Compassion

I’m starting to think that compassion may be a learned skill rather than an innate trait. I know we like to think of all the best qualities of human beings as something we have intrinsically but society squeezes them out of us, but I suspect compassion may be more complicated.

Or maybe not. Maybe we just live in societies that make it harder to keep at the forefront.

What is it they say? That our societies have grown too big, and that’s why urban dwellers have all these ticks to help them avoid noticing that the herd they’re running in is far, far too large to fully comprehend? Ignoring strangers on the bus, keeping our eyes averted while walking on the sidewalk? Is the absence of compassion a result of all that?

I don’t know. But it seems to me that it’s work to remember that every human being has struggles of their own that you may not be able to read on their bodies and faces (if you bothered to read their bodies or their faces, that is). And I’ve decided that compassion is something I’m going to spend more time deliberately drawing out of myself. I shall consider it constantly.

I say all this because I’m increasingly aware of the absence of compassion we tend to show students. We so often seem to assume the worst of them. I don’t really know why; we were all students ourselves once. Why is it so easy for us to forget what it was like? Or are we actually contemptuous of our younger selves, the ones trying to sneak a better grade in any way possible, rejoicing at every holiday and snow day, sleeping through morning lectures and drinking into the wee hours? Is it a form of self-flagellation to assume that all students are lazy and need to be controlled through our obscure and pointless policies?

Or is it just that we get so used to answering the same questions over and over, or dealing with bad behaviour every day, that we assume everyone is stupid and/or malicious? Relentless familiarity? Do we see faces we classify as “students” so often that they all start to look the same, and become some giant annoying creature who just never learns? I guess that’s where my call for compassion comes in.

But then I’m an optimistic sort, I don’t tend to imagine the worst of people. Quite the opposite, I think everyone is basically good and wants to do the right thing. (I suppose this may not actually be true, but I struggle to completely accept that.) I don’t usually deal with the same questions every day, but when I do, I generally remember that this is the first time this particular person has asked that question. When I will try to remember is that if they’re asking this question at the very last possible minute, there may be for very good reasons for that which are none of my business.

So my word of the day/week/year is compassion. And I will go on trying to hone my skills in that department.

The Conscious Patient

The weirdest thing about being awake while having surgery is that you get to hear what your surgeon’s thoughts about the process are while they’re happening.

Here’s how it went: I woke up at about 6:30 but didn’t really want to get out of bed. At 7:30 I leapt out of bed and took a shower, got dressed, took my valium and called a cab. The valium kicked in surprisingly quickly, and by the time I was waiting in the surgical waiting room at 8:45 I was feeling no particular stress. I could tell it was a muscle relaxant, and I repeated tripped over my shoes, but otherwise I felt pretty normal. The only thing missing was my requisite terror and overactive imagination in the waiting room.

Once in my surgeon’s play area (office? mini surgical clinic?), I assumed the position on my stomach. He shaved a bit of my head and washed it with alcohol. Then he said he was “turning [me] into a table!” as he put towels and whatnot over me to expose just the shaved spot on my head.

Then, time for the freezing! There were three or four needles, all at the location. They felt unpleasant and cold, but definitely better than dental freezing. After that was over, he said, “that was the worst part!” which was reassuring, as it wasn’t too bad, but some of my hidden panic attack surfaced after that. I started to cry, lying on my stomach, hiding my face. I don’t really know why I felt it just then. I took a lot of deep breaths and then asked for a kleenex to blow my snotty nose. I don’t think they realized that I was having a bit of a panic, though; the nurse said, “I hear a lot of deep breaths there, are you okay?” and I said I was fine. I mean, what can you say? It was at that point that I realized that the 20mg of valium probably wasn’t quite enough for someone with a panic reaction as strong as mine.

After that, I can’t really say exactly what happened. They waited only a few minutes at most before the first incision happened. I didn’t feel it. It wasn’t clear to me that it happened at all. So that was a relief. There was some tugging and pressing, but it felt more like getting a haircut than anything else.

I realized for sure that the incision had happened when the surgeon started to say, “It’s a lipoma!” I said, “yay!” because I know what a lipoma is and I know that it’s exactly not a big deal. My surgeon had hoped that my bumps were lipomas, but the CT suggested otherwise. So his repeated statements about how it was indeed a lipoma made me happy. At least it’s not cancer! Yay! This is over and it’s not cancer!

