Sign, Sign, Everywhere A Sign

I was sitting on the Long Island Railroad (where I spend two thirds of my life) with my iPod on when I looked up and saw a sign. I think I've seen it before, it must be in every car. But I never really thought about it before: Assaulting a member of the train crew is a felony and it'll land you as many as 7 years in prison. 7 years! I started thinking about that and not because I find it unfair, but just because I find it fascinating that a 7 year prison sentence is one very simple decision away.

When I stand on a train or subway platform I always think about stepping in front of the oncoming train. I don't think this makes me morbid, I actually think it makes me the opposite. I feel, in those moments, not just the fragility of life but also the beauty and wonder of choice. We choose to stay alive every day. Every time we stand on the edge of the platform we have an incredibly easy opportunity to end it all with one little step forward. But as I thought about possibly making the choice to end up in prison for any number of years I thought about how there are actually many different shadings of that. For instance, let's say I want to spend, not seven years, but one night in prison (I have no idea why I would want this). I could run naked through the park, that would probably get me arrested, right? I suppose it would ultimately get me fined, but they'd have to hold me somewhere, right? Or I could shoplift at Circuit City. There are so many simple crimes out there to choose from.

So many things are one simple decision away, even things which are not necessarily negative (like prison or death). I suppose if you start looking at life as just a series of these every day decisions that's when you can break harmful patterns, like binging on junk food or avoiding responsibility. When viewed as a single instant all decisions, whether its to pay your cell phone bill, put down the cupcake or jump in front of a moving bus, become equal.

I saw another sign on the subway. It was Gatorade (or a plastic bottle with the label obscured of what was clearly supposed to be Gatorade) being poured into a glass, only before the Gatorade got there it became fat. Ugly, disgusting, biology-textbook-illustration fat. I took a picture of it with my phone but I don't think the grossness comes across fully.

I get it, I get it. Gatorade is bad for you. And yes, I think it's important to educate people about something as insidious as a sugary beverage that promotes itself as a health drink that athletes like (and it makes them sweat colors!) and I think shocking imagery, just like the famous anti-smoking pictures of black lungs in health textbooks, is an effective way to garner attention but I ALMOST THREW UP ON THE F-TRAIN. Jeepers.

Communication Is The Only Way

With the rise of Instant Messaging as a primary means of communication for some people a new language has emerged. Not only a new language but almost a new paradigm of thought. Before facebook and friendster and myspace, when internet persona was still in its infancy, we all learned about a feature that came with AOL called Instant Messenger. It was almost exclusively the province of early and late teenagers with some spillover on either side of the age bracket. Around when I was a college student (2001-2005) it became much more widespread, an enormous part of college life. Now it's gchatting or ichatting or AIMchatting or just old fashioned IMing, and thanks to the iPhone it's become almost synonymous with text messaging*.

Internet chatting makes me understand that speech has much more purpose than simply to communicate words. Just as the loss of facial expressions over the phone is limiting, when simply typing words the loss of tonal inflection and the experience of conversing in real-time are irretrievably lost. This is why it is not like the phone; it is not a replacement for normal human conversation, it is a new kind of conversing that allows the participants to reveal as little of their true feelings as they want. Or as much. It's alarming what people will and can say to you when they don't have to look at your face. Words as cruel, salacious or frank have never been spoken to me until I discovered the boundary-less realm of the Instant Message.

In a way, though, all of this has allowed for many different shadings of friendship. I find that there are friends with who I communicate best through text message. I don't know why but we just seem to have a better rapport with snappy, no-nonsense one-or-two sentence blurbs without the usual pleasantries (these are frequently people with whom I'm doing some kind of business). Close friends, though, need to be in person. I have a good phone relationship with a lot of close friends but face to face is still preferred, and with some of them the phone just won't do. Unfortunately this means that, should a long period of absence occur, it's hard to reconnect, even with all of these options.

