Life is a Drain

I have an apt metaphor for my life:  the clogged drains in my basement.  I spent five fucking hours trying to unclog the drains, and guess what?  They are still fucked up.  I have hazardous chemicals all over me, because they were spraying up after the Drano wouldn’t go down the pipes, but I can’t bathe.  You know why?  Because the fucking water will just end up on the floor in my basement.

I looked at apartments downtown today, because I’m ready to get the fuck out of this suburban hell.  Oh wait, I can’t afford to even hire a plumber, let alone live the life I want to live.  So … I guess I’ll just fucking rot away in this shithole.  Awesome. 

I will never, EVER buy another house again.  This piece of shit house is killing me bit by bit.  When I have a stroke and die, don’t doubt for a second that I either died of a cerebral hemorrhage because I was so angry about ANOTHER BROKEN PIECE OF SHIT in my house or that I simply died of a broken heart.  A person can only hold so much disappointment in their hands before it starts to run over and drown them. 

Thus, here is my advice (which is fucking irrelevant, because apparently I can’t even follow my own advice): 

1)       Don’t buy a house.  The only exceptions are if you make a truly obscene amount of money and can afford all the stupid bullshit which comes with owning a house.  Apartments/rentals come with a landlord who HAS to fix all the bullshit, free of charge. 

2)  .     Don’t get married.  It’s the last legal form of slavery in America.  It is antiquated and fucking stupid.  The only exception to this rule is if you KNOW.  (People who KNOW will understand what I mean.)  I didn’t KNOW.  If there was a checklist for all the reasons a person SHOULDN”T get married, I would have checked about 90% of them.

3)       Don’t have children.  Just kidding.  They’re wonderful.  But make sure you know what the fuck you’re doing!  (for example, marrying someone who will not help you parent them is a bad idea.  And in the back of your head, you will know if he/she is up to the job or not.)

4)       Love your job.  And when you don’t love it any more, quit doing it.  I am perilously close to not loving my job any more.  It weighs on me every single day.  I can’t even read a book without trying to segue into teaching it.  (EQUALS UNHEALTHY.)  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I should probably just get a job at Trader Joe’s scanning people’s tofu and cheap wine. 

5)        Find good friends.  I don’t have any.  Seriously, not a single one.  My children are my only friends; and not only is that unhealthy, it’s not fair to them.  My problem is that most people suck and only care about themselves, so I have a hard time relating to anyone.  Oh, and the fact that I can’t ever leave my house because I have children and a husband who is NEVER home.  Did I mention that the husband has hundreds of friends?  That motherfucker never goes anywhere without someone knowing him and having stories.  How lovely.  (About as lovely as a pile of fucking dog shit on fire on my front porch.)

6)       Don’t listen to old hacks who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about and who can’t make their own lives work.

Secret Santa

                I want to play a rousing game of Secret Santa.  In this game, I will give a gift to a number of people who have made my list.  Let’s get it straight up front that “making my list” is not necessarily (though it could be) a good thing.  I will not name names, because that would be rude (and would thus ruin the Christmas Spirit). 

To _____:  I want to bake you a big, fat chocolate cake full of Viagra.  After you enjoy the luscious chocolate dessert, I will inject you with dopamine, serotonin, and Armani Aqua di Gio (for aesthetic reasons).  Merry Christmas to me. 

To _____:  First, I will go to the weird Asian store at Oak View Mall, and I will buy a samurai sword.  I will then oil it with the venom from a poison tree frog, then I will cut your fucking head off in one fell swoop.  You won’t even see it coming, so it can’t be considered unusually cruel or unusual.  My gift to you (and to the rest of the world) is that once your head is gone (and you are stone-cold dead), you won’t be able to open your obnoxious mouth ever again. 

To _____:  I give you the gift of cotton balls.  100 of them.  They will all go in your mouth at the same time, and you will have to decide whether to swallow or salivate or just wait.  You will be on stage so I can share this fine gift of silence and choking on the words you are unable to say anymore with the rest of the people who fucking hate the sound of your voice.

To _____:  I wish for you to be set in the middle of South-Central L.A. with your iphone and your $1,000 coat and your stupid, bedazzled ass-pocket jeans in the middle of the night so you can see that you don’t really matter.  Your ability to bullshit suburban idiots will get you exactly nowhere in the ghetto.  Have fun!  Call me when you’re bleeding out rectally from all the new friends you’ve made in jail. 

To _____:  Here’s some duct tape.  Cover all your holes.

To _____:  You’re super cool, because you take drugs and tell everyone about it.  So my gift to you is a needle and a balloon full of heroin.  When the drool is coming out of your mouth as you slowly die, I want you to think of my friend who died with the needle still sticking out of his vein and wonder whether you’re still as cool as you think you are now. 

To _____:  Since I know you are such a good Christian (at least when you’re in public and people are listening to you pompously orate about your special relationship with Jesus Christ), I give you a Quran.  You can either read it or shove it up your ass – I don’t see the outcome being any different. 

To _____:  I am going to donate you to an African family.  At least a sheep would have a purpose in Africa.  They could eat you or shave you and then you wouldn’t be such a fucking doormat piece of furniture, bleating for no reason.

To _____:  I love you.  SO MUCH!  So I give you a year in the Peace Corps to see what people who really have to suffer look like.  You’re a spoiled cow.  My gift is self-actualization.  Drink it in. 

To ______:  Thank you for being the only person today to say “I appreciate you” today, even though those words were never said.  Sensory candles, a candy cane.  It’s the little things that make me happy, and it’s the little things that make me want to kill people with a machete.  So my wish for you is lifelong happiness and the pursuit of knowledge. 

To the rest of you who I love and admire:  I want to give the gift of the better version of myself.  Although I am adamantly opposed to New Year’s Resolutions, I would like to  vow to live my life the way I preach it; hopefully culminating in the relocation and reinvention of me.  Or my gift to you will be a spectacular version of my own death, because I’d rather live than settle.     

Secret Santa

                I want to play a rousing game of Secret Santa.  In this game, I will give a gift to a number of people who have made my list.  Let’s get it straight up front that “making my list” is not necessarily GOOD, (though it could be) a good thing.  I will not name names, because that would be rude (and would thus ruin the Christmas Spirit). 

To _____:  I want to bake you a big, fat chocolate cake full of Viagra.  After you enjoy the luscious chocolate dessert, I will inject you with dopamine, serotonin, and Armani Aqua di Gio (for aesthetic reasons).  Merry Christmas to me. 

To _____:  First, I will go to the weird Asian store at Oak View Mall, and I will buy a samurai sword.  I will then oil it with the venom from a poison tree frog, then I will cut your fucking head off in one fell swoop.  You won’t even see it coming, so it can’t be considered unusually cruel or unusual.  My gift to you (and to the rest of the world) is that once your head is gone (and you are stone-cold dead), you won’t be able to open your obnoxious mouth ever again. 

To _____:  I give you the gift of cotton balls.  100 of them.  They will all go in your mouth at the same time, and you will have to decide whether to swallow or salivate or just wait.  You will be on stage so I can share this fine gift of silence and choking on the words you are unable to say anymore with the rest of the people who fucking hate the sound of your voice.

