Tag Archives: Introspective

Downsizing

So, besides causing me to look askance at the number of magnets currently adorning the outside of our refrigerator, this interview makes the book in question sound quite interesting. I suppose because I find myself well in the middle of that typical American family that the book promises to discuss.

As we are preparing for a move in the near future, Karen and I are entering the phase of preparation that I find the most beneifical: downsizing. We’ve made it a routine in the two moves we’ve made since marriage…and I hope it will continue…that we go through our stuff and start paring down various items that we just no longer need. Clothing is among the first things to go: if we haven’t worn it in a year, off to a clothing bank it goes. Furniture? If we’ve been saying that we could live without it, it’s time to take a photo for Craigslist.

This is partly a practical exercise in the sense that, whether you’re moving up or downsizing, moving is easier with less stuff. It’s also partly a spiritual exercise, because the more stuff we accumulate, the more of a position it can assume to use us instead of being used by us.

This is difficult, though, because Americans love our stuff. We accumulate it to make ourselves feel good (as the interview suggests), we accumulate it to indicate status and success to others, we accumulate it out of a desire to keep up with the proverbial Jonses. We accumulate it because we all seem to partially buy into the notion that “he who dies with the most toys wins.” All of that, and more, results in the fact that we accumulate too much stuff.

As much as we like our toys, I’m convinced that we should at least have a practical use for the items that we purchase. When we discover that we haven’t used something for an extended period of time, we need to part ways with that item. Because, when we hold onto things too tightly, they become a barrier between us and each other, between us and ourselves, between us and the Divine.

A few months ago, Karen spilled a glass of juice on our coffee table. She called for help, and I came running with towels. The first thing I scooped up was the iPad laying on the table. I did this despite the fact that the juice dripping down to the floor was landing on papers that were important to Karen. I justified this by saying that I was logically trying to preserve the most expensive item first, but the reality is that I didn’t act to preserve what I knew was important to her first. I really like my iPad, but it prevented me from seeing the most important thing in the picture.

I think that therein lies the ugly truth: our stuff does make our lives easier and more functional in a lot of ways. They also obscure more important things. They do it by nature, because the material realm is such a small portion of our existence, even though we focus on it almost exclusively.

Here’s to downsizing.

Photo Attribution: Surprise Truck under Creative Commons 

Been There, Done That, Got the T-Shirt

I like t-shirts. I like buying them to commemorate places I’ve been and things that I’ve done. I like getting free ones from local businesses and other places. In fact, in addition to the post-card collection that I keep to remember the places I’ve visited, I used to get a t-shirt from everywhere I visited as well (that was, until I realized that buying postcards alone were much more effective on the budget).

I have t-shirts from theatre groups I’ve been involved with, and even from specific shows that I’ve designed. I have t-shirts from faith-based functions that I’ve attended. And, of course, I collect Hard Rock Cafe t-shirts. I’ve gone through two t-shirts today alone: the one I’m wearing as I write this is a t-shirt from CNN headquarters in Atlanta that I purchased after touring the studios several years ago. Earlier in the day, I was wearing a t-shirt from a state park here in Virginia.

What I like about t-shirts is that they tell a sort of history. Each one commemorates an event, a person or people, a place, a memory of a time in our lives. Often, a t-shirt reminds us of more than one of those things.

Take the state park t-shirt I wore today, for example. Last summer, I was at this state park for work. I was seated at a picnic table near the water, when I looked down and found tiny orange creatures swarming up the white t-shirt that I was wearing. Horrified (have I mentioned that I’m not much of an outdoor person?), I brushed them off. Except they didn’t go away. I brushed more. For every one that was brushed away, ten took its place. Bug spray didn’t work. Nothing worked. Not knowing what they were, but becoming seriously concerned that they were either a mutant post-apocalyptic insect swarming me to devour my flesh, or, worse, the dreaded South-eastern plague known as chiggers, and since they appeared to have completely infested the t-shirt that I was wearing, I stripped it off, threw it in the trash, and purchased a new one at the gift shop. That was the one I was wearing today, and I have to smile whenever I wear it because of the humorous story that it represents.

Several of my Hard Rock Cafe t-shirts have been purchased while on adventures with Karen, one of which was our honeymoon. I remember those occasions when I wear them.

I remember productions in which I’ve participated, the fellow cast and crew members, the wild journey that each show involves if I dig a show’s t-shirt out of the drawer.

We’re a forgetful people, us humans. We tend to forget very formative and positive events in our lives without reminders, which is why nearly every major religious tradition places marker events and traditions in the lives of its adherents in order to remind them of critical moments in the history of their faith. Sometimes, I think t-shirts are like that for me. I frequently put one on, remember where I was and who I was with when I bought it, and I smile.

Because those good times are a huge part of what makes us who we are. And those moments are so important to remember.

Photo Attribution: deb roby under Creative Commons 

Imagining the Worst

I have these little things that worry me, sometimes. I guess that, because of my bent toward dystopian science fiction, I frequently ask myself what the world would look like if (fill in the blank) occurred. I’ll see these trends developing, or see the potential of how something could turn out, and suddenly imagine the enormous losses that we would experience if things actually went that way. Of course, my imaginings tend toward the gripping story lines of the worst case scenario, so my concerns seldom come true.

