Meek New World

In a second, I'm going to be the five-billionth person to talk about technology and how it's changed our lives. So, you know, brace yourselves for innovation.
As has slowly become more and more apparent, my natural inclination is to introversion. This is only fractionally surprising because I had about a 6-7 year run starting in college during which time I was pretty legitimately extroverted. Basically all my life before and after this sustained bout of openness has been what I now clearly deem to be my true state of being.
It's not that I don't like people or that I don't enjoy being around them, it's just that usually I don't need other people, and in fact I not-infrequently prefer to be totally alone. Additionally, in most instances when a decision could be made to do something either more or less socially, I will almost always choose the "less."
Anyhow, this fancy thing called the text message just happens to allow me to much more easily be myself.
People surely remember what it was like to communicate without text messages. You actually had to speak to someone else, like verbally. And you had to listen at the same time. It was weird. And awkwardly intimate. If someone was your friend, you had to call him on the phone to make plans to see him, plus you'd inevitably have to exchange pleasantries while doing so. There would be no sports or asinine commercials on the TV to use as a social crutch. And assuming you were trying to get together more than just one other person (again, the group setting to be used as a social crutch), you'd have to repeat this verbal conversation several times, likely even more than once for a couple of individuals. The horror, indeed.
My own personal timeline with this is a little bit undescriptive because wholesale texting started not too long after I left college and clearly my social dynamic was changing a lot at that time anyway, but I can pretty easily say that I communicate directly with far more people now than I did pre-text.
As long as you don't engage in many one-on-one dinners or conversations with people, it's much easier to maintain seemingly meaningful friendships in the texting world. I'm probably a little outside the meaty part of the bell curve on this, but think about your own list of regular communicators. I dare you to tell me that you would talk all of those people as regularly if you actually had to talk to them every time. No chance.
When you are in college, you have lots of "friends" who are such largely because of ease and proximity. They aren't actually your friends, because as soon as you or they move away you stop talking to them. Sure, it's easy to reconnect every once in a while and you would probably still get along fine, but they aren't on your speed dial. There are certain people who are your friends in college who truly are your friends and you in fact do keep in at least semi-regular contact with them afterwards, but there are more who you don't.
The text message allows a lot of those people who are fringe friends to stay in your inner circle. They aren't simply proximate friends like in college but their existence is your life is just as lazy for you. Because you don't have to really invest or engage or share those awkwardly intimate moments of direct one-on-one verbal communication, your dissimilarity or true standing with each other never has to be confronted. The text message lets us all be cowards. Which is fine with me, as long as I don't have to tell you that to your face, with actual spoken words.

The Worse and Worst

How horrible are people?
How much more horrible are we now than we were before?
How much of a reinforcing factor is the media in reporting horribleness?
Does this reinforcement work more strongly for negative stories than positive ones?
Is the media responsible for horribleness, if even slightly?

My kneejerk answers to these questions would be: pretty horrible, noticeably so, a lot, yes, and yes.
I'm not going to link it because the contextual facts of the story are irrelevant, but what got me thinking about this is that I stumbled onto a story about a 35 year old woman who had given up her child for adoption about fifteen years ago. It seems she tracked down this biological son via the internet, befriended/manipulated him, and actually had sex with him.
This story is so absurdly horrible that I at first have a hard time believing that a human being is possible of that kind of depravity all on his/her own, that some vile stew of contemporary evils must have swirled around in this woman's conscious and unconscious beings to create the possibility for her actions.(1)
My next thought was about the old cliche how the major news outlets only report on negative stories and not positive ones. I also thought about how the still-adolescent internet media seems to cycle through stories in an exponential desire to find the most extraordinary or most amazing or most horrible one, as though the hyper-competitive nature of internet news forces that media to deliver greater and greater shock value to slice off whatever attention it can from its overstimulated audience. And how could this constant yearning for extremes, coupled with the clear and longstanding negative focus of these news stories, not lead a consuming humanity into at least unconsciously worse and worse behavior.
It's like the psychology behind copy-cat crimes, only with a baser, least-common-denominator competitive streak.
I think this effect does exist. I think this is a form of radical social evolution that is sped along by the brute power and speed of worldwide web connectedness.
I think as a general rule that the media is definitely complicit in this, but on a macro level and not a micro one. I don't specifically dislike media outlets or forms or any people associated with or responsible for them, but I do with some consistency dislike the observable effects of "media." In a way, you could say that not everyone is prepared to be exposed to infinite information.(2) You could definitely say that not everyone producing media is prepared for the responsibility of infinite information.
It's nice to know things. It's nicer to know that you can know something if only you decide to. But the near-infinite experiences of the world population are too much for any one person, especially when being handily distilled by media into only the wildest and most unbelievable.
I guess in a secondary and indirect way I'm saying to you not to leave out the banality of the world. Indeed, if media only to focus more on the amazingly positive stories that abound in the world, then that would only partly remedy the situation.
Nonetheless, as a consequence of this strain of thought, here in this blog I'm going to try to consciously make note of the wonderful things that I see, both inherent in the world and of course those which come from people.


