Beach chair condemnation

Nearly a month ago, half past 11 at night, I stood on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico and looked up at the infinite sky, and I realized once again the smallness of my existence. This was no feat though. I could have determined the same thing by studying the anthill on the sidewalk. The stars and the ants have one thing in common: they share a reality that I can never know, a complexity that escapes me, that goes on all around me while I stand oblivious in the corner tapping repetitively on the screen of a phone looking up things about stars and ants because I don’t have a life to dedicate to astronomy and entomology. I need inspiration now, 4G inspiration to be exact, although I have no idea what 4G means or how satellites work or anything really outside of the embarrassingly narrow field of knowledge that I have managed to collect and retain after 19 years of schooling.

The real beauty though is that I don’t need anyone to tell me what the stars mean. I can look directly at them, for just a moment, and see for myself the truth that they represent. It is the truth of possibility. What limit is there on life when the light of the stars burns visible at distances we couldn’t travel in 50 lifetimes? Tell me what cannot be done when the tiny ant never strays from her work, faithful to her role in sustaining the homeostasis of the mound, of the insect kingdom, of the world?

What say you? Not people, you say? You mean that even with all the humbling glory of the stars, man sets himself above others? Even with the incredible, the explanation-defying example of logic and order set by nature, human beings live in disorder, in disarray? Inefficiency? Wasted time? Hatred? Self-interest? It can’t be true. It must be an aberration, a bad sample. Look again.

Look again and you will find the honest, never-straying worker who reports on time, brings home the food, nurtures the young, and protects the home. Look and you can find the civilian doctor working in a war zone tent, the community resident visiting nursing home shut-a-ways. There are everywhere examples of strength, courage, compassion, selflessness and love.

Although, I'll give it to you, cynic, that in the day to day, as you go about your errands dropping off the dry cleaning and picking up blood pressure medicine at the Walgreens drive thru, you are not driven to tears by the humanity of your fellow humans. But maybe it's less them and more us. Maybe when you spot the customer turning their blood pressure med pick-up into a combo cigarette and Cheetos refill-run and then overhear them complain about the three dollars they had to pick up as part of their government insurance plan, you should be reminded about your own internal inconsistencies. But that's just it - we're always pointing out the obvious, always shaking our heads as we go down our own self-destructive paths, muttering "idiot" under our breath. We might as well be muttering in front of the mirror.

As I stood on the shore, staring at the sky, I thought about the ocean soothingly beating the sand, the same way it beats the sand in every other place. That same ocean, unbroken by land, touches every continent and the shores of every country on the sea. As the water rolled up under my feet, I became part of wherever the water went, connected to the lives of those it washed over. But this is just sentiment, just bad poetry. I am already connected to the lives of those who the ocean touches, and those it doesn’t. Every person is a citizen of the world, responsible for honoring the opportunity we all share. The greatest reminder of how small we really are is the size of our aggregate, of our collective hopes and dreams. The accompanying tragedy is that their realization is sacrificed by the individualism that gave birth to them, and, most days, we are little more than individuals. That feeling we get when we know we’re shrugging off the reality happening all around us because we don’t want it to invade our lives, our leisure, our vacation: that’s us. The condemnation of the impoverishing effect of individualism from a beach chair: that was me a month ago. Looking back now, I’m glad I walked out there. Productive.

The Fiction of Happiness

Outside of a small coffee shop in Manhattan’s Upper west side, two men sit next to each other at adjacent tables, although they sit separately. One is young, and the other is older. The younger man is named Russell, and the older Victor. Russell has with him a small stack of books and a journal, which he hunches over as he watches passersby and occasionally makes a note, occasionally referencing a page in one of his books. Victor sits quietly sipping an espresso; he has nothing with him but a cane, one of those nice canes with a duck or dog head carved for the handle. The tables line the sidewalk, and across the street are various boutiques and high-fashion shops. Russell breaks the silence.

R: Can I ask you a question?

V: Me? Yes of course.

R: What do you do? What’s your profession?

V: Well I’m retired- I am- I was a teacher. I taught history for twenty-three years. Tenth grade.

R: Excellent. That’s perfect. Can I ask you another question?

V: Ask away.

R: Do you think people are happy?

V: What do you mean?

R: I mean, do you think people are happy?

V: What do you mean by happiness exactly?

R: Well, that’s a good question- I mean, well why don’t you tell me what you consider to be happiness, since you’ll be answering.

V: Perhaps we can define it together.

R: Perhaps we can.

V: When you ask of happiness like this, I assume you mean a general happiness, an overall feeling as opposed to one moment.

R: Yes. Happiness in the big picture.

V: Do you think people live in the big picture?

R: Ha- no actually, I don’t. But I think when they ask themselves this question, if they do, they are asking themselves “am I generally happy?”

V: So then you are interested in whether people actually are happy, as opposed to merely thinking they’re happy?

R: Exactly. Well a person could be deluded enough to think that they are happy when they are clearly not, but I think people usually know when they’re deceiving themselves. For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume people know whether they are happy or not.

V: Maybe we should assume instead that average—but not deluded—people may think that they are happy and be mistaken, and that they generally realize the mistake.

R: I’ll accept that.

V: So you are interested then in whether people are honestly happy with their lives in the big picture – but still, what exactly does this happiness feel like?

R: It must be more than simply “feeling good”- it has to be deeper, more substantial. A sense of satisfaction with one’s life, a sense that one’s existence is meaningful.

V: Do you think that in order to be honestly happy a person must believe that their life is meaningful?

R: Yes- don’t you?

V: What if something else makes them just as happy?

R: Such as?

V: Such as climbing trees, or riding a bike, or examining bugs under a microscope. What if the question of their life’s meaning never enters their mind? What if they are satisfied simply by being alive, and they don’t need to know that they are living “meaningful” lives?

R: First, such people don’t exist outside of simpletons. And simpletons don’t know what it means to be truly happy. Simple people are like children: they are satisfied with a new toy, but there must continually be a new toy. This is not happiness, it is amusement. But even simple people know the difference. Even simple people know that something is missing, that there is something more.

V: Ah. I see. So now we talk of true happiness. I take it you believe that true happiness is not available to all?

R: No- I believe that it is. But people stand in their own way. They don’t look beyond what is in front of them. They—well never mind. Let’s get back to answering the question first. Where were we?

V: I believe we have established that true happiness is to have a sense of satisfaction with one’s life, and a sense that one’s life is meaningful.

R: Yes. Can you answer now?

V: Yes. My answer is no.

R: So I expected. We think alike after all.

V: Less than you think.

R: Really? I took you for a thoughtful man.

V: Let me ask you a question- it’s….

R: Russell.

V: Russell. Victor. Nice to meet you. Let me ask you a question now: What do you do?

R: I am a graduate student in sociology. I also study philosophy.

V: I gathered something like that. I see your books there. Don’t read too much, or you’ll forget how to live.

R: Is that so? I think there is much life in books.

V: So there is. Here’s my second question: What do you think is significant about whether people are happy or not?

R: Well, I mean I think happiness is the end we are all pursuing isn’t it?

V: I asked this one.

R: Ok, yes, I think happiness is the end we are all pursuing. We are designed, by nature, or by God if you wish, to be seekers. We seek sustenance, and when we have that, we seek further. When our bellies are full and our thirst is quenched, our mind wanders to the desires of the flesh, and those of the heart, and finally the mind. Or so that is our potential. You can gauge a person by their tastes: the shallower a person, the more interested they are in things that satisfy the needs of the body. Most people are in-between, but they lean a little shallow: they appreciate a good book now and then, a thoughtful film, but they generally just want to be entertained, and the best entertainment satisfies instantly. What they don’t see is that the “happiness” they feel from eating cheese dip and watching their favorite sports team doesn’t last through bedtime. That’s why it must be repeated over and over and over again, until their bodies and minds have grown soft and they can’t appreciate any satisfaction that takes effort. Of course it’s not always cheese dip and sports. For some people it’s shopping, like our friends across the street. A shiny new bag on their shoulder and they’re all smiles. For the next person over, it’s not the bag but the compliments the bag brings. Or the envy. Or the acceptance. It’s not much different, whatever form it takes. People are pursuing the feeling of happiness, and most people don’t make it past full bellies, full egos and a good laugh. But we are laughing ourselves to death, and it won’t be funny in the end.

V: You said before that you think most people realize when they’re not happy. Are you saying people persist in this “shallow” behavior, and even though they feel some sense of satisfaction, they know that they are not truly happy?

R: Absolutely. I mean, years and years of shallow living can kill a person’s aptitude for higher living, but generally speaking, somewhere deep down in their consciousness, they know it.

V: They know what exactly?

R: That they are sad. That there is more to life. That they are settling for instant gratification. For consumerism. For a life on the surface. A life unexamined, as-

V: Yes, as Aristotle would say. So what is the remedy to this great lie that people live, if I might ask?

