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As I’ve mentioned before, I am a huge fan of This American Life. I used to listen it during my long drives across the US, whether it was driving back to Washington after hiking in the White Mountains in New Hampshire or traveling back to Ann Arbor after spending the weekend in Chicago. It’s been a staple of life for years, and after I moved to the UK, I started listening online, especially after they started doing podcasts this year.
Suw has quickly become a big fan, and we now often listen to the show on weekends over breakfast. Yesterday, we listened to the latest episode “Quiz Show“. The second of three acts was about MIT Mystery Hunt. As the show notes says:
Every winter, some of the world’s best puzzle solvers gather in Boston for the MIT mystery hunt, a competition in which teams of puzzle enthusiasts spend between 24 and 72 straight hours trying to solve what just may be the hardest recreational puzzles in the world.
I’m not really much of a puzzle person, but Suw and I both related to the slightly obsessive collectors of knowledge (some would say trivia) that made up these puzzle teams. I’m a geek, happily a pretty well adjusted geek as my friend Vicky says, but I wave my geek flag high. One of the members of the Dr. Awkward team (palindrome, as they were quick to note) was a guy named Dave. At a previous job, Dave had been told by his mentor that his colleagues were uncomfortable because he used too many literary allusions in his casual speech. People were complaining.
Dave was a bit baffled, but made a note of the things that he would have said over the next week. Then having lunch with former co-workers, he was asked a question about monkeys and chimps in which he went on a this painfully long exposition about the differences between apes, monkeys and prosimians. He had done a report on it when he was nine-years-old, and it was a personal obsession of his. His colleague said, “Yeah, Dave, speaking of animals, would you like to see the rat’s ass that I give.” Dave had an aha moment:
Ohh, that’s my problem. I inform people against their will.
Lisa Pollack, the producer narrating the piece, said that Dave and other puzzle solvers like him had found the context where they could shine, a place where their skills were best put to use and appreciated.
Suw and I both had those moments in life, where we found our peer group. For me, it was when I went from a small country school where I was the class geek to the Auburn Academy, a magnet school in an inner-city high school. Suw found the peer group in blogging and Joi Ito’s IRC channel a few years ago. We found a place where our slightly geeky skills were appreciated and where we weren’t ostracised for our intellectual curiosity.
It also made me think slightly about my day job as a journalist. I don’t want to go too much into that, that’s what our other blog Strange Attractor is for, but really, sometimes journalists ‘inform people against their will’. We like to think we know what people should know, but we forget that people don’t always respond well to being told what is important. They have their own issues an concerns. Sometimes, I’m sure that when journalists get too high on their horses, people just say: “Yeah, would you like to see the rat’s ass I give”.
I was walking to work today and had to stop and take a quick snap with the camera on my phone. It was just one of those incidental images that catches your eye. I just wish that I had my proper camera with me. But I looked at this trampled rose on the morning after Valentine’s Day, and I wondered what was the story behind it. Was it dropped in an absent-minded moment of revelry from the overfilled arms of a woman wrestling with a huge bouquet? Was it dropped by one of those rose salesman walking in and out of restaurants trying to make a buck last night? Or was it thrown to the ground after a spat that ensued after a couple stayed out too late, drank too much and the slightest offence took on an outsized importance.
I don’t know, but it looked so forlorn, trampled on the pavement like that. Sorry if this sounds a bit like a glass half empty. I blame it on This American Life and the episode about Star Crossed Love that I was listening to this morning on my way into work.
I ain’t saying goodbye to my pork pie hat. (Why is this in the music category? Follow the link. Not half as good as the Ah Um version, but then I’m particular that way…and thanks to Dan Chung for taking the picture.)
technorati tags:CharlesMingus, porkpiehat, kevinanderson
It came in time for Valentine’s Day, just as Nigel, our friend who is making the ring, wanted. Suw is traveling today so I placed the stones in the ring and took this picture so that Suw could get a look. She will suggest a few changes, but she was really happy to see the ring with the stones in.
A friend of mine was cross with me that Suw was actually choosing her own ring. Hey, we’re a user-generated content kind of couple so why not crowdsource her ring?
