reminded of what i was missing, it was painful to go back to staring at the screen and waiting for a webpage to load or an overloaded machine to start responding again. i’d like to spend as many days as i can with no computers in them.

how can a person enjoy the undeniable advantages of computers without getting sucked down the time drain? what are the ways and means of a neo-luddite life? i’ve identified two strategies. i’ll call them computer agnosticism and computer freedom.

computer agnosticism

computer agnosticism is disbelief in the doctrine of the one true computer. for a long time, my laptop was the only computer i used. it had all my files and was configured just as i wanted. it’s still my most comfortable workplace, but now any reasonably new net-connected computer is as good as any other. this gives two advantages. first, i can step out of the house anytime or travel to another city with worrying that something i’ll need is left behind. everything’s available wherever i can get online. secondly, trusting the world to provide a computer for me means getting a situation that is workable but not overly pleasant. i can sit with my laptop forever. if i’m stuck with illegible fonts, an unfavored operating system, an uncomfortable chair, and a room of boisterous library or hotel patrons, i’ll do what i need to do and get out of there. libraries are especially good, with a timer counting down and the next person on the waiting list hovering in the background.

online services are the key here. here are some tools i like for making any computer “my computer”:

toodledo

when i began implementing the ideas in getting things done, i wrote my own gtd script for managing my projects and todos. over the following years, i regularly enhanced and refined it. by the end, it had a powerful, good-looking interface for manipulating tasks. tasks could be scripts in different languages, launching complex repetitive jobs with a couple of keystrokes. it handled repeating and scheduled tasks. it attached and detached screen sessions associated with various categories of work so jobs could continue in the background while i was off to something else. it integrated with a scriptable window manager and switched to a different virtual desktop each time i moved to another work category. it managed time devoted to different projects, work categories, and other things to do, counting down remaining time on a taskbar and changing the color of all the windows when i should do something else or take a break. it was beautiful.

surprisingly, it was not only efficient, but effective. i really did get a lot of good work done through it and accomplished things that otherwise would have stalled. so why did i let it go? it was a fine way to work on my computer, but i no longer wanted to be tied to my computer. it was still the right answer, but the question changed.

i looked at several online todo list/project management applications and settled on toodledo as the most open and flexible. the development team frequently extends and bugfixes it, and i’m generally happy with it as long as i actually do the tasks on my lists instead of tweaking and pushing them around (not toodledo’s fault). one dealmaking feature was the ability to print a pocketmod-style todo list, so wherever i’m working, i can print my current open tasks, stick them in my pocket, and walk away from computers for as long as i like with a clear conscience.

gmail

the no-brainer replacement for mutt + procmail + postfix. the spam filtering alone makes it a winner. the interface is great, and when i’m on my laptop, imap and mutt let me burn through my email even more quickly.

google calendar

for a time, i synchronized this with the datebook on my palm pda. since i can’t do that from any available computer, i now print a one-month calendar on one side of a sheet of paper and a ten-day agenda on the other (the agenda includes my notes about events, addresses of places to be, etc.).

google docs

a pattern seems to be forming. this is another winner for google and the home of my spreadsheets and the documents i need to share with others.

del.icio.us

the firefox extension lets me use bookmarks as i normally would at home and have them available anywhere.

linode

(or any hosting service with shell access. linode is terrific, and i’ve been hearing good things about “nearly free speech“).

an always-online linux box gives me a way to connect to other servers as needed and otherwise fills any gaps left by web-based services. unison keeps everything up-to-date so that changes i make online appear on the laptop, and vice versa.

computer freedom

so now i can roam the world freely, treating computing as a public service, like water fountains or buses. that’s a big relief to my mind and my backpack-unladen spine. can i go all the way? what could enable someone who works online to spend days together completely free from computers?

some of my answers:

cron

when i moved my recurring tasks to toodledo, i looked at each and asked, “does this really need me to be present and active?”, and was amazed that 95% of the time, the answer was no. it can take some sideways thinking, but even tasks that “clearly” have to be done by you in person can be automated with a different approach and a bit of perl. i enthusiastically expanded the role of my crontab on my always-online computer, and now i just check the resulting email messages to see that all went well. any changes made to my files are pulled down by “unison -batch” cron jobs on my laptop when i’m not looking.

rss has been a lifesaver for getting out of news-checking quicksand (remember when you went to your favorite sites to see what was new? repeatedly? all day long?). i stick my google reader feeds into “monthly”, “bi-weekly”, and “weekly” folders and check them only when their time comes. for sites without feeds, a netstiff cron job lets me forget them and alerts me to anything new once a week. hpodder downloads my podcasts so they’re just there when my mp3 player runs dry.

non-instant messaging

irssi + bitlbee + screen running on my always-online machine let me engage in irc and instant messaging services on my own schedule. instead of letting them interrupt me, i just attach the screen once a day (or week) to see what’s new.

paper

let me say that again:

paper!

