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.  

“On Thinking”

I think too much. 

If thinking worked major muscle groups, I’d look like a yoga master:  toned, fit, and thin. 

Unfortunately, thinking does not make a person look better – it’s more like the equivalent of eating a bag of Doritos.  The first third of the bag is so good that you’re licking your fingers after every chip.  The next third is still good, but you’re starting to get a little sick.  And the last third kind of makes you want to throw up.  I guess what I’m saying is that when I wake up at four o’clock in the morning with my mind going a hundred miles an hour, thinking about things like why I shouldn’t wear what I’ve already picked out for work, or why I should totally rearrange my closet to incorporate an aesthetically pleasing color scheme, or why I desperately need better facial lotion, or freaking out about whether or not I mailed my mother’s birthday card … I might be thinking too much.

I just want to flip the switch, turn off my brain, hit the mute button on the words stampeding through my thoughts.  Just once, I would like to sleep through the night, without waking up in a panic for god-knows-what useless reason.  Or … having woken up on the brink of an inexplicable panic attack, I’d like to be able to just fall back asleep.   Oh, the things other people take for granted - like sleeping through the night.  I generally wake up with black circles the size of a small country under my eyes which no amount of “lightening cream” will remove. 

Thinking is good, right?  Knowing things is necessary, yes?  Then why is there simply too much information in my brain?  Why do I read the New York Times and feel like my head might explode?  Why is it that I try to process the various, current revolutions in the Middle East and I suddenly feel like if I read another word, my grey matter will start oozing out of my ears? 

I AM SO TIRED OF THINKING!

I want to watch a movie all in one sitting without wandering off to do other things that I “should” be doing before I relax.  I want to lounge in a hammock and NOT think about the statistical likelihood of whether or not a branch could fall on top of me.  I want to write this blog and not give a shit about who might read it and take it the wrong way and freak out and judge me and call the school and complain about the fact that I wrote some stupid fucking words on a blog and sent it into cyberspace.  

But I can’t.

Instead, I stew, and wonder, and project, and theorize, and reflect, and worry, and THINK … all the time.  Where did this ridiculous neurosis come from?  I don’t remember being so tightly wound when I was younger, but maybe I was simply a different person then. 

Here’s my theory:  if I could just be right next to the ocean all the time, the sound of the water would drown out the sound of my thoughts. 

But for now, I will have to rely on the sound coming from my air purifier – which doesn’t seem to be working very well. 

I should go to bed.   And think about it.  A lot. 

On Thinking, Part II

      

Arguably, there is nothing of value in my head.  I have no original thoughts, I have no insightful maxims, and I have no answers to the big questions. 

                The power of words is strange.  As soon as I typed those last two sentences, I stared at the monitor, and then I watched my weird, motionless hands on the keyboard, and then I got lost in the picture of French Polynesia on my calendar. 

                Words have weight, heft, baggage.  When a person says something, they can’t unsay it.  When I write these words down and send them into the cyberspace chasm, they are indelible.  While it may be true that no one reads a thing I write, and/or no one gives a damn about what I say, the words have impacted me.  They reflect something. 

                I read recently about a teacher from somewhere who wrote some critical things about her students in her blog.  There were no names, but she wrote some very inflammatory things about people in general.  While I haven’t read the whole thing (mainly because I don’t care enough), what I did read is probably true of students across the nation.  One thing in particular that she said rings true, which is her appraisal of the prevalent apathy in high school students. 

                Half of me (the younger half, I suppose) absolutely identifies with the inability to connect to high school classes and commit to them.  The information is oftentimes archaic, the teachers are holier-than-thou, and the social environment can be toxic.  High school students CAN BE (which certainly doesn’t mean they always ARE) incredibly cruel and immature, and any honest student in high school will admit as much.  Teenagers are just tired.  By junior year, for example, most students have been in school for at least 12 years.  Nothing is fun for 12 years.  Think of anything that makes you happy, then think about doing it for eight hours a day, five days a week, usually with additional hours devoted to practice, homework, a job, volunteering, and “family bonding” time; okay now it sucks, yes?

