This is what we talk about when we talk about gazelles

Growing up I lived in what has historically been referred to as "the parsonage" a house adjacent to a church building  that is typically owned by that church for the pastor to live in. The parsonage that I grew up in, which has since been bulldozed to make room for a as yet unrealized gym, was design as an almost two family house. Meaning that two families could live there as long as the second family was smaller and/or not staying for a lengthy amount of time. There were some definitive perks to this including a fairly massive yard for our area of suburban NJ and a half-sized basketball court.
When speakers came to the church  for particular speaking engagements, such the annual week-long "summer seminar", they would often stay in the bottom part of the parsonage. The summer of my 12th year one such speaker brought along his wife and his fourteen year old son. My mom informed me that this kid played basketball and was into the piano/keyboard. Large chunks of my day were devoted to playing mediocre basketball with much smaller chunks grudgingly given to playing mediocre piano and thought this other kid might be pretty good stuff.
There was a particular detail that my mom failed to share with me which was that this kid was a behemoth, especially compared to me. At fourteen this kid was inches, if not at least a foot, taller than me and much bigger. While I was an average height I was a really skinny kid. (I didn't weigh over a hundred pounds until well into my 13th year which was kind of a milestone.) Te outcome of the games is lost to memory but I do remember playing multiple bouts of basketball throughout that week  in which my attempts at rebounding were distinctly Sisyphean. There's not a lot of distinct recollection from that week of summer and in the standard thinking of a pre-adolescent there wasn't much expectation of needing to remember anything from that particular time.
So fast forward eight or nine years to sophmore year at Philadelphia Biblical University. I run into another student under circumstances that I don't totally remember though I'm  pretty sure it was outside the cafeteria entrance. I don't even remember what the initial conversation was. Not sure if was our parents but we both had vague inklings that other was in PBU's vicinity but hadn't run into each other. However both of us recalled the basketball games. Jon and his then girlfriend/now wife Kim and my my then girlfriend/now wife Kara and myself, that is to say all four of us started hanging outplaying once a week poker games.
Jon had a breadth of cultural interaction and experience that was quite foreign to me.
It wasn't until my senior year that Jon and I started hanging out quite a lot. Jon had graduate from college and was working/waiting for Kim to finish up school so that they could get married. Jon  introduced me to good coffee, interesting movies  the New Yorker and wide range of books. However the thing that we both spent a ton of time working on that year was Word of Warcraft Diablo II. This was Jon's last go-round for gaming. Our standard operating procedure was a call from Jon to me or from me to Jon around 9 or 10pm around the lines of
hey you doing anything
not really.
Want to swing by?
Sure.
We'd play until 2 am  and then fall asleep on his floor.
It was at least a year or so after Jon and Kim's wedding and I was going through my phone to call a another John. However, I got my Johns mixed up and was seriously surprised to hear Jon Beall's voice on the other end. So surprised that it took me about 20 seconds to figure out exactly which Jon/John to whom I was speaking. This accidental phone call kicked into gear a now ongoing every couple of months phone call from me to Jon or Jon to me which results, not unsurprisingly, in these intense 30-35 minute chats about music, politics, future of reading/texts, tech, the cell-phone industry and any variety of other topics.

All this to say is that Jon posts pictures here in Google+ and Flikr and roasts really amazing coffee while listening to awesome music. Kim has a delightful day-in-the-life blog here and a deeply compelling, incredibly moving, very honest and thought-provoking blog about living with infertility and the implications of that. Frankly, I wish we saw them more often.

I've recorded everything I've done since I was three

My friend Jon, writing over at Beans from Merriville, posted earlier this week about his process of disconnecting from the world. (Don't be too startled by the photo at the top of Jon's post; the rest of the post is much less alarming.)

Recently this interview between Tao Lin on behalf of the Believer with author Ben Lever and they had this really interesting discussion about, among other things, the real and the virtual and the pros/cons of experiencing the world through both. About halfway through the interview Tao Lin comments that
"The idea of the virtual seems to apply to all domains of human experience, not just to novels and poems—the inevitable disappointment of the actual due to the awareness of a virtual."
In thinking about this interview and Jon's post, the way that people interact with live events or picturesque moments also popped into my head. I play bass in a local Christian rock band and so we get to be out playing on a fairly regular basis in front of groups of people and often with other bands. So I've had the opportunity to regularly hang out at a bunch of big and small music events over the past two years. Just in observation of these shows, there seems to be a disposition to want to record or capture what is happening live rather than experiencing it. It seems that our default reaction to an interesting, memorable or picturesque moment is whip out some sort of recording equipment, typically video+audio, to record that moment.
Granted there are very positive aspects to this capturing ability. The revolutions in the Middle East would not be as nearly accessible to the rest of the world if it were not for this possibility. Perhaps they would not have succeeded at all. Nor would an issue like the BART in San Francisco killing cell service in response to protests be as crucial a matter.
And often, in order to avoid missing that moment, individuals will record the entire show/event/what-have-you. What seems then to end up happening is that instead of watching the actual or authentic live event the observer watches the entire event played out through the tiny screen held inches away from their face. How does this affect our interactive experiences? How does this affect our memory? If we are so intent on capturing the world around us are we forgetting to interact with it? Hence why this Toyota commercial is both funny and sad.
Interestingly enough since I've started writing this post earlier this afternoon (Wednesday 8/23), NPR posted this article entitled Does the Internet Make You More-or Less-Connected. (I swear I wrote the above before I read the NPR article.) Coincidentally the lead image has a bunch of kids with phones with the caption "The new concert experience: Is that digital device an impediment or an enhancement to your life?" The author, Dave Pell describes being at an Arcade Fire concert behind a guy who was recording the concert and sums up nicely the current concert/show experience:
"...a guy in front of me held his camera phone towards the big screen that flanked the stage and hit the video record button. He stood like that for a long time, separated from a live concert by two screens. Maybe he gained some social benefit by sharing the video with a friend or a broader Internet audience. But the concert provided him an opportunity to lose himself in the music and the moment. He let a screen block that experience."
It's as though we each begin to create our own digital arcade, a structure of seemingly random events held together by the individual doing the recording. Are we going to get to a point when I ask how was the concert instead of describing it the queried individual will simply whip out their recording device and show the person asking the question. Since we're often not terribly good at explaining experiences through words anyway perhaps video is more effective.
Pictures have been credited with being worth far more words than they really are worth. Video is even worse. If we are afraid of being disconnected from our devices because we are afraid of losing our place in the constant stream of data, are we also afraid of disconnecting from recording everything because we have become distrustful of our own ability to recollect and recount?

Can we still lose ourselves?