It’s because of my memory – and in spite of my memory, probably – that I found such affinity with the web: its organization, its structure, its ability to remember everything. Technology has replaced the sticky parts of our memory with a kind of semi-permanent record – a rolodex, a record collection, a calendar, a life connected by data and stored in a mythical cloud.

That’s good, right? Or are we losing something by depending on artificial knowledge like this?

The fine people at Offscreen Magazine asked me to write about something – anything – and this is what I landed on. It’s about photography. It’s about information architecture. It’s about my faulty memory. It’s about organization, its place in our life, and why it matters.

It’s one of the things I’m most proud of, too, this short essay.

You can’t read it online – not yet. When Issue 6 goes live, I’ll post “Life in Folders” for you. But out of respect for the magazine – and because, seriously, this magazine is fantastic and you should just buy it already because Nicole Jones‘ very short but very awesome thank you letter to the web is everything I’ve wanted to say for a long time – you’ll just have to purchase it or wait a bit.

It’s worth the purchase. I hope it’s worth the wait.

Which is not to say I didn’t look forward to being finished. I did. I did very much.

“Finally,” I thought. “I’ll be able to focus on something else.” Get back to writing. Get back to taking care of months of photography, of taking up all of the hobbies I had abandoned, to release my mind from the grip it had around projects and speaking and let go a bit. Exercise. Get some sleep. Kill the anxiety.

But I’m frozen. I’m stunned. I don’t know where to start.

I’ve spent the past two months being pressed under the weight of responsibility. I dug myself out from under it. I forced a tunnel out of the stress, and emerged at the other end, bathed in freedom, ready for the sun. Instead, all I can do is blink my eyes and ease back. All I can do is hunker back into the tunnel until I’m used to feeling normal again.

But it did. Copper – Isaac’s goldfish and Goldy’s bowl companion – died on Wednesday, a loss that we commemorated Cosby-Show-style with a toilet-bowl funeral and the promise that it was on its way to fish heaven (via the sea).

Because the memory-span of a goldfish lasts up to three months, Goldy will eventually forget he ever had a fellow swimmer; for our son, it could take longer, but he too will forget. Children forget things. They always will – that’s part of growing; our memories fade, our ideals change, our lives move forward.

Most of the time.

The Accident

If this was the only traumatic thing that’s happened in the past week, we’d be lucky. Instead, we’ve been working through two weeks of surgery, pain and doubt – the result of an accident that left Isaac with a lacerated tongue and a distrust for medicine.

The story is long and tangled, but it involves an errant trip to urgent care, a non-healing tongue and two separate surgeries. It involves a 45-minute fight to take a sedative, two IVs, a week’s worth of chocolate milk and a throbbing tongue that’s been sewn together twice.

It also involves a lot of crying. A lot of night-waking. An awful lot of fighting back, of communication dissonance and Isaac’s refusal to admit when there’s a touch of trouble, his mind wary of anything that might send him back to surgery, back into the gaping maw of sedation, anesthesia and sutures.

I’m afraid it will eventually involve a lot of memory, too. Children forget things. They always will.

But if it’s something traumatic, sometimes they don’t. They’re not goldfish, after all.

Remembering the Trauma

I remember the time, when I was five, when some moron kid on a bike didn’t see me and ran me over. I remember the roll, the smack, the pain. I remember being several states away from my parents – on vacation with my grandparents – and I remember being scared. I remember having to show the tire tracks on my leg to exonerate my grandparents from abuse, because kids don’t get run over by bicycles. I remember the picture my grandma took to document the process.

Later, I remember sitting in a doctor’s office, my lungs racked with pneumonia, refusing to take the medicine I was offered. I remember someone – my father? The doctor? – say that they’d “need to take me to the hospital” if I didn’t take the medicine, and I remember crying so hard, long after I finally took the medicine, long after the scare tactic worked, so afraid that I’d be hooked up to machines like they do on television.

I remember this all, still today.

My hope is that Isaac forgets this entire ordeal. But logic assumes he wont – that the Great Tongue Laceration Incident of 2013 will live on.

