An Off Week

On 60 Minutes tonight, there was an interview with a serial killer, a nurse who had lethally injected untold numbers of patients at several hospitals over a 16-year period.  To say this man was creepy does not do justice to the word creepy.  I rank the interview itself as the second most skin-crawling thing I have ever seen on television.  (First place goes to a show my brother and I caught when I was in high school about laboratories where monkeys were given brain and head transplants.  Whatever horrors you're imagining right now, the reality of it was worse.)

The reason this man went around killing people - some of whom were near death but most of whom were not - was because he was (of course) looking for a little control in his life.  When I need control in my life, mainly I just clean a lot.  And I was actually thinking about that earlier today while on my hands and knees in the bathroom, getting slightly high from ammonia fumes as I scrubbed the bathtub with indecent enthusiasm.

I had kind of a rough week last week; each of the major areas of life brought their own unique failures and disappointments sometime between Monday and Friday.  It did go up; Friday night, I had a fun night out downtown with some friends.  Saturday, I hung out at a lake for a while with a group cheering a friend who was marking her fortieth birthday with the remarkable achievement of running forty miles.  But then today, Sunday, I locked myself away from the world and I cleaned. 

Right now, in my life, I am feeling a familiar pull of disappointment, mostly in myself, though if I try to logically trace that back to any specific actions/behaviors, I can't.  So I don't think it's really me I'm disappointed in, no matter how much I want to take credit for it.

What I think I'm feeling is the dullness that comes from a lack of change.  I see so many fun things waiting for me in the weeks ahead (May will be a good month), but what I don't see is the expectation of potential.  There are the things I know will happen (the "definitely") and the things I can't possibly know will happen (the unknown), but I can't right now speculate on anything out there that *might* happen. 

A big part of the past year or so of my life has been my quest to live more in the moment, because so much of our misery is borne of either dwelling on the past or pining for what happy advancements we will have made in our lives in the future.  But I have to say, where I have failed utterly in that exercise is in eliminating my dependence on "maybe."  I think I feel frustrated right now because I don't see the maybe in anything.  There is nothing to pin my hopes on, no added variable to keep things interesting.  What I see ahead is lots of work, interrupted only by rigidly-scheduled frivolity. 

Tomorrow I will make an effort to greet the new week with a determination to be more appreciative.  I do well with that more often than I don't.  But there are times when I can't quite override my own self, and today I thought it was important to acknowledge that this side of me exists.

My apartment has never been cleaner these past few months, and is certainly in top condition after today.  But every once in a while, I can't help myself:  I long to catch a break of some sort...the kind that will pull me away from my bathtub...

Becky (Finally) Responds to the Terrible Facebook Home Video

I watched the promo for Facebook Home.  And then I decided the script needed a rewrite.


We carry our phones wherever we go.

They're with us almost every second of the day.

We reach for them when our brains want a kick of dopamine, or because we're too lazy to use our own memories to store information.

More than anything, we use our phones to disconnect from our immediate surroundings and to distract us from the people who are physically with us.

This is Facebook Home.

From the moment you turn on your phone, you cannot escape the nightmare of never being rid of your friends' incessant and insipid Facebook updates.

Your latest messages, calls, and updates are unavoidable, which will hinder your productivity and result in endless stress and anxiety as you attempt to respond to them all.

And you can keep chatting from any app, so no matter what you're doing, you will never be able to escape the weight of everyone you have ever met having instant access to you.

Home.

The same old experience for your phone.  Except worse.

(For Android only; fuck you, Apple.)

(Seriously, I can't believe they actually used a woman checking her phone in the middle of the night to try to sell this.  I guess this is the type of thing we're going to get now that Zuck is a Republican.)

We Are Not Cavepeople.

Longtime readers of this blog may remember my love affair with the book The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond.

As part of my lifelong quest to study every aspect of my favorite subject (myself), I turned to Diamond after a year of Thursdays with Breakaway.  I was primarily interested in what he had to say regarding the biological basis (triggers) for attraction, and he was quite helpful in that respect.

[I remember my senior year of college, while walking with my friend Megan, I confessed a crush and she veered off the sidewalk to melodramatically dry heave in response.  This would be neither the first nor the last time that someone responded to a choice of mine in such a manner, but after reading The Third Chimpanzee, I was reassuringly equipped with the defense that such things really were out of my logical control.]

Those were the days. [1]

As I discussed at the time, my (since curbed) tendency to try to kill the males in my life through alcohol poisoning had a surprisingly reasonable explanation.  In fact, most of my behavior had a reasonable explanation.  Evolutionary theory provided a tidy backdrop for psychoanalyzing myself.

