Remember When Roommates Were Random?

I came across an article the other day, “When Roommates Were Random,” that discussed the recent trend of finding one’s college roommate on the Internet. Apparently, the moment that high school seniors get accepted to their school of choice, or safety school if they harbored illusions about their own talents, they go onto Facebook and websites dedicated to finding the perfect college roommates.

So now an incoming freshman can match up with another freshman who is not only the same level of neatness, but also someone who keeps the same study hours, who likes the same color schemes, who feels the same way about politics, religion, and the Star Wars prequels. If you are going to be living on campus, you can find someone who is so much like you that it is well-past midterms when you realize that the reason your roommate gets up and goes to bed at the same exact you do is because you are looking into a mirror.

The housing application I filled out before freshman year asked me two questions: Did I smoke, and was I neat? I truthfully answered “no” to both questions.

“Great,” I thought, “now they’ll definitely match me up with someone who is just like me.”

The next thing I knew I was standing in front of the dorms on the far side of campus, my new home for the next nine months assuming I didn’t flunk out first semester, which television and movies had told me could happen. My parents stood beside me, wondering if I was going to be as messy at college as I was at home, and when my roommate was going to show up. The only thing we knew about him was his name, that he was from Kansas, and that he was getting to campus a few days before me..

A young man who looked exactly my age rode up on a bicycle. He had brown hair and a healthy look about him. A very All-American look. He braked near a bike rack, and I walked over to him and introduced myself. As we got to know each other, I learned that he ran cross country, and that he ran ten miles at practice every day. He learned that I had once bought a BB gun to shoot squirrels in my backyard. Freshman year began, and with cross country practice, the evidence I generally ever saw of my roommate was the growing pile of trash in his corner of the room.

We had been given a small gray wastebasket upon arrival where we could toss our rough drafts of papers or literature from campus groups promising to make us activists. These wastebasket could be emptied in a larger bin on the floor, but it was all the way at the end of the hallway, and generally I would tolerate a bit more garbage in my life rather than leave my desk and computer and Internet, which I had never used before college, and which, I was discovering, had a lot of interesting things on it. Since my roommate ran ten or twelve miles a day I figured he would be a lot more comfortable with getting out of his chair than I was, but he too didn’t seem much in a rush to empty his wastebasket.

I don’t know when exactly the garbage in my wastebasket began to peek out over the rim like an iceberg in the North Atlantic. One day I noticed that I wasn’t so much tossing the garbage in the wastebasket as carefully balancing it atop older layers of garbage. And that I had been doing so for some time. I realized what I was doing and was disgusted with myself, and reached a point where I was either going to change direction and throw out the trash, or press on into unchartered territory. Then I looked over at my roommate and saw that he was doing the same thing, but in sneakers and wrist bands. “If he’s not doing it, then I’m not doing it either,” I said. I wasn’t about to upset the karmic applecart in the room.

By Halloween our garbage piles had reached ghoulish proportions. Mine was already beyond the top of my computer monitor, and by merely scanning the midsection of the mound I could review the last few weeks of my life. It was a kind of journal, and by turning my head I could do the same with my roommate’s garbage.

I imagined that one day anthropologists would use the empty cans of Dr. Pepper to date my roommate and I and make groundbreaking conclusions about how males aged 18-to-21 lived at the turn of the second millennium. They would note the matching sets of Nutty Bar wrappers at isolevels of garbage, and conclude that humans were much more do the same thing and conclude that my roommate and I had been eating Nutty Bars at around the same time (assuming a constant rate of Nutty Bar consumption), and the discovery of only one box of Nutty Bars, peeking out from a sub-pile of orientation materials and promissory notes, would lead them to conclude that we had shared the Nutty Bars, giving birth to a new theory of altruism between males aged 18-to-21. As I let a crumpled napkin flutter down atop the pile, I swelled with pride at my contribution to science.

By Thanksgiving our efforts at balancing in the air were no longer having an effect, and the goal had tacitly become one of containment on the ground. Our respective monuments had reached a critical mass where the peak could go no higher, and any new additions tumbled down the mountainside to a final resting place by my feet and chair legs. The ground pile, being shorter, spread in area more quickly. It was ivy spreading across the floor, around our chair legs, into the bedrooms. I considered entering it in a student-run art show, but I let the entry form get buried under a family of Little Debbie’s wrappers.

