Aerial7...

...and Panasonic

Huh.

So, I’m tricking myself. A few days ago I decided to pack up everything, leaving only two of each kind – two bowls, two plates, two knives, two glasses, etc. If I want to use a bowl, and it’s dirty – well, I’ve got to wash it.  By making it more convenient to wash a single bowl and a single spoon than it would be to get a clean one out from storage, I’m hoping to prevent dishes from piling up.

This will (hopefully) lead to a cleaner living space and less frustration.

Anyone else remember the days of floppy disks? The growl of the motor as it spun the magnetic platter of the disk, the horrible access speeds, the fact that they couldn’t hold anything worth having in digital format…

Yeah, I don’t miss those days either.

Personally, I’m waiting until our phones automatically mount as hard drives whenever we go near a computer. Until that shiny new future arrives, however, I use thumb drives. They’re small, cheap, almost universally compatible, and they’ve got great storage capacity. Hell, if you’re paranoid, you can get one that will self-destruct.

The finest thumbdrive I’ve ever owned is the LaCie iamaKey. It’s simple and well-designed, its casing is durable metal (instead of plastic), and it comes in capacities up to 32 gb(!).

The best part of it, aside from its styling, is the fact that it blends in perfectly with my keys:

I hate big key chains. I keep my keys on a single ring. Unfortunately, every time I’ve tried to put a thumb drive on my key ring, it’s being either:

1. too big, making it feel like I’ve got a keychain attached to my keys
2. hollow, making a very loud and obnoxious rattling noise when it’s in my pocket
or
3. Not strong enough, causing it to break off of my key ring or stop working entirely.

The iamaKey addresses all of these shortcomings completely. The metal construction makes it sound like any other key on my ring, prevents it from breaking, and it’s a bit thinner, in fact, that some of my actual keys.

Is it perfect? Nearest I can tell. I am not in love with the completely-detachable cap that covers the contacts on the end of the drive (I always worry about losing it), and on occasion I will forget my keys because they’re plugged into my computer’s USB port (makes you feel like an idiot, let me tell you). But these are both small prices to pay for such a great design.

Thanks to the iamaKey, I can carry 8 gb of storage on me at all times without fear of losing or breaking it, and without being irritated by bulky design or loud noises. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Coming home to a nearly-empty room, my bed in one corner, a desk against the wall next to it. I would sit at this desk, possibly look out of a window onto the night lights of a city, and write a novel. On paper, with a pen.

Pure, unadulterated zen.

Only, this fantasy never even makes it out of the gate. Because currently, I own about 80,000 things.

Or it feels that way, anyway. I live in a small studio apartment in downtown Philadelphia. Due to my living situation, it is difficult and frustrating to store everything. To keep everything. Sometimes I feel like I’m curating a museum. On display are countless useless items – items that I love and feel attachment to as a result of the symbolic representation they maintain to past events, people, or places. Everything I own is a souvenir.

To some extent, it’s all just a big pile of stuff that highlights all of my previous unfulfilled aspirations – a whole bunch of stuff I thought would be interesting and swore would be different and would finally evolve into a hobby.

I’ve got a radio I swore I would start listening to, because it’s not that I like to listen to NPR as much as it is that I WANT TO BE the TYPE OF GUY who listens to NPR.

But I am terminally afflicted by an awful attention span – my hobbies die before they get off the ground.

This is not, in my mind, a raging diatribe on the US’s rampant materialism. That would be hypocritical, you see. If I had a soap box, I’d be using it to store CDs I haven’t listened to since I ripped them. No, this is more a “rock bottom” kind of thing. This is a realization that I have a studio apartment, for the love of God, and that I have formed unhealthy emotional attachments to stuff that I don’t actually want to have or use.

I’m constantly looking at things to throw away, and then finding a reason to keep them.

“That could be useful, you know, someday.”

“But I paid good money for it!”

“It was a gift! I don’t want to offend anyone.”

