Wednesday April 23, 2003

ATTENTION DEFICIT SYNDROME

Those few people out there who’ve read my past blogs have gotten this riff before. Sorry. You guys may as well just scroll on down to whatever I wrote about Sports Night and West Wing and Aaron Sorkin in general, somewhere below. Those who are new to my blogging, though, strap yourselves in.

I haven’t even been public blogging again for a week and all the old frustrations are back. Worse, because this time I actually broke down and did what everyone told me I should have done the first time around: got myself some comment threads.

On my very first blog, I did everything I could think of to get feedback from folks. For that matter, if you go to my geek page, which has been up for years now, you’ll find a gentle note at the top begging, positively pleading for email. I put up a bulletin board there. And on my previous blog, I begged, cajoled, ordered, threatened to stop blogging, even forbid people to send me email. I created fake email so folks would think I was getting a lot of it, which I know usually makes me want to write someone.

In all the time I had my first blog, do you know how many unsolicited emails of feedback I got on it? As Mark Evanier once said about James Garner’s profit sharing payments from Rockford Files… guess low. Guess real low. And if you guessed anything at all, you’re an order of magnitude high, because, that’s right, I got no emails. Nothing. Beating my brains out, doing some of my best writing ever, really cogent, witty, lucid stuff, and begging, begging, begging for the validation of one, lousy email so I’d have some evidence, besides the hit counter, that anyone was actually reading my horseshit, and maybe, thinking about it.

Zero. Zip. Nada. When you stare into the abyss, the abyss not only doesn’t stare back, it won’t even email you.

What really most disappointed and offended me was when a good friend of mine (or a good email pal, anyway) admitted, after I took my blog private, that he had been one of my ‘silent lurkers’… he’d read my blog whenever I modified it, and generally enjoyed it, but like everyone else, he just never really got around to sending me an email about it. Now, this I don’t understand. What’s the big deal about writing an email? I send emails to blogs I find and am impressed by all the time. It takes a minute or so. Nearly all of them have email links on them; you hit the link, your email window opens with their address in it, you type some stuff to them, you hit send. Why is that hard?

I don’t know. But I seem to be the only person in the universe who will send a person unsolicited email on their blog, or their other work that I find on the web and like. I should be proud to be unique, but I really don’t understand it. In fact, I once got screamed at for sending an email to someone… but never mind, she’s a psycho, not valid data.

And now, here we go again. I started up another public blog. A few people have been nice enough to blog roll me, or vaguely promise they will, next time they get around to it. One person, Emily Jones… praise her, praise her… even gave me a nice plug on her blog. I got the comment threads. In the last four days, I’ve had… well, a lot of traffic, according to my hit counter. And I’ve had some comments (when Squawkbox wants to bother to work) but sure as hell not many, and I’ve had a few unsolicited emails on stuff I’ve written (and that’s been nice). So I’m already an order of magnitude further along than I was on my previous blog.

And it’s still just so goddam frustrating.

I know I’m not the only one. I slog around to a few blogs regularly and try to post comments whenever I’ve got something to say that’s even barely worth the effort of typing. Most of the people whose blogs I comment on have come by my blog and desultorily dropped comments on my threads. And I know they’re in the same boat I am… frustrated and aggravated, as Emma Goldman once said to me, ‘tapping on the monitor, feeling like Homer Simpson, wondering if there’s anyone out there’.

And it’s frustrating. Yes, I’ve had more feedback this time around than I had last time, and I should be grateful, but I’m a brat. It’s not enough, I want more. I’m a brat, and I think we all are. All of us are in the same boat, and that’s the riff for today:

It’s all about attention.

Nobody ever gets as much of it as they want.

Now, read that carefully. I didn’t say ‘nobody ever gets a lot of attention’. I said, ‘nobody gets as much of it as they want’. There are basically two groups of people, in this context… those who don’t get enough attention (the much larger group) and those who get way too much (a much smaller group, generally of celebrities who are famous for something, that makes everyone else in the world crave attention from them in the hopes that some of the celebrity will wear off, so we pay a lot of attention to them, hoping they’ll be nice and pay some back).