We were too superstitious to clean up the garbage during finals. That December morning we were both returning to our respective homes for the colossal holiday break, we stood before our respective piles, holding our luggage, and I could tell my roommate was thinking the same thing I was: Is it sanitary to let this garbage dump sit around all break? For a moment we almost did something about it. But I think we realized that the thing that had brought us together in the truest tradition of dormitory life—a world-class indifference to filth—we wanted to continue into spring semester.

So we left the room as it was, shook hands, and went off to spend a few weeks in the care of people who would pick up after us.

Posted on 8 September 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 11

Remember Liner Notes?

One might be quick to say that an mp3, mp4, or mp79, or some other digital music file, is the equivalent of an old-time audio cassette (“tape”), or compact disc (“CD”). And one would be wrong, because the computer file lacks something that tapes and CDs always had—and not just a $17 price tag, or price tag at all. A purchaser of tapes or CDs got something other than two good songs, maybe one halfway decent song, and a bunch of drek. Tapes and CDs came with liner notes, and liner notes made the price tag totally worth it.

Liner notes were glossy booklets that contained notes about the artists and the production of the album, photographs of the artists performing live and smoking cigarettes, and sometimes the lyrics to the songs. Knowing all of the words to a song was like knowing a secret incantation, that when said would release the demons that gave the band members their talent and ability to play with sweaty strings of hair in their faces. I was never more impressed than when I saw a good friend sing along perfectly to “Back off B*tch [Explicit]” off of Use Your Illusion: Disc 1 from Guns ‘n’ Roses. He must have studied the liner notes for hours to catch each nuance of the piece.

But what I remember the most about liner notes—more than the lyrics, more than the photographs, more than the artwork, more than even the music itself—was the smell. That clean, sterile, plasticky, glossy smell that told my twelve-year-old brain that good times lay ahead. That smell would hit me the moment I pried open the jewel case, even though I never knew why it was called a jewel case, and that it certainly did not contain any jewels, unless you bought a CD by the artist known as Jewel, which I never did, and even if I did would never admit. Even now, years after I had to throw out all my jewel cases in the Great Scolding of 2005, I can close my eyes and imagine the smell of liner notes.

One time a friend caught me smelling the liner notes of one of his CDs. He had gotten up to go to the bathroom and I thought he was going to be gone longer than he was. When he returned I had my snout in the middle of the booklet to his copy of Metallica’s black album, which we just called Metallica Metallica.

“Hey man, what are you doing?”

“Um, nothing.”

“Were you…smelling my Metallica Metallica liner notes?”

“What? Smelling your liner notes? No, man. That would be weird. I was just taking a closer look. Oh, wow, you know I never knew that Lars Ulrich uses Zildjian cymbals. The print on these things is so tiny!”

As my nose became accustomed to the smell, my eyes would drink in the images. And drinking is an apt metaphor. Because no matter how many assemblies they made sit through in school, where adults used every approach short of mass hypnosis to persuade us that drinking and doing drugs was not cool, the photographs and original artwork of the liner notes told a different story.

The other day I was my parents’ home, cleaning out that week’s “mystery box from high school,” when I came across my collection of liner notes, stripped of their jewel cases but otherwise in perfect working order. I removed the hardened rubber band and flipped through the liner notes one by one, stopping every now and again to explore a particular booklet, and all the while breathing in the essence of ‘80s, ‘90s, and today. And I rolled around on the floor, reliving the magic, my mother walked in and said, “Did you know that the original liner notes came with records.” She paused and smiled. “Remember those?

Thanks to Patrick Champ for the topic.

Posted on 26 August 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 10

Remember Telephone Books?

I was reading The Information, by James Gleick, and came across this passage on page 194:

“[Telephone books] went obsolete, effectively, at the turn of the twenty-first century. American telephone companies were officially phasing them out by 2010; in New York, the end of automatic delivery of telephone directories was estimated to save 5,000 tons of paper.”

