Please note that this list does not include the apocryphal Fifth Law, which states, “There are only Four Laws.”
Normal 80s kids had Legos. My brother and I had Construx. I had the Space Series stuff that glowed in the dark, and Jerry had the purple Alien stuff. It didn’t seem odd at the time, but since he had … Continue reading
In 1998, I bought a Diamond Rio for $200. My life changed. I could take almost half an hour of high-quality, digital music with me anywhere. I had so much fun creating the ultimate 30-minute playlist every morning. I could walk to class or do shopping listening to music. After a few weeks, I sewed the device and my headphones into my jacket, so I would always have my personal soundtrack. Even though I couldn’t fit all of Shostakovich’s 24 preludes and fugues on my Rio, I was patient. I mean, do I really need to carry around more than 30 minutes of audio?
After a while of this kind of behavior, I got over it.
In 2001, I set up my computer to serve an text file to my website, so when I had my computer on, the text adam is currently sitting at his computer would appear on the footer of every page.
And then I realized no one cared about status updates.
In 2005, I bought a Treo 650. I could now synchronize my iCal with my phone, work on Excel files wherever I wanted, and best of all, send rich text messages, with photos or video. I sent messages to everyone I could, and photos and videos to people who could receive them.
And then it just got old.
Wouldn’t you know it, but 3 things I really hate are:
I feel justified that I binged when I did, because I was trying to get a handle on how these new things might affect my life. They were novel. So I binged, reflected, and backed off.
Notice the common term in my list above: constantly. Do people not realize that all these things are incredibly narcissistic? I never before wanted to smack someone upside the head because they weren’t listening to music in public. Do people hate silence? Do people just hate one another more now than they used to? They are certainly now more enabled to exhibit behavior that leads me to believe so.
(For this post I’m leaving out the blog I made in 1995 and got over, since I’m finally in to blogging. And, queue sad trombone.)
Here is some advice. Scenario: you’re playing Boggle™ and you’re able to come up with ‘bird.’ Congratulations. You must have read a lot of Highlights as a kid. But wait, what’s that? A suffix…for a noun. ‘-er.’ So now you have ‘birder.’ You have now begun your journey down the dark path of Boggle™, and your gaming partners give you that half-lidded Jon stare from Garfield.
They mentally consider any number of arguable points perhaps including the following:
…and so on. But you were thinking of ‘birder’ as in ‘bird-watcher.’ You are now requested to give account for the difference between ‘birder’ and ‘ornithologist.’ The answer?
Money / education.
Consider:
Basically, ‘-er’ means amateur and ‘-ist’ means professional. However, you can’t just slap either ending on just any occupational description. After all, how far would you trust someone who claimed to be a gynecologer? Armed with the knowledge that the occupations described by the lowbrow / -er words can be carried out by anyone, what noun can not be a verb which can then be turned back into a noun? Floor – floorer, water – waterer, chronicle – chronicler… Okay, there are a few, like ‘cat,’ but you just add another ‘-er’ and you’ve got ‘caterer,’ the less professional version of group-gastronomist.
However, what is a racist, but one who competitively drives automobiles? Sure, there might be multiple meanings for that word, but that’s what linguists are for. (Or, depending on your resources, dictionariers.)
The point here? Don’t be tempted by the the dark path of Boggle™. Once you open the game up to this kind of insanity, your partners will trust you less. In other words, your fellow Bogglists will view you as a mere speller, a worder, an amateur…er.
