Progress Report

It’s about a month and a half into 2015 now, and fulfillment of my new year’s resolutions is at a standstill after having gotten off to a heady start.

“Welcome to the world,” you say. “Everybody resolves to lose weight, eat better, read all the great novels, etc, but nobody ends up doing it.”

Except, I long ago stopped setting my sights that high.

Well, I don’t really need to lose pounds in the first place, because I’ve been obsessive-compulsive about maintaining my weight since I was in my 20s. But, as much as Lynn would love for me to stop competing for the superlative of Worst Vegetarian Diet Ever, I have every intention of continuing to guzzle Diet Mountain Dew and cap every workday lunch with an extra-large chocolate Tootsie Roll Pop from 7-Eleven (No fat, less than 100 calories, and  a week’s supply of sugar!). Read the great novels? I made the mistake of posting on this blog a few years ago a book-reading goal that I came nowhere near meeting, and War and Peace wasn’t even on it. (This was one of those instances in which having an infinitesimal readership proved to be a very good thing. Only one person called me out with a “How’s that workin’ out?” email.)

This year I decided to limit my resolutions—with a few notable exceptions—to completing niggling tasks that I just never get around to doing, or that I irrationally put off. It was a new and viable approach that kicked off like gangbusters during the first week in January, when I rode a Montgomery County Ride-On Bus to the Friendship Heights Metro station and added an app to my iPhone. (Those are two different things.)

I’d gotten out of the habit of riding the county bus a few years ago, and then, over the course of time, I’d managed to convince myself that everything had probably gotten too complicated, in my absence, for me ever to figure it out. Because this is how I think—this is how I am. Did the buses really take SmartTrip cards now?  Had our local bus route changed? Was the terminus by the Metro station in the same place where it used to be? Etc, etc. I’d even gotten parking tickets a couple of times in DC for lingering past two hours on neighborhoods streets while watching movies in nearby theaters—just because I wouldn’t go online to update myself on Ride-On’s current procedures.

Well, what do you know? I used my SmartTrip card that day last month to pay my fare, leaving from the same stop as always near my house and arriving at the same old terminus near Metro. And it seems that all of the bus schedules are helpfully posted online! I didn’t even need one of those printed-out route schedules from Ride-On’s display at the Metro station. (I’m not even sure those displays still exist. I haven’t looked.)

So, next, the app. I hadn’t added a new app to my phone in probably a year because I’d forgotten how one does that. While I was drafting my new year’s resolutions, this struck me as frankly asinine. I asked Lynn what our “Apps Store” password was, found what I was looking for, and soon had a shiny new app on my smartphone. Voila! Another resolution met.

But that’s where my new year’s progress stalled. Next on my list was one word: “Coins.” My dressing area downstairs in our house is littered with overflowing containers of various shapes and sizes that all are packed with loose change. The big one, which I filled first, primarily holds pennies, but there’s a lot of silver in most of the other ones. There’s no telling what the cumulative amount of cash is—much less than a fortune but considerably more than the cost of a few movie tickets. It's kind of a moot point, though, because the money is not being used. It, rather, is a sprawling eyesore that irritates me every time I look at it.

Back in the old days, I actually enjoyed rolling pennies into wrappers, writing my account number on the outside, and bringing the rolls of 50 to my bank in a shoe box. It was fun, walking in with a tidied mountain of near-worthless zinc or copper (or whatever pennies are made of these days) and walking out with 20 or 30 dollars of real greenback currency. But my coin tsunami now far exceeds a shoe box’s capacity. For all I know, too, banks now refuse to accept penny rolls for obscure reasons that may be linked to Homeland Security.