To _____:  I wish for you to be set in the middle of South-Central L.A. with your iphone and your $1,000 coat and your stupid, bedazzled ass-pocket jeans in the middle of the night so you can see that you don’t really matter.  Your ability to bullshit suburban idiots will get you exactly nowhere in the ghetto.  Have fun!  Call me when you’re bleeding out rectally from all the new friends you’ve made in jail. 

To _____:  Here’s some duct tape.  Cover all your holes.

To _____:  You’re super cool, because you take drugs and tell everyone about it.  So my gift to you is a needle and a balloon full of heroin.  When the drool is coming out of your mouth as you slowly die, I want you to think of my friend who died with the needle still sticking out of his vein and wonder whether you’re still as cool as you think you are now. 

To _____:  Since I know you are such a good Christian (at least when you’re in public and people are listening to you pompously orate about your special relationship with Jesus Christ), I give you a Quran.  You can either read it or shove it up your ass – I don’t see the outcome being any different. 

To _____:  I am going to donate you to an African family.  At least a sheep would have a purpose in Africa.  They could eat you or shave you and then you wouldn’t be such a fucking doormat piece of furniture, bleating for no reason.

To _____:  I love you.  SO MUCH!  So I give you a year in the Peace Corps to see what people who really have to suffer look like.  You’re a spoiled cow.  My gift is self-actualization.  Drink it in. 

To ______:  Thank you for being the only person today to say “I appreciate you”  today, even though those words were never said.  Sensory candles, a candy cane.  It’s the little things that make me happy, and it’s the little things that make me want to kill people with a machete.  So my wish for you is lifelong happiness and the pursuit of knowledge. 

To the rest of you who I love and admire:  I want to give the gift of the better version of myself.  Although I am adamantly opposed to New Year’s Resolutions, I would like to  vow to live my life the way I preach it; hopefully culminating in the relocation and reinvention of me.  Or my gift to you will be my own death, because I’d rather live than settle.     

Druids, Pagans, Jesus Christ & Rededicated Jews

                Leave it to the religious people to take a fairly simple idea (the winter solstice) and turn it into a fucking shitfest.  I love the idea of Christmas as much as anyone.  It’s ingrained in the common culture of my life – every December of my whole life I have admired a bejeweled tree, placed presents underneath it, carefully considered the best gifts for everyone on my list, and sent out season’s greeting to friends and family.  The IDEA is lovely, but the perversion of the idea is what kills me.  We can’t just admire a pretty tree anymore; no, it got turned into a marketing assault, forced familial bonding, and a reason to put things on credit which we could otherwise never afford.  Where is religion in all this again?  Oh right, the nativity scenes available at Walmart.  Baby Jesus lights up - how cute. 

                The winter break is better celebrated the way the druids did it back in the day:  dress up a tree and sing some songs with the people you love.  And (conveniently) there are four other solstices throughout the year, so the happiness gets spread around. 

                If a person who isn’t from America visited our country in December, they’d be like, “what the fuck is going on here?”  Who is this fat red-suited man invading homes under the guise that it’s Jesus’ birthday?  If it’s JC’s birthday, are the presents for him?  Why do these little American pricks think they should be showered with gifts just because it’s the 25^th of December?  Does the greenery have some symbolic meaning tying back to the pagan woodlands?  Isn’t a bit environmentally dangerous to mass-produce and sell millions of rolls of colorful paper which will not be recycled?  Is it part of the secret plan that outdoor lights never work for more than one year?  Since when are icicles multi-colored?

                Don’t get me wrong; I love the whole ho-ho-ho, festive-cocktail-party, cookie-making, anticipatory, holiday merrymaking, but I think maybe society has jumped off the deep end a bit and made what should be a festive celebration of life more of a guilt-inducing DUTY.  I don’t like that part.  I don’t want to see Christmas decorations in Target the day after Halloween.  Stop trying to market my life to me, Target, Inc.!  Dammit! 

                Another bone of contention for me is that I take gift-giving quite seriously.  I start picking up gifts in October (primarily because I can’t afford to buy them all in December) because I put THOUGHT into what I give to people.  While other (unnamed) people buy everything two days before Christmas.  No thought, no picking just the right thing.  It’s like, “well, Anne Marie has teeth, so I’ll buy her this toothbrush.”  Fuckers.  That’s not fair. By extension, I’m trying to impart the importance of GIVING to my kids, but (excepting the oldest one), they don’t get it.  At all.  It kind of makes me want to grab one of those little plastic baby Jesuses and punt it across the frozen tundra of the park.  (Just kidding, Catholic people!  I already know you think I’m going to hell.  Too bad there’s no such thing.  Joke’s on you!)

                So besides getting all kinds of drunk and belligerent this holiday season, how will I celebrate the season without the gaudy religious iconography being rammed down my throat at every store?  I don’t know.  I wish I had some clever pithy Christmas philosophy to present, but maybe staying drunk wasn’t such a bad idea.  That will help me ignore all the seasonal Christians coming out of the woodwork.   As Holden Caulfield so aptly put it, “Jesus would’ve puked.”  I don’t need to freeze my ass off in the middle of a bunch of other people oohing and aahing about the pretty lights in the trees.  I can drive by a week later from the warmth of my car and appreciate it just as much (or more, because I’m warm).  I sort of want to handcraft a huge menorah for my front yard, just to stir up some religious zealotry, but I have no carpentry skills.

                Just one more thing, while we’re here together:  the yearly Christmas letter.  Getting a mass-produced letter from my family members is probably the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of.  If I needed to know about your various life events, I already know.  Chances are, I don’t care anyway.  I got a card yesterday that said “Happy Everything.”  What the fuck does that mean?  Either make up your mind about what you’re celebrating, or keep the pictures of your children on your refrigerator where they belong.  Send the money you spent on that professional photographer to Africa where it will make more of an impact than it does sitting at the bottom of my garbage can. 

Two years ago I sent out a letter with a pack of hyberbolic lies about my children and I – modeling gigs, sports contracts, Rhodes Scholar.  The next year I just stole a bunch of Bill Watterson’s quotes about materialism and holidays, put them in my own voice, and sent it out.  (Turns out the family didn’t find it very funny.)  This year I’m boycotting the whole bloody mess.  I’d love to do my part to keep the U.S. Post Office in business, but no dice.  I’m going to beam the good will towards others (who deserve it) out through my brain instead.  Cheaper.  Less work.  Less fakely (is that a word?) cheerful. 

Celebrate the druids.  Hug a tree.  Pass it on. 

Earth signs & poverty

                So … I’m selling my shit now.  My finances have arguably never been in a worse place.  I do not go out and spend extraordinary amounts of money on stupid crap, but I certainly make enough money that I should not be stalking ebay to find money to buy Christmas presents.  Fucking ridiculous.  