                The other half (the mature half?) looks out at a sea of faces and sees raw potential being flushed down the toilet every single day.  I watch people who are remarkably intelligent throw paper wads, and color in coloring books, and text until their fingers cramp.  Why?  Because they simply don’t care.  Or maybe, more accurately, they are tired of caring.  But as an educator, it doesn’t hurt any less to know WHY they harbor the apathy; it’s only evident that they do.  There is no room in their heads for the deep and raucous intellectual arguments of Plato and Foucault and Singer, because that space is reserved for something else.  I wish I could telepathically import the knowledge to them that learning is good.  Knowing how to think (and finding different and varied ways to think) is actually beneficial, no matter what you choose to do with the rest of your life.  You may be a nurse or an engineer or a psychiatrist or a stay-at-home parent, but every single day of your life, you will benefit from being able to think.  That’s all I’m trying to do, every day, is give that to students.  And you know what?  They usually don’t care. 

                So…how powerful are words, really?  Do I ever get through?  Or is it only when I say something stupid (which is bound to happen when a person says a million words a day) that they focus in and pay attention?

                I’m beginning to think that maybe the words are only powerful to me.  Maybe only in my head do they sound impactful.  Perhaps I should get that job scanning useless items at Target after all. 

] On Pissing People Off

                Oh the many ways to get under other peoples’ skin.  I’ve been told that I’m quite good at vexing other people with my words and actions, even when I’m quite unaware of doing so.  In the spirit of looking at the bright side of things for a change, I’m going to look at my ability to piss other people off as a talent which can be honed and used to better society.  (Sort of like Mark Twain’s advice about lying:  it requires lots of PRACTICE!)

                I suppose words are my primary weapon in making others angry, but it’s necessary to consider the fact that I enjoy arguing, not fighting.  I don’t enjoy being angry; as a matter of fact, anger usually gets in my way when trying to be articulate.  I’m as apt to tell someone to just fuck off when I’m genuinely angry, rather than try to present a coherent and persuasive argument.  No, I would much rather just argue with people – debate them.  I find that there are gray areas in just about every issue on earth, and I love to discuss those anomalies with other (intelligent) people.  Notice how the most important part of the last sentence is in parentheses.  If the people in a conversation aren’t smart and/or well-informed, the debate will turn into an argument, which will turn into a fight.  That’s just the way it goes.  Dumb people get flustered and then begin the ad hominem attacks.  Yes, a good insult now and then is warranted (and sometimes just fun), but it sort of puts everyone on the defensive and sucks the fun out of the conversation. 

                If I am bored, I will argue just for the sake of arguing … because it’s putting fun in an otherwise mediocre day.  I may be pro-legalization of marijuana, but if a student is rambling on about smoking pot and loving Bob Marley, I’m going to attack every single point being made and require them to defend themselves.  Two things get accomplished in this scenario:  1) I’m then more amused, and 2) Little Johnny Potsmoker is learning how to present an argument without sounding like an ass.  Win-win.

                Of course, this semi-combative approach to communication pisses people off.  No one wants to be told they’re wrong, even when they are.  I get that, and I agree – to an extent.  I am not predisposed to getting angry when someone argues with me.  I have been known to listen to reason, IF an argument is based on fact or common sense rather than just tradition (“it has to be this way because it’s always been this way”) or manipulation (I’m gonna tell on you”).  Give me a good reason to change my mind or reconsider something, and I will.  I will not, however, be coerced. 

                Example of coercion:  parent overhears me talking to another parent at a child’s baseball game.  I tell the person I’m talking to (not the interloping, bitchy eavesdropper) that I love the classes that I teach because there is freedom in the curriculum and I can do what I want with the subject matter and that I love to make students think about things they’ve never been exposed to (blah, blah, blah … small talk).  Bitchy eavesdropper calls the school the next day and tells the principal that I am bragging about “doing whatever I want in the classroom” and “manipulating other people’s kids.”   (sigh)  Really?  I thought telling on people stopped somewhere around 6^th grade.  Apparently not.  So for those of you thinking that those types of people will grow up and/or go away?  They don’t.  As a matter of fact, they’re everywhere.  But just because some people are afraid their children might hear something they don’t approve of isn’t going to stop me from saying things out loud.  Thus the pissing off of more people.  My advice is to keep saying what you think; life is not a popularity contest.  (Well, sort of, but whatever.)

