in praise of mental instability
“Remember, genius is more often found in a cracked pot, than in a whole one.”
– E.B. White
rot your brain out in five easy weeks!
For the past several years, I have been, like many other effete snotty sorts affecting high-brow quasi-intellectual postures, a TV-non-watcher.
Which isn’t to say that I’ve strictly not watched TV. I have. But only those shows so clearly a head and shoulders above standard programming fare that I could continue to disdain the television industry as a whole. (Specifically, my watching was largely constrained to the West Wing, several of the HBO series, and old episodes of the Simpsons – ideally from the 1992-1997 seasons.)
Since arriving in Los Angeles, however, I have found myself watching ungodly amounts of TV. Arguably, that isn’t entirely my own fault; Yoav Fisher, one of my Cyan colleagues and my housemate in Los Angeles in the temporary corporate housing we’ve been sharing, is a heavy watcher. As a result, the TV in our apartment often plays for hours a day. Yet Yoav, a dyed-in-the-wool multitasker, utilizes this extensive TV time by simultaneously reading scripts and fielding phone calls. I admire his ability to do so, but I must admit that is a talent I do not share – if I’m in the living room trying to read and the TV goes on, my attention is immediately diverted to the tube.
As a result, in the past five weeks, I’ve absorbed everything from Elimidate, Boy Meets World and The Cosby Show to The Real World, Joe Millionaire, and Ricki Lake. And through it all, I have felt my brain cells dying off, perhaps committing some sort of ritual seppuku to escape the sheer agony of such crappy, mindless programming. With each passing day, I have felt my IQ (arguably limited as it already is) whittled away by the glowing box.
So I am particularly pleased to say that salvation is finally in sight. Yoav ships off to San Francisco this Saturday morning – as soon as he’s out the door, I’ll be unplugging the box. I can only hope that a steady diet of quality literature can reverse any damage sustained thus far.
narcissism now easier than ever!
Old: autoGoogle, v. intr. to search for oneself on Google.
New: Googlert, n., a web-bot that autoGoogles for you on a daily basis, then emails any changes in the top listings.
Ah, the power of technology, making ever easier such life-critical pursuits as obsessively monitoring what other people are saying about you.
today’s other quotes
The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.
– Sydney J. Harris
The man who doesn’t relax and hoot a few hoots voluntarily, now and then, is in great danger of hooting hoots and standing on his head for the edification of the pathologist and trained nurse, a little later on.
– Elbert Hubbard
today’s quote
There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.
– Calvin, to Hobbes.
today’s poem
Somewhere I Have Never Travelled
– e.e. cummings
somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which I cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though I have closed myself as fingers,
you open petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, I and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of it
suds stud
Growing up in drought-ridden California, I was, for most of my childhood, robbed of the carwashing experience. Which is why I was so excited to discover that, all around downtown Los Angeles, there are do-it-yourself carwashing stations.
Perhaps these are mainstays elsewhere in the country, but I’d never before seen one myself. In short, toss eight quarters into the wall, and a giant red digital clock comes alive – four minutes, ticking down quickly. From the ceiling, attached to long blue hoses, hang a variety of attachments: power washer, foam-emitting mop, wax sprayer. And, while the seconds tick, one frantically rinses the car, soaps the car, rinses the car, waxes the car, then rinses it once more for good measure. Then it’s on to the drying station, where (with a blue uber-paper-towel, purchased for another seventy five cents) one dries down the entire car, with Miyage-pleasing circular strokes.
This evening, as a result, our black rented SUV sparkles, and I glow with the pleasure of falsely productive manual labor.
life imitates art
Taking a break from a day spent wrestling the finances on I Love Your Work, I picked up my copy of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, and read this paragraph on page 406:
Brian had swooped down like an angel with a crucial fifty thou just as Schwartz began principal photography on a modern-dress Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov, played by Giovanni Ribisi…
Wait, what? Taking a break from financing a film starring Giovanni to read about financing a film starring Giovanni. The recursivity of it all is making me dizzy.