My 65th birthday taught me something, or maybe it's better to say, it caused me to focus on something that has always been just slightly out of my view. I'm still working out the implications for my work and for my life. Yeah, it was kind of big for me. Let me tell you what happened.
I've been unwell, really unwell, for a week now. I should have gone to the doctor earlier, but I didn't. So as my birthday approached, I was feeling really tired. Tired from coughing. Tired from lousy sleeps because of coughing. Tired enough to make everything, including things I like, seem burdensome. Even celebrating my birthday, which I had looked forward to, seemed like work to me.
But plans had been made. It wasn't going to be a big deal but it was going to be fun, and delicious. The girls and their mom were coming over and they, along with Joe, would make a huge batch of pancakes. Half blue berry and half chocolate chip, I was on the blueberry list, I'll leave you to guess who was on the chocolate chip list.
When they arrived I had moved from mys spot in my wheelchair here at the computer over to my big chair in the front room. Joe and I had been watching television and when the doorbell rang, he got up and when the door opened the noise began. It was happy noise. It was 'we're here' noise. It was welcomed noise. In they came to the front room and the first of many 'Happy Birthdays' was wished. We all talked together for a few minutes and then it was time for the kitchen.
Ruby and Sadie followed Joe to the kitchen and soon pancakes were underway. Marissa stayed and talked with me a bit and then, coming to a call from the kitchen, she went along to check on the progress and see what she could do for help. This left me alone. The room was darkened, purposely, so the Christmas lights could do their job of making the place seem warm and welcoming.
I took the moment alone to push back in my big, soft chair, and close my eyes. I could feel the warmth from the heater, I could smell the pancakes cooking, I could here the gentle sound of industrious children excited to be doing something for someone else. I could hear the sound of all of their voices, a soft symphony of instruments all perfectly tuned.
But more than that, much more than that, the sounds and the smells and the warmth combined with the weaving wonderful sound of voices in harmony with each other, I felt safe. Completely and utterly safe.
But there I sat, just a bit apart hearing the world around me and knowing that in no dark corner of my house, in no dark corner of anyone's mind, lurked danger. No one would hurt me tonight. I felt that. I knew that deep down inside me.
I rarely to never feel completely safe. As a person who lives at many intersections regarding disability, and sexuality and weight I am easy prey for a wide segment of the population and I have often shrunk deep down inside my body, hidden myself away, making who I am seem to be what they see and knowing that they are wrong. This is how I protect myself.
But I could rise up from that hidden place. I could inhabit all of my body and all of my differences because they are known here, yes, but they are cherished here as well. No one here would wish me different.
The next day I began to think of the people we serve who have significant disabilities, who are often those who experience life from other rooms of awareness. Who hear sounds. Who hear voices. Who smell smells. Who experience welcome though senses and through a lifetime of learning. Their mental age is the chronological age, people learn from the lives they live and should be respected for who they have come and how they have managed to survive.
Can we create moments where people who may seldom feel safe, completely and totally, in their body and in their mind and in their soul safe?
How do we use what's at hand to create at first moments and then, perhaps even, lifetimes of feeling safe, and warm and welcome? How do we make it safe for people to rise up and live fully in their body, fully in their world?
your writing is so clear that I felt as if i were in the room, hearing, smelling, seeing the scene. I've only met you once, so it is hard to 'see' you - though you reveal parts of your self clearly.
what you describe feels to me like what a baby feels being held when he is well-fed, warm, and in his mother's arms...that first intimate and life giving connection...
i think that experience of safety and belonging and serenity is what we all long for...and it is so rare for adults. How to ensure this experience for those who have disabilities, or who are seriously ill or in pain, or aging and feeling trapped is a mystery.
A few moments of that experience - such as you write about- is powerful and transformative for the recipient and the giver, if the giver is aware.
I am not sure how to make everyone feel safe but the descriptions you gave of the feeling you had this day are wonderful. I can just imagine the smells and sounds and I certainly know the feeling.
The word safety is often thrown around lightly, with simple solutions and with little understanding of what it really means. Many people have so little of it in their life or would even understand that concept. Love how you describe the simple things that support safety...
I use a bunch of different pieces of technology to put Dave’s Picks together every week. I also use it as a test-bed for new things I’m learning. Sometimes this will make things appear a little rough around the edges as I’m figuring something new out, but generally I try to keep everything happy and HTML 4.0 compliant.
This is an attempt to describe all of those bits of technology, plus give some reasons for why I chose them. But first I need to give a little history, since that will provide some background for the decisions I made. I’ll continue adding to this file as I change things, so it’ll be an ongoing history.
Finally, rather than being the usual most-recent-first order, this is in straight chronological order. It makes more sense for someone who’s reading it for the first time that way, and I think that’s important.
I started Dave’s Picks on Friday 21. November, 1997. Well, I actually started it before then, but that’s the oldest entry that survives. I was at WAM!NET at the time, and found that a lot of folks in the office were missing out on news that was relevant to our business. I was sending around links to news stories via email. Rather than clogging email boxes, I decided to start publishing those links to the web every Friday.