1. Big time disclaimer here. I'm in no way excusing this woman from blame here. I'm also not saying she did what she did as part of some natural escalation of society. Every crime is unique because every criminal is unique. What I'm saying is that the maybe 0.01% of crazy that got into this woman thanks to her absorption of other negative media stories might be enough to push her ever slightly to ever-worse acts. And if lots and lots of people are absorbing the same tiny sliver of acceptance of depravity, then eventually dominoes will start to fall. It's like the parable if you put a million monkeys in front of a million typewriters and give them a million years, eventually one would produce Hamlet. But if they were all watching a continuous loop of Shakespearean tragedies while sitting in front of the typewriters, you can be very sure that it would take a lot less longer.
2. Naturally, no one could ever be prepared for infinite information, though the thought, as mere theory to consider, is an interesting one.

A Conversation, Part II

So I was drifting along the fringe of this little conversation, mostly just waiting for it to be over and trying not to make it seem so, kinda enjoying the fact that I didn't have to join in much, when the other woman finally focused on me, and I'm pretty sure she only did so in a trying-to-be-nice way so I wouldn't feel excluded or so she could show how nice she is by showing interest in me, someone she'd probably never see again. Her question was so predictable that you might be amazed that at this point in my life I haven't ever bothered to create a stock answer for it.
"So what do you do?"
This is not even a difficult question to answer. And yet. I hate this question. It's not just the chit-chat banality of it, either, though I do hate mindless chatting.
When engaging in conversation with someone you don't know, 99.9% of the time the other person will be looking for a quick and easy way to stereotype, judge, and compartmentalize you(1), in that order; or, if you're lucky, they're not doing that very actively and are instead just trying to ask the flattest questions possible so as to fill the time until someone else shows up without having to mentally engage at all. "What do you do?" is the quintessential example of the latter, but its insidiousness lies in that after your brief chat is over, the other person will quite often actually remember how you respond to it and from then on that is how they will know you. To them, you will not be you, but instead a first name and an occupation(2).
Ah but this is my blog and this is going to be more personal than that. So let me admit that the other big reason I loathe "What do you do?" is because--at least compared with most people--I don't have a very good answer to it. I've been seriously employed for 6 years now so naturally I have a perfectly suitable answer, but I don't have a "good" one, an answer that engages the interest or, presumably, respect of the questioner.
My official title is Assistant Facilities Manager, but mostly I answer the question with Office Manager, because that word Facilities tends to confuse a lot of people. But everyone knows what both an Office and a Manager are. Telling a near-stranger that you are an "Office Manager" doesn't really elicit much interest; I know this because I don't often get a follow-up question outside of "Where at?" or "What company?"
Some of the reasons people don't find much interesting about my job title: I usually don't like talking to strangers all that much, I don't with any comfort brag about myself(3), I am pretty much biologically wired to hate all things pompous, and am therefore unable to engage in the same phony bullshit that people do to try to impress other people, and finally, I myself simply am not all that interested in talking about jobs, so my general inability to disguise my feelings about a subject can pretty easily influence another person's reception of it.
I am not what I do. A lot of people are, but not me. I don't take my work home with me, and I would change careers almost instantly if that were to ever change. I'm not usually very productive with my spare time, but I rather zealously will defend my right to it.
For me, a job is a way to make enough money to make myself, and now my future wife and presumptive family, happy. I've never really had much of a desire for a specific job. Maybe that's laziness and maybe it's a lack of ambition that's followed me most of my life, but I don't really care. It's hard to make other people interested in what you do if you don't devote terribly much of your own interest to it.