What was a little murkier, though, was how I was supposed to use my primal instincts to navigate the modern world.  Things are so complicated these days! I remember thinking.  Surely it wasn't this difficult for cavemen!

There has been an onslaught of nostalgia recently – which I have enthusiastically followed – for The Days Before Modernity.  What was life like for all those billions of humans who came before us? Surely in these contemporary, plugged-in, plastic-and-concrete days, we’re out of sync with the natural order of things. Right?

It’s not just me trying to rationalize my social circle.  It’s the barefoot running movement, advocating a more “natural” way of running.  It’s the Paleo diet fad, pushing the foods we “evolved to eat.” Perhaps most controversially, it’s the recent flurry of arguments against monogamy, because we’re “supposed” to mate with multiple partners throughout life.

Because of this, I was extremely interested to read Marlene Zuk’s Paleofantasy, which claimed to be a rebuttal of all these recent arguments for returning to our caveman roots.  Despite my fascination with it, admittedly this movement was long overdue for a dissenting voice.

Unfortunately, Paleofantasy wasn’t quite the denial that I anticipated it being.  A sizable portion of the book was dedicated to summarizing books and articles I’d already read, and as for pointing out more extreme examples of people subscribing to ridiculous theories, Zuk almost uniformly chose to quote anonymous commenters on message boards and websites.  (Why text space was wasted on non-experts spouting off online, I have no idea.)  She also steered clear of drawing too many conclusions.  In the chapter on exercise, for instance, she talked at length about the book Born to Run, seemingly acknowledging Christopher McDougall was probably correct in what he wrote, but then backing off in the last few paragraphs of the chapter to assert that none of us can say there’s any one right way to exercise.  (Pick a side, woman.)

Inaccurate, but iconic. [2]

And yet the waffling was perhaps the entire point of the book, and in a lot ways, it’s actually a pretty good one.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing to look to our ancestors for ways to live. But in doing so, it’s important to remember that you are not a caveman.

As Zuk so aptly pointed out, there were no “good old days” when man lived in perfect harmony with nature.  It's impossible, then, to replicate something that never existed.  And even the things that did exist can't necessarily be recreated.  Like the Paleo diet - the food today just isn't the same, can't be the same.  Neither is your gut or the bacteria that live in it (meaning that even if it were possible to eat an authentic caveman meal, it quite literally wouldn't go down well). 

Also, environment and culture play huge roles in personal development.  If there were one right way to run a society, then every society on earth would be the same, and that couldn’t be further from the truth.  There is evidence both for and against the biological advantageousness of monogamy, for example, which means that taking a firm stance one way or the other is something shaped by what works within the context of one’s own life and times.  There is no hard scientific evidence that “reveals” universal standards.  Nor can the "slowness" of evolution be used as an excuse.  Evolution can happen at a much faster rate than we give it credit for.  Suggesting we haven’t had “time” since the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago to change in any meaningful way is incorrect, as is our anthropocentric tendency to look at evolution as “goal-oriented” (i.e., it makes no sense to say any of us were "meant" to do anything).  

In conclusion, man is a complex animal who has, thus far, only been able to figure parts of himself out.  Because of this, I'm only going to get so far in analyzing my own life based on biological tendencies, and maybe I (and the rest of the pack) should focus more on how I can best utilize my body and mind in the world that I do live in.

Summary:  You’re not a caveman.  You don’t live in prehistory.  Don’t blame your genes for your disinterest in buying padded running shoes (or inability to keep it in your pants). 

Do take care of yourself and live the best life you are able in the time you’re alive.

It may not have been all I was hoping for, but Paleofantasy added some much-needed balance to this debate.  And if there's one thing everyone can agree on, it's that a huge advantage of living a modern life is the luxury of being able to speculate about the past in the first place.

Sources: Picture 1.  Picture 2.

Boston.

I haven't had a good track workout in several weeks, but tonight, my body was working with me.

Frequently (I dare say usually) I walk off the track feeling moderately pathetic and somewhat dejected.  But I go back most every Tuesday because I'm chasing the days like today, when the longer I run, the faster I run, and the stronger I feel.  I finished well tonight.

I likely would have had a good workout no matter what (I was overdue), but tonight I had a couple of things working in my favor:  1) There was a new girl there who was trying to keep up with me for the last quarter and fuck that shit, and 2) a friend of mine gave me the flattering assertion that in the wake of what happened yesterday at the Boston Marathon, my voice was one that should be heard here in Memphis.  On the surface, these are two antithetical statements, the first being one of competitive individualism and the second being one of community support.  But that's running for you.  It's both things.  It's a loner's haven and it's an exercise in group cooperation.  It's every man (and woman) racing him(her)self and yet it's also every person on the course sharing the same experience and looking out for everyone else.