“You’re doing really well!” my surgeon said brightly.

“So are you!” I said, in an attempt to be just as perky.

He laughed. “I’m the one with the instruments!”

Then after a bit he said, “That sound is me cooking you!” I hadn’t noticed any sound, but I said, “Mmm what’s for dinner?” This is the kind of conversation you have when you’re under a bunch of towels and cloths with surgical instruments on your back, I guess.

After a bit he said, “Well, maybe there’s a lymph node in there, let’s have a look.” Then I felt him digging around deeper. I still didn’t feel anything. “Oh, there’s the lymph node,” he said, then, to the nurse assisting him, “See there? The grey?”

“Ahhh,” the nurse said.

“Yeah,” he said. “There’s the lymph node.”

I can’t remember if I said anything at that point. I figured this kind of reversed all my good news feelings.

Then he started digging some more, I suppose, and suddenly I felt it. It was like a point of burning and pulling. I think I made a squeaky sound and twisted my leg.

“Oh can you feel that? I’m almost done, it will be over in a moment,” he said, extremely sympathetically. There was another hot burst of burning and pulling. It was quite unpleasant. “That’s it, I’m done,” he said. Deep breaths, deep breaths.

The nurse said something about taking the sample to pathology, and the surgeon said something like, “Yes, mark it down to test for everything.” I said, “I know what that means,” and he said something like, “aww, hmph,” in an oh-come-now-its-surely-not-the-cancer-again sort of tone.

I said, “Well, I did it once, surely I can do it again.”

He told me he was going to stitch me up, and that that work was all surface. I could hear the thread and feel the movement of the process, but I didn’t feel any pain again. The nurse helped him afix a bandaid (that’s what they called it, and, hours later I discovered that’s exactly what it was), they took the cloths off me and told me I should sit up, carefully.

I sat up, and he found me a clean piece of gauze. He told me to put some pressure on it for a while. “It’s going to be a lump at first,” he said. I manoeuvred myself back into my jacket and watched my surgeon tapping away on a keyboard and peering into a screen.

“All done with me?” I asked, pressing the gauze against the still painless lump on my head.

“Yep,” he said. “I’ll see you in a week.”

And that was it. I walked out pressing gauze to my head. I pressed it there for about 30 minutes before I gave up and threw the gauze away.

The first thing I did, out in the waiting area, was call my parents. It was 9:45 when I sat down, meaning the entire experience had happened in about an hour. I hoped I could catch them before they left to come pick me up to tell them I was done and was going to cab home, but the phone just rang and rang. So I settled in to wait. I called my sister, frankly on the brink of tears. That opening of a panic attack was still in me. Talking to my sister calmed me back down. I waited about an hour and then my parents arrived.

I don’t know what it means that he thought at first it was just a lipoma (maybe the largest part of it was?) and that he removed a lymph node afterwards. Good news? Bad news? No idea.

As the freezing came out it started to hurt. It hurts more than my thyroidectomy incision ever did, but I had morphine for that one. But it didn’t wake me up in the night, so I guess it’s not too bad.

Next challenge: taking a shower. I’m supposed to wash the incision and put polysporin on it, so I guess hairwashing is on the table this morning. My mother (who is still here with me) suggests I be brave and do it now. Wish me luck.

Academic Fandom: Collaborative Doctoral Work

I really miss school.

I work at a school, yes. But I miss being a student in one. Many people think I’m crazy, but I love being in school. I love the reading, the writing, and most of all the discussion. I’m a Harvard graduate, I know what it can be like to sit in a room full of extremely bright people and wrestle with a thorny problem. I love not knowing and struggling to understand, throwing ideas at the wall and seeing if any of them work.

But I’m a drop-out. I dropped out of a phd program at the very institution at which I am currently employed, in fact. It’s simultaneously the hardest thing I’ve ever done, the smartest decision I ever made, and the decision I am most likely to feel regret about. I don’t regret it because I want the life that would have come with finishing; I think I’m far better off as a librarian, playing with tech and managing projects and helping faculty with their courses, than I would be with a load of research and teaching to do. I adore my job, and I feel very lucky to have found this particular path. I only regret it because I’d like to do the work.

