Alex's Journal

The past couple of days have been rather productive. I’ve managed to write two new songs in relatively short order which means the new album now has nine completed songs. There are still a couple more on the way, but I just haven’t quite gotten around to finishing them yet. I will do that soon though I hope.

Another piece of exciting news in my life is that I’ve started preparations for a grant application and proposal to teach English to German middle school and high school students in Germany beginning next year. If I get it, I should be able to work on a Masters degree at the same time. I’m really rather excited about it, although it is a real pain to get everything together for a grant. I will definitely get through it though because it is absolutely worth it.

In the month since the university has been out for the summer, I have to admit that I haven’t had much motivation to write any entries about history. I haven’t researched anything nor have I really read anything pertaining to history. I have finished a couple of Mark Twain books and a book with short vampire stories, but other than that, I haven’t really read anything. Which brings me to this entry’s topic.

I’ve given it a bit of thought about why exactly I study history. The answer is fairly straight-forward I think. I’ve always had a strong fasciation for the past and for some unexplainable reason, a particular interest in the 19th century. I remember when I was a young child at my grandparents’ house when my grandmother would show me old photos of her grandparents and great-grandparents. I always marveled that the people in the old sepia photographs who I was looking at lived in a completely different time and century when things were much simpler.

Even today I think that same drive is behind my fascination with history. I am obviously a modern student in a modern world, who has a fancy laptop, a couple of websites, a couple of blogs, a cell phone, a Facebook account, several gigabytes of music, etc, etc — all of the so-called modern necessities for people of my age; and yet, even I often feel overwhelmed and feel the need to just reject all of this technology and go back to a more basic life. Studying history gives me the ability to simply disappear into a simpler world in which these modern marvels do not exist and to try to experience what life would have been like before electricity or the advent of microchips.

It may seem strange for the son of a computer programmer who is only 21 years of age and who has grown up with computers all of his life to feel this way, but I often do. When doing research, I prefer to use books in the library and read articles in physical journals and take notes with a notebook and pen rather than finding resources online and taking notes digitally as so many of my peers do. I know it is not as efficient and if pressed for time, I will resort to that, but I feel that if you enjoy the research, why does it matter how long it takes?

When I was much younger, the computer was virtually my life. I’ve created programs on multiple platforms, I’ve experimented with different flavors of Unix and Linux and I’ve done websites since I was 11 and the web was hardly anything but a sparse collection of text. I am by no means computer-illiterate or technology-shy (to be perfectly modest…) as many people I know who prefer to do things the old fashioned way. For me, it is simply a choice.

That is why I study history. Not only do I find it absolutely fascinating from an academic approach, but it is a means of escape, I suppose, where a body can disappear to a time before Facebook and MySpace, a time when calling somebody meant visiting them in person, a time when riding shotgun implied carrying an actual shotgun and a time when things were simpler.

This is a duplicate post from my history blog, History Rhymes.

I’ve finally finished editing my new story. It’s called Drilled and is the first sort of political kind of story I have ever written.

I, like most people I know of my generation, have an extremely strong web presence. Facebook, MySpace, StudiVZ, Last.fm, Wordpress.com, BlogCatalog and DeviantArt are just a few of the social networking sites that I have an account for. Of course that does not even include the other sites I have accounts for that are not technically social networking sites — websites such as Google and Amazon.com.

You have probably read it somewhere else before, but with the conveniences that these services provide comes the high price of anonymity and privacy. While some sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, are obviously much more attuned to the destruction of one’s privacy than businesses such as Amazon.com who use your personal information for business purposes (such as sending a package to your home address when you place an order), each time you sign up for a new account on a different website, a little bit more of your privacy disappears.

Unfortunately for someone of my age (a college student), having accounts on sites such as Facebook and MySpace are practically imperative for your social life. Let’s say you meet someone at a party who you would like to hang out with later or stay in contact with. The first thing they ask you isn’t for your phone number or your e-mail address, it’s whether you have a Facebook account. It’s gotten to the point that the only people you give your phone number to are your closest circle of friends. Receiving a text message is a far more private matter than receiving a message on Facebook. Why? I can’t really explain that.

Again, the biggest problem with this is the matter of privacy. While Facebook does allow you to change your privacy settings and you yourself can control what information about yourself you post to the social networking site, you can’t control what other people put on there. For example, I have always taken the precaution of not posting pictures of myself on the site; however, I am still somehow connected to over 100 different pictures of me that have been posted by other people. Facebook even furnishes a convenient link to these pictures right on my profile page. It is virtually impossible to control this.

On a side note, some may argue that keeping a blog destroys one’s privacy. That is not true unless the blogger wishes it to be so. While with blogging people have the ability to write about their personal lives or post private pictures (and no, I’m not talking about just naughty pictures), the beauty of it is that the writer has the ability to post whatever he or she wants and therefore the freedom to disclose or conceal whatever information about themselves to the world they want to.

The biggest concern I have with these privacy matters is largely two fold. First of all, I don’t think any government agent should be able to access my private information without probable cause, which is absolutely something he or she could do if it was generically posted online. The second concern I have is that future employers will ‘research’ me on the internet. I find it absolutely absurd that potential employers could justify not hiring me just because they found out about a party I went to or what my political or religious opinions are. That to me is an enormous violation of privacy and therefore I want to reduce the risk because the sad truth is that it actually happens.

