Stranger Than Fiction?

Frank Black--"Los Angeles" (mp3)

I saw a man I knew last month. He was at the bowling alley, actually just a lane or two over. I did not speak to him. I have known him for over 25 years. At times, he has been very important to me. In very tangible ways, he has been a mentor. There is no anger, no bitterness between us. In fact, there has hardly ever been a cross word between us. But I didn't speak to him.

He really wasn't bowling very well (not that I displayed the skills of a champion), so there wasn't even cause to congratulate him across the lanes. We never even made eye contact. But that isn't what this is about.

I am writing this play. It uses my basic work setting as a foundation. It is also inspired by aspects of people that I know. And in this play, I have used him, this man, to suit my purposes, and those purposes, quite frankly, involve him dying in the 2nd Act. The circumstances of that death are unclear, but it is very, very clear that he is dead.

So, imagine my surprise. To see him up, walking around, still doing quite well was, to say the least, disconcerting. I think he was joking with his teammates and drinking beer. I think he had a special shirt that he wears for bowling. I had no use for that. I didn't know what to say. I couldn't say, "I thought you were dead." How would that go over? I couldn't ask what he's been up to. That didn't fit, either. He wasn't supposed to be doing anything.

And so, I ignored him and went back into my play, stalled as it probably is until Spring Break when I can think for long stretches of connected time.

Take this little scenario, if you like, as some kind of convoluted allegory for retirement and what happens to those who do. That was not my original intent; I was just trying to work through something in my head.

But.

There are two things that I am pretty certain happens when you retire: a) you become what you once were, or b) you become what others want you to be. I am thinking from the perspective of the place where you once worked. As in, when your name comes up, it is in connection to things that you said or did years ago. Or, you may serve some institutional purpose by becoming a narrower version of yourself. You might be held up as a paragon; you might be thrown out as an example of an employee gone wrong in any number of ways. You probably won't be seen as both simultaneously.

But you do not become what you are. You can't. Because what you are doesn't fit.

I mean, you can't just bust back onto the scene and yell, "Hey, I'm doing great, having a great time, living a really meaningful existence now that I am away from the rest of you and the petty contraptions of this place where I once worked." How would that go over?

And so, the fledgling playwrights and the cynical bureaucrats have taken control of you in your retirement. And you probably don't even know it. But it's probably better that way. While you cavort about in relative freedom, parts of you are trapped forever, or maybe not forever, just until they are forgotten altogether.

If you're wondering why the classic Frank Black song accompanies this post, listen to the words and it becomes simple: "I want to live in Los Angeles, but not the one in Los Angeles." That says it all, doesn't it?

A New Year!

Hello everyone!  Happy New Year!  

Peace, Love and Happiness to you and your loved ones!

Please please forgive me for my long unannounced blogging hiatus!  My end of year move was hectic and riddled with struggles and problems.  But guess what?  It's finally over!  I feel free as a bird and ready to do great things this year.  By the way, that reminds me of a funny little quote I saw floating around on Facebook yesterday....

"Dear God, my prayer for 2011 is for a fat bank account & a thin body. Please don't mix these up like you did last year. AMEN!!"

To be honest, it's hilarious and cute but I know better than to pray to a higher being for such things.  I need to make them happen myself!  I don't care too much for money ("....money can't buy me love!") but a little to spare would certainly be a relief this year.  As for the thin body, I've gotta hit the gym and tone up, as they say, no more beating around the bush!  I know these aren't exactly original New Year's resolutions, in fact I'm fairly sure they are two of the most common!  However, this year won't just be about saving money and losing weight, it'll be about getting the so-called ducks in a row and fully accepting that at 26 I'm a full-blown adult and there's no turning back.  I've got to start moving forward consistently instead of taking two steps forward and three steps back (it feels like that is what I've been doing for the past few years).  

Except, of course, for Inspire Bohemia, which has been a great leap forward with regard to acting on my passions.  I have my boyfriend to thank for inspiring me to start this blog, and especially for encouraging me to press on when it seemed like I had no audience.  Now, almost a year and a half after I first started Inspire Bohemia I have over two hundred followers and have received a lot of compliments, attention and exposure from all different directions.  For that I am very thankful, it encourages me to charge on and most importantly, it serves as a small personal affirmation that I am headed in the right direction, towards fulfilling my passions and developing the things that I'm good at.

