Tuesday, July 27, 2010

More Miami driving and a theory on the dumbing down of America...

Miami Driving.  It hit me this morning.  The critical distinction between the commuter experience in Miami versus New York City (or any other major metropolitan city, probably) lies in the striking difference in approach - or attitude - toward the commute itself.  You see, New Yorkers are problem solvers.  (These are people who spend their free time on the subway doing crossword puzzles or sudoku...by contrast, in 2.5 years I have never seen anyone in Miami ever do a crossword puzzle. or sudoku.)   New Yorkers see the commute as sport:  they choose to approach it as a challenge...as a gauntlet to be run.  Each and every day creates an opportunity for increased efficiency or for a better overall time.  Hell, guys used to come into work bragging about a "great move" that shaved minutes, or out-elbowing someone through the turnstile to catch the train door, or discovering a new stairway that allowed for a quicker exit from Penn Station.  You get the idea:  New Yorkers worship at the altar of efficiency and problem-solving.  In part, it helps make The City what it is.  Here?  There is no such approach.  I see the northeastern commuter as a warrior, suiting up for battle each and every day, whereas the Miami commuter brings kitten posters to mind:  Hang in there... or It'll get better.  These are Garfield people, who accept their lot in life and could care less if they get to work sooner or later or even at all.  The message is, the commute is a drag...I don't care.  Where is the heart, people?  Where is the attitude, the effort?  How about rising to the challenge and actually - gasp! - making it better?  Or, how about paying attention at all?  (That would be a start.)  From my perspective, this is incredibly frustrating.  I seem to be the only person, day after day, who understands that you have to make it past that one light in order to catch all the others.  I seem to be the only person who understands that cutting through the parking garage when it looks like I will miss the next light can save valuable minutes.  I seem to be the only person who is actually not texting or talking on the phone during the morning commute.  And I am certainly the only person who is actually ready to accelerate when the light turns green.  Imagine that.  (But hey, I also work in a building where I watch people walk the entire length of the parking garage ramp in order to take an elevator one floor down instead of simply taking the stairs...which are right next to where there parked.  btw, stairs get no love in this day and age.  I might have to do an entire future rant about people who actually take the elevator in between floors of the gym while they are there working out!  I mean, huhn?).  Anyway, go figure:  in Miami, it is what it is...but some days, what "it is" is also waaay too much to handle for any sane person...  (And do you know the punchline of this entire rant?  How long is my commute that it could cause such vitriol?  And also cause the certain knowledge that a texter will crash into me through absolutely no fault of my own and that there is no way I can even prepare for that or avoid it?  Ahem...3.1 miles...which can actually take up to 30 minutes!  Imagine what this blog would look like if I had a ten-mile commute.)

More.  Since I am on a roll here, let's keep going.  Here are a few other observations about Miami, its drivers, and its roadways.  First (and I have never seen this in anywhere else - I just assumed all cities had a uniform infrastructure and copied one another), traffic lights in Miami are not hung over an intersection to give everyone the proper perspective and view of the lights.  Instead, they are generally hung closest to each street approaching the intersection.  That probably sounds vague, so let me say it this way:  when you pull up to the white line at a Miami intersection, you can not see the traffic light unless you are in a convertible because it's directly overhead!  The best view of the "light-change" is thus typically a car length back from the intersection, and most cars at the front either don't see the light change at all, or are too lazy to crane their necks upward to see what is above them.  So in that sense, the infrastructure - the set-up of the roads - is not exactly helping the driving experience.  Second, I may have a theory as to why people don't actually go at a green light.  This has been puzzling to me.  Half the time I can see what the person ahead of me is doing, and it's usually talking on the phone or reading the paper or taking a gulp of coffee instead of watching for the light.  But the other half of the time, I see the brake lights release as they take their foot off the brake...and then...and then...and then...there is this 2-3 second pause before they hit the gas to accelerate.  What does this mean?  Is it that hard to shift your right foot off the brake and onto the gas?  Does everyone in Miami have Parkinson's or something?  Or can people possibly be that lazy?  Hmmm, well...maybe not, actually.  In trying to give Miamians the benefit of the doubt, I came up with this theory, which again stems from a structural issue:  Up north, when one light turns red, there is a one mississippi, two mississippi, three mississippi pause before the perpendicular light turns green.  (Which is presumably for smart safety reasons and adds a buffer in case someone blasts through the yellow-to-red coming the other way.)  Every kid who tries to jump all the cars waiting at a light by pulling up alongside in the "right hand turn" lane knows this by the time they are 16-years-and-1-day old.  But in Miami, there is no delay of any kind.  When the other light goes red, yours goes green immediately.  My theory is that people probably run - or at least "close shave" - red lights all the time in Miami...and as a result, the drivers here have built in their own slight safety delay when the light turns green in case some Porsche-driving d-bag late for his tee-time flies through the yellow-to-red light the other way and risks taking you out in the intersection.  So ironically, not going at green may simply be a survival response to another terrible planning/design issue here since there is no "safety" delay at our intersections. 

