Why does every single thing on the Internet have to be changed constantly? Blogger used to work perfectly (well, maybe not perfectly, let's just say "in the reliably same way"), but now they have done some inane change to it so that my most recent entry has absolutely no paragraph breaks, and for the life of me, I can find absolutely no way to open it up for editing. (It's hard enough for me as it is to have readers, let alone me presenting to them an endless barrage of unparagraphed words.)
And, a problem that Blogger has long had that they OUGHT to fix (but have not), is that one split second after you post an entry, it gets sent to whomever subscribes to it. But if I discover unacceptable errors (which always slip through no matter how many times I read the entries beforehand) and go back in to edit, they don't send out the revised versions. So, I have to say to anybody who receives my entries (all of "one" person, I think), it is always best to read these on the site instead of on the original e-mail, because only on the site will the most recent version be shown. That is to say, if the thing can even be corrected at all, which, based on my just-previous-to-this entry, may not even be possible. Which, if it is genuinely NOT possible, will be the end of my relationship with Blogger.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
5K and Baseball
Sunday and yesterday.
Sunday: I participated for the second year in a row in a 5K Run/Walk (I’ll say right here that I WALKED) that charitably supports a program that helps children with cancer. I did this as part of a particular team who has been doing this for a student at our school who has been a cancer survivor for a year, now. It really is a lot of fun and both years I have gotten to have some really great conversations during the walk with some parents at the school whom I had wanted to get to know better.
But this year, I really was quite aware of the difference between those who were there to run and those who were there to walk. And other than for the great pleasure of getting to know better the people with whom I walked these two times, the group that I WISH I were in is those who were there to run. I don’t want to exactly make this similar to the experience of the ugly duckling seeing the swans (because I think I probably really am a duckling), but I truly did feel within me the inkling of an energy of wanting to run it, not walk it. And checking out the list of winners afterwards on the event’s website, I saw that the winner of the race finished the run in 18 minutes. Of course, if I ran the course (that really is only three miles, not the 26 miles that is a marathon), my time wouldn’t be 18 minutes, but even so, I ask myself, “Can’t I run for at least 18 minutes?” And that then leads to the question of how much effort it would be to work up to it. I do hike in the hills around here quite a bit and that effort isn’t quite like a “walk in the park”; there’s a lot of uphill and downhill (for me, the downhill is the harder), so it’s a better workout that it might seem. So couldn’t I run for some portions of those hikes, building myself up to the level of maybe being able to run a 5K, at least? Next year? That, currently, is my resolve.
Yesterday: I joined the small crowd of employees who after work went to watch, party with, and support our fellow employees in the school’s annual Parent/Employee Softball Game. Just allowing my body to be anywhere near the location of such an activity has been an anathema to me which dates all the way back to high school. While I nearly always got an A in every academic subject, when it came to PE, I almost vomited every day right before PE class. And this is probably weird (beyond the fact that most boys LOVE PE), because it wasn’t that I wasn’t athletic; in fact, I actually had been on both the swimming team and the wrestling team in after school sports, and in PE, itself, was actually good in the sports of trampoline and boxing, both of which are not even allowed in high school anymore due to having “too much dangerous liability”. But if you categorize swimming, wrestling, trampoline, and wrestling, you will see that these are all individual sports, and are NOT team sports. (I recognize that track, though, is also an individual sport, but running and I absolutely did not get along, and I was somehow terrible at things like the broad jump and the high jump, and it wasn’t that I didn’t try hard!)
I had always accepted this situation as a reality of life, that I was “bad in sports” and henseforth would do any and everything to avoid them like the plague, despite my parents doing almost anything in their power to change that situation. One summer they sent me to a sports camp, but, true to form, I remained terrible in the team sports but excelled in the individual sports. They’d buy me season tickets to the Stanford University football games, hoping that something fundamental within me would be ignited. They bought for the whole family season tickets to professional hockey games. I think any boy would be ecstatic at having both of these, but I hated them and going to these events were as boring and almost unendurable to me as it would be for the average high school student to attend a lecture on Shakespeare.
It wasn’t until I became an employee at this high-powered private elementary school that I began to understand this “disability” of mine. At our school, every child, barring not a single one, loves PE and after school sports. And why they do is quite similar to one remarkable experience that even I had had near the end of my senior year in high school.
That remarkable experience that happened to me was that one day in PE, our regular PE teacher was sick and so we had a substitute teacher, who happened to be a Stanford University graduate student earning his degree in kinesiology. At the very beginning of class, he told us that we were going to be doing something quite different from the normal pattern. He said that we were going to be playing football, and he understood that we already had teams set up (we had two of them that would play against each other), but now we were going to choose teams again, but this time, there would four of them, not two.
Team-choosing, for me, had always been the horrendous experience of, not me being chosen last, or close to last, but, worse than that, of not being chosen at all. Instead, the two opposing team captains would flip a coin to see which one had to have me. And of course, once somebody had to have me on his team, he made sure I never ever had anything to do (except, perhaps, “block” the opposing time right after the “hike”). For all practical purposes, I wasn’t on the team all.
But what this Stanford University graduate substitute teacher did was to ask who the captains were of the two normal teams, and then he had them go ahead a choose teams again, but once half the class had been chosen, he sent them off to play like they normally would. As for the second half of the class that was remaining, he merely divided us into two separate teams (no choosing of players) and sent US off to play. What that meant was that the “bad” players were playing on teams composed only of bad players. He helped us a little bit to set up who would playing various positions (most of us had always just been blockers) and then we played as best as we could. I will never forget the moment when during this game someone actually passed me the football, which I caught, and then I triumphantly ran and made a touchdown. No one had ever, in all my years of elementary and high school, passed me the football during a game. And so my situation was that I started out bad, and never had the chance to become good, because in a team sport, they naturally want to win, so they arrange it so that the bad players whom they are forced to take never really are participating, so once bad, always bad.
This is similar to a young student having trouble learning how to read, so from then on, never even GETTING to read. And I understand that we DO have that in our society, that we have fully grown and working adults who never ever learned how to read, so they live a lifetime of separation, carry around a working disability, and feel deeply ashamed.
Physical education nowadays seems to be more enlightened than it was back in my day, which might explain why at our school no student is actually “bad” in sports. Sure, there are a few stars, and some whom I guess never move beyond the “C” team, but they nevertheless do participate and have achievements and have a ball with it. But for me, when it comes to team sports (which an adult in our society can safely remain isolated from since all that comes to an end once you are out of school), they were something that I was easily able to avoid for all these years. In the corporate world, for example, there might be something like a company picnic, but if I got wind of the idea that as part of that picnic they were going to have a softball game or a volleyball game or something similar, my RSVP would be “regret”.
Somehow working at a school, though, remaining isolated from these things is not quite so easy.
Here are three examples of experiences where there had been no means of escape:
The parking lot: Until the day when I got a reserved parking space, I had to park in a parking lot at work that I refer to as being in “the lower forty”. Getting there involves a long walk across campus and then down a long flight of stairs that leads to a basketball court, next to which is the parking lot. The basketball poles there are the adjustable kind that can be raised and lowered to accommodate the size and ages of the various student grades, from pre-schoolers all the way up to adult players.
One day as I was leaving work and going down those stairs, there was a group of boys attempting to play basketball, but the net had been left in the highest position and they were having a blast fooling around with seeing what they could do with the net being way higher than normal, but it was clearly difficult. But when they saw me, a tall adult who must have looked even taller than I actually was since I was coming down a long flight of stairs above them, one of them, a very good-looking kid who was a “star”, saw me, looked up at my "giraffic" height and with great admiration said, “Wow you're so tall, doing a lay-up with this would be so easy for, why don't you show us!” and to my horror, he then passed the ball up to me with the obvious expectation that I would then show off to them what were bound to be my awesome lay-up skills. (By the way, I am only 6' 1/2", but for some reason, people think of me as being of "basketball player" height.) If possible, I think I was worse in basketball than I even was in football.
Instead, of course, I was horrified over this suggestion and actually hadn’t the slightest idea how to even DO a lay-up, let alone have the ability to provide for them the impressive demonstration they expected.
The only tack I know is to be as honest as I can, and maybe even make a joke out of the situation, so I passed the ball back to the boy and said, “Actually, I am TERRIBLE at basketball, and I am pretty sure you guys would be better at doing a lay-up with this tall basket than I would be if it were at Kindergarten height. You don’t want ME demonstrating anything, because my bad example would utterly destroy your basketball career for the rest of your lives!” Fortunately, they did laugh, and they went back to their own game. However, I felt terrible, not because I was “bad at basketball”, but because I was so out of it that I wasn’t even in the realm of being bad, that doing something like that was beyond my ken.
A few days later, I ran into one of our school’s basketball coaches, a woman, and I went to her because she teaches the littlest kids (that’s the kind of teacher I needed!) and I told her the story. To her great credit, she was totally understanding and gave me some pointers as to how to do this if it ever came up again. A few days later, as I was making my way down that now scary flight of stairs, I saw that somebody had left a basketball there, but there was nobody around. I decided to practice for real what she had told me, and I actually was able to do it. I then challenged myself to do some free throws, and said that I couldn’t leave until I had made ten baskets. Unbelievably, I was able to do it, and the accomplishment felt good.
I’ve not had any use for any of that since then, but at least now I am not afraid of it.
Sixth grade team-building games: I was chaperoning a sixth-grade field trip that involved two overnights and two days of games, including team-building challenges and a ropes course. Chaperones can elect to participate in some of the exercises along with the students, or simply stand by on the sidelines and help to “keep order”. I decided to participate, not really understanding what I was getting into (or maybe deep down inside I realized it was something I needed as much as the students did). Most of these exercise involved elements that are actually team sport skills, but utilized for a purpose other than the specific team sport, such as one of them that was designed to be a name-learning exercise, but to me was really a “baseball catching and throwing exercise” because the baseball throwing involvement was an adjunct to the name-learning. All of those games seemed to involve the concept of “complete rounds”, that is, if anybody messed up, the whole team would have to start over. So that was the team sports pressure that was on me, I had grown up being the one who would relentlessly mess up (fail to catch the ball or whatever) and I sure didn’t want that to happen in this setting.
Fortunately, I was able to do it to the extent that it was even fun, constantly reminding myself to concentrate and keep my eye on the ball. So I felt quite “accomplished” after all these years!
You know that thing of “Are you as smart as a fifth grader?” Well, that concept was essentially applying to me, not pertaining to “smartness”, but pertaining to these team sports skills, where I really was “behind” the level of these students, but somehow now made up for decades of lost time.
After school carpool: “Carpool” at our school is a word that has several different uses and meanings, and what it refers to here is the process of the children being picked up after school. At the beginning of the school year, families combine together into carpool groups and receive campus security priority passes based on how many students are in their carpool. Each carpool size has a time in the afternoon when they are allowed to come on campus for this purpose (transporting nearly 500 students on and off campus is like a military operation that requires careful organization), rewarding earlier scheduled entrance times based on larger carpool size. Those carpools who are picking up 6 or more students get on campus first, followed by the 5s, then the 4s, then the 3s, and then the 2s. Those who are “singles”, that is, those who are picking up only one student, can come no earlier than 4:00 PM, about 45 minutes after school is out.
Since 4:00 is the normal end of our working day, the school needed somebody to volunteer to stay after that for this extra 15-minutes, and I volunteered to do it. My job in this is to announce on a walkie-talkie to the after-school monitors the name of the student whom the parent (or nanny or grandparent or driving-age sibling) has come to pick up, and where I stand to do that is on the long driveway right down below the high hill, on the top of which is the baseball diamond, and right now it is baseball season.
What this means is that at least once every day, now, a baseball comes shooting off the hill and ends up right at my feet. I will then snag this baseball (and it IS a baseball, not a softball!) and I will look up at the top of the hill and there I will see several forlorn boys, looking all around for that lost baseball. Of course, being an honest person, I will then hold the baseball up and show them that the missing ball has been found, which makes them very happy. But now the challenge for me is to get the ball back up to them.
The first time this happened, I had to shout up to them and explain that I highly doubted that I would be able to throw the ball all the way up to where they are, but that I would do my best to get it as close to them as I could. I threw the ball to the best of my ability and it made it about a third of the way up the hill. Not very good, but at least it was better than if the boys had to go all the way around and down to where I was to get the ball, a huge waste of time. Fortunately the hill is covered with very thick grass, so wherever the ball landed after my throw, it stayed there where the boys could slide down and get it rather than it rolling back on down the hill to my feet, again.
The next time this happened, I managed to get the ball halfway up the hill. I was getting better!
I felt like I was doing a poor demonstration of baseball-throwing, but the truth was that I really didn’t know if somebody else would be able to throw the ball right up into the boys’ hands, either. So I described the situation to one of the PE coaches and he said that that distance is pretty far, he didn’t think that he could throw it all the way up, but he really wasn’t sure. So I felt better about it, that maybe what I was doing wasn’t so bad after all (and that all my efforts were valiant).
Last Thursday, when I threw the ball up there, I swear, I got it to within ten feet of the boy who was looking for it, so he only had to slide a tiny bit down the hill to get it. I had improved gigantically in only a week of throwing the ball up the hill. So I figure the PE teacher I had asked, if he had been down there, would have been able to throw the ball right into the hands a boy waiting up there, but it looks like I, too, would be able to do that probably by next week, and what an amazing feeling of accomplishment that would be for me! I had almost never ever in my life had a real baseball in my hand and for sure never would be attempting to throw it a long distance to some baseball-playing kid, while now doing something like that might become second nature—like with any other guy. (A normal guy is happy to have the chance to throw a ball, doesn't shrink back from it!)
So, those are three examples of how, due to working in a school atmosphere where I am surrounded by ball-playing kids, I have been drawn into having to deal with these issues which I have ignored or or hidden from for several decades.
It helps that I love the kids and have a great appreciation for how meaningful these balls are to them; in fact, I marvel at them. All they need is a ball, any ball, and immediately they create some kind of a game involving that ball that they can enjoy for hours. Balls are a treasure for a boy, not something to nearly have a phobia over like they had been for me. I realize, of course, how weird I am regarding this, but at the same time, I will take credit for attempting to change it.
So, yesterday was the Parent/Employee baseball game that I had ignored all these years, and even this year, I did not elect to PLAY (that’s going a bit too far right now), but I did GO. That took a certain amount of bravery, you understand, just the idea of being there and publicly being an obvious male who is NOT playing. There were even some tough females on both teams who played, it wasn’t just guys. Every once in a while, a person might ask me if I were playing, and I would answer with my standard joke, “If you want our team to win, then just sneak me onto the parents’ team.” They would laugh and that would be the end of it; we could then just get down to drinking and eating and cheering on our team, all of which I did with relish.
I will say, though, that I was honestly filled with admiration over some of the skills that I saw demonstrated out there. Somebody would connect with a huge hit that would explode with a loud crack and then the ball would go flying way, way out there. Or somebody far out in the field would jump up and snag right out of the sky one of those huge hits and then in the blink of eye throw it right into the mitt of baseman who would put the runner out (I don’t think I could even think that fast—where do I throw this!). Or these runners, who after hitting a powerful ball that was NOT caught, would run like lightening around all three bases and then back to home for a perfect home run. This is the kind of stuff you don’t see in the offices or in the classroom and it was as impressive to me as the runners were at the 5K race. I have to say that I honestly had a craving to go out there and play with them, but I wouldn’t dare, not right now (for me it would be strike outs and dropped fly balls). Maybe next year, though. I wouldn’t have to expect to be good; I just didn’t want to be, once again, that guy that they’d have to lose a coin toss in order to have to take.
Some friends of mine there at that game might have been going through the exact same thoughts that I was having. After all, they weren’t playing either, and why not? Every single high school in America probably had two or three guys who had been in a position like mine. I was thinking that what I wanted to do was to practice in a batting cage; it might be fun. And sure enough, somebody said that out loud, that they wanted to practice in a batting cage and wondered where there were some, and another one told us where there was a batting cage place--at Castle Park in Sherman Oaks, which also has miniature golf and a games arcade—it’s a popular place for birthday parties. I said to those three that we really ought to go do that. So, it looks like that’s what we will be doing next Saturday!
Who’da thunk it? Me wanting to go to a batting cage? Mom and Dad might even be proud. I guess we’re never to old to have a complete childhood.
Sunday: I participated for the second year in a row in a 5K Run/Walk (I’ll say right here that I WALKED) that charitably supports a program that helps children with cancer. I did this as part of a particular team who has been doing this for a student at our school who has been a cancer survivor for a year, now. It really is a lot of fun and both years I have gotten to have some really great conversations during the walk with some parents at the school whom I had wanted to get to know better.
