All About Options

Right coffee, left coffee, cocoa*? Care for your double shot vanilla latte with whole milk, two percent, half that, or half and half? Want fries with that? Supersized? One size fits all, but we can have that fitted for you. You on Facebook, You on Twitter, You on Google+. +1 at parties or, if you know the host and care to call, maybe even +2 (there's bound to be at least a few +0s). The toilet has two options: UP for #1 (liquid waste); DOWN for #2 (solid waste).

In the future, everything will be automated. The choices will still exist, but the tedium of choosing will be solved around. Really, we're almost there today. Telemetry in advertising, customer service, online shopping. Your seamless web experience. Seems the last step into the next great frontier will be teaching computers to detect whether or not you just took a shit.

*The coffee machines at work display these three options for regular coffee, decaf coffee, and cocoa, respectively. 

I Dream of Eidetic Envy

What does it mean to be a writer reading David Foster Wallace? It means you spend an inordinate amount of time in your dictionary, for one. It means that you not only look words up, but that you write them down and - if they're less than six syllables and not an obscure medical term - you consider using them in your own work. It means you begin again to trust in compound (and in extreme cases, run-on) sentences again.

It means that you truly begin to glean what they mean by 'detail,' not as a string of descriptors or an infinite list of character qualities or every scene captured down to the split second; but as small receipts of proof that the content on the page wasn't imagined as much as lived.

It means that you need to be a better writer, and it means that in the best possible way.