The Other Shoe

As I walked to the Metro station this morning, I was listening to music on my little pod of music joy. I noticed about halfway to the station that the headphones weren't plugged in all the way. I plugged them in and the music soared! I completely failed to notice how tinny and bad it had sounded. It was only in the contrast that I realized.
Eventually, I got off the bus and headed to the office. Almost in the door, I realized that I hadn't taken the little headphone earbuds out of my ears, even though the music had stopped playing twenty minutees prior. I took them out, and felt better. Those things are uncomfortable! I could hear!
How many other things are like this in my life? How many half plugged-in headphones or unremoved earbuds do I have that I don't even know about? How many stoppers could I pull? How many things could I be seeing more clearly if I'd just remember to remove my sunglasses? How much better could I feel than I feel, if I could just find the switch?
Why is it that all of these thoughts happen during my commute? Do I stop thinking during the rest of the day?

Viral Marketing

I was walking on Newbury Street in downtown Boston with Erica the other day, ogling the passers-by by whom we were passing. We had this fantastic advertising idea: what if, say, the Gap paid people to walk around downtown and notice when you're wearing Gap clothes, then come up to you and say, "I love your jacket!" That would sure get people buying Gap clothes...
You see where this is headed. It turns out that the evil geniuses in the world of selling you shit already came up with this idea. The kicker for me is that they came up with it three years ago! There's a company called BzzAgent here in Boston that pays people to sell products to their friends in casual conversation. The idea is that you do this anyway: something like 25% of casual conversations contain some product reference. They just pay people to do it. There are caveats, of course, like you should tell your friends that you get paid to sell them shit, and people only sell shit they like. This does not make me feel any better about this being an industry. Not to mention that they thought of it three years before I did. Damn! I hate it when that happens!
We all know that advertising is evil. it's people trying to make you feel bad about yourself, to create voids in your life that only products can fill. What really gets me is that it seems like some of the great minds of our generation are involved in what's a fruitless activity, in terms of human advancement. Insurance agents and marketers keep better track of trends than research scientists, professors, and doctors. There's the real triumph of the free market. Can you hear me now?
PS You should all go out and buy the new Broken Social Scene album.

discussion question

Human beings are differentiated from other animals because we are the only species to make war.
Talk amongst yourselves.

changes - a rant

It's important to go into any relationship (romantic or otherwise) with the knowledge that you can't make other people change. I may have said this before, so I hope I'm not belaboring anything, but here I go. People do change, but it's never because you tell them to. At best, you can enact change in others by showing them a better way to do things, an alternative. At some point there's potential for it to dawn on people that their approach might not be as good as yours, and there's potential for things to be better. And they will subtlely change their life to be more like yours. We see this in fashion, advertising, but it also applies to domestic and interpersonal issues. It applies to everything. This is why you should live the life you preach; it's the only way to truly enact positive change in the world.
It's worth being careful around other people when they say that they've changed. Because even if you want to change, if you perceive a desire within yourself to be different, there's still a period of time before that desire is made manifest. You can want to change and remain the same. Or you can think that you've changed when nothing's different. I'm always leery when people say, "I've changed." That's usually an indicator that everything remains the same. The true change happens more subtlely; it usually it made apparent when somebody else tells you that something's different about you.
This applies to relationships, of course, because so many people do this cycle of breaking up and getting back together, on the premise that things are different now, that he or she or life or the world or your perception of it has changed for the better and that everything will magically work. We're getting better culturally at seeing that this isn't the case, for example, in the case of physical or sexual or verbal abuse. But not emotionally damaging situations. We're still stuck, culturally, on the idea that if all that happened was that somebody broke your heart or drove you crazy, without actually hurting you physically, you've still got a chance of making it together. I think it's worth possibly re-examining this notion. However, in the grand canon of notions that ought to be re-examined, this one takes a low spot on the list.

Things I learned on the bus today

It's nice to fall asleep on the bus ride home. There's no need to worry about missing your stop, because everybody gets off at Forest Hills. You can read your book until you get too tired/nauseated to keep reading (which usually happens around the Dedham Mall, halfway through the trip from Norwood to Jamaica Plain), and just close your eyes and drift off. Lean your head against the glass. But be careful! Because it turns out that when you really fall asleep, your head will flop dramatically, loudly and painfully thwacking whatever hard object happens to be in it's trajectory. And if that object happens to be the emergency window opening handle... Let's just say that you won't be dozing too much for the remainder of the commute.
I ride the subway for one stop to get from the Forest Hills bus station to the Green St. stop, near which one can find my house. The train stops at Forest Hills and turns around. Everybody gets off, the doors open and close and open and close and the train goes in the opposite direction beeping and rumbling, like mechanical Ouroboros eating it's own tail or some sort of Moebius strip. Today there was a man, a poor crumpled man with a cane folded over on the seat after everybody else had cleared out of the train. The conductor (apparently notified of the man's presence) was trying to get him off of the train. The man smelled of alchohol and was incoherent; another passenger had to assist the conductor in getting him off the train. The passenger smiled at me when he got back in the car. "Life," he said, "I guess he wasn't always like that."
I watched the movie Capote this weekend. The thing that was most striking about Truman Capote, at least in the movie, was his absolute selfishness. He would say any lie to anybody for the sake of him or his book. He seemed incapable of casting anything in his life in a different light other than that which emanated from him and for him. His lack of compassion was startling, dealing as he was with inmates condemned to death, prisoners who had no clear idea of why they'd committed their crime.
I feel the same selfishness. I saw this man on the train, and was struck because the only thing I could think to do to help the situation at all was to help move this man to a cold bench outside in the T station. And I didn't even help with that. I watched. I have no idea what put that man in that situation, but I knew that something could be done, that I could do something to help it. Standing there carrying thousands of dollars worth of electronic gadgetry, the picture of privelage, and I can't even conceive of how I'd help somebody so far out of the light I cast.
A subway worker was cleaning the railings on the escalator stairs as I walked out of the train, one stop and one world later. He stood in the middle of the escalator, walking down as the treads moved up, not moving in real space, wiping the railing clean with his rag. It's a minor magical force that allows scenes like this to happen. If I had his job, cleaning the escalator railing would likely be my favorite part of the day.