Willfully Disengaged

I don't want to say that I'm willfully ignorant. I'm not that. I make an effort to read things that aren't fantasy. I think I probably consume non-fiction at a rate equal to my fiction reading at this point and considering how many books I read in a year I think that's pretty good. As the definition for ignorant is lacking in knowledge or education I think it's safe to say that I am not willfully ignorant. But there are some things I do to insulate myself from the way the world is. I think these things probably make me a happier person if not necessarily a better one.

In the world containing the internet it is possible to immerse yourself in the news all day every day. There are hundreds and thousands of news websites. You could read them or watch them all day every day and never see it all. Alternately, you could get all that fed to you in tiny bites from a news stream. You can see all those headlines, get a little gist, and read only the things that look interesting to you. Or you could be more traditional and watch the news or read a paper each morning. You could get the two-minute news every hour from a radio station if you wanted. You could also do some combination of the above where you have the news on in the background in the morning and then at work you have the news feed going and you look up articles about certain events or blurbs that interest you.

That same world, the one with the paper, the radio, the television, and the internet also makes it fairly difficult to avoid the news if you want to. I stopped watching television in highschool all together because it was otherwise impossible to not see any news on it. Even watching in the afternoon when the blah kind of mindless programming was on meant subjecting myself to news updates and "coming up on the six'o'clock news" style advertisements during the breaks. I could have tried to leave the room or change the channel but that, ultimately, probably wouldn't have been very effective and not only that but it would have drastically reduced any enjoyment I derived from the activity to begin with. So I came to the conclusion that it was probably better to just stop. I do watch television now but by television I mean "television shows". I watch television episode by episode on Netflix in an experience no different than watching a very long movie that has been broken into pieces. I choose what I want to see and I watch it. There is no channel surfing, no news, no just watching whatever happens to be on because it happens to be on. In fact, since they switched to the digital stream I cannot even watch regular tv if I wanted to despite the fact that my roommate has a HDTV... because there's no antenna or anything to go with it.

I could, if I chose, watch the news online or have a little stream of it to my desktop all day long or I could read it in the newspaper at work. Now that I am out of highschool and caring about the news is no longer a requirement to lead a productive life I just don't pay any attention to it ever. I sometimes check the weather after I find out about a storm from somewhere else and I occasionally hear the bizarre, isolated news story on the radio. But other than that the only news I hear about I hear passively from other people. I never ask about it, I just hear about it if they feel the burning desire to talk about it for some reason. This has made for some interesting thoughts about the way that information goes through networks. In this case, the network of people I know and interact with.

As it turns out, most of the news that I hear comes from strangers at work. I also disseminate most of the news that I hear to different strangers at work. I suppose it must be that strangers feel more comfortable talking about some neutral topic like the news or weather than anything else. I also find that the news I hear from strangers is more-or-less accurate or at least obviously false. I usually average out the weather forecasts of various people to get a much more accurate prediction than meteorologists ever give and I can easily tell when strangers are lying about things (usually unintentionally). The lies tend to be glaringly obvious because they have a certain grammatical feel the way a "trick" question has a certain feel. So hearing news orally is not a problem.

The other place I see a lot of news (or get it from there via my roommate) is on Facebook. The problem with news related from Facebook is that Facebook does not relate just the news. News can come along with theories and opinions and get morphed into entirely new "stories" with a modicum of truth in them and the force of people you know behind them to make them seem like real "news." News from Facebook is suspect because it has a reputation of being bad or flawed and yet because it always comes from people you know it's hard to resist the seductive logic that it must be true. And then there are the times when it is true. Your average person can easily distinguish between true and not true because they have a basis on which to lay the facts- a basis of news even if their basis hasn't been refreshed in a few days they can still determine, if they think about it, whether some piece of fresh news is true or false. Without a basis for the news however anything I see on Facebook has the potential for being true or not true at the same time the same way Schrodinger's cat exists.

Recently the weather was turning toward not being winter anymore as it tends to do eventually where I live and my roommate saw on Facebook that there was slated to be a huge storm the next day. A huge storm after a couple weeks of fair weather. Not totally unlikely given that I live in Maine and it's been known to hail in July here. But there was another factor. The storm was due to hit on the first of April. This one factor made me disregard everything I knew about weather and focus only on what I knew about people and about facebook. I concluded that it was probably a wildly-propagated joke. The weather was so bad on April first that aside from one of the stores (a store which is legally obligated to stay open) the mall where I work was closed. If the storm had been forecast for the last day of March instead of the first day of April my conclusion would have been that there must be a storm coming because after all this is Maine that I live in.

