Most of the time, when my text-message signal chimes, it’s my 13-year-old asking if I’ll pick him up at the bus stop (which is four-tenths of a mile from our house, so the answer is usually no, though sometimes I say I’ll meet him along the way on foot). Some of the time, it’s my 13-year-old asking what I’m making for dinner or, if it happens that he’s home and I’m out, when I’ll be back and whether I’ll make him some hot chocolate once I get home.
It’s no secret that 13-year-olds love text-messaging, and mine has certainly found a way to make it work for him by making it easier than ever to ask favors of his hard-working mother.
Once a week or so, though, the text-message chime signals something else: a short missive from my phone service provider explaining how to do something. These weekly tips inform me about new apps I might want to download, new data plans that might save me money, or new shortcuts to make using the phone more efficient. And they always end the same way: “To stop receiving these tips, text STOP to this number.”
I always laugh when I get to that part. Information on how to stop receiving tips? Tips intended to save me money, boost my efficiency or make everyday phone use more interesting? Why on earth would I want to do that?
“To the contrary; keep ‘em coming!” I sometimes tell my phone when I see that message.
The truth is, if anything I’d like to get more tips, from more sources, and about more areas of my life. Not long-form advice or counsel, necessarily – though there are certainly times I could use that also – but short, simple, tweet-worthy tips. It would be fine with me if I received lots more text-message advice nuggets: about nutrition, work habits, housekeeping, exercise, parenting.
I don’t mean to suggest there isn’t plenty of advice available on these topics. It’s just that the packaging of these little nuggets of useful information is so appealing. I find them easy to read and easy to use. Sure I could read entire books on parenting or time management. Truth be told, I have, many times. Sometimes they’re useful; sometimes not, and as many literary critics have pointed out, sometimes the best guidance for how to optimize one’s personal life doesn’t appear on the self-help shelf of the bookstore at all but in the works of Austen, Dostoevsky, Thoreau or Faulkner.
And sometimes, that’s just too much information to try to accommodate at once. Not so with AT&T text messages. “Download this app to track your mileage!” it will say, or “Save money on your next phone bill by consolidating your data plan!”
Keep sending them, I say. I imagine the other messages I might benefit from: “Don’t eat cookies after lunch!” “Think twice before hitting ‘send’ on your next email!” “Let the car at the intersection cut in ahead of you.”
Someday in the future, this might well be the case; all kinds of simple guidance may arrive in the palm of my hand by text message. For now, all I have is the phone company offering me a shortcut to directory assistance. But I’ll take it.
Text “stop” to stop receiving tips? Not a chance. I need all the advice I can get – and when it arrives in 140 characters or fewer, who can say no?
Showing posts with label advice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label advice. Show all posts
Friday, April 6, 2012
Monday, November 28, 2011
Before anyone has hurt your feelings
I almost skipped right over the Fresh Air interview with legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola when it came up on my podcast list. Filmmaking isn’t a major interest of mine, and I knew there were other podcasts in my iPod queue that would be of more immediate interest to me: a conversation about Thanksgiving cooking with New York Times food writer Mark Bittman; a discussion on the shortage of drugs to counter ADHD; a review of Tom Perrotta’s newest novel.
But the Francis Ford Coppola interview was what came up when my run began, and sometimes it just seems like too much of a hassle to take my iPod out of its armband case and start fiddling with the controls to get to the next podcast once my run is under way. Besides, I reminded myself, even if I wasn’t particularly curious about the topic of filmmaking, I’d almost certainly learn something about it. And even when I don’t leave a Fresh Air podcast retaining any information about the subject, I always learn something new about the art of interviewing.
What I didn’t expect was to find it laugh-out-loud funny, but laugh out loud I did when Coppola was discussing the importance for filmmakers and other artists of practicing their writing with great frequency, and gave this specific instruction about daily writing: “The important thing is: choose the time that's good for you. For me, it's early morning because I wake up, and I'm fresh, and I sit in my place. I look out the window, and I have coffee, and no one's gotten up yet or called me or hurt my feelings.”
