Feeling renewed...

A vague feeling of unease -- perhaps even depression -- has been plaguing me with increasing intensity the past few days, due mostly to what I perceived as a minor, but persistent, stream of events that tend to chip away at the old self-confidence. That, added to what I can only conclude is some kind of visceral response to my being far from home, hearth, and family on this Christmas day here in Russia.

To a certain extent, I was bitten by the same phenomenon that I'd been observing for the past few days. Specifically, whenever the U.S. participants need their Russian colleagues to do something, we end up calling the top people on the Russian side with the requests. (A little like calling Donald Trump to have someone turn down the air conditioning in the main hall at Trump Plaza.) I feel strange doing this, since my work experience in the U.S. tells me that, primo, I should know who to call in the Russian hierarchy, and segundo, routine requests ought to be routed to such persons instead of program management. Nevertheless, mine is not to reason why, but to help get stuff done.

Of course, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, so when people call the interpreter office here at the полтинник and ask to speak to Viktor, I should not give the matter a second's thought, but I do. I shall endeavor to suppress such feelings in the future. (As the man once said, scroom if they can't take a joke.)

Apparently, the Christmas celebration in Russia starts on the evening of January 6th, when it is dark enough for the first star to appear in the sky. The weather here in Baikonur has been uniformly overcast for several days, and so yesterday's get-together of interpreters and office staff (in a small, cramped room opposite our normal dining hall) commenced on a dead-reckoning basis.

When I entered the room, I was surprised to see Leonid Pavlovich, the gentleman who basically runs things around here, seated at the table with the rest of our group. Surprised, because on the one hand interpreters are fairly low on the food chain in most enterprises, although on the other, it can also be said that we are largely indispensable.

I worked several times with Leonid Pavlovich last summer during the Intelsat campaign and recall him to be a no-nonsense executive who has a stock exclamation along the lines of "It's an apparent error in interpretation!" whenever things get bogged down. He says it with such gravity, it's hard to tell if he's kidding or not. Last night, I got the impression, from what he said, that he'd been burned several times in his career by reports of what he supposedly said, published in the media.

When you consider that Russian media, released from the fetters of Soviet censorship, today routinely provides information in a slick, supermarket-tabloid style, and combine it with the media's almost genetic imperative -- be it Russian or U.S. media -- to sensationalize anything anyone says, however innocuous, and twist it to maximum destructive advantage, I begin to wonder if Pavlovich's heartache isn't due more to sloppy (or worse, agenda-based) reporting than to bad interpretation.

After a few rounds, Pavlovich departed and the rest of us continued the celebration, eventually moving to the dining hall for tea. By the time I went up to my room, my mood had improved significantly.

A new work schedule just hit my desk. I am the on-call interpreter tomorrow, and assigned to the town trip on Sunday, the one that will visit the Russian Orthodox church. Cool.

Cheers...

Why I LJ...

In the wake of the news that Danga has been acquired by Six Apart, I feel a dull, nagging compulsion to summarize why it is, exactly, that I do this LiveJournal thing.

At a high level, we can go the direct route and identify the basic driving factor as, simply, ego. However, it is not ego in the sense that I believe everyone in the world -- or even on LJ -- must or even should read my tappings, but in the sense that I believe my posts may be of interest to a small circle of folks (who, I realize, can just as easily not read what I post), and hopefully will be of interest decades hence to my children and grandchildren. You can think of this as "writing for an audience," without the trappings of looking to create a following.

Indeed, posting in my LiveJournal provides a release for the unfortunate affliction I have -- described by Robert Heinlein among others -- of needing to express myself in writing for an audience. In earlier years, this illness manifested itself in fruitless efforts to write pieces in which no editor was interested, culminating in an eight-year run of limited writing success, during which I wrote two books, several hundred articles, and became a columnist in four magazines, all having to do with computers. It was fun while it lasted, but like a heroin habit, repeated administration of the stimulant finally killed the ability of the organism to respond, for a time, but I digress...

I'm not addressing the main question, am I? What is it about LiveJournal that has allowed me to scratch that itch so well, when alternative (e.g., Blogger) and more traditional methods (e.g., paper journals) have not?

The answer is obvious with regard to a paper journal: there's no audience when you examine your life between the covers of a Moleskine. That's why I've started many paper journals, only to have them peter out shortly thereafter. The advantage of paper is the ability to draw pictures and diagrams, and to paste in mementos, but again, I digress...

Vis à vis online alternatives, the obvious question is: "Why is LJ better?" In my opinion, this lies in the "community" aspect of LiveJournal -- and that's significant coming from me, as I generally detest the word -- and in a very delicate balance that I somehow seem to have achieved here.

When you set up an account with one of the mass blogging services or on your own, it's much like setting up a vendor's kiosk on a highway in the middle of nowhere. Sure, anyone passing by may stop, but your visitors generally get there by accident and unless you work hard at providing a product with what Web designers like to call "stickiness," such visitors will hardly ever return. (People who say they don't care if anyone reads their stuff are either exceptionally indifferent to other people or lying, in my opinion. Why else write it?) So, for a personal blog or journal, this means having to conscientiously pursue a course of action that results in repeat visitors, i.e., you have to build a following.

The ease with which you can create a friends list of journals that interest you here on LJ is the critical factor in creating an audience (just turn the concept around), and the comment feature provides an avenue for the audience to let you know it's out there. I am fortunate in that the size of my comment stream is enough to keep me aware of the audience, but not so large as to drive me to "play to the house," so to speak.

More later, maybe.

Cheers...