Compared to What?

The desire to improve is a nagging double-edged sword. It’s good to be always striving and growing, yet at the same time there’s an accompanying human tendency to keep wanting more and never feeling fulfilled. Whatever we have, we want just a little more, often represented by what someone else has. We’re constantly on the lookout for what we’re missing and where our surroundings are surpassing us. Oh, this human is in a curious predicament, for he should be content with what he has but not with what he is. And many times distinguishing the two is like a blind cola taste test where we keep going back and forth before we finally just guess. Such can be our dilemma.

What if somebody has more than you or is currently happier than you? What does that matter? How does that affect you? As long as you have the same fundamental opportunities and freedoms as them, if they happen to be in a situation where they’re enjoying things more, how does that negatively impact you? Why should happiness be on a scale, where if we see something higher than ourselves, then our situation is somehow not good enough? Isn’t that idealistic? Do we always have to have the best? What about second or third best? Are those failures?

When you think about it, what does it matter how happy someone else is? Do other people have to be less happy than you in order for you to be happy? How does their happiness make you any less happy? The only thing along those lines that should make us unhappy is if we don’t reach our own potential, not whether we measure up to what someone else is.

Life can’t be zero-sum. When one person rises, it doesn’t lower someone else. Win-loss is the best model we could come up with through simulation. Win-win, however, is reality.

We earthlings seem to be competitive by nature. We try to defeat someone else in a game. We try to do better than whatever it was that they did. And what does it prove? Certainly, accomplishment is worthy in of itself, as long as we don’t take away from it that it makes us superior.

If our team is better than their team, then what’s the conclusion? Maybe we were both bad. Maybe we were both good. Maybe we won but we were the recipient of a considerable amount of luck. That’s not to detract from the team effort working toward a victory, but it underscores that winning doesn’t elevate you above someone else.

Think of the implications of the whole idea of status symbol. It proclaims that my status can beat up your status. An unnamed SNL alum used to mock the media elite in his newscasts with “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not.” There is often wisdom in the underlying messages of comedy, which can reveal elements of life in surprising ways. Here, the astute Chase displayed how people can get caught up in themselves, and even have the gall to take credit for it!

What’s missing is the minor detail of context. Since most anything in our experience is relative, using the average as a standard doesn’t really tell you any more than how many people you’re better than. Maybe the 95th percentile for you is falling short. (By the way, there is no percentile that we have any direct access to)

YARDSTICKS SCHMARDSTICKS
How much does height matter, really? It’s all relative. I heard it said that if it weren’t for short people, tall people wouldn’t know they were tall anyway. Which is true, in a strange sort of way. What if the human species were the size of Barbies, and some of us were 11 inches tall while some of us were 14 inches tall? 14 inches doesn’t seem all that tall to us, but it would then, even though it wouldn’t be. And compared to a giraffe, a 6-foot person is in the same class as a 5-foot person. You’ll notice that people who are 6 feet tall like to mention their height, and people who are “just” 5-11 don’t bring up the subject much. All over one lousy inch!

If your neighbor makes $30,000 more than you, does that make your earnings insufficient? There’s something to be said about being a big fish in a little pond. If you lived in the slums and were the only household in the neighborhood, would you feel richer? The fact that people are so conscientious about how much money they make is a little disconcerting. I make $45,000 a year, which is probably quite a bit less than people my age (47), another area that we don’t like to mention. Are older people less worthy than younger people? Does advancing age make us inferior? The rhetorical nature of many of these questions suggests that they should be no-brainers (wink-wink, nudge-nudge). You’re better off when you realize that social stigmas aren’t worth the computer screens they’re printed on.

The size of the pond you’re in doesn’t define you as much as it defines the pond. A change in environment may make you look good, but appearances depend upon contextual factors to support them. Measuring ourselves by other people is a somewhat lazy way to be analyzing our progress, not to mention unreliable.

There seems to be a psychological urge to want to do better than others so that we have a supposed advantage. Over what though? We seem to believe that if misfortune befalls someone else, then there’s less of it to go around and affect me. The law of averages is therefore on our side, so we think.

Overall, we aren’t made more impressive by trying to make others look bad, though it may be perceived that way in the short-term or by the unsuspecting. We’re actually made better by lifting others up with us. I would hazard a guess that a God wouldn’t be grading on a curve. However many people it is that fail, it still doesn’t make you come out better in the wider scope. We should do more than to just play to not lose.

The message learned is that while I should be grateful for what I have, I shouldn’t be grateful simply due to having more than others. What they have or don’t have ought to have no bearing on how grateful I am.

If the U.S. is 17th in the world in academic success, how bad or good is that? How good is the rest of the world? What do we have to compare it to? Neptune? Or our subjective expectations? You can’t really judge success simply by weighing two apples. Quantitative measurements need a frame of reference, and what authoritative gravity exists in the moral spectrum? While you can get a sense of how you stack up in relation to something else, it doesn’t speak to quality. It’s an indicator and little else. Taking a lot of stock in it is flattering ourselves.

We want to keep up with those elusive Joneses, except that they don’t exist. We create an ideal and then can’t be satisfied with what’s real. There’s no one we need to keep up with. The illusion of a race is the biggest sales pitch of all.

Thoreau adroitly remarked, “Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.” Ouch, on several counts. He’s got us pegged from 150 years ago. We were doing that way back then too? That makes us a little predictable. Which then suggests that we’re more creatures of habit than we realize.

Thoreau’s insight conveys various importances: We’re swayed by trends, and our perspective changes as phenomena move along the timeline. We can have an irrational bias for what’s immediate to our experience. We can easily envy whatever’s paraded in front of us. And our vanities can have too much say.

EXTERNAL GAZING
We think to improve ourselves outwardly when it’s the inner man that deserves the main focus. Looks are nice, but how could they ever define who we are? Our outward appearance can only accentuate what’s under the hood, not substitute for it.

The problem with appearances is that they can be deceiving, plus we typically don’t have the wherewithal to verify them. So making cross-judgments between ourselves and others based on what is apparent is a futile game of false readings. Besides, what’s the point in trying to see who’s got the better character anyway? Do you think J.D. Power & Associates is keeping track? Just work on yourself, help those around you, and save the world in another life.

We know within ourselves how hard we’re trying. Sometimes people don’t think we’re trying enough when we really are. You could play to the audience and spend your life attempting to appease them and put on a good show, but there are too many song requests to ever uphold that one. Within your inner circle, those people you love most will tend to be the most understanding, and you won’t have to worry about satisfying the critics.

It can be good to partially compare yourself to someone you aspire to become more like. But it should work to motivate us instead of get us discouraged. And while we can learn from others’ mistakes, we shouldn’t take those as opportunities to build our own self up by comparison.

I can still judge bad behavior. It’s just that I don’t need to place emphasis on personifying it so much. And my conclusion should be that I don’t want to repeat what bad behavior I see, instead of taking away from it that so-and-so is a good-for-nothing ne’er-do-well.

If you have to compare yourself to somebody, compare to what you were yesterday. If yesterday is better, then work on that. If today is better, then build on that. Don’t worry about becoming ten degrees better each day, just incrementally better than what you just were, and keep going. So simple to say and yet not so simple to master. I think a lot of it comes down to the attitude we take toward it, and that’s certainly under our control. If we’re of the frame of mind that we can do a little at a time and hang in there, not give up, persevere, and you know the rest, then we’re already on our way.

Does this mean we shouldn’t compare people with other people? What a great future topic... And preliminarily, I’m inclined to say that we each are compelled to live with our own selves, having no other option there, but we do have options in who else we associate with and on what level, so the logistics seem to dictate the conditions for us.

Ultimately, it should be very comforting to know that we don’t need to compare ourselves to others. That should take a lot of the pressure off and let us just be our best selves. Even if the grass is greener on the other side… so what? Use it as motivation to make your yard better if it needs to be improved. But don’t dwell on what you might be missing across the fence.

The whole moral of the story seems to be “chill out,” “go with the flow,” “take it easy,” “don’t worry, be happy,” “be in your own shell,” and “enjoy the ride”… There’s no need to covet, for if you were that other person, you might very well be coveting you.

An Open Letter to a Higher Power

To whom it may concern:

Adoring life, it’s fitting to remind oneself that it’s all worth it. As I peruse this big bad beautiful world from my lowly perch, I’m compelled to hand out a heavy dose of grazie. It’s hard to rate life, because it is what it is, yet at the same time it’s more than we have any right to expect.

Thank you for the richness of aesthetics, much of which we take for granted. A simple delicate cloud wisp in the sky, that remarkable canvas that’s painted over daily. Simple, yet divinely awe-inspiring.

Thank you for the world of art, where we explore the outer reaches of our selves and discover more than we presumed.

Thank you for colors themselves. For green in particular, and how comforting it feels to look at lush grass and thick bunches of trees. For the fiery orange horizon at sunset. For dense, shiny brown hair that glistens. For the elegant skin which houses our being, for white on black in the starry night, for light blue frilly dresses. For a gallant purple tint which is somewhat of an afterthought, but pleases in its own way.