What made me laugh was the ingenuity of Coppola saying he needs to write before anyone has hurt his feelings. I too write first thing in the morning every day, as soon as I get out of bed, and I never thought about it that way, but he’s right: at that hour, no one has yet hurt my feelings (though sometimes I’ve already been mocked a little, given my tendency to talk in my sleep and my spouse’s propensity for teasing me about it in the wee hours). First thing in the morning, my emotions are still as untainted as they are likely to be all day, and I suppose in some ways that’s the best time to write.
Of course, it also tends to be the most innocuous time to write. Sometimes, as I sit in the comfortable arm chair in the corner of our bedroom at 5:30 a.m. with the house dark and silent around me, I find myself at a loss for what to say in my journal: nothing’s happened yet, and the events of the previous day have faded into uniform banality.
But most of the time, this isn’t a problem. Most of the time, the events and emotions of the previous day are still present in my mind enough to record, even if my brain may feel a little fuzzy at that hour.
Still, no one has yet hurt my feelings at 5:30 a.m., and Coppola is right: that counts for a lot. I am indeed best off writing in the grayish drowsy haze of early morning, when no one voice takes precedence in my writing only because it is the voice of the last person to have spoken to me.
In an ideal day, of course, no one hurts my feelings at all, and I don’t say things I regret, and I don’t make bad decisions, and I don’t take out my iPhone while running and accidentally drop it on the pavement and crack the screen (not to dwell too heavily on my weekend).
But these things happen, sometimes, in the course of a day. And it was somehow reassuring to hear from someone as highly accomplished and highly regarded as Francis Ford Coppola that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to do your daily writing when your thoughts and emotions still seem to be your own, in your voice, freshly hatched, before you’ve been distracted by people hurting your feelings.
But the Francis Ford Coppola interview was what came up when my run began, and sometimes it just seems like too much of a hassle to take my iPod out of its armband case and start fiddling with the controls to get to the next podcast once my run is under way. Besides, I reminded myself, even if I wasn’t particularly curious about the topic of filmmaking, I’d almost certainly learn something about it. And even when I don’t leave a Fresh Air podcast retaining any information about the subject, I always learn something new about the art of interviewing.
What I didn’t expect was to find it laugh-out-loud funny, but laugh out loud I did when Coppola was discussing the importance for filmmakers and other artists of practicing their writing with great frequency, and gave this specific instruction about daily writing: “The important thing is: choose the time that's good for you. For me, it's early morning because I wake up, and I'm fresh, and I sit in my place. I look out the window, and I have coffee, and no one's gotten up yet or called me or hurt my feelings.”
What made me laugh was the ingenuity of Coppola saying he needs to write before anyone has hurt his feelings. I too write first thing in the morning every day, as soon as I get out of bed, and I never thought about it that way, but he’s right: at that hour, no one has yet hurt my feelings (though sometimes I’ve already been mocked a little, given my tendency to talk in my sleep and my spouse’s propensity for teasing me about it in the wee hours). First thing in the morning, my emotions are still as untainted as they are likely to be all day, and I suppose in some ways that’s the best time to write.
Of course, it also tends to be the most innocuous time to write. Sometimes, as I sit in the comfortable arm chair in the corner of our bedroom at 5:30 a.m. with the house dark and silent around me, I find myself at a loss for what to say in my journal: nothing’s happened yet, and the events of the previous day have faded into uniform banality.
But most of the time, this isn’t a problem. Most of the time, the events and emotions of the previous day are still present in my mind enough to record, even if my brain may feel a little fuzzy at that hour.
Still, no one has yet hurt my feelings at 5:30 a.m., and Coppola is right: that counts for a lot. I am indeed best off writing in the grayish drowsy haze of early morning, when no one voice takes precedence in my writing only because it is the voice of the last person to have spoken to me.
In an ideal day, of course, no one hurts my feelings at all, and I don’t say things I regret, and I don’t make bad decisions, and I don’t take out my iPhone while running and accidentally drop it on the pavement and crack the screen (not to dwell too heavily on my weekend).
But these things happen, sometimes, in the course of a day. And it was somehow reassuring to hear from someone as highly accomplished and highly regarded as Francis Ford Coppola that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to do your daily writing when your thoughts and emotions still seem to be your own, in your voice, freshly hatched, before you’ve been distracted by people hurting your feelings.
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