I have a hard time sometimes reading/listening to people's operatic odes to the act of running itself, not only because they're such clichés, but because, in a lot of ways, I don't feel that I belong to that club.  Running isn't who I am; it's something that I do.  It's not part of my self-definition; it's simply part of my life.  I don't call myself "a runner" any more than I call myself "an eater."  Or "a sleeper."  Or "a reader."  Running is just something that crops up in my routine on a regular basis.  Much like writing.  And showering.  And going to work.

And yet yesterday proved, to myself if no one else, that the mere fact that it's a part of my life means I'm a piece of something slightly separate.  Everyone abhors a tragedy.  Not everyone knows what it feels like to see the finish line of a marathon (and thus the true horror of having that euphoria desecrated).  Not everyone knows someone (much less multiple someones) who was running that race.

I'm going to take it on as a challenge to write something for our local running magazine to describe the feeling of familial concern that has enveloped us in Memphis in the past 36 hours or so.  Our community here was lucky.  None of us were hurt or killed, though many of us will be coming home with awful stories.  But we came together anyway.  We'll be coming together again on Thursday when Breakaway holds a fundraiser/2.62-mile run/Slider Inn party to honor the achievements of our local Boston finishers and memorialize the tragedy.

What we won't do is let any of this change anything.  We're all a bunch of idiots, you know, deep down.  No one in their right mind would do to their bodies what we do to ours, all for the sake of an elusive high that hits infrequently and erratically.  Or bragging rights that mean nothing to anyone but ourselves.

But there's something to be said for the sheer number of us that do it.  We feed off of each other.  We push ourselves to run brutal track workouts, like tonight.  We run for three, four, five, six hours at a time just to prove to ourselves we can do it.

I hope the girl I beat tonight comes back to the track.  I hope I do justice to our camaraderie when I write my article.  But most of all, I hope that yesterday doesn't discourage a single person from ever running a marathon.  People do terrible, terrible things for the stupidest of reasons.

But they also do wonderful things for the stupidest of reasons.  Running 26.2 miles is one of those things.  Hundreds of thousands of people have run Boston in the 117 years that marathon has been in existence.  One person turned it into a calamity this year.  To quote myself from above, fuck that shit.

My heartfelt sympathy goes out to each and every person affected by the bombings, and yet in the wake of not really knowing what to do about it, I'll be out there for more nights like tonight.  Just living my life.  Which includes running. 

This changes nothing.  And maybe that's my point.  This was a hideous, terrible thing.  But anyone looking to demoralize a group picked the wrong target in runners.  We don't know when to quit.  And when faced with a potential setback, the cold, hard truth is that it only makes us run harder...

More from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Adulthood for Millennials!

By popular demand...

Embracing Your Millennialism

Congratulations, you're already being replaced. (1)

No matter how old you are right now, you’re getting older.  You may have kids.  Or your friends may have kids.  Another generation is already working its way into our global consciousness.  And look at you.  Until you picked up this book, you weren’t even entirely sure your generation had a name.

In a society that increasingly relies on snapshots of information to define identities (think of your profile on a social networking site), Millennials at first glance don’t seem to have the collective personality that, say, the Baby Boomers do.  The term “Baby Boomer” conjures up specific images of psychedelic colors and war protests and crazy hair at rock concerts.  “Millennials” probably doesn’t conjure up much of anything.  Part of that likely stems from a general inability to agree on who belongs to this generation.  Many place the starting point at 1982, but depending on the expert in question, birth dates range anywhere from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s.  No wonder, then, that this is a generation that seems to lack a solid identity.

[Because all Complete Idiot's Guides come with ample illustrative material, my outline is full of potential future imagery.]

Gratuitous royalty shot. (2)

Chart – Famous Millennials

Prince William and Prince Harry – The Studly Royal Millennials

Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan – The Train-Wreck Starlet Millennials

Heath Ledger – The Gone-Too-Soon Millennial

Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian – The Why-Are-They-Famous Millennials

[...]

Applying for a Job

When applying for a job, one must approach the process as one approaches a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.

Do you intend to pursue a career in the field in which you majored?  If yes, congratulate yourself on being more self-aware than most of your peers were when choosing a major.  If no, proceed to the next paragraph.

Unlike in previous generations, today’s job applicants can expect to hop from job to job, even from career to career, over the course of a lifetime.  While there is much admiration to be given to those of us who “find their calling” early in life, there is no shame in feeling lost and/or deciding after graduation/mid-interview-circuit/mid-career that what you thought you wanted isn’t working for you.  In addition to being tech-savvy and self-confident, we are also a generation of choice.

