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Snuggie and Sales

Several members of my family got Snuggies this year for Christmas – and not as a gag gift. When I first heard about the Snuggie, I gave it no respect, dismissing it as the next As Seen On TV product, and I thought other people held similar views. I’ve been discovering more and more that people are just laughing off the commercials and buying the product as a genuinely useful thing, and giving it as sincere gifts.

It’s been almost a month since I stopped selling helicopters, but everyone in the company used (and wanted me to use as well) similar over the top sales strategies. They want to get people excited about the product, and stimulate an impulse buy. And though the helicopters I was selling were actually of pretty good quality (compared to versions of years past), it’s still ultimately something you get for someone for whom you don’t know what to get. Using the bare minimum of these sales strategies, I was able to sell hundreds of the things.

The Snuggie, on the other hand, isn’t a particularly useful product. In my opinion, the Snuggie is the unholy union of a sweater and a blanket, with some of the benefits and none of the versatility. It accomplishes something that nearly everyone was capable of before, but it does so in a novel way that is different enough to be seen as distinct. It’s interesting how keyed in sales people are to the fact that we’re not good at predicting happiness, and how often we fall in that trap.

American Studies

Just over a year ago, I graduated with a degree in American Studies. It’s really what interested me in general, and was (eventually) free of a lot of the crap that I disliked about college. But I’m far from done studying. It’s hard to find anything that isn’t a reflection of culture. Maybe one exception is the natural world, but it’s quite easy to see it through a cultural lens if you want to – most people do. I try and pay attention to culture because of its power. Obviously I’m simplifying a bit by saying that, there’s no one person or source who can identify culture, but if you pay attention to what people are interested in, and pay attention to a large amount of people, you can get a weak grasp of culture.

American culture in particular is important because we are so good at exporting it, and it’s influence can be found in every other major culture, and many smaller cultures. We’re pretty good at exporting our politics as well, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. Considering the wide influence of American culture in today’s world, why would I go anywhere else? I was born into the epicenter of contemporary culture.

Considering this, it becomes important to look at how culture is created. There are always people who have a greater influence on culture than others, and I like to think of them as ‘artists.’ Usually people define an artist as someone who creates cultural artifacts, but I prefer my definition. I think it holds up when you take the many kinds of cultures into consideration. These are the reasons I care about copyright, the internet, and New York City. It’s all about creating, and shaping the world around us. It may not have been a ‘real’ major, but I take it seriously.

Blue Highways

I finished Blue Highways recently, and I’m not quite sure whether I liked it or not. It has many lovely stories about small towns all across America, which I loved to read about, but it’s also littered with little throw away facts about towns he drove through. It felt at times like the entire premise of the book was just an excuse to tell stories about small towns, but there’s a point of separation from the story when he just rattles off facts about a town without having stopped in it or talked to any residents. It feels like it would have been better as a collection of short stories, each with their own setting and characters instead of pulling them all into this larger narrative. I realize it’s all true, it’s just that I didn’t find his voyage all that interesting in and of itself.

Although I guess that shouldn’t be surprising, since the author/narrator didn’t really either. From the last page:

The circle almost complete, the truck ran the road like the old horse that knows the way. If the circle had come full turn, I hadn’t. I can’t say, over the miles, that I had learned what I had wanted to know because I hadn’t known what I wanted to know. But I did learn what I didn’t know I wanted to know.

I feel a similar way about the Tour, and often replied as such if anyone asked what I had learned. That’s also why I probably won’t ever write much about the trip, save a few events. There was a more revealing passage, several pages earlier, that had also echoed what I had felt about the Tour. Looking back, it really reflects what I feel was the purpose of the trip:

In a season on the blue roads, what had I accomplished? I hadn’t sailed the Atlantic in a washtub, or crossed the Gobi by goat cart, or bicycled to Cape Horn. In my own country, I had gone out, had met, had shared. I had stood as witness.

Free Thought

I love the fact that I have Applied Daydreaming on my resume. In it I describe the club as “an on campus organization that encouraged setting time aside for unstructured thought.” It’s something I don’t do often anymore, though I really should, and want to (much like reading, I suppose). I drove to my parent’s house and back for dinner tonight, to see my sister off to Italy, where she’ll be studying abroad for the semester. On the way back, I found myself wrapped up in thoughts like I used to be while at the daydreaming club. Kind of an odd occurrence, since on the way there I was tired and bored, to the point where I was fighting to keep my eyelids from getting heavy. The next few posts are me trying to capture what I thought about, but they’ll be woefully incomplete, and probably half-baked, but that’s ok.

Day 6 of My Emasculation

Ok, it’s not really that bad, but my facial hair is slow to grow, and even after nearly a week I’m still only stubbly. I think it took a month to grow out the goatee originally, and I fear it may take that long again. I’m currently past the cool looking five-o’clock-shadow stubble, and moving towards the awkward high school mustache. I’m considering doing a daily photo until it’s grown out, just to catalog its progression. Might even make one of those snazzy time-lapse gifs.

OhmygodImissmygoateegiveitbacknow

So it’s been nearly 24 hours since I shaved off my facial hair, and I miss it a lot. I keep going to stroke my mustache, or put a hand to my chin, and feeling bare skin where hair should be. This is unpleasant. Nishi was curious about how I looked without facial hair, and I admit I was as well. It’s been a year and a half since I grew it out in the first place, and I’ve gotten very used to seeing it when I look in the mirror. And now that it’s gone I miss it terribly. I hope it doesn’t take too long to come back. A little over a year ago I accidentally trimmed my chin very close, and it wasn’t good, but it grew back over the weekend. I think it will take longer starting from scratch. Until then I guess I’ll keep looking like a Simpson’s character.

I found my new phone

And probably, my new computer. The Motorola Atrix, announced at CES the other day, is the phone I’ve been waiting for. While it isn’t exactly as I hoped it would be, and their laptop accessory is horribly executed, the “webtop” dock they have is pretty damn near what I wanted. I’m really hoping AT&T doesn’t mess up the operating system too much, because the potential of this hardware with untainted Android installed is incredible.

If they were to rework the laptop version to be a bit thicker with more battery life, and move the phone to serve as the trackpad, it could be usable. Or just make the keyboard all-in-one I envisioned.

Resolution

A non grammatical resolution this year: read more.
I’ve watched a lot of movies in the last few months, and I’d like to spend more of that time reading. I’m also going to better organize my RSS feeds to I can spend less time reading things I don’t need to. While it’s wonderful to read everything that comes through my feed reader, and often beautifully serendipitous, it’s also time consuming. I have a banister lined with books I need to start reading, and I intend to get through all of them in the coming year.