Author: Shawn

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Good morning! Time to get online!

I bookmarked this article from the New York Times a few years ago and read it again on Friday night. It wasn’t the inspiration for creating the “Unplugged” category on my blog, but it was definitely a motivator to try doing it again. (The first time I actively avoided using technology happened about two years ago.)

I think it’s worth noting that it was easier for me than it would have been for Kord Campbell: I don’t own an iPad, I don’t work with computers on a daily basis and I don’t ride the subway, so I have no idea how long I’d be offline inside a tunnel. That said, it’s not like I’ve been living in a secluded cabin. There’s still a TV in the house, I’ve got a laptop on my desk and an iPhone in my pocket… technology isn’t always in front of me, but it’s almost always there.

So I decided to try to avoid it on Saturday. I decided I was only going to use my phone for my alarm and that was it! Okay, I would have used it like a regular phone, too, but that was it! Until I decided to use it for listening to music later that night, but that was it for really real that time!

The urge to get online hit me as soon as I woke up. Normally, I roll over, then delete maybe a dozen emails from various mailing lists. (Admittedly, I let myself cheat a little bit right away: I’d written someone a message on Friday night about something happening on Sunday, so I opened up my email account, read that single reply, then turned off my phone again.)

In the early afternoon, our immediate family was meeting at a restaurant to celebrate several birthdays at once, so that helped pull me away from the laptop and television. It also helped pull me away from my phone as well because I accidentally left it on my bed before we took off, but the urge to use it was still there in force.

During the course of the meal, people were showing off pictures on their phones, looking for random information on the Internet… I wanted to pull out my phone for the same reason. I had some cool pictures I’d taken, there was something I wanted to look up during a conversation, but I couldn’t. My phone wasn’t there, but I wanted it. “Shawn wants the Precious, but the nasty little hobbitses left it at home.”

…

Okay, maybe it wasn’t that bad.

When I got home, I grabbed my phone, opened it up and saw that I hadn’t missed any calls. Didn’t check my email or Twitter, just closed it and put it in my pocket. Time to find something else to do.

So I started cleaning house. Or at least my small part of it. I’ve had way too much junk mail building up into little piles (that have slowly turned into big piles) over many months. After getting the space heater and humidifier out of my room—I’m hoping we’re finally done with blizzards here in Minnesota this spring—I plugged in my paper shredder and started clearing out some of those piles. I’d pull up a handful of old credit card offers, tear off the address labels, shred those, then dump the rest into a bag for recycling. Again. And again. And again.

It started getting tedious pretty quickly: tear, shred, dump. That’s when I cheated a second time by turning on some music. It helped keep my brain occupied, I could bob my head to the beat and occasionally sing along a little bit. (Yes, I can sing. No, I don’t do karaoke, so don’t bother asking.) It helped the time pass more quickly.

I was starting to feel burned out after a couple hours of being productive, so when the clock struck midnight? I turned into an electric pumpkin. Time to delete emails, scroll through my Twitter feed and play around on Facebook for a while.

Even though my “electronic fast” only lasted a day, I think it was worth it, if only as a reminder to step back once in a while. Focus less on online distractions and more on people. Get away from the TV and log off Facebook; enjoy spending time with friends and family. PUT THE SMARTPHONE DOWN. Unless someone’s actually calling you. Then it’s okay to answer the siren song of technology.

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Barbie’s chiropractor must be raking in the dough

A quick note about trivia at the Green Mill in Lakeville on Thursday nights: it’s broken into two halves and the team with the highest score for the first half gets two drinks courtesy of the MC. If there’s a tie, he summons a representative from each team to the bar and asks them a tie-breaker question. It doesn’t change anyone’s score, but that’s how they determine who gets the drinks. This was the most recent tie-breaker:

If a Barbie doll was a life-sized person, what would her bra cup size be?

