My life was
changed in serious, permanent ways a few years back. Adolescence
finally died and adulthood reached its long-overdue cruising altitude
within me. Like most major changes, it didn't happen all at once or
even in clearly defined stages. There was a long and muddy period
with no clearly defined beginning or end, but a definite change
happened.
There were a few clear landmarks on the
way. It all started with a house fire, and then happened more when I
got rejected from the four law schools I'd applied to. I don't
recommend either of those as the start of personal growth, but they
did the trick for me. I moved out of my mom's house (and into my
brother's apartment – little steps), six hundred miles from home,
and was finally able to find work. I came off my psych meds because
they had done their job. Part of their job was keeping me in a highly
suggestible state so my therapy would be more effective. Once I was
no longer in danger of hurting myself, I could come off of them, and
a fog lifted from my brain I hadn't even noticed before.
I was finally the person I had wanted
to be – independent, sufficient, and sane – instead of who I had
been most of my adolescence. I was all set to take on the world and
do whatever I wanted.
What did I want?
It took me a long time to come up with
any sort of answer to that question. I still don't have a good one. I
don't have any deep, burning passion, no great calling I just have to
achieve in life. I don't know if I'll ever find one. In the meantime,
my goal is to be happy and healthy. Those are fairly simple, and the
rough thing about simplicity is that it's very difficult to achieve,
and usually dangerous as well. I didn't have any idea what would make
me happy. I'd spent about half my life trying to be healthy, at least
mentally, and I wasn't sure what I needed to do anymore.
Enter the three media outlets that made
me into a better person, and a lot closer to my goals than ever
before. First was a morning radio show I was listening to on the way
home from work one morning. They were commenting on something they'd
found online for men with a title like “Tips to Improve your Sex
Life” and included items like good hygiene, good nutrition, etc
that weren't overtly connected to a better sex life. “We're onto
you, ladies,” the radio guy said. “Trying to trick us into doing
the right thing by telling us we'll get more sex. We're not falling
for it.”
I was struck by that statement. When
did the moral balance become men bad, women good? Since when did
women have to trick men into doing the right thing? Why would someone
who knows what the right thing is choose to do something else? I was
a little afraid, because I knew the answers to the last one, at
least. I hadn't been doing the right thing quite a bit. And I
resolved to start making some improvements in my life.
I quit smoking, something else that had
kept my mental health together for a long time. I was attached to
smoking like a baby to a blanket. I didn't want to quit because I was
afraid of the pain of separation and I was even more afraid I would
go insane again (because that's what happened on all my previous
attempts) now that I was off my meds. But I didn't go crazy this
time. I did start hallucinating worse than before, but I've been able
to handle it. I haven't been lost unable to tell what's real and what
isn't.
Encouraged by that success I started
making other changes. I went back to church on a regular basis, and
crashed through a series of diets trying to find a way to lose weight
and get in shape. That's been a much harder struggle than quitting
smoking, but I haven't given up. Based on what I've learned, I know I
can eventually, and it may not be pleasant but that part will go away
and I'll like being on the other side a lot better.
I've recently started getting exercise.
A few weeks of running laps back and forth across my living room
until I was comfortable enough to go out and do it in public. I've
been running a mile a day except in bad weather (when I ride an
exercise bike instead) for five weeks now, and I'm finally used to
it. But it was really hard to get used to. For the first three weeks
I thought about quitting every day because I was sore all the time.
My thighs, then my knees, then my calves, working on down. But after
three weeks it all started to pass, and over the past two running
every day has felt more natural than not doing it.
The only reason I made it through the
adjustment period was I already knew from quitting smoking it would
get better with time, if I didn't give up. The only reason all of
this self-improvement was possible was because I had resolved to do
what I knew was right regardless of whether another option was
easier, more fun, or more popular. It all stemmed from that radio
broadcast, and a few good decisions.
The second of the seemingly
inconsequential media that made me who I am today was a Daily Motion
clip. I've loved standup comedy for a long time, and I was poking
around looking for clips of comedians on YouTube and elsewhere. On
Daily Motion I found a clip of Eddie Izzard. I don't remember what
the show was, or what his joke was, but in the suggested links was
something I'd never heard of called the Intelligence Squared debate,
and it was Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens arguing with Ann
Widdecombe and John Onaiyekan, the Catholic Archbishop of Abuja,
Nigeria (none of which I'd heard of at that point) over whether or
not the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world. I don't
need to get into the specifics of what happened in the debate, but
what was important was that Daily Motion only had Stephen Fry and
Christopher Hitchens' parts of the debate. I stopped looking for
standup comedy and went looking for the other half of it.
I eventually found it on YouTube, and
in the suggested links on that site, I found an excerpt from a show
called QI. By the time I watched that all the way through, I was
hooked. I had no idea what British TV was like prior to that, other
than I had a vague sense that Whose Line Is It Anyway and a few other
shows had migrated over here from over there and I had always heard
that their shows ran for very short periods – like 15-25 episodes –
and then went away. Just over two years ago as I'm writing this, I'd
never seen a British TV show. Now I've seen every episode of QI,
Mock the Week, Would I Lie to You, 8 Out of 10 Cats,
all of the Big Fat Quizzes several episodes of Peep Show,
Mitchell and Webb, and The Graham Norton Show,
and “watched” all of The
Unbelievable Truth and quite a bit of Heresy, which
are radio shows uploaded with either a still photo or just a black
screen. As a side note here, I don't want to be a freeloader, but I
don't know how I can pay a BBC license fee from here in the States.