There’s nothing stopping me from going back. Not to that program, or that topic, or that department, though. I think I’ve moved into a new area now. If I were to go back, it would be in a very different way. And I wouldn’t do it in order to become an academic in the end. Not as job training. Just to improve the person that I am, and to enrich the work I’m already doing.

But you couldn’t drag me back to that style of PhD program. I was lonely, bored, confused about the purpose behind anything I was doing. I felt lost. I have discovered over time that my motivation comes from interacting with other people. This wasn’t immediately apparent all through graduate school because I was de facto surrounded by others. I didn’t realize how much my enthusiasm depended on the community. As soon as I lost that community, I seriously lost my way.

So I was thinking about it a bit, and talking to some doctoral students about the issues they’re facing, I think I’m actually on to something. I think I’ve figured out what kind of doctoral program I’d want to enter. It would go something like this.

You start a doctoral program with a group of like-minded people, interested in working together. In fact, I think the group should actually apply to a program together, be upfront about their collaboration. It’s not a huge group, maybe 4-5 people. Those 4-5 people have agreed beforehand that they want to work on an area of mutual interest. But each of them comes to the subject from a different angle, maybe even a different discipline altogether. They’re looking at maybe the same data, or the same subjects, or at historical data from the same decade, or the same region. Something ties them together, makes each other’s work interesting and appealing to each of them. It gives them a common language and common heroes.

They would all have their own advisers, potentially their own departments to turn to for support and guidance. But the group goes through their programs together, sometimes off doing their own courses and conferences, sometimes working closely together. If they’re doing data collection, the data is shared among the group. They may actually gather data together, and work from the same starting point. Sharing data isn’t plagiarism, after all; the insights you draw from it are the key part.

They discuss approaches and revelations, they have people to turn to when they are wrestling with a thorny problem. They influence each other; they also resist being influenced, or deliberately buck the trend. They read some books in common, but not all. Each brings a lot of unique insights and perspective from their own perspective, or discipline, or area. Comps would be a course (or set of courses, really) where the reading lists are created in an order that will allow all the participants to gain from each other’s thinking along the way. You read your own comps reading list, but you get insight from four others at the same time. Maybe they bring in speakers to talk to them. People to come inspire them or challenge them.

When it comes time to start writing, they have a structured plan, with key milestones and deadlines. They arrange to write their sections with commonalities at the same time, like writing a research paper for a seminar course. The writing process for the collaborative group might look like another set of courses, in fact: they take a “course” together to get each section or chapter finished, with a common deadline and requisite celebrations. They can get a mental tick mark as they complete each step, move through the process like an undergraduate moves through first, second, third, fourth year, graduation. The path of progression would be clear, manageable, collegial. The group could work together along the way to publish collected essays revolving around a theme or element of their collective work. They would meet weekly to discuss their work, their ideas, to be inspired and influenced by each other. They would work collaboratively toward independent goals that are inter-related and complementary. When they’re finished, their dissertations could be published together as a series of books, all related and referencing each other.

Chemistry already works this way, in collaborative units. I think if the humanities started doing the same, the work would be richer. And less tedious to produce.

After I thought it all through, I realized what I was considering: creating a fandom. A fandom in academia, around a topic/theme/group/region. A fandom with it’s language, traditions, communities, familiar cast of characters all re-written and re-imagined by each member. As long as it’s a fandom, it comes with a built in audience of people who are actually interested in your take on the very familiar subject. The conversations are deeper, the details and differences are more obvious. The process gains some meaning, even if that meaning is entirely about finding something to contribute to the group. Flagging enthusiasm can be bolstered up by someone else’s reinvigoration.

It’s not that it’s easier than the traditional PhD; it wouldn’t be. You’d still have to do the reading, pass your comps, do your languages if you have to, collect your data and compose your dissertation. It’s just that it wouldn’t have to be such a solitary task. I think this is the kind of PhD that could actually be fun to do. And wouldn’t the work be richer, with constant insight from others? It wouldn’t prevent you from doing solitary work. Solitary work is the foundation of most academic work, and, ironically, most fandom work too. But what is the benefit of solitary work? Don’t we learn better and think better when challenged and supported and listened to by others? Why do we cut so much of that out of the doctoral process? Doesn’t the solitary work gain meaning when it’s in aid of the collaborative? Isn’t academic inherently collaborative, with academics building on each other work, just at a relatively slow pace? From the slow process of getting an article published and the long wait for meaningful citations in future published work, it’s still highly collaborative. Just crazy slow. Would it be terribly wrong to speed it up a bit?

