It was one of the strangest moments of television I’ve ever watched, and not just for the more cartoonish reasons: the bullhorn, the hair-pulling, the fact that these women were wearing expensive ready-for-TV dresses and gowns and yet were saying and doing vile things that undermined any beauty they’d mustered. No, I’m desensitized to the nastiness; as a married man who wants to stay married, Bravo must remain pulsing and seething on at least one television in my house at all times, lest I give my wife an excuse to turn off my weekend football marathons in the fall. It’s a seesaw of TV torture.

Anyway, the moment was actually bizarre for another reason: the shock. I watched this and I wondered: Have we become so disconnected from reality by our easy and safe Internet vitriol that we no longer imagine people reacting in real time when we say something truly hateful and hurtful?

This woman—the one who shouted “You’re a dumb ho” into a bullhorn, remember—was shocked that her words had caused someone to leap into action, shocked that she was now being attacked
she’d literally used a bullhorn (a fact I can’t emphasize enough) to shout expletives into another woman’s face
they were an arm’s length apart
and yet there was this “why is she charging at me?” look on her face. Had she really expected she could insult someone so dramatically (again: bullhorn) without suffering any consequences?

I really don’t want to admit that anything Housewives-related is representative of our larger culture (you’ve got to believe me; it kills me to write this), but this moment felt much bigger than the Housewives, something much more expansive, something I see almost daily now: an ever-heightening level of anger and outrage and unchecked vitriol (usually expressed online), with a corresponding decline in our levels of self-awareness about what we’ve said. The important thing, many people think, is that we said the words, see, that we “got that off our chest,” or that we “told that person off,” or that we “made that joke,” or whatever. Often, our mean-spirited commentary is capped off by the awful expression, “Just sayin’,” the polite equivalent of a mobster saying “It’s just business, nothing personal,” before putting a bullet in someone’s brain.

We want to say the thing, but we don’t want to concern ourselves with the consequences of the saying. We’re, like, just sayin’, you know? It is as if we are tossing pennies into a bottomless pit, and we get to walk away without hearing the final plunk of copper on the cave floor.

This, of course, is why online outrage is so popular. On news sites, the comment boards ask us for our thoughts on breaking stories, and we quickly pollute the space with terrifying hateful rhetoric. Not just about important issues, but about everything, the release date for the new Spider-Man movie, the cast of the new Star Wars movie, the draft position of a football player. We summon our fury, and we scream in all-caps. We watch angry TV commentators argue, also hear them on the road as we drive, and we remain angry all day. Angry on message boards, angry on Facebook, angry on Twitter. On Yelp, we take out our anger on servers who make the slightest of mistakes, on restaurants that fail to achieve constant perfection. We rate the beers we drink, the bathrooms we visit, the amount of sunshine on a particular afternoon. On RateMyProfessor, my students have for years been registering their displeasure over the fact that—in my writing courses—I make them write. Some of them are furious. Some of them hate me. Everywhere we go, someone or something is asking us to rate our experience, to tell our horror stories, to let the mean spirits loose.

And so much of what we say is written under the veil of usernames, or is written in places and spaces that guarantee we won’t need to worry about reactions. Even on most television shows, the worst remarks are said via video-conference, or in those “testimonial”-style videos wherein a solitary Housewife speaks her mind to the camera. All of us: We speak our anger in safe forums, but there is no corresponding app to hold us accountable for what we’ve said, or to ask others to rate our value as human beings.

Our nation’s love affair with outrage isn’t a new development, obviously. The new development is how little regard we now pay to the consequences of our speech. We have become so enamored of our right to say whatever we want that we are shocked when someone reacts in non-virtual ways, when (for instance) someone we like is fired by their employer for offensive speech, or when a business is spurned by consumers after a CEO says something awful. We’ve wished the “right to free speech” into the “right to consequence-free Čő±è±đ±đłŠłó.”

Juxtaposed against this brief moment on the couch watching the Housewives altercation, I’d spent most of my evening reading Andre Dubus III’s excellent memoir Townie, in which he recalls a youth spent in constant fights with other Boston youths. Funny looks leading to bloody knuckles, mouths emptied of teeth, hospital visits. Men stabbed, faces beaten to hamburger. The slightest of slights, and then: violence. This was a world where you were always accountable, where you didn’t look surprised when someone punched you in the face.