In order to combat this potential problem, I have decided to attempt to reduce my web presence. This is by no means an easy task. Unfortunately in most instances, what you post on the web, stays on the web. Fortunately I have never posted anything too terribly private. I have begun by deleting my MySpace account. MySpace does not make it easy at all to cancel an account. They first make you confirm that you really want to three separate times, then they send you an e-mail with further instructions you have to follow in order to delete your account. In the e-mail you have to click a link where you are asked yet again if you really want to cancel your account. Then finally, they say your account has been ’scheduled for cancellation’ and that it will take ‘up to 48 hours’ for the changes to take effect.

I would love to delete the other social networking accounts as well, but unfortunately it is the only way I have to contact a lot of people — especially a lot of international contacts I have. That is the hook. Once you start using the service, you’re essentially stuck if you want to keep in contact with most people.

As time goes on, I plan to systematically remove as many accounts as I possibly can. This task might sound easy, but in reality is quite difficult. Most services provide you with a way to remove your account and others just allow you to hide your account from public view, but most of these companies and websites keep your information despite requesting a deletion. We will see how many I end up actually deleting and how many I will deem necessary to keep.

Last Friday (the 13th), my 1987 Toyota LandCruiser was broadsided by a 2007 Ford F-350. My truck is totaled, but fortunately I wasn’t injured. I was driving down a road and the driver of the F-350 neglected to stop at a stop sign and just plowed right into me. He was leaving a parking lot and literally just didn’t stop at the stop sign which was at the exit of the parking lot.

I’ve posted some pictures of my truck after the accident here: http://picasaweb.google.com/seifertalex/CarAccident.

So I broke down and decided to catalog my ever-growing personal library. I chose to use an online tool called LibraryThing because it seemed like a good way of keeping track of everything. There are other tools out there that I considered, many of which are offline, however most of the cost money and I didn’t want to spend money on something when I can get it for free. LibraryThing seems like a good tool. I haven’t cataloged my entire library yet, only what I happen to have on hand with me at the moment. All 38 books. I have a much larger collection of books that I still need to move to my apartment at some point.

If you are interested, you can view my library here. I will also be putting a link to my library catalog as a button on the right side of the blog so readers can view it at anytime.

If you have any books that you think I should add to my library or any comments, feel free to leave me a comment on this post or any other post.

Here is a widget with some of my books:

The past couple of days have been agony and torment for me to some degree with my head spinning around contradictions, frustrations and the overall irony of the present situation I find myself in. About a year ago when I was spending my year abroad in Germany, I met this Dutch girl whom I fell head over heals for. We had an amazing amount in common, she was bright and beautiful and we never tired of each other’s company. The biggest problem though is that she is insanely religious. I don’t mean to the point that she goes around praying all the time or trying to convert other people to her religion (to her religion is a deeply personal thing), but I mean it in the sense that she is vocal about it in private and that when we talk, she will occasionally go off on these religious tangents that drive me nuts.

Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis or has read a number of my previous posts can tell right away that I am a stark Atheist. I can’t buy into the belief in some sort of supreme being who has unlimited powers and controls us all through blackmail. I just can’t do it. Before I go on, however, I would like to make it clear that I am not so dense as to not understand or even respect other people’s beliefs. I am simply stating my view point on this situation.

To get back to the story, since I have been back in the US, we have consistently been talking on instant messenger — usually several times a week. A couple of days ago I was talking to her when she mentioned that she was watching a documentary on TV about the evolution of bears. I knew things were going to get bad from this point because whenever some who is religious brings up evolution, you’re bound for an argument. Well, we did have a pretty big discussion about it because she started going into this crazy creationist stupor condemning the theory of evolution as an unprovable dogma which people blindly buy into. Do you already see the irony in this argument?

I suppose it really wasn’t much of a discussion since, because I care for her quite a bit, I didn’t really say much. I did what I usually do and passively let her rant until she gets bored and drops it. Then I take the pent up frustration and spill it out here or to friends who have the same viewpoints as me. It’s not that I’m afraid she’ll hate me for it — in fact, I don’t think she would mind the debate at all and might even enjoy it — it’s that I know how she strongly she feels about the whole thing and I want to respect that. Besides, that’s what blogs are for. I can take it out here without running the real risk of hurting anyone’s feelings personally since it’s written for a general audience.

Well, I’m not sure what I really want to do anymore. I am about to graduate with a degree in both history and German, but I am not sure what I want to do with my degree anymore. I have been considering going abroad to Germany for a while and teaching English for a couple of years, but I really kind of want to start pursing a more permanent career option with the current economic situation.

The other consideration I’ve been having as of late is going into politics. I don’t really know if this is just a passing phase or something I am legitimately interested in though. All of the commotion surrounding the inauguration of Obama and everything has made me think it might be a viable career choice.

The real problem I have though is that I’m just too interested in too many things, so as I’ve said, this might just be a fleeting interest that will be gone within the next few days. We will see though.

Well, in my ongoing quest to learn German, I have decided to start keeping a blog in German. Since I have still have 2 unused domain names — both conveniently enough in German — I’ve decided to use one to keep a blog in German.

If you speak German and would like to follow it, please visit http://www.eswirdkalt.com.

Ever just have a strong desire to write something? I seem to be having that right now. My problem though is that I don’t know what to write about. I have a story that I’m continuing to work on, but I really don’t feel like writing fiction. For some strange reason, I really feel like actually researching something factual and writing about that.

I will probably end up writing about something history-related. And it will probably be for History Rhymes. I guess we’ll see though because, as I said, I don’t really know what to write about…