RyanHarne.com

The past week has been sleep-deprived and generally restless. I have been incredibly distractable but fortunately have retained my patience. Tomorrow, I am picking up the keys to the house, which looks surprisingly better off than that tired Flickr set I keep linking. I have to take some photos for renter’s reference, now that maintenance has made their rounds, and those shots will quickly be an addendum beside the old set. Quickly, as in, once I get internet at the house.

Last night, a good friend stopped by. Kent, whom I leased the apartment from last summer, is moving to DC following his graduation here. We are in similar but mismatched shoes. We are both spending more money in preparation for new housing than we ever anticipated (I spent … a lot … on a mattress last Saturday; the experience was jarring) and are both exhausted mentally from the elements present in this type of rearrangement. I can’t pretend my move is as extensive, but the responsibility of a house from my renter’s perspective is a new frontier. Plus, living with a best friend will likely pose minor tribulations.

I simply can’t shake the feeling that the house is a future or a period or a landmark in my story.

It may be the sleepiness speaking or the summer humidity causing dementia: I think that this move will be the christening of a grande voyage, an age of my life that I will recall with cautious smiles and satisfying shivers.

That’s what I’ll shoot for.

A gift from Flickr came today.

And inside of it was a really neat present.

I just discovered that since I don’t have a pro account, my shots are all re-sized. I had no clue that was the case. Looking through this book, some of the actual prints are astounding and the color in mine just pales in comparison. I suppose that a 1024 pixel-tall image won’t print nearly as well as these 3000-wide shots. Part of it is due to the dark hues of my photo - simply a set of inks that may not blend well in print-form.

Here is the amazing shot that is on the page with me. And here is my meager attempt.

Nik, Tara, and Katie are all famous.

The great allure of the fast food enterprise today is no longer the old-fashioned quality and family-friendly environment that once prevailed. The demographic who remember the good times of post-war America and the pleasurable McDonald’s atmosphere of the day are thinning out in numbers, primarily due to heart disease associated with a diet high in fast food. Even if they tried to pass along that nostalgia to their children, heart disease is striking younger and younger people today. Fast food needs a back-up plan.

Luckily, they already had one which, in a most subversive manner, became the dominant attraction to fast food franchises. With thousands and tens of thousands of stores plopped the world over, players like McDonald’s and KFC discovered that its not the high-fructose food that brings people back, but rather the regularity. People don’t want surprises in their daily routine, and walking into a McDonald’s should be an experience easily replicated, whether in midtown Manhattan, Moscow, or Mosul. In fact, Starbucks has been overt about this for years. Either way, normalcy paid off - people know what they are getting and as your company increases in size, you can lower prices as further incentive.

Unfortunately, this leads to a sterile life for the consumer (perhaps even literally, if enough faux-meat wreaks havoc to your southern hemisphere). You inherit a dependence on conformity; once-pleasant changes in routine are now perceived like DEFCON 1 threat levels to your otherwise stagnant way of life.

It follows, then, that the element we lack most today is not happiness - a symptom to this disease - but rather spontaneity and the willingness to simply do something different. Ze Frank put it best when he encouraged people to bust their cycle but it can be elaborated further. Busting a cycle still encourages you to maintain one, for the most part (not explicitly, mind you), and occasionally (weekly for the weak-hearted) prompts you to radically modify an aspect of it.

Each week this summer, I have made a new dish for myself. This is some real effort, too; when I am exhausted after work, it’s very tempting to slap a Boca burger on whatever fresh bread I just picked up, slice some cheddar, and microwave it for purification purposes. I actually used curry for the first time last week, a genuine attempt.

Also, once per week, I demand that I take an evening walk with my camera. The summer evenings in Blacksburg are to-die-for and I cannot allow myself to simply sit them out in the semi-comfort of a spacious apartment. These are just simple steps, almost tip-toeing towards the deep end, but nevertheless the budding promises that I am moving away from the cancerous stages of regularity and into the rehabilitation corridor of spontaneity.

Fast food promises expected results. It’s the antithesis of lab work, actually, where you always, always pray for something unusual to happen because A) surprising results can perpetuate funding and B) because an experiment repeated for solely the purpose of repetition is a waste of time and the aforementioned funding. A fast food lifestyle digs yourself into a gully - size and shape of your own choosing, but nevertheless an open grave.