The thing is, though, that my bank doesn’t offer those coin machines that helpfully convert customers’ loose change into paper money without the financial institution demanding a cut of the total. While I’m not averse to using a CoinStar machine in a grocery store—sure, they take a percentage, but what good are the coins doing me now?—I worry obsessively about the whole thing. Kind of the way I’d worried about the Ride-On bus.  I haven’t yet been able to force myself even to read the instructions on the machine, for fear I’ll find them too complicated. I also envision having someone standing directly behind me, waiting impatiently for me to finish. I worry to distraction about all the noise I’ll make, and the undue attention I’ll draw to myself. I wonder how many coins I should bring with me on that first trip, and how long feeding X number of them into the machine will take while I’m making all that racket.

Lynn tries to calm me, in the manner that one would a 5-year-old. She says, reassuringly,“We’ll go over to Harris Teeter one day and check it all out.” Which is sweet, and nice. And I know that she’s right. We would figure it out—and then, slowly but surely, my mounds of coins would disappear, and I’d have more “real” money in my pocket or bank account, or wherever I choose to place it.

But that hasn’t happened yet, somehow. I still dread the noise and the instructions. Does the machine give you cash, or a receipt that you then must bring to a cashier at the grocery store? How does it all work? Aaahhh! In the meantime, every morning, when I come downstairs to dress, I encounter an unruly army of Abes, Toms, FDRs and Georges, all sitting there in their containers, vexing me.

So, the baseball season’s coming up. Pitchers and catchers report to spring training in, like, a week. Which brings to mind two other seemingly simple check-off items on my resolution list: Nats Rewards and StubHub.

Because I’m a longtime Washington Nationals partial season ticket holder, I'm entitled to various “rewards” on the computerized card that I barely understand well enough to annually load my 20 game tickets onto. If I were to take full advantage of these additional rewards, I’d at the very least earn an excellent seat at one additional game per season. I know this because friends of mine have done it. It can’t be that hard to figure out. But I’ve just sort of psyched myself out about it, as I tend to do. I’ve convinced myself that it’s too difficult to so much as attempt. I really need get over this.

StubHub is a similar thing. Millions of people every day use this “fan exchange” site to buy and sell tickets to baseball games and other events at good prices. But I don’t really know much about it, and I worry that I’ll be stymied by an account that someone set up for me once, that may somehow prevent me from entering new information. Or something like that. (My fears often are less than fully baked.) Anyway, I really should check out StubHub before I next go to an Orioles game at Camden Yards in Baltimore. Why, perhaps, armed with my reasonably priced StubHub ticket, I could sit nearer the field and the Bird mascot! Wouldn’t that be awesome? Sure it would.

There are a few things on my resolution list that aren’t as easily actionable. For instance, I need to add a state, if not two, to my running list this year. (Actually, first I need to check the list on my office computer to see how many states I have to go. I’m sure it’s under 20, but how many  under? I am 56 years old, soon to be 57! Time’s a-wastin’.) I’m thinking that I can fly to a corner of one state I need that’s near another state I need, so that I can kill two running states on one trip. But this will take some planning.

One item on my resolution list that’s fairly easily actionable but is more at the traditional procrastinator’s level of onerous is clearing out this drawer into which I’ve thrown, over the past several years, pretty much anything of a size that could fit in a drawer. For example, I know—although they’re certainly no longer visible—that there are “valuable” newspapers in there commemorating Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009 as America's first African American president. I put the word valuable in quotes because, of course, these utterly unprotected materials are dry and yellowed by now—about as fresh and vital as our beleaguered president himself looks, well into his second and final term as chief executive.

The problem with cleaning out drawers that evoke a compact episode of the reality series Hoarders is that if you do, you’ve then got to figure out what do with all that crap. Not everything merits tossing or donating, but if you keep stuff, it’s got to be stowed somewhere. We live in a small house that already has available no attic space and a packed garage that never could house a car.

So, I guess there’s a backhanded argument to be made for further putting off the drawer-clearing. Perhaps that’ll reappear on the 2016 resolutions list. Ideally not to be joined there by “Coins,” “Nats Rewards” and “StubHub.”