More.  Here's another good one.  I also have a theory that non-native speakers here may very often confuse right and left when following directions.  I have never, ever seen more cars brake to turn, realize it's not their turn, and then swerve across traffic to attempt to make the opposite turn at the same intersection.  Yes, you read all that correctly.  That happens here...a lot.  Look, I have seen plenty of people pause to turn (let's call it a "left" for the sake of illustration), realize it's the wrong turn, and then straighten out and drive forward and make the next left turn.  We've all done that.  And I assume - in part - it's because most of us know we have to turn left, but just turned left too early...maybe at 14th street instead of 15th street or whatever.  But very rarely have I ever gone to turn left and realized "oh wait, that was supposed to be a right."  And IF that ever happened, my logical response would probably be to make that left regardless (but as a u-turn), then make another left to get back on my "main road" for a shot at turning right this time as I re-approached the intersection.  But under NO CIRCUMSTANCE would I say "oh crap, I should be going right here and not left," then break out of my left hand turn and swerve across traffic to force the right hand turn.  I mean, WTF?  Again, I see this once a week in Miami.  And I have no idea why. 

Last driving observation.  Dear Random Miami Driver:  Why are turn signals so difficult for you?  Is it that much of an effort?  Does it require Herculean strength to flick that lever up or down in your car?  Is it stuck?  Or are you purposely trying to trick me... perhaps to get me to careen into the back of your car as you randomly smash on the brakes and violently turn either left or right at a whim?  Or do you feel that driving is a private experience and thus your thoughts and movements are protected under the Constitution and thus not subject to public - and public safety - display?  Is that it - are you just a Libertarian at heart?  Please explain.  Thanks, Ben.  Seriously...I understand that turn-signaling is lax in many places.  But I also know that in places like Rome I am only going 15mph down the little cobblestone street anyway and really it's not that big a deal.  But in Big American cities, on Big American roads, and with Big American cars PLEASE use the damn turn signal!  Do you really want someone to plow into the back of you?  Don't you think the nanosecond flick of a wrist effort is worth staving off a potential pile-up?  Again, I see a near-accident from lack of turn signals at least once a week here.  And once again, I just don't get it. 

Dumbing down of America.  It's easy to rant against television - among other things - as causal to the gradual "dumbing down of America."  It's easy to point the finger at an electronic box that fills in all the blanks for your mind (unlike books - which require you to translate the written word into mental images yourself) and promotes a type of mental atrophy that was outlined in a recent Newsweek cover story on the death of creativity.  But I think it goes further than that.  There is one particular aspect of television - especially cable television - that stands out to me that no one seems to question.  Since roughly 1985 when MTV came on the scene, HBO came into its own, and cable TV exploded, the concept of playing the same movie over and over again became the norm in cable television programming.  And - this is my theory here - the mindless repetitive viewing of those movies probably causes exponential "creativity atrophy" in all our brains.  (While at the same time perhaps surprising the hell out of the cable companies.  Can you imagine that first HBO board meeting when the Neilsen results or whatever measuring-stick they had came back and someone said "holy crap - we never thought we'd get away with this, but people actually watched the same movie three nights in a row!")  Someone please tell me - how come this goes completely unnoticed in today's world?  Remember, before cable TV (and VCRs, I suppose) we all watched favorite movies annually (!!)...The Wizard of Oz was on every year around Halloween...The Ten Commandments was on at Easter time...Singing in the Rain was on sometime in the spring...and I am sure there are other examples.  And all of a sudden cable execs must have been shocked to discover that people will watch the same movie over and over and over again.  But at what cost to our brains?  Why do we watch things when we know exactly what is going to happen?  For my part, as I wrote over New Year's 2010, I have tried to implement a five-year rule for myself when it comes to watching movies.  In other words, if I have seen the movie within the past five years, I cannot watch it again.  (And I am as guilty of this as anyone...I can't seem to pass by Hoosiers, Bull Durham, Trading Places, or any Rocky movie without stopping for at least twenty minutes.  And - as much as I hate to say it - the same thing probably applies for Notting Hill, Serendipity, and Love Actually.)  But no more mindless repetition!   I feel like it literally makes me dumber by the minute - it kills my brain cells...and my time is better spent on a new movie, a new book, or any other new experience.  (And I think about it with my daughter now too...we will have at least a five-year rule in the house when she gets older.)  So my broader question remains, How is the socially-accepted norm of watching the same movie over and over and over not making us all intellectually lazier (and dumber) than previous generations?