Of course, I’m not saying that violence is acceptable retaliation against insulting language. I’m not advocating for the world of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, where comment-boarders are sought out and beaten for their online insults. I’m not advocating for the atomic obliteration of comment boards or Twitter, either.

I’m only advocating for a world in which we recognize that our speech does have consequences, that it can hurt, that it can wound, that it can cause someone to throw a punch even if we had the “right” to say what we said, that it can get us fired or cost us our reputation. I’m only advocating for a world in which—no matter how many new social media portals open before I’m finished typing this sentence—we recognize that the bottomless pit into which we throw our words does indeed have a bottom, a world in which (maybe, just maybe) we take a long moment to peer into the darkness before tossing our pennies.

Nathan Holic teaches in șŁœÇֱȄ’s Department of Writing & Rhetoric. ÌęHe can be reached at Nathan.Holic@ucf.edu.

The festival will be held from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. in the CFE Arena. Admission and parking will be free.

The festival is hosted by UCF’s College of Education and Human Performance in partnership with UCF’s Morgridge International Reading Center. Attendees are invited to meet with the authors—whose works are featured in classrooms and libraries around the country—and learn about their creative processes and how they bring their characters to life.

The keynote author will be Andre Dubus III, who wrote The New York Times bestseller House of Sand and Fog. His most recent book, Dirty Love, was released in October.

Other notable authors include Capt. Luis Carlos MontalvĂĄn, The New York Times-bestselling author of Until Tuesday:Ìę A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him, and David Menasche, author of The Priority List: A Teacher’s Final Quest to Discover Life’s Greatest Lessons.

Throughout the day guests can attend author forums, listen to readings, attend book signings and receive free book appraisals.

There are activities planned for all ages, with special events for teens and children. Advanced registration is required for the free teen activities, which include a writing workshop led by UCF faculty and young adult author Kristen Simmons, and a live-action game based on the book Divergent.

Local chefs John Rivers of 4Rivers Smokehouse and Hollis Wilder of Sweet! By Good Golly Miss Holly will demonstrate recipes from their cookbooks.

UCF faculty participating in the festival include David James Poissant and Nathan Holic from the English Department. Authors Ward Larsen and Will Wright are UCF alumni.

To register for the teen workshops, view a schedule of events, or for more information, visit www.bookfestival.ucf.edu.

Now, in the age of Netflix and 10,000 cable TV channels, this project sounds unrealistic, but as a pre-teen my world was limited: I had access only to the horror aisle at Blockbuster, to USA’s “Up All Night” and the HBO “Free Preview Weekend,” to Camelot Music and Suncoast Motion Picture Company (and whatever other mall-based entertainment stores that are now out of business). There was a horizon that I could see, maybe even reach.

Similarly, my friend Laurie recently told me about how she developed her love of reading. As a kid, she’d go to her small-town library each week and check out a few books; eventually, she decided to read every work of fiction in the library. She started with “A,” and she barreled through books, giving everything at least 30 pages to hook her. She never accomplished her goal, only made it to “G,” but damn: She made it to “G”! Maybe, like my horror movie project, this goal was impossible
but at least there was a sense that it could be accomplished.

These memories are silly, yes, and frivolous, but lately I’ve been thinking about them more and more. I miss the days before my reading and viewing lists became overwhelming, anxiety-inducing. I miss the feeling that I could actually consume the content I wanted to consume.

*

Back in the mid-2000s, I was a subscriber to Esquire and National Geographic, and my wife to Vanity Fair and Women’s Health. There wasn’t yet an expectation that all publications offer all their content online, for free, all the time. And anyway, I loved print magazines and journals, how the changing monthly covers would change the look and feel of our coffee table, and by extension our entire living room. I loved—still love—the sort of “reading goal” that a monthly magazine suggests, a finite number of articles, some which you dog-ear for immediate reading, others which become secondary priorities, backups if all else fails you
I love the sense of completion that a magazine represents.

