There's an App for That?!

A while back, I watched a YouTube video by Doug Walker (aka The Nostalgia Critic) of Channel Awesome.

This is not a review of that video.

This is me, as usual, marveling at the human animal’s infinite distractibility by anything that makes them go ‘Ooh! Shiny!’

A sponsor for the aforementioned video, Stardust, is an app which enables the user to record their initial reaction to new media; namely movies, TV shows, and trailers for same.

My initial reaction upon discovering that this was even ‘a thing’ was incredulity. “Really? This is something we need? A platform dedicated strictly to videos of people going berserk over the season finale of [insert popular show here yourself, I don’t know what’s cool these days]? How many people a) actually want to do that, and b) feel they need a special tool to do it?!”

After a preliminary fit of spleen (with a smattering of abject, foul-mouthed disdain, because this is me we’re talking about), I took a deep breath and tried to turn my mind back and trace just how we’ve gotten to this stage as a species. That, however, just royally pissed me off because what immediately came to mind was the meteoric rise of photos of avocado toast, and I abandoned the whole line of reasoning for about a month in a fit of pique.

Now, having gotten over my tantrum, I am prepared to explore this phenomenon for what it is: yet another brick in the ‘You are here’ wall. I remember the beginnings of social media (oh, here she goes with the ‘back in my day’ spiel) when sites like MySpace were a tool to engage with your friends without actually having to leave the house. (Let’s not even discuss Geocities websites. Then? Cool. Now? The thing we don’t admit we had because it’s just too embarrassing.) Unless I’m much mistaken, it took brands and celebrities a while to work out how to effectively use those kinds of sites to successfully market their wares, so in the beginning it was mostly just people doing people things.

What those ‘people things’ entail has changed drastically in the last fifteen years. We’re all connected to everything these days, up to and including photos of each other’s cats, breakfast casserole recipes, and workout suggestions. We take and share photos, we spout our opinions, we share funny things, sad things, fundraising things, and mundane things, so it stands to reason that methods for sharing niche interests would begin to crop up like toadstools after an all-night deluge, and that, friends, is how we ended up with Stardust.

The Stardust website states: “Stardust aims to foster a community for Movie & TV fanatics to connect and share their opinions about the entertainment they love.” Well, that’s not too offensive, is it? On the surface, it’s just another techie tool to connect people who like the same things. I’m not opposed to that. But here, in my humble opinion, is where Stardust starts to get a bit too big for its britches: “As one of the fastest growing platforms for video-content creators, Stardust is here to help you rise atop the global movie & TV community.”

Rise atop the global movie & TV community? That might be a little far-fetched. Engage with fellow movie and TV buffs? Yes. Create new and interesting content about your favorite new films and shows? Yeah, maybe. But skyrocket to fame as the result of a thirty second video of you squeeing over the newest Pixar film?

I think not.

Obviously there are people who have taken advantage of a particular platform or platforms and created a following for themselves, but it wasn’t immediate. It took work, and that work didn’t stop when they achieved a certain level of success. Realistically, even if you were to generate enough interest to develop a covey of devotees through the Stardust platform, the likelihood of you being more than a flash in the pan is pretty slim. In this day and age of instant everything, everyone can do exactly what you’re doing. You’d have to be pretty damned persistent to keep everyone’s attention, and tirelessly creative, to boot.

Moral: For my young impressionables, sit down and have a ‘Come to Jesus’ with yourself before you embark upon any kind of internet or app-based crusade in search of recognition. For the rest of you, it’s okay, you know how to deal with your own shit and you don’t need me telling you anything. Go, you!

If you haven’t noticed, when there’s a parade around I generally rain on it.

“Wait, wait, wait — what exactly are you doing, Miss I-Have-A-Blog?”

I began this endeavor with no delusions of… well, much of anything, really. I just needed to write, and I figured if I was going to do that I might as well let people read what I was turning out, and now here we are. I’ve done the math. As of last week, I was averaging 39.6 hits per post. I’m honestly amazed I made it into double digits. Would I like to reach more people? Sure! But that’s not really the point. The point is that I’m very busy happily doing my thing, and apparently there are people who want to come along for the ride. If they make suggestions or requests, I’ll do my best to accommodate, because if they’re kind enough to take the time to read, they deserve my attention.

I’ll leave you with this thought:

“If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.” -Katharine Hepburn

It Goes from Dogs to Plates. (It Makes Sense, I Swear.)

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The thought path on this one is a little circuitous — just bear with me.