                What’s a girl to do?  Find a new husband who is stupid and wealthy?  Coerce my husband into changing professions (and ultimately making LESS money)?  Stop using the ONLY things which distract me?  (Netflix and movies On Demand?)  This should NOT be happening.  I have stuck to a job I love (seriously, honestly, no lies…), but I am NOT meant to do the same thing for the rest of my life.  I know that at the very bottom of my existence. 

                An (unnamed) person pointed out a hokey thing the other day which really hit home. I am an Earth Sign.  I had no idea what that meant, so he looked it up for me.   Here is the explanation of what earth signs are supposed to be like …

 Talk about rocks. The most stable, consistent and sometimes rigid of all the signs. Once they make up their minds, like mountains they cannot be moved without huge efforts. Practical, patient, reasonable, and persistent are these signs. If you want to make sure a project gets done and gets done "right," call on an earth person. They will stick with it until the bitter end. Not much one for spontaneity or flexibility. (that’s the air signs) Not as sensitive as the water signs, the earth signs are still aware of the needs and often want to serve others. These people are not much one for the limelight. If it can be done, an earth sign will do it without the need for recognition.

Often so rigid, they become stuck with old routines to the point of impracticality. Fear of starting something new, earth signs can be very cautious to the point of missing a great opportunity. Conventional to a point of boredom.

If you see an adult asking why repeatedly, you can pretty much be assured you are in the company of an earth sign.

                Well, shit.  Summed up by some semi-astrological internet site.  I want to argue with it, but … what’s the point?  

                So I start off talking about being poor and stalking ebay and end up delineating my qualities as an earth sign.  Maybe the subconscious notation here is that I should sell myself, although I think the proper channel there is craigslist, not ebay.  At least I might be able to sell a kidney or some other organ I don’t really need.  Any one need a body part? 

Philosophical Lint

So I’m cleaning my room, and there are piles of very important things everywhere.  By “very important” I mean things which could, possibly be useful and relevant and insightful if only I could get around to dealing with them. I was paging through one such item, my notes from all the philosophy projects I listened to, (these notes have been sitting on a shelf for roughly nine months, mocking me with their just-out-reach knowledge) and I came across a quote from Albert Einstein:  “The only thing that interferes with my learning is education.”  Damn, Albert.  You have just summed up my life in 10 words. 

If I didn’t have to do all the busywork associated with teaching and educating I could be a fucking genius.  I’d finish reading Animal Liberation and Fernando Pessoa and The Myth of Sisyphus and the Koran.  I’d REREAD the bible.  Maybe even read the Book of Mormon.  Shit, I might even write my own bible like Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy, taking out all the bits I find troublesome.

I have a whole stack of books I want to read, but I CAN’T, because I don’t have time.  And then I get on this fucking computer and lose all direction.  The attention deficit is part of the problem, but when I have papers to grade or three classes to plan or textbooks to read and pick apart to teach … well, time slips into the void.  SCHOOL becomes the very thing which stops me from learning.  I wonder if students feel the same way.  I wish I could just be one of those intellectual types back in the day who got paid to tutor students and just read books, argue with other philosophers, and write down my thoughts occasionally.  Unfortunately, that’s not one of the jobs listed in the Want Ads. 

Oh, and I’d like to be a rock star too, even though I have no actual talent.

But back to this dictionary I’ve been staring at for five minutes.  I bet there are a thousand words in there just waiting to be discovered by me and then used in drive-by conversations with people.   On the other side of my desk is a book called Open Your Mind.  Open Your Life.  I haven’t even opened the book, let alone read pithy philosophical sayings while trying to apply them to my daily life.  The book, by the way, is sitting on top of a lottery ticket from July that I bought and never checked. 

I feel like Simone de Beauvoir had it right when she extolled the benefits of “human projects”, or things which are only about furthering the self above all else.  To truly put education at the top of my list would be to stop doing petty, distracting things and focus almost solely on intellectual and physical improvement.   This is a great idea, but I need to log off the computer first.  And maybe stop hoarding the notes – just recycle them and move on.  Because if I don’t, I’m not living the best life I can, and THEN, Nietzsche starts gnawing at the back of my head.  He proffered the idea of Eternal Recurrence in which we live the same life over and over, so we need to live life to the fullest.  In which case I’m fucked, because I definitely don’t do that.  And if I have to life this particular life over and over (in some Highlander kind of way) I will go on a killing spree after the second or third time.  Embrace change, overcome myself, create my own good and evil … blah, blah, blah.  I get it, Freidrich. 

Off I go to read Superfreakonomics.  It’s going to happen. 

Unless I see something shiny.

Small Talk – The Death of Communication

                It’s a series of little deaths, every time my husband calls me (you see, our communication is nearly always via telephone, since I work all day and he works all night) and he says  … “HELLO?!” (It’s always a yelling sort of tone.)  I always thought that when you called someone, it was your responsibility to start a conversation.  As in, you call someone, they say hello, and you say something like, “Hi!  I was just thinking about you and I wanted to say hello.”  Or … “Hey, I just wanted to hear the sound of your voice, so I called.”  Or … “Life is like a box of chocolates.”  ANYTHING, but an atonal, irrelevant, uninterested “HELLO?!” 

                I detest small talk.  I would rather pull out my fucking fingernails than talk to people about the weather.  I want to be genuinely engaged by conversations.  Why is that asking so much?  I desperately need to talk to people about things that matter.  I need for the people in my life to engage me, rather than talking AT me about bullshit.  Life deserves to be digested and debated and embraced, not just trivialized and truncated.  I want the dream.  I feel like everyone deserves their dream, not some abbreviated version of it. 

You don't understand; no one does. When a woman makes the choice to marry, to have children; in one way her life begins but in another way it stops. You build a life of details. You become a mother, a wife, and you stop and stay steady so that your children can move. And when they leave they take your life of details with them. And then you're expected to move again, only you don't remember what moves you because no one has asked in so long. Not even yourself. You never in your life think that life can disappear so easily into the details – that your life can become something so ordinary and conventional.  It’s remarkable the extent to which people can forget what inspires them – can leave their youth and vigor behind in exchange for an illusion of stability or some disillusioned shot at the American Dream.

We want so much in life, and then we forget to go after it, because we get so entrenched in dishes and laundry and soccer practice ad bullshit.  We forget how important connections are – how important being in love is.  When the foundation is gone, you’re left trying to quick-step out of the sand – waiting for someone to say a word or reach out a hand and pull you out. 

Life should be beautiful every day.  There should not be a bridge we cross where we stop looking to improve ourselves.  We shouldn’t settle, in any sense of the word.  People who love each other make each other stronger and better versions of themselves.  They don’t belittle or marginalize or ignore.  Life should be a celebration; and while every moment can’t be revelatory, when the moments are collected, they should create a pattern that reflects the dream.  At least most of the time.  Disappointment is extraordinarily powerful, chipping away at who we are.  Casting shadows. 

