This year, rather quickly, after only about a month of effort, I luckily stumbled upon what I want to do and where I want to go for my summer trip.
For the past several vacations, I have been searching for the “perfect” white-sand-blue-water tropical beach paradise and had been almost totally unsuccessful. Many people that I know like to go off to some cultured dense urban location-—Berlin, New York, Paris, Prague, London, Madrid, Tokyo-—but I already LIVE in a dense urban location, which I can enjoy all year around, and especially during the summer, as well, and I do enjoy it.
And here it is also known as almost the consummate “beach” location, but I guess that at this point I am rather “snobby” about that. I can hardly ever drag myself to the beach around here, which involves a long drive through traffic, fighting even heavier traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway, paying what I think is too much money to park (which is especially galling when I am still so paper-white-pale that at first I can’t even be at the beach more than half an hour without being turned into a red lobster, so why do I want to pay for a full-day’s worth of parking?), only to go to not particularly attractive brown sand, greenish-brown water that in Los Angeles County, at least, is somewhat polluted, and that is also ice-cold? As far as the LA County beaches go, swimming in the water is generally miserable in that all the beaches have a precipitous slope down into the water that causes there to be waves that don’t really break smoothly, but instead pound down so hard on top of you as to smash you down into a swirling “washing machine” of seawater while the undertow or riptide threatens to drag you far out to who knows where?
I think much further out there, where the surfers line up (covered neck to toe-tip in heavy wetsuits), the waves break much better and can carry them in for a thrilling ride. But closer in to shore where I and 90% of the other people at the beach feel more comfortable, it is a mess. Very few beach-goers here actually go into the water for more than a quick wetting of the feet. I don’t know if that is due to the cold temperature of the water, or the uninviting wave action (or both), but basically for the non-surfer, the beaches here seem to be for sunbathing on the sand, playing volleyball, or throwing the Frisbee. Little kids enjoy making sandcastles on the water’s edge.
Beaches beyond Los Angeles County are better. Many like the beaches of Santa Barbara; others like them in Orange County. And those are better, it is true. As for me, I prefer the beaches of San Diego County, especially liking Moonlight Beach in Encinitas, where I truly enjoy myself body-surfing, and San Onofre, which actually has warm water due its proximity to the nuclear power plant. I BELIEVE that the ocean water there flows through pipes in the power plant to help cool the reactor (although for sure I don’t really know or understand the process) and when it comes back out again, it has taken on the heat from the reactor. And no, this doesn’t carry along with it dangerous radiation, just nice semi-tropical-feeling ocean water.
But either San Diego County beach destination is a three-hour or longer drive from here, so good for a three-day weekend trip. When I hated the apartment where I used to live, I was looking to escape from it every chance I could get, so I was a pretty regular visitor to Encinitas and Moonlight Beach. I would stay in a hotel that was only a few blocks away from the beach. But ever since moving into THIS apartment, I haven’t felt the need to escape, so I haven’t been to Encinitas since.
So, any escaping I want to do is from Los Angeles, itself, so, back to the “snob” in me, when I want (or hope) to go to a great beach now that I live here, I have gone to Florida, Mexico, Honduras, Belize, Hawaii, or Micronesia, NOT Southern California.
Key West, in Florida, was disappointing, beach-wise. Any white sand there is not native to the island, but shipped in from the Bahamas and poured into “sand boxes” along the shore of expensive resorts. Also, there are yards of seagrass along the shoreline that is pretty creepy to wade through to get into the water, which is why most of those resorts have piers that extend far out into the water to provide access to the water beyond the seagrass. It’s okay, I suppose, but not my idea of what I wanted. Key West is more for tootling around the cute town on a rented motorscooter, rocking relaxedly on covered verandahs during the heavy summer showers, enjoying delicious meals outdoors on southern patios, and barhopping throughout the warm summer evenings. Going to the beach, not so much. Miami Beach was much more appealing when it came to the beaches and I would go back to Miami Beach in a heartbeat.
Cozumel, Mexico, had some pretty nice white sand, warm water beaches. Terrible snorkeling, though. Some hurricane or other apparently wrecked the snorkeling down there, at least, that was the excuse I kept hearing. There was nothing wrong with Cozumel other than it was for me a cruise ship destination and all that entails, probably the worst of which (to me) is the fact that you are going to be there for only a few hours. So while I enjoyed Cozumel for those few hours, it wasn’t really a full and deeply abiding experience. You’re mostly just lured into shopping.
