IVP - Strangely Dim

If I’m So Invisible, Why Do I Need a Haircut?

By David A. Zimmerman

I feel quite justified in my hatred of cell phone use. Now, before I go any further let me say that I do not feel any hatred toward cell-phone users, nor do I hate the phones themselves. Some of my favorite people—including my wife—own and regularly use cell phones, and the phones themselves have pretty neat features. If there were only cell phones and cell phone users I’d be quite content. But in between the two comes cell phone use.

My most recent experience as a cell phone casualty came during my monthly haircut. I sat down for some nice chit-chat and a little off the top and sides, but no sooner had the bib been tied around my neck than my hair-cutter-person’s cell phone rang.

Now, when a phone rings a person must make a decision: do I answer it? I take calls at my desk when I want a break from whatever task I’m working at, or when I want to end or pause a conversation with someone in my office; otherwise I let the call divert to voicemail. Accepting a phone call is effectively rejecting everything else. The question that supports that decision making process as such becomes, What impact would taking a call right now have on what I’m doing right now?

Let me preemptively answer this question for those of you in the hair-cutting professions: the impact would be pretty severe. Let’s just say that my current haircut is not my wife’s favorite, and no one has yet said to me, “Oh! I see you’ve had a haircut,” which presumably has allowed my friends to avoid the socially compulsory follow-up statement: “It looks very nice.”

My de-follicizer didn’t stop cutting my hair while she talked with someone who, I later learned, was her coworker. She stopped only briefly to wave as her colleague drove by and honked the car horn. They finished their conversation about the same time that she finished my haircut.

If instead of calling my hair-remover, her colleague had stopped in for a chat, I wonder, would either one have deferred the conversation till my hair was appropriately dealt with? Probably, but there’s something about that ring that suckers people into an inflated sense of self-importance. There’s something thrilling about being able to provide a potentially different answer every time you’re asked the first question in every cell phone conversation: “Where are you?”

Cell phones are great because they make your life as it’s occurring seem so important, so exotic. Yet the moment you answer your cell phone you take a time out from where you are and what you’re doing, even if you continue to stay there and do it. I did technically get my hair cut that day, but I did not have a satisfactory hair cutting experience. Maybe I should have had a cell phone with me so I could tell my friends, “Oh, I’m just sitting here getting a haircut.”

After all, that’s all I’m really looking for out of a haircut—a chance to be the center of someone’s attention.

I Got Nothing

By David A. Zimmerman

It was bound to happen. You write five hundred words a week and eventually you’ll run out of things to write. I’ll call it writer’s block, demon oppression, whatever, but I’ve got nothing, and I’ve got 464 more words to go telling you about it.

You come to regard yourself as a deep thinker when you spend as much time as I do putting your thoughts on paper—or more accurately, committing them to digitized memory. (Nice move—eight fewer words I have to write.) And so, when you can’t think of anything, you come to pretty much an identity crisis: If I don’t have this, what do I have? If I can’t do this, what can I do?

When I first toyed with the idea of a weekly column, I was on fire. I kicked out four months’ worth of mini-essays in a couple of weeks. Several months later I started posting them online, and the thrill of that new horizon spurred even more frantic typing on my PC and scribbling of graffiti script on my PDA. But several months after that, I find myself struggling to move beyond a witty headline. Even this confession buys me only a measly seven days—then I’m back to scratching my head and doubting my calling.

They tell you to always write something, to keep writing no matter how frustrating or exhausting or absurd the experience or the end product is. The newness of writing wears off dreadfully quickly, and when your dash becomes a walk, you either keep walking or you get nowhere. Strangely Dim is my exodus, I’m coming to discover. Inevitably, it seems, it has become pretty much a long walk.

I could carry the analogy forward, but I can’t figure out what the golden calf would be. What’s the quick payoff that would make giving up on Strangely Dim when I run short of ideas sound like a reasonable thing to do? Even the golden calf cost something, after all. Gold doesn’t come cheap, and before the Israelites had a calf to worship, they had to throw all their gold in the fire. What could be worth my doing something stupid like that?

