my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of height

this motionless forgetful where
turned at his glance to shining here;
that if(so timid air is firm)
under his eyes would stir and squirm

newly as from unburied which
floats the first who,his april touch
drove sleeping selves to swarm their fates
woke dreamers to their ghostly roots

and should some why completely weep
my father’s fingers brought her sleep:
vainly no smallest voice might cry
for he could feel the mountains grow.

Lifting the valleys of the sea
my father moved through griefs of joy;
praising a forehead he called the moon
singing desire into begin

joy was his song and joy so pure
a heart of star by him could steer
and pure so now and now so yes
the wrists of twilight would rejoice

keen as midsummer’s keen beyond
conceiving mind of sun will stand,
so strictly(over utmost him
so hugely)stood my father’s dream

his flesh was flesh his blood was blood:
no hungry man but wished him food;
no cripple wouldn’t creep one mile
uphill to only see him smile.

Scorning the pomp of must and shall
my father moved through dooms of feel;
his anger was as right as rain
his pity was as green as grain

septembering arms of year extend
less humbly wealth to foe and friend
than he to foolish and to wise
offered immeasurable is

proudly and(by octobering flame
beckoned)as earth will downward climb,
so naked for immortal work
his shoulders marched against the dark

his sorrow was as true as bread:
no liar looked him in the head;
if every friend became his foe
he’d laugh and build a world with snow.

My father moved through theys of we,
singing each new leaf out of each tree
(and every child was sure that spring
danced when she heard my father sing)

then let men kill which cannot share,
let blood and flesh be mud and mire,
scheming imagine,passion willed,
freedom a drug that’s bought and sold

giving to steal and cruel kind,
a heart to fear,to doubt a mind,
to differ a disease of same,
conform the pinnacle of am

though dull were all we taste as bright,
bitter all utterly things sweet,
maggoty minus and dumb death
all we inherit,all bequeath

and nothing quite so least as truth
—i say though hate were why man breathe—
because my father lived his soul
love is the whole and more than all

Jamaica is one of those places which remained under foreign rule much longer than anyone probably realized; it didn’t gain its independence until 1962, before which it spent a little over three centuries as a British colony. Though its previous European tenants, the Spanish, had gifted it the uninspired name of Santiago (St. James), the British managed a hairsbreadth more historical sensitivity by opting for Jamaica, an Anglicization of the Arawak Xaymaca, meaning “land of wood and water”.

Though slightly better-known than other well-touristed locales of the West Indies, Jamaica’s status in popular knowledge is limited to its notoriety in the transatlantic slave trade, in which slaves from West Africa were rather unhappily exported to the Caribbean, where they were sold to sugar plantations, the sugar of which was used to make rum and other goods, which were then shipped to Europe and New England, where the proceeds from their sale allowed for the further purchase of involuntary labor from Africa. Jamaica’s other crowning achievement is the cultural institution of Bob Marley, whose musical contributions were immense, but whose legacy in the form of pot popularization and Rastafari I could do without.

Though notorious for its production of marijuana (“Jamaica Red” is one popular variety) and duly famous for its Blue Mountain coffee, tourism is Jamaica’s most lucrative and important industry, comprising about half of its national income. This past week, my new wife and I, by way of a honeymoon, became one of approximately 1.3 million people to visit Jamaica every year.

On your mark, get set, obscure!

If becoming .0001% of the country’s annual influx of pasty gawkers makes one feel less than unique, the feeling pales in comparison to visiting a couples resort—Sandals Grande Ocho Rios, in our case—where you go from being the center of attention at your wedding to being one of hundreds of couples, most of them newlyweds, and many of them sharing your same wedding date. Thankfully, these kinds of resorts are not generally populated by the same taut, coiffed, half-naked demigods that populate Sandals’ brochures, so one did not need to add insecurity to the list of emergent problems. No, we were alongside a lot of Middle America’s workaday schmucks, which was comforting, considering my own swimsuited body resembles a phasmid in floral shorts.

All things being equal, I would have preferred someplace cold and rainy: Seattle, maybe, or England. Then again, my idea of a good time consists of drinking coffee, reading books, and programming, all of which I can do perfectly well from my home office, so nobody much cares about my opinion of honeymoon destinations. My wife, who is beautiful and wise and one of those strange people who enjoys ultraviolet radiation, promised me a shady spot and all the reading I cared to do; I am not a brilliant man, but I am smart enough to recognize arguments I can’t win. I booked the trip.

Allison and I got married on Saturday, got about 4 hours of sleep, and arose at eight in order to send off our out-of-town family. Sunday night provided perhaps another two and a half hours: a 3:30am limo pickup necessitated waking at an hour whose very existence was heretofore apocryphal in my mind. I don’t sleep in any meaningful way in cars or planes, so one may begin to understand my mental state by the time we arrived at our resort at approximately 5pm; a photograph from our arrival shows my eyes looking darker than a drag queen’s. The two-hour bus ride from the airport to our resort was peopled with a lot of similarly-exhausted and perspiring newlyweds, but many of the males especially had already launched into bravado about the duration and volume of that evening’s expected libations. Though Allison and I immediately went to one of the resort’s many restaurants for dinner—Tex Mex food, and very forgettable—I don’t think I exaggerate when I see we were in bed and asleep by 9.

