What motivates the brain to call the body into action? I imagine many things, they’re probably ranked, and high on the list is the threat of punishment, or in the grownup world, embarrassment. For example, the possibility that someone might come over (say someone who’s picking me up on the way to the airport) was enough to get me to clean the bathroom halfway. If people were dropping by once a week even, this place would be spic and span. As it stands, I don’t have much social shame to keep me in line.
Why is it that I can live with piles of envelopes collecting on every flat surface in my apartment (including under my left arm and laptop as I type this)? It probably comes down to the fact that I really don’t care, and I’m sure it’s not helping that I don’t have a 43 folders-esque system to scream at me when the piles reach a sort of critical mass. I think things started getting out of control because the previous tenants still get piles of junk mail every day, none of which seems to get forwarded. Since the modern world requires such a high noise threshold, I feel like many things become just too banal to bother with.
At Tony’s BBQ and pool party on Saturday I met the wife of a O’Reilly employee who is a professional organizer, in addition to being a full time mom. Wow. Believe you me, it has crossed my mind to contact someone like her to figure out some strategies to deal with my envelope pile problem. I’m already thinking one solution might be to buy a console table to put near the door to create a central drop spot for all the paper that comes into the apartment. And maybe on top of that a snazzy leather envelope sorter or something. Clearly I need to make filing sexier.
There’s this line of thought I’ve been having lately, namely the sense that previously exceptional individuals (in their mid-twenties) are finding themselves on a precipitous trajectory towards mediocrity. In this instance I’m actually worrying about myself. I’m thinking the cause is as follows. Those of us who thought we were exceptional were able to succeed by gaming our educational institutions for the past 17+ years. I think graduate school was really the death knell, where I elevated doing the least amount of work for the highest possible grade to an artform.
Now that I’ve been ejected out into the larger, heterogenous world, the rules of the game have changed. In fact I don’t even know what they are, and I’m pretty sure the ones I’ve figured out I don’t like. So I and anyone who feels similarly are kind of struggling to right ourselves. Trying to find like-minded individuals not because we need an echo chamber of sameness, but because the rest of society can seem like a blackhole sometimes, diffusing our once exceptional talents with a revolving litany of papers to file, bathrooms to clean, laundry to wash, food to buy, meals to plan, bills to pay…
the thoughts flow. i wonder why i don’t bring a moleskine with me where ever i go. probably cause i don’t have a moleskine. but i always have a pen. pilot v5 extra fine. always. thankfully right now i have a napkin. somewhere i was reading that writing is the loneliest occupation. or was it reading? or both? i think it was in that interview with Chuck Palahniuk.
i like weird. it calms me. tonight i walked over to a vegetarian buffet restaurant called govinda’s. the food reminded me of the free hare krishna meals on campus that i avoided. vegetable curry. rice. pasta with a pesto sauce. salad. who knows maybe it’s even a chain. the logo is very professional, as is the dining room decor. there’s lucky bamboo on every table.
behind govinda’s is the community market, which i discovered online while searching for things to do in santa rosa. but you can’t see it from mendocino, the main north-south strip, so driving by i wasn’t sure if it existed anymore. it reminds me of weaver street market in carrboro, without all the hustle and bustle. it’s just a natural foods market with the same weird healthy stuff that feels familiar and exotic to me. fruits and vegetables, european butter, tofu-based everything, tahini galore, items for sale in bulk, quorn and amy’s and garden of eatin’. no meat that i could identify.
i watch relatively little tv. but when i do, i feel tired afterwards, like my mind, which has become accustomed to the visual and auditory surrogate, suddenly has to reacclimate to the slower pace of real life. like that feeling in my guts, looking out an airplane window after landing, and feeling like the plane is moving backwards, even though i know it’s parked at the gate.
at the hotel i stayed at in ghana, i managed to catch the second episode of the L word of all things. i loved it. i was hooked. imagine my delight upon returning to discover it would soon be out on dvd. so over the last several weeks jane and i have been renting a disc at a time of season one. tonight we just burned through the third one, i think we’ve watched 12 anxiety-provoking, heart-wrenching episodes.
once the tv goes off, i go through a period of stimulation withdrawl, and i can’t help but think back to my memories of greek drama in high school. i think we learned that the experience of drama had a transformative, cathartic effect on the ancient audiences. and how afterwards my mind feels relaxed. and full of ideas. free to free associate.
i’m usually pretty down on tv, but that’s only because i think the average american watches enough to merit comparison with the matrix. i can empathize. if one vicarious dramatic experience provides a certain beneficial mental escapism, why not one more?
it’s a slippery slope that reminds me of another conversation i had in ghana. how strange it seemed to me that the awesome addictive power of nicotine, coupled with tobacco’s adverse effect on health, wasn’t eliminated by natural selection. perhaps it’s because smoking is a relatively new invention, or perhaps it just doesn’t kill a person before they’re able to reproduce.
the person i was chatting with suggested something i found altogether more plausible and yet provocative. that the potential for nicotine addiction in humans might actually have been (and continue to be?) evolutionarily beneficial because it offered one more thing that made life seem worth living, in the face of all that might not.
blogs will be the first place that news breaks, and the only place to go for serious, insightful reporting. local newspapers will be replaced with loose networks of local blogs. national newspapers will be driven to extinction by algorithms (e.g. google news, blogdex) and information clearinghouse blogs (e.g. boingboing, slashdot).
the wikimedia projects (wikipedia, wiktionary, wikinews) will overtake the new york times (still refusing to open their archives) to become the “news of record,” the first place people go for unfamilar information or to followup on previous events (after google).
eventually the cultural importance of wikipedia will spawn the wikiprint project (in a joint venture with lulu and the american library association) in order to provide periodically printed editions of the latest versions of all wikipedia articles. when the national newspapers go up for sale, the wikimedia foundation will start buying their archives and hiring a few wiki-friendly reporters and editors to work on developing content and editing full time.
cable news will become entertainment (wait, the future is already here) pandering to specific demographic and political groups. the daily show will outgrow comedy central to emerge as its own network; later internet distribution of their reports via bittorrent will outpace revenue from cable. it will attract the 18-34 year old, liberal intellectual demographic in spades, covering the news with a sense of humor while providing the most utterly devastating analysis of the issues of the day. expect the daily show to buy npr in order to deliver podcasted audio content and to support legacy radio devices.
fox news will carry the banner for the right, eventually replacing all of their “serious” anchored news segments with roundtable, debate shows, spewing a venom of hate, intolerance, moral superiority, and war-mongering. fox news will buy clearchannel. advertising billboards in middle america will read “the heartland: you’re FOX country.”
local tv news will be replaced by what we now think of as public access television, delivered over the web, but with the advent of low cost digital video recording and editing equipment, it will rival the cable networks in terms of quality, cutting edge content, and personal engagement. most future film makers will get their start producing pieces for local video websites.