                I want to do what I can to be happy in this life.  I don’t want to wait until my ashes are scattered in the Pacific to find a place that feels like home.  I’m so tired of pretending the small talk is enough.  It’s not.  I want it all.  And I think it’s out there somewhere; I just don’t have time to find it because my calendar is filled with the lives of other people.  I’m ready for my life to celebrate me, because only then will I teach my children the important lessons of life.  They should know to grab for genuine happiness, because it happens so infrequently.  I suck at making myself happy.  I give it all over to other people and have nothing left for myself.  I’m going to learn, and then I’m going to do.   Somehow.  Someway.  It’s the only way to live a life worth living.

Fuck this

If I had the courage, I would take a knife and slit my fucking throat right now.  I am so fucking sick and tired of this life that I want to fucking scream until I lose consciousness and die.  I don’t want to explain my reasons for wanting people to just do what the fuck they are supposed to do any more.  A thousand times I have to explain the same motherfucking thing to people, and somehow they still don’t understand.   They refuse to open their fucking ears and just listen to what’s being said.  Instead, they put up a fucking wall, plug their ears like a child, and refuse to listen to reason.  I refuse to engage in another petty fucking argument with another uninformed, single-minded, immature asshole.  My head is going to blow apart into little pieces.  I WISH my head would blow apart into little pieces, because then I wouldn’t have to listen to this fucking whining from other people.  It’s all about them.  They WANT.  They NEED.  Well, you know what, asshole?  Me too.  I want and I need.  And my wants and needs have nothing to do with your fucking pathetic complaining.  I am tired of being the only one who keeps everything together by doing the work of everyone else around me.  It’s not fair, and it fucking sucks. 

Life, Reinvented

By writing all this personal information and posting it online, what am I giving you?  I am giving you nothing.  If there is a God, (s)he knows the details; everyone who was there knows.  Maybe what I say will be my memorial to myself.  I hand out all these things; I tell about this or that person.  Sex, drugs, and rock n roll (to steal a shitty metaphor), but in the end of it all, what have I given away?  It seems like you know something, but you still know nothing.  It’s all in the abstract.  I can tell everything or nothing.  I can lie or tell the truth.  Those who know, know; and those who don’t … well, it hardly matters, does it?

                I could talk about disappointing my parents, or disappointing my own children with disaffected behavior.  I could talk about rampant sexual exploits, could get the permission of everyone in my life, tell all the sordid stories.  Hell, I could post their phone numbers and addresses online, but what do you have?  Nothing real.  Just abstract words about a feeling or a place or fight or a high.  Nothing we can collectively touch.  Past tense is done; none of it can break me any more than I’ve already been broken.  Things are diminished only by time, not by retelling. 

                We identify our secrets, our pasts, our bad habits, our identities; but none of it really matters.  The more we say, the less it has an effect.  More bleeding, more shedding of the skin.  By the time others see the skin which has been shed, the snake is miles away.  It’s growing and moving in a different direction.  We think we can know something about the snake by looking at what it has left behind.  Maybe. 

                I want everyone to witness my youth.  I would watch reruns of it on late-night tv, occasionally, if it was On Demand.  I wonder if I would get lost in it again.  Maybe not.  Once was enough.  But it was glorious, as youth always is.  But putting it on tv would flatten all the depth and nuance from the people in my stories.  They need to stay original and unprecedented and extraordinary.  It might sound irritating in retrospect. 

                I’ll reinvent my youth.  Make every day a world-clearing sort of revolution, a bloodless one, one more interested in regeneration than any sort of destruction.  Every day a fresh start.  Automatic.  Instantaneous.  Every day a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. 

                                                                  (thank you, Dave.  You inspire me.)

When the Shithouse Hits the Flame

                I have GOT to stop reading the newspaper.  Every time I sit down and read about the things going on in the world, I get a little vomity.  Reading about the millions of people in Africa who suffer degradation worse than I can even mentally imagine is probably the worst part of world events, in my opinion.  But as an American (and a middle-American at that) all of the world events are so outside the scope of my everyday life that they seem unreal.  I can’t possibly understand what it was like to be a part of any of those revolutions in Egypt or Tunisia or Yemen or Libya; I can only read about it in the newspaper.  But as an American, what I can do is pay attention to what is going on in my own country and get pissed about it. 

                What is the United States government even doing?!  I’ve already ranted about paying off other countries to be our “friends” so I’ll let that part go for now, but this whole shit storm in Libya is ridiculous.  WHAT ARE WE DOING OVER THERE?  Who are these rebels?  Are we basically arming Al Queda?  (Does anyone remember a little skirmish between Russia and Afghanistan in which we armed the Taliban?)  I would like to cast a vote of No Confidence in the U.S. government.  And no, I’m not on the I-Hate-Obama bandwagon, but I am definitely on the America-Needs-To-Pull-Its-Head-Out-Of-Its-Ass wagon. 

                Americans are faced with a grueling recession, but somehow the government has the extra cash to help some angry dissidents half way around the world to overthrow their shitty government?  Certainly Libya is not the only country with a tyrannical man at the head of its government (North Korea, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Iran), so is the United States going to step into all of those countries next and help the struggling revolutionaries?  No.  Why?  Because it doesn’t benefit them yet to do so.  You can bet your ass that as soon as there are natural resources to steal or strategic land grabs going on, the mighty U.S. of A. with be there will bells on.  (Or grenades or sniper rifles or missiles – whatever these people need, right?)  America seems to think its job is to monitor the world, but … NEWSFLASH! … we suck at it.  The government finds puppets to run their colonial empire in other countries and then acts surprised when all hell breaks loose. 

                Let’s not pretend that America is intervening because of the terrible unemployment rate or human rights abuses in other countries, because if that was truly the case, we would have been in Somalia or Ivory Coast or Congo raining down missiles a long time ago.  Or we might have stopped a little conflict in Rwanda which some people might remember.  The bottom line is that people are butchered all over the world every single day, and America only intervenes when they can directly benefit from trying to stop it. 

                Life is unfair.  The older I get, the more I see this simple truth.  I bust my ass to get by financially, and the United States just burns my money in foreign conflicts.  This country is going to fall, and I am going to be alive to see it.  That breaks my heart.  I don’t want my children to inherit this cesspool of an economy and/or the international derision being propagated by the American government.  Kurt Vonnegut was probably not far off when he looked into the future and wrote about the Balkanized States of America.  Eventually people are going to tell the government to go fuck themselves.  Fight your wars with sticks in you need to, or – better yet – stop fighting your wars and keep that money here to make America great again. 

                I have a few modest proposals: 

1.        Let’s stop the war on drugs and embrace the taxation of marijuana.  It seems problematic that someone dealing pot in this country could be given a harsher sentence than a rapist.  People do drugs, and no law will stop that.  Those who overdose and die are doing their part for social Darwinism.

2.       Another war we can stop is the one being waged on illegal immigrants.  I agree that everyone who lives, works, and receives services from the United States government should be naturalized.  But rather than using tax dollars to imprison and/or send illegal immigrants back over the border, stop the problem where it begins:  with the sleazy businesses who hire them.  Fine offending businesses $10,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 for every infraction, and we won’t have illegal workers in America anymore. 