R: I’m glad you did. The remedy is to wake up. To realize that life is short, and our opportunities to make it meaningful, and thereby derive a deeper sense of satisfaction from it, are few. To stop buying every new piece of crap that some manufacturer puts on the shelf, because it won’t fill the void. To stop convincing yourself that all those little decisions you make don’t matter, because for most people their lives are simply a bunch of little decisions. But they don’t have to be. The remedy is to seek greatness. Deprive yourself of what you can have now for what you might gain in the future. Don’t follow the herd into a life of mediocrity. We need to become a fitter people, so that we might do more. Fitness in all respects. Fitness of body and mind, fitness of choice. We need to become self-reliant. We should stop relying on the government, or the media, or our best friend to tell us what’s important. We must decide what matters, what is worth pursuing and what isn’t. That is a life examined. Most people are merely receptacles for other people’s creations and values. Most people are unhappy because most people don’t live- they are just preoccupied. If people would start rejecting the status quo, start thinking for themselves, they would see that they are playing the part of the cog-in-the-machine of the rich and powerful, and when they die, their only legacy will be how much they gave to perpetuate the cycle of mindless living that deprived them of true happiness. Happiness is self-determination. Happiness is independence, awareness of the self. Happiness is creation, not consumption.

V: I see. That’s insightful.

R: And you disagree?

V: I think that’s exactly what a graduate student in sociology living in Upper West-Side Manhattan would say.

R: Oh? And what would a retired high-school history teacher say?

V: I would say that your perception of this plight is myopic—in other words, you tend to apply the problems you see here, in middle-upper class American society, to the world, and assume that they are universal. But you’d be wrong. When you speak of “people” it means a great deal that you take all the people of the world into your account, and not just those conveniently situated in your own experience.

R: Who says I don’t?

V: If you did, you wouldn’t think that most people are faced with choosing between cheese dip and football and true happiness. Most people are looking for their next meal. Most people are living in abject or modest poverty. Most people are trying to survive in overcrowded cities with poor sanitation and corrupt governments. The problems of the world are not those of idle Americans with too much time and money on their hands. And whether the inhabitants of this country or any other are happy, whether they believe their lives are meaningful or not—these are questions born of idleness as well. A different kind—the academic kind. The kind that forgets that the world is a cruel place where people suffer, and that your average citizen of earth is simply trying not to starve, not to freeze, not to be killed by their enemies, and to progress only slightly beyond the station that nature has put them in before they die.

R: Ah- so the world is made up of simple people then.

V: Quite the opposite. Just because a person does not have time to sit around and wonder about whether they’re truly happy does not make them simple. They feel the pleasures and pains of this life just as keenly as you or I. It is their perspective that is different. They do not see life as a catalogue they can order from, hoping their choices will bring them contentedness. They see life as a challenge to their survival, and they are mainly focused on forestalling the inevitable for as long as possible. For many of these, happiness is just not suffering. Happiness is having meat on the table, light to see with at night, and having the whole family alive all at once.

R: Am I to believe that the majority of human beings live in third-world conditions?

V: Spoken like a true American.

R: Fair enough. But you said “no” to my question earlier about whether people are generally happy—so you must have some opinion on the issue.

V: I think people, like the ones you describe, are unhappy because they have come to mistakenly believe that happiness is an end in itself.

R: And why shouldn’t it be?

V: Because no matter how you define it, happiness is just a sensation. It is a feeling, whether deep or shallow, that comes and goes. Pursuing it as if it was something concrete turns people into seekers, like you say, as opposed to doers. They seek happiness first, and by it they decide what they will do. When what they’re doing no longer makes them happy, they do something else. Like locusts devouring crops, happiness seekers move from one field to the next. But the fact that something makes you happy is no criteria for judging the value of any action. It is possible that eating bacon every morning makes me happy, but what value is it to my health? Perhaps stealing makes me happy. Or beating my spouse. Or taking another’s life. Perhaps these actions bring me a deep sense of lasting satisfaction. Am I to believe that the only important factor then is that I am happy? Of course this is absurd. I believe that happiness is secondary to duty: for by duty we should decide what is right, what we ought to be doing, and let happiness follow if it may. The supreme state of being, in my opinion, is to be happy because you are doing what you believe to be right, to be your moral duty as a human being. For me, our moral duty comes before our happiness, principally and practically. I think you will find that the most satisfied people in life are often those who feel that they are living by the dictates of their conscience, and not simply by the whim of their desires. Such people do not live in a state of disarray, but in a state of order. They believe in a reason for their actions that lies beyond their own concerns, and thus they do not constantly evaluate their activities from the standpoint of their own happiness. They do things not because they feel like it, but because they believe they should. This bestows on them a sense of purpose, and purpose drives a person much harder than pleasure.

R: I’m not sure that’s all that different from my position.

V: Your position is that we should live differently because we will be more content. My position is that we should live differently because it is our duty, and to be true to our sense of moral obligation will bring contentedness after all.

R: Well, what then is our duty?

V: Your first duty is to answer that question for yourself. You can never live by the dictates of your own principles if you haven’t any.

R: And how do you think I might do that?

V: Finish your books, and follow the advice of old men you find at coffee shops.

R: Perhaps I will.


N

A Happier Ending

The other night I got sick. Virus of some sort probably. Fever, nausea, chills, etc. While I'd been in the bed for most of the evening, midnight rolled around and I couldn't sleep. I went downstairs and plopped down on the cooler leather couch and flicked on the television. Thanks to Comcast’s "On Demand" and the "free movie" category, I was able to select from a variety of instantly available B movies. Save of course the one I ended up watching: Kindergarten Cop.

While this might sound ridiculous, it was while watching this cheesy, antic-filled 1990 Schwarzenegger action/comedy that the Newtown shootings became especially real to me. It could have been the fever. I was in fact sweating profusely pretty much the entire movie. But more likely it was the collection of heartwarming scenes from a fictional kindergarten class, where well-compensated child actors said a bunch of mostly-scripted adorable things, adorably. But I was taken with them, and it was as if all of a sudden I realized it: this is what kindergarteners are like. They say funny things and make cute faces and they wonder about the world in a way that makes you both smile and want to cry: because you love their innocence, and you know they will lose it one day.

That day was last Friday for the children of Sandy Hook, and for many others. The words I would use to describe my feelings after these terrible events are "complete frustration." This comes from my sense that America won't be any closer to a solution to its gun violence problem a year or four years from now than it is today. The circumstances are not promising: there is no national consensus on how to make our country safer from your average criminal, much less your Adam Lanzas of the world. And there is some good reason for that: there is no "one” solution, any more than there is one thing that drives a person to become a mass murderer. Even if we may have a solution, any form of political action addressing gun violence is fraught with risk—less for citizens and more for politicians. Supporting the disarmament of the American population is thought to be anti-American and dangerous to individual freedom, so that's out; the death penalty is inhumane and ineffective, says the world, so let's not mention that; prison is an overcrowded criminal factory and a blight to society, so sending more people there isn’t the answer; and resources are already stretched too thin: we can't give more to some without taking from others. Inaction, then, is the safest political course. Meanwhile, during all the political seat-saving, there is lobbying, and of course profiting. The gun industry sells millions of guns each year and says "buy our guns, but don't do anything violent." Hollywood makes gratuitously violent movies and says "watch our violence, but don't use guns." And in the background, quietly, or not so quietly, we the people are dying, as we always have.

Is this it – are we so helpless then? Are we resigned to being consumers, suckers, victims, parents of victims? There is clearly outrage in the hearts of Americans this December for these children, and for the fact that whatever sort of societal construct we live in, school shootings are a reality, and not really that rare. It is easy to place fault here: blame the guns. I mean after all, a significant number of the mass murderers in American history have purchased their guns legally. Can you really say that those murders would have happened anyway but for easy access to the weaponry used? Or blame the lack of guns. Why is it that there are armed guards outside of Tiffany’s and Louis Vuitton at the mall I go to, but there weren’t any outside of Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14th? Are diamonds and purses so precious that they warrant more security? Or maybe it's because people assume that there are a good number of individuals who would readily steal from luxury stores, but very few, if any, who would walk into an elementary school and start shooting. So really, blame our faulty assumptions about what people are capable of. Blame CNN for 24-hour news coverage that has made every shooter before Adam Lanza a household name. Blame the liberals for forcing God out of schools. Blame God.

This conversation is fruitless, because its participants are overlooking the nature of the circumstances: people are, as John Stewart once said (oh yeah, blame John Stewart too), proposing simple solutions for complicated problems. The difficulty is that we are trying to solve a problem with multiple causes on a huge scale: there are too many guns, too many people, and too many places to keep track of without allocating more resources and restricting more rights. But every freedom comes with a cost, and rights are weighed against one another. A study of constitutional law will reveal to any astute reader that no individual right within the constitution has been interpreted as a limitless freedom, but rather a conditional liberty balanced by the needs of others and the whole. Just as the individual has a right to bear an arm, the State is empowered to protect its people. Just as the individual may not bear any arm he or she wishes, at any time and place to the danger of other citizens, the State may not cross a certain line in infringing on the liberties of its citizens for the sake of security. The system was designed to be balanced. At this, I think, we have failed.

