I’ve known since I was 11 that I existed in a finite idea space, since my father informed me from his death-bed, which is what he called the living room couch where he used to lay in the evenings, pontificating to his children, the three boys and one girl, of which I was older than my sister, and younger than my brothers, the truths and contentions surrounding his world view that he shared with precisely no one outside of those he could control, those being us, his motherless children who listened out of a form of fear, closer to dread, that he was steadily losing his mind after the death of his wife and our mother, the woman he had loved deeply for just over 19 years before holding her blood in his arms after the driver and the snow and the windshield had taken the part of her he loved out of her in front of him and left just the body and the blood, knowing instinctively that we would do better to forget his rambles as we grew if we were to be healthy, functioning adults, but also knowing that we’d have no real choice in whether his words would affect us, and we would essentially be doomed to think in the ways he prescribed as adults until we could systematically recognize and destroy each of his teachings as their effects revealed themselves in the contexts of future situations, that each person will have exactly 35 moments of convergence in his or her life, which was the term he used to describe that periodic experience where several seemingly disparate ideas we’ve consumed through readings, conversations, films, and other media fit together in an unexpected way and we are suddenly capable of creating something truly interesting that has not existed before because of that combination that no one else has in their heads in precisely the same way, but he clarified that usually those moments only exist in the brain and, due to external factors like working life, relationships, apathy, and psychological problems, most of us unfortunately will never manage to manifest outside ourselves, but that we were nonetheless assured that we’d be able to exploit if we simply listened to his other death-bed advice, which included avoiding long-term romantic relationships, committing to a regimen of mindfulness meditation, and undertaking menial, well-defined, blue- or entry-level-white-collar work as our career foci where we would have well-defined borders between the necessary element of labour and the evening opportunity to explore the ideas we generate, and that these strategies would not only benefit us, but also the rest of the world, because of the rarity of this possibility in others, and the “inertia of civilization”, but still it was important to remember that there was a limit of 35 times that that would be possible for each individual, a maximum he calculated by averaging the lifetime output of those whose ideas and inventions he respected, so that even my and my sibling’s well-trained capabilities were finite, like a countdown clock starting at 35, where our ideas would decrement the counter until we would one day reach 0 and know definitively that we would no longer be useful to ourselves or society, like my father, who claimed to have already had all his moments, the last of which had been this one.
misc: Transit Etiquette Campaign
I’m constantly frustrated by other humans in transit. As are you. I know it. Don’t lie to me.
I spend 3 hours on the subway and buses most weekdays. That’s a lot of time watching humans interact in a shared public space with few exit possibilities. We’re also perpetually afraid of engaging each other, as we create our own private space through books and music and eye-contact-avoidance within that larger container. So when some teenager with too much eye makeup betrays the simplest considerations, like refusing the pregnant woman the seat she’s grabbed for herself at the front of the bus, the barrier enclosing our private space we’ve created is broken for a moment, and the public space that floods in is swamp-like and icky. And often smells like salami or Cool Ranch Doritos, but that’s a different violation than the one I was just talking about.
When these violations of etiquette, or even more simply, human decency and attentiveness, occur, I get the rage. You do, too. But I’m a fraidy-cat. If I think about telling the offender, “hey, move your feet off the effing seat,” my scaredy-cat says “maybe you’ll get beaten up.” Even if that’s an unrealistic scenario, there’s still the I-don’t-like-getting-yelled-at-hamster saying “but being berated sucks in some ways just as much as getting beaten up,” or the sorta-unsure-zebra-mussel says, “but maybe you’re wrong and that’s totally okay behaviour for everyone else and you’ll look like an idiot trying to police the world where no one’s asking for police.”
So with that in mind, I’ve created some post cards (download printable PDF) to hand out on the subway or bus. Instead of risking unpleasant exchange, why not anonymously inform someone of their violation of transit etiquette? The conflict-avoiding-afraid-of-bullies-tadpole in me thinks that’s a pretty damned good idea. Here’s what the “bad” card looks like:
You check off the violation you think the person committed, and give it to them in some way. If you’re a societally-terrified person, you might consider dropping it beside the offender as you leave when they are not. Or, with a little more will (and pseudo-illicit tendencies), you could sneak it into their pocket, or their bag. Or if you’re a true champion, you could, of course, hand it to them deliberately, and say “please read this.” But if you’re that latter type, you probably don’t mind saying it directly to them in the first place, and these cards are redundant for you.
But it’s not all misanthropy here. Sometimes I see people behave admirably, so I’ve also created a “good” postcard, for those that impress:
I will leave some blank cards of both types around on buses and subway cars occasionally for people to pick up and use if they want to. The best would be to punch a hole in the top corner and hang them on the pamphlet hooks on buses as if they were official TTC information.
I might even try to use one sometime. More likely the positive one than the negative, of course. Let me know if you manage to use one. That’d be pretty exciting for me.
Think you can design it better, or write it better? Of course you can, and feel free. This is all Creative Commons, so do what you will.
Think you had this idea first? Of course you did. Out of millions of transit patrons, probably hundreds have this idea every day, and I believe the idea of owning an idea just because you wrote it down is ridiculous.
October 1, 2010
