Category: Deep Thoughts

Hate the Hypocrisy, Love the Hypocrit

So you want to get your message out to the masses. You want a soap box from which you can teach the world a thing or two about the world. You want to make a difference, foster change, foment revolution. You’ve got two birds in each hand having scoured the bushes and you’re ready to share a really fish and loaf miracle.

Well, son, that’s completely admirable. Question is, are you aware you are already standing on the kind of soap box your ancestors, both literal and figurative, could only dream of? Do you realize that this here Internet can reach nearly every nation; every culture; every single person who is not more immediately concerned with scratching an existence from some hard-scrabble desert floor? It is here, waiting for you seize the opportunity to shower us with your wisdom.

Oh, wait, you did realize this? So what is the problem then? Why are you standing here, bitching?

A-ha. You don’t have an audience. Well, that there Constitution—or at least the tattered remains thereof—doesn’t guarantee you an audience. Nope. An audience must be earned. You have to grow an audience like you would a bonsai tree. This isn’t your standard refrigerator science experiment kind of growing. You have to sit with your audience, keep them involved, play to their vanity. If they want to be entertained, you have to entertain them. If they want to feel intelligent you have to package your message with a certain distain for the common.

So you’re okay with that level of commitment? Are you sure? Because, from the looks of things, you’re not really doing a good job of that so far. But, okay, your word is gold. From here on out you are the man and the flock is just around the corner…waiting to consume your message.

You do have a message, don’t you? After all, your obsession with a soap box is grounded in preaching this message, right? So, then, start with an audience of one. What is your message?

…

Hey. You. Stop already. You lost me at about your third sentence there. That is, if what was coming out of your mouth could be considered as something remotely resembling the rules of grammar. You are familiar with grammar, no?

Well, see, here’s the deal. Your message? Yeah. It needs to be short enough to remember. They say the human brain can hold up to seven chunks of information at any given time. Seven. It would behoove you to distill that thing down into seven words, preferable fewer.

Sure, go ahead and write a manifesto, a treatise, a five volume disquisition on what ever it is that keeps that bug up your ass. Set it all down in writing with annotation, explication, appendices, and proper citation. Just don’t spew that at every opportunity. You have seven words. Use them judiciously.

So, again, what is it you are after? Why do you continue to bother us? What possible reason do you have for inserting yourself into our daily routines? Because, honestly, we don’t care. We all want our own soap box too.

You’re not the only one who has figured it all out. In fact, after hearing your spiel you obviously don’t have your shit together in the least. You’re going to have to compete with the rest of us trying to everyone to listen. Your precious Internet, the thing that provides you your global soapbox? Yeah, that. You ever wonder why you are gifted with such an opportunity? Well, it certainly isn’t because you are a unique, special snowflake. You get your shake at the Internet because we all do. You get it because the barrier to entry is so incredible low, especially here in the first world.

So, yeah, go ahead sucker. Have at it. Just keep in mind that it isn’t guaranteed, it isn’t easy, and you sure as hell aren’t the best one out there.

Some Words Revisited

So one week ago today Elz calls me (!!) and asks if I want to hear the good or bad news first. The way things had been going for her at the hospital I asked for the bad news first. The bad new: she didn’t have a ride home. Which, of course, means that the good news was they were releasing her.

Can’t say as it wasn’t a surprise. She was still on some pretty heavy O2 and they had shot her up with morphine just the night before. I didn’t think we were getting out of there before the weekend. But, happy day, she came home.

The first few days were kind of scary because she was still so physically beat. OTOH, getting her out of a place where her most comfortable position was sitting in a chair hunched over a table with her head in her hands seemed to do wonders. The swelling everywhere went down pretty rapidly and her mood perked up exponentially. We even went outside once or twice over the weekend.

Home for a week now and she’s mostly back up to snuff. We still bump the O2 up every so often during physically demanding tasks but the snappy wit and willingness to laugh at nearly anything is back. Things are good at the house and everyone is way less tense these days.