If I’d just set aside my fears and dive in, I conceivably could meet all three of those goals in a single day. But the day may have been back in January.      

Dying To Be Heard

There was a fascinating story in the Washington Post Magazine recently about a 66-year-old American, living in Japan, who e-mailed an array of journalists all over the globe, announcing his imminent suicide. He despaired of the fact that the world had ignored his blog and his self-published books, and decided he’d rather die than live on in what he felt was unmerited obscurity.

He followed through, too. Although some of the journalists to whom he’d written tried their best to thread together clues and stop him from carrying out his planned self-elimination—the Post reporter, interestingly, did not do so, feeling equal parts emotionally blackmailed, powerless, and suspicious of a hoax—the man made good on his promise. He jumped off a building. ("Take splat, cruel world!" Sorry.)

The deceased’s name is/was Dennis Williams. The irony, of course, is that he’s far more famous now than he ever was in life. The article made clear that Williams hoped the publicity surrounding his demise would call posthumous, appreciative attention to this writings. Which seems quite unlikely, given people’s short attention spans (the suicide already is old news), the vast competition for readers, and the fact that, in the Post reporter’s estimation, Williams’ obscurity was well-deserved.

Here’s how reporter Cynthia McCabe summed up Williams’ writing—and the weighty ideas about which he felt people should sit up and take notice—after having scrolled through a number of his blog entries: “Winding tomes about philosophy and nature and his view of the world that were articulate but uninteresting. He aimed for thought-provoking but clunkily landed just short of eye-roll-inducing.”

I’ve made no attempt to seek out any of Williams’ writings. I already know what articulate but uninteresting, and lamely “deep,” looks and sounds like. I’ve produced plenty of such material myself. In fact, one of the lesser reasons I want my octogenarian parents to downsize from their two-story suburban home—the biggest being because my brother and I don’t want to have to sift through 40-plus years of accumulated crap—is that there still may be, in various boxes, sheets of poetry I wrote in my teens. Which was a time of my life when apparently, given the melodrama of those lines, I was a young girl who was an acolyte of Sylvia Plath (speaking of suicides).

In this blog, I’ve seldom striven for “thought-provoking,” choosing instead to focus on subjects that interest me more and require fewer trips to the thesaurus—such as serial killers, celebrity deaths, annoying manifestations of pop culture, and my love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with technology. (Pause for an aside: Every time I prepare to post something to Lassitude Come Home, I fear that my host site will have “advanced” its procedures beyond my dim understanding. Honestly, the only thing I know how to do is flow unadorned text into a template. Nobody else is that self-limiting anymore. Yet this is the way that I live my life. The other week a colleague pointed at the old-school, transistor radio-sized tape recorder I had plugged into my land line to record a telephone interview and asked, “Really? They still make those?” Well, yes, the last time I looked on Amazon. At which time I stockpiled a few of them, just to be on the safe side.)

Where was I? Oh, I was noting that I, unlike Dennis Williams, don’t kid myself that I have anything profound to tell the world. Still, I must admire his industry. Sure, it’s easier to amass a library of writings when you love your own insights as much as Williams apparently loved his. Still, though, it takes considerable dedication and time. I don’t remember if the article mentioned it, but Williams presumably had a job and other daily obligations to attend to. He was married to a Japanese woman for many years. He may well have had hobbies beyond grandiosity and self-absorption. And the man had to eat. Maybe he rolled his own sushi. That strikes me as labor-intensive. I am not nearly so dedicated to my writing.

In fact, this is my first blog post since last November. It now is late January. The gap of two-plus months suggests a few things—some of them good, some of them bad.

Taking the bad first—I’m a glass half-empty kinda guy—the long hiatus suggests a lack of discipline on my part, an enduring inability to address this space as a place for fun rather than work, and possibly a certain lack of imagination.