I’d been using Frontier to build web stuff for a while, and the ability to have a scripts menu appear in my browser that could fetch the URL and title of a web-page was pretty cool. Plus, Frontier has an outliner, which I used heavily to get the structure I wanted to sort the links out every week.
When I was laid-off from WAM!NET in January of 1999 and decided to start my own business, Dave’s Picks provided a diversion while I was getting the business up and running (you wouldn’t believe how much time was spent waiting on other people because I didn’t know how long things took). It also gave me a chance to keep current with the latest changes in HTML.
I’d been running Dave’s Picks over on my personal site up to this point, but in November, 1999, I bought the davespicks.com domain name, and started running pre-release versions of Manila. I spent 2000 trying out cool ideas using Manila and generally being happy with the product, though its mysterious crashes got on my nerves.
This went on until March, 2001, when I’d finally had enough. The same bugs that I’d reported late in 1999 were still there in 2001. They would crash my server hard, and as near as I could tell, nobody was looking into the problems. They certainly weren’t getting solved.
So I bought my first x86 machine in nearly 15 years. It’s an AMD box, built by General NanoSystems. I wanted a bit of security (another thing lacking in Manila), so I installed OpenBSD 2.8 and a slew of patches, got Apache up and running, installed PHP and got that working. Then, because that was working too well, I decided to upgrade to OpenBSD 2.9, the latest Apache, PHP and MySQL and had everything completely broken for a while. Finally got back to a clean 2.9 build and documented how I needed to build all the various pieces, and that’s what’s serving these pages.
The twice-weekly updates of Dave’s Picks were still generated using Frontier in March of 2001. Many of the other pages are built using BBEdit, and use Apache Server Side Includes or PHP to supply things like the navigation on the right (I used to have navigation both on left and right, but decided I liked things better with just one navigation bar -- you can’t get to a specific month in the archives with a single-click anymore, but there’s a search now, so you don’t need to, either).
In December, 2001, prompted by Verio killing the server at best.com that had held those web pages for me since 1995, I wrote a bunch of software to wrap every page at Dave’s Picks a template to give the site a consistent look (including the hundreds of pages I migrated from best.com). This software’s written mostly in PHP, and is based on the template class within PHPLib. It also uses mod_rewrite to keep the URLs looking pretty (though if you get something wrong in mod_rewrite, it’s quite possible to have a server task chew up incredible amounts of memory, which can make the server pretty sluggish. Beware the infinite loop.
Rather than having to re-render all the pages in Frontier just to change the look, I can edit one template file by hand and everything changes. I’ve also got a better chance of cleaning up the code so I can make the transition from HTML 4.01 Transitional to XHTML 1.0 one of these days. There’s little chance of Frontier 5.0 ever generating XHTML for me.
Of course in changing to using PHP templates, I broke the search I had running when I did that, but I expect to have it working soon. And with the newfound flexibility, I can maybe drop Frontier entirely. I’ll be happy to not have it crashing my desktop Mac for me.
There’s also the sitemap. Since I was mucking with everything, I decided I’d add some intelligent caching to the sitemap. Now when you ask for the sitemap, it checks to see if the existing map is "current enough", and if it is, the cached version gets returned, rather than worrying about building a new one each time. Quicker response is good, especially since I display the sitemap when a requested page isn’t found.
The most recent changes (30. December, 2001) are the Suggest a Pick script and changes to the CSS and HTML to throw a background behind the date lines in the picks to make them stand out better.
The Suggest a Pick script pops a form for you, takes the information, formats it up just like in the final output version and writes it to a file only I can access. I’m currently manually moving things from that file into the main page, but the plan is that I’ll eventually write more scripts to automate this process. The bonus is that I can collect the various items until I’ve got enough for a theme. Having a script on my server also means that I’m no longer using Frontier 5.0 for the day-to-day work of keeping Dave’s Picks up to date. Everything new is added via the web, and I can do the editing either via BBEdit’s FTP functionality, using vi from a shell on my server, or any of a number of other ways.
The idea behind highlighting the date line for each entry is that eventually each date will be a separate file (or will at least look that way from the outside). Putting in the extra information now will allow me to break the old archives into pieces automatically, rather than having to do it by hand.
I describe how I improved handling incoming requests with an extra period or greater-than at the end of the URL in writing/programming/progexample1.html.
There have been multiple changes I didn’t document, but I’ve updated the Suggest a Pick script so that multiple categories are supported per item. This is part of a larger plan to do the following:
I’ve got a lot of work left to get all that done, but one of the first things I wanted to do was have multiple categories for a single posting. That lets me categorize things better as I enter them, and capturing that data is important to me. The rest of it is all display stuff, and I can worry about that as time goes on. But one of these days I’d still like to get Dave’s Picks being a real content management system with a lot less manual intervention on my part. I’d like to think this is the first step along the way.
I finially finished switching over the archives so each month has a directory. Thanks to Bill for some help writing the perl script that did much of the work. The to-do list is now: