The Hidden Benefits of Technology

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Google Maps may be alleviating traffic. Have you ever used it to find the fastest route to your destination? Here’s how it works: you type in your destination, and as long as you allow the program to detect your current location (through the GPS in your cell phone, don’t worry, the FBI doesn’t monitor Google Maps as much as your nervous next-door neighbor might say), it will find a few different ways for you to go. The program monitors traffic patterns. It will tell you which of your selected routes is the fastest. You can choose a course that isn’t the fastest—if you like. You can even start driving and change course in the middle a few times and it will adjust to get you to your destination. The reason I suspect Google Maps may be alleviating traffic is because if a large number of people are using it, then they’re being directed to use roads they might not have used. If one person goes one way and another goes another way, then the problem of traffic is solved, even if it’s only solved for those two motorists. They don’t have to contend with each other because they’ve never met.

Amazon’s Kindle has unintentionally created a benefit to the music industry. People get sick of all the problems with reading a book on their Kindle device, so they throw their hands up in defeat and say, “I’d rather listen to _________!” Then the would-be reader fills in the blank with their favorite music. They pick up an iPod or iPhone and start listening. They connect to a bluetooth speaker and blast away the frustration. Or so I’ve heard.

Did you know there are electric toothbrushes set to two minute run-times? Yep. Certain kinds of electric toothbrushes will actually indicate when you should be done brushing. Two minutes is supposed to be an ideal amount of time for cleaning teeth, so the electric toothbrush will slow down or make a noise to tell you when you’re done. Some people have outsmarted the system and found a two minute song they like, then they brush their teeth to music. When the music’s over, they quit brushing, turn out the light, and go to bed without reading a single digital book.

In a similar way to the Kindle’s hidden benefit, the giant tablets McDonald’s introduced in their lobbies for ordering have convinced fast-food customers to branch out and find a place less fad-oriented. Instead of McD’s, they find a great restaurant such as Taco Time. It only takes seconds for the fast-food customer to realize there really is life beyond the burger. There is also quality of life outside the burger joint. Tasty Veggie Burritos are far more friendly to an artery than a beef sandwich.

And don’t forget the invention of the Modobag. The hidden benefit to this odd motorized suitcase contraption is that people who sit on a plane for eight hours can continue sitting as they make their way through the airport. Everyone in the world needs more time for sitting.

The Frisson of Fright

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Halloween is a fun time to make things more mystical, spiritual, even more thrilling.

There’s a word from French which has become lost from our vocabularies. The idea the word represents has become less lost, but still under-appreciated.

The word is frisson. Our worldwide culture craves the frisson of fright, though we’ve forgotten how to express the craving.

We want to be scared. We want to find the tingling on the back of our necks that indicates potential danger. Undoubtedly, we want to find ourselves in sanctuaries of safety, but at the same time, we want to be near the edge. We want to walk the edge and almost fall off.

To almost die is to live more.

We want excitement in our entertainment because we live vicariously through the characters in the books and movies which we consume. We demand theme parks with roller coaster rides promising near-death experiences. We want to ride the bike on the cliff edge, or in the street with vehicles twenty times our own weight.

For extra thrills, we seek out highways that cross railroad tracks, houses built on fault lines, and employees of the government who defy the principles of common sense. Any one of these could kill us at any time. We know it and refuse to change our habits.

The frisson keeps us coming back for more. More thrills to drive us. More thrills to encourage our deadly persuasion.

Halloween-time is when we all get to dress up in costume and wander around a random neighborhood begging for candy. It’s also the time when reading a frightening book is more accepted. People on the downtown bus don’t seem to mind the gory cover of a horror novel quite so much. Some of them may even ask about it.

Halloween season is when watching a scary movie after dark is perfectly acceptable behavior as long as you invite someone to watch with you. Someone like this:

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Or this:

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Or this:

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All Scenarios

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If all the scenarios that ever ran through an imaginative head actually happened, there would be people who died one hundred times over, and then one hundred times again.

There would be those who could not die.

