Everything Popular is Wrong

Frank Zappa once said “Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read”.

The crux of this quote, when you dissect and digest it, leads to seemingly emasculating people around rock music. I disagree with the assertion, but I like the way the quote is formulated.

I yet to find anything more powerful than music that can bring people together and have them feel a social and converging connection.  Social connection is an essential aspect of happiness.

The problem, though, isn’t music. The problem is when musicians become popular. Popularity is boring. Popularity encourages no individuality or sense of self. It inspires no creativity and pushes followers to conform. Everything popular is wrong.

Stay unpopular and low key, Buster! The color of the key, to staying low-key,  is gray.

 

Let the World Win every now and then

The term “my life” in a leading sentence always sounds oxymoron to me.

 … she wasn’t born into privilege or wealth. She was good looking but not beautiful. Nobody would have picked her out at her young age and said she was destined for success or greatness in any realm of life. She was the last that anyone listened too. She never led, but also, she barely followed the trends. She wasn’t cool in a way of common non-sense .

She did ok in school. She graduated from college with mediocre grades. Deep down she liked Mr. right who was fine looking but not handsome enough to not need being interesting. He has some body fat and does ok in sports, but not good enough to not warm the team bench. His body has a unique equanimity of one thick upper body with two legs that are like two columns attached to his rear end. His presence around other females sparks no jealousy in her. After college they got married, and settled in a house with two garage door in the suburbs of the city. They now have two kids and they entertain themselves by BBQ’ing during the weekends and going to ball games. Their lives can be categorized as conventional. Kind of as cliché as it gets. Yet, they feel (and are being viewed by others as) profoundly happy. Everyone who met them sensed they live blessed lives.

They’re not interesting as a family unit. When they’re happy, they don’t need to let others know that they’re happy. Advertisement of happiness has no place in their sense of happiness. She loves him. He loves her. They have sex a few times a week –even in the morning when the kids are sleeping and before breakfast. She is an honest wife and has a solid character defined by a solid set of values she wouldn’t compromise on. She doesn’t care what her analyzing brain tells her. She doesn’t feel marrying him took away all other unseen and unproven options in the Love-Marketplace. She feels. She doesn’t run away from her emotions, and more importantly, understands that emotions are required in the process of decision making. She knows that bit she can never put it to words or explain it but she lets her emotions assign values to the pros and cons of different options. She still doesn’t think the job is done, and she has a healthy fear of the unseen future. But she’s adamant and sure that she can’t control much in the way of life. So she so unconsciously keeps her values and beliefs intact. She represents cultural continuity in social settings. She does let the world win every now and then…

The element of control falsely dismisses the role of emotions in decision making. “my life” starts from emotions, needs, and wishes and tries to structure reason to lead a series of complex and interdependent events (a.k.a., life) towards a specific direction. This is so painfully and stupidly the backward way! One should respect emotions and feelings and set them free to assign values to available options (a.k.a., decision making).

Sadly, it turns out it is a serious skill to turn opinions to decisions, and decisions to results. The problem with the mindset of “my life” is: it burns the very food it tries to cook.

Your Ass is not a Billboard

The first time I wrote something about bad habits of our daily style, my blog posting ignited a revolt amongst my close friends. So I stayed quiet on that subject for three years until now. I’ve seen enough and I can’t take it anymore -so here is some style faux pas you need to be cognizant of:

  • Don’t wear sweatpants at work. Your office is not a gym.
  • When you wear sunglasses, the bigger the shades the more badass you look. So if you want to look nice and classy, size down the shades.
  • No backpacks if you’re over 30. Backpacks are for school boys. A backpack is convenient but it’s so out of character for a 30+ years old.
  • If you invite a few friends over and make a homemade meal, don’t use paper plates and plastic cups. That screams you’re either lazy, or cheap, or maybe both.
  • A tie should be skinny with a small knot. Thick ties with fat knots are for Tony Soprano.
  • A suit looks great with no cuffs. Deep cuffs are ok only when your pants are shorter and you’re wearing them on a beach.
  • No shoulder pads on suits. It’s 2011 after all.
  • While having dinner, put the cellphone aside. Making love to your cellphone in moments that are meant for face-to-face interaction merely shows you’re suffering from SAS.
  • If you wear black jeans, the stiches should be as black as the denim. Otherwise your pants look like the revolutionary road.
  • Keep your jean’s back pocket plain. Your ass is not a billboard.

 … and at the end, there is always something to be said about hand-made shoes that match a sharp-looking suit: thank you Paul Smith!

Blue Valentine

I saw Blue Valentine, the movie, last night. It is pretty moving, and leaves you thinking for hours if not days. It reminds you of those moments of inner-defeat and profound sense of failure. It very well expresses not knowing what went wrong, why, and how a relationship gets to a point where everything becomes an unrequited question.