I’m not a pessimist…really…

I keep reading various online services that are coming up with special offers to monetize themselves…services that are primarily free developing business models, as it were. I’m not opposed to this…the coders and developers of these great services should be compensated for their work. I just begin to be concerned when I see the ways in which they choose to make money, because I wonder if they’ll choose to exclusively use these models at the expense of offering their services for free, in order to become (more) profitable.

And then I imagine a world in which the Internet…the communications medium that has revolutionized our lives and functioned as an equalizer of the classes, distributing the same range of opportunities to all of us…could become a “walled garden,” with the most useful and revolutionary services open only to those who are able to pay.

That would be…tragic.

I’m sure, however, that I’m inventing another worse case scenario, and that there’s nothing to worry about in actuality.

Right?

Little Bits of Me in Your History

I get the emails at least several times weekly. Often they come from Amazon, or L.L. Bean, or some other online store that I’ve frequented in the past, offering new sales, recommending new items, dressed up in classy design work to make the concept of buying appealing to me.

Some of them are better than others. I buy clothes from L.L. Bean frequently, but that’s about all. Unless it involves beach-combing or the occasional hike, I’m not really the outdoors type. So, when I get an email about a sale on, for example, kayaks, I’m amused a bit.

Amazon tends to be better. Often, I receive book recommendations from them that are already things that I own from elsewhere (I buy more often from Barnes & Noble). What’s specifically interesting are the book recommendations that I receive when I log into Amazon, because they’re an excellent sampling of my reading interests for, say, the past few months, combined with purchases that I made while in grad school. Amazon was my best friend in grad school (this was before I became a Nook owner, and before Amazon treated independent authors as poorly as it now does), because I could save nearly half the cost of a textbook by purchasing it there. Of course, that was all that I had money to purchase, aside from an occasional comic book at the time, so Amazon has a purchase history full of theology and religion texts. One would think that was all I read for three years.

Well, come to think of it…it sort of was, though by pressure of schedule, not choice.

In any case, my point is that, if some secret agency convened around a table in a smoke-filled room, or some alien race hacked into the world’s grid to examine the life of Dave (hey, it could happen), they could gain a wealth of information simply through my purchase histories. I moved from theology texts back to literature, to plays, to science fiction…this was all the process of my settling back into the groove of my natural self after having been displaced for the three years it took me to get that master’s degree.

Similar clues could be gained by sifting through my iTunes purchase history. One could not only quickly discover that I’m a sucker for police procedural dramas and quirky science fiction programs (and we won’t even discuss how many seasons of Cops are currently parked on an extra hard drive), but also see the sort of religious identity crisis in which I spent about two years of my life, based on the music that I purchased.

And I don’t even want to think about how much a certain search engine knows about my life, inspiration, academic plans, and who knows what else.

In fact, if a person can by judged by what he or she reads, listens to, and writes (and I think that’s a fairly safe judgement, as long as those things are looked at in their full scope and not in isolated segments), there are about four online retailers and service providers who, individually, could form a relatively coherent picture of me. With their powers combined, a professional profiler could be out of a job, and I would become suddenly very transparent.

That’s a little frightening when you think about it, and I don’t think that the Internet pioneered this potential for profiled knowledge as much as it perfected what was already there. What I buy for myself, what I buy for gifts (and the people to whom they are shipped) to read, to watch, or to listen to are in large measure descriptive of who I am. And that’s not even bringing social networks into the picture yet, because then the waters can become very murky, indeed.

I don’t think that this is a bad thing: I can opt out of whichever of these emails I choose, and I occasionally see a good recommendation when perusing them. It’s just that when I think of the amount of me that’s accumulated on various servers in the hands of various companies and corporations and private interests…the amount of privacy that I sacrifice for the sake of a certain lifestyle…I suddenly become protective of things. Progressive as I am in my view of technology, I won’t go entirely gently into that good night.

I just don’t know how much to rage against the dying of what quickly becomes antiquity.

Photo Attribution: ajc1 under Creative Commons

Is “Fantastical” a Word?

It actually is a word. It means, depending upon where you look, something along the lines of seeming more appropriate to a fairy tale than to reality. Every now and again, I stumble across an image, either a photo or a work of art, sometimes that’s completely fantasy or speculative, or sometimes a photograph that artfully twists the light as it captures its subject, that causes my mind to spring into the “what-ifs?” What if…that were a girl teleporting? An alien hovering above the ground in a globe? A man who can breathe fire? All of the things that we read about as being beyond the realm of reality, that we refuse to believe in on the surface, yet thrill at reading or watching on a weekend.

Sometimes I read a book that takes me to that place, an inventive way to take on a genre or two and meld them together. These books have the same effect.

And, honestly, sometimes it isn’t even about whether or not the novel or painting or photograph is of some stunning degree of excellence I’ve never encountered before. While they have to be subjectively good to take me to that place, they don’t have to be the best…just imaginative.

That, to me, is the fantastical. I cling to those moments of the fantastical because they take me out of the rational, the technological, the gravity-bound rules and parameters of daily life, which can sometimes sink to doldrums, and take me away to a different galaxy, a different dimension, with different people. That, in turn, inspires me to write different galaxies and dimensions and people in the hopes of saying something important.

I hope that you have a great weekend, and that you find ways to achieve some sort of imaginative escape velocity to launch yourself beyond the day-to-day and into a place that will feed you with the fantastical.

Image attribution: RL Fantasy Studio under Creative Commons.