I will remember it as a time of great strength and bravery, when we saw the kind of stoicism a three-year-old can exhibit. But also as a reminder of why the human body cannot be trusted. Why healing isn’t as easy as it sometimes seems.

He could remember it as a weird time of straws and ice cream. Or, he could take it on as anxiety – an irrational fear of doctors, or a sudden hatred for the Lorax Soundtrack (which has played in the background of these last two weeks like some kind of poppy Musak). He could forget. Or he could pack it away for later.

I just hope he takes it all in stride. God knows I haven’t.

Barely lucid in his final days, I watched him slowly lose track of the corporeal and succumb to lung cancer. He was my first hero, and here he was, human, weak, no longer able to teach me about building character and Charles Bronson films. I did my best impression of an emotionally secure human and stood in front of my family and his friends and, out of nowhere, eulogized a man who helped shape my life.

And then, I gave up. Speaking wasn’t my gig. I’d just be a writer and write in the security of my introversion.

Enter The Internet

Except, that’s not what happened. Instead, I became a part of the internet, where the playing field is leveled out if you’re willing to overcome your own insecurities.

So last year, I made a change. I decided that my introversion was a crutch. I used it to stay quiet. To be safe. To keep from failing.

I pitched for speaking gigs. And then I got one. I spent what felt like months on my slide deck. I practiced once a day for two weeks leading up, and twice a day in the few days before I’d go live. I tweaked. I ferreted out the details and made them right. I picked out a shirt ahead of time and kept it hidden and clean. I gave a damn about everything.

I had never been more frightened of a crowd in my whole life.

I went through with that speaking gig, and I didn’t shit myself or ball up on the floor, crying for mercy. Instead, I stood tall. I understood the situation. I realized I couldn’t do anything about the butterflies or the room size – all I could do is be who I was and stop giving a fuck if I failed.

Karen McGrane took this entire process and summarized it perfectly in her column for A List Apart, “Give a crap. Don’t give a fuck.”. There are two competing forces when we jump into public speaking: the need for everything to be perfect, and the understanding that we can’t always be perfect. But it’s that definition of “perfect” that holds us back. Are we being perfect for appearances? Or are we being perfect because that’s what is perfect for us?

McGrane says:

“Care deeply about your personal values and live them fully in this world. Don’t get caught up in worrying about other people’s checklists to tell you what good work means to you.”

In other words, there’s a need to focus on every detail, but there’s an even greater need to focus on the details that make better things. Your shirt might not be ironed correctly, but at least your heart is on your sleeve.

My Three Rules

Over the month between preparing for my first talk to the week after, a decade of fear faded to calmness. I attribute this to three things – the three things that are most important to public speaking, and the three things Karen expertly laid out in her article.

1. I learned to prepare. This was taught to me by Deane Barker – if you haven’t practiced your talk at least ten times, you’re already behind. The power of this preparation not only helps you for the current talk, but it also prepares you for future talks.
2. I cared about my audience. I’ve sat through boring speakers. I didn’t want my audience to be bored. I hated that someone might call me out on being too dull. So I fought to stay interesting, relevant and, most of all, connected to the situation.
3. I knew enough to open myself up. I’m not perfect. I’ve made mistakes, and I’ve learned from those mistakes. So instead of focusing on other companies and the ways they’ve screwed up, I talked about my own screw ups. I talked about how I learned things. I didn’t care about how it made me look, because I knew it made me look genuine.

McGrane says,

“What elevates someone’s work from ‘technically excellent’ to ‘truly great’ is the extent to which you feel like you’re seeing them live their truth, be fully themselves.”

This takes more than just a bunch of preparation. It takes a lowering of defenses, in which we stop worrying about our mistakes and start learning – no – teaching from them. It takes understanding that there’s a fine line between giving a crap and not giving a fuck, and that finding the balance between the two can open ourselves up to the rarest of combinations: being both impressive and believable in our convictions.

Looks like I’ve run out over the past few months.

Yet, there’s nothing that warns us about this. Call it fatigue – the fatigue that comes from writing for work and writing a column and writing about an industry – or call it blind fear – the fear that comes from making deadlines about very large projects. It’s bound to happen.

