Ranting On...Living in the Moment

Vice President Joe Biden (D-DE)

The name of this blog is "The Many Rantings of John," which is an odd moniker, and one I probably would change were I to go back and do it all over again, but I've used links and titles to it (its initials are my Twitter handle, for Pete's Sake) so often that I am sticking with it.  And I do occasionally do a rant on here, though rarely in the connotation of what we picture a "rant" being-an old man on the porch, waving his cane and telling the kids to get their skateboards off the sidewalk.  Well, if that's what you've been missing in your life, this is probably the closest you'll ever come from me.

Last night, I got to live a bit of a dream by meeting my personal hero, former Vice President Joe Biden.  I've talked about VP Biden here many times before, and I had the privilege of actually meeting the vice president and getting my photo taken with him (unfortunately, the photo is the worst picture of me ever taken, so I'm not going to be showing it to anyone else or to y'all, but I do have evidence that this moment happened).  He called me "Johnny," and I will officially only be going by that going forward, and thanked me for coming, and it was genuinely magical.  The inner teenager in me who used to spend hours watching my favorite senators on C-Span (Biden, Mary Landrieu, and Barbara Boxer being my favorites) was jumping through the ceiling, and it was a moment I'll carry with me forever.  The actual Q&A was heavier on answers than questions (Biden being famously loquacious), but it was moderated by another of the people I most admire in the public sphere, John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars and cohost of The Vlogbrothers.  Whenever I feel blue or or anxious or lost, I will literally watch a dozen or so Hank & John videos in bed until I can fall asleep or safe.  That two men who mean so much to me were on-stage while I watched-it was surreal, and truly an evening I will remember forever.

The only blemish (other than the photo that made me look like a garden troll-truly need to figure out a new smile posture or something there) on the evening was that the man who was sitting directly next to me had impossibly bad manners.  He came in late, despite the fact that he had been there for the meet-and-greet so there was no excuse for him coming in late (the meet-and-greet had ended 25 minutes before the event started), and then promptly wanted to talk to me during the opening question.  I gave him the universal index finger in front of my mouth to indicate for him to be quiet, and he took the hint, but then whipped out his phone.  There were a number of people in the first few minutes who were taking photos of Biden & Green onstage, and so I assumed this was part of what he was doing.  This is bad theater etiquette, but the rules always feel a bit looser during a Q&A than a theatrical production, so I figured I'd let it go, figuring that this was something that would disappear after about five minutes.  He Snapchatted, took another photo for posterity, and then I assumed he'd be done, but he wasn't.  Instead, he proceeded (with his phone not even on darkness setting so that it was bright blue in my eyes), to scroll through his Facebook feed and his Instagram, not paying attention to what was a deeply moving story about Vice President's first wife's death.  I am a born-and-raised Minnesotan, so confrontation is not my strong suit, but I tapped him on his shoulder, and said "that's very distracting, can you please put away your phone?" and he seemed agog that I had asked that (to add insult-to-injury, he also hadn't turned the sound off, so the clicks of likes on FB, and the automatic videos that he kept replaying on Snapchat were also creating noise).  It was obvious, though, that he couldn't handle not being on his phone-he was fidgety and looked over at me several times throughout the speech, eventually with ten minutes to spare in the speech, took it out again and started going to check how many likes his Snap and FB photos had gotten.  The women sitting next to me, as well as the people sitting behind us, were shooting him nasty looks, but he didn't pick up at it as he was ignoring the Vice President's story, again a personal one about how his son Beau tried to prepare his father for his death while he was dying of cancer.  I tapped him on the arm again and said "please put that away for the remainder of the show-it's very bright," to which he incredulously replied, "I can't do anything about it being bright," and kept scrolling.

At that moment I thought for a brief second about being angry.  There wasn't a lot I could do about what was happening (we were in the middle of the aisle, so flagging down an usher was going to be impossible), and I didn't want to ask him again for fear he would get angry or loud, but I took a deep breath, and just pretended he wasn't there.  This was a moment I'd paid a lot of money to experience, and it was a once-in-a-lifetime situation.  Getting to see two people I so admire and who have meant so much to my life on the same stage, discussing their lives and families and writing-it was a breathtaking experience.  I focused on his story, listened as he shared personal wisdom, and didn't think about the man until I left the theater.