But then somewhere along the line, I got a decent computer and a decent Internet connection, and I downloaded an application to “synch” my bookmarks across multiple PCs, and then I was creating folders for bookmarked web pages and magazines and articles. My folders started small, a handful of stories, but month by month they grew: links emailed to me by students, colleagues, friends, more than I was able to read; Esquire and National Geographic and Sports Illustrated at some point uploaded a century’s worth of archives, and so I was swimming in bookmarked articles, essays, feature stories, fiction, memoir, infographics; I found The Best American Magazine Writing on Amazon and read the table of contents, Google-searched the titles and authors, found the stories online, bookmarked them for later reading.

I canceled my print subscriptions, created more “Read It Later” folders.

And then came the Facebook newsfeed, new stories and articles and comics and videos posted by friends every 60 seconds. So many more things to read later. So much more content to consume. Click a link, open a new tab. Then another. I now have so many bookmark folders that, if I want to read something, I have to leave it open in a browser tab or I might never find it again. And then came my iPhone, with its own web browser, its own long line of open tabs, things that caught my eye and evoked a “click” but not yet a “read,” things that I still want to consume
someday.

And all of this, of course, raises an important question: Will I ever actually read or watch any of this stuff? When is “later” going to occur?

*

I’ve got a couple of friends who say that this is the key to immortality. Far from feeling anxious, they are emboldened by the hundreds of books on their Amazon Wish Lists, the thousands of movies on their Netflix queues, their full DVRs and watch-listed on-demand programming. They feel certain that they can never die so long as they’ve still got so many books left on their “reading lists,” so many movies left on their “viewing lists.” The moment that these lists are completed, they will have accomplished all that they set out to do, and fine, life is then allowed to end.

I’ve always liked this way of thinking, this emphasis on fun tasks that give shape and purpose to your future, compiling lists of books that you want to read so that you don’t forget any of them, building your Netflix Instant Queue so that (against all odds) you’ll always have the perfect movie for every moment, and so that—through the combined power of all those documentaries you added—you might someday know all there is to know.

But these days, the name of the game for any publisher or service—whether it’s a movie rental business, or an online publisher of Ed Wood fan fiction—is content. The more content, the better. More articles, more video, more recipes, more listicles. It’s as if every online “content provider” wants the world to perceive it as a dizzyingly tall staircase we’ll never be able to fully ascend.

There was a time when content was alluring to me, when it felt awesome to have access to 10,000 horror movies (available at the click of a button!). But now: the vastness— it’s so big that my time spent searching and list-building likely matches my time spent consuming, so big that the horizon has disappeared.

*

This is not something that a reasonable man should be stressed about.

These days, I too often respond to the black infinity of my options by freaking out, by turning off Netflix rather than watching any movie at all, by shutting my iPad rather than making a choice between the 15 different open tabs.

Maybe this is a personal problem, something that only I struggle with.

Or maybe you’re working through the same anxiety, a dozen tabs on your monitor and a full DVR at home.

Maybe I—maybe we all—need to re-evaluate how much content we want or intend to consume. Right now I seem to derive too much pleasure from simply crossing movies off the queue, clearing space from my DVR, emptying “Read It Later” folders and closing tabs, as if completion is the goal, rather than the experience of the book or article or film. If I’m going to ease this anxiety, I need to figure out how to approach these experiences in a different way than I approach my grocery list.

Maybe it’s as simple as telling myself that there is no way to consume everything, no way to consume everything, no way to consume everything


Nathan Holic teaches in șŁœÇֱȄ’s Department of Writing & Rhetoric. ÌęHe can be reached at Nathan.Holic@ucf.edu.

A few weeks ago, at the close of the university’s finals week, I sat in my home office and took stock of the clutter I’d allowed to build while immersed in teaching’s daily tedium: the piles of unread (and hopefully non-urgent) mail, the stacks of magazines, the abandoned safety pins from various 5K bibs, the old printer-paper boxes now stuffed with
who knows what? And I convinced myself that now, with a hint of free time before classes resume, I would finally de-clutter.

Except, well, putting things away wasn’t as easy as I’d imagined.

I’m expected to be part of the generation for which iTunes purchases are a first option, the generation that can do everything on the phone (completely paper-free). But my dirty secret is that I do struggle to go digital. My desk is littered with Post-its that—were I more technologically adept—might instead be rendered in some task-list app.

