Phone Rant

An advice: stop it with the phones already. Pay attention and stop staring at your phone. Having the power of the Internet at your fingertips doesn’t make you a better and more accurate conversationalist, it makes you a poor desktop computer that doesn’t show porn. If I wanted useless factoids and viral videos, I would’ve stayed at home and not gone out to dinner only to be ignored half the time. For the sake of the continuity of conversation, let’s just say Marilyn Manson was in Wonder Years. You don’t have to look it up now.

The farm game you play is not even a game. It’s an electronic version of Bop It (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH4XHwefPVY). Many video games end with a princess being rescued or whatever. A glorious kingdom has been restored and the people rejoice at your triumph. Your eternal farm game ends with boredom.

Don’t text your friend now. Excuse yourself from that phone call as well. I took the time to be here at your presence. Why am I competing with someone who is miles away? Your buddy is at home bored and just wanted to say hi. I’m here in front of you, bored as well. Every time you pick it up and make me wait on you, it tells me that my time is a tad worthless and whatever it is on that phone is more important than me and good manners in general.

You don’t have to take photos of food to show it to strangers in high school. There’s a reason why you don’t talk to those people anymore. You’re not going to rekindle friendships with pictures of food.

Stop staring at your phone in bed. It’s distracting and it keeps people up. You complain that you don’t get much sleep and yet you spend an hour at night learning useless things on your phone. Did you really need to read about Justin Bieber at 1:30 in the morning?

And don’t walk while you send text messages or play games. You’re a danger to everyone around you.

Your phone doesn’t make you an interesting person. It makes you dumb, boring, and rude. It keeps you from actually remembering things. You didn’t really know that thing you just said. You just read it a few minutes ago. And you’ll probably forget about it in a week. I could’ve done the same thing too. You’re not interesting. Whoever came up with whatever you said on the Internet is interesting. So stop it.

Anniversaries of All Kinds for Everyone

Today’s my wedding anniversary. It’s also my parents’ wedding anniversary. I used to joke that I chose to get married the same day because it would be one less day to remember. But really, it’s in honor of my mother who passed away a couple of years before I got married. It’s a way of sharing one of the most special days of my life to the people I love and miss the most. Happy anniversary, Ma. We miss you.

And to my lovely wife, happy anniversary to you too.

My best friend messaged me this morning, wishing me happy anniversary and hoping that the day would be an excellent one. Unfortunately, just like 2014, it’s gotten a very inauspicious start. First off, I woke up with a strange sharp pain in my gut. Who knows what it is? Ulcer? Maybe… but I chose to ignore it for now. Just like my diagnosis of an enlarged thyroid earlier this year, it could be as serious as impending death or just something I could completely ignore. With my luck, it could be something worse… me being paranoid about it for years.

Then I turn on the computer and learn that my favorite author just died. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s works could be wildly misogynistic, in a sort of every-man-cheated-on-their-wives-back-then sort of way… but they’re also magical and romantic. He saw humanity and created worlds that would take us through the great heights of love to the lowest of human misery. They were both exotic and familiar at the same time. I was selfishly saddened by the news that his deteriorating health and failing memories a couple of years ago could make Memories of My Melancholy Whores his last book. But now I’m simply stunned at knowing that a great soul is no longer with us, not one who entertained us with his words, but one who painted windows into our humanity. It’s sad. And I’ll probably have to pick up his books again.

We are seriously running out of living people to look up to.

(My entries are turning into Simpsons episodes. They start about one thing and completely end about another.)

Oh Look! Giants!

Remember Shadow of the Colossus? What a great video game! It seemed to be a bit of a bore at first, but I managed to finish it twice; once when it first came out, and more recently when it was redone HD. It’s one of the few games worth revisiting after HD touch-ups. I love playing games that make me feel small, either it be in size or difficulty. For a moment, it makes me feel like I’m doing something bigger than wasting a couple of hours staring at my television.

This Photograph Is My Proof.

Probably the work I most admired back in art school was “This photograph is my proof.” It’s about someone showing evidence that there was a moment that existed. And despite that moment being gone and things being different, for a moment in time, a woman did care for the subject.

Or at least that’s what the subject wants us to think. Because the evidence could be misleading, and perhaps that moment was misrepresented. Saying that, “This photograph is my proof… she did love me,” is just that: him saying that some girl loved him. That’s his interpretation, not hers, and perhaps not the viewers’. It talks about how photographs and their interpreters could very well lie. At least that’s the message I get under themes of longing, mourning, and insecurity.

This is not the first time I’ve written about “This photograph is my proof.” I think its message is easy to grasp because it’s quite universal. We’ve all held on to that one photo of proof of something that is no longer there. Heck, it’s the reason why Facebook is so popular. Half of their traffic is probably due to people pining over their exes.

Unfortunately, the more I think about it, a man holding and cherishing a photo as proof of love lost is probably something that doesn’t happen too often these days. Sure, images are now digitized and no one carries photos around aside from the ones stored in phones or accessible online. But because photos are non-physical, there is not much cherishing them. We can always view, download, delete, store, edit, and share pictures of our exes. The pictures we have hidden in a deep folder somewhere in our C drives are currently outdated by the ones they post online. And even if you cherish the old ones, have you seen what they have been up to lately on their timeline?!

If anything, the modern equivalent of “This photograph is my proof” is far more intimate, especially with the ease of taking photos these days. And if anything, these “proofs” are often used for more nefarious purposes. Nude photos of exes are the proof that things were good once.

You were happy. It did happen and she did love you. Look and see for yourselves, everyone.