When my father first bought me Hamlet, he told me pointedly that I should memorize several of the soliloquies (Hamlet's, Polonious', etc.). No phrase seemed more vivid to me at 11 than "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" and I return to it whenever I feel a rain of mishaps.
Imagine it. You're at the Battle of Hastings. Hundreds of arrows and slings cast into the air, they arch up until gravity exerts its pull, then turn downward, bound straight for you. You crouch and hold up your shield and hope to heaven that it is sturdy enough to protect you, so you can arise, run and attack the cursed Normans.
Misfortune doesn't seem to come unaccompanied. Not devastation, misfortune. Scraping my car while parking (and cracking the glass of the headlight), not being told one has cancer.
It falls like a fall shower, out of nowhere, with wind. You might get wet, lose you hat, get hit by a flying branch. Like Friday. (Fall comes late to Washington.)
You lose your peppy stride. You wonder what your next slip will be. You go lead a support group meeting and you nearly kill yourself and your passenger not once but three times. Because you just can't pay attention.
You're unshaven because you've had an office emergency and volunteer teaching and now this. You've had coffee but it was weak and you've never woken up.
You get home and resolve not to darken your doorway on the way out ever again! No socializing. No driving. No activity that requires good reflexes, self-control, patience, sanity.
That's when you know you've been hit by "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
Showing posts with label lifestyle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lifestyle. Show all posts
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Midriffs and Breasts, Oh My!
Just a day after my fellow blogger Julie wrote about acceptable and unacceptable breasts, I found myself on the subway observing a young woman baring her midriff in a way that I found disturbing. Julie and the barer set me thinking: What is it about the baring of the female body that summons up complex, often contradictory feelings in all of us?
Allow me to explain that Julie compared reactions to a model's near nudity in a perfume ad with a bare breast feeding a baby on a parenting magazine's cover.
The subway barer in question was wearing unusually informal clothes for work: jeans with probably false rips, which probably cost a mint just for that studied "casual" look, along with a pink T-shirt a size too small emblazoned randomly, in silver, with the word "Breasts" and the names of European capitals.
How do I know she was underdressed for work? She was on a commuter line at quitting time, carrying a brief case and accompanied by a man who was very obviously from her office. She was flirting with him outrageously, grimacing seductively and performing a nearly lewd dance on a subway hand-pole, almost in the face of her office mate, who looked on with what seemed to me stolid -- and unwarranted -- disinterest. Perhaps he was very married.
What was disturbing? OK, I found her attention-seeking a bit much. But that's not it.
She was slim, attractive and had a tight, small body that could have been a model's. Except for the bare midriff, which showed a slightly protruding stomach. At first I wondered whether she was pregnant -- just barely showing, if so.
Then it hit me.
Julie's model stood naked in half light with a bowler hat covering her breasts. She was, in essence, promoting the notion that she possessed the equipment needed to perform what the nursing woman of the parenting magazine did with alacrity: nurture a child, be a mother. The advertiser is highjacking that message to proclaim that the perfume will allow its wearer to convey to a man the atavistic biopsychological message -- ingrained in us since we lived in caves -- that she is a desirable mate.
The woman on the subway was saying something similar: look, here's my uterus. I'm sure she would be horrified to hear this. She probably was flirting without quite intending to lay out such a graphic message to the public at large. Yet there it was.
I am of two minds in my reaction.
The Torquemada in me wants to banish and ban all this display of nudity. Pornography comes from the Greek pornographos. This word combines two ideas. First, porne "prostitute," a word rooted in a much earlier term meaning "something purchased," which probably referred in antiquity to female slaves sold for prostitution. Second, graphein, "to write."
In the modern meaning pornography conveys the notion of salacious writing or pictures that are deemed to be obscene, which itself means "offensive to the senses," from the French obscène, in turn probably derived from Latin obscenus (ob "onto" + cænum "filth").
Legally, in the United States we define obscene as material that "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" would regard as appealing to "a prurient interest," subject to many and changing refinements and qualifications -- all emanating from the need to balance social taste with the First Amendment.
Clearly, the obscene is not meant to be, or should not be, seen in public, according to society, and its subject matter often reduces women to objects, instead of thinking, feeling people. The model and the midriff barer could arguably be seen as promoting the objectification of women in a pornographic, obscene way.
But why -- speaks up my other mind -- am I getting my knickers in a twist?
When women choose freely (no one put a gun to Keira Knightley's head, did they?) to display physical attributes that are beautiful, they are performing art. Some day, the ad will be in a museum -- as all well-designed advertising will be -- alongside the Venus de Milo and her disturbing chopped off arms.
When the woman on the subway decided to bare her midriff I'm sure she never thought -- or did she? -- that she would prompt a little essay about her. I assume that, yes, she probably would plead guilty before a jury of her peers of premeditated, attempted seduction of the man with whom she traveled. So? All's fair in love.
Besides, I don't really wear knickers. (Real men don't wear knickers, right?)
In the end, call it art or call it obscenity, human nakedness calls out from us the most sublime and at the same time terrifying responsibilities and ideas: childbirth, commitment, bonding.
Childbirth, frightening enough, is at least a temporary experience, something women forget (else we would all be only children). Then think of trying to master the art of sharing daily life with another for, as the World War II phrase had it, "the duration." It's enough to make Peter Pans and Wendys out of all of us.
Yet nakedness also takes our breath away, expressing the possibility of nurturing and love, of unity and companionship, of beauty and solidarity. We are marvels to behold, with all our imperfections, and we can barely survive without one another.
Allow me to explain that Julie compared reactions to a model's near nudity in a perfume ad with a bare breast feeding a baby on a parenting magazine's cover.
The subway barer in question was wearing unusually informal clothes for work: jeans with probably false rips, which probably cost a mint just for that studied "casual" look, along with a pink T-shirt a size too small emblazoned randomly, in silver, with the word "Breasts" and the names of European capitals.
How do I know she was underdressed for work? She was on a commuter line at quitting time, carrying a brief case and accompanied by a man who was very obviously from her office. She was flirting with him outrageously, grimacing seductively and performing a nearly lewd dance on a subway hand-pole, almost in the face of her office mate, who looked on with what seemed to me stolid -- and unwarranted -- disinterest. Perhaps he was very married.
What was disturbing? OK, I found her attention-seeking a bit much. But that's not it.
She was slim, attractive and had a tight, small body that could have been a model's. Except for the bare midriff, which showed a slightly protruding stomach. At first I wondered whether she was pregnant -- just barely showing, if so.
Then it hit me.
Julie's model stood naked in half light with a bowler hat covering her breasts. She was, in essence, promoting the notion that she possessed the equipment needed to perform what the nursing woman of the parenting magazine did with alacrity: nurture a child, be a mother. The advertiser is highjacking that message to proclaim that the perfume will allow its wearer to convey to a man the atavistic biopsychological message -- ingrained in us since we lived in caves -- that she is a desirable mate.
The woman on the subway was saying something similar: look, here's my uterus. I'm sure she would be horrified to hear this. She probably was flirting without quite intending to lay out such a graphic message to the public at large. Yet there it was.
I am of two minds in my reaction.
The Torquemada in me wants to banish and ban all this display of nudity. Pornography comes from the Greek pornographos. This word combines two ideas. First, porne "prostitute," a word rooted in a much earlier term meaning "something purchased," which probably referred in antiquity to female slaves sold for prostitution. Second, graphein, "to write."
In the modern meaning pornography conveys the notion of salacious writing or pictures that are deemed to be obscene, which itself means "offensive to the senses," from the French obscène, in turn probably derived from Latin obscenus (ob "onto" + cænum "filth").
Legally, in the United States we define obscene as material that "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" would regard as appealing to "a prurient interest," subject to many and changing refinements and qualifications -- all emanating from the need to balance social taste with the First Amendment.
Clearly, the obscene is not meant to be, or should not be, seen in public, according to society, and its subject matter often reduces women to objects, instead of thinking, feeling people. The model and the midriff barer could arguably be seen as promoting the objectification of women in a pornographic, obscene way.
But why -- speaks up my other mind -- am I getting my knickers in a twist?
When women choose freely (no one put a gun to Keira Knightley's head, did they?) to display physical attributes that are beautiful, they are performing art. Some day, the ad will be in a museum -- as all well-designed advertising will be -- alongside the Venus de Milo and her disturbing chopped off arms.
When the woman on the subway decided to bare her midriff I'm sure she never thought -- or did she? -- that she would prompt a little essay about her. I assume that, yes, she probably would plead guilty before a jury of her peers of premeditated, attempted seduction of the man with whom she traveled. So? All's fair in love.
Besides, I don't really wear knickers. (Real men don't wear knickers, right?)
In the end, call it art or call it obscenity, human nakedness calls out from us the most sublime and at the same time terrifying responsibilities and ideas: childbirth, commitment, bonding.
Childbirth, frightening enough, is at least a temporary experience, something women forget (else we would all be only children). Then think of trying to master the art of sharing daily life with another for, as the World War II phrase had it, "the duration." It's enough to make Peter Pans and Wendys out of all of us.
Yet nakedness also takes our breath away, expressing the possibility of nurturing and love, of unity and companionship, of beauty and solidarity. We are marvels to behold, with all our imperfections, and we can barely survive without one another.
Friday, August 03, 2007
Good Girl, Bad Girl
Would it surprise you that I once believed, even as recently as five years ago, that women were congenitally unselfish? The scales have come off: women are no more selfish than men, but no less. Yet even after the women's movement the "good girl" myth (with its underside, the lore about the "bad girl") seems to shape accepted perceptions.
This came home to me in discussing recent posts, in particular one in which the blogger, a young married woman, wrote eloquently and with humor about the hazards of multitasking as a wife and mother on a day she had a motorist court date. In the asides about her husband, she made me wonder just how inconsiderate we men are.
It took the comment of a woman to open my eyes: she said that women, in general, take on the role of complaining about motherhood and housework as a kind of badge of honor. If I understood her right, it's a bit like New Yorkers who proudly boast that "da city's got da worst subways in da world!"
Now I'm not saying that all this fits Julie or her blog post. The blog just triggered a set of thoughts and e-mails that led to the notion that women sometimes push the "poor me" envelope.
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks," says Queen Gertrude to Hamlet (Hamlet, III, ii, 239), much as my female correspondent commenting about the blog post. In the play, Gertrude's remark is offered as pride before the fall, as Hamlet has set a trap in describing a woman whose behavior he will unveil to have been just like the queen's.
I set no such similar trap for my correspondent, a woman as susceptible to poorme-ism as any other, but I wondered at yet another discovery: women are as competitive with one another as men, perhaps even more fiercely so.
Perhaps I am extremely naive, or lucky, or too self-critical, or something else, or all of the preceding, but it hasn't been my experience, or at least my observation, of women until very recently. I suppose this led me to believe in the Good Girl.
You know her. She does all her homework, her room is as neat as a pin, she feeds stray cats, she looks forward to make everyone happy. (Alicia Silverstone in "Clueless.")
When she grows up she joins the Junior League, has a dignified but not cutthroat career advancing good values and community welfare, and her three dark blond, green eyed children win genuine prizes at school for academics and athletics.
Then there's the Bad Girl. You don't know her, but you may have had sex with her.
