Memes and Me — Experimenting with Validity Friday, Sep 4 2009

Discovering the hidden power of STFU & GTFO.

Chances are pretty good you encountered the health care meme bouncing around the Internet. Here’s the first I saw of it yesterday on Facebook:

“So-and-so believes that no one should die because they cannot afford health care, and nobody should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.”

I did not react positively to this. My inner-teenager resents being told what to do. Flipping his hair out of his face, he points out the moral extortion swimming along just beneath the smooth surface of the post: if you DON’T surrender your Facebook status and help spread the word, well then… I guess now we all know who thinks poor Americans SHOULD die and sick Americans SHOULD go broke.

You uncaring monster.

Being young and so-so-sensitive, Emo-Jung wants to call someone a monster back. He puts me to work on a really biting status update, letting everyone know how morally inferior they are for alluding to everyone else’s moral inferiority. Then I remember that teenagers, no matter how bright and right they can be, still need guidance. So I tell him “No. We’re not gonna do that.” He glowers, flips his hair out of his face AGAIN (why don’t you just get it cut?) and wants to know what we ARE going to do. He’s daring me to ignore it. Smirking.

I can, but I won’t. The sentiment being expressed does bother me. And I’ve learned emotional discomfort is the same thing as physical discomfort: a message from unthinking-me to the thinking-me: “Something is off and would you please take steps to adjust, thank you.”

Whenever I catch myself struggling against what I perceive as an outside attempt to define me, I choose to give that definition a trial run instead. In other words I don’t fight it anymore… I experiment with its validity.

The message I got from the status update was essentially “People are suffering and you don’t care enough to really do anything about it.”

What’s important isn’t whether that is what is actually being said, or was intended to be said, or anything else having to do with other people’s choices. What’s important is acknowledging my response, and investigating the truth of it.

Are people suffering?

Yes.

Am I doing anything about it?

Nope.

Do I care?

Yes, I do.

And now I know why I was bothered. There was a contradiction hiding in the folds of my life, and my emotional center seized on the opportunity presented by the cascading meme to shake that blanket out and let me get a look at what was nesting there.

Now I could do something about it. I posted two status updates to Facebook through Twitter yesterday.

1: “Your Riverside Community Hospital Auxiliary Volunteer Information Form has been submitted. A member will contact you soon.” #py$wymi

2: Thank you to whoever started the #healthcare meme. You got me thinking–so I volunteered at my local hospital. b/c that matters more.

The first is quoting from the form response I got at Riverside Community Hospital’s website. #py$wymi is short for put your money where you mouth is. As a reforming yammer-mouth and armchair-everything, I’m discovering that the usually insulting STFU and GTFO are very powerful when combined and applied to oneself.

In this case, rather than debating health care, now I get to provide some.

One Response »

 

The Crack in the Floor Sunday, Aug 16 2009

The last couple of days were rough. It feels silly and stupid to write that in the past tense — the roughness only stopped about ten minutes ago when I left my bed and logged on. I didn’t expect that to make me feel better, but for some reason giving up on sleep and listening to some woe-is-us break-up music has soothed me.

Resentment and I have been slugging it out, toe-to-toe, and it’s been to the gym since the last time we squared off.

I know it’s no good, these thoughts of blame and anger directed at someone else. It’s chewing over rotten meat — all you’re left with is mold on your tongue. But it’s such a challenge to escape.

I try to keep an even keel. I remind myself of my own one-sidedness, recall my own persistant failure to love. I acknowledge that the way I feel now that we are no longer together must be very similar to they way my wife often felt while we were. I admit to all the time I was given to change and make better choices, choices that considered someone else’s feelings over my own. Now I don’t have that time anymore. Now it’s my feelings left in the dark.

It’s only fair.

But that doesn’t make it right.

And there’s the crack in the floor I fall into. Because whatever fed into it, the ripping apart of two people joined by vows is a betrayal. The fact that my daughter doesn’t live with me anymore, she visits; soap gets in her eyes during her bath and she cries for mommy — the simplest, most natural request of a child — and I have to tell her she’ll see mommy tomorrow, because mommy’s somewhere else.

