Life Kills: May 2007 Archives

At the risk of sounding exceptionally geeky... and I mean exceptionally even by geek standards... the Star Ship Enterprise show is surprisingly good.

Don't get me wrong: I'm a Star Wars guy (if it comes down to one or the other, of course). Star Trek has some entertainment value, if only to watch William Shatner's career-defining moments with green-skinned hotties and sending off red-shirted guys to their doom. In general though, it's written pretty badly. Star Trek Enterprise, though, seems to have all the same great entertainment (except for, you know, Bill Shatner), and the story is significantly better. Couple this with the Sci-Fi Channel's marathon mondays of STE, and I can tell you that from 7pm on, I'm very much into it.

It's pretty amusing, though, how they continuously recycle plot elements. Right now, for example, they've traveled through time (a plot cycle that has been used, and reused, and reused, and reused even by the original series) to - you guessed it - World War Two. Once again, serious recyclage. It's engaging though; I recommend giving it a shot.

Day two of my new job with Motorola has begun with a bang. A sloppy wet bang. The Jeep, which I've slowly started to despise, is literally just a bathtub on wheels. Driving to work shouldn't require goggles and a snorkel. I've put serious consideration into wearing swim trunks to work. Or drilling extra drains into the floorboards (which should help a bit.)

So I get to work, moistened to the core and ready to roll out a fancy shmancy website in high style. Not bad.

Motorola is pretty intense place - the campus is huge. There's cafeterias, gyms, clowns, daycare centers. It's like some crazy anime floating city. Color me impressed. Moto's marketing is pervasive; the hallways have lots of Motorola posters, there's full-on displays with old technology, new technology, up-and-coming technology. It really is pretty darned sweet. There's even production lines. For some reason, that makes me smile inside.

Don't get me wrong - it's still a cubicle city. But interestingly enough, it's not as bad as all that. And the WIG (Web Intelligence Group) gets the mad flava: we share one really enormous cubicle, a desk at each corner. The 4 corners of creativity, that's us.

Just like any place this big, the bureaucracy is a little cumbersome - I'm still waiting on my ID and badge, my workstation's still being imaged, etc. Still, it's not too bad, and in the meantime I get it done on the flaptop. The workstation's a beast though, so I'm looking forward to pushing that around.

Gotta get me some coffee. I wonder which corner of this million (yes, million) square foot facility dispenses the caffeine?

Everyone's a freakin' poet. No training, no studying, no background. There's no structure, no timing, no rhyming, no reason.

Just a bunch of words and sentences spaced dramatically. I might be wrong (it's been a while), but I believe that's called 'prose'.

But everyone's a poet. I'm a poet. I like the sound of that. It sounds artsy, and people can dig artsy. Maybe it'll get me laid, or make me some new friends. And the best thing is that you don't even have to show any work to still be a 'poet.' And if you do, it doesn't have to be good. Because most people (most people) couldn't tell good poetry from the menu at Denny's (which, by the way, is poetic in its own special way). I could scribble a bunch of lines on napkins or take-out menus and stuff it all in my back pocket, or carry around a notebook where I write observations (the sky... is blue today...) and say "Hey. What's up. I'm a poet. Check out my sweet, sweet poems."

"I'm a poet", a poetrist, the vocal stylist who puts words together in his/her own way and wants to sell you on their poetic identity. Maybe they want attention, maybe they really do love their art. No, not me personally, but I know plenty of people who do. Want attention. And love their art. And say they're poets. Sometimes it's a combination platter with extra cheese.

I don't know if I could do it... don't know if I could resist the urge to laugh. Especially if I ran across someone who read one of these seemingly poetic observations and said "Hey, yeah, that's really cool... you're really talented!" When they're actually thinking "Okaaaay... what's the point?"

What a line of crap all that is. If you want to take a dump in the woods and call it art, do it. I know plenty of people that do exactly that (and it smells terrible.) There's a great sales/business adage that says: "What's a nuclear submarine worth? Whatever someone will pay for it."

Definitions and structure lose their value in an ever-evolving field. I might go so far as to say art (and all its cousins) would be considered ever-evolving. Unless you're a creationist. Then you're just screwed.