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My former roommate (I left him for a roommate with boobs) enjoys his relationship with gravity. According to him, if you open a bagged food product, and want to close it for later consumption, all you have to do is wrap the bag around what remains of the product and place it back in the cupboard or refrigerator. Gravity, he explains, takes care of the rest. The bag will remain closed, and the product will remain fresh, so long as gravity keeps on grooving.

But not everyone has such a good working relationship with gravity. Overheard in Brooklyn, as I was exiting the subway:

Young Girl #1: Yo why escalators always be goin up? How come they don’t be goin down too?

Young Girl #2: True. Not enough escalators be goin down.

True. Walking down stairs should be easier. Get on that New York. Get on that.

I was standing in line at a bodega about ten minutes ago, when two women entered the store speaking loudly to each other in a language that at one point might have been English. They hovered by the entrance where they had come in, and I kept my eye on them because the first woman who had come through the door looked poised to jump the line.

And she did jump the line. After a few minutes of standstill it suddenly moved and she vaulted to the counter. I was supposed to be next, so I said: “Hey.”

I said it in a tone of voice that was louder than talking but not quite loud enough to be considered a shout. She ignored me. I moved towards the counter to confront her but she had already dropped a dollar in front of the clerk.

Without saying anything, he handed her two cigarettes. I stopped moving and watched her take them from him. She said thanks, he took the dollar, and that was it. She walked away, back in the direction of the entrance, and as I was laying my purchases out on the counter I heard her friend complaining about the line.

The clerk bagged my stuff. I paid, walked past the first woman, and left. I wasn’t as mad as I otherwise would have been. If she’s in a place where she has to pay for her cigarettes a few at a time, I can deal with waiting in line for an extra fifteen seconds.

I’m not sure why I feel the need to report the experience. It just seems like something worth a thought or two.

In case you haven’t noticed it already, keep your eye out for this latest-of-trends in American food and beverage product branding.

Emblazoned on everything sugary: the fact that sugar has 0 trans fats!

Emblazoned on everything fatty: the fact that fat has 0 carbs!

Or something to that effect. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go dip a cheeseburger in chocolate sauce (and feed it to a baby).

About a year ago, I was having lunch with a friend, and was just starting to launch into my usual “communications-technology-is-killing-communication” speech, when she stopped me pre-rant. “I know what you are going to say,” she said. “And it’s so much worse in Asia.”

My friend is Korean. She was born and raised in the United States but has worked in Korea and Japan for much of her life. And according to her, the average citizen of each of these countries - and especially, the average young person - is completely dependent on his or her cell phone as a source of not only communication but entertainment as well.

Now, I don’t have statistics to support that claim, but let it be known that my friend is both observant and intelligent. Even if her point of view is somewhat exaggerated - probably in the face of the possible ramifications of what’s in that point of view (something that admittedly often happens to yours truly) - there’s very little chance that she’s not somewhat right. I’ll leave it to my Korean and Japanese readers, and my half Korean and half Japanese readers, to add some more perspective or information if they feel the need.

But back to the point, before it stabs us:

Novels written and distributed via cell phone are starting to dominate the best seller lists in Japan.

Read more

Following is a list of links that you may find interesting. I emailed them to myself over the course of the week, because I had been planning to discuss each one of them separately, but that ain’t going to happen so here they are.

• The Sad Fact Link: This article from The New York Times is about vanishing blue collar jobs. The topic of vanishing blue collar jobs is certainly nothing new, and I’m sure that there are plenty of economists and sociologists and politicians and historians who will tell you that such phenomena are just a natural consequence of business. And that could very well be true. But truth won’t provide the people covered in the article with the traction they’ll need to keep from slipping into poverty. Neither will $800, Mr. President. Again, reader(s), read The Conscience of A Liberal.
• The Gleefully Relevant to This Site Link: The value of this article, as far as I am concerned, isn’t illustrated so much by the article itself as it is by the comments that the article inspired (almost 250). The main topic of the conversation is narcissism among young Americans. Unfortunately, the article itself isn’t as insightful or as thought provoking as it could be, however it did spur some conversation (again: see the comments section). Some very interesting ideas are tossed about in those comments, by both the old and the young. Check it out. And forward the link to ten of your friends or you’ll have (purple) diarrhea tonight.
• The Not A Huge Deal But Still Sort of Pathetic Link: This story is about the recent addition of Stephen Colbert’s portrait to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery. The situation itself is funny. The painting is only going to hang for a short while - between the bathrooms. But when you learn that twenty year olds “…might look at the rest of the museum, but really came for Colbert,” it gets less funny. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe no one cares about portraits - except this guy with his bobble head rhinoceros.
• The Other Blog Worth Reading Link: I started reading Patrick Walsh’s personal blog when he started writing for Cinematical.com. He’s a good, funny, intelligent writer. More importantly, he’s a readable writer. It really blows my mind (and cups my mind’s balls) when I see how many mediocre writers are out there getting their work read - when that work is hardly readable (as in, incompletely conceived and poorly constructed.) A good writer should be able to conceive and construct almost on the fly. Anyway, Patrick Walsh claims he is not a pedophile.
• The Good Example of Something Positive That Can Be Done to Offset American Technological Waste Link: Recycle that (mobile) shit.

