Impermanence and words

[Sandra Dodd]

I worry about my website, SandraDodd.com, sometimes. I worry that I'll die and the geocities bill won't be paid and it will disappear. I've told my family to keep that paid, but what if they don't? What if we all die in a cataclysmic... cataclysm? It could happen. There's always WayBack Machine.

So I could write right here "If I die, anyone who wants to lift some of those unschooling pages and host them elsewhere is free to do so," it would be here in public for people to see and remember.

But Laura could pull the plug on this forum someday and then it wouldn't be here. (I don't expect her to; it's a cool forum! But I'm just saying that as group owner she does have access to the Big Off Switch.)

Is paper more permanent? I've had to throw some papers away lately. Some I didn't mind. I have a little stack of printouts of e-mails from 1995 on my desk right now, water damaged. How "important" are they? Some have good memories. Some remind me of things I would have totally forgotten, like the The Homeschool Cyber-News, an e-mail newsletter I used to do for the AOL homeschooling forum, and then one of the notes I saved was e-mail from Helen Hegener asking if I would do one for Home Education Magazine too, or instead. That was in the days when websites were very new, and not very useful. There were user groups, but nothing like automated yahoogroups quite yet. I mailed that newsletter in batches of 50, by keeping all the e-mail addresses in a Word file on my Mac, adding new addresses to the list in green, "unsubscribes" in red, then re-alphabetizing and going through by hand and deleting duplicates (a green where there was already a black? Delete one) and deleting both if one was red.

Yeah. I had forgotten that.

When I first started doing calligraphy, I was surprised by the concept of "permanence ratings" on ink and paint. I did a test set, where I wrote the date or something with every kind of ink I had. That was nearly 30 years ago. I see that paper sometimes, and sure enough, some of that faded.

Photocopies from the 70's kept in some kinds of 70's vinyl binders have stuck to the vinyl, stuck to each other, and become unuseable.

Some words are more important than others.

There were discussions here that are gone now. Just gone. So if you write anything you really like, try to save it in more than one way if it's important to you.

Holly can't read my husband's cursive. I was showing her a Valentine he made me once, on computer printout paper, a long poem (parody of a tune I would recognize from the way it scanned). She might not be able to read those letters when we're gone.

What kind of writing is important, and to whom, and what (if anything) should or can we do about it? Things are different now than they were ten or thirty or sixty years ago. Everything changes.

[Schuyler]

A couple of days ago I was trying to pin down a date and went through file folders that I have filled with different kinds of things. Diplomas, letters, poems, papers I wrote, clippings from newspapers, fliers, lots of different things. In amongst them all I found these letters that friends had sent that I have no memory of getting. But I know where I was when they arrived and I could remember the feeling that I had getting letters from my mailbox in the dorms at Mankato State University. Those won't ever mean anything to anybody but me and, maybe, the person who sent them to me. It doesn't matter if someone finds them intact 1000 years from now in some sort of pile of compressed paper that was kept in an airless environment, they will only be words and pictures on paper, only something that produces some discussion among those who uncovered it, maybe a piece in an obscure scholarly journal talking about the language of the late 20th century. No one will ever feel the warmth of that contact between a friend who was far away, at a time when I felt lonely.

I think it is okay for ink to fade, for words to become separated from their original intent. Your words will have changed thousands of people's lives on the day when the cataclysmic cataclysm occurs that keeps the geocities bill from getting paid. I'd miss sandradodd.com as I'm sure many people would. Maybe you need to have some sort of trust established?

[laura bowman]

i think about this an awful lot. permanence and what it means and how it often eludes me. i save the strangest things. notebooks with grocery lists and such. and check registers from so long ago i can't imagine why i need them...but for the notes i put in there that are about so much more than where we ate or shopped.

i think about those "what ifs" as well. what if i die in an accident and no one can access my email accounts to tell my friends...or what if they can...which is worse? who will finish raising my kids? who will make sure the bills get paid??

i have a really bad memory and so keeping things that help me remember are really important to me. that's why i take so many pictures. i think about how for the last few years they are all digital. my photo albums just stop as if we were simply done with picture taking forever. i worry about something happening to the discs i have those pictures on. i think about getting them all printed and remember that i am not a rich person...because, hey that's a lot of pictures!!! then i'll think about the "what ifs" of some apocolyptic future where we no longer have access to computers. how will i see my pictures, i won't have them to pass on to my children and grandchildren. what if something happens to the flickr website and all my pictures are lost forever and ever along with all the comments!! that's my photo album!!!! it would be like losing precious things in a fire...sort of.

i lost a lot of stuff when the shed we had things in when i was younger was torn down by the relatives who owned it. they burned it and cleared the ground. i had a box of letters in there from a childhood friend that i've gotten back in touch with in the last few years and we both mourn the loss of those letters.

i had a laptop that the hard drive just up and died on one day. there were letters in there too. yeah, i keep lots of letters. email letters. letters i've typed and then printed out and mailed. i like to read them sometimes and see how if i've changed and/or grown. reminders of all sorts of of events and such.

i think all things are impermanent. yet there are things that seem to have been right where they are forever.

i would never ever pull the plug on this site ;) i was very sad to see recent discussions disappear as well. there was a world of ideas inside them that i thought were important. but they are gone. there is software that can be downloaded to back up this entire site on a regular basis and i'm thinking i might just do that. everyone has the option to delete whatever they contribute here. unfortunately it makes it too easy to take others' contributions as well.

[Ren]

~~i was very sad to see recent discussions disappear as well.~~

Yeah, I was a little pissed that someone felt they had a right to delete MY words. I had no idea you could pull the plug on your own discussion. That's too bad. It's like a collaborative work that becomes communal property and takes on a life of it's own, but one person gets to destroy without consent. That sucks.

