I'm approaching my twentieth anniversary as a weekly columnist at The Alliance Review. It's led me to look back at previous work with an eye toward reposting some of it here. The following column is one that received many comments and was reposted frequently when originally published in April 2012.
I’m standing in the bedroom that used to be my daughter’s, looking at walls that used to be hot pink but are now a mix of pink and primer, waiting to become a neutral beige.
My daughter turns 21 this week, something that happened in the clichéd blink of an eye. Clichés become clichés for a reason, after all, and the reason most often is that they are true.
I hardly need to tell this to other parents and grandparents who have watched their own children grow up like a movie stuck in fast forward. One moment you’re at the opening credits and the next you’re at the midway point, where images go blurry and characters shoot from youth to adulthood in the time it takes to chew a popcorn kernel.
It doesn’t seem all that long ago that I marvelled at my daughter’s feet, so small and perfect as they poked out of a receiving blanket. I remember trips to the park, pushes on swings, kissing away boo-boos, applying Band-Aids, shopping trips and vacations at the ocean and vacations in our backyard, filling plastic swimming pools with water that would soon become cluttered with grass clippings from neighborhood feet, alternating between lawn and house, depending on the temperature of the afternoon sun and the flavor of popsicle offered inside.
Parenting is really just one long exercise in letting go. You let go of the bicycle. You let go of the car keys. You let go of her hand when she climbs on a bus that takes her to a place where other people and other ideas begin to influence her more than you do, a truth both exciting and frightening. At some point, you let go of her heart and hope he won’t break it, but he always does, yet you let it go again because that’s life and it’s what she wants you to do and what you’re supposed to do.
You let go when you leave her on that first day of college with people she and you barely know, and although you tell yourself that the quiet house is a relief, you know it’s not. The quiet is something you endure, not something you get used to.
Some of the letting go is easier. You let go of the drama of lost homework and the surprise of discovering the gas gauge on empty and the conviction that never, ever, will you allow a room in your house to be painted, floor to ceiling, in hot pink.
You let go of all these things because you tell yourself that they’re only temporary, that these sojourns to school and mall and college and work will be over someday and that she will come back home and be your little girl again, but even as you tell yourself these things you know that they are lies.
A good friend once told me that grown children never come home the same way they did when they were young. Yes, they may return in late spring with futons and laundry in tow, but they’re really just marking time in hot-pink rooms until they can visit friends or head back to campus. Or until they can find an apartment where they can stay all summer long.
We didn’t plan to have the room painted this week. It was supposed to have happened weeks ago, but the painter’s timetable and ours didn’t quite match, so here he is, covering the pink with primer and creating, all unbeknownst to him, a metaphor.
The pink is what was; the white, what is; and the beige, what will be. Right now, the room is a mixture of past and present, and that’s how I view my daughter -- through the pink of the past, but with the white becoming more apparent each day. The beige is what she -- and our relationship -- will become, one of equals, something I’m learning means that, while I may still want to play the father card and yell and stamp my foot, I must talk to her the way I do other adults.
That, too, is about letting go.
Although she may still come home from time to time and sleep in the beige room, it won’t be the same; and even when I would like it to be, I don’t wish for it. It’s not the natural order.
But wherever she is and wherever she goes and whatever she does, the pink of her formative years is still with her, just as it will still be underneath these walls, unrecognizable and unsuspected by those who don’t know. I take pride in that, just as I take pride in the fine young woman she has grown to be, sometimes because of my help, sometimes in spite of it.
The future may be beige, but it sure isn’t neutral. Letting go never is.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com @cschillig on Twitter
Tuesday, June 22, 2021
Monday, June 21, 2021
Does Marjorie Taylor Greene's 'sorry' make it all better?
Offender: I said I’m sorry.
Offended: Sometimes sorry doesn’t fix it.
It’s a well-worn exchange, one that may apply to Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Republican lawmaker from Georgia apologized earlier this week for statements she made comparing mask rules on Capitol Hill to the Holocaust.
Following a visit to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Greene acknowledged the offensiveness of her comments. “I made a mistake,” she said.
The apology was immediately criticized by many as insincere and insufficient. Admittedly, it is hard to view this particular event in isolation. Greene, after all, rose to political prominence on the wings of unfounded QAnon theories. She has supported, at various times and in various ways, beliefs in white supremacism and Pizzagate.
