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kissingwithcannibals · 5 years

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March 2, 2019

This evening I sat down to read an essay in Lapham’s Quarterly. If you’re not familiar with Lapham’s, it’s a literary magazine in which each edition is a collection of essays, past and contemporary, centered around a single theme. The theme of the edition that I’m currently reading is Youth. I begin reading a story from the late 1800s about a young boy who suddenly realizes that his peers do not accept him, presumably because he comes from a wealthier family, and they resent him for this. In order to change his standing among them, he steadfastly refuses to wear any article of clothing that the other children don’t. For example, he won’t wear an overcoat, and he rejects the gift of a nice cap from his parents, because these are (for the time period) luxuries that his peers can’t afford.

It’s a story about peer pressure. However, I don’t know how it ends, because in reading this, a long-dormant memory within me suddenly snapped back into existence. I think this might have been in elementary school. Possibly early middle school, I can’t be sure. One day, Ryan Patterson had decreed that Old Navy clothes were “yuppie.” This word is not as it’s used today- a demographic shorthand with a somewhat hostile undertone for young, urban, professionals. No, at the time, to be a yuppie, according to Ryan Patterson, was to be uncool. I took his sudden declaration to be an unquestionable truth, as I always looked to Ryan as a boy who was on the forefront of style. I accepted him as a gatekeeper of culture. He was older than all of us, on account of being held back a year, but I viewed his maturity as imbuing him with a kind of privileged knowledge to weigh whatever fads and trends trickled down to us from the grades above, and to determine what was “dope” and what was unforgivably lame.

Ryan was my friend. He wasn’t some kind of peer-pressure demagogue. In fact, in our early years of friendship, one of Ryan’s most enduring traits was his abundance of kindness and flattery, which he readily heaped on me. But his decree about Old Navy sent me spiraling into weeks of nervous terror. There were Old Navy clothes in my closet. I stopped wearing them outright. Eventually, my mother caught on, and wanted to know why some of my shirts were going untouched. A brief flash of a scene has stayed with me: of burying my face in my pillow as my mom kneels beside me and asks me why I won’t wear Old Navy. I bury my face in the pillow and clamp my eyes shut, as if she will have to pry this stupid reason out of me. I can only speak the muffled answer into the dark of the pillow, too ashamed to say it to her face. “Because Old Navy is yuppie. Ryan Patterson said Old Navy is yuppie.”

“Yuppie? What is yuppie?”

I don’t remember how I explained to her what yuppie was. I don’t remember because, well, how could I explain something like that to a parent? How could I have decoded for her my complete and willing surrender to the invisible grip of peer pressure, that unintelligible doom that permeates the social life of a fourth grader? Cool has no logic. As if Ryan Patterson had a thoughtful case to make against Old Navy, and not that he had simply, say, overheard his older brother casually dismiss Old Navy, and then decided to pass this new law down to our grade.

Nevertheless, I cut the tags off my Old Navy shirts, hoping to conceal my shame from the clique. I do remember doing that.

Isn’t that insane? I almost forgot about that whole episode. In all my years of school, I really was a captive to peer-pressure. I think I relaxed as the years went on, and I was breathing a bit easier by the end of high school, but, God, I suffered so much self-induced agony during those early years. Nothing twisted my stomach into knots more than the thought of being disliked. And everyone knows that, especially for kids, violating the herd mentality is a swift way to the bottom of the totem pole. It seems so silly now, but it was everything to me at the time. Peer-pressure. What the hell. It’s like it forces everyone to walk on tightropes. Jesus.

Okay, well, thanks for reading! Until next time.

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kissingwithcannibals · 5 years

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I like to listen to podcasts while I sketch, and the other day, I put on an episode of Hidden Brain. If you haven’t check this show out, I recommend it. “Using science and storytelling, Hidden Brain reveals the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, and the biases that shape our choices.” Basically, the show packages psychology and sociology through stories and interviews, making it much more accessible for plebs like me. The episode was “Close Enough: The Lure of Living Through Others.” I thought: hey, that sounds cool! Until it started to describe my life.

The show opens up with an interview of guy who enjoys doing woodworking projects in his free time. A good deal of what this guy knows about carpentry he’s learned from tutorials on Youtube. He’s a teacher during the day, and when he comes home, he’s confronted with several ongoing projects in his home wood shop. Unfortunately, he’s so drained by the time he comes home from work that, instead of working on, say, building a cabinet, he watches Youtube. Hours of it. He goes down a wormhole of videos, watching other people demonstrate how to, say, clean a car engine, or build a deck, or how to renovate your kitchen. Some of it relevant to him, some not.

Part of the show is devoted to understanding why people spend hours every day watching experts do expert things. I can happily unpack some of this for you, because, first of all, this guy’s story is my story, too. (Except nobody should trust me to handle a bandsaw, or to, like, educate their children.) I can tell you, unequivocally, that the whole act of passively grazing Youtube absolutely sucks. It’s addicting, but it suuuuucks. The first five minutes are great. I’ve got my bowl of frosted mini wheats and a video of, say, the 2018 Starcraft 2 WCS Global Tournament Grand Finale Match queued up. But I wolf down the mini wheats in, you know, sixty seconds flat, and then I’m facing an hour and forty-five minutes of a professional e-sport player from Finland try to take down another top player from South Korea in the game of Starcraft.

Seeing that my attention span these days is about the length in time it takes me to eat a bowl of mini wheats, I hop to one of the many videos that Youtube’s almighty algorithm has recommended I watch. Maybe another professional Starcraft match, or a watercolor painting tutorial, or a Vox video about Why Safe Playgrounds Aren’t Great for Kids. Each video provides a progressively diminishing feeling of satisfaction, until, eventually, I feel like a pig at a trough, and it’s no longer about eating because I’m hungry, but because the food is in front of my face.

I don’t know why I do this to myself. It’s no longer fun. The dull, flat “enjoyment” of Youtube is somehow more comforting than the real world. The world beyond my computer monitor is a place of sensation, and action, and deliberate thought. Youtube is passive, it’s voyeurism, and it’s artifice. I can’t even tell you why I’ve been watching so many professional Starcraft matches lately. When I was younger, holy hell did I put hours into that game (and I was always terrible), but I haven’t played it in years. I’m not a member of the community, and it’s meaningless to me which South Korean player takes the top prize this year. (Because, like, 95% of the world’s best Starcraft players are South Korean.)

I think part of my attachment to Youtube is that I do find it compelling to watch a person do something so well. As a horrendous Starcraft player, it’s kind of amazing to see what these professional e-sport players can do. They’re basically playing an entirely different game than the one I played. Or take programming: I’m new to coding, and very awful at it, so to watch some of these coders absolutely rip through crazy code and produce amazing results with it is, for me, almost entrancing. Honestly, anything that I’m amateur or mediocre at, I want to see how the pros are doing it.

And, to be fair, Youtube can be a great resource. I have learned a lot by way of guitar, coding, juggling, drawing, to name a few, from tutorials. But most of the content that I’m glued to is mindless, and the the time I spend watching these videos is time I’m not spending practicing guitar or trying to learn how to code.

I’ll paraphrase a point made in the podcast: These videos are an escape into another person’s life. This passive voyeurism is simpler, cheaper, and the emotional results are “close enough”. You get a taste of what your life could be while eating ice cream on the couch. It’s a substitute for a lacking in your own life.

I was in a real Youtube spiral yesterday. By the end of the day, my brain was fried. I couldn’t find the excitement to do anything, and when I tried to sit down to read or blog, I couldn’t keep my concentration. It was completely demoralizing. Today was similar. I tried to do some coding this morning, but I kept messing up and getting confused, which only compounded my doldrums.