A Typical Argument

Valleywag: Home of Useless Perspectives

So Valleywag has put Second Life on deathwatch. I was sort of intrigued when I heard about this, because I thought they might have something interesting to say. Instead it contains some jabs about how it’s all digital dancing and sex, and then suggesting that linden labs saw SL as a kind of “online schoolhouse”. As usual, those with lots of cynicism and precious little imagination wait until someone tells them what a technology is for, and then merely attempts to half-heartedly evaluate how well that goal is met from their own rather jaded perspective.

While they’re claiming SL is dying, the population seems to have grown rather dramatically in the last few months. I used to see the logged in population sitting somewhere between 42 and 56K, where now it’s rarely below 72K. Just yesterday I was part of a panel of cancer survivors in Second Life talking about the impact of having a survivor community in world; of course I pointed out my own means of expressing myself in Second Life, my Cancerland build, and how the community helped shape it and me through their support and feedback. Others talked about finally being allowed to speak out loud about what they’re going through without having to shape their words based on the feelings of devastated friends and family who only want to see a happy, positive cancer patient. (This same topic was covered in the current issue of Harvard Divinity Bulletin in Mark U. Edwards’ Ways of ‘Knowing’ Cancer: How can we reason about illness?.) We talked about the impact of running in the Relay for Life without having to have the physical strength to do so.

While I quite like the idea of Linden Labs being bought out by an academic consortium, that hardly seems likely.

Having been so deeply impressed by the Second Life article, I nipped over to see what they had to say about twitter. They quote folks saying that twitter is for the insecure seeking out an identity, which I find quite bizarre. I wonder if they say that about everyone who puts their words or work into the public eye, like, say, journalists, novelists, or artists. Not that tweets are novels or art, per se, but I find the rationale behind their judgment quite baffling. Have they never heard of the value of presence awareness? Do they not understand that connection can be reached both through depth of contact and through regular, small acts of communication? Do they not have singular ideas throughout the day, short ones, that bear sharing and storing?

I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: nothing frustrates me more than the “what is it for” argument, which appears to be at the heart of both of these articles. It seems perfectly fair to ask someone who’s a fan of, say, Twitter or Second Life: “What’s it for?” but I suggest that it’s not a fair question at all. “What do you use it for,” perhaps. “What’s its appeal to you,” definitely. But “What’s it for?” is just a way to mark yourself as someone with no imagination, no critical faculty, and no interest in the actual answer. “I don’t see an application for this in my current life/online practice,” is just fine. I wouldn’t debate that. Everyone finds niches for things. But to ask other people to find a niche for something in your life, well. That’s lazy, in my opinion.

Not all ideas or applications work for all people. I can understand why del.icio.us is a great thing to many people, but I’m not really a link collector, so I don’t use it. It’s affordances don’t have a particularly important niche in my life. And that doesn’t mean it’s a useless application, it’s just not that useful to me. I have great respect for the gaming industry, and even have friends who work within it, but I don’t play games other than solitaire and boomshine. I can’t handle the stress. That doesn’t mean I think gaming is pointless. The mixture of personality, imagination, and technology is fascinating and rich; we each carve out our own ways to manage it. If you don’t want to do this, that’s fine; but don’t tell me it’s because there’s something wrong with me, or something wrong with the technology. Turn your high-powered lens of personality probing back on yourself.

What’s so funny about these tirades is that once someone else (with vision and imagination) demonstrates a use for a given application, suddenly those same people who complain loudly about it’s uselessness suddenly become fans. Remember the early days of blogging when everyone told us how bloody pointless and self-indulgent that was? Who doesn’t have a blog these days?

I know, I should get a better sense of humour. But this stuff really grates on me.

Got Married

So Jeremy and I got married on Thursday. (This is the Marriage is Serious Business picture.) We tried to keep it as low-key as possible, because a) we’re not big ceremony people, and b) I’m not really in the greatest of health presently, so it was in our best interest to keep it simple.

I think I overdid it a little.

It started with getting my hair done.

I went with a little back combing, because, hey, I was doing a bit of 60s inspired sort of thing. The last thing I needed was hairpins. At my sister’s wedding I had about 500 in my hair, and my over-riding memory of the experience was how much my head hurt.

