Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

57 channels? Not even.

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We made a couple of changes to our life when we moved out of our house and into this rental house. For one thing, we moved from a 2800 square foot house without a garage to a 2200 sq. ft. house with a garage, so we took a hard look at many of the things we owned and either said, “Bye,” or “Into a box in the garage you go.” (All of our books? Packed away. ALL. Except the kids’, who have been insistent that their books needed to be liberated, and so they were.)

Another thing was that we got rid of was the satellite TV.

And despite going with Comcast for our internet connection, we didn’t pick up cable. We have no direct connection to the wide world of television out there. I suppose we might be able to get “over the air” broadcasts (are those still happening even?), but we haven’t tried.

One night back at our house I found Darin in the TV room watching some movie and I asked what it was. “I don’t even know,” he said. “It was just on.”

“That is a silly reason to watch something.”

“Yeah, it is.”

Did we need all of these movie channels? We rarely watched stuff off of them. Did we need the 100s of basic cable channels? Not much. We thought about how we were spending $90 a month on satellite—that’s $1080 a year!—on stuff we just never watched.

And things we did want to watch… Well, there was always iTunes. We’d gotten into the habit last year of just buying “Lost” on iTunes every week, because for some reason the ABC-HD feed in our area kept messing up the transmission. Or our satellite dish was pointed the wrong way, but only on Wednesday nights.

$1080 divided by $30 (avg. cost of iTunes subscription?) equals 36 shows a year. I would be amazed if all of us watched 36 separate series a year. Here’s what I’ll be watching:

  • Lost: Final season. SOB.
  • Dollhouse: The name “Joss Whedon” buys a lot. The logic gaps are sometimes infuriating and Eliza Dushku is not exactly right for this material. But it’s okay.
  • Community: So far this has been hilarious. “Sharks, pencils, and Ben Affleck.” Good times.
  • The Simpsons: Yes. Still.
  • 30 Rock: When it’s good, it’s great, and when it’s not, it’s still okay.
  • Chuck: Of course! Even if it’s on NBC!
  • Dexter: A little Michael C. Hall covers up many storytelling weaknesses.

Darin also watches Mad Men (which I personally can’t stand), The Office, and Big Bang Theory (which I’ve enjoyed the few times I’ve seen, but I have a hard time loving sitcoms, despite having three of them in my above list).

I want to watch National Parks (which Nina said KQED is streaming? Let’s get that computer hooked up to the TV, people just discovered iTunes is carrying this one!).

We find series, by the way, following the advice of our most trusted TV critics: Alan Sepinwall (who as every “Chuck” fan knows, is DA MAN) and Ken Tucker (whose in-print stuff for EW is better than his blog, but never mind that). See? Critics are worthwhile, people.

So far it’s worked out great: we have stuff on the Apple TV we want to watch, we can store the old shows (or watch them on the computer, or on our iPhones, or whatever without too much hassle), and we don’t have the lure of just anything being on. Darin has been reading The Lord of the Rings to the kids, and as soon as they finished “The Fellowship of the Ring” we rented the movie. Simple.

What we’re missing out on: Food Network shows. My daughter misses her daily dose of Bobby Flay. Perhaps Food Network will figure out a way to deal with this.

Even if we do end up paying more than $1080 a year—I’m going to try to mark the various series subscriptions in Quicken to keep track of how much we end up spending—on the whole this system is a much better TV experience than watching cable/satellite. No commercials to fast-forward through! No endless promos for other shows! No teasers ruining the entire show before we see it!

Now if Darin would just hook up our DVD player so I could restart the Netflix subscription, that’d be good. Of course, what he really wants to do is get a PS3 “so we can watch Blu-ray disks.” Uh huh. I am the kind of “stupid wife” who “believes that.” My friend Otto also recommends hooking up a Mac mini, so as to use Hulu on the TV. But we don’t have a Mac mini. Maybe the kids will sacrifice their iMac for the cause…. HAHAHAHA. Just kidding.

Since sitting in front of the TV and just watching what’s on is not my idea of a good time, this setup is working perfectly for me. If I want to sit around and stare at a screen for hours to waste time…I’ll use my iPhone to play games, thanks.

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We also gave up our home phone in the move. Yes, it’s true: Darin and I no longer share a phone. But everyone knows that to contact him you call his cell phone, and having the answering machine at home mostly served as a vehicle for frustration for me (since he never listened to messages). Now I get everything on my phone and it’s much easier for me to stay on top of calls I need to return and messages I need to deal with.

Dang. We really are living in the future.

Diane’s Guide to Enlightenment

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My descent into touchy-feeliness continues unabated.

First, I gave up gossip because I realized it was making me feel icky—knowing those things about people does not improve my appreciation of their talents, ever; in fact, it can only lessen it. I’m at a point in my life where it’s easier to feel compassion for the mistakes people have made with their lives. Snark is both too easy and leaves me feeling foul inside.

