Month: April 2003

Categories
Just Shelley

Telling All

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Years ago when I worked for Boeing, I had to file paperwork for a government security clearance to work within the Peace Shield program. This involved writing down every address I’d lived in, all my previous jobs, my current friends, and family members. It also meant answering some rather invasive questions about personal drug use, membership within certain organizations, as well as recent travel activity.

I had experimented with drugs when I was in my teens and I debated whether to put this information in. Eventually, I decided it was best just to be honest and accept the consequences. Sure enough four months later the Department of Defense contacted me and told me an investigator would be flying to Seattle to discuss my application.

I was relieved to find the agent who arrived to be both pleasant and courteous, even friendly. She basically asked the same questions asked in the form and I answered truthfully. In fact, I was very comfortable in the interview, probably because I knew I was telling the truth and she wasn’t as formidable as I thought she would be. After five minutes, she said that she was satisfied with my answers and I’d get the clearance. She also told me it was the shortest and easiest interview she’d given because she could tell, immediately, that I wasn’t holding anything back. And she was right, I wasn’t.

As much as I wanted to work on Peace Shield, and I enjoyed my time on the project, I didn’t enjoy the security process. I was determined from that point on that I wouldn’t answer these types of questions unless I felt the job justified the invasive process. When I became a contractor, I made it a point never to go after contracts that would require a security investigation because I had no interest in going through this process for a job that would only last 3 to 6 months.

Last week, I interviewed for a contract lasting 3 to 6 months. I talked about it in Long Week, and though I said I wasn’t going to continue in this field, I decided to accept the job anyway. All things considered, I need a job and I decided that no matter how much I might dislike the job or the work, no matter how burnt out I am, I am also an old pro — I have enough discipline to do a job and do it well regardless of personal interest. I wouldn’t have pursued the job if it was a permanent position, but I can handle anything for 3 to 6 months.

(Besides, I thought, maybe I would find that my burn out is due to this depressingly long period of time looking for a job, and feeling less than worthwhile when never getting called. )

What I didn’t mention in the previous writing is that the job was for a department of the federal government, but none having anything to do with any enforcement branch of the government, or the department of defense, or working on anything that could remotely be considered ‘sensitive’ or having to do with the public trust. In fact, the application I would work on would become part of the organization’s public web site.

I was told last week that I would have to take a drug test and be fingerprinted for a criminal record, but that’s not unusual for jobs related to the government and I had no problems with this.

The person contracting the job phoned Tuesday to tell me he sent the offer letter through the mail, which I thought was surprising. In all previous contracts, I’m usually sent the contract via email and then I sign it and send it back. However, when I received the ‘packet’ with the letter, I knew why. In the packet were several documents requiring signatures authorizing investigations into various aspects of my life, as well as asking questions such as the following:

Since the age of 16 or in the last 7 years, whichever is shorter, have you illegally used any controlled substance?

In the last 7 years, has your use of alcoholic beverages (such as beer, wine, liquor) resulted in any alcohol-related treatment or counseling (such as for alcohol abuse or alcoholism)?

In the last 7 years, have you consulted a mental health professional or have you consulted with another health care professional provider about a mental health related condition?

I was also asked to provide the names and addresses of all my family members in addition to the names and addresses of people I consider ‘good friends’ who know me well. Any takers in the audience?

I would also have to provide complete details of all my financial information including bank and credit card information, every incidence when a payment was late for a credit card or a loan, as well as having to give the authorization to allow investigation of my credit history. This is surprising because, by law, this information can’t be used to make an employment decision. I guess the laws don’t apply to the federal government.

I would need to list every place I’ve lived for the last 7 years in one document, my entire life on another. I would also need to list details of every employer I’ve ever had. Considering I’ve moved quite a bit, and have also worked for a lot of companies as a contractor, my roommate and I estimated it would take about 3 months just to fill in the paperwork for this section.

I would have to list all the foreign countries I’ve visited, and why.

I was particularly impressed by one document I would need to sign providing my permission for the investigators to discuss me with my doctors:

Does the person under investigation have a condition or treatment that could impair his/her judgement or reliability?

If so, please describe the nature of the condition and the extent and duration of the impairment or treatment.

What is the prognosis?

I could go on, but I think the point has been made. Considering that this job is working on an application that has nothing to do with sensitive information or with the ‘public trust’, and that if a modicum of security procedures are in place I wouldn’t be able to hack into computers with sensitive information, you can imagine my chagrin when I saw the multitude of pages and pages and pages of requests for extremely sensitive and highly personal information.

What was worse was, according to one document, this information, once collected, could then be given to any other government agency requesting this information, or to a congressional office, or to Office of Management and Budget, or to a labor organization for investigation in labor disputes (the list goes on literally half a page of organizations this information could be released to).

I don’t think it’s a surprise that I declined the job.

