I watched “Falling Down” this weekend for the first time and it was great. Rent it if you haven’t seen it. Not unlike two of my other favorite movies, Fight Club and Office Space, the hero of “Falling Down” decides not to put up with the day-to-day stress that the rest of us constantly struggle against. In other words it is about an ordinary guy that snaps. Here is a great scene from the movie:

Most of us are pretty good at staying calm under normal conditions. It takes something out of the ordinary to get us worked up and we all have different triggers. Traffic, work load, poor service, stupid people… whatever. You could almost say that we are all ticking time bombs waiting to go off. Maybe you could go your whole life without ever losing your cool, but most of us have lost it at some point. We are human and we have limits. We have an ugly side that most of us try to keep hidden. Unfortunately, I think I am better than most at hiding it.

Not very long ago I was under more stress at work than I have ever been before. A day before a huge project needed to be completed my computer crashed. Then in the afternoon while I was installing an update to our company’s server something went wrong and our email was down for about half a day. It was the worst possible timing and I really surprised myself by how I responded to the stress. I should say how I didn’t respond to the stress. I could be wrong, but other than the perception that I was a little grumpy, I don’t think anyone would have known that my world was falling down around me. It was kind of disappointing. It is nice to be known as “cool under pressure” but I wish I could just lose it like normal people. I know a guy that doesn’t control it nearly as well as I do. You just know that inches below the fake smile is an angry little man who is one step away from losing it. I wonder if I would be happier if I was more like him. Wouldn’t it feel better to blow off some steam now and then rather than keeping it bottled up?

The downside of being able to control your reactions is that you don’t give off the signals that tell people to keep their distance. This can be a problem when you barely keeping it together and people are walking up to you asking how to help them add an attachment to an email. You want to say “figure it out yourself you idiot!” but instead you help them out like a nice guy. I think I am going to stop being a nice guy from now on. Maybe I will go to McDonalds for breakfast at 10:35 tomorrow just for fun…

Stop reading if you aren’t prepared to lose a few hours of your life on one of the best little Flash games I have ever played. Seriously, I just went back to the site to make a screen capture and replayed the first ten addicting levels. The name of the game is called Bloxorz. The goal is to roll the rectangular block into the square hole. Sound simple? The levels get progressively harder and harder and there are some serious brain teasers along the way. Enjoy, and don’t blame me if you get addicted!

I was thinking about my son as I traveled through Indiana last week. Since I posted about his smoke alarm fascination a couple months ago, Rian hasn’t passed a fire extinguisher, smoke alarm, or emergency sprinkler without a comment. “What’s that daddy?” It is amazing how many fire related objects there are that I never really notice.

Isn’t it interesting how our brains are able to filter what does and doesn’t catch our attention? My trip to Indiana was for a photo shoot for RV’s. Before I started doing work for this RV company I never really noticed RV’s. Now I watch for certain RV brands and know more RV trivia than is probably healthy. You probably had a similar experience when you bought your car and realized how many gray Honda Odyssey’s (or whatever you purchased) there are on the road.

The same thing happened when I started studying design. I started noticing logos, fonts, ads, signs – it was like a switch in my brain was flipped on. When I started to take photography seriously my filter for visual clutter got turned off. The urban clutter of signs, lights, power lines, trees that my brain previously filtered out of my vision became huge obstacles that I could no longer ignore because they ruined my pictures.

As I write this I have been sitting in an airport for about an hour watching people. There is a guy in a suit that must be older than he looks. I watched him sneak glances at the blonde next to me with the long stockings, short skirt, and fake eyelashes. There is a girl behind me who reminds me of somebody I used to know. The guy at the counter has great customer service skills. These are the visible people. Now I scan the room again and force myself to see who has slipped by my radar. It is impossible to pay attention to everybody, so how does my brain decide what to pay attention to and what to ignore? Is there any pattern to it? I don’t have an answer to that question, but I think that making an effort to recognize our biases and filters is a healthy habit to get into. I just hope that my boy grows out of the smoke alarm phase!

I believe that when I die I will go to heaven. Whatever happens to my body doesn’t really concern me. I figure they will bury me somewhere and I hope that some people will miss me when I am gone. The thought of cremation has never appealed to me. I can’t get excited about my ashes sitting on a shelf as a constant reminder to someone that I am dead. Scattering my ashes seems kind of gross when I actually stop and think about it. Then today I read a story that offered an alternative to getting buried that actually didn’t sound that bad to me. Apparently you can have your remains turned into a lifetime supply of pencils! The pencils come with a pencil sharpener that collects the shavings and becomes an urn as it fills up.

As awesome as this sounds, the fact that they can make a lifetime supply of pencils from one body seems a little weird. Just using the word “lifetime” in the context of writing with dead body sticks sounds like a cruel joke. Couldn’t they just say 573 pencils? Come to think about it, I think it would be nice if they were individually numbered. When someone is writing with me I want them to think “This is number 567 of 573. I better make this one last!” Yeah, that would make me happy.

I think the reason I thought this was so cool was because I have always loved pencils. In grade school I was always getting in trouble for taking apart my mechanical pencils. I carried them around in special boxes and stood in awe in the pencil section of the office supply stores. I had strong opinions about the perfect hardness (3b if you were wondering) and spent my allowance on expensive new drawing tools. It makes me wonder if I could be turned into 5mm lead refills instead of a traditional pencil? Hopefully they wouldn’t have to resort to 7mm because that is just so fat and clunky. I would rather be turned into a Bic than 7mm lead. I guess I never grew out of my obsession with pencils. I still have a weird reaction to 5mm lead containers. I get nervous when there is only a couple pieces left. What if I run out!?! Heaven forbid I have to use a pen!

The pencil sharpener urn is another question mark. I am trying to think of all the pencil shavings that I have made in my relatively short life and I bet there is quite a lot. If there really is a lifetime supply of pencils then I imagine the shavings would fill a small room. Something doesn’t add up. This is another reason that I am hoping for the 5mm lead refill option. It just solves the whole “what do I do with the daddy shavings” problem. Did I take that too far? Sorry.

The most interesting angle of the whole pencil concept is what would I be used for? It might be cool to be turned into a hand-written Bible. It would also be cool to be used for drawing. I like the idea of being pressed into a nice piece of stonehenge paper. I can almost feel the eraser rubbing against me and the artist’s fingers smearing me into something beautiful. That would be paradise.

In the end (pun) a box of precious person pencils probably isn’t the best idea for me. I am not going to abandon the idea completely, however. I am going to take the cheap way out and just have free mechanical pencils at the funeral with my name on it. I always feel great when I get a free pencil, and I want people to feel good at my funeral. I want people to say, “Wasn’t that a nice funeral? Did you get one of those free pencils? Yeah, Adrian sure was a great guy wasn’t he?”