With that said, I know I will always be a work in progress.  I need to gain some peace of mind and do some major self-reflection.  I want to find ways to be happier and improve my life and the lives of those around me that I care about and I want to eliminate as much of the negative from my life and my thoughts as possible.  I need to understand myself better and learn how to control my anger and my snap judgments, my insecurities and jealousies, and my own harsh judgment of myself.  I need to stop overwhelming my mind with the frustrations of how to get where I'm going, how to be all that I can be and all that I'm meant to be  in this life, and how to bring my passions to fruition.  In the words of Paul McCartney/The Beatles, I just need to let it be!  I need to trust my instincts, trust the power of my convictions and trust that continuing to follow my passions, all of them (however scattered they may or may not be) will get me where I want to be and where I should be.  I need to trust that at the end of my life I will be happy with how I've lived it.  Why?  Because at this moment I know that I have not betrayed who I truly am so far in life.  I have not lived a lie or denied myself the things I love to do and the things that I'm good at.  That is why I trust.  Be true to yourself and you will find happiness, even when things are bad and seem insurmountable, they inevitably lead to better things.

Wow, I better be careful or I'll turn this blog into a spiritual and theoretical think tank on life overnight!  And believe me, I can.  I've written a plethora of college papers on everything from Philosophy and The Gordon Rule, ghosts and spirits, Buddhism and other religions, sociological issues, anthropological issues, gender issues, men and women, sexuality, women and sexuality in the media and the list goes on and on!  I have been meaning to start another blog that focuses on those other major interests that are part of who I am on an everyday basis; however, I don't want to mix it in here so as not to drive away those with conflicting views who just want to stop by for some design, decor or gardening inspiration.  In fact, my boyfriend and I are going to start that blog tonight and collaborate on it together.  We are both great thinkers and, in our own way, philosophers... we are both great writers too, so it should be a fun endeavor.  I will keep you posted on the status of that new blog.

In the meantime, I invite you to check out a very interesting site that I stumbled upon yesterday called Thought Munchies.  Thought Munchies is written by an anonymous person and consists of exactly what it is titled - thought munchies, a.k.a food for thought, a.k.a. very interesting ideas, thoughts, observations, perceptions and analysis of various topics relating to humanity and the struggles of life.  It really impressed me.  I find a lot of this person's ideas and thoughts to be profound, insightful and incredibly identical to many of my own thoughts and beliefs.  If anything, it will really get you thinking, hence the name of the site, hehe.  

Oh, and guess what?  It's Friday!  Waaaahooooo!  I hope you've all had wonderful holidays and I wish you nothing but the best for 2011 and beyond!  I'll be back soon with some great posts to kick off the new year.

:)

xoxo

Kindle II: Revenge of the Kindle

I Could Write a Book - Harry Connick, Jr. (mp3)
Calling America - Electric Light Orchestra (mp3)

NOTE: Bob wrote a piece on his new Kindle back in July. Read it here, ‘cuz most of what he observes, I ain’t gonna re-observe.

I got the super-simple stripped-down Kindle for Christmas. After a month of somewhat intensive research and contemplation -- iPad? Droid Pad? Kindle? -- I decided the wisest move was to go with the cheapest and simplest option, the option that is almost universally loved in spite of its vast limitations. I’ve yet to hear someone complain that their Kindle “is too complicated” or “doesn’t do everything I expected it to” and that they regret the purchase. (I’m sure they’re out there, but not in my circle.) And, ultimately, isn’t that the best we can hope for in our modern capitalistic world?

Two weeks into my ownership, I’m giddy at the call. Worth every penny.

Yes, the weight and size are great. The user-friendly nature of the device is great. The ability to control how the text is presented in about 10 different ways is incredibly useful. But here are the 2 ½ most compelling reasons I’m loving this Kindle:

1. FREE SAMPLES!

You can download an introductory chunk -- usually the first chapter -- of almost any book sold for the Kindle free of charge. While far too many books cost a little more than I’d prefer when all you’re getting is the digital residue -- not like I can trade it into a used bookseller when I’m done, and paying merely for the information feels steep at times -- free samples are guaranteed to save me between $50-100 every year.