She's raunchy from the moment she becomes an adolescent, maybe at 10. She loves chocolate and moderates her consumption only to keep her figure (and appeal for the guys). She's ditzy and unaccomplished, sometimes cruel and cliquish, occasionally becomes the queen bee among other Bad Girls.
When she grows up, she either hitches her fortune to a man who regales her with wealth or she trolls for one until she is too old to find one. That's if she has not gotten married with the high school football star when she got pregnant and spent the remainder of her days in low-rent suburbs bringing him beer when he comes home from selling used cars.
OK, I got a little carried away. But you guessed: neither quite exist. And, yes, I've long been aware of the Eve-Mary archetypes and that what I have written is merely a (cheap) Americanization.
Yet I thought I knew mostly Good Girls. Or women who aspired to and often enough succeeded at being a Good Girl. Or people who could not help but worry about others more than themselves and give their all unstintingly to whatever and whomever they trusted.
Then I learned, through bitter experience that, as Rex Harrison sang in My Fair Lady,
In long-term relationships women often enough take on the role of victim, having arranged things as to preserve for themselves the privilege of being experts in their domains, to the exclusion of men, while reserving the right to go poach in the men's traditional preserves. Then watch out: to a degree you never expected, out come the competitive, self-preserving, bulldozing characteristics you never knew lay there, dormant.
In casual or shorter-term relationships, when a man tells a woman that he doesn't want to commit, it's normal for her to "forget" he said it. Then she'll complain that all she has given is unrequited.
In sum, women are selfish, at least as selfish as men.
This came home to me in discussing recent posts, in particular one in which the blogger, a young married woman, wrote eloquently and with humor about the hazards of multitasking as a wife and mother on a day she had a motorist court date. In the asides about her husband, she made me wonder just how inconsiderate we men are.
It took the comment of a woman to open my eyes: she said that women, in general, take on the role of complaining about motherhood and housework as a kind of badge of honor. If I understood her right, it's a bit like New Yorkers who proudly boast that "da city's got da worst subways in da world!"
Now I'm not saying that all this fits Julie or her blog post. The blog just triggered a set of thoughts and e-mails that led to the notion that women sometimes push the "poor me" envelope.
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks," says Queen Gertrude to Hamlet (Hamlet, III, ii, 239), much as my female correspondent commenting about the blog post. In the play, Gertrude's remark is offered as pride before the fall, as Hamlet has set a trap in describing a woman whose behavior he will unveil to have been just like the queen's.
I set no such similar trap for my correspondent, a woman as susceptible to poorme-ism as any other, but I wondered at yet another discovery: women are as competitive with one another as men, perhaps even more fiercely so.
Perhaps I am extremely naive, or lucky, or too self-critical, or something else, or all of the preceding, but it hasn't been my experience, or at least my observation, of women until very recently. I suppose this led me to believe in the Good Girl.
You know her. She does all her homework, her room is as neat as a pin, she feeds stray cats, she looks forward to make everyone happy. (Alicia Silverstone in "Clueless.")
When she grows up she joins the Junior League, has a dignified but not cutthroat career advancing good values and community welfare, and her three dark blond, green eyed children win genuine prizes at school for academics and athletics.
Then there's the Bad Girl. You don't know her, but you may have had sex with her.
She's raunchy from the moment she becomes an adolescent, maybe at 10. She loves chocolate and moderates her consumption only to keep her figure (and appeal for the guys). She's ditzy and unaccomplished, sometimes cruel and cliquish, occasionally becomes the queen bee among other Bad Girls.
When she grows up, she either hitches her fortune to a man who regales her with wealth or she trolls for one until she is too old to find one. That's if she has not gotten married with the high school football star when she got pregnant and spent the remainder of her days in low-rent suburbs bringing him beer when he comes home from selling used cars.
OK, I got a little carried away. But you guessed: neither quite exist. And, yes, I've long been aware of the Eve-Mary archetypes and that what I have written is merely a (cheap) Americanization.
Yet I thought I knew mostly Good Girls. Or women who aspired to and often enough succeeded at being a Good Girl. Or people who could not help but worry about others more than themselves and give their all unstintingly to whatever and whomever they trusted.
Then I learned, through bitter experience that, as Rex Harrison sang in My Fair Lady,
Let a woman in your life and your serenity is through,Or rather, less comically and much less in the Victorian mode, I experienced the rude awakening that even Good Girls were not as selfless as I thought.
she'll redecorate your home, from the cellar to the dome,
and then go on to the enthralling fun of overhauling you...
In long-term relationships women often enough take on the role of victim, having arranged things as to preserve for themselves the privilege of being experts in their domains, to the exclusion of men, while reserving the right to go poach in the men's traditional preserves. Then watch out: to a degree you never expected, out come the competitive, self-preserving, bulldozing characteristics you never knew lay there, dormant.
In casual or shorter-term relationships, when a man tells a woman that he doesn't want to commit, it's normal for her to "forget" he said it. Then she'll complain that all she has given is unrequited.
In sum, women are selfish, at least as selfish as men.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Failed Friendship?
Why don't people you choose to tell your most recent unpleasant encounter with humanity, even if it was over the proverbial hangnail, simply refrain from telling you it isn't so bad or from setting in motion a new edition of the Spanish Inquisition concerning the event or -- worst of all! -- from suggesting that the other person might have been right?
We all encounter rudeness or perceived slights. We may be right or we may be wrong. But when we choose to tell someone we know, we usually presume that there is some friendship and that we will receive some expression of support.
Yesterday I went to get a haircut. Toward the end of my cut, someone came in and said he needed a tiny trim on one side. Next thing I know, with nothing more than "excuse me a minute," my barber is cutting the other guy for five minutes!
His new assistant, a woman who is not really very good at this, won't cut my hair unless I move to "her" chair.
Whose the customer here? Who is paying? I got up and left -- not before giving both a piece of my mind and not a red cent.
Enter the friends. One wasn't there. Ring, ring, ring.
A second first said "oh," then tried to calm me down, then asked me how this had happened. Not one word that might suggest that I, the aggrieved person, was in need of comfort. When I said I'd rather not discuss the details and explained how I felt and how inadequate the response, suddenly I was cast in the role of "bad guy" and I had to put up with tears.
The third person tried to explain the barber's actions and said the event had no importance and -- again -- took offense at my suggestion that these were not responses of a friend.
Coincidentally, or perhaps to soothe my aggrieved soul, I went to see My Best Friend (Mon Meilleur Ami), a delightful French film I heartily recommend. Like the protagonist, I do not make friends easily, but unlike him, I think I do understand the demands of friendship -- especially when a friend is in need.
When you feel hurt by others, rightly or wrongly, isn't it the duty of a loyal friend to express solidarity without questions asked?
We all encounter rudeness or perceived slights. We may be right or we may be wrong. But when we choose to tell someone we know, we usually presume that there is some friendship and that we will receive some expression of support.
Yesterday I went to get a haircut. Toward the end of my cut, someone came in and said he needed a tiny trim on one side. Next thing I know, with nothing more than "excuse me a minute," my barber is cutting the other guy for five minutes!
His new assistant, a woman who is not really very good at this, won't cut my hair unless I move to "her" chair.
Whose the customer here? Who is paying? I got up and left -- not before giving both a piece of my mind and not a red cent.
Enter the friends. One wasn't there. Ring, ring, ring.
A second first said "oh," then tried to calm me down, then asked me how this had happened. Not one word that might suggest that I, the aggrieved person, was in need of comfort. When I said I'd rather not discuss the details and explained how I felt and how inadequate the response, suddenly I was cast in the role of "bad guy" and I had to put up with tears.
The third person tried to explain the barber's actions and said the event had no importance and -- again -- took offense at my suggestion that these were not responses of a friend.
Coincidentally, or perhaps to soothe my aggrieved soul, I went to see My Best Friend (Mon Meilleur Ami), a delightful French film I heartily recommend. Like the protagonist, I do not make friends easily, but unlike him, I think I do understand the demands of friendship -- especially when a friend is in need.
When you feel hurt by others, rightly or wrongly, isn't it the duty of a loyal friend to express solidarity without questions asked?
Friday, July 20, 2007
New Word
The principal benefit of having an inflammation and allergic reaction that left me literally needing a hand was that the friend who lent the hand also gave me a new word: dysthymia.
Pronounced, against every instinctive impulse of mine, dis-THIGH-me-ah ("You say dis-thigh-me-ah, I say dis-thee-me-ah..."), it refers to a low level, high-functioning form of depression (see here).
How do I come by this piece of information? Six months ago or so I was given steroids to help fight off the effects of an allergic reaction to a prescribed anti-inflammation drug. One of the perils of being generally healthy is that when you get sick you don't know what pharmaceuticals your body doesn't like.
Now I knew steroids from reports about sports figures using them illegally. Myself, I recoil at the idea of taking an aspirin for a headache.
So there I was with the top sports stars and -- wow! -- it was like I was on my third cup of coffee all day long. I was punning like a pro, smiling at and seeing insights in everything and at my charismatic best. (It's not blowing my horn to say that I have a modicum of charisma, but this was charisma ... on steroids. Hey, it really was!)
People noticed. I had never been this lively. It was distinctively me, but like a me that had emerged from under water. But then I began to be on the down slope.
That was more familiar.
In my history there was a very cheerful child who never cried and always smiled until I was about 5. Then I changed into the largely solitary, melancholy, ruminant proto-blogger I've been all my life.
Courtly and charming on the surface, repressed underneath and -- alas! -- never successfully so over the long term. In the wash my monsters come out and I'm a pain.
But what if I had dysthymia, as my friend (a certified and experienced therapist) said? What if the happy person who delights in charming others for the love of life, the one who lurks beneath the surface, can be brought out?
OK, now I've been diagnosed with dysthymia and I'm taking a pill that was supposed to help the real me, the me everyone likes, emerge.
For the first month ... nothing much, I felt. Not like steroids.
But I hadn't been down. I told the nurse who called that I didn't feel much of a change; then I said other people say they've seen a difference.
"Oh, they've noticed!" The jaded, flea-bitten me wondered what her cheerful tone meant.
Now I've noticed. I'm not on the unsustainable steroids high, but there seems to be a safety net to my moodiness and my anger. I go down so far, then it fizzles out. I let it go, then I bounce back up.
Science has been telling us for years that everything we value about ourselves, our personality, our presumed "soul" or "spirit," our individuality -- all of it -- are really a bunch of chemical compounds. Now that the evidence is in front of me I don't know whether I like the conclusion or not.
I would prefer to think otherwise.
Yes, I have not become president of the United States, nor won the Nobel Prize for literature. But in some small ways I've battled against the obstacles of life and won my small victories. Part of that comes from the person I have chosen to be.
Or so I thought. Now, I don't know. Except for one little hint.
Unaccustomed to taking daily medicine, I forget to take it at least once a week. The first couple of times this happened it was an unmitigated disaster. I was a bear just out of hibernation, hungry and in a bad mood.
But more recently, a day or two accidentally without pills no longer triggers Mount Vesuvius. My therapist friend says that it's the cumulative effect of the drug.
My therafriend is wrong. I think I have somehow "learned" to dim the lights of my own worst side. But, OK, just to be sure, I'll get up and take my pill now.
Pronounced, against every instinctive impulse of mine, dis-THIGH-me-ah ("You say dis-thigh-me-ah, I say dis-thee-me-ah..."), it refers to a low level, high-functioning form of depression (see here).