None of this is to say that what I do is boring or unfulfilling or in some way shameful. Well, I work in an office, so sometimes it actually is boring, but not usually. I will say that at one point I did wonder how essential my position was. Basically how replaceable was I? But that passed because I realized that yes indeed some of my personal skills provide sometimes great value to the company. It can be hard to effectively explain with any brevity what I truly do. Mostly this is because I do a lot of different things. Truly, I am not an Office Manager. I do many different things in many different degrees of intensity for almost random durations, and so I often don't know what I'll be doing in the next week.
Sometimes I am an Accountant. Sometimes I work in Real Estate. Sometimes I stock shelves. Sometimes I am a Financial Analyst. Sometimes I am a plain old Manager. Sometimes I work in HR. Sometimes I am a Project Coordinator. Sometimes I am a Painter. Sometimes I pass myself off as a Lawyer. Sometimes I clean up messes. Sometimes I am a Creative Consultant. Sometimes I am a Carpenter. Sometimes I work in Demo. Always I am looking for ways to be more efficient. Almost always I am a professional. I could probably get a lot more milage out of some of the specific aspects of my job when trying to impress people talking about what I do, but I don't try to impress people. I have heard friends or acquaintances answering the "What do you do?" question in the way that you are supposed to: embellished and aggrandized. I cringe when this happens. You see, it's the delivery and acceptance of this practice that makes people seem almost let down when I answer simply and reservedly. "What do you do?" isn't even really a question, it's an invitation to show yourself off. It's like a job interview question. And most people will bullshit with the best of them when given the opportunity.
Fuck those people. If you ask me what time it is I will say "4:15" or whatever, I won't talk about how great or expensive my watch is. If you ask me what I studied in college I will say "English," I won't give a dissertation on why I so dislike Charles Dickens. If you ask me if I have a girlfriend I will say "yes," I won't talk about how I often honestly feel like I have a better relationship than anyone else in the world. If you want to honestly know about my relationship experiences, then you're going to have to honestly ask. If you want the description of my job to sound like a CEO or a famous artist or goddamned race car driver(4), then you're going to be disappointed. Contrary to the way most people talk about themselves to strangers, those interesting or prestigious jobs are filled by a tiny tiny minority of the population.

What I do is I enjoy myself. Who I am is a much deeper and more complex topic than could or should ever be discussed with a stranger.


1. Those other 0.1% of people are the ones who become my friends.
2. This is only vaguely related, but I went through a phase a while back where I used to not want people to tell me their names when I met them. This was for two reasons: first, I would often just forget the name anyway; and second, since a person's name isn't of their choice it really doesn't say anything about him. I much preferred to see first if I enjoyed the other person any, and if so, only then would it really be necessary to know the name. After all, if I turned out not to like the person, I would not be communicating with him again and would have just wasted a tiny space of my brain by putting his name there. Efficiency.
3. I should say "truthfully" brag about myself. I used to, and sometimes still do, love to display a faux arrogance. I do it for laughs or to diffuse situations, but since I'm such a naturally gifted actor I can give people the wrong impression that I actually am that arrogant.
4. This is almost straight out of the movie Swingers, but I don't care. What kind of pretentious asshole society are we in where we are just as well making up some ridiculous fanciful lie about ourselves as telling the simple truth? It doesn't seem to matter that a person is happy with his life if he doesn't get appropriate approval from a stranger. Being proud of yourself is a 100% internal personal emotion.