If I knew how, I would, but all I keep getting are snarky suggestions
that I should just send the money to (insert username of person I'm
talking to) and let them pay it for me.
What I've seen has opened my eyes and
stretched my horizons in ways I never knew were possible. To start
with, I now have an idea of what life is like outside the US
and what people in other countries might think of us. I don't just
mean the different words Brits and Americans use and other cultural
differences like that (although that's going to get a post all to
itself because of the problems they cause), but I mean what it's like
to live in a different kind of political system, with a different
economy, with different reasons behind why people think what
they think and do what they do. I've come away from just watching TV
online with a better understanding of what it means to be
international, particularly what it means to be non-American.
I also realize that the cultures in
Britain and America are still pretty similar. That's what I mean by
stretching my horizons. I now realize that if there's this much I
didn't know in a country that speaks mostly the same language and
shares a lot of the same history, I can't even imagine what life
would be like in China, India... or Iraq. It's given me a level of
real comprehension I didn't have before about world politics, wars,
globalization, international trade, and what America has been doing
wrong in all those fields and why.
If you want to know how to make America
a better place, encourage all of us to watch British TV on YouTube.
But still, I never would have discovered any of this without clicking
that link from Eddie Izzard on Daily Motion.
The third medium that's changed my life
recently isn't so much a single broadcast as it is an entire
industry, and that's Hollywood. What's changed is, I've quit paying
them any attention. Some of that you might expect – I've been so
busy watching British TV I haven't had time for any American shows.
And you might also say that it's probably a good thing, and not worth
the trouble to miss. The thing is, that's been sort of true and sort
of not, sort of good and sort of bad.
I've never had any premium TV channels,
like HBO or Showtime, and when they started doing original series I
felt a bit left out because I couldn't watch the shows everyone was
talking about like The Sopranos. It was especially annoying in
college, because those of us who lived in a dorm had no control over
our channel selection and it made it a bit hard to take professors
looking down their nose at plebes who didn't appreciate their
favorite shows we couldn't watch. Some of what I've found in the
passing years has been good. Based on how I've seen other people
react, I'm really glad I've never seen Jersey Shore. In fact,
I avoid it so much I only know two names, Snooki and The Situation,
because of the radio, and I had no idea what any of them looked like
until I saw a picture of Snooki on a news website yesterday. I really
like that my head isn't full of useless and meaningless information
like that, and that if my thoughts wander at work it's more likely to
be into an area like particle physics than something I saw on reality
TV. (I don't want to make myself look like a genius there – it's
just as likely to wander into what I'd wish for if I ever found a
bottle with a genie in it, but still not reality TV.)
What I didn't expect is that I've
almost completely disengaged from the American culture. If you think
about it, what defines a culture is a shared sense of values,
priorities, opinions, and morals all drawn from a pool of shared
experiences in our lives. I'm missing more and more of those
experiences every day, and as a result, I'm losing my reference for
those really important values, priorities, opinions, and morals. For
instance, 2012 was the first year I didn't watch the Super Bowl. Now,
about 2/3 of the nation didn't watch the Super Bowl based on it's
rated viewing of 110 million viewers, but that still means that one
person in three did. When you take into account how many people
couldn't watch the game live (infants, people in comas, people who
wanted to but had to be somewhere else), the number of people who
watched it afterward (like those people who wanted to) , and the
number of people who weren't counted in the ratings, that figure
probably rises to half or better.
What were the commercials this year?
Super Bowl commercials are probably as important as the game now. Did
you see any you remember? I didn't. That's what I mean about
disengaging. I run into people who remember things I don't, and think
things I don't because of it. People who can quote lines from shows
I've never seen, catchphrases from movies I didn't see, jingles from
commercials I didn't see, lyrics from songs I've never heard, and
like movie stars I've never heard of. On and on it goes. There are
movies on DVD in the checkout counter at the grocery store I've never
heard of, and a lot of them were summer blockbusters. When people
make a reference I don't get, I come off as a weirdo, only unlike in
middle school I can't blame the fact that my mom won't let me watch
R-rated movies yet.
Therein lies a decision I haven't made
yet – do I sacrifice all that “blank space” in my head that's
not filled with memories I don't want, which is very valuable to me,
or do I risk becoming further isolated from everyone else around me
in important situations, like customer interactions, casual
socializing, >gulp< job interviews... I'm
introverted enough that usually it doesn't matter and I don't care,
but sometimes I do have to go out into public and it chafes me that I
can't do that without being as socially awkward now as I was when I
couldn't tell which of the people I was speaking to were really
there. And sometimes, it really matters that I'm unable to do that.
So all in all, a lot of things made me
who I am today. We are the sum of our experiences, our vices and
virtues, and other such cliches. In my life, some unusual things have
gone into that mix. Some of them were really important and it was
obvious, like the house fire and law school rejection letters. Some
of them were really trivial and it was obvious, like what toppings I
prefer on my hamburgers. What's surprising is how often something
that seems really important, like my college GPA, turned out not to
be, and something that seems trivial, like what radio station I
listened to on my way home from work, turned out to be the thing that
changed my life.
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