Jamaica… no problem

Sandals Resorts International operates no fewer than fifteen couples-only resorts in the Caribbean, eight of which are in Jamaica, though it also serves as an umbrella corporation for other family-oriented resorts. A Jamaican company founded in 1981, it until very recently garnered worldwide opprobrium for its ban of homosexual couples, a policy which wasn’t rescinded until 2004. It purports to be a company known for two things: luxury and service. It’s the milieu of Jamaican resorts: the customer is king, and Jamaica especially cultivates the image with catchphrases like “Jamaica no problem!”

There’s a strange line drawn in the sand at Sandals. Most of the male employees were cast from that mould; the young man responsible for our orientation the next day (which found me significantly brighter-eyed and bushier-tailed) even joked that if anybody told us “No” on the resort, we should sue them. While the entertainment crew, groundskeepers, and bartenders seemed to take this to heart (except for the bartender who told me they didn’t serve mojitos for some strange reason), it seems as though the deskworkers, mostly female, weren’t having nearly as much fun, and generally acted as though good service were the last thing on their minds.

Allison and I were originally supposed to stay at Sandals Negril; two days before the wedding, our travel agent informed us that they closed the resort, and were instead moving us to an “upgraded” room at the Grande Ocho Rios; in addition, she said, we should speak with the front desk when we arrived, as there was hint of additional compensation or freebies for our troubles. I approached the desk when we arrived, explaining the situation and inquiring as suggested. Was there anything else we would get? No.

Allison had bought a spa treatment in Negril. The Sandals website offered a free $250 spa credit if you went to Ocho Rios. Could we get it? No.

We bought internet access at a pay-to-play kiosk and needed a pen to write down our access code. Could we borrow one for just a minute. I only have one and I’m using it.

We didn’t receive a schedule of events one day. Did the front desk have any copies? No. Is there any other place in the resort that might have one? No.

Such was the nature of these resorts. Officially, they are all-inclusive: the meals are free, and in theory one could eat as frequently as desired. The booze is gratis, even though some of it is of the terrible, bottom-shelf variety (blended Scotch? really?). But there’s still an internal culture of upselling no different from the trinket-sellers that plague every destination outside the resort. In our room, we had access to a liquor cabinet and a fridge full of wine, beer and soda, and it was ours for the taking. A bag of cashews from the tray on the table, however, would set us back $9. Signs around the resort prompted couples to schedule a “complementary” photo shoot; I knew, of course, that acquiring the resulting photos would be exorbitant, but Allison underestimated the avarice and suggested we do it anyway. Afterwards, the staff didn’t bother asking if we were interested in purchasing any photos; they simply asked to cull any photos we didn’t like from the resulting set, and then read us a total equivalent to $16 per photograph. I politely demurred to purchase the entire set, which, it must be said, were rather uninspired anyway.

Minimizing Jamaica for non-Jamaicans

This isn’t to say that I consider an “all-inclusive” resort to be a mistake. Far from it, despite the cost. The general rule of thumb about Jamaica is that it’s lovely so long as you don’t leave your resort—or, if you do, only in the company of resort guides, on resort transportation. The lone tourist in Jamaica’s notorious slums will quickly find himself in dire straits.

I can’t square the disparate images of Jamaica I saw when I was there. On the one hand, it was littered with billboards for cell phone networks; I routinely saw commercials for On-Demand cable service; I saw, among the many run-down Hondas and Toyotas, and a number of German luxury cars. On the other hand, we drove by shanty town after shanty town, whole families in rags on the roadside with tables for salable fruit, waiting for customers that never appeared to come. There is grinding poverty in Jamaica, perhaps made worse to my ridiculous Midwestern sensibilities by how hot and squalid everything seemed in the thick, wet Jamaican heat.

To both pleasant and disturbing ends, resorts give you a smiling, sanitized Jamaica, where nothing is ever a problem (unless you want something from the front desk) and you can have a Red Stripe beer while you wait. Whereas one might expect a lot of reggae and steel drum, there was very little to be heard within the confines of Sandals’ Grande Ocho Rios; in its place was a constant loop of easy listening, including Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” and one or more songs by Kenny G, though it’s hard to tell specifically since everything he makes is indistinguishably terrible. It seemed engineered for a dorky white clientele by somebody who doesn’t actually know what dorky white Americans listen to.

Food, too, seemed to include very little Jamaican influence: aside from the proliferation of pumpkin, and the occasional availability of jerk chicken and pork, the apparent aim of the cuisine was to replicate, poorly, the sorts of things we might eat in the states: a mediocre Italian restaurant with an average 90-minute wait; a Tex-Mex restaurant whose location on a pier included so little light it was impossible to see your food when eating it; an Asian-fusion place that was, it must be said, quite good; an “international” eatery which served up bacon, eggs, and french toast every morning. Even the Caribbean restaurant went light on the spice, though admittedly my steak and cassava was still quite good.

