Are Friends Eclectic?

I saw this meme on Facebook a while back. That really stood out to me, since It’s become accepted wisdom among many that modern technology has left us more “connected” with people but emotionally distant. I’m sceptical of this concept, since I’d always noticed how superficial a lot of our interactions used to be even in the pre-social media world. I mean, you talk to far fewer people in the course of an average day now, but most of those lost moments of human contact were forgettable rote interactions. If you now buy things on Amazon instead of a store, you don’t really lose any emotional involvement, since the interaction with a store employee is usually just you playing a part based on expectations.

This meme takes that same concept to new heights: in the same way that you may play a part in your interactions with/as service workers, you also play a part as a high school student. In each case, you act as expected, and this prevents you from having a meaningful involvement. Yes, I know, lots of people develop really deep friendships in high school. But compared to the total number of people you go to school with, and the amount of time you spend with them, it’s amazing how little you know about them.

This comes back to a point I realized a few years ago. It’s not something that’s easy to say, and some people will be shocked by it, but The Breakfast Club lied to us. Its message was that teenagers can be pushed into different roles, but still have commonalities. There’s some truth to that, but it’s also true that high school forces a sameness on us. As I watch my friends and I age, I keep noticing personality come out that couldn’t be expressed before. In school there's so much pressure to play the roll of a teen that you suppress your unique features.

This might be a product of age: we just need a lot of time to explore the world and find ourselves. Our maybe it's due to the same modern technology that delivered that meme: The Internet has allowed us to connect with others with similar inclinations instead of having to fit in to a community of others that we have little in common with. Certainly that’s one thing I’ve envied today’s kids for: the Internet gives them a chance to pursue their interests regardless of how isolated their real-life situation.

But I suspect that my new understanding is because of the different perspective you have of your high school friends now. For adults, social media is more a respite from the world than a part of it. It's the people you choose to be around rather than those you must be around. Thus, it's safer to keep your guard down and be yourself. If people don't like what they see, you're an unfriending away from ending the problem. The irony is that the people you're now allowing to peek behind the mask are the people you used to show the mask to.

The Royal Weed

I have to admit a little bit of Schadenfreude when I found out that the soon-to-be-legal pot in Ontario will be sold through a small number of government-owned stores. I mean, I've always supported legalization, so that's good. But the government-owned stores concept gives me mixed emotions.

Just to be clear, I think this is a dumb decision by the government. It's essentially replicating Ontario's traditional way of selling alcohol in government stores. That never made sense to me: Alcohol isn't really dangerous enough to require such oversight, the government-run stores did nothing to keep alcohol out of the hands of minors, and for some reason, we're totally okay having private companies sell tobacco. And of course, we're now moving away from that approach in alcohol, selling it in grocery stores. That change, and the complete lack of a societal collapse resulting from it, would seem to show that the old approach was wrong, and we know it.

The decision to sell pot through government stores also makes little sense politically. Premier Wynne and government may be looking at this as a compromise between a ban and complete deregulation, so it will be a good way to sell the public on a change not everyone in comfortable with. But I think it's more likely to cancel-out support. Libertarians will hate the government control. Social conservatives won't be placated because they've been taught that pot is the creation of Satan, so careful distribution of the creation of Satan will seem no better. And even left-leaning people like me will see the move as paternalistic, rather than socialist.

Further, it looks like Wynne is developing a Hillary-Clinton-like anti-cult where a large segment of society has decided that they just don't like her or anything she does, not really sure why, but it couldn't possibly be sexism, really, I'm sure. As such, trying to reach a please-everyone compromise is impossible; people will just focus on what they didn't get, because the narrative is that everything Wynne does is bad. It doesn't really make sense for her to try to grab the centre; she'll find little traction there. She'd be better off trying to prove here bona fides to the left where more people will give here a chance.

But I am having a bit of Schadenfreude for Canada's prince of pot, Marc Emery. See, I've been waiting years for a chance to talk about him so that I could point out that I've actuality met him. After bragging about this to someone, that other person would then ask, "how did you meet him?" And I'd reply, "he spoke at my high school."

Okay, he technically spoke at our model U.N. assembly, invited by a school that was drifting towards the proto-alt-right. Back then, Emery wasn't concentrating on legalizing marijuana; he was just a general hard-core libertarian. For me, that was the beginning of a lifetime of finding extreme libertarianism both fascinating and scary. It's like how you might enjoy mob movies, but then you find out that people actually look up to their characters and suddenly it's not so much fun.

