Chat messages: why do I always send messages that I end up regretting? It probably has to do with why I also SAY a lot of things that I regret… and why I DO things that I regret. (Hint: it’s not the ‘it’ it’s the “I”!)
Last month I lost my friend. I still can’t accurately express how terrible this has made me feel…. Instinctively I downloaded all of our chat history from Facebook (as in @FatalisticYoga !) There were in the tens of thousands of messages between us. I then went through and re-read them, harvesting out some of our limericks and poems.
There were a lot of things in those messages that I regretted; things I should have kept to myself instead of just pushing all my chips out onto the table and causing pointless aggravation. Things I SHOULD HAVE said were also painfully obvious; so many junctures where I should have expressed my concern for his health or admiration for his writing.
And more importantly, and regrettably, there was not one single juncture where I ever expressed how much I valued our 40 year friendship. At the time I probably didn’t see it… now I see it.
Last week I created a fictitious college. Then I advertised on-line classes at this school. The main thrust of the curriculum would be to teach people how to embrace failure to the point that they could get past failing and start succeeding.
I chatted with another friend about this concept and we boiled the entire thesis down to TWO interconnected situations.
1) when you are looking for a job or for money to start a business you are at the mercy of other people… and people are not always naturally merciful. When you need money and they have money you’re basically screwed.
And
2) the best way to prevent ‘needing’ money (D’uh! Everyone NEEDS money! Money to buy love. Money to secure food. Money to attract shelter…) is to control your ‘Jones’ … you don’t need what you don’t spend.
… I wish there were a fake college for me to have gone to 30 years ago! I would have had a much easier time of it hence.
Another slight departure from the normal (abnormal) comedic tone of this page into one of my passions. Not really a passion – more of an obsession; Watches.
From the age of 7 I’ve been interested in watches. I like them because they are things. From the moment I got my very first watch (an Armitron Day’n’Dream watch (I still have it!)) I haven’t been able to fully extricate myself from time.
…what time did I wake up?
… what time did I go to bed?
…how long did it take me to brush my teeth?
…when am I supposed to be in court?
Watches and time have been suffused into the make-up of everything I do. (Why do you think these posts always come out at 5:55am???) And the abstraction of time itself is a constant feature of my wandering mind (much more on this later in later posts.)
R-Cubed:
Around the time I was graduating from college watches took on a new meaning: status symbols. I was interning for a guy who was also a fanatic about watches… but he was much more successful than I was at the time, so his watches were much, much, MUCH nicer. He explained to me that when he sits down at a conference room table with people he doesn’t know, his watch (Swiss), his suit (British) and his shoes (Italian) are subtle indications to his perspective clients that they are in the company of a person who knows the world… someone at their level and capable of understanding where they are on the arc of life.
R^3 (we’ll call him that for now) actually encouraged me to wear watches that represented things I wanted people to know about myself and not to be shy to have a nice watch because it told people things that my resume couldn’t.
Fast forward a decade and a bit and I’m sitting in a conference room with a guy… we’ll call him Mr. Lacrosse. He took a look at the bottom of my resume to find a little blurb about how I collect mechanical watches. “What kind of watch are you wearing today?” (It was a 70’s era, blue/black Seiko Bull-head chronograph). He asked how much I paid for it. (It was $250.00 from an online dealer in Florida.) Yeah – he was not so impressed with what I was depicting about myself. To him it seemed completely frivolous to own a watch so expensive (glad I didn’t wear my Rolex that day!) and proceeded to explain to me that anyone who wore a watch more expensive than his Timex was a show-off and a loser and not to be trusted and never going to work for his company.
R^3 was still right. The watch I wore that day acted like a ‘filter’… it filtered OUT ascetic Mr Lacrosse with his well defined and exclusively self-reinforced world-view. I never could have been happy there; he had no philosophy, he had an opinion. He had no desire expand what he thought, only the authority to surround himself with people who thought like him.
I’m not saying that you need to have an expensive watch or know the difference between a balance wheel and a date wheel to be a friend. Hardly. But if you’re dead-set against them we may not be able to hang.
The Spirit of America!
