Filed under: Blogging, Personal, Random Addictions, Reading, Rules, Words, Writing
I remembered this movie quote the other day from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I was going to write a whole post about it, but seeing as it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted, I have a whole lot of loose ends to tie up. Anyways, here’s the quote…
Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop to look around once in a while, you could miss it.
I’m not sure I agree with the first sentence. I mean yes, technically a whole lot happens from the time I wake up and the time I go to sleep. I take in a lot of information. My senses are stirred occasionally when I’m not staring at a computer screen. That’s why I always have my blog reader opened. It helps give the illusion that a lot is happening to me reading about things that happen to other people.
I remember I was so excited to grow up when I was still going to school. I had a pretty strict upbringing, which maybe comes with a lot of baggage. I thought as soon as I have the freedom to do whatever I want whenever I want, that’ll make me happy.
I’m a far cry from the happy adult me I’d imagined at that time. I get the feeling sometimes that my life is moving at a glacial pace. And instead of feeling that somehow the universe has dealt me this lot, I’m unable to feel any pity for myself. It’s no one’s fault but my own. Sometimes I think I’d rather feel helpless and victimized by circumstances outside my control than know I am perpetuating an uneventful adult life for myself.
One of the things that gives me some reprieve is knowing that there are plenty of adults like me who are in my same boat. See there I go. I am on a boat and I am not the captain. Isn’t that what I mean? I may imagine that there is no way to recalibrate my boring journey through life, but no matter how gloomy I get. No matter how hopeless things seem I ultimately have a choice in the matter. I could join the Peace Corp right now and be flown to a foreign country where I would surely not be bored. I could be helping the poor in the process and even learn a new language. I could create memories that would last me a lifetime.
Instead, I watch a lot of TV and drink a lot of beer in my little biosphere of an apartment with my Wii and my XBox 360 and my PS3 and Netflix. I’ve really been down on myself about the TV. My old routines are so ingrained I wonder if I will ever get out of them. Sometimes I hope I will be fired from my current job just so I’d be forced to seriously assess what is important to me.
I don’t mean to get all gloomy on you. I fear I may have ruined a new online relationship. Another part of me says if it’s that fragile to begin with, maybe I shouldn’t try to salvage it - I am likely worrying needlessly. The thing is when I come to expect an email on Monday and I don’t get it I fall into despair. I won’t go into the details of this one with you. To be honest I’m not really sure what my expectations should be for it.
It’s Monday. Those always suck. This is the worst Monday of the month for me. I just received The Wire on DVD. I feel like the whitest guy on Earth right now watching what I’ve read in reviews as one of the most realistic crime-dramas ever created. It follows the drug trade in Baltimore and ran on HBO for 5 years. I assume the dialog is authentic, but what do I know? I’ve only lived in the Midwest in places where there is no crime and the majority of the population is middle class and white.
So woe is me as I watch The Wire and see people addicted to crack, people beaten to death over a couple of bucks.
Life is pretty cozy for me. I can afford to buy nearly everything I want. It’s just this bloody social thing. I want to share my life completely with at least one other person. I have some skeletons and as far as I know only one person knows all of them and they seem to accept me even with my flaws. And I’m not talking about my mother here. I mean even there I’ve drawn a line in the sand.
Do you draw lines? Does anyone know every damning detail about what you do for fun? How about your prejudices and your weird taste in movies and books?
If not, then why not? I’ve found it very cathartic when it’s something pressing. For instance, I have this tendency to blush in meetings at the slightest provocation. Particularly when words are uttered that vaguely relate to sex. I work with a lot of beautiful women and I have likely at one point or another imagined having sex with all of them. Not all at once. For some reason when I hear these different words something in my nervous system goes unhinged. This happened in a meeting today and as far as I can tell the magic word was “commitment.” I have no idea why. I blushed so hard my eyes began to water and I could feel my cheeks become dabbled with sweat.
The worst part about it is that it’s slightly contagious. I tried to stare at the handout they gave us and propel myself to another realm of existence. One perhaps where the complexion of my skin would mask this very juvenile reaction to the stresses of being in meetings you can not meaningfully contribute to because there are too many higher-ups in attendance.