The words stop.

It’s a battle to make them start again. But they have to start somewhere.

I know. This writing about writing schtick gets tired, but it’s also how some people break out of the doldrums. When every possible post looks like an unscalable wall, the only thing that breaks through writer’s block is talking about writer’s block.

So forgive me for this writer’s block. If you’re still around, your patience will be rewarded – even if only a little bit at a time.

Favorite Albums From 2012

• Forgetters – Forgetters
• Macklemore & Ryan Lewis – The Heist
• Heartless Bastards – Arrow
• The Antlers – Undersea (EP)
• Sleigh Bells – Reign of Terror

Favorite Albums From Before 2012 That I Didn’t Pay Attention To Until 2012

• Archers of Loaf – Icky Mettle
• Daft Punk – Discovery
• Aphex Twin – Come to Daddy
• LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver
• Hüsker Dü – New Day Rising

Albums From My “Favorite Albums From 2011″ List That I Haven’t Listened To Since 2011.

• tUnE-YarDs – whokill
• Bon Iver – Bon Iver
• The Mountain Goats – All Eternals Deck

Lowest Vinyl Prices For The Three Albums I Want More Than Any Other, According To Discogs

• $250 (Modest Mouse – The Lonesome Crowded West)
• $237.55 (Modest Mouse – This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About)
• $101.07 (Ugly Casanova – Sharpen Your Teeth)

Artists I Should Have Loved 25 Years Ago, Except I Was Only Eight-Years-Old

• Hüsker Dü
• Dinosaur Jr.
• Minutemen
• Archers of Loaf
• Mission to Burma
• fIREHOSE
• Replacements

Songs I Keep Trying To Get My Kids To Love, But They Won’t Have It

• “Intergalactic” – Beastie Boys
• “The Vanishing Spies” – Frank Black
• “(It’s A) Departure” – The Long Winters
• “Swan Swan H” – R.E.M.
• “Red Letter Day” – The Get Up Kids

Favorite Music Habits

• Putting on my headphones and forgetting to turn on iTunes.
• Sticking with the same album over and over again because my iTunes library is too large and I fear choosing a different artist.
• Playing one song from an artist, then pausing it to do something and forgetting to press play.
• Buying an album and forgetting to ever listen to it.
• Listening to actual music.

Instead, let’s solve the gun problem in schools by putting more guns in schools.

Yeah. That’s probably what I should have expected. But the most telling part of the recent press conference from the wonderful folks at the NRA wasn’t in their solution, but by the way they chose to communicate it:

“As I indicated at the outset, this is the beginning of a serious conversation. We won’t be taking questions today.”

One way, no discussion, no chance for rebuttal. I do not think that means what you think it means, guys.

I didn’t just take pictures for me, though. I did it for my family and my friends. I took pictures so they could be seen. And there was a service that handled my pictures perfectly: Flickr.

I paid for the Pro account. I became involved in the community. I posted things to groups and commented on pictures from people I knew and people I didn’t know and will never know. I was a full out Flickr supporter – there was no site I used more.

And then things went mobile.

Things went mobile at the same time that, for our family, life became cluttered. I took fewer pictures with the Canon, but, as luck would have it, the cameras on my phone improved to the point that I could socially share at closer to the same quality as I was posting on Flickr. Photo editing fell behind, and quick snaps picked up. Eventually, posting to Flickr became an every-three-months exercise in marathon editing, ending in a glut of pictures that no one had time to look at.

I never used Flickr to be social, at least not in the way social media works these days. I never used Flickr to take quick picks and save them for use across Facebook or Twitter – to me, Flickr was a walled garden.

I didn’t neglect Flickr because I wanted to be more mobile. It’s just that my life had changed to the detriment of the service. I didn’t need Flickr as much as I used to. Instead, I turned to Instagram as a placeholder. A place to post the pictures I still longed to take, compressed and filtered and fast.

So when the Instagram terms of service update came down, I wasn’t as upset as others. I didn’t swear off the service and threaten to delete everything if they didn’t change. I hated their response to the outcry, but it wasn’t enough for me to cut ship and row away. I’m not dumb. I know that if we’re not paying for a service, that service is getting something from us in return – our data, our rights, our likeness, our implicit word.