But this year, I really was quite aware of the difference between those who were there to run and those who were there to walk. And other than for the great pleasure of getting to know better the people with whom I walked these two times, the group that I WISH I were in is those who were there to run. I don’t want to exactly make this similar to the experience of the ugly duckling seeing the swans (because I think I probably really am a duckling), but I truly did feel within me the inkling of an energy of wanting to run it, not walk it. And checking out the list of winners afterwards on the event’s website, I saw that the winner of the race finished the run in 18 minutes. Of course, if I ran the course (that really is only three miles, not the 26 miles that is a marathon), my time wouldn’t be 18 minutes, but even so, I ask myself, “Can’t I run for at least 18 minutes?” And that then leads to the question of how much effort it would be to work up to it. I do hike in the hills around here quite a bit and that effort isn’t quite like a “walk in the park”; there’s a lot of uphill and downhill (for me, the downhill is the harder), so it’s a better workout that it might seem. So couldn’t I run for some portions of those hikes, building myself up to the level of maybe being able to run a 5K, at least? Next year? That, currently, is my resolve.
Yesterday: I joined the small crowd of employees who after work went to watch, party with, and support our fellow employees in the school’s annual Parent/Employee Softball Game. Just allowing my body to be anywhere near the location of such an activity has been an anathema to me which dates all the way back to high school. While I nearly always got an A in every academic subject, when it came to PE, I almost vomited every day right before PE class. And this is probably weird (beyond the fact that most boys LOVE PE), because it wasn’t that I wasn’t athletic; in fact, I actually had been on both the swimming team and the wrestling team in after school sports, and in PE, itself, was actually good in the sports of trampoline and boxing, both of which are not even allowed in high school anymore due to having “too much dangerous liability”. But if you categorize swimming, wrestling, trampoline, and wrestling, you will see that these are all individual sports, and are NOT team sports. (I recognize that track, though, is also an individual sport, but running and I absolutely did not get along, and I was somehow terrible at things like the broad jump and the high jump, and it wasn’t that I didn’t try hard!)
I had always accepted this situation as a reality of life, that I was “bad in sports” and henseforth would do any and everything to avoid them like the plague, despite my parents doing almost anything in their power to change that situation. One summer they sent me to a sports camp, but, true to form, I remained terrible in the team sports but excelled in the individual sports. They’d buy me season tickets to the Stanford University football games, hoping that something fundamental within me would be ignited. They bought for the whole family season tickets to professional hockey games. I think any boy would be ecstatic at having both of these, but I hated them and going to these events were as boring and almost unendurable to me as it would be for the average high school student to attend a lecture on Shakespeare.
It wasn’t until I became an employee at this high-powered private elementary school that I began to understand this “disability” of mine. At our school, every child, barring not a single one, loves PE and after school sports. And why they do is quite similar to one remarkable experience that even I had had near the end of my senior year in high school.
That remarkable experience that happened to me was that one day in PE, our regular PE teacher was sick and so we had a substitute teacher, who happened to be a Stanford University graduate student earning his degree in kinesiology. At the very beginning of class, he told us that we were going to be doing something quite different from the normal pattern. He said that we were going to be playing football, and he understood that we already had teams set up (we had two of them that would play against each other), but now we were going to choose teams again, but this time, there would four of them, not two.
Team-choosing, for me, had always been the horrendous experience of, not me being chosen last, or close to last, but, worse than that, of not being chosen at all. Instead, the two opposing team captains would flip a coin to see which one had to have me. And of course, once somebody had to have me on his team, he made sure I never ever had anything to do (except, perhaps, “block” the opposing time right after the “hike”). For all practical purposes, I wasn’t on the team all.
But what this Stanford University graduate substitute teacher did was to ask who the captains were of the two normal teams, and then he had them go ahead a choose teams again, but once half the class had been chosen, he sent them off to play like they normally would. As for the second half of the class that was remaining, he merely divided us into two separate teams (no choosing of players) and sent US off to play. What that meant was that the “bad” players were playing on teams composed only of bad players. He helped us a little bit to set up who would playing various positions (most of us had always just been blockers) and then we played as best as we could. I will never forget the moment when during this game someone actually passed me the football, which I caught, and then I triumphantly ran and made a touchdown. No one had ever, in all my years of elementary and high school, passed me the football during a game. And so my situation was that I started out bad, and never had the chance to become good, because in a team sport, they naturally want to win, so they arrange it so that the bad players whom they are forced to take never really are participating, so once bad, always bad.
This is similar to a young student having trouble learning how to read, so from then on, never even GETTING to read. And I understand that we DO have that in our society, that we have fully grown and working adults who never ever learned how to read, so they live a lifetime of separation, carry around a working disability, and feel deeply ashamed.
Physical education nowadays seems to be more enlightened than it was back in my day, which might explain why at our school no student is actually “bad” in sports. Sure, there are a few stars, and some whom I guess never move beyond the “C” team, but they nevertheless do participate and have achievements and have a ball with it. But for me, when it comes to team sports (which an adult in our society can safely remain isolated from since all that comes to an end once you are out of school), they were something that I was easily able to avoid for all these years. In the corporate world, for example, there might be something like a company picnic, but if I got wind of the idea that as part of that picnic they were going to have a softball game or a volleyball game or something similar, my RSVP would be “regret”.
Somehow working at a school, though, remaining isolated from these things is not quite so easy.
Here are three examples of experiences where there had been no means of escape:
The parking lot: Until the day when I got a reserved parking space, I had to park in a parking lot at work that I refer to as being in “the lower forty”. Getting there involves a long walk across campus and then down a long flight of stairs that leads to a basketball court, next to which is the parking lot. The basketball poles there are the adjustable kind that can be raised and lowered to accommodate the size and ages of the various student grades, from pre-schoolers all the way up to adult players.
One day as I was leaving work and going down those stairs, there was a group of boys attempting to play basketball, but the net had been left in the highest position and they were having a blast fooling around with seeing what they could do with the net being way higher than normal, but it was clearly difficult. But when they saw me, a tall adult who must have looked even taller than I actually was since I was coming down a long flight of stairs above them, one of them, a very good-looking kid who was a “star”, saw me, looked up at my "giraffic" height and with great admiration said, “Wow you're so tall, doing a lay-up with this would be so easy for, why don't you show us!” and to my horror, he then passed the ball up to me with the obvious expectation that I would then show off to them what were bound to be my awesome lay-up skills. (By the way, I am only 6' 1/2", but for some reason, people think of me as being of "basketball player" height.) If possible, I think I was worse in basketball than I even was in football.
Instead, of course, I was horrified over this suggestion and actually hadn’t the slightest idea how to even DO a lay-up, let alone have the ability to provide for them the impressive demonstration they expected.
The only tack I know is to be as honest as I can, and maybe even make a joke out of the situation, so I passed the ball back to the boy and said, “Actually, I am TERRIBLE at basketball, and I am pretty sure you guys would be better at doing a lay-up with this tall basket than I would be if it were at Kindergarten height. You don’t want ME demonstrating anything, because my bad example would utterly destroy your basketball career for the rest of your lives!” Fortunately, they did laugh, and they went back to their own game. However, I felt terrible, not because I was “bad at basketball”, but because I was so out of it that I wasn’t even in the realm of being bad, that doing something like that was beyond my ken.
A few days later, I ran into one of our school’s basketball coaches, a woman, and I went to her because she teaches the littlest kids (that’s the kind of teacher I needed!) and I told her the story. To her great credit, she was totally understanding and gave me some pointers as to how to do this if it ever came up again. A few days later, as I was making my way down that now scary flight of stairs, I saw that somebody had left a basketball there, but there was nobody around. I decided to practice for real what she had told me, and I actually was able to do it. I then challenged myself to do some free throws, and said that I couldn’t leave until I had made ten baskets. Unbelievably, I was able to do it, and the accomplishment felt good.
I’ve not had any use for any of that since then, but at least now I am not afraid of it.
Sixth grade team-building games: I was chaperoning a sixth-grade field trip that involved two overnights and two days of games, including team-building challenges and a ropes course. Chaperones can elect to participate in some of the exercises along with the students, or simply stand by on the sidelines and help to “keep order”. I decided to participate, not really understanding what I was getting into (or maybe deep down inside I realized it was something I needed as much as the students did). Most of these exercise involved elements that are actually team sport skills, but utilized for a purpose other than the specific team sport, such as one of them that was designed to be a name-learning exercise, but to me was really a “baseball catching and throwing exercise” because the baseball throwing involvement was an adjunct to the name-learning. All of those games seemed to involve the concept of “complete rounds”, that is, if anybody messed up, the whole team would have to start over. So that was the team sports pressure that was on me, I had grown up being the one who would relentlessly mess up (fail to catch the ball or whatever) and I sure didn’t want that to happen in this setting.
Fortunately, I was able to do it to the extent that it was even fun, constantly reminding myself to concentrate and keep my eye on the ball. So I felt quite “accomplished” after all these years!
You know that thing of “Are you as smart as a fifth grader?” Well, that concept was essentially applying to me, not pertaining to “smartness”, but pertaining to these team sports skills, where I really was “behind” the level of these students, but somehow now made up for decades of lost time.
After school carpool: “Carpool” at our school is a word that has several different uses and meanings, and what it refers to here is the process of the children being picked up after school. At the beginning of the school year, families combine together into carpool groups and receive campus security priority passes based on how many students are in their carpool. Each carpool size has a time in the afternoon when they are allowed to come on campus for this purpose (transporting nearly 500 students on and off campus is like a military operation that requires careful organization), rewarding earlier scheduled entrance times based on larger carpool size. Those carpools who are picking up 6 or more students get on campus first, followed by the 5s, then the 4s, then the 3s, and then the 2s. Those who are “singles”, that is, those who are picking up only one student, can come no earlier than 4:00 PM, about 45 minutes after school is out.
Since 4:00 is the normal end of our working day, the school needed somebody to volunteer to stay after that for this extra 15-minutes, and I volunteered to do it. My job in this is to announce on a walkie-talkie to the after-school monitors the name of the student whom the parent (or nanny or grandparent or driving-age sibling) has come to pick up, and where I stand to do that is on the long driveway right down below the high hill, on the top of which is the baseball diamond, and right now it is baseball season.
What this means is that at least once every day, now, a baseball comes shooting off the hill and ends up right at my feet. I will then snag this baseball (and it IS a baseball, not a softball!) and I will look up at the top of the hill and there I will see several forlorn boys, looking all around for that lost baseball. Of course, being an honest person, I will then hold the baseball up and show them that the missing ball has been found, which makes them very happy. But now the challenge for me is to get the ball back up to them.
The first time this happened, I had to shout up to them and explain that I highly doubted that I would be able to throw the ball all the way up to where they are, but that I would do my best to get it as close to them as I could. I threw the ball to the best of my ability and it made it about a third of the way up the hill. Not very good, but at least it was better than if the boys had to go all the way around and down to where I was to get the ball, a huge waste of time. Fortunately the hill is covered with very thick grass, so wherever the ball landed after my throw, it stayed there where the boys could slide down and get it rather than it rolling back on down the hill to my feet, again.
The next time this happened, I managed to get the ball halfway up the hill. I was getting better!
I felt like I was doing a poor demonstration of baseball-throwing, but the truth was that I really didn’t know if somebody else would be able to throw the ball right up into the boys’ hands, either. So I described the situation to one of the PE coaches and he said that that distance is pretty far, he didn’t think that he could throw it all the way up, but he really wasn’t sure. So I felt better about it, that maybe what I was doing wasn’t so bad after all (and that all my efforts were valiant).
Last Thursday, when I threw the ball up there, I swear, I got it to within ten feet of the boy who was looking for it, so he only had to slide a tiny bit down the hill to get it. I had improved gigantically in only a week of throwing the ball up the hill. So I figure the PE teacher I had asked, if he had been down there, would have been able to throw the ball right into the hands a boy waiting up there, but it looks like I, too, would be able to do that probably by next week, and what an amazing feeling of accomplishment that would be for me! I had almost never ever in my life had a real baseball in my hand and for sure never would be attempting to throw it a long distance to some baseball-playing kid, while now doing something like that might become second nature—like with any other guy. (A normal guy is happy to have the chance to throw a ball, doesn't shrink back from it!)
So, those are three examples of how, due to working in a school atmosphere where I am surrounded by ball-playing kids, I have been drawn into having to deal with these issues which I have ignored or or hidden from for several decades.
It helps that I love the kids and have a great appreciation for how meaningful these balls are to them; in fact, I marvel at them. All they need is a ball, any ball, and immediately they create some kind of a game involving that ball that they can enjoy for hours. Balls are a treasure for a boy, not something to nearly have a phobia over like they had been for me. I realize, of course, how weird I am regarding this, but at the same time, I will take credit for attempting to change it.
So, yesterday was the Parent/Employee baseball game that I had ignored all these years, and even this year, I did not elect to PLAY (that’s going a bit too far right now), but I did GO. That took a certain amount of bravery, you understand, just the idea of being there and publicly being an obvious male who is NOT playing. There were even some tough females on both teams who played, it wasn’t just guys. Every once in a while, a person might ask me if I were playing, and I would answer with my standard joke, “If you want our team to win, then just sneak me onto the parents’ team.” They would laugh and that would be the end of it; we could then just get down to drinking and eating and cheering on our team, all of which I did with relish.
I will say, though, that I was honestly filled with admiration over some of the skills that I saw demonstrated out there. Somebody would connect with a huge hit that would explode with a loud crack and then the ball would go flying way, way out there. Or somebody far out in the field would jump up and snag right out of the sky one of those huge hits and then in the blink of eye throw it right into the mitt of baseman who would put the runner out (I don’t think I could even think that fast—where do I throw this!). Or these runners, who after hitting a powerful ball that was NOT caught, would run like lightening around all three bases and then back to home for a perfect home run. This is the kind of stuff you don’t see in the offices or in the classroom and it was as impressive to me as the runners were at the 5K race. I have to say that I honestly had a craving to go out there and play with them, but I wouldn’t dare, not right now (for me it would be strike outs and dropped fly balls). Maybe next year, though. I wouldn’t have to expect to be good; I just didn’t want to be, once again, that guy that they’d have to lose a coin toss in order to have to take.
Some friends of mine there at that game might have been going through the exact same thoughts that I was having. After all, they weren’t playing either, and why not? Every single high school in America probably had two or three guys who had been in a position like mine. I was thinking that what I wanted to do was to practice in a batting cage; it might be fun. And sure enough, somebody said that out loud, that they wanted to practice in a batting cage and wondered where there were some, and another one told us where there was a batting cage place--at Castle Park in Sherman Oaks, which also has miniature golf and a games arcade—it’s a popular place for birthday parties. I said to those three that we really ought to go do that. So, it looks like that’s what we will be doing next Saturday!
Who’da thunk it? Me wanting to go to a batting cage? Mom and Dad might even be proud. I guess we’re never to old to have a complete childhood.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Useful Toy
Only a few days after I wrote my previous entry, I settled down into a serious analysis and ended up buying an iPhone. (I so far have somehow have managed to dilute the energy of thinking about getting a new car.) I didn't just jump into doing that, but carefully evaluated many other options.
One the things I wanted to understand a little better was what was meant by the two different cell phone technologies, CDMA ("Code Division Multiple Access") and GSM ("Global System Mobile"). I suppose people can argue the different merit of these two technologies until their brains explode (and, of course, the same could be done between Android and IOS operating systems), but the gist of it (that which spoke to me) was that while CDMA was moderately "better" for local usage (clearer connections and the like), GSM was more useful for travelers, particularly international ones, because GSM phones have SIM cards and if one is in a foreign country, it is possible to buy a local SIM card and use the phone locally there instead of having to deal with international roaming charges. So, based on this, GSM was more appealing to me, and that therefore narrowed the field down to only two carriers who use GSM, AT&T and T-Mobile.
I had to see what on earth I could afford with AT&T and T-Mobile. The AT&T website had this very useful "call, data, text" usage estimator where you could see what kind of plan really might work for you based on the kinds of things you were likely to do, and, as an additional benefit, with AT&T you could do a "Chinese menu" type of selection of the levels you needed for each of three types of coverage, instead of having to figure out which pre-selected combination plan (T-Mobile) was the best compromise.
It looked like what would work best for me was the lowest level of call minutes, the middle level of data, and no plan at all for texting, but would pay 20 cents per text message if I actually ever did text. This ends up being a monthly charge of around $70.00, which was only twice what I was paying for the T-Mobile plan that I already had that was really ONLY calling.
The selection of AT&T over T-Mobile as the carrier selected for me by default the iPhone instead of an Android phone, and that really was the phone I had wanted the whole time anyway. So, I had proven to myself, step by analysis step, that this really was the best choice. And so, that's what I got.
And I really DO love it and am surprised at all that it can do for me. I had always felt kind of out of it by not having a smart phone, but my on-going discovery of its various features continues to show me that I had no idea of what all I was really missing.
Do I REALLY NEED to have such a thing? Well, I suppose not really, but then, why NOT have this?
I love having SIRI, the artificial intelligence personal assistant who follows your voice commands and speaks back to you, sometimes in very funny ways. I was curious as to what "SIRI" must mean and looked it up, but apparently (or to my knowledge), Apple has never released a definitive explanation, but the one that I like the best and think is the most likely is that it comes from SRI, the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park (more or less in Apple's home territory), that is one of the country's premier research and development companies and has been working on artificial intelligence for quite some time. I'm not sure whether they actually created this very program, or were instrumental in its creation (I am guessing the former).
