The Logic of Unfriending

The way I see it, there are two reasons for unfriending somebody on Facebook. The first one stems from a conflict of some sort—betrayal, break-up, creative differences, or anything else you can think of. Also under this category we can include cases of jealous lotharios (women are guilty of this too–female equivalent, anyone?) who require of their significant other complete cessation of contact with the former lover perceived to be a threat. Unfriending is something like virtual “fuck off,” to a greater or lesser degree. The unfriended person will definitely notice, and in all likelihood weep endlessly and tear their hair out in agony. Perhaps only a small subset will react in this way. In any case, the intention is to sever a bond, and given how much people rely on Facebook to maintain a relationship, the unfriending can feel pretty damn definitive, particularly on the receiving end. It should not be employed lightly.

The second main reason for rescinding Facebook friendships is for fat-trimming purposes. That classmate from elementary school who moved away in second grade and you’ve never spoken to since? Axed. That friend of a friend of a friend who didn’t speak a single word at that dinner six months ago but next morning friend-requested you? Axed. The total stranger who added you because they shared the same name as you? Definitely axed. I could go on and on. These are the people you do not care about. They do not care about you. Their birthday wishes are insincere and unwanted.  You certainly do not give a rat’s ass how awesome their crème brulee was, or that their phone is broken, since you will never call them, or how super attentive and super glorious and super everything Prince-Charming-boyfriend-of-two weeks has proven himself to be, or that they found Jesus and are now on the superhighway to salvation. Nope. Do. Not. Care.

Spare me your newfound piety.

Now—perhaps somebody can help me out on this next point. Some of these people, formerly destined to the realm of oblivion, mysteriously reappear months or even years later, in the form of a little red “1” in the top left corner of your screen, offering their friendship services once again. No discernable objectives, no specific questions, no personal message from which to glean a genuine interest. Why o why, o rando from the fog, must you court my friendship so assiduously? Were my Facebook posts so memorable that you would swallow the indignity of re-friending me? Did you simply forget about it, in which case the pointlessness is even more apparent? This is beyond my comprehension.

I’m not obsessive about this friend-list-management thing. But, do I really want/need 200 virtual strangers possibly flicking through my photo albums? No. Having 847 “friends” instead of 459 will not make me feel more awesome. Misanthropy, on the other hand—that’s a real joy!

This is how I feel about your Photo Booth bonanza album with your super besties.

On Music and E.T.

I will never tire of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto no. 2 in C minor. Its sweeping orchestral movements and dramatic crescendos bring me to the edge of tears every single time. The beauty is almost unbearable, painful to fully absorb. Rachmaninov manipulates your emotions like a skilled film director and then purifies your soul. I realize I have a bias towards romanticism, but it doesn’t make my words any less true.

I wonder which of our behaviors, if any at all, is unique to this universe. Mankind’s greatest creation is arguably music. Then again, it might not be a creation any more than breastfeeding is a creation. It emerges organically like a necessary component to life. Granted, we as a species have discovered some of the maximum expressions of it. Is music a constant of an intelligent civilization? Do our intergalactic cousins practice their own form of music?

Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Either thought is scary.” Lately I find it presumptuous to assume we’re alone when we know so little of life’s secrets. Our own world guards its share of mysteries close to the chest.  The deep ocean, for instance, is an ecosystem we know close to nothing about. How can we expect to believe God singled out Earth as the one hope for conscious observers? The universe needs a witness, and we’re certainly not reliable enough to hold all the responsibility. Maybe with a little luck and several million years of evolution another species will gaze at the heavens and feel overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of it all.

Eagle nebula.

My hope of making it to old age is in no small part motivated by my desire to see the secrets of the universe unfold before my eyes. The fact that I was born in such a transformative time in history does not escape me. If we can make it over the hump, perhaps we may still have a chance to do things right. Render racism, poverty, hunger, and hatred obsolete. Before the expanding red sun swallows Earth, I have faith we’ll transcend the shortcomings of our immature civilization.