No. Really.

I’m still me, people. Just a me determined to excise snark and sarcasm from my vocabulary. It’s a constant process—now when I let loose at someone and snark I know it’s about me, not about them. Most of the time, when someone says something I find stupid or hurtful, I tell myself, “That is not about whatever they are talking about, that is about them, and that is something they need to deal with.” It makes dealing with the world much, much easier.

I’m also doing meditation and and I’m keeping a gratitude journal. And as with most things, there are iPhone apps for that, and having an app makes things just that much more fun.

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I was sold on trying meditation again by The Happiness Hypothesis. I’ve tried meditation at various times in my life and always failed miserably—I’d either fall asleep during (possibly, the “lying on the floor” position was not my best choice) or forget to do it. I do well with guided meditations, but that doesn’t seem to be the same thing as garden-variety sit-down-and-shut-up meditation at all. Guided meditation tends to put me “out” much the same way hypnosis does: I wake up at the end of the session feeling pretty good, but with no memory of what happened or what Nigerian scam I’ve agreed to.

What I do now is take 10-20 minutes a day to meditate. I sit on the floor, legs crossed Indian-style, back straight. Sitting this way turns out to be way more painful than it was when I was in kindergarten because I’m so much less flexible, and suddenly the reason that meditation and yoga are so tightly interlinked becomes extremely clear. I put my hands on my lap, palms up, and I try to breathe in on a count of four and out on a count of four.

Brainwave app icon I also put on my headphones and listen to the Brain Wave app from Banzai Labs, which is a binaural beats generator. It has 20 different programs—”Positive Mood Boost,” “Lucid Dreaming,” and “Meditation” are three—but mostly what I’m aware of is the sound of “pink noise.” I thought it was “white noise” but “pink noise” is apparently totally different. It provides just enough cover to help me tune out the outside world, and if the binaural beats are helping me meditate, so much the better.

So far my meditation practice usually goes like this:

One, two…my hips are really tight and my nose itches. I need to get a meditation pillow to sit on. Focus! Breathe in: One, two, three…I’ll do a body check and breathe relaxation into the tense parts of my body. Mostly I’m thinking about things itching. Breathe out: One, two… I wonder if I ran the dishwasher last night. I will push that thought away for right now. Breathe in: One, two… Does this get easier with practice? Practicing, there’s a good idea. Breathe out: One, two, three, four… Hey, I got to four that time! Next stop, enlightenment! Wait, what’s this about the dishwasher? Breathe in: One, two… now my foot itches.

I haven’t had any amazing things happen as a result of doing some meditation: no spiritual experiences, no suddenly becoming psychic (as apparently happened to one woman, who then ran out and wrote a book on meditation, which I happened to read some time ago). My big goal right now is to get to a whole count of four in and out before my mind wanders. This will most likely occur sometime in my next incarnation. But that’s really okay: learning to quiet my mind, if only for a count of two, is pretty good. It’s amazing how loud my mental radio is playing ALL THE TIME.

(I also use Brain Wave on the “Creativity Boost” setting when writing. Does it make me more creative? Who cares? The pink noise drowns out the rest of the world.)

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I also read in a number of places about “gratitude journals,” which are journals you write in every day about the good things in your life. (Apparently Oprah talks about these; she was not one of my inspirations for doing this. This is not a judgment, just a statement of fact.) All you have to do is write down five things you appreciate every day! How hard could that be?

Gratitude app icon To encourage me to do it, I use the Gratitude! app from the Happy Tapper. Look at the icon: Doesn’t that make you smile? That’s just cute. Seriously: Good job, app icon designer.

The Gratitude! app gives you a page per day to write down 5 (or 10, or whatever) things per day that you are grateful for, plus rate your day from one to five stars, plus stick a picture on the page. For one thing, this app reminds me to take pictures of stuff with my iPhone so I will have a picture for my day’s entry, and since I’ve begun using it I’ve never had a less-than-three-star day. I have to report that, as with meditation, I haven’t had any of the marvelous mystical things that people report happening when they start using a gratitude journal, but I don’t care: it’s just nice to remind myself every day that things are good and honestly I have lots to be happy about.

I’m not too proud to admit that “high-quality chocolate” has made the list more than once. Because some days, I really am all about appreciating the chocolate.

Random and assorted, plus advice!

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Several very large, very polite men from Jack Trux Moving are taking everything out of my current house and loading it on to a couple of trucks, which will then take it all to the new house, where we will live where the current house gets demolished inside and rebuilt. This is a very exciting, very nerve-wracking process. Nonetheless, Darin and I manage to be quite cheery about it. I don’t know whether this is optimism, stupidity, or just simple naivete. Seems to have worked out okay so far.

Darin took the kids to see Ponyo, in order to get them out of the house for this part. I have chosen to remain behind, both to answer questions (since I’ve already decided where everything’s going in the new house and the floor plan exists only in my head) and to do laundry. Because like death and taxes, there is always laundry.