I know SRI, grew up right there in their area (SRI is only a few blocks from where I went to high school) and I even applied to work there a couple of times, but never got anywhere with that. Well, my father, a much more likely candidate than me, was never able to get hired there either, even though he always really wanted to work there.
Even though SIRI can do all sorts of things with your phone, making it seem like she is "in" there, she actually is software that is accessed from a server somewhere else as data via your WiFi (such as, in my case, when I am at home or at work) or, if you are not able to gain access to a WiFi, then you reach the server via the cell phone. That means there are geographical spots where you cannot access her, such as on some of the canyon streets I drive on up the hills to work and in some locations on the campus where I work. (But this is true for any of it...you aren't going to get traffic information or do any of the other data tasks in those "dead" spots, either.) But it is so marvelous when you are able to get her, which is most of the time. I think it is especially valuable to use her in the car, where you are supposed to be handsfree; I am NOT going to be typing in Internet searches on the screen's keyboard when I am trying to drive!
Sometimes SIRI's help is very impressive. I was outside one day at school, "doing the 4:00 carpool", which means that as cars arrive to pick up students at 4:00, I use a walkie-talkie to call out the students' names so that the daycare attendants can send them to the circle to get picked up. The traffic circle there in the driveway was decorated with lots of country flags in celebration of our "Go Global Week" and the security guard who works with me doing this duty (that I volunteered for) was looking at all the flags and he said,"How many countries do you think there are in the world?" I really had no idea, but I figured they had to number somewhere in the hundreds. Suddenly, I realized that I could ask SIRI, so I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket and asked SIRI the question, "How many countries are there in the world?" She responded with, "I have found a website with the answer for you." I glanced at the screen and there it said, "Number of sovereign nations in the world: 204". So I was able to tell the security guard and boy was he impressed! I was, too!
I speak of SIRI as a woman, because the program has a woman's voice, but I understand that in Europe she is a he, because there they use a man's voice.
One thing that is funny about me, and probably several other users, too, even though I know that SIRI is a computer program and a machine, it is so human-sounding and acting that I almost can NOT avoid saying "please" and "thank you". I have noticed that when I ask SIRI a question, she (it) will then text out my question. But suppose I ask my question (make my command) like this: "SIRI, please tell me what gas stations are in my location," what will type out will be "Tell me what gas stations are in my location". In other words, the program ignores or does not "hear" SIRI's name, or the "please"; those are, apparenty, just meaningless sounds. But on the other hand, SIRI will often use MY name, which I think is so cute. She tends to do that when she is being "persuasive". For example, if there is something she can't do the way I ask her to do it, such as when I asked her to "Tell me the cheapest gas station in my location," she has answered (using my actual first name, not "Pitbullshark"),"Pitbullshark, I can not tell you prices, but I have found eight gas stations near you," and will print out the names and addresses of the gas stations she found for me.
I do have a free app that DOES give me prices--"Gas Buddy". Since the phone always knows my location, I tap the "Gas Buddy" app icon and it will pop up a list of gas stations in the exact area where I happen to be. I can then tap on the kind of gas I need (premium) and it will sort the list in premium gas price order with the cheapest on top. I use this app, now, whenever I need to get gas.
I also downloaded the free app "Movieticket" and can find movie listings and times for my favorite theaters, or by whatever is in the area where I happen to be.
Twice, now, I have used the traffic feature and used it to guide my route. One time the traffic looked horrible on the freeway and I was about to get off and take a surface street, but tapped on the maps app (that shows traffic) and saw that it was going to clear by the next exit. And sure enough, it was smooth sailing and I took the freeway all the way to my destination.
Yesterday I went for an hour and a half hike in the hills between the San Fernando Valley and the Los Angeles Basin. I was amazed to see that the maps app also showed the trail that I was on! On my way back, I kept coming up with forks in the trail and could not tell which was the right way to go. Sure enough, I could use the iPhone to guide me; if I chose the wrong fork and walked a short way, the "dot" that was me had clearly moved off the trail. I suppose I have this available because of hiking in the middle of an urban area; of course the maps feature wouldn't work on a sailboat out in the middle of the ocean or even while hiking a trail in the high Sierras...it is a CELL phone application, not SATELLITE global positioning. Still, it was amazingly cool to use that app up there on the trail.
While I use a lot the appointment reminders feature that is part of the calendar, one of my favorite features is the alarm. I first set it for 6:00 AM by asking SIRI to wake me up at that time. It woke me up with the sweetest sound, a ring tone called "Marimba", which happened to be the default (one could change it to any of many other choices, but I like this Marimba). I love the sound of it so much that it never fails to make me happy when it rings, and that's saying a lot when you consider that this is an alarm clock waking me up early on a work day morning. It gets me right up, no problem! (My phone's ringtone, one of the choices already programmed into the iPhone, is the opening bars to George Thorogood's "Bad To The Bone." That, too, makes me happy!)
The second night, I wanted to use set the alarm again, so I asked SIRI, again, to wake me up at 6:00 in the morning. SIRI responded with an exasperated voice, "I have already set it for you!" I didn't quite understand what she meant, since I hadn't asked her about it since the first time, but discovered that if I tap on the "clock" application, there was an alarm set there for 6:00, and the "switch" was set to "On". The next night, I tapped on "clock" and saw that the switch was set on "Off". A quick slide of the finger turns the switch to "On". May as well do it this way instead of asking SIRI to switch it on for me, because SIRI is a data feature and that would "waste" data time if I weren't at home and doing this on the WiFI.
Now I have several wake-up times that I have used, sitting there ready to be turned on with a swipe of the finger whenever I need. Now no longer do I need to have a special travel alarm when I travel. Of course, the iPhone clock is also a world clock.
One more thing, I realized from taking my hike yesterday that I still had a "film" person's thinking about picture-taking. In the days of film (when did they end...not too long ago!), you always were somewhat discriminatory in taking pictures, because each picture used up film. But with digital picture-taking, you can take as many pictures as you want, hundreds and hundreds of them, deleting the ones that you don't like and nothing is ever wasted. Now I understand why people with camera phones end up having so many photographs of everything; there really is no limit.
I bought a wonderful digital camera for my trip to Palau last year, and I still love it and all the tricks it has for taking pictures (plus I have a waterproof case for it so I can use it in and under the water). I will continue to bring that on trips and to special occasions. But I won't have it on me every single day like I would the iPhone. It's a new way of thinking, freely documenting any and everything with your camera phone. But with digital, there's no reason not to.
One the things I wanted to understand a little better was what was meant by the two different cell phone technologies, CDMA ("Code Division Multiple Access") and GSM ("Global System Mobile"). I suppose people can argue the different merit of these two technologies until their brains explode (and, of course, the same could be done between Android and IOS operating systems), but the gist of it (that which spoke to me) was that while CDMA was moderately "better" for local usage (clearer connections and the like), GSM was more useful for travelers, particularly international ones, because GSM phones have SIM cards and if one is in a foreign country, it is possible to buy a local SIM card and use the phone locally there instead of having to deal with international roaming charges. So, based on this, GSM was more appealing to me, and that therefore narrowed the field down to only two carriers who use GSM, AT&T and T-Mobile.
I had to see what on earth I could afford with AT&T and T-Mobile. The AT&T website had this very useful "call, data, text" usage estimator where you could see what kind of plan really might work for you based on the kinds of things you were likely to do, and, as an additional benefit, with AT&T you could do a "Chinese menu" type of selection of the levels you needed for each of three types of coverage, instead of having to figure out which pre-selected combination plan (T-Mobile) was the best compromise.
It looked like what would work best for me was the lowest level of call minutes, the middle level of data, and no plan at all for texting, but would pay 20 cents per text message if I actually ever did text. This ends up being a monthly charge of around $70.00, which was only twice what I was paying for the T-Mobile plan that I already had that was really ONLY calling.
The selection of AT&T over T-Mobile as the carrier selected for me by default the iPhone instead of an Android phone, and that really was the phone I had wanted the whole time anyway. So, I had proven to myself, step by analysis step, that this really was the best choice. And so, that's what I got.
And I really DO love it and am surprised at all that it can do for me. I had always felt kind of out of it by not having a smart phone, but my on-going discovery of its various features continues to show me that I had no idea of what all I was really missing.
Do I REALLY NEED to have such a thing? Well, I suppose not really, but then, why NOT have this?
I love having SIRI, the artificial intelligence personal assistant who follows your voice commands and speaks back to you, sometimes in very funny ways. I was curious as to what "SIRI" must mean and looked it up, but apparently (or to my knowledge), Apple has never released a definitive explanation, but the one that I like the best and think is the most likely is that it comes from SRI, the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park (more or less in Apple's home territory), that is one of the country's premier research and development companies and has been working on artificial intelligence for quite some time. I'm not sure whether they actually created this very program, or were instrumental in its creation (I am guessing the former).
I know SRI, grew up right there in their area (SRI is only a few blocks from where I went to high school) and I even applied to work there a couple of times, but never got anywhere with that. Well, my father, a much more likely candidate than me, was never able to get hired there either, even though he always really wanted to work there.
Even though SIRI can do all sorts of things with your phone, making it seem like she is "in" there, she actually is software that is accessed from a server somewhere else as data via your WiFi (such as, in my case, when I am at home or at work) or, if you are not able to gain access to a WiFi, then you reach the server via the cell phone. That means there are geographical spots where you cannot access her, such as on some of the canyon streets I drive on up the hills to work and in some locations on the campus where I work. (But this is true for any of it...you aren't going to get traffic information or do any of the other data tasks in those "dead" spots, either.) But it is so marvelous when you are able to get her, which is most of the time. I think it is especially valuable to use her in the car, where you are supposed to be handsfree; I am NOT going to be typing in Internet searches on the screen's keyboard when I am trying to drive!
Sometimes SIRI's help is very impressive. I was outside one day at school, "doing the 4:00 carpool", which means that as cars arrive to pick up students at 4:00, I use a walkie-talkie to call out the students' names so that the daycare attendants can send them to the circle to get picked up. The traffic circle there in the driveway was decorated with lots of country flags in celebration of our "Go Global Week" and the security guard who works with me doing this duty (that I volunteered for) was looking at all the flags and he said,"How many countries do you think there are in the world?" I really had no idea, but I figured they had to number somewhere in the hundreds. Suddenly, I realized that I could ask SIRI, so I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket and asked SIRI the question, "How many countries are there in the world?" She responded with, "I have found a website with the answer for you." I glanced at the screen and there it said, "Number of sovereign nations in the world: 204". So I was able to tell the security guard and boy was he impressed! I was, too!
I speak of SIRI as a woman, because the program has a woman's voice, but I understand that in Europe she is a he, because there they use a man's voice.
One thing that is funny about me, and probably several other users, too, even though I know that SIRI is a computer program and a machine, it is so human-sounding and acting that I almost can NOT avoid saying "please" and "thank you". I have noticed that when I ask SIRI a question, she (it) will then text out my question. But suppose I ask my question (make my command) like this: "SIRI, please tell me what gas stations are in my location," what will type out will be "Tell me what gas stations are in my location". In other words, the program ignores or does not "hear" SIRI's name, or the "please"; those are, apparenty, just meaningless sounds. But on the other hand, SIRI will often use MY name, which I think is so cute. She tends to do that when she is being "persuasive". For example, if there is something she can't do the way I ask her to do it, such as when I asked her to "Tell me the cheapest gas station in my location," she has answered (using my actual first name, not "Pitbullshark"),"Pitbullshark, I can not tell you prices, but I have found eight gas stations near you," and will print out the names and addresses of the gas stations she found for me.
I do have a free app that DOES give me prices--"Gas Buddy". Since the phone always knows my location, I tap the "Gas Buddy" app icon and it will pop up a list of gas stations in the exact area where I happen to be. I can then tap on the kind of gas I need (premium) and it will sort the list in premium gas price order with the cheapest on top. I use this app, now, whenever I need to get gas.
I also downloaded the free app "Movieticket" and can find movie listings and times for my favorite theaters, or by whatever is in the area where I happen to be.
Twice, now, I have used the traffic feature and used it to guide my route. One time the traffic looked horrible on the freeway and I was about to get off and take a surface street, but tapped on the maps app (that shows traffic) and saw that it was going to clear by the next exit. And sure enough, it was smooth sailing and I took the freeway all the way to my destination.
Yesterday I went for an hour and a half hike in the hills between the San Fernando Valley and the Los Angeles Basin. I was amazed to see that the maps app also showed the trail that I was on! On my way back, I kept coming up with forks in the trail and could not tell which was the right way to go. Sure enough, I could use the iPhone to guide me; if I chose the wrong fork and walked a short way, the "dot" that was me had clearly moved off the trail. I suppose I have this available because of hiking in the middle of an urban area; of course the maps feature wouldn't work on a sailboat out in the middle of the ocean or even while hiking a trail in the high Sierras...it is a CELL phone application, not SATELLITE global positioning. Still, it was amazingly cool to use that app up there on the trail.
While I use a lot the appointment reminders feature that is part of the calendar, one of my favorite features is the alarm. I first set it for 6:00 AM by asking SIRI to wake me up at that time. It woke me up with the sweetest sound, a ring tone called "Marimba", which happened to be the default (one could change it to any of many other choices, but I like this Marimba). I love the sound of it so much that it never fails to make me happy when it rings, and that's saying a lot when you consider that this is an alarm clock waking me up early on a work day morning. It gets me right up, no problem! (My phone's ringtone, one of the choices already programmed into the iPhone, is the opening bars to George Thorogood's "Bad To The Bone." That, too, makes me happy!)
The second night, I wanted to use set the alarm again, so I asked SIRI, again, to wake me up at 6:00 in the morning. SIRI responded with an exasperated voice, "I have already set it for you!" I didn't quite understand what she meant, since I hadn't asked her about it since the first time, but discovered that if I tap on the "clock" application, there was an alarm set there for 6:00, and the "switch" was set to "On". The next night, I tapped on "clock" and saw that the switch was set on "Off". A quick slide of the finger turns the switch to "On". May as well do it this way instead of asking SIRI to switch it on for me, because SIRI is a data feature and that would "waste" data time if I weren't at home and doing this on the WiFI.
Now I have several wake-up times that I have used, sitting there ready to be turned on with a swipe of the finger whenever I need. Now no longer do I need to have a special travel alarm when I travel. Of course, the iPhone clock is also a world clock.
One more thing, I realized from taking my hike yesterday that I still had a "film" person's thinking about picture-taking. In the days of film (when did they end...not too long ago!), you always were somewhat discriminatory in taking pictures, because each picture used up film. But with digital picture-taking, you can take as many pictures as you want, hundreds and hundreds of them, deleting the ones that you don't like and nothing is ever wasted. Now I understand why people with camera phones end up having so many photographs of everything; there really is no limit.
I bought a wonderful digital camera for my trip to Palau last year, and I still love it and all the tricks it has for taking pictures (plus I have a waterproof case for it so I can use it in and under the water). I will continue to bring that on trips and to special occasions. But I won't have it on me every single day like I would the iPhone. It's a new way of thinking, freely documenting any and everything with your camera phone. But with digital, there's no reason not to.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Helping Me To Ruin
I tell you what, advertising really works. You might be thinking, Well, duh!, but honestly, I figured that an intelligent and knowledgeable person could be immune to it, but I suppose that is like saying that an intelligent and knowledgeable person could be immune to a heroin injection, or a cigarette…well, maybe we don’t have to go THAT heavy…how about to sugar or comfort food? In the battle between what we KNOW and how we FEEL, I pretty much believe that for me, at least, the feeling state will win over almost every time except in cases when I work very hard at girding the loins of my intelligence and rationality against what I know is a very powerful influence. Is this a sign of my weakness, or of my normal humanness?
My college degree, a bachelor of science in business administration (and yes, there actually is a science behind it), had the specialty of marketing. There were several other specialties I could have chosen, I suppose, such as personnel, production, transportation, finance. Probably the most valuable of those choices when it came to obtaining a job later would have been finance. And I honestly did enjoy the beginning courses in accounting, but the advanced courses in accounting didn’t move me very much, and while I very much enjoyed macroeconomics, I truly detested microeconomics (price theory), and also found wholesaling pretty bad, plus “finance” seemed to be a good specialty for introverts, which I absolutely am not. So, finance was out, although I knew that regarding earning money in the corporate world, those who worked with money earned the most, those who worked with people earned the least, and those who worked with data came somewhere between.
My favorite business courses ended up being in business law, which led to my going to law school for two years, but then I realized that I really didn’t want to be a lawyer for various reasons, so I dropped out before I started the final year.
Ironically, the work that I am doing now is a cross between both business law (specifically: legal compliance)—but definitely not earning at an $800.00 an hour billing rate—and personnel (now called human resources), but I never took a single personnel course in college, mainly because the professor in that specialty was so awful (I had signed up for the beginning personnel elective, but fortunately was able to drop it before the deadline), but also because of what I said two paragraphs up, those who work with people make the least money in the corporate world, so I saw no lasting value in electing those subjects.
So why did I choose marketing, of all things? Because in the advanced stages, it is actually a fascinating subject, a marvelous combination of science and creative artistry; it had the sort of course material that a person might want to audit no matter what their major. Unfortunately, though, the early employment tracks in that field can be pretty awful, in my estimation…such as sales. Sales, no thank you.
