I’m kind of in a fog today, which I’m choosing to attribute to airport lag (it can’t be jet lag, because I didn’t change time zones, but you get some of the same disorientation from spending too much time in airports and on planes), because the other option is incipient flu (half a dozen students in my classes have taken ill with flu-like symptoms, and been sent home or quarantined). I have too much to do to bag the whole day, though, so I’m going to resort to stealing a blog post topic from Chuck Klosterman.<\/p>\n
In one of the essays in his new book Eating the Dinosaur<\/cite>, he writes:<\/p>\n Here’s a question I like to ask people when I’m 5\/8 drunk: Let’s say you had the ability to make a very brief phone call into your own past. You are (somehow) given the opportunity to phone yourself as a teenager; in short, you will be able to communicate with the fifteen-year-old version of you. However, you will only get to talk to your former self for fifteen seconds<\/em>. As such, there’s no way you will be able to explain who you are, where or when you’re calling from, or what any of this lunacy is supposed to signify. You will only be able to give the younger version of yourself a fleeting, abstract message of unclear origin.<\/p>\n What would you say to yourself during those fifteen seconds?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I’m not 5\/8 drunk, but I’m probably only running at 37.5% efficiency, so I’ll throw this question out to my wise and worldly readers: What would you say to your past self, given those constraints?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It’s a tough question, particularly with fifteen as the target age. I turned fifteen at the end of ninth grade, and by that point, I had pretty much passed the worst problems of my adolescent years. The couple of years before that were pretty bad– seventh grade was particularly miserable– but by ninth grade, I had started to get things turned around, socially. I wasn’t entirely there, but by the end of ninth grade, I had mostly figured out where I fit, and that made my life in school vastly better than it was before.<\/p>\n So, while there are things I might like to change about the couple of years before that, by fifteen, there’s not that much I’d like to change that a fifteen-year-old me would have the power to change. I mean, I think the world would be a vastly better place had George W. Bush never been elected President, but there’s really not anything one slightly awkward teenager in central New York could do about that. And while it would’ve been nice to have information about which stocks to own in the mid-90’s, it’s not like I had access to enough money at that time to profit from the information.<\/p>\n As a result, the possible advice I could give myself is practically limited to things like “Don’t be such a dick to [some people you won’t meet for another four years or so<\/i>].” Or possibly “Grab a spine and ask out [a person you won’t be interested in dating for another year or two<\/i>].” Neither of which is likely to do much good.<\/p>\n Push it a couple of years earlier, and the message would be “The sooner you get over yourself, the sooner your life will improve.” Or even just “Hang in there; everything works out all right in the end.” Push it a couple of years later, and it would definitely be the “Grab a spine” one from the previous paragraph.<\/p>\n I’m curious to know what other people would choose, though. What fifteen-second message would you send yourself at fifteen?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m kind of in a fog today, which I’m choosing to attribute to airport lag (it can’t be jet lag, because I didn’t change time zones, but you get some of the same disorientation from spending too much time in airports and on planes), because the other option is incipient flu (half a dozen students… Continue reading Quasi Poll: Phone Call from the Future<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,137,37,29,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-polls","category-pop_culture","category-sf","category-silliness","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n