So I've taken note whenever Marc Emery's name has come up, as he's moved out west and taken marijuana as his life's cause. Living in Vancouver, he won't have to care about Ontario's nanny-state pot stores. But I'd like to think that his head did explode just a little bit when he heard about it.

Wouldn't You Prefer An "End Of August Sale?"

When I was in school, Back-To-School ads used to bother me, as an unnecessary reminder that summer was eventually going to end. The record earliest was two weeks into summer, and the record stupidest was from a car dealer. In retrospect, I realize that one was supposed to be ironic, but it wasn't too funny at the time.

It was understandable that stores made a big deal about it then: there was a lot to buy for school because so much of it was consumed or wore out: pens, pencils, paper, binders, bags.  You had to stock up on all you would need during the year because in those pre-Staples days, you didn't know when you could get it for a reasonable price again.

It seems to have changed with technology, though. The ubiquitous lined binder paper used to be an easy loss leader (I still have a box of it that I'm trying to get through.) But today it's more about technology, which doesn't really have to be replaced every year (trust me, I made it to 1992 writing reports on a Commodore 64.) But parents with the combined panic of back-to-school and fear-of-technology could be easily manipulated by their kids to get everything replaced with the latest models now.

Which leads me to this Future Shop ad where they have the teenagers walking out dressed as the academic superstars they are supposed to become: astronauts, surgeons, rock stars. And now I'm glad that I only had to deal with a reminder that school was about to start again, not pressure to be exceptional. Once again, in our fast-advancing technological world we're expecting too much from today's kids.  It makes me glad I came from good old no-hope Generation X.

Duly Noted

Whenever I had to write essays in high school or university, I had trouble with the footnotes.¹ The impression I got from teachers' instructions was to footnote anything that I got out of a book or any other source. But that always led to dozens of notes; far more than anyone else. And, far more than the teachers expected, since they would dock marks for using too many.

Occasionally I would back off and try to footnote fewer things, but without fail I would then get an angry message that I hadn't noted enough things. This was made worse by the fact that teachers and profs would always deliver that particular message through an abstruse accusation of plagiarism.²

I think now I have a better handle on it: you're noting anything the reader should know the original source of, whether it's a little known fact, or the ideas and opinions of others. Too bad I don't have a chance to ever use that knowledge now.

I mention this because it occurs to me that the web can be seen as a big set of essays, with the links as the footnotes. And often those notes are added for the same reasons: credit where credit is due, our backing up facts.

Usually in this blog I've added links to other topics to provide background for readers who may not be familiar with a topic. Sometimes I've used a link to provide evidence of a fact I've mentioned. I wonder if I should do more of that. In the throbbing vortex of misinformation that is the Internet, the definition of "disputed information" is much bigger than it would be in am academic essay.³ It might be a good idea if we all started working harder to link to sources just to stop the nightmare scenario of everyone providing their own facts and simply trying to out yell each other.


1. Or endnotes
2. Keep in mind that in those pre-internet days, actual plagiarism was rare, so the teacher could do this schtick with everyone understanding the accusation wasn't real. I don't know what they do now that real plagiarism is much more common.
3. Consider how many web sites and the communities around them would consider evolution, global warming, or equality of the races and genders to be open questions.

It Gets Mediocre

You may have seen the "It Gets Better" campaign. It's an initiative by sex advice columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage. The idea is to tell gay (and bi, trans, etc.) youths that their school experiences are not necessarily an indication of how the rest of their lives will go. That's especially true for gay kids in small towns, red states, or conservative families. Certainly, when I look back at the on-average one student in every class who wasn't straight, I can't imagine what they went through. The shift from that experience to a modern gay neighborhood in a big city would have to be a huge positive change in one's life.

When I think about that, I find myself thinking, I wish I was gay. Can you imagine what that would be like: you become an adult and don't just move out of your parents' place, you move to a place where suddenly everyone understands you and accepts you?

We should all have our own gay community. You suffer through high school, but then you get to move to the jock neighborhood, or the goth neighborhood, or geek town. There, you're surrounded by people who accept you and appreciate you for who you really are, even more than your closest friends and family did. Of course, for those of us who grew up in the pre-internet era, modern life is kind of like that. Online, you can find that personal community.  So if you're over forty, you have something in common with the homosexual community.