On the other hand, though (and yes, I know I don’t have another hand; that gag never gets old for me), my long writing silences the past few years also establish me as sort of an anti-Dennis Williams—not to pile on the man—in the sense that I clearly don’t believe the world would benefit in some meaningful way from more-frequent musings from me. I’m also the un-Williams in that no one ever need worry about getting a suicide e-mail from me. It’s not like I have a huge body of work that’s being ignored by the masses. I’ve written zero books, self-published or otherwise. Yes, it does irk me that the other, younger, Eric Ries—the startups-guru hotshot out in California, about whom I’ve griped before—renders me un-findable on Google because he hogs all of “our” search results. But hey, you can’t win if you don’t play. California Eric Ries hustles and gets himself Out There. I’m seldom even In Here, writing this obscure blog.

In short, while I’m just as overlooked, if not more so, than Dennis Williams, I haven’t tried nearly as hard as he did to be viewed in the first place. He clearly was bitter and frustrated by the lack of attention. If I’m at all bitter or frustrated, it’s only insofar as no one has magically plucked me from obscurity and handed me a fun and/or lucrative writing gig—like working for the Onion or writing a memoir over the generous course of, say, 10 years—without my having to do anything other than be willing to be plucked from obscurity. (My dream scenario is that one of my dozen readers will forward one of my better posts to someone influential and/or with deep pockets, who will exclaim, “Good Lord, we simply must have him!”)

So, anyway, I think we’ve established that I’m not a suicide risk. Not for any literary reason, anyway. (I do reserve the right to off myself if I’m suffering from a horribly painful disease, or if yet another Bush becomes president of the United States.) Still, I find this whole question of the push-and-pull of self-expression and fame very interesting. How often do we write about things organically—when it’s like eating or breathing? Is the motivation always, on some level, to be read and appreciated?

I mean, Williams insisted that it wasn’t about him, it was about his ideas. But how do you divorce the two? He certainly couldn’t. He equated indifference toward his ideas with rejection of him. Which, in turn, precipitated his suicide. (At least that's the way the article presents things. Williams had prostate cancer when he died—a seemingly important detail that nevertheless is made to seem irrelevant.)

There was a great quote in the Washington Post piece by Ron Charles, the newspaper’s book editor. I read it aloud to Lynn because it struck me as so nicely-stated and succinctly true.

“There are more people writing than ever who are desperate for attention, and we just don’t have that much attention to give,” Charles wrote. “No matter how rich or educated we become, we have only the 24 hours for each of us. And with everybody promoting themselves on every possible social network, all of us so desperate for eyeballs, myself included, with all of us living and dying by our click history, [Williams’ suicide] is kind of an extreme and terrifying example of ‘Why aren’t you looking at me?’”

There’s so much to chew on in that one paragraph. I find exhausting the cacophony of voices that scream out from our ever-growing multitude of platforms—even as I refuse to engage in Facebook or Twitter, for fear that doing so would devour my last minute of free time, and possibly my last ounce of sanity. Yet I, too, crave attention. I want to be read. I want to be heard. I want to be complimented. Perhaps not to quite the extent that some people—many people—do. Certainly less than Dennis Williams did.

Part of that is simply human nature. But part of it, I think, is fueled by the breadth and volume of the voices now vying for our attention. Quantity doesn’t equal quality. The more voices there are in cyberspace, the more certain we are that our own voice is smarter, funnier, better modulated. And surely it is, within the context of many voice-to-voice comparisons. It’s frustrating that these inferior voices are being heard while we are not. But it all gets back to what Ron Charles said: There’s only so much time in the day, so much bandwidth that any of us can access.

I mean to post material to this blog more often that I have been. A lot of things interest me enough to riff on, as my daily electronic correspondence tends to attest. But I seldom take the time or effort to translate those observations into blog posts. It needn’t and shouldn’t be that hard to do. I hope to be better about that in (the rest of) 2015.

In the meantime, though, I do have one gift to offer the journalists of the world: No moral quandary about how to handle my suicide note.

