posted 2007/05/07 at 19:46
I read the news enough that when a film breaks box office records (as Spiderman 3 did this past weekend), I'm going to hear about it, even though I've never particularly been a film person. Given how so many of my family and friends like films, though, it's been kind of hard to avoid discussion of all the films that are out. (By point of reference, the last time I actually watched a film in a movie theatre was the opening weekend of Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within.) I don't want to say that I'm particularly annoyed or bothered by all the film talk that I always seem to find myself around, but at the same time there is a strong part of me that wishes I could change the conversation to a topic I actually have some knowledge of.
As much as I hate to say it, I think the underlying problem here may simply be that growing up as part of the video game generation basically shattered my attention span, so sitting down for two hours to just watch something can be kind of difficult for me. As much as I enjoy reading, I kind of have to break my reading up into short little "bursts" in order for it to really be effective. When I have to sit down for a long time to do something like that, I can -- one of the classes I excelled at in my graduate career was a course on film adaptations of women's novels -- but unless I'm doing something that's highly interactive like a video game, my attention span really isn't as long as it could be.
There seem to be other factors involved here as well. As an example, I haven't played chess regularly since high school, but every once in a while I try to get back into it. I never seem to do as well as I used to do in high school, though, and I think the reason for that is that when I played chess in high school, I was playing in front of someone, in a quiet library, and the situation kind of forced me to be slow and deliberate with my thinking. Since I don't have any real-life friends to play (serious) chess with now, though, if I want to play chess I either have to go in front of my computer or in front of my Xbox, and no matter what I try, I just can't focus enough to play a long, deliberate game on a computer. I can do speed chess okay, but I kind of prefer to play those long, quiet games I used to play in high school.
Sean, could you please make another comment about the Red Wings? Preferably one saying that they will lose in the conference finals, as you said for the openers and semi-finals as well. Thanks!
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon