less of that, more of this
12 Jan 2017that = sports.
yesterday, i had a great conversation with jim moffet about the insanity that is sports in america. the gist of the conversation was the amount of attention sports takes up in popular culture. if you took just a single sports-watching american male and analyzed how much of his brain was taken up by sports knowledge, i think we’d be astounded. even in just a single year, the amount of time spent watching games, keeping track of teams, players, coaches, scores, stats, and game locations is huge. take that and multiply it by every season of that sport someone has watched. take that a multiply it by the number of different sports someone watches. then take that and add up all the people who carry that knowledge around for their whole lives. can you imagine? the level of complexity at which i hear people discuss why this coach is gonna help take a certain team to a championship is unreal. the ways in which the brain stores and accesses that much information are really complex.
and yet, i still can’t get a good answer out of why people watch sports who don’t (and don’t want to) play sports they watch. the only answers i can really get are “it’s something to do” or “it builds commarderie and character.” ummmmmm… what?
this = things like port cafe.
my (mostly internet) friend abe, keeps inviting me to this thing he’s a part of called the port cafe. i haven’t yet been, but it sounds awesome. some snippets from the port cafe vision:
The Port Cafe, based out of the Port/Area IV neighborhood of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is an intentional gathering of diverse people to break bread together. We believe that most effective and natural way to create community is over shared food. The idea of accepting all people at the dinner table is both radical and also a fulfillment of the basic premise of a civilization: there should be room for all individuals to be part of something greater than themselves.
The Port Cafe was founded in 2014 by neighborhood organizers from different backgrounds. Although we have distinct geographic and cultural identities , we all found ourselves caught in the same trap of the 21st century urban American neighborhood: How can we live so close to so many other people without knowing so many of them?
We asked how our neighborhood–host to such a wide variety of cultures, ages, ethnicities, national origins, and languages–could be so divided amongst our different populations. And we began imagining the life-affirming power that our neighborhood could have if we could figure out a way to create space for diverse people to interact with one another in a safe, trusting environment.
why do we (broadly speaking) think connecting with each other about who we are as humans is less valuable than watching people compete against each other whom we will likely never meet nor that we have any direct connection to?
?!?!!??!?!?!
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note: post published on 12 jan. date error. won’t compile posts properly ater jan 11th…