Some people have all the luck. (3)

Remember the good old days (medieval Europe) when you grew up knowing you were going to be a shoemaker because your dad and your dad's dad and every other generation of your family were shoemakers?  

And then your job had purpose because you were the only person in your village who knew how to make shoes?  No longer!  The complicated world in which we live has necessitated into existence lots of jobs that are boring and/or stupid.  Sure, now we've got that whole "free will" thing going for us, but with all the options out there, how could one possibly choose? And really, what could ever compare to the satisfaction of dressing the feet of an entire community?

Nowadays, there are lots of ways to make money that don’t have any real significance in terms of contributing to society.  And there is a trend in millennialism for Millennials to make other Millennials feel guilty about the ways in which they earn their income.  But let’s face it:  With 7 billion people on the planet, not all of us are going to be doing something for the common good.  Focus on what makes you happy (as long as what makes you happy is within legal boundaries).

[...]

Online Fame:  How It Both Is and Is Not Like Actual Fame

Now that you’re blogging and tweeting all the time and have your own Facebook fan page, you may have attracted a following.  And it may have gone to your head.  And you may be filled with feelings of triumph because for a Millennial, fame is the ultimate currency of success.

You live in an era in which the thrill of fleeting fame on the internet is more attainable than ever.  But just like fame in the real world, the key word is “fleeting.”  It’s much more common to be a one hit internet wonder than to launch a fulfilling career from your online notoriety.  Not that it doesn’t happen, but it’s best to have realistic expectations of how far your fame will take you based on what it is you’ve become famous for.

[What happens next?!  I don't know, because I never wrote it.  And to be entirely honest, I never wrote it in part because I was a little bit too right about the worthless nature of online fame and also that part about having to work for money even if, in doing so, you're not really contributing anything.

How ironic that The Complete Idiot's Guide to Adulthood for Millennials was never finished because the Millennial who was writing it had to continue living her adulthood exactly as she was trying to describe in the book.]

(1) Baby pic from lpaustin.com.
(2) Princes from usmagazine.com.
(3) Serf doing hard labor from this blog.

The Nine Friends on Facebook Timeline (Or the Sad Tale of How Zuckerberg Ruined Facebook)

11/12/2013 UPDATE:  The algorithm has changed, as of November 2013.  The most recent theories can now be found HERE. 

Remember the good old days, when life was super swell, and everyone was happy all the time, and the world itself was so nauseated by the collective awesomeness of humanity that it vomited up rainbows and sunshine each morning?

If you answered yes, then you are either a delusional old white man in a position of power in the Republican party OR you remember a time before Facebook ruined Timeline by taking away the six friends box at the top.  We here at the B Channel have already lamented the loss of the six friends box in a previous post, but that does not mean we have to stop being bitter about it.

For the uninitiated, the box of six friends at the top of one's Facebook profile has, for as long as Timeline has been in existence, been the subject of rampant speculation and discussion, the main focus being on whether it is possible to discern if someone is stalking you (or vice versa).  With the new Timeline overhaul, the dynamic six friends box has disappeared - along with its slightly less interesting eight-friends-box cousin - and been replaced with a static nine box configuration which is basically the dumbest thing ever.

Please allow me to walk you through the last week of my life through the eyes of the new NINE FRIENDS BOX. 

Sometime over Easter weekend, my Timeline switched over.  My original nine were arranged thusly:

Number 1 made sense; I have exchanged more private messages with this person than anyone else recently on Facebook.  (Although no "public" interaction - likes, comments, etc. - which suggests messages are weighted heavily.) 

Number 2 is one of my closest friends; we interact accordingly. 

Number 3, see above.

Number 4 is my brother.

Number 5 is another family member that I interact with frequently.

Number 6 is yet another close friend.  She rivals Numbers 2 and 3 when it comes to interaction with me.

Numbers 7, 8, and 9 are all family members I very rarely (if ever) interact with in any capacity, although all three seemed to get "stuck" in my Top 25 (as discussed in the comments of this extremely exciting entry), and all three are listed as family members on my profile.

So we have six that make sense and three that kind of don't make sense but also don't completely not make sense.  (If that makes sense.)  

One of the most annoying things about The Nine is that they don't rearrange when you refresh your profile.  On the one hand, this makes it seem as if their ranking is more meaningful than the previous six and eight boxes, which were subject to frequent and real-time change.