It wasn’t until last year that I finally switched to e-statements for my bank account, and my phone bills (still delivered via postal service) contain each month some new snarky message about how I’m killing the environment by not going paper-free. (Every month I try to log in and change this, only to be rebuffed by forgotten usernames and passwords and
aw hell, what with identity theft and the 200 passwords I must remember to avoid it, and with deep fears of a Revolution-style power outage that dissipates the cloud and all of my data, it’s a wonder I do anything paperless.) I’m 33, and feel like I’m living in a generational No Man’s Land between digital dependency and digital illiteracy.

After all, it’s considered okay for my parents to have boxes of old home movies, to have decades-old field guides to snails and mushrooms, but I am expected to be above any such attachment to outdated mediums or print artifacts. Heck, I used to make fun of my father’s bulky record collection (stored, no joke, in an old phone booth that my parents keep in their foyer), or my mother’s full bookshelf dedicated to 1970s encyclopedias. I snottily bemoaned their collections of old crap; I’d grown up withÌęMicrosoft Encarta in the ‘90s, then made my seamless transition to Google searches and Wikipedia in the 2000s. How foolish to own encyclopedias!

But now the joke’s on me. Unlike the younger, paper-free iGeneration, I’ve mostly lived a pre-cloud life. My ‘90s were consumed with CD purchasing, and so I have shelves of discs from middle and high school (Hey look, the Wayne’s World soundtrack!); my wife’s CDs are there, too, the entire catalogue of Backstreet Boys and Boyz II Men. My generation popularized Napster and the MP3 movement, sure, but we also have boxes of leftover Goo Goo Dolls and TLC CDs, the fixtures of a normal turn-of-the-century life. Not long ago, the homes of my generational peers were also cluttered with DVDs that we shouldn’t have purchased (see: the ALF boxed set), and with video rental boxes we had to keep in prominent places so that we wouldn’t forget to return them, thus accruing late fees.

Clutter felt
normal. But now, there’s no Blockbuster, and entertainment is streamlined by Netflix and Hulu, a world of cinema accessible through iPads and Blu-ray players
we’re not supposed to own physical objects
But still, many of us are burdened by those tons of plastic discs and cases.

But for someone my age, it’s the photographs that are the worst. Ìę

There are old photo albums in my home office that
well, quick question: Who still buys physical photo albums? The crunchy plastic pages
the awkward triangular shape that disrupted the perfect line of books on your shelf? Much is made about how quickly kids grow up in the Facebook Era, but here’s where kids have it good: They don’t have to open their scanners and, over and over again, transfer printed photograph to digital file
15-year-old photos that were once prized possessions, but whose quality is worse than the accidental pictures you take on your iPhone.

Let me be clear: I’m not a hoarder. I want to live digital and uncluttered. But just when I make progress with conversions, some other physical object is made irrelevant by a new app or web site. My generation is expected to negotiate the spaces between print and digital, to convert to digital what had been physical for a lifetime, but we don’t get the “pass” that is handed out to someone 10 years older
we’re not the old Mom joining Facebook and accidentally tagging her son in a picture of her dog
if it wasn’t for us, there would be no Facebook.

This year, to unclutter my office, I finally scanned the stacks of photos I’d shoe-boxed for years. And for one full day this December, I plugged my camcorder into my computer and transferred two years’ worth of videos. My son running around in his Where the Wild Things Are Halloween costume, or riding It’s a Small World at Disney and (justifiably) crying in terror. My dog belly-flopping into the pool. I rotated videos. Created folders. Renamed files. Yes, it was tiresome, but not nearly so terrible as in the days of videocassettes. The current generation will never know the awfulness of searching boxes of VHS home movies to find “Easter ‘89” for their nostalgic mothers.

Still, despite how amazing it sounds to live in the cloud, the digital uncluttering has become not liberating but exhausting. When the photos are scanned and the CDs are ripped, will I then spend full weekends “uncluttering my desktop,” endlessly organizing folders on my devices, trying to make the digital information ever more accessible, editing “Easter ‘89” to perfection, searching for the most recent digital task-list that I commended myself for having typed on my phone
but which has long since disappeared into the haze of clutter obscuring the screens of my devices?