Mostly, it was just bad timing for Instagram.

Flickr had released a new app a few days earlier. It was everything they should have done years ago. It had the same power and sharing capabilities as Instagram – a little more cluttered, but a lot better at showing the full scope of a set in one glance instead of an endless line of one-off images.

But it came with something else: my history. My past images, all in one place. My Flickr friends – many who also had never gone away. We had all returned. Some of us had never left.

There’s no need for two image apps on my phone. So I went with the one I loved the most.

I didn’t leave Instagram because of the new terms of use. I didn’t leave because they had suggested they were going to sell my stuff. I didn’t leave because they talked down to me in a response, and I’m not that concerned about their policy rollback. I technically haven’t left at all.

When it comes down to it, I abandoned Instagram. And I did so because I missed Flickr.

Now, a few months into her kindergarten year, I just drop her off. She insists. She walks onto the playground, turns, and waves, and runs to meet her friends. It takes all I have not to park the car and give her one last hug.

But I don’t.

She’s at school. She’s safe.

##

I was at the grocery store a few minutes after I found about the shooting in Connecticut. I walked in knowing that, at that point, 18 kids were confirmed dead. Grade-school aged kids. Kids just a few years older than Sierra, killed by a weapon that should never have been put on the market, within the confines of one of the few buildings a kid can really trust.

People were smiling. They were talking about email. They were putting bows on liquor bottles. They hadn’t heard.

No one had heard, yet. I felt as if it wasn’t real.

One by one, people hear. And they argue for – or against – better gun control, and they argue for – or against – better resources for mental health, or they just try to piece together what still doesn’t seem real: Eighteen kids. Dead. In their school.

This is how I cope. I write words on something for which there are no words. I stay out of the debates because other people can fight those battles better than I can. I struggle to hold back from platitudes. But that’s hard. Because what do you say?

There are no words for what happened today. There will never be words for this.

Eighteen kids. What do you say to that?

Fuck.

##

There are mornings when I fight with the kids. They are too slow, or they are not listening. They are pushing the envelope; testing their limits, causing lateness and anger and exasperation.

There are times when I’m totally fed up with one thing or the other, when I struggle with our kids’ disappointment in gifts, their inability to reason like an adult, their general childishness.

I send them off to school. They come home and we’ve all had time to cool off. Hugs. Stories. We start anew, because we are filled with love and there’s nothing that could stop that.

Today, in Connecticut, there are parents who had fights with their kids, who felt exasperated, who were worried about whether or not their kids would like the Christmas presents wrapped under the tree, who had cooled off and were thinking about dinner that night, who dropped their kids off at school knowing that they would see them just a few hour later. Who got a call – or, even worse, still haven’t gotten a call – and found their lives shattered. Who found that they will never get resolution.

Our President is on television, crying. There are parents who thought their kids were always going to be safe at school. There are gifts under the tree that will never be unwrapped.

There are no words.

Tools are specialized. They are created as a response to a problem, and they solve a very specific issue. Plumbers have specialized tools, and if you use those tools on a regular basis you are more likely to be defined as a plumber. Even those of us who use tools with wide use – laptops, or pen and pencil – are further subdivided by the solutions we use within that larger tool’s ecosystem – apps, programs, styles, brands.

I think the differences in toolsets – and the reasons why we choose them in the first place – is really fascinating, and for that reason I’ve always been drawn to The Setup – a site that focuses on what people use to get stuff done. There’s a definite focus on tools, here – equipment, apps, hacked-up solutions – over method, which, admittedly, can be dangerous. (There’s nothing worse than those moments when you realize you’ve spend hours getting a THING set up so you can actually begin doing the STUFF you want to do.)

Some of my favorite people have been featured, including:

• Robin Sloan
• Mandy Brown
• Dustin Curtis
• John Siracusa

Knowing I’m just some punk web strategist, I’m making the assumption that I’ll never be asked to submit to the site and, instead, I’m going to just lay it all out right here. This is my bootleg version of The Setup. (Without the cool URL, unfortunately.)

