But while it’s human nature to want to have a place to belong, we also want to be special, and defining yourself as someone who once lived somewhere more interesting than the suburbs of Michigan is one way to do that.
Beck explains that her house if filled with pictures and references to past places she’s lived. My house is similar, with photos of my Peace Corps community of Liro Village in the South Pacific, music from my time in Honolulu (Olinda Road by Hapa the best), bins of journals and term papers during my studies at John Carroll University or reporting notebooks from my early years as a magazine editor.
See my Travels page for a map of my round-the-globe trip that inludes some of my past homes.
Still, our families are spread far and wide, and Erin and I often talk into the night about where home would best be for us now, next year, in five or ten or more years on. My dad’s 20th marathon (he and I and my brother, Nick, ran our first together in 1993, and I would have loved to be with him for this race; Nick was there this time, too) and my brother-in-law Mike’s sudden heart surgery — he’s blogging his recovery at ShaughnessyMD.com — made this discussion even more timely.
As much as we want to be nearer our families, I keep reminding myself that my ancestors left their homes and familiies, sailed across the ocean and started a new life in America.
I was thinking about that on Christmas Day, when I set out on a walk of my own through the neighborhood, into the woods of the future Moniese Nomp county park and along the new Jones Creek Parkway. It was a beautiful, warm day, and just what I needed to still myself at the end of a busy year and on the cusp of an intense month ahead. As I finished, I was walking up a path beneath my street, and I looked up to see my house.
“I want to live in this house for a very long time,” I said to myself. I’m very happy here.
One of the reasons we chose this big house is because we wanted to entertain our friends, neighbors and community. We did that over the last couple of weeks in a series of bagel brunches. Today’s was a gathering of some of my BlogTogether friends, just a great group of people on a relaxing day off enjoying each other’s company.
As things slow down for the holidays — ScienceOnline2012 planning notwithstanding — I’m going to take some time to rework the design of mistersugar.com. This site has had the same design since 2006, and web design has gone through quite a few trends since.
I’ve spent the past few months monitoring Wordpress themes and site templates, at WooThemes (we use the Canvas theme for MedicineNews and the Kaboodle theme for ScienceOnline2012.com), ThemeForest and others — mostly lots of portfolio sites and sliders and same-looking business pages.
Anil Dash also has a simple blog — like the others listed above, he’s a great writer and a thought leader to follow – on which he spotlighted Bootstrap, a design toolkit for rapid site development. See his post Bootstrap Rising. A similar framework is Foundation by Zurb.
Last week, I played a bit with TypeKit and adjusted the fonts of my blog. In the next week or two, I hope to rework the site on Bootstrap.
I’m also experimenting with Dave Winer’s Radio2 minimal blogging tool for running a linklog. I’ve run both my blog and my Sugarcubes linklog with Textpattern, but Radio2 might help me better coordinate my linklog and the links I share on Twitter. I’ve got Radio2 and OPML Editor mostly figured out; just need to find the way to point a subdomain to Radio2.
So, anyway, as I move into my 12th year of blogging, I’m excited to revamp the site. Stay tuned.
The other day, in a discussion with other social media leaders at Duke, someone remarked that college students think it’s weird when adults respond to their online conversations. I’ve heard this before, but I’ve had a hard to buying the argument that we should be cautious in engaging with young people online.
I’ve spent the last week thinking this over, my thoughts rooted in a childhood experience: I was in second grade (in Caldwell, Idaho), and one morning was excused to use the restroom. On my way back to the classroom, I passed two teachers in the hallway, talking. When one of them mentioned a trending topic, I blurted out, “Star Wars, I want to see that movie.”
One of the teachers reacted immediately, grabbing my arm, marching me over to a bench and sitting me down. With one hand, she squeezed my cheeks. “Don’t you ever interrupt a conversation like that again,” she barked.
I learned my lesson about impertinence from that reprimand. But I also became attuned to situational conversations — what I think of as dialogue in public spaces — listening attentively whether someone is speaking directly to me or whether the conversation is between others.
This is eavesdropping, clearly. But when is eavesdropping impertinent?
I asked my brother-in-law, Tom Michael (he’s general manager of Marfa Public Radio, and is a great radio conversationalist) to consider this situation: You and I are sitting at a busy outdoor cafe, talking, and we’re aware — consciously or subconsciously — that others around us may be passively or actively listening to our conversation. How do you feel when someone leans over and says something related to our conversation?
