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A San Francisco resident, I devote my time to experiments in the kitchen, volunteering, cinema and live music, and teaching. I love art as I do activism.

Friday, March 11, 2011

The Spread of Snark

I made a tweet earlier about the worthlessness of snark and, immediately afterward, felt odd about having done so on that forum. The tweet itself went something like: "Quite sick of all these young people who only speak snark and nothing else. Try being wide-eyed or celebratory or outraged or even cynical." But part of my realization was owed to the deeper realization that it is the very limitation on the breadth of our virtual communication with one another that drives the world towards a spiritual niche that involves shortened breaths and mere moments to absorb each others' presence, even in the eternal vastness of the internet. But I digress. Sort of. Snark is a perspective and sentimentality that I would like obliterated from the world, it is distracting and empty and mean-spirited. We're all familiar with snarkiness, even if we're not with the word itself. It is to hold the world with an ironic disdain that disallows one to see things vulnerably. It is dismissive language. It is people saying, "oh, this" in such a way that you're left with nothing but those words and it is the displacement of an actual idea or worldview. To snark is to make oneself appear knowing but boastfully, and at the expense of whatever, or whoever, is being discussed.

Yes, I now most definitely digress. But I do so with swiftness and purpose.
I want the world to embrace naivete! Embrace regret. Embrace the fullness of your heart and your mind, and then embrace that of your neighbors and friends and then the strangers who surround them. Embrace the idea that life is interesting and that the world is a strange and wonderful place. And that we belong in this place at this time.

Maybe my suggestions aren't coming through, so watch this video and try to tell me it didn't somehow inspire something real out of you.



Jaw-dropping.
Listening to: Cults' "Go Outside"