I hate pecking orders of all kinds. At work, I have historically hated nearly all of my superiors for the fact that I never felt they had my interests at heart. Now I have a good boss, so I feel like I finally have a foothold, but I still imagine that I am going nowhere, spinning my wheels so to speak. And yet outside of the office I feel much taller. No loans to pay. I save every dollar I don’t spend on crap. I could buy a new car with cash tomorrow. I could, were I not weening myself off alcohol, purchase a bottle of wine for every day of the week. And yet all this material wealth feels like peanuts when it’s the middle of the afternoon and I’m working as fast as I can to push some assignment through and the 2 remaining hours of the workday feel like eternity.
Of course, being homeless is an option. Not where I live, but someplace warmer perhaps. I could comfortably live for a year on the money I have saved. Of course, I’d be kicking myself come retirement age. I’d really just like to maximize my free time in the present. I could attempt to read all of In Rememberance of Things Past instead of watching crappy sitcoms like Pawn Stars.
Maybe the trick is to just make a whole bunch of small improvements to my daily life towards stuff that’s timeless as opposed to ephemeral – the slow burn to the flash explosion.
I was almost not going to write this. I got done writing an email about what sort of plans I had in mind for my birthday, which technically is just 3 hours from now. After that I received a phone call from my good friend who proceeded out of nowhere to scold me for going to see two movies for the price of one without the written consent of the theater management. I wrote about it in a blog post a while back. I’m forgetting when exactly, which is one of the lesser known side effects of trying to write a substantial blog post every day.
The conversation wore me out. I had no idea there was a person out there who would feel strongly about this and here they were right under my nose all along.
I’m not going to defend my actions today. There is more than one way to skin a cat. And in this case the only cogent argument I can think of to defend myself is that the chances of me being caught are slim to none.
Nothing seems to go to according to plan when I blog every day. Ideally, I have a kernel of an idea that comes to me sometime during my workday (between the hours of 8 AM and 5 PM). Today I decided that I was going to write about my thumbs. Thumbs? Yes, thumbs. The nails specifically on my right and left hands. Down the middle of each runs a slalom like the half pipes at Breckenridge. They are not deep. In fact these divets are fairly shallow, but they are there like the rings on a tree. My other fingers remain unaffected. I’ve been wondering if I should be concerned. When a carpenter bangs his thumb, he may incur a black splotch under his nail where a small pocket of blood has pooled beneath the nail. Eventually it will creep it’s way further and further down the length of the nail until one day when he takes his nail clippers out and deposits the last speck of blood into the trash can.
My problem is different. Like I said, the slaloms run clear back to my cuticles and run the entire length of the nail.
I work a white collar job. I do not bang my fingers on a regular basis. Certainly nothing to cause a divet. Am I malnourished? Perhaps. I tend to eat one large meal a day and that’s it. However, I have been doing the one super-meal a day thing much longer than I can remember first noticing the divets.
I’m at a bit of a loss now. I can’t remember where I was going with this. Ideally, I will have a kernel of an idea during my workday, yes.
Check.
But then also I will think about this kernel throughout my workday. I will identify a theme. A central point. And today nothing.
Were the divets somehow supposed to relate to my turning 26 tomorrow. A symbol of the aging process?
I’ve got nothing. I’ll soon be 26 and I’ve got a nail issue that is not so terrible I need to see a doctor, but no so insubstantial that I don’t worry about it on my own. Perhaps I should simply get a manicure and gloss over the problem. It’s not like a mole. If I get rid of it I will not likely be riding my body of a cancer warning system. The ridge will not quickly change shape and it’s coloring is the same as the rest of my nail.
Perhaps the central idea here is to let the issue go. Or maybe it’s the opposite. Perhaps I should procure a primary care doctor. Something I’ve been neglecting to do for several years now. Of course, the primary care doctor will have to duke it out with my dentist, which I have also failed to utilize for quite some time.
Feel free to wish me a Happy Birthday in the comments. And if you live in the Minneapolis area, let me know if you know of a good doctor or dentist in these parts. Taking better care of myself. I think that was one of my New Year’s resolutions. I am 90% sure it has something to do with my diet. This year I will shoot to have two meals each day instead of just one.
As I was driving home from work I thought about a lot of things. I always do on the drive home from work. It’s a 20 minute drive to work and depending on the weather, substantially longer on the way back home.
Freedom. It’s the one thing I craved most growing up. That and that my mother would meet with some unfortunate accident. I’m joking, partially. I won’t get into why I felt that way, because I love my mother very much. And perhaps I wasn’t the best son to have growing up. I’d like to think I was pretty average. Filled with angst. Rebellious.
When I was young. Before I reached the terrible teen stage, but when I was capable of putting pen to paper, my mother would force my sister and I to write thank you notes. Always at the worst possible time. Birthdays and Christmas mostly. As my sister and I opened gifts from relatives and family friends my mother would note the gift and who gave it on a piece of paper. We would enjoy our presents for a brief time and then mom would set us down with a stack of blank thank you cards and that retched list and say get to it.
It was during this time growing up I used to fantasize about how great it would be to get away from my tyrannical, moody mother. I put adulthood on such a pedestal, because as an adult, we can do whatever we want right? Of course, we seldom do. When we’re not working our asses off to keep our jobs, we’re nursing our wounds. I never thought it would be this hard.
People like to be thanked. I failed to recognize that as I sat down to write these dozens and dozens of thank you notes by hand.
Always these things start the same. “Dear So and So. Thank you for the [insert gift]. It is great! I never thought that a [insert gift] could be so much fun. I look forward to seeing you next year. Love, Brandon.”
It didn’t take long for me to realize that people can spot a form letter a mile away, even if it’s hand written. Besides, with so many thank you notes to write after each major holiday, I realized that it was much more fun to write them when they at least appear to be heartfelt.
This is what I thought about on the way home from work today. This Christmas I got both of my parents a book – “The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman.” My parents both loved the authors previous book, “The 4 Hour Workweek.” It was a no brainer (of course, the “Incredible Sex” bit was maybe a bit odd, but that’s beside the point). Just a few days ago I got a short thank you note in the mail written by my Mom: “Your Father and I are really enjoying this book. It’s given us lots to talk about. We’ve been having some great discussions over it. Look forward to seeing you soon. Love, Mom.”
In a wave, the dreaded lists came back to me – the stacks of letters and matching envelopes with ‘Thank You’ embossed on the front. They all had to be filled. Over time I made them my own. To make the chore more interesting I would try really hard to connect with my readers. Of course, the best were thank you’s addressed to people who’d clearly put a lot of time and thought into the gift they’d given me. Not the “Thank you for the $20 bill and the crappy card. I hope you didn’t get a papercut on your tongue as you licked the envelope.”
One year my mother reported to me that one of my thank you notes made one of our close family friends cry. It was one of the proudest moments in my life. I could lie and tell you that that’s what made me decide to study to become a writer, but I won’t. It did inspire me to write better thank you notes, though. I still hated to do it, but I think that was the first times I came to understand the power that words have.
When was the last time you received a letter? Before email, snail mail was the primary mode of communication over great distances. Men of letters. All that. I think something has been lost. Email just isn’t the same. With a written letter there is no margin for error. No spell check. I imagine writing a large number of physical letters would be a pretty powerful exercise. I find myself getting extraordinarily impatient when I don’t receive a reply to an email I’ve written within 24 hours. A letter, even sent first class takes at least 2 business days to arrive in the recipient’s mailbox.
Perhaps the writing of letters is a dead art. Why not find a pen pal? Are there services that will connect adults via email? I’m not talking about online dating either. That normally ends quickly with an exchange of phone numbers and an agonized chat at the coffee house, does it not? I’m talking about old school pen pals.
Right now I am conversing with people on a daily basis via email. I’ve never emailed this much in my life. It is very fun. I wish I’d discovered it earlier in my adult life. Before I realized how boring and tiring really is. At first, I thought that it would be detrimental to my blogging activities. I’m the type of guy that hates to tell the same story twice or write about the same topic in more than one venue on the same day. Now I don’t worry about it so much. I am a loner in every sense of the word. I can still keep my blog writing fresh no matter how much I email during the day. It’s partially a matter of forgetting, but that’s not all it is. I work with lots of extroverts. I hear them tell one person a story and then tell it again to another and another. They refine it each time. It’s never the same twice and if their lucky or particularly savvy in the realm of socializing it will always get better. Even if it doesn’t they correct what doesn’t work the 3rd and 4th time around.
