I'm obsessing with passwords. I'm having a terrible time with them - with me. I go blank a lot, forgetting my magic words or symbols that open my possibilities. There are certain connections I cannot seem to make. When I started to write down a few passwords I thought a little notebook would be sufficient, but then I had to change or correct some and then some companies didn't remember when I changed or kept both of my identifiers and confused us both. A dear friend gave me an address book and that helps, although my bank refused to remember my new password and kept making me change it, so there is a whole page of scribbled-out passwords until we both finally got one to stick. Just last week I got so mad at one connection that either couldn't remember me or repeatedly refused me (my fault, I'm sure) that I finally wrote a password that stuck, for both of us: Feb83lardass. It won't do you any good to try to access me with that; It got censored.

I notice that Daytimer's that sell all the neat stuff for getting organized, has a new password notebook. Isn't it marvellous how designers keep up with the trends in peoples' needs? There are items that didn't exist a few years ago, like the clear plastic bags that hold your (small sizes) toiletries now so that airline scanners will let you on the plane. I use a Ziplok sandwich bag.

I'm not reconciled with passwords. It's a stand-off position. There must be some other way and I'm sure "they" are working on it. I rather like the idea of having my eyeballs scanned, something like that. But then, with all the places we go now and the contacts we have to make, it might be very hard on the eyes. At one time I thought it would be a good idea to tattoo a password on a baby's heel to provide a lifetime identifier. But then, some babies don't stay in the country they are born in, so they'd need an area code, and there are always new contacts that require more complicated sequences of numbers and letters . I don't think anyone's heel is big enough to accommodate all that.

I keep thinking of Ali Baba and how simple it was for him: all he had to remember was "Open Sesame" and the treasures were his.

Life just isn't like that any more, if it ever was.

Well, we all love words, don't we? More than food? I was thinking as I swam this morning (so good to be back in the pool) of all the words we know that didn't even exist 10 or 15 years ago. Cyberspace, for example, first coined by William Gibson (Necromancer, 1984), and defined by him as follows;

"A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. … A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. (Gibson 69)
Well, here's one from the nonspace of my mind, conjured up daily: blog. I guess everyone knows it's short for weblog, and became blog for short. That's why I first called my blog 'cobweb log', only stuck together. There are so many words, ideas, concepts and tools that simply didn't exist before because today's technical world didn't exist. On the other hand, there are words that have fallen into disuse and out of memory, concepts that I grew up with - and I still miss them and try to preserve them. It's a losing battle. What kind of words?
Well, words like responsibility, gratitude, grace, courtesy, honour, loyalty, fidelity, ideals and - yes- shame. I meet very few people, children of the Boomers, especially, who have never heard of them, or if they have, do not pay them the respect they deserve. That's another one: respect.
I have great respect for the skills of this latter generation, not to say AWE. But they seem to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. That expression is supposed to have come from the Saturday night bath ritual when everyone in the family washed, beginning with the father. Depending on the size of the family, by the time they got down to the baby, the water was so murky it was hard to see through it, hence the danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Quality of life. That's another phrase not used in my time, much prized today, and rising frequently from discussions about the end of life, the argument being if there is no quality why settle for quantity? Define quality.
Oh, my, I have gone far astray from my swimming meditation. Don't tell me I'm all wet.