The Q Continuum

Tomorrow is my birthday. Not that you need to know, but I'll be turning 29 again (yes, this has happened several times, but who's counting?) and I'm looking forward to it. There has been a lot of activity in and around our home the last few days, so when my wife finally broached the subject of birthday gatherings (I was hoping for some sort of surprise party), she mentioned that she didn't have time to get anything together, so if I wanted a birthday party, I was going to have to put it together myself. No problem. I've got nothing but time these days. Unfortunately, that discussion happened on New Year's Eve.

So I quickly got my e-mail program on-line and shot a hastily-written note to a few dozen of my associates who might be in town and available for dinner on Sunday night, gave them a basic idea, and let them know I'd follow up once more definite plans had been made. As expected, I received very few responses to the e-mail: some "maybes" and a few more "can't make its."

That got me thinking about the whole communication thing. I sent out the e-mail because it took less time to do that than to call everyone on the contact list and invite them individually. Does that make me a bad person? Would I have received more "yes" responses if I had made more personal invitations? I think not, but by then the brain cells were humming on their own beat.

As our society becomes more and more dependent on electronic means of communication, it almost seems that we're growing further and further apart. 10-15 years ago, I would call on my good friends almost weekly to keep caught up on life events. Now, I wait for mass e-mails to come out with updates, or I rummage through friends' blogs to see what's happening. This reminded me of a great line from the movie Contact. The character of Palmer Joss, played by Matthew McConaughey, is being interviewed about the impact of technology on society on Larry King Live. He responds, "We shop at home, we surf the net... and we feel emptier and lonelier and more cut off from each other than at any other time in human history... " At the time the movie was released (1997), I thought this was more of an alarmist statement. Reflecting on it now, I'm not so sure he wasn't dead on.

How many companies re developing services to "aid" in our electronic communications? I use www.blogger.com to update and post my blogs, and there are many other sites that provide the same services. My wife uses www.evite.com to send and track electronic invitations and RSVPs to gatherings she hosts. A good friend uses www.snapfish.com to post her child's photo album/scrapbook on-line. I'm sure there are other services that I'm not even aware of to help aid in our newly-embraced communication medium.

But are we better off?

I admit, when I get a mass mailing from someone with an update on their lives, I've thought "Wow, wouldn't it have been nice to get an individualized note?" And the next day, I turn around and send my own mass mailing. By posting family happenings on a blog, have I become someone to read about instead of associate with? By trying to be more informative with others about things that are going on in my life under the auspices of keeping in better communication with others, have I added yet another wall to the shell that surrounds me and keeps others at bay? That certainly hasn't been my intention, and I hope that's not really the end result.

I recall a novel by one of my favorite authors, Isaac Asimov. In the novel he portrays a subset of society who value their privacy so much that they are in constant communication by video phone, but are horrified by the thought of physical contact. Husbands and wives may actually see each other in person once or twice during their lifetimes. Egad, what a bleak prediction for our future. But is it an accurate one?

I guess we'll know more about the effects of this over the next few years. It will be interesting to see what new services come into being in our electronically-enhanced world. And if we become a truly global community, or if we retreat further into our own isolated lives...

Well, it's January 1, 2004. At least according to some calendars. I know there are at least two other major calendars out there that do not mark January 1 as the start of the new year. I even did some googling this morning to find a rough guess of what percentage of the world actually celebrates these other solar cycles. Hmmm. Even calling them 'solar cycles' is probably not correct.

I've found that about.com usually does a pretty good job of collecting information on topics of interest and presenting them in a useful format on the web, including the Chinese New Year and the Jewish New Year.

At any rate, whether it's Thursday, 1 January 2004, 8 Dhu al-Qada 1424, 7 Teveth 5764, 11 Dey 1382, 22 Kiyahk 1720, or Sweetmorn, Chaos 1, Year of Our Lady of Discord 3170, I hope you have some fun today!

One of my Christmas presents this year was the Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture DVD game. Man, this is the best Trivial Pursuit I've seen in years!

We also got the Scene-It DVD game. It's awesome for move buffs, but can be frustrating for movie novices. The interface and game play are sweet!

Most of the last few weeks I've been sitting in front of one of my many computers doing a number of tasks, but mostly job hunting. Then, when finished with my daily web rounds, I'd 'work' on any number of things - update copyright statements on my web sites, defrag my hard drives, make sure I had the latest OS patches, that kind of meaningless thing. Some of what I was doing was really significant stuff, like making sure my work search log is up to date for Texas Unemployment, if and when they choose to audit my job search activities. Most of what I was doing wasn't really all that productive or important. In fact, my increased idleness and increased intake of Caffeine-Free Dr. Pepper has added a few pounds to my not-so-small frame (like 20 pounds!)

Last week, my wife started her winter break, and she's been home with me during the day and will be until she returns to work in January. While her presence has increased my activity around the house, it wasn't until the last few days that I really got active again. on Saturday, we spent the day cleaning out the garage, and we're able to park both vehicles in the garage again, something that's only happened twice in the two years we've been in the house! Needless to say, we were both really, really tired, but I felt a definite sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. Sunday we cleaned up in the house and made dinner for my step-sister. Then yesterday, Monday, I got out in the garage again and made a few shelves for a storage cabinet so that we could put more of our games and my card collection in it. While I had all the woodworking tools out, I went ahead and made a small holder for our darts (we just put the dart board up and cannot find the old wall-mount dart holder we had in the last house) and mounted it on the wall. Again, at the end of the day, very tired, but a huge sense of accomplishment.