You see, pre-Kindle, if a book intrigued me, I had two options: (a) buy it and put it on my “In the Queue” shelf at home, where a long stack of books I bought in the hopes of one day reading linger, sad and forlorn like ugly pound puppies, or (b) make a mental or physical note of said book and hope to God I don’t forget or lose the note until some magical future time when I have time to give a flip. Neither of these options were ideal, and Option A can be painfully cost-ineffective at times. Buying a book used is even more doomed, because my screwed-up logical self then decides that, since I didn’t have to pay as much for said book, I need not feel the same urgency to read said book.

Now, if I want to keep a book in mind for consideration, I just download the free sample. It sits there -- Free. Brief. Harmless -- until I read that chapter. When finished with that chapter, I can then decide whether I want to pay for the whole book. This feature, dear friends, was made for idiots like me.

2. NOTES & HIGHLIGHTS!

Anyone who writes a blog for three years without ever earning much or building an arena-sized following must be in love with their own clever thoughts. But I’ve always been handicapped about marking up books I buy, and I have no logical explanation for it. I don’t like having to keep a writing utensil handy, and something about soiling the pages bothers me, but I don’t see how these reasons are quite enough.

Regardless, I bet I haven’t scribbled notes or underlined passages in more than half a dozen books since I graduated college. Yet here I am on my second Kindle book, and I’ve written more than 50 comments to myself and highlighted more than 100 passages. This is almost certainly New Purchase Overkill; however, something in me has long been wanting to have this power -- to add my own side commentary or observations to works with which I’m enthralled -- and it’s already clear that jotting notes and highlighting passages allows the book to make a deeper mark in my memory.

OH YEAH, NOT TO MENTION...

One of my biggest and baddest reading habits is to predetermine where I will stop reading. I find my bookmark and then immediately flip ahead to see where the chapter ends or where an ideal stopping place seems to be. Not having this ability on Kindle actually results in me reading more. I also now have the Kindle app on my Droid and, if stuck in a dark place with nothing to do (or the toilet stall next to Bob in the mall), can get through a few more pages on my phone.

So, in conclusion, It fits nicely and lightly into my backpack. It helps me better remember what I read. It minimizes my unnecessary purchase of books I might never read, and the books I do buy are a little (sometimes a lot) cheaper. And I read more ‘cuz I can’t as easily predetermine a good stopping place or too easily read the last page in advance.

Amazon, feel free to send all my advertising royalties ℅ “Bottom of the Glass.”

Precocious Alone

So Alone - Juliana Hatfield (mp3)

To be a brilliant and fiercely determined female is an isolating condition.

Saw the Coen Brothers remake of True Grit over the holiday break. The musical score was amazing, as was the movie. But what haunted me as I walked out of the theater was the main character a girl who concludes the film as an “old maid.” (Apologies if this is a spoiler. It’s not much of one if it is.)

The girl, Mattie Ross, is the movie’s eyes and heart and provides the point of view for the ensuing action and drama as she joins a U.S. Marshall and Texas Ranger in pursuit of the man who supposedly killed her father. To say she is supernaturally sharp and well-educated is to understate the level of her mutant power. The girl has the equivalent knowledge of a second-year law student and a kind of understanding of the ways of the adult world that drives adults crazy. So many of us complain about how slowly kids age these days, how immature they can be, yet nothing seems to anger and agitate adults more than a kid who is sharper than his or her years. Mattie’s world in this movie is full of men -- she only encounters and converses with two women the whole movie -- and nothing throws men off their game more than a younger female who can best them with a higher intelligence and greater grasp of information.

Perhaps, at long last, the 21st Century is changing this. With an increasing majority of college graduates and advanced degree earners being women, and with men increasingly focusing their skills on manual matters of war and day labor, perhaps the day has come when men will have no choice but to accept that they are the dumber sex.

Two songs immediately come to mind when I think about Mattie and the women I identify with her: “Secret Garden” by Bruce Springsteen and “She’s Always a Woman” by Billy Joel. Some people see these songs as romantic or loving, and in a way they are. But both are also written with this strange mix of resignation, consternation, and aggravation from men who have one too many times been defeated or painfully flummoxed by a woman who in some ultimate way is beyond their comprehension. They can appreciate her, perhaps, but they will never totally “get” her.

