500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
I am an elitist to the extent that I am likely to call myself a snob, unless I am in the company of other snobs. Then that would mean that I have joined their group, and that wouldn’t be good. I am more likely to quote Groucho Marx than the other Marx: “I refuse to join a club that would have me as a member.” I am not a man of the people. I do not care for pop music. I pretend not to know who Justin Bieber is. This, given my proclivity for populist movements, is a great contradiction.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
-Walt Whitman
The poem to which those lines belong is Song of Myself. Perfect reading for a snob, but then I didn’t read it all the way through because it was about him, not about me, and that was intolerable.
I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand.
- Linus, of the Peanuts comic strip
The New York maitre’d who won’t seat me in his restaurant without a jacket and tie or the San Francisco barrista who berates me for putting sugar in my espresso are irritating only because they are bigger snobs than I am. They have outdone me, beaten me at my own snobbish game. I enjoy being a snob in yoga class, watching newbies struggle with a pose, until somebody bests me by executing a posture far better than I ever could, or worse, I am corrected by a teacher who sees room for improvement. (“Can you get your foot completely into your mouth? Yes! That’s the pose.”)
I admit that being a snob is a rough and lonely game sometimes, but there is a purity to it that is greatly appealing. Reading Metamorphosis in German is a great way to get all of Kafka’s jokes, and even better, from a snob’s perspective, is telling somebody you’re reading Metamorphosis in German. I’m reading Paul Theroux’s travel book The Old Patagonian Express and one of its finer pleasures is his unflinching assessment of national character. He describes entire nations as crabby or backward; his highly-polished crankiness could also be called snobbery. This is good, because he’s not afraid to be who he is, which is sometimes tired, cranky and impatient. He’s not running away from himself, like the people at the American Association of Retired Persons who renamed their organization AARP, which is the sound a dog makes when you step on its tail, or those liberals who are afraid of being called liberals and instead want us to call them “progressives.”
Once upon a time being a populist was good, but the Sarahpalinization of culture has dumbed things down fast, and I’m going to let the Tea Party claim the populist territory for a while. If you want to hit the strike zone of meaning, I say, you have to be a snob sometimes. Do you agree? I hope not, because then we will have formed a club of which I would refuse to be a member.
Photo Credits: Snob dog by ~ggvic~ and snob drawing by Oldmaison, both via Creative Commons.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
I was speaking on the phone this afternoon with my friend Jeff Pflueger, photographer, web designer and data visualization guru. He asked me how I fit in all the things I do. I gave him my usual reply. “I work on my consulting business three days a week, and my film Shelter the other eight days of the week.” We both laughed. In fact, I work on consulting six days a week and Shelter the other 14 days of the week. I don’t get much sleep.
Sleep Deprivation as a Way of Life
Most people are functioning in a world of sleep deprivation. That loss of sleep is cumulative. You need to catch up somehow. Sleeping late on the weekends won’t always do it. Most of us parents became sleep deprivation heroes in our early days, performing complex acts of diaper changing while cruising by on just a few hours. When I worked in the news business, we often pulled all-nighters. If the story was any good, they asked me to recut it for the nightly news just as I was closing my briefcase and thinking about seeing my family again. Chronic lack of sleep has been linked to various ills, like heart disease, bellicose behavior around the police officer giving you a parking ticket, and terminal crankiness. To say nothing of the most serious problem, falling asleep while driving.
Sleep Efficiency
It takes me a while to get going in the morning and I like to work late. I like coffee. Sometimes my wife will give me a cup of coffee and just siphon off the ideas that come out of my mind as though carried by a flowing river. I like the feeling. But then, hours later, when she goes off to bed and falls asleep in two minutes like an angel, my mind is still humming, visualizing business intelligence data like Jeff and I were discussing, testing a new internet phone system that can recognize who’s calling, or laughing at some foolishness on Twitter. The ability to fall asleep fast and stay asleep is called sleep efficiency. I don’t have any of that. But I can see really well in the dark. This is useful when getting up in the middle of the night to check the doors, see if it’s raining, pick up a book, read two paragraphs, and try to get back into bed silently so as not to awaken the slumbering angel.
Persian New Year’s Resolution
It’s a little late for New Year’s, so I’ll have to make this a Persian New Year’s resolution. I’m going to start getting more sleep. Sleep is useful, as you might imagine, but scientists still can’t figure out why we need so much of it. Some believe that sleep is used to consolidate memories, filing things away and codifying them in powerful images of dreams. Others believe that our dreams are actually what we use to prune synapses, getting rid of unneeded memories by dreaming them away. Anyway, sleep deprivation research has shown that when people aren’t allowed to dream, they go nuts.
Of course, I’ll start on my resolution tomorrow. I’m writing this late, and the angel who usually proofs my 500 words is already asleep. Sorry for any typos.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
I like the little things, like when the wrapping paper pattern lines up perfectly when you tape it. I like the sense of being a skilled diplomat when the hummingbirds that we’re feeding get into an intense aerial battle and we have to talk some peace into them. I like that Mark Twain wrote, “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.” Sam Clemens is also my inspiration and guiding light for this column. He said once of a piece of writing, “If I had more time, I would have made it shorter.”
Brevity: soul of wit. What makes us laugh is often quick. Steve Martin used to include a bit in his act: He would raise his hand and ask, “How many people have never raised their hand before?” How about Hunter S. Thompson: “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” And he also said, “Some may never live, but the crazy never die,” and it was true.