Tom: Depends if they offer us directions because they heard us trying to figure out the best way to the outlet mall or because they heard us talking about a friend who is going to have surgery next week.
So, yes, clearly there are lines that can be crossed. Situational conversation depends on the situation, the location, the topic, the people. An empty cafe and someone sitting down close by to intentionally listen in is an affront. Or we whisper, talk cryptically or in Bislama to lessen the chance that eavesdroppers will understand.
But I’ve also had some wonderful conversations because people sitting by offer their ear, their perspective, their thoughts.
Now take the question to social media, where the tools we use to converse — Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and others — give us a spectrum of privacy settings, allowing us to determine who exactly can listen in. Granted, the default for most social media tools is full public exposure, but given the ability to make a conversation private, can we assume that what’s public is fair game to be listened to and responded to?
I’m not sure I have all the answers, but I’m posting this on my blog that is open to the public, and I’m hoping you’ll listen in and join the conversation.
Afterword
Much of my online activity, and the supporting events I’ve organized (like ScienceOnline2012 and Michael Ruhlman’s recent visit to Chapel Hill and Durham) has been to facilitate conversation. Recently, I’ve seen and heard others realizing that the great potential of social media is to get people together in face-to-face gatherings.
We’ve been promoting that for years with our BlogTogether events. Social media, to me, has always been best to say, “Let’s get together.”
Erin kindly left two of the upstairs bathrooms for me to clean, and since I’ve spent much of the past 48 hours sleeping, slumbering, napping or otherwise unconscious — more about that later — while Erin efficiently scrubbed, folded and arranged our home to look clean and shiny, I gathered up the cleaning supplies, some old towels and the iPad opened to the Monti podcast.
While I listened to Robert Bland and Dorothy Clark talk about love and fatherhood and race relations, I was struck by the passion with which Jeff Polish has executed his dream of facilitating storytelling in North Carolina.
I first met Jeff in 2008, when I was talking about a storyblogging idea and he was already getting his storytellers lined up for the Monti. I got to his second show, in May 2008 — Frank Stasio, Randall Kenan, Tanya Olson and others on the theme ‘travels’ — literally the last one in the door, and I’ve been his biggest fan since.
I’m looking through my Moleskine notebook now, and see that I asked myself what story I might one day tell; the tale of Geo the lost dog on Paama is one I’ve been working at ever since, writing and rewriting a little bit after every Monti show. This week’s show gave me double inspiration to finish. I had told Jeff that Michael Ruhlman was returning to Durham, and he’d be a good storyteller. Lo and behold, Michael was up on stage at Motorco Music Hall on Tuesday telling about how the CIA rescued him as a writer and made him as a chef, and about the passion for perfection that’s made Thomas Keller the best chef in the land. (Erin and I sat next to Donna Turner Ruhlman, Michael’s wife; she contributed the photos to Ruhlman’s Twenty. It was very nice to spend this time with her.)
Closer to home, Andrea Reusing is the best chef in the Southeast, as determined by the Beard Foundation this year. Andrea had Erin, Jeff, Michael, Donna and me — and a host of others — in her Lantern restaurant Wednesday night for a special dinner. My previous post is about that dinner, and doesn’t even come close to doing justice to the menu, the service, the setting. Clearly, Andrea has a passion for her work; buy a copy of her book, Cooking in the Moment and you’ll get a glimpse as to why.
At that dinner, in one room, three individuals who inspire me with their passion: Michael with his writing, Jeff with his storytelling, Andrea with her cooking. I spoke a few words to explain why our stars had aligned, telling a short story about how my mother taught me to reach out and ask friends or strangers to gather and participate. With ScienceOnline2012 looming, and me working late into each night on the details and logistics of this annual conference — hence the utter exhaustion that’s knocked me out this weekend — I’ve been reminding my friends that this is my passion (I call it, alternately, the BlogTogether and Long Table ethos). When Michael stood up and told the room that “Anton is an angel, a true angel,” I think he was acknowledging my passion.
Look, and you’ll see passionate people all around.
Yesterday, my friend Wayne Sutton must have been thinking about this, because he tweeted this tag 13 times: #passion.