I guess it’s easy for some married guy to look on the fates of women like Mattie and feel a tugging on his heart. I’m just a meaningless observer, a backseat driver, a rubbernecker. My sympathies and my cheering for them is ultimately as useless as Spike Lee on the sidelines of a Knicks game.

Did Mattie have to end up alone as an old maid? Perhaps it’s not fate, but it certainly seems inevitable. Maybe she marries. Maybe she even marries twice. But that woman will never find her match. For a woman to have so many amazing factors working in her favor yet seem incapable of finding the man able to manage, appreciate, tolerate, defer, whatever, will always give me this gnawing churning in my stomach. Or my heart. They’re located very close to one another, and I never took a biology class.

I can quickly think of 10 women -- seven friends or acquaintances or coworkers and three family members -- with similar dispositions, and their fate risks being equally unavoidable. From early on in my dealings with them, I can’t help but think, You’re going to have a helluva time finding a man capable of handling you.

Is this an insult? Is it a compliment? Is it both? I’m not sure. In my heart, it’s meant both as a compliment to the woman and an insult to the general state of 21st Century Man, but I suspect someone more attuned to the scholarly or political side of gender politics would happily point out the ways my comment is patronizing or insulting or downright spiteful. Then again, people involved in gender politics and studies tend to look for ways to read anything as patronizing, insulting and spiteful.

We are in an era when the sanctity - hell, the utility - of marriage is increasingly under scrutiny, where the number of women choosing to remain single well into their 30s and beyond is skyrocketing, where the number of men incapable of sitting still in a classroom long enough and convincingly enough to achieve “academic success” is fading faster than Marty McFly’s image in that newspaper clipping.

There’s that old fable about the scorpion and the frog*, and I can’t help but wonder if women like Mattie are scorpions. Sometimes beautiful, almost always intelligent, and usually driven by forces mere mortal men can’t comprehend or won’t appreciate. But scorpions nonetheless. And they don't wanna kiss the frog. They wanna kill it.

Or, put another way, which do we admire more, the fierce indie band that thrives on the fringes or the one who sells out to a big record company, polishes their sound, and aims for the arenas?

* -- used most recently and famously and -- for this post's purposes, ironically -- in a movie about a dude who looks like a lady, The Crying Game.

Book Guilt

Let's Active--"The Book Of Last Pages" (mp3)

Perhaps, unintentionally and in honor of going back to school, Billy has kicked off a kind of "Reading Week" on BOTG. His piece yesterday got me thinking about reading, especially in light of this strange occurrence: I finished two books yesterday.

Now, I'll acknowledge that I'm a pretty fast reader who has been known to skim though setting details that bore him, but yesterday wasn't about speed. It was about two different journeys converging.

In the morning, I fnished Zeitoun, the straightforward account of a Muslim-American painter and builder who stayed in New Orleans during Katrina, helping people and animals until he disappears into government bureaucracy and indifference, while his family and friends track him down. My daughter, who doesn't read much, had been required to read this book last summer and declared it her favorite book, so much so that we took her and several friends down to New Orleans at the end of the summer to find Zeitoun's house, which we did (he wasn't home). Last week, when we returned, I found one of his painting signs lying in a gutter outside of Commander's Palace (it now hangs in my daughter's English teacher's classroom), and I thought, okay, I probably need to read this book. The book is impossible to put down. I read it in about three days.

In the evening, I finished The Passage, a highly-regarded literary "vampire" novel (government program gone bad) I had purchased last summer with a gift certificate and which I had been slogging through at a pace of about 10-15 pages a night for several months.

You know how you stick with some books just to earn a "badge of honor?" Well, The Passage was one of those for me. I don't necessarily blame the book, since my reading pattern of a few pages until I fell asleep doesn't lend itself to cohesion or coherence in the mind of the reader, but I also never fully connected with the characters, and so the last 300 pages became about finding out what happens to conclude the 750 page, 100-year epic. I'm not sorry I read the book, but it didn't "wow" me in the ways I expected, drawing as it does too much on The Stand, Avatar, The Road, 28 Days Later, The Handmaid's Tale and a host of other influences. But, darn it, I was going to finish it.