So it was that while the gift shops peddled almost exclusively Jamaican-themed trinkets and overpriced t-shirts, the resort experience was designed to minimize the tourist’s interaction with Jamaican culture, save for its most superficial, smiling bits. I suppose I could say that I never really visited Jamaica at all, but an elaborate Potemkin Jamaica, trussed up for my honeymoon. I still have no idea what Jamaica is really like, other than the pearly-white resort experience, the dire warnings from other Americans about going off-resort, and a few excursions to well-traveled tourist traps. I realize that my purpose in visiting Jamaica was not to, well, go native, but there’s still something about the experience that bothers me in that same way that “complementary photo shoot” involves more and costs more than the signs would ever admit.

Despite the implication of the title, it was a stylish marriage; more importantly, it was my marriage, long in coming and sweet in arrival. It was an eight-year courtship, longer than this blog’s relatively short life (during which she was occasionally featured); it becomes easy—discouragingly easy—in a relationship of such length and regularity to lose sight of its uniqueness. Perhaps that is why, even as the appointed day (October 9th) drew closer, I felt little anxiety. The wedding was, in terms of dedication of time, about as involved as washing my windows.

There’s no wedding-day drama to make this interesting; no near-death escapes, no near-misses, no scandals. A groomsman came close to passing out (but didn’t); my palms sweated; immediately prior to beginning, I felt a strange lightness in my stomach which, it occurs to me, I think I first felt eight years ago, when I picked Allison up for our first major date. Actually, I showed up to the house an hour early, and her brother (who was slightly my junior, and also my subordinate in the marching band) regaled me with stories and photos from his recent trip to Europe.

Allison’s father, in his speech, joked that he wasn’t sure what would have happened if Allison and I had broken up: her brothers, after all, seem in all appearances to prefer me to her. I happen to know this isn’t true: were I ever to mistreat their sister, I don’t think they would hesitate to crush me into a wet, bony lump.

It’s good that they like me, however; were it not for their testimonials (Allison’s eldest brother is my age), our 3-year age difference (I was a high school senior, she a freshman, which in that context basically constitutes a May-December romance) may very well have precluded our relationship entirely. However improbably, but with a minimum of fuss and bother, she and I dated for eight years, from October 28, 2002, until October 9, 2010, when we finally got to stop “going steady” and start something more reified.

Those who know me know my habits: I am not a creature of spontaneity or caprice. Imagine those old yellowed daguerrotypes you sometimes see of great-great-grandfamilies, turtlenecked and collared in modeless black and white and white, staring into the camera as though its operator just shat on their dinner table. Well, as a metaphor for fun and excitement, that’s me: not the stern progenitors, mind you, but the dusty photograph itself, as two-dimensional and flat of affect as old varnish. There was not much by way of surprise or giddiness on the awaited day, but by mutual agreement between Allison and myself, I had no idea what the dress looked like, nor had I seen her since the night before, when we wrapped up our rehearsal dinner and headed to our disparate locations for the night.

Allison’s dress, purchased more than a year in advance of the wedding, spent most of its life incubating in my mother’s closet, which had empty space. In recent weeks, however, it had migrated to our townhome, where it hung, brazenly unsheathed, in the spare bathroom, the door of which was kept firmly closed. I was forbidden entrance; Allison stopped short of telling me that gazing upon it would melt my face like the Ark of the Covenant, but I believe the Wrath of God would be on her side. Imagine my consternation, then, when the day before the wedding arrives, Allison spends the afternoon with her ladies, and I set out to clean the two remaining bathrooms…. only to realize that our entire stock of cleaning supplies is squirreled away underneath the sink in her dress’ lair. Ever the gallant fiancé, I tightly shut my eyes, retired to all fours, and blindly felt my way into the bathroom; I retrieved the cleaning supplies without so much as a glimpse, but only at the cost of discovering the edge of the bathtub with my nose.

So this is the only real secret that awaited me on my wedding day: what would Allison look like? Certainly nothing else was in question: we knew the where? and when? and who?; we knew all too well the how much?, which all couples know is invariably much too much. I knew the why?, as I had told our officiant a year earlier; perhaps more accurately, I didn’t know the why: Allison defies my ability to explain or quantify, except to say that I want to be around her and take care of her and be loved by her. I think that’s what love is, anyway.

There’s a particular sensation associated with seeing your bride walk down the aisle. I can’t say for certain if it is a monolithic phenomenon or some synthesis of individual, discrete phenomena, but I can say the feeling was new to me. It had the air of a fever dream, in which white apparitions come down hallways as heat creeps at the neck. My palms sweated.

Truth be told, I don’t remember much about either the ceremony or the reception, and it’s not because I was was drinking heavily. Every old sage had told me that my reception would go fast; I believed them, but I had no idea that the entire night would vanish before my eyes like a darting insect. It’s not the blur of a cataract; it’s the quantum time of an amnesiac.