Privacy. Thanks to the Internet as well as the ‘war on terrorism’, privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Increasingly we’re meeting demands to tell more and more about ourselves, beyond that which we’re comfortable sharing. Holding anything back is equated with being unpatriotic, or deceptive, or being less than honest. After all, what have we got to hide? Our lives are open books. Right?

Wrong.

The only details we have to provide about ourselves are those we choose to share. There is no covenant we enter into with the “public” that says we have to bare all, just because one person asks or another is interested.

Categories
Just Shelley Weblogging Writing

Audience Matters

Steve, in an uncanny knack for putting his finger on the real issues, touched on what I think is the key aspect impacting on the type of writing we do within a weblog — the audience. And this includes audience expectations. It’s difficult writing War and Peace and have it fit comfortably within RSS feeds focusing on the War in Iraq and how sexy one’s boobies are.

I’m going to write something longer on this later, and then we’ll see if the conversation about writing continues or falters and trickles off as so many conversations do among the weblogs.

In the meantime, I have to go get a Trip Tik for my trip to San Francisco tomorrow, as I start what I call The Moving Adventure:

 

Trip 1. To San Francisco in Golden Girl to re-organize material in storage unit, deciding what to keep and what to give away. Stuff GG full and come home.

Trip 2. To San Francisco in Blue Beast (roommate’s blue van) to haul home as much stuff as I can. Also having person come out and haul bed to dump and rest of stuff to shelters in area for use. Donate books.

Trip 3. To San Francisco in Blue Beast, haul other stuff.

Possible Trip 4. To San Francisco in GG, grab rest of stuff, close unit, head out into sunset, drive to parts unknown.

 

I can make it to San Fran in 2 days going out, 3 days coming back. Most of the trips will be either 6 or 7 days, and I’ll be on the road, a lot, in the next few weeks. Won’t be blogging as much, but will try and do some quality blogging between trips.

Speaking of weblog: My lease with my web host ends the end of April. I’ve had a couple of very kind and generous friends offer to help me out with a new host because I can’t afford hosting my sites any more. But at 12+GB of bandwidth used a month, hosting me isn’t trivial. With other things in my life demanding attention now, and while I work through hosting issues, my site(s) might go dark for a time. Possibly longish time.

But you can’t keep a bird down too long. Especially one that rises from the ashes.

Categories
Places Political

Understanding the Problem

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I think it’s nice that Doc’s trying to organize an effort to save the looted Iraqi artifacts. However, his ideas of staffing a single television and radio station, and creating a web site to show the artifacts, all created for the purposes of recovering the items won’t be that helpful.

Two types of looters have been identified — poor, little educated Kurds and Shiites who most likely don’t have a computer, a television, or radio, and possibly even electricity; and professionals, most likely part of the museum itself, who could care less.

UNESCO is the organization best equipped for running an international operation to try and rescue the artifacts before they’re sold into private collections. I imagine they’re working with Interpol, and both organizations are quite good at recovery of illegally smuggled artifacts. UNESCO is taking the steps necessary to ensure descriptions of items are released into the hands where they’ll do the most good — traditional dealers of Middle Eastern artifacts. The idea of ‘closing’ the borders to search for artifacts is a good one, but this should also include searching belongings of the military before they come home. It’s not uncommon for military to take ‘souvenirs’ home with them.

Offering of rewards, no questions asked, and proving that people are not going to be arrested is one of the best ideas yet. This should result in returns of artifacts held by the poor who have no contacts in the international community. This won’t stop the pros, though.

However, if we want to do something, we should pressure the Congress to get the United States to own up to our responsibilities in this mess, and to provide support for recovery operations. Not lip service, actual sypport. The US and Britain need to provide money for rewards, and facilities for UNESCO to help in recovery. In this, I agree that we should be communicating this across weblogs — but we have been, even before this war started.

However, if we want to do something from a Web point of view, we could also start looking for artifacts on eBay — they’ll start showing up shortly.

I know that Doc thinks these efforts are ‘insufficient’, but I would tend to trust the experts on this one.

Categories
Just Shelley

What does this mean?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

So what does it mean when the car wash place turns off the power when you’re half way through?

I sat there, surrounded by apparatus that should be spraying, soaping, blowing, and generally getting my car clean. But nothing. No lights, no movement. I thought the power had failed because of the storms in the area, but assumed if this was the case the people would come by and tell me to drive the car through or something. After a couple of minutes, I tapped the horn and almost as soon as I did so, the power came on, and my car was pushed through the system.

It’s very discouraging to be so forgettable that you’re left halfway through a car wash.

