I’ve been preoccupied for the summer, and for that I am not even the tiniest bit apologetic. But, that time is coming to an end. Once I dig my way back out of the upcoming minor depression, I plan to go back to writing with at least my past intermittent bursts of output.

The other thing that new visitors won’t recognize is the significant revamp I’ve put into the site’s design and look-and-feel. I would gladly take any feedback and suggestions anyone has about any aspect of the new paint and trim. Hate the font? let me know. Think the background and link color is more “Pottery Barn” than “masculine moss?” Let me know. Find the comment balloons irritating and unsightly? Too bad.

If there’s something about the site after the change that “just works” or “just doesn’t” please drop a comment and let me know.

1. The last time I recorded my voice on purpose, Bill Clinton was president.
2. At that time I had a professional studio at my command.
3. The mic in my laptop sitting at my desk in a large room DOES NOT sound like a studio.
4. The breath-guard on pro mics is distinctly useful.
5. Without practice on a bad mic, my voice is monotonous and could put even hyperactive ADD kids on crack to sleep.

That being said, I did get the first one posted, and (as suggested) included a link to download the file offline for those that prefer to listen via a specific app instead of inline in the blog post. I used my “1827 Days” post as my guinea pig, I’ll continue to record and insert more over the next few days as I attempt to improve my process/technique/set-up.

I don’t think I’ll ever sound like Ira Glass or Frank Deford, but hopefully it will get a bit better than that first attempt. Nothing is ever perfect the first time you try it, and I’m ok with that.

Lacy didn’t need me to walk her the ten city blocks, which she made expressly clear the first time I accompanied her, but I was welcome as long as I stayed out of her way. This might sound a bit harsh, but there’s another detail, Lacy was born without functioning optical nerves. She is utterly and completely blind.

A few years after we all left college, Lacy was fortunate enough to be selected for partnership with a seeing-eye-dog named Justice, but at the time she was making her way confidently down Salmon Ave to the rhythmic tapping of her cane, counting off the streets, and listening for the crossing signal at every intersection. It was a point of pride that she didn’t NEED anyone to get where she was going.

[Author's Note: Justice passed away last summer at the ripe old age of 13. Not bad for a German Shepard, and he will be dearly missed. As a dog lover I just want to take this moment to remember a really great dog that I only met once, but who touched a lot of lives just by doing what he loved to do, which was be there for Lacy.]

And Lacy DIDN’T need anyone. Sure, there were a few mishaps: the occasional rogue messenger bike, herds of teenagers without the collective intelligence not to blunder into a woman walking with a white cane, cars blaring their horns constantly at a stoplight rendering the walk-sound inaudible, and so fourth…but she never needed me to get her where she was going. If something disrupted her progress she would stand up straight, square her shoulders, extend her cane and begin again. It was an amazingly regal gesture in someone who had never seen regal in her whole life.

I was never anything less than astounded by the way she strode confidently through chaos and arrived where she meant to go, without error, time after time.

Lacy was majoring in Communications, which is probably not much of a surprise for someone who focused on the intricacies of communicating day-in and day-out all her life. Take away visual clues and facial expressions, and the true utility of something as a communication object becomes quite clear.

Which reminds me of a funny story from her days working customer support, which I will relate here to her gentle embarrassment (she has no reason to be embarrassed, but she will be anyway).

At the wise and experienced age of 19, Lacy worked the customer service desk at the downtown Saks 5th AveNordstrom. Which is to say she worked the phones. Nordstrom had made some accommodations for her impairment, and by and large she was quite happy with the work. She had a knack for handling upset or confused people on the phone, and it showed. What was not so good, were the occasional moments when she would be the only CS rep behind the counter. Most customers were understanding and waited patiently for someone to return and handle their issue…but one time…not so much.

He was obviously in a hurry. The urgency of his voice, the tinge of panic as he called for assistance, she couldn’t just sit there with her back turned when a customer needed assistance.

“One moment sir, someone will be available to help you shortly.”