Prior to her election, she or a member of her team (she claims that diverse hands have handled her social media) liked Facebook comments calling for the assassination of Democratic politicians and branding the Parkland school shooting of 2018 a “false flag” operation.
Given this track record, Greene’s comparison of a mask mandate to the systematic extermination of some six million people is all in a day’s work. She appears to thrive on the continued publicity garnered from fomenting outrage. Some would call this “owning the libs.” Others would call it squandering an opportunity.
Greene’s penchant for repeatedly stepping in self-generated controversy has cost her all committee assignments, which were stripped from her in February. Eleven Republican House members joined the majority for the 230-199 vote.
But, to mangle Shakespeare, I come to praise Greene, or at least not to bury her as much as others are. Maybe the best I’ll end up doing, however, is applying another expression by the Bard and damning her with faint praise.
Like child actors in Hollywood, Greene is growing up in the public eye. She has distanced herself from much of the incendiary QAnon content, although she still firmly supports former President Donald Trump, who himself traffics in all manner of fringe theories to explain how he couldn’t have lost November’s election. (Even though he did.)
Despite, or maybe because of, this cognitive dissonance, Greene represents a not-insubstantial minority of Americans who have adopted a contrarian stance toward almost everything, even when such stubbornness is at cross purposes with their own best interests.
David French, writing about vaccine skeptics in the June 21/28 issue of Time magazine, notes that it is “difficult to fact-check partisans out of vaccine rejection” because their skepticism “has become a part of who they are.”
The same could be applied to Greene et al.’s anti-fact positions on so many issues. The bullheaded refusal to listen to reason and to view any expression of empathy as weakness are central to their identities. Any reversal is tantamount to denying their core truths and allowing the forces of godless liberalism, as they see it, to win.
And yet, here is Greene, apologizing for a gross and unfair comparison, perhaps having truly learned about the atrocities of the Holocaust. Sure, a 40-something might be reasonably expected to know this already, but we all have to start somewhere.
More importantly, perhaps Greene is modeling a stance that her supporters both within and outside her Georgia district will mirror – recognizing an untenable position, reversing course in the face of facts, apologizing.
Don’t get me wrong – and here comes the damning with faint praise part – Greene has a long way to go before she can claim to be anything close to a fully self-actualized individual. If past performance is indicative of future results, she may never get there. And politically, she may not want to, as it could cost her votes.
But everybody is on a journey in this life, and we all deserve to be given another chance. Greene may be apologizing only as a matter of self-preservation, but there is always a chance that she is sincere, able to lead other former or wavering QAnon believers (and those who are unwilling to claim membership in this club but nonetheless subscribe to many of its tenets) to more sensible positions. And these people desperately need to be led – re: deprogrammed – for the sake of the nation and democracy.
That makes Greene important in ways she may not recognize. It is incumbent, then, on progressives to be cautiously optimistic (but wary), keeping the focus on her and not on their response to her.
“Sorry” may not fix it, but at least it applies some much-needed duct tape to one of the cracks.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Offended: Sometimes sorry doesn’t fix it.
It’s a well-worn exchange, one that may apply to Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Republican lawmaker from Georgia apologized earlier this week for statements she made comparing mask rules on Capitol Hill to the Holocaust.
Following a visit to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Greene acknowledged the offensiveness of her comments. “I made a mistake,” she said.
The apology was immediately criticized by many as insincere and insufficient. Admittedly, it is hard to view this particular event in isolation. Greene, after all, rose to political prominence on the wings of unfounded QAnon theories. She has supported, at various times and in various ways, beliefs in white supremacism and Pizzagate.
Prior to her election, she or a member of her team (she claims that diverse hands have handled her social media) liked Facebook comments calling for the assassination of Democratic politicians and branding the Parkland school shooting of 2018 a “false flag” operation.
Given this track record, Greene’s comparison of a mask mandate to the systematic extermination of some six million people is all in a day’s work. She appears to thrive on the continued publicity garnered from fomenting outrage. Some would call this “owning the libs.” Others would call it squandering an opportunity.
Greene’s penchant for repeatedly stepping in self-generated controversy has cost her all committee assignments, which were stripped from her in February. Eleven Republican House members joined the majority for the 230-199 vote.