I’m really happy that a friend is making the ring, and that we’re getting a say in how it looks. It’s based on Suw’s great-grandmother’s ring. That one is so worn that the metal is just a thread on one side. I love the citrine’s. They will go so well with the amber that Suw loves so much. This is only a silver model. After we’re happy with it, Nigel will cast it in white gold. Exciting!
First off, what I’m about to write in no way means that I’m any less chuffed about being engaged. I’m actually happier and more excited than I thought I would be. Not that I thought I wouldn’t be happy, but both Suw and I let our brains get the better of us at times and tend to over-analyse things. (I anticipate a knowing groan from family and those of you who know us well.)
OK, enough of a disclaimer. I now feel as if I’ve given myself enough cover to write openly. Last week, we went shopping at the local Waitrose. Just as we got to the checkout, Suw said, “Forgot something”, and dashed off. She came back with You & Your Wedding magazine. Actually, it’s too encyclopedic to be called a magazine. It’s got a biblical heft to it. I told Suw if she wanted to work on her biceps, she could just do some arm curls with it.
Don’t take my word it. “276 ways to wow!” I mean, you’re not going to fit ‘276 ways to wow’ in a skimpy little publication. I just flipped to the back: 432 pages in total. There are a bunch of other pamphlets, fliers and ads included that we haven’t even touched. After leafing through it for a while, Suw discovered that the average reader of You & Your Wedding spends £20,000 pounds on their wedding. Gulp.
This all reminded me of a theory of mine. Growing up, everyone remembers when we our thoughts turned to well, sex. For some it was members of the opposite sex, or for others members of the same sex. But let’s face, it was about sex. In the Midwest of the US where I come from, we tend to paper over such sordid things. As we used to say, Christians don’t get horny, they get married, but whether PG or R-rated, dating, relating and, for some, mating began to take up a lot of our spare time.
Now, for most people, dating leads to marriage at some point. For Suw and I, it took a little longer than most to find someone that we could tolerate and that would actually tolerate us. About five years ago, I noticed that women’s thoughts had changed, had turned again. Their focus was well, more focused. It wasn’t just about dating. It was a single-minded obsession with marriage. That was one of the great things about dating Suw, we got to enjoy the romance of falling in love before getting ahead of ourselves and worrying about the ’till death do you part’ part.
I put this matrimonial obsession down in part to where I lived at the time: Washington DC, where we didn’t just have alpha males, we also had alpha females. Alpha females had gone to the best schools, landed the right job out of university, got the advanced degree young and began to climb the ladder with great vigour. That’s all well and good. In their 20s, they worked hard and played hard. When they decided that they wanted to get married, they did it with the same single-minded sense of purpose that they had done everything else. It did bleed much of the romance out of the process, and many women in Washington wondered why men fled in terror. They put it down to fear of commitment. No, it was a primitive fight-or-flight response brought about by predatory dating practices. A friend was once asked his net worth on the first date. Needless to say, there wasn’t a second date. All of us men knew there was a check list by which we were being measured, but when a woman whips out the pen and clipboard, it banishes all pretence from the process.
I don’t blame women for this. I blame the wedding-industrial complex. Just like so many other traditions debased by consumerism (see Christmas), marriage and really the wedding itself has become just like so many other consumer goods. It’s marketed and packaged like so much processed food. Your wedding: Now with 25% more lace, flowers and stress. The societal pressure for women to marry is bad enough (men don’t have any pressure to get hitched), but then add to that the slickly produced hard sell of wedding-industrial complex and it’s no wonder there are so many attacks of bride-zilla. But all this again just bleeds the romance out of everything.
I’m trying to balance keeping a cool head about the whole thing in the face of a lot of planning – especially considering the Trans-Atlantic nature of our wedding – while keeping a focus on what the day is really about: This is about me standing up in front of friends and family and pledging my love to Suw. That’s a beautiful thing in itself, and all this expensive garbage just distracts from the real focus. Suw and I are looking forward to a great celebration with friends and family. We’re going to make this day ours and not get suckered by the wedding-industrial complex to spend a lot of money making our day look like everyone else’s.
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