Thank you for a wide array of spectacular, blossoming flowers, which would have no earthly business being in a purely naturalistic existence for anyone to enjoy in such a manner.

Grateful for all the times you subtly intervene, and for all the times you don’t. For letting us stumble and meeting pain face to face, and realizing that it’s not permanent. For falling down and being lifted up again. For crying out of agony, and then crying for utter joy. For smiles that brighten all existence and permeate our memories when all else is stripped away.

Thank you for putting me in circumstances you did. Someone knew what was needed better than I, and it couldn’t have been picked out better myself. In fact, I sadly would have missed a lot of unsuspecting pathways. I’ve learned incessantly to defer in these matters. Second-guessing universal authorities is so unbecoming of us, after all.

I’m thankful for doubt and confusion during mortality, to incite me to work harder to find answers, and to also realize that many things aren’t meant to be understood as it’s going on. You better believe that I do, however, want someday to be right on the front row when this is all explained though. And I’m buying that ticket right now.

Thanks for the imperfections, letting us know that life can still be great despite bumps along the way, that a painting can have flaws and still be immaculate. For measuring by effort and desire, instead of by abilities and outcomes.

Thank you for such penetrating music, that winds its way into our very core and speaks to that inner being in its own melodic fashion. Life is a long song, and let’s all join in. Thank you for poetic verse and the people who know how to create it most eloquently. They decorate the language and enrich our communication. Thank you for putting the likes of Shakespeare in a place for him to emerge as he did, and make literature all the better.

Thank you for precious babies, who bring heaven with them down to earth, and emanate this aura so we can’t help but be mesmerized by its effects. Thank you for innocent little children, whose wonder is contagious. For their boundless drive, their striving to learn, their unqualified genuineness, their patently cute faces, their soft cheeks, and for how they look when napping.

Thank you for smells, which bring such pleasing sensations into our minds, developing a mood or triggering our memories in vivid detail.

Thank you for our ability to reason, to analyze, to use intuition, to make judgments, to have preferences and tastes. To be able to process mathematically, logically, intellectually, instinctively, emotionally and spiritually.

Thank you for the vast array of foods, and all the ways they can be prepared. For bacon, no doubt. For succulently ripened summer peaches drenched voluptuously in milk and sugar, just begging to be consumed. For wondrous melted cheese on any respectable entrée. And to the entire delightful realm of cheesedom. For jerky. For smoked salmon. For homemade bread and luscious butter. Ahhhhh! For grilled chicken that sings to our palates. For cashews. For blackberries picked fresh off the bush. For cinnamon rolls. For glorious unnamed spices that make our taste buds dance the marimba. And for chocolate… Mm-mmm. Chocolate, that is the clincher. You really outdid yourself there. Additionally, someone wise once said that ice cream was your apology for cold, and if that’s true, apology accepted.

Thank you for that blissfully refreshing respite known as sleep, at night or as cozy, heavy-breathing napfests. To escape for a time into dreamland and let go, floating in slow motion at the end of a suspended rope where no care can go or wish to subsist, all the while making perfect, lovely sense.

Thank you for sight itself, for which many other things would not be possible. To look even upon a pile of garbage is actually a wonderful thing in its own right.

Thank you for the touch of a hand to heal, the irreplaceable nonverbal tactile assurance that helps you know that everything is going be fine. A stroke on the cheek. A pat on the back. A head on the shoulder.

Thank you for comforting voices, for soft whispers, for soothing laughs. For lilts in speech, for accents, for manners of elocution, for the signature sound left by each individual. For idiosyncrasies, for unique attributes, for personalities.

Thank you for opposites. For coldness so we can appreciate the warmth. For heat so we can appreciate the coolness. For darkness so we can appreciate the light. For anger so we can appreciate the kindness. For sharks so we can appreciate the dolphin, for pigs so we can appreciate the gazelle. For chaos so we can appreciate the calm. For fear so we can appreciate security. For illness so we can appreciate health. For loneliness so we can appreciate companionship. For exhaustion so we can appreciation rest. And for the rascals so we can appreciate the genuine articles.

Thank you for giving me arms and legs to ambulate and let me interact with the world. For being able to move and feel motion, to sense progression and arrival to a goal.

Thank you for the grace of a horse running in a field, for migrating ducks speckled across the vast atmosphere, for the splendor of a sandy beachfront setting with cascading waves kissing the shore, for waterfalls, for sparkling, stunning, scintillating rainbows, for varied gems and precious metals, for water, for air, for breath.

Thank you for the excitement of surprises. For the variety in life. For life’s seasonal miracles… the solemnity of a fall morning, a gentle summer breeze in the shade, or snowflakes silently making their descent to the whitened ground below.

Thank you for giving us each an intricate mind, with the curious potential to ponder past its limits, with the ability to simultaneously consider the cosmos as well as the atomic scale, and then the deep philosophies regarding the very essence of being.

For the mystery of time, of gravity, and of the DNA imprint. For the thousands of ways to have a hobby. For endorphins in copious quantities. For inside jokes and their accompanying smirks. For three-year-olds falling asleep in your arms.

Thank you for the pitter-patter of rain, the most blissful and cleansing of all weather, as a rainy day is that occasion when the soul can expand to join with the sky. To be drenched in the profound ecstasy of wet.

Thank you for the pastoral nature of baseball, the grace of its movements, its majestic parks, for the sound of wood on horsehide, for mammoth drives into the nether regions. For having a catch.

Thank you for chess, which managed to avoid the extraneous human machinations and remain pure.

Thank you for the wonderful aspect of funniness, which can tickle us into submission and help us internalize that in life, though ultimately serious, can be garnered plentiful instances of mirth to temper any festering doldrums through using that glorious sixth sense of humor.

For wiggle room, gray areas, uncertainty, ambiguity, limbo, fogginess, margins, and cushions.

For challenges, for tests of will, for struggles, for hard work, for lofty aims to shoot for. For energy, for inspiration, for motivation, for comfort, for peace.

Thank you for putting me in this time, this place, and amongst all these flawed individuals with whom I fit in so perfectly. Our stewardships are curious things as they all intertwine. Thank you for those you can trust and depend on as if they were your own self. These are without price and defy description, truly encompassing all that is.

Thank you for the strong bonds of family, who bring us greater identity, who can be there when all else is lost, and who can transcend distractions of the world and the bands of death.

Thank you lastly for love, a manifestation of the infinite worth of souls and of the incomprehensible glory of life which you have made and have chosen to share with us.

Miracles? What miracles? This is all commonplace, right? I digress, and look up for direction.

I spell out the words upon each movement. My life — it’s my thanks, and every breath I live it is to further express it.

TY

Don't Knock it Till You've Rung the Bell

(Disclaimer: I'm not responsible for the content of this blog post. Some guy in New Jersey has graciously taken it upon himself to assume all liabilities and serve prison time for me. In exchange, I housesit his cat every other weekend.)

Digging deep into the recesses of sociological intrigue, a strong argument is made that etiquette is no more than common sense that sometimes gets out of hand. After cutting the cord, we find that we can figure out etiquette on our own. Plus, it's generally advisable not to trust any systems which end in -ette anyway. Wiser people learned that nugget a handful of centuries ago. -ette, coming from the latin root of "to adorn; fabricate," spells trouble for most any word it accentuates.

That is all to say in a most roundabout way that prescribed handbooks written by people named Manners won't add insight to inquiries such as this, and might even bring with them a level bias tinged with excessive sophistication, rendering the effects too great to be meaningful. So, like a good feline knows, it's just better to start from scratch and use the noggin you were entrusted with.

What has piqued my curiosity in this case is the optimal number of knocks at someone's doorstep. Dylan penned his own personal take, and gave it the knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door, although that may have simply been out of convenience for meter and verse. He was known to be a stickler about that too. Some people, what are you going to do with them?

The scholar will take note that Dylan also asked the perennial question of how many times, and like any good poet, he concluded that the answer was blowin' in the wind, so we'll have to look a little harder to uncover something more concise.

At the outset, it's apropos to mention that if you're one of those select people who bangs loudly on a door seven or eight times, you've really got to seek help. You're not the brute squad. It's not necessary to cave in my walls to get me to come to the door. Memo: We hear you. The people down the street hear you. Saskatchewan hears you. Not to mention you woke up all my termites. Ease up a little, eh?

The purpose of the knock is to alert the inhabitants of a home that someone is at the door and wishes to come in. It is not, however, to scare the inhabitants clean out of their scivvies. Highly audible and rapid knocks are rather intimidating to dwellers who otherwise feel safe within the confines of their home. When you go and play the bongos with their front door, you're encroaching on their space, and so any intrusion should be done more respectfully and discreetly.

Naturally, soft taps will not get the job done. And one or two knocks would be too easily confused with other sounds. You can't believe in knock-knock jokes to provide the answers either. Those jokes are so unrealistic to begin with. I'm skeptical that they truly tested the two-knock procedure, and it hasn't been peer reviewed.