Now we’re back from our honeymoon (I was not quite crass even to turn to her in the airport and quip in my best noir male, “Honeymoon’s over, sweetheart!”) and face a life not terribly unlike the one we had before, and so I feel a little like Dustin Hoffman in the back of a bus. Still, it’s unfair to make that comparison: Allison and I aren’t confused and separate lovers fleeing a scene; it seems to me, anyway, that we’re seasoned and faithful companions walking hand-in-hand. Even if mine is always sweaty.

The Engaged Groom by Doug Gordon

My usual literary fare doesn’t trend this close to self-improvement; The Engaged Groom is a rare bit of advice column material for me, given to me by my fiancée shortly after I proposed to her. Since she had availed herself liberally of both books and magazine alike, she decided that I too should have some sort of reference when it came to planning our wedding. Since there is no wedding periodical, to my knowledge, that caters to grooms (however disinterested or engaged they may be), the clear choice was a book whose subtitle is both succinct and informative: “You’re getting married. Read this book.”

I suppose it’s important for me to preface this entire process by noting that Allison’s and my relationship is not necessarily of the garden variety wherein the bride and her mother plan the entire blessed event and the groom attempts to not show up the ceremony with a hangover. No, I am very much involved in the proceedings, though truth be told, I am no more wedded to the idea of a traditional ceremony+reception than I am to a simple elopement. My stake in this entire project is less about the procedure and more about getting the girl of my dreams, but in this respect the relationship is traditional/typical: Allison wants a White Wedding, and so a White Wedding we shall have.

In other words, Allison and I are doing this together, and she figured—rightly—that I should have some clue as to what I’m doing. The Engaged Groom is author Doug Gordon’s attempt to provide simple but helpful advice to grooms who, by design or by coercion, are an integral part of the planning process.

Gordon is the proprietor of PlanetGordon.com; I know this because the book’s requisite author blurb told me this before anything else. I therefore expected a rather elaborate website of moderate-to-heavy traffic; I was surprised to find a rather minimalistic MovableType-powered blog, which, thought active since 2003, consists most of Gordon’s asides, and very few comments. The author’s other plaudits include being a writer for Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, though it fails—consciously, I’m sure—to mention in what respect. My conclusion, then, is that Gordon, though billed as though a wedding expert or minor celebrity, is just another poor schlub trying to make it in New York City. I can’t explain exactly why, but there’s something incongruous about the entire deal which makes me uncomfortable, but again, it’s not a feeling that I particular understand.

But that’s enough about the author; whether it’s written by the Risen Christ or a schizophrenic hobo, the real value in the book lies in its content, especially when you’re a dizzied groom guarding his wallet and shooting dirty looks at DJs and florists.

I’m pleased to report that The Engaged Groom is a rather nice compendium of advice for husbands in potentia. Simply put, it’s a (mostly-)chronological walkthrough of the event from immediately after the engagement to the immediately after, well… consummation. Though Gordon has only been married once, and that recently, he seems to have a pretty good handle on the whole concept, which I attribute both to his urbanity and what appears to be a metrosexual sort of interest in the wedding process.

The Engaged Groom is less of a strict timeline than some wedding-planning workbooks you can by, but it general attempts a temporal and categorical grouping of subjects; while it wanders a bit, occasionally, I find it’s generally true to its purpose and often generally helpful. The difficult for wedding book authors is to present information that doesn’t bore those readers to whom it doesn’t apply: I care not a whit, for instance, about advice on destination weddings. But luckily Gordon doesn’t dwell too long on any particular section.

Having only been engaged once, and this having been my first guide in the matter, I have very little to compare The Engaged Groom to. My largely-contextless opinion is generally favorable, however, in that I finished the book better informed than I began it, which I suppose says all there is to say about a book with such a clear aim.

Up to this point, I’ve been hosting it locally, mostly picking at it whenever time allows.

I just updated it the other day to add a new feature (editable ASIN) and hopefully fix a recurring bug (CDATA error when searching).

In any case, I hope to make a push in the near future to clean it up and submit it the official WordPress plugin site so that its user can benefit from auto-update, etc. etc. My own much-atrophied skills as a PHP developer aside (I deal mostly with Java at work), I think that it will ultimately benefit everybody, assuming I can make it so that the updates don’t override custom templates (perhaps giving preference to Now Reading template files in the theme folder?).

Stay tuned. The plugin is now here.

Comments on this post are closed. For support, please use the forum feature of the official plugin repository.

I took a picture of the Liberty Bell earlier, but it was a mere formality: the bell, in real life, was smaller, duller, and much less impressive than I realized. Congress Hall, too, was neat but tidily boring. I thought of the Nick Cage vehicle filmed in next-door Independence Hall and can’t help but think it’s all been trivialized to the point where it’s impossible to care.