But, to mangle Shakespeare, I come to praise Greene, or at least not to bury her as much as others are. Maybe the best I’ll end up doing, however, is applying another expression by the Bard and damning her with faint praise.
Like child actors in Hollywood, Greene is growing up in the public eye. She has distanced herself from much of the incendiary QAnon content, although she still firmly supports former President Donald Trump, who himself traffics in all manner of fringe theories to explain how he couldn’t have lost November’s election. (Even though he did.)
Despite, or maybe because of, this cognitive dissonance, Greene represents a not-insubstantial minority of Americans who have adopted a contrarian stance toward almost everything, even when such stubbornness is at cross purposes with their own best interests.
David French, writing about vaccine skeptics in the June 21/28 issue of Time magazine, notes that it is “difficult to fact-check partisans out of vaccine rejection” because their skepticism “has become a part of who they are.”
The same could be applied to Greene et al.’s anti-fact positions on so many issues. The bullheaded refusal to listen to reason and to view any expression of empathy as weakness are central to their identities. Any reversal is tantamount to denying their core truths and allowing the forces of godless liberalism, as they see it, to win.
And yet, here is Greene, apologizing for a gross and unfair comparison, perhaps having truly learned about the atrocities of the Holocaust. Sure, a 40-something might be reasonably expected to know this already, but we all have to start somewhere.
More importantly, perhaps Greene is modeling a stance that her supporters both within and outside her Georgia district will mirror – recognizing an untenable position, reversing course in the face of facts, apologizing.
Don’t get me wrong – and here comes the damning with faint praise part – Greene has a long way to go before she can claim to be anything close to a fully self-actualized individual. If past performance is indicative of future results, she may never get there. And politically, she may not want to, as it could cost her votes.
But everybody is on a journey in this life, and we all deserve to be given another chance. Greene may be apologizing only as a matter of self-preservation, but there is always a chance that she is sincere, able to lead other former or wavering QAnon believers (and those who are unwilling to claim membership in this club but nonetheless subscribe to many of its tenets) to more sensible positions. And these people desperately need to be led – re: deprogrammed – for the sake of the nation and democracy.
That makes Greene important in ways she may not recognize. It is incumbent, then, on progressives to be cautiously optimistic (but wary), keeping the focus on her and not on their response to her.
“Sorry” may not fix it, but at least it applies some much-needed duct tape to one of the cracks.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Saturday, June 12, 2021
Will vaccine incentives backfire?
I intended to get satirical this week with outlandish ways state and local governments, along with private businesses, could entice more Americans to get the COVID vaccine.
Then I heard about “Joints for Jabs” and those plans went up in smoke.
It’s true: Washington state is offering a pre-rolled joint to any resident who gets a first or second dose of one of the vaccines. According to the New York Times, an Arizona dispensary is doing the same.
Suddenly, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s Vax-a-Million and college scholarship incentives, which drew so much bipartisan ire when first announced, sound circumspect and even quaint by comparison.
A little Googling reveals a motley crew of vaccine promotions around the country and the world. These include free beer and food, apartment rentals, days off from work and, of course, cold hard cash. All in the name of encouraging people to roll up their sleeves and stave off future COVID disruptions.
Giving away prizes for people to do what is already in their own best interest has always been steeped in controversy.
Most behavioral experts will agree that intrinsic motivation, doing something because you want to or because you recognize its importance, is superior to extrinsic motivation, doing something because you are being forced, coerced or externally rewarded.
One of the earliest lessons future teachers learn in college is to be wary of bribes. Handing out candy for completed math problems may appear to be a good way to get kids to do their homework, but what happens when next year’s teacher doesn’t carry over the practice? The well-meaning, candy-dispensing educator may be conditioning kids to work only for external rewards and not for the short- and long-term benefits of math.
Similar debates swirl around the practice of paying kids for good grades. Does $20 for an A, $15 for a B, and so on devalue the inner satisfaction that comes from learning a subject well? Or does money help keep kids focused until they develop the maturity to recognize learning as its own best reward?
Americans of a certain age may remember a major restaurant chain’s reading program. Kids who read a certain number of books earned coupons for free food. The hope was that this short-term extrinsic reward would spark a love of reading, so that youngsters would go on devouring books once the food incentive was off the table. (Sorry, these meal-oriented figures of speech keep simmering to the top.)