I think most of us deal with some level of "book guilt," that notion that you are somehow a failure if you don't finish a book that you've started. My wife suffers excessively; I suffer selectively. I mean, let's face it, regardless of how well-reviewed or how classic they might be, some books just plain suck and are not worth the time that they demand. But once we start, we tend to let them dictate the terms of our relationship, we being mere readers, while they are published books.

They are like a meal we've ordered in a restaurant. We tend to eat it, if for no other reason than we've paid for it. I think it's worth realizing, though, that this guilt, like any other guilt, is entirely of our own creation, and need not be served. Just because I paid well over $20 for The Passage in hardcover, that should not create any more obligation than Zeitoun, which cost me $5.46 on the Kindle. The latter was the more pleasurable reading experience.

I mean, you don't keep listening to a crappy CD just because you blew $20 on it, do you? You might give it a few more tries, but you will give up on it. Same thing if someone hands you a burned CD that they say is their favorite by a band you've never heard of, but you can't get into. You'll find one song that you can mention to your friend by name, and then move on.

Finishing The Passage created nothing in me more than a sense of freedom. I had, for whatever reason, committed to it, and now I've finished it. Free to move on to other projects.

And so, last night, I had a third reading experience, as I started Matterhorn, the epic novel of Vietnam that came out last year that took the author 30 years to write. A friend had just walked into my office and handed it to me without saying much. He wanted me to start it right away, but I had other obligations at the time. But last night, within 50 pages, I was completely entranced by Matterhorn, and so right now, I am in my favorite reading position--at the start of a good book, with a few other good-looking ones lined up.

I've got Keith Richard's Life waiting on deck (a Christmas present to myself), and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, a Kindle book I started and liked, but got distracted from. It's a book I want to read and look forward to returning to, probably even starting over. No guilt, though.

Dystopia Dyspepsia

Honey Bee - Grinderman (mp3)

I saw Blade Runner in the theater in 1982. I was 10 years old. I thought it would be some futuristic Raiders of the Lost Ark or some revisioning of Star Wars, because I was just a kid, and I understandably equated Harrison Ford with those two movie franchises.

This memory came to me because I took my two daughters to see Tron: Legacy during the holidays. The movie was difficult for me to follow -- because, well, the plot kinda sucked -- so I knew the girls were lost during most of it. Their looks of stern concentration as they tried to comprehend it reminded me of the replicants and the scene on the roof where Rutger Hauer’s character is slowly dying in the rain. The difference between the two moments is that Blade Runner got better as I got older. Tron: Legacy will continue to suck with each passing year. In that sense, I have done my dear children wrong.

The other thing that reminded me of Blade Runner was a “debate” on the NYTimes web site about the current state of young adult fiction, or YA for lingophiles. Called The Dark Side of Young Adult Fiction, the debate is about what to think of the increasingly dark, violent and “dystopian” movement in the genre.

Anyone my age who read comics in their younger days knows that dystopian and dark visions are nothing new. They weren’t even new in the ‘80s when Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns completely nuked the Archie universe of sugary gum drops with superheroes who raped and murdered and TV reporters who smiled while reading about unspeakably horrific world events.

Worse still, some 25 years after Blade Runner and The Dark Knight Returns, one would have to admit that too much of their futuristic vision is far too close to our current reality.

I spent my break quickly devouring a popular YA novel on my Christmas present, a gorgeous and cheap Kindle. The Hunger Games is certainly dark and dystopian. A more believable and better-written and Americanized version of the Japanese cult novel Battle Royale. Both are about teens chosen to duel to the death for the entertainment of a captive and somnambulently passive citizenry, and both owe origins to a history of gladiators and The Running Man by Stephen King nee Richard Bachman.

The Hunger Games is extremely popular amongst our middle school-aged boys. While I have an admitted weakness for YA fiction, this book seemed particularly well-written and danced the line between violent enough and not too violent, and it never felt particularly exploitative or bandwagon-happy the way many of the vampire genres do.

So the questions worth asking about this “trend” of violent dystopian YA novels, which is hardly a new trend, are as follows:

• Are these books merely another form of vampire novels, pure science fiction meant to entertain and bemuse?
• Are they that “dystopian,” or are these novels trying to prepare our younger generations for possible realities our parents and culture refuse to acknowledge?
• Does reading about young protagonists struggling to survive and fighting to the death for food or shelter help keep stresses about stupid bubble tests in perspective for its readers?