As a side note, learning to code has been a struggle this past week. I find myself jumping from lesson to lessons, topic to topic, not entirely sure what I’m doing, or why I’m doing it. Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to understand web applications, and how to construct and launch web pages using Python, Flask, and Bootstrap. But after hours of watching lessons, and writing code, and screwing up my code, I close my laptop and think to myself, Wait, when have I ever wanted to make a website? Was this even any fun? Why am I doing this?

Eventually, I felt so frazzled that I thought to myself: I literally need to just lie down for an hour and close my eyes. I put in my earbuds and played an episode of This American Life, knowing that I wanted to just invest in one single story for an extended time. Well, I fell asleep, and when I woke up, the episode had finished and the next TAL episode in the queue was playing. Still only half-awake, I really had no idea what was going on, but the episode was about, like, this library that had a really unusual collection, in part because the library would accept books from authors who had been rejected by publishers everywhere else. Or something like that. Don’t quote me.

In my haze, it hit me like a bolt of lightning: libraries? Libraries! In my slog of coding tutorials this week, I completely forgot that one of my original programming goals was to replicate a working library check-out system. Among other things, it would have databases for storing books and patron information, as well as a search tool that patrons could use to find books. And, of course, I would want to incorporate those little scanner guns. When I first started learning to code, my friend Gus recommended that I have a project in mind, as a means of giving myself something to work toward. I completely forgot about my model library idea, but this is the kind of goal I need to rekindle my motivation.

So today ended better than it started. And some days, that’s the best you can ask for!

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kissingwithcannibals · 5 years

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Feb 20, 2019

My favorite part of this yearbook project has been gleaning the senior photos, and so far 1953 is one of the best.

But before that, I’d like to shout some praise for the yearbook staff who included a page dedicated to the high school’s cafeteria staff, custodians, and bus drivers, a group of absolutely essential people who are, at best, looked over, and, at worst, looked down upon. I don’t recall any pages in my own yearbooks for these employees.

Anyway, on the the senior class! What I appreciate here is the inclusion of a “candid” photo for each graduate. Not included are each student’s clubs and activities; instead we have the delightfully juicy inclusion of a pet peeve. You’ll see below that Theodore Emmons is turned off by “slow people,” so I wonder how he must feel about Joesphine Clifford’s ambition to become “waves.” Personally, I’d be more worried that Ruth Farmworth (who incidentally goes by, wait for it, “Ruth”) aspires to be a nurse, but -who is she kidding- she fully expects to wind up as an “importer of French mice.” You know, as one does.

I was also a bit thrown to see that there are several guys in this class who reserved their pet peeve line for women. Paul Brooks can’t stand “girls that smoke”. Paul Feltrinelli has a special aversion toward “ambitious girls.” Richard Chappell simply writes “Girls” as his pet peeve. The same goes for James Kellish. And Raymond Phelps just can’t stand “girls making out in the halls.” (What does that mean? Not making out with you, Ray? Or girls making out with each other? This Ray guy, I swear, such a prude.)

(I guess I could also include the aforementioned Josephine Clifford, who doesn’t like “Girls who make up stories”. And Christine Catherine “Chris” Carr, a girl whose parents clearly had a thing for alliteration, simply listed “People” as her pet peeve.)

I don’t know what it means to be the “proprietor of an old maids home,” but I really hope Gloria “Flip” Fillippelli was able to to take a crack at that. I would also like to know her problem with spaghetti.

A rather confident Michael Hampe felt that fame was in the cards for him. Or, at the least, a career in acting and directing. I combed the web for his name, and after 10 minutes of searching, I found nothing concrete, and moved on. Sorry, Mike!

I’m also starting to wonder if this class is a bunch of trolls. I mean, check out this page below. Of the four of them, three want to go into the Air Force, and one wants to be a radar technician. And yet, Ursula Kramer thinks she is likely to become a “mother of six” instead, while Mary Miemietz believes it’s “tight-rope walker” for her. And then there’s Donald Manning, future water commissioner. Finally, Richard Knapp, our aspiring radar technician, is likely to be “lazy.” Now that’s a career path I can identify with.

Anyway, that’s just a sample of the 1953 seniors for you. One other thing: I wonder what it’d be like to be a senior in high school and go to school amongst kindergarteners? Because every grade -kindergarten through twelfth - were housed together in this building. Like, would the older students see the little the little fourth graders as easy pickings to bully? Or would the older students carry themselves more maturely, knowing that the youngest of their peers would be, literally, looking up to them? Or, very possibly, all of this and none of this.

In closing: the advertisement section. When I first began browsing these old yearbooks, I often disregarded this part. However, I’ve learned that you can discover some pretty cool things. For one, you get a sense of how wildly different the industry once was in the town of Manlius. Today, most businesses in town are in retail and consumption, but there was a time when we had, for example, S. Cheney and Son, who provided services in “Gray and Alloyed Iron Castings”, “Jobbing Machine Work”, and “Specialty Machines.” They were located across the intersection from what is now the Tops grocery store.

Also, for any business that provided their address, I can search that in Google Maps and see what stands there today. 215 Smith Street is presently a residential house, but it was once Ruff’s Grocery, which advertised “Liehs and Steigerwald Famous Franks and Sausages and also Colosse Cheese”. Kind of strange to imagine a grocery store tucked along a residential street. (Also, Liehs and Steigerwald still exists, as a butcher shop in the Northside of Syracuse, and as a butcher/grocery/pub in the downtown.)

A few final observations:

-I appreciate the tagline for Tony’s Lunch Bar. “COME AND GET IT”

-The phone number for Tony’s Lunch Bar is simply 2-5684.

-What or who is the “Village Bookkeeper”? Was that a kind of library? A bookstore? A guy who just hoarded books? Is he like a crypt keeper?

-305 East Seneca Street once had a barber shop. And, coincidence or not, a barber shop is there today, too!

-What is Snook’s Pond? Where is Snook’s Pond? That is a mystery.

-I see that Manlius once had a coal yard? At least in 1940, they did. (I went back and looked through the advertisement sections for 1940 and 1941.)

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kissingwithcannibals · 5 years

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Feb 15, 2019

Well, I’m back. The year? 1941.

There are 29 students in the senior class, an increase of six from last year. (I won’t be including every page from the senior photos this time.) Here’s something to note: nearly everyone has a nickname.

“Klondyke”, “Cookie”, “Slicker”, “Fritz”, “Stub”, “Sliver”, “Gertie”, “Joe College”, “Tootsie”, “Satchel”, “Shorty”, and the most unfortunate Anita “Hag” Howell.

I’m realizing now that nicknames weren’t included in the senior biographies in the 1940 yearbook, though I think they’re a nice touch. What’s up with nicknames being so common? I’m sitting here on my couch in 2019, racking my brain, and I don’t think I refer to a single one of my friends by a nickname. Are nicknames now relics of the past? See, this is something I can’t wrap my brain around- what shifted in the culture that causes nicknames to fall out of style? When did this happen? I wonder if it was common at the time in film and television for characters to have nicknames. But that doesn’t solve the mystery of why assigning nicknames to your friends and peers dropped out of fashion. I’m stumped.

Anyway, in addition to a nickname, each senior still has a tagline of sorts, a kind of quote or inside joke. My favorite is Louise Cook’s. “Lookie, Lookie, Here Comes Cookie”. That’s pretty cute.

Nurse and business school are two popular choices for girls. Verna “May” Cookhouse would be a notable exception, listing “a farmer’s wife” as her destination. Two guys want to be aircraft mechanics, which is pretty cool, except that World War Two is still in full swing, and I think having to take part in that would be definitely less than cool. Marjorie Ethel “Marge” Culver plans to be an aircraft stewardess, not on one of those Allied bombers, hopefully. Cornell is a popular choice for those going to college.

My favorite senior quote is “Hey! Stop kissing my sister” from Matthew Rybinski, who plans to become a tool maker, which I assume must have been a career path back then. Also present in this graduating class: a one Adeline Rybinski.

