The Old Man and the Sea...of Ladies

Hello nurse. Could you take a look at something for me? Image by Quasimondo via Flickr

I'm having trouble concentrating today. It's so bad that halfway through my research on Ritalin I realized I was reading a blog about lawn maintenance. I often have a lot of things going on, and few things keep my focus for very long. To keep a level of concentration on any one thing I am forced to shut down other parts of my brain. I think a lot of men are like this, which explains how we can play video games for a solid 24 hour period and forget to eat.

Ritalin is prescribed for people with ADHD and, because it's basically cocaine, is helpful for those with narcolepsy. Though my concentration could use improvement, I prefer to reserve the option of passing out at will (I mean, uncontrollably). I often feign sleep, complete with snoring and drool, when someone goes on too long about something or asks me for a favor. Then when I awake, I apologize and blame "the narcoleps." Eventually, with age, I hope to shape this into a believable ruse. Combined with "losing my hearing" and "forgetting where I am from time to time" I could then successfully skip out on restaurant bills and parties I don't want to attend without being arrested or hurting anyone's feelings.

Doctors are using this methylphenidate to help with depression and recovering cocaine addicts, (basically just legalizing their drug use), but no one knows the long term effects. It's literally a wait and see situation. With the changes in diet, drug use, and technological interaction I can't form a good grasp of what our generation will be like when we senior size our citizenship. I'm seriously doubting that we will be respected for our elderly wisdom. With the advent of the Internet you don't need to ask Grandpa what it used to be like in the olden days. You just Google it. My only hope for the future is that pants on women becomes some sort of taboo or masculine imprisonment of womanhood, promoted by the Great Skirt Movement. I plan on being a dirty old man with some thick sunglasses and a mirror on the bottom of his cane. That is until actual X-ray glasses are invented. What's the hold up on that one?

It's Earth Day...now what?

Gearing up for Earth Day Picnic 2010! At least there are no flies this year. The Image via Wikipedia

I have been informed that it is Earth Day. It was actually on my calendar so I have to believe it's true. I'm unsure what to do about it, and apparently so are many other folks. Google hot trends shows "earth day activities" as the top search right now, only six spots above "earth day wordsearch." Because the only real objective behind Earth Day is to raise awareness of the Earth's environment, circling environmentally themed words is sure to complete that objective. The only time I'm environmentally conscious is when I'm in a small but crowded room and I'm feeling gassy.

There is actually an Earth Week which ends with Earth Day, but I find Earth Hour is really a more favorable duration of awareness. I usually take the time to light a candle and surf the Internet for tips on saving electricity. Some think you should plant trees today, but I'm fairly sure Arbor Day has the dibs on tree awareness. If we keep planting trees where are we going to shop or fine dine? Maybe we can use the toilet less today or process less coal, but I guess then we'd have a bunch of coal miners doing the potty dance all day. Get back to work! I admit, I am at a loss of how to thank the Earth for allowing me to live on it or do anything to make it more comfortable during my stay. I already carpool and I grudgingly recycle.

In my poor college days, I thought recycling would be the answer to my monetary problems. Some friends and I consolidated hundreds of cans one summer (translation: we were drinking and throwing the cans in the yard until advised by the city to clean up the mess) and drove them to the outskirts of town for recycling, only to receive about thirty wet dollars for our good deed. A couple of beer runs later we had 48 more cans in our yard. I was sorely unimpressed by the three 'R's that day, even more so when I could make just as much money giving plasma twice a week. Giving plasma was just two hours of my day that I would have spent doing the crossword, only I could spout blood for dollars like a reverse gas pump. Had the Earth Day wordsearch been available I probably would have done that too.

To be honest I'm not sure that we shouldn't skip Earth Day this year as punishment. Every time I turn on the news the Earth is acting up. Floods here, earthquakes there, ...volcanoes. I say we give the Earth a decade long time out and give it time to think about what it has done. Bad Earth. Bad.

Putting your best Facebook forward

Despite my hermit-like avoidance of social networking sites, I land on a few from time to time. None hold my attention for very long, but I do thumb through the pictures despite the often

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

shallow and redundant content. Cameras can now take hundreds of pictures which should greatly magnify our ability to capture rare events and brief moments in time, yet the majority of online photo albums feature the same predictable scenes: friends posing as if staged for a portrait, holding up their drinks, flashing their "victory" fingers or wagging their tongues (how happy the day will be when this trend dies).

The background, foreground and context are ignored and candidness apparently goes without consideration, unless of course it's in catching someone in a compromising situation. This raises the real point of concern.
When teens through twenty-somethings are documenting the unruly, experimental, law-breaking, party-dedicated experiences of their youth, what kind of photographic legacy are people leaving for their children?

The photos I have of my relatives are respectable scenes, depictions of civil social gatherings. I don't have a picture of my grandfather doing a keg stand or my mother hanging on men who were not my father. I know they were all young once and went through similar experiences, maybe made similar mistakes, but the world wasn't watching then. Their was no chance their embarrassing situations would end up on YouTube.

When generations down the line are assigned a genealogy project for school, they'll compile their ancestral information with ease by simply plugging our names into Google. What sorts of images will they find?