The same could be said for Cancun. Not so enjoyable from a cruising-in-by-ship perspective, but I could see myself going back there for a longer stay at a large resort. Mexico's not so high on my list these days, though, thanks to the drug wars and so on.
Ensenada, another Mexico cruise-ship destination for me, was inferior beach-wise, really like just going to a California beach except that you are constantly bothered by people hawking jewelry and hair braiding. At least in California you are left alone. I did not go into the water, there, because I had already gotten too sunburned on the ship and the idea of the salt water made my skin crawl. I was the only one of my group who did not go into the water and I was the only one who did not get sick-—a sort of Montezuma’s Revenge that I guess is absorbed through the skin. Instead of “don’t drink the water” (which still holds), it was “don’t get INTO the water”.
When I was doing background work on films the first year I moved back to Los Angeles, I met a ton of people who had been extras on “The Titanic”, which had been filmed at Cameron’s studio in Ensenada where there had been constructed a 1/3-size tipping scale model of the ship. This was around the time that movie had come out, so if I had moved to L.A. about half a year earlier, I would have been able to have been in that movie, too.
At first I was envious, the fact that they got a free trip to Ensenada for the filming and were in that phenomenally popular movie, but they all said that it had been a miserable experience, just floating around in the water for hours and they ALL got sick. So I view that as an incontrovertible fact, now, swim in the polluted ocean at Encinitas and you will get sick. So no, that one is out.
The island of Roatan, Honduras, was a beautiful place loaded with gorgeous beaches. Again, it was a cruise-ship destination with all my typical complaints of going there by ship. But I am quite sure that I will go back to Roatan sometime, again, to stay on land there and find a deeper enjoyment of it.
I never saw the beaches in Belize, because, you guessed it, that was yet another cruise-ship destination. For Belize, I chose an eight-hour inland excursion to see the pyramid at Xunantunich and it was well-worth it. I climbed up to the top of it and could see over into the jungles of Guatamala. I studied Mayan culture before I went on that trip, which helped me all the more appreciate and enjoy what I was seeing. Belize definitely has a reputation for having very good beaches, so I will have go back there someday to experience that, although the attraction in Belize that interests me more is cave-tubing (so I would do both).
Without a doubt I love the Hawaiian island of Kauai and for sure very seriously plan to return there. I want to kayak the Na Pali coast and camp on those isolated beaches in the Na Pali Wilderness. I was a millimeter close to going there this summer, but learned that camping permits for that region usually fill up over a year in advance. So, some other time.
Beach-wise, though, I have never been to a place that was more “dangerous-beach-warning-centric”, to the extent that even beaches that LOOKED okay (and had some people swimming in them) nevertheless kept me enough on edge that I couldn’t enjoy them. It’s funny, though, because clearly THE MOST DANGEROUS BEACH on Kauai, and maybe in all of Hawaii (excluding the North Shore beaches of Oahu during the winter), that was constantly warned against, was Hanakapiai Beach, two miles into the Na Pali Wilderness, and in 1975, I spent one of the most enjoyable days of my life body-surfing Hanakapiai Beach, totally naked, I might add, for several hours, all by myself. I had no idea that it was supposed to be so dangerous, so I had no fear, only an amazingly great time. Was I lucky, or was this fear-mongering just so much the way life is, now, in the 2000s, where every American is meant to be scared to death of any and everything and the cherished status of becoming a victim is always just around every corner? I don’t know, but as wonderful as Kauai is, to me, it is not a place for great beaches, now.
Palau is mostly “photographic hype”, looks like the most wonderful place on the planet, and I imagine that all those hundreds of beaches and hidden lagoons in the Rock Islands are as fantastic as you’d expect them to be, if only it would stop raining! I never thought to check out the weather pattern in Palau, assuming that like every other tropical destination I was familiar with, that when it rained, it would be an immense and gloriously exciting tropical downpour that would be over in half an hour, once a day. This is something that you WANT to have happen. But in Palau, as I am sure I have said elsewhere, it rains, on average, every day but four out of every single month. So a beautiful beach in the midst of a constant tropical downpour is anything but a vacation pleasure.