I feel attached to these people, and I feel sad that they’re all dead. That’s pretty morbid, I know. I’m not sure why I feel this way. Maybe I’m envious of them, somehow? It must have been kind of special to grow up in a class of only 29 kids. Then again, I don’t ever remember feeling lost inside my class of some four hundred others, so how can I compare? In my mind, I imagine how solidly linked each of them were to each other, how layered and intimate their bonds were, that they must have confided in each other and leaned on each other in the ways of some kind of idealized family. Which, you know, is a silly thing to believe. I am romanticizing them, because this was still high school, and kids in high school can be petty and cruel and jealous and hormonal, whether it’s 1941 or 2019.

There’s just something about looking over this group of kids in black-and-white photos, with the guys in suits and the girls in, well, whatever you call that fashion, something about it makes me see them all as so innocent. A simpler time; before computers, before the television was in every home, before national highways ripped through and gutted communities, before 24 hour news cycles. People wrote letters and walked to the grocery store. I know, this is my brain on nostalgia. This is me being selective, pushing aside the inconvenient truth that the times may change but our humanity is remarkably stubborn. I mean, honestly, what innocence? The world was at war, tearing itself apart. Kids were graduating high school and being sent overseas to die. I can’t even imagine someone trusting me with a gun at 18, let alone to go kill a man. And forget the war, just think about high school for a moment. The whole arc -the whole point- of high school is a young person’s journey through a loss of innocence. That’s what happens. You know, Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, Looking for Alaska, all of that.

Just to drive home the point of class size: the graduating class is small enough that some of the senior wills are provided on a first-name basis.

Wesley will share the secret of his complexion for any one who cares to inquire.

Fritz’s excuse for a pipe goes to all his well-wishers.

One theme that seems to have disappeared from our modern yearbooks is a section for well-wishes and wisdom from the faculty. I’ve included a snippet below.

Skimming the advertisements, I’m always struck by several things: that a BBQ dinner would only set you back a dime; that Manlius once had a lunch room and billiard parlor; that people named their kids “Herb.”

It also becomes readily obvious that Manlius in the 1940s, like most towns in America at the time, was a place comprised mostly of locally owned businesses. Today, Manlius is flooded with chains, and I’d wager that they outnumber the local shops. I think that Manlius still has character, but it’s hard to deny how corporate homogenization has erased some of the personal touches of this town that make it distinct from, say, our next-door neighbor, the town of Fayetteville. (That town being even more consumed with shopping plazas anchored by national chains.)

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kissingwithcannibals · 5 years

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Feb 12, 2019

As if you needed another reason to love public libraries, here’s one more: they may be archiving some of your local history. That task is mostly undertaken by historical societies, but every now and then, the two institutions team up. And when they do, you can bet things can wet, weird, and wild. This was the case in my town, when, a couple years ago, with the help of a sprinkling of grant money, my town’s local library and historical society worked to digitize all the old school yearbooks.

I do sometimes find myself nostalgic for the past. And I mean, like, the past past. Late 1800s. Early 1900s. Wrapping my head around life back then is a tall order, so personally I just try to remember what my life was like before I was hopelessly addicted to my computer and phone. Frankly, I can’t do it. I can’t very well articulate why I’m drawn to those old eras, but the word “community” is always floating around my thoughts. Maybe this is the fallacy of wistful, nostalgic thinking, but I believe that people were closer back then. Communities were tighter. You knew your neighbors, you know? I’ll leave it to sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists to determine (with evidence!) if modern society is making us more distracted, depressed, and disconnected, but I have always had this vague, gut instinct that there were some good things about life “back in the day,” namely that the pace was slower, and the world was smaller, and damnit a person could sit down to read book without getting distracted!

I worry that when I heap praise on times gone by, I’ll come off as a grouchy conservative, i.e. “back in my day, we didn’t have smartphones or internet, and we had to actually talk to each other!!” You know, all that garbage. I’m so totally opposed to becoming someone like that. Still, if you think about it, it’s probably terrifying to grow old and realize that your generation is no longer the most important one. The spotlight shifts to the next generation, who now seem to you so strange and abrasive. I think that would make anyone grumpy. But let me be clear, I’m glad most of the past is past. We can do without the separate water fountains and landline telephones.

Anyway, I decided to dig through the old yearbooks. I began with the oldest one available: 1940. Just to set the scene: the first McDonald’s opened in 1940. And Bugs Bunny made is TV debut. Also, World War 2.

Here’s the cover.

The villages of Manlius and Fayetteville had independent school districts until 1951, when they merged. The current F-M High School was built in 1960 in Manlius. The Manlius High School represented in this 1940 yearbook became the Pleasant Street Elementary school of the combined F-M school district until it closed in 1975. It is now a daycare and church.

A few things I’ve picked up. For one, there are 23 seniors in the graduating class of 1940. Twenty-three. I think there were about 400 of us in my graduating class. Consider, also, that with so few students, grades kindergarten through twelfth were housed in the same building. This means that you may have very well grown up and gone from class to class with the same small cadre of peers for thirteen years. That’s nuts. Imagine how deep everyone must have been up in everyone else’s shit. No secrets. Your classmates were pretty much your second family.

Another minor observation: becoming a farmer was a legit career back then. You could expect that you yourself or someone you know would aspire to become a farmer. Not only did this school have a teacher each for art, music, “gymnasium”, language, “home economics,” and something called “commercial,” but they also had Mr. Harold Love instructing the agriculture class. The school also had a “Future Farmers of America” club. That’s pretty metal.

Okay, moving on to the senior photos.

I just want to point out some of the rather strange choices for senior quotes.

Mary Carr: “You are so quiet and so shy, we’d like to know the reason why” I can’t decide if I feel bad for Mary, or if maybe there’s a couple bodies buried under Mary’s porch.

Lillian Martino: “Early to bed and early to rise, you miss meeting some of the swellest guys” Ayyy get it, girrrrllll.

Harriet Holbrook: “Quiet but pleasant to know” This has got to be the saddest one of them all, right?

“What is thy name, fair maiden?” Rodney Mills, the original neckbeard.

I’d also like to mention that Edward Sunderman’s post high school destination is simply listed as: “Air Conditioning”

Moving on to the senior awards. I’ve gotta say, the awards were way better back in 1940. Here are a few nuggets:

“Most handsome boy”

“Most handsome girl”

“Best natured boy” and “best natured girl”

“Best answerer”

“Class question box”

In addition: awards for the laziest boy and girl, the quietest boy and girl, something called the “class sheik”, the class angel, the class pest, the class infant (def would not want to get that one), and -am I reading this right?- the class vamp. (Congrats to Lillian Martino, who you may remember from her senior quote above. Actually, now it kinda makes sense.)

Senior Wills (not pictured):

Nothing much of note here, except “Rodney Mills leaves his success with the opposite sex to any junior so inclined.” Rodney Mills, you may remember, as the chap with the neckbeard quote.

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The back end of the yearbook honors the yearbook’s financial supporters. I was surprised to see a paper supply company all the way out in Albany supporting the yearbook. (Maybe it really was a smaller world back then.)

I also got a chuckle that one could rent a typewriter for three months for five bucks. I checked online and can tell you that 5 dollars in 1940 is equivalent to about 90 dollars today. I’ll also note that the store is on 444 South Salina Street in Syracuse. Today, a U.S. postal office occupies that building, at least according to Google Maps.

This was probably the most fun I’ve had blogging in a while. I don’t know if anyone else digs this crap the way I do, but I’d like to poke through a few more of these. Cheers!