I should mention here that I'm not a skilled woodworker or carpenter by any means. In fact, I went through three designs on the dart holder before I came up with one that would work and not look totally crappy. But through the process, I was exercising a number of body parts that don't usually get exercised, including my brain. I was having to think in ways I haven't thought in a very long time. But even being able to finish a simple, but practical, project was very fulfilling. And, I realized, I wasn't in the kind of mental funk that I'd been in the last few weeks.

While I was trying to get back to sleep at one point this morning, I thought of the phrase "Idle hands are the devil's playthings." At least, that's the way I heard it when I was growing up. I Googled the first part of the phrase this morning and found that there are several common variations of the phrase:

• Idle hands are the devil's tools
  
• Idle hands are the devil's workshop
  
• Idle hands are the devil's playthings
  
• Idle hands beget the devil's work
  
• Idle hands make the devil's work
  
• Idle hands are the devil's play pen

The link above points to the GoEnglish.com Pocket Idiom Site for an explanation of the phrase, which is pretty succinct, but focuses mainly on children. The Google search resulted in a number of pages of opinions about the phrase variations and what, if anything, it means in our society today. Trust me, the whole gamut of opinions is out there. Only a few that I found actually extended the thinking beyond the realm of children, teenagers specifically. Many of the authors discussed the need to keep 'idle hands' busy with tasks so that the same hands are unable to find other, destructive things to do.

I think it's more than busywork that's needed. I think back to high school and college classes where instructors would assign busywork to fill up time in class. I recall any number of times that my mind would wander while performing the busywork, and boy could my mind be mischievous! Well, the same thing has been happening to me recently. I've been going through the same busywork in my job hunt, all the while my mind has had the freedom and room to go off and think on it's own topics. Instead of the mischievous antics of my high school and college days, my mind has wandered into more melancholy topics, and as a result, I've been bogged down in this mire of apathy.

But that wasn't the case this past weekend. Keeping my body physically active and my mind fully engaged on the tasks at hand has had all of my life energy focused on productive, constructive tasks, and kept my mind out of the bog of eternal stench. Now, I was in a funk of a different kind yesterday, which I may or may not discuss in a future entry, but my overall attitude was more positive, more outgoing, and definitely more hopeful. So as I move into the new year and the prospects of getting back to work soon, I'm not too worried about falling back into an idle state. I have several projects to get started that will fully occupy my being and scare off those idle hands.

I've never been a huge fan of remakes, whether in music or movies. I'm not some sort of purist, thinking that you cannot improve on the original, although there are plenty of examples of that NOT happening out there (take Gus Van Sant's remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho"). But what I have been noticing in recent years is the increasing number of remakes in Hollywood and the music industry.

Tell me I'm wrong. In 2003 alone, we have been treated to a "Freaky Friday" remake (this remake for the big screen and not TV as in the 1995 version), yet another "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (not counting the Matthew McConaughey vehicle "The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre" in 1994), not to mention "The Italian Job," "Love Don't Cost a Thing" (taken from 1987's "Can't Buy Me Love"), and how can we forget "The In-Laws?"

In the music world, we find the ska-roots supergroup No Doubt taking a page from Talk Talk's past covering "It's My Life," teen crooner John Mayer does a turn on "Message in a Bottle," Russian dance duo t.A.T.u. deliver their rendition of The Smith's "How Soon Is Now," and Erasure (who is surprisingly still around) generates another take on The Buggle's MTV trivia answer "Video Killed The Radio Star." Even my favorite creative musical troupe Blue Man Group covered Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" on their second studio recording.

My personal favorite for remake heaven in 2003 belongs to Hootie and the Blowfish rerecording "The Goodbye Girl" for TNT's renovation of the Neil Simon production of the same name. Remaking a song for a TV remake of a movie remake of a stage play. What else can you ask for?

How about some originality?

Now, I'll be the first to admit that I've enjoyed some of these remakes this year. I was entertained by "The Italian Job," I've got "It's My Life" (both versions) in my iPod, and I'm wanting to see "Freaky Friday" because of the rave reviews Jamie Lee Curtis is getting for the role. But please! Is this what the cream of the entertainment crop is capable of these days? Are there no new ideas out there?

As further defense of my stance, I also offer the cinemazation of old TV shows as fodder for the moviegoing public. This year, we had another Charlie's Angels rendition at the megaplex, Ang Lee brought us his vision for "Hulk," and Colin Farrell and Samuel L. Jackson help us with another "S.W.A.T." And the trend continues - in production for 2004 releases are "Starsky and Hutch" and the second "Scooby Doo" movie.

When does it stop? Are we as a moviegoing public giving Hollywood execs a "thumbs up" by continually buying tickets for these reheated redos? Or am I just one of the minority wanting some originality from people who are being paid to be creative?

The one flaw in my argument, of course, is that not everything original is good (take "Gigli" for the prototypical example), nor is everything remade bad (the Ataris rendition of Don Henley's "Boys of Summer"). But the more we rehash what's already been done, the fewer the chances of something new really striking a chord with the world.

I'm very annoyed with American media, which has brought us a slate of "reality" television that has frankly insulted my intelligence. I really couldn't care who "wins" on "Survivor", if "The Bachelor" remains one, or just what the hell happens on "Temptation Island." I will tune in to formulaic shows like "While You Were Out" to glean some new decorating/remodeling ideas or "Good Eats" to expand my cooking repertoire. But I long for the TV days of "Twin Peaks" and "Nowhere Man" that made me think instead of just "veg out." I enjoyed the twist in "Identity" though I'm not much for slasher flicks. If I want to reminisce about my high school days, I'll put in "Grosse Point Blank" or a movie that was actually produced during that time period. I'll continue to spend my few moviegoing dollars on "Lord of the Rings" and "The Missing" and not reworks of older films or, God forbid, yet another TV rework.

Unless you're going to make a big screen treatment of "Monk".