this is remarkable technology, flexible, portable, and widely available. as with cron, it may take a new way of thinking, but how many of the things you do on the computer could be done on paper? how many could be 95% completed on paper so that when you go online, you just have to transfer the results or execute the last steps of a paper-outlined plan? is an offline day stealing from your boss, or are you even more productive when you print your work the day before and worth it with a pen? which accomplishes more — 45 minutes work on paper + 15 minutes bringing the computer up-to-date, or two and half hours on the same task online, with side trips to check email and rearrange your netflix queue? which leaves you refreshed and ready for work the next day?

this article is an example of paper-based computer work. i’m writing it in an old college composition book, much more portable than my electronic notebook. how it will get online is discussed in the next section.

while on the topic, i should add my plug for the famous moleskine notebooks. they’re pricey, but are things of beauty, simple and elegant and a joy to write in. they fit right in a pocket, and with my toodledo list and google calendar in the expanding back pocket, one makes a fine pda (ppa?).

vpas

the virtual personal assistant marketplace is flourishing, and online helpers can help keep you offline. they can be useful on both ends: before fleeing the net, you can hand over a list of online chores. when you connect again, you can send what you did offline for processing. this article is an example. when i’m done, i’ll tear the pages from the notebook, scan them to a pdf, and email it to an assistant to type into a reply to me. a little editing and formatting, and it will be ready to post. lather, rinse, repeat, and you have an invisible staff working alongside you all your offline days. you’re taking full advantage of the net and full advantage of that table in the park, putting out more work and pulling in more fresh air.

tim ferriss discusses the details of working with a vpa. i’ve been happy with onassist.com.

phone-based services

sooner or later on a non-digital day, there’s a moment of temptation to boot the laptop just to check the weather report before leaving the house or to get directions to the coffee shop. and since you’ve sat and waited for it to come on, you may as well make it worthwhile by checking out that site you saw on a billboard. and though you definitely weren’t going to check your email today, you’re so curious to see how mike replied to… wow, you never expected him to say that. how are you and connie going to fit that into your schedule? it’s going to be on your mind all day now…

phone-based services can give you the limited information you need without exposing you to the danger of spoiling your free day with full net access. i hope they continue, and don’t fall in the face of web-capable phones. three i use regularly:

goog411 (1-800-466-4411)

goog411 provides the aural equivalent of google’s stripped-down webpage look. it’s simple and powerful and lets you quickly get the address of a business, then connects you to them to ask directions or how late they’re open. i hope google adds support for residential listings.

tellme (1-800-555-8355)

provides news on various topics. i use it to get the weather report, to decide how to dress for the day.

jott

this one’s for putting information in instead getting it out. i have it linked to my toodledo and google calendar accounts so i can call to add an item to my todo list or put an event on my calendar. it’s a good way to save some typing, though their voice recognition leaves a lot to be desired. they should license whatever google uses for goog411.

conclusion

for someone professing to write about computer-free living, i’ve spent a lot of time discussing computer-based software and services. i have two excuses:

first, many of these tools provide ways of letting work pile up out of sight and mind. email piles up in your inbox as long as you like while gmail sends replies with your phone number and the request that people call you if it’s urgent (and grandcentral separates the wheat from the subsequent chaff). articles wait in your rss reader until the time you’ve dedicated for them. just keep that laptop safely tucked away (a remote shelf in the basement works well), and life becomes less interrupted.

second, and even better, are the tools that run unattended. cron jobs run even when you’ve forgotten about them, and vpas have pleasant surprises waiting when you get around to logging in again. jott’s added a reminder to check out a wine festival next fall. services like these uphold the promise of computer automation and let you get on with real life in the real world.

there’s another solution, of course — to drop the halfway measures and just go cold turkey forever. maybe it’s worth stopping by the park office to see if they have any jobs for the summer.

it’s very simple:

1. when a call comes in, the phone should check the incoming number against its phonebook.
2. if the number is found, it should put the call through right away.
3. if the number is not in the phonebook, a recorded message should say “you have reached the cellphone of [click, followed by my voice] jeff covey [click]. if this is the person you wish to reach, please stay on the line, and i’ll connect you. if not, please hang up and redial the number you were trying to call.”
4. after about five seconds, if the caller is still on the line, the phone should start ringing.

since small phones with small number keys became commonplace, i’ve received many more “wrong number” calls than ever before, and this seems to be true for everyone i know. just delaying the incoming call for a few seconds while the person on the other end decides if this is really what she wants could noticeably reduce the number of times each day we go scrambling to find the phone for no reason.

please mention it to your friend’s sister, the one whose uncle’s ex-wife’s stepson’s cousin’s roomate’s boyfriend is the godson of the ceos of all the major phone companies.

— Thoreau

for the past six months, i’ve almost entirely let my car sit in front of the house and gotten around by buses and trains. so far, there hasn’t been a single occasion on which i had to use the car, but i use it once every week or two to keep it healthy. whether i’ll keep it remains open to consideration. ^[1]

the disadvantages of relying on public transportation are obvious. for those thinking about doing it more often in order to save money, the environment, or sanity, i’d like to offer the lighter side of it with this selection of random thoughts:

footnotes

1. (i got rid of it for good on 09/06/2005.)