Uncrazy also works. Adam Savage, the Mythbusters guy, gave a nearly perfect commencement speech about belief, faith and humanism and how they can all work together for a scientific thinker, and another favorite of mine is Steve Jobs’ talk about how, after he dropped out of Reed, his impulsive act of taking a course in calligraphy changed so much about computers.
Little things. Small decisions. Big results.
I’ll come up with the remaining 200 words for this article another time. For now, be well and let’s all have a great 2011.
Typographic bicycle: from Aaron Kuehn via Yay Everday.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
The Internet lets me astral travel. This past week I was hired by a company in South Australia and prepped a film shoot in Florida. I have a researcher in Austin who wrapped up a project for me today and an SEO analyst who lives in Oklahoma who’s starting another. It sounds like a lot of bouncing around, the sort of light-speed tasking that drives some people crazy, but I find that I thrive on it because it lets me move consciousness around. But I can see that not everyone’s having fun moving ideas around the world like I am.
The Wikileaks guy, a former computer hacker who makes sensitive information public, seems to be leading a hellish life on the run after leaking information that powerful governments would rather have remained unleaked. I wouldn’t want to be the guy other people want to kill because he has exploited information networks effectively. But I like knowing things, and if that means knowing what brand of beer might be vegan, or that one intelligent individual in a group won’t necessarily make the group smarter, or that Malcolm Gladwell thinks that online activism is a waste of time, that works for me. I even like disagreeing with Gladwell just this once and can easily find others who feel he blew it this time.
This is more than just gadget-porn, more than mind candy, more than realizing how great Skype is or that my phone knows when it’s home so it can turn on WiFi. This is about consciousness.
Consciousness, of course, is the original virtual reality, no goggles or joystick required. Right now we have an opportunity to spread consciousness around the world and work with it in ways only mystics have dreamed about. Stephen Dinan has written about efforts to spread peace using Twitter, and an author friend of mine is using the interconnectedness of all media to tap into the universal truths of creativity and intelligence. Some embrace this opportunity to move information at amazing speed. Others are running away as fast as they can.
I have friends who don’t use email. So I have to call them on the phone, which is ridiculous. I would feel sorry for these friends, but when email becomes obsolete in a few years, they will look really smart because they will still know how to talk. I have clients who need to be told what html stands for and how embedding doesn’t have anything to do with sleeping with supermodels. I know people who have film in their cameras.
Nobody knows where this is going, whether it will ever be worth it again to use film or speak into an analogue device, or learn how to fix a radio. Something surely is lost, but I prefer thinking about what is gained. We now have, in the words of my author friend, a tremendous playroom/shed/hackerspace to mess around in. It used to take a lot of time for information to be transformed into knowledge and finally, to wisdom. I think of scholars studying, yogis wandering, mystics gazing inward for decades seeking insight. In the online world, however, time, like distance, becomes compressed, and I think the distance between information and wisdom will be shorter, too. Especially when you can move consciousness around.
Photo Credit: Roger Price via Creative Commons License
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
My mother used to do yoga regularly, and once she tried Bikram, the kind of yoga where they dress in hot pants and heat up the room until your eyes melt.
She didn’t like the puddles of sweat and got up to leave in the middle of the class. The teacher was aghast.
“You can’t leave! What about the toxins? You have to get the toxins out of your body!”
My mother responded, “Fuck the toxins.”
I’ve always liked the sound of that. I know there are toxins in us, but we are not dirty. We don’t need cleansing. We are not originally sinned. Most importantly, nobody’s more pure than anybody else. Holier than thou doesn’t work for me.
There are yoga classes in LA where you have to audition to get in. There are people out here on the Left Coast of Crazyland (to borrow a friend’s coinage) who are telling me about conscious parenting classes, suggesting that the rest of us bumbling fools have been doing this parenting stuff with a can of warm beer in one hand and a burning cigarette in the other. (Some of us have.) The assumption is that the conscious people (and parents) are going to be ascending to a higher plane, while the rest of us will be consumed in an inconvenient fireball. (“Before you consume me in that fireball I need to check my email one more time.”)
This creates a spiritual caste system. You have your vegans with the glassy, golden light in their eyes and you have the rest of us coffee-drinking, indulgent humans moping about in parking lots scratching off Lotto tickets. I believe it’s a fantasy that people can be “saved.” Saved from what? People are morally messy, lack focus in their day-to-day activities and eat too much candy. People are impure. The world resolutely lacks absolutes. So how are we going to get better?
Scientists are documenting that we are soft-wired to feel empathy. If you feel joy or anger I can feel that with you, and the same neurons will light up in my brain as though I’m having that experience myself. Jeremy Rifkin wrote a 700-page book about this called The Empathic Civilization, but you can look at an animation that tells the story in a couple of minutes. (Not only am I impure, I also like to save time.)
“Empathic moments are the most intensely alive experiences we ever have. We empathize with each other’s struggles against death and for life. One acknowledges the whiff of death in another’s frailties and vulnerabilities. No one ever empathizes with a perfect being.”
-Jeremy Rifkin
Empathy means you become part of another’s experience, of a family’s, of a nation’s, and a planet’s. In the empathic world, there’s no spiritual caste system, no holier than thou – we’re equals. If we extend the concept of empathy to its outermost then we can connect with anyone, and we can save the planet, too. I think that’s a true spiritual democracy.
Photo credit: j_silla via Flickr and Creative Commons License.