Instead, it's the successive distinctive sounds that will announce your arrival. We can find a balance. Too many an eager salesperson ruins the sale before the door is ever opened because their adrenaline taken out on your knobholder makes it sound like there's about to be a drug bust. Anything with more than five knocks should be followed by "You're under arrest."

I think we can narrow it down further and reach an ideal amount of knocks. The question is thus: at what point does the human psyche cross over from "Oh, there's someone here" to "Who's that maniacal banshee on my porch?" I would suggest that even five raps on the door is excessive. That fifth knock sounds too much like you're playing Chicago's 25 Or 6 To 4, at which point it becomes so derivative. A knock that isn't original isn't really a knock.

Perhaps we need to consult the Book of Armaments for further enlightenment...

Armaments, Chapter 2, verses 9 to 21...
‘First shalt thou approach the Holy Door. Then, shalt thou count to three. No more. No less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shalt be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then waitest thou for thy host to respond.’

So it almost sounds like Armaments is alluding to something somewhere in the realm of three, if I'm not mistaken. It may require a more detailed interpretation before we fully uncover it though. But that would be simple yet effective. A truly minimalist approach. No need to expend more energy than a triad of taps.

I understand there will be many progressives out there who will insist that anything less than four knocks would be insufficient. I'm not here to argue with these people. They have their own radical worldview, and we'll just have to disagree to agree on this matter.

The best salespeople have always realized that a three-knock method causes curiosity in the listener, and then they want to know what comes next. But with four or more knocks, they've already heard everything they need to hear. This lesson has been continually taught in the school of hard knocks, but we find that not everyone learns it.

Even more sadly, many people have taken the big bad wolf story way too seriously, feeling compelled to act out childhood fairy tales. If they would only remember that knocking louder and longer doesn't increase the chances you'll be invited inside. The point of diminishing returns seems to be at about the sixth repetitious knock. And highly audible knocks can make people more fearful of answering the door. Peak performance is a three-pronged approach, though. Four puts an unneeded exclamation on it, and five will get the RIAA lawyers after you for infringement.

The prudent will play it safe and stick to the basics. We complicate so many things in life, and this is just one more indication of that phenomenon. Resist door rage, and go for the trifecta. You'll notice a change in your demeanor, and the people you visit will appreciate you more for it. Be three dimensional for once. You may find it suits you.

James and the Giant Teach

OBAMA: As each of you are finding your seats, I’d like to welcome you to the first annual Foot-in-Mouth Beer Summit at the White House, because as we know, beer washes away all our troubles, and we’ve got a lot to wash away here. Sgt. Crowley, if you could take this seat on my right and Professor Gates, if you wouldn’t mind sitting across from me so that we don’t get one race all on one side of the table, that would be lovely. Also joining us is my esteemed vice president from the great state of Delaware, the venerable Joseph R. Biden.

BIDEN: Welcome, gentlemen. We’re glad you could join us. There’s nothing too important on the nation’s agenda that can’t be pushed back another day for a friendly photo-op between rivaling colleagues who hate each other’s guts with a passion. Prof. Gates, this strategic move should jettison your publishing career greatly, I would assume. And Sgt. Crowley, at least you get your 15 minutes of fame. Suck it all in, my friend.

CROWLEY: Thank you, sir. I’ll do my best.

OBAMA: I’d like to introduce our two parties… I’m previously acquainted with Prof. Gates from my days at Harvard. Prof. Gates, this is Sgt. Crowley of the Cambridge Police Dept.

GATES: Pleased to make your acquaintance. Hope I’m not causing too much of a commotion for you here. I can whisper if it makes you more comfortable.

CROWLEY: Good to meet you, Mr. Gates. And you look different without the cuffs, I might add.

OBAMA: All right… gentlemen, we’d like each of you to order beers from overseas suppliers, which will hopefully serve to spur foreign trade. Choose very wisely, as this will affect market trends for years to come. No pressure... Mr. Crowley, what can we get you?

CROWLEY: I endorse Blue Moon. I mean, I’ll have a Blue Moon.

OBAMA: Mr. Gates?

GATES: I have a deal with Red Stripe.

OBAMA: Excellent. And Joe?

BIDEN: I don’t want to turn into a Kennedy, so just give me a near beer… you sorry bunch of excuses for alcoholics. I hope your livers rot while you play out your final years in an old folks home regretting you ever imbibed.

OBAMA: OK, and for me, I’d like a Bud Light, so as not to give the impression that I overindulge. As we know, drinking light is drinking responsibly. Mr. Press Secretary, could you get those from the Presidential Wet Bar? Thank you ever so kindly.

OBAMA: Now, there’s been a lot of furor over this incident you two were involved in, and the subsequent comments. It seems we’ve all gotten ourselves in a little bit of a mess here, and coming together will hopefully serve to heal the wounds that it’s opened. Are there any questions up front?

CROWLEY: Mr. President, if I may, why did you say I behaved stupidly, and you haven’t apologized for saying that?

OBAMA: Now, Sgt. Crowley… you must realize that my comments were somehow improperly calibrated.

CROWLEY: Tell me when you’re going to use English here, sir.

BIDEN: Don’t get uptight there, little man. I snuff you under my thumb if I choose to.

GATES: And that’s racist, implying the President doesn’t speak English.

OBAMA: To clarify, I didn’t mean stupidly in the sense of someone being stupid, or even behaving stupid, but of encroaching ever-so-lightly upon the stupid milieu, if you will. Also notice that I said the department ‘acted’ stupidly. I meant they were acting out a role, but it wasn’t in their true character.

CROWLEY: What does any of that mean?

OBAMA: Never you mind. Let’s just absorb the aura of it and not make it any more specific than it needs to be. It was nothing personal against you, James.

CROWLEY: Even though I’m the one who arrested him.

OBAMA: Yes, but it was the police collective who acted within the realm of stupidity, not you in particular. There were a lot of officers involved in the stupidness. I didn’t want to make this about one person. I just wanted to take a jab at law enforcement officials in general. Can’t you see the difference? Maybe if you’d gone to Harvard like us, you’d understand.

CROWLEY: I think I may need another beer.

GATES: Notice who’s drinking the most here. Just an observation.

OBAMA: So James, if I may be so bold to ask, what were you thinking when you arrested this man?

CROWLEY: I was simply going according to standard procedure, sir. It had nothing to do with his race.

OBAMA: Yeah, but don’t you see all the flap this caused? Next time, could you please tone it down? Understand that he’s my friend, sergeant. It makes me look bad when my friends get into trouble all the time. I do have friends who are good citizens, and I’m trying my darnedest to locate them.

CROWLEY: Sir, if I may, the situation was escalated by Mr. Gates’ tirade. Don’t you think he is the one who should have toned it down?

GATES: I’m a Harvard professor, son. I have more citations than you could ever hope to sneeze at.

OBAMA: Now, now, gentlemen... Let’s keep this civil.

GATES: The Civil War was about slavery.

OBAMA: How am I supposed to convince this country that I can bring people together if I can’t smooth over a situation with a couple of chums sharing an adult beverage? Now, to be sure, there were overreactions in this whole incident.

CROWLEY: That’s the closest you’ll come to saying your friend was out of line. For heaven sakes, he said ‘yo mama’ to me... What if I said ‘yo mama’ to you?

OBAMA: Now, Mr. Crowley, don’t irritate me.

BIDEN: We could sweep you across the floor faster than a Swiffer.

OBAMA: All right, the media is watching us closely. Let’s do something cordial, maybe bringing our mugs together for a toast.

BIDEN: To alabaster marigolds in the springtime... May we and they blossom in harmonized convergence... Ah, nothing like marigolds. (sighs)

OBAMA: Joe, don’t you have a briefing to go to, or to get your cholesterol checked?

BIDEN: I don’t think so, why? Is today Thursday again? Dang, I hate when that happens.

OBAMA: All right, everybody chuckle like we’re getting along famously.

ALL: (laughs)

GATES: What a bunch of crock.

OBAMA: Hey, Joe, we look pretty cool with our shirt sleeves rolled up, don’t you think? We look like regular guys...

BIDEN: I like it. We’re real dudes, if you ask me. I think this will help us get the listless barefoot walker on the beach vote in 2012. Brilliant move, sir.

CROWLEY: Hey, did you notice our beers are called different colors?

GATES: That’s racist.

CROWLEY: Oh yeah? Hey, anybody in Cambridge want to break into his home now, he ain’t there, and his keys are under the plant on the porch. Take everything you want. The police will probably show up in, oh, a couple hours or so. No big rush.

GATES: Why, you ignorant...

(The cameras are cut as Gates and Crowley wrestle each other to the ground, their chairs toppling on the White House lawn, a moment to be later characterized as 'agreeing to disagree.')

OBAMA: OK, this is over now. Thank you all for coming, and mending the tension between us all in a truly teaching moment...