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kissingwithcannibals · 5 years

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Feb 2, 2019

As mentioned earlier, I recently finished reading this history book by Jack Larkin called The Reshaping of Everyday Life, which was all about how life changed in America between 1790 and 1840. A few things:

1. A lot of people, except in the winter, went barefoot. Especially poorer, rural folk. So I imagine people straight up had feet like the hobbits in Lord of the Rings. Also, ringworm.

2. Everyone was drunk. All the time. Kids drank, too, especially the homemade hard cider. The modern American’s yearly alcohol consumption is absolutely dwarfed by people in the 1800s. Pretty much doing anything was an excuse to drink. Shucking corn? Drink. Traveling by horse between towns? Drink on the go! Drunk and fell off your horse? That must hurt- have a drink!

3. Violence was much more prevalent in daily life. Which probably was made worse by the fact that guys were stumbling around piss drunk all the time. Corporal punishment was common in schools and in the homes. In fact, back then, teaching school was seen as a male job, and new teachers in rural schools sometimes had to prove their authority by fighting the older students. If the teacher lost, he could be fired! “Parents and school committees simply assumed that a schoolmaster worth his pay would overcome any challenges to his authority on his own” (288-289).

4. Adding to this, "rough-and-tumble” fighting was common in the backwoods of the South. Guys would be looking for excuses to fight, and they would tear each other apart, to the point where the term “gouging” became, like, a thing. As in, guys would pride themselves on how well they could remove another man’s eye in combat. People walked around with eyes missing because gouging was on trend! What the fuck.

5. Air conditioning wasn’t around yet, so life was hell, and churches often left their doors open during sermons. As a consequence, chickens and ducks would just wander inside, strolling up and down the pews. Also, sermons could be, like, three hours long, so people would bring things like nuts for a snack, and then throw the shells on the floor. They would also spit their chewing tobacco on the church floor.

6. That’s another thing: everyone chewed tobacco. Lots of people smoked it with pipes, but everyone chewed it. And they spit it out anywhere and everywhere. I remember one passage that described the whole floor of a county courtroom being black with tobacco spit.

7. Premarital sex was surprisingly common. A sizable percentage of weddings were shotgun weddings. It didn’t have such a negative stigma until a growing religious revivalism later made everything lame.

8. If you lived in an urban area, you might have had a privy in your backyard, and at night, someone was paid to come collect the “night soil.” (”The dripping carts of the nocturnal gold-finders.”) I’m really glad I don’t have to walk out to a privy when it’s five degrees outside. I’m also really glad there’s no chance of running into someone in my backyard at night who’s there to collect my shit.

9. There were no snowplows. Just imagine that. Just imagine living in Syracuse with no snowplows. It makes me shudder. For those even wealthy enough to own a horse, they might take a horse and sled to, say, visit a neighbor. Then again, you might just be isolated for weeks.

10. Courting was weird. Parents actually gave young people a fair amount of space and privacy for courtship (perhaps because parents were too busy working to interfere). One item, to note, though: In the northeast, there was this now-dead practice called “bundling,” which involved the guy and girl each being wrapped in a blanket, and lying together in bed. The blankets were there to stop any funny business. But, just to be safe, the parents sometimes put a wooden board or plank between the two. (Yes, imagine your mom tucking you into bed with a guy, and then sticking a board between you to stop you from slappin’ hams.) The whole point was to encourage intimacy without sex, but it didn’t really work. Especially when it’s so easy to sneak off to the barn for a romp in the hay!

Well, anyway, that’s just a taste of what life was like back then. I find some aspects of ye old times attractive, but mostly it was terrible. No AC in the summer, no heat or lights in the winter. You toiled sun-up to sun-down on the farm most of the year. Everyone was super smelly. Slavery was still a thing. There wasn’t much to eat besides bread and salt-pork. (Unless you count alcohol as a food.) The roads were awful or non-existent. Your bathroom might have been a privy, but in all likelihood it was a chamberpot or the nearest bush outside. Entertainment comprised of who could shuck corn the fastest. Yeah, no thanks.

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kissingwithcannibals · 5 years

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Jan 30, 2019

I’ll admit that I’ve had trouble concentrating lately. It’s been hard to do much of anything, let alone blog. I took Shadow to the vet today, which involved driving along some pretty scary roads. Her appointment was at 2:30, and I think I spent a full three hours before it pacing around my house, swearing under my breath as I watched in horror as snow came barreling down from the sky in flurries, and I conjured in my imagination every doomsday scenario that slick, snowy roads might bring.

In the end, ninety percent of the drive was totally fine, though blustery winds did cause snowdrifts between Manlius and Chittenango, effectively erasing the road, which I met with much groaning and cursing. That area is mostly farmland, so the lack of trees, which would otherwise create natural barriers to the wind, allows snowdrifts to happen. This helped me reaffirm my belief system that trees are good and people are dumb.

The visit to the vet went well enough. Shadow is back on antibiotics, which I hope will turn the tide against this problem with her eyes. I’m finding that accomplishing even a basic level of productivity in my daily life is at a debilitating standstill while her health and comfort remain precarious. To experience abundant joy right now seems a betrayal to her. I can’t seem to do much more than fitfully read. Caring for the birds, however, has offered a glimmer of comfort. I’ve also seen that chunky ol’ rabbit many times now, and he no longer scurries away as I toss him baby carrots. I think he’s also dining well on all the leftover apple cores I’m tossing under the deck for him. The deer, of course, are regular visitors around here, too, though they’re pretty skittish, and any attempts by me to throw them an apple might startle them. Or, more likely, with my aim, the apple would veer wildly off-course, plunk down and disappear into a snow bank, and I’d be met with the bewildered, blank stares of five hungry deer. How could I face them after that? I couldn’t. Birds are much easier to please.

Today I finished reading “The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790-1840″ by Jack Larkin. It was a good read, and maybe I’ll talk about it another time. Anyway, here’s a weird song.

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Jan 27, 2019

Oh boy. Shadow’s eyes have regressed. It seems the inflammation has slowly become worse, and in turn, her vision has taken a nosedive. I think we discontinued the anti-infection drops too early. Of course, that was in accordance with the vet’s instructions, so what do I know? Our vet appointment is on Thursday, which feels like a long ways away. Emotionally, I’ve had the wind knocked out of me again. Often I find little appetite to do anything productive, but I try do do things like reading and painting, which allow me to keep half an eye on Shadow. Agonizing over Shadow is not what I want this blog to center around, even though her health has near totally dominated my life since Christmas. Ugh.

Mom and I went to Michael’s (the craft store) the other day. She helped me pick out supplies for watercolor painting. My mom has intermittently done art her whole life, but she began taking weekly art lessons as of last year. Watercolor so far has proven a little unwieldy, and my mistakes are harder to correct. But after dwelling solely in pen and pencil since I began practicing drawing in earnest over the summer, the addition of actual color has been lovely. Yesterday I painted a strawberry! YUSSS.

It brings me a lot of joy when I think about how my mom has taken up art again. It’s never too late to bring a new hobby into your life, is it? Even at my age, I feel that way. Yeah, there are 5th graders who blow my art out of the water, and while I kick myself for not starting this earlier in life, I also told myself that there’s still plenty of time to learn, and that further delay will only increase my regret. It’ll take a year or two before I can appreciate the progress I’ve made.

This past year has been one of new hobbies. As I said, over the summer I began a near-daily drawing habit. Drawing is still a battle of self-confidence for me, but I do think I’ve made some improvement. It was later in the summer that I began to learn some basic coding (Python), which, with Gus’s help and invaluable guidance, led me to discover the world of physical computing, which is stupid levels of fun (and, yeah, hair-yanking degrees of frustrating at times). All my little gadgets and devices for physical computing are in my room in Manlius, and because I’m now living out in Caz full time (Shadow does better out here), I haven’t spent much time with coding/computing lately, which I feel guilty about, but the fact is that I simply don’t have space to bring my computing workstation out to Caz. Here out in Caz I just have some clothes, my backpack of stuff, and that’s it! I sleep on the couch. Anyway, the least I can do in the meantime is work on pure coding/software projects while I’m out here.