History, for a block

I’m here for Sungard HE’s annual Summit, an international get-together for users of Sungard’s ERP system, Banner. Last year, I blogged from Anaheim, and there were about 8,000 attendees; this year, there’s perhaps 5,500, a significant decrease. One could argue that it’s due to restricted travel budgets from the current economic crisis; I, cynically, will point out that nobody gives a shit about the Liberty Bell compared to, say, Disneyland.

If you ask me, of course, Disneyland is a blight upon the pristine Californian landscape, but I hope we can all agree on the historical import of Philadelphia. It did, for instance, house the entire federal government for 10 years (1790-1800); it was the most populous city in the nation at that time, which didn’t help when Yellow Fever killed a third of its inhabitants. Though one of several critical locations in the history of the country, however, Philadelphia takes a decidedly low-key approach to publicizing it.

When I went to Springfield in the fall of ’08, I couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a brown landmark sign; half the city’s restaurants or tourist attractions invoke Lincoln or the government. In other words, the city really milked the Springfield/Lincoln connection for all it was worth; Philadelphia, on the other hand, while it doesn’t fail to mention its historicity, cordons off the Liberty Bell and Congress/Independence Halls appropriately, but has them sitting in the middle of urban sprawl. One moment, I’m passing the 6th pawn shop in as many blocks on the Market St.; the next, I’m suddenly standing before a 200+ year old brick edifice that housed some of the greatest political thinkers in history. Disinterested guards (with pistols!) watch the exits. Within line-of-sight, a homeless man curls against an office building, wrapped in a flowery blanket, sleeping despite the chilly breeze and the 2-o’clock sunlight.

I did see the Liberty Bell in person, but somehow it failed to move me: the build-up included a long hallway full of tasteful displays which illustrated the Bell’s historical and political importance. Then it was there, at the end of the hall, cordoned off with a metal bar. It was smaller than I thought, its inscription blurry from the distance and the flash of cameras. Somehow, it was larger (literally and metaphorically) in my mind than it seemed to be in person.

OK, but brotherly love?

Perhaps I’m just conflicted. I came here for the Banner conference, and can’t help but feel melancholy when I think that, had he not died, my father might well be here. In an alternate history, I could have just come back from sharing a beer with him at the Irish pub, shooting the shit about degree audits or portal design. He and I would have had the sort of casual male relationships that fathers are eventually supposed to have with their sons, fraternal and yet deeply symbolic.

But my dad and I never had too many heart-to-hearts; he was never the maudlin type, and he preferred treating his sons like friends and colleagues rather than children (once we were old enough, of course). I know that he was—to my occasional embarrassment—a reader of this blog. But he only ever left one comment… last year, when I blogged about the 2008 Summit. So, I suppose, my attendance this year is a constant reminder of what should have been in a just world. Dad was the figurative strawberry field, and Disney bulldozed him to erect its latest ride. I’ll never know why he elected to comment upon that entry and none other. I could posit that he was feeling alienated in his new job, in need of communication with his son(s). I could argue that he circumstantially felt compelled to comment upon the strength of my writing (sure!) and perhaps some emotional resonance (slightly more plausible). His single solitary comment has remained immortalized to me as a reminder of something innately human and youthful about my dad… that he—against perhaps all my expectations—showed up in a medium totally foreign to him, in order to communicate with me. That he may have felt too embarrassed to talk this way with me in real life is no surprise—ask me sometime about my “birds & bees” talk—but it still remains a focal point in my memory of him.

Philadelphia, in many ways like my father, seems determined to conflict and confuse me. Its downtown area is a nice grid—except in the part where I’m staying and traveling, which devolves into curves and circles. Though I arrived yesterday (Saturday, March 21st), I have yet to do anything in Summit-related as of today (Sunday, March 22): the only sessions today were of the useless “Banner! Whoo!” variety, which I swore after last year I would no longer attend. Tomorrow starts the meat and potatoes of the conference, 2.5 days of solid sessions, though those sessions’ usefulness has yet to be determined.

I spent today sightseeing. I ate lunch at the Down Home Diner, a small greasy spoon in the Reading Terminal Market (a strange name for an indoor marketplace, selling just about everything). I had a bacon cheeseburger with bacon slices that were—I kid you not— a quarter of an inch thick. I was so positively ecstatic about pork as a result that I made an impulse purchase of an “I ♥ Bacon” t-shirt; a cheese-steak is pending, since I don’t think that TSA employees let you fly out unless you can prove you’ve eaten one.

Just like last year, I’ve gotten excessively introspective and maudlin. New places will do that to me, especially places that make me walk around with my eyes upward and my mouth slightly agape. Philadelphia, for all its (very obvious) faults, is an incomprehensible city, confusing as it is large. Its apparent insouciance toward its own history serves only to beleaguer the enthusiastic tourist, who is earnest until five beers in (then belligerent or solemn, depending on the tourist).

The conference, too, seems to some degree insouciant, as though it is merely going through the motions this year. From 8’000 attendees (Anaheim + Disneyland) to 5’500 (Philadelphia and mid-40°s), the scale of the conference has dropped proportionally. Such is the danger of a conference whose appeal is not predicated upon the appeal of the system so much as the whim of its functional users.