How do I come by this piece of information? Six months ago or so I was given steroids to help fight off the effects of an allergic reaction to a prescribed anti-inflammation drug. One of the perils of being generally healthy is that when you get sick you don't know what pharmaceuticals your body doesn't like.
Now I knew steroids from reports about sports figures using them illegally. Myself, I recoil at the idea of taking an aspirin for a headache.
So there I was with the top sports stars and -- wow! -- it was like I was on my third cup of coffee all day long. I was punning like a pro, smiling at and seeing insights in everything and at my charismatic best. (It's not blowing my horn to say that I have a modicum of charisma, but this was charisma ... on steroids. Hey, it really was!)
People noticed. I had never been this lively. It was distinctively me, but like a me that had emerged from under water. But then I began to be on the down slope.
That was more familiar.
In my history there was a very cheerful child who never cried and always smiled until I was about 5. Then I changed into the largely solitary, melancholy, ruminant proto-blogger I've been all my life.
Courtly and charming on the surface, repressed underneath and -- alas! -- never successfully so over the long term. In the wash my monsters come out and I'm a pain.
But what if I had dysthymia, as my friend (a certified and experienced therapist) said? What if the happy person who delights in charming others for the love of life, the one who lurks beneath the surface, can be brought out?
OK, now I've been diagnosed with dysthymia and I'm taking a pill that was supposed to help the real me, the me everyone likes, emerge.
For the first month ... nothing much, I felt. Not like steroids.
But I hadn't been down. I told the nurse who called that I didn't feel much of a change; then I said other people say they've seen a difference.
"Oh, they've noticed!" The jaded, flea-bitten me wondered what her cheerful tone meant.
Now I've noticed. I'm not on the unsustainable steroids high, but there seems to be a safety net to my moodiness and my anger. I go down so far, then it fizzles out. I let it go, then I bounce back up.
Science has been telling us for years that everything we value about ourselves, our personality, our presumed "soul" or "spirit," our individuality -- all of it -- are really a bunch of chemical compounds. Now that the evidence is in front of me I don't know whether I like the conclusion or not.
I would prefer to think otherwise.
Yes, I have not become president of the United States, nor won the Nobel Prize for literature. But in some small ways I've battled against the obstacles of life and won my small victories. Part of that comes from the person I have chosen to be.
Or so I thought. Now, I don't know. Except for one little hint.
Unaccustomed to taking daily medicine, I forget to take it at least once a week. The first couple of times this happened it was an unmitigated disaster. I was a bear just out of hibernation, hungry and in a bad mood.
But more recently, a day or two accidentally without pills no longer triggers Mount Vesuvius. My therapist friend says that it's the cumulative effect of the drug.
My therafriend is wrong. I think I have somehow "learned" to dim the lights of my own worst side. But, OK, just to be sure, I'll get up and take my pill now.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
A New Adolescence
In my continuing ruminations about people roughly my age, the Boomers, I have come to the conclusion that many of us are in the throes of a new adolescence.
Just a few days ago I qualified for the Bureau of Labor Statistics' label "older worker," yet I feel sometimes that I have just turned 17. It's better than four or five years ago, when the collapse of a marriage had rendered me 11 years old: technically capable of taking care of myself, but sorely lacking in the common sense needed to do it well.
I remember well that first dance at which I mingled with the "boys," afraid once again of what would happened if I asked a "girl" to dance. Then I discovered the bar and recalled how much "courage" came from its concoctions.
Or that first date, I think we went to a concert, walked around some parks and tentatively held hands. Just like when I was 16 and my girlfriend, the first I ever kissed, was 14.
Or even my first car accident on a highway, a fender-bender really, due to a very peculiar driving history, which I'll save for another post.
Adolescence. The sense that one is alive, everything is very confusing, no one really prepared you for this, you'll live forever but you'll die of unrequited love, you'll try out new feelings and if people don't like the results let them look away. Freedom. Zest.
I can't help thinking that I'm in an adolescence in reverse. I go to book clubs, group discussions, dances, barbecues. Flirt, laugh, talk. Then retreat to my cave to ruminate.
In this new stage I started out adult, organized (or repressed), subject to obligations and routines; eventually I'll come out childless, unconnected to anyone in particular, retired, perennially out of school, seeking a sandbox in which to lose myself in another childhood, until I'm unborn back into the darkness whence I came.
Just a few days ago I qualified for the Bureau of Labor Statistics' label "older worker," yet I feel sometimes that I have just turned 17. It's better than four or five years ago, when the collapse of a marriage had rendered me 11 years old: technically capable of taking care of myself, but sorely lacking in the common sense needed to do it well.
I remember well that first dance at which I mingled with the "boys," afraid once again of what would happened if I asked a "girl" to dance. Then I discovered the bar and recalled how much "courage" came from its concoctions.
Or that first date, I think we went to a concert, walked around some parks and tentatively held hands. Just like when I was 16 and my girlfriend, the first I ever kissed, was 14.
Or even my first car accident on a highway, a fender-bender really, due to a very peculiar driving history, which I'll save for another post.
Adolescence. The sense that one is alive, everything is very confusing, no one really prepared you for this, you'll live forever but you'll die of unrequited love, you'll try out new feelings and if people don't like the results let them look away. Freedom. Zest.
I can't help thinking that I'm in an adolescence in reverse. I go to book clubs, group discussions, dances, barbecues. Flirt, laugh, talk. Then retreat to my cave to ruminate.
In this new stage I started out adult, organized (or repressed), subject to obligations and routines; eventually I'll come out childless, unconnected to anyone in particular, retired, perennially out of school, seeking a sandbox in which to lose myself in another childhood, until I'm unborn back into the darkness whence I came.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
A New Aesthetic
It all began with a comment passed from mouth to mouth: several Argentines, to a pair of Brazilians, to an American woman, to me. As the journalistic jargon would have it, well-informed observers (one imagines little men standing on a hill scanning the horizon with binoculars) affirm that the cosmetic surgery in greatest demand in Argentina is breast reduction.
You read right: reduction.
The gamine look, typical of the postwar French street waifs, with its slim, often boyish, sexually teasing appeal, is valued for women. Tom Wolfe calls them "boys with breasts" in A Man in Full. For the man, there's the hairless, or hair plucked, slim but not muscular look. The preferred skin is cafe au lait or Asian; the favored face is clean of obvious ethnic characteristics or, at a minimum, it hints at a cultural blend.
The desired character of women is now decisive and lively; the men calm and easy-going.
Think of Angeline Jolie's full and luscious lips or Halle Berry's prim and European pout or the transcultural look of Keanu Reeves, who in The Matrix played Neo, the new man.
The new aesthetic proposes, as I see it, the perspective of a generation that has seen neither war, nor hunger, nor pestilence, nor death. Today's young adults of around 25 began to become aware when the world was already cybernetic; in their adolescence they glided seamlessly into an Internet newly opened to non-academic users.
It's the L'Auberge Espagnole generation: thriving, open to everything, pluralist. To them, traditionally masculine and feminine roles are intermingled, because to the extent possible they share the common human task for the first time. The races, colors, nationalities, creeds, are all part of a quilt, humanity in fusion.
Perhaps this is the generation addressed by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill), possible president of the United States, or by Paul David Hewson (better known as Bono) in his humanitarian hegira in Africa, or by Danish novelist Peter Høeg, who Smilla's Sense of Snow playfully fused the humanities and mathematics.
Even though this trio does not belong to the new generation, they seem to express the new zeitgeist, just as The Beatles did in 1964 for the postwar Baby Boom generation that was really made up of their younger siblings.
Every aesthetic has its significance: the equilibrium of the Renaissance after medieval chaos; Baroque tension through the wars of the religion and the breakup of the European consensus; the theocratic escape of Gothic style as compensation for the loss of Greco-Roman culture caused by the onslaught of illiterate Teutonic hordes; the European absolute monarchs' excess, expressed in Rococo; and so on and so forth.
At the moment we see in this aesthetic an ethnic and cultural fusion, pansexualism and possibility. For the moment, it inspires optimism.
You read right: reduction.
The lollobrigidian augmentation is a thing of the past, according to the Feminine Party spokespersons. (Incidentally, my adjective -- also passé -- was once rumored to have been accepted by the French Academy to describe hilly terrain.)
These days the thing is to have bosoms no larger than an American champagne glass (see image).
Another correspondent adds:
I heard this from a transvestite leader: those who in the ´90s got silicone implants regret it today. They envy the young transvestites, who rarely even try to enlarge their breasts because, according to them, the masculine market (their clients in prostitution) demands adolescent breasts. Note that transvestites try to emulate the women that men desire.Are we facing a new human aesthetic in the 21st century? If so, it is anti-rubenesque, transsexual and multiracial.
The gamine look, typical of the postwar French street waifs, with its slim, often boyish, sexually teasing appeal, is valued for women. Tom Wolfe calls them "boys with breasts" in A Man in Full. For the man, there's the hairless, or hair plucked, slim but not muscular look. The preferred skin is cafe au lait or Asian; the favored face is clean of obvious ethnic characteristics or, at a minimum, it hints at a cultural blend.
The desired character of women is now decisive and lively; the men calm and easy-going.
Think of Angeline Jolie's full and luscious lips or Halle Berry's prim and European pout or the transcultural look of Keanu Reeves, who in The Matrix played Neo, the new man.
The new aesthetic proposes, as I see it, the perspective of a generation that has seen neither war, nor hunger, nor pestilence, nor death. Today's young adults of around 25 began to become aware when the world was already cybernetic; in their adolescence they glided seamlessly into an Internet newly opened to non-academic users.
It's the L'Auberge Espagnole generation: thriving, open to everything, pluralist. To them, traditionally masculine and feminine roles are intermingled, because to the extent possible they share the common human task for the first time. The races, colors, nationalities, creeds, are all part of a quilt, humanity in fusion.
Perhaps this is the generation addressed by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill), possible president of the United States, or by Paul David Hewson (better known as Bono) in his humanitarian hegira in Africa, or by Danish novelist Peter Høeg, who Smilla's Sense of Snow playfully fused the humanities and mathematics.
Even though this trio does not belong to the new generation, they seem to express the new zeitgeist, just as The Beatles did in 1964 for the postwar Baby Boom generation that was really made up of their younger siblings.
Every aesthetic has its significance: the equilibrium of the Renaissance after medieval chaos; Baroque tension through the wars of the religion and the breakup of the European consensus; the theocratic escape of Gothic style as compensation for the loss of Greco-Roman culture caused by the onslaught of illiterate Teutonic hordes; the European absolute monarchs' excess, expressed in Rococo; and so on and so forth.
At the moment we see in this aesthetic an ethnic and cultural fusion, pansexualism and possibility. For the moment, it inspires optimism.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Monday Morning Angst or ...?
Few disappointments in life compare to waking up Monday morning with the prospect that the escape of the past two days from one's labor, much as one may love one's work, is over.
In Western societies, at least, since the 3rd century Christian sabbatarianism has given us one day off, the day known as the Day of the Sun in ancient Egyptian astrology. Clergy rebaptized it as the day of the son (of the deity), Sunday, a day of worship.
Saturday, the original Sabbath, was added as a day of rest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in response to trade unions rather than religiosity. Thus was born the weekend.
