The Amish Project
A 24-year-old student went 90 days without using a cell phone, email or social media. Yahoo News interviewed him about the experience:
I definitely just lost complete contact with people that normally would have been part of my life. I mean it’s also an interesting metric for your life to see who some of your closest friends are, you know, and who’s willing to take the time.
I find it an interesting thought experiment to contrast this idea with Clusterflock, which is the clearest example in my life of the relationship-building power of the internet and social technology. The internet made it possible to seek out an entirely new tribe of people – people with which I have so much in common and so much to talk about, but that I hadn’t realized existed.
But then there are social networks like Facebook, which at their worst takes all of the people who are already part of your life – your co-workers, your school chums, your family – and hands them a level of intimacy about our lives that they haven’t really earned and don’t particularly deserve. I think that’s why it’s so interesting when these online relationships predicated on intimate knowledge but passive communication go bust when one party pulls out of Facebook – we’re just learning a hard lesson about the differences between that kind of intimate knowledge and true friendship, which for the longest time I thought were one and the same.
A couple relatives recently found me on Google Plus (I use it primarily for the sad remnants of what was once Google Reader). I hadn’t even acknowledged their existence before they were already commenting on every single piece of information attached to my name. This, I’m told, is keeping in touch.
Metta World Peace thanks Jesus Christ that he still has his teeth
So not only did he build the world in seven days and seven nights, but he also said, “OK, let them lose their teeth early, rather than late.”
Repost of a Post Past
Going down the rabbit-hole of Cece’s post. Great rememberies here, following “flockers.”
Because, there you are
One of my favorite parts of Hillman Curtis’s book on Creating Short Films is that as soon as you turn the camera on, the person you are interviewing is there. You don’t have to do anything. They will show you who they are. I may not be remembering that part exactly right, but I’m not going to look it up, because it’s true.
An Introduction
My car is a Kia.
I drive to IKEA.
I had Chick-fil-A for lunch.
How doctors die
Ken Murray, MD, is Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC. These are his observations:
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently. [...]
To administer medical care that makes people suffer is anguishing. Physicians are trained to gather information without revealing any of their own feelings, but in private, among fellow doctors, they’ll vent. “How can anyone do that to their family members?” they’ll ask. I suspect it’s one reason physicians have higher rates of alcohol abuse and depression than professionals in most other fields. I know it’s one reason I stopped participating in hospital care for the last 10 years of my practice.
How has it come to this — that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system.
text my mom sent
check out the bear with boobs behind jesus.
Ice Cube Celebrates Charles and Ray Eames (and Los Angeles)
In a world full of McMansions where the structure takes up all the land, the Eames made structure and nature one.
(via @gary_hustwit)
from the comments
For me, holding a grudge is like expecting the world to conform to my view of it. So I don’t hold them. But everybody encounters the stuff that grudges are made of, and when I do it always leaves me with a sense that a mystery is hovering at the edge of my vision. My impulse always is to make things right, but experience has shown me that my desire for that is not always sufficient cause to make it happen. For me, moving on can often just mean becoming very good at looking away, and away, and away.
from the comments
The seeds that fell off are the footnotes.
Cain Suspends Campaign
It’s official, Herman Cain has suspended his campaign. And he certainly picked an interesting opportunity to make the announcement:
The announcement, originally slated as the opening of his campaign’s Georgia office, featured barbecue, a blues band, and Tea Party movement supporters in colonial costumes, The Times reported.
Too bad. I suspect he would have truly shown brightly in the upcoming Trump-moderated Republican debate.
Poop Brush
This morning I noticed my toothbrush smelled like ass. I didn’t know what to do.
I didn’t exactly yank it out of my mouth right away. I was thinking.
When I removed the brush I looked at it for a time. Then I sniffed it. It smelled pretty high at the base. Pretty extremely fucking stinky. I thought am I in the movies?! Who the hell has put my toothbrush up their ass, and doesn’t this clown know the right way to insert it?
Ahem. Turns out there was a simple answer. The silver goblet thing that holds the toothbrush was full of a terrible solution. The smell was primordial. It almost knocked me out.