Both people whispered their answers in his ear and I guessed at our table that she’d need an F. [Insert quiet drum solo here.] The MC announced that one person had guessed C and my jaw dropped. The other one? B. Not the first letter of her name, her bra size. I was dumbfounded. Flummoxed. Flabbergasted, even!

I mean, I wasn’t a big Barbie fan when I was a kid (at least that’s what I’m telling you), but He-Man’s pecs were larger than a B! There is no way that Mattel would make toys based on gender stereotypes and give a masculine sword-wielding dude bigger boobs than a subservient woman!

Then the MC revealed the answer: Barbie would need a double-F cup. When looking for a website to confirm that answer just now, I found some other disconcerting measurements: she has child-size 3 feet, a body-mass index (BMI) so low she’d be biologically incapable of menstruation, a head so big it’d snap her neck in two… body proportions that all women should aspire to, especially since they can get you free drinks at Green Mill on Thursday nights.

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Oh my God, it’s Aaron Starr!!!

We had a pretty solid second weekend of Wage Warfare. The guy in the light booth and I hit all of our cues, so I stayed within my quota of screw-ups. (Yay for me!) But alas, now the play is over and I haz a sad. I won’t see most of the cast until our DVD viewing party in about a month, at which time I plan to get everyone to autograph a poster so I can sell it for a lot of money when they all become famous.

I do have one tiny regret. One of the characters in the play is Aaron Starr, “an international superstar and music icon.” The director picked a guy named Kyle for the role in part because he could get up on stage and play guitar between scenes and during intermission. (Wage Warfare takes place over the course of a work week, so people needed time to change into new clothes for almost every scene.)

I consider the final intermission a missed opportunity because if I’d told people ahead of time, they could have recruited some friends and family members to carry out my sorta evil plan: While Kyle performed, have a bunch of audience members stand in front of the stage cheering and screaming, then start throwing very large pairs of women’s panties up at him. He might have felt like a music icon; he might have frozen like a deer in headlights; he might have panicked and sprinted out of the theater. Whatever happened, I’m sure his screaming fans (and those of us backstage) would have loved the show.

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That was our cue! Hit the lights!

The first weekend of Wage Warfare went well. We had a decent audience for all three shows (they might have been larger had Winter not decided to rear her cold and snowy white head again) and there were no major flubs onstage. Honestly, I think I might have been part of the worst one.

In the program, I’m credited as “Creative Coordinator/Swing.” What those actually mean are 1) I made various suggestions to the director and he used about three of them; and 2) the musical theater term for “understudy.” The title I really wanted, the position I’m most proud of, is that of “Smoke Machine Guy.” And that’s where things got a little messy on Saturday night.

During one of our final rehearsals, I showed up late, but early enough that I was there to push the button and send fake smoke shooting out onto the stage (the first of five times). I heard my cue and pushed the button. Nothing happened. It made a nice clicking noise, but that was it. The director told me later that the machine takes seven minutes to warm up, so since then, I’ve always plugged it in as soon as I get to the theater. I figured I’d reached my quota of screw-ups at one, so I better get it right from then on.

Fast-forward to Saturday night. The smoke always accompanies a change in lighting… I like to think that the lighting change accompanies me, but I usually wait for the lights anyway. When I heard that first cue—the same one when the smoke machine didn’t work before—the lights didn’t change. I had one of those oh-crap-nothing’s-happening-the-lights-haven’t-changed-should-I-hit-the-button-anyway moments—I’m sure you’ve all had a few yourselves. (There was one person in the audience who saw the Friday night performance and had more of an oh-crap-nothing’s-happening-should-I-run-backstage-and-tell-them moment instead.)

I’m not sure if the actors onstage paused at that point or not. After hearing the cue and the lights stayed the same, I was too busy trying to decide if I should hit the button right away and let the lights accompany me for really real. Thankfully, they changed a few seconds later. I think it was a few seconds later. It might have been just one or two, but after getting the timing down during all the rehearsals, it felt like a long time.