3.       While we’re at it, let’s get rid of this welfare state we’re in.  Social services are a necessary part of any functional government, but once the government becomes an enabler of laziness and fraud, it’s time to gut the system.   People should not be punished for working, and conversely, they should not be rewarded for sitting on their asses at home.

4.       Next, stop pretending with the social security.  Just give me my money back and we’ll call it even. 

So if any politicians want my help, I’m ready to get started today.  Or since politicians are the ones getting paid to solve such problems, AND they get paid their salary for the rest of their lives (a perk no one else in America gets) perhaps our elected officials ought to do something besides campaign and talk out both sides of their face.  

Culture Shock

                I am utterly, completely, absolutely disgusted by the state of the world.  Seriously.  Does anyone read the paper?  Watch the news?  Read periodicals?  Everything is absolutely going to shit.  The only reassuring thing is that if one looks back at the history of mankind, things have always seemed to be going to shit, so chaos must just be the norm.  It’s not possible that the world is on the brink of collapse.  Is it … ?

                People are starving to death RIGHT NOW in Somalia.  Dead children.  Parents who can’t physically take their children to get help, because they’re dying themselves.  How does this affect me?  It doesn’t.  Obviously, (or I wouldn’t be writing about it) this famine affects my sense of white, ex-Christian guilt, but it doesn’t change my day.  When I was reading the newspaper with breakfast, I forced down the rest of my piece of toast.  I wanted to throw it away because I was repulsed by the photo of a malnourished, suffering, African child on the front page, but when I got to the trash can, I thought about wasting food, so I choked the rest of the toast down.  

                How can we all go about our days, going to work, eating breakfast, running errands, lounging with a book, gardening, playing video games, watching television, drinking cocktails, (insert more inane activities here), when people are enduring the most painful, grievous deaths imaginable? 

                More bad news?  Certainly:  the Syrian army is butchering people who disagree with them, Libyans are in fear for their lives because of tribal power struggles, the American government is trillions of dollars in debt and about to lose its economic power, a Norwegian psychopath just killed 76 people (mostly children) because of his radical religious beliefs, immigrants are showing up in countries around the world and demanding social services which bankrupt economies, political leaders worldwide are acting like the rules of the social contract don’t apply to them (which apparently they don’t). 

                Actually, I can’t continue this list, because it makes me want to puke. 

                I just want to be.  I am sick and tired of hearing about the debt ceiling and worrying about not being able to pay my bills and acquiring new personal debt and all the other daily bullshit when other people around the world are in serious and real danger of dying … today … right now.  And here I am buying anti-wrinkle cream.  Something is very awry when the world is in such disarray.  Peoples’ priorities should be at least similar if not the same:  live, love, laugh, right?  Isn’t that what all those cheesy, stupid plaques say?  The front section of the New York Times is about dying Somalians, and the Style Section is about rich little cunts from wherever who are at fashion camp.  Really?  The imbalance is jarring.

                I want to quit my job, cash in my retirement, max out the cash advance limit on my credit cards, and just disappear to an island nation where I can watch the ocean, read books, and enjoy my family.  Oh, but wait, I can’t do that.  Why?  Because all the island nations will soon just be ocean because of the vastly changing climate.  Or because those nations are struggling with oppressive debt or cholera or money-thirsty dictators.  Fuck. 

                I really, really wish that I was like the millions of other people on the planet who just plow through their day without worrying about anything.  Just wake up, go to Starbucks, go to work, go home, bond with the family a little, then go to bed in my house.  Seriously, even the poor people in America have it better than the people in the really fucked up countries, and GREAT BIG AMERICA can’t figure out how to take care of its own people properly.  We suck.  The world sucks. 

What are we supposed to do?  Keep drinking ourselves happy every night?  Keep pretending that all the blight in the world has nothing to do with us?  Keep paying $5 for a 50-cent cup of coffee?  I’m paralyzed with indecision and repulsion.   I can’t be the only one without a plan B, and when the shit hits the fan, we’ll all just be watching.  Not doing anything.  Because, after all, we’re okay.   Who gives a shit what the rest of the world is like … right?  

THINGS & stuff

“Things” are omnipresent in life.  They collect like dust piled on a windowsill – always there, but not directly noticed.  To steal, once again from E.B. White, “a man could walk away for a thousand mornings carrying something with him to the corner and there would still be a home full of stuff.  It is not possible to keep abreast of the normal tides of acquisition … (which) go on day and night – subtly, smoothly, imperceptibly. I have no sharp taste for acquiring things, but it is not necessary to desire things in order to acquire them … Under ordinary circumstances,  the only stuff that leaves a home is paper trash and garbage; everything else stays on and digs in.”

Amen.   I have so much … stuff.  Why?  Because I’m alive.  People acquire things over time, and then we don’t even know why we have them or where they came from.  Honestly, I have thrown more things away in the past few years than ever before.  I just don’t see the need to keep THINGS which don’t get used or have a practical purpose.  For example, I threw away almost all of my old pictures of people from high school.  Why?  Because I don’t even know those people any more.  I don’t give a shit about them.  They are from another life – a million years ago, so why should they occupy space in my photo albums?  They shouldn’t.  So they got trashed.   Burned, actually, which was quite satisfying to my inner pyromaniac.

I also threw away the old notes from boyfriends and friends from back in the day a long time ago.  Some might argue that those things are artifacts from a different time, and thus worthy of saving, but I think they just get in the way of moving on.  Again, I don’t even know those people anymore, so why would I keep mementos of them?  Prime example:  I went to a concert the other day, and I saw a person I use to date.  (You know, like in the “intimate” sense of the word “date.”)  He didn’t even recognize me - literally had no idea who I was!!  How is that even possible?  It made me want to throw up at the time, but now I understand that he must be better than me at evacuating the extraneous bullshit from his memory.  People can sometimes also count as things we collect or can’t let go of.

Anyway, the point is that things become leeches.  They pull at one’s emotions and refuse to let go.  Why can’t I throw away that trophy from 6^th grade soccer?  Who gives a shit what place our little Catholic school team came in?   I don’t care (or remember).  

I have my two degrees from college setting on the bookshelf in my basement.  Again, why?  It’s not like I need to prove that I graduated twice.  That’s what transcripts are for.   If I had any guts I’d burn them and call them past tense, but keeping crap like that is ingrained in peoples’ minds from the moment they’re born.  Parents clip and save locks of hair from a first haircut, or Student of the Month certificates, or Little League trophies, and those “things” become quite hard to part with.  We may sweep them into a drawer or stuff them in a box in the back of the closet, but actually disposing of them is much harder than throwing away a frayed rug or some worn-out shoes.  Such sentimentality placed on items that have no real value, except as relics, seems misguided if the purpose of life is to move forward.      

          

Most of the things I can’t let go of take the form of books or photos, probably because both have the capacity to take me somewhere else briefly.  Photographs are lovely, even though I take them hardly at all any more.  I used to chronicle everything, and now … well, now fewer things strike me as remarkable enough to document.  When I look at the pictures of a previous vacation, I just want to be back in that place, which isn’t so great for my current happiness.  So while I have volumes of scrapbooks piled under my bookshelf, they mainly just collect dust. 

