Petition interruption

A while ago I was walking and talking with a friend who is of Russian extraction. We were approached by a girl gathering signatures for a petition. I don’t remember the cause—stop coal, improve salmon self-esteem, elect Jesus, whatever. She asked us if we were interested in helping it. “Oh, I already signed that one,” I lied. Seemed like an easy way to get out of hearing about it. My friend had a more interesting response. “Sorry,” he said, gesturing toward me and obviously a bit put out, “but we’re in the middle of a conversation right now.”

I can’t imagine many Americans being that frank. It was refreshing. He was right that we were in the middle of a conversation, and that it’s rude to interrupt two people conversing. Until he pointed it out like that, I had never realized how often these petitioners violate basic manners. Nor had I realized how accustomed Americans are to it. We accept intrusive cause-hawkers the way we accept bad weather.

Maybe it’s worse in the Northwest than it is in other places. We have many causes. The environment is a big deal—there being rather more of it here than other places—and we have more college degrees than we probably need. It’s a recipe for lots of street-corner activism.

People like me only encourage the petitioners in their bad manners. I’ve been educated against my will to believe that causes and activism and awareness-building are endeavors to be solemnly admired. I’ve been programmed to feel ashamed to admit in public that I consider my own business more important than that of stopping squirrel poachers. So I wimp out and avoid telling the signature-collectors they’re intruding. “I already signed it” or “No, thanks” are about the best I ever do.

I wish I could be more like my friend and tell these people—politely and correctly—why they can go ahead and kiss off. Maybe it’s that Russians are raised on more traditional values. My impression has always been that they’re much more friend- and family-centered than Americans. They tend to get really involved in their conversations. For a stranger to insinuate that his pet political project is more important than two Russian men’s discussion of Moscow women versus Petersburg women? Highly insulting.

Most petitioners would probably counter that their interruptions are really for the benefit of the people they’re interrupting: “Invasive plant species affect you.” That may be true (though I take it all with a grain of salt), but it doesn’t excuse the interruption. Stopping people on the street is just bad marketing. It’s door-to-door sales and cold-calling and spam. Sophisticated sellers don’t use those methods. 

It doesn’t matter what the content of the interruption is. If I stopped two people in the park and started recounting one of my hilarious anecdotes, they would immediately find it rude (crazy, too) and maybe even call it out as such. Why should they react differently when an environmental science major tells them the sky is falling without their signatures?

Getting and getting rid

I got rid of some stuff a couple weeks ago. Clothes, old shoes, a few other things. Now that all that stuff is gone, I can’t remember why I ever had it. I can’t even remember what it all was. If you asked me to list the contents of the four bags I took to Value Village, I probably couldn’t come up with even half of them. 

 A lot of the stuff we have is like that—stuff we wouldn’t even notice being gone. Yet most of us have a hard time getting rid of it. Even if it’s something we haven’t used in a year and don’t plan to use anytime soon (or something that never had a use to begin with), we convince ourselves we will someday regret getting rid of it. When we come to the moment of truth—throwing it away, giving it away, selling it on Craigslist—we falter.

We get anxious thinking about discarding possessions. It feels like throwing away money. Even if we plan to sell these things, we worry that we’ll get a disappointing price. Easier to just hang on to them and lie that they still have value in our lives. Easier to avoid the distressing feeling that when we toss something, it’s forever. 

Getting rid of stuff is emotionally fraught. But being rid of it is easy. I now feel nothing about the stuff I donated recently—it wasn’t a meaningful part of my routine. I don’t go absentmindedly reaching for that stuff and find the shelf empty. Not having it is a non-experience. 

There’s a similar contrast between getting and having. Getting something, either a gift or a purchase, is a thrill. Having it is boring. Of all the things in your home you were excited to get, how many do you actually find fun to own? The answer—for me—is only a handful. If you took my bike or my computer, I would notice within a day. If you took my kettlebells, I would notice within a week. But if you took my copy of On the Road—which I didn’t like that much and never plan to reread—I might not notice ever. For stuff like this, owning and not owning are equal states.