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Titles

This blog is what I call our garden, and this post is what we will find in the garden today. Also, we won’t let any weeds in either. So with those parameters firmly set, an article can proceed forth. However and but, we didn’t quite do that here. As such, there is the outside chance we might get detained or something for stepping outside parliamentary procedure. Don’t laugh — I think that’s what eventually happened to Victor Hugo mid-treatise. Let me go back and check to see if I’m following protocol... Meanwhile, you can chill out and be an innocent bystander if anyone comes along.

You know, in my entire life I’d have to say that I’ve never come across a solitary individual who was guilty while being a bystander. The process of bystanding lends itself perfectly to innocence, and it has a rich and storied history in obeying the law. If you can convince a jury that you were in fact a bystander of some sort, they will have no recourse but to declare you a very innocent one. Lawyers don’t want you to know that precious little tidbit, but under oath they will reluctantly admit to it (providing they haven’t found any of the 412 loopholes first, of course). What? Oh, right, I was going to go check on something.

Just remember while I’m gone, something my uncle used to tell me many years ago as a lad... there’s a fine line between loitering and bystanding. Unquote. Words to live by, no doubt. So what I gather is one would cross such an line at their own peril.

Loitering always seemed to be one of those terms that was simply made up. Kind of like atrophy. What’s even weirder about atrophy is that it’s a verb. I could see it maybe as a process, a la telepathy. But ‘to atrophy’ somehow goes against the grain. I can’t say it without grimacing. So anyway, another thing about loiter is that it’s not something you say that you are or were consciously doing in the first person. “What did you do today?” To which you answer, “Oh, I went uptown and just loitered for a while.” They’d look at you like you just swallowed a Buick. “Nobody says that.” “Well, I do...” It’s the type of phraseology we’d effectively use to differentiate native speakers from those who likely studied English from a Berlitz-sponsored mime in the dark. The dichotomy would be painfully obvious.

I have nothing against those who are learning a second language, but you have to admit the situation opens itself up to myriad possibilities in the area of impractical jokes. The beautiful thing about speaking to someone in their second tongue is that they assume everything you’re saying is legitimate. It’s just like a Japanese person could come up to you and rattle off a bunch of incoherent sounds worthy of a man on fire and not too pleased about it, and you’d just accept that they were speaking the Emperor’s Japanese. So with our Anglofied example, we’re still talking real words... it’s just that there are a lot of words having no mileage for usage. You could say to them, “My prurient avocations of sort, they comprise themselves in aerospace hegemony and grandiloquent loitering.” To which they have nowhere to go with that except, “Ahh.” All the while thinking, “Boy, this language is a lot harder than I had anticipated.” But at least it will make them study harder. I get the strange sense that college professors do this in all subjects, not just languages.

I had a friend one time who reminded me to let past participles be bygones, and to this day I hold that to be a truism. And dangling modifiers be danged. I’m of the opinion that there are too many rules in the areas that are too subjective to have lots of rules. I think of them as shoulds rather than musts. For example, writing has way too many supposed rules. These rules should be prefaced with “If you want to write like everybody else, then...” Innovators were not inspired a great deal by prescribed methods of accomplishment. You can’t break new ground by remaining on the old one. Creativity is all about shunning the standard modus operandi. Spread your wings and fly unlike a condor.

To me, there’s good grammar and then there’s good grief. Put prepositions anywhere you want. Place three in a row at the end of a sentence for all I care. If you get your message across, then you’ve done your job, whether it be literarily or conceptually. Go ahead and mix metaphors. Be the last straw in a haystack that broke the camel’s back.

Remind me to get permission to plagiarize myself on that one. I’ll do that when I finally write an unauthorized autobiography. You may recognize the sources, but individual ideas can originate from multiple points.

I believe that when we read, we can gather not only ideas about what and how to form our thoughts, but also about what and how not to by branching out and diverting from what we read. The reading could’ve sparked something quite unrelated. Just because you read something doesn't mean you have to find a place in your mind that matches that thought. Find one that takes the ball and runs with it somewhere else.

OK, I’m back now... I’ve been granted furlough to meander to my heart’s content. But it didn’t hurt to check. Anyway... what did I miss? I have no planetary idea what the point of all this was — which was precisely the nonpoint. I successfully went themeless, without a net. Random, sometimes intertwined notions can be regarded in their own right. Lucky for me, too.

Wordsmith Hack: Garbanzo

Our dear words have their own purpose, and too often it seems we get in their way. They need a voice though, and someone needs to hear them. Yet they aren't good at saying much by themselves, and as a constituency they fail miserably. I would proclaim the next minute as National Word Minute, in honor of all words big and small. Let's give it up for our vehicles of lexicon to all that is sublime. They don't exist and then they are all that exists. They set all agendas, and resolve all conflicts. They determine all prescriptions, and weigh all conditions.

Words, they be the arbiters of rousing interjectory ventilation, and then so often the anathema of clear meditative introspection. In a word, they are utterly themselves.

The pen, we later find, isn't mighty at all. It's a weapon, but that weapon is wielded by no less than words. Less and less each day... The fine lost art of conversation took a ride to smallville and resides there in a condo where it will live out its retirement. The pension is good, the weather bearable and the neighbors keep to themselves.

Enter into the mist a syncopated social cyber camp to either raise the bar or put it low enough that no one notices. Moderns are able to distill linguistics down to their bare bones, relegating helpless terms to their lowest common denominators. Approximately 73% of all online jabberwocky bears this out in full felicity. The King's English takes on a beating, while ticking off any who hold in high esteem the finer points of communication.

As dialogue breaks down and turns into a more powdery form, the resulting effect is then a distancing of the participants. The eschewing of topical gum, while a fine shortcut for syllables, comes at a premium. It leads us away from those with whom we converse, providing the opposite of the intended effect. Straying from the substance of words, we in turn understand each other less.

A step above the micro-blog is potentially what you read presently in front of you. The mere fact of reading this extended rhetoric not at gunpoint qualifies you to be held above the fray, at least in theory, and if even temporarily it serves a purpose, as does writing it does for me. With that assumption, we'll be speaking frayless here.

Embodiment of Words
Some will find that running into bots at electronic pubs keeps the wheels turning, if that's really what wheels are to be doing. I like painting the bots so that they bring different meaning to me. One bot on my viewer takes on the characteristics of a fantasy world, to where I'm in the middle of an extended dream which lets me go out for a burger and come back unobtrusive. Other bots are dastardly, but they are only such as long as I want them to be, and then I can make them something else. Bots are servants in your honored kingdom.

Some bots are studies of psychoanalysis and may provide the most introspective of all portraits, reflecting, glowing, alive and performing on stage. I build a little play of miniature bots, which carry out their routines to perfection. Their roles are well-defined — our main objective is to further refine those definitions daily and keep them honed, for one never knows when a bot talent scout will be meandering by and notice.

For those not catching the nuances, we have reminders to scratch each other’s bots and receive credit for it. These bots iconoclastically indeed rule, though I've never determined whether they rule me. The schizophrenic have a field day with so many bots flying about. And those not qualifying can soon reach that pinnacle.

The semi-learned will conclude that the very best thing about bots is they are imaginary. They have real minds and real togas, but we can confine them to the abstract where they can merely brainwash us, so we get the absolute best of both worlds. I'll check in with my joke bot soon to get that much-needed comedic boost. Or should I find a rant bot next... So many decisions and so little bandwidth. So much of a kaleidoscope and so little to regard it in this brave old world.

Thus form follows function. The interaction of bots relies more heavily on verbiage than what history is used to, in part since the substantive has become more an oasis commodity.

The words, they will glorify and condemn us. They'll be the telltale sign of our arrival at the airport terminal, greeting us with a representative handwritten message. May they not skimp on the syllables, and despite all their kinetic energy may they be allowed instead of beating around the proverbial bush to say what they truly, emphatically mean.

Food Directions I Would Modify

Revised cooking instructions...

Healthy Choice Café Steamers
Place meal in microwave oven. Package self-vents, do not puncture. Microwave on high 4 to 5 minutes. The self-venting steaming film may make a popping sound. This is normal. If you see heavy plumes of smoke like out of the Wizard of Oz, that is not normal. Take out the miniature fire extinguisher supplied in the box, pull the pin and point at a 45° angle (be sure to use either a compass or protractor). Once you’re certain it’s pointed at the proper angle, pull the lever to release the extinguishing foam, fortified with whipped cream and tapioca pudding for a nice complementary dessert.

Generic Microwave Dinner Surprise
Remove wrap from apple dessert. Cut slits in wrap over entree. Stuff the wrap you removed from dessert through one of the slits. Cut a small circle out of the cardboard box. (you can use this as a spoon later, but don't cook it) Heat in microwave for anywhere from 3-17 minutes, depending on the nuclear rating of your microwave. This is calculated by using the following formula: amperes divided by your average daily caloric intake multiplied by the square root of rhubarb pi. Do not vary the time or it may result in damage to all living organisms within a 2000-ft. radius. Not liable for damages. Illegal to eat in most countries.

