The Language of Disappearance

Whenever I travel to a place where they speak a language other than English -- a rarity -- the trouble is that the inhabitants of this place speak English. Sure this is in a lot of ways great for me, one not very adept at other languages, but I can't help but think it's also a shame in what it tells us about alternative cultural appreciation here. After all, we don't provide all these other peoples the benefit of speaking their language when they travel to the old US of A. Then again, they wouldn't be learning English if it weren't a business and lifestyle necessity. Alas, such is the cost of globalization, progression, unfication, quotation marks wherever you think I intended them.

At any rate, it's easy for the visitor to cast the wistful eye at foreign places without a full grasp of what it is to actually live there. What I can tell you in my latest visits is that in the Central European cities of Prague, Budapest, and Vienna, people do not run without shirts on. Even sizeable tourist groups from Italy (granted they happened to be teenagers), land of fashion that would attract a skeptical eye in America, do not understand the shirtless runner donning short shorts. I'm still on my quest to discover what it is about this situation that sets so many ill at ease. After all, in Budapest for instance there is no shortage of baths, where same-sex nudity is unquestioned, and in Prague there are ample banners for escort service sex.cz -- not to mention the city being well-known for its technically illegal, but blind eye more than turned and in fact approving of services to improve tourism. Hell in Prague I'm pretty certain I encountered a Brit taking good advantage of such access (I took his photo with a barely obliging woman at 6 in the morning) and in Vienna another Brit seemed to have brought an escort to 9:00am breakfast. But look, by no means should you run without your shirt on. A shame that Freud's no longer over at Berggasse 19 to help come to a precise psychoanalytical conclusion

And now, at this point, it's natural to wonder if the likes of Mozart and Beethoven went without wigs when they were out on long walks (maybe not Beethoven since he was blind) composing the classical music we still listen to today and, if so, whether they were looked upon strangely by peers. After all, "wiggin' out" is derived from the situation of one entering society without one's wig on, hence exposing the true self. Witnessing a person wig out makes people uncomfortable precisely because it exposes true nature and innately we fear the dark inner self.

On that note (a b-flat according to Wolfgang Amadeus), I'm going to head back to reality.

A Summery

Well shit, it looks as if the summer is nearly through, even if fall technically doesn't begin until late September. Calendars aside, the weather has been decidedly fall for some weeks now round these parts. It's a shame because while I'm quite the sweaty beast, one of the benefits of living in a climatic zone that has notable seasonal differences, is those notable seasonal differences. If it's going to be cold as monkey nuts (assuming those are always served chilled, or right out of the freezer), it'd be great to have summer last at least its usual length.

The kind of summer I'm talking about is the kind of summer going on here. Sure it's doofy britpop selling teenage sex but that's not a new phenomenon and at least they're obvious about it with the giant inflatable banana and all. Come to think of it though, the people in that video are primarily wearing slacks and there is many a long sleeve present, so that's not quite the summery heat I'd meant. What a video like that really drives home is that I've been missing one heck of a beach party for probably 17 years now.

The last thing I'll say about the weather is that it allows for those bringing about the return of dressing like these lads not having to worry about looking a slobbery mess.

The boutonnieres, I admit, haven't actually hit yet for regular daily consumption, but I can only imagine it's just a matter of time.

But young folk have reason to dress sharp. After all, they are surely applying to jobs like these. And rather than be discouraged by reviews like this one,  I would think they might be excited by the prospect of a trusted colleague "pour[ing] feces down their throat." I suppose that is what they mean by shit job. It's great to see Bob Bland, CEO respond directly. Honestly though, for being Mr. Bland, it sure sounds like an exciting place to be.

Speaking of exciting places to be, I'm sure we've all got one. Well, at least more exciting than this dark corner of the Internet. Perhaps those Mods above could head to 1996 and drive the limos for Blackstreet. Play on playas.

The Secret

No not Victoria's Secret, that delightful self-help book. The secret is that there is no secret and I don't understand how someone could read that book and not feel cultish, weird, and a bit dirty. But that's just because I have a negative outlook and bring it to that book or so the story might go.

I actually think there is something to having a positive outlook on life, rather than dwelling on the negative, but unfortunately thinking positively about things doesn't actually make them happen. For the privileged folk spewing the fecal matter in this fine piece of print, I suppose this works. Or maybe one day they awaken in their vapid wasteland of a life.

But hey, I'm actually a relatively positive guy or positively a relative guy, I always get those confused. Take today, where I put on my shirt before my pants for about the first time ever and the result was such that I'd tucked only the back of my shirt into my waistband (when really none of it should have been tucked), and meanwhile my fly wasn't done up. Did I freak out? No, I took it in stride, laughed to myself and apologized to the large group of schoolchildren that had to witness it all.

Even with my fly down, my secret wasn't revealed.

Until next time internet, you stay data rich.

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.