                I think my face pisses some people off too, which is really funny when you think about it.  I have this … tendency, we’ll call it … to betray my thoughts with the expressions on my face.  So if you are being a douchebag, my mouth might not open to express the words I’m thinking, but my face is probably telling you.  This happens a lot at school, because sometimes I just can’t believe the things which come out of student’s mouths.  I try to compose myself (I’m not a complete ass), but when Susie starts telling the story about her mom being a pole dancer, in front of the whole class, for the third time, in a situation that has NOTHING to do with dancing, stripping, or parenting, my face is going to start telling you to sit down and shut up.  Same thing goes if the kid is talking politics and the only “sources” that come out of his or her mouth are “my parents” and/or “Glenn Beck.”  I can hide the contempt for only so long before my face starts to tell you you’re an idiot.  (And don’t worry, the same goes for treehugging liberal idiots who speak without valid facts.)

                Here’s one I really don’t get:  I’m fairly sure that it pisses other people off that I am sort of hermit-y (is that a word?).  I am not a social butterfly.  I am not an ass-kisser.  I deeply dislike small talk.  All of these things make me an outsider in most places.  Just because I don’t go out of my way to talk to other people doesn’t mean I’m a misanthrope.  I am not a bitch just because I don’t “chat” with people about nonsense. 

                It’s funny – I was at Mark’s Bistro the other day, and every time I go there, there’s at least one big table of “ladies who lunch together.”  I am SO not one of those people.  I COULD be, if the company were right – you know, like if the other people at the table were eccentric, intelligent, slightly mentally ill, oddballs like me.  For example, I could see myself lunching with Fran Liebowitz or Kurt Vonnegut, but only because they have something to say about things that interest me.  I could fucking care less about what kind of new carpet someone just put in their house.  Hunter Thompson would never try to talk to me about something so inane; he’d be too busy getting loaded and waving his gun around in the restaurant.  Now THAT’s my idea of a good lunch date.  Not chatting about your handbag.

                So I’ll continue to live by the “live-and-let-live” motto, and people will think what they want.  If people don’t have anything else to fill their empty lives with besides being angry and judgmental, there’s nothing I can do about it.    

On Hypocrisy

                In an ideal world, potential parents would be given a manual when their children are born and instructed on how to raise those children.  Shockingly, (I know, right?!) no such thing happens.  Parents are all left to their own devices about how to instruct, mold, inspire, motivate, and discipline their charges.  I recognize that most people have at least a basic support system in the form of various family and friends, but at the end of the day, each person has to decide how they present themselves to their offspring on a daily basis.

                I would love to be able to say that I model ideal behavior, but that would be an abject lie.  I am at turns:  narcissistic, angry, petty, belligerent, condescending, selfish, impatient, pushy, and brutally honest.  To be fair, I have also been known to:  challenge, inspire, listen to, cuddle with, and genuinely love my children.  But there is one characteristic that winds its way through all of the various stages of parenting, and that is hypocrisy.  Even writing it sounds dirty, but I can say with absolutely certainty that the one thing every parent will do at some point in the child-rearing game is be a fraud. 

                I will admit to saying the following things:  “Because I said so.”  “This is not open for discussion.”  “When you have children, you can make the rules.”  (among others)  The sheer stupidity of each of these statements is staggering.  I coach debate for god’s sake, and I couldn’t think of a better retort?  Sad.  But I think I’ve stumbled on to the reason why these inane, ridiculous, childish, condescending things come out of parents’ mouths.  (Besides the obvious and omnipresent fact that we are simply tired of arguing with a child who does not possess the capacity to critically reason yet and/or has such high levels of hormones racing through their body that even normal thought is inhibited.)  The reason we say stupid shit is because we are afraid of the repercussions of the truth which might accidentally come out of our mouths. 

                I, probably more than most people, tell my children the truth about nearly everything.  I believe they need to know that the concept of Santa Claus (and Christmas in general) is a conspiratorial plot to separate people with their money on a druid tree-celebration marketed as a Christian prophet’s birthday.  (That doesn’t mean I don’t buy presents; I’m not cruel.)  Actually, I have always spoken to my children as though they were little adults; it makes the conversations much more exciting.  So when the little one comes home talking about how some little boy said the word “sexism” at school, I can explain to her the basic ideology behind gender inequality, harassment, and fallacious assumptions some people make about other people based on things which are beyond their control.

                Similarly, when the oldest one talks to me about underage drinking and drug use among the people she knows, I will listen without judgment, because I know that the fact that she is talking to me about these things means she trusts me (to some extent at least) not to freak out, overreact, and/or slap the shit out of her. 

