Killin' it! with Paul Crik

Brett Favre, the one time great American Green Bay Packers hero, is at it again. Into retirement. Out of retirement. Back into it, and out again.  Reports have now been confirmed that Favre has reversed his reversal about joining the Minnesota Vikings, and instead will undergo another surgery to reconstruct both of his weathered shoulders with a new medical composite made of walrus muscles…after which he plans to compete on the mens’ professional tennis circuit instead of in the NFL.  Alright alright, you got me, I’m kidding!  But it’s hard not to poke a little fun at Favre’s inability to stick with a decision, right?  His waffling on retirement has become a kind of yearly ritual, just another boy who cried wolf story.  Why should we ever believe Favre is retiring at this point, after he’s faked on us so many times?  We shouldn’t.  He’ll still be in the NFL when he’s 65, I’m pretty sure.

But even though we may think him foolish at this point, he still deserves a small killin’ it nod too.  Favre’s yearly rise and fall offers us the same high-impact narrative each time.  The hero, bruised and battered, resigns, but then rises again, restless, denies his defeat, and returns to battle once more, addicted to the thought of squeezing just a little bit more victory out of life.  People, myself included, can’t ever get enough of that story.  And we also can’t help but be at least mildly inspired by Favre’s relentlessness.  It’s almost like good ole Brett knows we need his broken-fix it tale each year; perhaps he retires and re-emerges just to show us that quitting is always reversible.  You can quit and then decide not to quit.  And in fact, you can do it again and again.

Killing it, believe it or not, is not simply knowing when to quit, but also realizing that you have to quit quitting.  Favre may have overextended the number of times we fans can take his quitting seriously, but America never gets tired of his rebounder’s killin’ it spirit.

Over the last couple weeks, town hall meetings have been held across the country to give information about the health care reform congress is trying to pass.  The meetings have been big news because they generate high levels of emotion.  While I know that people get more sensitive in a chaotic economy, I wonder how all this drama sprouts up so suddenly, like a dormant beast just waiting to rear its head.  It seems to me that the drawn out process of getting the health care bill approved has maybe given people too much time to mull the issues.  We read endless–and often paranoid–speculation on what will happen if we socialize healthcare.  The government will start euthanizing the elderly, abortions rates will skyrocket, health care will be rationed, people will become doctors after a one month training course, and so on and so on.

Like so many “big” stories, most of what we gather about the health care proposal from the internet.  The repetition of information is rampant: a headline is reported, tweeted, commented on, recycled through status updates, blogged about, re-tweeted, parodied, dugg, and pundited.  Though all of it centers around a single event, our brain (at least in part) registers all the repetition as separate events.  So even though just one stressful thing has happened, it feels like several. The overload which occurs creates emotional responses that are out of sync with the size of the actual event or story.

Human brains, as of now, are still not equipped to process thousands of images and words a day that have little immediate bearing on our physical situation.  Maybe we can facilitate our own evolution by training our minds to digest the web vibrations at a lower frequency.

Killin’ It is remembering that anything repeated hundreds of times on the web can stir these amplified emotional levels; it’s  a little like the equivalent of your neighbor suddenly becoming a Brad Pitt level celebrity because he/she is the subject of a single viral story.  Good for your neighbor, but bad for public understanding.  You have to remember to peel back a few layers of public frenzy anytime it erupts.

Balance the presence of the web in your life with a balanced life of web presence.  That makes no sense, right?  But read it 100 times and it will start to seem like poetry. Killlin’ It!

Running.  It’s the simplest exercise there is, requiring nothing but a pair of shoes and your will.  Yet, when you go to the shoe store the choices are endless.  Air channels in the heels, elastic laces, sole pumps, honeycomb vents.  All that before you even consider a brand.  But recently a new shoe breakthrough has been grabbing the attention–and adorning the feet–of serious runners world wide.  Vibram’s new barefoot shoes, a glove-like footwear with separated chambers for each toe, offers the novel experience of running with nearly naked feet.  The trend comes on the heels of shoes getting unnecessarily complicated, lifting runners up with thick soles and creating a sloppy distance between the foot and the ground.  Like the hybrid’s blossoming after an era of overbuilt inefficient SUV’s that have now been all but discontinued, barefoot shoes embrace the idea of a progressive scale-back.  Streamlined and efficient, though unusual looking, these breakthrough shoes actually allow for faster run times as they eliminate the bouncy interference of 3 inch soles.  In short,  they hold the promise of keeping us connected to paths we tread. And you guessed it….that’s killin’ it.  I’ve already ordered my first pair.

If you were on twitter late yesterday you might have noticed a trending topic was #iwillneverforget. By the end of the day on August 4, 2009 over 24,000 people had mentioned #iwillneverforget in their tweets.

I’ve heard that our memories tell us more about who we are now than who we were in the past.  Saying that you will never forget a certain period of time, person or event is essentially saying you hope some of who you are now will live on as we roll into the future.  Never changing seems like immortality (and thus, appealing)…but living, by definition, is change. Right?

This is why I think the #iwillneverforget project on twitter is killin’ it. Drop your memories online like seeds to be watered by other people’s responses.  Don’t delay in posting your tweet with #iwillneverforget.  A new trending topic will surely overtake it very soon and make #iwillneverforget into a distant memory itself.

Here are a few examples I grabbed:

JillLegacy #iwillneverforget my first celebrity crush: bobby brown. i didn’t say it was a good one

rockstarahead #iwillneverforget the day when columbia shuttlle get caught in a crash .

fraaankyT #iwillneverforget what i once was, and what i have become today

SssuperB #iwillneverforget all of the amazing friends I’ve made over the past few years. Whether we talk or not, you’re still in my heart.

JennGurule #iwillneverforget the day I met my biological mom. I love her dearly.

jennifercupcake #iwillneverforget that night at the park when you said you wanted to be just friends, after i told you why i never open up to people

billy_daKidd #iwillneverforget when i was still a kidd so sad i am a teen

LadyLove88 #iwillneverforget watching “7th heaven” every monday night..

200,000 square feet and a 200 car garage all for the low, low price of a $10,000 down payment.  That was the deal for Victor Vangelako’s family, who bought a condo in a Florida high-rise only to find that every single other unit remained unpurchased and empty.   Now they want out because they’ve got no neighbors.

I say sign me up!  In a world impoverished from overcrowding if you can’t find the silver lining in having an entire high-rise to yourself, you’re just not trying.  Bowling down the hallway – no problem!  Skinny dipping in your private pool – no problem!   Cookies in the parking lot – not a soul to disapprove!

Often in life we set our sights on something and then find ourselves disgruntled when it arrives.  When we become too attached to an idea of what the future is going to look like (i.e. lots of other people in my condo high-rise) we fail to see that our courage in going after something may have yielded even more than we imagine.  Goals are guideposts; the point is not to crash into them but pass through them into something new.

If you wake up alone in a high-rise and want to Kill It, celebrate the emptiness, explore the quiet, let this unique one of a kind wrinkle in history be something to set you apart, not something to flee.