Tip: use a transparent container for your toothbrushes, or create new stinky life in the home. And when you rinse the mouth, rinse the container. Simples.
from the comments
I’m in my sweats, under the covers, in a frigidly cold loft located above the karaoke action of my friends’ wedding reception. Right now a muffled voice is singing that love song from the movie, Aladin. We’re all in the guest house on a farm in McDade, Texas. Let me save you the trouble and clarify that this place is about 40 miles outside of Austin. I wish I were wearing some socks, but they’re somewhere in my suitcase and it’s too dark to tell where.
Today was kind of amazing. Rain was forecasted for the outdoor wedding, but as the hours counted down a storm blew in early and fast. We set everything up in the morning, tables, chairs, cloths, settings, flowers, other decorations, and sound equipment. By the time of the ceremony, nearly an hour late due to the brides’ clear need for a last-minute nap, winds were ripping across the farm at speeds greater than 30 miles an hour. Temperatures had dropped below 60 degrees.
You plan for months, you wake up worrying about the location of those dessert spoons you intended to have on hand for the cake course, and then the entire wedding happens (happily!) in the small room intended just for the catering set-up.
What also amazes me is how I respected my socializing limit and stopped there. I wished my friends love and happiness and all the fun they could have in one night, and then I came up here to rest. Last night it nearly broke me being trapped out at a bar in downtown Austin with no hope of leaving the bachelorette party until everyone staying at the farm was ready to take the van back, including the brides.
I am not the unyielding, overtired extrovert I used to be. Now, where are my socks?
tweet of the day
from the moderated comments
…Um, these kind of suck…
Full Disclosure
I’m not cut out for the Back-to-Basics life.
The last few years seem to have been on repeat: By late winter my body is craving an unprocessed, detoxed existence in the sun filled with hard work, and less digitized shenanigans mediated by an ongoing and evermore invasive variety of screens. So nose in a seed pack, fingers in the soil I get to work preparing and planting while dreaming about making cheese from scratch and creating handmade paper. Horrifically, I actually begin to think that one of those back-to-the-land communes could be kind of cool–communes got a bad rap, but they could be something special. Ugh. What is wrong with me?
Further disclosure at maldita lengua.
Last Words
Among the last words my mother spoke to me: “I wish money had never been invented.”
Putting the caped crusader on the couch
From a New York Times Op-Ed published several weeks ago:
Comic books have long relied on mental disorders to drive their most memorable villains. Consider the Batman line, in which the Joker, Harley Quinn and other “criminally insane” rogues are residents of Gotham City’s forensic psychiatric hospital, Arkham Asylum.
Introduced in 1974, Arkham grossly confuses the concepts of psychiatric hospital and prison. Patients are called “inmates,” decked out in shackles and orange jumpsuits, while a mental health professional doubles as the “warden.” Even the antiquated word “asylum” implies that the patients are locked away with no treatment and little hope of rejoining society. [...]
Of course, DC Comics, and comic books in general, are hardly the only source of these stereotypes or the only contributors to discrimination. At the same time, they are widely consumed, whether in the original form or as story lines for movies, TV shows and video games. Modernized mental health depictions in the Batman titles alone would reach millions of people worldwide through its billion-dollar-grossing films and blockbuster video games.
That’s why DC Comics should seize the opportunity with The New 52 to move to the forefront in transforming mental health depictions in comics. To start, writers should stop overemphasizing a link between violence and mental disorders to explain criminal behavior.