Another odd thing about Palau, for a place that I would expect would be wedded to the sea, and especially with the awesome treasure of the labyrinth of the Rock Islands, there would be more boats than Los Angeles has cars. But there were hardly any boats at all in Palau, and any that I saw belonged to the touring companies for the purpose of trucking boatloads of tourists in and out of the Rock Islands region. (Not even any private yachts were seen, which I for sure expected to see a lot of.) This gave me the impression that the only people who ever went into the Rock Islands were tourists who were paying money to formal excursion companies for organized and standardized trips. And from my driving around everywhere on the main island of Koror, I found basically only TWO non-commercial beaches on that island. By non-commercial, I mean a beach that isn’t owned by a very expensive resort hotel (to whom you must pay for day use if you aren't a guest there). There was a beach that was owned by bar and restaurant that was owned by a scuba diving company, that charged an admissions fee for their tiny beach.
The two “free” beaches that I am referring to were one kind of polluted one in a formerly industrial area near an old ice plant, and another one that I would have been quite happy to use that was in the vicinity of the large bridge that connects the island of Koror with the island of Babeldoab. It had white sand and beautiful water and was on the “lagoon” side of the bridge instead of on the “ocean” side of the bridge. I saw some local men fishing there, and asked the man at the car rental place about it, who confirmed for me that that was the beach the locals use and a good beach that few tourists even knew about.
I think a possible rule of thumb about beaches, which I apply to Palau and I believe also holds true for Kauai (or anywhere else), is that one ought to go to the beaches that the locals use, because who would know better which beaches are the best? There are only two potential ticks against that idea, though. One is that it is possible that the very best beach areas were co-opted by the wealthy international resort builders who came in, scoped out the best locations, and wrested them away from the locals. So that would mean that the locals were pushed onto having to use beaches that were not their chosen ones previously. I don’t think that is true of Kauai, though. For one thing, what had been the most famous and glamorous resort in Kauai prior to its being destroyed by Hurricane Iniki was the Coco Palms Resort, which I noticed was ACROSS the Kuhio Highway from a beach that the LOCALS used. One would think that the Coco Palms would have to be ON the beach (al la Miami Beach resorts, for example), but no, a popular and extremely-well-used locals’ beach was left undisturbed. Maybe there were protections in place for the interests of the locals?
Interestingly, the captain of the zodiac raft I rode in the Na Pali Coast excursion I went on on my last trip to Kauai, who was born in Kauai and never has been anywhere else in his life, told me that HIS absolutely favorite beach, and where he and all his friends go every chance they get (so they never get tired of it), is Polehale, a very long beach on the west side of the island, the last beach before you get to the south side of the Na Pali Wilderness. Next to Polehale is Barking Sands beach, controlled by the military and available only for those in the military. So here you have the United States military claiming a beach, but they left Polehale alone. The closest resorts to Polehale are the south shore resorts, further away, in the area of Poipu. Whether the locals preferred Poipu long ago, I don’t know, but according to this guy and his friends, you couldn’t possibly do better than Polehale.
The second potential tick against going to a locals’ beach is what the reaction of those locals might be when tourists come in. Some people have reported violence. I definitely would NOT fear violence at that locals beach in Palau that I found. But a locals’ beach on the east side of Kauai, Anahola, I might worry about (there have been some negative reports), but my guidebook, written by a local, describes this beach as a “Designated Homelands” (I’m not sure what that means, but I think it refers to something that is reserved as native land). But he says that while few tourists ever go there, tourists are “certainly welcome”. And of all the beaches I saw in Kauai, this one was absolutely the one that was the most used. And that generally has been true of all local beaches I have seen, such as in Fiji or in French Polynesia. I did not go swimming at Anahola, although I do plan to go there next time I go to Kauai.
I think whether a tourist is accepted or not has to do with attitude. Are you an “ugly American” (although I think the “ugly American” was replaced by the “ugly Japanese” in the 80s, only to be replaced by the “ugly Germans” in the 90s, and now THEY have been replaced by the “ugly Chinese” in our current time), or are you respectful of the culture you are visiting and of the people who live there?