There would be explosions on the freeway daily. No vehicle would be safe from the bullets, bombs, smokescreens, and lasers. Skyscrapers would rise up in seconds and slow-motion fall. Rockets would fly off to faraway places to never return. Portals would open up passage to every point in the known and the yet-unknown universe. Soap opera affairs would curse every human relation. Time would frequently stop, reverse, fly forward, then stop again. Underground caverns would be mapped and reveal their treasures. Treehouses would be war rooms. A trampoline would shoot a person into outer space and have the ability to catch anyone from great heights so they wouldn’t get hurt. Varieties of aliens would visit the planet in hordes; some would be peaceful, others violent.

Wings would sprout out of the shoulders, backs, and feet of humans. Magic spells might really work. Magic items would pass through the hands of many: cloaks of invisibility, rings of death, amulets of strength. Dragons might show their might. Dragon eggs would be traded like currency. Orcs would overrun cities and towns only to be cut down by armies of men.

Unicorns would remain elusive.

Mushrooms would grant powers to those who dared eat them. Stuffed animals would come to life, speak wisdom to any who may hear. Cats, ravens, and rabbits would carry on conversations with everyone.

Walls would become philosophical constructs. Doors would become debatable, moot. Gravity could be manipulated with the flip of a switch. Suns and moons would become symbols of power—and would power massive machines. Machines would be grandiose and miniscule all at once.

Musicians would be grand wizards. Painters would hold the keys to other worlds. Writers would be able to knit over the fabric of reality. Sculptors could raise the hammer like Thor swings Mjolnir and rearrange the elements at will. Artists of all kinds would forever be regarded as the most powerful among us.

God Himself would be seen as the ultimate imaginative mind. And yet…and yet…He is seen in such a way even now by those who have faith. The faithless accept limitations.

Just Admit It

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Hanging from the office lights, I casually snipped off and conked the HR guy, Gavin, on the head with a freakishly large, size eleven boot.

It was his boot.

He was trying to get me to give his boot back to him. He’s so tall, you’d think he could jump higher, but reality isn’t always as you think. He jumped, but he barely left the ground. Then I let go of the lights and knocked him out. To play fair, I left his boot by his unconscious head. He’ll find it easily.

Teasing him is my habit these days. There are things about him that make it seem like he is absolutely begging to be teased. For one, he’s noticeably cute. He’s tall and very much a man. I’m very much a woman, so there’s that between us.

He also likes to wear hats. Stupid hats. He thinks they make him look like something other than what he really is. He has his wide-brimmed “adventure” hat. He has his bowler and his stovepipe and even one of those hats like the guy in the band Cake wears. It doesn’t make him look like the guy in the band Cake. It doesn’t make him look like anything to me except a target.

I stole his hats whenever I got the chance. I still steal them. And when he left his boots on the side of his desk while he was clipping his freakishly large toenails—that was nothing more than blatant temptation. How could any self-respecting tease pass up such an opportunity? How could anyone not see those boots sitting there like something more likely to be found in a dry dock? Anyway, I stole one while he was looking and he chased me for it. You know how that ended. While he was out cold, I stole another hat.

People in the office have called me “floozy” and “tease” and some other things not worth repeating. “Dum.” They call me dum. I’m no ladder-climber. I’m just in the office to do my job. Like teasing Gavin.

Don’t get me wrong. The teasing is not all one-sided. He can send the tease right back at me. He isn’t one of those who can’t take the bug—he could return the bug with style, if he wants. He told me once about how dum my spandex is. “Who wears stretchy pants to work?”

I do. It’s dum, like dum-dum dum, you know? It’s goofy and self-aggrandizing, but I’m addicted. Addicted to spandex. Is spandex a brand name? Should it be capitalized? I don’t know. I’m dum, remember?

Back to the point, though: thank goodness he never stole my pants and hid them behind the break room refrigerator. That could’ve been really embarrassing. And that would be where he’ll find his bowler hat if he thinks to look there. Behind the break room refrigerator.