But this is what it’s all about, and if there’s anyone out there who gets Goldilocks type attention… you know, just right… I’ve never met them.

No, think about it for a second. I’m right about this. You come home from work and somebody… parent, kid, spouse, lover, sibling, whatever… asks how your day was. And you say either “I had a really good day” or “I had a totally shitty day” or “Ehhh… It was okay, you know, nothing special”. And when we say this… now think about it for a minute… what we are really saying is, “I got more positive attention today than is routine for me” or “I got more negative attention today than I’m used to” or “I got about the same amount of attention today as always”.

Or at least, that’s true of me. If I have a really good day, it’s because I had a good encounter with someone… somebody gave me a compliment, or maybe a birthday card or otherwise paid positive attention to me that I wasn’t expecting. If I have a really shitty day, well, it’s because my good friend Jess just told me she doesn’t want to hang around with me at work any more or have anything to do with me ever again, and won’t tell me why, and doesn’t want to discuss it, or my boss took me aside and told me she was very very disappointed in me, or I finally got up my nerve to ask the amazing babe down the hall out, and she looked at me pretty much exactly the way you’d expect an amazing babe like her to look at a 41 year old 255 lb geek asking her out, and then said “Well, I’m not really looking for a relationship right now”, which of course is actually true, she just didn’t finish the sentence by adding “with a loser like YOU, for God’s sake, do you think I’m that desperate?”

And, you know, those days that don’t seem like much of anything are routine days… which means, nobody momentarily pumped us up by giving us a shot of positive attention, and nobody shot us down in flames by giving us a hit of negative attention.

Friendship is, basically, an attention transaction: “I’ll pay positive attention to you if you’ll pay positive attention to me”. Romance is just friendship with a couple of nice fringe benefits thrown in: the basic positive attention exchange, with, you know, intense physical affection and candy on Valentine’s Day as lagniappe. And the people we really can’t stand, who completely aggravate us? They either consistently pay negative attention to us, or worse, they just annoy us by not paying any attention to us at all, when we really want them to.

(This is people actually in our lives, I mean, that we have a personal relationship with. Ann Coulter annoys me, at least, because she writes insane things that I completely and utterly disagree with. But, you know, if I had a personal relationship with Ann and she paid positive attention to me from time to time, I’d probably cut her some slack.)

Virtually everything we do in a social continuum is either attention-getting or attention-aversion behavior. If somebody we know has a crush on us and that we really don’t want to date comes into the room, we try to avoid eye contact. If we can, we get the hell out of Dodge by another exit before he or she comes over to our desk with that heartbreakingly hopeful gleam in their eyes. On the other hand, if someone we’re deeply attracted to comes wandering by, we instantly go on high alert. We’re looking for opportunities to make eye contact. Even if he or she is married and completely uninterested in us, we want to at least say ‘hi’ before he or she leaves again. Make him or her say ‘hi’ back. Get that little acknowledging ‘ping’ of attention that is, more or less, our just due, for behaving ourselves in a reasonably civil and social manner in this person’s presence.

Even the most basic and nominal social interactions are attention transactions. We see somebody at work that is neither a friend nor an avowed enemy, we say ‘hi’. We may not know them well, but still, we see them, we say ‘hi’ or ‘how’s it going’, or they say it to us first, and then there is the mandatory response: ‘I’m fine’ or ‘It’s going’, or, whatever. It doesn’t mean anything, but everyone does it, and in point of fact, it does mean something: it’s an attention exchange. It’s us bouncing a ping off them, and getting a ping back, which says ‘yes, I’m here, and you’re here, and I acknowledge you as someone whose existence is valid in relationship to mine’.

