The Daily Procrastinator

The past week has been a sad one, procrastinators. On June 23, Ed McMahon died at age 86 of various health problems related to his age. On June 25, Farrah Fawcett succumbed to her three year battle with cancer at age 62. Just hours later, pop icon and worldwide cultural phenomenon Michael Jackson was rushed to UCLA Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead of cardiac arrest at the age of 50. On June 28, television pitchman Billy Mays was found dead in his home with no apparent cause of death. He, too, was just 50 years old.

He was probably the greatest sidekick of all time.

This string of tragic headlines really has me thinking. Each of the four celebrities who went on to reap his or her reward this week affected my life in one way or another. The one I remember being aware of first is Ed McMahon. When I was a little boy, my mom loved to watch The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I remember the rare occasions, usually during summer vacation, when Mom would allow me to sit beside her and watch the show. I always loved to listen to Ed McMahon laugh at Johnny’s jokes. He had the kind of laugh that spread to other people. My mother would sit and chuckle softly, trying not to wake my dad or younger brothers, while Johnny and Ed bantered back and forth. Being allowed to sit up and watch The Tonight Show with my mom was one of the first “big kid” privileges I ever earned. It was Mom’s silent acknowledgment that I was growing up. When Johnny Carson died a few years back, I felt a small part of this childhood memory slip away. Now that Ed McMahon is gone, as well, another small piece of my life has transitioned from dynamic reality to a crystallized memory.

Although the height of her popularity was a little before my time, I know that Farrah Fawcett was the sex symbol for guys my age and just a little older. Starting with her portrayal of Jill Munroe on Charlie’s Angels in 1976, Fawcett’s smile, and her hairstyle, became a mainstay of American pop culture. From television, she graduated to starring in feature films, most memorably1984’s The Burning Bed.

This 1976 photo is the world's best-selling pin-up.

This is where my memory of her begins. I can’t recall if it was in public school or CCD (that’s Bible study for kids, in the Catholic church), but I know that I watched The Burning Bed in a classroom somewhere as an example of the horrors of domestic abuse. I must say that it has stuck with me. I remember the lights coming on in the classroom after the credits rolled and all the students sitting dumbstruck. Many things go into the formation of an adult, and my father was certainly the most important influence on the way I undersand the way men should treat women. The Burning Bed is probably next on the list. The horror and sympathy I felt while watching Farrah Fawcett struggle against her abusive husband made a lasting impression on me. I’m sure that watching the movie at a young age added to the effect, but that’s how formative experiences happen. You just have to be in the right place at the right time.

If Farrah Fawcett was a little before my time, Michael Jackson was my time. Every kid I knew had a copy of Thriller. The lucky ones had it on newfangled cassette tapes. We listened to it on our boomboxes, cruised to it at the roller rink (although I never could skate),  swam to it in backyard pools, and danced to it in the middle-school gym. In fact, to this day, I can’t help dancing to pretty much any track from Thriller when it plays at wedding receptions. We didn’t have MTV at my house, but when Michael made appearances on network TV, I remember being absolutely fascinated at his unmistakable style of dancing. When I

Michael Jackson, as my generation remembers him best.

heard that he had died, I watched some live performances on YouTube out of a sense of nostalgia. It turns out that I’m still mystified at the way Jacko could dance. My body just can’t do that. In the years after his musical superstardom, I watched with the rest of the world as Michael Jackson faced one struggle after another. Financial missteps, public relations nightmares, criminal accusations, ill-advised surgeries, and tabloid headlines plagued him for years. Over the course of just a few years, he fell from the top of the world to the depths of public disdain. No other single person has served as more of an example to teach me never to take anything for granted. Anyone can fall from grace at any time.

Just when it seemed that the odd phenomenon of celebrities passing away in threes had been fulfilled, the pattern was broken by the death of Billy Mays, who most people know simply as “The Oxy-Clean Guy” or “The Guy Who Shouts About The Products He Sells.” Although he may not have been as major a contributor to American popular culture as Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, or Michael Jackson, he was no less recognizable, and he probably got considerably more face time on television than any of the other three, in the past few years. If Ed McMahon serves as a memory of my young life, and Farrah Fawcett is tied to one of the formative experiences that helped define the way I view male/female relationships, and Michael

That's the smile of a very determined fellow.