Perhaps. Or maybe I have nothing to fear. If I just procrastinate long enough, maybe photo albums and VHS tapes will come back into style.

Nathan Holic teaches in șŁœÇֱȄ’s Department of Writing & Rhetoric. He can be reached at Nathan.Holic@ucf.edu.

Ìę

Diet Coke was my brand. I was the college instructor who (daily) entered class with cup in hand, who built a Diet Coke policy into his syllabus, whose students commented about Diet Coke on my evaluations and on RateMyProfessor. For several years I wrote a blog called “The Diet Coke Chronicles,” wherein I detailed my odd habits, my preference for specific straw length, my argument for plastic cups over styrofoam, my ideal ice-to-soda ratio.

I was Diet Coke. The Diet Coke Guy.

Sometime in the past two years, though, 7-Eleven quietly reduced its Super Big Gulp cup size from 44 ounces to 42, and then again to 40. When it happened, I exploded in mock outrage. I threatened protests and boycotts. I threatened to shop exclusively at Circle K. (I didn’t care that much, but the outrage was expected of me. I’d written thousand-word essays on styrofoam cups, for crying out loud. If anyone should speak out about this subject, it should be me.)

Days passed, weeks, months, and my average daily consumption (ADC) dipped by about two ounces through the first six months of 2012, matching the new Super Big Gulp cup volume. And when the cup size shrank again, my ADC tumbled to 40.

*

In one of my kitchen cabinets, I have (for some reason) a stack of old Super Big Gulp cups. One is absolutely blank, no 7-Eleven logo, what I call my rare “albino cup.” Another is a standard 44-ounce Super Big Gulp cup, perhaps the last original cup I saved before the stores changed from 44 ounces to 42.

And now, on occasion, I find myself using this old cup at my local 7-Eleven because the store offers a refill discount. (I save about 50 cents per transaction, which is not insubstantial when considering the totality of my annual purchases.) The clerks know it’s an older cup, and they give me winks and head-nods, as if I’ve bucked the system by not only getting a cheaper drink, but a larger drink. It should make me feel sneaky, smart.

Except now—whenever I use that old 44-ounce cup—I find myself struggling over the final 10 ounces. I find myself dumping the last of the soda. It’s a strange thing for me to do, to just call it quits and give up on the drink
I used to be the kind of guy who could drink the 64-ounce Double Gulp, who would drink warm soda just to finish it, who once (no joke) drank 13 refills during an afternoon at a sports bar watching the NCAA basketball tournament.

I’m not sure how to process this.

Am I happy because I’m consuming less Diet Coke? Certainly it’s wreaking havoc on my body (especially in heavy quantities).

Or am I sad because this feels like a metaphor for aging, like one of those comments that men my age (now in our 30s and 10 pounds heavier than in our metabolically blessed 20s, and slower, and quickly exhausted just from watching our sons spin around the room) make about our youth, like “I remember when I could eat a whole pizza by myself!”

From 44 ounces a day, to 42, to 40. And now 40 ounces is a generous estimate, as I’ll find myself going days without a Diet Coke.

*

So often, we become the brands with which we identify: the bands we follow, the sports teams, the stores at which we shop. Each, we think, is a critical part of our personality, our own brand (making us, really, a collage of other brands).

For a decade, I was the Diet Coke Guy: eccentric, mainstream but not obvious, at odds with the way others would try to define my masculinity (how many “Dude, why are you drinking Diet Coke? Worried about your girlish figure?” comments have I fielded?).

Could my fading addiction be a sign that—in my 30s, with a child—I no longer have the time to care about which brands define me? That’s a nice thought.

The other day, I ran into an old friend from college. His wife is pregnant, and I warned him about the upcoming mayhem that would soon overtake his house. At one point in the conversation, he asked, “Are you still, uh
” and he motioned an invisible cup to his lips, “the Diet Coke thing?”

And I was relieved that I could say, “Yeah, you know, I do still drink Diet Coke,” but that I could say it without real passion.

Nathan Holic teaches in șŁœÇֱȄ’s Department of Writing & Rhetoric. He can be reached at Nathan.Holic@ucf.edu.