Getting and getting rid—charged with feeling. Having and not having—as humdrum as flossing. We love hellos and hate goodbyes. But the stuff in between and after, we barely notice. 

When you wish upon a lottery

A few months ago I had a conversation with two older coworkers about what we would do if we won the lottery. They started the conversation, not I. Everyone was talking about the lottery at the time. The jackpot had gotten huge, and the numbers were going to be drawn in a few days.

My coworkers mentioned the typical dreams: sail to some island, build some big house, move someplace where the sun always shines and the water tastes like rose nectar. They seemed pretty well convinced that if you won the lottery you would have it made.

I presented the heretical idea that maybe having a huge lump of cash wouldn’t be that great. Maybe, I suggested, what makes life good is having something meaningful with which to occupy yourself. Maybe people need to produce something with their lives in order to feel fulfilled. Maybe, if you feel lost when you have little money, you would feel just as lost with lots of it.  

They wouldn’t have it. They laughed and implied that I must be over-complicated: “Well I wouldn’t have any problem just sitting in Fiji for the rest of my life!”   

Lots of people say things like that. I think they’re mistaken. People want to believe they would be content living off a massive nest egg with a Mai Tai in hand and no worries in their heads. But that kind of contentment can’t last very long. Passive pleasure is not in itself a reason to live. Any thoughtful person who has spent a continuous stretch of time pursuing it can attest to that fact.

I once took a chunk of savings and spent over four months traveling with no obligations. I remember many long days. Sixteen hours is a lot of time to spend with nothing productive to do. After only a few weeks, the pleasure and excitement had become routine.

My coworkers turned the discussion to less selfish aspects of lottery winnings. They thought this might be more rhetorically persuasive. “Think of all the people you could help,” one of them said. 

It’s true, to a small extent. If I had ten million dollars sitting around, I could give it to the hospital and pay for every cancer patient’s chemo. But the thing is, you can help people with just ten thousand dollars. Or even one hundred. Or even with nothing more than your time. Most of us don’t do so—at least not very often. It’s just not a strong desire.

So unless you’re someone who gives every last spare cent to charities and causes—and loves doing it—you probably wouldn’t be made that happy by giving away millions. And even if giving away millions was a happy experience, how long could that single experience sustain you? Five years later, would you be looking out the window with a cup of coffee in hand thinking, Boy, I sure do feel good about giving that money to those needy strangers half a decade ago? Would you ruminate on that one thought for six hours straight and go to bed that night feeling satisfied with yourself?

Again, count me doubtful. Giving money to the needy may be an admirable thing to do, but as an experience it’s boring. There’s no creativity in it.

This discussion with my coworkers didn’t bring up a single money-enabled thing that sounded to me like it could make me happy long-term. Maybe for a month, or two, or even a year—but not for life. 

I realized how rarely money is a solution to anything. Some of our problems can indeed be solved with cash. You need a knee replacement. Your basement flooded. Your car won’t start. But these aren’t the kinds of problems people are thinking about when they dream of winning the lottery. 

The problems people really hope money can solve are a lot more serious. Things like aimlessness. Loneliness. Confusion. Money doesn’t help with these things. 

In fact, a big sum of money that you simply won might actually be detrimental to solving these problems. The daily necessity of making a living gives shape to our lives. If approached mindfully, it may be in that process that we have the best hope of finding our true direction. And the best hope of connecting with others. And maybe also the best hope of seeing clearly. 

The dinosaur method

Five years ago, when I was 20, I found a way you could teach someone to like eating vegetables—or teach yourself how to like them more. That is, if you know you should eat more vegetables, you want to eat more of them, but you just can’t get very excited about them—this is the method. All you have to do is pretend you’re a dinosaur when you’re eating them.

