can't have your cake ...
I agree with Sab's pet peeve: the 'where you at?' question. Not only is it a grammatical violation, but also it usually serves no purpose whatsoever ... the person -never- responds with 'ok, give me five minutes, I'll meet you over there.' It's only purpose, therefore, is conversational lubricant.
To that, I'd like to add a complaint about all of those who complain about Facebook's new mini-feed feature ... but use it anyway. Yeah, it's intrusive ... yeah, it's irritatingly plastered all over your home page ... but yeah, it's optional, sort of ... (apparently once it's activated it's part of your profile for good, but it isn't activated by default). And, more importantly, yeah, you love it. So as far as I can tell, the outrage everybody's indulging in over serves exactly the same purpose as the 'where you at?' question ... just better ... because after everyone's made the requisite God/CIA/my-personal-stalker jokes, everyone can give concrete examples of the privacy violations committed against them ... so instead of only killing a few seconds in a conversation, in can kill whole conversations! Not only all of that but it can also apparently spawn whole anti-anti-facebook-feed monologues ...
In other tragicomic ironies, I'm reading a book called Hello, I'm Special about how individuality is the new conformity, and a big point of it is how mass-media consumerism fuels and facilitates this conformist non-conformity (i.e. we can purchase our way into specialness). Necessarily, then, all its examples are references to pop-culture. So I'm reading it and right behind my concerned realizations that our lives are filled with anxiety because of this cultural mandate for inidividuality and because our response to that is not to develop a deeper self-awareness or seek challenging, transcendent experiences but to go out and buy shit, I'm cross-referencing my own cultural consumption with the book's examples, watched that - check, listened to that - check, mental note to self, I should watch that iconic indie 80's film ... whine whine whine ... Sometimes I just feel like a big shopping cart, stuffed not so much with physical product, Swedish furniture or watersport equipment, but with cultural product, several terabytes of music and at least a year or two's worth of film and tv ... some more whining ... it's culturally imposed, but at some point, one has to take personal responsibility.
To that, I'd like to add a complaint about all of those who complain about Facebook's new mini-feed feature ... but use it anyway. Yeah, it's intrusive ... yeah, it's irritatingly plastered all over your home page ... but yeah, it's optional, sort of ... (apparently once it's activated it's part of your profile for good, but it isn't activated by default). And, more importantly, yeah, you love it. So as far as I can tell, the outrage everybody's indulging in over serves exactly the same purpose as the 'where you at?' question ... just better ... because after everyone's made the requisite God/CIA/my-personal-stalker jokes, everyone can give concrete examples of the privacy violations committed against them ... so instead of only killing a few seconds in a conversation, in can kill whole conversations! Not only all of that but it can also apparently spawn whole anti-anti-facebook-feed monologues ...
In other tragicomic ironies, I'm reading a book called Hello, I'm Special about how individuality is the new conformity, and a big point of it is how mass-media consumerism fuels and facilitates this conformist non-conformity (i.e. we can purchase our way into specialness). Necessarily, then, all its examples are references to pop-culture. So I'm reading it and right behind my concerned realizations that our lives are filled with anxiety because of this cultural mandate for inidividuality and because our response to that is not to develop a deeper self-awareness or seek challenging, transcendent experiences but to go out and buy shit, I'm cross-referencing my own cultural consumption with the book's examples, watched that - check, listened to that - check, mental note to self, I should watch that iconic indie 80's film ... whine whine whine ... Sometimes I just feel like a big shopping cart, stuffed not so much with physical product, Swedish furniture or watersport equipment, but with cultural product, several terabytes of music and at least a year or two's worth of film and tv ... some more whining ... it's culturally imposed, but at some point, one has to take personal responsibility.