I will admit that I am a bit of a materialist:  I love my bed.  I love my blankets, my pillows, my saris, my collection of high heels, my books, my dresses, my candle holders, my ipod, my Blackberry, my framed photos, my vinyl records, my garden, and so on.  I would never readily give these things away, but they don’t add meaning to my life either – only temporary comforts.   I’d like to move, if simply to de-clutter the rest of my life.  How freeing it must be to leave behind the old and simplify.  Shed the skin. 

Free your mind; the rest will follow.  

The Vicious Cycle

                How can educators make students achieve at a high level without lowering their standards?  Actually, that first question begs a series of question:  What is our measure of success?  What steps do we take to define success?  To initiate it?  To chart it?  To prove it?

                These are not rhetorical questions; they all have concrete answers.  Unfortunately, the answers vary depending on who answers.  There is absolutely no consensus on how education should work or even what it should look like.  School districts, administrators, teachers, students, and parents all have differing versions of what it means to be educated.  How can we possibly fix a system wherein there is no concrete version of student achievement and/or teacher accountability?  And to what extent are administrators responsible for the achievement of both staff and students?  What responsibility do parents shoulder in the education of their offspring?  

                Here’s the hypothetical situation:  An observer walks into a classroom and sees a class of 30 students.  Of those 30 students, 20 are busily writing something in their notebooks.  5 of them are chatting with each other.   1 is sleeping.  1 is walking around the room intermittently speaking to other students.  1 is on the computer looking at videos.  2 are listening to headphones and staring at the wall.  The teacher is sitting at the front of the room, also writing in his or her notebook. 

                The general conclusion might be that 20 students are on task, which would mean a roughly 70% achievement rate.  But common sense tells us that the math here is too easy.  It’s impossible to measure achievement based on observation only, especially the brief, intermittent observation afforded by administrators.  Of those 20 students busily writing, three quarters of them might be writing notes to their friends.  There is no way to tell without interrupting them and asking.  The five who are chatting might be making sense of the assignment, and thus more on task than any of those writing silently.  The student who is wandering around might suffer from attention deficit and need to occasionally get up and move around in order to be productive at all.  Those with headphones might be trying to drown out the “school room” noise in order to focus their thoughts in for writing.  No observer would ever know.

                Here’s another hypothetical situation:  Students are assigned a project in class, due in one week.  Students are then given four in-class work days to put together the materials necessary.   Each day the teacher works his or her way around the room, helping students as needed.  When the day comes to check the work, 10 of the 30 students have nothing to turn in.  Another 10 of the 30 students have roughly half of the work done.  The other third of the students are right on task, work done, ready to be checked.

                So what’s the story?  Perhaps the teacher hasn’t given students enough time to do the assignment.  Maybe 30 students are simply too many for the teacher to tend to one-on-one to help them meet the expectations.  Maybe the expectations are too high.  Or maybe the 10 kids who did the assignment and turned it in on time were the ones who listened, worked hard, used the tools at their disposal in the classroom, and met the expectations.  If the last is correct, should the teacher work at the pace of the slowest kids or the fastest?  If students consciously waste time and don’t achieve at capacity, should the teacher and the other students be made to stop and wait for them to catch up?

                There is no correct answer.  There is an answer, depending on who you are and what your agenda is, but there is no one, correct answer.  It’s all relative.  Welcome to the dilemma of education. 

___

One of the biggest conundrums is accountability.  Schools change to 10-point scales so fewer students fail; they eliminate Ds so students don’t simply creep by; they allow students to retake tests until they pass;  they eliminate homework so work left undone doesn’t pull down the percentage grade; they don’t factor in work that was either not turned in or not done at proficiency level. 

Where does it stop?  When do students become responsible for learning? 

Do we honestly think that students don’t know that they can manipulate the system to their advantage?  To be sure, there are students who need extra help and who benefit from accommodations, but the general population of students is no less intelligent than they were 100 years ago.  If anything, they are more savvy with information and technology than ever before, so why are we treating them as though they are illiterate and incapacitated?  There is a word for this in addiction/recovery programs:  enabler.  America needs to face the fact that we are slowly moving toward a culture where it is the school’s job to learn for the student, not the student’s job to learn.  Yes, the school needs to provide a solid, informed, balanced, researched curriculum.  And yes, the student needs to engage and be responsible for learning the information.  At the rate we are going, however, the changes in education will do nothing more than lower the bar of expectation and make teachers more adept at manipulating numbers in order to satisfy a public yearning for high test scores, even if the trade-off is less-educated and less-well-rounded students.  Just as long as the newspapers can publish some impressive-looking numbers, even if those numbers reflect absolutely nothing. 

More and more, the debate about education comes down to what sounds good and appeases the majority.  It’s utilitarian both in the media and in the home; as long as most people are happy, that’s all that matters.  Unfortunately, most people are happy with window dressing.  They care only to the point that they might have to do something about the problem, then the responsibility rests solely on the shoulders of classroom teachers, whom parents have decided to entrust the entirety of their children’s knowledge.  It’s a scary thought, really, that parents are so willing to hand over the reigns of their children’s minds to absolute strangers.  We should all be paying more attention to what and how, where and when our children learn things.  We should make sure that they question ideologies, including the ones we try to instill in them, because critical thinking is the real measure of education, not arbitrary test scores.  

The Smiths

Listening to The Smiths is like crawling into a womb.  A heartbeat pulsing in the background, my body slowly makes its way into the fetal position, wrapped up in the lilting resonance of Morrissey’s voice. 

“The time’s for a change.  See the luck I’ve had could make a good man turn bad.  So please, please, please, let me get what I want this time...  Haven’t had a dream in a long time.  See the life I’ve had could make a good man … bad.   So, for once in my life, let me get what I want.  Lord knows, it would be the first time.”

The sentiment is sad and introspective (and yes, even a bit melodramatic), but it’s so entirely lovely when Morrissey begs for something to go right, and most people understand that bone-deep longing to have something we want, but can’t have.   His pain becomes our pain vicariously.  Or rather, he is channeling our pain and expressing it in a way we just hadn’t thought of yet.  The music becomes everyone’s, even if the words don’t match my thoughts, he can harness emotions just by humming or singing absolute nonsensical syllables over and over.  It stops mattering what he sings and changes into how he’s doing it.  His music becomes a place I want to go – to wallow in – to dream about.

“What she said, ‘How come someone hasn’t noticed that I’m dead?  And decided to bury me?   God knows, I’m ready!’   What she said was sad, but then, all the rejection she's had, to pretend to be happy could only be idiocy.  What she said, ‘I smoke ‘cause I’m hoping for an early death, and I need to cling to something!’”

Oh Morrissey, your lugubrious words somehow make me happy.  No, I don’t want to die (don’t be ridiculous) but life tends to come and go (while I might be dead in this moment, I’m very much alive in others, Mr. Vonnegut) and everyone sometimes just wants to be noticed.  Some people blend right into the wall, and if they weren’t breathing loudly, you might never notice them at all.  What I love about Morrissey is that he’s over there by the wall screaming, “NOTICE ME!” while he complains that no one sees him.  Is he maybe the original emo guy?  Could be. 

