All Of The Lights
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At long last, the power to light your home like a German disco is in your hands.
As much as I love my new apartment – spacious, affordable,
bug free, in an awesome neighborhood, with a private bathroom so I don’t have
to be sociable every time I have to pee – it is not without its shortcomings.
Namely, there are no overhead lights in my room, so the only way to light it is
with a bunch of lamps. This means that whenever I want to turn the lights off,
I tragically have to walk around my small room turning off each lamp
individually, a monotonous task that can take up to ten seconds on a bad day.
To understand why this is so upsetting, you have to
recognize what a big role sloth plays in my day-to-day routine. As I’ve
mentioned before, I put in ten hour days at the office – I leave the house a
little after 8:00 AM and get home around 7:00 PM, and I have to be in bed by
11:30 PM to get a full night’s sleep. I only have four and a half hours to
myself every night, and over the past year I’ve started calculating the usage
of those four and a half hours down to the second.
Naturally it was unacceptable that I should be wasting up to
30 seconds per night walking around turning lights on and off – time that I
could be spending feeling guilty for not writing something, or watching that Django Unchained shootout scene again.
So this weekend I went to the Apple Store in Santa Monica and bought a set of Philips Hue lightbulbs.
Philips Hue are energy efficient LED bulbs that use
80% less electricity than standard lightbulbs and can replicate any shade of
white, as well as any other color in the visible spectrum. What’s more, they
come with a wireless bridge you can plug into your router which allows you to
use an app on your phone to turn your lights on and off or set
their color depending on your mood:
If you’ve got white people problems, I feel bad for you son
– I’ve got 99 First World Problems but my lights aren’t one.
Maybe, like most of my friends, you’re shaking your head
that I’d buy something so frivolous and unnecessary. But look at it from my
perspective: I love science fiction. Blade
Runner is my shit. And now I can tweak the specific color and brightness of
the lights in my living space to my exact preferences, save those settings, and
then turn my lights on before I even get out of my car every night.
What I’ve realized recently is that a lot of recent
technological developments aren’t so much entirely new inventions; they’re
inventions that modify existing inventions to make them better. My car is old
enough to get married in Alabama, but because of a miraculous tape deck adapter
someone invented I can command my miraculous phone to play music and I’ll hear
it through my car’s ancient speakers. Likewise, my lamps are either old, cheap,
or both, but because of the bulbs in them they now put Captain Jean Luc
Picard’s quarters to shame in the futuristic luxury department.
So my enjoyment of my new lighting setup isn’t strictly
personal – I enjoy it both because I can turn my lights on without having to
get out of bed, and also because every time I do I’m reminded of the true power
of human ingenuity. (I try not to think about how we should probably be using
that ingenuity to stop global warming instead of making fancy lightbulbs for
lazy douchebags.)
Now that the lights are installed, though, I don’t know how
much of a timesaver they really are – for every ten seconds I spend not having
to walk around my room turning each light on or off individually, I spend
another five minutes giddily fucking around with the color and brightness
settings on my phone. I was trying to reduce the amount of time I spent illuminating my room; now I spend entire evenings turning the lights on and
off.
What’s more, in less than a week it’s made me a total
lighting snob. With my phone I now have access to a bunch of preset color and
brightness configurations such as READING, CONCENTRATE, ENERGIZE (?) or RELAX.
According to the website, each of these settings is scientifically proven to
make you more effective at whatever it is you’re trying to do. I’m 80% sure
that’s bullshit, but now I find myself hating the bright fluorescent lighting
at the office because it isn’t the optimal color for concentration. All I need
is a yoga mat and a bottle of Fiji water and I’ll be the most insufferable LA
person ever to have lived.
Hue lightbulbs are pretty new, so there’s still kinks being
worked out of the system. Sometimes, for example, the wireless bridge goes
offline and needs to be reset. This is problematic for two reasons: One, my
lights can only be controlled via the
phone, so if the router bridge isn't working when I get home that means I don’t
get to have lights that night. Two, the bridge is plugged into the apartment’s
wireless router, which is in my roommate’s room, which means that if the
wireless bridge breaks while my roommate is sleeping or masturbating, I’m up
shit creek until he’s done.
I took the first world problem of not wanting to get up to
turn off my lights and replaced it with the decidedly third world problem of
sometimes simply not having lights –
although it’s balanced by the extremely
first world problem of being a lighting snob. In the end I think it averages
out to a second world problem, and I’m okay with that.
Truman Capps has already named one of his light settings 'Morning Mist.'
Truman Capps has already named one of his light settings 'Morning Mist.'