About ThisAbout Me
Email Me
Bookmark
Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
I’ve reached a crossroads.
No, it’s more than that; it’s an existential fog. A crisis of identity. A questioning of everything I am.
What brought on this morphing of self, this foreign mode of being?
Yesterday, in the afternoon, I laughed — out loud, physically laughed — at a picture on the internet.
Of a CAT.
I know, right? This is bad.
It’s not even about the cat. Sure, I don’t like cats much. Cats are apathetic, self-absorbed antisocial assholes, and that doesn’t fly with me. Because that’s my job, dammit. Stop hogging my thing, cats.
Also, I’m allergic. And cats’ chief mode of communication is to scratch gaping wounds into your flesh. And ancient Egyptians liked cats, and they yanked people’s brains out through their noses and dumped them in pickling juice.
Oh, sure, it was people who were already dead. Still, it’s weird. Cat people are weird. I’m not cat people.
But it’s not about the cat, really. It’s about what the cat represents, online. Cat pictures are, like, the quintessential indicator of someone who’s doing the internet wrong. Somebody emails you cat pictures? You block their address. They post felines onto your Facepage+ wall? Defriend it with fire! That same person starts a Tumblr dedicated to their “varrah mst favirite LOLkittehs EVAR!!“?
Schedule an intervention. Bring a priest.
And a scratching post.
“This is what people’s grandmothers do when they’ve first discovered the interwebs, and someone’s explained that the mouse isn’t a foot pedal and get your goddamned coffee cup out of the DVD tray, grandma, this isn’t freaking 1997, ya coot.”
Now obviously, I’m not going to start spamming out photos of cats with captions like “WHO’S A BEBBEH KITTEH?!“. Because I’d sooner shove my keyboard — and hands — into an industrial blender. Obviously.
Still. I’m concerned. Partly that I laughed. But mostly because the natural end of this story is to share with you the picture in question. The picture of. A CAT.
I feel like this has to be some kind of gateway thing. A portal into a dark and harrowing world, where I definitely do not want to go and don’t have the Benadryl available to cope with.
And yet I’m torn. My only defense at laughing at a cat picture is to show it to someone else. This is what people’s grandmothers do when they’ve first discovered the interwebs, and someone’s explained that the mouse isn’t a foot pedal and get your goddamned coffee cup out of the DVD tray, grandma, this isn’t freaking 1997, ya coot.
That’s not cool.
(Also, the picture is apparently over a year old. Part of me feels good that I avoided at least one stupid picture of a stupid cat for so long.
The rest of me is fully aware that I’m now discussing not only a picture of a cat, but a picture of an idiot cat that the rest of the world has already seen. Which is exactly the sort of shit internet grandmas pull all the time.
That second part of me is drinking heavily, to try and forget.)
If I don’t share the picture, then I laughed — alone, forever alone (or months after everyone else, anyway) — at a cat picture. I’d be taking one for the team, suffering a partial pariahship, but not sinking quite to the point of distributing dangerous kitteh-based content.
On the other hand, if even one other person sees the pic and laughs, then we’re both in the same boat. I’ve tarnished the soul of humanity, sure. The world would be a shadowier, prissier place, covered in fur and canned tuna and smelling vaguely of animal urine. But at least I wouldn’t be alone.
I don’t know. Could I live with myself? Exposing an innocent mind to feline photos? Hastening the demise of other internet users into useless, drooling cat whisperers? Perhaps yanking the very cornerstone from the facade of civilization as we know it?
Yeah. I think I can. Anything to avoid being “that cat guy”. Here. Look upon the cat picture, and weep.
Weep for us all. The terrorists have won. By which I mean, the FURRAH KITTEHS!!
Goddamned cats.
Today, I was asked to write a first draft of an email with an update on what my department has been up to recently. The final email will soon be sent to the entire company. It was my job to get the ball rolling.
And I rolled that ball. I rolled it to the tune of two-and-a-half pages, including section headers. And footnotes. Eight of ’em. Footnotes.
“Tomorrow Never Datas”
Actually, that might be the problem. Or at least, a really strong indicator of the problem. Which is me. Obviously.
I won’t bore you with the actual text of this update. But I will share those section headers — and the footnotes. These are actually real. I just sent the email. Noodly appendage to god.
Sections of the Update Email to Communicate to the Company What We Do:
Data Hard
Data Hard with a Vengeance
Live and Let Data
To Live and Data in L.A.
Tomorrow Never Datas
(Did I mention our department works with data? That’s kind of important. We do data. I think most people in the company are aware of this.
If not, they will be soon.)
And the footnotes:
(1) There aren’t actually any Easter eggs. But don’t tell the people who don’t bother to read footnotes.