Wash a whole leaf of lettuce and hold it in two hands. Bend at the waist a bit to mimic a more horizontal spine. Imagine you’re some bipedal herbivorous dinosaur, like a parasaurolophus, iguanodon, or pachycephalosaurus. Rip a huge mouthful of vegetation out of your hands. Don’t be afraid to really put your neck into it. Chew extravagantly. Steal furtive glances from side to side as you watch for predators.

Go ahead and do it right now. I promise you it will be the funnest god damned leaf of lettuce you ever eat in your life.

Even if you only do it a few times, the dinosaur method works. It gives you the idea of vegetables as something precious and coveted. I never hated vegetables, but doing a bit of dinosauring a few years back took my appreciation of them to the next level. Even when not eating like a dinosaur, per se, I can still keep the idea in the back of my mind that hey—fuck it—I’m just a tenontosaurus, and munchin’ on salad is what I do. 

I learned the dinosaur method—in a different form—when I was six or seven. Like all right-thinking boys of that age, I was obsessed with dinosaurs. When I would leave class to use the bathroom or drinking fountain I would—as discreetly as possible—walk in the gait and posture of my favorite dinosaurs. I would put my hands right up against my pecs with my fingers curved and facing outward like claws. Two fingers meant I was a tyrannosaurus. Three fingers—and a bit more forearm extending from my chest—meant I was a velociraptor.

(I had one friend who got even more into character than I did. He really didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought if they saw him. He would walk in lumbering, menacing steps and look at you with the possessed eyes of a predator. His posture was such that you would swear he had a tail. He’d even snarl a bit and refuse to respond in words if you said anything to him. Damn, he was good.)

The dinosaur method helped alleviate some of the boredom of school—and other parts of life. I would do it whenever I needed to. The physicality of it made the imagining more intense. (Again—just try it. It can’t not make you feel good.) 

I guess when I was about nine, though, I decided acting like a dinosaur was no longer an appropriate way to spice up my life. It was over a decade later—as I looked at a head of lettuce—that I rediscovered its effectiveness.    

Adults need more fantasy in their lives.

Consider the sardine

More co-op scribbling: http://www.communityfood.coop/coop/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/May12-NL.pdf. Page 6.

Capitalization punishment

Working with words is a dangerous business. I don’t mean working with words in the sense of writing amateur essays or poetry or the like (though that can be fun). I mean working with words in the sense of a 9-to-5 job, where words are business. If you’re a natural linguistic nitpicker (like me) a job working with words will probably only amplify that shameful part of your personality. 

You find yourself internalizing house style standards and applying them to everything you see. Every publication (or publishing house) worthy of the name has some sort of house style guide. Some of these might be extremely long. Some houses might follow Chicago to the letter. Others might be shorter and less formal. But even blogs (the professional ones, anyway), have made choices concerning fonts, line breaks, jump breaks, spacing, margins, and other basic formatting. They do it because they want their readers (who are, after all, customers) to know what aesthetic to expect when they visit their site. It’s like McDonald’s.

Working within a defined style standard for a long time trains your eye to catch minor discrepancies as though they were nickel-sized blotches of ink spilled on the page. I can  now tell the difference between an en dash and an em dash faster than most people can tell the difference between a Great Dane and a Shih Tzu. I know where each respective dash is supposed to be used, and when I see one in the wrong place I find it—well, appalling. Conventions for line breaks, closing up, and ampersands I’ve taken to heart as well.

But the rule I’ve internalized more than any other is one for capitalization. A convention within the niche I work in (technical publishing) is to list all titles of papers in sentence case (e.g. “A compact hyperspectral imaging spectrometer for spaceborne . . .”), with only the first letter capitalized. When I was introduced to this style standard, I thought it looked odd. I had spent my entire academic life writing papers with titles like “Regressive Transcendence and Subversion: An Analysis of Postantimodernism in the Novels of . . .” where you gave a cap to pretty much everything other than a preposition or an article. 

Taking a title down to sentence case seemed almost like a deliberate humiliation to the author. “Your paper’s title is no longer a capital-t Title, it is simply a sentence that happens to be on the top line.” It felt like we were intentionally announcing to the world that these papers were not important enough to warrant capital letters.

