When a plate of pancakes are put in front of me, I can’t not finish them. I don’t know why — I’ve abandoned other meals, why should pancakes be any different? Something about them represents a challenge, perhaps. Or, maybe it has something to do with the fact that you can’t take them home in a doggy-bag, because leftover, unfinished pancakes are disgusting.

This shit is going to kill me, eventually. It’s certainly not doing much for my social relationships, because nothing ruins a good time at breakfast quite like witnessing a man’s grueling struggle against a quick bread. I almost always manage to pack away the last few bites — but at what cost? The end result is a grim thing to witness. Also, bloating.

Of all the things to approach with grit and determination, pancakes are probably the stupidest. And yet, no matter how many times I tell myself, “next time I’ll just get some eggs,” I always blow it.

Maybe I need to take baby steps; perhaps I should just switch to waffles, at first.

Hey former teenagers, do you remember when you were totally into music? I do. It feels like my chest is full of hot burning coals of shame when I think back on those days, but I can’t stop the remembering.

Junior high is when people started asking what kind of music I liked. I said I didn’t know, which was the Wrong Answer. The right answer would have been either “rap” or “rock”, a sign of a cultural sore point that had developed in the face of hip-hop’s rise to the forefront of the popular consciousness. What could I say? I liked Weird Al, and all the stuff they played on America’s Top 40. I was twelve, for god’s sake.

That experience might have had something to do with my approach to music later in life, because I grew to hate the question. I hated the way it reduced the world to two broad categories. I hated the fact that it was not a question about taste, but a demand that one produce one’s cultural bona fides. I hated the racial implications of the question, couching it as an irreconcilable opposition.

A year later though, I started getting into a couple of metal bands, and I figured that was as good a genre as any to admit to enjoying. I was feeling beaten down, and I was willing to settle into an easy answer that I could give people. Then came that one magical detention, when the teacher I was stuck with decided to play Yaz’s Upstairs at Eric’s on his shitty little boombox.

Well, that was it. I learned it really is okay to pick and choose, that allegiance to categories is an obstacle to happiness. (Or deep depression – I got into The Smiths, at some point.) Unfortunately I got a bit carried away, enjoying the obscure chiefly for its unpopularity, the esoteric mostly for its inaccessibility.

I’ve gotten over that, thankfully. I’m beyond my irrational fear of the quotidian, which is good, but I’ve also lost much of my passion, which is probably not. I do remain mostly unapologetic about the music I like, a sometimes useful hold-over from the old snobby days.

That said, I’d be quite embarrassed if somebody were ever to get a hold of my iPod. If you clicked on the video at the top of this post, you might have an inkling as to why.

I have to admit, I’m a bit cool on Apple’s new wundertoy. And yet, I’m still looking forward to its launch because of the inevitable cavalcade of followers it’s bound to inspire. The serious contenders, the cheap knock-offs, the cynical attempts to cash-in – I can’t wait to see what people will come up with.

The main complaints that people seem to have about the iPad is that it might fall between two stools: It may be too big and clunky when compared to an iPhone, while also being not quite useful enough to supplant the netbook. Be that as it may, the fact that Apple is basically telling all the little consumers out there that tablets are a viable form-factor means that we’ll likely see more people embrace it. And that gets all the other hardware manufacturers dreaming of all the money they could be making selling their own tablets. (And a lot of hardware makers have such devices on the market, already.)

Which is a good thing, because the other big complaint about the iPad is the closed-off, proprietary nature of its software, which allows it to be elegant – but also makes it the best device yet for nickel and diming consumers to death, constantly dunning them for new apps, new content.

It’s a good thing that there’s going to be wave after wave of non-Apple clones of this thing, because at least a few of them will be so, so hackable. The word will get out about which ones are better than others, hobbyists will start cranking out code, prices will slowly start to fall, and then – maybe – it will happen. That dream shared by millions of geeks the world over, might actually come true.

I am referring, of course, to the mass adoption of hand-held, truly general purpose computing. In computer science, general purpose computing is strictly defined as any computer that can follow arbitrary, programmed instructions. (Technically, the iPhone is a general purpose computer, from that point of view.) However, while the chips in an iPhone might be capable of just about anything, the restrictions placed on it by its creators hamper its potential, and betray the spirit of General Purpose.