There is a kind of a “trick” useful in entering a realm of the locals, and by that I don’t mean “fooling” them, but by being sincere in your respect of them as having “ownership” of the space, a kind of “asking permission”, and that can easily be done, by, for example, coming up to an obvious local, let’s say the biggest, strongest, most “alpha” guy you can find there (who, in a culture like the Hawaiian, will be a sight to behold, believe me), greet him with a broad smile, and say something like this: “Wow, what a beautiful beach this is! I sure would love to go swimming here, can you tell me, is there a good place to body surf, I am kind of afraid of undertow, so can you point me to where maybe I could go?” I did that at a beach on Kauai, but instead of asking about body-surfing, I had my rented snorkeling gear with me and I asked a local about a good place to see a lot of beautiful fish. The guy smiled back broadly and said, “You’ve come at a great time, the fish seem to be back right now and the best place to see them is over there near that spit of land, see, it’s not too far, and a lot of fish gather there to feed. But be careful, don’t go too far around that tip, because that’s where the tide comes in and out and the current might be a bit strong.” I thanked him sincerely and went exactly where he told me to go and the fish out there were quite numerous and they were all eating madly, something I had never seen before snorkeling elsewhere! His guidance was perfect. I had hoped to see him again when I came back to shore so that I could tell him how great his idea had been for me, but he was gone. Still, what I had done WOULD make anyone welcome, I think, because I had legitimately positioned the local man as the expert and the one who “belonged” and I was clear about being the “stranger” seeking help. And if there had been some resistance to my presence there, I think it would be clear from his response. For example, he could have spat, or looked at me angrily, or actually said, “You shouldn’t come here, you’ve got other places where you could go.” But, no, he tells me exactly the perfect place to see what I wanted to see and what danger to watch out for.
I think what angers locals against tourists is that the tourists feel that THEY own the place, and with that ownership they are demanding—they want the weather to be good, the conditions to be picture-postcard perfect, they want bathrooms and showers and plenty of parking and maybe a snack bar, and somehow it is the fault of the residents that things aren’t “right”. Yuck!
One place I definitely hope to go to someday, but I just wasn’t ready for it this year, is the Solomon Islands. Now there they take this idea of the “locals” to an extreme that gets to be kind of tricky (and a little beyond my current expertise). You go to the outer islands or even go for a hike beyond the more populated or “civilized” places and you come to regions that are as primitive as anything from a couple of hundred years ago. There you will encounter “kastum” people who for centuries have been shrugging off every manner of westerner, European, missionary, colonist, or technologist, who continue live close to the way they have done since forever. They have a sense of “communal” ownership of the land and of everything, and that includes the trail you are walking on, the waterfall from which you might drink, the forest from which you might pick a fruit, the rock you might sit and rest on, the shore you might land your kayak on, and even (or especially) the lagoon that you have been paddling on. So anyone you encounter may demand (or request?) a payment from you of what you have used. This “payment” will be in money (a sense of “valuable exchange” is actually a pretty ancient concept), probably measured only in cents (from our point of view), or maybe a very, very few “dollars”, but it will involve a brief but tricky negotiation (especially if one does not understand this and attempts to refuse to pay something) and sometimes violence has come from that. Frankly (although it may just be my own fear, not a true understanding of the situation), I feel that such a situation is absolutely rife with danger, because there you are, the white-skinned stranger, utterly alone out in the middle of “nowhere” and they know you have a pocketful of money yet are restrained and fair enough to ask for something quite reasonable, and yet, what is preventing them from slicing your head from your neck and taking it ALL? Who on earth would care about you out there at all? And while I am not afraid of cannibals, it doesn’t hurt to remember that these people WERE cannibals in the not too distance past, and some government officials think that they actually still are in some of the more isolated villages. I mean, if “kastum” means that they live in the traditional ways, then it's not inconceivable that they still might also continue to practice cannibalism. Of course, though, they have been exposed to a wider perception of the matter, so who knows how their attitudes and customs may have changed.
And associated with all this is a fascinating concept that I had never thought of before, and that I feel is alien to our own way of thinking, and yet, it does make perfect sense. To them, only THEY are “people”. Every other living thing is something else, NOT people. So a white man from California walking through the forest is an animal, different from, say, a pig, only in that the “value” of that white-skinned animal is different from the “value” of the pig. The pig has really good meat, but no money in its pocket. But we all know that to a cannibal, the two-legged animal has quite delicious meat, too, rather on par with the meat of the pig. So anyway, that wasn't a situation I was ready to just jump into.
But travel writer Paul Theroux was able to go there and discuss religion and customs with tribal chiefs and go on fishing trips with villagers and presented himself in such a way that the people there found that he had a value to them other than “meat” or “money”; such as, he was different, he was interesting, he was a curious oddity that made the day special, and he wasn’t irritating. He also was clearly there with a genuine interest in who they were and how they thought, which I think is a great sign of respect, maybe the greatest sign of all. The people were very helpful to him, and guiding him further on his way toward others whom they thought he would like, people who were just like them, which I think is quite cute, and I think he thought so, too. To me, it indicates that he had found a “home” among them, was welcomed as a kind of “almost them”. How could any traveler do any better than that?