You feel powerless and it’s natural to point fingers at someone else.

But that’s the lie. I feel powerless. But that’s only how I feel. And I’m learning to perceive through the illusion.

Anger is a threat response. Someone cuts you off on the freeway, you feel endangered, you yell in your car. Doesn’t make you any safer.

I’ve been wrestling with resentment and anger and bitterness. Somehow, tonight during the walk from my bedroom to the office, I stepped out of the ring. Somehow my soul recognized that everything that upsets me is a lie. And a lie only has power over you if you engage it. Fight or give in, you are subject to it either way. You win by not fighting.

So I didn’t come through as a husband. I’m a better man today then I was yesterday.

So I was betrayed. That’s a result of someone else’s choice to believe a lie. I don’t have to believe it too.

So my daughter got soap in her eyes. We rinsed it out. She went to sleep. In the morning she’ll wake up and see her mommy.

And that’s something to be grateful for.

“We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.”
- John W. Gardner

Leave a Response »

 

On Poor Writing Thursday, Aug 6 2009

I’m sitting at a red light. To my right is a video store. In this day of the download, those old brick-and-mortars don’t look so hot. Oh, they try — but so do the trannies in fishnets back on Santa Monica boulevard.

Still no green. I look at a very large poster for a movie I’ve never heard of.

The design elements are:

* a whole lot of white space

* a title I don’t remember

* a tagline in a font too small to read from the street despite the poster’s window filling acreage

* a man

* a woman who is Beyoncé

* another woman

* the arrangement of man-woman-woman to imply a love triangle of menacing nature

So, an awful poster for what looks like an awful movie.

I grew up in this neighborhood. I know this is the longest red light in town, but still — get me out of here.

Then everything that is on my right resonates with everything that is off in my life:

What if I write a movie like that? What if I write a screenplay and I think its really good because its the best I can do but then I see the poster and its something like that because frankly the marketing guys just don’t have a lot to work with? And the movie is awful and uninteresting and even I want to change the channel because I caught it on TV — didn’t even bother to DVR it — because frankly the director and actors and even the art department didn’t have anything more to work with than the marketing guys?

What if I write a bad movie?

I relate this story over sushi to my friend, a business director in her position and a novelist in her soul. The sun is now disappearing outside.  “Well,” she says, handing the black check presenter back to our server with her credit card inside,  “At least you’d get paid.”

My friend is very clever, and she’s right: I should be so lucky.

Back in the car, and now I’m looking out at the morning sun in the rearview mirror.

You should be so lucky, to write a terrible movie. If your first draft is coherent at all, it would be a happy accident.

I think of a screenplay sitting in my closet at home: a copy of an early draft of The Last Samurai. Its radically different than the story that Edward Zwick actually filmed, and not nearly as satisfying. Captain Algren isn’t a drunken soldier of fortune haunted by memories of genocide — he’s the darling of West Point. Katsumoto is the enemy and he stays the enemy. Algren is married, and his wife dies — predictably. All in all, rather bland.

“I’m like that too,” my friend says between sips of water. “I want it to be perfect the first time.”

“I guess it’s like what Hemingway said about first drafts,” I reply.

We smile at each other. We’re both writers; we know the quote. No need to curse during dinner.

The light turns green, and I pass through the intersection and continue towards the onramp. Time to go home and write something awful.

Leave a Response »

 

Consuming Friday, Jul 31 2009

Decided to meditate today.

Went in my room, shut the door, closed my eyes and tried to focus on my breathing.

Sitting wasn’t really comfortable, so I cleared off the bedding and laid flat on my back, no pillow, hands rising and falling over my stomach.

Ah yes… my stomach. That tricky little bag of complaints. It wants, it gets, it wants again.