More recently than the weather incident there was another bit of news I learned about from facebook. The Government was going to shut down. Not the state government and they weren't just talking about black-out days that they do at the DMV. Facebook was panicking about a total shutdown of the government and any government spending and yelling angrily about how they weren't going to pay the military and how they had to pay the military. Of course they have to pay the military. They stop paying and they stop being the military. It was just as easy for me to see that this bit of news was wrong as it had been for me to assume that the storm was a hoax. This time I was reminded distinctly of Randall Munroe's comment about how Twitter was the best way to watch panic unfold in real time. Facebook's Newsfeed (intentionally) works the same way. I was watching a massive panic unfold where the only goal was the breeding of more panic and not the spreading of real information. This, unlike the storm, really was wrong. The Government had announced they weren't shutting down anything essential. Essential to them included Military, Health, Wellfare. Anything to do with any of those things wasn't to be shut down and of course included in that was all the bureaucracy as well. The only things I could really think of that they would have actually shut down were federal museums and National Parks.

So there are some hazards to disengaging from the news and certainly you might think I was a bad person because it took me whole days to learn anything about the mess in Haiti and I didn't think about it multiple times a day every day. Because I wasn't forced to by the news. I don't hear pundit's spewing nonsense and political lies or things that actually really don't matter to me. Not hearing the news except from other people applies an interesting filter. A filter that in turn must be re-filtered. It's maybe immoral and somewhat dangerous in terms of misinformation but what it also is is interesting. Knowing everything about everything leaves you nothing to talk about much less wonder about.