So, here I entered into the spring knowing full well that I still had that unfulfilled “white sand beach, warm blue water, tropical island” desire and was mucking about through travel books and magazines, and the Internet, trying to figure out a great place to go, and spending most of my time attempting to fashion a trip to St. Lucia in the Caribbean, or to Vanuatu or the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, but none of it was gelling. I did, however, realize something, and that was that if I (for some reason) really wanted a white sand beach, what I wanted to go to was a CORAL ATOLL, not a VOLCANIC ISLAND. Now, it may be possible to find white sand on a volcanic island, although I would venture to say that 99% of the time, that white sand is artificial; that the true sand of a volcanic island would be black or brown sand, because it would be made of lava. WHITE sand is coral sand.
This was a very important revelation, because having this understanding helped me to track my desires down deeper. Mostly where people go is to volcanic islands, and they are certainly phenomenally beautiful, with their high green mountains lush with waterfalls. Probably the best example of that kind of beauty may be the afore-mentioned Kauai, but certainly also Moorea and Bora Bora and Tahiti are three well-known amazingly beautiful volcanic islands that people yearn to go to. I have been to them, myself.
But still, the most beautiful place I have ever been is the Yasawa Island Group of Fiji, which anyone who has ever seen the movie, “The Blue Lagoon”, has seen it, because that is where that movie was filmed. I visited the islands via a small cruise ship line called “Blue Lagoon Cruises”. Very wonderful (and very expensive). They took us to some of the most wonderful beaches I have ever been to, and then (like almost all cruises), took us away from them far too quickly. So THAT’S what I had been looking for, to stay on a “Blue Lagoon” type of island for more than a few hours.
But that whole Yasawa Island Group is really pretty far out of my price range, and is at this point not a particularly “rarely-trod” tourist path. I unreservedly recommend it to anyone, but I wasn’t too sure that I wanted to go back there, myself. I wanted something like that, but something kind of OFF the normal tourist track, but still someplace I had to be able to get to, of course, since I don't have my own sailboat.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I had a desire to go back to French Polynesia, but not back to the islands that I had already been to. French Polynesia is HUGE, with several different island chains spread out over an immense amount of Pacific Ocean. Where “everybody” goes when they want to live out their Tahitian fantasy is the Society Islands chain. I had been quite curious about another Tahitian island chain, the Marquesas, but they are all volcanic islands, and while they look phenomenally spectacular as seen from the sea, they aren’t really all that great to stay on. At any rate, they weren’t what I wanted.
It was my very, very great fortune that I happened to stumble upon the website of the perfect place. A “pension” (think “bed and breakfast”, Polynesian style) called Raimiti on an island in French Polynesia’s Tuomoto islands chain, coral atolls, between the Society Islands and the Marquesas. (If you check out their website, please be sure to click on the 360 degree virtual tours...fantastic!) The Tuomoto chain is somewhat dangerous for ships to sail in and around due to all the reefs, so they have remained somewhat isolated, which is a good thing, I think. But they ARE accessible via Tahitian Air, at least, Fakarava is, the island that I am going to.
The island of Fakarava has only about 250 residents. No roads. The whole island is like a snake formed into a rectangle, surrounding a gorgeous lagoon, and is only about 36 miles long down one of the longer legs of the rectangle. You fly in from Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia (direct flights from Los Angeles on Air Tahiti Nui, an international Tahitian airline that is different from the local Air Tahiti), and are met by the owner of the pension, who takes you to his place via an hour and a half boat ride down the blue lagoon.
There you find an island paradise, all virtually hand-made from woven palm fronts. What electricity they have, they generate from solar panels. The guests sleep in individual bungalows on either the ocean side or the lagoon side, with each bungalow’s bathroom being a small building next to the bungalow. The bungalow that I will have is the smaller of the two sizes available (there are only 10 bungalows in all), for one or two people, and the shower for my type is an outdoor one, surrounded by a curtain. In my dream house, even if it were a multi-million-dollar house, I would have at least one shower outdoors (which I think is so sensual). I would also have an open-air bedroom in which to sleep, that is exactly how these woven-palm-frond bungalows are, with no glass windows or wooden doors, but instead, a woven screen that can be closed for privacy, and a gaily colored Tahitian cloth curtain at the door. You sleep caressed by the perfumed breezes. They also provide a mosquito net, but mosquitoes are only a problem in the rainy season, but I am going in the season that has the least rain (after Palau, that is how it would have to be!).