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Corey Vilhauer. I am a web strategist who still pretends he’s a writer. Sometimes I take pictures. I also blog about beer.

What hardware do you use?

I’m currently on a year-and-a-half old 15″ MacBook Pro. On the go, it’s just the laptop, but when at my desk at work it’s accompanied by two Samsung SyncMaster PX2370 23″ monitors – the better to cross-reference spreadsheets and style guides with, of course. My backups are also all handled at work through a 1TB Western Digital My Book external hard drive. I have a Magic Mouse, and my keyboard is wired.

My second screen is an iPhone 4S, which is what I now use as an iPod despite also having an older Classic 80GB iPod. I used to use an iPad 1, but ours has gotten so slow it’s difficult for me to use if for anything but reading from the Books app.

I write in a Moleskin because they’re wonderful. I use Energel Liquid Gel Ink pens. It’s all contained in Incase products – an Incase iPhone 4 Slider Case, an Incase 15″ MacBook Pro messenger bag that they don’t sell anymore – because I like Incase a lot.

There was a time I fashioned myself as an amateur photographer (I’m really just a hobbiest now who takes fancy pictures of his kids) but I still use an older Canon Rebel XTi (a.k.a. the EOS 400D) which is an entry level DSLR released in 2006. I’d guess 95% of the time I’m using our Canon 50mm 1.4f prime lens.

And what software?

This is where things get fun. I’ve already posted about how I write, but since then the tools have changed slightly. I write in Markdown using BBEdit as my text editor for posts that will end up as HTML, and I’ve begrudgingly turned back to Pages for documents and deliverables that require an extra level of formatting. (I used to be a MS Word guy, until it started taking minutes to open up.) My files are sorted by a weird combination of client, deliverable and version number – CLIENT DELIVERABLE YYMMDD. This helps my computer keep different versions of a document in chronological order.

To organize my life I use a sync of OmniFocus across my iPhone and my laptop. I use and often hate BusyCal when it comes to calendars, and the revolving door of calendar apps on my iPhone has landed – for now – on Fantastical. I still use Sparrow both for Mac and iOS, even after the Google purchase. I no longer know where things live on my computer because I’ve become an Alfred devotee. I also can’t remember a single one of my passwords because I use 1Password.

At work, we use a combination of a time-tracking system called Redmine and an newly minted intranet built on EPiServer. File sharing and internal discussions happen almost exclusively over Skype. When I need to edit graphics I’ve got a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 4, and when I need to mark things up and illustrate problems I’ll snap a screenshot with Skitch, which I’ve just learned is a part of Evernote.

Most strategic deliverables, as mentioned above, happen in Pages, but wireframes are created in OmniGraffle and presentations are hammered out in Keynote. In the rare case that I’m fooling around with code on one of my three WordPress blogs, I turn toward Expandrive and Smultron.

I’d talk about browsers, but my allegiance changes based on how much trouble I have with the current one. I love things about both Firefox and Chrome, and find myself ditching one for the other every four or five months. It’s a problem.

When I’m not doing work things, my software skews almost exclusively toward iOS. I use Tweetbot for Mac because I love Tweetbot for iOS, and the same is true for Reeder as an RSS channel on both devices. I use Instacast for podcasts, Pocket for time-shifted content, Lose It! and Runkeeper for the times when I’m trying to be healthy, and I use the official apps for Facebook, Instagram and Foursquare.

I read in Books because that’s where all of my books are. I listen to music with iTunes because I have a lot of music there, and when I do it’s with Bose AE2 headphones. I use Adobe Lightroom for editing pictures, and they all end up on Flickr because Flickr is the best place to host images for Much More Sure.

What would be your dream setup?

I don’t know that there’s more I’d need compared to my current set-up, though I imagine someday I’ll get the upgrade to a retina display. My work is a lot of meetings and documents, so as long as I have a fast text editor and a way to export documents to .pdf I’m set. I love the idea of the MacBook Air, but I also cherish a larger screen – when the two become more viable, I’ll jump toward that.