I could complain… but not without giving license to myopia. Its hard for me to eat enough. Eating effects my energy level and mood and stuff, but as far as my body is concerned, “weight gain” might as well be a foreign phrase in a pocket guide book.

No, I’m thinking about my stomach because it’s the only part of me that is moving. It’s drawn my attention, and I’m hungry because I haven’t had lunch yet, but I set the alarm on my blackberry for 4:30pm. Half an hour of meditation during which I don’t have to check the clock because the clock will let me know when to stop.

Up and down. Breathing. Relaxing.

Maybe.

Thinking about appetites. The stomach’s obvious, but there’s more than one bellicose empty space in my body. I’m covered and surrounded by them. There isn’t an inch of me that doesn’t clamor for attention.

“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” –Herbert Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World”,p. 40-41 (1971).

My hands, my feet, my mind, my heart — they’re all telling me they have space to fill.

They want to build, to go, to grasp, to know.

There’s a choir of concave hollows, singing, sometimes howling for the convex contentment that had been their earlier blessing.

But it was for the fulfillment of appetite that the pleasures of the Garden were lost. As it was in the days of our fathers, so it is now — even in this age.

Simon spoke of attention as commodity. As I lie on my bed, eyes closed, ears open to all these damned pressing needs (there are none, not needs, not really — but I can hear them nonetheless), I know the economy is in shambles.

Throw a dart at a map of Africa, and you will find the state of affairs in my body. Oh, we’re a republic in name, to be sure — on good terms with the West and its NGO’s and charities and chartered institutions. We wouldn’t get by without the daily influx of foreign aid. But the hospitals are staffed with one doctor per ten thousand residents, infrastructure is a nightmare of intermittent services and milk-skimming dairy hands, and for want of employment, the streets abound with young men with guns. Young men who do not always agree.

My body is a bundle of cravings. Satisfying one means denying another.

“Do you consume so that you may produce? Or do you consume in search of satisfaction?”

Well there’s a thought I’ve never quite heard before — not that succinctly.

I know the answer. Why the inmates run the asylum. Or maybe it’s the old folks who have taken over the nursing home, popping all the pills they want. Sending there hearts into overdrive and tripping on colors and four hour erections.

Jesus and the fig tree — a tree draws nutrients from the soil its rooted in and the sun that shines on it and the water that comes to it, all so it can produce fruit. We’re no different. No fruit on this tree; Jesus curses it. It withers, releasing its components to be reclaimed for productive use.

Why would a tree fail to produce fruit? Couldn’t have been healthy. Like those corrupt third world fiefdoms. Like me. I can feel the pressure in my head — anxiety. Every message I’ve ever internalized, the light and the darkness in conflict. You’re everything; you’re nothing. You’re only worthy of contempt, sometimes not even that: only indifference. You’re loved; it’s a lie. You’ve been given so much; you’ve given so little. You’re a whore and a thief. You’re a saint — pure.

I think about what I want. Not my appetites. This is passion. Desire for wholeness. I ask for it. My body strains after it, physically. It’s not relaxation — it’s yearning.

The mob settles down. The Blue Helmets arrive. Oh, the country’s still a mess, sure. But the urban fighting stops. No more automatic weapons fire at midnight. There’s going to be an audit. Money will go where it was intended.

The blackberry goes off, and I sit up. Centered.

Time to eat.

Leave a Response »

 

Someone buy me some speed pourers. Wednesday, Jun 4 2008

Because I don’t know how much I’m drinking without them… but I’m guessing its a lot.

God bless Maker’s Mark, and George Bush for buying the bottle.

