If it’s not on facebook it didn’t really happen: or, reality through technology

I watched the first episode of The Wire today.  So far it comes across as one more (exceptionally complicated) cop show.  I was struck, however, by the repeatedly interspersed shots of the action as seen through surveillance technology.  An illustrative example is when two of the cop/detective types (can’t quite keep up with the names yet) step into the elevator together.  As they enter and exit the elevator, the shot is a fairly standard medium-distance color shot–what the tv/film viewer is used to accepting as an unmediated look into the storyworld.  As the elevator ascends, however, the shot shifts to grainy black and white taken from above, as from a security camera.  Nothing whatsoever happens in the elevator–no activity, no conversation, nothing.  The only point of the shot is to remind the viewer that everyone is always being watched, that technology is constantly absorbing and fixing reality for later review and analysis.  What actually happens is ephemera; it’s what the camera captures that is reality.

This sinister reminder of the ubiquitous eye of technology is made (to me) even more disturbing in Paul Murry’s Skippy Dies. This novel seems to suggest that the mediation of reality through technology is not just an unnerving reality, but in fact the contemporary individual’s preferred method of dealing with life.  One scene that sticks in my mind is when history teacher Howard Fallon is having a strained conversation with his girlfriend, a technology writer.  He is playing with an image-enhancing digital camera about which she is writing a piece, and as he looks at her through its gold-toned screen all the tensions of their relationship fall away and he finds it easier to talk to her.  Of course, it doesn’t last–their conversation devolves into argument–but for a few moments, through the screen of the camera, he is able to see the beauty and good in the woman with whom he’s been sharing his life.

In all honesty and hopefully without sounding like an old fogey or a Luddite, I have to admit that this deeply worries me.  It worries me because I see it in myself.  I am much fonder of my online presence–aka the facebook me–than my actual self.  The allure of the online presence is control; facebook Kate is both wittier and prettier than the real thing, due to my ability to carefully think out her words and censor her images.  The thoughtless stupidisms and double chins are largely filtered out in advance, and my “about me” suggests that I spend all my time reading and painting and frolicking outdoors, passing completely over the stretches of time I spend lying on my bed staring at the ceiling or engaged in other unflattering occupations.  It’s uncomfortable to realize that one’s better half is a construct, an electronic projection of the rosier bits of oneself.  It seems wrong to prefer the image of sterilized reality filtered through the camera/internet/phone to raw, messy, uncontrolled, real reality–wrong, but uncomfortably like the truth.

Yes, I’m worried.  Of course, I could talk out the worries with an actual human being, but…I think I’ll just blog about it.

ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties

Last night, as I was having trouble falling asleep, I thought about how I have always, for as long as I can remember, had trouble falling asleep.  As a child, however, the unquietness of my mind stemmed from far more fanciful, yet strikingly more fearful subjects.  I was, in general, a bold kid.  I’d touch any bug, perform any daring stunt, tackle any social situation (shyness came along with bad skin and unfortunate fashion decisions in junior high), but I was cripplingly frightened of the shadow-world of possible evil I imagined when alone in the dark.

Ritual kept me safe.  Every night, after my parents read to me and tucked me in, I would say, “I love you I love you, goodnight goodnight” and they would answer with the same redundant phrase, as I had instructed them to do.  You had to say it twice, you see, to make absolutely certain it was heard and understood.  Then they would leave the door open a crack with the hall light on, so a narrow beam of gold fell comfortingly across my bed.  Sometimes, when Daddy was in a silly mood, he would leave the door open a “butt crack,” measuring the width of the opening with his posterior.  I would laugh, but when he had gone I would get up and close it to its normal two inches…he didn’t know (how could he!) that skeletons could creep in through a larger opening.  With the skeletons safely shut out, I only had to worry about the witches in the closet, the mummy in the niche over my closet, and whatever-it-was lurking under my bed.  “Everybody and everything, I love you I love you, goodnight goodnight,” I would whisper out loud, to ensure that the ghoulies, ghosties, and beasties of every sort didn’t feel offended or left-out and creep in to take their revenge.  I pulled the covers up to my chin–to protect my neck from vampires–and lay on my side–to protect my heart from the stabbing blades of “murderers.”  I lay in the dark, frightened, and thought about things that troubled me.  About the witches, skeletons, vampires, mummies, and murderers, yes, but also about nothingness and nonexistence.  Someone must have explained to me what death was around the age of five or six, and the concept of non-being gave me a chilling sense of vertigo.  Actually, it still does.

