Mastery

So a couple months ago I filled out a form listing all of the classes I have taken in the last year and a half, and now I have a master’s degree!! Life. Anyway, the first thing I did, naturally, was to take it to Kinko’s and have it photocopied, and then have the photocopy blown up to comical proportions (5 x 6 feet), and then have that framed in pure gold and hung in my Jacuzzi room. The second thing I did was to pause, step back, and take stock of the last year and a half. I came up with the following list.

Ways I have improved myself since college
1. More confident tone in emails
That’s all I’ve got.
The list had some other things on it before, but they got crossed off in afterthought. Like:
2. Spend less money on pot
Afterthought: I’m not sure where this has left me. Plus, now I just spend money on adult things that I thought were stupid in college, like ordering any drink other than “water” in a restaurant.
3. Read the newspaper
Afterthought: Even though I’ve been reading the newspaper for a while now, I still feel like an impostor in the way you do at the gym for the first time. I’m constantly waiting for the newspaper to be like, “You’re using that elliptical machine backwards, idiot.”
4. More accepting of otherness
Afterthought: By accepting things that younger me thought were lame/baffling, and swore never to understand, I may be betraying my teen self. So #4 is sort of a pyrrhic victory. King Pyrrhus being in this case the World Music phase of David Byrne.

In short: Here’s to being a master, me. A true master of life.

Re: LOL so true

This is a response to the post directly below it.

1) I'm telling that joke to kick off Liz's eulogy.

2) I wonder: if we had given them Facebook in 1906, and presented it as a solution to the anonymity and isolation problems created by the telephone, would they have sighed relief or become more anxious?

3) A related anecdote:
When I was in college, I went to a media studies conference and saw a grad student read a paper on how cable news screens were corrupting news(journalism? information?) by showing viewers so much information at one time that it was impossible to properly focus on any one story. She drew a diagram of the Headline News set-up and pointed at what she drew to represent the anchor's head, the over the shoulder image, and the news ticker below the anchor's face, over and over really quickly to show us how our eyes/minds were working when we watched that kind of show. Afterwards, two dude classmates of hers commented "Walter Benjamin said the same thing about newspapers." And their faces were like "we are sooo close to kind of fake laughing out loud right now. That's how stupid your paper is."

I wanted in on the fun, so I quickly started pretending like I could have started fake laughing at any moment. Others in the audience joined us. I thought we were doing this because we had all read newspapers and found it actually works out pretty well, so, like how Benjamin, in retrospect, sounds irrationally scared of newspapers, the presenter sounded irrationally scared of cable news which we all watch and don't really have that hard a time processing.

I just finally looked up that Benjamin essay (Storytelling), read several paragraphs of it online, and re-assessed that situation. Now I'm pretty sure the dudes we were laughing like "No shit, you idiot bitch. Benjamin already wrote about this problem, and in the exact same way. As fellow grad students this is hilarious to us because it means you have failed miserably in your research and have proven us to be the superior minds we always knew we were. Cable news is soooo confusing to us. I wouldn't even look at a newspaper for fear of complete disorientation. This is common knowledge."