What are small children going to sit on when they are too big for high-chairs, but too small to reach the dinner table by sitting on a regular chair? Copies of the The Information? Whatever the effects are, this intelligence reminded me of a story, as told to me by a friend. This is what he said:

“I always thought it was so nice of the telephone company to distribute free copies of the telephone book to the doorstep of each house. Every summer these yellow directories would magically appear, as if to say, ‘Your telephone company loves you.’

“On delivery day, I could see the books in front of every home. But the homeowners, for some reason, were not always that anxious to adopt the books, and often left them out there for a day or two. I smelled opportunity, and one year I went out and stole every copy of the telephone book that had been delivered in our neighborhood.

“Under cover of night I went door to door, grabbing the yellow tome before the homeowner awoke or dog started barking. It was tedious work. I could not carry more than two or three under each arm, and so had to make frequent trips back to my house. I stored the telephone books in my closet, and when I was done there was not much room for my clothes.

“I remember exactly how the telephone books looked in my closet. Five-foot stacks that shoved my pants and shirts aside. The pristine spines glowed like bars of gold with advertisements for personal injury lawyers. I thought about the thousands of names and addresses and telephone numbers of people I would never know. I thought about all of the pizzerias and locksmiths and hardware stores and roofers and orthodontists that were nestled in next to my old sneakers and a stop sign I stole over spring break. I thought about all of the trees that had been cut down to make these telephone books, and that by stealing them I was saving the trees, in a way.

“But what I did not think about was how I was going to keep these stacks of books a secret during a time when I still lived with my parents and did not do my own laundry. I guess I should have thought about that.

“I would later tell my mother, upon questioning, that I did not know why I stole the telephone books. Grown-ups always got annoyed when kids said they did not know why they did something bad. But in my case it was true; I really did not know. It just seemed like the thing to do. The phone books were free of charge, in the open, not nailed down, and easy to spot in the dark. In the summer, when there was nothing to do, this was something to do that did not entail hopping fences.

“With a little less MTV and a little more foresight, I might have told my mother that I was helping train my neighbors for a time when telephone books would no longer be distributed. I was doing them a favor! But instead I gave my stock answer: I looked at the ground and said, ‘I don’t know.’ I thought about that answer as I returned the telephone books to each and every neighbor that night.”

Had my friend continued I’m sure he would have concluded his tale by saying that he learned a valuable lesson; that no amount of midnight mischief is worth depriving one’s neighbors of their means of communication. But at that moment his cell phone rang. He picked it up and said, “Hello?…Really? The Verizon guy just left the modem sitting on their stoop?…I’ll be right there,” and then left, pleading a prior engagement.

Posted on 18 July 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 20

Remember When We Didn’t Have Piles of Chargers and Power Cords?

When I was a kid there was a power outlet next to my bed. I had no need for power strips or outlet multipliers because I only had two devices to plug in: my alarm clock, and a reading lamp that I used to heat up the thermometer whenever I wanted to play sick, just like Elliot did when he wanted to stay home with E.T.

Today, I can’t take two steps in my house without stepping on a power charger or cord. A charger for my Kindle, a charger for my laptop, a charger for my digital camera, a charger for my old digital camera (a Canon ELPH that cost me $500 in 2002 and which now gets the cold shoulder from every current operating system), a charger for the portable external hard drive, a charger for the electrical drill I’m forced to use whenever a blind needs hanging or a neighbor needs a root canal, a charger for the digital camcorder, a charger for the digital speakers, a charger for the steam mop, a charger of unknown chargee—so far behind the buffet that reaching it is not worth the health insurance deductible—and, last but by no means least, a charger of the purest white for my beloved iPhone.

These chargers and power cords congregate in a giant knot by the outlet. My wife dislikes these piles and is always trying to find ways to hide them.

“Mark,” she asks, “what are we doing about that pile of phone chargers in the corner of the living room?”

“What pile? What chargers?”

She pointed to the pile of black wires. If the scene had been out of a movie I probably would have chuckled and then mentally scolded the owner of the house for creating a fire hazard. But I was not in a movie and I didn’t chuckle. This was my life and it wasn’t funny. I explained that we couldn’t just move the wires because they were hooked up to things that could not be moved.

