It started raining at 1:50 this morning, and as the noon hour approaches, the ground is wet and the sky is heavy. The rain seems to have stopped for now, but we got some good, solid hours of downpour, including some power outages. This makes me happy.
The work week whipped by in a flurry of darkness and starlight. One of my favorite teachers, my friend Les, was up with his class. This meant I finally got to return all of the books and DVDs I'd borrowed from him. It was a by-the-numbers sort of week though, so no stories to tell.
Halloween came and went. I actually went to a party, but it was as a hired hand. I brought reptiles, plus a tarantula and a Hissing Cockroach, to a birthday/Halloween party in Los Altos. This was the second time I'd been to this particular house, although the first time was three years ago, so the birthday girl was correspondingly older. It went well, and in addition to my fee, I was sent home with a pizza and a ton of leftover spaghetti.
At home, Jeanine counted around 120 trick-or-treaters. For some reason, a lot of kids really don't know how to ring doorbells or say "trick or treat", instead electing to stand quietly on the front step and hope that somebody notices them. Modern parenting paranoia (not allowing kids to go to friends' houses on their own) is probably to blame. This year, I didn't dress up or carve a pumpkin. Inspiration just didn't strike. Jeanine carved all three. She never seems to lack inspiration for such things.
Shifting gears a bit, recently, I stumbled across an online writing challenge, and I thought I'd give it a try. The challenge consists of responding to one writing prompt/question per day for a whole month, and it appeals to me because it will shake me out of my comfort zone (or rut) as far as the kinds of things I post here go.
It's already the second of the month, so here are the first two:
Five problems with social media:
The following answers are based on my experiences with Facebook, since that’s the only social media I currently use.
The omnipresence of clickbait and targeted advertisements simultaneously empty the minds and wallets of the unwary. Even if the user genuinely wants the subjects of the ads, it still results in people having too much of a good thing and not enough of a bank account. My Achilles’ Heel is music and literature. That said, most of the music I find through social media comes from pages I choose to follow, not targeted advertising.
It’s the place where good grammar goes to die, sort of like the fabled lost graveyard of the elephants, except it’s all too depressingly real.
Social media insidiously changes the way people think. Like monkeys, we reach our little questing hands toward the objects of our desires, but the objects are forever changing, and suddenly we find that we desire things that aren’t conducive to health and happiness (for instance, stupid viral videos, arguments that go around in downward spirals of ever-increasing fallaciousness, blood-pressure-inducing articles about human idiocy, etc.). It’s like a drug that leaves the user wanting more and more. Since it’s updated in real time, there is always a new fix to be had, 24 hours a day. It’s easier to sit down in front of one’s favorite electronic device and scroll than it is to spend time accomplishing real world things.
Did I mention that social media is the grandfather of all time sucks? It’s like a black hole where all of our good intentions go to die.
It’s passive entertainment masquerading as active interaction. What we see is chosen for us, mainly because it’s easier just to scroll down the page than it is to premeditate our reason for being there.
Social media reveals that many people in our lives are rather vapid, which is kind of depressing. For example, many people tend to “share” things on Facebook as true, when they are obviously satire. It’s pretty simple to take the extra seconds to either closely read the article or do some quick background searching.
Oops. That was more than five. It might have been more challenging to come up with five advantages of social media. Writing only about the problems sounds too much like complaining, although it's probably more fun. The best way to write about problems is to pair them with solutions, and the best solution here is to be aware of the problems and simply use social media in moderation. Being human though, a lot of us, including me, have trouble with moderation.
Your earliest memory:
I’m not sure how old I was at the time, but I have a really clear memory of breaking a lamp in my room. If memory serves, the base of the lamp was in the form of a man holding a bunch of colorful balloons. I knocked it off a table (or something to that effect) and proudly went into the other room to show my parents what I had done. I remember feeling confused when they weren’t happy at my ingenuity. My destructive tendencies ended up being the cause of many other minor incidents over the years, often involving my own possessions. I thought it was a laugh riot to hit things (usually toy cars) with a hammer and pretend that they’d been in horrible accidents. The lamp might have been where it all started.
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