In other news…

The garden is coming along slowly. Flea beetles are doing battle with the eggplant and the rabbits decimated my first row of snap peas. The rain is keeping everything kind of stunted too. The grapes look gorgeous this year although one of the concord vines is kind of meh. Not sure what’s wrong there but it looks like it is muddling through. The mulberries are about 3 – 5 days from feasting and I think we’re going to get raspberries this year too. We got jack from the raspberries and mulberries last year due to the late frost so we’re trés eager this time around. Ice cream and pie crust is at the ready.

That’s all the big news for now I guess. Just wanted to push the previous entry off the top of the page because it’s increasingly irrelevant.

Some Words

In the last few days I’ve encountered a number of words that, while previously unknown to me, have come to define this week. Words like hemoptysis, friable, pulmonary lavage, and bronchoscopy.

While I’m glad the latter two exist, the whole ordeal from Elz suddenly coughing blood on the way to do some mundane provisioning to the four total hours of sleep I’ve had the past two nights to spending lunch and evenings in ICU with my poor lady who is just physically beat down, I could really do without encountering any of these words again. She’s slowly on the mend and might even make it home some time this weekend. As a favor to me, please hug and/or kiss [as appropriate] those around you who matter most.

As for me, well, the dogs need to go outside, some semblance of laundry needs to be done, and there’s a special lady who requires adult supervision.

Dynamic Languages Strike Back

Steveys Blog Rants: Dynamic Languages Strike Back is a great article. Or at least it reads like a great article. To be honest, I don’t have the chops to voice a truly knowledgeable opinion but I figure if I keep reading this stuff it will come to me eventually.

It all relates to a paradigm I and my first mentor skirmished over a bit. He was old school and in to sucking every bit of processing out of a single command as possible. I, being much less experienced, would write code that was a bit more human readable but also less direct, less elegant. To be sure, I greatly admire elegant code and strive for it myself but I also recognize that processors have a little overhead when it comes to dealing with most tasks so why not use it?

Bringing it all around then, the essay deals with how dynamic languages are becoming competitive with static typed languages when considering the application as a whole. Improvements in hardware, compilers, and runtime engines plus smaller code bases and quicker prototyping make dynamic languages attractive.

Of course, he’s pushing for Lisp while I’m pretty happy with Python.

Celebrating Entropy

Listening to M83’s Before the Dawn Heals Us and I am struck by the overpowering evocation of longing and despair the album has. Seriously. I’m sitting here at work and all I want to do is sigh and maybe let loose with inexplicable sobbing. Haven’t felt like this since my at-the-time spouse seemed to be purposefully incinerating our marriage and all I could do was watch. I want to say the music personifies reckless waste for the sake of dystopia. Not so much reckless I guess, because it’s as if there’s a compelling need to bring about destruction just for the sake of destroying something.

Celebrating entropy maybe…

I think this mood has been prevalent lately because the slow-mo incinerating marriage is also finally approaching its terminus. That, and the fan blades gained their fecal coating about this time of year two years ago. The judgment is final on the 9th and this completes the cycle that began June 18th, 1993. From then on, she becomes no more than any other person I might run across on the street and I am protected from having to clean up anymore of the messes that have been spawned in the past two years. The dissolution has been exceptionally drawn out for reasons beyond my control and for the past two years it has been to my emotional well being what smog is to Los Angeles.

Oddly, we’ve been forced to correspond a bit over the past month and change because she insists on soaking up every last bit of support she technically has coming to her. I’ve changed jobs and this means a change in insurance and the like. So, anyway, a rash of email back and forth. I was somewhat struck by the apology she issued in her last communique but, ultimately, I’ve just got to file it away with everything else. Sometimes a wholesale paper shredding policy is best. At any rate, I have a great thing going with Elz and I’d have to say that I’m better off now than I have been in the past 20 some odd years.

Anyway, M83 reminds me a lot of Sigur Rós which, oddly enough, I listened the heck out of almost two years ago. Time to find me some juju right quick so I can reverse this emotional trainwreck. King Sunny Ade is completely antithetical to depression which is what is called for at the moment.