If you haven’t noticed, we have gun control. What we need is smarter gun control. A recent article in the New Yorker noted that the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco estimates that 40% of gun transactions each year fly under the radar as private sales, comprised of gun sales occurring between owners, at gun shows, and over the internet. In these scenarios, background checks are not typically required or performed. More importantly, the sales are not recorded by any government body. 33 states reportedly do not regulate gun show sales in any manner. Even if these numbers are exaggerated, this would still be unacceptable. Disarming everyone is an overreaction, and it goes against the plain meaning of the 2nd Amendment. But no one really disagrees that there are certain individuals who should not have easy access, or any access, to guns. It is apparent that limiting that class of people to felons is inadequate. The process of acquisition should simply be more arduous than it is. If we are ever to have any institutional safeguards against people like Adam Lanza, then we need to devise ways at weeding them out from the gun-owner pool. If that doesn’t cut it, as in this case because Lanza took the guns from his mother, we need to devise harsher disincentives against careless gun ownership. Stricter laws on secure gun storage would be a start. And we need to keep better track of the guns in this country. While I believe in the right to bear arms, it baffles me to think that the 2nd Amendment could be interpreted to prohibit the government from requiring gun registration. Even a cursory balancing of the right, the duty even of the State to protect its citizens against the individual’s right to bear arms would fall in favor of this simple, fair measure of gun control. Paranoia that Obama is Hitler in disguise is not a valid counter-argument.

By the same token, we need smarter security. We need to treat our children as we describe them: as our most precious resource. We must accept the realities of this world and not be naïve about the human condition, or we will continue to pay dearly for it. This is already happening. Since the tragedy last week, local officials across the country are already talking heightened security with their colleagues and constituents. The national discussion on who should be armed and who shouldn’t will likely vacillate between extremes before it manifests in responsible new ideas for schools across the country. But, as we have seen, talk is cheap. Putting new security measures in place is not. The outrage will fade, but the danger will still be there. To make progress in our discussions and in this process, we must devote ourselves to improving upon those ideas we disagree with, as opposed to criticism that ultimately produces nothing. We must remove our egos from this discussion. Of all the discussions in this country that should be free from our incessant desire to be right, surely this one is deserving. Because we need consensus here; without consensus, these ideas will die in committee (and our people in the streets).

America is not a movie. It is not Kindergarten Cop, where there is one good guy, one villain, one innocent child in danger. There is no happy ending where our need for resolution is satisfied just before the credits roll. America is a hundred million moving parts. It is less or more of this or that. Less or more violence, less or more killing. There will always be some, but we are always seeking less of the bad and more of the good. We seek a happier ending, one where we reduce pain and suffering, and increase comfort, long life and happiness. We cannot abandon solutions because they will not eradicate our problems entirely, especially when the “statistics” are really human lives. If you knew right now that stricter gun laws in America would produce 5 less murders of innocent people in 2013, and 10 less murders in 2014, and 40 less murders in 2015, would you say that gun control doesn’t work because the murder rate is more or less the same? What if it is was a 1000 less people murdered? 2000?

What about 20 kindergarteners? Is that enough?

I'm still trying

At around 11:45 every weekday except for Wednesdays the St. Mary of the Seven Sorrows Church at the corner of Union and 5th Avenue in Nashville opens its doors for Mass. But Mass doesn’t start until 12:10, and between 11:45 and 12:10 the church is quiet (and nearly empty, save the few dedicated souls who wander in for a midday liturgy). In this small space of time I like to occupy a back pew and soak in the sound of nothing beneath the frescoed ceiling, where you can find Saint Peter and the rest perched on white fluffy clouds (they’re all dead). I’m not catholic, and I leave before Mass, but this little part of my day is an oasis.

I don’t say this to seem pious, as half the time I’m sitting there wondering why it is I believe what I believe or if I believe it at all. That is of course why I go. It seems reasonable that I should devote at least ten minutes every day to the matter of eternity, and whether it’s an exclusive, all-inclusive, or non-existent place.

This is ten minutes too much for some, I’m sure. For much of learned society, the idea of God is an antiquated superstition that was explained away a long time ago by science. And if we will just give this science a chance, they say, it can provide us with a reasonable answer to the ultimate questions of the universe, one that does not come encumbered with a long list of “must-believes” and “must-dos” that ruin all our fun and take away our freedom and make enemies of our neighbors.

I am glad they found the God-particle. That’s very reassuring. Although I will admit that the big bang theory leaves me feeling a little dissatisfied. But the reasons for my faith do not grow out of this dissatisfaction. In other words, it is not for lack of proof that there is no God that I believe what I do. On the contrary, I find the concept of God just as or more incredible. But this too does not seem to deter me.

Still, being who I’ve become, I find it hard to accept something as true just because: just because what rejecting it would mean, just because of the alternative. As I strive to produce reasons for my faith, I try to step outside of myself, away from the interested part of me that wants a tidy explanation for existence and a ready-at-hand meaning of life. But I cannot deny that seeking part of my soul that wants to believe, and I’m not sure I should.

Because I want to believe that there is a first cause somewhere in the darkness. I have hope that everything that has ever happened, that every thinking person who has ever lived with the awareness of their own existence and experienced the uncountable number of thoughts and emotions and shared moments of joy and of pain—that this is not all simply particles in the wind, meaningless interactions among organized matter. I admit that I feel consciousness is part of something bigger, something that transcends life and death and that the soul isn’t just grey matter located in one of the four lobes. I want there to be more, because this world is so full of loss and injustice and goodeness and love that it pains me to think that the end is so empty, so full of nothing, no reunion, no continuation, no fulfillment. Call this weakness, call it ingratitude—this is what I want to believe. I need faith to believe these things, and I need it because I believe the story of humanity plays like a Shakespearean tragedy, its characters torn between good and evil, its history so full and running so deep, that the whole thing is utterly remarkable and it’s an affront to call it a coincidence. I need faith to believe in the reason for life, and I’m trying to find it.

"It's a Great Life, If You Don't Weaken"

I heard this the other day (the saying above) and have thought much about it since.

I did a little research, and it appears that the phrase originated as the title of a strip written by a cartoonist from New York in 1915, and later became a rallying cry for soldiers in the first World War. Whether this is true or not, I found myself imagining soldiers penned up in foxholes and trenches in the dead of Europe’s winter thinking about home and their families and warm pies on window ledges and reminding themselves not to weaken, lest they forget it’s a great life they lead.

If this so-called rallying cry seems oddly phrased, perhaps it’s because we are all tempted to finish that sentence differently. Maybe not in public, but to ourselves, we know that our “great” lives are more contingent on circumstances than character. It’s a great life if you have friends. It’s a great life if you have money. It’s a great life if you have your health and a decent job and live comfortably and really that’s not too much to ask.

But for many of us, myself included, the idea of life is not so “great” at the thought of losing your decent job or your comfortable house, or any of the other things on which we build our sense of contentedness. Not that we should welcome suffering, but is it possible that we’ve become so averse to it that its presence upends our ability to enjoy life – or worse – to appreciate it? What happened to the idea of resolve? What happened to the idea that a great life is only a matter of having the fortitude and strength of character to withstand the pressure of reality? Why is it now that we look at life with so many conditions on it before it can be labeled “good”, and why do we have so many requirements for our own happiness? Is not having one good day of existence, one good meal, one instance of shared love, one moment where a cool breeze on a cool night washes over you when you’re completely and totally free – is that not good enough? Must you and all your friends and relatives live to be 80 in comfort and harmony? Must you be well liked? Must you make enough money so that you don’t have to “worry” about it – is that when you’ll have a good life?

Not weakening isn’t about having perfect self-discipline or never failing yourself. At least not for me. For me it’s about not losing sight of the perspective that makes possible a “It's a Great Life” philosophy in a world like this one, a world where so many people pay so dearly for just the chance at life. The other day on the way home from work I heard a story on the radio about a man in India who traveled a 1000 miles from his remote village to a city where he could receive chemotherapy, leaving behind his wife and two children, living outside the clinic because he had nowhere else to go, spending a third of his annual wages on just a short supply of what were largely outdated cancer drugs. As the reality of that man’s situation hit me, I felt the deepest sense of guilt – not because if I were to fall sick I would have access to the best treatment 5 minutes down the road, after which I could return to a very comfortable home – but because I wouldn’t care. None of it would matter unless everything was going to be okay. Because ultimately I’m not strong enough to be okay with not being okay. And that is such a sad way to be, because there is so much more.

It is a great life. Period. And if we’re strong enough not to weaken, we just might realize it one day.

A little truth.

As the election nears, the noise level escalates to a deafening roar, persuasion coming in every form. Just this morning Mitt Romney’s face popped up in my Pandora iPhone app: “Join our team!” Fortunately I was able to erase his face by clicking the little black “x” in the corner of the advert. Unfortunately, this little black “x” does not exist outside of the digital world.

