Day: November 23, 2014

I haven’t had significant internet access since Thursday night. What should seem like a relatively minor thing to someone born before the internet was created, is actually a really big deal. Take the blog for instance. Here I am uploading three days worth in one day and feeling terribly guilty about it. I also feel less aware about what is going on in the world. I mean I could’ve picked up a newspaper and read something, but the ubiquity of network access has me trained to not only go to the net for news, but to read news in a whole new way.

News on the net is everywhere. I used to write a lot about how the internet allows you to experience the type of news that you decide you want to read or hear. This remains true and I likely do the same thing. I’ll cruise through Digg and CNN and BBC combing for angles on popular stories that tell me the writer did more than ‘mockingjay’ the person who first published on the topic. I’ll also pop open a new tab and go spelunking for more info on the topic and sometimes the writer. This is the beauty of the web—the story doesn’t have to end with the end of the article.

This is the curse of the web—without access to it, the world seems much more two dimensional in terms of information access. I suppose I could watch TV, but I’m not a fan of TV news. I suppose I could rock my phone for internet, but I do so much with music on that platform that I’m afraid of going over my plan limit and paying exorbitant fees.

So finally I was able to get a fairly stable net connection out of my room and I’ve been sitting here through the 5:30 midpoint hacking away at this blog and salivating about the good stuff I’m (hopefully) about to see on the web.

Good webhunting!

Disclaimer: I am a conspiracy theorist, so sometimes my ruminations will take me so deep down the rabbit hole that I have no idea how to crawl back out. For example, when I woke up this morning my web page was open to a CNN front page article about Adam Lanza. This is in the wake of the Florida State Library shooting, and tried to bring attention to the clear connection between mental deficiency and school shootings. My mind, on the other hand, started thinking about how the Lanza case tends to pop up every time people talk about guns in relation to a shooting, but disappears immediately after. I flash back to the work my students did on their ‘mythbuster’ papers and how one set of kids tried to convince me that the Lanza story was a complete fabrication and, for just a moment, I say hmm…

This piece isn’t about that possible hoax. This is about the ‘hoax’ of No Shave November (NSN). I haven’t shaved since the month started and my beard is about to where it can possibly be—which isn’t much. I don’t know think it looks very good. In truth I think the beard makes me look lazy, which is where the hoax comes in.

When I started the NSN, I wondered about my motivations. I only shave twice a month or so, and not having to do it at all felt like another thing being taken off my plate. It did not feel like I was giving something up or working particularly hard to bring attention to any issue or situation. Instead I was left with the impression that this whole thing is actually designed to let dudes off the hook of their responsibilities. Maybe it is. Maybe the whole thing is about the hair itself and when you see the men who haven’t shaved you’re supposed to connect the idea of cancer awareness to those men. I.e. These dudes are hip and real and do what they can to get the message out about prostate cancer. In contrast, the shaved men are not any of those things and or don’t give a dang. Only the shaved men outnumber the bearded few by a horrific scale. In other words, the message isn’t getting out there the way it should and is partly resulting in making us ‘not-so-long beards’ look really lazy.

I think Wednesday morning represented some kind of invisible line; a turn which once I’d made I could never come back from. I was sitting in class with a slew of much younger people and talking about vaping. Up until that point I hadn’t quite seen the parallels between my youth and their own. I was raised in an era where cigarettes were slowly fading into the realm of the unclean. Here now is a student vaping in the middle of class and presuming that it is totally okay.

Vaping is the new form of smoking. It is the term applied to people smoking vapor cigarettes. As I understand it a cartridge of nicotine is loaded into a water solution and processed through a small pipe or cigarette like device that permits you to exhale ‘harmless’ vapors into the air. This is so new that many locations (including my college) don’t have rules in place governing where you can or cannot smoke. As a result students are smoking that stuff in class without the slightest concern for whether or not it is disruptive to the environment.

It isn’t disruptive, really, but it is rather weird and difficult to comprehend in the context of my own personal history. That’s the turn I speak of. Growing up in an era where smoking was so heavily criticized it is foreign to recognize that I live in an era where a form of smoking is about to take off and start the cycle all over again. In a sense, history is repeating itself and I am at once the holdover codger of a bygone era struggling to recognize a world that no longer makes sense to me.

Or I’m just being a melodramatic talislegger talking about a relatively small-scale phenomena and equating it to a much broader cultural shift. You be the judge.