I’m also surprised at how much I’m enjoying bird-feeding. It’s kind of addicting, even though it’s a relatively passive hobby. As “Pigtails”, the staff girl at Wild Birds Unlimted told me, “it sucks you in.” She’s right- I’m constantly walking over to the window to see who’s hanging around the feeder, and I’m always thinking about what feeder I might install next. (I’m thinkin’ one specifically tailored for woodpeckers.)

This past month I’ve taken an interest in beat-making. If you’re interested in some relaxing background tunes for studying/chilling, check out this lo-fi hip hop radio channel on Youtube. My goal is to replicate beats like these, as well as more popular styles like pop and trap. Sitting around with a MIDI keyboard has then had me seeking out piano lessons on Youtube, so I think I’ll try to learn more piano this year.

Well, probably just gonna close it here. Thanks for reading!

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kissingwithcannibals · 5 years

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Jan 24, 2019

I discovered that, with the onset of winter, two species of birds began showing up to my feeders. The first, juncos, are these pudgy little ground-feeders with blue-black feathers and white undersides. The other are mourning doves. I didn’t believe my mom when she told me they were doves. In my mind, doves are either the pure white acrobats used in magical acts (also called Release Doves), or the purple-grey bobble-heads that roam city sidewalks gobbling up fallen french fries (formally known as Rock Pigeons). These ones were tan in color. It took me a while to confirm for myself their identity, and in the process, I learned their call. Click this link to hear a mourning dove.

Okay, did you check the link? Did you listen to that? For my entire life I’ve believed that this call was that of an owl. I remember hearing it in the early morning as I walked to school, or in the late afternoons around dinner time. All this time I’ve been wrong. (And so I ask myself: what else have I been misguided on all these years?!) For how many years did I hear that cooing resonate across the neighborhood, and feel stumped that in all that time I never once saw the owls. Of course, the mystery still remains: I can’t recall a single instance of spotting a mourning dove either! The mourning dove’s call is the sound of my childhood. It’s the trumpet call of suburbia. I was heartened to see in the comment section of that Youtube clip that so many others felt the same way. So to have these guys suddenly become regulars in my mom’s backyard is special, and it feels like a long time coming.

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kissingwithcannibals · 5 years

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Jan 22, 2019

Today my dad and I were driving to the vet to pick up a resupply of Shadow’s eye drops, and as we were passing through Chittenango, I mentioned that they built a casino in town. (But where? Where in that tiny town is this casino? I have yet to see it.) Well, eventually he began telling me that when he was younger, he and his friends would go to Atlantic City to gamble. Now, of this group of friends, my dad was not the gambler. His friends, however, would apparently regularly make upwards of fifty thousand bucks in the course of a night...only to lose fifty thousand bucks the next time. The casino knew that my dad’s friends were liable to blow through tons of cash, so the casino would send a helicopter to pick them and bring them to the casino. Now, I’ve heard of casinos comping your booze or hotel room (which they also did for my dad and his friends), but I’ve never heard to chauffeur helicopters. That’s pretty wild.

So, what interested me was not the part about the helicopter (though helicopters are pretty cool, I guess), but the fact that I’ve never gone out gambling with my friends. I know it’s a very bro-squad thing to do: get sloshed and hit the the blackjack tables, and maybe that was not our style. (Too busy invading each other in Risk, perhaps.) Personally, gambling’s just not my scene. I have other ways of blowing all my money. (For example: on bird food.) And, frankly, I don’t think any of my friends are really into gambling, either. But I also wondered why we never even tried it once. One excursion to see what all the fuss is about. I mean, casinos are weird places. They’re designed to keep you gambling: there are no clocks visible, so one’s sense of the passage of time is compressed, and exits are strategically placed in inconspicuous locations in order to hold you in this sensory-extravagant environment for the maximum length of time (which, you know, could be a pretty long time, as they’re often open 24 hours a day).

This entry isn’t really about gambling, though. What all this meandering around gambling has me really thinking about is the concept of novelty. More specifically, the novelty of experience, even if that thing is completely counter to your values. Here’s a different example. I’m not sure if I’m convinced about kombucha. That weird, gunky tea tastes like carbonated apple cider vinegar. For now I look on it as another New-Age product whose benefits are mainly rooted in the placebo effect. Despite this, I did plunk down $5.99 for a bottle of it over the summer. And you know, it was kinda fun! I mean, not the actual drinking part, because I can’t decide how I feel about a fruity seltzer water with the lingering, sharp aftertaste of vinegar. But the novelty of the experience was great. Now I can talk about kombucha. Or at least bullshit about it.

I’d like very much to not become some grinchy creature of habit. I want to leave room in my life to surprise myself. Part of that, I think, means trying things that I may not like. In season two of Seinfeld, Jerry, George, and Kramer visit an alternative-medicine doctor. Jerry is totally unconvinced, saying, “I’m here strictly for material.” That’s a pretty good approach to life. I’m not sure if I’ll be buying any more kombucha in the future, but when I’m pushing my cart past rows of it in the grocery store, I sometimes find myself slowing down, wondering if I’m not missing out on something. I keep going, but think, eh, maybe next time.

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kissingwithcannibals · 5 years

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Jan 18, 2019

We’re going to get ass-blasted with snow tomorrow. A foot on Saturday and three to five inches on Sunday. (No need to worry about me. I have two boxes of Frosted Mini Wheats and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. Nothing can hurt me now.) The birds were on my mind, as they often are. Temperatures will be brutally low in the coming days, and food will be hard to find, so I wanted to give my pals some help. I glooped more bark butter on the trees. I saw a red-bellied woodpecker nibbling some this morning, which felt like a small victory. Later, as I was standing under a tree filling one of the bird feeders, I realized that a tiny fleet of chickadees and titmice were watching me from the branches above. They darted through the tree’s crown, talking to each other as they angled for a look at me from different branches. It became clear to me that these birds knew that I was refilling the feeder, and they were waiting for me to clear out. A chickadee landed on a branch perhaps not even two feet from my face. It’s remarkable how comfortable chickadees will be around people. I’ve read that they will eat food from your hand. I scraped some bark butter onto my palm, holding it out in front of me for the taking. No dice.

I’m reading this book called “Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919″. Has anyone ever heard of this disaster before? Okay, if you haven’t, it’s wild. During WW1, the United States had a huge demand for explosives. A key ingredient of which is distilled alcohol. How do you make distilled alcohol? By fermenting molasses. (This is also you make rum.) So there was this one alcohol distiller in Boston called the Purity Distilling Company, and they were importing shitloads of molasses from places like Puerto Rico. To store all of this molasses, they constructed this giant tank in the North End of Boston. Two things: when I say tank, it isn’t like one of those tanker trucks you see these days hauling gasoline to gas stations. This tank in the North End held 2.3 million gallons, and it was like bigger than several houses combined. Just a massive structure. The second thing: why the North End? In Boston today, the North End is stupid expensive. But in the early 1900s, it was this densely packed slum, filled, at the time, with immigrants, mostly from Southern Italy. These Italians were often very poor and couldn’t speak English, so the distilling company knew that they could get away with putting this massive industrial installation right in their backyard, because this community couldn’t and wouldn’t offer an effective political protest.

So the U.S. army has a huge need for distilled alcohol, and the distilling company is under massive pressure to fill this demand. Purity Distilling never bothers to test their new tank for leaks. And, wouldn’t you know it, it begins to show signs of leaking over the coming months. People hear the metal groaning from the stress of all this molasses. Little streams of it leak down its sides and onto the street below, where kids are scooping it up because it’s like a dessert treat. Several workers quite rightly freak the fuck out about this, and they alert the company boss, who’s like, “whatever dude, it’s fine.” But it’s NOT fine. And on one unseasonably warm day in January, after the tank is filled to the max, the whole thing fucking blows. And these giant waves -15 feet high, going at initial speeds of 35 miles per hour - come barreling through the streets. Entire buildings are completely obliterated. Like 21 people are killed, and 150 injured. People and animals are getting destroyed from the impact of the waves and debris, or they literally drown to death in this thick, sticky molasses. Insane.