(2) In fairness, we’ve written scripts that do most of the work. We barely stake any personal pains over this any more.
(3) Or pizzas slipped under the door. We’re not so picky.
(4) Hah!
(5) We are so sorry. Yes, we know. So sorry.
(6) Happily, the “five-second rule” works much better with a hard drive full of data than a bite-sized candy. Though both taste worse after you step on them.
(7) Well, not all our activities. We never(8) post anything to the mailing list about our writing gigs or orienteering events, for instance.
(8) Mostly. Mostly never.
So my question is this: Should I be worried that my boss will fire me the second she’s done reading the email?
Or should I be more worried that she’ll send it out, everyone will read it, and the entire organization will fire me, possibly involving actual fire?
This whole “business savvy” thing. I do not think it means what I think it means.
Permalink | No Comments(Sundays are for science! But Mondays can be, too!
So if you missed yesterday’s Secondhand SCIENCE post on neutrinos, hop on over for a look. I promise it’s the ninja-y-est, most Bigfooty article about physics you’ll read all week.
Or at least until Sunday, when I ruin science again. Stay tuned for that. Meanwhile…)
I’ve never paid much attention to the latest fashions or styles. This should be clear enough from every picture ever taken of me — even the ones posted on the internet.
All right. Especially the ones posted on the internet.
One example of my laissez faire attitude toward haute couture: I bought some new jeans recently. On Amazon, using a tag ripped out of a current pair as a guide — because I don’t want the “hot new fresh”; I want the thing I’ve got that fits my ass and has the pockets I like, only without the scraggly leg cuffs or that weird stain on the crotch I still can’t explain.
(Seriously, is that mustard? Curry sauce? Did I dry hump a bowl of Velveeta and then forget about it? What?)
I bought three pairs — one I needed, one for backup, and one in case another cheese-thrusting emergency comes up — and I was mostly happy with my choice. Except for one thing — I usually get stonewashed pants. I like those. They’re lighter and softer and feel a little worn-in already.
I’ve had non-stonewashed pants; for the first six months, they feel like wearing two huge wrapping paper tubes around your legs, taped together to a cardboard codpiece. I’m not into that. It’s like being a life-sized flat Stanley fetish doll. No, thank you.
But the best I could find on Amazon was “medium stonewashed”. I don’t know what that means, exactly — do they wash them for less time? Or with smaller stones? Is the procedure the same, but carried out by a tarot reader who can tell the pants’ future? I can’t say.
All I know is, “medium stonewashed” came in my size, and most others. Actual “stonewashed stonewashed” pants were available in just two sizes. One was a 28-inch waist, which would work wonderfully, so long as I abandon the notion that “pants” are a thing meant to cover parts of my body north of the lower thigh. The other was a 52-inch waist, which my wife might be able to climb into with me.
(Only she wouldn’t, because she wouldn’t be caught dead wearing stonewashed pants, because apparently they’re unfashionable this year. Or this month. Or anytime before three o’clock on Tuesday; I really don’t keep up with the rules on these things.)
In fact, the missus was quite happy to learn about my order adjustment, and offered that with their limited selection, “maybe Amazon is trying to help you dress better“.
I rather doubt that. Given the outrageous shitton of poor decisions (and fake poor decisions) I’ve made during Amazon orders — and Amazon’s relentless, non-judging enablement of more self-defeating behavior by making recommendations based on those very same poor decisions — I don’t think Clan Bezos is going to draw the line at a pair of pants two shades lighter than they’re wearing in Milan this spring. I just don’t see it.
In the meantime, I’ve got three pairs of not-quite-cardboardish-but-still-somewhat-sandpapery new pants to break in. And to lighten up. And try not to stain in mysterious ways, at least until they’ve appeared with me in a decent photograph or two.
Oh, who am I kidding? These things probably already have polka-dotted something-or-other spilled all over them. Or they’ll be around my knees in any picture that gets taken. You don’t have to be a stonewash medium to see that coming.
Permalink | No CommentsThe other day, I was asked a seemingly simple (if rather pointed) question:
“What are you doing to save the environment?”
I was not ready for this question. I certainly had not thought about this question. And it’s quite possible I was eating a megafarm beef burrito from a big-chain restaurant out of a styrofoam container at the time I was asked this question.
I don’t remember doing that. But the way the question was asked, it sure as hell felt like that’s what I was doing. That, or strip-mining the Amazon rainforest with chlorofluorocarbons, somehow. Something very enviro-dickish.
My answer was, of course, inadequate, mumbled and incomplete. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing for the environment — I wasn’t thinking about what to do for the environment, just at that particular moment.