“Now, explain to me again how the modem affects where we can move the phone. We have cell phones. What do we even bother with a land line anyway?”

I told her that the only way that would be possible would be to put something in front of it the entire time, because to move the wires was not reasonably practicable. That would end the discussion.

“Well, smart guy, I guess you’re going to have to stand in front of it the entire time.”

And that’s how I found myself standing in one spot for hours on end, like one of the guards at Buckingham Palace, except instead of a busby on my head there was a bowl of Tostitos in my arms, containing at its center a smaller bowl filled with salsa. Our guests come by me and dip some chips. I was amused at how often they succumbed to the pressure to talk to me. Most of them I did not know me that well, and struggled with the awkwardness. A few gave up.

Then there was the time that I tried to unplug my cell phone and ended up unplugging the Tivo, ruining my wife’s taping of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. “That’s my favorite one,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m going to miss it now.” I suggested she put an ad on Craig’s List for someone who taped that episode.

“It’s not a tape. I’ve told you this like a million times. What are you, stuck in the 80s?”

Eventually, the cords and chargers end up in a closet or in the basement. Deep down I know that the exiled cords and chargers will never be used again, but I am too scared to throw any one of them out. To throw out the charger is to throw out the device itself.

I spend at least 12 hours a week untangling the wires for all of the power cords in the living room. There must be a way to monetize that skill. People should want to line up and pay $5 a head to watch me untangle power cords and cell phone chargers.

I suppose, though, that I should not complain about the mess of chargers when the devices do so much. Instant communication, instant information, instant access, instant video, instant gratification—a small unsightly pile of tangled black plastic wires and domestic strife is a small price to pay for such wonders.

Do you have a knotty pile of cords and chargers in your home? How do you cope?

Posted on 11 July 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 6

Why the iPhone is Perfect for Writers

Last year I submitted a piece by email to my local newspaper for Op-Ed consideration, and then left for a four-day bachelor party in Florida. When I was able to see straight again at the close of the trip, and got to an Internet connection, I saw that I had received three emails from the newspaper’s Op-Ed editor. She had wanted to run my piece in the Sunday edition but needed to talk to me about it, and all she had was my email address. I frantically called her Monday morning, but it was too late.

Missing a publishing opportunity because of missed email was a bitter pill to swallow. I swore it would never happen again. You might be thinking that I could have avoided the problem by including my cell phone number with the submission. But then I wouldn’t have this little story.

Getting an iPhone solved the problem of the missed email. But I’ve discovered two other advantages that have improved my life as a writer. It allows me to take notes without looking like I’m taking notes, and it allows to me read without looking like I’m reading.

For years I carried around a little notebook. If I thought of something, I would write it down. The problem was that people sometimes acted funny when they saw me taking notes. “What are you writing?” they would ask, or “Are you writing about me?” or “Can I read what you wrote?” or “I’m going to take that notebook when you are sleeping and read it!” That kind of attention affected my prose.

With the iPhone, however, they don’t know I’m taking notes. They think I’m just texting or, better yet, playing a video game. Sometimes I angle the device this way and that to make it look like I’m racing a car. And as soon as I’m done recording my thoughts, with one tap I can email the notes to myself for later use, with no crumpled up receipts to clutter the coffee table and spark an argument.

Reading books in public used to be a problem, too. Bringing War and Peace to the dinner table was generally interpreted as rude, no matter which translation. One evening as I dined with family, I noticed that someone was holding his iPhone under the table to watch a YouTube video of washed-up celebrity chefs falling down flights of stairs. I asked my fellow diners why he was allowed to watch a video, while I was not allowed to read. Everyone stared into their mashed potatoes.

The message was clear. There was a double standard for new technology and old.

The iPhone has made it possible to read at the dinner table again. I read books on my iPhone and everyone thinks I’m on Facebook looking at wedding pictures of people I don’t really know. Attending parties with a book, even a book that had received good reviews, always met with stares. Now people just stare at their devices, as I stare at mine. Just like with the notes, an unacceptable rudeness masquerades as an acceptable one.

And sometimes when the party’s over, and the potato salad scraped off the plates, and I’m back in my room, alone, I pick up a notepad and a book…and find them both a little heavy.