Note the shift from the sabbatical impulse to the weekend of recreation. One was about setting a time for Someone Else, the other is about setting aside time to re-create, or remake, oneself.
In the so-called Protestant work ethic the insistence is on work as the means to "salvation" (Arbeit Macht Frei, work shall make you free, proclaimed a slogan on the gates of several nazi concentration camps). In a more Dionysian and perhaps more humane perspective on human activity, we accept that we become tired from ordered work, particularly that which mostly benefits someone else, and need to replenish ourselves with joy.
Let's ask ourselves the defining question: Do we live to work or do we work to live?
(If I work hard, is it because it fulfills me in some way or is it for a joyless reason? Are the goods and services I get as the fruits of labor really sources of joy to me or are they what I think I am expected to have? Do I own them or do they own me?)
Remember: no matter how many lives you are counting on based on what clergy tell you, you have only one life in the here and now.
Make your time here count for something. Take as many steps as you can beyond the place at which you first gained awareness of yourself and the world.
Even if you expect to find the proverbial 72 virgins in the afterlife, what makes you think that the first time done 72 times in the great thereafter is any better than the first time done here, just once, in the back seat of a Dodge? Besides, who's to say that the 72 virgins won't be surly ruler-wielding Catholic nuns ? (Imagine Allah saying, "Ha, ha, fooled ya, Al Qaeda!")
Seriously, folks, remember to laugh. That's a cosmic order!
In Western societies, at least, since the 3rd century Christian sabbatarianism has given us one day off, the day known as the Day of the Sun in ancient Egyptian astrology. Clergy rebaptized it as the day of the son (of the deity), Sunday, a day of worship.
Saturday, the original Sabbath, was added as a day of rest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in response to trade unions rather than religiosity. Thus was born the weekend.
Note the shift from the sabbatical impulse to the weekend of recreation. One was about setting a time for Someone Else, the other is about setting aside time to re-create, or remake, oneself.
In the so-called Protestant work ethic the insistence is on work as the means to "salvation" (Arbeit Macht Frei, work shall make you free, proclaimed a slogan on the gates of several nazi concentration camps). In a more Dionysian and perhaps more humane perspective on human activity, we accept that we become tired from ordered work, particularly that which mostly benefits someone else, and need to replenish ourselves with joy.
Let's ask ourselves the defining question: Do we live to work or do we work to live?
(If I work hard, is it because it fulfills me in some way or is it for a joyless reason? Are the goods and services I get as the fruits of labor really sources of joy to me or are they what I think I am expected to have? Do I own them or do they own me?)
Remember: no matter how many lives you are counting on based on what clergy tell you, you have only one life in the here and now.
Make your time here count for something. Take as many steps as you can beyond the place at which you first gained awareness of yourself and the world.
Even if you expect to find the proverbial 72 virgins in the afterlife, what makes you think that the first time done 72 times in the great thereafter is any better than the first time done here, just once, in the back seat of a Dodge? Besides, who's to say that the 72 virgins won't be surly ruler-wielding Catholic nuns ? (Imagine Allah saying, "Ha, ha, fooled ya, Al Qaeda!")
Seriously, folks, remember to laugh. That's a cosmic order!
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Slings and Arrows
Nothing reminds me more of the powerlessness of a single individual than sitting down first thing in the morning in a car that refuses to show signs of life no matter how you insert and turn the key in the ignition.
It's not just the helplessness of being unable to displace 1.6 tons of metal and upholstery down the road to the mechanic. Nor is it the patent inability to impress upon roadside assistance staff that waiting for two hours is not really your idea of fun.
Nor is it, finally, the notion that there's really nothing you can do about the frustration but to let it bore holes in the thin veneer of confidence in life you had finally developed.
Shakespeare said this, and so many other things, best:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
As you wait for things to get better, for help to arrive, for someone to show the slightest pity, you begin to think of the myriad ways in which a seemingly vast army fires its slings and arrows at you in daily living.
Think of the phones that don't work, the computer components that weren't right or didn't work out of the box. The bus driver who couldn't be bothered to stop where you wanted, even though you rang the bell. The fellow worker who doesn't care if his sloughing off means you have to work harder.
At every turn the slings and arrows chip away at your armor until one day you lie bleeding, wondering just how long you can hang on all alone.
Do you take it or do you fight? Which do you think is better? What if you lose?
In the end, you know, you'll lose. In the end you'll be aged and alone and no one will understand any of your references, if they bother to try to understand you at all.
It's not just the helplessness of being unable to displace 1.6 tons of metal and upholstery down the road to the mechanic. Nor is it the patent inability to impress upon roadside assistance staff that waiting for two hours is not really your idea of fun.
Nor is it, finally, the notion that there's really nothing you can do about the frustration but to let it bore holes in the thin veneer of confidence in life you had finally developed.
Shakespeare said this, and so many other things, best:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
As you wait for things to get better, for help to arrive, for someone to show the slightest pity, you begin to think of the myriad ways in which a seemingly vast army fires its slings and arrows at you in daily living.
Think of the phones that don't work, the computer components that weren't right or didn't work out of the box. The bus driver who couldn't be bothered to stop where you wanted, even though you rang the bell. The fellow worker who doesn't care if his sloughing off means you have to work harder.
At every turn the slings and arrows chip away at your armor until one day you lie bleeding, wondering just how long you can hang on all alone.
Do you take it or do you fight? Which do you think is better? What if you lose?
In the end, you know, you'll lose. In the end you'll be aged and alone and no one will understand any of your references, if they bother to try to understand you at all.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Happy Father's Day, Andy Brown
I have just finished watching the pilot episode of the television show that eased my way to healing my "distraught heart." That's the term the narrator and one-man Greek chorus uses for the malady afflicting the main character, Dr. Andy Brown (Treat Williams), when told the good doctor speaks out loud to his dead wife.
The show is Everwood, a family drama set in an eponymous fictional town in Colorado, to which world-renown neurosurgeon Brown has moved from New York City with his son Ephram (Gregory Smith) and daughter Delia (Vivien Cardone) after the death of his wife Julia (Brenda Strong) in a car accident. In the picture above, from left to right: Ephram; Dr. Abbott the local doctor (Tom Amandes), jock son Bright (Chris Pratt); Delia; Andy; Amy Abbott, Ephram's love interest (Emily Van Camp).
Throughout the show, the most powerful character for me was the affable, sometimes corny, always quick-with-a-quip Andy. The character is fiftyish, only a year younger than me, yet often enough I adopted him as my role model. I ached as he attempted to communicate with his concert-piano genius son, he engaged in rediscovering love in middle age, attempted to grapple with his own demons and those of others, even as he made a fool of himself.
This particular drama never topped the charts through the four years that it ran before its last episode on June 5, but it was the top of my "must see" TV for two and a half of those years. It was, however, a show that delivered to TV-land the two essential actresses of the top-rated Desperate Housewives. Wisteria Lane's deceased Alice, whose death and narrator role set off the first season of Dantesque desperation, played in an earlier incarnation, so to speak, none other than Andy Brown's Julia. Similarly, Marsha Cross was Dr. Abbott's HIV-infected sister before she was Bree Van De Kamp.
But as narrator Irv (John Besley) might have said in Everwood, you could find out that and more anywhere else.
My interest in Everwood arose in a particular way. For 25 years I had not had a television; then I bought my first color TV in the middle of Everwood's second season in the winter of 2003.
Like Everwood's Andy Brown, I suffered from a distraught heart. My wife had left after 27 years of marriage and I was living in an emotional haze as confusing as Andy's and with difficulties communicating with my younger son that rivaled his own struggle with the sarcastic, often cutting Ephram. Amid the disintegration of my family, I was ripe for the picking of any television producer with a clever way to pluck at the heartstrings.
No surprise, then, that when I found Everwood, it became my sacrament, my therapy and my most precious entertainment. Case in point: I was asked to serve on the board of a nonprofit for which I volunteered and only agreed when I found out that board meetings did not coincide with the show.
My first viewing of the pilot came later, when I was given the boxed set of the first season, which had begun in 2001. For one summer I eased my Everwood-withdrawal with the episodes I had never seen before.
My viewing it again on Father's Day this year -- today -- probably has something to do with my knowledge that Andy and Ephram, who started out so rough with each other in the Oedipal struggle depicted in the pilot, gave me hope. Over the years they eventually talked things out, and as Andy stabilized and Ephram matured, they came to have a worthy relationship.
It's a hope that has not come to fruition in my life yet. Today, neither of my sons has called nor written. (Really, it's not their fault, even though it's a symptom: their mother, in a classic case of pre-emptive rejection, banned the celebration of Mother's Day; the now-grown children's assumption was that I felt the same way, even though I do not, see here.)
Nor am I on the path to a final romantic resolution, all tied with a bow as TV could do in the final episode, when Andy finally wooed the woman we've all been cheering for him to connect with.
Still, two weeks ago, when the camera panned away from the final kisses and embraces, to reveal the sleeping town of Everwood in its last night, I wished I could go there once again one day. Alas, I can't. There is no Everwood; the show, indeed its network, has been cancelled.
But I can still spend Father's Day with my favorite father and wish Andy, wherever he is, a well-deserved day.
The show is Everwood, a family drama set in an eponymous fictional town in Colorado, to which world-renown neurosurgeon Brown has moved from New York City with his son Ephram (Gregory Smith) and daughter Delia (Vivien Cardone) after the death of his wife Julia (Brenda Strong) in a car accident. In the picture above, from left to right: Ephram; Dr. Abbott the local doctor (Tom Amandes), jock son Bright (Chris Pratt); Delia; Andy; Amy Abbott, Ephram's love interest (Emily Van Camp).Throughout the show, the most powerful character for me was the affable, sometimes corny, always quick-with-a-quip Andy. The character is fiftyish, only a year younger than me, yet often enough I adopted him as my role model. I ached as he attempted to communicate with his concert-piano genius son, he engaged in rediscovering love in middle age, attempted to grapple with his own demons and those of others, even as he made a fool of himself.
This particular drama never topped the charts through the four years that it ran before its last episode on June 5, but it was the top of my "must see" TV for two and a half of those years. It was, however, a show that delivered to TV-land the two essential actresses of the top-rated Desperate Housewives. Wisteria Lane's deceased Alice, whose death and narrator role set off the first season of Dantesque desperation, played in an earlier incarnation, so to speak, none other than Andy Brown's Julia. Similarly, Marsha Cross was Dr. Abbott's HIV-infected sister before she was Bree Van De Kamp.
But as narrator Irv (John Besley) might have said in Everwood, you could find out that and more anywhere else.
My interest in Everwood arose in a particular way. For 25 years I had not had a television; then I bought my first color TV in the middle of Everwood's second season in the winter of 2003.
Like Everwood's Andy Brown, I suffered from a distraught heart. My wife had left after 27 years of marriage and I was living in an emotional haze as confusing as Andy's and with difficulties communicating with my younger son that rivaled his own struggle with the sarcastic, often cutting Ephram. Amid the disintegration of my family, I was ripe for the picking of any television producer with a clever way to pluck at the heartstrings.
No surprise, then, that when I found Everwood, it became my sacrament, my therapy and my most precious entertainment. Case in point: I was asked to serve on the board of a nonprofit for which I volunteered and only agreed when I found out that board meetings did not coincide with the show.