Anyway, that’s where I am now in the book. It’s pretty crazy. You can read more on the Wikipedia page.

Now I wanna go to the same streets in Boston where this took place. Such a crazy story!

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kissingwithcannibals · 5 years

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Jan 16, 2019

Bird seed varies in quality. That may not be useful information to you, but now you know. You are an informed citizen. Here’s some more: When the subject inevitably arises at the next fundraising gala you attend, you can chime in, “The percentage of milo used as filler in hardware store seed blends is just, in my opinion, a deep disappointment. And who is eating the cracked wheat? Nobody.” Drop that one and get back to me.

See, I’ve been upping my bird seed game. It was weak, now it strong. I’ve made a habit of purchasing pretty cheap bird seed from the True Value hardware store in Manlius. Cheap bird seed is loaded with filler: milo, cracked wheat, corn. Most birds don’t give a shit about those seeds. They literally kick them out of the feeder as they dig for the good stuff. What is the good stuff? Black oil sunflower seeds, bitch. Also: white millet, safflower, and striped sunflower seeds.

I drove to Wild Birds Unlimited in Fayetteville today. This is the mecca of all things bird-feeding. My mission was to buy a few bags of high quality bird food. That part was easy, because, like, I’ve been there before and I know where the bags are. They’re right in front of you when you walk in. The hard part (and this is not an innuendo!) was when the cute girl on staff came up to me and asked me if I needed any help. She had big, black-rimmed glasses, and she wore her dark hair in pigtails. I feel like pigtails have kind of fallen out of fashion, but she was rockin’ them. By then I was the only customer in the store, and I decided my best course of action was to ask her for advice and help on a number of matters that, frankly, I already knew the answer to. Like, I knew that the Deluxe Blend of bird seed would be ideal for my one feeder that attracts blue jays, woodpeckers, doves, nuthatches, and cardinals (among others), but that didn’t stop me from asking, “So, what kind of birds is this bag of seed best for?” I also knew that I was going to buy something called Jim’s Birdacious Bark Butter (it’s like peanut butter for birds), but I still asked her, “Do you guys have Bark Butter?”, and “Have you tried it? Does it work?”, and “Would you like to try some of my bark butter?” (just kidding).

Yeah, so, I definitely did a lot of stalling. Really wanted to run up the clock with this girl in the pigtails. The problem is that the main line of communication between my brain and my mouth also did plenty of stalling, because, holy shit, I stuttered so much. Ugh. It was awful. I was so obviously nervous and tongue tied. “Yeah, I’m just, like, you know, trying to b-buy, uh, buy better bird, uh, seed. Yeah better bird seed.” Try getting to the end of the sentence in one piece, you idiot. I was about ready to rush out of the store and lie down in front of the first moving car I saw in the parking lot.

Anyway, I got my bird seed. And my Birdacious Bark Butter. Pigtails was super nice to me, and I honestly didn’t get the sense that my presence was unwelcome to her. She was more than accommodating to my questions and rambling, jumbled comments.

I felt like kicking myself as I walked to my car, but in time I lightened up. Back home I was way too excited to try out my Bark Butter. Fork in hand I ran from tree to tree around my mom’s house, pressing globs of it onto the bark. I don’t remember the last time I felt like such an overjoyed kid, an unblemished surge of happiness steeped in a simple thing. A simple thing like feeding birds. So now it looks like the trees have melty peanut butter cookies glued to them. I probably peered out the window two hundred times hoping a woodpecker would show up, see all the bark butter, and cry out “Holy shit, what the fuck kind of miracle is this!?” Except that didn’t happen. I didn’t see a single bird at the feeders for the rest of the day. It was like a ghost town. But tomorrow is another day, and I can wait until then.

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kissingwithcannibals · 5 years

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Jan 14, 2019

It was stupid cold today, but the sun was out, so I went for a walk. During my winter walks I often find myself thinking about travel. I like to daydream about road trips, especially down South. One of the more unusual items on my bucket list is to travel through the Deep South during the winter. I want to know what I’m missing! I can’t grasp the idea that everyone isn’t as miserable as I am in this cold weather. Here I am, making pasta, huddling over the boiling pot of water for warmth, and like 1,300 miles away some chump in Mobile, Alabama is strolling the beach in a t-shirt and jean-shorts. (Note- new item for bucket list: acquire jean-shorts.)

But the daydreaming helps the walks go by faster, especially when I’m suddenly walking into the wind, which kind of feels like getting whipped in the face with, like, a whip. Except the whip is made of razors.

I need to go through Michigan at some point. I have several family connections in the state. My great-great grandfather was a miner in the Upper Peninsula. A miner! I sit in front a laptop 16 hours a day.

My goal is to drive into the land of the yoopers via the Mackinaw bridge. I think that’d be pretty grand. After traveling through the UP, I’d be dumped out into the top half of Wisconsin, where I’d then proceed to head straight on to glorious Minneapolis, Minnesota! (Suck it, Wisconsin!) I’ve had a weird fascination with Minneapolis for years, even though I’ve never been there. After Minneapolis, I think I’d like to see Chicago. I’ve had Chicago on my mind a lot recently, though I can’t give one good reason why. I can’t see myself living in L.A., and I’m not so sure about NYC. So...maybe try Chicago?

Well, I dunno, whatever. There’s a whole gaggle of other places that I have in mind to visit some day, but that’s for another entry. My 30 minute timer is up!

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kissingwithcannibals · 5 years

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Jan 12, 2019

I am ecstatic to report that Shadow has improved so much since we took her to the vet this past Wednesday for a follow-up. I think we have beaten the infection in her eye. This injury to her eye, however, had her in a great amount of pain, so much so that Shadow kept her eyes shut all day long. On Wednesday, the vet prescribed some anti-inflammatory medications that have already worked wonders. Shadow keeps her eyes open at all times, and she has regained her old energy. So much of my stress has evaporated. Shadow can even get around decently, which tells me that she is not yet 100% blind. So...hooray! She’s such a damn fighter, it’s kind of insane. These past few weeks have been some of the worst in my life. Any time I was on my own, I couldn’t help but think about Shadow, and I would have to fight away the stupid tears. I felt sick to my stomach at the thought that the final act of her life would be consumed by the terror of blindness and the pain of sickness. I guess I still don’t know how things will play out from here, but I’m super happy to see her better spirits.

ANYWAY. There is a rabbit that is living under my mom’s deck. Every night I eat an apple and throw the core underneath the deck. I’m pretty sure the rabbit is eating it! I check the next day and find nothing. What’s strange is that ever since I tossed that first apple core to the rabbit, I now feel responsible for its survival. I feel guilty if I don’t have an apple to give it. The weather has been silly cold lately, and I think, “You know, it’s really cold and snowy today. The rabbit could really use some food. Why aren’t you doing something about that? You really need to do something about that.”

It’s the same way with the birds. I have two bird feeders hung from trees in the yard at my mom’s house. I never gave any thought to the survival of our local bird population until I put up a bird feeder. Now I constantly monitor the seed levels. Like, all the time. Which, honestly, is really easy, because from my chair at the table all I have to do is turn my neck and look out the window. Bird feeding is actually really great. Really great. Highly recommended. It’s very little work for a huge payoff, which is a principle that I base my life around. My favorite are the chickadees, because they were the first birds that showed up when I put up my first feeder. But my feeders also attract gold finches, blue jays, nuthatches, titmice, juncos, two kinds of woodpeckers, doves, cardinals, and, lately, a few big-ass crows. Oh, and, of course, squirrels. (Who I also love very much.) I love it when I fill up an empty feeder. As I filled one up yesterday, I spotted a junco perched in the tree, watching me. As I walked away, it began a frenzied chirp, calling out to every other junco in earshot, “GUYS. HEY, GUYS. THE FUCKIN’ GRUB IS BACK UP. WAKE THE FUCK UP, WE EATIN’!”