“I really can’t wait, I must get to an appointment at OHSU” he said, just as urgent as he had been when he called out over the empty counter.

“Well sir, I might not be able to resolve the issue, but perhaps I can help get the process started. What can I help you with?” She got up from her chair at the phone desk and crossed over to the counter, approximating where he was by the direction of his voice.

“Yesterday my wife bought several shirts and ties for me, but she didn’t get the sale price. She paid full price and the markdown should have been thirty percent! I sent her here specifically for my shirts because of the sale. How stupid do you have to be? Full price for shirts and ties?”

She wasn’t sure who was supposed to be “stupid” but he was shifting from urgent to angry. “Well sir, obviously I don’t know what items she bought specifically…but the sale on Menswear ended last week. I’m afraid any purchase yesterday wouldn’t have been eligible for the-”

“That’s what the last two sales girls said! I don’t want to hear that! Obviously these were supposed to be on sale! Who would buy all this at regular price!?”

“I’m sorry sir, I can’t give a sale price for merchandise bought after-”

At this point her cut her off again, and the sequence started over. This went on for about five minutes before he tried a new tactic. “You know I’m right! You won’t even look at me, and if you weren’t lying about what you could do, you’d look me in the eye!”

At this point her brow furrowed in perfect proof that facial expressions are inherent and not learned by observation. “Actually sir,-”

“Look at this receipt, who would buy all this at regular price? Even a blind person could see that I should get the sale price for these shirts and ties!” His voice was aggressive and his breath was hot in her face, leaning in to drive home his point.

“Sir!” she said sharply, wresting control of the conversation back to her side of the counter. “As a blind person, I assure you that the only thing I see is that you are being unreasonable and refusing to listen when I try to discuss this with you. We are here to help you, not to be yelled at because you missed a sale. I would gladly refer you to a manager, or assist you in processing a return of the shirts and ties you are unsatisfied with, but what I don’t SEE is a reason for you to demand the sale price for merchandise bought almost a week after the sale ended.”

At this moment the Store Manager who had paused while concealed to listen to the last few moments of the exchange now came around the corner from the back office to the customer service desk. “Good afternoon sir,” she said with a professional smile. “I understand Lacy has been diligently trying to resolve your concern with your purchase yesterday. I’ve also spoken with two associates on the floor that also had this discussion with you. As the Manager of the store, I would like to resolve this once and for all. I understand that Lacy has given you the store’s position on sales. We would be glad to refund you for a return of the merchandise, but we will not be able to extend sale prices for merchandise bought after the sale ended. Lacy, was there anything else that you saw?” Her emphasis squarely placed on the man’s own foolish word.

There was a long pause. Deciding that honesty was more important than a smiley face on her review, Lacy answered “Yes. I plainly SEE that you sir, are an ass.” and then she turned and walked away.

These days, Lacy works as a communication consultant for a media agency in Portland that focuses on reaching niche markets. She also sidelights as a Book-on-CD performer and records radio commercials for several area radio stations.

Scott (her husband) and I are probably “closer” in the male-bonding sense of the word. I used to see him once or twice a month for lunch, we are Facebook friends, and we’ll IM every so often when something makes one of us reach out to the other. I only hear from Lacy via email. One of the things that I’ve realized is that the Social Media revolution is not convenient for the visually impaired. Facebook is a highly visual design; and Twitter, with it’s #hashtags and overuse of acronyms and abbreviations seems designed intentionally to foil screen-readers and text-to-braille interfaces.

Lacy has only recently started to follow blogs regularly. She used to be a Podcast addict, but she’s discovered that by using the text-to-speech facility on her Mac, blogs are becoming meaningful to her. Her favorite “computer voice” is Alex, which comes built-in with the OS X operating system.

It was that detail that led her to email a link to this TED talk by Roger Ebert along with some thoughts about how the internet begins to replace our senses, and what that means for different people with different sensory impairments.

