There's an ongoing disagreement between me and my wife about television, of all things. She's of the opinion that television is bad for our seven month-old son, whereas I think that's just plain nonsense.
The basis on which I build my side of the argument is that, after an hour-and-a-half of attempting to entertain my boy face-to-face, I'm pretty much desperate for something else that can hold his attention for awhile. And, since television--particularly the "Nick Jr" channel--seems to delight him to no end, I have a hard time finding any problem with it. Besides, watching Nick Jr may actually one day result in the boy learning some Spanish, Chinese and sign language, so he'll have surpassed all his father's communications skills by the age of five.
My wife, on the other hand, always falls back on "experts." After arguing my position until I'm out of breath, she'll always just click off the television and say "All the experts agree television is bad for babies."
I really get frustrated with my wife's "experts" argument, because it's entirely unfair. For starters, she doesn't have to name specific people, or even their professions: they're just "experts." She doesn't even have to bother to tell me where she heard or read of these experts and their position on infant television viewing. They're just experts, and they're all in agreement. How can I even begin to argue with that? I can't even cite leaked e-mails that show experts have been fudging their research numbers and subverting the work of other experts who disagree with them. It's exasperating.
What makes it all even more irritating are the uneven ways by which my wife implements her interpretation of the advice of the "experts." For example, I've noticed that television viewing is particularly bad for our son when I fall back on it after exhausting my own personal Daddy powers. However, television is perfectly permissable if my wife wants to take a ten minute shower.
Television is also okay if my wife has to conduct some business on her computer. Apparently, her understanding of the experts is that yelling "You're doing good, Honey!" from two rooms away to an infant watching "The Smurfs," is entirely acceptable and promotes infant health. However, the moment Daddy flicks on the tube in an attempt to assuage a fussy baby, I'm informed that the "experts" all agree television is rotting our child's brain as we speak.
The rate of brain rot, the experts say, accellerates in direct proportion to how much Daddies may find relaxation and entertainment from the television viewing. Television is at its worst for babies when it seems to be annoying Mommies. It's all based on very complicated research and numbers. It's science.
Personally, I'm inclined to think my wife may be spouting a bunch of bull. I know a thing or two when it comes to throwing bull. You could say I'm something of an expert.
Caroline: Yes, I open a blank .doc file when I start a new article.
Ryan: See, I always open an old file, delete all the old text, and save it as a different file.
Caroline: why?
Ryan: Habit, mostly. But I started doing it to preserve all the old settings and fonts and margins of the previous file. It never caused any issues, until I came here.
Ryan: Thing is, even if you do a "Save as" of an old file into a new file, the file retains some of the old information from the old file. Such as the title of the document.
Caroline: well that's stupid
Ryan: It is. Anyway, I sent a file on to editing today. It was about "Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation."
Caroline: riveting
Ryan: Guess what the title of the document is. . .
Ryan: "Barbecuing."
Caroline: I can see the connection.
Caroline: Why do you have a doc about barbecuing?
Ryan: I couldn't for the life of me figure out how I had a .doc file about barbecuing. Then I remembered I wasn't the original content producer. It originally came from a freelancer.
Ryan: So, apparently, I'm not the only person who does a "Save as" over previous files.
Caroline: That's so weird. i wouldn't think to do that.
Ryan: It would be interesting to discover just what doc titles are floating around that have nothing to do with the actual content.
Caroline: You and I have different definitions of the word "interesting"
Ryan: Oh, come on. Imagine if "Barbecuing" was the title of a .doc file about Heat Ablation Surgery.
Caroline: Funny, yes. Interesting ... probably not.
There was a time when I felt I was generally caught up with technology and its associated effects on how the mass media is distributed and beamed into people's cerebrums.
That time was 3:45 p.m. on Aug. 12, 2004.
Ever since then, I think I've basically been watching the technology/mass media bus leave me behind in a choking plume of diesel exhaust and helplessness
I'm not sure what happened, exactly. One day I felt all hip and with it, with a blog--A BLOG!--and I was writing for a business IT magazine and everything. Now, I'm basically totally confused and out of my element.