Congressman Tom Davis
U.S. House of Representatives
2348 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515-4611

Dear Congressman Davis:

I’d like to share with you the horrible experience we had when we tried to use the D.C. Metro system today. We’re from Baltimore, and we wanted to see an exhibition at the Freer Gallery. We drove to the Landover station and parked. As we entered the lot, I read a sign about the need to get a card from the station to pay our $3.50 to leave. I thought this meant I needed to get a transfer ticket from our destination, as I’d had to do when I used the Metro many years ago, and I didn’t think any more of it.

We had a fine time downtown, and when we returned to Landover, I asked the attendant on duty what I needed to do to pay for my parking. She told me I would have to pay $13.50 because I didn’t have a “SmarTrip” card. I was blown over, but she insisted there was no option. She showed me where the SmarTrip machines were. Unfortunately, they only took $1, $5, and $10 bills. We’d paid the full roundtrip fee when we bought our Metro tickets, and had nothing but $20s with us. We tried to get change from several other Metro riders buying their tickets, but no one could help us. The attendant pointed out that the machines would take credit cards, so I went back to try my Visa on them. The first machine read the card, asked for my Zip code, then said it was unable to process the card. I tried the second machine, and got the same result. The attendant came over and tried to help. I did it again to show her what was happening. I then tried it one last time as a debit card instead of as a credit card. I entered my PIN and waited a much longer time, but still got the message that my card could not be processed.

We were seriously concerned that we were stranded at this point. We had no money that the machines would take, they gave error messages in response to my only credit card, the attendant said she was not allowed to give change, there were no change machines, and the attendant said we absolutely had to have the SmarTrip card to leave and there was no way we could just pay our $3.50 to a human parking attendant. We seemed to be hostages in the parking lot indefinitely until she suggested we go outside and try the cab drivers. One of them was able to give us two $10s for one of our $20s, and we finally got the card and could leave. Luckily, the attendant was mistaken, and the $10 cost was $5 for the card itself plus a $5 credit toward Metro services, so we ended with a $5 card, $3.50 paid, and a $1.50 credit.

The bizarre incident seemed to be over until I returned home and was balancing my checkbook against my bank’s website this evening. I found four $10 debits made against my account by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. At this point, we’ve paid $53.50 toward a $3.50 parking fee.

I assume that when it’s discovered that these four charges were made and no cards were issued, the $40 will be automatically refunded to my account, but given the comments from other Metro riders I found in a Washington Post article, my optimism may be poorly placed.

But even if the whole exchange had gone smoothly, the system is patently ridiculous. We live in Baltimore and usually drive downtown on the rare occasions when we visit Washington. Why did we have to pay $5 for this card? It’s going to be years before we use it, if ever. It and its $1.50 credit will probably sit in our sock drawer for decades. What about this card could possibly cost $5? Is it made of gold-plated plastic?

While we were in the Smithsonian station, we helped three Japanese tourists to find their way. When they returned to their rental car, did they find themselves similarly stranded? Did they have to use their limited English to try to understand the complicated procedure they had to follow? Did they have a $10 U.S. bill, or were they humiliated by having to beg for money from Americans entering the station? Did they have to invest $6.50 in a piece of useless plastic to take back to Tokyo with them? How many people from all over our country and the world have had to pay this unadvertised $6.50 tax just because they parked at a Metro station?

I’ve always encouraged people from out of town to visit our nation’s capital and to take advantage of its subway system, but I’ll now be advising them to stay far away from this nightmarish scam. I’m embarrassed that we’re treating our guests this way.

The Post article listed you as one of the people trying to straighten out this farce. I hope you’re able to do something about it.

Sincerely,
Jeffrey Covey

• freecycle’s future
  • background
  • disclaimer
  • how it could be
    • problem 1: getting onboard
    • problem 2: managing what you receive
    • problem 3: opening and closing offers and requests
    • problem 4: transferring items
      • choosing who gets it
      • arranging the exchange
    • problem 5: moderating
  • objections
    • it will take too much work and money
    • the horse is already out of the barn
    • it will destroy the freecycle community
  • conclusion

background

freecycle was created last year by deron beal as part of his work for a recycling program of a tucson-based non-profit organization. it was made very simply: he created a mailing list on which the members could offer items they owned but didn’t need or want. anyone who wanted them could contact the posters privately to make an exchange. for a small, local program, this was perfectly adequate.

now, the freecycle idea has been copied all over the world. there are 1,297 official freecycle mailing lists as i write. they’re all based on the tucson model, but each has its own rules. some of them cover huge metropolitan areas and regularly split into smaller spinoff groups for specific neighborhoods or suburbs. because they’re simply free-form mailing lists, it’s impossible to keep everyone using the prescribed format for messages. discussions frequently erupt, wander off topic, and go down in flames. those on the losing side of the argument leave and create their own splinter group.