The talented and lovely Andrea Reusing, winner of the 2011 James Beard Award for Best Chef Southeast, (here’s a photo I snapped of her back in 2007) and her team at Lantern created a most memorable meal (full menu, with wine pairings, is here), with an amazingly diverse set of tastes and textures. As Michael pointed out, serving all this amazing food family style was a brilliant way to facilitate the meal (the Long Table spirit, I’d say).
I had my very first raw oyster — Nassawadox oysters with hot sauce and North Carolina horseradish — and loved the softness (I took three bites). The dainty tea eggs with sichuan salt and scallion were perfect, and I wanted to ask if there were more in the kitchen, but before I could I was savoring the rilettes with “ume” salted cherries and the crispy Chapel Hill Creamery pork belly with 5-spice and pickled pumpkin. The crispy whole puffer fish with Edward’s country ham, braised cabbage and oyster mushrooms was unique, and fun to eat. I’d order that for lunch every day if I could — Andrea gets a lot of this fish from Virginia, and talked with us about sustainable seafood and other local ingredients.
At the dinner were quite a few local suppliers to Lantern. I sat next to Richard Teague, whose High Rock Farm in Gibsonville, NC produces chestnuts, pecans, blackberries and raspberries. Richard is a retired chemical engineer living in a restored historical farmhouse built in 1807, and he’s got a lot of chestnuts, from which he’s beginning to produce gluten-free chestnut flour. Also at our table was Phoebe Lawless, whose Scratch Bakery is pie heaven.
Dessert was ginger fizz with muscadine grape creamsicle and homemade candied ginger. Mmm, mmm, mmm. That was created by Monica Segovia-Welsh, who works at Lantern and bakes bread with her husband in a wood-fired stove at their Chicken Bridge Bakery. Here’s Monica serving Bora Zivkovic the roasted Moulard duck with kasu, white sweet potato, and pickled apple and shallots:
So, an amazing night I won’t soon forget. Many thanks to Michael for traveling to North Carolina and to Andrea for delighting our appetites and to the many producers of food and cooking who make life so delicious.
UPDATE: Even though Andrea and I only started discussing this event a few weeks ago, she and her sous chef, Miguel Torres, explained to us that the meal had really begun 18 months prior, when they’d first put up a ham for curing in Andrea’s basement. Talk about slow cooking!
UPDATE 2: I forgot to mention the best part of my conversation with Richard Teague. When he learned that I’d grown up in DeKalb, Illinois, he told me that his late wife was a member of the Ellwood family of DeKalb. My grandparents lived across the street from the historic Ellwood House, and I once read an essay as part of an Independence Day ceremony on the front lawn.
Quickest of posts to say the next few days are going to like speeding down a hill on a bobsled, taking me with it as fast as can be.
Tomorrow, for a brief few minutes, we’ll open ScienceOnline2012 registration at 12 noon EDT for for 100 spots.
A few minutes later, albeit unconnected to #scio12, MIchael Ruhlman will be interviewed by Frank Stasio on WUNC’s The State of Things show. By evening, Erin and I will be in our seats at The Monti eager to hear Michael and the other featured storytellers. Their theme is ‘rescues.’
Wednesday morning, Michael will be at A Southern Season to sign copies of his great new cookbook, Ruhlman’s Twenty. Wednesday night, we’ll be dining in the splendid Lantern with a 10-course meal. It’s sure to be an amazing night! (Join us — there are seats available.)
Walking back from a meeting on campus at the end of the day today, I heard the bells atop the Duke Chapel chiming, so I took out the iPad, opened the SoundCloud app, and recorded the sounds of bells, bicycles and students walking through fallen leaves:
Michael Ruhlman — his name shows up on this blog quite often — is coming back to the Triangle next month to promote His latest book, Ruhlman’s Twenty.
Michael will be a featured storyteller at The Monti Nov. 1. The next night, he’ll be guest of honor at a special dinner at Chapel Hill’s great Lantern Restaurant.
I’ve revived thelongtable.org to reflect this opportunity to hear from Michael. Head over there to read more about his visit.
David Remnick on Jodi Kantor's The Obamas: As the Italian-American philosopher Rocky Balboa said of his beloved Adrian Pennino, “She’s got gaps. I got gaps. Together we fill gaps.”