Hell, I have entire conversations out there in webspace that were things I argued to the death back in 2000 that I did a 180 degree switch on and yet the thoughts I had back then (and the embarrassing arguments) are out there for the world to see. I'm glad that's documented for others to read. I'm glad people can change or argue different points and have it in black and white for other's to learn from.

This is a truly amazing resource for unschoolers and I'm very grateful for it.

[laura bowman]

yeah i was upset too. i was trying to keep my language...quiet i guess...trying to keep the emotion of it in check for all sorts of personal reasons. then i turned right around and put a comment on jules' profile with the word "fucking" in it...southern culture on the fucking skids to be exact. LOL, so much for my quiet mood. but hearing good music wakes me up!!!

[Sally Lopez]

I participated for several years on a large (more than 10,000 members) forum at an author's fansite where they were having the same problem. Many times a particularly brainless poster would start a thread about something simple or trivial, but other people would join in the conversation later as the topic naturally evolved. The danger was always that the original poster was holding the Delete button.

One irritating guy would start threads about volatile topics then delete them after people expressed opinions different from his. People would invest serious time and thought into their writing (like they do here), then sometimes there would be months' or years' worth of discussion that would disappear without notice. One frequent poster, who everyone relied on to start threads about new movies, deleted about 30 threads at once one night when he was blue and was feeling that his interest in movies was too trivial.

Eventually, members got so riled by people deleting months' or even years' worth of discussion that they asked everyone to "sign" a statement saying that they would maintain the integrity of the community by not deleting threads. Some posters won't participate in a thread unless it is authored by a signer. I stopped reading there about 6 months ago so I'm not sure how it all worked out, but it was one solution that sorta worked.

I save everything I post and stuff I like in a journal file on my desktop. I don't want to lose it if Blogger suddenly disappears or whatever. Martha Stewart prints out and files all her emails. *vbg*

[Jules]

Yeah, good music's great for bringing out the expletives. And so are heated online discussions. I missed what got deleted here but did notice that you could delete anything you created. I imagine it's a difficult design decision for any social networking site: do you put control in the hands of the individual or at the group/forum level? Recently there was an article in the NY Times about how difficult it is to truly remove yourself from Facebook, how users leave "footprints" throughout the site, etc. Seems to me that if someone chooses to leave a social site, any contributions to discussions could remain but just become tagged as having an anonymous or deleted author. I don't know how other sites handle it.

In the early 90s, I printed out an email on big perforated, green and white striped line printer paper that I used to print my computer science homework out on. It's a personal letter from a friend who I saw every day (meaning it was rare that we emailed back then, and even rarer that I would have printed out something personal since the printers were shared resources in the computer labs and you had to go and pick up your printouts from someone who would tear them off for you). I think we had had an argument or misunderstanding about something, and the letter was about that. I'm sure we made up because we were close for several years but eventually drifted apart. He died a couple of years ago, and while I have pictures of us and handwritten letters from him, I think that printout (which I haven't dug out in years), must have a lot of weight in its words. But it doesn't matter whether I ever read the letter again, the memory of having it and of the effort I went through to get it, will always remind me of him.

[Melissa]

And yet...I just can't help but to give thanks that the written word can be lost. The kids and I were digging through some boxes in the garage when I found report cards and letters from high school to my parents. I was amazed at how much hurt was brought up, from words such as "She could do so well if she'd just apply herself," (gd forbid I have a B in Calculus) or "she'd learn more if she'd stop socializing".(which is why I find it ironic that so many people use that argument against homeschooling) The kids read through with me, helped verbalize that pain, and then helped me burn them all in the backyard. They probably still exist at the school, on a hard drive or file (or I may just be more impressed with myself than they were, and they are gone) But the physical act of losing those words were very healing to me.

And I like to think that even with your website gone (pbtpbt...may it never happen!) the wisdom that has been created, refined, passed through us all, will remain and be passed down in a lifestyle that has allowed us to defy the words previously meant to confine us to someone's expectations. They live in our hearts, not just on a hard drive.

[Sandra Dodd]

-=-Still, it doesn't hurt to back stuff up and print out important documents/articles on acid free paper.-=-

But not with an ink-jet printer! Then it can be washed right off (but the paper might survive! ).

THAT's some craziness: Water-based ink.

[laura bowman]

those words are hurtful aren't they? i remember many hurts from school, being rejected by just a few point from going into the gifted program because my library skills weren't strong enough. the hurt had a lot to do with the fact that my best fried DID get in and i would miss her.

but i'd think they could also be affirmation. of your choices you've made today. i know that the hurts i experienced in school had an effect on things i inadvertantly made sure my kids knew. like using the library. that is just something we do an awful lot. and they knew from a very young age which state was texas. when i was in the fifth grade i had the pleasure of being laughed at by my whole class because i could not identify that big funny shape as texas!!

i love the idea and image of a burning of the effigy of those cards. that's pretty awesome!!

[Katherine]

Speaking of the impermanence of words. How about that? Impermanence of what's important to know.

Is it really detrimental if someone doesn't know what the shape of Texas is? I was born there but for a twist in history Texas might not ever have been. It used to be Mexico and some people still insist that by rights it *is* Mexico. Just think. Maybe I wasn't really born in Texas but in Mexico.

A fact that could just as well be a mere opinion.

[laura bowman]

oooh, interesting thoughts. i often think about that...what IS important to know. some things are simply not relevant to every single person. there are some things i don't know squat about and i never will.

[Rebecca Allen]

I got a "U" for unsatisfactory in Skipping in Kindergarten. I'm still trying to shake the "uncoordinated" label in my mind.