It's not like I haven't TRIED to keep up. I have a FaceBook account, and a Twitter account, and a LinkedIn account, and even a Tumblr presence (which I don't much like because it feels like the blogging equivalent of "Meh). But maintaining all those different social and professional networking presences is like trying to juggle kittens: sure, it's amusing, but the claws hurt and it just seems cruel somehow.
It doesn't help that I've never been much of a multi-tasker, and each social and professional networking offering that blinks into existence tends to have its own unique audience, at least for me: Facebook is for friends and family, so watch the effenheimers, if you please; Twitter is for 140 character missives that challenge me to make very tightly wrapped poop and fart jokes; LinkedIn is where I sheepishly ask current and former colleagues to keep me in mind for any writing/editor positions or freelance opportunities and always reminds me of Russell Crowe passing the hat around the bar for donations in "Cinderella Man;" Tumblr's where I post whatever Web flotsam I find amusing on any given day; and of course through it all there's this eternal blog. Oh, and also, YouTube, which I primarily use to upload baby videos.
That's a lot of crap to keep straight in my head, and it's supposed to be FUN, but there are times when it feels an awful lot like work.
And that doesn't even begin to address the world of digital gadgetry, an area that I've had almost no interest in whatsoever. Texting has always struck me as a completely pointless exercise to engage in when I've been writing professionally for over a decade. . . you know, with real WORDS and everything. In those rare instances when I do dabble in LOL-speak, I consider it the equivalent of kicking a dog turd down the street a piece.
I have a cell phone, but I don't really want anything to do with a "smart phone." I have a Microsoft Zune and Flip Video camera, but I only even knew about those because I won them via Pepsi Sweepstakes. I mean, I LOVE the Flip camera, but until I was informed I won one, I had no clue what it was. And, of course, the Flip camera has only led to my further immersion into YouTube.
With the exception of LinkedIn, all the preceeding stuff I dabble in for personal entertainment and archiving purposes. The professional world of the Web has left me completely mystified.
I've been writing freelance articles and humor columns now going back to 1999, so I like to think I have some understanding of freelance writing gigs. But searching for freelance writing opportunities online is like diving naked into a pool full of worms.
I mean, there are a ton of freelance writing opportunities available online, but most of them offer writing gigs that are the literary equivalent of a Chinese sweatshop that requires a single worker to churn out 900 Air Jordans a day for the price of a chicken and a smile. I've seen online content requests asking for 500 word product reviews for $10. At that rate, I'd have to write 23 hours a day, seven days a week, just to pay my mortgage.
And even those 500 word $10 gigs come with their own challenges, including writing for search engine optimization (SEO), which is just a bitch of a way write content. If you read something crafted to appear high in search engine results, you'll notice it's alarmingly similar to listening to the automated voice on the Weather Channel.
Also, perhaps you've already heard, but "Content is King," which is an encapsulated way of saying "throw as much crap against the wall as you can in the hopes that some of it sticks." Those online freelance gigs mentioned earlier? The companies that offer those gigs aren't much interested in general written quality; they just want something--A LOT OF THINGS--they can upload and attach ads to. Which of course just means the Web is getting ridiculously bigger and louder and messier every single day.
And every day it just gets more and more complex, and more and more niche. And I honestly don't know if I can keep running along behind this technology bus much longer, because diesel smoke is just murder on the lungs.
Ryan: "Mass. woman with no arms preparing for black belt"
Caroline: Glad it's not "Black arm band"
Ryan: "McCorry, her teacher, said he's never seen a student like Radziewicz. Despite her condition, she can use nunchucks and break boards with her kicks."
Ryan: This is where sentence structure comes into play. She can use nunchuks with her kicks?
Caroline: That confused me for a second.
Ryan: How dangerous do you have to be to use nunchuks with your kicks?
Ryan: Like dodging the kick isn't hard enough, you also have to take into account the nunchuks.
Caroline: I wouldn't want to find out. There should've been a 5th Ninja Turtle who was armless and used nunchucks with his kicks.
Ryan: "The foot I could deal with, but those fucking nunchuks got me right between the eyes."
Caroline: Fucking nunchucks.
Ryan: Fuckchucks.
Caroline: Holy nunfucks
Ryan: Sacreliscious.
Caroline: Mmmmm.