My first viewing of the pilot came later, when I was given the boxed set of the first season, which had begun in 2001. For one summer I eased my Everwood-withdrawal with the episodes I had never seen before.
My viewing it again on Father's Day this year -- today -- probably has something to do with my knowledge that Andy and Ephram, who started out so rough with each other in the Oedipal struggle depicted in the pilot, gave me hope. Over the years they eventually talked things out, and as Andy stabilized and Ephram matured, they came to have a worthy relationship.
It's a hope that has not come to fruition in my life yet. Today, neither of my sons has called nor written. (Really, it's not their fault, even though it's a symptom: their mother, in a classic case of pre-emptive rejection, banned the celebration of Mother's Day; the now-grown children's assumption was that I felt the same way, even though I do not, see here.)
Nor am I on the path to a final romantic resolution, all tied with a bow as TV could do in the final episode, when Andy finally wooed the woman we've all been cheering for him to connect with.
Still, two weeks ago, when the camera panned away from the final kisses and embraces, to reveal the sleeping town of Everwood in its last night, I wished I could go there once again one day. Alas, I can't. There is no Everwood; the show, indeed its network, has been cancelled.
But I can still spend Father's Day with my favorite father and wish Andy, wherever he is, a well-deserved day.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Confessions of a "Futbol" Hater
For the eight and a half years that I lived in Argentina, when I was between the ages of 9 and 17, whenever a soccer championship approached I fervently requested of the Divinity that the national, or most popular, team ... lose.
Why was I such a heretic in soccer-mad Argentina at the age that most boys are fans, not foes, of sport? Let me count the whys.
Because when the favored local team beats a rival the fans come out in sweaty, smelly, noisy droves honking cars, blocking traffic, making an absolute nuisance of themselves.
Because when the leading team then wins a regional or national league championship, even more fans, some from the team's defeated following, come out in sweaty, smelly, noisy droves honking cars, blocking traffic, making an absolute nuisance of themselves.
Because when a national selection team wins an international championship, the Libertadores de America Cup or the World Cup, out come millions of people (in addition to the regular fans of particular teams), people who have never even imagined the feel of a soccer ball's leather, in sweaty, smelly, noisy droves honking cars, blocking traffic, making an absolute nuisance of themselves.
What's my beef with sweaty, smelly, noisy droves honking cars, blocking traffic, making an absolute nuisance of themselves?
First of all, they all claim "we" won.
Speak for yourself, masked man. "We" didn't win anything. The people who won are the 11 men who trained a lot. Unfortunately, these are the same fools who, when someone puts a microphone in front of them (hugely bad idea), come up with gems such as: "We played hard and the other team fought hard too, but I guess we had better spirit."
Pro-found! One point for soccer players over American football players: they don't say "dee-fence." But that's because Americans have essentially stunk at soccer so far and are light-years away from making a dent in the sport.
Second, when it gets international, soccer becomes the worst instigator of hate-a-thons.
Argentines call Brazilians names, racism pops up, bloody dictatorships prop themselves up; there's even one recorded war (Honduras-El Salvador, 1969) set off by an international soccer match. (Trivia: Hondurans expelled all the Salvadoran immigrants and found themselves suddenly lacking mayors, watchmakers, cobblers, essential folk; the Salvadorans are known in Central America as the hardiest, rise-to-the-top folks in the region.)
Thirdly, like almost every commercialized sport, soccer promotes illiteracy and stupidity and big soccer events simply impose both on the majority, fans or not.
Take the term "fútbol," as the sport is called in South America. It comes from "football," which is what the English youths who brought the sport called it in the 1880s. But then there's "orsaid" (or-SYDE), for off-side and a whole variety of sandlot Spanglish that makes the players look even more illiterate than they are already.
Of course, to folks as poor as Brazil's legendary Pelé once was, futbol has been the path to upward mobility, much the way basketball remains in South Central LA, South Side Chicago, Harlem or Anacostia. But think of the millions of shattered dreams!
Fine, you may say that my attitude is a betrayal of guydom, that maybe I just didn't get the "sports gene" all guys get. Guilty as charged! My sons never had my competition for the sports pages.
In the next two months I intend to studiously avoid all talk, broadcast or news of the FIFA World Cup. I can't stand futbol!
Why was I such a heretic in soccer-mad Argentina at the age that most boys are fans, not foes, of sport? Let me count the whys.
Because when the favored local team beats a rival the fans come out in sweaty, smelly, noisy droves honking cars, blocking traffic, making an absolute nuisance of themselves.
Because when the leading team then wins a regional or national league championship, even more fans, some from the team's defeated following, come out in sweaty, smelly, noisy droves honking cars, blocking traffic, making an absolute nuisance of themselves.
Because when a national selection team wins an international championship, the Libertadores de America Cup or the World Cup, out come millions of people (in addition to the regular fans of particular teams), people who have never even imagined the feel of a soccer ball's leather, in sweaty, smelly, noisy droves honking cars, blocking traffic, making an absolute nuisance of themselves.
What's my beef with sweaty, smelly, noisy droves honking cars, blocking traffic, making an absolute nuisance of themselves?
First of all, they all claim "we" won.
Speak for yourself, masked man. "We" didn't win anything. The people who won are the 11 men who trained a lot. Unfortunately, these are the same fools who, when someone puts a microphone in front of them (hugely bad idea), come up with gems such as: "We played hard and the other team fought hard too, but I guess we had better spirit."
Pro-found! One point for soccer players over American football players: they don't say "dee-fence." But that's because Americans have essentially stunk at soccer so far and are light-years away from making a dent in the sport.
Second, when it gets international, soccer becomes the worst instigator of hate-a-thons.
Argentines call Brazilians names, racism pops up, bloody dictatorships prop themselves up; there's even one recorded war (Honduras-El Salvador, 1969) set off by an international soccer match. (Trivia: Hondurans expelled all the Salvadoran immigrants and found themselves suddenly lacking mayors, watchmakers, cobblers, essential folk; the Salvadorans are known in Central America as the hardiest, rise-to-the-top folks in the region.)
Thirdly, like almost every commercialized sport, soccer promotes illiteracy and stupidity and big soccer events simply impose both on the majority, fans or not.
Take the term "fútbol," as the sport is called in South America. It comes from "football," which is what the English youths who brought the sport called it in the 1880s. But then there's "orsaid" (or-SYDE), for off-side and a whole variety of sandlot Spanglish that makes the players look even more illiterate than they are already.
Of course, to folks as poor as Brazil's legendary Pelé once was, futbol has been the path to upward mobility, much the way basketball remains in South Central LA, South Side Chicago, Harlem or Anacostia. But think of the millions of shattered dreams!
Fine, you may say that my attitude is a betrayal of guydom, that maybe I just didn't get the "sports gene" all guys get. Guilty as charged! My sons never had my competition for the sports pages.
In the next two months I intend to studiously avoid all talk, broadcast or news of the FIFA World Cup. I can't stand futbol!
Friday, June 02, 2006
The Idiot
Friday afternoon, minutes to closing. I'm sick, trying to supervise my company via e-mail. Then I learn that someone has committed a devastating error: he has e-mailed proprietary internal information to all our customers, instead of our publications.
I am surrounded by idiots!
Two people checked this. One was less experienced than the other, his oversight is forgivable. But the other, who has been setting up this routine e-mail for five years, what is his excuse?
I would like to put him in front of a firing squad, then have the squad shoot and miss killing him, the way the French did in Madrid when Napoleon invaded Spain.
(People talk about the "cruel Spanish," but no one ever mentions the round-the-clock summary executions by the French in Madrid, with firing squads so exhausted that they routinely missed and left people bleeding to death for as long as three days.)
OK, so I won't execute anybody.
Instead, let me ponder the idiot for a moment. The Greek idiotes had nothing to do with the 19th- and early 20th-century common word for a condition now called "profound mental retardation."
To the Greeks, the word was more closely connected with the name that Sigmund Freud gave to the unconscious center of very basic, visceral desires, such as hunger, rage, and sex. I'm referring, of course, to the Id.
(Yes, yes, the Greeks didn't develop scientific theory about the unconscious, but their art and culture showed an intution of it, much as Fyodor Dostoevsky explained guilt with pristine clarity 40 years before Freud came along. This is why Nietzsche was absolutely right in calling Greece the cradle of every archetype in Western thought. But I digress.)
The Greeks believed that democracy could only thrive if people participated in public life and concerned themselves with the interests of the community. Those who focused too intensely on their own self-interests without regard for the commonwealth were called, you guessed, idiotes. The selfish idiot made bad decisions for the community and eventually his incompetence is what stuck to the word, instead of the original selfishness.
The ancient Greek sense of an idiot explains perfectly well what is going on in our economy and our society. Everywhere incompetence reigns supreme, from the White House to the tradesmen that service your house.
Indeed, yesterday a military helicopter crash in perfectly good weather killed four people in Georgia. So I searched for military helicopter crashes and got over 4.8 million hits. Crashes in Georgia, in Iraq, in California, everywhere.
There's even a Web site for military humor with a whole category of jokes about helicopter crashes!
Based on an actual 1995 purchase by the Royal Air Force of Chinook helicopters similar to the one crashed in Georgia, I'm guessing that each one of these babies costs about $60 million.
So, ha, ha, funny, a group of 20-somethings piloting the craft, or a group of 40-somethings who built it or maintained it, just wasted $60 million of our tax dollars! (And let's not forget the human loss.)
When you observe the self-serving leadership and the self-serving tradesmen and the self-serving military incompetents and all the idiotes that seemingly have taken over, is it such a mystery that everything is going so wrong everywhere?
At the core, incompetence flourishes because we have lost attentiveness to detail, caring, pride in one's work, or a genuine interest in the effect of one's behavior on the community at large. The citizenry and the mass of employees have become atomized Ids, looking after their primal urges and little else.
The company be damned, the taxpayer be screwed, the nation go to hell, the world ... the world doesn't even exist to the Id.
I am surrounded by idiots!
Two people checked this. One was less experienced than the other, his oversight is forgivable. But the other, who has been setting up this routine e-mail for five years, what is his excuse?
I would like to put him in front of a firing squad, then have the squad shoot and miss killing him, the way the French did in Madrid when Napoleon invaded Spain.
(People talk about the "cruel Spanish," but no one ever mentions the round-the-clock summary executions by the French in Madrid, with firing squads so exhausted that they routinely missed and left people bleeding to death for as long as three days.)
OK, so I won't execute anybody.
Instead, let me ponder the idiot for a moment. The Greek idiotes had nothing to do with the 19th- and early 20th-century common word for a condition now called "profound mental retardation."
To the Greeks, the word was more closely connected with the name that Sigmund Freud gave to the unconscious center of very basic, visceral desires, such as hunger, rage, and sex. I'm referring, of course, to the Id.
(Yes, yes, the Greeks didn't develop scientific theory about the unconscious, but their art and culture showed an intution of it, much as Fyodor Dostoevsky explained guilt with pristine clarity 40 years before Freud came along. This is why Nietzsche was absolutely right in calling Greece the cradle of every archetype in Western thought. But I digress.)
The Greeks believed that democracy could only thrive if people participated in public life and concerned themselves with the interests of the community. Those who focused too intensely on their own self-interests without regard for the commonwealth were called, you guessed, idiotes. The selfish idiot made bad decisions for the community and eventually his incompetence is what stuck to the word, instead of the original selfishness.