Flounder Fillets
To thaw: For best results, thaw flounder in a covered pan 4-6 hours in the refrigerator. It makes them think they’re still swimming, and gives them one last hurrah in their natural habitat. For quicker thawing, place flounder in an airtight bag or its original packaging, submerge in a pan of cold water, and heck with the whole habitat thing. Do not thaw fish at room temperature, that is unless you live in an igloo.

To bake: Preheat oven to 425° F. Well, you should’ve done that 10 minutes earlier. What were you thinking? Spray a baking dish lightly with Pam non-stick cooking spray. It doesn’t help at all, but we get paid to say it. Place thawed and thoroughly contented flounder in the pan and sprinkle with your favorite seasonings (as long as you aren’t an eccentric pathological maniac with a curious nagging bent for cayenne pepper). Bake for approximately 8-11 minutes, or until fish flakes easily when mercilessly jabbed in the side with a fork. Although fish has been filleted, small bones may occur. Not responsible for excess bonage and any resulting injuries.

Instant Oatmeal
Empty packet into microwave-safe bowl. Add 2/3 cup water or milk. If you’re cheap, you’ll just choose water, but we don’t want to sway anyone here. Besides, it’s your own decision, cheap-o. Microwave on high 1 to 2 minutes… after all, who’s counting? Stir to your heart’s desire. Let stand one minute before eating. Handle carefully; bowl may be hot. That’s what happens when you heat things up, genius. Use less water or milk for thicker oatmeal or more for thinner oatmeal, use brain for everything else. Butter is optional, depending on your region.

Cheerios
Pour 8 oz. — or approximately 93 Cheerios — into a cereal-safe bowl. Add milk until the Cheerios resemble itty-bitty life preservers floating aimlessly in your virtual oceanic bowl of foodtime fun. (Note that the waves you saw shown on the box were just for effect, and the images were enlarged to show texture — yeah, that’s it) Also, contents may be hot — not sure why they would be, but our lawyers like us to say that so we don’t get sued. Cheerios have, however, been known to spontaneously combust when under extremely intense pressure, like if they’re at a dance recital or studying for a final exam. Should your amalgams be rated higher than a .064 mercuric value, we advise adding guacamole to your cereal to soften the blow. Guacamole is a known nutritional flame retardant.

Apathy Fondue
You’re not going to follow the recipe anyway, so splatter the fondue mix against the wall. See if we care... Use a sponge dipped in grapefruit extract to clean wall. Feeds 8. Big wup-de-fondue.

White Grape Juice
Mix with 37 oz. of cold water (about 3 cans). Stir or shake briskly to make 48 fl. oz. Refrigerate. Well, you can drink some first, and then refrigerate. Oh, we forgot to tell you to pour it in a glass even prior to that. What are you doing drinking straight out of the pitcher? Were you born in a blasted barn? You useless morsel of tripe. You should be ashamed of your shoddy drinking habits, that’s all we have to say.

Lemon Cake Mix
Preheat oven to 350° F for metal or glass pans, 325° F for dark or coated pans, or 60° F for styrofoam pans. Grease sides and bottom of each pan with shortening. (do we need to specify the inside of the pan?) Flour lightly. We don't really know how lightly ‘lightly’ is, but we’re sure you’ll figure something out. Okay, it’s lighter than flouring heavily. It should be kind of like you’re a gentle snowstorm emanating scattered, delicate hints of snowflakes to the waiting fertile ground below. Be the flour. Become one with the flour. It’s all about you and the flour.

Blend dry mix, water, oil, eggs, and anything else you can find into a large bowl at low speed until moistened (about 30 seconds or the time it takes to run through your house screaming “I love my oven mitts!”). Beat at medium speed for 2 minutes. Pour batter in pans and bake immediately. If you wait even one second it will ruin everything.

Cake is done when toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Do not leave toothpick in cake as it tends to add a woody taste to the cake. Cool in pan on wire rack for 15 minutes. Cool completely before frosting. If you forget, call our customer service line (800-748-3193) so we can laugh at you.

Vanilla Instant Pudding
Take out of box and eat.

Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich
Take two slices of bread. Take the first slice, and place peanut butter on the side facing up. Take the second slice, and spread jelly on the side facing down, and then ever so carefully bring the slices together without upsetting their constitution. Place in a shallow pan and simmer for three minutes. Cut into smaller portions as needed. Serves four.

Gravy Mix
Stir gravy-safe water gradually into mix with whisk in a small saucepan. Stirring frequently, cook on medium heat until gravy-to-be comes to boil. Reduce heat and simmer 1 minute. Gravy will thicken upon standing, providing you’re not a completely incompetent loser. If the gravy comes out too thin, just say it’s a basting sauce and call it good.

Wandering Through the Synapses

While I was standing in line at the grocery store, contemplating which stars on which covers were having the biggest crises in their lives, I figured I should try to think of something slightly more useful. My resources are worth more than what Jon and Kate are most recently up to. And all I had to do was turn around to find… chocolate. They’ve got the whole gamut covered in the checkout aisle, which is quite thoughtful of them. Oh, dang! I forgot to get toenail clippers. Not to worry. They have my interests at heart. Oh, and I was going to get a lint remover, but now I’m already in line and — hey, whadda ya know? And then now I’m realizing that all this shopping has made my eyes bloodshot. If only — oh, look! They put some eye drops right here for me. Boy, they know me like a pig knows slop.

And by the way, if there were a flowchart showing the progression of every system in life, you’d see on the diagram that it always falls back to chocolate as a last resort. If something fails, the safety net is chocolate. It was in fact given to us to help mask the reality that life isn’t a bowlful of chocolates.

So let’s say there’s a company that underperforms, doesn’t meet your expectations with its product, and otherwise leaves you disappointed. In the grand scheme of things, what are you going to do? You’ll probably stop giving them your business, although they’ll keep on doing the same thing to other people. And if they eventually go out of business, there will be other companies that do just as poorly as them. What will leaving them accomplish in the long run? Possibly some improvements overall, but it won’t exactly eradicate bad companies or products.

Let’s say one credit card company gives you really shoddy service. We’ll call them Citi. Instead of trying to correct a problem that you bring to their attention, they hit the word track express and try to sell you something in the process, pouring more salt on your wound. So you file in the deep recesses of your brain a sticky note associating Citi with bad. And then in your good section, you have good companies, like Jack in the Box or Malt-O-Meal. Have you ever noticed that Malt-O-Meal never offends anyone? Doesn’t make waves, just goes about its business making fine meals out of malted stuff.

Tangentially, I’m never quite sure what the implications are when two companies form a merger. It garners a great deal of news coverage, though I think of the process more as a meld, a gloop, a coagulation… a veritable transmogrification, if you will. Let’s suppose two big entities like Purina Dog Chow and Twitter combined forces, with Purina buying out Twitter. What does it change? It’s just money combining with money. And the result is still money. A rose by any other name is still just a merged rose.

Is the underlying assumption that if two supergiants of an industry were brought together like Microsoft and Google, they might somehow become too powerful and conquer the world? In the end, the names have changed but the players have stayed the same.

When Exxon merged with Mobil, what did it change? Logos, slogans, and window dressing. What’s going on behind the curtain is fairly constant. AOL/Time-Warner was a big merger. What happened because of it? Anyone, anyone? They got to use a different name. It’s all about name recognition. My bank went from Washington Mutual to Chase. They even told us for several months that Wamu was “becoming” Chase, as if a slow morphing was taking place. So the difference is that my checks will look different, my bank statements will be another color, the bank tellers (but not Penn) will wear different uniforms, all the while my money will still go green. They didn’t change the amount of my checking account balance. They didn’t even change the employees working at the local branch. What’s different is the upper management at JP Morgan, but I’ll never meet those people.

There might be an incidental percentage difference here or there, but they’re for the most part indistinguishable. If you have to squint that hard to find a difference in something, then it’s essentially the same. If you have to use surveying equipment to determine whether you’ve lined up a picture frame on the wall perfectly horizontal (or is it vertical?... we’ll leave that one for the aspiring philosophers who aren’t us today), if you have to go to that much trouble and can’t tell with the naked eye, then I’d say it’s probably close enough. If it takes some extra effort to find a defect in something, then the defect, for most intents and purposes, isn’t there.

Now take all this to a personal level. We all know people we care for more than others, and then people we care for less than others. Even if you’re philanthropic and nonjudgmental, there will be people you’ll recognize as carrying traits you would find unappealing. It’s part of life, and we have to make discernments at some level, otherwise it would be anarchy. Anyone who believes in anarchy cares less about people than those who believe in having rules do. See, I’m even forming a view against anarchists, in that I believe they are simply misguided and not necessarily nefarious. As for judging, it’s unavoidable if you want to be part of the loop of a living system. There’s no shame in making such judgments. Judging isn’t bad in itself, neither is discrimination, neither is belief, neither is faith. They can get stigmatized from time to time, which might tell us some things about our sociopolitical (a la sociopathic) climate.