I no longer lie in bed hearing the creaks of the sleeping house as monstrous footsteps of innumerable nightmares.  Contemplations of what it must feel like not to exist are rarely allowed to trouble my mind.  My worries now, however irrational, are far more likely to come to pass than any of my childhood fears.  And yet, while I still have trouble falling asleep, these “realistic” fears are warm and welcoming compared to the perilous nightmare-world I invented as a child, in which safety was secured by a delicate web of precautions and rituals that, if disturbed even a little, might bring disaster.

A rich imagination is a child’s greatest asset by day, and her darkest curse by night.

Fear of the void

Of the several complaints I have about my disability studies course, one is that it makes me feel so damn fragile.  I lay there reading about perfectly average people whose able-bodiedness was snatched away in an instant by a car accident, a sports injury, or a sudden medical condition like stroke or hemorrhage, and as I read I can feel my heartbeat in the hand against my temple.  The layers of skin and bone, the delicate connections of nervous tissue, the harmonious functioning of the complex whole–it all seems so vulnerable and breakable, like an antique china vase in a children’s playroom.

Death terrifies me.  When I was a very little girl, I used to get out of bed and sit at the top of the stairs while my parents read and talked in the living room.  When they noticed me, I would come down, climb into my mother’s lap, and tell her, in tears, that I didn’t want to die.  I remember being told that most people die when they are very old and that little girls like me had nothing to worry about.  But, you see, I remember that like it was yesterday when truly it was fifteen years ago.  In another fifteen years I’ll be in my mid thirties, and in another fifteen and another, it won’t be such a comfort that death is for the old.

Some people say it is illogical to be afraid of death.  When you die, they reason, you won’t even know you’re dead, so what is there to be frightened of?  But non-being is like a void; when I think of it, it swallows me up and paralyzes me with the claustrophobia of the immense.  I always picture being dead as floating in an outerspace devoid of stars: cold, dark, silent, alone.  The fact that I won’t be alive to experience it doesn’t make death less frightening…it is what makes it frightening in the first place.  The absence of everything is a vacuum, is space, is cold, dark, silent, and alone.

So, much as it scares me that I could slip on some ice, fall wrong, and break my spine, ending up paralyzed and unable to communicate, it scares me more that I could fall really wrong and end up nowhere at all.  While I like a class that makes me think, I don’t so much like a class that spirals me down the path of vertigo and terror that is contemplation of my own fragile mortality.  There are some things that don’t bear thinking on when you’re still too young to die.

Eyes

“Oh if I ever lose my eyes / if my colors all run dry / yes if I ever lose my eyes / ohhhheeeeeeaaaaeeeee / I won’t have to cry no more” –Cat Stevens, Moonshadow <–Great song, optimistic but bogus sentiment

On days like this (which seem all too frequent of late) when my eyes go wonky, I realize how important they are.  Don’t get me wrong, I place a pretty high value on all parts of my body.  I’d hate, for instance, to lose my sense of smell–no more baking bread, Christmas tree needles, or orange-ginger perfume–but I’d lose it ten times over before I’d lose my eyes.  I’d lose my legs before I’d lose my eyes.  Blindness vs. quadriplegia is a toss up.