Then we went into Toronto to meet Jeremy’s mother and stepfather for lunch. On the way in on the train, I noticed that my ankles and wrists were swollen. That’s a symptom of hypothyroidism, but not one I’d noticed before; but then, I hadn’t put tights on, and I hadn’t really thought much about my wrists. They were aching slightly. We went to our favourite brew pub on Front street and I had a cask pint. After that I didn’t have a care in the world. I walked about three or four blocks in my beautiful green fluevogs; I felt great!

After lunch we did a brief stopover at St. Lawrence market to pick up a few items for dinner, which was to be made by Jeremy’s stepfather, who happens to be a professional chef. He picked up: foie gras, demi-glace, and mushrooms. After a quick costume change at the hotel, we met my family at city hall.

The whole clan was there. Jason and Yuka were our witnesses; they really feel that a woman should witness for a woman, though I felt that Yuka should have witnessed for Jeremy (pandas need to stick together) and Jason for me. But tradition won out, awkwardly.

The ceremony itself was short, pretty, and sincere. I was anxious, about me, about Jeremy, about…I don’t know what. It was a kindly fellow who did the job was very supportive and made it painless and stress-free. Max acted as ring-bearer. He did a stellar job.

Little Leo had been diagnosed with pneumonia the day before, but had gotten a puffer to help him breathe and finally got a good night’s sleep at night. So was a pleasant little trooper, and I even got a smile out of him afterwards.

After the ceremony we went to Jason’s and Jeremy’s stepfather (with help from Yuka and Jason) made us a fantastic dinner. We just lounged and chatted and ate, his folks, my folks, us, Jason and Yuka. Low-key.

We were home before 9:30pm. My shoes are divinely comfortable, but I think I pushed it a little too hard too fast; my knees and hips were aching and felt horribly weak. Jeremy told me I looked like I’d been punched in the face, that my eyes looked all sunken and blackened. I said it was probably just my makeup finally smudging off; I tried to wash it off, and then he took a washcloth to my face and tried too.

“I think you’re just tired,” he said.

When we set this date, we were both pretty sure I’d be chipper and mended and full of vim and vigour by now. The wedding was never meant to be a defining moment in our lives, not, say, the day of reckoning, the princess moment, but I had hoped to be a bit more up for it than I actually was. The blessing in it, really, is that for the moment part, the wallop of the consequences mostly hit me after the fact. Rest and relaxation is in order now.

We had a genuine time.

http://www.mixwit.com/flash/widgets/shell.swf

And I failed typing in high school

94 words

Touch Typing

The Quiet Wedding

As reported elsewhere, I’ve gotten engaged.

I’m sitting on what is, I suppose, a kind of personal conflict. Marriage is a traditional heteronormative lifepath, and the non-traditional, non-heteronormative parts of me tend to bristle at the thought of it. First, there’s the historical issues. Women being handed over from father to husband like cattle; the white dress and the presumption and requirement of sexual “purity”; the changing of names, effacing a woman’s identity, etc. And then there are the modern reinterpretations of marriage which I find additionally troublesome. The price of entering the wedding dress cult; the fantasy weddings girls are meant to dream about from the time they can first fathom the concept; bridesmaids; the “princess for a day” mentality; the endless expensive gifts from near-strangers; and of course all that money, time and energy poured down the drain for a single celebratory day that doesn’t appear to denote much more than the signing of some paperwork and a photo op.

You could call me cynical.

On the other hand, I can appreciate the value of two (or more) people commiting to each other for the long term. That’s a wonderful thing. Life is short, often uncomfortable, and requires a lot of laughter, alcohol, and international travel to keep it from getting horribly boring. Having a partner in crime can help you along the way. It’s good to love other people. And awfully nice if they love you back.

I suppose my issues with marriage aren’t really about the practicalities of the thing itself, but more about the ceremony and its trappings. I don’t object to monogamy (I vastly prefer it). I don’t object to sharing resources, taking turns putting the cat out, or washing the dishes leftover from someone else’s amazing dinner experiments. I don’t object to the joining of families or making compromises. It’s the wedding machine that throws me off. In the end I think it comes down to a basic philosophical premise about what the committment is about, what that ceremony is, and who’s responsible for the relationship.