I happen to be backing up some computer data and came across a large archive of documents that I took from his computer in the days after he died.

Going through a dead family member’s documents is always a strange experience, but it’s also a time for learning. There were no skeletons in my father’s proverbial closet, neo-Naziism or secret lives or anything like that. All we found was a shitload of credit cards, investment accounts, and backups of backups on his computer.

My father was a bit of a packrat, never throwing anything away. He was even worse with computers: since he was an early adopter of computer technology, he had computer parts and digital data that stretched the limit of imagination. Since I was the resident computer guru in the family, I spent the week or two after his death going through his computers, backing up what personal files I could and social-engineering my way into most of his accounts, sounding out what he had and where; canceled his book club subscriptions, documented his credit cards, saving into many media his documents, photos, and any scrap of material that could possibly preserve Eric Gunnink after his body had been committed to the ground.

There were a lot of work-related documents that ended up being preserved. My father, before he switched jobs in the Fall of 2007, worked as the Registrar in a small Fransciscan university in Joliet, IL (where I am now employed); he had become something of an expert at the administrative software system / database used there, known as Banner (a product of Sungard HE). So, surprising nobody, I found a lot of documents pertaining to registrar procedures, data extracts of various types from various years. I found a “Goals to Achieve” from 1999:

Goals for 1999-2000: Eric Gunnink

• Produce 2000-2002 University Catalog on time.
• Increase knowledge of Access and Excel to improve reporting capabilities from Banner.
• Develop processes and procedures to identify and report graduates by semester in Banner.
• Assist with the implementation and maintenance of degree audit in Banner.
• Assist with the implementation of WEB based registration for students in all colleges.
• Assist in developing processes and procedures to insure the accuracy of the data in Banner
• Review records retention practices and evaluate the effectiveness of microfilming records vs. other storage methods.

I found an old Christmas list:

• Two Towers Extended Ed. DVD
• Heart Rate Monitor
• Casual/Dressy casual LS shirts
• Lightweight sweater (s) (blue or brown/tan)
• Brown tone dress shirts (17.5″ X 36″)
• Best Buy, B&N, or A.com gift certificates
• Tall sweatpants (XL)
• Glide Comfort Plus dental floss
• Red, Blue, and Green retractable pens (big around)
• Talking Dictionary program (one that loads on the hard drive)
• Popcorn (like Brian’s)
• USB Hub (4 port USB 2.0)
• Almond patties

I was able to recover dad’s original masters thesis from a floppy disc, stored in a propriety (ASCII + control chars) format in files that are older than me. That’s right: when I recovered the data, the timestamp on the files was 1984 (I was born in ’85):

Heinlein develops the theme of sexuality and the roles of men and women through the “Success” period, changes the idea somewhat in #Starship Troopers# and moves on to new ideas in the “Alienation” novels. Heinlein has women play many different roles in his novels. The competent female is one main role. The role of father seems to be an important one to the author. There are many “neutered” male characters with domineering females in their backgrounds in the “Success” novels, culminating with Starship Troopers and Farnham’s Freehold.

The theme of free will is subverted in Starship Troopers from its strong showing in the “Success” novels. Determinism takes over in Starship Troopers and the “Alienation” novels. The hero who determines his own destiny is made into the “hero” by virtue of forces beyond his control.

Heinlein frequently uses sociopolitical themes to make his points. The themes examined in chapter four are: Heinlein’s Utopia, “benevolent” vs. “corrupt” government, libertarianism, and communism. Each of these themes develops in the “Success” period, changes in some way in Starship Troopers and continues the change in the “Alienation” period.

Think of “Contents of a Dead Man’s Pocket,” but no longer so abstract and literary.

It’s almost as though dad left a legacy in two parts: that which he passed on to those he knew, and that which he left written or photographed. How to process his notes about databases, or his letters of recommendation for students, or his resumes, notes to self, and data extracts? From a document of questions to ask his cardiologist called How do we know that my arteries are not clogging up again.doc, which is utterly devastating to read. Can I learn anything from the fact that his “To-Do” list from February 11th, 1999 lists ‘Complete 993 degree audits” as the first item? That he had written documentation for web-based frontends that I created (I think he was immensely proud of me)? Or his set of photographs from the last Gunnink reunion he ever attended (summer 2007, in Iowa).

Today, my father would have been 52 years old. I am tempted to rail against the cosmic injustice that denied him such a relatively small number of years; I demure for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that 51 years was enough to do an awful lot, including the insistent devotion to his wife, his children, and an extraordinarily large number of colleagues and friends who weren’t simply blowing smoke when they proclaimed what a great guy he was.

In that spirit, I console myself with the notion that grief is the price of love, and that dad’s legacy, in whatever media, isn’t simply committed to the ground along with him. December 18th is a reminder to me of the inherent fragility of human life; it also forces me to remember that the window of opportunity to do great things—to accomplish, to learn, to love—is arbitrary in its length. I could die tomorrow, for all that the molecules of my body care: remember our oldest of texts, Gilgamesh, in this, that immortality is achieved not in the living, but in what one leaves behind.