What’s your experience been? How has an iPhone (or similar device) changed your life as a writer? Or are you still carrying around a notebook and getting weird looks?

Posted on 27 May 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 0

Remember Using Paper Maps?

Remember using paper maps to get places?

old map — Map Reproduction Courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library

I do.

Today people have talking computers suctioned to their car windshields to guide them to places they’ve never been. But when I was a kid we had only paper maps to scream at when we got lost. And each other.

The maps were a sagging bulge in the pouch at the back of the passenger seat of my father’s Renault, and covered our general traveling region: upstate New York, New England, and other places that put ketchup and mustard on hamburgers unless you asked otherwise.

I don’t think a single map, once unfolded, has ever been folded back again. It is the law of entropy. No matter how many diagrams and colored tags I used, I could never get the map folded up sharp and neat like it had been on the rack at the rest area store by the Roy Rodgers and the machine that flattened pennies. The best I could do was crumple the map into something approaching a rectangle, and squeeze like I had to nail a sforzando on an accordion.

And that was just putting the map away. Reaching for the map was even more dangerous. It often ripped. Once we were negotiating around the Boston Museum of Science, and my father needed me to navigate instead of watching my breath condense on the window. But the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had become a stack of paper that I flipped through like I was counting money. Then a pigeon flew away with one of the sheets, and we could not find our motel again.

Before long trips I would spread the map or map pieces before me, and trace our intended path, imagining our car following the same red-lined trajectory as the plane in the Indiana Jones movies. Sometimes my father would whistle the Indiana Jones music while I did this. When we got lost, the whistling ceased.

“But where is the dang exit?” he would ask rhetorically on the shoulder of Interstate 95, the skies darkening, and motel vacancies vanishing by the second. “The number is right next to the highway on this page, but all I see is another sign for corn.” I wanted to help him at these times, but the only things I knew how to do with a map was trace my finger along it.

The best was the time my grandparents took my brother and I to Disney World. My grandfather was following a set of directions that he’d written down on a piece of paper, and my grandmother was reading them back to him as he drove. “It says take Exit 16 A-B,” my grandmother said.

“What’s A-B? I never heard of an exit that ended in A-B.”

“Well you wrote it. Don’t blame me.”

We passed Exit 16 A, and then we passed Exit 16 B. But no Exit “A-B.” The next exit was Exit 17. So we had to get turned around in a swamp, asking an alligator for directions that were not remembered because we all thought someone else was listening. I thought I could hear the fireworks at the Magic Kingdom over the Yiddish being screamed two feet away from my ear. Eventually we pulled over, and after more careful examination my grandfather concluded that the directions were supposed to say Exit 16 A or B. “Exit A or B,” he kept saying as we pulled into our lodgings, dreams of long lines and expensive souvenirs already dancing in my head.

Today these dramas are played out with sterile soft-spoken machines that says things like, “Turn right,” and “Recalculating; Drive…three…blocks…then…turn left.” The computer should say, “Recalculating; Pull over…and…bang your head against the…driver’s side…window.” That would add some of the old excitement that made family trips memorable. Screaming at a machine is just not the same.

Posted on 23 May 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 0

Remember Typewriters?

Remember typewriters?

Image courtesy J. Mayer via Technabob via Creative Commons — Sculpture by Jeremy Mayer (jeremymayer.com), Image via Technabob (technabob.com)

I do.

The final assignment for my seventh grade English class was a research paper on William Shakespeare. We were given months to work on it, and the night before it was due I thought I should probably start my research or at least take a look at the assignment sheet. Aside from the usual admonitions about structure, sources, and spelling, there was a direction I had never seen: “All papers must be typed! No exceptions!!” And underneath that was something I had seen before: “No extensions will be given! No exceptions!!”

Typed? I had seen typewriters in movies. All of my papers up until then had been handwritten, and it was still the time where only extremely nerdy families had computers. This typing requirement put a ripple in my usual last-minute drill. I found my mother in the kitchen consolidating boxes of cereal and asked her if we had a typewriter.

“I think there’s one in the basement. Who knows if it still works. Why do you ask?”