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I have new goals in life:

  • To have laundry minions, who will just take care of the laundry for me, dammit, day in and day out. I know laundry isn’t the greatest trauma in the world, but it’s such a pain in the ass.
  • Next year, I want to do the world’s most perfect move: walk out the door of one place, walk in the door of the next. No movers, no boxes, no unpacking, no tsuris. All new stuff waiting for us at the end; leave the doors open on the old place for looters, et al. Darin has said that if I can figure out how to do it for our move back to this house, he is all for it.

I didn’t say they were important goals.

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I’ve been hanging out a lot at my favorite fashion forum, only not in the fashion areas, but in the chat-about-life areas. Many (though by no means all) of the posters on the forum are young women in their early 20s, and God help me, I want to shake them so badly. I know, there are certain truths you can only learn for yourself, and people can tell you this stuff over and over and you won’t grok it until you get it for yourself.

But if I could get a few things through to these women (and, by extension, to 20-year-old me), I would say:

  • You are all you have. Anything more than that you have access to (family, friends, money, living situation): awesome. But in the end, you are all you got. Act accordingly and treat yourself like the special, important person you are.

    Important corollary: you are all you need, too. Which is convenient and cuts down on the number of things you need to stuff in your bags.

  • Not everybody’s going to like you. There’s no magic formula of niceness or agreeability that will make you popular. In fact, the popular people are the ones with strong convictions, who go ahead and do what they want no matter what you think.

    The trick is, You have to actually not care what other people think about every damn thing you do. Conveniently, this turns out to be much, much easier than we were led to believe as children.

  • Don’t wait. Ever. For anything or anyone. You don’t get extra points for being the patient, uncomplaining one. In fact, you’re probably going to get stepped on for your troubles. The person you are waiting for is not going to wake up one day and go, “Oh gosh, that person who’s just been so accommodating—she’s the one!” Your boss is not going to say, “Hmmm, who’s the best worker, the one who never says anything or the one who tells me in detail about their weekly accomplishments and is vocal about taking on new responsibilities?” The whole Discovering-Cinderella shtick wasn’t true back then and it ain’t true now.

    When I was investigating agents to query, I was amazed at the number of people who focused on the one agent they wanted and they were just going to wait forever for the response from that person. My advice was always: Move on. If they want you, they’ll get back to you. In the meantime, check out who else is out there. Which brings me to…

  • Make them (boy, job, whatever) reject you. Don’t decide ahead of time you’re not going to get it. Ask for it, and make them say No. Yes, rejection hurts. So, somebody doesn’t like you. Here’s your mantra: NEXT. That one didn’t work out? NEXT.

    A young woman I know got a callback for a role in a Harry Potter film…and decided she wasn’t going to get it, so she didn’t even go. I want to shake her! But what’s done is done. And I’m not so sure that the universe is going to make that offer too many more times. (Yes, I’m anthropomorphizing the universe. You’d be surprised how well that actually works.)

  • Just say what you want. No demands, no threats. It’s a simple formula: “I want such-and-so, and I will not accept anything less.” If you get something less, honor your commitment to yourself and leave. That’s it. This bargaining skill works with everything: lovers, jobs, children.

    For example, many people have noted that we have good communication skills with our kids: we tell them what we expect of them, and we tell them what’s going to happen if they don’t live up to it. This doesn’t stop me from yelling…but generally the yelling happens when I wasn’t clear enough before hand, so: my bad. (And when I get a hold of myself, I apologize to the kids for my behavior.)

  • The guy he is right now is the guy he’s going to be forever, unless he decides to change. Deal with the person in front of you, not the person you want him to be.

    If I read one more goddamn romance (or bulletin board thread) where the object is to transform the bad boy through the magic of the (patient, understanding, loitering) woman’s love, I’m going to vomit. Remember that line from As Good As It Gets where Jack Nicholson says, “You make me want to be a better man”? The only response to that is, “Then go ahead and work on that, and right now I’m going to go out and find someone who’s already there.”

  • It really is better to be alone than in bad company. The nice thing is, there are so many good people out there to be with!
  • Stop worrying so damn much about how you look. You’re never going to look prettier than you do right now. And pretty/fashionable/anorexic has nothing to do with how attractive you are or how much you get laid. We have all known size Whatever women who could attract anyone they want, because they like themselves no matter what. Is it more fun to be with someone who likes herself, or one who’s criticizing herself all the time?
  • Yes, if you stand up for yourself and what you want, you’re probably going to lose some friends. Conveniently, this will weed out which of your friends aren’t really your friends, which we can only regard as a BONUS!

Mind you, I’ve learned every single one of these the hard way, and many of them I have to keep telling myself, over and over, day in and day out. But when I’m using them, I feel so much more powerful and in control and every day life is just so much more enjoyable!