should auld inboxes be forgot

Over the past few days I've been going through old email backups and uploading them to Gmail. Some of the backups go all the way back to 1995, and since I'm an incurable email pack rat, the total number of messages is now somewhere north of 20,000. It started off as an attempt to clean up the various ZIP files and backup folders I had lying around, but as I've slowly reconstructed my email history of the past 13 years, I've come to a surprising realization.

When I think back over the years since 1995, I don't imagine them as a continuous progression from one year to the next, or even as chapters within the same story, but as completely separate books. Just as with books, a few characters may carry over from one to the next, but in general each book is self-contained and clearly separated from the next. I suppose that some degree of this is normal, since things like switching jobs and moving tend to mark off different periods in everyone's life, but in my case I think it's even more pronounced. For example, I find it hard to connect the memories I have of, say, working at First Floor in late 1997 and working at @Home in mid-1998, almost as if they were memories from separate lives.

Paradoxically, I think I'm also much more susceptible to bouts of nostalgia than most people, to the point of what the Portuguese call saudade, a sort of melancholic longing for something that's gone, or maybe never was. This might actually be because of my tendency to treat the past as a closed and locked book, something completely inaccessible and mysterious.

Now that I've got a single narrative of the past decade-plus in one place and have been spending some time browsing through it, it's easier to see the overall arc of the story, and to realize that despite all of the changes, and for better or for worse, I'm essentially the same person as that wide-eyed and earnest 27-year old back in the mid-90's. It hasn't all been easy reading; a lot of it is painful to revisit, some of it is embarrassing, and a fair amount is just plain boring. But together it makes up a priceless snapshot of years of my life that I might otherwise have forgotten. Not bad for a free email service.

Of course, all this nostalgia is amplified by the fact that it's New Year's Eve, which always puts me in a reflective sort of mood. This year is a bit different from most, since I'm sitting at home alone except for a sleeping baby and a head cold to keep me company. As Sofia's first new year and my 40th, it's not exactly spectacular. Still, I suppose there are worse ways to end a year than with a little quiet reflection and some Sudafed.

Finally, although I don't normally make a habit of posting videos or music, it is New Year's Eve, and there's one song that I always associate with that feeling of nostalgia with a touch of melancholy that comes along with the end of the year, at least for me. (Yes, I am a child of the 80's...so sue me.)

Happy new year, everyone.

yo A, what up?

On a tip from my Twine feed, I tried out a site that promises to create a custom virtual personality, so that you can chat with famous dead people, or recreate yourself as a virtual avatar. Thinking that I might be able to let the virtual me deal with emails and chat meetings while I lounge on the beach in Ibiza, I signed up and filled out some basic information. Once I was logged in, the first thing I decided to try was a chat with a virtual Abraham Lincoln. In eager anticipation of sage advice from the Great Emancipator on all of our 21st century problems, I summoned up all my gravitas and said hello:

Greg Gladman: hello, Mr Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln: hey, what's up.

I think it needs some work.

the journey of 1000 miles

As I'm writing this, my parents are waking up and getting ready to go to the airport, and in just over six hours, they'll be leaving Columbus for JFK and then on to Barcelona to meet their new granddaughter for the first time. This might not seem like a big deal for seasoned travelers, but for my mom and dad, it's a huge undertaking. My mom has only left the country once -- to come to Spain for our wedding -- and my dad didn't have a passport until we cajoled him into getting one for this trip. I imagine they must be more than a little anxious right now (as my mom said, "we want to be there, we just don't want to go there"). The fact that they've been without power for almost a week because of the remnants of Hurricane Ike probably isn't helping, either.

So, Mom and Dad, if you see this before you go: relax, take a deep breath, and before you know it you'll be touching down in Barcelona, where we have electricity, running water, and happy little 3-month old girls.

Have you seen me?

Like it or not, everyone has a limit, some point past which body and mind conspire to say, "no more." For me, that point was sometime around Saturday, August 23rd, when at least four weeks of sleep deprivation and physical exhaustion finally caught up with me in the form of a nasty cold that I'm still trying to shake off over a week later.