It wasn’t until I had been employing this standard for a while that I realized that this demotion is, in a sense, the point. We apply this standard to proceedings papers, which are just reflections of presentations given at conferences. They aren’t peer-reviewed, and they don’t make or break careers. They’re typically a snapshot of work in progress. The idea behind them is that of sharing information. From that perspective—sharing—a title in sentence case makes sense. You’re just saying, “Hey, this is what my team and I did—see if you find it interesting.” You’re not trying to impress anyone with a big show.

The standard works. It makes the papers appear less pompous. If you care to see how fully I’ve internalized this style, just take a look at the title of every post on this blog. If I gave these blog posts title-case titles, each one would become “a piece,” as in, “That piece I wrote on x.” And I don’t consider a single one of them to be that. They are, at best, snapshots of ideas in progress. 

Some writing—the long stuff, the very thorough stuff, the painstakingly crafted stuff—does deserve a title in caps. But much doesn’t, and it’s actually better to admit it. Take a look at The Economist. They use sentence-case titles (though they cap the first word after a colon, which I dislike). Now take a look at Time, capped up to the gills. Which of the two looks smarter? 

Lately I’ve noticed odd capitalization all over the place. I got thinking about this from something I saw in the dentist’s office today. They had on the wall a wooden placard in the foofy, curlicue style of those “Home is Where the Heart Is” things your mom or grandma probably has in the kitchen. It read thus:

We Always

Make room for your

Friends

and Referrals

I won’t even bother commenting on the extremely strange choice of line breaks (though you could probably write an essay on that, too). I’ll confine myself to the capitalization. The first baffler is the inconsistency. Why are “room” and “your” lower-case in a sea of caps? But that almost seems like a typographical mistake. 

Let’s say they were capped like the rest. It would still be an odd thing to read: “We Always Make Room for Your Friends and Referrals.” I hope it’s oddness is especially apparent when written in-line without special breaks. The oddness is that it’s a damn sentence! It’s not a title or non-sentence phrase like “Home Sweet Home.” It’s a diagrammable, textbook sentence with subject, predicate, preposition, and objects of preposition. So why the caps? Make it sentence-case and give it a period. It would look like an actual statement.

Just below this in the rack was a magazine called Trailer Life (god only knows what is found in those pages or who the hell bothers to find it). They listed a feature on the top line of the cover: “Improve Truck Handling With One Simple Add-On.” Man, they even capped the prepositions in this one, and yet this too is precisely a sentence—of the imperative variety, with the implied subject and modal verb of “you can” or “you shall” (the latter being definitely the funnier). 

So what’s with the loud caps? Is this a “piece” that trailer enthusiasts are going to cherish for its wisdom and pass on to friends and family? Or is it just some mildly informative throwaway content that readers will forget as soon as it’s no longer useful to them? Turn it into the sentence that it is. Give it no more than its due. Stop yelling at us with titles too big for their britches. 

Anyway, my hypercritical perspective.

When no news is good news

I’ve been abstaining from the news lately. Not that I’ve ever been a news junkie, but for the past week or so I haven’t read or watched any at all. I’d found myself tired of it—the repetitiveness, the irrelevance—and then I read an essay by Rolf Dobelli that convinced me to try giving it up altogether (at least for a while, as an experiment). The guy makes a cogent argument against the Standard American News Diet—one of the key points being that nearly everything you read in the news has no discernible effect on your life. After all, if the effect was discernible, you wouldn’t need the news to tell you about it. 

My news-abstinence became significant early yesterday morning, though. There was a fire at the marina, clearly visible from my apartment, about a mile away across the water. It was only 6:30, and still twilight. I watched the flames and the rising black smoke while I brushed my teeth and buttoned my shirt. It looked like the fire was pretty big.