The ancient Greek sense of an idiot explains perfectly well what is going on in our economy and our society. Everywhere incompetence reigns supreme, from the White House to the tradesmen that service your house.
Indeed, yesterday a military helicopter crash in perfectly good weather killed four people in Georgia. So I searched for military helicopter crashes and got over 4.8 million hits. Crashes in Georgia, in Iraq, in California, everywhere.
There's even a Web site for military humor with a whole category of jokes about helicopter crashes!
Based on an actual 1995 purchase by the Royal Air Force of Chinook helicopters similar to the one crashed in Georgia, I'm guessing that each one of these babies costs about $60 million.
So, ha, ha, funny, a group of 20-somethings piloting the craft, or a group of 40-somethings who built it or maintained it, just wasted $60 million of our tax dollars! (And let's not forget the human loss.)
When you observe the self-serving leadership and the self-serving tradesmen and the self-serving military incompetents and all the idiotes that seemingly have taken over, is it such a mystery that everything is going so wrong everywhere?
At the core, incompetence flourishes because we have lost attentiveness to detail, caring, pride in one's work, or a genuine interest in the effect of one's behavior on the community at large. The citizenry and the mass of employees have become atomized Ids, looking after their primal urges and little else.
The company be damned, the taxpayer be screwed, the nation go to hell, the world ... the world doesn't even exist to the Id.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Time Machine
I am sick. Sore throat. Coughing. Sputtering. Sneezing. Mild fever.
Remember when you were a kid? You could take a day off from school, lie in bed and mother would bring you cookies and puzzles?
I want a time machine.
Remember when you were a kid? You could take a day off from school, lie in bed and mother would bring you cookies and puzzles?
I want a time machine.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Mothering and Fathering
The Mothers' Day just passed and the impending Fathers' Day turns my mind to the notion of mothering and fathering, so essential to all of us at some points in our lives.
Without both we would not be here. Without a mother we likely would not have survived our first year; without a father we can stumble through adult life. The roles are traditionally different. The mother nurtures the young, the father sends off the young adult into the world outside the family.
In families in which one parent is dead or absent, as the one in which I grew up, often a mother or a father will try to do both and ease the heartbreak in both child and parent. For there is no greater hole in the heart than when father is no longer sitting at the dinner table on Fathers' Day or when mother is gone from the hearth on Mothers' Day.
Yet I can attest, also, that the hole closes and heals when you begin to father or to mother your own child, or someone else's. Then, by happy and unintentional coincidence, you end up parenting the child inside you.
There is, of course, a certain mother and father chauvinism at work in how we recall our progenitors. My mother, now dead for years, used to think Mother's Day was better than Easter or Christmas; in my teenage years I thought that was a bit self-serving. Of course, the greeting card companies agree and the politicians would have nothing but good to say about fighting for apple pie and Mom.
But that's not how Mother's Day started.
Originally, it was a call for peace and disarmament. The holiday was first celebrated in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1908, under the leadership of by Anna Jarvis, who had begun organizing women to improve sanitation in 1858 and to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors after the Civil War. Her appeal to motherhood as an ideal of peace was embraced by Julia Ward Howe in a poetic proclamation of Mother's Day in 1870.
Two years after Jarvis' West Virginia celebration, Sonora Smart Dodd celebrated her father, William Jackson Smart, who had raised her and five other children in Spokane, Washington. Mothers' Day was officially proclaimed a holiday by President Woodrow Wilson, Father's Day by President Lyndon Johnson.
Parenting is about peace and disarmament, about nurturing, inspiring, and simply being there, all with no thought of recompense or reward. If the commercialism wears on you, you are not alone. Anna Jarvis protested against Mothers Day in the 1920s, once the holiday took off and commercialization set in.
Yet we all can celebrate motherhood and fatherhood in everyday ways -- without a holiday. I can paint no better picture of it than what I saw recently upon approaching the home of a friend I intended to drop in on by surprise one evening.
I approached the house and saw my friend teaching her young teenage daughter dance steps, her son prancing about, perhaps mockingly, yet in utter, unabashed joy. At one point another child, an older daughter, came over to enfold everyone in her arms. It was a charming, warm scene that I knew my arrival would only disrupt. So I stood there a few minutes peering in, as if I were watching a Disney movie about an idealized family having clean fun on a Saturday night ... only this was real.
I recalled a few moments of the sort that I had experienced with my sons and I envied that she still had that priceless time. Then I tiptoed to my car. In my last quick look everyone behind that window still looked happy and loved and warm.
And they were.
Without both we would not be here. Without a mother we likely would not have survived our first year; without a father we can stumble through adult life. The roles are traditionally different. The mother nurtures the young, the father sends off the young adult into the world outside the family.
In families in which one parent is dead or absent, as the one in which I grew up, often a mother or a father will try to do both and ease the heartbreak in both child and parent. For there is no greater hole in the heart than when father is no longer sitting at the dinner table on Fathers' Day or when mother is gone from the hearth on Mothers' Day.
Yet I can attest, also, that the hole closes and heals when you begin to father or to mother your own child, or someone else's. Then, by happy and unintentional coincidence, you end up parenting the child inside you.
There is, of course, a certain mother and father chauvinism at work in how we recall our progenitors. My mother, now dead for years, used to think Mother's Day was better than Easter or Christmas; in my teenage years I thought that was a bit self-serving. Of course, the greeting card companies agree and the politicians would have nothing but good to say about fighting for apple pie and Mom.
But that's not how Mother's Day started.
Originally, it was a call for peace and disarmament. The holiday was first celebrated in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1908, under the leadership of by Anna Jarvis, who had begun organizing women to improve sanitation in 1858 and to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors after the Civil War. Her appeal to motherhood as an ideal of peace was embraced by Julia Ward Howe in a poetic proclamation of Mother's Day in 1870.
Two years after Jarvis' West Virginia celebration, Sonora Smart Dodd celebrated her father, William Jackson Smart, who had raised her and five other children in Spokane, Washington. Mothers' Day was officially proclaimed a holiday by President Woodrow Wilson, Father's Day by President Lyndon Johnson.
Parenting is about peace and disarmament, about nurturing, inspiring, and simply being there, all with no thought of recompense or reward. If the commercialism wears on you, you are not alone. Anna Jarvis protested against Mothers Day in the 1920s, once the holiday took off and commercialization set in.
Yet we all can celebrate motherhood and fatherhood in everyday ways -- without a holiday. I can paint no better picture of it than what I saw recently upon approaching the home of a friend I intended to drop in on by surprise one evening.
I approached the house and saw my friend teaching her young teenage daughter dance steps, her son prancing about, perhaps mockingly, yet in utter, unabashed joy. At one point another child, an older daughter, came over to enfold everyone in her arms. It was a charming, warm scene that I knew my arrival would only disrupt. So I stood there a few minutes peering in, as if I were watching a Disney movie about an idealized family having clean fun on a Saturday night ... only this was real.
I recalled a few moments of the sort that I had experienced with my sons and I envied that she still had that priceless time. Then I tiptoed to my car. In my last quick look everyone behind that window still looked happy and loved and warm.
And they were.
Monday, March 13, 2006
No Problemo
My experiences with Apple illustrate a situation that has become commonplace in the 21st century.
You go to a store and buy gadget X. You go home and try to get it working and it fails to turn on. Or it works for a week, then it dies.
You go back to the store, where a twentysomething with a goatee smiles idiotically and shrugs, saying, "No problemo."
No problemo?
Let's first start by informing the public that "problemo" is not a word in any language. The English word problem, meaning "a difficult question proposed for solution," comes from the Old French problème, which in turn comes from the Latin problema (from which Italian and Spanish get problema).
The Latin came from Greek problema (transliterated from the Greek alphabet), which itself derived from proballein "to propose," from the combination of pro "forward" and ballein "to throw."
So we have tossed the kid a hot potato and he smugly proclaims it's no biggy, we can get it fixed or get another.
Wait a cotton-pickin' minute here!
You paid the store good money. If you used a credit card, they checked and got the payment authorized.
The money was good the instant they got it. They didn't go to a restaurant get told that, "Sorry, those dollars just aren't working." They didn't have to take those malfunctioning dollars to the U.S. Treasury where some young thing named Tracy said "No problemo!"
Nope. So why is it not a problem that you had to go back to the store to repair or replace the shoddy machine even though you bought it with perfectly good legal tender?
You go to a store and buy gadget X. You go home and try to get it working and it fails to turn on. Or it works for a week, then it dies.
You go back to the store, where a twentysomething with a goatee smiles idiotically and shrugs, saying, "No problemo."
No problemo?
Let's first start by informing the public that "problemo" is not a word in any language. The English word problem, meaning "a difficult question proposed for solution," comes from the Old French problème, which in turn comes from the Latin problema (from which Italian and Spanish get problema).
The Latin came from Greek problema (transliterated from the Greek alphabet), which itself derived from proballein "to propose," from the combination of pro "forward" and ballein "to throw."
So we have tossed the kid a hot potato and he smugly proclaims it's no biggy, we can get it fixed or get another.
Wait a cotton-pickin' minute here!
You paid the store good money. If you used a credit card, they checked and got the payment authorized.
The money was good the instant they got it. They didn't go to a restaurant get told that, "Sorry, those dollars just aren't working." They didn't have to take those malfunctioning dollars to the U.S. Treasury where some young thing named Tracy said "No problemo!"
Nope. So why is it not a problem that you had to go back to the store to repair or replace the shoddy machine even though you bought it with perfectly good legal tender?
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Customer Unfriendly
Apple Computer, with its kindergarten sugarcoating of everything technical, popularized the term "user friendly," but don't be fooled. Apple products are no easier or effective, work no better, than any others.
As a matter of fact, Apple didn't invent the term "user friendly"; that was the work of the late architect and industrial designer, Ronald L. Mace (1941-1998), who pioneered buildings and devices accessible to disabled people.
More to the point of this essay, Apple customer service is decidedly unfriendly. Take my iPod. Please!
I was given the gadget as a present in the latter half of last year but have only been able to actually enjoy it for a few weeks.
First problem: you have to have a Mac (cough, sputter, spit) or Windows XP to load it. I had Windows 98. One of my sons had to format it and load my music on his laptop. Eventually I downgraded to XP.
Second: a couple of weeks into using it the thing simply stopped working. Wouldn't turn on no matter what I did.
I spent weeks trying everything imaginable. I even bought a new USB port card for my computer and downloaded, installed and uninstalled their software for, oh, a dozen times. I thought it was my fault somehow or that, as with most computing things, it was something I could fix.
I can fix most computer things -- short of a hard drive dying or a power supply melting down, in other words, things that you really need a factory to repair.
On the Apple Web site I put the problem and they sent a cute little box with foam in it to put the thing and have their messenger vendor take it back to Apple's Mecca in California's silicon valley. A couple of weeks later, they sent it back -- allegedly repaired.
Third: the iPod worked for a few days until it got a "sad icon." A computer with a frown on its monitor appears and points you to the support Web site, where they give you a list of things to try -- none of which worked.
So once again I played the cute-box game with Apple, this time with two or three of those oh-so-unhelpful corporate public relations e-mails in between, each saying essentially that very little was wrong their machine but they fixed it. The iPod came back in a about a week.