The iPad is yet another instance of Apple’s dictatorial approach to information technology. This has its advantages, and can lead to some incredibly elegant and reliable products. But, the iPad — its software will be closely monitored, and expanding its capabilities will be costly to the end-user, and ultimately, it still may not do all the things you want, the way you want. We might accept this for a mobile phone (the major carriers and phone manufacturers have trained us not to expect much), but the iPad is half computer; and maybe that’s too much like a computer for us to stand for that sort of thing.

Cheaper, more open knock-offs are bound to emerge. They may never be as popular as the iPad, nor will they ever be as cool, or as easy to use. But any company hoping to seriously compete (or siphon-off the people who can’t afford the “real deal”) will try their damnedest to build open, high-quality machines to face-off against Apple’s new marvel. True wide-spread, hand-held, general purpose computing might actually arise.

And so, the iPad really could change how we think about and use computers.

And it will be all Apple’s fault.

Not to cast aspersions at what is likely to be the most important tablet since Mt. Sinai, but even if this thing completely revolutionizes computing as we know it, the odds are good that the technology won’t trickle-down to us underclasses for awhile. This is good news for anyone that can afford the new toy, because it means that you hold off on buying the new Apple thing, while still retaining an audience of people to impress with it. And you should hold off.

It’s a widely held belief that one should never buy first generation Apple hardware, and there’s some reasons for that, not all of them technical. Remember all those early adopters who got burned by the sudden iPhone price drop that happened mere months after its release?

I say: Ignore all that. You’re going to hear a lot of people tell you to hold off for at least a couple of months – a year if you can manage it – but I’m giving you permission to go for it. Sure, if you wait they might drop the price; and, of course, there’s all those inevitable hardware and software bugfixes that will be incorporated into later manufacturing runs, and the increase in available software that also comes with the passage of time.

None of that matters. What counts is showing your friends and co-workers that you’re doing well enough to spend unwisely. “Yeah, just happened to be walking past an Apple store, and I figured what the hell, you know?” And then you watch your friends, coworkers, and family-members try their best to keep their intense feelings of jealousy from being revealed by the expressions on their faces.

As fleeting as this sort of thing is, you shouldn’t let that stop you. This is your last chance to be cool, even briefly.

I mean, look at you.

But there’s a few ways not to care about things like that. Some kids were offended that their brilliant artistic skills were being ignored by the teacher, who of course had a duty to educate all the people in the room, rather than simply lavishing attention on those who were the most talented (those whose parents were convinced they were, anyway). Then there were the kids who were convinced that it was all bullshit, a dodge or a game. This blank canvas is a statement, you know? It’s art — how can you say I did it wrong?

I was one of those who simply couldn’t believe that any of this stuff had much to do with me. I had decided that I certainly wasn’t any kind of artist, and therefore had no real need to retain anything the teacher said after the semester ended. I just wasn’t a creative person. Lacking ideas, I let the mechanics of art slip through my fingers because I thought I would never need them.

I even took a creative writing class (laugh if you want to — I did). Sure, why not? I was doing all right in my English class, why not get an easy mark in what, I figured, would basically be another one. I was reading for fun almost all the time, but the thought of being a writer was horrifying to me. Creating  coherent written material was something I found grueling, at best. I liked school essays and papers, though, because my teachers presented us with a strict set of rules about how to do them. Topic sentence, supporting sentence, reword your sources until you met the page/paragraph minimum, and then wrap it all up and be done with it.

Things got really easy once I learned how to type.

I regret all of that not paying attention, now. It didn’t occur to me, as time went on, that I would change. Over time, a couple of developments occurred that made me reconsider my failure to work at developing any sort of artistic skill.

I admit, it was mostly hormonal. Most teenagers have trouble dealing with the newfound intensity of their emotions, and I was no different. Searching for an outlet, I started taking guitar lessons, and spent most of my weekly sessions talking about my life with my instructor, who was kind enough to realize that, really, I needed a sympathetic ear more than a musical mentor. (I imagine how difficult it must be to be a guitar teacher, when you have to do double duty as some kid’s therapist.)

The lessons lasted about a year, but everyone involved kind of realized that they were going nowhere. I plateaued pretty early on, and I wasn’t doing the work needed to improve. I got what I wanted from physically bashing away, but the subtleties of the instrument were beyond me. Also, the money ran out. I eventually grew up and learned to deal, mostly.

Later in life, two things happened to me that I did not expect.I began to experience the first of a series of sudden realizations that I was getting older, and that we all have a limited amount of time to work with. Everybody has those moments. Eighteen, twenty-five, thirty — you wake up in the night, thinking that time is running out. Some nights, when I misbehaved a little too badly, I was quite sure I was going to die, and had no accomplishments to point at to make myself feel a little better.