I’m willing to bet you’ve said a few of these things to yourself, on occasion, holding on to your flute from 6th grade or some such nonsense. The worst part, the very nucleus of my materialistic self-loathing, is the fact that my desire to throw things away is cyclical. I suddenly snap – say, because I stubbed my toe on a side table that I don’t have room for that was given to me out of a garage by a friend’s well-meaning father, and decide I’m going to become a monk – living in a single bedroom with nothing but a cot, a blanket, and a laptop (in my defense, bytes are a highly-efficient storage medium). Usually this ends up in the formulation of plans and fantasies of ascetic living and my name in the papers for being the guy with the least stuff ever. And then I get lost for 3 hours reading the wikipedia article on minimalism and aesceticism, and I start looking for cots on ebay, and then I forget that I ever wanted to get rid of that end table.

To my credit, I’m taking some steps to reduce my clutter. I’ve hopped on the “living minimally” bandwagon. In my case, “living minimally” (a phrase that requires context) means a few things.

1. Reducing the number of things I own.

You never know how much junk you own until you move into a studio apartment. All the useless stuff that distracts me, worries me, breaks on me – I’m trying to get rid of it. Sometimes this means selling it on eBay. Sometimes it means just setting it out by the curb so that someone else takes it. In every instance it means severing some kind of emotional tie you had to this object. And it is emotional – otherwise, why wouldn’t you have gotten rid of it in the first place, right?

The stupid thing about it is that I find myself hoarding things that aren’t even important. Copies of Wired that I never read. Gag gifts from friends that I don’t really want. Things that I swore I would start using in my daily life, but never did. These things don’t even matter to me. And so I am getting rid of them. A little at a time, sometimes, but nonetheless they are being removed from my life.

2. Requiring the possessions I DO own to be high in quality.

I want the things I decide to own to be the best possible things I can own. Quality objects will last a long time, reducing consumption and greatly increasing your comfort and sanity. I am (again, slowly) attempting to replace the things I own with the best-possible products I can find.

3. Focusing on fewer hobbies.

I find that too many things beckon my attention at once. As a result, I never develop serious skills because I lack the focus to work on them. This is a problem I am attempting to fix. I am giving my attention to fewer hobbies, which allows me to devote more time and attention to the ones I do enjoy. It also means less equipment laying around for all the things I am trying to learn to do, which include: rock climbing, DJing, and bag-making (posts on some of these later, no doubt).

I know this whole “minimalism” thing is a fad. It’s a new trend for 20-something yuppies to hop onto so they can feel justified in checking the “Buddhist” box on the religion section of opinion polls or whatever. But it makes me happy. It’s something that is improving my life.

Or if would if I could figure out a way to get rid of all my crap.

I like big headphones. I think it’s a style thing. When I see someone wearing big headphones, my first impression is a kind of reverent appreciation, like a nerdy version of guys showing off their cars (iPod earbuds, on the other hand, scream “hipster” to me. How judgmental am I?). I don’t know. I just think that big headphones make a person look cool, I guess. It’s like a form of Batesian DJ Mimicry – I’m tricked by appearances into thinking people are cooler than they actually are.

I used to wear Bose Around-ear headphones. but they weren’t very comfortable and I always thought I was going to break them. Also the cord was like, six feet long. A cord that long is really more of a pain than anything, you know? I don’t need six feet of cable dangling everywhere and getting caught on things for when I’m carrying my iPod ON ME.

The sound quality of the Bose set was good, although I admit that I am not much of an audiophile. I’m sure there are people out there that will tell you they sound like garbage. Then again there are audiophiles that pay nearly $3,000 for a set of three-foot speaker wires, or nearly $1,000 for a “cable cooker.” Because of crap like that, my guideline will always be: “Does it sound good to me? Yes? Then I’m in.” Everyone else can go bollocks.

While I was in the market for headphones, I saw an entry at Fort 90 entitled “Fake Girls and Real Headphones”. Long story short(er), I ended up getting the Panasonic RP-HTX7s in green for Christmas. And they’re just plain awesome.

They’re incredibly comfortable, for one thing. I don’t feel like my head is caught in a plush vice grip. The cups are actually elongated slightly, which feels like a better fit on my ears. And the headband is fine – only slightly padded, but definitely comfortable. Truth be told, comfort is my number one priority in a pair of headphones – I like to wear them (like most everyone does) on trips, walking around the city, etc., and I found that my Bose headphones actually gave me a slight headache if I wore them around in normal use.

