It’s Like I Pressed “Shuffle” on My Brain
Random observations before lunch on yet another holiday-coded day that should’ve been a sick day.
- Prop noise on certain small planes sounds uncannily like throat/overtone singing.
- David Foster Wallace’s essay on the use of irony in the plight of under-40 post-postmodern fiction writers in the early ’90s has had an impact on the way I interact both with my friends and my television. I’ll have to read it again to be able to articulate what I mean, but for now I’ll just mention that I’ve started to notice exactly how many pop culture references get bandied about in my everyday conversation in place of actual sentences of my own creation, and it makes me a little uncomfortable.
- Airport bars aren’t as depressing on Christmas as one might think.
Edited to add:
- Leafycaust 2006 has (probably unintentionally) yielded a wealth of useful discussion and information for small business owners, office drones, IT guys, and people in other service-oriented positions. The most useful nugget I’ve gleaned, which changed my work habits almost immediately (and which may be common sense for most people), is to communicate with customers/co-workers/bosses with “I have done x” instead of “I will do x as soon as possible.”
Comment by Doc
December 28, 2006 @ 2:41 pm
DFW has a nasty habit of making me uncomfortably self-aware. I suspect this is because he is, himself, absolutely achingly self-aware, and wants to inflict this condition on as many of his peers as possible.
On the pop-culture reference issue, though, I tend to think of the geekglot more as the naturally evolved analogue to Nadsat. If one examines the work of the Modernists, the precursor is there in all their poetry, thick with allusions to other literature, history, politics, and popular culture. It’s a way of condensing semantic content into the smallest available space, which is virtually made a necessity by the sheer velocity at which most of us live.
Whether or not living at hypersonic, hypertext-required speeds is a good thing or not is certainly debatable, mind you. My point is basically that I can’t make myself feel intellectually lazy for using pop-culture slang/references as short-hand in conversation with those of my tribe.
Comment by Kevyspice
December 28, 2006 @ 4:53 pm
Heh, I was typing that post just as Tammah! got home, so I didn’t get to finish my obsessive editing/rewriting process.
I originally excluded the geekglot (snagged for my personal use! :)) from my vague unease, as it’s an established method of self-inclusion and group identification within the geek/nerd/Dragon*Con set, with which I happily associate myself. I imagine that most insular groups (football fans, opera aficionados, gun enthusiasts, Limp Bizkit fans, what have you) have similar inclusion/exclusion methods, so I’m okay with that.
I guess what bothers me (to a small degree now, maybe more when I get over this damn cold and can interact with my fellow humans without fear of being an infection vector) is the proportion of my conversations with co-workers and other acquaintances that consists of references to and reflections on various pop-culture entities, rather than actual personal interaction. I think our perpetual fast-forward state (2-3 arrows for me, usually) does play a big part in the necessity of this kind of shorthand, and I can’t help feeling that something is being lost. Of course, that may just be the cough medicine talking.
I’d like to articulate this scattered mess in my head in more detail, but it’ll probably be easier to link to someone else who’s already done the hard work.
Comment by Doc Ezra
January 1, 2007 @ 8:36 am
Ah, gotcha. Honestly, I wonder some times if the pop-culture banality of small talk is entirely a side effect of more traditional small talk subjects (the weather, for example) are now so totally exposed as a sign of one party’s disinterest in the conversation?
If I start talking about weather with a coworker, they know I’m just going through the motions, because “talking about the weather” is shorthand for “I don’t really want to talk to you, but you’re here, and we get uncomfortable silence otherwise.” However, if I ask them about American Idol/Britney’s vagina/Dancing with the Stars/whatever, the starting assumption is that I’m actually interested in finding common conversational ground (I’m not) or actually interested in the pop culture subject itself (ditto). I imagine in 20 years, asking someone what they thought about this week’s episode of Survivor will be seen as the same sort of snub that the weather is now.
Comment by Kevyspice
January 1, 2007 @ 4:26 pm
I think you’re on to something. “How’s the weather” may once have been an actual exchange of useful information, but now that most of our time outside in the elements entails scurrying from one climate controlled environment to another, it’s essentially meaningless (except, of course, for notifications of impending inclement weather, but that’s what the internets are for). “Who got voted off?” may indeed become the next “Please just go away” when sufficient time has passed, and the next couple of Big Cultural Phenomena have hit.
I’d guess that vapid small talk has been around as long as humans have been able to communicate with each other vocally, or at least as long as we’ve been able to pause for 1-3 minutes in our back-breaking toil when the boss isn’t looking.
Regarding my little bullet point way up there, I’ve narrowed down my concern to my own pose of weary irony and bitter complaint about the very stuff that I spend so much of my non-work time absorbing, either directly or indirectly. It’s a subject that I think merits further reflection, but I’m hungry.