That's it for now.
All the Best,  Ben

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The constant need for stimulus, courageous authors, ethnic food choices, and more LeBron...

The Need for 24-7 Stimulus:  Someone please help me with this... I sat down to an absolutely amazing dinner last night.  Brielle had gotten me a bone-in rib-eye (my favorite) and she prepared it French style, marinating it in dijon mustard and coating it with herbes de provence... add an artichoke, a green salad, and perfectly cooked new potatoes, and you have one of my favorite all-time "comfort food" meals.  The meat was cooked perfectly - slightly charred on the outside and medium rare on the inside - and led me to open a 2006 Chateauneuf-de-Pape to take it over the top.  In short, it was heaven.  (And this was a Monday night, btw...maybe we need to re-think weekends and weekend eating, because I might looove Mondays if this became the normal routine.)  But here's where the needle skips and the record comes to a screeching halt.  Get this:  sitting by myself (Brielle was feeding the baby in the other room and I had the "ok" to get started alone) with all of this in front of me, I actually stood up and started to walk into the other room to get the recent copy of The Economist that I am halfway through.  Thankfully, however, I caught myself.  Why is this significant?  It boils down to this...given the perfect meal and a quiet setting in which to enjoy it, I once again fell into the trap of "fill every waking moment of my free time with something substantial and meaningful," i.e. finish the magazine, or the paper, or answer an e-mail.  So I ask myself, what is so wrong with just "enjoying the moment?"  I love Rudyard Kipling's If...it is probably my favorite poem.  But do I really need to "fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run" all the time?  Really?  When did that happen?  Am I a product of my environment, wherein there is so much information overflow that I simply need to be keeping up with it all the time?  Does this make my life better in any meaningful way?  I don't know - maybe the article on gold that I was reading in The Economist is entirely useful and I really should be reading it.  Or maybe - like so much in today's world - it's more white noise.  In the end, you really never know, so I seek to consume as much as possible.  I operate under the assumption that got me through Amherst College:  "I am the dumbest guy in the room...everyone else is brilliant...I need to read more and work harder."  What I do know, however, is that I miss being a kid...and in particular I miss being a kid in a non-internet, non-information-overload world.  I miss playing outside, and then tiring out and just plopping on my back on the grass and looking up at the sky, the clouds, and the birds passing through my line of vision.  How long did I do that for?  Hours?  Minutes?  Did I fall asleep sometimes?  Did I ever feel the urge to get up or fill that time with a magazine article or by clicking a link I had emailed to myself to read later on?  No, I didn't...I would just lay there until I was ready to move on to the next thing...or until I regained my energy and went back to kicking the ball or shooting the jumper or whatever.  But my mind was quiet.  It was ok to do nothing... And it still should be.  So I sat back down last night, dispelled all thoughts of "catching up on reading" and enjoyed the incredible meal my wife had made.  The world was ok for a brief time as I savored each and every bite while simply staring at the wall, letting my mind go blank...and I vowed to try to do this much, much more often...

Courageous Authors:  I recently read Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions (recommended) and found myself relying on the oft-necessary book-reading side-job:  I kept a dictionary on hand as my Dad had always urged me to when I was younger (well, now it's websters.com) and found myself looking up quite a few words.  Kunzru is a talented writer and I really enjoyed his novel, which is set in the U.K. and centers around a former Vietnam-era student protester (finding himself swept up into more-and-more violent forms of protest before ultimately going into hiding and taking on a new identity) who is suddenly confronted with his past after 30 years.  It offered what I assume to be a very real and authentic glimpse into the world of extremism, and the shades of gray that can take one on a path from peaceful marching to terrorist bombing.  But getting back to the dictionary look-ups, I found myself thinking about whether or not authors are truly courageous in their use of language, or whether perhaps they are just that much smarter than us all.  Here's what I mean:  there's generally a process when I learn a new word...there's a delay before I ever have the guts to use it in writing or in public.  First I need to be sure what it means, then I need to probably overhear someone use it in a sentence so I know how it is actually pronounced, then I might see it in writing again, and then - finally - I might find myself needing to sound smarter than I actually am after a few beers and saying something at a dinner event somewhere like "no, no...I don't mean that in the pejorative sense."  It's a lengthy process from start to finish.  And that makes me wonder if people like Hari Kunzru are similar or entirely different.  If he's similar to me, that means he actually mingles with people who use words like "elided" or "prurient" or "oleaginous" (to name three that I remember looking up) at parties, right?  Doesn't that blow your mind?  Or, maybe he's just different...and he reads dictionaries for fun and stumbles on words that suit his needs and he uses them without ever speaking them.  Maybe that ability is in part what makes an author an author... Regardless, it's impressive and intellectually courageous in my opinion.  Either guys like Hari Kunzru hear these words within a conversational circle of friends and they are part of his world...or he has the daring-do to use them without prior experience with them.  In any event, he kept me busy with the dictionary, and it may be a while before I casually request a more prurient attitude from my wife...but ya never know. 