people trying to reach as wide an audience as possible join all the groups they can find in their area and crosspost to them all. the same message goes to six groups with different guidelines; it’s acceptable on four of them, spurs 17 flames of indignation on the other two. three of the lists are moderated, and by the time the message is approved and reaches the members of the moderated lists, the item has already gone to someone on the unmoderated one. someone gets tired of this and creates freecycletopekaksnomods. the original poster remembers to tell two of the lists that the item has been taken. members of the other four lists continue to write him for days, getting no reply.

it’s a trainwreck.

disclaimer

i don’t mean to say that freecycling isn’t doing good. even with all its problems, i see it doing great things every day. i just want to say that it could be so much easier and better.

before i make my suggestions, i want to point out that i’m very much on the fringe of the freecycle community. i’ve been a moderator of freecyclebaltimore and a member of various area groups for a month. there are many people who have been involved in the project and working as moderators for much longer. my opinions don’t have the authority of a long-time moderator behind them. i’ve just been bothered for several days by thinking about the wasted potential of freecycling, and wanted to write down my thoughts.

how it could be

my suggestion is just this: freecycle has long outgrown the mailing list model. it should be centralized and web-based.

i’ll explain why i think this is so by describing how it could address the problems freecycle faces.

problem 1: getting onboard

freecycle is getting a lot of press these days. someone who reads about it in a newspaper is sent to freecycle.org. she finds the clean, nicely-organized list of groups. let’s say that, like many people, she lives outside baltimore, maryland, and works in washington, d.c. she joins the lists for her town, glen burnie, her metropolitan area, baltimore, the area where she works, washington, and the town she passes through on her way to work, bowie. she spends weekends with her boyfriend in annapolis, so she joins that list, too. she starts getting messages which tell her about two smaller groups near her. she joins them.

she now has to manage subscriptions to seven mailing lists. she has to learn and try to follow the conflicting rules for what is acceptable on each of them. she receives the same messages over and over and over as people post what they want to one list, then another and another.

what i think should happen instead is that she should go to freecycle.org, register an account, give her address, and specify that she would like to be informed of offers and/or requests within 5, 10, 15, 20, or 25 miles of her home. that’s it. nothing more complicated.

problem 2: managing what you receive

as it is now, members of a freecycle list have to receive whatever messages the other members want to send them. if the list is moderated, there’s at least some quality control, but everyone still has to receive:

• offers.
• requests for items.
• notices that an item has been taken (whether or not the item was of any interest to the reader).
• messages from bob saying he lost joe’s phone number and asking him to send it again.
• clarifications of earlier offers and requests.
• any discussions the moderators allow.
• all the malformed messages from people who can’t remember to use appropriate subject lines.

it’s too much. people should be able to just check off whether they want to receive offers, requests, or both. they could then choose whether to receive an email message each time an appropriate item appears or just log in to freecycle.org whenever they want to see what’s new.

centralization would also make it possible to offer announcements by other means, such as rss.

problem 3: opening and closing offers and requests

someone who makes an offer now has to post a message offering it, then post another to say it’s been taken. those following the transaction have to see the offer message, then look for a “taken” message in the list’s archive to see whether or not they should bother the offerer about it. hopefully, the subject lines will be clear. even if they are, this is too much work.

what should happen is that an item appears in the list of offers. once someone has replied and been picked as the recipient, it’s removed from the offers. if someone gets a message about it too late and goes to freecycle.org to reply, she’ll be told it’s no longer available. if the transaction falls through, the offerer can just mark it as canceled, and the item will appear in the list of offers again. there’s no need to post a message offering the item again, as is done now.

requests can work the same way. an item appears as wanted until it’s fulfilled. there’s no need for anyone to keep posting her list of wants once or twice a week to be sure people see it.

problem 4: transferring items

once an item has been offered or requested and someone has replied wanting or offering it, the offerer has two jobs to do:

choosing who gets it

currently, the offerer has to manage all the email from people who reply, try to organize it, pick someone to give the item to, backtrack and try to find the mail from the other people who replied when that exchange falls through, etc. this is unnecessary.

the offerer should just get a page with a list of everyone who’s interested. this page could
offer several ways of helping the offerer decide who gets it:

• it could be sorted by time, so the first responders are at the top.
• a note from each responder could be included to say something about why the person wants it.
• each username could have a link to the responder’s public profile for more information about her.
• there could be an indication of the distance from the responder’s home address to the offerer’s (without giving the addresses).
• there could be a marker showing the responder’s freecycle rating.

by “freecycle rating”, i mean that there could be a rating system in place like those people are used to using on ebay or amazon. a week after an item was promised to someone, freecycle could remind the offerer to mark the transaction as either canceled (reopening the item) or completed. if it were marked completed, both the offerer and receiver would be asked to rate the exchange on a scale of 1 to 5 and give a brief comment about it.

this would solve the problem of people worrying about complete strangers coming to their homes; they could look at the responders’ ratings and the comments other freecyclers have made about their interactions with them.

another common problem is that items just go to the first person who replies because offerers don’t want to be bothered with sifting all the mail. those who don’t sit in front of their computers all day never have a chance. this could be solved by making the list of replies unavailable to the offerer until 24 hours after the offer is made. this would also solve the problem of moderators abusing their privileges to take items first. even if all posts were moderated, the moderator’s reply to an offer would reach the offerer at the same time as the others. contacting offerers privately before the replies are made available would have to be forbidden.