Writing advertising copy might be fun, but for someone who actually should have chucked college altogether and become a professional writer (no matter the struggle and expected poverty), advertising copy would have made me feel that my head was in a vice. Oh, working in New York City might have felt like “success” (if, presumably, I had actually managed to achieve that), at least for a few months, but I know that ultimately it would have been a nightmare.
Again, ironically, through some kind of great fortune I did gravitate into something that skipped over the whole sales track, and that was being a market research analyst. And it was in that position whereby I got to experience at the creative level how advertising really works, or doesn’t, as the company for which I was a project director was there to determine that success or failure for advertising creators so that they didn’t waste untold millions in publishing or running advertisements or commercials that weren’t effective.
Some of the elements to be analyzed and evaluated are (a) the introduction of the product, (b) the person presenting the product, (c) the demonstration of the product, (d) the music in the commercial, (e) and various other subtle elements, such as colors, graphics, the emotions induced, the fears induced, the satisfaction promised, and so on. Audience testing will show the analyst just how well these elements are working, and if any of those pieces don’t work very well, the whole the marketing effort can come apart (and maybe even do more harm to the product’s success than good).
Having professionally analyzed those various elements, I am pretty familiar with them and can intellectually recognize and subjectively evaluate them (how they work for me), but I can also see how often I am just as helpless against them as somebody who is entirely consciously unaware of their effects. I think just about the only way to not be affected by them is to not be exposed to them, which really means don’t look at any magazines, don’t watch television, don’t go to any movies. I add “movies” to that list of “don’t dos” because I am aware that there is hardly a coming attraction I have seen that didn’t make me want to go see that movie. I have noticed that if I stop going to movies for a while, then I don’t go to movies for a LONG while (because the desire/fulfillment dynamic is broken), but if I break that long-term absence from the movie theater, then I end up going continuously until I get sick of it again.
Watching television is something that I had stopped doing regularly about fifteen years ago when my cable bill had reached $100 a month and I realized that the only channel I was ever watching was Showtime. Yes, I liked Showtime, but I realized that for much less than a hundred dollars a month I could watch everything that Netflix could throw at me, so I got rid of my cable and until very recently, was a most peculiar oddball in that I never watched television at all…only DVDs and videos on the TV screen.
I am still pretty much that same oddball in that I don’t have cable. I am able to receive 13 basic channels (and dozens of Spanish and Asian channels that may as well not exist) via an antenna and a digital converter box, which comes in sharp and clear and is completely free. Right now, I am watching only ONE television show, though, and THAT is because of going to a free movie screening, which happened to be in the very office-building-with-a-test-audience-theater where I used to be the market research analyst described above, except that that company is now no longer there. It wasn’t a movie, though, but an advanced screening of the television pilot (also the kind of thing I used to analyze) of the NBC television show, SMASH. Like what happens to me with coming attractions at the movie theater, I got interested in watching this TV show, so my Monday evening is devoted to watching this one television show. And maybe one other that precedes it (so it is convenient), Alcatraz, because it is executive-produced and sometimes script-written by the husband of a teacher at the school where I work. But I am more devoted to SMASH, not missing an episode, and can be hit and miss with Alcatraz.
So, after a decade and a half’s absence, I am now being exposed to television advertising, which on Monday night, at least, seems to basically be lots of car commercials alternating with lots of cell phone commercials. They may be advertising other things, but apparently I am immune to those products whatever they are as I couldn’t tell you what a single one of them is…oh, no, that’s wrong, trying to remember, I do actually remember one for a Scott lawn product (memorable because the man presenting speaks with a Scottish accent, which is an effective gimmick) and another one for a Chase Bank cell-phone-oriented method of sending money to somebody (memorable because it features a cute and funny little boy toddler who is into kicking a ball that smashes all the neighbors’ windows), but as I do not have a lawn, the Scott advertisement means nothing to me (and, if anything, it makes me not want to have a lawn, because it involves all that work to take care of it), and for some currently unknown reason, I’m not really into the idea of transmitting money via cell phone. Who knows, though, maybe that will change.
But what I AM suddenly driven by is (a) an emotional desire to get a new car, and (b) a desire to get a Smartphone with lots of apps.
Sigh.
I really don’t intellectually want to buy a new car. I don’t want to have a car payment! And yes even though my 1993 Cadillac Sixty Special sedan is now 19 years old (and has something over 150,000 miles), it is huge and roomy and powerful (and, I think, beautiful and elegant-looking), which is very hard to come by with affordable 2012 models, and runs pretty well (although not as well as it should) and looks pretty good (although ideally I would like to have it repainted). Its flaws are not enough to justify getting a new car that will be smaller, weaker, and a car almost indistinguishable for every other car out there on the road, and that will COST ME!
Naturally, though, the car commercials dangle what seem to be amazingly low lease rates, rates that make we wonder how they compare against whatever I am paying in repairs to keep a 19-year-old car running. Maybe I am just being stupid and uneconomical…I mean, if it is cheaper to lease a new car than to keep my 19-year-old (gas guzzler) running….
The one thing saving me from running right out now and leasing (buying?) a new car is that the ones that appeal me really are the ones on the more expensive end and truly do, or would, go over any kind of repair bills that I have. So those apparently quite low lease rates don’t quite manage to pull me right into the car dealerships with my checkbook in my hand, because I realize well enough that they are nothing but loss leaders (for me). I am not ordinarily one to get the rock-bottom model of any car line (I want the biggest engine, the top-level trim, virtually all the options…so forget that at-first reasonable price).
But this doesn’t mean that I am able to blissfully be fully satisfied with the car that I already have, like I was before I started watching television again. I find myself constantly noticing OTHER cars, and my brain is continuously running little gears evaluating the various cars that catch my eye, that convertible sure would be nice… maybe I should figure out what I would want to go out and get if my car died right this minute… gee the way my engine seems to be skipping a beat when I accelerate up a hill between 55 and 60 miles per hour… isn’t that shifting getting to be a little bit too jerky and rough—how long has it been this way? In another words, a constant stream of “potential new car” talk keeps unavoidably running in my head.
However, due to how much money is involved, I probably will successfully beat the new car advertising.
But the cell phone advertising?
I am someone who hardly ever actually uses his cell phone. I am not one of those people (apparently the vast majority) who seem to be ON their cell phone every single possible second. While they are walking down the street. While they are driving their car. While they are sitting in a booth at a restaurant on a dinner date. While attending a business meeting. While walking down the stairs exiting a stadium movie theater, like they have been painfully putting their text-messaging and e-mail-checking on hold throughout the two-hour duration of the movie, but the second they are free to do it, they are back on that cell phone like an addict.
Sometimes people do call me on my cell phone, but unless I am expecting them (“If I will be delayed in meeting you downtown, I will call your cell phone”), I usually miss the call and end up getting their voice mail weeks later. I don’t normally carry the phone around in my pocket, but leave it in the car (my main expected use is to have it in case I need to call AAA…does this connect with the situation of having a 19-year-old car?), as I can’t imagine having any reason to call somebody while I am out, and if somebody were to call me, I wouldn’t want to talk to them while I am out. I’ll talk to them at home.
In a way, I am remarkably cell-phone-unsavvy. I have never sent or received a text message, and truly can’t imagine why I would want to. I don’t even have text-messaging capability on my now-ancient clamshell Motorola. It DOES have a rudimentary ability to go on-line, but it is so slow and the screen so tiny that I never have enough patience to actually use that feature. (Naturally, I have the lowest cost plan.)
An example of that “unsavvyness” was a couple of weekends ago when I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to see a marvelous artistic creation (kinetic sculpture) (that has something to say about the frenetic and inhuman quality of car-centered urban culture but is also awesome-cool), "Metropolis II", which was like an immense Hot Wheels and model train set.
Before I went there, I toyed with the idea of bringing my digital camera (which also has a video feature), because I figured I might want to photograph this, but then, similar to a concert, I figured that that might not be allowed, something about this work being proprietary, so I decided to leave the camera at home. Well, of course, I discovered nearly everybody in there, people by the hundreds, were snapping pictures and taking videos of it—with their CAMERA phones. I suddenly felt stupid…of course, you can’t take people’s cell phones away. Even if the museum WANTED to prevent picture-taking, there seems to be in this era no way to actually stop it. And this meant that technologically, I was being left behind.
It was not that I wasn’t able to do something, because I could have chosen to bring my digital camera, but that I was out of actually thinking what was capable of being done.
Even more powerful of a lesson was a school event we had a little after that day I went to the museum. Instead of the usual drinks and dinner party that the school has every year as a way for the employees and the trustees to get to know one another, the event planners decided to make the event “experiential” and set up an event of fun that was also meant to be team building and competitive, which was in the form of a commercially-produced “scavenger hunt” (called “CityHUNT”) which took place on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.
This “scavenger hunt” consisted of a three-page listing of various locations, activities, tasks, and items to be documented by photographs and videos taken by cameras that the company furnished, and collecting some required items. Some examples of tasks might be (“taking candy from a baby”, “helping a stranger”, “the entire team in mid-air”, “shaking hands with a policeman”, “being under water”, “walking two dogs”, “getting a pair of chopsticks”, “read the school’s mission statement very passionately to a group of people dining in the food court”, “putting a coin into a dolphin”, “the group doing high-fives in front of the Disney Store”, and so on and so on (and so on!). These activities and items had various point values depending on their difficulty in doing or complication in figuring out what was required. We were allotted two hours to this task.
What at first seemed like it would be very difficult, eliciting the help of strangers or interrupting or bothering them, was actually quite easy and was probably the most fun aspect of this. The strangers out there having a good time on a Friday night on the Third Street Promenade were all so nice, and it ended up that their experiences with us in doing all these various things was entertaining for them. So if team-building was what was required, part of the lesson of team-building included being open to strangers and honestly enjoying this expansion beyond our comfort zone.
Teams were chosen at random, except that every team would have at least one, if not more than one, trustee (since employees outnumbered trustees by about 5 to 1). This provided an opportunity for the trustees and the employees to work together "on the ground".
After it was all over, the facilitators of the scavenger hunt received back all the cameras and evidence and calculated all the scores. The group that I was in came in dead last out of about 12 different teams. We earned a little over half of the total possible points. Aw. But we got a good booby prize, though!
What was surprising to me was that the winning group had successfully completed every single thing on that list but one…they got an almost outstandingly perfect score.
As it happens, for the casual dinner that came afterwards (and a showing on a screen of all the photographs, many of which were hilarious), I ended up sitting at a table with some friends of mine, and who also sat at that table were three of the nicest trustees of all, and whose teams had come in first, second, and third place. And so of course in the discussion at dinner was what strategy (or strategies) worked, which came in in various pieces during that dinner, which I must have mulled over in my mind later that night so that by the time I was up and cooking breakfast Saturday morning, I understood what our team SHOULD have done.
Our team (and, I suppose, most of the others) immediately felt the pressure of competition that made us almost immediately leave the bar where this whole thing was to begin and end, taking off at almost a run down the street while somebody was to read out loud on the go the list of things that we were supposed to do, which list-reading would be stopped if we saw something along the way that satisfied one of the tasks. This already set us up for a random, chaotic, running round, hoping to come up against or recognize various things that we were to do, and this very unorganized activity kept us frantically busy for the whole two hours and was only good enough to successfully complete a little over half of the required tasks.
Here, instead, is what we SHOULD have done, and is exactly what the winning team DID do:
Not leave the bar until the entire list had been read and everybody on the team had heard and understood everything that needed to be done. Ironically, there were about 5 tasks that could be completed right there in that bar, and which we didn’t figure out, or see, until the very end when we came back, but too late to complete.
All teams were furnished with a basic Third Street Promenade map that, while not showing the name of any store or identifying any particular feature such as a fountain or a food court or a bus stop, DID show where the starting bar was in relation to the whole Promenade, and demarcated the various blocks along the whole length of it. The team then should have marked on that map the location of everything they could see that was required. For example, a man on our team already knew where there was a sculpture of a dolphin, and a woman on our team knew where the Disney store was. We should have marked these on the map.
But, beyond using the knowledge of members of the team, the winning team pulled out a SMARTPHONE (by the way, the moderator of the game, in giving his instructions, had said “If you get lost, you can call my cell phone number”—which he gave us—“either from a payphone or feel free to use your own cell phone which you can certainly use, and I will guide you back here”) and obtained a complete, detailed MAP of the entire Third Street Promenade, complete with store names and landmarks, so before they had left the bar, they pretty much already KNEW every location they needed and in which organized route to get to them the most efficiently. A Disney Store, a movie theater, a food court, a chinese restaurant, an Apple store, a Puma store, Victoria’s Secret, a candy store, Easton’s Gym, were some of the required destinations. Also, one of the tasks was to find a store that had in it the name of somebody on the team…that might not have been possible for every team (but maybe it was possible to be creative), I don’t know, but the winning team was able to figure that out by having this entire directory of all the store names on the Third Street Promenade.
Also part of the winning way to organize the hunt was to take into consideration the point value of the tasks. There were some tasks worth as much as 120 points (and we had completed only ONE of them, to have somebody video us doing a conga-line in front of the Cabo Cantina), while most of them were worth only 40 points.
We did ATTEMPT another 120-point task, and that was to go into a store and have three of us sing the song “I Will Survive” to a customer in the store. Unfortunately, none of us knew the words to the song, and hardly even knew the tune, so while we did put together an awful video of our attempt, we didn’t earn any points for that one. The winning team? They used a Smartphone to find the lyrics on a website that also played the tune, so they did a beautiful job.
So, you can guess what I got out of all this. Even though this whole thing was just playing a game (but one that our EMPLOYER figured was something we needed to do for some of the lessons involved, and one of the school's current focuses is TECHNOLOGY and understanding the kind of world that our students will be living in), I guess that the deeper lesson in all this is that in our current era, one can no longer afford to NOT have a Smartphone; that being outside of that technology is similar to not even having a computer. And nobody wants to be left in the dust of progress.
And here’s another obvious advantage to having a Smartphone. Something kind of weird has been happening with LA traffic, lately. It seems that I get everywhere way more quickly than I expect to, sometimes having an hour, and maybe even an hour and a half, to KILL. Several times in the past month, I have had to use my cell phone to change the time I was going to meet somebody, because I had gotten there way earlier than I had thought I would (which is better than being late, but being right on time is best). And I am pretty sure this isn’t because LA traffic has suddenly become delightful, but that I have gotten used to adding so much cushioning to my time estimate that I am now going way overboard.
The way I use Mapquest is to obtain driving directions and see what their time estimate is…let’s say it says 20 minutes, so I round that up to an easy 30 minutes. But then my rule in LA is to double Mapquest’s estimate, which in this example now means that I will make it an hour. But if I am going to do this drive during rush hour (in other words, after work, for example), I will then TRIPLE it, so now we are up to an hour and a half. And if the event or occasion is so super-important that I absolutely do not want to miss it, or be late to it, I will add in an extra half-hour as a cushion…so now for a trip that Mapquest originally estimated at 20 minutes, I might be allowing two hours! So, no wonder I am often getting there way ahead of time. And that is a waste of time.
I have seen advertisements for Google’s Nexus Smartphone on the Internet, and their traffic app, where they show you the bad traffic areas and the good traffic areas and all the alternative routes, really really really appeals to me. How incredibly wonderful it would be, especially when stuck in heavy traffic, to actually find out what is going on and figuring out what you can do in that situation. I find that I am spending a lot of time going somewhere by automatically taking the alternate route by default, when the traffic on the freeway might actually be quite light. Light traffic on an LA freeway might mean that to travel three miles actually takes three minutes, but in heavy traffic, might actually take 20 minutes, or if traffic is stopped because of an accident, that same three miles might take several hours. So if a person is going to live in a city like Los Angeles, then having available accurate traffic information while on the go is pretty important for daily life unless you are going to live like a hermit.
Sometimes I am out on the road and suddenly feel like going to a movie (one whose coming attraction I had seen, probably!) but out of five or six theaters in the area that might happen to be showing it, I probably don’t know what times they will be showing it and from my car, have no way to easily compare all the possibilities…that is, if I don’t have a Smartphone to give me that information. So, wouldn’t I like to have this information at my fingertips? Prior to seeing all these cell phone advertisements along with the TV show, SMASH, I would shrug my shoulders and think, oh well, if I want to see that movie, I’ll go tomorrow after I have checked all the times on-line from home or work. But even that is not foolproof, because plans change, things come up, my time gets allocated differently the next day, and so weeks may go by before the opportunity comes up again and by then I may have missed seeing the movie altogether (some of them don’t stay around too many weeks, since they have to make room for the next one), when I COULD have seen it that day when I felt like it when I was out in my car.
In a way it’s kind of silly to only recently be awakening to the benefits of having a Smartphone, but my point is that it has been all this advertising that has been raising my awareness and making me feel that I NEED this. I don’t REALLY need to have a Smartphone any more than I may need to have a maid to come in and clean my house once a week, but I sure do seem to keenly FEEL the advantages of having one.