Jackson was not only the soundtrack of my childhood but also a case-in-point lesson about appreciating the good things in my life, what possible difference could a guy like Billy Mays make? After all, I never bought Oxy-Clean, Mighty Putty, or the Quick-Chop. Simply put, he was a model of determination. The products he sold to midday television viewers weren’t especially useful. Nor were they especially life-changing. Billy Mays knew his job, though, and he dedicated serious energy to completing it. Never for a moment did a person viewing one of his infomercials doubt that he believed 100% in the stuff he was hawking. Granted, he got paid to look that way on television, but who among us couldn’t use a little more firm determination in our lives and wholehearted belief in our work?

A good friend of mine, while discussing this week’s string of celebrity deaths, said that the only thing she takes away from them is the reminder that she’s getting older. I think there’s a little more to it than that. As each of these people fades from a living person in my world to a memory of a person past, I’m reminded that everyone–everyone–has something to teach me. Whether they’re teaching us about ourselves, giving us examples of who we should be (or not be), or simply modeling an admirable trait, celebrities are really just regular people put on display. They work like we do. They get ill and grow old like we do. They rise to great heights like we do, and they fall to terrible depths like we do. They’re more than just faces on the television. They’re lives lived publically so that we can watch their experiences and learn from them. I hope that I, and you, my fellow procrastinators, learned a thing or two from Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and Billy Mays. May they all rest peacefully.

Getting information is too much work. There’s no need to browse around to multiple web sites and reload CNN.com every few minutes to get the latest and greatest anymore. Let me show you how to let information come to you, so you can spend more time relaxing, reading and most importantly, procrastinate more.

RSS - (Real Simple Syndication). On most sites these days, you’ll see this image:

RSS Link

This means that you can subscribe to the information the site publishes and pull it into an “RSS Reader”. An RSS reader can be Bloglines.com (my fav), Google Reader or any of hundreds of different software readers out there you can install on your computer or phone. By just using any of the above, you’ve just saved yourself a ton of time by not having to check, or bookmark any of the individual sites that you used to visit. 

Twitter – For real time news, sign up for Twitter. Then follow the people / items you want. Be it Oprah (who for some reason is tweeting to Ashton right now) or CNN. If there’s a topic you’re interested in following in detail, simply go to Twitter Search and search for it and add it to your RSS feed from above. Twitter search also allows you to see in real time what people are talking about on their home page. Besides having Twitter on your phone as an application, you can set Twitter to SMS/Text you Tweets you want in real-time, or you can get yourself a Twitter desktop client.

For Windows users, I recommend Digsby, which also allows you to set up IM accounts for Yahoo, Facebook, MSN, AOL, etc so you don’t have to have multiple IM clients installed.

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That’s all you need. By using these tools available right now, you’ll save time and be more informed when it happens, without having to refresh your browser even once. 

I recently discovered this blog, discussing packaging and branding changes.  I find myself strangely drawn to the hits and missteps of branding — yes, I’m looking at you for the latter, Wisconsin.

And while we’re on the topic of branding, you really ought to read this post about Pepsi’s new logo strategy.  Please, please, please download the PDF from the branding agency.  I’m not sure if I’m a bigger fan of the references to the Golden Ratio (which they spelled Golden Ration), or the implication that the new Pepsi logo will create its own gravitational field.

There is no mistaking the serious weirdness of Facebook.  I’m all for connecting with my current friends, and even friends from my past, however estranged we may have become as a result of time and distance.  Even exes.  I’m so totally, completely fine with exes.  And the people I met senior year of high school when I started hanging out with the theater crowd and working the ticket booth on performance nights.  And even my college roommate that I more or less haven’t spoken to since we had that blowup fight sophomore year.  I’m cool with that.  I had some sort of connection with all of these people.

But what I still can’t seem to get over are the people from high school — the popular, student council, homecoming court kids — who acted as though I was invisible for four years.  Why on earth are these people sending me friend requests?  How do they even remember my name?  And if you couldn’t manage a “hello” during the four years we sat next to each other in homeroom, why on earth are you so interested in finding out what I’m up to now?