Here we see one of my so-called “tool” watches. Michael Kobold is a guy who has been fascinated with making watches for the past few decades and had his own spin on the process. He wanted to bring watchmaking BACK to America. The Spirit of America was his tribute to those who fell on 9-11. The markers at 12 o’clock represent the Twin Towers. This watch, the brand and even this model are a perfect metaphor for America itself: parts and processes cobbled together from the four corners of the globe but proudly assembled in (of all places) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
This one was custom ordered: the typical model is manual winding with the winding-crown at 8 o’clock. That really perturbed me so I asked if I could have mine with the crown at 3 o’clock… Ta-dah!
P.S.
My photography sucks (please note the carefully placed lint and how all of the swirlies and scratches on the case of the watch are highlighted). There are folks (I know them) all they do is photograph watches. They are artists. I’m NOT an artist when I use a camera. I’m a GREAT director of photography but when I actually have to ‘shoot’ the images things go terribly wrong. I used to write pieces for an online watch journal… it was a running joke (for me anyway) that I always had to use stock photography because the images I took were bizarre and unusable.
P.P.S.
The center pin of the buckle has a subtle message for Mr Lacrosse. Enjoy you smug, sanctimonious, egotistical (wait wait wait – who are we talking about here??? Him or you???)…. I digress.
To me the only thing I hate worse than clicking on a link that brings me to some questionable software that deludes me into thinking it will be easy to blog my cartoons to the world (and achieve acceptance and fame and glory and international acclaim…sigh) is getting a message from a friend that is clearly engineered for me to say something falsely complimentary.
Is there anything more frustrating than sending a message to someone – or perhaps worse: asking a question – and NOT getting an answer right away?
Then when the response to your pivotal moment comes (hours or days later) you find out that the other person was doing something totally random!
“…oh I went shopping for carrots…” “…I had to have the muffler on my car recalibrated…” “…there was a casting call for extras for a dog-food commercial…”
Someday technology will tell us what’s happening on the other end of our conversations. And when it does we’ll probably feel like garbage.
Sometimes when I send a message to a friend and there is a long delay in replying I generally assume that the person has died laughing. Literally died – because what I’ve said is so funny. …then the little (typing) notification comes on and I know they are ok.
So the question becomes – what is really happening while waiting for a response…?
Apparently RJO selected this location to test his (so-called) “gadget” because his parents used to send him and his brother there to camp in the summers of their youth. (And people say that “I” hold a grudge!)
The Manhattan Project and the life of Robert Oppenheimer have long been sources of fascination for me. The peril and the challenge and the race to push theoretical physics out past its comfort zone.
I doubt that they were able to delude the scientists into thinking that this was a theoretical project – so they must have known that the four devices they made (four that I know of) would be put to use. What a terrible thought; to achieve the pinnacle of your life’s work and have it immediately and eternally linked to two devastating events.
Were the Bombs needed to end the war in the Pacific theater? Probably. Was there another way to achieve the same outcome? Yes – but not without killing millions more people. It was a rotten conundrum to wrestle with then and it is still a rotten conundrum now.
Perhaps if we are all lucky Einstein will be wrong; the next major wars will not be fought with atomic weapons or sticks and stones, but rather internet browsers and hacked credit card accounts instead.
This week I found out that my very best, closest and oldest friend died. We’ve known each other since we were kids… 7 or 8 years old!
They say that when you share a close bond with a person you can finish each other’s sentences – we not only would finish each other’s sentences but we’d sit down with a notebook: I’d write a few lines, he’d write a few lines and pass it back… I’d write the next few lines and then pass it to him and he’d write a few lines… and like that we’d compose some crazy, crazy stuff.
One thing that I’ve been doing over the past few days is to re-read some of the thousands and thousands of chat messages between us. I was able to screen-shot about 400 limericks and poems and short stories. Coupled with the scans of our handwritten work I’m compiling a collection for his son. I want it to stand as a document of how a smart, playful and daring mind can work to express itself. As a parent I’m also keenly aware that sometimes you have to wear the ‘disciplinarian hat’ and it’s easy for children to be of the impression that their parents are “NO FUN!”
We were fun! We used to be fun. We used to be.
Now I have to confront the near constant urge to chat or text a message with a bizarre quip or a photo of some improbable agglomeration of unthinkable things … but having no one to send it to.
This week I found out that my very best, closest and oldest friend died. We’ve known each other since we were kids… 7 or 8 years old!
