The Patient Etherized

The Patient Etherized
Q: Et tu, Jonathan? A: Read. Read some more. Buy Red Bull.

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

The Infinite Patheticness of IM Being

Robert M Schmidt (4:33:18 PM): yeah, farts are like dreams, in that they're intense when you experience them but you remember them poorly
Robert M Schmidt (4:33:37 PM): that would be a good yearbook quote
JSchroed03 (4:34:26 PM): You are a moron

Most days, whether I'm doing work or not, I talk on IM with Rob, who manages to waste an astounding time at his job talking to me. I've copied and pasted plenty of conversations over the past couple months on this blog, but the general gist of our conversations goes something like this: one of us will mention something strange, then the other will instantaneously come up with a link to the topic we were just talking about. With this semblence of information we will proceed to bullshit and make wry jokes, until the next tangent. In fact, most computer programs, working on the theory of probability, seem to affect my mind in this manner. I set my iTunes to random today so I could shake myself out of the patterns of listening to the same music over and over (lately I've been listening to either The White Stripes, White Blood Cells, a little Brahms, and the old standby David Bowie, The Singles Collection). I wasn't focusing on the song that came up, but because it was unfamiliar (I have over 3,000 songs, some of which I have rarely listened to) and good, it caught my attention. The song was "Symphony" and was apparently (so Google taught me) an '80s rap mainstay by Marley Marl 'N the Juice Crew.

After finding out that Marley Marl lived in the Queensbridge Projects in New York, I told Rob, who proceeded to research Boston-area public housing for two minutes, and then after another tangent, learn about Singapore (which has an excellent public housing system)

The conversations are usually amusing, but I worry that my mind is becoming Googlized and that I will slowly become unable to concentrate on any single task. On a highbrow note, there's a good article in the London Review of Books that mentions this trend (and cites Wallace Stevens at the same time). Ironically, it was a stray mention by the author, Mark Ford, of William Carlos William's Paterson that started our whole stream of consciousness expedition into oblivion today. Paterson, NJ is apparently home to the second largest waterfall in the Northeast, behind Niagara Falls. That fact is completely unimportant.

But Rob mentioned that it was weird that anyone would want to make a webpage about the waterfalls of New Jersey. So that got me thinking:

Are people who show an excessive love of eccentric useless hobbies more pathetic than people who show an excessive love for the same things that everyone else likes?

Is there a similar void in everyone who shows an obsessive fetish for anything at all? Or does it differ if you like the sidewalks in the metro Boston region versus if you like Friends? A related issue comes from the people who spend all their time playing video games, surfing the internet, or watching TV. Perhaps no one has a right to say what other people should be doing with their time. The argument that 'most people would agree' might not even apply to this question because it's about precisely a person's choice to like something. However, at the risk of sounding hypocritical, it does seem like human interaction is the most basic need and other activities like video games and TV are substitutes for this primary urge.

The problem that all these substitutes and fetishes have is that they make people forget why they probably started their hobby in the first place. Some people may be scared to interact with people, but isn't it better to face the nakeness of the world rather than through the tinted glasses of Hollywood or the resettable thrills of Madden and GTA?

Thought for the day: Since "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" is a double negative, shouldn't it really be called "I Believe It's Butter."

posted by Jon | 5:37:00 PM