I Just Can't Find the Words

This was the title of a continuing education session that I attended this afternoon as part of my professional development required by the college for which I work. It was the creepiest, most insulting fifty minutes of time I've endured in recent memory. Let me describe the scene.

The speaker's style was breathy and flowery, full of tangential anecdotes that made no sense. He would frequently pause for a few seconds before inhaling deeply and proclaiming "Oh boy," for no apparent reason. He would also take up to thirty seconds to study a piece of paper while the room, thirty colleagues full, sat in silence politely waiting for him to collect his thoughts and continue his presentation.

Style aside, if the presentation was worthwhile, we should overlook these quirks in the delivery method, right? It wasn't. He spent fifteen minutes introducing himself, talking about his youth in Queens, every place he went to college in his entire life, and why he ended up in Omaha. Now, as an Omaha transplant, I understand the need to explain yourself if you've somehow found yourself residing here after coming from, say, New York or Chicago, but the classroom probably isn't the place for that.

He then began a thirty minute stream-of-consciousness ramble about politicians who spoke without considering the ramifications of their words and why that upset him. However, he gave no solutions about how to go about prevent such atrocities of communication in our own interactions. Also part of the thirty minute poetry slam were descriptions of emails with colleagues in which someone said something he didn't like or used a word that he didn't feel was appropriate. Of course, no examples of that behavior were left without a complicated, tangent-filled rant about how he responded to the attack. No one in the room, including me, had the heart to ask him to consider why people reacted to him they way that they did.

Following the descriptions of emails that probably should have remained private, he then began to rail on contemporary mediums of communication like email, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. It was easy to understand how much he detests these things because every time he mentioned one of them he would intentionally mispronounce it, as if he were some kind of incredibly stupid Luddite who couldn't figure out that it's not pronounced "MyBook" or "TwitSpace." His reasoning for the contemptuous behavior? Everything in an electronic medium can be copied and printed, potentially ruining a reputation in the process. I found myself thinking that I could understand why this would be threatening to him.

At one point, he even told an incredibly insulting story about a conversation with a garbage man, which I paraphrase here in his voice:

I don't mean to insult anyone in the garbage collection profession, here, but listen to this story. A garbage man was emptying my recycle bin and mentioned something about the can 'not being able to withstand such an excessive impact'. I was impressed that he used such big words for someone without a lot of higher education.

Then he paused and continued, "But it's the recession so I guess we all have to do what we can," implying that the only reason the man knew such big words in the first place was because he had to take a job below his normal stature because of the poor economy.

At the end of his lecture, he asked the standard question, "Does anyone have any questions?" Of course nobody did because not only were some of his comments, in an unexpected twist of irony, completely inappropriate, but his thought process was so broken, so twisted in its logic, that I don't think any of us in the room could have even begun to decipher exactly what the hell his point really was in the first place.

As people filed out of the room, I felt like I was the only one who found his presentation completely insulting and worthless but as I discovered, everyone else was similarly disgusted by what they'd just witnessed. Thinking back to the event, I wish I'd had a recording to device to capture the insanity I'm attempting to describe. When it comes to describing it in this medium, I just can't find the words.

Hulu There!

In an effort to shift the tone around here away from wailing and the gnashing of teeth, I'd like to point your browser to Hulu.com. It's free to sign up. Once you do, you'll have access to a number of decent television shows and movies. Like television, there are commercials, but there's never a break like the yawning gap of a twenty minute chasm between the last set and the end of the movie you're trying to finish. Most of the time, it's fifteen or thirty seconds and you're back to the feature.

We've been watching it a bit since we've all been sick, we don't have a TV, and the two-at-a-time Netflix queue can't spit out or requests quickly enough. I mostly like sticking to the television offerings. We keep up with our viewings of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report this way. King of the Hill is finally accessible whenever I'm ready for it instead of being shifted around table-tennis style between five different time slots. They also have an all too brief list of Three Stooges shorts. Granted, these are some of the best the Stooges have to offer, but there are still more I'd like to see up there. Thankfully, they've confined the offerings to the depression-era Curly years. The episode Three Little Beers always makes me laugh.

The Internet Makes You Stupid

In light of the Hot Coffee minigame scandal with GTA:SA, I am very disappointed in the industry which I have so staunchly defended for so long. I am not disappointed at all because of the content of the minigame, but because of the fact that Rockstar Games violated the full-disclosure policies of the ESRB by not submitting the minigame for the ratings review. In my disappointment, I mistakenly got involved with an online messageboard discussion and I am amazed at how much information people think they absorb but don't.

To explain my point, it must be said that what I stated above is exactly what I posted on the messageboard: basically, "It's not the content but the cover-up that concerns me." The reasons should be obvious. First, this casts a lot of doubt on the veracity of anything that those in the industry have to say about their products. Secondly, politicians have been waiting for the first easy chance to strike at video games and this stupid fiasco is the perfect opportunity to do so.

Unfortunately, when I'd rather discuss the full disclosure violation and make it totally clear that I don't have an issue with the content being in the game, the argument always comes back to the content and avoids facing the lie. Except for one comment, most people on the messageboard who are still supporting Rockstar aren't paying one bit of attention to the fact that Rockstar violated a clear policy of the ESRB, but instead, they are focusing their argument on the content, conservativism, and the pair's influence on American culture. The only comment that didn't switch the argument's topic actually attempted to defend the violation of the policy with a weak allegation of induced fear due to political pressure.

Regardless, everytime the argument flopped over to the questions about the content and American moral culture, another participant and myself attempted to move it back to the clear ESRB policy violation. But, it seems that our efforts are to no avail. We continue to be labled as stuffy, panicking, over-moral Americans (mostly by Europeans) when we have continually made it crystal clear that our argument does not concern those issues. I have since given up the argument, but I am left with some questions: How much information do people really receive and interpret? How much of what little information we do recieve and process do we need to start labeling ourselves experts? Why do I feel such a need to continue arguing with someone who obviously isn't really listening to what I am saying?

In the end, I violated my own rule of not getting into arguments on the internet and I am paying for it dearly because I am a competitive person. I want to win that argument so badly by going back to previous posts to pull quotes and responses to quotes in order to prove that the thread continues to avoid the true argument. I know that continuing to argue is futile and so I have abandoned the argument. In my mind, I know I did not lose because I made my point clear and it was misconstrued and misused and, frankly, at times it was even ignored. But, by abandoning the argument I appear to have lost because I have stopped fighting. I find stepping away to be the hardest thing to do.

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If you made it all the way through, thanks for reading. If not, that's ok too. Writing this saved me from continuing to bicker with random strangers on the internet. Fortunately, the board I was on is a professional board (GANG) so people are not very likely to resort to flaming, which is the only saving grace of the whole debacle.