Today is my day off, and I'm pretty psyched that the weather is kind of shitty. Nothing makes me feel worse than being a lazy shlub like sing song happy sunshine all over the place, and for the past month that's all Alameda's been offering.
It's been like living inside a cupcake with a Disney soundtrack. Okay, maybe not exactly like that (which when written out reads more like a re-imagining of the fourth circle of Hell) but definitely far too cheery to allow for some good old fashioned lazing.
Sunday being Father's Day I spent the afternoon with my parents. We had lunch and then went for a bike ride around town with Adam and Stephanie, reveling in the warm weather and bright blue sky. Last Thursday was equally beautiful and stirred this super productive bug in me. I rode around town on my bike running errands and then completely re-caulked my bathtub (stabbing myself in the thumb during the process).
But luckily, today it's shitty out. It's gray and windy and the one time I left the house (around 11, to go buy milk and yarn) it was cold even in my warmest article of clothing (a leftover shark sweatshirt that friends persuaded me to take after one of our clothing exchanges). By the time I got back I felt zero compunction about curling into my papasan chair and knitting while the day wasted away outside.
While I knitted, I listened to NPR. If you know me, you are probably surprised.
For the most part, I don't indulge in news (pop or world or other). I find it largely irrelevant to my personal experience, and fail to see the benefit in knowing about current affairs. But for the past few weeks I've been conducting an experiment in being aware. It's sort of in the same vein as my attempt to cut refined sugar out of my diet or eat fewer processed foods, which is to say it's largely arbitrary, I'm pretty uninvested in the outcome, and the decision to try it is primarily motivated by a shruggy "well why not?" sentiment.
Anyhow, I've been listening to NPR occasionally in the car while driving to and from San Francisco (and have to agree with Patton Oswalt--as radio, it's mostly unlistenable largely because of the break music. Tibetan scream singing, indeed...) but today was the first time it occurred to me to listen to it online, while knitting.
When I was a heavier knitting (and by that I mean in frequency of projects, not my actual size) I often mentioned how much I wished there were a cheap and easy way to get audio books so that I could listen to those while knitting (instead of listening to and occasionally glancing up at Law & Order episodes). Yes, music was always an option, but for some reason sitting and listening to music while knitting does not feel engaging enough. It's too relaxing and meditative, and I want my brain to feel like it's getting some sort of stimulation (knit one, purl two, cable 6 is not enough). I visited the limited selection of free audio books online, but The Island of Dr. Moreau read by a volunteer who sounded like Kenneth Parcell wasn't really doing it for me, so eventually I defaulted back to the TV.
Until today, that is, when it occurred to me that I could easily combine knitting with my political awareness experiment, so I went to NPR.com and opened the streaming morning edition. I listened to it through about 40 rounds of a glove before finally being interrupted by a bunch of work-related calls, and now that everything is hunky-dory over at the gym, my thoughts have returned to the question of "awareness" and the importance of that to my individual life. And no matter what the subject matter is--General McChrystal or the effect of the BP spill on Louisiana's local economy--I keep coming back to the same thing, which is that for me listening to NPR feels very much the same as listening to segments from E! News.
If you are a fan of NPR, you are probably offended by this, but bear with me because here's why: regardless of the subject matter, news channels are all offering basically the same thing, that is second or third hand summaries of events bolstered by paragraphs upon paragraphs of subjective conjecture.
I listened to one segment the other day about Tony Hayward's upcoming testimony before Congress, and whether or not people "felt sorry" for him. Crisis communication expert Joanna Biddolph spent ten minutes clarifying that her remarks about feeling sympathetic for Hayward were based in her perception of him as a fellow human being, but had nothing to do with his role in or responsibility for the spill. Listeners called in and offered their own predictable long-winded perspectives, other talking heads popped in with a point or two, and the whole thing left me wondering, "How is this any more relevant to my life than whether Brad regrets dumping Jen for Angelina?"
Today I heard ten minutes of speculation as to whether David Petraeus will have a more productive (if less amicable) relationship with President Karzai then Stanley McChrystal did. The soft consensus was that he would, though everyone agreed we would have to wait and see. Maybe I'm missing something, but it strikes me as ultimately pointless to listen to a bunch of news correspondents basically showing their guesswork. Everything said amounted to a 50/50 prediction that would be easy to look back on in the months to come and clarify with a, "Well, this is why things didn't turn out the way I predicted," or "This is exactly what we said would happen (pats on the back all around)."
I fail to see the point in this kind of information, especially when it's filtering down through so many officials, politickers, and pundits that it's impossible to feel confident in its validity. And this is what really kind of annoys me about the whole NPR thing: considering how low news media really is on the totem pole of information prioritizing (does anyone actually believe that anybody who knows anything about anything is still giving out honest, un-spun, un-deniable information anymore?) how can people listen to these reports without continually asking whether or not what they're hearing is even true? All I think about when I listen to NPR is how little I trust what they're saying because for the most part the people they get their information from are the types who are most concerned with covering their asses, not letting the rest of the country in on the secret.
It becomes clear how starved news media is for genuine information when they actually come upon an unassailable fact. At one point while driving last week NPR broadcast a Wiki-leaked recording of a helicopter attack on what ultimately turned out to be a group including a Reuters reporter and his photographer, and then a father and his children. It was almost entirely incomprehensible--the recording was noisy and the recorded were speaking in military jargon that made zero sense to a civilian like me, but boy did NPR have a field day discussing its finer points; the commentators were so effing excited to have this little sliver of genuine information that they picked it over until there was nothing left to say about it. It reminded me of when Paris Hilton's sidekick got hacked and the tabloids got a chance to print her text messages which they then spent weeks and weeks dissecting only to ultimately come up just a tiny bit less empty than they had been before the hack. Okay, yes, fine--thanks to this recording we have confirmed that war is a bad thing, and innocent people are killed during it. But did we really not know this already? How is it that we're as surprised to find this out as we are to learn that Paris is a shallow bitch? And why are we wasting so much time discussing it?
My impression so far is that NPR is the equivalent of a pop-culture stroke job for intellectuals. People who listen to NPR generally like to make an outward show of avoiding tabloid news because they think the subject matter is frivolous, but when you boil it down the subject matter doesn't really matter. Both types of infotainment contain the same basic elements--a one or two line summary of what actually happened followed by hours (or even days) of mostly frivolous dissection which leads nowhere--and this kind of intense scrutiny of second-hand experiences seems like a total waste of time to me. It's just another way to distract yourself from your own reality and get bogged down in the details of something other than.
I care just as much about listening to someone try to predict what Karzai's relationship with Petraeus might look like in three months as I do about suffering through Ryan Seacrest speculating on whether Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt are trying to have a baby. Both stories ultimately leave me with the question, "How is this relevant to my life right now?"
And it isn't--it's just a bunch of talk that doesn't go anywhere. I might as well be listening to Seacrest for all the difference it's going to make to my life. Yes, it is good to know about things that are happening--that's fine, and even potentially useful--but to suffer through the yammering on and on, and to behave like the discourse itself has more worth than any other brand of yammering, is stupid.
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