I mis-dated my last post and only just now caught it. No one else seemed to notice, but the knowing is the thing. There is one strip of paint that needs attention in our kitchen. No one else has noticed it yet, but I can’t walk by it without noticing. I’m fairly certain there’s a picture frame that I’ve put on the wall that isn’t level with the one next to it or another across the room.
And on Friday I re-alphabetized the DVDs. They sit in a closet and no one would ever know except The Yankee — and she makes fun of me — but I see the need to know precisely where My Blue Heaven is, but not have to scan through Sixteen Candles and Bulworth to find it.
Could be worse. Could be autobiographical.
“If I want to find the movie Labyrinth I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the fall of 1986 pile, but didn’t give it to them for personal reasons.”
“That sounds — “
“Comforting.”
Pounded a little pavement this morning. Ran into a friend this afternoon. Everything else was class preparation. Or preparing for class. The new semester starts tomorrow.
I haven’t taught this class before and I’ve been laboring to get the handouts down to something that doesn’t seem too intimidating. Right now, on the first day, the students are getting nine pages. These are younger students and I’d like them to come back for the second meeting.
The text for this class, which is a mass media introduction, is Media / Impact by Shirley Biagi. The front cover features the facade of the David Letterman studio, a cellist, advertising, newspapers, magazine collages, books, satellite trucks, storm troopers and an iPhone.
The first page of real text quotes Dr. Edward Hallowell. “What we’re seeing, we’ve never seen in human history before. It’s just the extraordinary availability and magnetism of electronic communication devices, whether it’s cell phones or Blackberries or the Internet. People tend to — without knowing it or meaning to — spend a lot of time doing what I call screen sucking.”
Try to get that image out of your head.
Hallowell is a psychiatrist who formerly sat on the faculty of Harvard Medical — I love that usage, imagine this man sitting on top of a bunch of professors — and wrote the book CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap!. The quote, as it is included in a later essay reprinted from The Boston Globe, relates to the idea that too much screen time is working to the detriment of interpersonal time at home.
The second page, and this is genius, manages to work 5,500 years of communication history onto one page.
My how far we’ve come, just in a century. Where do you think things will stand in another half-century, when this class’ students are retiring? (Happy coincidence: It doesn’t appear on that list, for reasons of simplicity, but it just happens that on this day in 1984 Apple’s Macintosh first went on sale.)
Well? Was it like “1984”?