His “adventure” hat is having its own adventure out on the fire escape ladder. He might not know to look there either.

He stole my coffee cup not too long ago and hid it on the mail delivery cart. I found my cup and stashed his stovepipe hat there in return. Do you think he’ll find it?

His Cake hat? I bet you can guess where that is. It’s in my spandex.

The other people in the office say I’m showing off my butt when I wear stretchy pants to work. What will they say when they see this odd lump on my rear? Will they even care? Will they tell me I need to go to the doctor and get the lump checked? Will they tell me to stop teasing Gavin? What will they say when Gavin wakes up? Will they tell him they’ve seen a hat shaped lump somewhere, but they can’t say where exactly? Maybe they’ll give him a clue. Maybe they’ll play that game Hot-and-Cold. I’ll have my deepest girly thrills if they do. They’ll all be saying, no, they’ll be ADMITTING, that my butt is hot.

A Bob Ross Positive

It really is easy not to like things. Or rather, I should say, it’s really easy to express a negative opinion about things. Especially art. Especially your own art. Art is easy to dismiss. Art is easy to criticize. It’s easy to find the faults in a piece of art. Everyone with a mouth can criticize a movie, a book, a painting, a wood carving, a sculpture, a poem, a song, a cartoon, or a sand castle.

Bob Ross enjoyed calling mistakes “happy accidents.” Why? Probably to just keep moving. You don’t get very far as an artist if you get hung up on the mistakes. The faults will happen. But if you swing it more to your own corner, then you continue with the art. If you slow down even a little bit, the slowing can turn into stopping. Then what are you doing? Not art.

A perspective of “good mistakes” or “happy accidents” will get you so much farther than a perspective of “disastrous mistakes” or “dreadful, deadly accidents.”

You’ve probably experienced someone who couldn’t get over a certain situation—someone who saw a mistake as something worse than it really was—and you probably wondered how they could see it that way. You may have tried to help them get over it, tried to convince them that the problem wasn’t so bad. They turned it around, didn’t they? They told you the problem was the most serious problem ever. They told you it was devastating. They convinced themselves it was the end of art, it was the end of the world, and they tried to convince you of the same. You probably thought, “This person is hopeless. They claim the light that illuminates the path is too bright and blinding.”

How could you help someone out of such a mental state? How can you overcome such a self-defeating attitude? Isn’t it obvious? The cure is to show the poor downer dude (or dudette?) some Bob Ross. Bring peace to the world through instructional painting videos. Bring optimism to the lost with beautiful landscapes and “happy accidents.” That’s not the only way, of course, but it’s in the Top 10 of ways to cure a self-degrading funk. So right about now, you’re probably wondering what the other nine ways are. I could be funny and tease you: “Tune in next week…” but I won’t. Here’s the list:

Top 10 Ways of Developing a Positive Creative Mental State

  1. Watch videos of Bob Ross. Pick up the habit of seeing accidents as a positive.
  2. Build a sand castle. Sometimes the most temporary art forms teach us how to be less serious, less stressed, less negative.
  3. Start making mistakes in your art on purpose, then fix them.
  4. Consider a child showing you some macaroni glued together. They tell you it’s their favorite and they made it for you. What is it? Does it really matter what it is? Would you ever tell that child their creation was ugly? If not, then why do it to yourself?
  5. Meditation. Sit still and contemplate things that are beyond your art. After a few moments of separation, then go back to your art. Rarely does meditation ever make people turn toward the negative.
  6. Rorschach test. Rorschach test upside down. Did your answers change?
  7. Go for a hike. What do you see in nature? Do you see perfection?
  8. Carve a bear in a tree stump with a chainsaw. Too difficult? Maybe the chainsaw artist thinks your particular brand of art is too difficult? Did you ever think of that?
  9. List the worst, the good, and the great about your art. Throw away the “worst” list. Post the “great” list on your fridge.
  10. Talk to other artists, especially those who do different art than you. Find out what they do and do not enjoy about it. Chances are you’ll find things in common.