I prefer to think of blogging as performance art. Not only that, I think it works best when it’s completely improvised. I want to entertain myself just as much as I want to entertain you. Sometimes I’ll repeat myself, but never consciously. It goes back to those damned thank you notes. They taught me how boring it is to follow a formula. It’s much more fun to try to make your recipients feel something and you can’t get that with a formula. At least that’s been my experience. What do you think?
This weekend marks a milestone for me, at least over the past couple of months. I think I mentioned that my New Year’s resolution this year is to be more social. Well, this weekend I did it. I did more this weekend than I have in a long time. First, on Saturday I went to go see 2 movies – Tron and The King’s Speech. I liked both movies equally well and because I only paid to go see Tron, I was only out $11.50, and I got my heart racing.
I’ve been struggling to find a good cardiovascular workout since my apartment’s gym is only equipped with free weights and weight machines. Sneaking into The King’s Speech after Tron actually got my heart racing. First there was my very casual walk from Tron into the adjacent theater for The King’s Speech. Then my heart was still racing as I posited my ass next to an old lady who for some reason thought it appropriate to save a seat for her coat. I kept expecting someone to claim the spot. Someone she knew perhaps, but no.
My heart raced more when the lights in the theater were turned on to help folks who bought their tickets last minute identify open seats in the primo section where you’re not forced to crane your neck to look up at the movie seats in the front rows.
I said my heart raced, but only for a moment. When I thought about it I decided that I’d never in my life been in a movie where the ushers check your tickets. I worried as the theater got more and more packed, but even then I knew, if people were unable to find seats they’d go to the front and get a refund as opposed to a witch hunt to find out who hadn’t paid for a ticket.
Both movies I liked equally. They were both very different. There was considerable downtime before the start of each movie. I’d timed them out almost perfectly. I think I waited 15 minutes before the previews started on the 2nd movie in my perfectly engineered double feature. During this time I thought about just how social an activity going to a movie is. It’s certainly not a place for intimacy. I have never in all my times going to see a feature film on the big screen seen anyone make out. It’s really terribly introverted this activity. Sure, you can look at box office revenues and know that you are partaking in an activity that thousands and thousands of other movie goers have experienced in the same way as you. But if you’re someone more lucky than me and you have someone you’re attending your movie with, is your experience really more social than mine? Maybe you will mutter a few words between you before the movie starts, but once it starts and you’re urged not to make a peep once the movie begins, I figured I was on equal footing with anybody else. In fact I did something which I would only feel comfortable doing with people I know really well, which is to enjoy snus throughout both pictures and just chuck them under my seat when I was ready for the next. It’s like chewing tobacco. I’m sure people next to me can smell it.
Wait. I’ve started doing this at work as well. I guess this is my new movie going habit. I would feel odd making out with someone after using it unless they also used snus. I guess there isn’t anyone I wouldn’t feel comfortable using snus with during a movie. Especially when I’m watching 4 hours of movie in one sitting. I couldn’t leave the theater and come back. I almost changed my mind after Tron. I thought to myself, it’s Saturday, why don’t I just go see The King’s Speech tomorrow after I’ve had some time to rest? But The King’s Speech really was the adjacent theater. When Tron ended, I pulled out my iPhone and saw The King’s Speech would start in just 15 minutes. Perfect. I plan to pull this trick next time I see a movie. Only one theater looked like it would be playing both these movies in succession like this.
What else happened this weekend? I read both the Saturday and Sunday paper. I had it in my mind to do this in an environment populated by other people in order to work on my resolution to socialize, but I instead brought them home. I thought that a coffee shop might be the perfect environment. Perhaps there being a slight chance that I have an extended or even brief conversation there with someone I do not know – that list includes just about everyone except my mum and dad. To top it all off I purchased a coffee maker to save money on coffee, so it looks like the only logical place for me to read in a setting conducive to reading and containing other people will be the library. I plan to go there next weekend. Perhaps I will meet a shy Swedish girl with enormous tits who will ask me where the Fiction section is.