Fourth ... are you getting tired of counting? Me too, except that I'm living through the litany. So let's press on.
The "fixed" iPod worked for less then a day, sputtering between songs until it stopped and got "sad" again.
!@#$%^&* iPod!!!!!!!!!!!!
So I decided to call. (Stop laughing.)
I got someone who would not apologize, would not offer the slightest empathy. They got Bethany from Autism Casting Central -- zero emotion and totally wrapped up in her point of view of things. Bethany unhelpfully pointed me to the Web site, where they would send me a box and ...
I asked if she could actually help me. "I can fill out the Web form for you."
Sigh! Ok, so I answered her questions as she did. I spoke slowly, giving her time to type but she seemed baffled that there would be so many data elements.
"Does your address usually have all that in it?"
Bethany had been absent from school the day they explained that addresses may consist of name, organization, street address, city, state and zip (and, yes, country, continent, galaxy, ending with "The Universe").
Then she would lapse into silence without telling me what was going for two or three minutes at a time.
At the end of it she game me a "case number" ("Doctor, what do you make of this case of Sadiconitis?" "Oh, my, we'll have to fly in a transplant specialist.")
Fifth: My experience left me unconvinced that Bethany had solved matters. So I called their corporate headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.
I said I was a very dissatisfied customer who actually wanted to talk to somebody who would resolve my problem with some assurance that the person would understand and actually solve it.
I got Jackie. She was kind, said "oh, dear!" at appropriate moments, and generally seemed puzzled that the thing had been sent in twice and still didn't work. She suggested that I go to an Apple store and talk to a "Genius," which is what Apple calls its face-to-face tech support people.
Sounded like a plan. Jackie cancelled the cute box, which was probably already flying over Arizona coming my way.
Sixth: I looked up Apple stores. They have none in that remote, unknown little hamlet I live in called Washington, D.C., where there's a rumor of a village idiot named George B-something. Hmm ... but they have several stores in the suburbs.
The white suburbs, let's make that plain. Washington is 80 percent black -- no Apple store. Washington suburbs are 80 percent white -- 3 Apple stores. You do the math.
Then a funny thing happened on the way to the Apple store. You have to make an appointment on the same day and they will tell you when there are Geniuses available. I clicked on the Apple store closest to me and it went to a colorful Concierge page, then asked for my name and e-mail, then finished with a notice that they couldn't help me. Then it went back to the page with the store's address and phone number.
What? They won't serve me because they know by Web that I'm a Spic?
Seventh: I called the store. Taylor told me to "calm down." I couldn't be helped because the Bethesda facility is a "ministore" with only 1 Genius. (Somehow, I was not surprised that genius is in short supply at Apple.)
So here I am ... dreading the whole thing. I have to get up early one morning, log in, get an appointment for a time of their choosing, as if I have nothing to do, no work to do, no life to lead.
I don't even know whether the Apple Genius will turn out to be as genial as the iPod they sold and "repaired" twice or whether I will be forever trapped in the quest for the Holy Grail of iPod Repair.
No, that won't happen. One of these days, after my 17th cute box, 103rd telephone customer disservice representative and my 54th Genius, they'll say "The warranty has expired, sorry."
As a matter of fact, Apple didn't invent the term "user friendly"; that was the work of the late architect and industrial designer, Ronald L. Mace (1941-1998), who pioneered buildings and devices accessible to disabled people.
More to the point of this essay, Apple customer service is decidedly unfriendly. Take my iPod. Please!
I was given the gadget as a present in the latter half of last year but have only been able to actually enjoy it for a few weeks.
First problem: you have to have a Mac (cough, sputter, spit) or Windows XP to load it. I had Windows 98. One of my sons had to format it and load my music on his laptop. Eventually I downgraded to XP.
Second: a couple of weeks into using it the thing simply stopped working. Wouldn't turn on no matter what I did.
I spent weeks trying everything imaginable. I even bought a new USB port card for my computer and downloaded, installed and uninstalled their software for, oh, a dozen times. I thought it was my fault somehow or that, as with most computing things, it was something I could fix.
I can fix most computer things -- short of a hard drive dying or a power supply melting down, in other words, things that you really need a factory to repair.
On the Apple Web site I put the problem and they sent a cute little box with foam in it to put the thing and have their messenger vendor take it back to Apple's Mecca in California's silicon valley. A couple of weeks later, they sent it back -- allegedly repaired.
Third: the iPod worked for a few days until it got a "sad icon." A computer with a frown on its monitor appears and points you to the support Web site, where they give you a list of things to try -- none of which worked.
So once again I played the cute-box game with Apple, this time with two or three of those oh-so-unhelpful corporate public relations e-mails in between, each saying essentially that very little was wrong their machine but they fixed it. The iPod came back in a about a week.
Fourth ... are you getting tired of counting? Me too, except that I'm living through the litany. So let's press on.
The "fixed" iPod worked for less then a day, sputtering between songs until it stopped and got "sad" again.
!@#$%^&* iPod!!!!!!!!!!!!
So I decided to call. (Stop laughing.)
I got someone who would not apologize, would not offer the slightest empathy. They got Bethany from Autism Casting Central -- zero emotion and totally wrapped up in her point of view of things. Bethany unhelpfully pointed me to the Web site, where they would send me a box and ...
I asked if she could actually help me. "I can fill out the Web form for you."
Sigh! Ok, so I answered her questions as she did. I spoke slowly, giving her time to type but she seemed baffled that there would be so many data elements.
"Does your address usually have all that in it?"
Bethany had been absent from school the day they explained that addresses may consist of name, organization, street address, city, state and zip (and, yes, country, continent, galaxy, ending with "The Universe").
Then she would lapse into silence without telling me what was going for two or three minutes at a time.
At the end of it she game me a "case number" ("Doctor, what do you make of this case of Sadiconitis?" "Oh, my, we'll have to fly in a transplant specialist.")
Fifth: My experience left me unconvinced that Bethany had solved matters. So I called their corporate headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.
I said I was a very dissatisfied customer who actually wanted to talk to somebody who would resolve my problem with some assurance that the person would understand and actually solve it.
I got Jackie. She was kind, said "oh, dear!" at appropriate moments, and generally seemed puzzled that the thing had been sent in twice and still didn't work. She suggested that I go to an Apple store and talk to a "Genius," which is what Apple calls its face-to-face tech support people.
Sounded like a plan. Jackie cancelled the cute box, which was probably already flying over Arizona coming my way.
Sixth: I looked up Apple stores. They have none in that remote, unknown little hamlet I live in called Washington, D.C., where there's a rumor of a village idiot named George B-something. Hmm ... but they have several stores in the suburbs.
The white suburbs, let's make that plain. Washington is 80 percent black -- no Apple store. Washington suburbs are 80 percent white -- 3 Apple stores. You do the math.
Then a funny thing happened on the way to the Apple store. You have to make an appointment on the same day and they will tell you when there are Geniuses available. I clicked on the Apple store closest to me and it went to a colorful Concierge page, then asked for my name and e-mail, then finished with a notice that they couldn't help me. Then it went back to the page with the store's address and phone number.
What? They won't serve me because they know by Web that I'm a Spic?
Seventh: I called the store. Taylor told me to "calm down." I couldn't be helped because the Bethesda facility is a "ministore" with only 1 Genius. (Somehow, I was not surprised that genius is in short supply at Apple.)
So here I am ... dreading the whole thing. I have to get up early one morning, log in, get an appointment for a time of their choosing, as if I have nothing to do, no work to do, no life to lead.
I don't even know whether the Apple Genius will turn out to be as genial as the iPod they sold and "repaired" twice or whether I will be forever trapped in the quest for the Holy Grail of iPod Repair.
No, that won't happen. One of these days, after my 17th cute box, 103rd telephone customer disservice representative and my 54th Genius, they'll say "The warranty has expired, sorry."
Friday, February 10, 2006
The Way Things Weren't
Seductive as it may be to look back upon a supposed golden age of extended families and traditional marriage, once we examine the way things actually were, the story is quite different.
This comes to mind as I recall the words of my maternal grandmother Ercilia in one of the series of notebooks that she came to title her Home Encyclopedia. Writing in in May 1959, at the age of 82, she had this to say about old age and, implicitly as we shall see, extended families:
Old age is the most unfortunate stage of life: you become clumsy and unpleasant, your face wrinkled and ugly, you suffer hearing loss, you bother others with constant repetition. In such circumstances, it would be most sensible for there to be a "Retreat for the Elderly."
These words were penned three years before she died. Ercilia had gone to live with my uncle Firo and aunt Lila, who were devoted to her.
You might have thought of their house as an impromptu artist colony. Lila, a pianist, still had students and their manglings of Beethoven's Für Elise on one of her pianos will echo forever in my brain. Firo was an artist in retirement who turned his imagination to his garden and to telling endless stories to his nephew.
My grandmother was a reclusive writer, leaving behind a dozen or so notebooks of poems, recollections and famous epigrams. Firo, who himself had his share of ailments, famously brought his mother-in-law a whole variety of healthful teas.
Yet the bedridden Ercilia, my family's last 19th century grand dame, was a ghost of the lady who would never step out into the street unless she was dressed to the nines, in her stole and flamboyant black hat. She understood her decline and she obviously detested her state, wishing for her own version of an ice floe.
The same can be said about the marriages of friends and relatives of my parents' generation, whom I shall allow the safe haven of anonymity and privacy. Only now as they age and die are the torturous and closeted secrets of even the most "perfect" unions coming to light.
The newly deceased Betty Friedan described the woman's side in her localized and pointed description of "the problem that has no name" in her acclaimed 1963 work The Feminine Mystique:
It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — "Is this all?"
And the men? Who could forget John Cheever's story The Country Husband, in which protagonist Francis Weed experiences a crash landing outside Philadelphia yet can barely get a word in edgewise at home, between his bickering children and impassively efficient wife's serving dinner. It is the kind of scene that might have inspired Henry David Thoreau to write that "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
It isn't mere happenstance that once men and women were allowed to voice their despair, 50% of all first marriages and 75% of all second marriages came to end in divorce.
When I think of appeals to a better time in the past when the aged were supposedly at peace in a Waltonesque family network of love or an age in which men were men and women were mothers in hallowed structures supposedly protected by law, I am wont to recall the title of Simone Signoret's memoirs, Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be.
This comes to mind as I recall the words of my maternal grandmother Ercilia in one of the series of notebooks that she came to title her Home Encyclopedia. Writing in in May 1959, at the age of 82, she had this to say about old age and, implicitly as we shall see, extended families:
Old age is the most unfortunate stage of life: you become clumsy and unpleasant, your face wrinkled and ugly, you suffer hearing loss, you bother others with constant repetition. In such circumstances, it would be most sensible for there to be a "Retreat for the Elderly."
These words were penned three years before she died. Ercilia had gone to live with my uncle Firo and aunt Lila, who were devoted to her.
You might have thought of their house as an impromptu artist colony. Lila, a pianist, still had students and their manglings of Beethoven's Für Elise on one of her pianos will echo forever in my brain. Firo was an artist in retirement who turned his imagination to his garden and to telling endless stories to his nephew.