The Rip-Mix-Burn mentality of the Y2K years is fading out. Now, it’s Rip-Burn, Rip-Burn, ad nauseam. Variation to our days is vital for both physical and mental health reasons. I try to vary my days as much as possible; I do what I can. Maybe the attitude is enough, but some results must back your enthusiasm. Whatever your plan, the summer is prime time for action.

For an entirely different alternative to this portrait, check out Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, then The Story of B, and then Beyond Civilization.

Even though the research work life is full of ups and downs right now, I am comforted by last night’s fortune cookie prophecy, “You are one of those people who goes places in life.” I understand the random probability of receiving any given fortune cookie catch-phrase-well-wish. BUT. Last night, those planets and stars aligned just enough to pool their gravitational force resources together in order to direct that one fortune cookie right to me. I am also addicted to those sweet Chinese donuts, available at your local Chinese buffet restaurant.

Plus, I got a call this afternoon that, summarized, said, “This is going to be a great summer and beyond.”

I will be at Radford University, selling Macs, at the exact moment of the iPhone release. However, I will choose to celebrate the holy occasion by cleaning out the new house and moving a few items over - the keys to which I will have picked up earlier in the day. Again, I emphasize the aforementioned and summarized call I received today. Note to self: find Chinese donuts to savor for the grande occasion.

Half of all stories should be left open-ended. Not necessarily incomplete, where a phrase drops off into an abyss. Rather, they should become amorphous and appear to dissolve into the world around you.

The other half of all stories need to give us a satisfactory conclusion. A good conclusion is not an inflatable cushion to fall upon, nor a wall to race into. Rather, it’s a comforting embrace goodbye, forever - you shouldn’t expect another crossing of paths, and that shouldn’t be regrettable.

If the ratio of story types is ever unbalanced, we’d either be left with a stigmatizing uncertainty or a frightening finality.

I think we need some more open-ended stories. They tend to be more relatable and inspiring.

Even though I listen to some music while at work in the lab - and then do my best to enjoy the eclectic mixes of contemporary German pop, 80s one-hit-wonders, and 90s one-hit-wonders, all thanks to my colleagues and YouTube - most of what I have listened to this summer has been podcasts. The ones that get my regular attention are BBC Radio 4’s “In Our Time“, the archived and remarkable “TED Talks“, Cool Hunting’s video podcast, and, naturally, Chicago Public Radio’s “This American Life“. Podcasts have become an addiction, though one requiring the comforting environment of home to actually pay attention to and enjoy - I simply cannot be walking around campus or whatnot and make a thread of sense of a podcast; the static scenery is best.

The method of presentation that “This American Life” takes is quite possibly the most effective one for my attention span. Stories. You can tell me that you own a Jaguar and I’ll zone out in the first few syllables. But if you tell me the story of how you interned for a famous Swiss designer and how you became his dearest apprentice and then he decided that you should take possession of his Jaguar upon his death… Wow! I’ll be waiting for each word to drop from your experience with the delight of a kid waiting for the clinging bells of reindeer overhead.

Stories are not something that require serendipity in order to take form; they require commonplace observation and interpretation. Red doesn’t begin to accept meaning until people attach it to such ideas like hot or stop or glamorous. In the same way, your regular routine is nothing more than a cog in a machine until you spot the odd quirks we all have and see them for that, instead of “just the way things are.” For example, I am incapable of getting a good day started without a toasted bagel with a sliced banana and cinnamon sugar as toppings. To an uninterested observer, I am eating breakfast; but I see it as a morningtime religious experience that is connected to the overall wellness of my entire day. See, story.

Maybe the greatest cause of stories is an exuberant attitude. Those millions of Americans who work for the thought that money will solve their insecurities and that their debt disappears one day before their children inherit it - well, frankly, they have no capacity to witness the richness of life all around us, and how wonderfully dynamic both the earth and humans can be. You’ll never realize you have a story if your greater concern is the survival of your materialistic life. It’s impossible to spot a gold coin in a haystack if you are adamantly looking for that pin.

So, my point is that you should listen to “This American Life”. “Each week on our radio program we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme…”