 

                Here’s where the hypocrisy comes in.  I cannot possibly share all of the things I did in high school and college with my children.  No way.  As a matter of fact, I am self-censoring RIGHT NOW because I know that some of the people who might read this would have a fucking aneurism if I started to spew the laundry list of irresponsible, selfish, cruel, stupid, and downright illegal things that occurred from roughly ages 17 to 24 in my life.  Shameful … yet I probably wouldn’t change much of anything if I had it all to do over.  I had moments of absolute debauchery which landed me in places no parent would EVER encourage in (or even admit to) their children. 

                Does that mean I’m a deviant?  Does that mean I am “going to hell?”  (“Hell” being the absolute last-ditch effort of an ancient church which was deeply paranoid about how it was going to clutch on to the dissipating power it held over people – thus resorting to heinously making up terrifying stories to scare people straight.)  Does it mean I’m a liar, because I can’t tell my children everything I want to? 

                I’m going to say … yes and no. 

                I can’t always say what I want; it’s irresponsible (at least until they are old enough to be in-the-know, so to speak).  I would love to share those stories with them, but it is socially unacceptable and (possibly) ethically shady. 

                So since I can’t actually come out and say them all, I will allude to some of the juicier parts which I will tell them later in life with all the delicious details.

• ·         The Pink Floyd concert at Arrowhead Stadium (probably already renamed Squat-Com Park now for all I know) which I attended with both of my boyfriends.  Together.  In the same car.  And I remember seeing a bed flying through a flaming hoop on stage – no lie.
• ·         The deaths of four of my close friends from alcohol or drug related overdoses.
• ·         The three concussions from … illegal things resulting from absolute stupidity.

1. ·         The two car crashes.  Both my fault.

• ·         The .02 GPA after an entire year at UNL.
• ·         The tuition money I just … spent.  Not on tuition.
• ·         The time I skated out of the hospital and hid in a parking lot.
• ·         The several juvenile delinquents I dated along the way.
• ·         How I met my husband.  And how I lost him for a while.
• ·         A series of road trips to … Detroit, Chicago, Phoenix, Oregon, Kansas City,  Las Vegas, San Francisco …
•    Does junior year Spring Break in South Padre with 10 of my friends count here?
•   And the subsequent trips over the Mexican border where Corona is brown?
•    Or that Spring Break with my friend and I in Hawai’i when I was 19?

Good god I sound like a heathen.  No wonder I’m a hypocrite.  If you’re already a parent, you understand.  If not, just wait.  It will happen.  When it does, come talk to me. 

Midlife Crisis on the Balcony

                I have all of life’s necessities at hand:  Jeremiah Sweet Tea & lemonade (with crushed mint from my garden), my Blackberry, my ipod cranking out Pearl Jam, exterior lights hanging from the umbrella over my head, a cushy blanket under my ass, Raid Yard Guard to annihilate unsuspecting mosquitoes, citronella candles on the table, a citronella plant under the table, (and would you believe those little fuckers are still sucking my blood?!), and beautiful flowers in every direction.  Oh, and my job gives me two ENTIRE months off, so I don’t have to work tomorrow morning, or the next morning, or even 20 mornings after that. 

                So why is it that while I sit here in my secret garden, my minds wanders off to how things could be better?  I’m convinced that not being satisfied is some sort of (as yet unnamed) mental illness.  For example, my situation could be better if I were surrounded by intellectuals who would engage me in scandalous and intriguing dialogue.  Or if David Beckham (or some other ridiculously hot man) was massaging my shoulders while I type.  Or if the ocean was about 50 feet away soothing me.  Or if I had a hot tub to chill in and a personal secretary to transcribe every fascinating thought I have (editing out the nonsense, of course).

                Is this asking too much? 

                I have to try NOT to look at my house if I’m trying to be Utopian, because otherwise all I see is peeling paint, shoddy windows, the gloves my husband used a month ago to clean the gutters and then couldn’t be bothered to put away, the rotten portions of the deck, the dozens of carpenter ants parading around like they own the place.  No, in order to put on the happy, Stepford-Wife face, I have to consciously tell myself how lucky I am not to be under fire in a cave in Afghanistan or having my hut set on fire in a Sudanese village.  I DO have it better than most people in the world.  It’s that top 10% of the wealthy that I envy (a deadly sin, I know), because I want what I want when I want it.  (Bruce, I can’t believe you’ve summed up my life in such a ridiculously childish and apt phrase.) 

