Wiki-walking: my term for the countless hours lost hyperlinking your way through Wikipedia when, initially, the intent was to read only one entry . It is completely possible someone else has coined this term.
Here is a good wiki-walk I took this morning:
Moby Dick-->greatest novels (Western Canon)-->Great Books of the Western World-->The Great Converstion-->Moby Dick-->Romanticism-->Transcendentalist-->Romanticsm-->The Sorrows of Young Werther-->Sturm und Drang-->Prometheus (unfinished Goethe poem)--Prometheus-->Prometheus Society-->Mensa International . . . terminated.
I learned that Sturm und Drang loosely translates to Storm and Stress . . . which I kind of think would be a cool band name, or a blog name. So would Mental Furniture. Odd band names would be a good topic for another post.
All of this started because I was reading The Pig Did It by Joseph Caldwell, which so far is exceedingly average and overwrought with commas (which I am particularly sensitive to because I struggle with this same prediliction, and I kind of hate it) . . . but in one scene he compares his pursuit of a pig to Ahab's pursuit of the whale. I got to thinking about Moby Dick and zoned out for half a page before looking it up.
Could the tools and systems of information and convenience have such a warping effect on our minds so as to cause something like ADD, or does it just seem that way? The links vying for my attention on that site are little data-sirens. I do this a lot.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Itinerant's Law #33
Itinerant's Law #33: You are likely to be the only "expert" in the airport's Expert Traveler security line.
Provenance: Any airport where they give a person the ability to
qualify themselves as an expert in anything.
Example: The "expert" in front of me had to go through the metal
detector 3 separate times to remove from his pockets, in order: a lighter (TSA alert?), 4 individual serving Advil packets, and finally about $2.73 in loose change.
Provenance: Any airport where they give a person the ability to
qualify themselves as an expert in anything.
Example: The "expert" in front of me had to go through the metal
detector 3 separate times to remove from his pockets, in order: a lighter (TSA alert?), 4 individual serving Advil packets, and finally about $2.73 in loose change.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Itinerant's Law #41
Itinerant's Law #41: The shorter the flight, the greater your
frustration with airport inefficiencies.
Provenance: Flights between St. Louis and Chicago
Basis: Arrival time at airport before flight: 2 hours; seat assignment
due to flight being oversold: middle; t-shirt on the guy sitting next
to you: "Northwestern Football Bench Press Champion 2008; time spent at baggage claim due to overhead space being full: 40 minutes; actual flight time: 47 minutes. Temper: red-line and rising.
frustration with airport inefficiencies.
Provenance: Flights between St. Louis and Chicago
Basis: Arrival time at airport before flight: 2 hours; seat assignment
due to flight being oversold: middle; t-shirt on the guy sitting next
to you: "Northwestern Football Bench Press Champion 2008; time spent at baggage claim due to overhead space being full: 40 minutes; actual flight time: 47 minutes. Temper: red-line and rising.
Itinerant = business traveler
From Dictionary.com:
i·tin·er·ant [ahy-tin-er-uh nt]
–adjective
i·tin·er·ant [ahy-tin-er-uh nt]
ər
–adjective
1. traveling from place to place, esp. on a circuit, as a minister, judge, or sales representative; itinerating; journeying.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Inventing Color
My daughter is 8 months old this week. I was speaking with a friend of mine at lunch a while back, and he asked me how it was going, you know, being a dad. What it was like. I replied it requires the most rigorous self-discipline I am capable of to not talk about her all the time . . . to not regurgitate the explicit details of every micro-milestone she achieves. It is actually, physically, hard to do. I have to completely be conscious that a request to see a recent photo of her is really a request to see at most 2-3 pictures. Not the 53 I immediately want to display. Also, to constantly remind myself that her small coos and long naps are only interesting to maybe 5 people in the entire world . . . and that is if I include the grandparents.