Facebook has really changed everything, though. I can now stay caught up on lives of people who I know/used to know without ever having to say a word to them again. This is the next phase, it's the anti-communicator. It has the power to keep us all connected, and connected we will be: Insulated and isolated and all alone with over five hundred "friends". No one will ever attend a High School Reunion in the future. What would be the point? All of the pedigree information is there for everyone to see, and no one will ever again have to use small talk as a transitory tactic to find out anyone's whereabouts. I don't think I can say whether this is good or bad. I think it might just be a fact. Friendship means different things now, or rather it can mean several things, some of which seem contrary to the others. And I do feel more connected to more people. But I can't deny that at the same time I feel pretty disconnected.

*I feel I must point out that in that sentence I used five completely made-up words, and this does not make them less valid. They are simply the only words available for what I'm describing, and that is linguistic evolution in a nutshell.

The Thermodynamic Miracle

“Thermodynamic miracles… events with odds against so astronomical they’re effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.

And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter…

…Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you that emerged.

To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air into gold…

That is the crowning unlikelihood.

The thermodynamic miracle.

(Laurie: But… if me, my birth, if that’s a thermodynamic miracle …I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!”)

Yes.

Anybody in the world. But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget…

I forget.

We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away."

Star Trek Invents New Technology

Will youtube's uses never stop emerging? Long before my (some might say unhealthy) obsession with all things Harry Potter I was a science fiction nerd. I grew up watching Star Trek and Star Wars, and by the time I was nine years old I was well versed in Isaac Asimov's ouvre which served as a gateway to a lot of classic sci-fi. I don't tend to wear it on my sleeve all the time but I'm still a massive fan of the genre, particularly Vonnegut's short stories and Philip K. Dick. I have to proclaim my love to the world now, though, since I've been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on youtube like it's my job. And never mind science fiction, it's just a great show. It is my belief that the greatest art always transcends its genre (West Side Story, for example, stands out for me because the quality of the music and lyrics is so high that it being a musical has nothing to do with my enjoyment of it any more). Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner lead, in my opinion, one of the strongest ensemble casts ever to grace television and the writing and characters have no dependence upon the usual devices of science fiction to make them work.

The thing with shows, books and movies about the future: they usually get it really wrong. A lot of the time technological development is grossly overestimated (in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey there is a shuttle that runs regularly back and forth from the earth to a well established moon colony. Fail. There is also, apparently, an unexplained obsession with Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz). Sometimes it's prescient yet strangely off (Bradbury's Farenheit 451 told of a world where books are banned and everyone watches wall-sized televisions all the time. Hardly Kindles and Flat Screens but you get the idea). Smart writing is setting your futuristic world in the distant, unverifiable past (Star Wars, Thundercats) so that you can't be wrong, but back in the 1960s the 23rd century seemed far enough off to make some wild predictions about technology. Don't get me wrong, a lot of liberties of taken, particularly where faster-than-light travel is concerned (although Prof. Stephen Hawking, during a tour of the engineering set, was heard to remark upon seeing the Warp Plasma Coils "I'm working on that."). But there are some little things that were more than a little accurate.

In the original series, for example, the crew all carried flip phones. Flip phones with voice recognition technology.

I was watching Next Generation, though, and noticed a lot of technological conveniences that were very familiar indeed. Captain Picard goes into his ready room and opens up a laptop. Really. And this was 1989, folks. It's a laptop, and he doesn't have to plug it into the wall (and perhaps Macintosh stops lying about the battery life of their Powerbooks in the 24th century). They don't carry communicators anymore, now they all have bluetooth devices. And the crew quarters are all equipped with an iPod touch. I've seen several crew members simply say "Let's hear some jazz" or "Play some Bach!". That's not very different than "Play songs by Jack Johnson".

It's nice to think that, if such technology could be so specifically predicted, some of the other advances described in the show might be true. Medical care, for example, seems to have developed to the point where doctors barely have to touch patients anymore and pain is removed by harmless little laser lights. Hunger and poverty are things of the past. Although baldness is not. But honestly, with Patrick Stewart at the helm, baldness is badass. So much the better.