For kids who didn’t catch the reading bug, educators worried that once the food coupons stopped, so did the reading.
Outside of education, psychologist Edward L. Deci and others have found evidence that paying workers more can actually decrease their job satisfaction, as they go from being intrinsically interested in the work to being extrinsically motivated by the money. There are lots of caveats here: The work must be interesting in the first place, and the pay should be enough that basic needs are easily met. (No fair using this as “proof” that minimum wage should keep workers below the poverty level.)
Implications from the education and employment sectors, then, are profound. Yes, the needle poke is not intrinsically interesting, although the bigger societal win from herd immunity most certainly is.
And while nobody is too worried about how current incentives will impact our willingness to get vaxxed for the next global pandemic (COVID-20, anybody?), it's worth pondering how today’s freebies could impact regular childhood immunizations and annual flu shots. Will we now be less likely to get these for ourselves and our children without some sort of prize?
There are also those who argue that if COVID vaccines are truly safe, governments and private businesses would not have to dangle so many carrots to get needles into arms. In that sense, then, these grand-prize drawings are also disincentivizing, not only to this particular health initiative, important as it is, but to the overall impression that the general public has of vaccines.
Getting more people to agree to COVID vaccines is undoubtedly important. Hence, all these special prizes and incentives.
Whether COVID should take precedence over society’s collective comfort and confidence in public health is more arguable. In this regard, states offering big incentives for the vaccine are not just rolling joints, but also the dice.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Then I heard about “Joints for Jabs” and those plans went up in smoke.
It’s true: Washington state is offering a pre-rolled joint to any resident who gets a first or second dose of one of the vaccines. According to the New York Times, an Arizona dispensary is doing the same.
Suddenly, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s Vax-a-Million and college scholarship incentives, which drew so much bipartisan ire when first announced, sound circumspect and even quaint by comparison.
A little Googling reveals a motley crew of vaccine promotions around the country and the world. These include free beer and food, apartment rentals, days off from work and, of course, cold hard cash. All in the name of encouraging people to roll up their sleeves and stave off future COVID disruptions.
Giving away prizes for people to do what is already in their own best interest has always been steeped in controversy.
Most behavioral experts will agree that intrinsic motivation, doing something because you want to or because you recognize its importance, is superior to extrinsic motivation, doing something because you are being forced, coerced or externally rewarded.
One of the earliest lessons future teachers learn in college is to be wary of bribes. Handing out candy for completed math problems may appear to be a good way to get kids to do their homework, but what happens when next year’s teacher doesn’t carry over the practice? The well-meaning, candy-dispensing educator may be conditioning kids to work only for external rewards and not for the short- and long-term benefits of math.
Similar debates swirl around the practice of paying kids for good grades. Does $20 for an A, $15 for a B, and so on devalue the inner satisfaction that comes from learning a subject well? Or does money help keep kids focused until they develop the maturity to recognize learning as its own best reward?
Americans of a certain age may remember a major restaurant chain’s reading program. Kids who read a certain number of books earned coupons for free food. The hope was that this short-term extrinsic reward would spark a love of reading, so that youngsters would go on devouring books once the food incentive was off the table. (Sorry, these meal-oriented figures of speech keep simmering to the top.)
For kids who didn’t catch the reading bug, educators worried that once the food coupons stopped, so did the reading.
Outside of education, psychologist Edward L. Deci and others have found evidence that paying workers more can actually decrease their job satisfaction, as they go from being intrinsically interested in the work to being extrinsically motivated by the money. There are lots of caveats here: The work must be interesting in the first place, and the pay should be enough that basic needs are easily met. (No fair using this as “proof” that minimum wage should keep workers below the poverty level.)
Implications from the education and employment sectors, then, are profound. Yes, the needle poke is not intrinsically interesting, although the bigger societal win from herd immunity most certainly is.
And while nobody is too worried about how current incentives will impact our willingness to get vaxxed for the next global pandemic (COVID-20, anybody?), it's worth pondering how today’s freebies could impact regular childhood immunizations and annual flu shots. Will we now be less likely to get these for ourselves and our children without some sort of prize?
There are also those who argue that if COVID vaccines are truly safe, governments and private businesses would not have to dangle so many carrots to get needles into arms. In that sense, then, these grand-prize drawings are also disincentivizing, not only to this particular health initiative, important as it is, but to the overall impression that the general public has of vaccines.
