Thursday, Feb 27, 2003

Chris Offers You a Taste of the Good Life

One thing that frequently occurs when one is living the good life is that one is given an update on a number for the budget chart. Then what one does is one opens up the budget in Excel and hi-lights the outdated number and replaces it with the fresh new one. This feels like presiding over a really good wedding – so refreshing. Although I've never presided over a wedding. Printing the new version of the budget, the version with the updated number, feels like consecration. During a typical day of good life, you'll experience little weddings of this sort twenty or thirty times.

A reliable litmus test for whether you are doing some good living is the color temperature of the light:
Daylight: You are living like an animal.
Candle/Firelight: You are living as in the Middle Ages.
Incandescent: Like spending your day in a cup of tea.
Halogen: Very nearly the good life. The okay life.
Fluorescent: Good – clean, precise, consistent. Light this good can be hard on the eyes; make sure to shut them for one minute or so every three minutes.

At some point specialization (as a function of industry) dictated that people should be cordoned off in distinct spaces determined by what work they perform. I am in a building with people who "make great ads". Using email and Instant Messenger and discussion boards, though, I spend more time with my friends than with my co-workers. That is to say that I'm 100% physically present in a place that receives 30-40% of my attention; the other 60-70% of my attention goes toward communicating with people physically present elsewhere and toward planning for the Small/Medium portion of my days that will be spent on the Outside. In this sense the good life is analogous to life in prison. But don't let numbers mislead you; it's not really like prison at all. In prison, for example, they all shuffle into a big mess hall for lunch. During the good life, you eat at your desk with your monitor and binders and thirty red #2 pencils from Self magazine fanning out of an MSN coffee-mug like a friendly wave.

Caffeine increases attentiveness, ability to focus, energy levels - productivity - so it makes sense that the kitchens have free coffee. Still, they didn't have to get such good milk. How long does your milk at home last? A week? The milk here, where we are immersed in the goodness of life, lasts for many, many months. Today, February 27th, there are cartons of milk in the fridge with expiration dates like "6/15/2003". How the hell! I believe that the milk is refrigerated only out of respect for tradition, like how Coke makes ads even though it's safe to assume that most people know about Coke, Coke having permeated the public mind by now at a genetic level, so that if you were to download all images from the visual cortex of a 10 second-old baby, you would have a 10 second MPEG of a shaky, blurred tableau of the delivering doc, blood up to his elbows, foregrounded against a bank of fluorescent ceiling lights; and you'd have a high-resolution TIFF of a Coke bottle, foregrounded against a six pack of cans and a fatherly 2-liter. Which reminds me: how many public vending machines have canned soda for 55 cents? These days, precious few. One is here. It rests tall – humming – in the kitchen; a benevolent, stubby emperor.

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