Please don’t misinterpret – my vote is not yet cast. This fact I know disturbs certain relations of mine on both sides of the political spectrum. I think what disturbs me is that both sides are so disturbed. Who do you heed when people you know and trust, smart, seemingly informed people come to such different conclusions on the same issue? What am I supposed to do – go look it up for myself? Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t have time to digest the principles and mechanisms behind each candidate’s competing policies for the economy or health care, or look at history to try and formulate an accurate prediction concerning how well their ideas will fare in practice. What I do have time for, however, is to repost a funny ecard that uses sarcasm as a political tool to make my opponents look extreme or backwards. It’s just I’m not sure who my opponents are.

I think I don’t know who my opponents are because I’ve been thinking too much about cause and effect. That is, why are things the way they are. Why the economy has not recovered at a quicker pace. Why gas costs what it does. Why July was the hottest month in U.S. history. Why the senate race between Todd Akin and Claire McCaskill is still so close. And why so many people are content to explain the political and social phenomena of American life with one or two-word phrases like “Obamacare” and “gay agenda” and “terrorists.” The thing is, the more I learn about things like the tax code and the health care system and other complex systems that operate in our country (not to mention the political system), I realize that causes are almost never one, but multiple, and effects, if you can call them that, are sometimes effects in name only. Obama made the mistake of declaring an end to the recession while so many people were still receding into financial hardship. “Well, that’s what it says on paper.” Paper is only paper.

When a cause is touted as having brought about a certain effect, what is the right degree of skepticism? Should we even accept the premise of the proposition? I think voters are often expected to function within scenarios that have been framed for them by politicians and other interested parties. We are told that the country’s problems are 1, 2 and 3, their causes are a, b, and c, and we must choose between solutions Obama, Romney, and nobody else because America can never get past these two really terrific parties. What if, just what if, America’s recovery, global warming, Iran, illegal immigrants, health care, oil dependence, and many other problems our acting and prospective leaders claim they can solve with your vote were born of causes and have solutions of which we are largely ignorant? And if this is possible, what then is your duty as an American citizen?

Our duty, I believe, is to stop serving as dumping grounds for every talking head with a catch phrase and start doing a little independent thinking. Start looking at the numbers. Gathering evidence from all sides (as opposed to “both” since there can be more than two). Drawing your own conclusions instead of looking for support for preconceived notions. Starting from scratch.

It’s a grand idea I know. All of us with jobs and families and enough on our calendars to occupy every minute of our free time—starting from scratch sounds like a luxury we can’t afford. But that’s just what politicians are counting on. That we’ll look to them as the politically knowledgeable and give their ideas just enough time to satisfy our one demand that they “sound right.” That’s why Obama runs commercials where he says that Romney wants to give rich folks more tax breaks and Romney says that Obama is stealing from Medicaid to pay for Obamacare. Because they know that a little truth is all we want to hear. But a little truth is not enough.

Demand more.

I love you specifically

Before we started saying “I love you” we had various alternatives: “I care about you so much.” “I want to be with you more than anything.” “I can’t wait to see you.” “I really, really like you.” (note the two reallys). Ironically, they meant the same thing, just the little individual component parts of “I love you” offered one at a time. It’s funny now, sometimes I feel lazy when I only say “I love you,” like I should be more specific.

Like this.

I love that you call me several times a day, even if it’s just to tell me about the morning, or about what Eve had for lunch (especially that), because it’s usually not something you really need to tell me, you just want to talk to me. Lord knows I’m a bad audience sometimes – but it doesn’t seem to matter. You keep calling.

I love how when I walk in the door from work, before Eve has seen me, you make a really big deal about how “daddy’s home” so that she gets excited.

I love that you are disappointed in me when I lose my temper, or when I talk to you rudely, or when I do any number of things that I shouldn’t do, because that’s exactly what I need – to be reminded that my words do matter, that I can cause hurt.

But I equally love when you forgive me. There’s scarcely a better feeling.

I love that you love Eve more than anything or anybody, more than me, and more than yourself, and how obvious it truly is.

I love how you know me, how you know if I’ve tried to put your clothes away, or that a particular piece of tiny trash was left in some obscure place by me, or that I’ll forget a particular thing you told me before I forget it.

I love how you always diminish my flaws, that you’ll never admit to the true size of my head or how bad I look in shorts.

Sometimes I look at my life and I become afraid that one day God will realize that He’s been terribly unfair to the rest of the world and will have no choice but to see to it that tragedy befalls me, and that the woman, the sweet, beautiful woman and the life with her that I love will be taken from me, and the score settled.

Although I hate this fear, I love it too, for what it means.

This is how I love you, specifically.




To many more August 2nds.

Your N

Limited beats

Life is a cruel mistress. Our affair with life is, like many affairs, short lived: the passions fleeting, the pleasure always tainted by the knowledge of things to come. The deeper our love, the greater our bitterness as it dies—as we die. Death is the spouse which we cannot divorce, which we never chose to wed, but were wed to all the same.

And so, like lovers who will not acknowledge the futility of their feelings, we keep on with life, storing up joy and happiness and hiding it away for that inevitable point when we know the game is up. We don’t like to think about it, we don’t want to ponder it—for if we look at it, even for a moment, it floods in, drowning out everything, reducing us to clock watchers and hypochondriacs and beings who dread. And dread is the killer of joy, death before death.

There are many who say that they do not fear death, and maybe they don’t. There are those who have confronted it, knowingly, and did not blink. There are many who choose death over life, as if life was the fate they wished to escape from. But the instinct to survive is strong, and most of us reject death, and cling to life with the hope that it will bear us more happiness than sorrow.

Sometimes my wife (my real wife) will lay her head on my chest, listening intently, and will whisper that she can’t believe someday my heart will stop beating. But there is nothing more certain than the limited number of beats my heart will give. Yet in the face of this truth, I do have a choice. I can choose to keep death at bay in my consciousness, never giving it more attention than I have to, grappling with its cold approach only when there is nowhere else to look. Or I can let death become what it ought to be: that which gives our lives meaning.

Without death, no moment, no experience would be what it is. Happiness would be infinitely achievable, and joy would be a common commodity. Discovery and accomplishment would be only a matter of time. The true obstacle to life would not exist. I would prefer such an existence, we might say—but we speak out of fear. When we can stop fearing death, and begin to use it, then we have learned how to live.

Everywhere in existence there are analogies to death. Every thing has a conceivable beginning and an end. Every blade of grass withers, every plant dies. All day turns night, and night to day. The seasons come and go. Buildings crumble, water dries up, and every movie has ending credits. We are no exception. We stop growing, we stop regenerating. Our skin wrinkles, our hair grays or falls out, and we slowly but surely begin to return to the dust we once were.

I do believe death is victorious only over the physical. I like to imagine an intangible sphere where minds and souls and ideas and deeds live on. Call it heaven, call it the memory of the living. But even in my dream these intangibles are immutable, made into what they are by the beings who forged them in life, cemented in permanence by death. In dying, our imprint is made complete, and nothing may be added. Our precious time will end, and so I say this to myself and to anyone who hears it:

Stop wasting it.


"Who's killin us...
robbin us of life and light...
mocking us with the sight of what we might have known?"

-Explosions in the sky, Have you passed through this night?


-N

Sometimes I write poems

One night last week while I sat before the screen of my desktop Dell
My fingers by some magic typed, words appearing as they fell
as if I wasn't writing but instead just watching
keen on what the keys pressed might together tell.
While my fingers typed the typing the words were foreign to me still
like my fingers had an independent will.

What divine forces were at work I wondered while the writing fixed before me?
Is it God, come from on high with a message to restore me?
Or maybe not, I'm not sure I deserve any better than a warning…
Well that's not true I mean I'm not so bad, yeah let's go with "restore me".
Who am I kidding I'm damned I know it He's probably here to scorn me.
Then again I went to church last week He might want to reward me.

That's not how it works besides it's probably my subconscious, I think
I read about that once, it's consciousness with out the conscious, we think
certain thoughts but they're just thought below the surface, you think
they made that theory up just to make us nervous?
Like a second you you've never heard of?
Is there anything we're sure of?

The words continued forming while I conjured speculations grand:
A vengeful ghost who died while typing?
An impatient ghost who died while skyping?
A mental illness setting in?
The digital beginning to my mortal end?
A chain email curse I brought upon myself by failing to resend?
What were these words that formed by no human hand?!?!?

And so I looked upon my screen, with hope and dread, through wincing eyes,
at what this unworldly message said.

And so it read:


asd;flkjasdfl;kjasdf;lkjasdfl;kjasdfl;kjasdlf;kjasdfl;kjasdlf;kj


What could this mean! I racked my mind, I pondered all night long,
I fetched every book on meaning, language, science, art and song.
I interpreted and deconstructed this cryptic message until dawn.
Until it hit me finally, like a Godsent breeze:

I'd hit a bunch of random keys.


But as I reflected on my search for meaning,
I thought a thought that's worth repeating:
It was after all my search for meaning
that gave meaning to the keys repeating.

Please allow me to distinguish myself.

