Bryan’s Ramblings

Blogs are dumb. Still, I plan on using them here as a therapeutic ranting tool to help slow down the ever spinning gears in my messed up little head. I have no illusions that anyone particularly cares what I have to say, nor do I have any reason to believe that anybody is even reading this shit. Sure, I could use a journal – but who willingly writes longhand anymore, really? I type faster than I think, so this medium works better anyway. Sure, I could mark all of these as private so no one has to read my useless bull shit ramblings, or even just save a bunch of Word documents into a “My Writings” folder. But why not give in to society for a change? Everybody has a freaking blog these days, so who am I to not have one? I’m already enough of a nerd to have a lame web site with my own domain name – I really have no excuse not to have a blog.

Sites like MySpace, Friendster, LiveJournal, Xanga, and all the rest really make me sick. Don’t get me wrong though – I have accounts on three out of four of those sites. By “make me sick” I mean “are so clever, I wish I’d come up with the ideas”. I mean seriously, most people (with access to the Internet anyway) believe that the universe revolves around them. Every person wants to have his own “space” to post a bunch of crap that he thinks is important. That’s really our whole purpose in life as humans: to show the rest of the world how everything about us is cooler than everything about them. We are also a species who respond positively to visual stimulants like pictures, bright colors and obnoxious fonts – so the ability to display those at the same time that we promote ourselves is why these sites are so successful.

Speaking of technologies that I hate but use all of the time, let’s talk about cell phones. Here is my list of rules that everyone should follow in order to have good cellular phone etiquette:

1. Ditch the obnoxious rings. I admit, I’m mesmerized by them too, and I even have some on my phone. However, 98% of the time, my phone is on vibrate. It’s just more polite, and you never know when it will go off. If you don’t have your phone with you and you’re concerned about not hearing it, here’s a tip: keep it with you. If you’re a girl who keeps it in her purse and the vibration is not loud enough to hear it, I suggest either putting something rattly in your purse or doing the vibrate+ring thing so that it only goes to ringing after you haven’t heard it for a certain amount of time.
2. Use Caller ID. Most phones have it now, so when somebody calls you, look to see who it is. If you followed rule number one, you can discretely look and see who it is and either ignore it if it’s probably not important, or if it must be answered, go to a place where you can have a private conversation…which brings me to rule number three.
3. Avoid using it in restaurants and theaters or while in groups or public places with lots of people. Nobody else wants to hear one side of your meaningless conversation. Plus, if you are like most people I know, you yell into the phone and make it impossible for the rest of the people you are with to carry on a normal conversation, forcing them to all watch you as you talk about your day with your mom. Seriously, wait until you are by yourself.

That’s it. Three simple rules to make your life better. I still think that it’s complete insanity that we need to be reachable at all hours wherever we are, but that’s the world we live in now.

While we’re on the topic of cell phones, let me just say that I’m on board with the text messaging thing. (Using TXT as an abbreviation for TEXT is almost as stupid as using BLOG as an abbreviation for WEBLOG, but I guess that’s the world we live in now…) I wasn’t on board with the text messaging thing at first. I’ve had two major miscalculations in my lifespan as a techno-geek. One was not believing in text messaging, the other was not believing in MP3s. For the first one, I thought “How is that different from AIM?” until I of course realized that everybody always has a cell phone but not always a computer. For the second one I thought, “Just buy the CD!”. I truly didn’t get those things at first. I guess it takes the right people to show you how it’s useful though. It’s like the story my dad always tells me about the WAH-WAH pedal for a guitar. When it first came out, the demonstration showed a single “WAH” note and he thought it was really stupid…until he heard Jimi Hendrix use it the way it was meant to be used. It’s all in the application…

I think this has been a superbly successful and sufficiently satisfying session of writing to open up this blog for consumption. It was just the right amount of useless ranting that I was going for and will continue to strive to do in this space. I’m sorry for the lack of pictures and colors though. Luckily, you can still leave comments to give me feedback make me feel important…