Typically Up for Interpretation

      My typical day starts with being woken up by a small child who is angry because the preparation time of breakfast is not instantaneous. I then get up, blindly, and grab my contacts and go into the bathroom. I go and I wash my hands, just like everyone else and then pop in my contacts. I either eat oatmeal or I get fancy and make pancakes or a breakfast sandwich for breakfast, I almost never eat cold cereal- not for breakfast, anyway. I will then often go into our other bathroom for a shower or into our living room to watch an episode of inane television from Netflix or play Wii Sports.
      At some point during my usual morning I log onto my computer and put in time checking my dozen or so e-mail accounts. I also check the social networking sites to which I belong and spend some time composing responses to various things that have occurred or been sent. This happens every day. I usually have about a dozen or more tabs open in my browser while I'm doing this because I can't usually manage to stay on one page for more than a few minutes. I find myself pressing command-t so I can check the definition of a word or to grab a url or just going to another site to briefly put off responding to some other internet situation.
      Eventually (usually later rather than sooner) I will get dressed in "real clothing" and caffeinate my brain. I will pack myself some kind of lunch. The kind of lunch will vary wildly depending on factors such as how recently we have been shopping, whether anyone has felt like cooking lately, whether I feel like cooking before going to work, what I had for breakfast and what I think I might intend to eat for supper. I'll usually fill my bottle with water and mix with a very small amount of Crystal Light just so it doesn't taste like water but isn't obvious enough that my boss will tell me we can't drink anything but water behind the counter at work.
      Just about forty-five minutes before I have to be at work I will leave my house. I'll walk down town to Pickering Square and wait briefly to get on the bus. While I'm walking I will mostly skip through various songs on my iPod and occasionally listen to some of them. I usually use this time to think busily about either writing or reading (every other time I think about these subjects it is lazily and with a lot of interruptions.) I pay eighty cents to ride the bus. The trip usually takes longer to go a shorter distance than if I was in my car but this does not bother me greatly.
      While I am riding the bus I either stow my iPod in my bag or I turn it off but leave the earphones in so that I can listen to the people on the bus who are talking. Listening to the Dull Normal having religious, political, scientific or philosophical conversations for fifteen to twenty minutes is often the best part of my day. At least in the sense that it gives me lots of funny stories to tell even if it tends to be rather painful to listen to.
      Last Thursday my day had been going very much like this. I got onto the bus and sat in my favorite seat at the front of the raised tier in the back. Just before the bus started moving I noticed that the woman sitting right in front of me in the lower section was looking at what I thought was a Biology test. It looked a lot like the standard tests we took when I was in AP Bio in high school. Since I like biology and I felt like being nosy and wondering what a middle-aged woman with gray shot through her hair was doing looking at a biology test I tried to read some of the questions. What I could make out made me very suspicious about this test booklet.
      A few minutes later she re-arranged the pages to put them in the right order and before she replaced them in their manila folder I got a good look at the cover page. It read: "Starfleet Academy Marine Corps Entrance Exam". Yes, I do mean that Starfleet Academy. From Star Trek. That one. My immediate thought upon seeing this was to start Star Trekkin' by Dr. Demento playing on my iPod but I was quickly distracted by a conversation that had just started.
      The conversation was between three people I had seen on the bus on previous occasions. One was a youngish buff african-american man. One a middle-aged scrawny italiano man who I knew from previous encounters had worked at a variety of jobs, mostly business, in a variety of places, and who had also been in the Army once upon a time. The third participant was an older lady who came into the bookstore where I work at least once every week. I usually resist calling this woman the crazy cat lady but if it came down to explaining who I was talking about to one of my co-workers that phrase always gets across who I mean.
      The conversation started when the two men were talking about the weather. There were some severe storm warnings evidently (two days later there were tornado warnings in northern Maine) and they mentioned that they both liked Maine because of how safe and normal it is up here. And then, what seemed randomly to me but probably made sense to someone who watches the news, one of the men brought up the Bishop who recently married another man in New Hampshire (please take note that I make no effort to know anything about this story other than what the men on the bus mentioned because I am of the belief that news rots your brain).
      They both seemed to think that this was an awful, terrible thing while I was affirming in my brain that this was a step in the right direction. I don't necessarily think they had anything against people who are gay but it seemed terribly wrong to them that a member of the clergy could be gay. One of them brought up the fact that according to the bible men can't be gay. The crazy cat lady said that some religions didn't think so and that they thought it was okay. He responded by saying that that was just their interpretation and that the interpretation of god, the bible, didn't say anything like that.
      It was at this point that I had to get off the bus. If I thought my face would be more attractive with the crooked bump from having had my nose broken I might have wished the lady good luck getting into Starfleet and reminded the man that god did not write the bible. People wrote the bible. And not only did people write the bible but it wasn't even written in English. So by the time most catholic or protestant practitioners got around to interpreting the bible it had already been filtered and colored by other people's perceptions. Unfortunately for the edification of the world I generally like my face the way it is.
      Thusly I said nothing and walked into work five minutes after I was supposed to be there. The bus is habitually late. It's supposed to get to the mall I work in at five minutes before the hour but this almost never happens. I clocked in. I shuffled books. I smiled at people. I read from the same script over and over. And then my boss left and I ate the lunch that I had packed after I went and got some more caffeination from one of the other stores in the mall. While I was hanging out at the desk to allow my coworker to roam the rest of the store doing her share of the book section someone asked if we carried The Cannabis Grow Bible. My first thought was that I was sure that the Cannabis Grow Bible had nothing to say about gay men. I shook my head because knowing my boss it was fairly easy to know that we didn't.
      A minute later I checked on the computer to see if we could order this book. I did this for two reasons. One, I knew my boss would be disapproving that a customer wanted one, and two, you have to have a lot of some kind of interesting quality to walk into a bookstore, totally stoned, reeking of pot, and ask if they carry the Cannabis Grow Bible. It turned out that we could order it. I looked and saw that he and his friends were looking at Adult Magazines so I told him what I had learned. He seemed excited and explained that actually he already had that book and he was looking for one by the same author on Hydroponic growing (of Marijuana).
      I did some checking on this and determined that as far as I could tell no such book existed and suggested that either it was no longer in print (which seemed strangely unlikely) or that it was by a different author and if he wanted to find out who from his friend (who apparently owned this book) I could probably find it to order for him. He seemed terribly sad and dejected that I couldn't find his book for him but thanked me anyway, bought a copy of High Times and left.
      After closing I either get home in one of two ways. I go there directly in a car with either my brother whom I share an apartment with or one of my coworkers or I go to the grocery store, walk around and buy a couple of things, call a cab to pick me up out front and then take the cab home.
I usually cook myself dinner. I then usually entertain myself on the computer for at least a few minutes. Friends of ours usually show up unannounced after the baby is asleep and then it is time for the temporary chemical alteration of our collective brains and either playing a board game (of which we have many), some Wii Golf, or watching bad Netflix television. I usually take out my contacts, brush my teeth excessively and go to sleep somewhere between sixteen and twenty hours after waking up.
      And then we start it all over again.