By request, a consumerist tale:
Yesterday my friend L. decided to buckle down and stop stealing internet service from her neighbors. Currently Comcast is offering high speed internet for 19.99/mo for 6 mos. So she does the sensible thing and calls comcast.Knowledge. We teach our children that the quest for knowledge should be lifelong. And while knowledge can be good, having only a little bit can be horribly bad. In an age when information propagated slowly, this meant one should acquire whatever information was available. But now, when access to knowledge seems limitless, when is enough, enough?
If there were a test for geekiness I'd pass with flying colors. And though I might not be top of my class, when I gotta know something, I gotta know. So I find myself a dozen times a day, looking up something on google or wikipedia, often at the expense of doing more important work. And it makes me wonder, what is the point of all this knowledge?
I know people who hate to vote. I can relate, there's a lot going on in the world and we have a pretty complicated system of governance. How does one stay knowledgeable about all these things, especially with everything else there is to do? New knowledge is being generated constantly. More than that, not all of them are created equal. One wonders, which bits bring your closer to the truth and which take you away?
More than ever, the quality of the information that you consume is important. You can spend you whole life studying and waste it learning the wrong things. I have often dreamt of having a very large library, one that you need a rolling ladder to get around. But now I wonder what I would do with all those books, dusty, untouched.
Perhaps one day you will come into my home and I will show you my great library. If I am fortunate, it won't reach to the ceiling and it won't span the length of a room, it will only be a modest collection of a few dozen books. And when you ask me how I, a great lover of books, a lifelong seeker of knowledge, came to have such a small trove I will say, "Only these, these few, mattered to me."
What frightens you? As we near the 5 year anniversary of 9.11 I pause to wonder. C. hopped on a plane to Canada nearly a week ago and all we talked of was the inconvenience of the new safety regulations. In the five years since that day, much has happened in the world: governments have been toppled; nations have been destroyed; and still, terrorists have struck again and again. Ask me if I am scared of boarding a plane or going to a large event or simply opening a piece of mail, my answer is no.
There is something that frightens me though and it has something to do with that fateful day. This frightens me. For some purgatory is a fate worse than hell. If you ask this man I'm sure he'll tell it to you straight. Imagine for a moment, five years of your life stripped away, untried, unaccused, ignored. Imagine it was the past five years of your life.
Reason tells us the needs of the many must outweigh the needs of the few. A recent study provides some interesting reading on how much "reason" plays into it. (Thanks to B. for the link.) I don't question who is many or who is few, I question who needs what.
In the past five years I have not done enough of what I wanted to do. And seeing as how this man, Benemar Benatta, paid for a little bit of my freedom, I regret that. I should have spent a little less time watching tv and playing video games, surfing the net aimlessly. I should have spent more time writing, dreaming, dancing, being with friends and family, even just doing my job properly. But most of all, I should have spent time wondering what was going on with our world and talking about it. And though it might not have changed much, I should have been here regretting that I had not done enough, instead of not doing anything at all.
This morning driving in to work, I was passed by a seemingly ordinary black accord. What caught my eye was a small sticker in the back right window which read, "Still missing you." I knew as it slid by my periphery that the license plate would be New York. Earlier this week I spied this same black accord for the very first time. I wondered who she was missing and if that was what brought her from New York out to California. Add to that, I was running fairly late today and it stands to reason, so was she. I'd like to think that maybe she remembered my car too. And that we were, for a moment, sharing a common occurrence, being late; yet we were strangers absolutely.
I wonder about the stickiness of certain words. What makes them so? Are they euphonic? I'm struck by how they can become embedded in our culture -- a meme of sorts. For example, the first time I saw the trailer for the newest Will Ferrell movie, the name Talladega suck in my mind. I'd never heard of the name and thought it was a fictional place. I am intrigued by how one comes up with a proper name for a thing, one that people find memorable, Aragorn and Legolas, the Bene Geserrit and the Kwisatz Haderach. I digress, those familiar with NASCAR know that Talladega is a real track. And, depending on how popular the movie turns out to be, I'm sure a number of non-NASCAR fans will remember the name Talladega. Similarly, the phrase, "Tannhauser Gate" is likely to be familiar to film buffs and geeks. Until recently I thought that it was a fictional word, a fictional place. Turns out I didn't listen to enough Wagnerian opera when I was a kid.
There's a lot of stuff I skipped there between that first paragraph and second. There's a lot of distance between you, dear reader, and I. But eventually something -- maybe it's as complicated as a shared predicament, maybe it's a simple as a remembered word -- something comes along and ties us together.
I've been thinking lately about metaphors and duality. It's probably because of "Snow Crash" which, by the way, was a pretty good book up until the end. Just today, as I was sitting and eating lunch, I was thinking about this on-line life of mine -- surprisingly even more stagnant than my real life -- and how the things that go on here parallel what happens in real life (sometimes to me and sometimes to others.) That's really not so strange however, considering the internet began as an imitation of real life. Consider for a moment, that your virtual desktop could have been just about anything. For awhile it was anything you imagined it to be, that was the freedom of a blinking green cursor. But the PTBs decreed that it was to be a desktop and so it was. Everything became virtual after awhile: mail, relationships, money. Everything has a doppelganger in this place.
But it all comes back to what's real, right? And I wonder, what is real? When I read the latest news about liquid bombs on planes I thought to myself that it was all too convenient for the struggling airlines who would now have a host of things to sell you in the air. And then there are the security screeners who would have more things to screen from your luggage (like expensive colognes, laptops, etc.) But all this is not to say that there isn't or wasn't a plot to put bombs on Transatlantic flights. It's just the prevalent reality. I'm just pointing out another possible one.
I think a lot about a certain cat eternally trapped in a box, trapped between two distinctly different fates. Perhaps the word fate is too prescriptive though since it generally implies that there is one particular fate or destiny. Maybe our lives aren't 100% real or 100% virtual. Instead we're distributed across a number of different realities: Work reality, home reality, on-line reality, nightlife reality. And we hope that no one ever opens that box and takes a look at us, trapping us in one unfortunate reality or another.
One Night in Bangkok -
The queens we use would not excite you
Imagine, if you will, meeting a lovely, young woman at a local nightclub, offering to buy her a drink (which she coyly accepts) and then engaging in some small talk:
"Hi my name is Bobby. What's your name?"
"I'm Arianne."
"Arianne, that's a beautiful name."
"Bobby's not a bad name either."
"Well, most people think it's boring."
"Oh, I don't."
"Heh, well, um ... you're not from around here are you?"
"No."
"It was the accent. British?"
"No. Care to try again?"
"Australian?"
"Much better."
"So Arianne, what brings you here?"
"Oh, I'm playing in a tournament."
"Oh really? What sport do you play?"
"Chess."
"Chess? Um ... are you any good?"
Hello again. Some how I've managed to skip over July and lept all the way to August. When I look back on this I'll think, "Did I do anything in July of 2006?" Here then, briefly is an enumeration of what transpired: 2 road trips (Southern California, Napa/Sonoma), 9 birthday celebrations (including my 30th, twice), 1 concert, and the usual assortment of work, house painting, and climbing days. Somewhere along the way I've managed to acquire a new Canon Rebel XT and some helpful software, so there will be pictures and more pictures very soon -- including, I hope, some never before posted pictures from the last couple years. Hopefully now that all the excitement has died down I'll have some time to revamp this old blog of mine.