A Conversation, Part I

Sara's mom was in town last weekend. Now, since they live in Chicago and we've only been around a handful of times, I'm still rather new to the whole mother-in-law situation. There is the stereotype that all mothers-in-law are awful people, to be dealt with only when necessary, and then swiftly and forcefully, but I can't say that I've had that yet. Maybe it hasn't fully sunk in yet that she is going to be a part of my immediate family, and not just a parent of a friend. The latter is the way I've approached her so far. Actually that's basically how I approach everyone in my life. But I wonder how things will change as time goes by.
On a more immediate level, her visit last weekend came with its perks and its.......uh, not-perks. Really the only not-perk is the simple obligation to spend large amounts of time doing things that I might not necessarily choose to do in normal circumstances. This obligation-reaction is probably just the bachelor part of my psyche trying to fool myself into thinking I ever live my life fully independently anymore, and since you know I'm going to be married in just a couple months, you know that's certainly not true. Anyway, I'm still dealing with making these simple sacrifices of my personal time for the greater good of my lovely Sara and my new family. I'll get over it. And besides, having multiple meals and other things paid for will always far outweigh any childish instincts I may have.
It was at one of these gratis events that something happened to spur this post in the first place. We three went to see an Off-Broadway show on Saturday night.* After the show, we were talking with a couple from Chicago that Sara's mom knows and randomly bumped into.

--Give me a brief aside here. Try to think of a social situation in which your dear friend Josh would have the least amount of things to say or add to the conversation. Now compare that scenario to the real-life one I was confronted with here: Saturday night, with future wife and future mother-in-law, just exited a Broadway show and have about 1/1000th the sensibility for them as my two companions, who are exhorting me to share my thoughts on the show. Add to that mixture two similarly-aged friends of future mother-in-law from her city in town specifically to see Broadway shows. Oh, and the conversation started off reminiscing about how future mother-in-law's friend is the mother of a guy who represented future wife's first-ever date, which took place when she was in the 3rd or 4th grade. Oh, also, this guy is either married or engaged and happened to bump into Sara when she was alone a few months ago and hit on her. Wind-up Josh doesn't have any pre-prepared quips or lines to deal with this situation. Ok, back to the story--

So anyway, the conversation progressed as you might expect, mostly Sara's mom and the other wife talking, Sara smiling happily and jumping in from time to time, the husband doing the fake smile only older married men are capable of while slipping in the proper amount of jokes. You notice I didn't mention anything about myself. That's because I didn't really add anything, rather predictably.

Ok, I realize now I'd like to break this into two parts, this one contains enough observation for now. You'll get Part II with the actual meat of the post later.

* I've been to two shows now and I can say a few things about them. First, if the show is not on the campy side of the spectrum, I can certainly enjoy it. Both of the two I saw were safe here. Second, my ability to appreciate the medium of Broadway is nowhere near fully formed. It would be presumptuous of me to make any assumptions about when or if it ever does form. My commentary on any show would be like a tourist just back from a 5day stay in Russia rhapsodizing about communism. It's best just to stay out of things you don't know. Third, I'm going to make an honest effort to go to more shows at irregular intervals because I realize that Sara approaches these shows in the same way that I approach live sporting events: they are very nice and fun, but ultimately just a tip of a larger obsession, but nonetheless if I avoid live sporting events for too long a time, I will find myself needing, not wanting, to attend one. Finally, why can't these theaters invest in comfortable chairs? Is there some tradition I'm unaware of that dictates that seats should hold your ass comfortably for no longer than an hour, even though any show is at least 30-40 minutes longer than that? Come on, broadway, the movie industry figured out that it's ok to let audiences be comfortable in their seats for long periods. The few you will lose to sleepiness will be easily offset by the more who will come because they don't have to worry about ass ache (I'd like to say I'm part of the latter category, but I can't promise I wouldn't also belong to the former).