And finally, the most emotional draw of all, and this is the final demonstration of how powerfully well advertising works…working on your self-image, desires, and maybe even your fears. Here, this has to do not only with being left behind, things changing very fast, but of a sense of aging, becoming too old, of possibilities soon to be lost, or already gone. And that is the iPhone commercial that shows the attractive young male teenager whose face they don’t really show in full, which means to me that he stands in for “the generic good-looking lean-bodied totally hipster youth who has EVERYTHING ahead of him" (a) asking SIRI, iPhone’s voice-command system, where he can buy a guitar, (b) digitally uploading the recording of a song he wrote on the guitar he bought, (c) asking SIRI to send the love song to his girlfriend, (d) asking SIRI to make a note of his new rock band’s name, (e) asking SIRI to send an invitation to his girlfriend to attend his rock band’s show tonight at such and such a club, and (f) asking SIRI to refer to him from now on as “Rock God”, with the commercial ending with SIRI saying back to him, “Okay, now you are ‘Rock God.’” And you know what, you really do think he is a "God". He is, and you aren't. But you want to be.
I also love the other SIRI commercial with various people demonstrating all the things that it can do (answer questions about the Grand Canyon, finding the nearest gas station, etc.) that ends with “Remind me to do this again,” and the SIRI voice says, “Okay, I’ll remind you.” I am pretty sure that the SIRI voice is the same female voice that is in these XtraNormal YouTube videos (although yes, I could be wrong). It is a voice I have already come to love.
At any rate, I think that voice is very funny and appealing, so now I want THAT feature. And anyway, not using cell phones hands free in the car is illegal, not to mention dangerous to keep glancing at the screen while driving, having this voice activation and communicating feature seems almost essential. Of course, Android phones also have a voice system (they even had them first), but it doesn’t seem to have the same level of artificial intelligence that the iPhone SIRI system has, plus I don’t think it talks back.
So, all this is to say that I definitely now WANT a Smartphone; I keep hearing the SIRI voice saying, “Okay, you are now ‘Rock God’”, so that probably means an iPhone (which also has a traffic app and all the other stuff, not too different from what Android phones have), but there is the problem of how expensive some of these phone plans are when you include data downloads and the like. Unlimited plans can cost over a hundred dollars a month (thinking back to when I cancelled my cable TV, that seems to be my negative price point), but I have no frame of reference for how much of a data plan I would need if I got a cheaper plan where usage was charged by the minutes and gigabytes. Having never had this, how do I know how much I need?
So that, for now, hangs me up.
Yesterday I went for a walk throughout the whole huge Topanga Mall in Canoga Park, and you can guess which TWO stores I happened to walk into (since they were there...), and they were the ONLY stores I went into.
1. The Audi dealership (yes, they sell cars at this mall, too; they also have a Ferrari dealership there, but I didn’t go into it!). Audi IS one of the cars I would consider getting, although gee, too expensive, really, except for the smallest, most basic, 4-cylinder model.
2. Best Buy Mobile, “Any Carrier”, “Any Phone”, “Any Plan”, although I don’t think they sell the iPhone…for that I would need to go one floor up to the Apple store. The guy there was very helpful, demonstrating with his own phone several of the apps that interested me. But gosh, just SO MANY choices of carriers phones, and plans unless I just jump in with both feet say, “Okay, iPhone, unlimited everything plan, just wipe me out totally.”
Advertising, are you helping me, or ruining me?
My college degree, a bachelor of science in business administration (and yes, there actually is a science behind it), had the specialty of marketing. There were several other specialties I could have chosen, I suppose, such as personnel, production, transportation, finance. Probably the most valuable of those choices when it came to obtaining a job later would have been finance. And I honestly did enjoy the beginning courses in accounting, but the advanced courses in accounting didn’t move me very much, and while I very much enjoyed macroeconomics, I truly detested microeconomics (price theory), and also found wholesaling pretty bad, plus “finance” seemed to be a good specialty for introverts, which I absolutely am not. So, finance was out, although I knew that regarding earning money in the corporate world, those who worked with money earned the most, those who worked with people earned the least, and those who worked with data came somewhere between.
My favorite business courses ended up being in business law, which led to my going to law school for two years, but then I realized that I really didn’t want to be a lawyer for various reasons, so I dropped out before I started the final year.
Ironically, the work that I am doing now is a cross between both business law (specifically: legal compliance)—but definitely not earning at an $800.00 an hour billing rate—and personnel (now called human resources), but I never took a single personnel course in college, mainly because the professor in that specialty was so awful (I had signed up for the beginning personnel elective, but fortunately was able to drop it before the deadline), but also because of what I said two paragraphs up, those who work with people make the least money in the corporate world, so I saw no lasting value in electing those subjects.
So why did I choose marketing, of all things? Because in the advanced stages, it is actually a fascinating subject, a marvelous combination of science and creative artistry; it had the sort of course material that a person might want to audit no matter what their major. Unfortunately, though, the early employment tracks in that field can be pretty awful, in my estimation…such as sales. Sales, no thank you.
Writing advertising copy might be fun, but for someone who actually should have chucked college altogether and become a professional writer (no matter the struggle and expected poverty), advertising copy would have made me feel that my head was in a vice. Oh, working in New York City might have felt like “success” (if, presumably, I had actually managed to achieve that), at least for a few months, but I know that ultimately it would have been a nightmare.
Again, ironically, through some kind of great fortune I did gravitate into something that skipped over the whole sales track, and that was being a market research analyst. And it was in that position whereby I got to experience at the creative level how advertising really works, or doesn’t, as the company for which I was a project director was there to determine that success or failure for advertising creators so that they didn’t waste untold millions in publishing or running advertisements or commercials that weren’t effective.
Some of the elements to be analyzed and evaluated are (a) the introduction of the product, (b) the person presenting the product, (c) the demonstration of the product, (d) the music in the commercial, (e) and various other subtle elements, such as colors, graphics, the emotions induced, the fears induced, the satisfaction promised, and so on. Audience testing will show the analyst just how well these elements are working, and if any of those pieces don’t work very well, the whole the marketing effort can come apart (and maybe even do more harm to the product’s success than good).
Having professionally analyzed those various elements, I am pretty familiar with them and can intellectually recognize and subjectively evaluate them (how they work for me), but I can also see how often I am just as helpless against them as somebody who is entirely consciously unaware of their effects. I think just about the only way to not be affected by them is to not be exposed to them, which really means don’t look at any magazines, don’t watch television, don’t go to any movies. I add “movies” to that list of “don’t dos” because I am aware that there is hardly a coming attraction I have seen that didn’t make me want to go see that movie. I have noticed that if I stop going to movies for a while, then I don’t go to movies for a LONG while (because the desire/fulfillment dynamic is broken), but if I break that long-term absence from the movie theater, then I end up going continuously until I get sick of it again.
Watching television is something that I had stopped doing regularly about fifteen years ago when my cable bill had reached $100 a month and I realized that the only channel I was ever watching was Showtime. Yes, I liked Showtime, but I realized that for much less than a hundred dollars a month I could watch everything that Netflix could throw at me, so I got rid of my cable and until very recently, was a most peculiar oddball in that I never watched television at all…only DVDs and videos on the TV screen.
I am still pretty much that same oddball in that I don’t have cable. I am able to receive 13 basic channels (and dozens of Spanish and Asian channels that may as well not exist) via an antenna and a digital converter box, which comes in sharp and clear and is completely free. Right now, I am watching only ONE television show, though, and THAT is because of going to a free movie screening, which happened to be in the very office-building-with-a-test-audience-theater where I used to be the market research analyst described above, except that that company is now no longer there. It wasn’t a movie, though, but an advanced screening of the television pilot (also the kind of thing I used to analyze) of the NBC television show, SMASH. Like what happens to me with coming attractions at the movie theater, I got interested in watching this TV show, so my Monday evening is devoted to watching this one television show. And maybe one other that precedes it (so it is convenient), Alcatraz, because it is executive-produced and sometimes script-written by the husband of a teacher at the school where I work. But I am more devoted to SMASH, not missing an episode, and can be hit and miss with Alcatraz.
So, after a decade and a half’s absence, I am now being exposed to television advertising, which on Monday night, at least, seems to basically be lots of car commercials alternating with lots of cell phone commercials. They may be advertising other things, but apparently I am immune to those products whatever they are as I couldn’t tell you what a single one of them is…oh, no, that’s wrong, trying to remember, I do actually remember one for a Scott lawn product (memorable because the man presenting speaks with a Scottish accent, which is an effective gimmick) and another one for a Chase Bank cell-phone-oriented method of sending money to somebody (memorable because it features a cute and funny little boy toddler who is into kicking a ball that smashes all the neighbors’ windows), but as I do not have a lawn, the Scott advertisement means nothing to me (and, if anything, it makes me not want to have a lawn, because it involves all that work to take care of it), and for some currently unknown reason, I’m not really into the idea of transmitting money via cell phone. Who knows, though, maybe that will change.
But what I AM suddenly driven by is (a) an emotional desire to get a new car, and (b) a desire to get a Smartphone with lots of apps.
Sigh.
I really don’t intellectually want to buy a new car. I don’t want to have a car payment! And yes even though my 1993 Cadillac Sixty Special sedan is now 19 years old (and has something over 150,000 miles), it is huge and roomy and powerful (and, I think, beautiful and elegant-looking), which is very hard to come by with affordable 2012 models, and runs pretty well (although not as well as it should) and looks pretty good (although ideally I would like to have it repainted). Its flaws are not enough to justify getting a new car that will be smaller, weaker, and a car almost indistinguishable for every other car out there on the road, and that will COST ME!
Naturally, though, the car commercials dangle what seem to be amazingly low lease rates, rates that make we wonder how they compare against whatever I am paying in repairs to keep a 19-year-old car running. Maybe I am just being stupid and uneconomical…I mean, if it is cheaper to lease a new car than to keep my 19-year-old (gas guzzler) running….
The one thing saving me from running right out now and leasing (buying?) a new car is that the ones that appeal me really are the ones on the more expensive end and truly do, or would, go over any kind of repair bills that I have. So those apparently quite low lease rates don’t quite manage to pull me right into the car dealerships with my checkbook in my hand, because I realize well enough that they are nothing but loss leaders (for me). I am not ordinarily one to get the rock-bottom model of any car line (I want the biggest engine, the top-level trim, virtually all the options…so forget that at-first reasonable price).
But this doesn’t mean that I am able to blissfully be fully satisfied with the car that I already have, like I was before I started watching television again. I find myself constantly noticing OTHER cars, and my brain is continuously running little gears evaluating the various cars that catch my eye, that convertible sure would be nice… maybe I should figure out what I would want to go out and get if my car died right this minute… gee the way my engine seems to be skipping a beat when I accelerate up a hill between 55 and 60 miles per hour… isn’t that shifting getting to be a little bit too jerky and rough—how long has it been this way? In another words, a constant stream of “potential new car” talk keeps unavoidably running in my head.
However, due to how much money is involved, I probably will successfully beat the new car advertising.
But the cell phone advertising?
I am someone who hardly ever actually uses his cell phone. I am not one of those people (apparently the vast majority) who seem to be ON their cell phone every single possible second. While they are walking down the street. While they are driving their car. While they are sitting in a booth at a restaurant on a dinner date. While attending a business meeting. While walking down the stairs exiting a stadium movie theater, like they have been painfully putting their text-messaging and e-mail-checking on hold throughout the two-hour duration of the movie, but the second they are free to do it, they are back on that cell phone like an addict.
Sometimes people do call me on my cell phone, but unless I am expecting them (“If I will be delayed in meeting you downtown, I will call your cell phone”), I usually miss the call and end up getting their voice mail weeks later. I don’t normally carry the phone around in my pocket, but leave it in the car (my main expected use is to have it in case I need to call AAA…does this connect with the situation of having a 19-year-old car?), as I can’t imagine having any reason to call somebody while I am out, and if somebody were to call me, I wouldn’t want to talk to them while I am out. I’ll talk to them at home.
In a way, I am remarkably cell-phone-unsavvy. I have never sent or received a text message, and truly can’t imagine why I would want to. I don’t even have text-messaging capability on my now-ancient clamshell Motorola. It DOES have a rudimentary ability to go on-line, but it is so slow and the screen so tiny that I never have enough patience to actually use that feature. (Naturally, I have the lowest cost plan.)
An example of that “unsavvyness” was a couple of weekends ago when I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to see a marvelous artistic creation (kinetic sculpture) (that has something to say about the frenetic and inhuman quality of car-centered urban culture but is also awesome-cool), "Metropolis II", which was like an immense Hot Wheels and model train set.
Before I went there, I toyed with the idea of bringing my digital camera (which also has a video feature), because I figured I might want to photograph this, but then, similar to a concert, I figured that that might not be allowed, something about this work being proprietary, so I decided to leave the camera at home. Well, of course, I discovered nearly everybody in there, people by the hundreds, were snapping pictures and taking videos of it—with their CAMERA phones. I suddenly felt stupid…of course, you can’t take people’s cell phones away. Even if the museum WANTED to prevent picture-taking, there seems to be in this era no way to actually stop it. And this meant that technologically, I was being left behind.
It was not that I wasn’t able to do something, because I could have chosen to bring my digital camera, but that I was out of actually thinking what was capable of being done.
Even more powerful of a lesson was a school event we had a little after that day I went to the museum. Instead of the usual drinks and dinner party that the school has every year as a way for the employees and the trustees to get to know one another, the event planners decided to make the event “experiential” and set up an event of fun that was also meant to be team building and competitive, which was in the form of a commercially-produced “scavenger hunt” (called “CityHUNT”) which took place on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.
This “scavenger hunt” consisted of a three-page listing of various locations, activities, tasks, and items to be documented by photographs and videos taken by cameras that the company furnished, and collecting some required items. Some examples of tasks might be (“taking candy from a baby”, “helping a stranger”, “the entire team in mid-air”, “shaking hands with a policeman”, “being under water”, “walking two dogs”, “getting a pair of chopsticks”, “read the school’s mission statement very passionately to a group of people dining in the food court”, “putting a coin into a dolphin”, “the group doing high-fives in front of the Disney Store”, and so on and so on (and so on!). These activities and items had various point values depending on their difficulty in doing or complication in figuring out what was required. We were allotted two hours to this task.
What at first seemed like it would be very difficult, eliciting the help of strangers or interrupting or bothering them, was actually quite easy and was probably the most fun aspect of this. The strangers out there having a good time on a Friday night on the Third Street Promenade were all so nice, and it ended up that their experiences with us in doing all these various things was entertaining for them. So if team-building was what was required, part of the lesson of team-building included being open to strangers and honestly enjoying this expansion beyond our comfort zone.
Teams were chosen at random, except that every team would have at least one, if not more than one, trustee (since employees outnumbered trustees by about 5 to 1). This provided an opportunity for the trustees and the employees to work together "on the ground".
After it was all over, the facilitators of the scavenger hunt received back all the cameras and evidence and calculated all the scores. The group that I was in came in dead last out of about 12 different teams. We earned a little over half of the total possible points. Aw. But we got a good booby prize, though!
What was surprising to me was that the winning group had successfully completed every single thing on that list but one…they got an almost outstandingly perfect score.
As it happens, for the casual dinner that came afterwards (and a showing on a screen of all the photographs, many of which were hilarious), I ended up sitting at a table with some friends of mine, and who also sat at that table were three of the nicest trustees of all, and whose teams had come in first, second, and third place. And so of course in the discussion at dinner was what strategy (or strategies) worked, which came in in various pieces during that dinner, which I must have mulled over in my mind later that night so that by the time I was up and cooking breakfast Saturday morning, I understood what our team SHOULD have done.
Our team (and, I suppose, most of the others) immediately felt the pressure of competition that made us almost immediately leave the bar where this whole thing was to begin and end, taking off at almost a run down the street while somebody was to read out loud on the go the list of things that we were supposed to do, which list-reading would be stopped if we saw something along the way that satisfied one of the tasks. This already set us up for a random, chaotic, running round, hoping to come up against or recognize various things that we were to do, and this very unorganized activity kept us frantically busy for the whole two hours and was only good enough to successfully complete a little over half of the required tasks.
Here, instead, is what we SHOULD have done, and is exactly what the winning team DID do:
Not leave the bar until the entire list had been read and everybody on the team had heard and understood everything that needed to be done. Ironically, there were about 5 tasks that could be completed right there in that bar, and which we didn’t figure out, or see, until the very end when we came back, but too late to complete.
All teams were furnished with a basic Third Street Promenade map that, while not showing the name of any store or identifying any particular feature such as a fountain or a food court or a bus stop, DID show where the starting bar was in relation to the whole Promenade, and demarcated the various blocks along the whole length of it. The team then should have marked on that map the location of everything they could see that was required. For example, a man on our team already knew where there was a sculpture of a dolphin, and a woman on our team knew where the Disney store was. We should have marked these on the map.