“I have to type a research paper on William Shakespeare.”

“And dare I ask when this paper is due?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Of course. Well, I think I last saw it in the basement under a bunch of your old lunch boxes. When are you going to throw those things out?”

“Um, never.”

Underneath the moldy and dusty lunch boxes was a moldy and dusty plastic covering under which lay a somewhat less moldy and dusty typewriter. It was large and black like a Rolls Royce and at first I thought the carriage return was a hood ornament.

With the help of a neighbor I hauled it up to my room and removed the covering. I was afraid to touch it, and as I plugged it in I felt a little like Dr. Frankenstein.

The machine whirred and I pressed one of the keys. The resulting sound was a like a gunshot, a short staccato pop and I checked the opposite wall for holes. I hit a few more keys, and figured if I could get used to the sound of Hungry Hungry Hippos I could get used to this. After a few minutes of working on my paper I realized something was wrong and had to visit my mother again.

“Mom, where does the paper come out?” I asked.

“It doesn’t,” she said. “You have to load typewriter paper. What have you been typing on all this time?”

“Um, never mind.”

I loaded in paper from my spiral notebook but the mangled edges looked like the work of a fifth grader, so I had to persuade my mother to drive me to the office supply store for some typewriter paper.

Typing on typewriter paper was a lot more effective. Then I accidentally spelled “Stratford-upon-Avon” with a “Q” and discovered that the correction tape was missing, and again we were off to the office supply store. Using a typewriter apparently required a full tank of gas.

Not five minutes after our return the ink dried up. I could see letters being embossed on the paper, and considered filling the indentations with pen. Luckily my mother still had her coat on and again we went to the office supply store.

But alas, the ribbon was not in stock. “We really don’t carry stuff for typewriters anymore,” the manager said. “But we’d be happy to order it for you. When’s your paper due?”

We tried another store but the manager there just laughed at me. It was getting late. Stores would be closing and I did not know what I was going to do. I needed this time to be thinking about making the Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on Shakespeare sound like my own words, not having my mother drive me all over Long Island looking for typrewriter ribbon. Writing with a quill would have been easier than this.

Somehow my father had gotten wind of my dilemma and took me to the working typewriter at his office. I typed my paper while my father sat in the waiting room reading a book titled You’re Almost There: Parenting Through Adolescence. It was close to midnight when I finished, and from my father’s face I gathered that we would be not going for ice cream. My parents bought me a word processor the following year, and we traded in the typewriter for an Acura.

I just read that the last typewriter factory in the world, located in Mumbai, India, is closing its doors forever. I am sure that a lot of people are lamenting this, people who grew up with typewriters, got used to thinking with rapidfire gunshots coming with every depression of their fingertips, people who got a thrill from hearing the ‘ding’ that told them to hit the carriage return, people who enjoyed the challenge of knowing which stores stocked their particular ribbon and correction tape. People who are not me.

Image credits: Sculpture by Jeremy Mayer, Image via Technabob

Posted on 2 May 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 0

Remember When Video Games Did Not Feature Flying Body Parts?

Remember when video games did not feature flying body parts?

I do.

I grew up in the days before federal law protected a child’s right to play video games, and my parents decreed that it was more important that I learn to read and write and look at people when I talk to them instead of living vicariously through jump-kicking digital characters. So I had to live vicariously through my friends’ vicarious living, pressing my face up against the windows of their basements, bedrooms, and dens.

The earliest games featured geometric shapes. There was one where a yellow circle moved along straight lines and right angles, gobbling up white dots and flashing ghosts. Another game involved a triangle that moved along the bottom of a screen and shot white dots straight up at falling squares. Yet another featured two rectangles that moved vertically along the left and right sides of the screen, bouncing a small circle between them, and for every miss, the rectangle had to chug a beer.

Around the time my braces forced me to take all my pizza with a fork and knife, there was a great leap forward in the detail of video games. Instead of circles and triangles there were mushrooms and shells and plumbers leaping between free-floating platforms. There was a robot that tucked into a ball and a little green knight that wielded a sword and candle.