I am the metropolitan hipster. My skinny boy jeans are tucked into my Chukkas, and my mustache is curled at the ends. I reject conformist trends and create an identity for myself in being different, although I tend to congregate with other hipsters at hipster coffee shops, where my difference appears more like conformity. My inner-depth is reflected in my artistic lifestyle and grass-roots musical preferences. Please do not overshadow my uniqueness with your predictable suburban consumerist presence and conventional conversation topics, although this is what my uniqueness depends on.

I am the high society dweller. Do not question my ability to spend incredible amounts of money to maintain my lavish lifestyle, with which I distance myself from my less fortunate and poorer peers, except for when I surround myself with them for purposes of receiving their recognition. While most of my money is inherited, I take pride in my wealth as if I earned every penny of it scrubbing floors for minimum wage. Someone in family probably did that anyway. I will defend my right to spend money without conscience or perspective. Any suggestion that I should voluntarily share my wealth to improve the standard of living of others is Socialism, and possibly Nazism if Barrack Obama is saying it. With my money comes automatic self-importance and a place in privileged social circles, where constant comparison deprives everyone of true friendship.

I am the good Christian. I tell my agnostic and atheist friends that I will pray for them when they confide in me about difficulties or struggles in their lives, even though they have asked me not to. I occasionally will forget to close my Bible after highlighting various verses and then will leave it in a conspicuous location at home or at the office. I pray lengthily at restaurants before eating, so that those who witness my devotion may be moved to belief in God. When I'm with my fellow believers, I often go into great detail about my own spiritual failures with a rather transparent sense of false humility. I enjoy leading group prayer, where I occasionally let out a contrived sob after a particularly emotional plea to God. My faith is most real to me when recognized by other people, and I have difficulty containing the joy I feel when recalling my charitable deeds in front of friends and family. I also love telling people that I have forgiven them.

I am the mocker. Sarcasm and satire are the primary tools of my social skill set. I can demonstrate disdain for any person or idea simply with a flick of my vocal tone. When confronted with a legitimate question to which I have no legitimate answer, I make light of the subject. I make light of everything. Actually, for fear of a mocking reprisal, I rarely make any serious substantive comments of any kind. Through my constant use of sarcasm I show my boredom for the ordinary and mundane, which I hope comes across as sophistication, although I also mock sophisticated people to diminish their perception as, well, sophisticated. With my highly developed mocking abilities I wish to create the impression that I am, in fact, very intelligent, or very funny, although in reality my overbearing use of sarcasm reflects a low level of maturity where recognition among my peers for a sharp use of humor is valued more than any contribution I might make to a subject by committing to any position or idea. In my own trite little brain, I am above the things I mock, and I mock everything.


I am the individual's search for identity. I take many forms, but I am always true to my nature, which is at its essence the desire for affirmation. It is in the pursuit of identity, when the baser part of the individual is unceasingly seeking acknowledgment, where people may find true commonality.

N

Kitteh Blogger

“Some bloggers, when they know they have nothing to say, walk away and don't blog… Interesting people run interesting blogs, but it's remarkable how few of them there are.”

-The Register


OK whoa. Let me just say that I REzent that! Maybe not every blogger in the blogosphere is writing about foreign policy or quantum physics, but those blogs are boring anyway. What makes a blog interesting is up to the reader, not some ivory tower psuedollect.

I personally connect with blogs that speak to issues in my life. And boy, do I have issues. Just ask any one of my 784 Facebook friends. My lives (web and real) are cr-uh-azzyy! Speaking of Facebook…

Does anyone else hate the new, new, new (to infinity) Facebook? Every time they redo it they undo something I just learned to cope with. Quit changing it Zuckerberg! And give me a billion dollars too. LOL ha ha no seriously give it to me. And besides, I don’t need people prying into my timeline way back in 2000-whatever. Not even the closest of my 1075 Facebook friends.

I mean really everyone knows that Facebook friends are mainly just people whose friend requests you don’t have the nerve to ignore, and then a few of your actual friends. I’m over the constant newsfeed drama anyway. I don’t need to know that you ran 12 miles because you felt fat in your size two $700 dress that your mom got you as a Good Friday present. TMI about your body dismorphia and stupid mom.

But I digrezzzz…

I mean I think what my point was is that blogs are interesting because people are interesting just being who they are! Just because your blog might consist of nothing more than a daily rambling of your latest opinions on self-interested topics, of which you write about because it gives you a chance to seem creative and complex and measure your popularity by counting comments, doesn’t mean it’s not something of substance! Thoughts that people think are substance. And if you thought it, it’s probably worth blogging about.

For instance, have you ever thought about how headphones make great homeless people-deflectors? If you work downtown like I do they are a must have. Just pop in some earbuds and you can travel safely down the avenues undisturbed. Homeless people come up to me and are like, “buuuuuhhhhhh can I have some money buuuuhhhhhhhh I’m out of cigarettes” and I’m like “What? What sorry I can’t hear you because Chris Martin is currently nailing a live version of Viva la Vida in my eardrum and I’m spacing about how good the $13 lunch was that I just ate and anyway it’s rude to talk to people when they have headphones in.” And poof! - they go away.

Blogging can be about anything or nothing at all: there are no rules. You can write about your controlling girlfriend or your new smartphone or which smartphone case you should buy or how Obama loves same-sex marriage or how Mitt Romney hates poor people. Politics are especially fun. And you don’t have to do research like you were supposed to for papers in college. You can just assert anything and it becomes part of Internet history.

Ha ha I just watched some uber hilarious American Idol tryout flops on YouTube. Oh MMMMG I’m LMAO, ROFLBNRIHELMAOAINROTFLINI (That’s “I’m laughing my a** off, rolling on floor laughing but not really I hardly ever laugh my a** off and I never roll on the floor laughing I’m not insane.”) But seriously, rofl.

So to person from The Register who thinks that there are few interesting blogs, you’re missing out on the good stuff. To every blogger out there who takes the time and energy to tell their followers about their favorite breakfast cereals, their dilemmas about what present to get their best friend for their 10 year friend anniversary, to recap the 5 best episodes of True Blood and talk about how stupid it was that Godric killed himself, or to use their blog as a photo stream for daily individual pics of themselves, keep on keepin’ on. You are my people, the life-blood of the internet that makes the web a living thing.

Shut the front door I just found out that JERMAINE PAUL WON THE VOICE!! Thank God for the American public’s ability to recognize true talent. But seriously J, stop crying so much. Less crying and more singing. If I won that contest I would tear off my shirt and punch Christina Aguilera in her fake blonde head, not cry! Ah well. All’s well that ends well I guess.

Peeeze out ma read-uhhs.

N

Freedom of Choice

Ever since I started paying more attention to politics, both people’s and the nation’s, I’ve noticed how truly polarizing the issue of religion really is. If it’s not someone’s Facebook status about the hypocrisy of religious people, it’s religious people complaining about the lack of religion in government. In social situations it’s about as taboo a topic as one’s income or stance on abortion, always threatening to lead to friction and irresolvable disagreement. It’s often a determinative issue for voters in elections. It’s an element of our identity that tends to define our social circles and can even preclude certain relationships. Unless of course you live in the South like I do, where everyone goes to church and believes in God, even when they don’t.

The reason for this, I think, is that we can’t get around the implications that our religions have for our lives. Some of us try to. Some find a way to interpret the principles of their faith so that they are all-inclusive, creating a place for everyone, regardless of lifestyle or worldview. But some of us are not so lucky. For some of us, there is, simply put, a very judgmental aspect to many of ours or others’ religious principles. Even if some of them contradict themselves, the contradiction is usually between one exclusive way of life and another. It’s difficult to ignore the call of our respective faiths to live by a set of rather narrow moral standards, where specific behaviors are often prescribed or proscribed, depending of course on who’s doing the interpreting. The polarizing effect of these varying moral standards is a result of our adoption of them as our own and the type of connection we form with them. They are, in essence, the manifestation of our beliefs on right and wrong. For many of us these beliefs are the foundation of our worldview. And ideas that contradict these beliefs threaten this foundation, and thus threaten our worldview. And it is no surprise that we are partial to our own views on the world.

There is something even deeper though about our attachment to these beliefs. Of all the different types of beliefs that we hold, those constituting our personal morality, especially when adopted in the shadow of religious convictions, are held with a special intensity and fervor. Naturally there is a connection between moral standards and certain issues of ultimate significance for adherents of religion, such as salvation (to mention one). This explains a degree of the passion with which some religiously inclined people defend their moral positions. Logically, if a moral standard derived from religious beliefs can be invalidated, the underlying beliefs are possibly suspect. There is also a certain amount of pride in the individual judgment through which individual believers reach their faith-based conclusions about morality. Retreating from these positions could be viewed as admitting an error in judgment about such a fundamental thing as right and wrong itself. And not insignificant either are the social pressures amongst congregations to conform or fall in line with positions accepted by their church or denomination.