“The environment is a little like your left armpit. It’s always there, and you’d miss it if it went away, but you never give it a lot of thought.”
Or at many others. Let’s be honest. The environment is a little like your left armpit. It’s always there, and you’d miss it if it went away, but you never give it a lot of thought.
Not until something weird grows in it, anyway, or it starts to smell like an overripe mushroom with halitosis. Then you call the EPA. Or the people at Mennen.
My point is, I do some things to help the environment — and, for the record, my left armpit. I just don’t keep a running tally of each and every one of those helpful little deeds I do.
Or rather, I didn’t, until some jackhole came by and asked the question, and made me feel like Baron Acidrain von Oilspill when I didn’t have an answer ready. So now I know what I do to save the environment. In fact, I’ve come up with a whole five things. And I’m going to tell you what they are.
In digital form, thereby saving an innocent tree.
That’s the first one. Point, me. I can feel the ozone layer’s sphincter relaxing already.
Here’s the rest:
2. I recycle.
Which is to say, I have a blue bin at home into which I cram stuff that isn’t styrofoam or factory-cow burritos or spent plutonium waste, and another bin into which I do cram that stuff. If I have it. To be fair, I don’t keep a lot of styrofoam around.
Now, I don’t further sort the stuff in the recycle bin. My understanding is that there are machines or hobos or small indentured children whose job it is to keep the plastic side plastic and the glass side glass, so to speak. I mean, I put things into the blue bin, and not the not-blue bin. Responsibility has to be handed off somewhere; there’s only so much I can do. I’m just one man.
(I have it on good authority, by the way, that at my office, the blue bins and not-blue bins all get dumped together into unspecified-color bags and hauled off to the dump. I have no input or sway over this practice, so short of dragging my trash home to recycle it myself — and I’m not doing that; my car already smells like stale burritos — I’m really doing the environment no good with any personal waste management strategy I choose to employ at work.
Of course, I still throw my recyclables into the blue bin, anyway. I call this “recycling in spirit”. And goddammit, I’m counting it.)
3. Though I still run the water in the sink while I brush my teeth, I don’t run as heavy a stream as I used to.
My wife, little miss conservationist showoff, doesn’t run the water at all. She wets the toothbrush, then brushes over a completely dry sink like some kind of ascetic hermit.
I can’t even.
Look, I’m all for the environment. And she’s convinced me to run just a trickle of water, for the sake of the whales or farm-raised salmon or slip ‘n’ slides in the middle of the Mojave. Something or other. But good lord, woman — this isn’t feudal Europe. You might as well bathe in last night’s filthwater and get your humors bled out at Supercuts. We won the Cold War, already.
Fine. The first Cold War. Anyway, I don’t care. I’ll save the planet a little. But I’m running water while I brush. Next.
4. I only drive to work five days a week.
Because the planet can use a petroleum holiday for those other two, while I’m sleeping and drinking. You’re welcome, Ms. Nature.
5. I give to Greenpeace.
Frankly, I don’t know whether Greenpeace saves the environment or not. I’ve never actually read any of their literature or website or anything. So far as I know, their agenda consists of making PETA seem reasonable, mooning horny Japanese whalers and strapping friendship bracelets onto endangered penguins.
(Are there endangered penguins, even?
Probably the ones near the Japanese whalers. I’ll stand by that.)
But “Green” is in the name, so probably somewhere in there is verbiage about protecting all life and swaddling nature’s creatures and making out with potted ferns or something. I just assume. So why donate to Greenpeace in the first place?
Because my doorbell rang one Saturday afternoon between my sleeping and drinking time, and outside I found two painfully sincere college chicks with their hemp socks and their suburban dreads and their reverent plans to go (back? I didn’t catch that part) to the slums of San Povertina to nurse clubfooted chickens back to health. Something like that. Noble gesture. Poor country. Gimpy poultry. Something.
Anyway, I was so moved by their enthusiasm and their passion and their dedication that I signed up right there to help their cause. Because I am a person who firmly believes in contributing to the betterment of our environment.
(And totally not because I am a person who thought that they were maybe going to kiss if I made a donation.
Totally not that. At all.)
So, there you go, smartypants enviro-question asker. Five whole things that I do to help the environment, which is four-and-a-half more than you’re doing by going around asking pointy questions to unprepared burrito-eaters.
Why don’t you stick that in your pipe and… then carefully take it out, fold it into your compost heap, break your pipe down into components, reuse what you can’t recycle and give your nearest white elm — or reformed Japanese whaler — a big fat smooch for me. Because environment.
Permalink | No Comments
![[Subscribe]](/blog/images/subscribe.png)