Insults

Tonight I was having a conversation with an older woman, in her seventies. Her grandchildren had just been out to visit from Omaha and she had spent the week observing the interactions of the younger set. She told me an interesting piece of information: apparently the worst insult that the kids were currently using on one another was 'racist'. I find this more than a little strange. Growing up, my brothers and I used the standard insults, one's that pretty much express universal negativity. Asshole, moron, jerk-face, etc. I never really thought of 'racist' as something that could be re-contextualized. But then again I guess an insult is usually a word that's not exactly being used in its intended way. A douche bag, in and of itself, is not derogatory. It is a hygienic product, but when I describe Scott Stapp, lead singer of the band Creed*, as a douche bag, no one misreads my intent.

More interesting than the apparently widespread (according to one Omaha, Nebraska household) use of the epithet 'racist' outside of its denoted meaning is a much older insult that this same granny informed me of. As school children during the 1950s in the American Midwest it was often required, as anyone who used to be a child knows, to ridicule someone anonymously. The methodology differed from anything we did in school though. Using a stick or shoe, the victim's name would be written in the sand and circled. And underneath would be drawn a swastika. This had to be done covertly, she said, lest someone catch them drawing the forbidden sign. This kind of behavior must sounds like the basis for an entire branch of semiotics.

* This video is...it's as if someone went inside my brain, listened to the way Creed sounds like to me and somehow translated it into the real world.

The Little Semantic Argument That Could

"I'm telling you, I can't just pick up and move to Thailand."
"You could if you wanted."
"That's just not true. How would I pay my bills? And I have student loans to pay off, and those have cosigners."
"Those are consequences you won't accept. You don't want to accept them."
(sighs) "Fine. What's the difference?"
"There's a world of difference between can't and won't."

As infuriating as this logic is, it is a valid point. It's a defeatist attitude to say there are certain things I can't do. I can do anything, but all courses of action have consequences that I can either choose to accept or choose not to accept, and this logic can pretty much be applied to every decision that you make, regardless of the size. It may be semantics but I think it represents a significant shift in mode of thought. It forces me to identify the things I actually want and how much I want them based on my priorities, or even my values.

Thus, "I can't move to Thailand (for example)" can be restated as "I want to move to Thailand, but that desire is outweighed by my desire to continue living without the consequences of moving to Thailand." It becomes a question of which wants are outweighed by others, making me examine how much I want things in addition to what they are. Here's some example of juxtaposing two things and drawing a conclusion:

I want one hundred thousand dollars. I do not want to kill another human being. Therefore I would not kill a person in exchange for one hundred thousand dollars.

I want to eat an entire bag of Oreos. I do not want to feel sick to my stomach. Sometimes I want the Oreos more. And I accept the consequences. (And no, eating less than a full bag is not a viable option.)

So, as an exercise, here is a list of things I can't do, translated into things I, upon further examination, do not really want to do.

I can't fly ---> I want to fly, but I don't want to spend an exorbitant amount of money to construct an elaborate personal flying device or otherwise fund a project to invent the technology to do so.

I can't communicate with animals --->I want to communicate with animals but don't want to spend two years in the Sierra Leone amidst the Western Lowlands Gorillas learning their ways and being accepted as one of the tribe*.

I can't perform oral sex on myself ---> I want to perform oral sex on myself but I don't want to develop the flexibility and core strength necessary to assume that posture, nor do I want to remove one of my ribs. I also don't want to accidentally snap my neck during the act and be discovered in such a compromising position.

I can't breathe underwater ---> hmmm...

I invite all of you, dear readers, to engage in a similar shift in thinking. There is nothing you can't do (except for breathe underwater. And go to Hogwarts). Exist in a world where anything is possible if you're willing to give something else up and you'll find that there is nothing stopping you from achieving what you want. The true lesson is that the more outrageous your wish, the more you will have to give up for it.

*I am kind of describing the plot of the movie Instinct now.