THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 8, 1995 TAG: 9510060080
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
I'M TRYING to learn how to live without noticing it and how not to notice the people who notice how I'm living. I'm trying to enjoy simpler pleasures, but not ``return to nature.'' I'm taking a lot of long walks, but I'm trying not to talk about it. If I do, others will tell me they're doing the same thing and then I'll be part of a ``trend,'' like it or not. And I don't.
For once in my life, I want an unexamined life. This could be regression or progression.
It's best not to notice.
I just hope it is not symbolic of a movement. I don't want to join.
I used to take long runs, 10 long years of long runs, but that became way too taxing and conspicuous - too many people noticed runners running and marked the trend - so now I'm walking. A lot. Perhaps walking, too, has become a ``lifestyle choice,'' like celibacy or a low-fat diet or swampy ecoadventures, but so far I'm only bumping into dogs and other inconspicuous walkers who wave, but don't seem to notice me.
I notice the dogs. The Shih Tzu has the low-down on the neighborhood.
I'm talk-saturated. I'm swirling down into a mass-media vortex, suffering from yammer overload. Television, radio, film, computers, CD-ROMs, even newspapers and magazines, they're all guilty. Talk for the sake of talk. Ye gads, I may even be yammering now. It's insidious.
So far, though, no walkers have yammered at me. Bird yammering, I can handle. Music-yammer emanating loudly from a car, I'd like to obliterate.
I used to fall back on the TV for ``background noise'' - there's a modern peccadillo for you - but now when I look at the screen, I see blank actors, actors as doctors, actors as lawyers, actors as newscasters, actors as faux people, talking idly within a great big air pocket. The bigger the screen, the bigger the air pocket.
When I do watch TV, sports mostly, I silence not only the yammering ads - are the two clowns who call the play in the control booth (They go on fourth down; big mistake.) the same clowns who dicker with Barry Sanders over a McDonalds meal? - but the yammering commentators. The remote control, I'm convinced, was created for one purpose: the mute button.
I remember ``Tastes great, less filling.'' Colts great Bubba Smith even repented his part in promoting Miller Light. But what are they selling now? Computer effects? Surely not beer.
I like the concept of The Weather Channel. Twenty-four hours to talk, and draw swirls, about the weather. Tropical storms and temperatures in Moscow and Paris are real and good and, so far, not a trend. Hurricanes are a bit showy, though. Everyone noticed Opal.
I reach for the phone. If I'm lucky, there may be a real person at the other end. Someone I even like.
I'm renting movies, and then not watching them. I can't bear to hear them talk at me. Even the good ones, the ones with genuine stories. The tapes make it out of the video store, but not out of the box. Three bucks a pop, and all I can say to the clerk when she asks me if I liked it is ``Ave Maria.'' I didn't watch it. And I'm not Catholic.
I'm also listening to a lot of doo-wop. Over and over again. ``Doo-wop-diddie, baby, come home to me'' 20 times a day, with abandon.
This, I think, is a healthy sign. Doo-wop makes sense to me.
We live in an age of constant yammer, noise for noise's sake, attention-getting and rather meaningless. The yammers fill in the cracks in our lives.
We also live in an age of conspicuousness, in which the mass media convert actions into ``trends,'' trends into ``lifestyles,'' and lifestyles into societal theories and predictions, all of which feed yammer fests, known as ``talk'' shows. Knowing how to talk is no prerequisite for talking, however. In fact, it may be a hindrance. Witness ``The George (Hamilton) and Alana Show.'' (Or is it ``The Alana and George Show''?)
When they surfaced on an ad, I muted them.
I'm claiming ``mute'' as both an intransitive and a transitive verb.
I'm becoming Andy Rooney. I'm observing ``ages.''
Information has replaced knowledge, entertainment has replaced information, and trends have replaced entertainment. What's your ``emotional intelligence'' quotient?
I'm going to look for the mythical Hydra. If you see me walking past, wave. Your dog will know who I am. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma, book editor of The Virginian-Pilot, lives on the Outer
Banks, where there's still room to walk. by CNB