Happy birthday, dad. We miss you.

As a professional working in Information Technology, I often encounter hesitation and trepidation on the part of functional users to engage my employer’s information system, an ERP system known as Banner. The engagement of technology—especially for older generations of users, in which was not inculcated the idea of information systems (i.e. the Internet) as pleasurable or entertaining—has been a focus of information systems and organizational behavior research for some time. In much the same way as MacGregor’s landmark work (Montana & Charnov, 2000, pp. 251-52) split the concept of innate employee behavior into two extremes—essentially wicked and lazy on one end, earnest and self-actualizing on the other (“Abrahamic,” to borrow Herzberg’s phrase)—so traditional IT adoption research has rather myopically divided all impetuses for system use into either endogenous or exogenous antecedents of behavior.

Malhotra, Galletta, and Kirsch’s “How Endogenous Motivations Influence User Intentions” expands upon and empirically tests Deci and Ryan’s organismic integration theory (1985, as cited in Malhotra et al, 2008, p. 269). The proposed model ostensibly offers a better prediction of actual system use than the traditional “Motivational Model,” which accounts in large part for the existing dichotomy of external factors, such as reward for work, and internal factors such as the inherent joy of performing the task (1992, p. 111-1132, as cited in Malhotra et al., 2008, 270). Malhotra et al. rightly question the continued validity of such a model, citing the inherent variability of the effect of extrinsic motivators on different groups of people as well as the possible interplay of extrinsic and intrinsic factors of motivation (2008, p. 270). While perhaps useful as a rule of thumb, or popular as a crass generalization, this existing dichotomy “seems to have limited our understanding of user motivation” (2008, p. 270).

Admittedly, some of this is a difficult sell: Malhotra et al. strain to find examples of such an “endogenous notion of volitional extrinsic motivation,” finally offering such internal thoughts as “good employees do not play computer games as work” (2008, p. 271), an idea which inhabits several strange belief schema at once. With very little prestidigitation, such an example an internalized external motivator can be externalized once more by tying it deftly to fear of reprisal or loss of other purely extrinsic motivators. Because it is extraordinarily difficult to map such internal representations and—as the authors themselves note—to consistently calculate the effect such external motivators, internalized or not, this is a very precarious concept. In the case of their rather poor example, the idea of a good employee is either entirely an intrinsic motivation, or it is an external demand: that the ultimate damnation possibly comes in the form of self-reprisal rather than external punishment (to wit: one’s own goals for baseline accomplishment meet or exceed institutional goals but fail to meet internalized representation of said accomplishment) in no way necessitates that this motivator be extrinsic in nature and internal in representation.

Venkatesh, Brown, Maruping, and Bala (2008) speak to this in a limited fashion by reinforcing the theory of “behavioral expectation,” which takes into account not only an employee’s internal schema of beliefs (called “behavior intention”) but also the extrinsic factors which are subject both to change and to amorphous degrees of influence on intrinsic motivations (p. 486). Their findings indicate a weak relationship between the internalized belief systems of behavioral intent and the frequency and intensity of system use but a strong relationship with intensity alone (p. 497).

What strikes me as fundamentally odd about Malhotra et al.’s study is the semantic ambiguity. The authors’ eventual semantic summation of intrinsic and extrinsic stimuli (or more importantly, the dynamic between the two) is “perceived locus of causality,” or PLOC (2008, p. 271), usually a dialectic reached by some internal confluence of motivations. This perceived locus of causality is by necessity an internal representation; as such, the authors find it grounds to argue that unequivocally extrinsic motivators are therefore functions of this concept, and no longer purely extrinsic in nature. This, therefore, is the difference between “volition” and “compulsion” (2008, p. 272); since compulsion may exist anywhere along a wide swath, the authors admit that attempting to identify or measure extrinsic motivation (and therefore qualify the PLOC of which it is constituent) is difficult (2008, p. 274). There exists a relatively small slice of intrinsic motivation, and my experience in the field of information systems would indicate that it—that is, a desire to use the system out of an inward desire to learn and explore it—is almost never to be found in functional (to wit: the majority) of users. Even our so-called “power-users,” who may explore the system and test its capabilities beyond the scope of their stated duties generally do so in the context of an internal goal which is externally motivated—i.e. a job function.