I guess it boils down to three possibilities: (1) I’m stroking my ego by maintaining Strangely Dim, and I ought to take advantage of my lapse of imagination to walk away and not look back; (2) I’m trying to protect my fragile ego by using this lapse of imagination as an excuse to quit, and I need to suck it up and keep going; (3) my ego has nothing to do with this, and there’s really little consequence to whether I keep writing Strangely Dim or stop doing it, so I might as well do what I really want—which is to keep writing and keep posting. Strangely Dim, for all the work it’s caused me, has always been a gift, a luxury item I could never have acquired without someone else’s generosity (like the gold the Israelites carried into the desert), and one I can hardly see myself casting aside so frivolously.

Hey, look at that: I made it past the five-hundred-word mark! See you next week.

***

What's in my hopper? Check here.

I fight authority (authority always wins)

David A. Zimmerman

I guess I need to be concerned for my reputation. My editor is telling me to be more "authoritative"—less deferential to competing and critical voices not only in my writing but in my casual conversations. People need to be given confidence, the argument goes, that whoever calls them to follow along knows where they're going to wind up and what they'll encounter along the way.

Here's my problem, though: I'm thoroughly Gen X. I ride the slacker waves that birthed, among other things, the song "I'm a Loser, Baby (So Why Don't You Kill Me?)" Let's just say I'm not comfortable with the concept of authority—at least as authority is commonly understood.

"The authorities" are the ones who come get you when you've done something wrong. Their opinions are incontrovertible and their decisions decisive. Authority in this sense is a thoroughly modern concept—patented property of the Baby Boomers. No wonder I resist it.

Still, authority has the word author written right there in it. So if I want to claim the one, I'll have to contend with the other.

I brainstormed a list of what I might convincingly claim authority over in the minds of my Boomer friends:

 self-promotion
 underachievement
 humor as defense mechanism
 musical snobbery
 sinning

Rereading this piece, I'm starting to have my doubts about that first one, though I think I can now make a strong case for being named chief of sinners. Nevertheless, with a resume like this you can understand why I favor a more nuanced understanding of authority.

My preferred model comes from the U.S. House of Representatives. You don't necessarily get to Congress because you know Arabic or have secured cheap prescription medication for your octogenarian parents. You get to Congress mainly because you've convinced a plurality of the population that they’re safe authorizing you to speak and act on their behalf.

That’s a whole different ball of authorial wax. Rather than dictating to their subjects—“Respect my authority!” in the language of South Park—people of authority under this model are accountable to their constituents. They are obligated to responsibly represent the needs and wishes of their audience no matter what they come across. They govern with the consent of the governed.

Maybe I’m making too big a deal out of this. It’s not like I’m writing foreign policy or security codes for the Department of Defense. I write about stuff like comic books and television and eating with the wrong fork. But we’ve become a culture that wants immediate, authoritative answers, even though many of our questions can’t really be answered immediately or authoritatively. If you want to know the meaning of life, you won’t turn to a dictionary or a phone book; you’ll start out on a quest that likely won’t end.

A quest like that can be humbling and perplexing—not something that cultivates authoritarian impulses in people. We need to commission people willing to embark on such a quest and brave the confusion it engenders, authorizing them to report back whatever they discover.

Hmmm. Authorized confusion. That sounds right up my alley.

***

Check out my secret identity at www.ivpress.com.

If you love it so much, why don't you marry it?

My favorite website, Busted Halo, has agreed to carry an article I've written about Spider-Man versus the Punisher--two superheroes visiting theaters this spring and summer.

I was so excited to get an e-mail from Brett, the site's founder and editor, that I didn't mind his request that I shrink the article from its original, bloated 1,800 words to its now-svelte 793. I didn't mind his request that while I trimmed I also try to give the article a point. I was just happy to join the family that produces "Trivia Inferno."

Busted Halo is a ministry of the Paulists. It bills itself as "everyday faith for everyday people." I saw that and thought, Hey, wait a minute. I . . . am everyday people! This must be a site for me! Perhaps it's a site for you as well.

Sorry for the shameless plug. I hope you enjoy the article and the site. I also hope you'll come back to this site eventually; I'm here all week.

Dave