I realized awhile back that long blog posts are never a proper way to get readers back. Nor is it the way to get readers at all. None of them will ever read a word of a particularly long post (even if they might, somehow, bring themselves to comment on it), and having spent a great deal of energy and thought into a single monstrosity, experience suggests that it becomes difficult to continue that momentum for future use.

Oh well.

So spring break, I suppose, has been as interesting–if not as productive–as any other break this year. Incidentally, my brother’s birthday is tomorrow, and it came as quite the shock the last day of school before break that my brother is apparently more social than I. My brother, apparently, not only has friends who celebrate his birthday, but he has friends who get him things–including (much to my amusement, if not bemusement) members of the opposite gender who bake cookies.

Needless to say, this forced me to take a closer look at my own standing socially. If my brother, purportedly even more awkward than I, was making such headways mere months into his freshman year, where did that place me, less than three months removed from high school graduation, and five months from college matriculation? If nothing else, it placed me, certainly, in quite the quandary.

Spring break, if nothing else, provides an opportunity for contemplation. Certainly the desire to procrastinate finds no enemy, despite the piles of calculus or Spanish work awaiting me even as I type this. I’ve found it generally difficult to accomplish things of tangible value, even with a to-do list staring me in the face. Thus contemplation is all that remains to be accomplished, aside from some idling in the name of “rest and relaxation”.

Certainly contemplation is easy to come across. Having a decent amount of free time to watch television, for example, I haven’t been able to help but shake the notion that game shows would, almost invariably, be better if contestants would simply hurry the hell up more often.

It’s really a pretty simple idea, actually. As any number of teachers will remind one during a test, you either know something, or you don’t. Watching a 40-something year old mother struggle on a second grade math problem (thank you Fox) hardly challenges the typical viewer’s nerves quite the same way Jack Bauer getting shot does, provided you don’t notice the bulletproof vest he’s wearing. (24′s recent failings can be the subject of another post, more likely to come on a Monday night when it can be as terse as possible.) Certainly the audience is most interested in seeing the contestant win the grand prize–whatever that may be–and any impediment to this is merely a waste of the viewer’s time. So let those who can proceed quickly, and those who can’t step aside promptly. Relatedly: why would Fox run a promo for their show by advertising the fact that they went through three contestants in one hour? Doesn’t that suggest that there are three stupid contestants, none with any ability to reach the end of the game? I digress, but I urge the further consideration of my point.

Yes, it would be difficult to argue that contemplation cannot be had during a break. And when it comes to social contemplation, it’s difficult to ignore the attempts at quantifying the social experience that have been heralded in by the proverbial Web 2.0. Indeed, as others have discussed previously, this quantifying defies all ambiguity in the name of open dissemination and comparison, betraying perhaps the unquantifiable–stated more eloquently, perhaps, as unintellectual “feelings”–that propel this experience. As Facebook informs me that I have a scant number of friends in comparison to much of the rest of my “network” (and my personal belief that I probably have about twice as many as I should) and periodically offers a glimpse into the lives of the social elite via my “news feed,” it seems but to confirm my instinctual belief: I’m behind.

What Facebook fails to offer, however, are solutions. How does one take hold of his last months of high school for the best? If an event like senior prom is to be regarded as one of the most memorable events of one’s life, surely there must be more than one’s internal willpower and social prowess–things that I, apparently, have been lacking going on eighteen years–to guide him forward? How is it that there could be such a disparity between intellectual stature and social maneuvering ability?

Perhaps the intellectualness of it all is part of the problem. As I sit here writing this, I can’t help but notice the swath of Firefox tabs, each open to something undoubtedly important that I’m trying to master–how to write UIs for Java programs, looking at the most recent Drupal modules, figuring out how to optimize Google Calendar, some new program that will convert these DVDs to DV video for me, and probably any number of things in addition to that. Maybe it’s my intellect that persuades me to attempt to address all of these things, always caught instead in the infinite loop of contemplation–hindered from action by thought–instead of properly accomplishing that with which the dumb dolt sitting next to me finds no issue.

A quick check of the calendar reveals three days remaining in my spring break (barring an unexpected snowstorm–given the weather recently, stranger things have happened) and about 76 days until graduation. I guess I should try to figure this out by then.

I think some introspection is good every now and then.

Comments (1) | Random, School, TV