As I drove in to work I thought about the fire and its relation to my news-abstinence. Obviously, this was a newsworthy event. In only a few minutes I would be at my computer, where I could look up some local “BREAKING NEWS” site and surely get a preliminary, on-the-scene report. And I kind of wanted to. I was curious.

But of course my curiosity had no basis. I don’t sail or own a sailboat, nor do any of my friends/family, nor do I even think very highly of sailing as a pastime (very cliquish, it seems). I knew (as Dobelli’s essay predicts) there was almost certainly nothing in that fire that would affect me. My curiosity was morbid, voyeuristic, and transitory.

So I decided to maintain my celibacy and not look it up online. I decided instead to conduct an observational study. I was the first person in my little work area to arrive that morning, so I figured my two workmates, when they got in half an hour later, wouldn’t know about the fire (not everyone’s home has a kick-ass bay view like mine, heh heh). I wanted to see how they’d react when I brought it up. I know neither one of them sails, and that they’d have as little reason as I did to imagine they’d be affected by the fire.

Only a few minutes after they’d each sat down, I said (nonchalantly), “Hey, did you guys see or hear about the fire at the marina.” One said she’d noticed smoke on her commute, the other wasn’t aware at all. Obviously, since I had only seen it from a distance and hadn’t read about it, I had nothing to offer by way of explanation. “Yeah, I could see it from my apartment, and it looked kind of big,” I think I said.

They immediately wheeled around to their respective computers—in unison, and as if in a deliberate effort to confirm my expectations—and looked it up online. I couldn’t help cracking a wry smile behind their backs. They each found it on a different site, too. The fire—still burning—had made not only local but also regional news. My, the speed of the internet in spreading tidings of disaster.

They shared aloud some of details, and sure enough there was nothing meaningful to any of us. A boathouse had gone up. No one knew why. If anyone was hurt or dead, they didn’t know who. It was still rather hot at the moment. 

So the whole checking-it-out-online, gathering-of-information thing had been a waste of time and attention. Not a huge waste, obviously, but a waste just the same. Imagine how that interaction might have gone if we didn’t have the internet (or other rapid-delivery news channels). The fire is the type of thing I probably would bring up anyway, even if I wasn’t conducting an observational study, just in case my workmates had friends or family they might need to be concerned about. Here’s how I see the web-free version:

Me: “Did you see/hear about the fire?”

Workmates: “No.”

Me: “Looked kinda big.”

Workmates: “Oh. I hope no one’s hurt.” (Maybe get on phones to call loved ones.)

I’m not trying to deride my workmates for turning around to their computers the way they did. Turning to a computer (or pulling out a smartphone) is the instinctual 21st-century response to hearing about anything. Can’t blame anyone for it. But the nature of that response should by itself indicate to us that what we’re responding to isn’t terribly relevant to our lives.

How would you respond if someone told you something that seemed like it might be a cause for your personal concern? If a coworker came in and said there had just been an explosion at the tire factory, and you knew your son/husband/brother was supposed to have just started his shift at the tire factory, would you turn to your computer and try to find a news story about it? Far more likely is that you’d be getting on the phone and/or running out to your car.

My guess is that many people around town turned to their computers over word of this marina fire. And my guess is that it was for them as irrelevant as it was for my workmates and me. It’s funny, since you would expect that if any news were to be relevant, it would be the local news. The truth, though, is that most of the things that genuinely affect us are either mundanities that don’t make the news, or they are emergencies so personally critical that our knowledge of them bypasses news streams altogether. 

I’ve only been avoiding the news for a matter of days, so I can’t confirm if a news-free life is truly better. There may in the future be something seriously important that I—in my book-reading, semi-unplugged world—totally miss out on. Maybe I’ll miss the opportunity to work for some hot new company because I didn’t read about it in a Time magazine profile. Or maybe I’ll lose all my money when I don’t read the CNN Money article about fears of my bank’s becoming insolvent. Or maybe my mother will be shot in the face by a terrorist and I won’t hear about it until she’s already buried.

I’ll be sure to let you know.