Happy Weekend. Check out those links. After all, Saturdays are for catching up on what’s going on in your world.

As mentioned in an earlier post, I’ll soon be working on producing some web video episodes (webisodes!) for the site. They will hopefully be both entertaining and thought-provoking. Look for the first one to arrive in three or four weeks.

For now, though, please watch (or re-watch) the only other online video(s) I can offer for the time being, which come from my first directing effort, Over Easy. Originally released as a standalone short film, I have split it into three parts for the internet.

Add this to the list of posts reprinted from Yesterday’s Salad. It’s from a while ago but the experience it details provides a good example of how backwards our “progressive” society and economy can be when simple tasks get spread out among a throng of people - each of whom is perched in front of their own computer and/or toying with their cell phone.

* * *

Early one morning, a few weeks ago, I dropped my cell phone in the toilet. It was a pre-pee-or-poop drop, so I dove in. Alas, it was too late.

That baby really slid down there. It was almost as if it knew how worthless it was, being 1) old 2) unattractive (gasp!) 3) a cell phone in the first place. The thing almost disappeared down the toilet hole, and when I finally got it out, it started calling my parents all on its own. I don’t believe this was a coincidence. It was my lady’s toilet I had dropped it in, and I think my cell phone, knowing how worthless I felt it to be, was seeking some sort of tattle-tail’s revenge.

“He’s at a lady’s house early in the morning, parents. Do you have any idea what that might mean? What would your own parents think if you had done that? Sure…times are different…but look what happened to Uncle Al! Oh, and, mom-parent, he didn’t lift the seat - but despite all of what I just said, you’ll like the lady - she yells at him for peeing on the seat. He grumbles at her about how he can’t win, that she always nags him for leaving it up, so he just leaves it down now. Then she says that she means to put it back down when he’s done - and then there’s a little more back and forth, then they argue, and then he tells her how sexy she is, and she, after agreeing, says something similar in turn, and then they’re both in the bathroom, and, well, you don’t want to know what happens then, unless you do-”

That is what my cell phone would have said, if I hadn’t ripped out its battery. Such a vindictive cell phone. All the more so, I believe, because of what I would have to go through to get a replacement. I feel like it knew this, and purposely enjoyed a last laugh even as it died.

So, because the majority of our lives seem to now revolve, if not around our cell phones exactly, at least around conditions wherein constant and around-the-clock communication is not only possible but imperative to our day-to-day survival (what if my car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, or worse, the edge of nowhere, otherwise known as the abstract state of being that I am slowly falling into as I sit here talking about someone or something that was doing something to someone who was talking about them doing something that they didn’t do but was only talking about doing…or something) - anyway - because of all this, I decided to wait a week to replace my phone.

I also decided to wait a week because in a week I would be eligible for a free one hundred dollar upgrade from Verizon (who, by the way, totally ruined the nickname that Vertical Horizon was planning on using for themselves while touring…before they fell off the face of the earth…because they’re full of fluff) as a result of my plan being up for renewal.

Please follow that link, because:

1. I need to know what they are all looking at…especially if the horizon has been rotated to run up and down.
2. I need to know if that’s Roger Clemens in the back-right of the picture.

Back to the handed task: I waited the week. But how did I survive? Well, I’ll tell you the truth. I used my work phone and a landline. This left me susceptible to incommunicadoness when I wasn’t at work or at home. It was like a vacation in the past, and I liked it. My lady: “Wait, so if you’re not at work or at home…I can’t talk to you?”

