Credit where it’s due: The cartoon’s page at the New Yorker store.
I do really detest Facebook. Some reasons include:
- The site is ugly.
- All “personal” pages look the same.
- There are ads.
- The “applications” are inane visual noise.
- The concept of “friends” is disingenuous. I used to think it was primitive (everybody is a friend on the same level, in the same sense), but now I realize that the whole point is to co-opt one’s acquaintances (however superficial) into an ever more sprawling commercial undertaking disguised as a social network. Yes, I am a bit slow.
- The status messages (the original Twitter-tweets?) transform or filter or distort one’s “life” into pellets suitable for distribution to a mass audience of your so-called friends. However, Mass != Friends. If one were to walk around in real life disclosing verbally and face-to-face one’s changing mood and observations several times a day to everyone in earshot, the behavior would be viewed as self-absorbed and (ultimately) tedious. Facebook constructs an audience of a specific sort (semi-anonymous, bored, obsessive, voyeuristic) that is addressed by an equally constructed self (narcissistic, undiscriminating). I don’t like either of these subject positions. I don’t hear MYself addressed when I read those messages, and, that being the case, I don’t want to eavesdrop. And if I actually know a person, and if I am in touch with that person, I find it disconcerting and squirm-producing to encounter this other Facebook self. Yes, this may be neurotic.
- Everyone is doing it.
Facebook is the PowerPoint of personal communication, worse even than Twitter (which I have never used because I don’t like texting — cell phones are horrible input devices for text). Twitter, to its credit, has only one constraint — the message length limit — and beyond that it’s open season. Facebook, on the other hand, is a complex trap for e-mail addresses and eyeballs. Twitter (which has no business model) is stupid on its face, and I appreciate that.
I am so busy always that I only now report on my first attempt at climbing Mt. Si on 19 June (Father’s Day). It was a really tough workout, and I was sore for a week after. The day was mostly cloudy and unsettled. I had a small amount of wetness heading up but more sunshine. Mostly, though, it was misty and strange through the endless switchbacks that wind 3000 feet up the mountain. I got to the meadow at the top in about two hours, or 30 minutes per mile, which wasn’t too awful. Suddenly there was little soil and the environment was extremely rocky and alpine, with drop-away views of the Snoqualmie Valley below, hidden and then exposed through swirling clouds. Oddly, all the way up the mountain you can still hear the rush of I-90. I had lunch and then set out to climb the Haystack, spire leading to the true summit. As I and two other hikers approached the base of it through a beautiful, flowery basin, lightning hit the peak. The other hikers turned on a dime and ran in terror back to the cover of the woods. I laughed out loud and then hustled back at a pretty good pace myself. A second lightning strike hit and was accompanied by a crackle (not a boom — a crackle, it was that close), and it began to hail (BB-sized). I zipped up all the orifices of my expensive raincoat and headed down the mountain. I was back at the bottom in about an hour, greeted by clear, mild, sunny weather. Mt. Si, including the Haystack, was spectacular from Northbend as I drove home.
Jan and I will try it together on July 5, next Sunday. With better weather, I’ll make the Haystack this time.
Light in the cathedral of trees on the way up Mt. Si.
From Mt. Si looking north.
The Snoqualmie Valley from on top of Mt. Si.
The Haystack viewed a few hundred feet from its base.
In September 2008, Jan and I attempted to climb Mt. Phelps (Phelps I) in the Cascades. We drove successfully to the trailhead (no mean feat) but had to give up because of rainy, socked-in conditions.
Last Saturday, May 16, we tried again (Phelps II), with Rosa along. In the intervening months, abnormally heavy snowfall and rainfall had ruined the Forest Service roads running up to Phelps, and we parked several miles short of the trailhead. Walking on the road was hard going because of deep snow, washouts, and truly astounding mudslides that were treacherous to cross. From the trailhead, we hiked up perhaps less than a thousand feet before deciding that our route was too-nearly impassible, our clothing was inadequate in view of the dense brush of the five-year-old clear-cut we were traversing, and we were running out of daylight.
View Needle to Phelps: 37 miles in a larger map
Instead of retracing the route we had come, we cut directly down the slope, paralleling a large creek and sticking to old second-growth forest that had much less debris to fight through. The weather was beautiful, warm, mild, dry. The car ran properly. It was a good experience apart from being a failure. I contemplate another assault (Phelps III) in August, more carefully and knowledgeably planned.
Pictures here: http://www.oneeyedman.net/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=14463.