In the two weeks leading up to then, I had been walking the streets of Amsterdam, averaging 20km (12 miles) per day according to the GPS tracker I bought, carrying a 10 kg (22 pound) camera bag with me every step of the way. By night I would take the train back to Den Haag, where our friends Karen and Joost graciously let us stay with them, and stayed up as long as I could to edit photos for a deadline which was already receding in the rear-view mirror. In between, I would try to steal a few minutes with Amy and Sofia so that they would remember who I am. My diet consisted of anything you could eat while walking, mostly hot dogs, Diet Coke, and snack cakes (including my new best friend, roze koeken). In retrospect, the surprising thing isn't that I got sick in the end, it's that I wasn't found floating in a canal, dead from junk-food poisoning. Oh, and did I mention the unseasonable and unphotogenic pouring rain?

If it sounds like I'm complaining, though, I'm really not. It's true that I would probably have enjoyed the job more if I weren't already exhausted from crunch time at my day job, or if I wasn't sleep-deprived from having a new baby, or if I were 21 years old and indefatigable again. But it's still an opportunity to do something I love and get paid for it, which doesn't come along all that often.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have 9,200 photos of canal boats to edit.

Hello, Sofia!

Sofia Gladman Artal made her way into the world just after midnight on Friday, May 30th. Mother and baby are both doing well, while Daddy is desperately trying to figure out how to edit hundreds of baby photos while changing diapers, burping the new baby, and going home twice a day to feed and medicate the cat. I have managed to get a few uploaded to Facebook, though, and you can take a look at them there.

In the end, Sofia arrived as a cesarean, since she was already more than a week overdue and there were some signs that waiting any longer might be dangerous, according to the non-stress tests and fetal monitors. We had gone to the doctor for the second checkup of the day, when he looked at the monitor printout and said "we're going to the hospital." After a couple more hours of more detailed monitoring, it became clear that although the contractions were progressing, she wasn't showing any signs of engaging, so a cesarean was the only reasonable option. An hour's worth of prep later and we were in the delivering room, where they handed her to us, apparently safe and sound. The only problem so far seems to be that she has her schedule reversed, so she tries to sleep all day and stay up all night, making for some seriously sleep-deprived parents. Over the next few days we should be able to change that, though, and everything else seems to be going well. With any luck she'll make the trip home sometime tomorrow afternoon, and a whole new adventure will begin.

21st Century Digital Girl, or How Things Were Different Back in My Day, Part 17

Now that we're officially across the border and into May, there are only three weeks or so left before Sofia's scheduled arrival. If this were the 1800's, there's a good chance that everyone who would be interested in getting the news about her birth would be within walking distance of each other, but with friends and family spread across the globe, communication gets a little complicated.

To get around this problem, I'm planning on sending updates (as often as I can) via Twitter. If you haven't used it before, Twitter is a "microblogging" tool that lets you send short updates -- less than 140 characters -- about what you're doing at any given moment. The best part is that it allows you to send and receive updates via the website, instant messenger, or your mobile phone, which means I may be able to send the occasional update between contractions.

If you're interested, you can follow the updates on my Twitter page, or you can sign up for an account to get updates automatically sent to you (it's free, and I haven't gotten any spam from them yet). You can also download any number of programs for the PC which will sit on your desktop and tell you when there are updates...I especially like twhirl.

Finally, for what it's worth, I'm already using Twitter on a semi-regular basis for everyday things, so if you care to find out what I had for lunch or what interesting website I found today, feel free to "follow" me there. If you have your own account, let me know and I'll follow yours, too.

gloomy thoughts on a bright spring day

Today was a beautiful spring day in Barcelona, the kind of day that just begs to be enjoyed while sitting outside having lunch at a nice little cafe. I didn't, though -- not because there aren't any nice little cafes nearby, but because I have roughly 58€ to last through the end of the month. Not since university have I had to give such careful consideration to paying for basic staples, and it's a depressing situation when you're 40 years old. Add in the fact that there's a baby on the way next month, and it becomes a terrifying prospect, one that keeps me up at night staring at the ceiling.