protips for arguing
A must read list of intellectually honest and dishonest debate tactics. For example:
Accusation of taking a quote out of context: debater accuses opponent of taking a quote that makes the debater look bad out of context. All quotes are taken out of context—for two reasons: quoting the entire context would take too long and federal copyright law allows “fair use” quotes but not reproduction of the entire text. Taking a quote out of context is only wrong when the lack of the context misrepresents the author’s position. The classic example would be the movie review that says, “This movie is the best best example of a waste of film I have ever seen,” then gets quoted as “This movie is the best…I’ve ever seen.” Any debater who claims a quote misrepresents the author’s position must cite the one or more additional quotes from the same work that supply the missing context and thereby reveal the true meaning of the author, a meaning which is very different from the meaning conveyed by the original quote that they complained about. Furthermore, other unrelated quotes that just prove the speaker is a nice guy are irrelevant. The discussion is about the offending quotes, not whether the speaker is a good guy. The missing context must relate to, and change the meaning of, the statements objected to, not just serve as character witness material about the speaker or writer. Merely pointing out that the quote is not the entire text proves nothing. Indeed, if a search of the rest of the work reveals no additional quotes that show the original quote was misleading, the accusation itself is dishonest.
You know those people you hate getting into arguments with? It’s probably because they, willfully or not, ignore these sorts of distinctions. (via @interdome)
whoa
I just had a miniature explosion – the good kind – inside my head. I don’t quite know how to tell the story, but I’ll try to do it linearly. That’s usually a good strategy.
1st: I become an English teacher and rely almost completely on a book by Jim Burke to figure out what I’m doing. I think it’s a great book. I read every word, including the eloquent epigraph from one of Burke’s students:
Without companions, the world is a sea of stories with no one to listen.
2nd: I join Clusterflock.
3rd: I find that a certain Clusterflocker – Kelsey Parker – was the author of that epigraph.
4th: I hum “It’s a small world” to myself incessantly.
The world of the heterosexual
Commentary courtesy of Aunt Ida (Edith Massey), “Female Trouble” (John Waters).
in a haze
seeing isn’t necessary, running is. so say the limbs to the eyes.
screams echo in a haze but there is no body.
The torch gives enough light to see a couple feet in front of you
Frank Chimero posted the talk he gave at the AIGA National Conference in Phoenix:
There is a reach to knowledge and skill. You know what you know, and through time and effort and diligent focus, you’ve also come to realize a few of the things that you don’t know. You begin to understand that those unknowns are within reach if you stretch a bit. That’s learning. And then the thought occurs to you that puts the fear of God in your bones: there are things out of your reach, (Important things! Crucial things!) that you will never know that you don’t know. It’s a darkness too dark to pierce.
Don’t worry, it’s hopeful too.
quote out of context
In fairness, Generation X could use a better spokesperson. Barack Obama is just a little too senior to count among its own, and it has debts older than Mark Zuckerberg. Generation X hasn’t had a real voice since
Kurt Cobain blew his brains out,Tupac was murdered,Jeff Mangum went crazy,David Foster Wallace hung himself,Jeff Buckley drowned,River Phoenix overdosed,Elliott Smith stabbed himself (twice) in the heart, Axl got fat.
via Tim Carmody
From streetbonersandtvcarnage.com
A reflection on #Occupywallstreet by a twenty-something hipster-ish business owner:
To make ends meet while my business grows, I work at a wine shop and that nets me a whopping $12.50 an hour. As a bonus for my ears, I am privy to humoring whatever bat-shit crazy political stance my customers offer up as they wait for me to ring up their booze. Lately, I’ve been getting customers buying hooch on their way to Occupy Wall Street. Funny, because I don’t recall seeing any of the Little Rock Nine being armed with flasks of Evan Williams. Anyhoo, today this British girl with legs that nearly scraped the ceiling strutted into the shop wearing a see-thru dress. She was particularly amped because she was on her way to the protest and asked if I would like to go. I said no thanks. Without skipping a beat she asks, “Why not? Don’t you hate the banks?”
And there my friends lies the problem with Occupy Wall Street. There is a considerable lack of education on what caused the economic crises and therefore we are playing the blame game. To make matters worse, there seems to be no clear resolution being offered by the protest’s organizers. And if you are reading this and saying, “Well, the giant corporations could just give us the money,” then you sir are a jackass. That mode of thought is reserved for friends of successful rappers who thought that they’d be getting a free ride out of the hood.
I don’t think people shouldn’t be angry, but this feels more like a mood than a movement.
