Unplug: Can You Do It?

LAST NIGHT I DREAMED I was drunk, belligerent and enjoying myself — not a good combination, nor one which I experience (or wish to experience) in real life. The subject of my tirade seems to have been the apologetic and paralyzing self-consciousness of the modern Jewish stereotype, and while I don’t remember exactly what I said I was truly “all het up” about it. (Which I occasionally am in real life, and maybe why it felt so good to express it.)

But that sense of muddy frustration evaporated when I discovered http://www.sabbathmanifesto.org/ and their call for a National Day of Unplugging from sundown March 4 to sundown March 5. Wondering what to do with your time? Ten suggestions are right here (from “Avoid technology” and “Get outside” to “Find silence” and “Give back”), but participants are also encouraged to create their own.

The basic idea is this: No one can run 24/7 without burning out, even someone as necessary and busy as you. So take a regular day off. See what’s within arm’s reach, and maybe rediscover who you are and what you’re doing here — or at the very least, take a well-earned nap. (Remember naps?)

(And if you found this via Facebook during one of many five-minute “just checking” sessions, you might just want to unplug right now.)

Compassionings

IT IS PRECISELY AT THAT moment when compassion seems most remote that it is most greatly needed. This principle is easier spoken than implemented — what isn’t? — but holds true not only for the individual, who is buffeted by a daily stream of bad news, but his or her logical and multiplex counterparts, arrayed in a social complex which seems to crumble by the day despite sincere effort. Some of us feel like we’re propping up a collapsing tent — but prop we must, because it’s what we do. If we are fools, as we even sometimes seem to ourselves, at least we’re getting some exercise. Maybe we’ll even glimpse Someone Else through the enshrouding folds.

Everyone you see is broken. Everyone needs at least a smile; some also need a job, or food, or shelter, or a reason to live. We are seeing heartbreak and pain on a massive and seemingly accelerating scale. We all need acknowledgment that we’re not alone — that our cry in the dark is at least heard, even if we are powerless to do more than cry, or listen.

We need each other, because we are all we have. So be kind to someone today. It may be their last, or yours.

Free Metaphor: “Don’t Poke The Squid”

STUCK FOR AN ANALOGY WHEN your well-intendeds provoke a horrible mess that you should have known better than to bother with? Then “Don’t Poke The Squid.”

Squid are lovely, largely inoffensive creatures who flash and lurk throughout the ocean’s vasty deep. They have eight tentacles and two arms; all appendages have suckers, some jaggedly toothed. They flail something awful when disturbed, and can entwine sperm whales instantly and dance them to death. What chance has an unwary swimmer? Thus, for your own safety and health, “Don’t Poke The Squid.”

(Usage of this metaphor is subject to payment via pizza or other coin-shaped vittles. Thankee sir or madam, and g’blessye.)

Ship Geeks Ahoy

IF YOU’RE CURIOUS ABOUT LIFE on the other side of the foghorns, waste no time in clicking on marinetraffic.com — a global, scalable, real-time map of the world’s shipping traffic, from cargo and passenger vessels to navaids and tankers to tugs and pilots. Each is labeled with specifications, course and speed (if applicable) and destination. (Think of it as a very stately air-traffic control diagram. Which makes me wonder if there’s one for air traffic … clicketyclickety … yep: flightradar24.com. Cool. Limited, but cool.) With this in one window and the Califonia Highway Patrol’s dispatch logs in another, I feel like a secret peeker at the world’s gears.
(Thanks to Friend-of-the-Show Steve Marler for sliding this my way.)

Words Mean Stuff

A SHORT LIST OF WORDS which, through overuse, have been consigned to the meaning-deficient self-parody heap:

Blatant
Flagrant
Offen(sive/ded)
Rabid
Sexist
Racist
Controversy
Security
Freedom
Democracy
Republican
Terrorism
Diva

(There are others, but these are what I found in this morning’s newspaper. Additions and substitutions welcome.)

Quick Review: Toy Story 3

ANOTHER GREAT PIXAR ROMP — IMAGINATIVE, colorful, well-rendered, well-written. But I can’t get over what a JERK that stuffed bear is.