Perspective

My Canadian pen pal Peggy e-mailed me after last Tuesday’s elections to ask if Lynn and I soon would be seeking asylum in her country. Although Peggy and I haven’t see each other in person since we met for the first and only time in Edmonton, Alberta, sometime in the late 1990s when I was there on a work assignment, she knows my politics well—from correspondence and this blog. She’d assumed correctly that I’d be displeased—to put it mildly—by the Republican romp that will give the GOP control of the US Senate come January, and its biggest majority in the House since 1930.

What I told her, however, was that she needn’t worry about our showing up at her and husband Bob’s door in Victoria, British Columbia, seeking refuge from at least two years of foxes guarding the henhouses of everything I hold dear (environmental protection, the social-safety network, etc). Rather, I remarked, when you feel certain, as I do, that we’re already on an inexorable path to the end of the world as we know it (see my September 5 post, “Sing a Song of Armageddon”), it’s hard to feel as if an electoral debacle is even the figurative end of the world.

Indeed, just a couple of days before Election Day, an article ran in the Washington Post that began on this gallows note, “The Earth is locked on an ‘irreversible’ course of climatic disruption from the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the impacts will only worsen unless nations agree to dramatic cuts in pollution, an international panel of climate scientists warn.” The article’s gist, if you’ll forgive my paraphrasing, if that we’re already completely screwed, but, should the governments of the world unite in ebony-and-ivory harmony, in such a way that even a made-up optimist I'll call Stoner Pollyanna couldn’t conceive, our beleaguered planet might swirl down the drain to widespread drought, horrific flooding, and devastation on an unimaginable scale just a tad less rapidly.

I mean, sure, it’s maddening and depressing to me when Republicans Win Big at the polls on promises that they'll unfetter business to pollute more and will see to it that the national wealth is spread even more inequitably than it is now. But those polar ice caps were melting before November 4, and the sea levels continue to rise. We all have bigger fish to fry—pun inadvertent but apt, as one of this morning’s newspaper headlines was “Larger Ocean ‘Dead Zones’—Oxygen-Depleted Water—Likely Because of Global Warming.”

Which is not to say that I’m happy about last week’s results at the polls, or that I’m feeling particularly conciliatory toward the two-thirds of eligible Americans who didn’t bother to vote, leaving a passive nation to the government it arguably deserves. Even here in Maryland, where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by a two-to-one margin, we’ve now got a Republican governor-elect because too few Democrats bothered to turn out. (I also fault the camp of Democratic Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown, which ran such a safe and uninspired gubernatorial campaign that its spokesperson should’ve been Mad magazine’s Alfred E “What, Me Worry” Neuman.)

I’ve already read, by the way, that my governor-to-be, an Annapolis businessman named Larry Hogan, thinks the Washington Redskins, whose home games are played in Maryland, should proudly keep their odiously insensitive name. This stance struck me as a dog-bites-man bit of “news.”

So, anyway, would I like to live in a land where, in the short run, I could avoid the news media regularly uttering such obscenities as “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell,” and where, in the long run, I perhaps could enjoy four well-defined climatic seasons for a few decades yet? Sure. But not enough to move to Canada. It seems like a lot of upheaval for some temporary gains.

Besides, there’s still the occasional pitcher of lemonade to be made out of the (oxygen-depleted) ocean of lemons that our future promises. I’m already savoring in anticipation a cool, refreshing glass of electoral turnabout in 2016, when the Republican Party will have to defend both its Senate-majority record and many more up-for-grabs seats than will the Democrats. And when Hillary Clinton just may become the nation’s first female president, to the GOP's apoplexy.

Two "Bangs" for the Buck

Two posts in one day! What’s that about?!

Well, I’ll tell you. But first, I must call attention to something I just did. And, in the process, give a shout-out to my awesome friend Karen.

Over the course of an illuminating happy hour that she and I shared last week, she schooled me on the tantalizing yet sadly marginalized existence of the interrobang. Which, per Wikipedia, is “a nonstandard punctuation mark used in various written languages and intended to combine the functions of the question mark and exclamation point.”