I love everything he says in his talk, she writes, and I love the way he chose to say it. What I wish people understood is that the internet is wonderful for people who have no sense of sound, either due to deafness or muteness, because it creates a level playing field of visual communication. But for people who have no visual communication, these tools could be just as wonderful, but right now are much harder to use.

The internet is slowly helping the deaf feel less alone in a silent world. Disappointingly, it seems as though the same advances are making the blind feel more alone in a darkened one.

I’ve thought about this quite a bit in the last couple of years actually. Lacy once asked me if I ever thought about podcasting because that was her primary interface into the blog-o-sphere. I know Lacy reads My Bad Pants with some regularity via screenreader, or had Scott read it to her when they have the chance to surf the internet together. And while I love the thought of two of my friends reading my writing together, experiencing it in a cooperative way that only a couple like them, that have overcome challenges like they have, can really understand; I also want to respect that sentiment.

“Why can’t this be an audible resource as well?” I ask myself.

I worked for six years “on air” for several radio stations. I have a “radio voice” and enough elocution and diction and enunciation training to choke a horse. There’s a microphone built-in to the laptop I use to write these posts, not to mention the software and apps out there for recording on my iPhone or iPad or iWhatever that are cheap and easy to use. Why can’t I record what I write? Why can’t it be personal?

So, I’ve decided that I’ll do my best. I’m going to start by working out any tags and css elements necessary to make this site friendly for VI Browsing, and I’m going to go back and start to record the posts as mp3′s. I know how to embed those, and I’ve got plenty of storage with my hosting provider. It will take some time, but hopefully I can get all of my posts recorded and uploaded in the next few weeks.

So soon, at the bottom of every post, there will be well-tagged audio player that will spool out my dulcet tones and shimmering verbalizations. Barring that, it will just play a recording of me, reading my own words in my own voice, so that readers can experience my words the way I meant them, and not the way a computer parses them together. I don’t know that it will be a “better” experience, but it will certainly be more personal.

[Word Count: 2240]

Last week I noticed something when I posted, my stats were all screwed up. Since I have like NO stats, that was both difficult to quantify and hardly important.

Then I noticed that comments were being erratic.

Then I installed the JetPack plugin (which I LOVE).

Then my stats are back, but the comments thing officially became a crisis (in the very VERY unimportant sense of the word crisis).

Apparently JetPack and Akismet have “a thing” and that thing makes prior approvals go boom. Which means if you tried to comment in the last few days, unless I happened to see your comment in a very narrow time period (of less than 15 minutes) your comment was tossed out of the spam filter and lost forever.

I know that Allison and Rachel had comments get trapped, and one of Rachel’s even wound up lost to the digital aether. What I don’t know is if anyone else commented. If you did, it’s gone. And I’m REALLY sorry, because comments are what I like best about my blog. I promise they didn’t get destroyed on purpose.

So, if you try to comment now, I believe that things are once again on track. If you have any issues, please let me know. I can always be reached at my “mybadpants” gmail address.

The other neat thing is that my RSS feed went, as they say, “all to hell.” If you read through a feed reader, then the last post, and possibly last two posts didn’t show up. While that’s not a huge deal, I just thought some of you might like to know.

Anyway, hopefully we’re back to normal operating procedures around here.

See, not dead! (and I know some of you suspected different.)

Ok, so this isn’t a post per se, just a quick note. I’ve watched several people visit this blog recently from my GoodReads profile and They tend to start with my navigation section on the left, hitting my Author’s Note, the Preface and Prolog, and then they start in on some recent posts. They usually find one of the last “What I’m Looking For” posts and then peter out. Mostly I blame the ridiculous length of my average posts, but I also realized (ok, someone emailed me and told me) that navigating within the larger sections is pretty much impossible.

So, I’ve added a top page for the “What I’m Looking For” series and stuck it in the Navigation Pane, and also put some line by line links in the posts. I’ll try to keep up with that as I add more.

Which brings us to the next point, i.e. adding more.

