Life in Contechxt

Frequently in life of the flesh and in life of this Internet I go about bemoaning technology. What better sounding board for it than the medium(s) it/themselves, right? Focusing on the Internet in particular, I once spent a great deal of time on here. As it happens, I still do, as for eight or more hours per day at a workplace I am in front of a screen and connected, and here I am now in hours at which I am not at a workplace. That alone is 33% of the day. And given that I sleep ~ 6 hours/night, we're talking 4/9th of my waking day, so ~44% on weekdays. Except tack on maybe another hour to be unsafe and that's 9/18 or a full 50% of my day (on weekends probably 11% or less), 25% for sleeping, and in the 3-4% range for a run so I'm left with about 21% of the day.

I'm leaving out cooking, eating, pooping, commuting, and some other things. That isn't a whole lot of leftover time, even with my reduced web use. As is often mentioned, it's not the presence of technology so much as what we do with it. And for me, it's often been about reading. Of late it's taken me to stories with 'beginners' in the title. If you've read this far, do yourself a favor and read the high quality Raymond Carver short story  "Beginners" (thank you Internet for making it available). And then maybe if you've got more time, sit yourself down to absolute beginners. Where that book deals with the absolute beginner as the never before existing teenage class with expendable income in a backdrop of 1950's England, now we've got the technagers who won't have experienced life before the web. But thanks to it, they can know all about Webb.

Well shit, that's July.

Life: All It's Hacked Up to Be

A few weeks back, I started to get some unsolicited emails from a site called Afroromance that I had in fact not signed up for and which I chronicled rather unexcitingly here. These kinds of things happen, though I'm not sure exactly why someone would have registered me for such a site. I assume there must be some technique whereby my clicking somewhere or filling out some form would then allow them to steal my personal info. I hope they're having fun with that.

 

Still, in seven or eight years of Gmail use, this kind of thing largely hasn't happened. Sure, part of that is a function of my not just plopping down my email address everywhere, but it's also probably a credit to Google (even if I might espouse their evils at times, even on this blogging engine powered by them).

 

Signing up for a new Yahoo account in order to use messenger for work purposes however quickly resulted in someone creating a Twitter account for me that follows the following: Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant, Chris Paul, Dwayne Wade, and two Chris Paul fan accounts. Seeing as this account had no tweets, I do have to wonder if this was created purely to boost followers for these NBA stars. And I wonder if it was this same industrious human or automaton that went and sent up a Facebook account for Solomonodero Mubido. As it happens, I like this as a pen name, though I might drop the fourth 'o' in Solomonodero to be just Solomondero. One less syllable gives it better rhythm and tongue sound.

 

Speaking of sound, this sounds like a good time for me to wrap this up. Solomondero out.

Six Years, Six Days

The title is the period of time this blog has been live. It seems like a long time. Every now and then I wonder of the implications if I'd kept a journal (men's diary) for this same period of time. But alas Diaryhea never afflicted be.

 

Back to the standardly unstandard contents of things here, the other day I was wondering whether the TV show Will and Grace has double entendre implications, like not only are the stars of the show named Will and Grace, but there was a suggestion of a theme of the show being these qualities. Survey says, doesn't matter.

 

Back in the day I watched many an episode of W&G, or any other NBC sitcom. It certainly was skewed by not growing up with cable TV but, with the exception of Friends, I felt like a lot of solid comedy was coming out of primetime NBC. These days I wonder if there is anything or if there will be anything so zeitgeist-defining as a Seinfeld. We have so much choice at our disposal, that we simply aren't tuning into universal programs anymore. I'm pretty sure NBC trademarked the slogan "Must see TV," and I have to wonder if they could use that anymore.

 

These days my TV viewing is confined to Pretty Little Liars, my latest entry in the teen market. Things get a little sexy on there sometimes, which is a surprising for ABC Family (I say this not watching any other ABC Family programs). 

Perhaps halfway through the second season of the show I started to wonder if it weren't all just some elaborate coffee ad as the main characters are ALWAYS DRINKING COFFEE. Or rather they're not drinking it, but at least holding coffee cups and raising them to their lips in avatar/advanced/devanced improv fashion. The point is that the implication is that they are drinking this caffeine-imbued beverage. Again, ABC Family, teenager see, teenager do.

I can't tell you precisely what it is that ropes me into shows like this, but I can tell you precisely what begins to turn me off and it's the repetitive, formulaic structure and manufactured emotion meant to move the viewer. The nice, dizzying 360° camera rotation around a character in despair, accompanied by some pulse-raising swell of string music. It might work the first time, but when you have to do it over and over and club me over the head with it, I remember the decided lack of music whenever I might have a little bout of anxiety. Then again, I'm not dealing with a serial killer/stalker in my day-to-day life, so I've got it pretty easy and perhaps if I was dealing with this as a high-schooler things would spin 360° and the orchestral sounds of my own experience playing in an orchestra would swoop me up.

The real problem — aside from my perhaps overanalyzing — is that TV, books, movies, and so on are concentrated slices of life. With the ability to pick what is shown, just as you and I pick what we tell in our stories to one another, you've got to pick well. If I tell you the same story over and over you might get a little tired of it (I have done this, people have pointed it out), and that's what happens here. Things aren't evolving, the same mistakes are made — and hey, sure, we do repeat ourselves life — but any artful crafting is removed in the name of keeping the machine going. Characters just do the thing to cover up the plot twist rather than acting consistent with character.

And I wouldn't be keeping with character if I weren't getting frustrated by a show lingering while continuing to watch JUST TO SEE AN END. But I can change, and I could always just write some fan fiction.

Indeependants Day

I'm definitely phone[tically]ing this one in over here. The fourth of July which we celebrate as a day of independence draws forth the particular effort of titling this here entry. What exactly constitutes independence and freedom is on the brains of people these days given a certain frozen-element-room named individual who released information regarding our government's consumption of "personal" information. Other countries are bummed we were keeping tabs on them, but then they should probably have been doing a better job of keeping tabs on us. So long as you're keeping tabs on the tabs being kept you're all set.

The inability to account for some tabs is of course also a major problem for worldwide economics, from the monetary trust standpoint of whose money is where and who exactly owes what to whom and can we expect them to repay it, but as well from the will people want to continue doing business with us considering the other tabs we're keeping.

Let's forget all of that though, and just enjoy our fellow Americans and grilled meats and meat-substitutes and beers of rice and once of Milwaukee in cans showing pride in America and owned by worldwide conglomerates. Made in America is more a think of maiden America (even if, sure, some production of these beers is still stateside). And let's blow some shit up. For the day that is tomorrow let's be independent from the things that worry us about this country and this world.

More than two-hundred years later we're still in the hangover of our jubilant celebration of breaking free of our oppressors, only to casually remove mention of the atrocities committed since that split, at home and abroad. But I get it, I like beer too.