I believe the combination of this deeply personal stake in faith-based moral standards and the fundamentalist nature of many religious beliefs brings about a potentially destructive inability among religious followers to see the true subjectivity of their beliefs and consequent moral standards. In effect, their beliefs become truly fundamentalist—there is no other possible alternative, and any suggestions to the contrary are not only untrue, but morally wrong. This is a predictable outcome, given the particular qualities of certain major religions. In Christianity and Islam, for example, the scriptures of both are considered sacred, and viewed as infallible and exhaustive of all revealed truth by many believers. And so treated are the accepted interpretations of the scriptures within certain groups and communities. To stray from the deduced principles and rules is to risk the wrath of the Almighty, or so we’re told.

But belief in God and what this belief requires is an intensely personal and subjective thing. To be clear, this is belief in a usually invisible being occupying another realm whose supernatural status is well beyond our comprehension. The most studied scriptural commentators often come to conclude that the nature of God is a mystery. Even so, those who choose to undertake the notion of faith are often faced with the prospect of forming a relationship with their God and attempting a life of obedience. Naturally it is this area of “obedience” where moral standards come into play. For these standards to be legitimate, they must, for lack of a better term, “come” from God. For a believer to try and fulfill what God commands, they must make decisions about exactly what God does command. Enter subjectivity: the individual’s decision about what God requires of the individual. No one can make this decision except for the individual, and the decision itself is an act of faith.

But faith has become religion, and religion has become morality. People of faith forget that their belief is the condition on which their morality rests. Faith has become somewhat irrelevant really to the question - the question being whether you believe like they do. Right and wrong goes from being a personal faith-based decision to a black and white truth that should be embraced by government and citizens alike. In America, I have witnessed an alarming clash between the conservative religious demographic and the rest of the secular public, and the argument of moral superiority is fueling the fight. Even more alarming is the clamor for religion to play a more prominent role in the laws and governance of our nation. Religion is simply not democratic. What’s right and wrong in religion is not decided by popular vote, but by one all powerful being with the last word. And while some argue that our country was founded by men of faith, those men of faith founded this country on a set of principles that are subject to the democracy which they empower.

This is not to say that religion cannot or should not play a role in a person’s politics. There is a fine line though between supporting a law or policy because it conforms with your belief and wanting the government to enact laws on the basis of your belief. One only has to study the history of theocracies - where the government enacts or enforces laws based on their inherent rightness (according to an inspired and select few) rather than on the will of the people - to know how the combination of religious ideals and governance can turn for the worse. To truly believe in Democracy is to believe in the freedom to choose - but it’s hard to support this freedom when you look at those who choose differently than you as hell-bound sinners who are ruining your country.

When we ask the rest of the world to believe like we do, we are asking them to come to a decision which we arrived at through the intimate channels of our own experience and influences. Before we apply the labels of right and wrong, we must remember the distinction between a faith-based moral standard and standards born out of consensus. One is a standard we have chosen to adopt as an act of faith, and the other is (hopefully) the will of the majority. The freedom of choice is there for when the two conflict.

Decisions

There it sits, shining smugly in its painted foil, the colors hiding a thick milky deliciousness, crafted with expertise into a disarming and tasteful form: a solid milk chocolate turkey (yes, a turkey). Courtesy of my mother-in-law’s somewhat belated generosity (it was, no doubt, a seasonal product of the past). But one bite off the tail dispels any fears that it might have spoiled, and now I am faced with a decision: do I slowly but surely eat the chocolate turkey, taking a step backwards in my ever-present struggle to move forward towards health and fitness, or do I throw it away, sans consumed tail, in a demonstration of incredible will power (yes, incredible). Who cares?

Who does care? Does my decision to eat a chocolate turkey have any real significance? Outside of my personal ambitions, one might say no, it does not. But then again, my ability to exercise self-discipline is not completely irrelevant to the rest of the world. For this somewhat trivial decision reflects my ability to deny myself on a basic level what I know to be harmful or at least an obstacle to my very own goal. And if the pull of chocolate is too great, how then will I resist the pull of a tall glass of 2% that would follow so nicely, or the pull of lounging when I know exercise is what I need, or the appeal of mindless activity when learning and self-improvement would be better, or the impulse to anger when an apology is what’s in order? (my ability to apologize is highly valued, I know—as is everyone’s). This is not to say that a lapse in self-discipline on any level demonstrates an inability to exercise it at all or when the stakes are higher, but that sometimes seemingly unimportant decisions carry more significance than we realize.

The ability, or for some of us the choice to see the true consequences of our decisions is often the only thing between a life of realism and perspective and one of self-deception and internal discord. Consider another example (which may or may not be based on real events):

I come home from work. I am tired. What I want is rest, probably with some food, and time to enjoy my family and for all of us to relax together. What I do not want is more work, like cleaning, or worse, cooking for the food I do want. I do not want to pay bills or give money to anyone, except to the people who will cook the food I don’t want to cook. I do not want my internet to be on the fritz or to pack my lunch for tomorrow. Basically I want the benefit of everything I enjoy without the effort required to acquire and maintain it. But this ignores the reality behind the enjoyments. It ignores the fact that my wife too wants rest and needs my help. It ignores all the work that goes into receiving the benefit of preparations made and costs paid out. The decision here of course is not whether to come home and completely ignore my responsibilities (although that is an option, theoretically)—but whether to embrace them with enthusiasm and an attitude that lends support and relief to my family or whether to be a disgruntled presence until the nightly chores are finished. The decision seems less significant then because either way, the work gets done—but this perspective underestimates the impact of my attitude on those around me.

I wish I could say that I have always chosen the higher road, but that would be too generous. What I can say is that I’m attempting now at least to be honest about the consequences of my decisions. This requires in turn a certain amount of self-awareness about what choices I do have. There is in life a strong temptation to disclaim responsibility for the state of our personal affairs. There is hardly a limit to the external forces that we like to attribute responsibility to. Many times when we end up dissatisfied or disappointed, or unhappy, or lesser people than we’d like, we allow ourselves to fictionalize the means by which we arrived there, projecting onto other people or things responsibility for the choices we ourselves made. Sometimes this self-deception runs so deep that we end up convinced that we cannot control who we become, and that our flaws and weaknesses are “just who we are.” I have often heard people pronounce that others should just “take them as they come.” That they “can’t change who they are.” Fortunately, just as anyone can choose to believe this idea, anyone can also choose to reject it. It takes a brave individual to truly accept their role in creating the circumstances of their lives, and a wise one to see just when they have a choice in doing so and when they do not.

The chocolate turkey, I am happy to report, was thrown away, sans consumed head and tail (compromise?). Of course, the decision making is not over. There are more turkeys out there, and more chores, and more hardships and obstacles and situations that will come before me. If I’m real about it, I will take responsibility for what’s mine to take.

Like, for example, taking the Turkey back out of the trash. I mean it’s wrapped in foil so it didn’t get dirty.


N

Particulars and Abstractions.

I live between particulars and abstractions.

One the one hand, I keep doing the things I do to maintain the life I have. I get up and go to work. I do my job, come home, be with my family, pick up toys and put away clothes and pay bills and hang the frog shaped toy-basket in the shower that keeps falling off the wall because the tape has lost its stickyness.

On the other hand, I try to imagine nothingness, and cannot. I cannot conceive of nothingness. Beacuse even the darkest, blackest matter-free vacuum must be somewhere, some place. My mind cannot escape the boundaries of space. Even God must be somewhere. And how can God have no origin, no beginning? How can anything always just be? How can the vast expanses of the universe exist with no boundary, no starting point, but just exist? And anyway what are we doing here, going to and fro like ants who think their purpose is divined but who aren't sure that they're not just one of a type, a soldier, or a worker, or a queen? Some of us are even watching ants. Ants watching ants. Our colony is bigger, we think, but it's on the same dirt. And how can at one time children be starving in the Congo because drug runners killed their parents while wealthy executives play tennis while their wives drink mimosas while advertisers spend millions for 30 seconds of your attention to try and get you to buy a drink while captives of the sex trade suffer horrible fates and I do nothing?

These are not really abstractions. They are particulars, but I can only imagine them. I suppose I could travel to the Congo, and then my particulars would be my abstractions.

Life is so funny because we live in little worlds in a big world, and somehow we find a way to keep our little worlds intact, sometimes even sealed, despite the pressures and the noise of the big world around us. We compartmentalize our existence, each compartment protected from what's in the next one, in case they're incompatible. We can buy energy saving light bulbs and drive SUVs. We can wear sweatshop brands and give to world hunger charities. We can eat organic food, and way too much of it, until we are organically fat. No hormones though. We can go to church on Sunday and hate everyone on Monday. We can live undisturbed, unshaken by reality in its entirety, as long our abstractions don't become our particulars.

And sometimes, even when they do, we can shake them off, slowly starving them of the attention they need to survive, like a teen who comes home from a mission trip, witness-happy, and talks about the dirt streets and the poverty and oh, the poverty, until surely but slowly their old particulars creep back in and replace the new ones, until they forget about the pact they made with their fellow missionaries back in Guatemala to "always be changed from this."

