Hey there! Happy Monday. The holiday weekend was good - hope yours was too!. Friday found Christ and I at The Purple Pig on Michigan Ave. - their tag line, "Cheese, Swine and Wine." Once a year, on Good Friday, Christ, who is aptly named for the day, gets to prevail on hostesses to give him preferential treatment, given it's about the last bit of fun he'll have before the crucifixtion! Fun to have the name Christ this time of year I'm thinking! He and I had a great time. I was in amazing hands with him steering the wine decisions. It is, after all, his business to know good wines. We ate strange things like roasted bones from which we scraped the marrow and spread it on garlic toasts. "Pig" was hopping - it's a trendy place to go and it was filled with fancy folks. We sat at the bar and I engaged the friendly fellow next to me whose smile beamed and filled the room - he had an immediate engaging way about him. Made sense once I learned he was in from D.C. and works in the White House as a legislative liaison (or something like that). I needed the crib sheet to understand his role and asked him who played him on the television show, West Wing. He described a black woman (I can't remember her) who ran interference between the two Houses (White and Capital). He left after a bit with his friend who was an ambassador. New friends. If they're in town, they're coming to my birthday party!
Then on Saturday, hanging with Victor and Con in Bucktown and a trip to an amazing new grocery store that is more than a grocery store - really a coveted destination. The name, Mariano's. If you haven't been there, go. Think cross between Whole Foods and a sensibly priced upscale grocery store. It was wonderful and really elevated grocery shopping to a cool new social event among friends! Then Easter - everything according to plan including over the top food, harmony between the girls, friends and tenants, lots of fun and laughter and games afterwards. I worked myself to exhaustion but loved every minute of it. Family=wonderful these days.
Leave it to Carol to spot a pertinent article that dovetails what I've been writing about stupid game addiction! She sent me the link to it, Just One More Game. It cited the invention of Tetris in 1989 as the start of the tradition of "stupid games". Sam Anderson, the author, describes Tetris as a "faceless ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end.....and it's final insult is that it annihilates free will." He goes on to say, "Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can't make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves." He fast forwards to the present and describes his wife's addiction to Words With Friends (the game I got addicted to!) "Before long she was playing 6 or 10 games at a time, against people all over the world (I was playing 40+ games between Words with Friend and Hanging With Friends). Sometimes I would lose her in the middle of a conversation," he said.
Games have been around forever (Egyptians played board games) but the difference, according to Anderson, is that pre-Tetris games were played in a primal way, real opponents and a conscious choice to play. He makes the case that stupid games "push their way through the cracks of other occasions. We play them incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally....a distraction from other pursuits." Hours and hours lost. On Sunday when Catherine came over she announced with glee that she had finally downloaded Words With Friends on her phone. She doesn't read this blog so she wasn't aware of my existential angst over this subject matter. "Noooooooooo!" I shrieked! And sure enough, as we all sat around eating appetizers, there she was, checked out, engaged with an anonymous opponent, ignoring the people she had traveled to see. I begged her to put it away. Only after pulling out the big guilt guns, did she relent. I could swear I could see, during the evening, her eyes darting longingly toward her phone as she pretended to enjoy our live presence better!
So, corporations already understand the power and future of stupid games. They call it gamification - "corporations will be able to inject their messages directly into our minds with ads disguised as games.....amoral corporations hiring teams of behavioral psychologists to laser-target our addiction cycles for profit." That should worry all of us. Here is the link.
Same day, I read a wonderful article about April being National Poetry Month (see I wouldn't have had the time to read this if I hadn't erased all the stupid games from my phone!). Loved reading about poet Nikky Finney who won the National Book Award last November for her collection entitled, Head Off & Split. Here is the link. Head off and split was the question the fishmonger asked her every week when she was sent to the market, as a young girl, to get a fish for the family dinner. She would always answer, "yes", and the fish would be dressed and readied for cooking. Later in life Nikky paid a sentimental visit back to the same fishmonger -he still asked her the question, "Head off, and split?" This time she said no.
"This time she wants what she was once sent for left whole, just as it was pulled from the sea, everything born to it still in place. Not a girl any longer, she is capable of her own knife-work now. She understands sharpness and duty. She knows what a blade can reveal and destroy. She has come to use life's points and edges to uncover life's treasures. She would rather be the one deciding what she keeps and what she throws away."And with that, I thought of people pulling our strings as in the whole stupid game thing, the assumed loss of free will, a kind of "build it and they will come", but really "build it and they will succumb." Not me. For me, each choice I make is my own - each decision made thoughtfully and responsibility. And, the hours and minutes of my life spent purposefully even when the purpose is pure, silly fun, hours wasted with friends.
The challenge today is thinking about free will, the decisions you make consciously and unconsciously. Thinking about how permeable we can be - how there are forces who would penetrate us for their own gain and scrape our marrow for their own appetites - leaving us hollow. Knife work of a sinister kind. Me? I prefer to do my own knife-work. I understand sharpness and duty. I will decide what gets kept and what gets thrown away. Free will. Stupid games won't make the cut.
Peace,
Sarah
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