But enough of this macabre “would you rather”.  I want all of my body parts functioning and happy, period.  It’s just that without my eyes…well, it starts with the fact that I should be reading for class right now, but I can’t.  Every time I look at the page for more than a few minutes my eyes go out of focus, roll up in my head, and water profusely.  (I can type this because I’m a skilled non-visual typist.)  I can’t read for homework, I can’t read for fun, I can’t even properly loaf in front of the television.  Annoying, yes, but what is worse, I can’t imagine how I would make it through grad school without eyes.  How many scholarly articles are available in braile or audio recording?  Thus eyes are to my professional goals what arms are to an aspiring NFL quarterback.  With a career in academia closed to me and the possibility of escaping into literature or mindless television also out the window, it’s quite possible that I would lose my mind.  And a mind is the absolute rock-bottom most horrible, rubbishy, and unfortunate thing to lose.

Of course, this whole discussion would probably not be kosher in my disabilities class, because a) I am suggesting that blindness would be a limiting factor on my achieving my dreams, and b) because I am implying that it would be a tragedy if I lost my sight, and we’re not supposed to view disability as tragedy.  But despite my respect for many of the tenets of disability studies, I guarantee I would view blindness as a profound tragedy if it happened to me.

The Newest BoME

Applying to graduate school is the most current Bane of My Existence.  Like most BoMEs, it entails late nights awake and fretting, early weekend mornings on the computer, anxious conversations, lists, scribblings, spreadsheets, heart palpitations, and (hopefully) metaphorical gray hairs.  Over the past two greasy, pajama-clad mornings, I’ve come up with a list of 8 potentials: UW Madison, Uof Michigan-Ann Arbor, Brown U, Yale U, Northwestern, Michigan State U, U of Illinois, and Ohio State U.  8 schools, all of which require personal statements of varying length and content, writing samples of various lengths, ridiculous amounts of supplementary materials, and modest-to-exorbitant application fees.  I have regular nightmares that all 8 will respond to my applications with skinny envelopes containing variations on “no thank you” (except for last night, when I dreamed a completely non-grad-school related dream about kissing the rather elderly Sir Paul McCartney).

There’s probably a terrible heap of character to be built through this experience.  Lessons on perseverance, organization, hard work, and perhaps graceful acceptance of failure may be provided, free of charge.  Hopefully the overwhelming sense of overwhelmption* that I’m currently experiencing will hold off some of the less-worthy competition.  As for me, I don’t have a choice–this is the thing, the only thing, I want to do with my life.  So no pressure, right?

*Hey, if Shakespeare got to make up words and be called a genius…

Failure

Obnoxious people often say, “if you never set goals, you never achieve them” which is, obnoxiously, true.  However, what these individuals refuse to acknowledge is the psychological toll of repeated failure.  If you repeatedly set goals and then fail to achieve them, it begins to feel like the very act of setting the goal dooms the entire enterprise to failure.  For instance, I had goals for this summer.  I was going to write, study for the GRE, produce a poem a day, practice guitar, lose weight, blog, and not complain about work.  Of those, I’ve achieved one–I’ve been blogging with more regularity than in previous months.  However, as I’ve often been using blogging as a self-indulgent method of whining about life (see current post) I’m not really feeling the warm glow of success.

I’m not saying that I never succeed at anything–it’s just that the things I end up succeeding at are not the sort of things I set as goals.  I don’t make it a goal to do well academically; it’s just an expectation, and since it’s unacceptable (and out of character) to do otherwise, I tend to live up to that expectation.  I only set goals for things that have proven really difficult for me to do on a consistent basis.  Either they are distasteful, or they require mental focus, or they are just time-consuming and call for more energy than I keep on tap.  Maybe I have too many at once.  For instance, if I said screw everything else–I can just watch Buffy and sleep away my free time–but goddamit I’m going to get fit, perhaps that would be more effective than having a list of goals.  It may be worth a try, but all I know right now is that every time I re-dedicate myself to a goal and then fail to achieve it, my confidence that I will ever achieve that goal sinks.