I find this to some degree a largely irrelevant when discussing information system use, since such system use is usually mandated by employment but entirely volitional insofar as the employee has chosen to fulfill said employment and in the nature prescribed by the information system. However, the flexibility of PLOC allows for it to account for and describe such flux states as an “introjected PLOC,” wherein a user’s desired action does not match the system’s mandated action (2008, pp 272-273). At the University of St. Francis, Banner is usually the cause of such states, since it represents the absolute nadir of human interaction design. While this makes the use of Banner unpleasant, and results in an elevated level of required support and training, it has not in our experience actually lowered use of Banner by those functional users whose job requires it. This is precisely what Venkatesh et al. refer to when they introduce “behavior expectation” into their proposed nomological framework. Behavior expectation is “an individual’s self-reported subjective probability of his or her performing a specified behavior, based on her or her cognitive appraisal of volitional and non-volitional behavioral determinants” (Warshaw and Davis, 1984, p. 111, as cited in Venkatesh et al., 2008, p. 484). Behavioral expectation, in accounting for the user’s internalized representation of extrinsic, non-volitional factors (to wit: the often confusing or counterintuitive nature of a given information system), has influenced a new conceptualization of system use. Their research indicates that when mediated by measures of behavior expectation, there arises no discernible relationship between external factors (“facilitating conditions” in their parlance) and actual system use (2008, p 494-95), meaning that regardless of the qualities of an employee’s perceived locus of control, their behavior with respect to mandatory use of an information system can be accurately predicted insofar as the employee understands the relationship of the system to his or her job.

Vaske and Grantham report that measurable intelligence leads to varying results in perceived locii of control; specifically, intelligent individuals tended to report higher levels of control (1990, p. 58). Vaske and Grantham posit a particular conceit on the part of intelligent people, in that they believe there are fewer variables outside of their control; in addition, internal causality becomes the default attribution for successful experiences, while external causality remains the scapegoat for failure (1990, p. 58), reinforcing that there is a consistent dichotomy persisted by individuals between their intrinsic and extrinsic forces, even if there is a nebulous area wherein those two mingle, outside the scope of the individual’s self-analysis. Malhotra et al. use this as their first hypothesis (2008, p. 274).

Vekantesh et al. (2008) warn against drawing any conclusions based on this sort of experimental data, citing the “productivity paradox,” the theory that greater system use is not equatable to greater productivity (p. 499). Indeed, all this talk of motivations has drifted far away from what is perhaps the more pressing question to managers, namely “What will maximize productivity?” Is work done out of fear of retribution, termination of employee, ridicule of peers, or the motivation to more respect and better salary substantially different from that done out of technically curiosity or some other elusive intrinsic motivation? To their credit, Malhotra et al. (2008) do consider this possibility, measure breaking down initial adoption and continued use of a given information system (in their case, Blackboard, a web-based course management system) based on the composite reliabilities of various PLOC categories and other factors (p. 281-82). This, of course, is an experiment with immediate interest to the University of St. Francis as a whole, since its Information Technology department will be moving to Blackboard in 2009. Given a population who is not required by employment, but rather by education requirements, the confluence of personal and educational (in this case substituting for intrinsic and extrinsic, respectively) factors is of great importance, since we may to some degree predict the success of our online learning program on the relationship of motivation to continued use. In fairness, I cannot think of any theoretical student who would continue taking classes online only because he or she enjoyed the look of Blackboard and so fulfilled a peculiar internal drive, but for those students who generate introjected PLOC (perceived locii of control) from their interaction with the system, the difference may be enough to potentially reduce enrollment. For a system which, though mandatory, is part of a larger structure which is volitional, the quality of the information system, and the University’s approach to managing and promoting it, is potentially a thousand- or million-dollar issue.

Malhotra et al. (2008) ultimately conclude that “motivation may influence behaviors in more complex ways… [than] this simple dichotomy [between intrinsic and extrinsic factors]” (p. 290). Like Venkatesh et al. (2008, pp. 497-98), they suggest that while behavioral expectation is a reliable predictor of usage than quantifiable extrinsic factors, which seems not only correct, but obvious to anyone who has worked either in management or in an capacity relating to information systems. However, Malhotra et al. (2008) appear to suggest that extrinsic motivators almost never exist in isolation, but almost always as internal representations interpreted by a particular employee. I take issue with such a characterization, as I believe it relies too heavily on a particular sampling of a particular kind of employee in a particular kind of organization. Perhaps most the beneficial conclusion, though surely not the most novel, is the emphasis of an introjected PLOC’s negative effect on a user’s attitude and future intentions with respect to using to system (p. 291).

References

• Malhotra, Y., Galletta, D. F., & Kirsch, L. J. (2008). How Endogenous Motivations Influence User Intentions: Beyond the Dichotomy of Extrinsic and Intrinsic User Motivations. Journal of Management Information System, 25(1), 267-299. Retrieved October 27, 2008, from Business Source Elite (33245054).
• Montana, P. J., & Charnov, B. H. (2000). Management. Hauppauge, NY: Barron’s.
• Vaske, J. J., & Grantham, C. E. (1990). Socializing the Human-Computer Environment. Bristol: Intellect Books.
• Venkatesh, V., Brown, S. A., Maruping, L. M., & Bala, H. (2008). Predicting Different Conceptualizations of System Use: The Competing Roles of Behavioral Intention, Facilitating Conditions, and Behavioral Expectation. MIS Quarterly, 32(3), 483-502. Retrieved October 27, 2008, from Business Source Elite (33436540).