A grand wedding, it seems to me, is an attempt to make an entire community complicit in the relationship. You stand up before these people, you let them know, we are committed to each other; please help us keep that committment. Please treat us differently, respect our committments, keep us from turning astray. Friends and family are all part of your relationhip, the den mother that looks in and makes sure all is well, makes sure that everyone in the community is behaving accordingly. This is never more obvious as when a married man or woman has an affair; some will pin blame on him/her, while others will point fingers the co-conspirator, wondering why s/he failed to keep the public compact that has been made between the couple and the community: this person is off-limits to you, and you must respect that. I’ve always been conflicted about this expectation (though I have not ever taken up with anyone in a committed situation, let it be known!). The people in a relationship define their expectations of each other, and it’s not up to them to dictate behaviour of others. If a married person decides to break vows, that is the married person’s decision. (I wouldn’t want to be the person s/he is breaking said vows with, however; how fraught! How dramatic! How ultimately pointless!) I suppose in this arena I am a strange individualist. I love the idea of individuals being built from the whole of the community in which s/he resides, but when it comes to romance, that seems to be an ultimately private affair to me.

This is an odd sort of private experience, between the two of us, where we will whisper our commitment to each other once again and sign the legal papers that solemnify the promise. No one else needs to hold us to it, no one else needs to ensure that we succeed. We cannot expect someone else to make our committments a reality, and this is where we’ve thrown in our lot with each other rather than with the whole world. It’s a quiet moment where we say, yes, I really do mean it, we’re in this for the long haul. It’s a whisper rather than a brass band concert; we say it softly rather than shouting it from the rooftops because we’re both just here, and sound only needs to travel as far as each other’s ears. It’s not a secret, as I am wearing a ring on my finger, thanks to Jeremy’s mother. It’s not a secret, but it’s not a responsibility, either. And I’m not wearing it to remind others that I am taken. I’m wearing it to remind myself that he is always close by (even when he is far away).

So I am embarking on the heteronormative lifepath entirely by accident. It was never my intention, but as it turns out, there’s this fellow who causes me long-term delight, and I thought it would be best to stick with him.

1: Things with Unexpected Significance

I couldn’t make this picture not come out fuzzy, go figure.

This is a teacup, German-made china. Note the lack of a saucer, and the bit-up edge on one side. This is a cup my grandmother managed to bring with her on the boat from Germany to Canada in 1950 after my grandfather got back from the POW camp in Africa. My mother remembers that my grandmother was always drinking tea from it, minus any saucer, because she didn’t have a saucer for it. It is what remains of a set my grandmother had in Germany, and my mother doesn’t remember any other piece from it coming with it.

My grandmother had 5 children, including a set of twins (my mother and her brother); it’s not hard to imagine that this was her last remaining piece of a beloved set, the rest broken either by the constant moves (from Latvia to Poland to Germany, and then to Canada) that the war demanded, or by her boisterous children desperate for a place to play and romp around. My mother tells me that, before the family left Germany, they were living in two rooms offered to them by a German family; my grandmother, her mother and father, her cousin and her two children, all crammed into two borrowed rooms. The children were constantly being shushed because my grandmother didn’t want to disturb their generous hosts. This cup was what my grandmother held in her hands to calm herself during that horribly stressful time.

When my mother got married she found another tea cup like it in Toronto, with an actual saucer; she bought a cup and two saucers and sent them back to British Columbia as a gift for her mother. When my grandmother died, my mother brought both tea cups back home with her. The other tea cup matches this one, but you can still tell that this is the original one.

As a gift, my mother bought me a set of dishes just before I moved to Mississauga, in this pattern. I love them.

Things of Unexpected Significance

Jeremy linked me to this the other day: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance. It’s a book full of photographs of objects along with the story of their particular significance to their owners. I really like this idea, and I think it would make a nice blog series. It would be fun for me to acknowledge those strange things that are important to me, and share them.

So I’ve decided to work on a 5 day series called 5 Things of Unexpected Significance. There will be a post for it each day for 5 days, starting Monday, October 22nd. Each post will contain a photograph of some item, and the story of why it’s significant. I’d love to have company! I think Jason is going to be joining me…how about you, Julia? Catsy? Jeremy? Aleja? Dorothea? Please drop me a comment or a note to tell me if you’re interested in joining, I’d love to check out the contributions of others! We could set up a flickr group or something! It will be fun, come on! Sharing! It’s good for your soul!