They’ve also got great sound quality, especially for the price point. As I said before, I’m not an audiophile. I could start ranting here about “mids” and “presence” and how “dynamic” the “bass” is. But that would be a complete sham. Mostly, I listen to electronic music and host of colors is diverse, and (in my opinion) the retro design just screams cool. And like I said, I can’t diminish the coolness factor, here. I want my headphones to look good. I want them to catch peoples’ eyes. Is that stupid and shallow? Probably. But no more than any other way in which we pick our accessories – I also pick my t-shirts based on their coolness factor.

Only complaint I’ve had so far? For the span of a few hours, I think something got loose in my left ear cup – it sounded like a small ball bearing or something was rattling around in there. It completely disrupted my ability to listen to music – it was a loud rattling right in my ear. Panasonic’s support was amazing, though – even after admitting that I hadn’t registered them online, and that I’d thrown away the packaging to save space during my holiday travels, they were perfectly willing to repair them. Thing is, they didn’t need to – overnight, with literally no action on my part, the issue cleared itself up. Even violent shaking has not reproduced the noise, which leads me to believe one thing:

Panasonic has an army of ninjas that roam the country, servicing products in the middle of the night.

(Highly recommended)

The apocalypse is usually portrayed as a sort of human twilight – the fading afterglow of an existence that burned too bright for too long. But it is also a global reset button. If everything is destroyed, the characters are forced to survive on their own resourcefulness, their own ingenuity. I love reading about clever ways (scientifically sound or otherwise) that characters are able to survive and even flourish in such a harsh environment. From the supremely hostile world of the zombie apocalypse to the highly creative (and equally terrifying) pandemic in “Blindness” to the classic nuclear holocaust – any of these devastating scenarios can provide an extraordinary circumstance in which we can truly examine the core of a character’s being.

Imagine yourself, huddled in a corner of an apartment on the 13th floor of a high-rise. You haven’t eaten in days, of course, because the cupboards had been raided by the time you arrived. It is dusk, the world dark outside, save for the occasional flash of lightning. And besides the rain and thunder that accompanies the lightning, the only sound you hear is a low chorus of moaning. 12 stories below you, for a reason you cannot even begin to understand, the dead have begun to once more walk the earth. Adding to this hellish scenario, these re-animated corpses hunger for your flesh.

What would you do? Would you stand and fight, trying to find other survivors to reclaim your world? Or would you become a scavenger, trying always to stay ahead of the hordes below?

Talk about drama! I got chills even writing that, and it’s a cliche!

Humanity has always had apocalypse stories. Ragnarok of Norse mythology, Armageddon of the Bible, the Five Suns of the Aztecs. There is even a term for study of the end of the world – Eschatology. We as humans have always been fascinated with the idea of the world’s end. We have always created theories, religious or otherwise, as to how the light of humanity will suddenly go out. This morbid fascination has been translated into the various fictions that we as humans have created – the Fallout series of games, Night of the Living Dead and its sequels, Stephen King’s The Stand. They are all explorations of the collective fear and fascination our species has with “the End.”

Of course, the apocalypse can be poorly done. The Day After Tomorrow? Beyond Thunderdome? Doomsday? (Oh GOD, Doomsday!) – all of these movies were awful. And yet I still respect the imagination that goes into them. They still press that core button in me – the one that forces me to consider: “Would I survive, if the world became this way? What’s important to me? Where would I go? Could I make these choices?” And when the Apocalypse is done well? It absolutely enthralls me. The Book of Eli is probably one of the most amazing post-apocalyptic movies I’ve ever seen. My jaw was dropped for nearly all of 28 Days Later. I even liked Waterworld for its imaginative setting.

These stories are the opposite of “escapist” literature – you are drawn into a world that is worse, not better, than your own. You are forced to think about your own survival as you see or read or hear about the hard choices the characters make. And yet, at the end of it all, there’s often a sense of hope. Of appreciation for the world in which we live. Is this the reason for our perverse interest in these scenarios? Do we need to be reminded of the relative safety and comfort of our lives?

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get my crowbar.