Getting more people to agree to COVID vaccines is undoubtedly important. Hence, all these special prizes and incentives.
Whether COVID should take precedence over society’s collective comfort and confidence in public health is more arguable. In this regard, states offering big incentives for the vaccine are not just rolling joints, but also the dice.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Friday, June 11, 2021
The Whistler
I love people who are truly enthusiastic about a particular hobby or subject and work diligently to add to the sum total of knowledge about it.
Case in point: I'm a casual fan of the old-time radio program, The Whistler. By casual, I mean that I enjoy listening to the anthology series and learning more about what went on behind the scenes.
I recently found two fans online who take their Whistler much more seriously. Karl Schadow and Joe Webb are experts about the show's various hosts, dueling versions from west and east coasts, and movie and TV spinoffs.
A 53-minute presentation from Schadow and Webb, recorded several years ago at the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention, offers a wealth of scholarship. It's more than a casual fan like me would want or need, but again, I love the energy and enthusiasm the hosts bring to the subject.
The presentation, along with loads of other archival material about this obscure OTR (old-time radio) program, can be found at the aptly named Whistler Files. It's a fun site.
Monday, June 7, 2021
Mad about this special
Occasionally, a particular piece of pop-culture entertainment lands at just the right time. Think of it as the mass-media version of the old saying, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears."
Mad Special #22 fits this role for me.
Dated 1977, the magazine is typical of the extra issues that Mad has published throughout its history and presumably still releases today. It's a mixture of mostly old work — "the usual bunch of articles and other garbage from past issues" — with a few new pieces.
Not that the ratio of old to new work mattered to 9-year-old me. I hadn't read any of it before. This was only my second encounter with Mad. I had an earlier issue from the bicentennial year that failed to make much of an impression.
Not so Mad Special #22, however. I damn near inhaled its contents, revisiting them many times over the next few months and even years after I probably begged my mom to drop an entire dollar to buy it. (My tearful negotiations for comics and comics-related merchandise were commonplace before allowances and part-time jobs.)
Looking back, I find it hard to express just how big an impact this issue had on me. The contents introduced me to the world of satire and parody, helping to form opinions and forge directions that still guide me today.
The special begins with a Jack Davis cartoon (written by Don Edwing) on the inside front cover that could have been my earliest introduction to race relations and white flight. Tarzan, swinging through the jungle, comes across his minority counterpart. In the last panel, he puts a "For Sale" sign on his treehouse. I'm sure explaining that punchline in 1977 made my parents squirm.
The first feature is "The Milking of The Planet That Went Ape," a parody of the POTA saga that was already so much a part of my life. In retrospect, this is probably what attracted me to the book in the first place. I had definitely "Gone Ape" in the 1970s and was susceptible to anything featuring that pre-Star Wars cash-cow from 20th Century Fox.
My crash course in topical humor continued with "Graffiti Through History." It included a cartoon where Muslim and Christian soldiers met at an intersection marked by corresponding "Allah Saves" and "Jesus Saves" graffiti. I doubt I understood the meaning at the time. Ditto "The Mad Car Owner's Hate Book" by the legendary Al Jaffe, which would surrender its full flavor only as I became more aware of automobiles, drivers, and mechanical breakdowns over the coming years.
One piece that was simultaneously over my head and "just right" was "Rewriting Your Way to a Ph.D" by Tom Koch. It demonstrated how a writer could reuse the same topic, with increasing complexity, from grade school through graduate school. I have referenced the piece occasionally with my high-school and college students; it's still a spot-on skewering of academic writing.
Again, it's hard for me to overstate the importance this piece had on my development. For one, it demonstrated the adaptability of writing over an academic career. Hell, it even opened my eyes to the possibility of an academic career! The article showed that success in composition required, at some point, a transition from handwritten to typed work. Koch perfectly captures the growing complexity of students' writing, including the elementary scrawl, the typos so common for those of us who grew up with manual typewriters, and the padded and pompous syntax of the doctoral thesis.