On the other hand, the static nature of The Nine seems to, by default, remove all of the mystery.  No one has (yet) showed up briefly and disappeared, no one who wasn't already in my Top 25 has made an appearance, and though I've purposefully increased my interaction with a couple of people not in my Nine, while simultaneously stopping my interaction with a couple who are in my Nine, this has made no difference whatsoever in terms of who the Nine are.

Over the last week, I chronicled every single change in my Nine.  Here are the riveting results:

April 1 (one day after original order):

 April 3 (back to original order):

Later on April 3:

April 8:

The most interesting thing I can say about the changes is that both times Numbers 1 and 2 have switched, it's been on a Monday.  The first switch happened right after I sent a message to Number 1; forty-eight hours later, Number 1 was back to being number one.  Today (April 8) I sent a message to Number 2 right after she was bumped up, so I would imagine she'll remain in the top slot now for a while.

Do you see how boring this is?  How lame? 

WHAT IS THE POINT OF LOGGING INTO FACEBOOK ANYMORE.

There is none.  Checking my profile is now like looking into a dark, empty abyss of sad nothingness.  I mean for Christ's sake, if I wanted to look at unchanging rows of pictures of my friends, I'd pull out a damn yearbook.

This is no good, Zuck.  No.  Good.

Page 228

"Once inside, I was ready to rush up to the balcony to grab the best available seats, but the red carpet wound its way from the sidewalk and through the lobby of the theater.  It ended at an elevator that took important non-balcony-seating people to their seats down below.  Our group thought it a better move to stand by the red carpet than to find our seats just then.

A man who was obviously very sick walked up behind me.  "That's Gene Siskel!" Carol whispered from my left.  "That is Gene Siskel!"  But it wasn't Gene Siskel because Gene Siskel had been dead for close to a decade.  

It was Roger Ebert.  No one recognized him or bothered him or even said anything to him.  He stood next to me, patiently, until a woman escorted him to the elevator."

A couple of years later, when Roger Ebert was interviewed by Oprah, I learned that the woman I'd seen come to his aid was his wife.  A chance event, and one in which no words were exchanged, but something I will never forget:  waiting silently with Roger Ebert to go into the theater to see Rendition.

May he rest in peace.

Facebook's "New" Timeline Is Zuck's Personal Attack on Me

It is no surprise to anyone who has read this blog or visited my Facebook profile or met me for five minutes in real life that I have some issues with Facebook.  So why, you may ask, do I write about it so much?

Well, for one, it is a pervasive part of modern life, and my own active dislike of it, combined with a systemic dependence on it for social planning, has resulted in a deeply-rooted personal conflict that I periodically need to write out in order to make sense of...

And two (more important), these Facebook posts are really fucking popular.  Generally speaking, they help my traffic over here even more (if you can believe it) than the entries about the Gyllenhaal boy that I roll out every now and again.  

Here is an actual graphic of my actual traffic on this blog:

I swear this is the right graph even if Google has put completely irrelevant dates under it.

The first peak, back in '11 ('09 on this poorly-labeled chart), was because a Bud Light can I used in my first Cheap Beer of the Month Club entry randomly wound up at the top of a Google image search.

But the steady rise you see in the past few months has been almost entirely because of a single entry, a post I called "Regarding the Six Friends at the Top of Your Timeline."  It was popular from day one, and has only gotten more so (see graph).  Recently, it's been pulling in about a thousand hits a week.

Mark Zuckerberg, well-known dork and personal foe of mine, seems to have taken note of the fact that interest in my blog entry has soared because when he rolled out the "new" Timeline over the weekend, there are no longer six friends at the top.  (!!)  (??)  (!?)

a) This has ruined my only real source of outside blog hits at the moment. :(
b) This has taken all the fun out of logging into Facebook, because usually when I log in, I get annoyed by, like, the seventh update in my newsfeed, so then I just click over to my profile, take note of the six people at the top, and come back here to discuss wild conspiracy theories with complete strangers.  (This was the best part of Facebook!)

On top of that, he changed up the cover photo so my painstakingly crafted masterpiece celebrating my individuality no longer fits correctly, and - and! - the Timeline itself now closely mimics the layout of the mobile version of Facebook.  So I'm really glad I spent all that time eighteen months ago highlighting stories and making sure everything looked great on a computer screen.  (Christ Almighty.)

Basically, I think it's undeniable at this point that all of these changes were directed at me, specfically, because how could they not be?  That's what Facebook is about after all:  ME ME ME.

I guess the best I can hope for at this point is that, deprived of the six-friends box to obsess over, the masses start searching in earnest for opinionated reviews of Graph Search.  Either that, or I'd better come up with a theory on that new nine-friends box pronto... :-/