“You should know, time’s tide will smother you.”

It already is.  Time marches blithely on, regardless of what we do.  One thing we can’t do is stop the slow march of seconds and moments and days and months and years – friendships and love affairs and revelations and endings.  The tide comes in and erases, deposits, and moves on.

“Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before…

 Nothing's changed , I still love you, oh, I still love you
...Only slightly, only slightly less than I used to, my love.

I smelt the last ten seconds of life; I crashed down on the crossbar, and the pain was enough to make a shy, bald, buddhist reflect and plan a mass murder.  And, so I drank one -  It became four
And when I fell on the floor ...
...I drank more”

 Understandably bad advice.  Don’t drink until you pass out on the floor and then drink more (which is actually physically impossible if you think about it).  But the sentiment remains legitimate:  sometimes people do things to us that break out hearts a little.  It takes a small chunk out of us that we might never recover, but we still love the person who did it – just a little bit less.  Sometimes it hurts so much that the pain is enough to make a pacific monk think about retribution and revenge, so what hope is there for the rest of us who have less control of our emotions?  Less will power?  The point is that his words strike a chord with anyone who has been crushed a little because of someone else’s disregard or cruelty.

“I’ve come to wish you an unhappy birthday, because you’re evil and you lie, and if you should die, I may feel slightly sad, but I won’t cry...may the lines sag heavy and deep tonight.  So drink, drink, drink, and be ill tonight.  From, the One You Left Behind.”

Hateful, spiteful lyrics … sung with a perky little background tune.  This dichotomy is my love affair with The Smiths.  My faith in love is still devout.

The Perfect Family

                One of the basic conundrums of deciding to get married and have a family is the acceptance of a loss of privacy.  Once a person gets married, he or she is one of a pair or people; total independence is gone.  There are, of course, many benefits to choosing a life partner and sharing all the ups and downs of life with someone who complements you.  Children, also, are such overwhelmingly amazing illustrations of one’s self that they add something indescribably powerful to the quality of life.

                But the central fact that one loses his or her privacy when making a family is unarguable.  Solitude becomes something to hoard whenever it presents itself (because it’s so rare), and individual expression of idiosyncratic behaviors and personal habits and/or hobbies simply tends to go away over time.  Unfortunately, much is lost in this life-altering transaction, because people have a lot to offer others (and society in general), but once they commit to being married and raising other human beings, spontaneity and personal expression tend to be chucked out the window in favor of cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring, working, worrying, and wondering what happened. 

                Once we get these children to the point of launch (graduation from high school and potential entrance into either college or the “real world”), they want to leave - to get away from their family and “”find themselves elsewhere.  I get it.  Really.  I wanted the same thing.   But there is something quite compelling and nurturing about a family unit.  They are reflected in each other – both good and bad.   And because we can see our own personal traits in those we love (but sometimes want to beat the shit out of), there is the potential for tremendous personal growth if everyone stayed “together.”  –Ish. 

                Wouldn’t it be cool if families stayed together in community-type housing?  An immediate family, for example, could have a complex of homes which all interconnected to give everyone the space they will (eventually) require.  Of course, when the kids are young and cute and toddling about, there is no real need for such division, but as the kids get older, everyone (parents and kids alike) need to get away from each other occasionally.  Most of the time, the kids take off and go to a friend’s house, but what if they could just go to their own apartment?  (to which the parents have a key, of course)  Wouldn’t everyone like each other just a little bit more? 

                People will obviously argue that a terrible and unalterable separation might occur, but I call bullshit on that point.  I think that if people were given the ability to DECIDE when they spent time together, that time would be much more productive and happy.  I mean, friends get that option, so why not family?  People could then engage with each other on their own terms rather than feeling claustrophobic all the time. 

                Of course, all this requires more money than any average person has, so it’s all just a stupid, impervious theory.  As much as I want to be able to know my children as adults and have them hang around and live with me (at a nice distance, of course), they will all just leave.  I will miss all the nuances of their behavior, because they will be sharing themselves with another group of people whom they have chosen on their own.  Families are just temporary.  We try so hard to create a home, but in the end, they all leave and we are left to survey what’s left and wonder how to fill the gaping void each of them has left.  Holiday and weekend visits will be all that’s left of the people who once breathed our same air and gathered together to eat, argue, snuggle, sleep, play, cry, and celebrate. 

                The transitory nature of relationships, even those which are closest to us might be the hardest part of living.  Even when we find people we love and for whom we would lay down our lives, we often eventually grow in different directions, so day-to-day life becomes a trial to find those things which brought us together in the first place and revisit them to recreate an environment which fosters happiness.  With children, maybe those things which brought us together were merely a child’s need for food, shelter, and protection.  Maybe there isn’t a pressing need to stay with those who brought us life, because they were merely vehicles.  Possibly, my children will stay with me only until they can be free of me.  Perhaps that’s how it’s supposed to be, but I can’t help but wish we could all be adults together – to share more than the “pre-life” routine.  I don’t want to be an annual visit on someone’s calendar.  I think I’d prefer to just fade out entirely rather than watch their lives from a distance. 

The Martyr Syndrome

                                                                                                                                    

Do you remember that time when I was relatively sane and sober?  Me neither. 

I think it might have been back in like 1980.  Back then I was still a nice, refined, naïve, Catholic school girl, unmolested by society.  What’s interesting to me is the transformation between a person who is influenced by social mores into someone who influences those same social standards.  Personally, I was very influenced by other people until about my “junior” year in college. ( I put that in quotes because credit-wise I was still probably a freshmen – what a fucking delinquent ass I was…)  the point is that I was far into my twenties before I had a sense of SELF, of EGO.  I was narcissistic and self-centered, for sure, but I didn’t have any sense of self-reliance or purpose.  But during those formative years of finding who I was, I definitely spent time posing as a malevolent part of the peer-influenced, vapidity of youth culture -  a fact I’m not particularly proud of, but about which I can do nothing. 

How and why are people so unduly influenced by the common culture which surrounds them?  There’s an old Japanese proverb which says “when someone’s character is unclear, simply look at that person’s friends.”  Based on some of the people I hung out with back in my early twenties, I was a fucking asshole.  They were assholes.  We were (together) a big pool of worthless, self-absorbed nothingness.  We contributed nothing to society.  We did not support each other (unless it was to hold each other’s hair back from the vomit).   We convinced ourselves that the stupid shit we did mattered in some way.  It didn’t.  (Insert Jersey Shore analogy here.)