 The movie is not prescriptive. The acting is unbelievably real. There are no answers, you see the beginning of a relationship, witness parts of its progress, and you see the end not knowing what happened. Fill the gaps.

The man is a goofy and likeable romantic. The woman is ambitious and bitter out of her unfulfilled hopes for the future she had once planned. For the most part, the movie is an unsolicited greeting from the dark side of life but it truly touches everyone’s heart in that it reminds us of the fragility of relationships.

The story of Blue Valentine is frighteningly realistic in that it shows how fatal fractures can begin to sneak in within a relationship.

Love is no Option

Human beings drink water and breathe air. Technically, those are the main things we need for living. Well, add to that nutrition of some sort. And, by no means have I dismissed the fact that many around the world struggle to even have those primitive aspects of life. Then again, for all of my adult life the matters of heart seem to have been amongst the top two of everyone’s concerns, and most importantly, the matter that implies glee.

 Why is love such a hard proposition?

In all honesty, I really don’t know the answer to that question and I’m not sure if there is “an answer”. The span of answers to that question might be as great as half of the population of the world. And for the record I, as the person who sits in an after-work Irish dump in freaking Mountain View and drinks Jameson on a Valentine’s Day, should be the last person who could have any prophecy in that matter. But heck, you’re reading my blog, I might as well share some viewpoints.

Love is meticulous, in that it demands perfection form a bunch of imperfect creatures. It is the meticulousness that makes people analyze emotional relationship to no end. At times, one side blames another for not understanding their positions and expectations because there is a proclivity to develop hope for an uncertain future.

At times, we say we can’t stand drama and that all we want is a stable relationship with someone who loves and treats us well, but for some of us “stable” have hardly the appeal of “exciting”. At times, our status as single, independent, financially solvent has us sitting on a mountain of exceptional options. Options are exciting. So we want all the options. But having “options” is a cop-out for having nothing else, no interests, no commitments, and no values. Narcissism is not the quintessence of interest in any romantic or especially matrimonial connection to anyone worthy of a mature relationship.

One of my best friends with whom I used to discuss these things very frequently busted out of this endless circle and married to someone who had the main attributes of what he desired, and he was ready to forgive the rest of what he didn’t get. I wasn’t ready to forgive anything. Now he’s happily married with a beautiful baby girl and two dogs taking black and white anniversary pictures on snowy roads. I don’t even have a cat, but I have options.

Evolution is a lusty mistress. The human beings were original designed to live for 45-55 years. The clever animals that we are we screwed the game by tamping down infectious diseases and copiously swelling our food supply to live longer. We haven’t even begun to evolve into the world we created. Wait a bit longer, and you see that our qualification for someone’s idea of lifetime commitment will vanish altogether. In that case, having ‘options’ gets closer to the truth.

And of course in the end, you always find those shallow, coldly judgmental, obsessed with status, and unforgiving about any imperfections. You always find those who are angry and you represent everyone they have dated to that point. Before you chew the first piece of steak at a restaurant you’re the cheater, user, liar and irresponsible mate they’ve hated. That’d make you subject to many stupid tests they’ve read in relationship-for-dummies. Others have lived the party life and finally decide to settle down when you realize that settle means they’ll settle for you.

All of that shouldn’t irk you because if you are not alone, you have a different set of options. Yes, I assert there is something wrong with sampling liberally from the buffet. It reinforces what is already the problem for serial daters, both men and women. It’s not that you don’t know what you want. It’s that you only love yourselves. “To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.”

 True! Love is not as sacred as it once was. Still, it is the most sacred thing I know.

Beautifully Boring

Some of the most interesting people are the ones who seem to know everything, despite the fact that; they appear to know information they had no participation in producing. Bunk information entertains if nothing else.

My memory is as good as a Kim Kardashian’s acting. But there are phrases I never forget. They’re the true meaning of random crap. I heard or read them in situations when my brain had a short-lived spark for saving garbage data. Here are some of those:

  • When you know nothing, you think you could do anything
  • Art is competitive
  • In all the movie lines, “You can’t handle the truth!” tops it all
  • Happiness is sporadic
  • In a PG-13 movie, one “fuck” is allowed
  • There are things that are worth regretting
  • If you’re using a pay phone, things aren’t going well
  • Good health is beautifully boring
  • The difference between an X-rated and R-rated movie resides on male genitalia pointing up or down

Carol doesn’t exist

A few days of sunny weather in the middle of the winter on the left coast gave an opportunity to walk around the city and enjoy the scenery. While reflective, the modesty of feeling like an outsider presents a fresh perspective on simple observations.