My grandmother was a reclusive writer, leaving behind a dozen or so notebooks of poems, recollections and famous epigrams. Firo, who himself had his share of ailments, famously brought his mother-in-law a whole variety of healthful teas.
Yet the bedridden Ercilia, my family's last 19th century grand dame, was a ghost of the lady who would never step out into the street unless she was dressed to the nines, in her stole and flamboyant black hat. She understood her decline and she obviously detested her state, wishing for her own version of an ice floe.
The same can be said about the marriages of friends and relatives of my parents' generation, whom I shall allow the safe haven of anonymity and privacy. Only now as they age and die are the torturous and closeted secrets of even the most "perfect" unions coming to light.
The newly deceased Betty Friedan described the woman's side in her localized and pointed description of "the problem that has no name" in her acclaimed 1963 work The Feminine Mystique:
It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — "Is this all?"
And the men? Who could forget John Cheever's story The Country Husband, in which protagonist Francis Weed experiences a crash landing outside Philadelphia yet can barely get a word in edgewise at home, between his bickering children and impassively efficient wife's serving dinner. It is the kind of scene that might have inspired Henry David Thoreau to write that "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
It isn't mere happenstance that once men and women were allowed to voice their despair, 50% of all first marriages and 75% of all second marriages came to end in divorce.
When I think of appeals to a better time in the past when the aged were supposedly at peace in a Waltonesque family network of love or an age in which men were men and women were mothers in hallowed structures supposedly protected by law, I am wont to recall the title of Simone Signoret's memoirs, Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be.
Saturday, January 14, 2006
On Becoming a Woman
"I miss Lapwing," some folks have written to me. I miss Lapwing, too, even though I was (am?) that insouciante young woman inside the skin of a much crankier middle-aged man.
Who was Lapwing and who is Lapwing? I've already explained the origins of the name and it's author (see here), and when people say they miss Lapwing they don't mean either. They mean they miss the distinctly female personality of Lapwing.
I didn't set out to create a female Lapwing. Indeed, I never came out and told anyone Lapwing was female. When some curious souls asked whether Lapwing's relationship with Cecilieaux included bed, I adopted a Sphinx-like silence.
It was men, men who wanted to know whether the author of Lapwing's e-mail and Lapwing's blog was a man or a woman, men who wrote to meet Lapwing, men who began referring to "her" while Lapwing made strenous efforts to write without using personal pronouns ... they were the ones who made Lapwing feminine. Then there were some women who believed the men or to whom Lapwing sounded female.
Truth in labelling: I belong to the male persuasion with no interest in changing. I am heterosexual.
And yet, and yet ... Lapwing seemed to be female. She was a 30-something know-it-all young woman. A bit biting at times, yet a softie in the end: a pacifist, a person concerned for children. Stop the presses: I have those qualities.
Lapwing, however, had a lighter touch than I and when she was insulted or hurt she would not let the sun go down on her wrath. She did not return rudeness in kind. Lapwing ended up, by acclamation, becoming a woman.
It was quite an experience. I never lied. I never invented things to trick people. These were my honest feelings, the honest facts (with a small genital omission).
Is there such a thing as a female personality? I used to think not. But I think now that there is. Or rather, that we assign to certain behavior the label feminine and to other the label masculine.
It was fun trying out being a woman without any messy biological work or serious legal complications.
Women can speak up gently, can embarrass, can call rowdy behavior to a stop with a figurative wagging of their finger. A woman never gets into a fight. She wins by raising her eyebrows. No one dares outright challenge a woman to go mano a mano.
There are, of course, a whole lot of troglodytes out there -- you know who you are -- who think nothing of belittling a woman in a way they'd be afraid to do so with a man. Yes, I learned that if you are a woman on the Net, at least the other women will always stick up for you. They won't pick up your cudgel and beat the brutes' brains out, as they deserve. No, they'll quietly send a little message of support.
At last, I had a sense of what women do among themselves. I experienced a little bit of the sorority, so healing, so supportive, so helpful, that binds women in a way that is not echoed in the male bond of fraternity.
Who was Lapwing and who is Lapwing? I've already explained the origins of the name and it's author (see here), and when people say they miss Lapwing they don't mean either. They mean they miss the distinctly female personality of Lapwing.
I didn't set out to create a female Lapwing. Indeed, I never came out and told anyone Lapwing was female. When some curious souls asked whether Lapwing's relationship with Cecilieaux included bed, I adopted a Sphinx-like silence.
It was men, men who wanted to know whether the author of Lapwing's e-mail and Lapwing's blog was a man or a woman, men who wrote to meet Lapwing, men who began referring to "her" while Lapwing made strenous efforts to write without using personal pronouns ... they were the ones who made Lapwing feminine. Then there were some women who believed the men or to whom Lapwing sounded female.
Truth in labelling: I belong to the male persuasion with no interest in changing. I am heterosexual.
And yet, and yet ... Lapwing seemed to be female. She was a 30-something know-it-all young woman. A bit biting at times, yet a softie in the end: a pacifist, a person concerned for children. Stop the presses: I have those qualities.
Lapwing, however, had a lighter touch than I and when she was insulted or hurt she would not let the sun go down on her wrath. She did not return rudeness in kind. Lapwing ended up, by acclamation, becoming a woman.
It was quite an experience. I never lied. I never invented things to trick people. These were my honest feelings, the honest facts (with a small genital omission).
Is there such a thing as a female personality? I used to think not. But I think now that there is. Or rather, that we assign to certain behavior the label feminine and to other the label masculine.
It was fun trying out being a woman without any messy biological work or serious legal complications.
Women can speak up gently, can embarrass, can call rowdy behavior to a stop with a figurative wagging of their finger. A woman never gets into a fight. She wins by raising her eyebrows. No one dares outright challenge a woman to go mano a mano.
There are, of course, a whole lot of troglodytes out there -- you know who you are -- who think nothing of belittling a woman in a way they'd be afraid to do so with a man. Yes, I learned that if you are a woman on the Net, at least the other women will always stick up for you. They won't pick up your cudgel and beat the brutes' brains out, as they deserve. No, they'll quietly send a little message of support.
At last, I had a sense of what women do among themselves. I experienced a little bit of the sorority, so healing, so supportive, so helpful, that binds women in a way that is not echoed in the male bond of fraternity.
Friday, December 16, 2005
And, And, And
Such a wonder the circling ride of the Great Mandala!
You go round and round and you think you're coming to the same spot. You think you're stuck, just as in the song from which I take this space's new title.
Everyone I knew who heard "The House Song" always seemed to break out into a nostalgic sigh the minute Paul Stookey called out the first two lines:
This house goes on sale ev'ry Wednesday morning
And taken off the market in the afternoon.
What was so great about that? They couldn't make up their minds? Or break out of their pasts? The house was rickety? Yes, yes, yes and more. One definition of insanity is to repeat the same old thing, over and over again, expecting different results. We get seemingly stuck in the Mandala's circling motion.
Then we figure it out ... it's really a spiral, like the slinkies with which we used to play long ago. Each turn takes us to another level. Each return goes to a similar place. But we're really on a different plane.
You go round and round and you think you're coming to the same spot. You think you're stuck, just as in the song from which I take this space's new title.
Everyone I knew who heard "The House Song" always seemed to break out into a nostalgic sigh the minute Paul Stookey called out the first two lines:
This house goes on sale ev'ry Wednesday morning
And taken off the market in the afternoon.
What was so great about that? They couldn't make up their minds? Or break out of their pasts? The house was rickety? Yes, yes, yes and more. One definition of insanity is to repeat the same old thing, over and over again, expecting different results. We get seemingly stuck in the Mandala's circling motion.
Then we figure it out ... it's really a spiral, like the slinkies with which we used to play long ago. Each turn takes us to another level. Each return goes to a similar place. But we're really on a different plane.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Goodbye, Lapwing
Nothing quite ever heals the wound of abandonment by a parent, by a lover or spouse, by people thought of at some point as the closest human beings alive.
To be abandoned is a bit more than to be left, although that notion, too, is included. To be abandoned is to have support withdrawn despite duty, allegiance, or responsibility. To be deserted. To be given up on. To be seen as a sinking ship from whose danger or impending threat the other has chose to flee. To watch the other's interest decline to the point that it ceases to continue, leaving one wondering whether it ever was there.
To abandon is to relinquish ties, to yield oneself completely to other interests. The abandoner has better things to do, more intriguing people to use.
Lapwing is being abandoned, having been abandoned, and is curling up to muse alone.
Lapwing was, it is true, the play name of someone with whom I fell in love; it was self-deceptive to hang on to the moniker simply because the email address existed, because it sounded so much better, so much more acceptable than my own or the play names of my own devising.
I was abandoned by a parent, by a lover and spouse, by people thought of at some point as the closest human beings alive. People stink. Even I, when I take a good look (and a deep breath) ... I stink.
Before bidding Lapwing goodbye, a last word, because the original Lapwing never quite died or ever left the game. The Lapwing was a way for the one I fell in love with to cheat one's way out of a game of War.
You remember War? The children's game whose aim is to win all the cards by playing the highest card, one card at time. You divvied up the pack into two piles, face down and put them on the table. Whoever turned the higher card, won the hand, adding the two cards to the bottom of his or her pack. Remember how, if the turned up cards were equal, you said "I declare war" and laid down three cards face-down and then one face-up (and your opponent did the same)? Wasn't it such an incredible booty to win the whole lot?
Lapwing was a variation in which the low cards were set aside as a "reserve" for the loser. So the Lapwing would arise and fly at the end of a long summer game, especially if supper was not yet ready, to prolong the fun endlessly.
But now this game is over. So goodbye, Lapwing, goodbye.
To be abandoned is a bit more than to be left, although that notion, too, is included. To be abandoned is to have support withdrawn despite duty, allegiance, or responsibility. To be deserted. To be given up on. To be seen as a sinking ship from whose danger or impending threat the other has chose to flee. To watch the other's interest decline to the point that it ceases to continue, leaving one wondering whether it ever was there.
To abandon is to relinquish ties, to yield oneself completely to other interests. The abandoner has better things to do, more intriguing people to use.
Lapwing is being abandoned, having been abandoned, and is curling up to muse alone.
Lapwing was, it is true, the play name of someone with whom I fell in love; it was self-deceptive to hang on to the moniker simply because the email address existed, because it sounded so much better, so much more acceptable than my own or the play names of my own devising.
I was abandoned by a parent, by a lover and spouse, by people thought of at some point as the closest human beings alive. People stink. Even I, when I take a good look (and a deep breath) ... I stink.
Before bidding Lapwing goodbye, a last word, because the original Lapwing never quite died or ever left the game. The Lapwing was a way for the one I fell in love with to cheat one's way out of a game of War.
You remember War? The children's game whose aim is to win all the cards by playing the highest card, one card at time. You divvied up the pack into two piles, face down and put them on the table. Whoever turned the higher card, won the hand, adding the two cards to the bottom of his or her pack. Remember how, if the turned up cards were equal, you said "I declare war" and laid down three cards face-down and then one face-up (and your opponent did the same)? Wasn't it such an incredible booty to win the whole lot?
Lapwing was a variation in which the low cards were set aside as a "reserve" for the loser. So the Lapwing would arise and fly at the end of a long summer game, especially if supper was not yet ready, to prolong the fun endlessly.
But now this game is over. So goodbye, Lapwing, goodbye.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)