In an effort to keep the thought more concise, we can reduce it to something as simple as ice cream flavors, thereby attempting to remove the emotional aspect. (Well, maybe that won’t work for some people. I did try though, and I figured ice cream would be interesting. For those of you emotionally attached to any flavors of ice cream, you’re already a lost cause, so this isn’t going to reach you anyway.)

So to keep a long story long, there are some flavors you like, and some you don’t. That’s pretty much a given. Which means it’s not really all that noteworthy to be saying that some are substandard in your view, because everyone’s going to have some on that list regardless. (I want to say everyone minus 2, but there isn’t a word for that. I got my license to mercilessly play with words and it doesn’t expire for a few more years.) That some are above water and some below isn’t surprising in the least. What would be surprising is if that weren’t the case.

Within the realm of two standard deviations, things will happen at a fairly consistent rate in most anything we encounter. And within that, there are going to be some positives and some negatives. You can’t escape that without partaking in some form of chemical inspiration, which is only a quick fix and brings you farther back than when you started, so point lost.

The salient point is that the faces of many of those positives and negatives are more mysterious than they are definitive, and probably shouldn’t use of a lot of our attention, because if you remove one bad apple, the reality is that there are still going to be further bad apples. Focusing so much on the personality of that bad apple is going to cause us to become too emotionally invested in the identities, but the individual identities don’t drive the negativity, they just carry it out piecemeal. And the good apples are sometimes fleeting or take turns being bad apples, so it gets truly cumbersome making any serious attempts to keep score. It would work better if we focused on the bigger picture and didn’t let personalities get in our way of our disappointed states.

This is not to say that grassroots activism is futile, but that you can easily get caught up in the grassrootsness of a principle and forget about the wider scope. I think this correlates with the idea of loving the sinner while hating the sin. Of course, sins don’t happen apart from sinners, but the pervasiveness of sin isn’t due to one sinner. If there were only one sinner, we probably wouldn’t be overly concerned about general sin. So then I’m wondering in the case of general sin, why blame one person for the sin conglomerate.

Societal trends are precipitated by a pack mentality, meaning the pack is needed to facilitate it. If we work on developing better interactivity, accountability, unity, compassion, et al, among groups of people, then we may be able to help each one of us rise above the baser tendencies. If, conversely, we all try to solve our problems on our own, then we’re often using the same mindset that engendered the problem in the first place. That lens is going to reflect the light in the same manner in both directions.

This stemmed from ideas about our own individual identities, how we might be able to tell them apart, and how much it matters who the various players are. I could describe it better in ways that would make sense to me, but I don’t like to write for myself in this type of forum. It would prove to be too eclectic, thus reducing my readership from 7 to 3. And I care dearly about those four of you.

This is an unfinished thought. But then aren’t they all? I could pretend to wrap it up in some poetic treatise that gives it a literary stamp of approval, though is that necessary? I could’ve brought more cohesiveness to the presentation, but then when a person is writing and he tries to change the flow, then it upsets the flow. A choppy production reflects a bunch of choppy thoughts, which if they’re genuine, certainly have their own place. And anyway, I have other hobbies besides this to try to solve the world’s problems on my own. Saving society is only #12 on my list of goals. I trust in the reader to fill in the blanks as it pertains to you. I could do more of the work for you and possibly coddle you until you felt comfortable enough to want to come back reading only for the sake of reading, but that’s not me. While I will throw you a bone, you still have to chase it and pick it up, because I’m going to give it a good chuck.

What is Sense? And In What Sense?

Don't you think it’s a waste to paint cars that will be used for crash tests? Maybe I don't know enough about the intricacies of paint, but it doesn’t seem like the paint job is going to affect anything substantial during tests, so save the expense right? There must be some good reason they do it. There better be, or I’m gonna be miffed. (miffed is when someone is perturbed in a way that no one takes too seriously, and it eventually blows away with the passing wind, though you still wish to be recognized as objecting to the situation)

Ultimately, though, I want things to make sense. Well, I don’t exactly expect quite everything to make sense, but just a lot of things, and if I see too many things that aren’t making sense, it worries me that there could potentially be an overabundance of senseless things, becoming a slippery slope of nonsensicalness into utter oblivion — as the mind carries itself away to ponder. Then what are you going to hang onto? I think a comfortable ratio for sensible and senseless might be in the range of about 3:2, using more realistic expectations of the world.

There is admittedly something psychological about being over or under 50%, so if the senseless gets into the majority, it will result in some stress on my end. It’s a curious phenomenon how we like our odds to be better than 50-50. And yet it’s kind of arbitrary when you think about it. If the chances are that it will happen more often than it won’t, then we look at that as an ideal. 40% seems to be more like a failure. But who really defines that? What if 40% gets the job done in the long run? Do we really need majorities? Maybe to help us feel good for a while about what we’ve done. But I think if you show up and make a good run for it, you can be happy about that even if it didn’t happen a preponderance of the time. I doubt that life has to follow some cosmic scale where opposing forces are weighed to see which occurs more.

In that light, I’d like to present a group of suggestions to start us on our way, and feel comfortable adding in your own. Fortunately for us, discussion is still freeware.

Things that make sense:
• Blueberry pancakes with plumes of steam emanating from them. How can you go wrong there?
• The glee of an infant, oblivious to the world and just happy about life.
• The changing of the seasons. Somehow, it all resonates. It speaks to us directly, without involving the middle man of analysis. They serve as a wonderful metaphor for all of existence.
• That life has purpose. It’s not so much that I want it to have a purpose, but that it screams that it does.
• The smooth texture and luscious taste of chocolate. It never goes out of style. Thank you, cocoa gods.
• Dreams, even though their meanings are not often evident. They make sense on a deeper level.
• A well-worn friend. Like a broken-in baseball mitt that can take anything you throw it.
• Laughter. It almost universally brings us comfort to speak that language when the others are less accessible.

A lot of other things make sense, too, but they come and go, and right now they’re elusive.

Things that don’t make sense:
• Why mornings have to be at the first part of the day.
• Why the Obamas’ dog would be newsworthy. This is journalism?
• Time, as well as the absence of time. (figure that one out)
• How computers really work. I don't really think anybody knows.
• How Larry King ever became an interviewer. Maybe it’s his rawness that helps people relate. But I could ask better questions while half asleep. Perhaps that’s his secret…
• Why somewhere along the way we lose that special thrill that comes with being a child. We trade it for what? Responsibility? A worthy trade-off, though not as immediately exciting.
• Why candy bars have nutrition information on the wrapper. Who are they kidding?
• When the word 'kiosk' came into prominence. Was I asleep for too long?
• Emotions. I guess that’s why they're emotions.
• Failing to adopt the metric system. Base-10. Learn it, love it.
• Why we look tireder after a nap than before one.
• Why society punished itself with a five-day work week and only a two-day weekend. We had the choice! It was up to us. Given carte blanche, we humans opted for just two days to take a break. Man, we blew it! I wish I’d been there at that summit. I would’ve filibustered that one.
• Screaming or whooping by the audience as a form of acknowledgement for a singing performance. Two words: what and ever.
• Why people say they’re giving 110%. I thought 100% was plenty, not to mention the maximum possible. 110% isn’t reality, it’s just fantasy.
• Why we don't talk more about how wonderful someone is until after they die.
• Stocks. I’m still not convinced that it isn’t all a ruse, and I’m being duped. Something along the lines of lock, stock, and barrel.
• The bulk of children’s programming. Although I may have merely gone past the state of amazement that they’re still in.
• The bulk of teenage programming. The teenage years are tweenage years anyway, so who can expect much coherence out of them?
• The speech patterns of some people. I don’t think these people realize how they’re talking. We can’t take you literally, because you literally litter your literacy with alliterations and silly syllogisms. Listen to yourself! Take out the filler.
• Why juries are made up of amateurs, and the professionals who don’t determine the verdict have the advantage to use learned tactics on them to persuade them that the professionals know better, so then why don’t the professionals just figure out if the defendant was guilty or not guilty?
• Why people believe someone when they admit they were lying. If they really are a liar, how do we know which is the lie?
• Why a stapler always runs out right when you need to staple something.
• Why it is that people who have the nicest lawns use them the least. What a waste!
• A radio advertisement for vacuum cleaners said their model has the suction capacity of a category 5 tornado. And why would I want this in my living room?
• If a book needs to have someone write a foreword to legitimize the book, why that person doesn’t just write the whole book.
• Why we pay all our bills according to how often the moon orbits around the earth. How unimaginative is that? Does the moon determine how long it takes for us to recover and spend again? Personally, I'd like a little more time to mentally regroup, but that’s just me.