But, beyond using the knowledge of members of the team, the winning team pulled out a SMARTPHONE (by the way, the moderator of the game, in giving his instructions, had said “If you get lost, you can call my cell phone number”—which he gave us—“either from a payphone or feel free to use your own cell phone which you can certainly use, and I will guide you back here”) and obtained a complete, detailed MAP of the entire Third Street Promenade, complete with store names and landmarks, so before they had left the bar, they pretty much already KNEW every location they needed and in which organized route to get to them the most efficiently. A Disney Store, a movie theater, a food court, a chinese restaurant, an Apple store, a Puma store, Victoria’s Secret, a candy store, Easton’s Gym, were some of the required destinations. Also, one of the tasks was to find a store that had in it the name of somebody on the team…that might not have been possible for every team (but maybe it was possible to be creative), I don’t know, but the winning team was able to figure that out by having this entire directory of all the store names on the Third Street Promenade.
Also part of the winning way to organize the hunt was to take into consideration the point value of the tasks. There were some tasks worth as much as 120 points (and we had completed only ONE of them, to have somebody video us doing a conga-line in front of the Cabo Cantina), while most of them were worth only 40 points.
We did ATTEMPT another 120-point task, and that was to go into a store and have three of us sing the song “I Will Survive” to a customer in the store. Unfortunately, none of us knew the words to the song, and hardly even knew the tune, so while we did put together an awful video of our attempt, we didn’t earn any points for that one. The winning team? They used a Smartphone to find the lyrics on a website that also played the tune, so they did a beautiful job.
So, you can guess what I got out of all this. Even though this whole thing was just playing a game (but one that our EMPLOYER figured was something we needed to do for some of the lessons involved, and one of the school's current focuses is TECHNOLOGY and understanding the kind of world that our students will be living in), I guess that the deeper lesson in all this is that in our current era, one can no longer afford to NOT have a Smartphone; that being outside of that technology is similar to not even having a computer. And nobody wants to be left in the dust of progress.
And here’s another obvious advantage to having a Smartphone. Something kind of weird has been happening with LA traffic, lately. It seems that I get everywhere way more quickly than I expect to, sometimes having an hour, and maybe even an hour and a half, to KILL. Several times in the past month, I have had to use my cell phone to change the time I was going to meet somebody, because I had gotten there way earlier than I had thought I would (which is better than being late, but being right on time is best). And I am pretty sure this isn’t because LA traffic has suddenly become delightful, but that I have gotten used to adding so much cushioning to my time estimate that I am now going way overboard.
The way I use Mapquest is to obtain driving directions and see what their time estimate is…let’s say it says 20 minutes, so I round that up to an easy 30 minutes. But then my rule in LA is to double Mapquest’s estimate, which in this example now means that I will make it an hour. But if I am going to do this drive during rush hour (in other words, after work, for example), I will then TRIPLE it, so now we are up to an hour and a half. And if the event or occasion is so super-important that I absolutely do not want to miss it, or be late to it, I will add in an extra half-hour as a cushion…so now for a trip that Mapquest originally estimated at 20 minutes, I might be allowing two hours! So, no wonder I am often getting there way ahead of time. And that is a waste of time.
I have seen advertisements for Google’s Nexus Smartphone on the Internet, and their traffic app, where they show you the bad traffic areas and the good traffic areas and all the alternative routes, really really really appeals to me. How incredibly wonderful it would be, especially when stuck in heavy traffic, to actually find out what is going on and figuring out what you can do in that situation. I find that I am spending a lot of time going somewhere by automatically taking the alternate route by default, when the traffic on the freeway might actually be quite light. Light traffic on an LA freeway might mean that to travel three miles actually takes three minutes, but in heavy traffic, might actually take 20 minutes, or if traffic is stopped because of an accident, that same three miles might take several hours. So if a person is going to live in a city like Los Angeles, then having available accurate traffic information while on the go is pretty important for daily life unless you are going to live like a hermit.
Sometimes I am out on the road and suddenly feel like going to a movie (one whose coming attraction I had seen, probably!) but out of five or six theaters in the area that might happen to be showing it, I probably don’t know what times they will be showing it and from my car, have no way to easily compare all the possibilities…that is, if I don’t have a Smartphone to give me that information. So, wouldn’t I like to have this information at my fingertips? Prior to seeing all these cell phone advertisements along with the TV show, SMASH, I would shrug my shoulders and think, oh well, if I want to see that movie, I’ll go tomorrow after I have checked all the times on-line from home or work. But even that is not foolproof, because plans change, things come up, my time gets allocated differently the next day, and so weeks may go by before the opportunity comes up again and by then I may have missed seeing the movie altogether (some of them don’t stay around too many weeks, since they have to make room for the next one), when I COULD have seen it that day when I felt like it when I was out in my car.
In a way it’s kind of silly to only recently be awakening to the benefits of having a Smartphone, but my point is that it has been all this advertising that has been raising my awareness and making me feel that I NEED this. I don’t REALLY need to have a Smartphone any more than I may need to have a maid to come in and clean my house once a week, but I sure do seem to keenly FEEL the advantages of having one.
And finally, the most emotional draw of all, and this is the final demonstration of how powerfully well advertising works…working on your self-image, desires, and maybe even your fears. Here, this has to do not only with being left behind, things changing very fast, but of a sense of aging, becoming too old, of possibilities soon to be lost, or already gone. And that is the iPhone commercial that shows the attractive young male teenager whose face they don’t really show in full, which means to me that he stands in for “the generic good-looking lean-bodied totally hipster youth who has EVERYTHING ahead of him" (a) asking SIRI, iPhone’s voice-command system, where he can buy a guitar, (b) digitally uploading the recording of a song he wrote on the guitar he bought, (c) asking SIRI to send the love song to his girlfriend, (d) asking SIRI to make a note of his new rock band’s name, (e) asking SIRI to send an invitation to his girlfriend to attend his rock band’s show tonight at such and such a club, and (f) asking SIRI to refer to him from now on as “Rock God”, with the commercial ending with SIRI saying back to him, “Okay, now you are ‘Rock God.’” And you know what, you really do think he is a "God". He is, and you aren't. But you want to be.
I also love the other SIRI commercial with various people demonstrating all the things that it can do (answer questions about the Grand Canyon, finding the nearest gas station, etc.) that ends with “Remind me to do this again,” and the SIRI voice says, “Okay, I’ll remind you.” I am pretty sure that the SIRI voice is the same female voice that is in these XtraNormal YouTube videos (although yes, I could be wrong). It is a voice I have already come to love.
At any rate, I think that voice is very funny and appealing, so now I want THAT feature. And anyway, not using cell phones hands free in the car is illegal, not to mention dangerous to keep glancing at the screen while driving, having this voice activation and communicating feature seems almost essential. Of course, Android phones also have a voice system (they even had them first), but it doesn’t seem to have the same level of artificial intelligence that the iPhone SIRI system has, plus I don’t think it talks back.
So, all this is to say that I definitely now WANT a Smartphone; I keep hearing the SIRI voice saying, “Okay, you are now ‘Rock God’”, so that probably means an iPhone (which also has a traffic app and all the other stuff, not too different from what Android phones have), but there is the problem of how expensive some of these phone plans are when you include data downloads and the like. Unlimited plans can cost over a hundred dollars a month (thinking back to when I cancelled my cable TV, that seems to be my negative price point), but I have no frame of reference for how much of a data plan I would need if I got a cheaper plan where usage was charged by the minutes and gigabytes. Having never had this, how do I know how much I need?
So that, for now, hangs me up.
Yesterday I went for a walk throughout the whole huge Topanga Mall in Canoga Park, and you can guess which TWO stores I happened to walk into (since they were there...), and they were the ONLY stores I went into.
1. The Audi dealership (yes, they sell cars at this mall, too; they also have a Ferrari dealership there, but I didn’t go into it!). Audi IS one of the cars I would consider getting, although gee, too expensive, really, except for the smallest, most basic, 4-cylinder model.
2. Best Buy Mobile, “Any Carrier”, “Any Phone”, “Any Plan”, although I don’t think they sell the iPhone…for that I would need to go one floor up to the Apple store. The guy there was very helpful, demonstrating with his own phone several of the apps that interested me. But gosh, just SO MANY choices of carriers phones, and plans unless I just jump in with both feet say, “Okay, iPhone, unlimited everything plan, just wipe me out totally.”
Advertising, are you helping me, or ruining me?
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Not Wasted On The Young
Sometimes on these marvelous lazy weekend mornings when I can wake up when my body wants to, without an alarm piercing a leak into my dreams and murdering my sense of peaceful comfort, I can enjoy the pure simple comforts of being in the bed and having no particular demands on my time. Everything feels delicious, the soft but firm mattress, the numerous loving pillows, the smooth elegant silken sheets, even the soft thickness of the black and gold comforter that has a rich beauty that would have made a Russian Czar envious. But, best of all, is my own body, that as my exploratory fingers stroke across my chest and stomach, and beyond, I am surprised and impressed anew by this internalized feeling of perfect physical beauty.
I am amazed by the lean hardness of my sternum, bracketed by the obvious slopes of evident pectoral muscles, and my lean ribs, rising and lowering in clear relief, and the sudden downward ski slope of my abdomen with its moguls of abs, and there in the center of those muscles is the magnetically sensual indentation of my belly button, surrounded by a rubbery ring; I HAVE this now, instead of…what was there before.
Intrigued, wondering if this looks as good to my eyes as it feels to my fingers, I push the covers down and lift my head for a look at my stretched-out supine self and all of it appears even better than my fingers had imagined. There is, of course, the centerline trail and its lighter splayed out branches as the hair becomes fuller across this flattened valley and instantly I grab what is the centerpiece down there (guarded by the wings of pelvic bones and the lean but strong thighs and long racehorse legs of the long-distance hiker that lie splayed there beyond), the apparent goal of all these pathways, already close to fullness even before I began my squeeze, and I see it rise up rich and thick and tall and fragrant…and gorgeous in all its perfection of size and proportion, not huge, mind you, but way more than adequate, but, more importantly, clearly very beautiful and a very icon of male sexuality.
Within the privacy of my thoughts, I think that I ought to take a picture of this, but I don’t, haven’t, not yet, anyway, if I ever do, but I realize that I do not reject or dismiss or think negatively of the concept, not at all.
A little narcissism is good for the soul, I think.
I have to quote Alice Walker here, on this, “I think it pisses God off if you see the color purple in a field and don’t notice it.” A little noticing of and admiring with appreciation your own color purple is what is called for, here, and it is only a force of evil that leads you to thinking that that is wrong. Where did that come from, anyway? From out of a pit of diabolical darkness, I am sure.
I’m rather intrigued by those guys (and girls do it, too) who photograph their naked selves and even videotape themselves and sext them to their friends or post them on the Internet. Not that I would do that, I am, after all, NOT of the “Internet generation of youth” which is another way of saying that no purpose would come from me doing such a thing and not a soul on earth would be interested in seeing it if I did. Early morning physical self-admiration is one thing, but expecting others to share in that is quite another and I do know better than that. It is quite enough for me to share my thoughts in a reasonably-anonymous forum like this one, but a visual physical sharing is not going to happen with me at my age, now. But if I were, say, twenty-two, yes, indeed. I WOULD.
And I think those who can, SHOULD. Beauty should not be hidden away under a barrel (or some phrase like that), especially for youth who are in a stage or phase where they need to have confidence and social affirmation and be securely centered in their own power as they set off to make their way in the world. Their own body is surely an expression of their own dreams as anyone with half a shred of artistic sense can clearly see by how and what those bodies are communicating.
But for the middle-aged (and older), the fading of those dreams is also on display and in so many ways, it is a very sad pageant of misery. There is the sagging and the bagging and the softening and the fading. There is the thickening middles and the angry dispositions. The frowns and the scowls and the sharp barking orders and admonitions to those very youths whose energy is viewed as an affront against those failures—the nos and the don’ts, that what I think of as the “don’t runs” and the “sit down and shut ups”. Hatred of that which one once had and never appreciated and now doesn’t have and appreciates even less.
BUT.
You CAN have it. Again. Or still.
You just have to know the way.
Way number one: you must not lose the feeling inside you. What you see in the mirror may not be what you remember from decades ago, but keep smiling anyway. Even if you have gotten so out of shape that you avert your eyes from every reflection that stands in your way and mocks you mercilessly, you must still feel an appreciation for beauty that is everywhere, and that you even surprisingly sometimes still feel within you. It COMES from you anyway, even if currently it is only a flickering ember. With the right fanning and oxygenation, that ember can become a roaring furnace again.
Way number two: you must be healthy and you must be discriminatory in how to have that health. Listening to (a) marketers and (b) governments who are in the pocket of marketers are probably not the best people to listen to. They don’t care about you, they only want your money for as long as they can squeeze it out of you. To listen to them and to do what they tell you is to be a special kind of stupid, and I realized sometime back that I didn’t even blame them for what they did; that people let themselves be so lazy and stupid that manipulating them was like taking candy from a baby, so the temptation was too great for this kind of person to not take advantage of. (In this case, it is GIVING candy to a baby.) So, don’t be lazy, don’t be stupid, or what you will end up suffering will be your own fault. You saw the trap, yet you just kept on walking right into it anyway.
Way number three: What makes sense from a natural, ecological, tribal, worked-for-millions-of-years-of-human-evolution point of view? Stand in the doorway of a gas station mini-mart and sweep your eyes across all the shelves of packaged material on offer there. WHAT in there is actually FOOD? Instead, it is all white sugar and white flower combined in a myriad clever forms and shapes. If you were, for example, a Masai warrior, you wouldn’t see that as any more a food store than you would see the gas pumps as water fountains.
Way number four: Be wary of commercial weight-loss programs. For me to better explain this, let me give you an example of something that happened many years ago. I was on a little road trip and had to go to the bathroom. When that happens, I look for a McDonalds, which are plentiful and always have a bathroom. Well, if I am going to take advantage of their bathroom, I feel that I ought to buy something from them, which usually means that I get a cup of coffee. So, on this road trip, I had gone to a McDonald’s bathroom and now was in line behind a woman who was about to place a food order. For some reason, I just KNEW that she was a member of Weight Watchers. She wasn’t “fat”, mind you, in fact, I figured she had reached her goal weight. The SCALE was reporting back to her a poundage number that had positive meaning to her, so she had successfully achieved this thing, she was now weighing an acceptable weight for her height and age.
She then placed her order and I knew enough of how the Weight Watchers program worked, so I heard myself say to her, “You just ordered a perfect Weight Watcher’s meal,” and I reported to her how many “points” that meal was. She smiled back at me, very happily, and said, “Yes, I am a Lifetime Member of Weight Watchers!” I said back to her, “Congratulations, a job well done!”
I got my coffee and got back into my car and resumed my road trip. But I was thinking about that woman and wondered HOW I so accurately knew that she was a member of Weight Watchers. As I said, she clearly wasn’t “fat”, and, as she confirmed for me, she was even a Lifetime Member (that’s actually a scary phrase if you really think about it, and very telling), which means that she had reached her goal weight, maintained it for six weeks of maintenance, and from now on can attend as many Weight Watchers meetings as she wants and never will have to pay anything so long as she stays within two pounds of her goal weight and continues to attend meetings at a certain frequency (the actual number of which I forget…one a week, maybe?). So, she was a SUCCESS as far as that program goes. And Weight Watchers is generally considered the most successful of all the commercial weight loss programs.
So, with her having achieved that success, shouldn’t she look like, say, Audrey Hepburn? I mean, if a total stranger can simply take a glance at her and think “she is a member of Weight Watchers”, then something must be wrong. A stranger should be able to look at her and never have the slightest clue that she had ever been overweight. One would hope that having once suffered obesity would not leave an indelible footprint.
The clues that led me to see her as a Weight Watchers success are myriad and subtle and I can only think that while she weighed a lot less, her body somehow still must have retained the “shape” and ratio/proportions of an overweight person. And believe me, we humans are GENIUSES at instantly making all these body proportion calculations in our mind, it seems to be hard-wired within us so that even at a huge distance, we can immediately see if that person up ahead has a beautiful body or not, and even babies can do it.
I still get cues and clues as to that with my own person. When I moved back down through the pounds to the weight loss success that I have had, I went beyond even the smallest clothes that I had retained, which means that I am now leaner and more muscular than I was when I was a freshmen in college and hadn’t a thought in the world of ever being overweight. I had to buy new clothes and needed to have my shirt and pants size measured. But the measurements by a sales clerk at Macy’s, while close, were not entirely accurate. She measured my shirt size as neck 15 ½, sleeve 32-33, and pants waist size 34, inseam 30. I didn’t try on the shirts (so packaged and pinned-up as they are), and the pants SEEMED more or less okay when I tried them on. So I bought several shirts and pants.
However, actually experiencing the wearing of them, I soon enough realized that shirts sized 15 neck, 34-35 sleeves and pants waist size 33, inseam 32, would be better, and so I bought some of those.
Then I noticed that whenever I wore any of the 15 ½ x 32-33 shirts, or the 34 x 30 pants, if I got complements at all, it would be on the color combination of the clothes, but whenever I wore any of the 15 x 33-34 shirts AND the 33 x 32 pants, I not only ALWAYS get complements, I also keep hearing about how surprisingly thin (or tall) I am (so that my 6 feet ½ inch height seems to be perceived more like 6’2” or more). There’s not all that huge of a difference between those two shirt or pants sizes, and, frankly, either one of them is pretty damned good for a man of my age, but essentially what is happening between the two combinations is that the ones that get definite complements are ONE INCH less wide and TWO INCHES longer. Somehow, people just instantly see that as an immensely important difference in a person's appearance.