                I’m just not sure how I ended up in the suburbs.  When I applied to college (I’ve been over the fact that I was a jackass in high school and probably didn’t deserve to go anywhere good), I sent my ACT scores to four schools:  UNO, UNK, UCLA, and the U of HI in Manoa.  I went to UN Kearney as a freshman.  What the fuck?  I blame hormones (my boyfriend went there) and blatant stupidity.  There is nothing in central Nebraska, thus there is no reason to go there purposefully, unless you are traveling to another location.  Why didn’t I throw caution to the wind and go to the island nation of Hawai’i?  Because I was a coward. 

                So, now here I am, sitting in my Papillion backyard, wondering why I’m not a professor at Berkeley, or a famous writer collecting royalties from my dozens of novels, or a prolific essayist who publishes in the New Yorker (or even the New York Times).  I blame my own laziness.  I would rather drink the Jeremiah Weed than focus on a real novel.  How did all the famous literary drunks do it??!!  Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson…  It’s impressive that these people even got out of bed in the morning, let alone writing the classics of American literature.   I think that part of it was that these people told themselves from the beginning that they were WRITERS (yes, the caps are necessary, because they DEFINE, which is how we define ourselves - it tells us who we are).  If I decided to be a WRITER, quit my day job, and just wrote all day then maybe I’d be on to something … like welfare.  

Jean Paul Sartre

                Jean Paul Sartre was dead by the time I graduated from high school, but I have to agree with a little known philosopher by the name of Mike Mulligan who claimed that Sartre was “the bee’s knees when it came to existentialism.”

                Existentialism stresses individuality and choice, which people always claim to value.  The three main tenets existentialism are:   1) everything a person does affects those around them, 2) each person is responsible for all society, and 3) the world wouldn’t change with or without god.  Simple enough.   Obviously, it’s the third tenet to which people will take exception, but I’ll come back to that later.

                So … Our actions affect other people.  How?  Ideally, knowing that our actions affect others should make people think before they act, something which is common sense, but which not all people think about what they do.  The smallest of our actions have a big impact on both others in our daily lives and on society in general.  For example, the way a parent treats his or her child affects that child’s daily life, his or her general personality and future behavior, and also affects the way that child treats other people, for better or worse.  Our actions (including our words, which are events) travel well past our immediate location.  How people act is a reflection of how they want society to be.  If I spend my days telling people the honest truth about things, I am doing so because I believe that everyone in society should do the same.  If I lie to people occasionally about small things to protect their feelings, I do so because I believe it would benefit me for others to protect my feelings.  If I lie to others often about unimportant things, it is because I don’t believe in the importance of truth, or I don’t see the harm in manipulation. 

                Jean Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, but he rejected it because he didn’t want to be “institutionalized.”  His refusal is shockingly honest and admirable, because he didn’t care what the world of academia thought of his ideas; he simply wanted to share them.  He devoted his life to study, but he had the capacity to enjoy life as well.  He was not a sad, miserable, pretentious (well, maybe), misanthrope.  He simply didn’t believe in the mainstream ideology of humanity.  He believed that he could control his own life, and that it was unnecessary to explain away all the minutiae by using god and/or religion.

 

                Yes, Jean Paul was an atheist.  GASP!  What a terrible profanity society has turned that word into.  Religion has so infected people’s thinking that most rational, intelligent people shut down when they hear the word atheist.  “No god?  Surely you must be joking?!”   But my argument for Sartre’s accuracy of thought far exceeds the idea of god being real or not; Sartre makes religion irrelevant, because he puts the power to be good or bad directly in the hands of the people.  Free will.

“I exist by defining myself at every moment.” JPS

                Let’s go back to the central ideas which Sartre presented:

1.        Freedom is existence, and existence precedes essence.  Sounds complicated, but isn’t.  What we do and how we act determines who we are.  People are a continuous process of behavior – we are what we do.  Sometimes I can embrace that idea and be satisfied with my choices and other times I am a bit appalled that I don’t follow my instinctive behaviors, but ultimately the way we act IS who we are.  How can we deny that?  Religious people may call themselves sinners and proclaim that mankind is born under a bad sign (or whatever), but people don’t sin because they can’t control themselves; they simply act on their instincts rather than thinking before they act.  OR, they choose to do the “wrong” thing because they want to, and they beat themselves up about it, because the act had bad consequences.  Sometimes, though, poor choices, spontaneously irrational behavior, and gut reactions teach us the most about who we are and what we believe.  The resulting consequences may not be what we foresaw or expected or even wanted, but they are what makes us.  We are free to act any way we want.