… I was close to the tail end of the daily walk. To get to the entrance of the building, where I temporarily live, I have to go through a long covered sidewalk with arches on the street side. I get to the sidewalk and I hear someone shouting “Carol, Carol, where are you?”. And he keeps repeating it. People who are simultaneously walking in both directions of the sidewalk are wondering and looking around as to who Carol is –since the guy is uncontrollably loud.

I get closer where the shouting comes from and I see this man maybe in his 30’s. Young but he looks old. He looked tired and wobbly. He has tears in his eyes and was carrying a few wore out stuff which could be heavy since he walked slumped over. For some off reason I felt like I knew him.

As we passed each other, we glanced at each other and he asked “Did you see Carol?”. I replied “No, who’s Carol?”. At this point, pretty much everyone around is staring at us and following this conversation as the man is so intensely loud and present:

He said “Carol, you know? I have been looking for her”

Me: “Who’s Carol. Is she your sister, wife, girlfriend?”

He replied “No, you don’t understand. Carol doesn’t exist”

Me: “Why are you calling her then?”

He said “I knew you wouldn’t understand. Carol doesn’t exist. Since last night, Carol doesn’t exist anymore…”

…and he walked away. It was the New Year’s day.

Seattle

I moved to a new city. I don’t know why but the main reason seems to be a combination of several lesser reasons. If nothing else, I’m no longer as comfortable as I used to be which is an advantage all by itself. Screw conformity of being comfortable.

 Any new change is first condemned as ridiculous, and then dismissed as trivial, until finally it becomes what everybody knows. But hey, no one I know, got the market corner on human suffering so who is to appraise the weight of change. That goes to show that not everything happens for a reason.

The glass is half full here but I miss Seattle. When you think about Seattle, a lot of adjectives come to mind, but pretense or look-at-me swagger are not one of them.

Size of Brain

Transforming a long relationship means taking very significant actions to alter the fundamental dynamics that have so long impeded progress or caused setbacks. Naturally, one would like to see such actions coming from both sides, and eventually this must be so. The risks of doing so are very low and one cannot hurt another in any significant way by merely reaching out.

The mystery of it is to: shrink the ego to fit in to the size of brain.

Make a Wish

I love short stories, and for that reason, I impatiently wait every other week to read Nancy Gibbs new essay. Her latest was something that I couldn’t resist not posting on my blog. Here is the short version of her newest article:

 

When you’re little, every birthday is a big one. But as you grow up, it’s O.K. to let them get small. I have mixed feelings about how midlife birthdays, once easily waved at as they passed quietly by, have spun so far out of control, thanks to Facebook alerts and my generation’s abiding commitment to our eternal youth.

Ten felt very big — those two digits, one so straight and mature, one so round and promising. And 13, which made it official: childhood is memory now; life is PG-13. Sixteen was sweet; 18 was freedom, a launch that in those days could legally include a champagne toast. Your young self-hatches again and again between birthdays, so marking them has meaning — a grab for the handrail to steady yourself on a dizzying climb. Turn 14 and grow five inches. Turn 17 and fall in love.

But at some point, that all changes, once time is not sliced into semesters anymore. How different really is 27 from 26, or 42 from 41? The journey curves and loops; your age in years seems to detach from your age in experience. You get fired at 32 and feel 12 again, or you’re invited to teach for the first time and feel ancient standing in front of all those wide eyes. You circle back on certain ages, replaying them until you get it right. If the middle-school cafeteria is the setting for your recurring nightmares, you can spend decades as a preteen in your head, refining the snappy comeback that you never mastered at the time. What is a midlife crisis if not an adolescent rebellion with a bigger price tag? And our culture conspires to add to the confusion, now that 50 is the new 40 is the new 30.

Above all, it was having children of my own that most messed with my life cycle. Being allowed to walk out of the hospital with that child in my arms — no instruction manual, no warranty — sealed the certainty of adulthood in a way no car keys or paycheck or mortgage ever had. Their birthdays loomed so large that ours could discreetly recede. My diet would soon include, once again, cupcakes and macaroni and applesauce. The first time we all went to the circus, I felt 6 years old too.

Raising teenagers has forced me and every mom I know to double back even more, recalling what heartbreak feels like, and moodiness, and mystery, when every day feels so suddenly rude and ripe with expectations and revelations. My husband and I talk late into the night, trying to remember what it was like for us, even as we realize how much has changed for these kids. It feels ageless, middle age, when we are suspended between twin poles: the needs of our own parents as they hang on to us tighter and the needs of our children as they push us away. Who has time to stop and look closely at the calendar?

But when we do, when we gather with friends and count our blessings, what I find I’m most grateful for, nestled so deeply here in middle age, is being able to watch the candles flicker, and marvel at how many birthday wishes past have already come true.