arranging the exchange

once someone has been picked as the recipient, a web-based freecycle could offer tools to facilitate the exchange. the offerer could have the option of having her address and/or phone number automatically given to the recipient. the address could come with a link to a map site showing directions from the recipient’s address to the offerer’s.

if the offerer didn’t like giving recipients her home address, she could specify another address (such as her work address or a public place) as the one which should be given. if the offerer were worried about spam, she could choose not to give her email address to the recipient, and make all communication through freecycle.org.

once an item was marked as promised but not yet completed, the list of responders could be greyed out. if the exchange were canceled, it could become available again, and the offerer could pick another recipient from the list.

problem 5: moderating

moderating a freecycle list can be a very time-consuming process. it can also involve a lot of thinking about whether certain offers and requests are acceptable, and (sometimes unpleasant) discussion with list members and moderators of other lists to get their opinions.

a centralized freecycle would remove this duplicated effort. sitewide policies could be decided, and that would be that. the rules could be posted, and posts which violated them would be removed. the burden of reviewing posts for violations could be distributed to all of the site’s users, removing the burden from the moderators. each offer and request could have a “report violation” link like those on craigslist. it could lead to a list of the rules with a link next to each. clicking the link would report the item as in violation of that rule. if more than one user reported a problem with an item, it would be flagged for review by a moderator.

many moderators are exasperated by list members who can’t or won’t follow the guidelines for how to write their messages. each message is supposed to have a subject line which begins with “offer:”, “taken:”, “wanted:”, or “admin:”. some members can’t or won’t do this, and everyone has to open their messages to see what they’re about. when submitting their items through the web, the only mistake people could make is to mark an offer as a request, or vice-versa. everything would be formatted in a consistent way because people would be filling in forms.

also, many lists ask their members to include certain information, but people ofter forget to do so. we ask people to give their location, for example. this would be handled automatically, because the offerer’s zip code would be displayed. we ask people to describe the item’s condition, but this often isn’t done. offerers could be required to choose from a list such as “like new”, “good”, “well-loved”, “needs repair”, etc. a web-based system would also allow people to upload photos of their items.

one of the biggest headaches for moderators is trying to keep discussions under control. someone offers a puppy, someone complains about offering animals, ten people jump on each side of the issue, a dozen more jump in to complain about the discussion, and the moderators heave a sigh. some spam gets through, and it starts all over again. removing the possibility of public discussions from the method of exchanging items will put an end to this.

objections

i can think of several objections to this plan.

it will take too much work and money

someone will probably offer the most basic objection:

“it’s not worth the trouble.”

i think it is. freecycling is a terrific idea, but the system established for a single community has not scaled well to an international movement. the problems i’ve described have nearly torn several freecycle lists apart, have led to flamewars both on the local lists and on the international moderators discussion list, and have caused many good participants to unsubscribe.

yes, it would be a lot of work. the system i’ve described is not trivial, but it’s not rocket science or anything very original, either. any competent web programmer could do it, and it doesn’t all have to be done all at once. i’ve just brainstormed many features here; they could be added a bit at a time once the basic mechanism is in place.

“it would cost too much to make it.”

there are lots of ways to get it done. the simplest is just to ask for volunteers. it’s a worthy cause and has a high enough profile that people may be interested in giving their time to it. if volunteers can’t be found, we could try schools. college students might be found who could work on it for credit, or a professor willing to assign it as a project. the non-profit could take a student as an intern.

if someone has to be hired for the job, there are plenty of capable, underemployed programmers these days. there are said to be 420,982 people in the official freecycle groups today. there should be no problem getting enough in donations to pay for the work and the ongoing cost of maintenance and server fees.

if worst came to worst, advertising space could be sold.

the horse is already out of the barn

“it’s too late for this now. the mailing lists are already established, and no one’s going to want to change.”

i think the advantages i’ve described are enough to make both users and moderators want to switch. nothing would stop those who prefer the mailing lists from continuing to use them, and they may eventually decide to join. in the meantime, momentum will grow from new people coming to freecycle.org for the first time and opening accounts.

it will destroy the freecycle community

“centralizing freecycle will ruin the local community we’ve established.”

there’s no reason this has to be the case. discussion can still go on, it just has to be kept separate from the day-to-day business of transferring items so that those who aren’t interested don’t have to read
it. there could be discussions organized by zip code or state so local conversation can continue. it could be as simple as adding a third item to the subscriptions: “offers”, “requests”, and “comments”. by checking “comments”, the user would receive any public comments posted by anyone within the area she’s chosen (her home address plus [x] miles). again, she could choose to receive comments by email or just read them on the site.

moderation could continue to be done locally; people could volunteer to moderate items posted in their own zip codes. the difference would be that moderators would be more accountable to the members. the system-wide rules would provide the parameters within which the local moderators could operate. if the members felt the moderators were overstepping their authority, they could appeal to the freecycle administration. if the moderators were found to be at fault, the administration could replace them.

