Privacy: Yours, Mine, and Mark Zuckerberg's

          The notoriously private Mark Zuckerberg, the boy genius who imagined Facebook into existence, is famous for having observed that the age of privacy is over.  In every way imaginable, we sign off on privacy when we post our breakfast menus on his website.  And that's fine, Zuckerberg says, it's the way things are in the 21st century.  Get used to it.  And judging by the wholesale internet intrusions into our lives and the way we shrug it all off, he may be right.  We don't seem to care much for privacy any more.

          But Zuckerberg sure does.  He recently bought four properties around the one he owns and lives in in an exclusive area of Palo Alto, CA for a whopping $30 million, a drop in the bucket to the young man worth a reported $19 billion.  All to make sure he keeps his own privacy.  He has no plans for the properties and in fact is leasing them back to the former owners, who are now tenants and no longer a threat to the peace and quiet (and privacy) necessary for the good life.  Zuckerberg's, that is.  What's next for the mega compound?  Maybe a twelve-foot fence with razor wire.  That ought to keep out the undesirables.

          The age of privacy is clearly not over for the founder of Facebook, just for us.

Keurig Coffee and the Decline and Fall of the American Republic

          "Let's go in the kitchen.  I'll put a pot of coffee on and we can talk."

          All through my part of the twentieth century words like that were part of my life.  When I was a kid, my parents percolated their coffee, the boiling bubbles popping up to the glass top for a few minutes before it was finished brewing.  My wife's family used a drip pot that took several cups of boiling water and let it slowly drip through the fresh-ground coffee beans into the pot below.  Later still the electric drip coffee pot took the place of the real thing (like the way electric typewriters replaced the manuals), and I was unhappy about that too, but at least we still went into the kitchen and put a pot of coffee on.

          Now, however, we have the Keurig Single Cup Brewing System.  My wife and I held out until yesterday, and now the new coffee maker sits on our kitchen counter.  It just doesn't have the neighborliness associated with putting a pot of coffee on, damn it all to hell, and I'm dead certain this is yet another step toward the end of civilization as we know it, or at least as I know it.  Sad.

           I wish our new Keurig coffee didn't taste so good.  It ruins all my self-righteousness.

Calendar Crazy People

[An earlier version of this essay appeared as an Op-ed piece in the Daily Record in Morristown, NJ on January 5, 2001.] 

          Sometimes I think I need to join a support group for calendar crazy people.

          I don't know where or when my concern for the day and month was born, but I do know that I surround myself with constant reminders of moments flying by.  My office at home has an electronic date and time keeper on the desk, plus a page-a-day "rip-off" calendar at my second work station--just in case I forget what day it is when I walk five feet to my other desk, which is directly below the large office clock.  Of course, the computer keeps me fairly well grounded in the day, date, and time too.

          And yet, despite this collection of date reminders, I recently felt the need for another, so for 2001 I added a standup calendar on my main desk at home, so I can now see the entire month, although in my own defense, this one came in the mail from an organization of disabled people who painted the pictures with their feet--how could I throw it out?  For Christmas I received a new one, something called a "golf calendar" so I can keep track of each round--my score, my partners, my putts, and my "most memorable happening."  (That's what it says, but I've never been able to figure out what it means.)

          When I go downstairs, there's another "rip-off" on the kitchen counter plus the all-important wall calendar, where my wife keeps track of all our dinner dates, vacations, and miscellaneous appointments, like when the gas repair person is scheduled to fix the glow bar in our oven.

          When I leave the house, I usually carry two calendars--the oversized and bulky one for my briefcase and the slenderer pocket-size one for those occasions that I am without my briefcase.

          Perhaps there is some dark psychological issue at stake here and I am in a classic case of denial, but it all seems very healthy to me.  I believe that by keeping track of days so carefully, I am controlling their passage.  That is, I think that if I live by the day and date (plus a to-do list of course), I slow time down a little.  This I know is just an illusion, but it has a good effect, so every Christmas I stock up on calendars, spread them around the landscapes of my life, and even give a bunch to friends and family.

          The irony is that with all this interest in time, I'm always late.  I have absolutely no interest in getting anywhere "on time."

          As the moment to leave for a dinner appointment nears, for example, my wife sits patiently with her coat in her lap as I dawdle.  Oh, it doesn't seem like dawdling to me, like trips upstairs to get a handkerchief or my backup eyeglasses or my scarf.  What's a man to do?  Rush out half dressed?

          The truth is I just don't like to rush--which means that to some people I am infuriatingly slow.  (That doesn't bother me much either, which seems to exasperate them even more.)  I have, in fact, made slowness an art.  Sometime I even spout quotations to the rushing hordes, as for example the Roman proverb, "Make haste slowly."  And years ago I took to saying "slow is fast," my paradoxical way of rephrasing the familiar "haste makes waste."

          Of course, I get my share of quotes back, which paraphrase down in something like respectable language to "get your lazy butt moving."  But I just make a note in my calendar to write an essay about it.  When I'm good and ready.