As a Lenten commitment — and because I have a little more time with it being the offseason and all – I’m attempting a return to the personal, stream-of-consciousness writing that once yielded some fulfilling work. Finishing an entire piece daily is more than my schedule will permit, but for the moment at least 20 to 30 minutes of my day is spent learning to recapture a voice that I feared might be lost.
Here is the first piece, which is in the form of an e-mail:
So tonight and on many other evenings, you ask me, “What’cha looking at?”
Variants of this question have been a regular interruption of my time with computers since I was in elementary school. Dad did this quite often; he’d walk into the home office and in a forceful-yet-genial voice, ask, “What’cha doin’; what’cha doin’; huh, huh, huh?” He had a way of doing this without knocking, so without fail, I jumped at those words, leading him and Mom to suspect I was doing something forbidden — which I suppose I was, if they had rules against playing video games or e-mailing.
As you know, I typically offer a generic response to these questions. “Stuff,” “Not much,” or something equally trite and non-descript.
It’s not a lie; it simply isn’t a revealing response. The truth is that the response would change by the minute. One moment I’m catching up on the notable deaths of the previous week; the next I’m researching TWA Flight 800 — the one that went down off Long Island in July 1996 — because I flipped past a “Seconds From Disaster” focusing on it earlier in the day but didn’t watch because I find the re-enactments have a visceral effect on me, rendering them excruciating and thus, unwatchable.
So what would have been the detailed answer when you inquired tonight?
Yes, there’s Twitter. There’s an application on my iTouch called “Tweetdeck,” which you might have seen noted below a Facebook post or two, since it allows me to post to multiple Twitter accounts and Facebook simultaneously if I wish, or to read entries as they are posted. The only problem is that Olympic updates are difficult to avoid. As I wrote in my Twitter space Wednesday evening: “What’s worse than tape delay? Tape-delayed tape delay.” I was pissed at NBC and remain so. Fortunately, NBC’s logic — of which I heard a comically illogical defense from an ESPN radio host who can best be described as a corporatist blowhard — is not emulated by CBS and ESPN, who broadcast the NCAA Tournament and World Cup, respectively, and will happily go all out and show everything live during the weekdays. I know I’m looking forward to the USA-Slovenia game in June, which kicks off at 7:30 a.m. Mountain Time. I’ll be feeding the dogs their breakfast that day.
(But back to the Olympic broadcast before I move forward: No, I will not spoil any results for you when I return to Eastern Standard Time next week. I might be too narrowly focused and convinced of my own intellectual strengths, but I’m not a jackass — not usually, at least.)
I quickly sifted through eight pages of posts on a Tar Heels message board, just to see if the masses’ take on still another desultory performance mirrored my own and my mother’s. The sentiment was similar, but many emtroes were harsh on a personal level, which is disturbing. I learn little from a quick perusal of these postings; I glean more from watching the games and, in Tuesday’s case, hearing of Mom’s rarely precedented halftime change of the channel. (It’s been eight years since she willingly walked away early from a Tar Heels game she was watching.)
I look up every Winter Olympics medal table since 1980, not simply to refresh my memory on the final numbers, but to look at how many sports have been added in the last 30 years and remind myself how the Games barely resemble the ones of my youth. In 1980, there were 38 gold medals available; this year there are 86. Snowboarding, short track speed skating, freestyle skiing, curling, women’s hockey, women’s bobsled … they accumulate like lake-effect snowfall. In that same vein, I detoured upon another tangent and researched Lake Placid, the the site of the 1980 Games. What I knew of the town was its role in the Olympics and its geographic placement — so far upstate in New York that the closest major city is Montreal. (This I know from a weekend jaunt to Quebec to watch a Braves-Expos series a decade ago.) Lake Placid’s population is 2,639 — or approximately 219 times smaller than Vancouver’s. Somehow I doubt they’ll have the Olympics again.
Olympic research tangents are where my Internet adventures grow more arcane. I found myself investigating the Olympic fortunes of noted Olympiad lightweights such as Afghanistan, India, Indonesia and Iraq. India arose in my mind because I wanted to learn which nation was the least efficient at winning gold medals relative to its population. India gets the nod over Indonesia, whose fortunes have accelerated because badminton was introduced to the Summer Olympic program in recent decades. (I quickly conclude that India’s fortunes would be assisted if cricket were ever added, but if baseball can be a part of the Olympics and then extracted, cricket, which is only played in current and former Commonwealth nations, has no shot.) The check on Indonesia subsequently causes me to research Jakarta, the nation’s capital, which then causes me to follow a link that lists the world’s most populous metropolitan areas. Jakarta is sixth; New York City is fourth; Tokyo, with over 32 million souls in its region, tops the list.
Oh, and there’s the YouTube clicks. The focus of my distracted mind for 20 minutes after I returned from the dentist’s chair was gold-medal winning short and long programs; I watched John Curry’s in 1976, Robin Cousins’s in 1980 and Brian Boitano’s in 1988 (thus answering the question, “What would Brian Boitano do?”) and muttered, “They wouldn’t even make their national teams today.”
Some reasons for my research tangents are quickly forgotten. Why, for instance, was I Googling “myocardial infarction” today? I mean, I know why I was reading about “dental fillings,” since as of now, a new one sits in a lower tooth.
So as you can see, what I’m looking at is not much. It’s just stuff.
