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arbitrary outcome
Monday, August 27 2001
Despite the Luddite environment of my childhood, I nonetheless became something of a technophile. I love and even fetishize machines. That in 2001 I can dictate my ideas to some inanimate object across the internet and it will carry out my instructions meticulously, continuing to do so after I've sent my orders, means that my childhood fantasies have come true. Back in the late 70s, dead ragweed stalks served as antennæ, pegboards stood in for video screens, and a swath of Lego bumps played the role of keyboard. But even the imagined functions of these things pale in comparison to what the real gadgets of the future allow me to do.
But technology definitely has its limits, and I'm reminded of this every time I contemplate using the auto-flush toilets of my workplace. The technology must not have been perfected before installation, because the toilets' behavior isn't just bad, it's unpredictable as well. Sometimes when I'm seated on the throne the thing flushes three or four times in response to every major, um, movement of my body. But sometimes I'll get up and the autoflush mechanism won't do anything at all and I'm forced to hit the manual button in order to spare the next person an insight into my lower intestinal condition. And unless that manual button is held down for a few seconds, the resulting flush serves only to churn feces into a murky opaque brown liquid. Often I encounter a toilet full of such liquid when I've come to heed nature's call.
The New York Liberty women's basketball team lost the East Coast championship tonight and it threw Gretchen into something of a funk. I never thought I'd care about the fortunes of a sports team, but tonight their loss affected me as well. It's amazing that when you place hope in a certain arbitrary outcome and then watch events as they unfold, your happiness comes to be tied directly to whether or not the hoped-for outcome materializes. I've experienced this before in other situations of course: politics, personal finance, jobs, relationships, etc. But in those cases, the outcomes always had meaning beyond their occurrences. Why did it suck for George W. Bush to steal the election? Ask the polar bears in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Ask Michæl J. Fox. Ask the ozone layer and the low-lying cities of the world.
But now that I've received my $300 check bearing the Statue of Liberty watermark and the memo "Tax Relief for Working Americans," I've decided the man can do no wrong.
Back briefly to the subject of women's basketball. It's hard not to watch these athletes tossing around the ball and making lightning-quick strategic decisions without being dazzled by their skills. To reach this level, these women must be practicing all the time. But where exactly do women practice basketball? Have you ever seen chicks shooting hoops in a public park? There must be some sort of unwritten rule in our culture saying that women must not play basketball outside. When you think about it, this convention (wherever it comes from) is the beginning of a slippery slope that leads all the way to the freedoms enjoyed by the women of Afghanistan.
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