your efforts are futile

ive come to realize that i have a real talent for something. hold on now, because no this isnt going to be any kind of back-slapping exercise like i sometimes engage in. i only realize it's a talent because ive noticed that not only do not many people share this talent, but quite a few are actually utterly incapable of it in any regard.
i have an effortless ability to not feel another person's uncomfortability in conversation. basically, i do not naturally feel any empathy in conversational settings. ive only come to notice this over many years, as i watch other people get sucked into things they dont want any part of simply because they do the normal thing and act interested and nod their head and otherwise dont ignore the other person imposing on their time/space.
if you find yourself with me in a social situation and neither of us has anything natural to add, then you can just save yourself the agony and know that i wont say anything and i wont judge you for doing the same. see, what happens for the huge majority of people is, while they might be able to recognize that i wont add anything to the "conversation," almost no one is able to come to terms with the latter fact: that it really is ok for them to do the same. pretty much everyone i ever come across finds it impossible to leave well enough alone and forces some attempt at chatter, only to find that their efforts only enhance the awkwardness.
i say awkwardness because i can appreciate the sensation that most people have in these situations. i am capable of feeling awkwardness, though it is relatively rare. the important thing to know here is that, with extremely small exception, i dont feel awkward during conventionally "awkward" social conversational situations.
if you want to talk to me about your cat or something and you cat doesnt happen to interest me (this is an apt example, fyi), then i wont really engage in your conversation and youll end up basically talking out loud for no good reason. if you tell me something about the weather being hot, i will recognize this as a forced attempt at breaking through, but i will do nothing to help you there; instead i will either agree or disagree about the actual point you make regarding the heat, and then stop talking.
i dont want this now to sound like im not ever interested by things people say or merely people themselves. this is far from true. sometimes the smallest or most banal things will completely engage me. i think i am interested by things a pretty normal amount. normal, meaning about the same as most people. which, given the fact that i felt the need to write this post on this subject, would seem to suggest that most people who are normally interested by things do not actually behave that way. they will act like they are interested in far more things that they really are. they will be phony. i am sorry but this is true. if it's a bad thing to be phony on a macro level then surely it should be just as bad to be phony on a micro level.
i think this ties back into how i started this, actually. it's ok to feel uncomfortable. it's ok not to care about things, just as much as to care about things. do not get frustrated by my seemingly poor social skills just because you have a hard time understanding this, and i promise not to let your lack of awareness further degrade my social abilities around you.

The Big Republican Problem

This ought to be the last political post for a while, or at least the last one focused mainly on politics. They're fun in doses, and I'm sure I will have had my fill soon enough.