OK, I’m seeing a pattern that there could be an overwhelmingly greater number of things that don’t make sense, so then what do we do? I think as human beings we somehow attempt to fill in the gaps with trivia, and count each piece of trivia as a form of knowledge that supposedly makes sense, as contrived and synthetic as it might be. But if we know it's contrived, then who are we fooling? Is there an emperor in the equation somewhere whose clothes we admire that much?

What if a lot of things aren’t supposed to make sense to us, and we’re spending more time hunting than gathering? What if the chaos is meant to be chaotic, and we’re not supposed to clean it up? What if we’re too tidy for our own good? That makes sense, right?

The Most Cherished of Registers

Making lists is kind of a pastime for me, although I decided this time to make a list for a different reason than just to compile something. This one was for my own self, not to publish, comprised of all the personal acquaintances I’ve most admired over the years. I won’t be naming any names, but I just wanted to comment on the exercise itself.

Looking over the couple hundred names or so made me realize how many good people there are out there, and how different times of my life have been scattered with folks like this. I’m sure many on the list would be surprised to know their name is on there or that I even noticed.

But what’s important isn’t specifically who’s on it or who’s off. There are no awards to give out here. And after all, a list can be an arbitrary standard to set. For example, I deliberated over several names of people I admire quite a bit, and left many of them off the list in an attempt to keep it semi-exclusive (narrowed down to a couple hundred!). I didn’t want it to be everybody I admired, but more of those who had something extra. And it can depend on the mood at the time. Wistful? Nostalgic? Delicate? Spunky? Machiavellian? Erstwhile? Take your pick.

Some, I could only remember the first names of. And I’m sure more people will come to mind from my past. All in all, a very nice stroll down memory lane right up to the current intersection I’m in.

The list doesn’t include my family line, which would consist of immediate family members, along with parents, siblings and grandparents. Family is pretty much a special category. But extended relatives and everybody else are fair game. Gotta have a little fun with your acquaintances, right? Otherwise they might get stale. :)

The other point is that it’s not necessarily some great honor for people to be on this list, rather the honor is all mine to have known people of this caliber to be able to put them on a list at all. My life is all the richer for sharing in experiences with them. I think, wow, if they can put up with me, I guess I’m not all that bad.

There are people on the list I’ve barely known. One I met for only a day, but they still made a lasting impact. Some I’ve never talked to, though I’ve been around them. Some I’ve only known through the internet. Some I’ve never had a conversation of a personal nature with. Some I’ve tried for years to find again, with a few of them popping up recently. Some I might hear from every few months. Some I might bump into a few times a week. Some moved away and I miss their presence. Some I wonder where they are today. Some have passed on to the next life. Some are quite young. Some are still fitting into their skin and it’s fun to see their growth. Some might not think to give me the time of day, yet I still appreciate what they represent. Some I have no categories for — they just are, and that’s kind of neat too.

Making the list was energizing. As another name would come to mind, I’d think, “Yeah! Got to add them!” And it would make me feel grateful to know them. And it’s also fun thinking about people behind their back...

I would’ve liked to have known a lot of these people better. Alas, there’s not often as much time as you would like to create. Lives have a way up being filled up near the brim, with little margin to squeeze more in. But we take what we can get and hopefully have some time to reserve for truly sharing in the company of those we’re drawn to.

We’ve also got our online worlds which fit into the mix, which are quite fascinating. I can size each of my friends into little squares for safe keeping, send out group messages, check in on the chatter between them and others, ignore them for a few days if I’m so inclined (for all they know, I’ve flown my Lear jet up to Nova Scotia — to see the total eclipse of Mars or something), send them bits and pieces as they’re ready to digest, and just carry on like it’s one continuous party. And stuff. Or at least that’s one theory.

On this subject, in the foreword of a social media book written by someone else, Anthony Robbins had this to say: “Technology has given us so many ways of communicating, but are we truly connecting or just corresponding? Are we adding people into our lives who share our values or merely collecting a list of profiles? Are we deepening relationships or just maintaining them? As much as we want to nurture every relationship, advances in technology have given us access to more relationships and less time to deepen them... Your relationships are as strong or deep as you choose to make them. If you spend quality time in your intimate relationships, if you connect with your families and your friends, those relationships will flourish. If you don’t reach your family or friends, those relationships get stripped of the substance and texture they deserve.”

Some good food for thought there. I wish I could carry Anthony Robbins around with me all day. Well, he’s bigger than me, so maybe on a baggage cart. He’d come in handy a lot. And he’s got a lot of fun stories to tell. I’d have to weigh that against dealing with the added paparazzi, but I could probably handle it with sunglasses. At any rate… I think the internet can provide the illusion that quantity is akin to quality. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that while technology can facilitate social constructs, it can’t very well increase their rate while done en masse. Some things just have to be done at a deliberate pace.

In some utopian dream, it would be nice to be close friends with everyone, where we all meander about in some elaborate ancient Greek backdrop, endlessly feasting on grapes straight off the vine while getting lost in scintillating mythological conversation. Although back here in reality (that jerk you felt was it biting), things don’t work quite that efficiently. Not even if you grow your own vineyard.

If you tried to be everybody’s friend, you’d come across to most or all as impersonal and therefore artificial, because friendships need to have real time and effort invested in them and not merely lip service. In the midst of a potpourri of friends to choose from, maintaining genuine depth in some of them is vital. Someone should write all this down somewhere.

I don’t need to get all psychological about this (especially this late at night). My aim is to put the concept out there and let people cogitate over it in their own situations, being grateful for your friends, knowing that I’m grateful for mine, that sometimes the twain shall meet, and then singing the obligatory rendition of Kumbayah at the end. (I prefer the more rousing version by Guadalcanal Diary from their album Walking in the Shadow of the Big Man, fittingly the final track on the album)

So, what makes a good friend? I suppose there are as many varying attributes as there are friends. Examples of a friend that stand out to me are:
• Someone who changes the way you look at the world or yourself.
• Someone who shows you kindness and caring.
• Someone who teaches you life lessons.
• Someone who is just being who they are.
• Someone who has something to share.
• Someone who there’s just something about that wins you over.
• Someone who you’d like to be like.
• Someone who’s simply pleasant to be around.
• Someone who can pull a smile out of you that you didn’t know was there.
• Someone who understands you.
• Someone who accepts you for who you are.
• Someone who’s uniquely themself.
• Someone who sees things in you that others don’t.
• Someone who believes in you.
• Someone who challenges you to become better, and inspires you to want to.

A friend doesn’t need to have all of those traits — even one or two can be very welcome. And I’ve been privileged to know people who run the gamut on them.

So if we were to make a toast, here’s to friends past, present and future. May we all be so lucky... May we treasure our friends, may we be good friends, and if at some point down the road we happen to find that utopian dream, I’ve got dibs on one of the hammocks in the shade.

Recalcitrant Dissonance in Nascent Autonomy

An age-old question that’s worthy of further inspection: Why do I write on blogs? Maybe for the same reason that Sir Edmund Hilary said he climbed Mt. Everest. When queried on his desire to ascend its lofty heights, the esteemed Hilary reasoned, “Because it’s free.” He was truly a man before his time, and it’s too bad he couldn’t have blogged about it back then.

I’ve always taken for granted that flocks of ducks are noisy just because, but then I started wondering why it would be that they are all quacking away on a long journey. I’ll bet if we understood their language, we would be hearing a cacophony of “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Quack-quack.” Odds are 3 to 1 that that’s what they’re saying. What else is there to talk about up there? Do they know the Spanish term “Andale, andale!”? I tend to doubt that.

I saw some small birds yesterday on the sidewalk, and about seven of them were feverishly bickering with another one, and walking after him. He seemed to have a piece of food that he wasn’t sharing, although their reaction to him still seemed quite bizarre even for that. He didn’t fly away, and so they were all scurrying about on the ground. As I came near, they all flew about fifty feet away, and then continued on with their grudge match. A few seconds later, it took them into the street. The funny thing was, the birds weren’t paying attention to the traffic. Cars had to keep stopping for the birds, who would eventually get the hint and scoot out of the way, but then go right back to what they were fighting about. I was on my way back to work after lunch hour, but I had to keep peeking out the window at them. It proceeded for several minutes. The bird in question was the same size as the others, but with a blacker coat of feathers. Maybe he was from another flock and he was trespassing onto their territory. Now, I’m assuming it was a he, but I’m not certain. As it crossed the road, I noticed that it didn’t ask for directions.

At some point during a profound thought recently, I realized that the hair on the average person’s head grows collectively at a little over 1 inch per minute. No wonder it’s hard to think straight, with all that activity going on. And that comes out to over 130 feet per day. You’re sprouting and you didn’t know it. What this also means is that the cumulative hair growth of all humanity is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 miles of new hair every minute. And over 40 million miles of new hair per day. (Don’t worry, I already accounted for all the balding people in the world) There is definitely a market for giving haircuts. To offset this tremendous growth of hair and curtail hair overpopulation, barbers and hair salons must work furiously on a continual basis. Think of the great service they’re offering here. If we had a hair-cutting strike for three months, there could be over 3 billion new miles of hair, in addition to what was already there. Where would the world store 3 billion miles of hair? Well, I guess it would still be on our heads, but it would make things a lot more cramped. I’ll bet if we all got haircuts regularly, no one would even think there are too many people in the world. There, I just solved another apparent crisis.