I’ll be honest, I’m struggling with this right now. Not because I don’t know what to say, or I have a hard time writing the next few lines…it’s because I don’t like what the next few things say about me. So far the sequence has largely followed events from my youth and teen years, and while I’ve really learned something from writing some of them, for the most part they don’t make a statement about who I am now. Mistakes or victories that happen when you’re a teenager (or younger) are meaningful, but they’re not necessarily indicative of who a person is as an adult.

I just finished reading an autobiography, and I was reminded of a quote a college professor once passed on: “Autobiography is when we tell the story of our life the way we want to remember it. Biography is when someone tells it like it really was.”

So far I’ve tried to be relatively true to my personal history, even when I don’t look particularly “cool” or “suave” or “with it.” Not being “with it” isn’t something that is particularly bad, or even particularly unusual; especially for teenagers and young adults. But what comes next is largely bad. And ugly. And I don’t get to hide behind the “I was just an awkward teen” defense anymore.

I once started to draft a post about all of this titled “The Lesser Angles of My Nature” that never got past paragraph one because I’m terribly disappointed in myself when I read back through it. But, I’ve started to recount my past, and what makes me “me,” and that means being true to the history, even when it’s not the Autobiography I wish I could write.

Bare with me, the next few lines are coming. Perhaps slowly, and with stops and starts, but they are coming.

[Word Count: 466]

So…if I’ve gone five days with no new posts, I encourage you all to metaphorically beat me soundly about the head and shoulders until I get something into your feed readers or RSS do-hickys or whatever it is that you use to read new posts.

Feed-Readers are a bit mysterious to me, as I just use the links running down the side of my page to open each blog in a new tab…I’m sure there’s a better way to do it, but in general I’m just old-school when it comes to blogs I guess.

Any way, here’s to more output in 2011!

[Word Count: 158]

A couple of people noticed that some links and comments went…missing. I thought I would address the question a couple of people had and say categorically “NO, we’re not having issues.” Let me explain.

Someone related to someone related to me found my blog, and liked it. Liked it so much they’re paying me real money to write some related articles for a local news magazine. That’s cool. Not so cool, is that full disclosure required talking the development over with my parents. Which led to my mother visiting my little slice of the interwebs.

While I’m not at all ashamed of what I’ve written, it did prompt a couple of things, including a quick whitewash of links and comments that someone didn’t want readily visible while my mom was clicking around…because people should have the right to write a personal blog without their in-laws showing up and taking a peek…

All comments and links are back up, I don’t expect to have any more visitors anytime soon.

I will admit it had a bit of a chilling affect on my own writing. It’s one thing to split open your soul and spill it gently onto other people’s screens over the internet, it’s something else to know that the screen where it’s showing up next is your mother’s.

As I said, I don’t expect any more visitors for a while, so I hope to get back into the swing of things and start posting regularly again. I’ve got about a dozen drafts in the works, so hopefully I have enough material to get deep into November. Which is good, because I’ll be participating in NANOWRIMO again this year…you can follow that over on Serial Storyteller if you want to watch me train wreck in week two again. How’s that for positive thinking?

But bigger picture, I’ve come to a realization recently and I’d like to put it out there so everyone will understand where I’m coming from. Let’s talk about comments. Specifically, how I answer comments.

The comments are my favorite part of blogging. I enjoy writing comments, and I deeply love when people post comments on the things I write. My favorite blog in the whole world is noteworthy not for the posts themselves so much as the wonderful comments and conversations that happen there.

Conversation is the key word. I feel like every comment here is a part of a conversation. Every comment I post somewhere else is part of a conversation. Some conversations are very public, and I just feel like I’m contributing one more voice in a collective; that I’m just chiming in, and no reply is necessary or expected.

But here, on my blog, I feel like I’m having conversations in a coffee shop…personal and sincere, but not private. I feel like everyone who shows up is due the respect of a response, even if it’s just a verbal nod of the head and the confirmation that I was paying attention and I heard what you said.