Ethnic Food:  Have you ever had this conversation?

Person A:  What do you feel like for dinner?  I am thinking Thai food.
Person B:  Nah, I had Thai for lunch.  How about Indian?
A:  I had Indian last night.  What about Japanese?
B:  No, I'm having sushi for lunch tomorrow.  Maybe Italian?

And so on... anyway, this got me thinking about how silly that all sounds.  I mean, what do you think people in China or Thailand say?  Nah, can't have food for dinner, I had food for lunch...??  It's kind of funny how entitled that all sounds, I guess.  We really do live in the most affluent and entitled age in the history of the planet as we know it.  (Unless, of course, the crazies at the Church of Scientology are right and there were aliens here first or something.)  We probably have it better than 99.999999999% of humans who have ever been born.  And as a result, we get to decry food choices for fear of...duplication and boredom.  Where is it written that you can't have a type of food back-to-back?  I am pretty sure something like 4-5 billion people (in other words, everyone other than the US, Canada, and Europe) do this everyday, lol.  It's all comedy. 

LeBron:  It's all good, King James...I am fine with your right to pursue free agency and your choice of the Heat.  But just remember that actions have consequences.  And as Michael Jordan hinted at yesterday (and as Charles Barkley has outright said), you just no longer belong in the MJ-Larry-Magic-Kobe conversation.  Your bar has been re-set at "Pippen."  Good luck with that, but know that as a fan, I am disappointed.  Meanwhile, this Heat season could go one of two ways...a 10-10 start due to "gelling together" and "getting used to each other" issues, followed by Spoelstra going the way of Stan Van Gundy in 2006 and some media panic before righting the ship...OR...the NBA and in particular the Eastern Conference just bows down to these guys and they go like 72-10 and roll through the regular season.  I bet on the latter.  Unfortunately today's NBA just doesn't seem to have many...ummm...well...MEN.  The Jordans and the Oakleys and the Xavier McDaniels and the Akeem Olajuwons and the Alonzo Mournings and the Anthony Masons and the Rick Mahorns of the past would be saying, "ok Heat...let's see what you got...bring it."  But today's NBA?  Have you heard a peep from Dwight Howard and Vince Carter?  Nope, and don't expect to.  Or the Celtics?   I mean, Dan Gilbert - despite crossing the line in his open letter to LeBron - seems to be the only person in the NBA actually possessing testicles.  The NBA today is like Pedro Cerrano in Major League II.  Fat and happy and not interested in hard fouls or serious rivalries.  Ah, maybe I am off-base here...but I can make at least one relatively sure prediction:  The 2010-2011 Miami Heat will break the all-time NBA record for least flagrant fouls against.  No one will touch, or test, these guys...either because today's NBA player is softer than past players, or because the NBA and David Stern's WWF referees won't allow it.  Either way, it's a shame.  And thank goodness for football...

Economics:  Found myself wondering the other day whether Capitalism simply moves into Socialism with age...kind of the same way young liberal thinkers become more conservative with age. Could this be why
Europe is mostly socialist at this point?  Because they are just older than us?  Didn't - for example - European nations start out as utterly capitalist (Columbus seeking America, the Dutch East Indian Company, Francis Drake bringing back tobacco from North Carolina) and - after wars, famine, crises, aging populations, etc - ultimately went down the road of  debt which led to something akin to today's "new normal" of unemployment and government spending as necessary to maintain a functioning society?  If so, do all great powers morph into socialism eventually?  I feel like there is simply an arc - a lifespan - to modern empires...and that there is
not much that can be done about it.  Thus begging the question...is the current reality of our deficit, government spending, and reliance on debt just a step along that inevitable path to socialism and - ultimately - irrelevance?  Of course, if we are heading in this direction, there is one side benefit - our soccer team will surely improve...

That's all for now, stay in touch,
Ben