As I left, I thought about the man sitting next to me, and anger honestly gave way to sadness and pity for him.  This is a man who completely missed out on an extraordinary life experience because he was so intent on proving to the world that he was having an extraordinary life experience.  I had seen him in line for the meet-and-greet, and he seemed very eager to meet the Vice President.  He was obviously a fan of Biden, and had opined to anyone who would listen that he wished for him to be the president.  But instead of experiencing the evening, his only real goal seemed to be to prove to people that he had gone to this.  I suspect he'll bask in the glory of a couple of dozen likes on his photos, and tell anyone who listened how cool it was to see Biden, but he didn't get to experience the night.  He didn't pay attention to the words that Biden & Green were saying, and he'll never get that back.  He was more intent on proving that he had had a momentous Saturday night, and in the process he didn't really have one.

I find this to be true more-and-more as I get older, and realize that on trips or at concerts or even small events that the important thing seems to be to get a photo to capture to share on social media, without ever really taking the time to just enjoy the moment.  I was at a concert in September with multiple different acts, and Rachel Platten was giving a very moving performance of "Fight Song" (I know, I know, but I like her), and it was drumming up a large amount of audience participation.  It was a cool moment, and yet what I saw most in the auditorium was a sea of cell phones.  Not just taking in this unique experience, but instead trying to quantify it for your friends, and in the process your memory of that moment will be you trying to shove a crappy (concert snaps are always terrible) video onto your Snapchat feed rather than singing along with 15,000 other people.

I am not immune to this need to qualify or to think that I should multitask when I clearly shouldn't.  About a year ago, I watched a movie on a Saturday afternoon, and was also casually moving through my cell phone.  The movie ended, and I started to write the review on the blog...and I realized I had almost no idea what I'd just watched.  I had been in the room for the piece the whole time, but I had also been on Twitter and reading CNN or Political Wire articles, and so large chunks of the movie had abandoned me in the process.  I couldn't tell why the main actress had ended up finding her father, and suddenly was very sad because I hadn't actually watched that movie.  Something that I loved (the concept of the movies, not the movie itself as the picture was middling), I'd just spent two hours telling myself "you're giving yourself a treat," but instead spent that time just meddling on my phone.  I'm not a luddite, and I do love my phone (and I'm inseparable from it, mostly for Twitter and political updates), but I made a vow that that would not happen again.  I never did the "bad manners" routine that the man sitting next to me did, but I also said that if I'm watching a movie, the phone's in another room.  I'm allowed a couple of photos on a trip, but the bulk of my time experiencing something needs to be just me (or we, if I'm with someone) enjoying it, not trying to capture it to make others envious or impressed.  And if I do share things from my trip, it's through a postcard, so that people will get something special in return (everyone loves mail, and I love writing postcards!).

This philosophy served me well when I went to Hawaii this past year, and had perhaps the best moment of my trip in a sort of alien way on my first night.  I had landed, thrown my suitcase into my room, taken the requisite photo of the view from the room, and then headed downstairs for dinner, and left my cell phone in the room.  No phone, no one else getting to take this time on my trip but me.  I walked around the resort, and sat on a ledge overlooking the ocean and the dwindling sun, and saw the surf break against the volcanic rocks that littered the shoreline.  It was a calming, gargantuan moment, feeling a part of the island's history and thinking about how remote I was from the rest of the world, 2400 miles west of California and truly in the middle of nowhere.  I got a table and watched a luau while enjoying a pork quesadilla that was bliss, and just felt the sea air on my face.  And I don't have a picture of any of it, because I chose instead to just live through the moments, having them in my memories.  When people ask my favorite part of the trip, I try to explain that moment, but it's lost and I realize that that's okay because it's important to just live in the present at times-not just live as if others are watching, but to live for yourself and experience something special.  And so I pity the man who sat next to me at the Biden event, not realizing what he was missing in the process, insisting to himself that he had a good time but in reality just pursuing his next source of validation.  Life is very short of wonder, so when you get to have those rare moments of it, make sure you're looking at up at what is happening in front of you, rather than down at a blank screen.