We are not forced to see the world through a wide-aperture lense, where only objects in the foreground are focused. We choose the depth with which we look at life. We may see a little, or a great deal. What we do about what we see--and what we don't do--this is who we are.

"For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

-William Blake

N

I have thought for some time that what I wanted to be, more than anything else, was original. 

To be original…what a supremely difficult task in a world of 7 billion people where every persona, no matter how idiosyncratic, has its replica somewhere.  How difficult it must be to be original when from the moment we wake up in the morning, to the moment we go to bed at night, we are inundated by the ideas of other people. Information lies at our fingertips. It swirls in clouds of sound waves and video images, hovering around us as we go where we go. To have an original thought- an idea not planted in your mind by a talking head or a pundit or your teacher or your mother- how rare. To resist the urge to mimic those you idolize and admire in mannerisms and ideology- how trying. Yes, I have thought before now that to be original was to be in some ways extraordinary: certainly a personal state worth pursuing. 

But I have begun to question the value of being original, or the emphasis of originality over everything else…especially truth. I have never thought that originality was worth the cost of balance or stability, or sanity. And of late my understanding of what I take originality to mean has changed; I no longer believe it necessary to have a truly original idea to be an original person. One can be original in presentation, and most definitely in valuation: what value we give to things. But even so- what does it matter that we are original? The pursuit of originality appears more to me now as a search for an identity, and the search for an identity is defined by recognition. 

I believe now that the search for truth is the most important thing that an individual can embark on. If originality is the byproduct of this search, all the better, but never the focus. The question of “who we are” is answered better by what we know and what we believe than by how we appear to the world.  People have a tendency to devote great energy to refining their tastes, their preferences and appearance in an effort to appear original, unique, interesting. The pursuit of originality is, in large measure, the desire to be different, and difference in an of itself has no merit. The pursuit of truth, undertaken sincerely, allows for self-realization—that is, perfect comprehension of what it means to be an individual and of the significance of the “self.” To understand the meaning of our own lives.

 I have lost interest in the means by which I come to the truth, as I see it. All that matters is that I arrive there, or that I am satisfied that I have arrived. There is great value in originality and creativity, but they are not ends in themselves. They must be balanced by the importance of the end aim. Art may be valued for its originality, but I believe it should be valued it for what truth it embodies. Yet just as with art, the truth is what we believe it to be. We cannot see truth unless we allow ourselves to see it, and outside of this truth has little meaning for the individual. 

Frederich Nietzsche said, in the most offensive way possible, that the only true words spoken in the New Testament were those of Pontius Pilate. “What is truth?” he asked of Christ. I would have asked the same question.

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I will follow

One night about two weeks ago, somewhere close to midnight, when I’d finally run out of spontaneous reasons to stay up long enough to be sleep deprived the next day (night Nathan always sabotages morning Nathan), I went to bed.

Crawling in beside Lauren, I laid my head back on the pillow and took a deep breath, trying to let the bed absorb the weight of the day as I sunk into the mattress. Lauren was awake, and we began to talk in voices trained by a baby sleeping within earshot. We looked back on the day and, like we always do, on how cute Eve was and how lucky we were and how we hope it never ends. As we paused for a moment, smiling in the dark, Lauren said something which wasn’t so significant for what she said but how she said it.
With a quiet sadness, she said softly: “I love life so much."

And she does. She does love it so much. She loves every bit of it, the people who we share it with, the memories of childhood and of high school and yesterday when Eve laughed and Christmas and vacations and going to the movies and the first day of Spring. But that love, as much joy as it brings her, is not felt without a cost. The cost is the knowledge that life ends, a truth made bitter by living, and that no matter how much we love it, life is not ours to keep. It’s a gift, meant to be loved, but meant to be given up. And the deeper the love, the tighter our grip on this gift, until at last we are forced to come to terms with its parting, which is just impossible.

And so Lauren, knowing this, having the foresight to see that love cannot be without loss, combined in one statement love and sadness, a simple statement that somehow sums up a very profound irony.

Lauren’s not a melancholy person. She doesn’t live with guarded emotions. On the contrary, she gives herself completely to life, to joy and happiness, to relationships, and she feels everything, all the way through. Her comment that night was sincere, just like her life.

I don’t remember what I said back to her right then. I like the way her statement sounded, and I hope I left it hanging in the air for effect. I may have gotten excited at such a philosophical musing and rambled about the “tragic dualities” of life or something made-up like that and ruined it, but I can’t remember. What I would like to say now, though, is that while what she said was true in both its plain meaning and its intention, she will not have to experience her love of life or the pain of its loss alone. I will be by her side, until I’m not. I will share it all with her until I can’t anymore.

And when it must be, like the song says, I will follow her into the dark, or I will wait there for her.

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Expectations

Have you ever noticed that people disappoint you a lot? Do you regularly find yourself disapproving of others' conduct? Are you surprised when someone lives up to the standards you set?

You could have expectations.

If this is the case, you’re not alone. Most of us have expectations for other people, and it is not unusual for them to go unmet. In fact, some of us have so many expectations that our relationships are often a source of dissatisfaction, leaving us frustrated and unfulfilled. These expectations are not always easy to explain either. Some of them are the product of our upbringings and the expectations that we were held to as children. Some of them are the side effect of another condition, self centeredness, which gives rise to a type of entitlement-based expectations. And then there are expectations formed around others’ behavior—as in what you’ve come to expect. And to top it off, there are principled expectations, which are abstract in nature and represent how we think people should behave in general. Determining what kind of expectations you have—and where they come from—is an important part of learning more about your condition.

To truly understand your expectations—and to learn to live with them—you have to be honest about the effect they have on you. For instance—is it your husband’s incurable laziness and bad attitude about housework that disappoints you, or is it your unrealistic expectation that one’s spouse should want to help the other spouse equally shoulder the responsibilities of the home? Is the source of your disgust really the blatant superficiality of all your friends and how much they talk about money and new clothes and houses and other people, or is it your naive expectation that people should, on average, be concerned with matters of significance? Are you perturbed because the receptionist at your doctor’s office barely looked you in the eye and acted like you were annoying them the whole time you were there, as if you weren’t the customer and you weren’t paying good money to see your doctor and as if you didn’t make this appointment three months ago—or is it your overly demanding expectation that people should practice simple politeness and make eye contact and stop bringing their crappy attitudes into work with them and show a little professionalism? Are you angry because your nearly-adult kids complain constantly and take their privileged lives for granted and act like spoiled little brats who can’t tear themselves away from a text message for one second to actually communicate with you about their day, or is it because, like an idiot, you expect them to understand the advantages they have in life and show some appreciation and act their age instead of acting like tweens for once? Are you enraged by people in line at Starbucks who throw a hissy-fit when the barista doesn’t have their favorite ingredient, by drivers who honk at you after .005 seconds of sitting at a green light, at parents who smoke in the car with their babies in the backseat, at the nearly 2000 people who stampeded into a Walmart on Black Friday in 2008 killing a seasonal employee by crushing him to death and then complained when they were asked to leave the store, and by John Edwards?

Or are you enraged because, despite thousands of years of history and atrocities and small minds and weak characters and the utter predictability of human behavior, you still expect people to be better than they are?

It’s exactly this kind of introspective exercise that can help you determine the source of any negative feelings you might be experiencing as a result of your relationships and interactions with the world. And when you realize, finally, that it’s your expectations that are at the root of your negative feelings about people, you can take the first step towards recovery:

Abandon them.

“For your health.”

-Dr. Steve Brule

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A guest, like all my Fathers.

King David, in what must have been a moment of angst about the tragic brevity of life, wrote in melancholy song:

“Oh Lord, make me know my end
and what is the measure of my days;
let me know how fleeting I am!
Behold, you have made my days a
few handbreaths, and my lifetime is as
nothing before you. Surely all mankind
stands as a mere shadow! Surely for nothing
they are in turmoil; man heaps up wealth,
and does not know who will gather!"

Psalm 30, v. 4.

No matter what creed you live by, or what beliefs you hold, there is something true about David’s words that transcends religion altogether. The insight of David’s reflection is not primarily the words themselves, but the reason behind them. He is asking, praying, that he will be made aware of his temporariness, his transiency. Is this necessary? Does not the very request itself beget his awareness of the fact? Doesn’t he already know? Or was he acknowledging that tendency people have of putting death out of their minds, or if not that, the habit of living in a way that takes for granted the frailty of life and misplaces significance in things that do not last? Did David know that before long he would forget this sacred appreciation towards time and begin again to entertain the illusions of the everyday? Surely a man like David understood the weaknesses of human character, and knew too well the attachments to this life that we form so deeply. We are not deterred from loving this life, no matter how incapable we will be in dealing with the loss that must necessarily follow. I think David knew this, and I think he believed that freeing ourselves from our attachment to this life was so inhuman, so against our nature, that to do so required a revelation.