We think this stuff doesn’t matter, but let’s all remember how we rack our brains whenever we bounce a ‘hi’ or ‘how’s it going’ ping off a casual work acquaintance and don’t get one back. We’re flustered and agitated. We wonder what’s up. What did we do? Why is this person pissed off at us? If it’s our boss, we wonder if he or she knows about the sticki-note pad we stuck in our pocket and took home two nights before, or all those bowling league newsletters we stayed after work to run off on the office Xeroxer. If it’s just a fellow co-worker, we speculate: did he or she overhear me telling Jenny what I really thought of that new hairstyle? Does he or she know I’ve been going to lunch with his or her boy or girlfriend and I’m thinking of asking him or her out? Did I accidentally park in their parking space? This stuff is only perfunctory when the exchange goes off without a problem. When someone doesn’t give us the attention we expect, we freak out about it, and assume we did something to deserve it… even though nine times out of ten, when we finally ask this person about it (and we usually get around to that), they say “Oh, no, I was just in a world my own this morning… I don’t even remember it”.

But we always think it’s about us, we never think it might just be them.

Now, as I said before, most of us are in the ‘don’t get enough attention’ group. So we do stuff with our hair and our wardrobe, we adopt certain behaviors in public, some of us practice smooth pick up lines, and a lot of us blog. Or post our creative product on the Internet, hoping someone will notice. We’re not getting enough attention, we’re hoping to get some more… and what we’re really hoping for, if we admit it to ourselves, is that someone out there… that Magic Someone… will notice us, and do something wonderful to Make Our Lives So Much Better. (My Magic Someone is either a publisher, a literary agent, or, you know, just a good looking, sharp, funny, uninhibited single woman who doesn’t mind fat guys and really likes my writing. Or, preferably, a combination of either of the first two with the third.)

And that brings me back to: less than a week into public blogging again, and having gotten, well, an infinite amount more attention than I got last time (I mean, how do you measure ‘more’ from zero?), and I’m still feeling pissed off and cranky. SquawkBox stopped working the whole goddam day on Sunday and I had some great stuff up and no one is ever going to comment on it now. I’m getting some email, but not enough. I’m getting occasional, social contract-driven comments (You know, I put comments on Elayne and Emma’s blogs, so they put comments on mine) but I look around and see some people with 72 comments in their comment threads! (The woman at Making Light, which you can get to from Tom Tomorrow’s links page). But, of course, I also see, everywhere I go in the blogosphere, other people making the same pleas as I do… Robert Prather says ‘give me more comments or I’ll shoot this dog’ (and it’s always nice to find a fellow Firesign Theater fan). And everybody says stuff like this, one time or another… except Tom Tomorrow, who is kind of a celebrity, and Mark Evanier, similarly. They never beg for email (neither of them has comment threads on their blogs) and I assume they get an overwhelming ton of it, and me, being in the other, larger, attention deficit group, can only envy them.

I want comments, dammit. I want email. I want people reading my writing, and publishers offering to buy it, and women telling me they adore me. I want positive fucking attention. And I want it now.

But, you know, I guess I’ll just go watch TV instead.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.

ANY DAY ABOVE ROOM TEMPERATURE

Despite how cynical that sounds, today has been a good day. But we’ll get to that in a second.

Last night around ten p.m. I opened my apartment door for the first time and saw a notice taped to it. It was startling, since it was from the management office and the woman there, Sondra, goes home around 4:30 every day… this meant I hadn’t opened that door all day. That’s normally not a particularly weird thing; sometimes I just stay in all day. But yesterday I remember spending time outside; in fact, I took one of the outdoor chairs off my small patio out onto the small stretch of lawn in front of my apartment building and read The Element of Fire by ‘Martha Well’ (nee’ Barbara Hambly) for about an hour, as the sun was going down… it was lovely weather, and there was a breeze out on the lawn that I couldn’t feel on my patio.

However, I’d pretty much exclusively come and gone through my patio door all day, and just hadn’t realized that the interior door leading into the complex itself hadn’t been used since the previous night.

The note informed me that sometime over the next two weeks, engineering types from the City Water Department will be showing up to put a meter in my apartment, and from that point onward, I’ll be paying my own water bill. Whoo hoo.