a centralized, web-based freecycle could offer many more means of fostering community, both locally and globally. in addition to local discussion, sitewide discussion lists could offer the opportunity for anyone to share her ideas and help shape freecycle’s policies and direction. each member would have a public profile page on which she could reveal as much or as little about herself as she liked. user ratings and feedback would minimize the interference of spammers and scammers. the administration would have the ability to send messages to all users announcing site and policy changes, etc.

i believe that, paradoxically, moving freecycle from many small, scattered groups to one site will bring the community together in the cities, not just as a whole.

conclusion

freecycle and its many members have a lot to give. i believe it’s reached a critical point at which it can either continue to suffer from trends it’s developed or, with a bit of elbow grease, greatly increase its ability to do good.

i’ll welcome your thoughts and comments about this.

it’s now trivial for people to pass the things they don’t want to people who can use them. my first great experience with this was through craigslist. i’ve been looking forward for a long time for them to add a baltimore section, and they finally did this year. i subscribed to several of their classified ad sections, and have found all kinds of things through them. glenn and i now sit on the futon i found free through one person, which sits on the frame i found through another. i’m typing this on the beautiful computer desk someone gave us.

craigs can be a source of bargains, too; glenn got a year-old $100 microwave for $15, and i got a year-old $80 vacuum cleaner for the same. it can even be a source of revenue; the vacuum cleaner came with an unused $10 coffee maker (retail: $30) which i sold on amazon for $25.

but the really exciting aspect of this is the transfer of free stuff. this is a terrifically important change. in the past, so many things sat around unused or went to the landfill just because people didn’t know anyone who could use them. now, there’s freecycle, which is devoted solely to the transfer of items without cost. in each city that has a freecycle group, people post what the have or what they want, and others reply to say they want it or can give it. usually, the person who wants it comes and picks it up, so the giver gets rid of the clutter with even less effort than dragging it to the curbside or hauling it to the dump.

the social network expands. before, we could ask the handful of people we knew, and word-of-mouth might or might not bring a reply. now, we just spend a minute or two typing an email, and the word goes to hundreds. (1,212 members currently in baltimore. 6,403 in portland!)

several months of watching the craigslist ads has made it clear that all or almost all household items can be had for free or for very little cost if you just wait a while. if you can sleep on a mattress on the floor for a couple of months, someone will inevitably have a bed she wants hauled away. if you can live with a fan for part of the summer, someone will have a nearly-new air conditioner to sell at 1/2 price. if you can cook on the gas range this fall, someone will give you a microwave this winter. i’m learning just to make do and wait and watch.

from each according to his surplus, to each according to his need. and nothing thrown away!

i love this house; it’s beautiful (well, the part that was fully renovated, anyway and comfortable and, well, home. i love the brick walls and the woodwork around the doors and windows and fireplaces. i love the wood floors that can be cleaned with a quick sweep of a broom. i love the big windows that let the light pour in. i love all the space that gives my cat room to run around like mad the way cats do sometimes. i love the window sills where she can lay and watch the birds in the trees.

i love being in the city. i love going for a walk and seeing the squares with the cherry trees in bloom. i love the activity of the city, the fact that there’s always something new happening every day. i love having the resources of a city in the palm of my hand, being able to hop in the car and, in five minutes, be at a good restaurant or library or concert hall.

and i love this street. people who don’t live in the city and only come into it during the day don’t know how peaceful it can be. you wake up in the morning with the windows open, and the birds are chirping in the trees out back, and there’s no way to tell that you’re not a thousand miles from civilization. you can have the peace of that solitude and the support of the city all at once.

if you know where i live, by now you’re poking and prodding me to get on to the other side of it. yes, it’s a poor community. it’s almost entirely made up of black residents. there are three kinds of buildings in the neighborhood: houses, churches, and liquor stores. it’s been torn apart by the drug trade. if you head north a few blocks, violence and vandalism are everywhere. a few blocks west is the intersection of fayette and munroe, about which david simon and ed burns wrote the corner.

every alley and every lot is covered in garbage. drunks smash their bottles in playgrounds and pass out on park benches. addicts break into abandoned houses, use them as shooting galleries, and set them on fire.

as i drove to the y yesterday, i stopped at a light and saw a funeral letting out across the street. it was obviously a funeral for a dealer; half the crowd was in its sunday best, and half were members of his crew, in tshirts and jeans with their boxer shorts pushed way out of their pants, gang style. most of them had matching white shirts with some image or pattern which i couldn’t make out but which obviously related to the dead member of the gang in some way. one had a plain white shirt on which he’d painted “r.i.p.” and the name and birth and death dates of his friend. they were all standing around in their sunglasses, striking stereotypical yo-boy poses and trying to look cool.

