A former student of mine reminded me this morning of Vonnegut’s excellent baptismal advice:
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’
In the first part of Douglas Crockford’s five-part series on the JavaScript programming language, he explores the historical context from which JavaScript emerged. But he begins with a little bit of his own history, relating his first efforts as a child to build a homemade computer:
I found some pieces of particle board and a saw and I sketched out what it was going to look like, and started sawing. I sawed, and sawed, and sawed. The particle board was really, really hard, and the saw was really, really dull. I sawed for what must have been at least two minutes, and then I gave up. OK, I’m not going to do that. So I probably went into the house and watched television after that. At that time, even at that tender age, it was already obvious that I was going to be a software guy.
From his Notes & Errata column:
You are not perfect. I forgive you for this in advance. Nevertheless, when you freeze up, crash, accidentally erase a brilliant brainstorm for a new book, or fail to sufficiently scour my Facebook fan page for mentions of free foot massages, oral sex or complimentary flights to/guest rooms in Paris or Thailand, I would like to be able to hurl you against the wall in a sudden vent of frustration, only to have you bounce tenderly off said wall and float back to me as gentle as a summer’s breath, as soft as a fistful of feathers thrown by nubile wood nymphs, as you forgive me all my pathetic human flaws and temperamental foibles. This might require some special engineering.
About a young couple in love, looking ahead to a life together:
We would avoid the pitfalls of complacency; stay young at heart and in shape, keep our kisses long and deep and our bellies flat, hold hands when we walked, conduct whispered conversations deep into the night, make out in movie theaters, and go down on each other with undimmed enthusiasm until the arthritic limitations of old age made it inadvisable.
About…well, self explanatory:
There is nothing more pathetically optimistic than the morning erection. I am depressed, unemployed, unloved, basement-dwelling, and bereaved, but there it is, every morning like clockwork, rising up to greet the day, poking out of my fly cocksure and conspicuously useless. And every morning, I face the same choice: masturbate or urinate. It’s the one time of the day where I feel like I have options.
Excellent throwaway lines like:
Penny’s honesty has always been like nudity in an action movie: gratuitous, but no less welcome for it.
Up in the Air comes down to a story of two backpacks, and why we feel differently about them.
George Clooney’s character, Ryan Bingham, is a business consultant specializing in downsizing. But as a sidelight, he does motivational speaking at conferences, and his schtick revolves around backpacks. In one backpack, he says, imagine putting all your stuff — trinkets, books, cds, coffeemakers, cars, apartments, houses. Think about how heavy it all feels. Now, set that backpack on fire. What do you feel? Loss? Or exhilaration? If the latter, why? Is it because we really do get bogged down, owned by the things we own? This part of the schtick is plausible, and in the context of the movie’s argument we’re meant to believe its plausibility. In fact, it’s meant to resonate, and probably does.
In a second backpack, Bingham asks you to imagine putting all the people you know. Acquaintances first, but then friends, family, lovers, spouses, children. Pretty heavy, he says, don’t you think? We aren’t swans, he says, not meant to mate for life and carry around all the interpersonal baggage in that second backpack.
The movie sets us up for this second backpack exercise to fail to resonate, whereas the first one is meant to at least evoke flights of fancy. Give up all our things and travel light? Yeah, Walden! Step back from all our relationships and withdraw to our cabin in the woods? A little too unabomberish.
But James Reitman doesn’t give us any vision of a good middle ground. In an unhollywood move, he leaves the tension between the two backpacks unresolved. He leaves unanswered the criticism that single people are “happier than all the married people I know”, in the words of one character. Vera Farmiga’s Alex has the “whole disaster” (home, husband, kids) and likes to play at Bingham’s unencumbered but intrinsically unmeaningful game (“you’re a parenthesis”, she tells him). Meanwhile, Bingham is left longing for the potential of Alex, wistful for what she signified to him: hope for life with a copilot. Neither is fully happy or realized in his own existence.
Up in the Air ends up being a brilliant movie about the nature of commitment by making no commitment itself on the issue.
Scary and sad, really, but another lens through which to understand the puzzle of how someone who wrote “In Bluer Skies”, “The Killing Moon” and “Ocean Rain” could have also written some of the work he and his band did in the 90s and beyond.
“In the early morning the light leaned on these eastward-facing mountains. She could see it gilding the ridges southward and making a moiré of the varying leaf-faces of oak, madrone, and bay in the gulches. The fogfall that lay along the crest in a cottony roll was as white as the clouds of a fairytale.” — Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose, writing about Loma Prieta (pictured above)
Appropos of “I Will Unfollow” is this cartoon from The Joy of Tech which sums up the issue more thoroughly with one rule than I do with ten.
Why did I unfollow you? Probably for one of these ten reasons:
If none of these reasons seems to apply, I either unfollowed you by accident (hint: not really), or perhaps because you did something like use the acronym “FTW” in a tone that was insufficiently ironic.
