Thawed

There is, it is rumored, a phenomenon known as "the Seattle Freeze," and it is much discussed and argued about here in the Seattle area. Some people swear it's a real thing, and others have determined that it's a myth.

In my own experience as an expatriate Chicagoan living in the Seattle area, I'd long suspected it was something of a real thing, but that's it's mainly a difference in styles and what is considered polite. But I'd been in New York State for the week, and I noticed something striking when I was suburban New York City. Unlike Seattlites, New Yorkers seem to actively enjoy talking to strangers. Random conversations that I would strike up with people, either on the street or across a counter, would routinely run longer than they do here in Seattle. (Not to mention that people just seemed more likely to say "Hello," when you encountered them.)

I, for my part, actively enjoy having random conversations with people I don't know. And the impression that I received from people in New York was that they enjoyed it, too. It was common to come away from a conversation with the idea that the short interaction I'd just had with someone genuinely brightened their day. Not in the sense of a complete turnaround, but that they found value in the chance to talk to someone about something of interest to them, and they were therefore happy to have had the opportunity. I don't get that same vibe from speaking to people in the Seattle area, although they're friendly enough.

And maybe that's why the subject of the Seattle Freeze can be so contentious. I suspect that many Seattlites feel that they're being called out for being, unfriendly, rude or even snobbish for not engaging in what strikes them as meaningless small talk (even though the Seattle Freeze is bigger phenomenon than that). And that sense of being criticized, especially by people who aren't from here, rankles. Maybe what's needed is a new term, or a new way of talking about it. Assuming, of course, you can convince a Seattle native to talk to you...

Churchyard

I'm on a trip to New England (upstate New York, to be {somewhat} precise), and one of the first things I noticed in wandering around is that the old (some dating back to the 1710s) churches have cemeteries in their yards. Which makes sense; it was the way things were done back then. But not having grown up in place where it was still done. I find it interesting.

Nobody In Particular

The original plan was for this to be an "about me" post. Despite the fact that one of my stated goals for Nobody in Particular was that it wasn't going to be about me, this is post #2,000, and so I figured that I'd make an exception for the occasion. And then decided against it, because I still consider myself to be a boring and unremarkable person, and I can't really imagine what anyone would want to know about me. I'm not really that interesting.

But back in 2006, when I started this endeavor, I'd noted that "interesting things happen around me, and in the United States, and I hope to make this into a somewhat interesting place to read about them." I don't know how good a job I've done at that. My ex-girlfriend put her finger on it, I think, when she noted that I tend to use this space to complain about the world, and despite a stated desire on my part to give the blog a more positive tone, I still tend to post about things that strike me as wonky. When I'm playing the part of "Guy With a Camera," it tends to be about interesting things, so the Photography posts don't strike me as having the same negativity. Outside of that, however, things can seem one-note at times.

When I started this, part of the reason behind it was to become a better writer, in a few different ways; to be better able to organize my thoughts and to work on the skill of translating them into a written format. I'm also a terrible typist, and considering the amount of time my job has me writing e-mails or working on documents, weblogging seemed like a good way to hone those skills. I'm not sure that it's been working, despite my having been at it for more than a decade now.

Instead, Nobody In Particular has become about me understanding the world around me; making sense of it and placing it into a perspective that allows me to better relate to it. It's not so much a venue for "thinking out loud," as it were, but one for solidifying those thoughts and being able to come back to them later. I'm something of a forgetful person; going back through my old hardcopy "diary," I was impressed at the number of times I'd had the same epiphany, and decided to write it down. I want to avoid doing the same here, but I have caught myself repeating posts in the past, as I've come across something I've written in the past, cleaned it up and posted it here without realizing that I'd already been through that same exercise.

And I think that I do this because one of my recurring questions about the way that people behave is: "What purpose does this serve?" Because while I understand that people don't do things without having a reason; in a lot of cases, that reason isn't immediately accessible to me. And so I sit down at my keyboard, and I work it out. And I either find and answer or confess to being unable to do so. I should, I think, leave it as a question when I can't sort it out, rather than deciding that some or another action is "a pointless charade that does nothing constructive," as I put it in one of the first time's I used the formulation. (For the same reason, I should also retire the "Rampant Idiocy" label for posts.)

If I could choose literally anything to have as a special ability, while I might consciously be tempted to grab a useful, but low-key, superpower, like walking through walls or something, I think what would best fit with my personality would be the capability to consistently and accurately understand people's motivations; to understand what they think they're accomplishing with something. I don't know that Nobody In Particular will move me closer to that. But I've come to find the work of it worthwhile.

Harken

In the time that I've spent reading things on the internet, it seems clear to me that "The situation is getting no international press coverage," or "the mainstream/liberal/conservative media won't cover this" are simply shorthands for: "This isn't generating the response that I think it should, so people obviously aren't be informed of it." In my own experience, it's rare to find a story that "the media" is supposedly ignoring that doesn't immediately turn up in the recent archive the first two or three major news outlets I investigate. Those that don't commonly fall into one of three primary categories; items that are more conjecture or opinion than factual reporting, limited interest stories with relatively low relevance outside of a particular niche and things that are simply out-of-date.

But the idea that "the Media" commands the public's attention, in the sense that it can literally dictate what people do and do not pay attention to, dies hard, perhaps because it's such a convenient way of understand why things that are so important to certain people aren't at all on the radar of everyone else. Some of this is a sense of superior intellect and sensitivity. It's fairly simple, I would think, if others are easily lead astray and "distracted," that they must not be as intelligent or discerning. And so not only is the self-professed media watchdog more upstanding and ethical than the editors and owners of the media outlets they disdain, but they're smarter, wiser and/or more "awake" than the general public. And perhaps this sense of virtue is what keeps the idea going.

Not that there isn't media bias, of course. Media bias and a general bent to story selection are common. My favorite example is National Public Radio; they seem to have never encountered a story about a hardworking, but undocumented, immigrant jeopardized by America's immigration rules that they didn't like. But for me, this is a function of the left-leaning audience that NPR currently has. And to the degree that people who are willing to donate money to the network keep the lights on and the salaries paid, NPR's coverage can be expected to align itself with what prompts those individuals (and organizations) to open their wallets.

And this is my general theory of "media bias." Rather than the media leading the public, the audience leads the media. Sure, a media outlet can get out in front of it's audience. But if it heads off in a direction that the audience wasn't already willing to go, it will find itself alone, and lacking revenue, when it arrives.

Down on the Corner