In summation, I really wasn’t that social this weekend, but I was busy, which made it difficult if not impossible for me to dwell on it too long. Most weekends I live in squaller and am happy for Monday to arrive, for then I will have my co-workers to interact with and I can pretend to be just like them. This weekend, I am in contrast wishing that my weekend would last for all eternity that I might blog without time constraint and enjoy the paper every day and smuggle an entire meal under my coat so that I could enjoy every decent movie playing at the local theater without my stomach calling to me rebelliously to feed it when I’m only halfway through with the 2nd feature like I experienced on Saturday. Lesson learned. Bring food.
I feel sick. I think I maybe should have gone with leftover pizza instead of candy for dinner.
Today I want to record a dream I had. I wish I could literally have recorded it – the experience of having this dream. I find that most dreams I have cannot really be told as stories. None of them seem to have any continuity to them whatsoever and I don’t think it’s because my memory is failing me. Whenever I hear someone tell me about a dream they had I am very dubious, especially if the dream this person is describing makes sense or is entertaining in the same vein as a story I assume they’re embellishing. Dreams are fractured (at least my dreams are). I’ve heard of authors who’ve created best-selling and/or classic fictional stories based on dreams they’ve had. Like Tolkien and his Lord of the Rings. Here, I’m not going to invent details that I can’t really remember to make this dream more palatable to you. Not even a little bit. You had to be there.
This dream I had was odd as far as my dreams go. It was intense. More so than usual although I’m out of practice in the art and skill of recalling my dreams upon waking. Perhaps the strangest thing about it is that I forgot it when I woke up and didn’t remember it until about 5 o’ clock in the afternoon when I was reading an article in the Guardian. This dream. I remembered it as I was reading this article on 20 predictions for the next 25 years. I skimmed to #6 – predictions about neuroscience. After reading these two lines the dream came back to me in a flash…
Then there’s the mystery of consciousness. Will we finally have a framework that allows us to translate the mechanical pieces and parts into private, subjective experience? As it stands now, we don’t even know what such a framework could look like (“carry the two here and that equals the experience of tasting cinnamon”).
That line of research will lead us to confront the question of whether we can reproduce consciousness by replicating the exact structure of the brain – say, with zeros and ones, or beer cans and tennis balls. If this theory of materialism turns out to be correct, then we will be well on our way to downloading our brains into computers, allowing us to live forever in The Matrix.
I love predictions. I also love sci-fi. I’m planning to see Tron Legacy this weekend. I don’t know what it was that triggered the dream.
Like I said, I don’t know all the details. One minute I’m being led up some stairs to some kind of zen-esque temple with like bonzai trees. Then I’m meeting with my old neighbor who worked for Boeing creating jet engines. Then I get this incredible sensation of being split into two separate people. I see a red flashing light. I get the distinct impression that I’ve just entered an alternate universe.
Have you ever seen the movie Moon? Aw crap, I don’t want to spoil it for you. I think what happened to me in the dream is that I was cloned, memories and all. It was as if someone clapped there hands together when the red light went off and suddenly I didn’t know if I was myself or the clone. The Guardian article I read at the end of the day mentioned that in the future it may be possible for us to download ourselves into something resembling the Matrix. Not only did that bring my dream rushing back to my consciousness, it was like I solved the mystery of what the dream was about.
I really hope Tron is good. From what I’ve heard it’s about a video game that you play, but if you die in the game you die in real life. My dream was like that. If I was the clone, I’d be able to live forever, but if I was plain old me I would die per usual. This all seemed incredibly real for me. I felt elated for the 50/50 chance that I’d suddenly achieved immortality in this dream. Or maybe it was more a sci-fi movie. I do recall thinking that somehow I was very special – that I’d been somehow redesigned as a kind of super-soldier… that I was now invincible after this splitting of self.
Later I thought that it would be cool to write about decision making. How we often bank on having a long and healthy life while we’re alive. Like I said, I ate a lot of candy. I’m trying to insulate myself from any deep thought this evening. I’ll put that idea in the oven and see if I can’t make a great blog post out of it later.
That red light. The sensation of being split in two or perhaps living in two separate bodies. I wish that I could convey the experience to you better. The sensation really was amazing. I don’t even have a good story to relay it to you. At least now it’s not lost to me forever.