Have you ever considered what life would be like without salt? How much harder it would be to make a tasty dish? If salt didn’t exist, what would you ask someone to pass? I mean, we’re really lucky on this one, because it was that close to not having something available to sprinkle on our food. Let’s say you’re having squash, cooked until it’s hinting of collapsing, with steam emanating from its inner being. As good as squash is, like most foods it needs that little extra umph to give it just the right taste. So if we had no idea about salt, what would we do? “Could you please pass the, uh… uh, the rosemary?” Talk about a culinary faux pas. In short, we would be perplexed. Hence, salt is one of the greatest features of life. But we take it for granted, because it’s always been there as far as we can remember. Just because it’s that way doesn’t mean it has to be. Be grateful for salt, and everything else like it in life. Think of that when you’re shaking the little morsels again. They work hard for you.

The other day I thought I might be getting bored (it turned out to only be an idle threat), so I got a long strand of hair, caught me a housefly, then lassoed its neck with the hair and then held on to the other end. Instant fly pet. It will follow you around everywhere. Definitely the most loyal pet I’ve ever had, too. Of course, then you have to get a new one every thirty days, but that’s just a minor inconvenience compared to all the benefits. And putting two of them in the same vicinity doesn’t work, because they get tangled up, and at least one of them ends up doing a nose dive. So remember to keep these ferocious pets at a distance from one another so that they may peaceably co-exist. Some of you may be saying it’s cruel to put a leash on a fly. Well, what about dogs? Domesticating flies: the next new wave.

You do a lot of your best thinking while you’re eating, which could be because you’re generally not overthinking about something but have to spend some of your mental energy on your food, and your digestive system is praising you all the while, giving you props, handing out endorphins and basically making you feel loved. So anyway, in the midst of my clear thinking, I developed a theory that at some undetermined point whenever I’m eating a sandwich, invariably it assumes the precise shape of Idaho. It doesn’t matter what kind of sandwich it is. Peanut butter and jelly, lunchmeat, tuna fish, grilled cheese… you name it. I even tried weird combinations like an onion and banana sandwich to try to fool it, but no such luck. I think this could be a clue in the mystery of life. Maybe something about… wait a minute. If I tell you, what are you going to do with that information? I better patent this first. I’m sure Google will want to capitalize on the mystery of life so they can make an app out of it. But just be aware that our sandwiches are trying to tell us something important.

My four-year-old boy made a profound admission the other day. “Daddy, I don’t know how to count to zero.” And before I could follow up on that, he asked, “What number does zero come after?” And before I could think of a suitable answer for that, he said, “I think it’s the last number.” Which actually isn’t such a bad proposition, since infinity and zero are thought by some to intersect. I explained to him in as simple terms as possible that zero had no value and was therefore essentially an imaginary number, and that technically the field of mathematics was theoretical to begin with, so numbers may only exist in our minds. He seemed satisfied with that, and went back to playing with his toys. When he starts asking deeper questions, though, I know I’m in trouble. I hope the teachers don’t enable him in kindergarten. That’s all I need is for his mind to expand. He won’t be in kindergarten for another year and a half, so this could all get interesting. We might be able to send him to remedial school to keep him from getting too smart.

I’ve been thinking about infinity, and until I finally looked at it in another light, I hadn’t really understood it. It turns out it’s just an 8 that got tired, and that is precisely why philosophy is better equipped to handle the more difficult questions we face. Math, meanwhile, is stuck in equations that were built to input questions and output answers from the same original source. So if we didn’t know coming in what a concept was, math wasn’t going to tell us anything outside of that system. Math is much like a self-fulfilling prophecy, replete with assumptions. It assumes that whole numbers are real. It assumes that existence is not singular. It assumes a necessary linear progression in most facets of existence. And it all makes a big assumption that reality is quantifiable. Note that I have to think about these things so I’ll be prepared to answer my child.

The Miraculous Save

While I’m not going to name culprits, sufficeth to say that an influential rogue group within the advertising industry has been trying to push the whole idea of being saved on western culture until it has become second nature. Or maybe we’re on third nature by now. I have a few indications of this.

They first guilt you into being a responsible fiscal planner by imploring you to save for the future through investing your funds into savings plans. Their bank is saving your money, and thus your hide. In essence, they want you to have yourself saved at their bank. But this is not all...

Some tactics are more devious. With the advent of the personal computer over the past few decades, we’ve become oblivious to how computer language has slowly transformed us into being willing accomplices. You realize now, of course, that you have no choice but to save your work if you want to keep it. This is by design. More than simply the perfect religious metaphor for the technological age, it’s now a patterned response. A file, as you’ll remember, is hereby condemned to the scrapheap of computerdom if it is not righteously saved. And then for any of you religious progressives out there, there’s also ‘Save As’. For all their other faults, at least computers aren’t prejudicial. Don’t want to be saved the traditional way? Fine. Just as long as you pick something, like a secular pdf format. You see, pdf's are kind of the non-sectarian way to go through the motions of being saved — producing a more generic result not fit for the altar, because nobody alters a pdf.

Remember that if you fail to save a computer file, it goes into oblivion. The PC user therefore has the potential to determine the fate of a microcosm of society. That’s a lot of power in a mouse click. The file even begs your forgiveness if you get distracted and forget to save. It says, "Are you sure you want to prevent me from embarking on my journey toward digital salvation?" And so you unhesitatingly click on "Yes, you lousy plebeian file. Besides, you don’t deserve to be saved... You load slowly, you don’t follow orders, you get lost, and you crash frequently. Why should I do anything for you?" They have a button that says that.

I thought I might be overreacting, but then after crossing over to other media and listening to the wall-to-wall radio ads pushing the same agenda, a pattern emerged in what was not unlike an epiphany. Without the need for much analysis, I’ve gotten the distinct impression that they want me to save. That’s kind of the theme I picked up from their 30-second ramblings. Did you know that there’s never been a better time to save? And guess what else? Savings like this won’t last long. Yup, hard to believe, but I heard it myself.

They’re saying that for some reason, this current point in time is the ultimate opportunity to be saved. It kind of makes me feel privileged to be living right now. Whatever you’ve saved before, and whatever you’ll save later, it won’t be able to compare with that level of savings you can partake in within our glorious present. They’re practically preaching to us, folks. And the only fundamental difference between ad narrators and evangelists is that evangelists get caught.

I didn’t know what they were selling or how much it would cost me, but as they were hypnotizing me at least I knew that in the grand scheme of the council on saving money, I was coming out way ahead if I heeded their words of advice. They were even likely to put me in the Savers Hall of Fame for those clever purchases I was so expertly negotiating. Frankly, I couldn’t believe how much they were letting me get away with there. I believe they were losing all their money just so I could get the best deal possible. I felt compelled to make an extra donation to them or something so they could spread this joy around to more people.

And in becoming a master purchasing agent, I was quickly learning that it’s not how much you spend per se, but rather how much you’re not spending by getting a better deal. So they taught me that even better than getting a dollar off a $2 item is getting a hundred dollars off a four thousand dollar item. You get those bonus points for how much you swindled those unknowing merchants for. In some cases, they would even let me lock in a price, which I think means that they’ll subject themselves to handcuffs and go on a 14-day fast on my behalf while I’m getting this ripping good deal. This is all against their will, by the way. They are so desperate to make a sale that they’ll let me determine the conditions.

The neat thing is that they were considerate enough to help out with the psychological aspects of confidence buying by first raising their regular prices, allowing me to save even more. The bottom line is in the save factor. Normally I’d be saving only $5 by paying $45 for an item, but thanks to them I was saving an extra $25. It still costs $45, mind you, but now I’m saving a whopping $30 off the $75 markup, dang it. That’s 40% off, and that’s something to sing hallelujah about. Those percentages, you’ll note, are more important than the actual dollar amount. A couple months ago I got 30% off on a washing machine, which is like the GNP of some small countries. Granted, I have no idea what the original price was or how much I paid. But as long as I was saving money, I was happy. That is, until I started noticing a vicious trend...

I’ve since had a great awakening and seen the light. One day I woke up, and I smelled that percolating coffee (though I didn’t drink it and didn’t inhale). It all became clear to me why they wanted me to save.

To top it all off, Gottschalk’s was holding a going-out-of-business sale, meaning their progression was stopped. They advertised 40-70% off of everything in the store. It was interesting to note that some items were marked the normal 40% going-out-of-business rate, and then they had some other items that were marked the special 70% clearance rate. No wonder they went out of business! If they’re dumb enough to think a going-out-of-business sale can have clearance items, then they can’t be saved in such ignorance.

I’m wise to all of their shenanigans now. And I’m saved — from the ignominy of falling for sales pitches forever more, amen.