What I don’t want, is to come across like I have to have the last word. Or, to sound like some sanctimonious prig who always thinks he knows better…or knows more. I want this to be a place where people feel invited to have a conversation. I value every comment, and I want to encourage that conversation, even if I disagree with someone’s position, my disagreement and my response are a part of a conversation and NOT meant to be seen as “the last word.”

I do not think of myself as someone with all the answers…hell, I don’t even think of myself as someone with even a decent grasp of SOME of the answers. I am a person who will write about what I’m thinking, and then enjoy talking about what other people have to say about those things.

I guess what I’m saying is that I have a terrible addiction to words. I use lots and lots and lots of them. If you write a 30 word comment, and I stitch in a 300 word response, please PLEASE don’t feel like I’m somehow talking over you…I’m just a talker; and I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate the chance to talk.

I don’t confuse the amount of words I can say about a topic with being “right” about a topic; I’m just perpetually afraid that other people don’t draw that distinction.

So, in order to not fail on day four of my personal challenge, I’m pulling out something that I’ve been working on for more than a year.

When I first started to work on it, I thought I’d post the whole thing as one long blog post. I thought it would be about 3500 words or so. It’s currently half-done and clocks in at 5800 words so far.

So I’m going to post each section, in a row, until it’s finished. I won’t get 1000 words a post. I’ve thought about it and I don’t care. When it’s finished, I’m going to collect the whole thing into one long page along with the original music and that’s how it will ultimately live on the blog. I’m probably going to post more than one a day, otherwise it’ll take more than a month to finish.

So I’ve spent some time over the last couple of weeks actually drafting up a series of posts.  I tend to work better that way: outlines, synopses, drafts; you’d think I have a “workflow” for this stuff all worked out!  Anyway, before we start down that path, I realized that I need to set forth the rules I’ve been using for the last few years when it comes to comments.

These rules are the result of years of occasionally blogging on topics that bring out a different crowd from my usual collection of like-minded blog readers and fellow leaky-brain ramblers.  More than ninety-nine percent of my non-spam comments are approved.  Hell, even the occasional spam comment is approved just because it’s sorta funny in an ironic way.  So these rules very rarely come in to play.  But when you need them, you REALLY need them; so what follows are my time tested criteria for why I won’t approve your comment:

1. No Punctuation.
2. Comments in ALL CAPS.
3. Comments longer than the original post.
4. Comments that reference more than three verses from the religious works of your choice.
5. Comments that actually include entire citations from the religious works of your choice.
6. Comments that insult either my position or the position of other commenters.  I reserve the right to decide the difference between ardent disagreement and out-and-out insulting.
7. Obvious Trolling.
8. (corollary to # 7) Obvious Troll-Baiting.
9. Having a worse potty-mouth than I do.  I have been known to edit particularly foul-mouthed comments, substituting humorous non-swear words and phrases (or archaic and out-of-vogue ones) for over-used examples from our current spoken English.  I do this rarely.  Generally I just hit delete.
10. Using the “C” word (and no, I’m not talking about “crap”) under any circumstances.  Why is this different from #9?  Because all other criteria are flexible, this one is not.

As I point out in rule 10, these are basically criteria, not hard rules.  I’m likely to let a reasonable comment that only breaks the first rule pass if the comment is short, and the intent is clear and vitriol free. Likewise with a comment that seems reasonable except for the (perhaps accidental?) use of the caps-lock key.  I myself have posted comments that were longer than the original post, so the third one is highly flexible…but not if it’s trolling, quotes the Koran for 33 verses, or if seven hundred of its thousand words can’t be repeated on broadcast television before the watershed hour.

Also, these rules essentially only apply to new commenters.  If you’ve been approved, commented consistantly in the past, and have a generally reasonably position that you are defending ardently in a way that bends these criteria, I’m VERY unlikely to revoke your comment.

Except for rule 10.  Break rule 10 and I will delete your comment and assign you to the spam filter for all time.