Around the time my voice was cracking and I started taking showers everyday without being reminded, there was a popular game with a little blue hedgehog that sprinted through hill and dale in search of rotating gold coins. One time my friend showed me how to break into the games codes or something so that you make coins appear as if my magic, like some magic coin-making machine. I kept asking him to make more coins until he had his parents call my parents to come pick me up.

There were also video games where that featured one person beating up another person. It was a lot like school, except instead of the victim having his parents call the assistant principal, he just flickered and vanished. The sound effects were another feature. “What are those horrible noises?” my friend’s mother yelled from the kitchen. “What horrible noises?” he answered, swinging a lamppost at a group of digital insurance salesmen.

A few years after I graduated college I went to see my brother, who at 12 had run away from home with a Super Nintendo tucked under his arm. Now an adult, he was playing a so-called “first-person” video game, where you saw the world through the character’s eyes, felt what the character felt, lived what the character lived, and shot anything that moved.

But when he shot someone they would not just disappear or fall down or be consumed in a cartoonish blaze of fire. Instead, their bodies disaggregated. Heads, arms, and legs went flying in different directions. Blood and brain matter were splattered against the wall. Later on the stains would still be there. Eventually a team of digital forensic criminologists would show up and take samples of carpet fibers.

I tried to play. The control pad was not like the two-button or four-button flat ones I was used to. Instead, the controller was a bulky spaceship with buttons on the face, buttons on the sides and corners, trigger buttons underneath, and two joysticks for your thumbs that doubled as buttons. And the game was now in three dimensions. In addition to the traditional up-down-left-right, you could jump, crouch, and do Pilates.

My inexperience showed. I have a hard enough time dealing with the z-axis in real life; in a video game I was dead meat. “How do you run with your head up?” I asked my brother, who shook his head and looked around to make sure none of his friends were around. He changed the controller settings to accommodate a left-hander who read short stories, but I was not any better. I died before I could splatter anyone’s brains or even kick them in the throat.

Too embarrassed to continue, I relinquished the controller, and walked away…head down. The world of video games had side-scrolled without me.

Posted on 14 April 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 0

Remember When Wishing Someone a Happy Birthday Was Not Done Digitally?

Remember when wishing someone a happy birthday was not done digitally?

I do.

When I was a child, happy birthdays were wished in person, by a group of peers surrounding the birthday boy or girl, wearing cone-shaped hats with an elastic chinstrap stapled to the sides, and singing the song “Happy Birthday” while a parent tried not to drop the blazing cake on anyone’s head. When my closest friend at the time – closest meaning his house was closer than any other kid’s – turned five, I was positive that the instant he blew out the candles he would grow a few inches before my very eyes. I was disappointed to see that he stayed the same size and still refused to let me sign-out his He-Man figurines.

In elementary school the procedure was the same except that it was done during class time. These were the days before peanut allergies, and the procedure was similar except that a parent of the birthday boy or girl had to take time off of work to bring in a cake so that class time could be spent wearing the cone-shaped hats and singing the song. If your birthday fell on the weekend or during the summer you were out of luck.

In high school, though, the male students adopted an odd procedure for wishing other male students a happy birthday. Instead of wearing hats, or singing songs, or eating cake, or even just saying “Happy Birthday,” the birthday wishes came in the form of birthday punches.

My seventeenth birthday is etched in my memory. It was third period math class, and I was trying to decide how many lines of notebook paper I wanted my integral symbol to occupy, when a classmate in the next row said, “Hey Kaplowitz, I heard that today’s your birthday.”

“Oh really? No one told me.”

“Very funny.” And he came over and punched me seventeen times in the upper arm, hard. “And one more for good luck,” and he punched me again. Then another classmate got me. Then another. I tried to turn away but they had no problem going to the other arm. “Happy Birthday,” each would say before laying in. They were all lined up. It was like being mugged.

By fifth period my arms were throbbing and I couldn’t hold them up. I staggered into English class like an old boxer and the words going through my head were, “Please, please no more.” But they were there in the back of the classroom, like a gang, throwing their fists softly into open palms, waiting for me. “Hey guys, it’s Kaplowitz’s birthday today!” said the ringleader, the same one who first got me in math class. I cited an old rule from the Court of Chancery that permits only one series of birthday punches per person per birthday. “Wow, you’d make a good lawyer,” he says, and then starts punching me in the arm. He doesn’t get through them all because I start falling to the floor and our teacher starts passing out copies of A Separate Peace.