Anyway, I won’t be taking off tomorrow as planned because of major storms all along the way, as pointed out by the kindly, helpful staff at AAA. Friday morning should be perfect, but we’ll see how Golden Girl survives the hail tonight.

cloud2.jpg

Categories
Just Shelley Writing

When Truth Conceals, Lies Reveal

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

So many excellent comments associated with my previous writing, Shadow Talk, as well as exceptional writing in other weblogs such as Jonathon’s, Dorothea’s, Aquarionics, Elaine’s, Laura’s, and (soon to be) Chris’s. I only wish I could do justice to the debates because there’s a rich story unfolding among all the different views, but I’m not sure I’m the one to tell it. All I can do is give my own understanding of the topic of ‘truth in weblog writing’ and that’s difficult enough as it is.

When I tell a story from my past I try to describe events accurately; however what results is inevitably ‘tainted’ by my personal viewpoint of the event. Someone else reading my story might say, “I don’t remember it that way”, and I’m sure they’d be equally correct. Chances are a videotape would prove us both wrong.

The important part of the story isn’t necessarily any individual fact; it’s my experience of the event, my image of it, which I then share with my readers; to me, the image is the truth, though the facts, if recorded, might not completely agree.

Am I practicing a deception if my view of the events differs from the actual facts? No, because what I’m writing, my feelings and responses, they are very real. They are the essence of what I’m trying to convey with my stories.

Of course, one could say that this isn’t the same as deliberately creating a story and putting oneself into it. After all, the former is nothing more than writing from our own personal perceptions of an event, while the latter could be said to be writing from a lie. From …bits of alibis and consistent lies, as Jonathon would say. Still, I’m not so sure the two are that different.

A few weeks back I wrote about two essays — one by Virginia Woolf the other by Annie Dillard — that had enormous impact on me when I read them in college years ago. The subject was the same, a first person narrative about watching the death of a moth; but each writer’s written description and interpretation of the event differed enormously. In Woolf’s the moth dies nobly, quietly, and with dignity, while Dillard’s moth died with passion, with a fierce resistence, burning brightly at the end.

I would give anything I own, including the soul I don’t believe in, to be able to write as well as both of these women did in these particular essays. However, if you were to tell me that the incident of the moth really didn’t occur for either author, that they ‘made it up’, it wouldn’t matter a bit to me. I would still love these stories as much, and they would still have as profound an effect on me.

In my comments Language Hat brings up a very valid point about the introduction of fiction into our personal narratives:

Most of us, on the other hand, use fictionalization as a means to make ourselves look better or somehow impress others, and since we don’t have the insight and imagination of a Joyce or a Faulkner, the results tend towards a homogenized “story-telling” mode that can be mildly amusing but doesn’t hold the attention for long.

I agree with Language Hat, this type of fictionalization becomes all too obvious at some point and rather boring, even embarrassing. I saw this once with another weblogger, someone who I haven’t read in a long, long time. But then, I’ve also seen this happen with webloggers who have no idea that they’re ‘fictionalizing’ themselves. They cast themselves as the heros, the shining knights, in their own stories and they are no less sad for all their belief that they are being ‘honest’. (I have a lowering thought that I’ve done this a time or two myself.)

If another weblogger tells me that they’re an agent for the FBI, working undercover to hunt terrorists, but in actuality, they’re a security cop at a mall, I would be furious, and they would be foolish, because that kind of lie will out. The same as saying you’re not married when you are, or that you have children when you have not, and so on. Even saying you have a cat, when you don’t, is a foolish lie that has nothing to do with writing, literature, or weblogging for that matter. A person pretending something they’re not isn’t writing, but a sad admission that they think little of themselves.

This type of lie, this personal fictualization as Language Hat so aptly calls it, is completely different from the subtle storytelling in the essays about the death of the moth I mentioned earlier. In these, it doesn’t matter if the event was real or not because what the writer was feeling, the thoughts and images they wanted to communicate with these stories were very real. More so, the stories reveal rather than conceal the author. They didn’t seek to hide behind the story of the moth — they sought to use it to tell a story about themselves, and how they experience life. Both writers used the moth to describe their own fears of death, their own views of how they see themselves dying. And that’s as authentic as you can get in writing.

I think this is the point that Beerzie Boy was making when he said:

I like to think that for myself, when I change facts it is fairly superficial as far as the “factual” aspect, and the purpose is usually to make the underlying meaning (theme? message?) more concise or clear. In my view, changing facts for self-aggrandizement is intellectually wrong, but it really hurts the writer more than the reader; generally if writing is insincere it undermines a work’s artisic qualities.

I’m not sure if the story of the moths is the same as Jonathon’s bits of alibis and consistent lies. He’s the only one can answer that and I am looking forward to hearing his answer, and exploring the concepts further, if he chooses to share them. Regardless, I have a feeling that Jonathon’s ‘consistent lies’ are closer to who he really is, and far more authentic, than recent posts that focused on the war in Iraq, for all their truthfulness.