2.       The focus is on the subject rather than the object.  Humans aren’t pawns – they shouldn’t manipulate or be manipulated.  This one is much easier said than done.  I think that anyone who reads the second sentence would agree with it (except maybe politicians and cheaters), but when put into practice, not manipulating people is very, very hard.  I do it every single day.  I manipulate my children into acting a certain way and doing certain things, I manipulate my students into trying to think and exert effort on assignments, I manipulate my spouse into helping me achieve the things I think we need done, I manipulate my parents into thinking I still need their advice and support.  We all do it, but it belittles us when we do.   We are not being our “best” selves if getting what we want takes emotional larceny. 

3.       Freedom is the central and the unique potential which constitutes us as human.  In other words, “man is condemned to be free.”   We choose.  WE choose.  No one else does.  We can rationalize that other people influence us or manipulate us, but in the end, we are free to do what we want.  Period.  That concept is terrifying, because it means that all the things I do not have or do not want to do (but still DO) are on my shoulders.  They are my choice.  I am free to stop them from happening or to choose differently.  It’s much easier to blame other people than it is to be free. 

4.       You are your own choices.  Seemingly repetitive, but worth the second look.  Even if you don’t choose … you choose.  Inaction is still action.  Not doing something leads to a series of consequences.  If I choose not to deal with an issue (big or small), my inaction does not make the issue go away.  People think that ignoring things is easier, but generally, avoiding something just makes it more stressful later, which is why it is so essential to actively choose rather than passively backing in to something which we did NOT choose.  I’d rather be in charge of my life than just accept what comes when other people decide for me.  I choose not to leave my life up to “fate,” whatever that is.

5.       Responsibility rejects inevitable circumstances.  You are responsible for every choice you make.  People make seek advice from others when trying to decide what to do with their lives, but ultimately, people choose the adviser based on what they want to hear.  If I can’t afford to get my roof fixed, but I know that not doing so will void my homeowner’s insurance, I will call my father, who will talk me into fixing it.  I will not call my friend who smokes pot and lives in his mother’s basement.  Common sense.   Conversely, if I want to get high, but I haven’t done so in a very long time, I will not call my father, who will point out that pot makes me stupid; I will call my friend who smokes pot occasionally and enjoys it thoroughly.  We look for the answer we want before we even ask it. 

6.       Past determinants seldom tell the crucial information.  If we look into out past, we can reveal a wealth of information, unfortunately, that information is not always the best source of knowledge.  If a person had an unfortunate experience with an African American, for example, he or she might be led to believe that all black people suck.  That would be an unfair assumption, but it would be directly tied to past determinants.   If we could get rid of all the excess baggage of what we “think” we know, we could approach the world with renewed vigor and honesty (I know, there’s that word again).  Looking into the past to “remember what we know” is disingenuous at best.  Only with an open mind can we really experience life with true excitement, otherwise, everything is jaded by what could have been or how we are colored by a previous experience with people or places. 

7.       Our acts define us.  Again this concept may seem repetitive, but a person can THINK what they want all the time, but what they DO is what defines them.  People watch others all the time, and they judge accordingly; so to be seen as a good person, it is necessary to do good things.  That means all the time, even when you think no one is looking.  How hard is that?!  Incredibly tough.  If I tell my children not to drink, but they see me drinking cocktails every night to wind down, my actions are speaking louder than my words.  If I talk about being passionate for environmentalism, but I don’t do simple things like recycling or conserving energy in my own home, my words are empty and meaningless. 

8.       Finally, we continually make ourselves as we are.  Every day is a process of becoming ourselves, regardless of age or station in life.  People can and do change over time, so we are constantly becoming who we are. 

None of these ideas has intrinsic ties to religion, but each of them factors into the major tenets of religious teachings.  The most obvious exclusion in Sartre’s ideology is that everything comes back on the individual; there are no excuses for who we are and what we do.  Existentialism forces people to take responsibility for their lives and reject the ingrained avoidance of accountability that permeates society.  Limiting ourselves to that which is in our power to accomplish is not “giving up” – it is simply being realistic.  Putting one’s fate or decisions in a “higher power” is just another way of not choosing.  Sartre’s philosophy is empowering and inspiring, not nihilistic. 

Repeat after me:  “I AM FREE!”