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Jan 10, 2019

“Jesus, has every one of us in the group been depressed at some point?!”

I’m paraphrasing a good friend of mine here, but that’s generally the observation he made. And, holy shit, he’s totally right. I don’t think anyone in our little gang of friends has been immune to feeling depressed, lost, and burned out at some point since high school. I wondered: is it just our group? Or is everyone out there in our generation feeling this? Can it be a coincidence that everyone in our hometown crew has or has had serious depression? Something like that doesn’t happen by chance, right?

I’ve been puzzling over this for a while now. The grip of depression has been so pervasive, so total, and complete across my friends that, I would argue, something larger is going on. Like, some seriously wicked shit is afoot. So my friends and I were brainstorming what kind of big, bad cultural forces might be at work.

Now, gotta be honest here, the specifics of what we discussed are gone from my memory (sorry guys!), but this problem was still at the front of my mind when I noticed this article from Buzzfeed News making the rounds on Twitter. It’s called “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation”. It’s a long essay, but I can promise you that it’s half-decent and worth a read. (Though what is up with author sprinkling these humble brags throughout the piece? Girl, I ain’t gonna read the book you published!)

I think if you are a masochist and enjoy reading articles about millennials, many of the author’s points will be familiar to you, so I don’t think I want to repeat them here. But to hastily summarize with a quote:

“We’re deeply in debt, working more hours and more jobs for less pay and less security, struggling to achieve the same standards of living as our parents, operating in psychological and physical precariousness, all while being told that if we just work harder, meritocracy will prevail, and we’ll begin thriving.”

If you would indulge me to be an obnoxious ideologue for a moment, I’d like to get up on my high horse and yammer that the capitalist forces of efficiency and optimization have contributed to this freakishly bleak economic reality. (Actually, I think the author pretty much says this in so many words.)

Okay, that sucks, right? But, wait, there’s more! The author also considers how these same forces rooted in capitalism are exerting pressure in our private lives as well. A familiar critique of Instagram is that it encourages people to craft a “personal brand,” which is to say, turn themselves into a marketable product. People craft a narrative of their lives on Instagram that presents an “optimized” life: exotic travel, endless festivities, and unquestioned happiness. This is the scourge of optimization. As the author notes, there has been a blurring or destruction of the line between work and play. We now expend precious minutes or hours of our free time each week to consider, craft, and sculpt a presentation of our life outside of work, all in the service of narrative and branding.

And not to put a bow on it, but this terrible treadmill existence is fueled by an addiction to phones and the internet. I don’t know if the research is conclusive yet, but everything I’ve heard and read so far has suggested, at times pretty damn firmly, that phone and internet addiction makes us more distracted, miserable, and lonely.

I don’t think I’m saying anything novel here. (Honestly I’m just regurgitating what the article stated.) I did, however, find myself gelling with this one sentence I read in the article. Here it is:

“The modern Millennial, for the most part, views adulthood as a series of actions, as opposed to a state of being,” an article in Elite Daily explains. “Adulting therefore becomes a verb.”

Not a state of being, but a series of actions. I absolutely feel like this most days. There are days when I trudge from one task to the next, often not as means of finding joy or accomplishment, but simply to pass time. I could very easily lounge around all day like a cat, but I need to create busyness for myself to ward of feelings of guilt or self-loathing. I wish I could have a stronger sense of my own self, my own being. I wonder why I don’t have a strong sense of identity. I chalk that up to a lack of self-confidence on my part, I think. Ideally, though, I’d like to be like one of those wildly self-motivated people; to live a life in which it is a strong sense of self that drives my actions, as opposed to one in which I drift from task to task, hoping to cobble together some marginal sense of accomplishment at the end of each day. Am I making sense? I’m not so sure. This got depressing, fast.

So, listen, here’s what I think: there are a lot of things going on that are making us all want to jump off a cliff just to feel something. Maybe you’re drowning in student loan debt, or social media is making you hate yourself, or you have to work multiple part-time jobs because businesses don’t want the expense of a full-time employee.

Those things alone are awful. The thing that makes me want to scream, I think, is that we live in a world of sensory overload. There’s just too much shit going on, and it’s happening all the god-damn time, and I feel powerless to break away from it. I mean, the fucking crush of news and politics every single day is too much for any sane person to absorb. And, of course, there is the daily avalanche of content on Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, etc. It’s information overload. It’s noise. So much noise. My brain cannot keep up. I feel like I don’t retain information as well these days. My memory is worse. I can’t pay attention as well, or read a book without quickly feeling distracted. Taken together, this is burnout.

A person in the comments section of the Millennials article noted something called “Directed Attention Fatigue”. I don’t know if this is considered legit, but it rings true for me. Perhaps this is similar to decision fatigue? It certainly takes brain power to seek out, scan, and quickly process all the content on news sites and social media, and I imagine that this does cause a kind of draining effect on the brain. I mean, working a full-time job can be physically and mentally demanding enough- now consider all the extra stimuli that we must process on top of that! Our brains are being bombarded with an insane amount of information (and noise) every hour of each day. It doesn’t surprise me at all that people are feeling burned out.

Here’s something else I wonder: are there people out there who are not feeling burned out? Is this just something that my clique of white middle class friends are experiencing? How can we measure burnout across racial, socioeconomic, and age lines? Did twenty-year olds in the 1830s feel burnout? (I need to know this!!!)

Well, anyway, I’m gonna stop here. I know- such an uplifting blog post! I’ll circle back to this topic again, I’m sure, especially because it’s worth brainstorming some concrete, pro-active solutions to combat burnout.

Thanks for reading! Until next time!

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kissingwithcannibals · 5 years

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Jan 7, 2019

Hey, back in the blog! It’s only been how long? A year? I have no idea. Once again I was telling myself to WRITE MORE in my New Year’s resolutions. I have such a stupid anxiety about blogging, and I can’t even figure out why. I mean, let’s be real: nobody is reading this. This isn’t the most groundbreaking material. I think the reason I stall so hard on the writing is because writing is, for me, a self-reflective action. And turning inward to be self-critical is hard! It’s damn uncomfortable! But isn’t that why I have a journal? Because I do have a journal, and it ain’t no thang to scribble down all my goopy emotions in there.

So, to state the obvious, I think blogging is hard because it is an exercise in taking what is private and revealing it publicly. If I want to seem open and authentic, I have to grab a fistful of my dumb, mangy, jagged emotions and wave them up in the air for everyone to gawk at. Behold! My inadequacies!!!

I’m too in my head about all this. I just set a timer for 30 minutes, and I will write until the beeper startles me.

My dog Shadow has recently gone blind. And, wow, it happened fast. I noticed cataracts in her right eye a few days before Christmas. In the time since then, I think the affliction has appeared in her other eye as well. She’s basically gone blind in less than 3 weeks. She’s a 17 year old Schnoodle. She is about as old as Schnoodles live to be. I know that dogs can go blind in old age. But Jesus, it’s been brutal. Shadow has had insane levels of energy her entire life. Just a few weeks ago she was running around the property, leaving me in the dust. Now she gingerly tiptoes around the house, step by step, trying to find her way. She bumps into walls and chairs probably 100 times a day. Her life has been reduced down to a small geometry because of simple things like stairs. For Shadow, the top of the stairs might as well be the edge of a cliff. Mostly she sleeps in her bed. But when she wakes, I have to guess what she wants: Food? To go out? So I gently place my hands on her to guide her to the food and water bowl, stirring up the kibbles with my hand to generate a noise that she would understand as “yes, we’re in front of the food dish now.” After this, I will pick her up (which she hates) and plunk her down outside, which I imagine is a confusing environment for a blind dog. Shadow may be able to use the different rugs we have inside the house to mentally map her place in each room, but there are no such guidelines outside. Though I suppose it doesn’t matter, because I’m right beside her at all times.