But like I said, that may have been the biggest screw-up over the entire weekend, which I think says a lot about the actors and the play as a whole. For those of you who are interested in seeing a really funny show this weekend that has several bursts of fake smoke in it thanks to yours truly, you can still come to one of the remaining performances:

WAGE WARFARE
April 19-20 at 7:30 p.m.
April 21 at 2:00 p.m.

Lakeville Area Arts Center
20965 Holyoke Ave., Lakeville, MN 55044

The official Facebook event page

The official website to buy tickets online ($14.50 for any seat in the theater!)

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The Science of Fear

I made a reference to my Senior Speech a while ago and I wish I had a copy somewhere because it’s pretty relevant given what happened at the Boston Marathon yesterday.

For my first three years of high school, I had planned to pick a topic that would make people laugh and there’d be glowing smiles throughout the auditorium when I was done. (Yes, there was a lot of laughter when I blurted “BLEEAAAHH!” into the microphone, but I hadn’t written that part down.) My eventual topic was something very close to my heart, but not in a good way: I talked about fear.

All throughout school, I was horribly shy. My only date in high school was my senior prom, which I was pressured into attending by my parents. (I love them to pieces, but they had no idea how little I wanted to go until years later.) In the weeks following their decision, I managed to ask one girl if she’d go with me—a Brazilian foreign exchange student—but she already had a date. As a result, I was set up with one of my older brother’s friends. Who got back together with an ex-boyfriend several days before prom. Nope, not an awkward experience at all.

By avoiding most social situations, it was easier for me to limit the potential for agonizing shame if I made a foolish mistake when interacting with others. That’s a long sentence with big words that can be narrowed down to “I was afraid of looking stupid.” There were a handful of us my senior year who labeled ourselves “The Outcasts” because we didn’t really fit in with any other social group. I felt more comfortable there, but not completely comfortable: one of the girls asked me to the Sadie Hawkins dance that year (girls would ask the guys) and I panicked. I told her I had a debate tournament that day, which was true. The whole truth was that debate tournaments finish in the afternoon, so I could have gone to both with no trouble.

I’m not trying to make a laundry list of social awkwardness for you all, but we’re almost back to my point here. Those of us on the debate team were always scheduled to give our speeches at the beginning of the school year, so I didn’t have a lot of time to bounce topics around in my head. Who knows, maybe I would have convinced myself to talk about something else if I’d had another few weeks to think about it, but I ended up latching on to the one thing that had been consistent during my existence in high school: fear.

Mind you, I didn’t just walk up to the microphone and say, “You people scare the hell out of me.” I ended up talking about how effectively Nazis kept people in check: occasionally search a few houses at random for Jews. My introduction was about a study where scientists put some electrodes on rats and would shock them from time to time. When the rat pushed a pedal, the shock would stop. Rats that got zapped on a regular schedule—say, once every four hours or something—would be ready to step on the pedal and didn’t get shocked very much.

As for the rats that got zapped at random times… their health deteriorated, their hair fell out and they would step on the pedal. A lot. All the time.

Apply that to the citizens in Germany in the 30’s and 40’s. They might have lived peacefully most of the time, but once in a while, a group of soldiers would enter someone’s house and trash the premises, all in the name of searching for Jews. It could happen later today, tomorrow, next week. It could happen to your friends, family, neighbors… it could happen to you. People were scared, they cowered and they lived in fear.

Part of the conclusion of my speech was a list of people in modern times who might be afraid and I almost slipped “or giving your Senior Speech” in there. Almost. I didn’t because I didn’t want to make light of the speech. When everyone was laughing before, I was telling the room, “Okay, calm down, this is a serious speech.” I wanted it to stay serious. No one knew it, but I was baring my soul behind that podium. Making a joke like that at the end may have been clever, but… it was a serious speech.