Today, when I first stepped outside, my next door neighbor Lilyrose was coming out too. Lilyrose is a doll, she’s probably in her mid 70s and just the sweetest, kindest woman you’d ever want to meet. And for some reason (probably that) she really likes me. It’s certainly nothing to do with me; I’m an obnoxious, surly grouch. But she really likes me, and she stopped me, hurried back into her apartment, and then came out with a small Hershey’s chocolate Easter rabbit for me.

Actually, the nice Christian couple that lives two floors over me, Beth and Nick, had also given me a chocolate Easter rabbit and a card on Sunday. Again, they like me because they’re great people, not because of anything to do with me.

So I thanked Lillyrose (feeling vaguely guilty because I never get anyone much of anything for holidays, although when I got the Omaha Steaks picnic coolerful of Expensive Yuppie Meat a couple of weeks ago, there was some fish in it – sole patties stuffed with crabmeat and scallops – and I don’t like seafood, generally, so I gave them to Lillyrose… but it’s not the same, I just didn’t want the stuff and she was handy) and went on out to my mailbox in the lobby, and in amongst the usual Woden’s Day junk, found some notices from the local Unemployment office… which in Florida, apparently, calls itself the Agency for Workforce Innovatation. My weekly Unemployment benefit rate is $164 a week… better than a poke in the ass with a broken beer bottle, as Emma has put it so cogently, but, well, it won’t pay my bills… it will barely cover the rent, but not the phone or the utilities, and let’s not even think about luxuries like, oh, food.

And then, remembering that I wanted to buy a Lotto ticket, I wandered over to the Citgo station, and while I was on my way, I got a glimpse of the sign for the Maggiano’s restaurant across the street at the mall, and I remembered:

Last Wednesday. Two days before I started this blog. Those of you where were around in the Major Attitude days remember what happened, the rest of you, however, can hear me tell you now: I had a really good day.

See, there’s this lawyer named Mark B., who, unfortunately, represents a lot of developers. (I don’t care for developers much. Florida has enough development, and developers are categorically incapable of believing that undeveloped wilderness is a finite resource. They are going to continue paving over Florida wetlands until one day, around 2024, the last patch finally goes under the hot top, and then, before they can pack up their cars and move on to Arizona, the entire isthmus will shudder once… twice… three times… and then with a gigantic wet slurping sound, all of Florida will abruptly subside to a new geological stability point, about eighteen inches below local sea level. A few minutes later, that big, oddly gentle, strangely liquid FWOOSH! sound you will all hear, wherever you happen to be, will be the noise from the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico joining hands somewhere around Orlando. ) But he’s a nice guy. I’ve seen (and mostly listened) to him appearing before Council probably hundreds of times in the last two and a half years in the course of my job, and frequently chatted with him casually when he came into the City Clerk’s office for something. His secretary, Heather, is one of the three women I’ve been seriously interested in since I moved down here… she’s smart, funny, I love talking to her, she’s widely read and a very nice person, and, well, I think she’s sexiness incarnate. Alas, she got married on me about a year ago, and I don’t think she was ever really all that aware of my existence, but she was always nice to me when we ran into each other, and I used to have this huge crush on her.

Anyway, I ran into Mark on Monday… I think he was in the building for an Architectural Review Committee meeting, or something… and in passing, I mentioned that Thursday would be my last day. Now, I would have testified in court that Mark did not even know my first name. But on Wednesday, Heather showed up and gave me a card, from her and Mark, wishing me good luck. It was the nicest, sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me… and I think I mean that literally. I honestly… well, as I said, I didn’t know Mark knew my first name. And to hear somebody say something about leaving their job on Monday, and then remember it and do something like that… wow. I was blown away. And I got a goodbye hug from Heather, too, which I would not sell to any of you for any amount of money. (Okay… that any of you can afford.)

Yeah, yeah, I know… bring it around to why today is a good day, Darren. Fine. I’m getting there. It’s not like I charge you people for this crap by the word or you’re going to give me any comments on this entry, so shut up.

Included in the card Heather gave me was one of those gift cards. It was worth $20 at Chili’s, which is this Tex-Mex chain (I don’t know if they have them in your area). And on the back of the card were listed several other restaurants, among which was Maggiano’s Italian Ristorante.