I’m not sure if revelation is required or not, but it’s here, right in front of me. I open an ancient book, and I read the words of an ancient man, and in them I find a soul that pleads the way I feel. And what I feel, to be clear, is that the world has confused filler with substance, and false meaning is the byproduct. By sort of an ironic mistake, we have artificially distorted the value of things that fade away, and neglected that which truly lasts. Society uses this distortion to preserve itself by luring onlookers into pressure cooked lives where it sucks out their time and money and soul and distracts them to the point where they don't notice that their days are almost up until it's too late, and by then they've given their lives to it, ensuring it's immortality with their sacrifice. And while a few mourn the loss of one of their own, the masses hardly notice, and the cycle continues.

I don’t say this to aggrandize my sense of self awareness; I say it because it makes me profoundly sad to imagine a person who, coming to the end, realizes that they invested their lives in phony futures with no return. And if the author of the Psalms thought it could happen to him, I don't see why it couldn't happen to me. Or to you.

I don’t know if praying for an increased self-awareness of our own fleeting existence will make us any more likely to choose the carpenter’s cup over the golden goblet, but if all it does is remind us to look again at how we use our time here and how we live out our lives, then it wasn't in vain.



"Ignatius J. Reilly's supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul.

Ignatius himself was dressed comfortably and sensibly. The hunting cap prevented head colds. The voluminous tweed trousers were durable and permitted unusually free locomotion. Their pleats and nooks contained pockets of warm, stale air that soothed Ignatius. The plaid flannel shirt made a jacket unnecessary while the muffler guarded exposed Reilly skin between earflap and collar. The outfit was acceptable by any theological and geometrical standards, however abstruse, and suggested a rich inner life."

-John Kennedy Toole, from A Confederacy of Dunces

-N

There's a protest for that

If you think that America’s government has lost its way, there’s a protest for that. If you think Washington is in bed with big business and that lobbyists write our national policies, there’s a protest for that. If you think that Wall Street is a good place to indict the 1%, you’d better hurry because that protest started without you. And if you think that governments the world over are conspiring to slowly but surely encroach on our civil liberties as part of an organized scheme to enslave and suppress the governed in a vice-hold of absolute power, then (1) you’ve been spending too much time on inforwars.com, and (2) there’s a protest for that.

It’s all one protest actually.

The “Occupy Wallstreet” movement has given a voice to seemingly disgruntled, disenfranchised and disillusioned people across America. There are as many motivations behind the protesters as there is social and economic disparity amongst the 99% that is ironically represented as a united front. Yet somehow there’s unity enough to have propelled the movement out from New York’s crowded island to less cliché places for protests. If it shows anything, it shows that a significant number of people are being moved to political speech, even if what comes out is an inarticulate generalization that glosses over the causal relationship between national policies and their own current personal circumstances. It’s more along the lines of that feeling that something is wrong, although you can’t prove exactly what caused it, and you can’t exactly describe it, you know something is wrong, because what’s going on can’t be right.

Even if not everyone is saying it, there’s a fundamental principle mixed in with all the political rhetoric and pun-ridden signage that underpins the legitimacy of the protests, and the right of the protesters to demand change, or even just an explanation from our leaders as to why things are the way they are. This is the idea that the government—defined as the representative body of the people—has a purpose determined for it by the people who elect it, and that it should be accountable to those same people for its failure to achieve it.

Perhaps up to this point we might find some degree of consensus. But if there was ever a fork where the road splits, it is here. To say that Government has a purpose is one thing. To say what that purpose is, even on a broad scale, is to pick one stance in a thousand. And what’s more interesting to me than the plurality of opinions as to the government’s purpose is the reason for the plurality itself. The average voter’s perception of the government’s purpose is, in my opinion, a direct reflection of their own interests and position in society. And as there are many different interests and many different positions in society, so goes the logic.

Maybe this sounds obvious, but I don’t think everyone wants to readily admit that this is true. But just look at politicians—or more specifically—congressmen and women: they are often and necessarily torn between voting for laws and policies that help their constituencies (or the majority of voters within those constituencies) and voting in the interest of other causes. In an ideal world meeting the needs of any one constituency or community and the needs of the country would not be a mutually exclusive choice. And generally speaking what is good for the country as a whole is good for any one community, as communities are often microcosms of the nation with the same social and economic qualities. But not always. And when it comes down to choosing sides, loathe is a politician to come home from Capitol Hill bearing no gifts.

But who wants to confess that they’re more concerned about the value of their home than America’s poverty problem? Who wants to acknowledge that they’re more worried about their small business than whether the Nissan factory employing a whole town is about to close? What state employee is willing to admit that they won’t accept a pay cut and reduced pension benefits even if the state goes bankrupt? Who is going to be the first in line to refuse to support a tax increase that would create a path to national solvency? Who isn’t?

We believe the purpose of the government is to help us (or leave us alone), and we are 300 million individuals. It is only natural to assign priority to those issues that most immediately affect us. But we cannot all pursue our own ends and expect the government to pursue them all with us. And too often we overlook the connection between a problem that seems outside the scope of our interests and a problem we currently face. But even if our problems and their problems were totally unrelated, we cannot ask a government with limited resources to address ours first without acknowledging the implications: where resources go one place, they don’t go another. And where resources don’t go, they are missed.

It is difficult to escape the meddling influence of us. If the purpose of the government is to help rather than hurt, and helping means dividing resources among the people, the next question is fairness, and what is a fair division of resources and what’s not. Fairness is a judgment on the worth of human conduct, and what it entitles a person to. Valuations of human conduct evolve from a moral code. And a moral code is not without a source. And all of our answers to these questions are the product of the development of our consciousness in a certain environment, with certain internal and external forces wearing on us at all times. Yet when we come out formulated and all determined like we are, we forget the million varieties we could have been, and judge life from our point of view as if we can take credit for the whole process of our becoming, or as if we had nothing to do with it—whichever is easier to believe.

So am I saying that people more often form their political opinions around their own self-interests and prejudices than by using a set of principles that take into account the natural inequalities of existence and evaluate the needs of society based on disinterested criteria?

Guilty. But don’t worry—when I wrote this I took into account the natural inequalities of existence and evaluated the needs of society using disinterested criteria.


"Although a society is a cooperative venture for mutual advantage, it is typically marked by conflict and by an identity of interests...there is a conflict of interests since persons are not indifferent as to how the greater benefits produced by their collaboration are distributed, for in order to pursue their ends they each prefer a larger to a lesser share."

John Rawls, Theory of Justice


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Smiles

6:00 a.m. Every morning it comes, arriving precisely on time, conspiring with my body to wake me in the sleepiest possible state. And with it, chirping softly as she pushes up on two tiny arms to see what she can of our dimly lit room through the ivory colored bars of her crib, my reason for waking up.

I stumble negligently out of bed and walk over to collect my daughter. I do this very well with my eyes closed. I carry her over to my wife’s side, and place her gently on the bed. She clasps her little hands together with a smile in anticipation of her favorite food—one that only her mother can provide. Having come to terms that I am not capable of fulfilling this need, I go back to bed. About ten or so minutes later, my wife nudges me lovingly and motions for me to look at our very satisfied baby who is clearly ready for the day. “Well,” I think to myself, “I guess that makes two of us.”

Out in the living room daylight forces my eyes to adjust. Over in one corner is the blanket of the day, laid out in a neat square shape, with a toy or two waiting to be played with. I imagine the toys suddenly pretending to be inanimate as I walk around the corner and wonder if I’ve seen Toy Story too many times. I lay Eve down on her back and her arms quickly straighten over her head as she stretches from the 11 hour slumber that must be quite rejuvenating. I, on the other hand, still can’t seem to get enough sleep.

“I’m tired,” I say to myself as I look down at her.

“You are?!” her wide eyes seem to say back to me. “You should come to bed at 7 with me. I feel great.”

And as I think about how to explain why I never make it to bed at 7, her wide eyed stare shifts into a smile and my tiredness is momentarily forgotten as we begin to exchange smiles and before I know it I’ve said “Good Morning” in 5 varieties of baby talk. She has a way like that.

No matter how hard I try to complain about being tired, or having to go to work, or not getting to be a baby and lay around on soft blankets all day and take naps, she takes the wind out of my discontent. With every smile she gives, I feel a little bit warmer, a little bit happier. This warmth and happiness builds by the minute as I’m with her, and by the time I have to walk out the door to catch the bus to work I’m wishing I could wake up at 6:00 a.m. all over again.

It’s amazing to me what power there is in such a simple expression on such a little face. Behind Eve’s smile is the purest innocence, unspoiled in a world of spoiled things. Behind her smile I see joy uninhibited by the worries of life. I see excitement that is not jaded; enthusiasm that is not forced. And I see a love that expresses itself in recognition: she knows me, and the sight of me makes her happy. I cannot imagine a better feeling. It overwhelms me, and for the life of me I can’t figure out what I did to deserve this smile, but I would never, ever undo it.

“I love you,” I say to her, as she grasps one of my fingers in each hand, bringing them slowly to her mouth, cooing all the while.

And though she can’t return the sentiment, she doesn’t have to. I know love when I see it, and I see it in her smile.

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