The new material in the issue was also courtesy of Mr. Koch, who penned several 8 x 10" diplomas and certificates that could be removed from the magazine and displayed. Already keenly concerned about ruining a book's condition, I left all the certificates in the center of the book, although I did carefully write my name in cursive on the Messiest Room of 1977 award. Next to that certificate is the 1977-1978 Public School Teaching Certificate. I left my name off that one. Had I filled it in, it would have predated my first real teaching license by some thirteen years.
Of course, the book ends with the traditional Mad fold-in, also by Jaffe. The cartoonist plays on the similarities between "capital" and "capitol" with several death-penalty scenarios which, when folded in, reveal the U.S. Capitol.
So, a fun and formative offering from the Usual Gang of Idiots. Kids' brains are like sponges, and mine certainly soaked up a good deal of anarchy and liberal thoughts from this Mad Special. It came at the right time in my literary development, and Mad magazines from this era are probably the biggest single influence on my still-skewed sense of humor.
Aiming for fame on TikTok
I may never be TikTok famous, but is moderately well-known too much to hope for?
A few weeks ago, I made and posted my first TikTok video. It is an 18-second clip of my daughter trying to use her foot to open the automatic liftgate on her car.
The operative word is “trying.” She repeatedly swipes her foot under the bumper with no effect.
Cut to her staring at the vehicle, trying to puzzle it out. Then one more swipe. Victory!
My daughter has been making and posting videos on TikTok for several months. She does it mostly as a way to relax.
She’s also a licensed physical therapist with a doctoral degree, so it’s not like she sits at home all day making videos. Not that there would be anything wrong with that if it made her happy, a supportive dad notes. Just saying.
Her videos frequently feature her golden retriever, Remington, “commenting” on the world, eating bananas, or just being a good dog. One, about scraping the label off an empty candle jar, has millions of views.
My TikTok originated as a goof. She was just so excited about the liftgate that when it didn’t work, I started filming her frustration.
“I’m going to make this into a TikTok!” I vowed.
Given my antipathy toward the site, my announcement was met with skepticism. My wife, accustomed to my sincere but short-lived schemes, said nothing. My daughter rolled her eyes.
I don’t know what draws people to TikTok. Mostly, it’s just amateur videos set to the same half-dozen songs. One is “Savage Love” by Jason Derulo. Another is the “Happy Dog Song,'' created by a TikTok user. Ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
I have a TikTok account, where I follow exactly one person. You can guess who it is.
Otherwise, I am content to occasionally look over my wife’s shoulder as she burrows down the TikTok rabbithole. One video by somebody who loves Trump. Another video by somebody who hates Trump. Hundreds of dog and cat videos. “Tips from the ER,” where the narrator lobs F-bombs while teaching viewers to avoid medical mishaps. (Pro Tip: Don’t drink to excess, or ask “I wonder what would happen if …?” Both are gateway drugs to the emergency room.)
I was determined to join this digital menagerie. Loading the raw video was pretty easy. Pairing the images to an appropriate song was also simple. I did have to enlist the help of a student with titles at the bottom of the video.
Then I posted, sent a link to my wife, daughter and son-in-law, and promptly forgot about it.
A few days later, my daughter called to tell me the clip had been watched 70,000 times. Currently, the video has 123,600 views, hardly viral but a modest success by TikTok standards. I’ve also had 46 comments, mostly about how cute my daughter’s shoes are. Several commenters said they’ve ordered a pair.
By way of comparison, I doubt that I have ever had a column viewed by 123,600 readers, and I’ve been writing for almost 20 years. Nor has any one piece garnered 46 comments.
And so it goes.
Despite my beginner’s luck, I doubt that I will transition to full-time TikTok production anytime soon. It might be better to be a one-hit wonder, go out on top, burn out instead of rust, quit while ahead and various other cliches.
But then, speaking of cliches, I wonder if lightning could strike twice. Maybe a video of my wife making potato salad or the dog barking at a would-be murderer (aka the Amazon driver) would boost me into the social-media stratosphere.
After all, I’ve always wanted to be the TikTok of the town.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
@chrisschillig on TikTok
A few weeks ago, I made and posted my first TikTok video. It is an 18-second clip of my daughter trying to use her foot to open the automatic liftgate on her car.
The operative word is “trying.” She repeatedly swipes her foot under the bumper with no effect.
Cut to her staring at the vehicle, trying to puzzle it out. Then one more swipe. Victory!
My daughter has been making and posting videos on TikTok for several months. She does it mostly as a way to relax.