As a single guy, then later as a proud four-year member of the DINK ("Dual Income, No Kids" for the uninitiated) club once married, I was constantly annoyed by one of the tics common to all new parents--the frequency with which they would assert some variation of the following: "You just won't understand what I mean until you're a father." And this disqualifier would almost always follow a lengthy story or description of how great and fulfilling it was to be a parent, which would then be immediately deconstructed by the qualification that I am incapable of understanding what was just described. Then why did I just listen? There must be several hours of my life I could recover if not forced to endure these self-described incomprehensible anecdotes.
In fatherhood, however, I've found the immense compulsion; the need to share these types of stories is almost uncontainable. So I suppose I understand now. I have still vowed not to do it. I try very hard not to indulge that urge.
So it was that I was sitting there with my buddy at lunch, and he began to press me on this topic which defies description, as he has no kids-- and the truth is, there are just things you can't comprehend except through experience. Like going 200 miles per hour in a car. Sky diving. Getting hit in the balls by something traveling at great speed . . . the English language fails us here. It has no capacity to accurately capture and convey these things.
I looked at my friend and said, here is what it's like: try to invent a new color.
I asked him to conceptualize a brand new spectrum on the rainbow, using nothing from our known palette to construct it. Invent a color. It's impossible.
This is what it's like to be a father. To look at your little girl and having the very sight of her tap a previously undiscovered internal reservoir of emotion, only to instantly realize that this emotion is unlike any other you have ever felt. Language . . . and even imagination fail that request. It is instant folly.
Pal, I said . . . defeated . . . you just won't understand what I mean until you're a dad.
As a single guy, then later as a proud four-year member of the DINK ("Dual Income, No Kids" for the uninitiated) club once married, I was constantly annoyed by one of the tics common to all new parents--the frequency with which they would assert some variation of the following: "You just won't understand what I mean until you're a father." And this disqualifier would almost always follow a lengthy story or description of how great and fulfilling it was to be a parent, which would then be immediately deconstructed by the qualification that I am incapable of understanding what was just described. Then why did I just listen? There must be several hours of my life I could recover if not forced to endure these self-described incomprehensible anecdotes.
In fatherhood, however, I've found the immense compulsion; the need to share these types of stories is almost uncontainable. So I suppose I understand now. I have still vowed not to do it. I try very hard not to indulge that urge.
So it was that I was sitting there with my buddy at lunch, and he began to press me on this topic which defies description, as he has no kids-- and the truth is, there are just things you can't comprehend except through experience. Like going 200 miles per hour in a car. Sky diving. Getting hit in the balls by something traveling at great speed . . . the English language fails us here. It has no capacity to accurately capture and convey these things.
I looked at my friend and said, here is what it's like: try to invent a new color.
I asked him to conceptualize a brand new spectrum on the rainbow, using nothing from our known palette to construct it. Invent a color. It's impossible.
This is what it's like to be a father. To look at your little girl and having the very sight of her tap a previously undiscovered internal reservoir of emotion, only to instantly realize that this emotion is unlike any other you have ever felt. Language . . . and even imagination fail that request. It is instant folly.
Pal, I said . . . defeated . . . you just won't understand what I mean until you're a dad.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Thoughts from a traffic-mired taxi
When you need to go to the bathroom and there isn't one in sight...no
matter how long you've 'held' it...no matter how many miles you've
traveled under the mounting pressure...when you come within range of the target, the last 20 feet are the most excruciating.
The human ass can detect proximity. In all of history, never has a more accurate homing beacon been devised than the rectum.
matter how long you've 'held' it...no matter how many miles you've
traveled under the mounting pressure...when you come within range of the target, the last 20 feet are the most excruciating.
The human ass can detect proximity. In all of history, never has a more accurate homing beacon been devised than the rectum.
Friday, April 16, 2010
The Flu, Tolkien, College, Suicide, etc.
When I was in 7th grade I stayed home sick from school. My parents didn't have the most extensive reading collection, but one book that was on the shelf, a book my aunt had given me for Christmas some years before was The Hobbit. Being stranded in a suburban home with an itchy brain and an ill body . . . with nothing on pre-cable daytime television but soaps and "The Courtship of Eddie's Father" . . . led me to pull the Tolkien story down. It changed my life. Literally every direction I have moved since can in some way be traced to that serendipitous flu.