And they’re not just friending me.  They’re tagging me in all sorts of lists to find out what books I’ve read, or 25 random things about me, or whether or not I’ve ever been to jail.  I just can’t understand it.  Are they sitting there with a yearbook, searching for everyone alphabetically, regardless of relationship?  Do they have any memories of me whatsoever?  Does that guy remember turning me down flat when I asked him to the sophomore dance, telling me that he had “someone else in mind”?

For as infrequently as I think about high school, I also seem to have pretty distinct memories of it, and I just wonder if everyone else does, too.  I have no illusions that we’re the same people that we were at 15 or 18.  I’m certainly not the same shy, insecure girl that I was, and I don’t expect that anyone else reflects what they were then, either.

Maybe that’s the point of Facebook.  Maybe it doesn’t matter where you’ve come from or if you’ve lived parallel yet completely separate lives.  Maybe it exists to remind you of how far you’ve come, and help you to appreciate the value of the true friends you’ve made along the way.

Ah, prom night: the source of many exes.

Ah, Facebook: the place where the past meets present, sometimes with jarring results.  Childhood friends, recent colleagues and family members mingle in a “worlds collide” sort of way.  It’s a fascinating social experiment.

I was chatting with a Facebook friend/colleague recently when he asked me, “What’s your xCount?”  This was his own personal term — one that I must admit that I love — for the exes that have crawled out of the woodwork and once again made themselves part of your life.  

I scanned my list of friends.  ”I’ve got two… and a half,” I told him.  He told me that you can’t count anyone as a half, but I think that a prom date who appeared in pictures but actually spent the night sitting in the lobby outside the hotel ballroom qualifies as something less than a full xCount point.  And believe me, after that fiasco at 17, I was thoroughly shocked to see that he wanted to connect with me.

He had four full-fledged exes on his list, not including one whose request he rejected outright.  ”Sometimes, the requests are just too creepy.”  Many of my friends agree.  There was the one who was contacted by the guy who stalked her after they broke up.  Another got a request from the girlfriend who had certain… uh… shall we call them “unique” sexual proclivities?  And what about that guy you hooked up with after the frat party sophomore year?  From first loves to major heartbreaks, they’re all out there, and they just might be looking for you.

Who's in my inbox? I can't bring myself to look.

What prompts exes to want to get in touch again, especially those that you haven’t spoken to in a decade or more?  As for mine, I still have a good relationship — albeit separated by time and distance — with one of them, and accepted the second just out of a ridiculous sense of curiosity.  You know the kind.  They’re the ones whose request is met with audible talking back to the computer.  ”Oh my god, John Doe?  How the hell did he find me?”  These requests are met with a connection, a few obligatory messages back and forth, and the obligatory Googling of their name to figure out what they’ve been doing since the 90s.

His story was slightly different.  He had one with fond memories who had sent the occasional Christmas card, one who had been a complete WTF entry, and two who were clearly taking Google stalking to the next level.  ”I don’t mind connecting with them,” he said, “but it’s a little weird that they have to respond to everything I post, as though they’re spending their days just waiting for me to update my status.”  Weird, indeed.

It seems that nearly everyone has an xCount greater than zero.  An informal survey of friends reveals xCount numbers between 3 and 9, each bringing varying levels of discomfort and baggage with them.  One, however, through the benefits of a new married surname and a move to a new continent has managed to avoid the xCount concept altogether, and was stunned to learn that I had an xCount.  

“I mean it’s lovely that they want to get in touch and it speaks volumes about your effect on their lives ….and yet: eeeeek.  I always wondered if I was crazy/unfriendly for not wanting contact or if the crazies were the ones who did.”

There’s no shortage of posts about this very topic.  This one talks about being the one that’s obsessed with the ex on Facebook.  This one talks about the shock of seeing the photo of the ex appear in the inbox.  Yet another talks about why your ex should never see your Facebook account.

Should you friend exes?  Only you know for sure.  Of course, you could always accept their invitation, learn everything you need to know about them, and then stealthily “unfriend” the person, leaving them to discover your passive-aggressive acceptance and rejection at their leisure.  But does that make you more or less creepy than the creepy ex that you’re trying to avoid?