She’s also a licensed physical therapist with a doctoral degree, so it’s not like she sits at home all day making videos. Not that there would be anything wrong with that if it made her happy, a supportive dad notes. Just saying.
Her videos frequently feature her golden retriever, Remington, “commenting” on the world, eating bananas, or just being a good dog. One, about scraping the label off an empty candle jar, has millions of views.
My TikTok originated as a goof. She was just so excited about the liftgate that when it didn’t work, I started filming her frustration.
“I’m going to make this into a TikTok!” I vowed.
Given my antipathy toward the site, my announcement was met with skepticism. My wife, accustomed to my sincere but short-lived schemes, said nothing. My daughter rolled her eyes.
I don’t know what draws people to TikTok. Mostly, it’s just amateur videos set to the same half-dozen songs. One is “Savage Love” by Jason Derulo. Another is the “Happy Dog Song,'' created by a TikTok user. Ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
I have a TikTok account, where I follow exactly one person. You can guess who it is.
Otherwise, I am content to occasionally look over my wife’s shoulder as she burrows down the TikTok rabbithole. One video by somebody who loves Trump. Another video by somebody who hates Trump. Hundreds of dog and cat videos. “Tips from the ER,” where the narrator lobs F-bombs while teaching viewers to avoid medical mishaps. (Pro Tip: Don’t drink to excess, or ask “I wonder what would happen if …?” Both are gateway drugs to the emergency room.)
I was determined to join this digital menagerie. Loading the raw video was pretty easy. Pairing the images to an appropriate song was also simple. I did have to enlist the help of a student with titles at the bottom of the video.
Then I posted, sent a link to my wife, daughter and son-in-law, and promptly forgot about it.
A few days later, my daughter called to tell me the clip had been watched 70,000 times. Currently, the video has 123,600 views, hardly viral but a modest success by TikTok standards. I’ve also had 46 comments, mostly about how cute my daughter’s shoes are. Several commenters said they’ve ordered a pair.
By way of comparison, I doubt that I have ever had a column viewed by 123,600 readers, and I’ve been writing for almost 20 years. Nor has any one piece garnered 46 comments.
And so it goes.
Despite my beginner’s luck, I doubt that I will transition to full-time TikTok production anytime soon. It might be better to be a one-hit wonder, go out on top, burn out instead of rust, quit while ahead and various other cliches.
But then, speaking of cliches, I wonder if lightning could strike twice. Maybe a video of my wife making potato salad or the dog barking at a would-be murderer (aka the Amazon driver) would boost me into the social-media stratosphere.
After all, I’ve always wanted to be the TikTok of the town.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
@chrisschillig on TikTok
What a yearbook cover-up reveals
A group of my students was using old yearbooks to complete an assignment the other week.
They loved looking for photos of their parents, seeing how much teachers had changed, admiring fashions at homecoming and looking at the records of various sports teams.
It was a reminder of the power of a physical medium in a largely digital age. Phones and tablets can hold many more images than even the largest yearbook, and the number of photos available on various social-media platforms is infinitely larger. Yet if I were to put an iPad filled with such photos on one table and a handful of yearbooks on another, my hunch is that people of all ages would gravitate to the yearbooks.
Part of the reason is the tactile sensation of turning pages. Books exist in the real world. They don’t require a password or a power source. The only way to zoom in is to hold the book closer to your face, and for most photos, this method suffices.
Books are also organized in ways that digital collections are not. Sure, digital images can be separated into folders, accessed by hashtags and arranged on the screen to illuminate a subject. In other words, they can be made to resemble a well-organized book.
I’m no Luddite. I love finding and sharing images online and scrolling through social media. Storing photos across multiple platforms helps to ensure they cannot be accidentally damaged or destroyed, unlike prints and books.
But still, books abide. And a yearbook, it seems to me, remains the best way to encapsulate an experience like school. It’s a common touchstone for classmates, a slice of history. While it can and should be replicated online as well as in print, a completely digital yearbook has neither the heft nor gravitas of its real-world counterpart.
Yes, physical yearbooks have a finite page count, so not every photo will make the cut. This, too, is part of the charm — the idea that you are looking at somebody’s judgement call about what is and is not important. It’s reality, but a curated reality.