Read more

Note: This post is also available on Yesterday’s Salad. I have included it here because certain elements of “the story” have to do with some of the not-so-good things about this country that are touched upon in the introduction to the site.

* * *

I had two run-ins with the law this past weekend, one direct and the other not so much. Before I go any further, I should say that both were extremely minor, and probably boring as well. But seeing as how this is The Internet, I will elaborate anyway. Someone, somewhere, might care about these run-ins, and for this reason both stories are important. I will keep telling myself this for as long as you support the delusion.

The second one first (so backwards!):

I was driving. A strong rain began to pelt my car, and all the cars around it as well. My windshield was dirty, my wiper blades were dull, my tires were bald, and I hadn’t driven much over the course of the past six years (a result of living in Poor Person’s Purgatory New York City). Six years ago I would have taken the situation for a challenge. But last weekend it made me nervous. My future wife was in the passenger seat, and I didn’t want to hydroplane and possibly get into an accident because then she might get hurt. This would have been no good. Her face is too pretty and I love her and besides that I need someone to pick my nose. So, anyway, a strong pelting rain.

As we got closer to The City, the rain stayed strong and the amount of traffic increased by about a million percent. This obviously made things even more difficult, and I soon ended up in an EZ-Pass toll lane instead of a cash toll lane when it came time to pay the man (for the privilege of independent movement). My ass was fresh out of EZ-Passes, so I couldn’t pull one out of there, and so not knowing what else to do when we came to that toll barrier, I put the car in park and looked (sheepishly!) around. Very soon, a tall, angry police officer approached the car.

I won’t go into specifics about what he said to me, except to say that it was comprised mostly of abusive questions as to why “it’s so hard to get into the right lane,” and angry professions about how “it’s not his job to collect money from people.” Being somewhat empathetic to his situation (as well as towards angry people in general) I apologized more than once, and attempted to explain to him what should have been pretty clear - that it was fucking raining like hell and I hadn’t done it on purpose. But that really only made him madder.

Partially he got madder was because I was right, but I think his problem with me also had a lot to do with the general fact that some angry people are going to be angry and abusive no matter how you choose to deal with them. Hit them back with a smile and a calm voice, and they’ll get madder. Give them some of their own medicine, and they’ll get madder. There’s no winning with them - they are angry not at you but at what you represent, a reflection of their own dissatisfaction with their life and situation. These feelings are only somewhat offset by shiny badges. A much better choice, for the unfortunate soul that finds himself subjected to them on a regular basis, would probably be to subvert all of these feelings, ball them together, and then plug them into a bureaucracy. That way more people - and their families - can pay the price for your emotional issues.

Anyway! My conversation with the toll booth police officer ended in him saying “don’t speak,” in a tone of voice that made me want to get out of the car and punch him in the face while speaking incessantly. I didn’t get out of the car, though, and I didn’t speak - because my future wife advised me to just stay silent and listen to him, and because had I done anything to piss him off further I most probably would have been both beaten up and arrested. This would not have been fun.

In the end I paid five dollars for a four dollar and fifty cent toll, the entire amount of which probably went into his pocket. I was also made afraid to exercise one of my rights as an American citizen because “I didn’t want no trouble” after making an understandable mistake while driving in pouring rain.

So that was fun. Read more

Check out this post from the NY Times Bits Blog for a sampling of what it’s like to be in the belly of the consumer electronics beast (The 2008 Consumer Electronics Show).

And, if you’re interested, click around and read a few more of the author’s posts. He looks like he knows both how to write and what he’s talking about.

This is encouraging. This is refreshing. This is a Diet 7-Up with a fortune cookie label.

To read Part I of The Computerization of Your Human Brain, click here. For Part II, click here.

* * *

I was listening (with attentiveness!) to my wife-to-be the other day when she all of a sudden forgot what she was talking about, stopped speaking and sighed.

“I hope you know that if you marry me, I may end up like that woman in The Notebook.”

In case you haven’t seen The Notebook, I’ll tell you two things before I move on. First, Rachel McAdams is in The Notebook, but her eyebrows are not. I don’t know why. Second, after my wife-to-be (or, wyfe2b, as she’s known on MySpace) told me this, she then swore to God that her memory, at twenty-five, is starting to seriously fail her. That’s all you really need to know. Except that…

…she’s probably right.

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