My arms eventually healed, which was fortunate because wishing someone a happy birthday today requires typing. But not much more than that. You enter a username and password on a social networking website, and the website reminds you of your friends’ birthdays. Click on their name, type “Happy Birthday” in the field, press return, and you’re done, your birthday wish slotted atop all the birthday wishes that came before. For a while I tried to add variety to my birthday wish by adding “Hope you have an awesome day,” but then one day I did that with two people who had the same birthday, and I got caught and it was awkward. At least I didn’t punch them.

The other day was the birthday of a good friend that I had not seen in a while. I could have posted a “Happy Birthday” on his profile page, but it felt so impersonal. I wanted to do something really special. So I texted him instead.

Happy birthday to my wife, who tolerates all this blogging, and who I think is expecting more than a text.

Thanks to Adam Foley for the topic.

Posted on 7 April 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 0

Remember Y2K?

y2k — Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

I do.

In the late nineties, as the year 2000 approached and everyone prepared to trade in their cars for flying machines, we started hearing about something called “Y2K.” At first I thought this was a knock-off of the singing group Boyz II Men, but it was in fact a computer bug, and meant that the disk space that computer engineers had saved for pictures of people’s pets was going to be needed to express the year in four digits instead of two.

Yes, the looming end-of-millennium disaster, the moment where humanity would finally face judgment for its wickedness and fanny packs, was not an asteroid, or Godzilla, or aliens, but the inability of computers to express the year in more than two digits. How exciting. Engineering hadn’t failed us – Hollywood had. I had to picture the disaster myself: At the moment the year changed from 1999 to 2000, and people everywhere were trying to pop champagne without breaking any rare vases, computers would think it was the year 1900 and instantly turn into ticker tape machines.

It is hard to exaggerate the hysteria that surrounded the Y2K bug. I will try anyway.

Planes were going to fall out of the sky. Bank records would be deleted. Toilets would overflow. My biggest worry was that report cards would be lost, including the 90 I got in English junior year, mainly on the strength of my essay on Lady Macbeth’s shoe collection.

The government and corporations began spending billions of dollars on Y2K compliance, and I started spending my weekends going through all my old homework assignments and adding “19” to every date. There were some who criticized the prevention, saying we were going too far. One critic said that the Y2K bug would cause nothing more than a few blank TV screens. When people heard that they doubled their efforts. We all went around telling everyone that there was no way we were going to be flying when midnight struck. For months I did nothing but make preparations to not be in an airplane at the stroke of midnight.

As New Year’s Eve approached, I decided I would not take any chances by going to some booze fest in a major metropolitan area. So instead I went to a booze fest in the country, at the home of a friend of mine that, he assured me, was not in the way of any flight path. It was a fun party and only a few people threw up – obviously from Y2K jitters. We were all worried about our digital infrastructure as well as our coats, which had no doubt been tossed onto a bed along with many other similar-looking coats.

Soon it was time to prepare for the new year and the awkward election between kissing, shaking hands, or waving. The ball in Times Square began its descent. Dick Clark began the final countdown. The 1980s band Europe sang “The Final Countdown.” In those last seconds I braced against the inevitable, took one last look at the world as I knew it, and took the last brownie, confident that no one would say anything at such a moment.

The ball hit the ground, and…nothing. No planes fell out of the sky. No bank accounts were deleted. One toilet overflowed, but I don’t think that had anything to do with computers. The world’s digital infrastructure was fine, and I was going to have to pay back my student loans after all. “Auld Lang Syne” was just as depressing as ever.

No major problems were recorded, and the critics said this was proof that Y2K was a hoax all along. “You see?” they said, “We were right. You spent billions on Y2K compliance, and nothing happened.” And the people who spent those billions said, “Exactly.”

The Y2K bug is thankfully, along with paying for news and music, part of the past. Now we can live in simple peace and harmony and await the “Y10K” bug in 9999. Maybe by then I’ll have found my coat.

Posted on 4 April 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 0