Thought That Came Unbidden

You have no idea how much you really sweat until you have a case of poison ivy as an adult.

The rash that happens from contact with poison ivy, poison oak, or poison sumac (altogether now…Don’t need nothing/but a good time/and it don’t get better than this) is a contact dermatitis reaction caused by an oil called urushiol which is found in all parts of the plant. Basically, it’s the thing that makes you itch. But in this day and age of climate control – hello personal HVAC unit in the new office – and Benedryl spray it’s fairly easy to keep the itching under control…until you go outside.

It has been brutal in DC the last couple of days: On Monday it was 83.8degF/28.8degC at 8am and while the official high was 98.4degF/36.9degC the heat index made it feel like 102degF, especially on the paved streets of downtown Washington. Now imagine that with 77% humidity and you’ll understand why I felt a certain shiver of…not schadenfraude for I take no delight in their discomfort…but vindication as I in my shorts and aloha shirt passed people who were wearing full-on office drag. Yes, you may make more money than I do, you may have more IT support than I do, you may have nicer office furniture than I do (and you probably didn’t have to go to Reston, VA in a rented truck to pick it up) but it is days like this past Monday when I am certain about why I continue to work in non-profit.

Tuesday was little better…official high of 99.9degf/37.7degC but today was gorgeous…a perfect summer day in DC. About 85 degrees and not too humid. So after three days of anti-poison ivy wash, at only $40 for a 1oz tube, and three days of being doped up on Claritin and coated with Benedryl spray I thought I’d take a walk around the neighborhood near my new office.

And it was quite pleasant, warm enough in the sun to appreciate that it was summer and similarly cool in the shade. Not hot, mind you, but appropriately warm. Not once did I break an actual sweat, but sweat I did based on how much I itched after a brief walk around the block.

So the next time you think you aren’t sweating because you aren’t completely pitted out or because you don’t have that tell-tale rivulet running some place intimate think again. Unless there’s something seriously wrong, your pores are busy putting out salt and other toxins by the gallon.

If you’re at all variant in American society in a way that doesn’t scream serial killer, whether your variation is sexual (as in “Hi, everyone, I’m queer!”) or it’s the fact that you really, really, really thought that Voyager was the best installment of the Star Trek TV franchise, coming out of the closet can be both a joy and a relief. When that coming out is something you choose to do it happens because you’ve finally reached a point where your own comfort with who you are is more important to you than society’s often arbitrary and exclusionary mores. Getting outed, though, is painful no matter what. It’s especially painful when it happens because a technological system fails to work in the way it’s been advertised to work.

Much has been made of Google and its potential to abuse the massive amount of data it is collecting both in aggregate and about you personally when you’re logged into your iGoogle account. Google has been accused recently of participating in Chinese government sponsored censorship and of failing to comply with California’s online privacy laws by making their privacy policy difficult to find. And while some of the critiques of Google may present slightly paranoid, it says something about the power of the data they collect that over two years ago the U.S. Justice department issued subpoenas to all of the major search engines as part of their attempt to enforce a controversial anti-pornography law.

Though the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Gmail FAQs is a comprehensive, well thought out list of reasons why you shouldn’t use Gmail it doesn’t mention Gmail’s one major flaw: it can expose your identity without your knowledge.

See, Gmail has this great feature that allows you to retrieve e-mail from other accounts into your Gmail box. Handy for people like me who have multiple e-mail accounts separated by function – one e-mail account for social networking, one for neighborhood political activities, one that fronts my blog identity – but who don’t want to have to log in and log out of several accounts multiple times per day. Ostensibly with your Gmail account you can set different identities in your umbrella account, the one that you’re using to pull from all your other e-mail, so that when you send e-mail to your boss telling him you’re sick it doesn’t come from cupcakelover56 it comes from Jill Jones. What Gmail doesn’t tell you with these identities is that each e-mail that’s sent carries your umbrella address with it.

When the Compose window looks like this:

it implies that your e-mail will be received as being from you with no association to any other e-mail address. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Check it out: This message was sent from my umbrella account (that’s my blog-fronting address) but was sent using my “professional” identity.

That blur at the top is my actual name. The blur at the bottom is another of my e-mail addresses. But that thing in the clear, that’s the address of the umbrella Gmail account I used to send the message.

I found this out this out the hard way: by finding my blog-identity e-mail address associated with my real name in documents that are part of the public record relating to the siting of a charter school in my neighborhood.

So whether you’re trying to separate your Facebook identity from your identity as a level 70 Tauren Druid, beware of Google’s hidden privacy flaw. Otherwise, your boss might be getting e-mail from BromopneaDruid without you ever knowing it.

I took 22 subscription cards out of three magazines this week…you know, those things that fall out while you’re reading in bed and inconveniently on to the floor where you can’t quite reach them but you just know that if you leave them there you’ll step on them when you get up at 3am to go pee, do that Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford thing, crack your head open and either die of it or end up having to go to the emergency room in whatever your S.O. could find in the closet before the ambulance arrives (’cause everyone loves a 3am trip to the ER).

Everyone talks about reducing junk mail but what about reducing the impact of publications you want to get? How many pounds of paper would we save each year if every magazine published in the U.S. cut their subscription blow-ins and sew-ins by even a third?

I don’t have the answers to this but I think I may have found my next project. Nothing like hard data to make a point.

I’m not writing enough.

There, I said it. Admitting that you aren’t writing enough when you’d like to honestly be able to call yourself “a writer” is a bit embarrassing for as my friend Sal once told me “It doesn’t matter if you get paid. Writers write. Period.” I try not to argue with Sal when she explicitly vocalizes punctuation. I like having all my fingers and toes.

Point is, I’ve been trying to find ways to write more, to take Julia Cameron’s advice and not make writing such a big deal. It’s a hard thing to do when you function well (OK, when you function highly efficiently…could someone please throw some hand grenades at me for the rest of my life? Thanks.) under deadline pressure. It’s one of the reasons why I find the structure of NaNoWriMo so comforting: there’s a schedule and a deadline and it’s clear and measurable.

And since my problem is finding time – this is what happens when you get involved in community politics – and since Cameron’s advice is to fit the writing in where it fits, I’ve started with a book called Fast Fiction: Creating Fiction In Five Minutes.

If I can’t find five minutes a day to write I figure I’m not a writer.

I’d started posting some of those exercises here but the more I thought about it the more I thought that my fiction, both the limited number of recent examples and pieces from my library, deserved a home of its own. So, I gave it one at Fiction That Comes Unbidden. Check it out; let me know what you think.

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• I’ve never been colder in my life than Sat. in SF,CA. Yes, that includes skiing in CO at -6dgF. Windbreaker anyone? 11:34 AM April 21, 2008