Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Frighteningly Appropriate

A friend of mine forwarded me a link to this with the comment, "I couldn't help thinking of you when I read this article." And, man, oh, man, I can understand why. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of my life: "choice fatigue."

Here's an excerpt:
...[A]s those unread supplements pile up, as the VHS tapes filled with recordings of old but as-yet unwatched episodes of The Nazis: A Warning From History and Spaced form a mountain on the floor, what we are left with is an ever-expanding sense of failure to catch up with all the sensory experiences that have been made available to us.

Like the theoretical physicist, with his quest to arrive at a fundamental equation that would work out the state of the universe and everything in it, we, too, entertain aspirations of completeness. We all still believe that some day we will have seen and heard everything, that though we may have fallen behind, we’ll eventually become synchronised with our cultural output. It’s a sort of entertainment Nirvana we hope to enter; how many times have we considered taking a day off just to watch our backlog of videos?

For the record, for those who've read the article through, I've never seen an episode of The Sopranos, either, because I don't get HBO. But I keep thinking that I really need to go out and rent the DVDs. Very, very soon. Just as soon as I finish watching the hundreds of hours of DVDs I already have...

Forget "taking a day off." I need a year. And, knowing me, I'd probably come out at the end of that year more behind than ever...

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