this is the second lost generation, the children of the first generation lost to crack and the war on drugs. this is the crowd that grew up with dad in jail and mom locked in her bedroom with the crack pipe. there were no adults around, no rules and no guidance. it was lord of the flies on an urban island, and they had to invent their own way of life. the one they created is simple: you deal drugs. someone shoots you or stabs you or you overdose, and you die in a gutter or an alley somewhere. someone spray paints your name on a wall. fade to black.

it’s so damned stupid. i wanted to get out of the car and grab them and shake them and make them look at what they’re doing to themselves. even here, the resources they need are all around in the churches and community centers, the schools and libraries just waiting for someone to ask. they could wake up tomorrow and put a stop to it and make life into whatever they wanted it to be, if they just had the imagination to think that they don’t have to kill one another.

of course, grabbing people and shaking them doesn’t seem like such a good idea when you stop and reflect that they’re all carrying guns and razor blades.

so why am i here, five years after dan and my ostensible reason for being here have gone? well, there’s always the practical reason that i have a beautiful rent-free house. there’s the fact that this was our home, and, for a long time, it kept me close to the memories. there’s the simple inertia of being so long in one place and settling into it.

and as i said, i love the house and i love the location, and my block has been a good place to live until very recently. the west side of the street is all rental properties, but my side has been made up of homeowners since before i lived here, and they take pride in their homes and look out for one another. linda and gloria and ruth and sam — i’ve never had a complaint about any of them.

there’s crime and dirt to deal with, but they’ve never really gotten me down. my car was broken into twice, but that happens anywhere in a big city. there was a fellow who did some odd jobs for me, then kicked in my back door while i was out and stole some odds and ends (then came back a week later and asked for a handout, if you can imagine). that seemed like a big deal when i came home that night, but was nothing much by the light of the morning. i knew why he’d done it, and that heroin is a harsh mistress. he’d actually been quite considerate, not causing any damage, and even carefully picking up a videotape and setting it to the side before he took the vcr. he gave me the chance to stop and think about space and the extent to which it makes sense to call it “mine”. it was dan’s space before it was mine, and someone else’s before that. some day, it will be used by someone else. for maybe a quarter of an hour that night, it was his. that vcr was dan’s, then mine, then his, now someone else’s. someday, it will rust and fall apart and sink back into the earth. this house will fall down, and the space that was marked off by the walls will be part of the open air again. in the end, it’s just a space and just a vcr, and the label “mine” that i stick on them is as temporary as i am, and you can’t let your ideas about possession become more rigid than the facts about how things come and go.

i don’t mind him taking some junk that was cluttering the place in exchange for helping me clear my thoughts about that.

there are signs of hope in the neighborhood, too. not everyone ended up on the street; some of the people who were here before the 80s are still here. some younger working people with families have moved in. there are lots of churches and community groups that try to improve life around here. i don’t mind lending a hand where i can; if you’re not willing to do what work you can to help the community, you have no business being there.

but there is something i do mind, and it’s driving me out after none of the other problems could.

as i’ve said, this was a quiet, peaceful street. aside from the occasional siren or the rumble of a truck going by that are part of life in any city, i could enjoy a relaxed evening at home at almost any time of the year. winter was the best, when the cold had driven everyone inside, but even in the summer, there was rarely more noise than the sound of kids playing on the sidewalk.

sometime during the past year, this changed, like a switch had been thrown and everyone had new orders. it’s a mystery to me how it could happen overnight, but when i look back, there was nothing gradual about it. it wasn’t there, and then it was. what is “it”? well, let me describe a typical evening at home now:

i was at barnes & noble, and i splurged a bit in their music section. one of the gems i brought home was a complete set of the scores to the brahms symphonies. my work’s done for the day, and i get out the book. the windows are open, and one of the first warm breezes of spring is blowing softly through the house. across the stree
t, the trees are swaying gently. the setting sun is throwing rich shafts of light over the rooftops and making my living room glow with a lazy, comfortable warmth. i put on the mpegs of the second symphony, carefully adjusting the volume so i don’t disturb the neighbors, and sit on the couch by the window, my legs propped up and the score in my lap.

after a couple of minutes, i hear this from the street:

LOVE MY NIGGAS, BUT WHERE’S MY BITCHES?
LOVE MY NIGGAS, BUT WHERE’S MY BITCHES?
LOVE MY NIGGAS, BUT WHERE’S MY BITCHES?
LOVE MY NIGGAS, BUT WHERE’S MY BITCHES?
IT’S ALL GOOD!
IT’S ALRIGHT!
FUCK ALL DAY!
FUCK ALL NIGHT!

etc., etc.

well, what to do? the obvious solution is to go down and ask them to please turn it down. that’s fine, and when it’s been neighbors causing the noise and i’ve asked them to turn it down, they’ve always apologized for the trouble and done so.

the problem is that “it” is somehow related to overnight advances in car radio technology. 98% of the time, the noise is coming not from someone on the street, but from someone sitting in his car, waiting for the traffic light to change. by the time you pull on your shoes and walk downstairs, he’s already gone. what can you do about that?

some of them have speakers that take up the whole widths of the trunks of their cars. when they come by, i can hear my windows rattling from the barrage and feel the floorboards shaking under my feet.