And now, currently, I am wearing the “lean” or “slim” cut of those smaller sizes, and I can now wear 32” waist pants, so now the gushing never ends (which, I freely admit, I really do enjoy). I can’t make myself any taller, and with a single-digit fat percentage, I can’t really lose much more weight, but I do see that I am probably just one more pant size away from male fashion model dimensions, which might be worth achieving, if possible. Also, I do think it would now be worth it to get custom-sized clothing, now that I see how much difference these tiny changes in sizing make toward the perception of ones body dimensions.
All of which is to say that a person doesn’t have to end up with that “Weight Watcher’s body”, but that it is actually possible to transform a body back to what it is supposed to be.
I have a body composition monitor that provides me with several other measurements, one of which is an estimation of my “metabolic” age (based on fat, lean body mass, bone mass, and other measurements), which in my case now fluctuates around among the various TEEN years, which, incidentally, seems to also be backed up by what my blood test shows about my testosterone level, which used to be so low that I was supplementing it with biodentical hormone therapy, but now is a good reading for even a man in his prime.
So, for all VERIFIABLE measurements and methods, miraculously, I am now actually physically “young”, that is to say, “a youth”, without actually being a youth. How fantastic is that? To actually have at this point of life, again, what was once had in the prime physical years, but at a time when I can really appreciate it, is totally delightful.
So leave me to my early-morning self-admiration, not diminished when get up and see my smiling self, naked in a mirror. What I am enjoying IS available for all of us, no matter what our age, and I am simply the happy proof of that.
I am amazed by the lean hardness of my sternum, bracketed by the obvious slopes of evident pectoral muscles, and my lean ribs, rising and lowering in clear relief, and the sudden downward ski slope of my abdomen with its moguls of abs, and there in the center of those muscles is the magnetically sensual indentation of my belly button, surrounded by a rubbery ring; I HAVE this now, instead of…what was there before.
Intrigued, wondering if this looks as good to my eyes as it feels to my fingers, I push the covers down and lift my head for a look at my stretched-out supine self and all of it appears even better than my fingers had imagined. There is, of course, the centerline trail and its lighter splayed out branches as the hair becomes fuller across this flattened valley and instantly I grab what is the centerpiece down there (guarded by the wings of pelvic bones and the lean but strong thighs and long racehorse legs of the long-distance hiker that lie splayed there beyond), the apparent goal of all these pathways, already close to fullness even before I began my squeeze, and I see it rise up rich and thick and tall and fragrant…and gorgeous in all its perfection of size and proportion, not huge, mind you, but way more than adequate, but, more importantly, clearly very beautiful and a very icon of male sexuality.
Within the privacy of my thoughts, I think that I ought to take a picture of this, but I don’t, haven’t, not yet, anyway, if I ever do, but I realize that I do not reject or dismiss or think negatively of the concept, not at all.
A little narcissism is good for the soul, I think.
I have to quote Alice Walker here, on this, “I think it pisses God off if you see the color purple in a field and don’t notice it.” A little noticing of and admiring with appreciation your own color purple is what is called for, here, and it is only a force of evil that leads you to thinking that that is wrong. Where did that come from, anyway? From out of a pit of diabolical darkness, I am sure.
I’m rather intrigued by those guys (and girls do it, too) who photograph their naked selves and even videotape themselves and sext them to their friends or post them on the Internet. Not that I would do that, I am, after all, NOT of the “Internet generation of youth” which is another way of saying that no purpose would come from me doing such a thing and not a soul on earth would be interested in seeing it if I did. Early morning physical self-admiration is one thing, but expecting others to share in that is quite another and I do know better than that. It is quite enough for me to share my thoughts in a reasonably-anonymous forum like this one, but a visual physical sharing is not going to happen with me at my age, now. But if I were, say, twenty-two, yes, indeed. I WOULD.
And I think those who can, SHOULD. Beauty should not be hidden away under a barrel (or some phrase like that), especially for youth who are in a stage or phase where they need to have confidence and social affirmation and be securely centered in their own power as they set off to make their way in the world. Their own body is surely an expression of their own dreams as anyone with half a shred of artistic sense can clearly see by how and what those bodies are communicating.
But for the middle-aged (and older), the fading of those dreams is also on display and in so many ways, it is a very sad pageant of misery. There is the sagging and the bagging and the softening and the fading. There is the thickening middles and the angry dispositions. The frowns and the scowls and the sharp barking orders and admonitions to those very youths whose energy is viewed as an affront against those failures—the nos and the don’ts, that what I think of as the “don’t runs” and the “sit down and shut ups”. Hatred of that which one once had and never appreciated and now doesn’t have and appreciates even less.
BUT.
You CAN have it. Again. Or still.
You just have to know the way.
Way number one: you must not lose the feeling inside you. What you see in the mirror may not be what you remember from decades ago, but keep smiling anyway. Even if you have gotten so out of shape that you avert your eyes from every reflection that stands in your way and mocks you mercilessly, you must still feel an appreciation for beauty that is everywhere, and that you even surprisingly sometimes still feel within you. It COMES from you anyway, even if currently it is only a flickering ember. With the right fanning and oxygenation, that ember can become a roaring furnace again.
Way number two: you must be healthy and you must be discriminatory in how to have that health. Listening to (a) marketers and (b) governments who are in the pocket of marketers are probably not the best people to listen to. They don’t care about you, they only want your money for as long as they can squeeze it out of you. To listen to them and to do what they tell you is to be a special kind of stupid, and I realized sometime back that I didn’t even blame them for what they did; that people let themselves be so lazy and stupid that manipulating them was like taking candy from a baby, so the temptation was too great for this kind of person to not take advantage of. (In this case, it is GIVING candy to a baby.) So, don’t be lazy, don’t be stupid, or what you will end up suffering will be your own fault. You saw the trap, yet you just kept on walking right into it anyway.
Way number three: What makes sense from a natural, ecological, tribal, worked-for-millions-of-years-of-human-evolution point of view? Stand in the doorway of a gas station mini-mart and sweep your eyes across all the shelves of packaged material on offer there. WHAT in there is actually FOOD? Instead, it is all white sugar and white flower combined in a myriad clever forms and shapes. If you were, for example, a Masai warrior, you wouldn’t see that as any more a food store than you would see the gas pumps as water fountains.
Way number four: Be wary of commercial weight-loss programs. For me to better explain this, let me give you an example of something that happened many years ago. I was on a little road trip and had to go to the bathroom. When that happens, I look for a McDonalds, which are plentiful and always have a bathroom. Well, if I am going to take advantage of their bathroom, I feel that I ought to buy something from them, which usually means that I get a cup of coffee. So, on this road trip, I had gone to a McDonald’s bathroom and now was in line behind a woman who was about to place a food order. For some reason, I just KNEW that she was a member of Weight Watchers. She wasn’t “fat”, mind you, in fact, I figured she had reached her goal weight. The SCALE was reporting back to her a poundage number that had positive meaning to her, so she had successfully achieved this thing, she was now weighing an acceptable weight for her height and age.
She then placed her order and I knew enough of how the Weight Watchers program worked, so I heard myself say to her, “You just ordered a perfect Weight Watcher’s meal,” and I reported to her how many “points” that meal was. She smiled back at me, very happily, and said, “Yes, I am a Lifetime Member of Weight Watchers!” I said back to her, “Congratulations, a job well done!”
I got my coffee and got back into my car and resumed my road trip. But I was thinking about that woman and wondered HOW I so accurately knew that she was a member of Weight Watchers. As I said, she clearly wasn’t “fat”, and, as she confirmed for me, she was even a Lifetime Member (that’s actually a scary phrase if you really think about it, and very telling), which means that she had reached her goal weight, maintained it for six weeks of maintenance, and from now on can attend as many Weight Watchers meetings as she wants and never will have to pay anything so long as she stays within two pounds of her goal weight and continues to attend meetings at a certain frequency (the actual number of which I forget…one a week, maybe?). So, she was a SUCCESS as far as that program goes. And Weight Watchers is generally considered the most successful of all the commercial weight loss programs.
So, with her having achieved that success, shouldn’t she look like, say, Audrey Hepburn? I mean, if a total stranger can simply take a glance at her and think “she is a member of Weight Watchers”, then something must be wrong. A stranger should be able to look at her and never have the slightest clue that she had ever been overweight. One would hope that having once suffered obesity would not leave an indelible footprint.
The clues that led me to see her as a Weight Watchers success are myriad and subtle and I can only think that while she weighed a lot less, her body somehow still must have retained the “shape” and ratio/proportions of an overweight person. And believe me, we humans are GENIUSES at instantly making all these body proportion calculations in our mind, it seems to be hard-wired within us so that even at a huge distance, we can immediately see if that person up ahead has a beautiful body or not, and even babies can do it.
I still get cues and clues as to that with my own person. When I moved back down through the pounds to the weight loss success that I have had, I went beyond even the smallest clothes that I had retained, which means that I am now leaner and more muscular than I was when I was a freshmen in college and hadn’t a thought in the world of ever being overweight. I had to buy new clothes and needed to have my shirt and pants size measured. But the measurements by a sales clerk at Macy’s, while close, were not entirely accurate. She measured my shirt size as neck 15 ½, sleeve 32-33, and pants waist size 34, inseam 30. I didn’t try on the shirts (so packaged and pinned-up as they are), and the pants SEEMED more or less okay when I tried them on. So I bought several shirts and pants.
However, actually experiencing the wearing of them, I soon enough realized that shirts sized 15 neck, 34-35 sleeves and pants waist size 33, inseam 32, would be better, and so I bought some of those.
Then I noticed that whenever I wore any of the 15 ½ x 32-33 shirts, or the 34 x 30 pants, if I got complements at all, it would be on the color combination of the clothes, but whenever I wore any of the 15 x 33-34 shirts AND the 33 x 32 pants, I not only ALWAYS get complements, I also keep hearing about how surprisingly thin (or tall) I am (so that my 6 feet ½ inch height seems to be perceived more like 6’2” or more). There’s not all that huge of a difference between those two shirt or pants sizes, and, frankly, either one of them is pretty damned good for a man of my age, but essentially what is happening between the two combinations is that the ones that get definite complements are ONE INCH less wide and TWO INCHES longer. Somehow, people just instantly see that as an immensely important difference in a person's appearance.
And now, currently, I am wearing the “lean” or “slim” cut of those smaller sizes, and I can now wear 32” waist pants, so now the gushing never ends (which, I freely admit, I really do enjoy). I can’t make myself any taller, and with a single-digit fat percentage, I can’t really lose much more weight, but I do see that I am probably just one more pant size away from male fashion model dimensions, which might be worth achieving, if possible. Also, I do think it would now be worth it to get custom-sized clothing, now that I see how much difference these tiny changes in sizing make toward the perception of ones body dimensions.
All of which is to say that a person doesn’t have to end up with that “Weight Watcher’s body”, but that it is actually possible to transform a body back to what it is supposed to be.
I have a body composition monitor that provides me with several other measurements, one of which is an estimation of my “metabolic” age (based on fat, lean body mass, bone mass, and other measurements), which in my case now fluctuates around among the various TEEN years, which, incidentally, seems to also be backed up by what my blood test shows about my testosterone level, which used to be so low that I was supplementing it with biodentical hormone therapy, but now is a good reading for even a man in his prime.
So, for all VERIFIABLE measurements and methods, miraculously, I am now actually physically “young”, that is to say, “a youth”, without actually being a youth. How fantastic is that? To actually have at this point of life, again, what was once had in the prime physical years, but at a time when I can really appreciate it, is totally delightful.
So leave me to my early-morning self-admiration, not diminished when get up and see my smiling self, naked in a mirror. What I am enjoying IS available for all of us, no matter what our age, and I am simply the happy proof of that.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Jeffrey Dahmer of the Woods
I certainly very much enjoyed my first cut Christmas tree, but the going in is better than the going out. While I am pretty sure I will have one again next year, I nevertheless wonder if the whole thing makes more sense when one lives in a rural setting, or if urban or suburban, then at least living in a house with a yard. Somehow having a cut Christmas tree, especially with the disposing-of-it-after-Christmas issue, in an urban apartment may seem as peculiar as having a pet tiger…something that more reasonably belongs in and can be better taken care of in a different and more appropriate environment.
First, getting the tree home…certainly not every urban dweller has a truck, or, if they do, it is more of an affectation rather than something they ordinarily will get much use out of. I guess maybe one could stuff a Christmas tree into the back of an SUV (most of which never haul anything except children), but the whole Christmas tree thing seems to fit more of an image of tromping out into the snowy woods, cutting one from your farm’s tree lot, and then dragging it home. None of that in the big city. As for me, I had mine delivered, and was thankful for the service.
The place where I bought the tree advertised a disposal service at the end of the holiday, but when I asked about it, they said that it wasn’t them, but a separate service that they would be happy to refer their customers to…all arrangements would made with that particular company. Somehow this extra step was enough for me “think about it later”, which I also did when I saw that the place was selling “Christmas tree disposal bags”, at a price I don’t remember, but somehow it seemed that the disposal service and the bag, together, were going to cost more than the whole tree did to buy in the first place, and that is not even counting the cost of the delivery (and tip), so I balked. So, I just took one step at a time.
But soon enough (actually, surprisingly quickly), it was time to deal with that issue. Despite having a full bowl of water to sip on, the tree was noticeably drying up, even before Christmas. This did not destroy its appearance, but instead, as the thick, rich, full foliage “shrank”, it revealed the lights more (which I had buried into the branches), which was quite pretty, and still did show green, although a paler green than it had shown originally. So I was happy to keep it going a while longer, keeping an eye toward New Years day.
But, alas, the calendar turned and New Years came and went and winter break was over and I was back at work. For sure the time was now to undecorate the house and figure out how to get rid of the tree, which I thought of kind of like a pet that needed to put down.
I was curious about “curb-side” pick-up, but, looking on-line, found nothing conclusive. It seems that in my area, trees can be “dropped off” at several county parks and fire stations, but only on Sunday, January 8, between certain hours. No mention of any kind of curb pick-up, and indeed, last week along my commuting route, I saw only one tree outside on the curb and there it stayed all week.
I did find an advertisement for what I bet is the same pick-up disposal service that the place where I bought my tree mentioned, but it just seemed to cost too much, so I was reluctant to simply use them. I figured the best bet would be for me take advantage of one of the drop-offs, but for that, to be able to put the tree into my car, I felt I needed to put the tree in a disposal bag. However, now it seems that where I bought my tree (where I saw the bags for sale) is closed for an indefinite time. This isn’t because they are only a Christmas tree lot, because they are not. They are a vegetable and fruit farm, selling produce all year-round, or so I thought. Anyway, they aren’t open NOW, so no Christmas tree disposal bag.
I decided the best thing for me to do would be to cut up my own tree. Using a hand saw, I cut off the top two feet. This revealed a forest of branches underneath, so I began to eviscerate the tree, one branch at a time, sawing, sawing, sawing, and stuffing the branches into regular kitchen garbage bags (which were too thin, but serviceable). I figured this would be good enough for stuffing pieces of the tree into my car’s trunk, which otherwise wouldn’t have carried the tree whole.
I admit that I felt like Jeffrey Dahmer, doing this, except that instead of my apartment now flowing in blood and internal organs, the tree version is needles…so many needles…a virtual unstaunchable torrent of needles.
I’ll tell you this, if you love the scent of an evergreen tree, having had the tree, itself, over the Christmas holiday gives you only the hint of evergreen, but cutting one up from limb to limb, you’d think I spilled a whole bottle of Pine Sol. Also, there is quite a lot of tree sap generated, which required me to stop and wash the tar off my hands as I progressed.
It was at the time of cutting off these branches and attempting to stuff them into kitchen garbage bags that I came up with my “you ought to be rural for this” thesis. How badly I simply wanted to burn the whole thing, a nice wintry bonfire in the evening would be perfect, or, failing that, I could be warm and toasty crackling these branches in a wood-burning stove. But, an urban apartment…please.
The most laborious aspect of it all was the shifting Sahara of pine needles all over the place. I had read on-line that one needs to sweep up all the pine needles, NOT vacuum them, as apparently they can gum up your vacuum cleaner’s works (must be that tar, again). Taking them at their word, I actually did sweep up those needles, and added them to my kitchen garbage bags (picking up handfuls of them). Of course there was still some dusty duff that I couldn’t manage to pick up off the living room carpet, so that portion (not too much), I did vacuum. I discovered that when I did some more vacuuming today, that my vacuum cleaner (at least with this bag still in it) is now a powerful pine scent atomizer.