If indeed there’s nothing new under the sun, then these apocalyptic visions downgrading The Road into something more palatable for young teen brains are also finding slightly new ways to tell tales as old as ink and parchment. And just as A Clockwork Orange did almost half a century ago, these tales must feed some part of us that needs a warning, a fright, a shock to our malaised system.

God bless you, Nostradamus, original dyspeptic dystopian visionary. Your spirit lives on!

Po(o)p Psychology

I promise, I will gloss through the scatalogical details of my story as quickly as possible.

So, as I'm walking into the mall today, on the day after New Year's Eve, having just eaten also spaghetti with meat sauce, salad, and a breadstick, and I think, 'Oh, no, I have to go and it's going to be bad.' Luckily, I think, we're walking into the Belk for Women, so there's a guarantee that a) they will have bathrooms, and b) traffic will be very light in the mens' bathroom, so I'll be able to sit and agonize in peace.

To get to the bathrooms in a women's department store, you have to wade through a lot of departments. I guess they think you'll do some impulse shopping on the way. There are even sale items in the otherwise-empty hallway once you get to Customer Service and turn down toward the restrooms. The men's, of course, is at the very, very end of a long corridor.

And I'm right. I walk in and it is completely empty. Staking my claim to the place, I head down to the farthest of five stalls quickly, the explosion imminent. Within moments, I've gotten a bit of relief, done a courtesy flush for an empty bathroom, and taken out my cell phone to play a little "Spit!" (a card game) while I'm waiting.

But I'm wrong. The bathroom door opens and someone walks in and keeps walking, all the way down to the stall right next to mine! I can see his feet, of course, he fiddles for a minute like he's going to settle in, but then, I'm thinking because he's realized I'm right next door, he walks out of that stall and moves, maybe, down to a farther stall.

To me, that's polite.

But then, he leaves. Did he not like the stall? Were the others somehow worse? Was he, too, looking for an empty men's room? I don't know. And then the bathroom door opens again and again the footsteps cross the entire bathroom and again someone chooses the stall right next to mine. Different shoes. And he proceeds to get everything unbuckled and sits down and....does nothing. He makes no sound for minute after minute. I sit there quietly myself now, making only the slightest noises of pushing phone buttons to play my cards, to try to make myself invisible so he can "do his business." But still, nothing for minute after minute. And then I get out of there.

In Chemistry class, back in high school, when we were studying electrons, we learned something like this. It was call "The Bus Seat Rule," suggesting that typical human behavior dictated that if a person got onto a bus where there was only one other person sitting, the new person would sit next to the one who was already there, despite the emptiness of the bus.

Apparently, that's how electrons behave, but for the life of me, I've never seen humans behave that way. Maybe that's why Chemistry didn't click with me. People, in my experience, usually afford each other as much space as they can, standing on opposite walls of an elevator, taking seats away from each other when entering a movie theater. It's the person who doesn't honor another person's space who tends to be the outlier.

As for what was happening inside the Belk For Women's men's bathroom, I cannot understand why a person walks into a bathroom, sees one far stall occupied, and decides that he will choose the one right next to it. Especially when the bathroom is otherwise empty and quiet as a tomb. Especially if doing so is going to cause him to "freeze up." I would think he would want his own little space and the illusion of privacy created by camping out 3 or 4 stalls away. After all, if you arrive after the other camper, if you leave either before or after he does, he can never know who you are, can never put a face to a pair of shoes, can never give him the look that says "Whew, buddy, what crawled up and died in there?" or "It sure was quiet and strange over there; what were you up to, pal?"

My own oddity is that I consider the bathroom stall, even in the most public of restrooms, one of the great refuges of the modern world, a place where you've rented your own four walls, and no one can tell you when you have to leave. It's just not that easy anymore to get that kind of separation. Sometimes in an airport, when I'm stressed out from traveling, even if I don't have to go, I'll take myself and everything I'm lugging along and go into a stall and just sit for a few minutes and let the airport public safety announcements play outside and all of the comings and goings and hurryings occur around me and do and think absolutely nothing. That's bliss.

Sorry, no songs came to mind to accompany this post. I'm open to suggestions.