The other week I had occasion to dig through my old photo files and, in doing so, found a bunch of pictures of me with other people’s dogs. At this point, sadly, all of the dogs in the photos have moved on from this life, and they are all very much missed by their humans and their extended human family. Naturally, I got a little verklempt over the whole thing. These were records of furry little souls I had spent time with, and it’s all I have left of them. Photos and lovely, slobbery, wiggly, tail-waggy memories.

All of those dogs were special to me, and to their families, but there’s always one, isn’t there? One that’s beyond special. One that full-body-wiggles its way into your heart, turns around three times, and settles in forever.

For me, it was Monty.

Monty was an American Pit Bull Terrier (possibly a mix, but that’s a secret known only to his mother and father). He was mostly black with a white patch on his chest and little white French manicure tips on three of his paws. He was a rescue. He was missing half his teeth, had a scar down one side which seemed to be linked to his only-noticeable-if-you-were-looking-for-it limp, and he was afraid of everything. If it made noise, he didn’t want anything to do with it. If it was unfamiliar, he hid behind what was. If it was large and male and human? Oh, that was the biggie. Large, male, and human sent him under the nearest piece of furniture or the deck or whatever was on hand to be used for hiding.

Long story short, the poor guy had trust issues.

This is going somewhere, I swear. My little foray into those photos got me thinking about Monty, which got me thinking about the origin of trust.

We’re born with nothing. We’re helpless and squalling and utterly dependent upon those around us to attend to our needs.

“But how would an infant have the capacity to trust or not? They haven’t developed that level of thought yet.”

Well, in a way, they have. They trust that if they make enough fuss, something will be done. They’re hard-wired for that.

“But is that really trust, or is that just screaming?”

Inclined as I am to classify it as ‘just screaming’, it’s screaming with a purpose (usually), and it’s a cry for anyone within earshot. Eventually — and I’m sure it’s different for everyone — preferences for caregivers manifest, presumably based upon routine and familiarity, but there’s a level of trust involved in those things, too.

“I trust these two big people because they take care of me. I don’t trust that old bag who shows up on Tuesdays because she doesn’t do things the same way as my normal big people.”

...I’m not sure if the concept of Tuesday and having the presence of mind to classify someone as an ‘old bag’ are too far advanced for a fictional infant’s inner monologue.

If one doesn’t first trust, how can one come to distrust? This would imply the existence of inherent trust. I mean, if we were all born cynical and paranoid there would be far fewer hours of classroom instruction devoted to lessons involving things like: “John can trust Mrs. Peterson because she lives next door and knows John and his mommy and daddy. John can’t trust the man in the windowless white van outside the school yard because he has never met him before.”

So are we born with an inherent level of trust, and as we grow, we refine it through experience? Perhaps along the lines of ‘We trusted Uncle Joe to toss us in the air and catch us, until one day he missed, and now we won’t play that game with him anymore, because ow’?

Or do we learn to trust only after we’ve been treated in a fashion that leads us to distrust the person or situation that was unpleasant? But again, this implies an inherent level of trust to begin with, and we’re back where we started.

Chicken? Egg?

Never mind where it comes from or how we develop it, I suppose the heart of the matter is that trust is both an intensely fragile thing, and can have the strength of an iron girder. It’s all in how you nurture it.

If we go back to Mr. Monty for a minute, he was conditioned, through unconscionable abuse, to distrust just about everything. That distrust stayed with him even after he was safely in a home with people who cared for him. I’m still, frankly, amazed at the fact that he trusted me the way he did. It took him a solid hour, but once he decided I was safe, I was safe forever. 

Like, “Hi, I’m a dog and I’m going to sleep rightnexttoyou and snore in your ear and hide behind you when the doorbell rings kthx” safe.

How? Why? What made him come to that decision? Would it have changed after the fact if I had started kicking him? (I would NEVER, obviously, but it’s something to think about.) And this is the thought process of a dog, which, according to everything we know at this point in time, isn’t nearly as complex as that of a human being.

So let’s add that layer of complexity. Human beings exist with a whole lot of gray area. We trust different people to different extents. I might trust a co-worker about as far as I could throw them, but I trust my best friend with my deepest, darkest everything. I might trust Emily to keep a secret, but not Jane because we all know she’s got the biggest damn mouth there ever was and ever will be, amen. These are things we learn as we go along. Whether we attack them from a place of initial trust or initial distrust is a product of so many factors in our lives. If we’ve existed in an environment conducive to trust, we have no trouble placing trust in others — ‘innocent until proven guilty’, if you like — and we’re surprised when someone dishonors that trust. On the other hand, if we’ve come from a place of keeping everything at arms length because experience has taught us that very little is to be trusted at the outset, we expect to have others betray us at every possible opportunity.