The Cliffhanger Addiction

I am a serial monogamist…of television series. “Lost” was the first one to take over my life. It absorbed me in a way no other show ever had. From the Pilot episode onwards, I was a passenger of Oceanic flight 815. Jack mobilized my feet and Kate shook my heart. I hated Shannon with a passion.

Lost represents, in many ways, an important time in my life. I dipped my toes in the shores of adulthood. Discovered love and heartbreak. Experienced devilish joy and piercing angst.

Much happened in the middle.

After the Lost finale, all the questions I still had about Jacob, the Island, and the Dharma Initiative knotted up into a bezoar that hardened and lodged in my brain. I no longer tried to make sense out of it. The gaping void would not easily be filled. I had become physiologically addicted to the cliffhangers at the end of every episode. My need was on par with that of a desperate meth head.

A reasonable transition drug appeared with Entourage. It captured my attention with its easy humor and Ari Gold’s glorious temper. I studied their lives like a kid fixed on a fishbowl. The ending of season 7 left me empty and unsatisfied. Without Drama’s shenanigans to look forward to, I searched for a change of pace.

Out of the glimmering koi pond of possibilities, Mad Men shone the brightest. Back then I was in London, in the midst of momentous changes. Don’s solitude reflected my own. From day one I rooted for him and his Jedi-like power to seduce women and CEOs alike. Peggy won me over with her kick-ass rebel streak. Betty stirred the toxic vitriol in me and I wished someone would smack her repeatedly.

The Don.

Alas, it all came to an end. A temporary one, at the very least. For a while I dabbled indecisively, like a man faced with too many nacho dips to choose from. As it were, the surreptitious powers of marketing brought me to Dexter and his knives. Like so many before me, I now cheered on the serial killer-cum-lovable family-man persona of Michael C. Hall. When it comes to mass murderers, Dexter is my favorite. (To the horrified neophytes: He only kills the baddies). I am now on season 5. Do I get a prize for consistency? I’m doing so well. Look Ma, I can watch TV all day!

Lost sparked my dependency and many others have fueled it. Television on demand is a dangerous, dangerous thing. You might just get swallowed into an alternative reality and never come back. That is where I am writing this from. I may never return.

Lying, texting, and small talk

There’s a NY Times article out there making the rounds that talks about lying in relation to technology. Mr. Austin Considine makes an observation, “We’ve always lied; new technologies are merely changing the ways and the reasons we lie.” I have to disagree with the last part. The reasons? I don’t think the reasons change. The reasons are always the same. He exemplifies with the term “butler lies”– devices we use to to “politely initiate and terminate instant messaging conversations”. Like saying, “my phone’s about to die, bye!” But we do the same thing when we run into undesirable acquaintances in the street. There you are, enjoying your solitude among strangers, until suddenly a recognizable face pollutes your peace. Enquiries about the other person’s life must then necessarily follow, a happy-go-lucky charade of feigned interest. And then that dependable, yet utterly detestable question that is a staple of small talk. “How’s life?” Good! Great! Wonderful! Nobody expects a real answer to this question. Its purpose is merely to be asked. It is the clearest indication that the other person has zero actual interest in your life. Then again, this might not be such a bad thing after all. Operating by process of elimination is a time-tested technique of survival.

Anyway, the main point was that whether we’re doing it via text or face to face, lying to escape an unbearable situation is the most natural human response. “So, it was great seeing you (not), but I have to rush home and give medicine to my sick puppy!” Right. Ok.

Considine’s article also mentions Google Latitude (has anybody used this??), an application that sounds absolutely terrifying–it “allows people to geographically pinpoint their friends’ mobile phones”. This whole accessibility thing is scaring me. I already have one big brother, and it’s more than enough.

 

A drink from my cup

It appears that I have, again, let my ailing blog slink away and crawl under a porch to await death. I’m here to forcefully yank it out of oblivion. My last post was in April. APRIL. Shameful. The world almost ended and I had nothing to say about that (google Harold Camping + apocalypse for more info). I’m sure other important things happened in the middle as well, but I can’t recall them at the moment and can’t be bothered to look them up. You know what they are.