I may not believe in Catholicism anymore.  I may not believe in the Christian version of god which was rammed down my throat for the first couple decades of my life.  But I do find validity in the Jesuit dedication to learning and improving the communities in which we live.  Idealistically, I DO want the world to be a better place; it’s just that I often don’t know how to make that happen.  Or I’m just a bit too tired.  Religion goes a long way towards building better people, but arguably what it does has nothing to do with the religious tenets or the god being worshipped or the church in which this all happens.  It seems to be more about community.  If we can teach each other to be representatives of mankind – to act in a way which we would like other people to act – the world would be a better place.  Even “terrorists” subscribe to this basic philosophy of reciprocity.  They have a theory about the way the world should be.  Is that theory often sad, delusional, and misguided?  Yes.  But at least they are living their life with purpose, as opposed to the majority of Americans who live to watch television and eat shitty food and look out for #1.  Yes, that’s a stereotype, but most stereotypes can be proved correct by simple observation.  Look around you.  People are generally happier when they are stupid and selfish. 

I cannot function the way society expects me to.  I refuse to be stupid.  I have (literally) dedicated my life to learning.  I cannot be selfish.  I have (again, literally) handed over the keys to my life to my family.  Their needs come first every, single day.  I don’t know how to wallow in self-indulgence, even though I often want to.  Perhaps it’s a Martyr Syndrome  (I don’t think that’s a diagnosed complex yet, but just wait).  I want other people to recognize the sacrifices I make, but I am uncomfortable accepting that recognition.  I want my children to be self-sufficient, but I continue to coddle them so they aren’t independent.  So … I don’t know.  I think I missed that part where someone whispers in your ear and tells you what this life is all about, because I have no fucking idea.  I WANT to know, but I can’t figure it out.  And then I want to spew some bullshit about how I could find peace or meaning if I lived in a different place with a different scenic view or whatever, but we all know that location is irrelevant.  If I moved, my existential issues would follow me.  Our demons are imbedded.  They are here to stay.  Even if we exorcise them temporarily, they are still an integral part of who we are -  for good or bad.  

On Religion

Thinking is not an easy thing to do, so those of us who do it often (and deeply) should probably excuse those people who avoid it all costs. 

What is thinking, exactly?

It is a process which enables people to transcend narrow realities and expand personal boundaries.  It allows for ideas outside of one’s comfort zone to penetrate and incubate.  Things which we might not agree with or condone can become thoughts we entertain in order to understand humanity. 

Voltaire said best that I may not agree with what you’re saying, but I will fight to the death your right to say it. 

Somehow, this idea seems to work with most people, until the idea of religion comes up.  Then … well, everyone but you is wrong.  YOUR religion is the right religion.  YOUR ideas are the right ideas.  YOUR opinion is the right one, and pity the soul who disagrees with you, because they’ll end up in hell. 

How do you know your religion is right?  Faith. 

People who are normally rational, intelligent, agreeable individuals take to the irrational, unintelligent, and divisive ideology of religion so easily;   why is that?  Why do these people who are smart and logical leave that reason at the door and judge people and situations so wantonly without common sense?  They get offended by a word or a phrase or a comment, and they react accordingly.  No conversation.  No debate.  No back and forth.  Just judgment. 

My hope for humanity is faith in diversity.  Diversity of opinion. of ethnicity, of ideology, of life choices.  I believe that right and wrong are mutable and situational.  Religious fanatics do not.  THEIR right and wrong are THE right and wrong.  If, indeed there is a god, he or she would be astounded by the arrogance of those individuals who assume they know god.  How egotistical is it of mankind to assume they know what god is thinking or what god wants – that their tie to god is better than any other religion’s. 

Christian, Buddhist, Pagan, Muslim, Jew, Rasta, Atheist.  People are people.  Labels divide those people and cause derision.  What is the point?  Believe what you believe, but don’t impose those beliefs on other people – just because you’re the main character in your own life doesn’t mean you are even a cast member in anyone else’s. 

Quantifiable Happiness

                How do you know if you’re happy?  Is it like a pig in shit, just rolling around in the glory of life?  Is it noticing that you’re smiling in all your pictures?  Is it giving thanks for how lucky and blessed you are?  Or can happiness be smaller, like noticing moments of contentment and appreciating them?  Can a person still be considered “happy” if they have to remind themselves of fleeting moments in order to hang on to them during the other, sadder times?  Or does happiness merely mean an absence of fear and loneliness?

                I am not happy. 

                I put that sentence there alone, because it looks better that way.  That sentence looks the way I feel.  Alone.  In the middle of a lot of other sentences, but not a real part of any of them.  That sentence also looks abrupt, which is how I feel – a bit abbreviated.  It’s not incomplete (it has all the necessary grammatical parts), but it isn’t whole either.  That’s me up there. 

                It’s quite possible that my standards for life are impossibly high.  Maybe I want too much, and I should just be happy with what I’ve got.  How does a person know if they should just glide?  How are we supposed to know if we have it good, when it feels like we don’t?  I don’t have an outsider’s perspective to tell me I’m either crazy or correct; I just have to guess at my own life. 

                On the surface, I have everything a person could ever want:  a husband who loves me, beautiful and polite and intelligent children, a supportive extended family, a house in the suburbs of a peaceful city, a solid job which pays well, a new car, electronic gadgets, and a bit of expendable income.  Lovely.  But the husband who loves me is never home; I see him maybe three hours a week.  We have absolutely nothing to talk about when we do see each other, because he’s never home, so he lives his life and I live mine.  My life happens to be with our children; his is with his coworkers.  Not so great.  My children are indeed beautiful and polite and intelligent, but they take advantage of me every single day by not doing anything to help unless they are coerced.  They are selfish, which breaks my heart a little every day.  My extended family is around, but I was the youngest of five kids, and I came 10 years after the 4^th.  Read:  mistake.  Read:  my parents were done when I was born.  Read:  I don’t fit in with the rest of them.  My house is in Nebraska.  I am not Nebraska material.  I do not belong here, which I have known for most of my life.  My job is wonderful, but it sucks every bit of mental energy I have.   I can’t afford the car I just bought.  And the electronic gadgets are just another way of wasting time; plus they distract my children from becoming the better people they could be. 

                I don’t know how to get happy.  It’s just a state of mind, of course, so why can’t I just choose it?  Why can’t I just say:  “I’m going to be happy now” and do it?  I don’t have the answer to that question.  I think the answer is that somewhere along the line I got lost in life.  I forgot the way.  Or maybe (more likely) I never knew the way.  Maybe I just thought the path to happiness was to do all the things society told me to do, and happiness would ensue:  get married, have kids, get a house … None of these things makes a person a happy.  That state of contentment has to come from within, and I am not content.  What I am is alone.  I don’t have friends, because I chose to stay home and be with my family instead.  Turns out, not such a great decision, in expansionary terms. 

                So what is the point of all this?  What is the point of life if life is just a series of unappreciated, truncated, repetitive, menial actions?  I don’t know.  Someone please tell me. And I swear, if that answer is god or heaven I will fucking scream.  Humans made that shit up so they could live with the strife inherent in everyday life.  They told themselves from the very beginning that it has to be better afterwards, because life is so hard that people must be rewarded somehow in an afterlife.  What a bunch of daftly hopeful bullshit. 

This is it.  We are it.  We are on our own.  Happiness shouldn’t come in the Kool-Aid or the bible or the koran or the torah or the bhagavad gita

; and if it does, then that happiness is just like a heroin addict’s high:  it’s not real and it doesn’t last. 

Help.