Brian Crick

Symbols

Last night I uninstalled a bunch of games from my computer. I hadn’t been playing any of them in a while and had pretty much decided I wasn’t having much fun with them; it wasn’t really a spur of the moment move to make me more productive or anything.

And yet, I felt an immense sense of relief. It’s symbolic, and symbols can have real weight.

I’m usually good about changing my habits when necessary, but there are a few specific things I’m not really making progress on. So I’m wondering to myself what sorts of symbolic gestures could help me there.

A good symbol should be highly visible, have a design or form that immediately reminds you of its meaning, and maintaining the symbol must not become and end unto itself. With that in mind:

having real fun

Since I don’t tend to have much fun playing video games, I’ve already started looking for ways to truly unwind — and the roller coaster thing mentioned yesterday is part of that.

I’ve made a map tracking our progress, and that’s sort of a symbol. It will be important to keep that up, though the goal is, of course, to have fun — not to fill in the map or obsess over numbers like percentage of U.S. roller coasters ridden.

diary

Posting journal entries helps me think, and I’ve been neglecting that lately.

In the interests of getting me posting more, maybe I could designate different days for different types of content. Music Mondays. Coding Tuesday. Stuff like that.

Not that I’d post every day, but limiting my options on any given day could actually get me to organize my thoughts better because there would be less flailing about finding post subjects.

diet

I’d like to reduce my soda intake, and increase my homemade food and veggie consumption… though I’m not doing a very good job lately. I’m not sure what a good symbolic gesture is there.

Though going with the journal subject days, it would make sense to make Thursdays about cooking, since I’m trying to do more Wednesday game night cooking, and those sorts of things are high-stress, experimental endeavors that are frequently worth doing postmortems on.

However, regularly doing large scale cooking isn’t necessarily going to encourage me to do more ordinary cooking. It’s getting into symbol-for-its-own-sake territory.

Going with the ‘highly visible’ definition of a good symbol, it might help to have my crock pot stored in a more visible place (right now it’s at the bottom of a pantry that’s not even visible from the kitchen proper.

I keep forgetting simple meals are an option. Yeah. I like that.

A friend of mine posted this thing about using a simple calendar to develop good habits, and I may try that too.

Roller Coaster Rankings

This has been a bit of an unusual summer. For no particular reason, my wife Marie and I have decided to ride every roller coaster we can.

While the goal is, of course, to have fun, I’m finding the experience strangely educational.

By my estimation, we’ve already been on 4 percent of the operational, non-kiddie coasters in the United States. Still a long way to go. When my 20 year high school reunion comes up three years from now, we’re seriously considering doing a big road trip from my current home of Cleveland to my childhood home of Tulsa, hitting all the parks we can along the way.

Of course, said road trip is dependent, among other things, on how sick we are of roller coasters by 2015.

I don’t see that as too much of an issue; in fact, if anything, this summer has made me like roller coasters of all kinds more.

Part of it is the mindset I’m in when I enter a park. If I get to pick what coasters I’m going to ride, I start trying to evaluate them in terms of this one-dimensional scale of I’ll hate itI’ll love it before even getting in line.

Case in point: up until this year, I hated wooden roller coasters. I didn’t like how bumpy they were. I liked the smoothness of steel coasters, the openness, the sensation of flying.

If I go in trying to evaluate a wooden coaster on a scale from bumpy to frictionless, it will get a low score every time. And because I’ve been concentrating on just that one scale, I’ve missed things that are uniquely appealing about wooden coasters: the way landscape and trees can be part of the ride design; the way all those wooden supports create this interesting volume through which you travel; trying to wrap my head around the idea that almost a hundred years ago, people were riding these.

On a scale of short to tall, steel coasters will usually beat wooden ones. On a scale of slow to fast, steel probably wins again. Every modern wooden roller coaster has exactly zero inversions.

On any of these scales that I am used to thinking about, either because of personal experience or because theme park marketing fluff likes to harp on the biggest, fastest, steepest coasters, wooden coasters don’t measure up.

But if I’ve already decided to I’m going to ride everything at least once, my mindset is a little different. I forget about the scales. It’s easier to just go in with an empty mind, free of preconceptions or that laundry list of specific things I and copy writers like and do not like about rides.

It’s easier to just absorb the experience for what it is. And that’s a skill that’s worth practicing.

Copyright © 2017 Brian Crick.