Here’s a question I heard a good man pose, not too long ago, in the interest of atheism: Is there a teapot circling Mars?

A Red Planet

There. Something to think about for today.

 

18 Tongue-Tickling Words

They come in no particular order. Say them out loud, feel them in your tongue and lips. Let them reverberate (#4). Make them into a short paragraph, if you must.

1. Supple
2. Pursue
3. Burrow
4. Reverberate
5. Languid
6. Lounge
7. Prismatic
8. Surprise
9. Dribble
10. Erosion
11. Shuffle
12. Yesteryear
13. Miasma
14. Nimble
15. Caress
16. Belligerent
17. Effervescence
18. Monsoon

Rejoice! All is Not Lost

First off, I apologize for the extended silence. I have been writing, albeit in the traditional and self-contained form of ink and paper, away from the public sphere. Last week I was in the process of composing a chunky blog post, and all was going well until I had the misfortune of clicking “Publish”. WordPress’s servers then maliciously served up a login and password page, and I discovered that 90% of what I’d written was permanently gone. Having lost the motivation to retype and/or rethink, I filed it away for future consideration and forgot about it. It was going to be a semi-angry lament on the current state of cultural erosion, decrying the popularity of talentless teenagers such as Rebecca Black and the prevalence of idiocy in the comments of Youtube’s videos.

Lately, however, it has come to my attention that through the millennia, the greatest minds of every civilization have been preoccupied with what they sense to be an inevitable decline of language, culture, and society. Even in the most veritable golden eras there is always a well-versed intellectual mourning the ever-expanding plague of barbarism.

The scream

A couple of weeks ago I was poking about the recesses of the Camden market, trying to rediscover a stall that sold dilapidated upright pianos. Instead I found a little cubicle nearby stocked with aging hardcover and paperback volumes of every age, size, and subject matter. A small blue hardcover soon came to my hands—a collection of essays by Aldous Huxley titled “On the Margin”. In one of them, “Pleasures”, Huxley writes, “There have always been fourth rate writers and dramatists; but their works, in the past, quickly died without getting beyond the boundaries of the city or the country in they appeared. Today the inventions of the scenario writer go out from Los Angeles across the whole world. Countless audiences soak passively in the tepid bath of nonsense.” Keep in mind that this was written in the 1920’s–Huxley might as well have been writing about the Internet and the far-too-simple ways of disseminating worthless prose. As the network loses its exclusivity and is embraced by billions as a means to relay everyday minutiae, intellectual rigor becomes diluted and harder to detect. Sifting through the useless trash brought up by Google’s search results is a skill in itself.

However, I am optimistic about the state of our cultural degradation. As culture “degrades” in the eyes of conservative academia, it is also recast and molded in response to the protean conceptions of modern society. There is no golden standard to be applied. When sound was introduced in cinema with the arrival of “talkies”, many denounced it as a shameful travesty that stripped the medium of its artistic qualities. The naysayers, needless to say, were not around for too long. They made a brief reappearance with the advent of Technicolor, but were again silenced when competent directors used the technology to their advantage. Nowadays, neither color nor sound factors into an audience’s appreciation of a film; these accessories are only [usually] noted when exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. Alas, I am veering off topic—cinema requires its own focalized attention.

Oh dear... (Heraclitus)

Heraclitus, with his infinite wisdom said, “The only constant is change”.  It was as true then as it is now. The artistic traditions of the past and today will be digested and regurgitated by young and irreverent artists, and the reactionaries will look away in denial as a new platform rises out of the steaming primordial soup. Every paradigm-shaking idea generally follows a path of initial rejection, gradual acceptance, widespread imitation, and finally opposition (once again). From Baroque art to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, every movement and mode of thought has been exalted and condemned. Our future selves may not look proudly on our generation’s worship of Justin Bieber and fossil fuels, but redemption is still possible.

- A.T.

P.S. The scholars out there who have studied Adorno, Foucalt and Derrida probably have a much better idea of what I’m trying to say here. My apologies for the skin-deep analysis of this post.