Why

Well first, I’m hilarious and I’ve got jokes to make.

Aside from that, the impulse is this: one of my best friends told me over dinner that another of my best friends worries about me not because I regularly find myself in trouble but because I regularly like to think I find myself in trouble. It’s hard to think of an example, but if you’re a good friend of mine, you’ll recognize the signs: speaking using frantic gestures, a lengthy digression relating to a shared experience, then the realization that we just spent the last five minutes talking about why Pellegrino and Orangina coming in plastic, not glass, bottles signals a savage new low of corporate cost-cutting industry robbing us the pleasures of our aspirational, low-grade-luxury consumerism. Or maybe it’s actually a sign of the mean rising and that the earth is flattening and slightly finer products should appear to be more accessible. But whatever. To return and paraphrase: “Eric gets wrapped up in everything and makes such a big deal of everything. He cares about things too much”

My response, to quote: well, things are important.

They are. Everything is important to someone. Everything matters. There are so many grad school -ologies being invented/dissertated everyday, so many strange OCD tics and peeves being hidden every hour, and so many Facebook fan pages that we don’t care about being created every minute.

A healthy way to look at them is not to look at most of them. Ignore most things. I think most people do. I think it was Marc Maron who said that on the internet (and by extension the world), everyone thinks they’re important because they have a Facebook. Paired with The Incredibles (“if everyone is special, no one is.”), this is a valid response.

Or I can look at everything and try to understand everything and try to see the connections between entities, actions, platforms, whatever, and, I dunno, make an insight or find some sort of explanation for something.

I’m not that smart, so it’s not about finding a Universal Theory for Everything, but I’d like to try to understand you and me and talk about why we do and think what we think and do. It’s very simple and I think most of the reasonable people I know already do it. I doubt I’ll have any unique thoughts here, but you’d be reading this because you’re a friend, not because I’m, like, actually interesting or anything. I can go on more, but the point is, things are important. Let’s talk about things.