Why did I just burden all of you with these really depressing stories about my youth? It’s because of this:

TERRORISM 101: FEAR IS AWESOME

Truthfully, the bombs that exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon were pretty simplistic and/or sloppy if they were terrorist work. They didn’t explode at the same time, two of the four didn’t explode at all… not very effective if you’re trying to scare a nation. But that’s just what explosions like that do: they scare a lot of people.

That’s when a bunch of places go into lockdown, people hide in their basements and they live in fear. It’s better to be safe than sorry. Who knows when the next attack might come? There might never be another bomb, but can you be sure? Of course not!

TERRORISM 201: FDR WAS NOT AWESOME

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” — Franklin Delano Roosevelt

There might never be another bomb, but can you be sure? Of course not! Should people hide in their basements and live in fear? No. Not now, not ever.

We’re never going to stop bad things from happening once in a while, but there are so many more good things that happen all the time. Hell, there were good things happening immediately after the explosions. People braved potential danger to help others, runners went straight from the finish line to the Red Cross to donate blood, locals opened their homes to strangers who needed shelter.

Screw the statistics they’re showing on the news and videos of how horrific the event was. There’s no question that it was tragic; my heart goes out to the victims and their friends and families. Should we focus entirely on that, worry about the next explosion that might never come, ignore all the good things that happened and are continuing to happen? No. Not now, not ever.

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Engaging in Wage Warfare in 5… 4… 3… 2…

Over the last month and a half, I’ve been working with a fun group of people rehearsing for a play that’s starting in 5… 4… 3… 2… yeah, two days. Today is Wednesday and the first performance is this Friday night. A quick summary of Wage Warfare:

If you’ve ever had a job, or wished you hadn’t, this office comedy is for you. Even on a good day, tensions run high in the customer service department of The Treasure Chest because two of the female coworkers can’t stand each other, and a third is constantly stuck in the middle. But when a chance for a promotion suddenly appears, all three women find themselves fighting for the job, although they don’t all fight fair. A madhouse free-for-all of schemes, sabotage, and unlikely alliances erupts, unseen by their idiotic boss.

Sadly, I’m not a member of the cast this time around. I know, pity party for me, right? In the program, I’ll probably be listed as “Creative Consultant,” “Assistant Stage Manager” or “Smoke Machine Guy.” (I’m leaning toward that last one.) Hey, we need some smoke puffing up in the background a couple times during the show and someone needs to push the button on the machine—it’s totally within my skill set, so I’m the man for the job!

I could probably be “Stand-in” or “Understudy” as well. One cast member who plays “UPS Guy” has had problems adjusting his work schedule, so during the last few weeks, I was filling in for him on stage. The director was talking about how we were about the same size and could use the same outfit, I needed to learn his lines… thankfully, he’s only in a few scenes, so it didn’t take me too long to figure out the cues, what to say and when to say it. However, he’s been at all the dress rehearsals and should have no trouble from here on out, for which I’m also thankful, but I’m not going to spoil anything by telling you why.

This week, I’ve been giving people high-fives backstage because, hey, team spirit! One person preferred a fist bump last night, which was cool. It wasn’t as cool a minute later when I found out I had to fill the role of a teenage girl who couldn’t be there because she was taking an ACT prep course. (Yeah, I don’t understand her priorities, either.) I had to say one line last night. One line. I said it backstage as soon as they told me and said it wrong, so he took his fist bump back and it made my hand very sad.

Up until now, it’s just been rehearsals. The real fun happens over the next two weekends. And now it’s time to promote the show! Because I don’t want you all to miss out on my mad-crazy smoke machine button pushing skills.

WAGE WARFARE
April 12-13 & 19-20 at 7:30 p.m.
April 14 & 21 at 2:00 p.m.

Lakeville Area Arts Center
20965 Holyoke Ave., Lakeville, MN 55044

The official Facebook event page

The official website to buy tickets online ($14.50 for any seat in the theater!)

Hope to see a bunch of you there!