Which makes it all the more disappointing to read of yearbook faux pas like the one in Bartram Trail High School in St. Johns County, Fla., recently. Students and parents there were disappointed to discover that at least 80 images had been altered to align with somebody’s sense of propriety.
Speaking more plainly, photos of many girls in the book had been modified to cover their cleavage. The alterations were laughably amateur — repeating a pattern from the girls’ blouses and dropping it overtop the allegedly offending body parts. Some of the people affected called it body-shaming. They also pointed out the double-standard of the boys’ swim team, photographed in Speedos, which escaped alteration, according to a New York Times story.
The yearbook’s bowdlerization follows an earlier attempt by school personnel to clamp down on dress-code violations. Now some parents and students at Bartram Trail are vowing to oppose that dress code even more adamantly, while the district backpedals and offers refunds for the book.
The school certainly had better remedies than heavy-handed editing. Administration could have given students an option to be rephotographed. An adviser could have cropped the photos more tightly.
Or — and here’s a novel idea — the school could get out of the business of policing how much of girls’ shoulders are visible on any given day.
By trying to cover up something that wasn’t an issue to begin with, the school has created an issue. Censorship often does.
When future generations of students at Bartram Trail look back at this year’s book, they won’t be looking just for pictures of Mom and Dad, teachers or the basketball team. They'll also be looking for images that were digitally defiled with a puritan’s misplaced zeal.
In other words, something they could easily find online.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
They loved looking for photos of their parents, seeing how much teachers had changed, admiring fashions at homecoming and looking at the records of various sports teams.
It was a reminder of the power of a physical medium in a largely digital age. Phones and tablets can hold many more images than even the largest yearbook, and the number of photos available on various social-media platforms is infinitely larger. Yet if I were to put an iPad filled with such photos on one table and a handful of yearbooks on another, my hunch is that people of all ages would gravitate to the yearbooks.
Part of the reason is the tactile sensation of turning pages. Books exist in the real world. They don’t require a password or a power source. The only way to zoom in is to hold the book closer to your face, and for most photos, this method suffices.
Books are also organized in ways that digital collections are not. Sure, digital images can be separated into folders, accessed by hashtags and arranged on the screen to illuminate a subject. In other words, they can be made to resemble a well-organized book.
I’m no Luddite. I love finding and sharing images online and scrolling through social media. Storing photos across multiple platforms helps to ensure they cannot be accidentally damaged or destroyed, unlike prints and books.
But still, books abide. And a yearbook, it seems to me, remains the best way to encapsulate an experience like school. It’s a common touchstone for classmates, a slice of history. While it can and should be replicated online as well as in print, a completely digital yearbook has neither the heft nor gravitas of its real-world counterpart.
Yes, physical yearbooks have a finite page count, so not every photo will make the cut. This, too, is part of the charm — the idea that you are looking at somebody’s judgement call about what is and is not important. It’s reality, but a curated reality.
Which makes it all the more disappointing to read of yearbook faux pas like the one in Bartram Trail High School in St. Johns County, Fla., recently. Students and parents there were disappointed to discover that at least 80 images had been altered to align with somebody’s sense of propriety.
Speaking more plainly, photos of many girls in the book had been modified to cover their cleavage. The alterations were laughably amateur — repeating a pattern from the girls’ blouses and dropping it overtop the allegedly offending body parts. Some of the people affected called it body-shaming. They also pointed out the double-standard of the boys’ swim team, photographed in Speedos, which escaped alteration, according to a New York Times story.
The yearbook’s bowdlerization follows an earlier attempt by school personnel to clamp down on dress-code violations. Now some parents and students at Bartram Trail are vowing to oppose that dress code even more adamantly, while the district backpedals and offers refunds for the book.
The school certainly had better remedies than heavy-handed editing. Administration could have given students an option to be rephotographed. An adviser could have cropped the photos more tightly.
Or — and here’s a novel idea — the school could get out of the business of policing how much of girls’ shoulders are visible on any given day.
By trying to cover up something that wasn’t an issue to begin with, the school has created an issue. Censorship often does.
When future generations of students at Bartram Trail look back at this year’s book, they won’t be looking just for pictures of Mom and Dad, teachers or the basketball team. They'll also be looking for images that were digitally defiled with a puritan’s misplaced zeal.
In other words, something they could easily find online.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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