The problem lies partly in the amount of money we've had to spend in the last couple of months to get ready for Sofía, but the real root cause is a combination of low Spanish salaries and the rapidly rising cost of living. Although the the situation in Spain hasn't yet reached the level of the subprime mortgage crisis in the US, there's an increasing amount of talk about people not making their mortgage payments and defaulting on loans. If our own mortgage goes up again next year by the amount that it did last year, chances are we'll need to start looking for a cheaper place -- again, not exactly the ideal situation with a newborn baby.

In short, something has to change. All things considered, I like living in Spain, and I think it's a good place to raise a family, but unless the salaries reach some sort of parity with the cost of living, we're going to have to make some tough decisions before long.

4am ramblings of an insomniac

There's a moment at the end of the film Blade Runner where Rutger Hauer's character, having reached the end of his preprogrammed lifespan, talks about the things that he's seen in his four short years, then makes a poignant comment on life and death:

"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

And then he does. The entire movie is a parable about what it means to be human and the nature of memories, but for me it's that one line, and the pathos behind it, that sticks with me. No matter how much you see and do in a lifetime, there is always a huge part of it which goes with you when you die, lost forever to the rest of the world.

Sometimes I think that keeping a blog or a journal could be a way to keep those experiences alive; after all, with the almost unlimited lifespan of information on the web now, anything you publish has a good chance of outliving you, whether you'd like it to or not. The problem is that a lifetime isn't made up of big noteworthy experiences or even minor blogworthy ones, but small little moments that are hard to put into words, and harder still to appreciate vicariously.

Here's an example, one which was running through my mind tonight for reasons unknown as I lay awake in bed. Back in the early 1990's, I took a business trip to North Andover, MA, to the headquarters of the company I was working for at the time. It was one of my first real business trips, and for that matter, one of my first real trips anywhere. The idea was to spend the week meeting and working with colleagues that I normally only talked to via email, but my evenings were pretty much my own.

One night, I stopped into a music store to browse the discount cassette bin, and picked up an album by a woman named Kate Bush called Hounds of Love. I have to admit that I'm not the biggest Kate Bush fan, since some of her earlier songs are reminiscent of a small animal screeching on helium, but when I put the tape in and drove around that night, there was something there that captured the feeling and froze it into my memory. I still remember the synchronicity of pulling over beside the road and listening to the lyrics to Hello Earth:

I get out of my car, step into the night
And look up at the sky.
And there's something bright, travelling fast.
Look at it go...

To the average person, including anyone who reads my account of it, this might sound meaningless at best, and laughable at worst. But to this day, when I hear the song, I'm right back alongside the car on a northern Massachusetts road, looking up at the stars through spent rainclouds. It's not something I can put down into words, and I can't explain why that small moment has stuck with me. It could be the fact that I was a young kid in his early 20's traveling alone for one of the first times; it could be knowing, in retrospect, that I had spent a couple of hours earlier chatting leisurely with the man my then-wife was having an affair with, although I didn't know that at the time; or it could be that I have a natural propensity to imagine that song lyrics somehow apply to me. Whatever the reason, there's a strong connection with that moment in my memory, one which I don't think I could explain without somehow recounting everything else that was going through my head at the time. Maybe there are writers who are capable of doing just that, but I'm not one of them.

Like a lot of things on my mind lately, this all comes about, at least in part, by thinking about the fact that I'll be a father very soon, and that someday my daughter might be curious about what kind of person I was before she came along. I know that my Mom and Dad must have had experiences before I was born that still stick with them, and I would love to be able to read what they would have written about them back in 1967. On the other hand, maybe it's best not to let her know I'm too human, at least until she's old enough not to use it against me as proof of my own fallibility. Why, back in my day, we didn't have time to go driving around willy-nilly, listening to songs about Emily Brontë novels and rainmaking machines.

At least someday she'll know what I did when I was up late with insomnia: namely, writing long, rambling posts quoting Rutger Hauer movies and Kate Bush albums.