They say that when you share a close bond with a person you can finish each other’s sentences – we not only would finish each other’s sentences but we’d sit down with a notebook: I’d write a few lines, he’d write a few lines and pass it back… I’d write the next few lines and then pass it to him and he’d write a few lines… and like that we’d compose some crazy, crazy stuff.
One thing that I’ve been doing over the past few days is to re-read some of the thousands and thousands of chat messages between us. I was able to screen-shot about 400 limericks and poems and short stories. Coupled with the scans of our handwritten work I’m compiling a collection for his son. I want it to stand as a document of how a smart, playful and daring mind can work to express itself. As a parent I’m also keenly aware that sometimes you have to wear the ‘disciplinarian hat’ and it’s easy for children to be of the impression that their parents are “NO FUN!”
We were fun! We used to be fun. We used to be.
Now I have to confront the near constant urge to chat or text a message with a bizarre quip or a photo of some improbable agglomeration of unthinkable things … but having no one to send it to.
After yesterdays I thought I’d post this one. A real visual masterpiece.
I have NO IDEA what the hell I was thinking when I playfully implicated that these three symbols would decide to vacation together in what appears to be Hawaii. (I hope they’re having fun.)
That happens more and more to me these days. My favorite playlist is an acronym … but I can’t remember what it stands for and it is starting to infuriate me. “MCATIS”
Will someone please contact my subconscious and tap into my memory to find out and then tell me?
If you were looking for Kierkegaard – you came to the right place! (But on the wrong day… catch me in another decade when I go back to rereading all my Hong & Hong translations.)
(Sorry – still no cartoons … well I have about 40 in reserve but they are heinous. Like – they make me question how I can be a husband, father, philanthropist and humanist …)
So – we are down to words
As the tag line states none are facts. The universe itself is temporary. All things in it are temporary. A priori thought is only temporarily eternal (the concept of the form of a perfect square can only last as long as the person thinking it).
Anyone selling facts is a fraud and needs to be ignored or mistrusted.
Do it. Don’t do it. Like it. Don’t like it. Right now is not the same as tomorrow or yesterday.
The things that make me laugh are varied but all linked by the connective tissues of irony and/or plausibility/implausibility.
Could this happen?
If it can happen – how humiliating would it be for everyone I know to see it happen to me?
If it isn’t likely to happen is the pay-off (the humiliation factor) so great that it is worth pushing the envelop of statistical probability to try to reach the point where it IS likely to happen?
Is it ironic?
If it happened in front of people would they instinctively think that I deserve this kind of humiliation?
If it didn’t happen in front of people, would the think it so humiliating that they would either be willing to believe it happened because it would please them or at least pitch it up against my track record of humiliating myself publicly to think “…yeah – he really did do that…”?
I guess what I’m saying is that the thing that makes me laugh is humiliating myself. That explains a lot about the past 40 years.
It’s an unflattering characterization of people. I hate to poke fun at any one gender but the harsh reality is that I’ve only experienced the humiliation of being a man.
For some reason this reminds me of a time back at school. There was a girl in my Existential Philosophy Class that I thought was nice, so I asked her if she’d like to go for a coffee. (“No.”) ‘Not a coffee drinker eh???’
Maybe pizza would be the thing to coax her out of her shell? (“Sorry, I can’t. I’m rearranging my sock drawer.”) ‘Neat and tidy! This girl is getting better and better by the phone-call!’
I made the mistake of not being savvy enough to pick-up on the clues that were being left for me. For all the times I spoke to her about going out (a respectful number of times: three) she said no.
BUT THEN she snagged my back-pack at the end of class and asked ME if I’d like to go to the reggae concert. Well of course! We made plans to meet there, the show started at 7:30 so I should be there before. (I was.)
I was there at 7:30… and 8:00…. and 9:00… and just as the house lights went up she walked in, flanked by a group of her friends, pointed at me and started laughing hysterically and then walked out. Sure, I could have and perhaps should have said something but I didn’t. No, instead I waited until today to relive the horror and grief!
JK! It really didn’t impact me that dramatically at the time. And while cancer certainly slowed me down a peg or two I’m pretty sure it killed her so… Karma – DON’T F**K WITH IT!
To The Spanner Born 