Now, I don’t drive… don’t start with me, I just don’t… and the closest Chili’s is a pretty good bus ride away. But Maggiano’s, as I indicated, is Right Over There. So, after getting my Lotto ticket, I walked over to Maggiano’s, and went to their carry out window, and put in an order. Then I sat down and read my paper for about ten minutes. And then the very attractive and professionally pleasant woman behind the counter called me up and presented me with this wonderful bag full of treasure.

I’d ordered the garlic roast whole chicken, because it came in under $20 (just barely, it was $15.99 and with tax came to $20.23… I hate tax… fortunately, I had a quarter in my pocket). And I could see they’d put more goodies inside, but I waited until I got home to unpack the bag. Inside, I found:

The chicken will last me three or four meals. The bread is the real delight, I love white bread, especially crusty, sweet white breads like Italian and French breads.

So, today I got positive attention, I got the promise of money in the future, I got lots of food, and I got chocolate.

So, never mind that self pitying whine in the entry above. As Andy Sipowicz once said, ‘who’s got it better than me, huh?’

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.

A MAN FOR ONE SEASON

One of my earliest entries on my very first blog cried out plaintively for somebody, anybody, to put Sports Night on DVD for me. Apparently, I should have asked for Katie Holmes in a thong, because a few months later (a few months ago) Sports Night came out on DVD, and I cheerfully paid the $70 price tag to take home the entire two seasons of a show that I’d loved, and that I hadn’t even ever managed to see the first 12 or so episodes of, prior to then.

Lately I’ve been watching the DVD set again, and I’m once more really deeply impressed with just how good the first season of this show is. As opposed, really, to how comparatively lame and broke-dick the second season was.

Aaron Sorkin, the guy who created and wrote Sports Night, is also the guy who created and writes The West Wing. And I’ve come to a conclusion about him: he’s got one good season of TV in him. Then he runs out of ideas.

Those few of us who have watched both shows already know this. Much of the story material shown in West Wing, including entire specific dialogue exchanges, was simply recycled whole fromSports Night. Yet even on Sports Night itself, Sorkin cannibalized himself mercilessly. In the second season there’s an episode where Dana suddenly discovers church when she wanders into a church service to get out of the rain, and it’s a huge, life altering discovery for her. Not a big deal, since I loathed Dana anyway (she dated Gordon, for God’s sake, and that dating plan she came up with for Casey was simply cruel and deranged), so let her get some Jesus, I didn’t care. But the show absolutely echoed an episode in the first season, where Dana had had to take her niece to a Broadway show, and had discovered musical theater in a big, life altering way.

On West Wing, well, Sorkin was gonna screw up the second season anyway, since he decided to start pandering in hopes of getting some conservatives to watch, making me long to choke him until his beady little eyes popped out. But he started recycling his plot lines immediately, too. Sam Seaborne abruptly was revealed to be having exactly the same troubled relationship with his father as Jeremy had been having in Sports Night. (With Jeremy’s father. Not with Sam’s.) On Sports Night, Dan had gotten in trouble for making a statement regarding the stupidity of criminalizing marijuana, and on West Wing, the Surgeon General got in trouble for the same thing. It seemed like I couldn’t watch a single episode of West Wing from the second season onward without seeing an echo of something that had already been done on Sports Night... usually better.

Mind you, I think the first seasons of Sports Night and West Wing are brilliant television. Hopefully, Sorkin is going to start another TV show soon, so we’ll get another good season out of him.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I’m not a likable guy. I’m not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It’s simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don’t like my opinions or my blog, don’t read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I’m not going to say that this time around, because I’ve realized that what this is basically saying is, ‘if you don’t like what I have to say, tough, I don’t want to hear it, don’t even bother to tell me, just go away’.

And that’s actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country… for a little while longer, anyway… and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I’m not sure that’s a right when you’re doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don’t feel like reading… and I’m really quick with the delete key… as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don’t like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance… these things are only worth my time and attention if they’re entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough with, style, and/or panache to amuse me… try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.