A couple years later, I was at church with my folks for a Thanksgiving service and browsing the bookstore when I came across The Fellowship of the Ring. I hadn't heard of any sequel to his first and most famous book-- but recognizing the author's name, I bought it with allowance money and devoured it and the subsequent members of it's trilogy.
Because of Tolkien I chose-- much to my father's disapproval-- to study English Literature in college. Also, being a collegiate football player made this choice . . . somewhat strange. Having landed at Illinois State University, football faded away and even to me a Lit education at a second rate school at the end of the postmodern bubble . . . in its final death belch . . . seemed less than aspirational. However, it did afford me lottery-ticket level exposure to a young writer and professor named David Foster Wallace.
When my wife asks me now why I was, and am, so fascinated by him--particularly because our lives have almost nothing in common and he chose to hang himself in 2008--I tell her being there, at that point in both of our personal histories (1), was like being able to reach out and touch lightning without getting burned.
If David Wallace-- who the day he died would likely not have remembered my name-- could have received a small jar filled up with some cosmic substance capturing all of the anonymous impact he had on my life and all of the personal importance, fulfillment, gratification, and potency that knowledge could have carried with it . . . if there was an ice cream scoop for the brain that could remove that compartment of reverance/gratefulness/respect in me and surgically juxtapose it with whatever his final reality was, he never would have died the way he did. That knowledge would be a cure for anything. Even depression. He didn't know me, and I miss him.
The rest is details. I want to say or do something, someday, both worthy and reflective of his impact.
___________
(1) - It was the school year of 1995/96. He was already a legend in the small universe of the English department, and was on the cusp of publishing the cruise ship article in Harper's which served as a shot-across-the-bow to the world for the super-stardom which would accompany the arrival of Infinite Jest. I was in my final year, and had just enough education and exposure to such things that I understood the rare air I breathed. (I obviously understand the triteness of a footnote here. I'm sorry.)
A couple years later, I was at church with my folks for a Thanksgiving service and browsing the bookstore when I came across The Fellowship of the Ring. I hadn't heard of any sequel to his first and most famous book-- but recognizing the author's name, I bought it with allowance money and devoured it and the subsequent members of it's trilogy.
Because of Tolkien I chose-- much to my father's disapproval-- to study English Literature in college. Also, being a collegiate football player made this choice . . . somewhat strange. Having landed at Illinois State University, football faded away and even to me a Lit education at a second rate school at the end of the postmodern bubble . . . in its final death belch . . . seemed less than aspirational. However, it did afford me lottery-ticket level exposure to a young writer and professor named David Foster Wallace.
When my wife asks me now why I was, and am, so fascinated by him--particularly because our lives have almost nothing in common and he chose to hang himself in 2008--I tell her being there, at that point in both of our personal histories (1), was like being able to reach out and touch lightning without getting burned.
If David Wallace-- who the day he died would likely not have remembered my name-- could have received a small jar filled up with some cosmic substance capturing all of the anonymous impact he had on my life and all of the personal importance, fulfillment, gratification, and potency that knowledge could have carried with it . . . if there was an ice cream scoop for the brain that could remove that compartment of reverance/gratefulness/respect in me and surgically juxtapose it with whatever his final reality was, he never would have died the way he did. That knowledge would be a cure for anything. Even depression. He didn't know me, and I miss him.
The rest is details. I want to say or do something, someday, both worthy and reflective of his impact.
___________
(1) - It was the school year of 1995/96. He was already a legend in the small universe of the English department, and was on the cusp of publishing the cruise ship article in Harper's which served as a shot-across-the-bow to the world for the super-stardom which would accompany the arrival of Infinite Jest. I was in my final year, and had just enough education and exposure to such things that I understood the rare air I breathed. (I obviously understand the triteness of a footnote here. I'm sorry.)
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