lyrical musings

Editor’s Note: This post is not directed at anyone in particular, despite it’s relevance to some of our readers and personal experiences mentioned. The use of the term ‘you’ is a generic, despite bearing resemblance to Dustin Hoffman. Kidding.

There has been a new trend recently, this so-called ‘life-hacking’, which is defined by Wikipedia as:

Productivity tricks that users devise and employ to cut through information overload and organize their data.

Let me blunt: what a load of shit. If you’re so incredibly disorganized that you can’t control the flow of information in and out of your life, you need to change career fields; I hear McDonald’s is hiring.

A simple analogy:
You watch TV all day Saturday. At the end of the day, your eyes are tired, and you say to yourself “whoa, television overload”, you turn the TV off. Simple.

Are you really that addicted to your computer that you can’t turn it off? If so, stop reading this entry right now, close your browser, shut down your computer and go the hell outside. These people who read hundreds of blogs per day drive me insane - there is not a chance in hell that all of those entries are relevant to your life or work. Of those entries you read, how many do you really make use of? (Gaining some useless knowledge is not making effective use of a blog entry.) I’m willing to bet it’s far fewer than is worth all the time you’re investing in reading those entries.

I read THREE blogs on a SEMI-regular basis, two of which are authored by friends, and I read them only so I can keep abreast on their lives. I was recently informed of this new ‘life-hack’ called `going dark` - getting away from all blogs, emails, internet, etc. for some period of time. Another erroneous crock of dog crap. While this may be ‘great’ for managing your addiction to your computer, you fail to realize that all the people that normally know you as a well connected, savvy internet user now just see you as failing to respond to them in a timely manor, furthering your ‘information overload’ by sending an extra 10 emails saying “Did you get my last email?”

‘Life hacking’ does not simply apply to the digital world, or so lifehack.org claims. It’s about “living life to the fullest” - you’re telling me I need someone else to tell me how to live my life to the fullest? Come on people.

I skimmed (I couldn’t bring myself to read) this article. Again, who the hell are you to tell me how to life my life?

Originally, this post had a lot more anger, and a lot more valid points to argue that life-hacks are quite possibly the most useless thing since the fish pen:

Point being: take a couple of hours, go outside, and avoid living your life on your computer.

My random discovery of the evening: a huge stack of DVDs that were unlabeled, and that I hadn’t seen before, or so I thought. I thought I’d provide a brief synopsis of my findings:

• Atlas, Live at the Freeman Center - a promo DVD I did for them many years ago, with Cody on Bass and David on Drums. Wow, what a time
• A copy of “The Hazy Zone” - a film done by some friends for the roast of another friend, Matt Haselton. Holy shit was it funny.
• 10 Things I Hate About You - a chick flick. The only reason it made the list is because I remember scouring all of Santoro Hall trying to find a girl that owned it so I could copy it and have a romantic movie date with my girlfriend of the time before she got there for the weekend. Heh.
• My Public Speaking Final - a copy of the movie we made for my public speaking project back in 2005. Wow, how times have changed.
• A sports segment from the 2005 season of The Navigator. Hey, at least the Captains were doing well back then.
• The original, never aired pilot of The Navigator - With Eric Harkins and Emily Schwab as our anchors. Joey Kirchgessner at the sports desk. A hilarious reminder of our humble beginnings.
• h0t sh*t - A DVD I filmed when some guys stopped me outside the Freeman Center one night and asked me to film a commercial for their new record company. Comedic gold.
• Black Betty Extended Edition - for those of you that don’t know, you can go to YouTube, type in CNU black betty, and see myself and a bunch of my friends making a fool of ourselves and CNU. I found the extended edition, which features a bunch of things not seen in the YouTube version. Good thing, too.

I need to get in to campus to download the rest of my work onto disk before someone over there gets hot fingers and erases it. Funny stuff, though. It was nice running down memory lane for a bit.