The other thing that happened to me was that I began to react to things more than I’d used to. I’d been listening to the news for years, but I had almost nobody I could to talk to about what was going on in the world. I had a lot I wanted to say, and these things stacked up. I felt like I had a pile of smoldering embers in my head that I needed to get out. So I started a website, so I could have a place to dump the stuff in my head.

I soon realized that I just didn’t have the skills necessary to make sense out of what I was thinking. I was grinding my brain into paste, just to produce some 500 words or so. I couldn’t organize my thoughts, and I couldn’t make the words line up in a sensible way. But I couldn’t stop. I kept at it for years. I’m still terrible at it, but at least it’s gotten easier. I’ve written more than a thousand posts, between my various ventures, and some of them are kind of all right. Maybe five or six of them.

The moral of the story is that I should have paid better attention to the mechanical aspects of the craft — any crafts, really. I had mistakenly assumed that artists are full of ideas, all of the time, which is not something that’s true for everybody. The problem was that I assumed I would never have an idea that I needed to express, so I never got good at using the tools. Eventually, when I started feeling a powerful urge to get to work, I went out to the shed to find what might have been alien artifacts, for all I knew about using them.

Well, now I know better. But I am old, and so, so tired. 

Atmosphere counts for a lot. If you’re with a bunch of people who are joking around, being funny, having a good time, then the quiet person might come off as a downer. Worse still, they might appear to be depressed or troubled. Lot’s of people tend to avoid those who seem dour, because they’re just no fun. It could be as simple as that.

Or: Being the quiet person in the room is, ironically, something that can attract a lot of attention. In a place where everyone is trying to figure out what everyone else’s deal is, forming their own interpretations as to what everyone else is about, conversation is a vital clue. In social situations where everyone else is talking quite a bit, the quiet one stands out because he or she seems to be working from a different agenda.

The person you’re talking to is giving you information, just as you are giving information to them. You’re exchanging data. However, the quiet person is not exchanging information. Some may suspect that he or she is taking it all in, absorbing data, without actually giving any information back (even though what’s really going on is that they’re just distracted by their own thoughts). So, they get to figure you out, while they remain the cipher in the catbird seat. That can be disconcerting. It feels unfair. You’ve just exposed yourself (verbally), and there they are observing, possibly judging, while maintaining a fortified position.

Or: As Bill Burr mentioned, people might interpret the unwillingness to talk as arrogance. As if the quiet guy or gal is saying, “I’m above all this petty bullshit,” without actually saying it. But that’s kind of a leap to make about a person, when all they’re doing is not talking much. People sometimes have some shit going on, you know? Unless the quiet person is dramatically sneering, and then peering at you over the hem of their cape, you needn’t immediately assume that they’re silently judging you.

The problem is that quiet individuals are nearly blank slates, on to which some people can’t avoid projecting their own insecurities. If someone is afraid of sounding like an idiot, they might think the quiet person is thinking that he or she sounds like an idiot. If someone is worried about their own value as a person, they might interpret the quiet person’s silence as dismissive.

Can you tell I’ve had problems with this kind of thing? I don’t generally talk much when at functions where there are a lot of strangers about. It’s nothing to do with arrogance or judgment, I’m just shy. I don’t want to say the wrong thing and upset somebody, or waste their time with a bunch of boring, awkward shit. And, sometimes, when there’s a lot of people around, it’s hard to find an opening.

It comes back to bite me in the ass, occasionally. Timidity just doesn’t work. (Especially when alcohol is involved, and I’m not the one involved with it.)

A: “What’s that guy’s problem, why’s he so quiet?”

B: “Him? Oh, he’s okay — he’s just kind of shy.”

A: “No, fuck that — that guy’s a dick.”

(Anyway, be sure to check out Marc Maron’s podcast — that Bill Burr one was extremely good, if you can’t decide which was to check out first. Burr’s also got his own thing going on, too. I haven’t checked it out, yet, but he’s a funny man, so I’ve got a good feeling about it.)

I wouldn’t say I’m complacent (Who would?), but I can’t say I’m shocked. As I get older, I find that even so-called revolutionary changes in the political landscape, in the end, turn out to be part of the systematic back-and-forth that always occurs, but is easy to forget. Like, remember how it felt like George W. Bush would be president forever? Now, whenever somebody talks about him, a lot of people just yawn. Because they’re not the sort to dwell on the past, so the abuses of his admini–to the future! Look to the future!