During the last several weeks as I've habitually politics-loaded, I've tried to make sure I get a little of both sides. The problem with internet surfing for legit but opinionated information is that similar-minded sites tend to link to each other but not as much to dissenting ones. To get around this, you have to follow a link where a liberal is making fun of what a conservative is saying, and then once at the other site, to browse around rather than simply read what was linked. For your information, one site that's dedicated to conservative thinking (and no I'm not using that phrase ironically. I think it's terribly stupid when liberals (or any group that might ever drift toward elitism) act like it's impossible to find extremely intelligent arguments from the other side. No one has a monopoly on good ideas.) which I have found to contain plenty of smart, readable content is nextright.com. There are many others but my laziness has limited me mostly to revisiting this one.
Anyhow, in reading some of these Republican sites, I can't help but notice some of the comments to articles. As with any site, the comments are on another planet than the articles, quality-wise, but since I don't have as many righty friends anymore, and I don't see many here in Manhattan, it can be slightly if curiously informative. Being from Eastern Ohio, and raised in a somewhat culturally conservative household, I have some experience with both sides of the political debate. Of course over time I have tended to the left in my own thinking but I can certainly respect and often agree with either side.
Now, there are a lot of conservatives lamenting their performance Tuesday, for good reason, but there may be even more (the more ambitious or enthusiastic at least) that are attempting to lay out how to regain traction and eventually return to national power. Many of the excuses/ideas offered are reasonable, but I've found that my own personal feeling regarding the biggest Republican problem has gone laregly unmentioned.
Somewhere along the line (I'll leave others to decide when exactly), Republicans made a decision that, sure, it's ok if a large portion of our base consists of bigoted, ignorant, uninformed, and homogenous individuals. By letting too many of these types of voters run amok as a big chunk of their base, the Republicans took up residence on the wrong side of history. By consistently doing this, they ensured that no matter what else happened in the present, sooner or later, they were going to fall. I talked about this is my gay marriage post a few back, but it's a guarantee that fairness and virtue will win out in this country in the long run (And let's pause here to note that no matter the flaws of the country or its people, this fact stands high as evidence of its true greatness).
You could probably trace today's versions of the Democratic and Republican parties directly to the civil rights era, when Lyndon Johnson's signing of the Civil Rights Act changed the south from a Democratic stronghold to the Republican one it has remained to this day. Starting there, they fell behind (in many cases, to say they "fell behind" is very generous, more descriptive to say they "vigorously opposed.") on racism, abortion, guns, the environment, anything science-related, homosexuality, and pretty much any other progressive social/cultural issue. They took the easy road and pandered to the ignorances, fears, and insecurities of the present, somehow not noticing that the supporters of intolerance would shrink as the years went on and people naturally became more accepting of others' differences. They somehow didn't notice that the national share of white males was diminishing every year as this country continued it's centuries-old tradition of receiving immigrants in high numbers (I don't have a source handy, but it's estimated that in the not-too-distant future, there will be no more majority race).
Of course, not all Republicans favor oppression and intolerance. Most of the leaders of the party and a great percentage of its members nationwide are personally appalled at that behavior. But too many of their base is not, and because it's "the base," Republican leaders have gone to great lengths not to alienate it.
The Democrats are imminently capable of screwing up their current majority (also let's not overlook the poorly educated sections of their party) and they might sometimes consider themselves lucky to have stumbled into their preferred socially progressive positions, but assuming they steer the ship reasonably enough, I predict that the Republicans as we know them will never become a majority national party again until they've accepted this as ground zero and simply cast off their lot of ignorant fools. In consecutive national elections, this base has proven utterly futile, so what good is it to them? They need to rework the party from the bottom up. If their various strategists and thinkers can't see that their uneducated and intolerant base is nothing but a huge albatross, then they don't deserve the status as anything more than a minor third-party. Let their factions form their own parties: the Racist Party, the Homophobic Party, the Creationist Party, the Guns Don't Kill People I Kill People Party. What would be left of the Republicans would be absolutely certain to peel off lots of the not-yet-entrenched newly moderate part of the Democratic party. If they were somehow able to commit to their policy issues in any kind of big-tent way, they would probably stand a great chance to defeat the Democrats again.
But this kind of eschewing of their embarrassing base would take time and result in many failures in the near future, so they are sure not to heed it. It's the easy way out, and it's what got them into this mess 40-some years ago.

Finally, from a personal standpoint, can you imagine this country with the various intolerant groups having been marginalized politically? I'd say that's as close as a large society like the US could get to eutopia.

you remember that pathetic woman i work with? well i still can't stand her. "hi josh! happy friday!" -- i can't here effectively describe the pluckiness present in this greeting, nor the transparency of the pluckiness. she's a bitch. she knows it, i know it, and worse--she knows i know it. so why carry on the charade? on a more fundamental level, what disgusts me not so much about her specifically but people like her that have nothing in their lives (that comment might sound harsh but let me specify that her circumstance is through no fault but her own, it's not like she's lost friends and/or loved ones through tragedy or anything of that sort), is that these people don't get any joy from it actually being friday. they only look forward to the ability to say "happy friday!" in other words, she couldn't care less about having a weekend ahead of her (in fact she probably despises them as it cuts her off from her only real connection to the "real world"), she only enjoys the ability to be awful and obnoxious and waste people's time. and i can't stand it. it make me upset and uneasy so that i have a physical need to recoil from it. kinda like how some people feel about being around nursing homes. sure, maybe it's insensitive on my part but let's get real, that shit is just unpleasant.