Conceptualized in 1962 by American advertising agency head Martin K Speckter—a true “Mad Man”—it is a punctuation hybrid that looks something like a capital “P” (a modified question mark) with an open space on its stem (forming an exclamation mark). It’s entirely awesome, and I so wish my computer keyboard included it. But alas, the interrobang never quite caught on. Decades ago it was featured on some keyboards, domestic and foreign. But no longer. Which is a crying shame, if you ask me. Why, I could’ve saved an entire keystroke at the start of this post, had the interrobang been available. Multiply such savings a zillionfold worldwide, and cancer may well have been cured by now, and planet-saving energy sources discovered, in the resulting pool of otherwise-unused time.

Anyway, back to “two posts in one day.” Back on January 6, 2012, I posted a tribute of sorts in this space to theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking on the occasion of his 70th birthday. I saluted his achievements, and cataloged the conjectured medical reasons for his longevity, despite the fact that amyotrophic lateral sclerosis popularly is known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and Lou Gehrig didn’t live to be 40. I began the post by noting, in full disclosure, however, that I’d found the audiobook of Hawking’s A Brief History of Time to be so incomprehensibly boring that I nearly fell asleep at the wheel on I-95 about 20 years ago while attempting to be edified by it.

In the intervening years, Hawking, who I believe already had consensually appeared in animated form on The Simpsons by 2012, has continued to display an impish good humor that is stratospherically beyond what I imagine I’d be able to muster as an undoubtedly whining, self-pitying invalid. Last year he was a complicit, I assume, part of the storyline on an episode of the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory. I again was reminded of just how delightful Hawking can be when I was reading an article this morning about The Theory of Everything, a new movie that traces Hawking’s life from age 21—when he was diagnosed with ALS and given two years to live—to age 45. The film itself is getting middling notices for a formulaic approach to its material, but the actor portraying Hawking, Eddie Redmayne, already is attracting Oscar buzz for his ability to wring pathos, dignity, drama and humor out of a character who’s mute and all but immobile for most of his screen time.

The article in today’s paper actually wasn’t so much about the film itself as it was an interview with Redmayne about what it was like to meet and portray the still-living scientist. The 32-year-old British actor came off in the interview as self-effacingly likable. His first quote, in fact, was, “I tried to educate myself on the science, which was complicated for someone who is pretty inept.” But the passage that really endeared me to Redmayne, and made me like Hawking more than ever, was this one:

“Hawking, now 72, uses his cheek muscles to communicate with a sensor on his glasses that prompts a computer screen with an alphabet and a cursor. “It takes a long time for him to communicate, and one’s instinct is to start a conversation,” said Redmayne. “Maybe Stephen said eight or nine sentences. So I spilled forth about Stephen Hawking to Stephen Hawking for 40 minutes.”

He shook his head at the absurdity. Hawking had just published his memoir, “My Brief History,” in which he mentioned being born on Jan. 8, 1942, three centuries to the day after Galileo’s death.

“And I told him my birthday was Jan. 6 so we’re both Capricorns,” Redmayne said, “and as I said that I thought, ‘What am I saying?’

“There was this excruciating pause,” he recalled. Hawking, a man of few words but considerable wit, replied, “I’m an astronomer, not an astrologer.”

In response to which, Redmayne said, “I died a hundred deaths.”

God, how much do I love that anecdote?! And, yes, of course, the interrobang that I again was denied the opportunity to employ just now?

I try not to be too oppressively grim in this blog. I really do. So, granted, Armageddon is nigh. And today’s Veterans Day ceremonies, while properly saluting our soldiers past and present, remind us that war is endless. Still, I must add that life’s pleasures are boundless. (For whatever time we have left!) All one need do is look around. You’ll find joy in the darndest places, ranging from physics labs to barstools.