i’ve run into this wherever i’ve gone in the city, whether in so-called “good” neighborhoods or in so-called “bad” ones. there’s no escaping it, and it’s making this whole great city that i love unlivable for me.

i’m willing to put up with quite a lot, but i just can’t live this way. i think it’s good for practicing living under circumstances you wouldn’t choose, a skill that’s necessary for a life that’s frequently out of our control, but i can’t work in it. i can’t sit and write or edit someone else’s writing for very long when i’m constantly being bombarded by the sound of drum machines and the latest ballad about the glories of “slinging coke” and “slapping hos”.

so i’m looking around at places to live, and it’s a little depressing. i remember reading some comments in a book once (i think it was in your money or your life, and i wish i could find the quote) about the american way of having a home. the gist of it was that we try to make our homes as private and self-sufficient as we can. we each get our own house with our own kitchen and our own washer and dryer and our own telephone and our own tv, until we never have to leave it or see anyone who lives around us. we sit by ourselves in our little space with our stuff year after year, and then we pay thousands of dollars to psychiatrists to try to figure out why we feel lonely. what we ought to wonder instead is why we don’t all just go home and blow our brains out more often than we do. most people know that solitary confinement is the most dreaded punishment in prisons, but we don’t stop to think that we willingly inflict the same conditions on ourselves.

everywhere i look, i’m seeing that the american home is a sad and lonely place. i saw that there were cheap townhomes for rent in essex. i hadn’t been in that area, but the location looked good on the map, so i drove out there yesterday to look at them, and i got to see why they’re so cheap. it’s a flat stretch of land with all the trees cut down, and row after row of identical houses with just a view of one another. the whole area around them is made up of nothing but gas stations and fast food restaurants. it’s horrible. it’s no wonder people hide inside watching tv to escape from it.

but how different is it in the most expensive apartment building? everyone goes in, says hello as they pass in the lobby, then each disappear into their own set of rooms and lock themselves in.

where do you find community in america?

we seem to have replaced community with family. each family has its own house and lives privately behind closed doors. the people who live in the next house have no reason to have any contact with us. we no longer have an agricultural society in which everyone goes to work in the fields together. we don’t have an industrial one in which people live together to be near the factory, and walk there together every morning. in the extreme case of someone like me who just needs a phone line to work, there’s no reason for me to be anywhere in particular, and therefore no common bond with the people who live around me.

i live in my own little family with only the most passing interaction with the people on either side. the trouble with relying on families is that they come and go. dan and i were a family here, and since he’s gone, it’s just me. maybe someone else will come along, but then he’ll be gone, too. in families that have children, the children grow up and move away. you can’t rely on family to take care of the need for community. you wouldn’t want to, even if you could. keeping your circle of relationships that small leads to stagnation and overburdens the people involved; couples that don’t have friends don’t make it.

my solution to the problem of finding community (a live one, not just online) has been to have friends that i see regularly. i have my privacy at home, then i go out and join friends for lunch or work at the agape house, get my fill of interacting with other people, and come back and enjoy my privacy again.

now i’m pondering the dilemma of where to live. on the one hand, i’m jonesing for peace and quiet. my picture of the ideal place is a townhouse with a patio on the back that connects to a lawn that connects to a forest. i walk out the back, onto a trail, and i’m in patapsco state park. the people around me work 9-5 jobs in offices, and i have the whole long, peaceful day to work and listen to the wind in the trees.

on the other hand, i’m picturing myself living there like a hermit, not really connecting to anyone around me, and not being in easy reach of friends and the city.

there should be a compromise between privacy and community; neither one is what you need all the time, and can be harmful in excess.

americans err on the side of privacy — i have my stuff in my place and you have your stuff in yours. never mind that it makes no sense to have my own washer and dryer in my apartment 24/7 when i only use them once a week and walking down to the community laundry center and chatting with you through the spin cycle might be just what i need to give my day a lift. on the other hand, excessive community is the way we start, as part of a family we didn’t choose but that we have to be with every day for the for the first decade of our lives. if enough allowances are made there for privacy and individual activity, that can be wonderful. otherwise, it can be hell.

there are a few times in my life that make me think i’m missing something now. there was high school, when we all got up together, prayed together, ate together, studied together, played together… an open barracks-like dormitory is a bit more community than i would want as an adult, but i look back on that experience and the friends i had there, and think that people who didn’t have that really missed something.

then there were a couple of houses i shared with classmates in college. there was my room and my stuff, but there was also the common area downstairs. it was like a family that you chose to be a part of; you could go down and sit and talk all you wanted, and you could go to your room when you wanted to be alone.

that strikes me as what people need — the availability of both and the ability to choose one or the other. both a room of one’s own and the company of people who have a reason to want to live together. maybe there’s a place that compromises between the monastery and the freestanding home at the end of the cul de sac, an update on the communal college house, someplac
e where i have my own kitchen for when i’m on my own schedule, but we can still all get together and talk over dinner whenever we like.

i should look into intentional communities. in the meantime, i’ll keep all this in the back of my mind and just try to find someplace quiet…