I kept the eviscerated Christmas tree parts by my front door all weekend until this morning, Sunday morning, the day that all these places were accepting the drop-off of dead Christmas trees. Now for the task of getting the bags out to my car. However, only a third of the bags completely filled up my trunk, and left a trail of pine needles (and on the floor of my trunk), to boot. And, sitting right there next to me were four perfectly good garbage dumpsters, not anywhere near full…in fact, the furthest one was nearly empty, and I knew that the garbage collection would occur tomorrow. So, to heck with it, I simply threw the sections of tree into the dumpster. I’m not quite sure why I shouldn’t…after all, except for the garbage bags themselves, this is definitely biodegradable and may actually be good for the landfill. I am pretty sure the apartment complex’s gardeners put their prunings into the dumpster. Still, I did feel a bit “bad”, like I had put myself in league with all those people I complain about who throw their furniture away in (and mostly around) the dumpsters (which is against the lease). I wished that the management of the complex had sent notices around to all the tenants regarding the best way to dispose of their dead Christmas trees, but they ignored the issue, leaving it to the devices of the residents, which is not the best idea.
As an example of that, one person had simply dragged their finished Christmas tree out to the dumpsters and left it lying there, still nailed to its stand and water bowl, right in the exit path of the guy who parks next to me. Next time he wants to leave, he will be faced with having to do something with that old Christmas tree that is blocking his egress. It’s still unimaginable to me this low level of action (simply leaving a Christmas tree there for another tenant to deal with), but in this place, the unimaginable is becoming “normal” quite fast. Of course, whoever did that wouldn’t be expected to even have a saw to use for cutting up his tree like I did, let alone actually do the work of cutting it up, the benefit of which apparently would accrue only onto to somebody else, a stranger, no less. Which takes me back to the idea of having to being rural again, where self-reliance and, I hope, some consideration of your neighbors, might be the norm. Which makes me wonder why people like that celebrate Christmas at all. Just what does it mean to them, exactly? In their heart and soul, do they even have a place for meaning?
Monday, January 2, 2012
If I Express It, Maybe It Gets Better
One thing good about starting back to work tomorrow after having had one of the best winter breaks ever--and this is the only good thing I have thought of so far--is that I won't have to hear every day the horrible voice of the man who lives down below me. I don't really know if he actually does live there, I don't think I have ever seen him (I only hear him), as I had originally thought who had moved in was three very ugly girls (young women). I wouldn't ordinarily think to describe anyone as ugly, and the fact that all three are grossly overweight has nothing to do with it, but when I happened to run into them waddling across the parking lot and gave them a very friendy "hello", they ignored me entirely, which in this complex (or neighborhood) could mean that they don't understand a word of English (or even have the ability to interpret a smile), or, more likely, actually are very ugly people. Their ignoring my friendly overture lifted any optimistic veil I might have had covering my eyes and I could see quite clearly that the very best word to describe all three of them was "ugly".
It must be that all three girls were moving in, they kept piling in so much junk that boxes and bean bag chairs and every other kind of assorted (ugly) junk filled up even the dining area that is easily seen from the front door. They even filled up their balcony with junk, something that is against the lease, but is something that is generally ignored elsewhere in this complex, as well. As the quality of the clientele here has diminished steadily over the months (to the extent that I feel a rush of surprise and positive energy if I happen to run into somebody here who is actually decent), so have the standards, to the extent that, apparently, there no longer are any standards at all.
The unit below me is like mine, a three-bedroom apartment, so three college-age girls commonly makes sense for that size of an apartment if one isn't a family. In fact, I have finally understood why there is so much moving in and out, which I have observed over the months and determined from some conversations I have had with those doing the moving out--they are singles who have roommates and the roommate moved away for some reason, and, since the tenant couldn't find another roommate, he or she had to move out, too. The other big reason is that if it is a couple, they break up, or get a divorce. The complex is large enough, and the relationships unstable enough, that there is a U-Haul in the parking lot almost every single weekend, including the resultant thrown-out ratty furniture crowding out my parking space...also against the lease, and also generally ignored, of course, because it is impossible to police and it seems that people have lost the ability to police themselves. Which means that I will very soon be treated to a whole forest of dead Christmas trees also crowding out my parking space. For my own (sadly) drying-up Christmas tree, I have found several places run by Los Angeles County where you can for free drop off your trees to be turned into mulch, so that's where my own will be going. By the way, a few days ago, I took to one of the county's hazardous waste disposal three bags of stuff--one filled with expired prescription medications, one filled with expired over-the-counter medications, and the third filled with old grooming products that I no longer use. Imagine, I didn't just throw all that out into our apartment's dumpsters, how weird everyone here would think I must be to not do that!
As ugly as the "three girls" were, they weren't really very noisy, which was a blessing compared to whomever lived there before, the heavy pot smokers who generated smells in addition to their constant fighting and door-slamming noise, not to mention their yippy little dog whom they would put out onto the balcony (instead of walking him like they should), which made his yapping all the more evident to my ears. I seriously contemplated dropping down some poisoned meat, and I love animals and normally would never think of such a thing, but this dog simply did not deserve to live. I prayed for these people to move out, but, you know, be careful what you wish for.
However, after a month of blissful quiet, I soon started to hear the sound of a baby or child crying. Now, this isn't minding that per se, or least, in this case it wasn't the crying itself that was bothering me, but more that it sounded like a child who was possibly being abused. I definitely couldn't hear clearly enough to make any kind of a determination on that score, nor can I explain exactly why that thought would enter my head, but somehow, this didn't quite sound like a baby's "normal" cry, but had some note to it that made me think "abuse". And with three obese ugly girls taking care of it (read: "serious emotional problems and frustrations"), abuse sure seemed like a possibility, but not enough for me to call any kind of authority, but just enough to put me into a state of constant tension whenever I would hear it.
It was soon after that that I began to hear the voice of this hideous man. Again, I don't believe I have ever seen him, but there is some evil quality to his voice that makes me want to vomit. He never seems to speak, he only seems to shout. It is impossible to understand what he is actually saying, because it is in a foreign language, so for all I know, he may be saying "Honey, do you want me to help you with dinner?", but instead it sounds like anger and bullying. I do think it is Spanish, but I have never heard Spanish sound ugly, before, so, again, I think he actually is speaking ugly, angry, bullying words. Anyway, he seriously puts me on edge and the fact that I live so close to such a horrible-sounding man is disturbing, and also a bit frightening, thus the feeling of nausea that overcomes me, as if I, myself, were the child fearing abuse.
Without knowing his story at all, what I can imagine is that he was the "lover" (using that term very loosely) of one of the ugly fat girls, who got impregnated by him and now this is the baby of the two of them, who are not married. He is probably taking no responsibility for this baby at all, but comes by periodically just for some more sex. I can't imagine anyone wanting sex with one of those three girls, whichever one it is, if any of them, but from the sound of him, he can't be too choosey. He probably hates her for her ugliness, though, and he hates her for his sexual need (a man like that doesn't take responsibility for anything, even his own desires; it is all the fault of somebody else). And so it is possible that the abuse of the baby comes from him...in fact, I have started to notice that the two sounds are now often concurrent. Again, not anywhere near enough for me to be conclusive, only negatively imaginative.
Fortunately, I really don't think he lives there, but, instead, comes loudly clomping up the stairs (also disturbing to me) and slammingly enters the door and the shouting begins until he slams the door on his way out and his hobnail boots go stamping on down the stairs and his car-sorely-in-need-of-a-muffler-repair goes booming out of the parking lot. I hate him and want him totally gone. Even if everything I have imagined is 180 degrees away from factual, the hideous sound of his voice, alone, is enough for me to want him removed to a different dimension.
I am sure that all this makes it seem that I live in a truly awful place and, of course, must want to move, myself. Well, I do want to live in a house (living here has made it very clear that I would never buy a unit in a condomium) and have no idea what my future holds, but I actually really love the apartment, itself. And unless I were a millionaire (or maybe even billionaire), I have no idea where I could go where the entire culture, itself, isn't falling apart. Fortunately, except for some noise and a certain feeling of "aloneness" (the negative aspect of "solitude"), my life here is good. There are so many neighborhoods that are much, much worse. From a middle-class point of view, this one is still pretty good. Although I will admit to being disturbed by having discovered just last week that the Spanish-language billboards are now only one major street to the north away (as you travel south from here, the neighborhood goes from middle class to some of the more upper class in the entire San Fernando Valley, but as you travel north from here, well, the billboards being in Spanish tell you what that means).
With the United States being economically more polarized than ever before in its history, and it is predicted to get only worse, the ones who are being hurt are the middle class. The rich class seems to still be untouchable, and the lower class is now the ever-increasing majority. When one reads of people moving out of Los Angeles specifically, and out of California generally, I think the ones doing that moving are the middle class. Again, the rich are still benefitting from the assets that California has to offer, and the poor somehow just keep on piling in, across the border if from no place else.
Strangely enough, I am actually liking Los Angeles more than I ever have before, but still, if I ever manage to hear of (and be convinced of) any place in the world where things are actually getting better (and by that I don't mean China, which most westerners think is the economically booming place, but I think that it is heading for a serious correction, or Africa, some countries of which actually have logged in some of the highest economic growth on the planet, meaning "up from nowhere", so...no), I would visit there to see what it was really like, and maybe even make plans to move there. However, so far, I have not heard of one hint toward anything in that regard. Instead, what I have heard of strikes me as ridiculous; mostly extremely rich Americans moving to what they believe is the real-life version of Atlas Shrugged's "Galt's Gulch", but which is located, not hidden away in the mountains of Colorado, but in southern Argentina. I say, "Argentina, you've got to be kidding me;" that's a country that seems to alternate among dictatorships, socialism, and economic collapse, which one of those cycles is the one that is supposed to be appealing? Of course, I'm not rich enough, or "mover and shaker" enough to be welcome even if it really were a genuine "Galt's Gulch" but as it is, it is a commercial real estate venture that heavily advertises its golf courses and the like and is being sold more like a billionaire's resort except not in a Caribbean paradise. So that one is a "no".
So, for now, like most everyone else, I am stuck with what we've got and attempting to make the best of it. So for me, to quote Nick Vujicic, "Attitude is Altitude".
It must be that all three girls were moving in, they kept piling in so much junk that boxes and bean bag chairs and every other kind of assorted (ugly) junk filled up even the dining area that is easily seen from the front door. They even filled up their balcony with junk, something that is against the lease, but is something that is generally ignored elsewhere in this complex, as well. As the quality of the clientele here has diminished steadily over the months (to the extent that I feel a rush of surprise and positive energy if I happen to run into somebody here who is actually decent), so have the standards, to the extent that, apparently, there no longer are any standards at all.
The unit below me is like mine, a three-bedroom apartment, so three college-age girls commonly makes sense for that size of an apartment if one isn't a family. In fact, I have finally understood why there is so much moving in and out, which I have observed over the months and determined from some conversations I have had with those doing the moving out--they are singles who have roommates and the roommate moved away for some reason, and, since the tenant couldn't find another roommate, he or she had to move out, too. The other big reason is that if it is a couple, they break up, or get a divorce. The complex is large enough, and the relationships unstable enough, that there is a U-Haul in the parking lot almost every single weekend, including the resultant thrown-out ratty furniture crowding out my parking space...also against the lease, and also generally ignored, of course, because it is impossible to police and it seems that people have lost the ability to police themselves. Which means that I will very soon be treated to a whole forest of dead Christmas trees also crowding out my parking space. For my own (sadly) drying-up Christmas tree, I have found several places run by Los Angeles County where you can for free drop off your trees to be turned into mulch, so that's where my own will be going. By the way, a few days ago, I took to one of the county's hazardous waste disposal three bags of stuff--one filled with expired prescription medications, one filled with expired over-the-counter medications, and the third filled with old grooming products that I no longer use. Imagine, I didn't just throw all that out into our apartment's dumpsters, how weird everyone here would think I must be to not do that!
As ugly as the "three girls" were, they weren't really very noisy, which was a blessing compared to whomever lived there before, the heavy pot smokers who generated smells in addition to their constant fighting and door-slamming noise, not to mention their yippy little dog whom they would put out onto the balcony (instead of walking him like they should), which made his yapping all the more evident to my ears. I seriously contemplated dropping down some poisoned meat, and I love animals and normally would never think of such a thing, but this dog simply did not deserve to live. I prayed for these people to move out, but, you know, be careful what you wish for.
However, after a month of blissful quiet, I soon started to hear the sound of a baby or child crying. Now, this isn't minding that per se, or least, in this case it wasn't the crying itself that was bothering me, but more that it sounded like a child who was possibly being abused. I definitely couldn't hear clearly enough to make any kind of a determination on that score, nor can I explain exactly why that thought would enter my head, but somehow, this didn't quite sound like a baby's "normal" cry, but had some note to it that made me think "abuse". And with three obese ugly girls taking care of it (read: "serious emotional problems and frustrations"), abuse sure seemed like a possibility, but not enough for me to call any kind of authority, but just enough to put me into a state of constant tension whenever I would hear it.
It was soon after that that I began to hear the voice of this hideous man. Again, I don't believe I have ever seen him, but there is some evil quality to his voice that makes me want to vomit. He never seems to speak, he only seems to shout. It is impossible to understand what he is actually saying, because it is in a foreign language, so for all I know, he may be saying "Honey, do you want me to help you with dinner?", but instead it sounds like anger and bullying. I do think it is Spanish, but I have never heard Spanish sound ugly, before, so, again, I think he actually is speaking ugly, angry, bullying words. Anyway, he seriously puts me on edge and the fact that I live so close to such a horrible-sounding man is disturbing, and also a bit frightening, thus the feeling of nausea that overcomes me, as if I, myself, were the child fearing abuse.
Without knowing his story at all, what I can imagine is that he was the "lover" (using that term very loosely) of one of the ugly fat girls, who got impregnated by him and now this is the baby of the two of them, who are not married. He is probably taking no responsibility for this baby at all, but comes by periodically just for some more sex. I can't imagine anyone wanting sex with one of those three girls, whichever one it is, if any of them, but from the sound of him, he can't be too choosey. He probably hates her for her ugliness, though, and he hates her for his sexual need (a man like that doesn't take responsibility for anything, even his own desires; it is all the fault of somebody else). And so it is possible that the abuse of the baby comes from him...in fact, I have started to notice that the two sounds are now often concurrent. Again, not anywhere near enough for me to be conclusive, only negatively imaginative.
Fortunately, I really don't think he lives there, but, instead, comes loudly clomping up the stairs (also disturbing to me) and slammingly enters the door and the shouting begins until he slams the door on his way out and his hobnail boots go stamping on down the stairs and his car-sorely-in-need-of-a-muffler-repair goes booming out of the parking lot. I hate him and want him totally gone. Even if everything I have imagined is 180 degrees away from factual, the hideous sound of his voice, alone, is enough for me to want him removed to a different dimension.
I am sure that all this makes it seem that I live in a truly awful place and, of course, must want to move, myself. Well, I do want to live in a house (living here has made it very clear that I would never buy a unit in a condomium) and have no idea what my future holds, but I actually really love the apartment, itself. And unless I were a millionaire (or maybe even billionaire), I have no idea where I could go where the entire culture, itself, isn't falling apart. Fortunately, except for some noise and a certain feeling of "aloneness" (the negative aspect of "solitude"), my life here is good. There are so many neighborhoods that are much, much worse. From a middle-class point of view, this one is still pretty good. Although I will admit to being disturbed by having discovered just last week that the Spanish-language billboards are now only one major street to the north away (as you travel south from here, the neighborhood goes from middle class to some of the more upper class in the entire San Fernando Valley, but as you travel north from here, well, the billboards being in Spanish tell you what that means).
With the United States being economically more polarized than ever before in its history, and it is predicted to get only worse, the ones who are being hurt are the middle class. The rich class seems to still be untouchable, and the lower class is now the ever-increasing majority. When one reads of people moving out of Los Angeles specifically, and out of California generally, I think the ones doing that moving are the middle class. Again, the rich are still benefitting from the assets that California has to offer, and the poor somehow just keep on piling in, across the border if from no place else.
Strangely enough, I am actually liking Los Angeles more than I ever have before, but still, if I ever manage to hear of (and be convinced of) any place in the world where things are actually getting better (and by that I don't mean China, which most westerners think is the economically booming place, but I think that it is heading for a serious correction, or Africa, some countries of which actually have logged in some of the highest economic growth on the planet, meaning "up from nowhere", so...no), I would visit there to see what it was really like, and maybe even make plans to move there. However, so far, I have not heard of one hint toward anything in that regard. Instead, what I have heard of strikes me as ridiculous; mostly extremely rich Americans moving to what they believe is the real-life version of Atlas Shrugged's "Galt's Gulch", but which is located, not hidden away in the mountains of Colorado, but in southern Argentina. I say, "Argentina, you've got to be kidding me;" that's a country that seems to alternate among dictatorships, socialism, and economic collapse, which one of those cycles is the one that is supposed to be appealing? Of course, I'm not rich enough, or "mover and shaker" enough to be welcome even if it really were a genuine "Galt's Gulch" but as it is, it is a commercial real estate venture that heavily advertises its golf courses and the like and is being sold more like a billionaire's resort except not in a Caribbean paradise. So that one is a "no".
So, for now, like most everyone else, I am stuck with what we've got and attempting to make the best of it. So for me, to quote Nick Vujicic, "Attitude is Altitude".
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