I wonder what part of the American educational system failed him that he can't fathom the distinction between watching and listening. One you do with your eyes. The other you do with your ears. And it's true, I almost never watch videos. But I often listen to music. Confused? You shouldn't be.
But I guess we've become so used to the idea of watching things that we don't do anything else. The other day I saw a commercial for some tablet computer. The commercial briefly showed some kind of text, as though to highlight the fact that the tablet could be used as an e-reader, but then the disembodied hand came in, dashed away the text, and replaced it with a video of some guy surfing. Yeah, we can't be bothered with words, get that intellectual crap out of here, there are videos to be watched! We have media to consume!
I try not to have a lot of pet peeves, because I try not to be too peevish in general. But there is one thing about modern life that makes me clench my teeth so hard I think I'm going to break all my teeth. It's being dragged into someone's cubicle at work to watch a YouTube video. There's something about having to stand behind someone and watch a video over their shoulder that drives me right to the brink of physical violence. It doesn't even matter what the video is. It could be something really fun, like Scarlett Johansson in a leather bikini explaining the shock wave interactions in the exhaust nozzle of a Rocketdyne F-1 rocket engine, and it would still gall me. Send me the link and I'll look at it later, but please, I beg you, don't drag me into your cubicle and make me watch a Sesame Street video. Ever.
I don't trust computers that don't have keyboards. But I guess that explains a lot about me, me and my stodgy old-fashioned refusal to watch videos and my insistence that tweeting something like "i 8 2 much sicky sick" isn't writing. I don't tweet anything, actually. Writing this blog is about as self-important as I can get. I don't really think anyone cares about what I write about here, and I can imagine even less that anyone would read tweets from me like "I saw a bird" or "Is it lunch yet?" (Considering that apologizing for inappropriate tweets now seems to take up about 40% of the average celebrity's time, is tweeting anything at all a good idea? Though when I was going through chemo, I did seriously consider - for about five minutes - the idea of tweeting "I'm throwing up" every time I did, just so everyone could understand what it's like to throw up every half-hour or so.)
But it isn't a case of me making a stand for artistic integrity. I just happen to think that most of the videos I've ever really watched were kind of dumb. The chief exception to that being Dethklok videos, and they're parodies anyway. Death metal videos are especially obnoxious. I don't mind the ones that just show the band windmilling their hair - watching that holds a kind of sick fascination for me. But my idea of fun isn't watching some scrawny, heavily be-tattooed yokel who couldn't defeat a Subway six-inch tuna on white in a grudge match grimace for the camera. That's just stupid. Almost as stupid as the "hellish image" videos, where we're supposed to be jolted out of our smug bourgeois sensibilities by flying skulls and whatnot.
Just play the music, chief, and spare me your edgy video.
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