Though these are equally valid methods for assessing our acquaintances, the latter comes with some extra baggage that speaks to a destructive sort of nurture. There’s a meme that makes the rounds on the internet every so often. It goes something like, “Take a plate. Smash it on the floor. Now say you’re sorry”, the point being that once you’ve fucked up, the person on the receiving end is irrevocably damaged, and no amount of ‘I’m sorry’ is going to return them to their original, unbroken-plate state. Once fractured, it becomes more difficult to believe that the next person isn’t going to eventually smash you to bits, too.

Why do humans have such a difficult time just being basically decent to each other? I doubt we’ll ever know.

Moral: Don’t be the plate-smasher.

And I hope beyond hope that you’re not the plate.

The Devil You Know

Everywhere in the world has its own unique set of geographical quirks. There are monsoons in India, tornadoes in middle America, and sandstorms in the Sahara. People who inhabit these places are well versed in their local natural phenomena, and generally seem to take them in stride. It’s only to out-of-towners that things like hurricanes and blizzards are incomprehensibly frightening. I don’t particularly think I’d like to deal with a tsunami, thanks very much, that sounds like a whole lot of not fun. But to someone who hears the sirens on a regular-ish basis? It’s just another day at the office. Last week provided one of those “Oh, is that happening again?” moments.

On January 4th, 2018, at approximately 2:30 AM, the earth moved.

Not everywhere, just under me and the rest of the residents within a certain radius of the epicenter of the event.

I’m a native Californian. Earthquakes are just ‘this thing that happens’. The one the other week was a magnitude 4.5, which means nothing to you unless you’re used to riding them out or you have an unhealthy addiction to the Richter Scale.

I was in bed. The quake itself didn’t wake me up — I had woken up about three minutes prior for no apparent reason. When it kicked off I was startled, but it became almost immediately clear what was happening, so I just stayed put. About the time I was starting to consider getting up and seeking shelter, it was over. No aftershocks, the ceiling was still where it was supposed to be, everything was fine.

So I rolled over and went back to sleep.

I consider this to be a perfectly reasonable response to an earthquake. People I know who live in areas not prone to tectonic plate movement, on the other hand, think I’m off my head. “OMG, earthquakes must be so scary! How can you react to them so calmly?!”

Darlin’s, I remember Loma Prieta. Ladies and gentlemen, THAT was an earthquake.

October 17th, 1989
17:04
Magnitude 6.9

I was three-and-a-half, and spending the day with my maternal grandparents in Los Gatos while my mother was teaching at the Yamaha store in San Jose. (Pianos, not motorcycles. I do not have a badass, motorcycle-riding mother. At least, not yet. I’m still waiting for the call to say she’s finally embarked upon her mid-life crisis.)

My grandmother and I were in the kitchen. The way their kitchen was set up didn’t allow for a table, so the counter on one side was like a diner counter. There was a pass-through so that if you sat at the counter you could see anyone in the living room. Or, you know, the TV. Above the pass-though on the kitchen side was a glass-front cabinet full of commemorative wine glasses. My grandmother had me sitting on the diner counter underneath the aforementioned glassware while she fixed my dinner. I’m sure we were having a conversation of the sort you have with three year olds.

When the house started to shake — after the initial WTF?! moment — my grandmother grabbed me off the counter because I was under a literal wall of glass, and those tend to shatter if disturbed. The next part is a little weird. I think she must have originally intended to take me out the front door, but changed her mind once we were out of the kitchen and headed for the dining table. The kitchen opened at both ends, so she could very easily have gone straight for the table to begin with, but what the hell do I know, I was three and freaking the fuck out. In any case, we made a circle, and I know this to be a fact because to this day, I can vividly see my grandmother falling on top of me in front of the living room sofa. The next thing I remember after that is being under the table for a reeeeeaaaallllly long time with her and losing my shit every time there was an aftershock. Actually, both the aftershocks and me losing my three-and-a-half-year-old mind went on for a couple of days after the initial quake.

Needless to say, it took my mother longer than usual to collect me that evening, and my dad longer to get home from the Cottle Road IBM campus. Mom had ended up taking refuge under a piano to ride the quake out, but my father’s story is the best. He was on a conference call with the IBM office in Rochester, MN, and when the building started going and didn’t immediately stop, he dived under his desk with the phone and said, “Sorry, guys, I’m going to have to call you back. We’re having an earthquake. Bye!!!”

Sixty-three people were killed, all told.

Property damage was estimated between five and six billion dollars.

But the Oakland A’s stole the World Series victory from the San Francisco Giants. Silver lining!

So, yeah. A 4.5 in the wee hours of the morning? Piece of cake.