I’ve come to feel incredibly deflated. Sometimes I actually catch myself in a kind of zombie-like stupor. Some days I have no patience for hobbies, or productive activities, or joy at all. I hunch over my laptop and watch Youtubers that I like. This is absolutely a kind of psychological numbing that I’m doing to myself. I’m very aware of that. It’s been a challenge to adjust to this new reality of having a blind companion. I know that Shadow is old. I don’t really know how much longer she’ll live, or if I’m going to have to make that choice for her. I think just about everybody these days has an understanding of how close people are to their pets. Apart from when I was away at college, Shadow and I have been inseparable. She goes where I go, even if it’s just me walking to the kitchen for thirty seconds. She sleeps in the same room as me. We have had a ritual of going on nightly walks since I was in high school. (I still go for an evening walk. It feels wrong not to.) When I would leave the house without her, my mom says Shadow would pace from window to window looking out for my return.

(Oh, there goes the timer! Let me wrap this up and I’ll continue this another day soon. I recently read this article on Buzzfeed News titled “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.” Aside from the author dropping these weird humble brags here and there, I thought the essay was pretty good. I want to talk about it in my next blog post. My friends and I have started to wonder: why does it seem like everyone in our friend group has been really depressed or burned out at some point? I’m insanely interested in this question, and, more importantly, the solutions!)

(One final thought: I feel so much better for having written a blog post! It’s been hanging over me for weeks. I will try to keep this up. Thanks for reading!)

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kissingwithcannibals · 6 years

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Resolution

Back in January, I made a list of New Year’s Resolutions. (Is this considered cliche? Have we all collectively decided that none of us will actually stick to these commitments?) Well, I decided I needed a change. I found that I had let my usual hobbies fall by the wayside in favor of drooling in front of a screen. I wasn’t feeling satisfied, productive, creative, or fulfilled.

I found the entry in my journal. Here’s the list. Please take note of my exquisite penmanship.

Keeping to the list is coming along...decently. For example, I’m not a vegan, though I have cut out some dairy. (My long-term relationship with Kraft Mac n’ Cheese continues.) In my mind I closely associate my goal of veganism with my aspiration to eliminate junk food, because the only junk food I generally still indulge in is chocolate, ice cream, and pizza. I still drink coffee, but I hate that I am dependent on it. If I don’t have my morning coffee, I become stupid, impatient, and grumpy by late afternoon. A drink should not have that kind of power over me. Every few months I gradually reduce my caffeine levels down to decaf coffee or decaf tea, but I inevitably fall of the wagon.

One bright spot has been the daily reading, which has been consistent since January. I’ve knocked back several books, and I’m working through a stack of New Yorkers that have piled up. Goodreads has been useful in tracking my books. I have a bad habit of browsing the internet with my morning coffee and when I’m lounging around before bed each night. Lately I have made an effort to replace my laptop with a book, with some success.

Most of my leisure time in January was spent cooking up some posts for the new blog. I’m not a good writer but I do enjoy the challenge of it. But I am also a slow writer, and often I find myself, after five or six hours of working on a post, asking myself if the final piece was worth the time. (In fact, I’m making an effort to speed up my pace. As I write this I have set a timer for one hour in which I hope to complete this post.)

Ultimately, I have done okay with my resolutions. There’s a lot of room for improvement. You may notice that I made special note of “Practice as much as possible.” Because while I have committed more time each day to things like reading and writing, there remained a glaring omission: guitar!

I love playing guitar! But considering how long I have been playing, I’m not nearly as good as I should be. For several years now, I’ve been content to just “noodle” whenever I pick up the instrument. Noodling is just the mindless act of playing licks and riffs that come easy to you. It’s a common trap for guitar players, and I would often noodle while browsing the web and watching Youtube videos.

Over the winter I read a book by Cal Newport called “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.” It covers several topics, but mostly it’s about how some people come to master extremely difficult skills in a very short span of time.

I’ll spare you the detail, but here’s how you become a master at something:

High Quality Work = Time Spent x Intensity of Focus

Work for extended periods of time on a single task with full concentration and free from distraction

Experts are produced by intensely focused practice. And this can be applied to anything: learning piano, a computer language, skateboarding, chemistry, juggling, history, or, of course, the skill of writing itself. You have to put in the hours, and they have to be good, productive hours. There is evidence to show how even brief distractions or interruptions will cause your brain to require much longer time to learn the intended work.

So, tired of being a lousy guitar player, I’ve restructured my approach to guitar. I compiled a list of fun, but challenging songs to work on. (Current projects include, among others: Interval’s “I’m Awake,” CHON’s “Bubble Dream” and “Puddle.” Songs like “Always Focused” by Tiny Moving Parts have improved my tapping.)

I no longer check my phone or the web when I sit down to practice. I use a stopwatch to track my hours each day. At the end of each day I mark my productive hours on an Excel sheet. Here’s a graph of my time thus far.

My goal is to practice at least 8 hours a day, but as you can see, I will need to step up my efforts before I can achieve that.

Still, I have seen results already. If you watch this clip of the song “Dew” by CHON, you’ll see the guy on the right -Erick- doing some fancy tapping maneuvers. Boy, when I first sat down to learn that, I had to slow the song down to a crawl to even hope of coordinating my hands and land the notes. But as of last night, I can now play the song at full speed, and decently cleanly! I never thought I’d be able to play this part.

I also want to talk about something that I fully acknowledge will sound like (and likely is) complete bullshit, but here it is: I’ve conjured up this idea that maybe I can, like, re-wire my brain to crave playing guitar in the way that I currently crave internet use. This is rooted in the idea that I want to replace one addictive habit (internet use) with a new one (guitar). I mean, I think back to 8th grade when I first started playing, and how for the first few years I had no laptop of my own and virtually no internet or computer access. But my playing improved pretty quickly back then, in part, I believe, because there were far fewer distractions in my daily life that would impede my learning of this skill. My hope these days is to replicate that productive environment. I’m trying to eliminate from my daily life anything that might prevent me from engaging in deep work toward the guitar. This mostly means cutting out shallow/superficial internet use and not checking my phone (I’ve removed all social media apps except snapchat). But I’m also wondering what would happen if I cut out something like sugar from my diet. Because I truly find sugar to be addictive as well, and on days that I don’t have any, I just feel...antsy. And if my brain is craving something besides guitar, I might find myself playing less. It’s a junk theory, I know. I will say this, though: as I’ve reduced my internet use, I find that my attention span in regards to reading has greatly improved, and I find myself feeling less scatter-brained, and I sometimes wonder if my attention span and short-term memory have recovered some. Does a reduction in internet use have positive impacts on things like concentration and memory? I’d be curious what evidence exists on this topic.

I know this all sounds silly, but it is an idea I find pretty fascinating. And to be fair, Newport in “Deep Work” does discuss some evidence to suggest that constant screen time has caused our attention spans to take a hit. I can only speak for myself, and I do believe my shift in priorities has had positive impacts on my sense of well-being. So...yay!

This is a long-winded way of explaining why I haven’t been blogging every week. My priorities have shifted to guitar. But if I can structure my time more intelligently, I can easily find the time to write for even one or two hours a week.

Post-script: Argh! I blew my timer. This took more than an hour!

#writing #distraction #memory #guitar

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