The bungalows have no electricity; light in them is provided by candles and kerosene lanterns. Very romantic.
All meals are provided and even in the few on-line reviews by people who did not like this place (because they wanted a more structured resort) the people revealed that they loved the food, which will be the largesse of the sea and the tropical wonderland cooked up in the French style.
There is total freedom to simply be left alone Robinson Crusoe style to allow all tension to be sucked out of the body (which is how I felt simply looking at their website), to go walking along the beach (there are no roads and no motor vehicles, only boats), swimming in the delicious lagoon or the ocean, enjoying spectacular snorkeling right there at your doorstep, and kayaking wherever you want to go in the lagoon, such as across the water to a vacant “motu”. What I love is the idea of being able to swim in the lagoon or ocean day or night-—at night under the brightest stars one has ever seen, and they say that sometimes dolphins come swimming over, and even whales that have come to the Tuomoto islands to give birth have found their way into this lagoon with their newborn babies (and I'll be there during this "season"). After my enjoyable experience with the dolphins in Palau, I crave to swim with wild dolphins, and the idea of maybe even swimming with a whale, if it happens, is spectacular.
There are organized adventures, too, all at the whim of the owner whose personal guest you are. You do whatever he feels like doing that is a good idea of something to do that day, including any of the following: a picnic on a pink sand beach, fishing (huge fish!), visiting the small town, visiting a pearl farm, snorkeling at a particularly interesting place. You can go along on these, or not, as you wish.
One excursion that is fantastic to do is snorkeling the South Pass. You can scuba dive it, also, but if you want to do that, you contract with the dive shop that is on the island.
The tide flows in and out of the lagoon via two different passes, the large North Pass and the smaller South Pass (Raimiti takes people to the South Pass). Every manner of sea creature is there during these tide changes to take advantage of the concentrated food supply. Not only are tens of thousands of every kind and color of fish there, but also huge fish, such as the Napoleon Wrasse, and also schools of dolphins, manta rays, sharks, and sea turtles. The sharks are (apparently!) the kind that are not apt to attack humans. The way I have doped it out is that some sharks absolutely do NOT attack humans (such as Nurse Sharks), other sharks absolutely DO attack humans (such as the Mako or the Great White), but there is third category that never really attacks humans (such as the Black Tipped, which is what I think these sharks are), but MIGHT if molested. A magazine article I read about the favorite tourist thing to do in these islands, dive the passes, warned that it was dangerous to touch the sharks, but that they otherwise were safe. My guess about them is that they have more than enough food to fill their bellies without any trouble at all, so there is no need to go to the effort of attacking something large and weird like a human. Just leave them alone and they will leave you alone. At any rate, these sharks are considered a definite attraction, not something to fear or avoid.
What I would fear more is the current, itself, and, again, magazine articles warn to NOT dive these passes when the current is going OUT of the lagoon into the open ocean, and the reason is that they cause tornado-like whirlpools in the ocean that can suck divers and snorkelers down very deep into the watery depths…into “oblivion” as one article frighteningly described it. You don’t have to tell me twice. After all, I realize that a whole “reservoir” of water is flowing out through a very narrow nozzle and you're just a floating leaf in the immensity of it all.
The tide coming IN, though, does not generate those whirlpools, but the riding of this current is like riding a locomotive and is quite a thrill, well worth flying halfway across the Pacific to get to experience. So, I am sure that one of the days that I am there I will be able to do this. Good thing I have a Casio Gulfmaster watch that reveals the movement of the tides, though, just to be on the safe side!
The experience of being on an atoll is the pure stark closeness to the oceanic elements (I mean, really, when a whale can just pop her head right up and look at you sitting on the step of your thatched bungalow…!). You are on a beach, flat down near the surface of the ocean and the lagoon, in the middle of an ocean that covers one half of the entire planet, no tall valleys to hide in. I love the idea of that. No hiding from nature, no hiding from our own selves.
I think the way Raimiti is set up is exactly what I want…just the right combination of activity with others and opportunity to be at peace and quiet with paradise. One couple who wrote a five star review of the place had planned to spend two days there, but ended up staying for seventeen days! I won’t have that luxury, but I love the idea of somebody being taken by a place to that extent. Maybe that means I will love it, too, as I expect to. I may not want to ever leave, but at least I could always go back. I imagine that IT will stay with ME forever.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Saturday, May 5, 2012
The Insanity of Constantly Changing Formats
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.
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.
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.
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