My Blog

So, once in a while in my blogs, I will attempt to chip away at the various day to day experiences that prove that I am joyfully soul-less. I am often enamored with finding clues that validate many of my post-modern suspicions that I am simply a vessel for outside culture. I am a giddy sponge. I suck up what is around me. My favorite example is contagious lingo. Ever have a friend who simply has a way of talking that is particularly them? They have a cadence to their conversational style or an abundance of odd idioms? Do you ever notice when someone who has been around them, including yourself, they suddenly begin borrowing phraseology? Where you get that creepy and entertaining feeling that one person is slightly becoming the other? That happened to me and Matt Littlejohn. It also sometimes happens with Karyn Behnke’s wacko phraseology like ‘crankerpants’, ‘secretly’ and ‘butts’.

My crash course into Wittgenstein in undergrad left me slightly scarred. But the one thing it taught me quite well is: we are the words we use. We conceive of ourselves through language and language makes us what we know to be ourselves. The implication of this, of course, is that when you start borrowing your friend’s strange terms, you aren’t just borrowing language, you are becoming your friend. Your souls are gooing together into one lump of lingo. That is an odd thing to think about.

This is an old thought but one worth considering. Time, as we know, is relative. But what is more elusive than just knowing that, is locating the implications of that in your own life. Ah, repetition. Ever notice that the first time you drive somewhere it seems to take a long time, but then the return trip takes less? Ah ha! A clue. That is due to the relative shrinkage of time due to repetition. The more we repeat something, the less relative time it takes as the mind processes time based on new stimuli. Now, what might this mean for us? Well, I distinctly recall when I was a temp worker horribly doing the same thing ever day doing telemarketing or in the mail room at Farmer’s Insurance, that this repetetive form of existence was shrinking my relative life span. That I would look back on my life and see one instant of putting mail in a box. Or if you live in the same town too long, you are shrinking the relative time span of your life. Now, given that, to what degree are businesses which make its workers do repetitive tasks a la Fordist models of manufacturing, culpable of shrinking the relative lifespans of their employees? To what degree is forced repetition prosecutable as a crime against life? Can we defend our right to relative time as an inalienable right directly tied to relative existence?

Question: Has anyone ever been saved from an airline crash by using a seat cushion as a flotation device? I ask you. Has this ever happened? I feel like the answer is no. And yet, the entire airline ritual all revolves around the magical seat cushion. I wonder this constantly on planes but never feel quite resolved about it. Every time I think I have an answer, it slips through my fingers. I mean, lets just say that the answer is no. Then that would mean that the entire opening ceremony of any plane flight is in fact an enormous psycholgoic performance that is geared towards producing calm in the passengers. This performance may actually occurr more times per day than the sacrement. But if it is just a trick to make passengers feel comfortable, why belabor the point? I mean they even have notes on the back of your serving tray indicating where the cushion is.

And also, does this ritual actually make passengers feel comfortable? Does a person on a plane think to themselves, “well, I’m ok, because if something were to go wrong, the plane would land in a nearby body of water and then I could grab this cushion below my seat and float to safety.” Maybe. But it might also produce the opposite reaction which is, ‘this is ridiculous. These guys are in the midst of some strange performance art piece of lies!” Have you ever noticed that even if the plane isn’t going anywhere near a substantial body of water, they still do the dance. I mean can a plane land on the Mississipi river? Where does the cushion come into play in Kansas?

If someone knows the answer to this quandry, can you please tell me. I am at a loss and well, I’m tired of just passively accepting this new genre of airline safety performance art.