(a note for the uninitiated: speed pourers are those nifty little rubber and metal spigots you see affixed to the top of liquor bottles at a bar. The regulate the rate at which the liquid comes out, allowing a professional bartender to measure by count, instead of having to go through the slow and cumbersome process of pouring into a measuring device like a jigger and then pour that into the glass. However, I haven’t been able to find any decent ones for sale, so I’m just eyeballing it. Generously)

2 Responses »

 

A Poem of Thanks Thursday, Nov 22 2007

I THANK YOU

by E. E. Cummings

i thank you God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth

day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any–lifted from the no

of all nothing–human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

—————-
Now playing: U2 – Wild Honey
via FoxyTunes

Leave a Response »

 

Something wonderful Wednesday, Nov 21 2007

So, even though I’ve managed to drive my life into a ditch — no worries though, I know a Guy, and He’s got a BIG tow truck — there’s still way more to be thankful for. Here’s some off the top of my head:

I live when and where I do. There are a whole bunch of ways to be screwed up, but there are a lot of ways to work through it and heal too. And even at my low income level in our society, I live like a king.

I’ve never starved, and never realistically worried that I might.

I have a car. It runs reliable and fast, gets good mileage and plays CD’s.

Health!

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing some extraordinary people in my life and calling them friends, family, and lover.

My darling little girl.

Hope . . . and a calling in my heart, and a faithful and supremely loving God who fashioned it.

Many pleasures, many pains, and the knowledge that it all means something wonderful.

—————-
Now playing: U2 – In A Little While
via FoxyTunes

Leave a Response »

 

Not enough dough in the pie. Monday, Nov 5 2007

Choices.

I didn’t choose this situation.

[Or maybe I did, but I'd like out now, thank you...]

Here’s where I’m at:

I have never made enough money to support myself, let alone my wife and child.

Just need to come out and admit that.

I was always chasing a dream. But I think now that while my dream of becoming a working screenwriter was and is perfectly valid, the motivation behind my pursuit of that dream was not. To wit, right thing wrong reason.

I was looking for the silver bullet. The solution to all of my problems.

Well, now the Writer’s Guild is on strike (a friend of mine is reporting for his shift on the picket lines tomorrow). Now even if I did finish the world’s greatest screenplay and the studio’s wanted to start a bidding war for it, I can’t sell it.

So now even the silver bullet is a blank.

I think this is a good thing. I think this is one more thing God is stripping away right now.

Because now I’m starting to own up to some failures. Starting to develop some much needed hustle.

Here’s the math: There are three things that require most of my time, aside from eating and sleeping.

1.) Work – 5 nights a week

2.) School – 2 Days, 1 Night, and much more for homework

3.) Single Dad – 3 Days and Nights a week.

Net result: 1 Free evening and 2 Free half-days. Unfortunately, my financial aid got yanked this semester, and I’m not making enough at my job to meet expenses. To sum, the situation is unsustainable. One of these three has to give.

Money is what is lacking. Time and Energy devoted to Employment has to go up, not down.

I can be finished with school by January. I’ve decided that its not progress for me as a person if I quit. Better to achieve this goal sooner rather than stretching it out to June.

Which leaves my time with my daughter. I can’t take care of Adee by myself anymore.

But I am by myself.

So I can’t take care of Adee. Not if I am going to take care of–provide for–Adee.

I’m already missing out, I guess. Adee changes noticeably between each time I see her.

I wish there were other options. But I don’t get wishes.

Just choices.

Leave a Response »

 

Chronological Complex Wednesday, Oct 24 2007

So, I think I am going to have to abandon the idea that this blog is going to work on a chronological basis. I simply don’t have the time and there is so much happening so fast for me to get it all down. I get overwhelmed and ignore the thing, which is even worse.

Instead, I’m going to switch over to an idea-centric approach. This seems to be the way I write anyways. But since I’m committing to the idea of posting along the line of ideas, rather than “and then this happened,” I won’t feel like I’m failing to get everything posted.

This should also help with the problem that a lot of people, from what they read here, are going away with the impression that I’m really depressed. For the record, I’m not depressed. Depressed is when you feel bad more than you should. That’s not me.

You see, I’m really hurting.

But something would be definitely wrong if I wasn’t. I see this in some of the advice I get–that if she doesn’t love me like she should, I don’t have any obligation anymore, that I’m being unhealthy or unaccepting by pining away from someone who’s over me, that I should accept her choice and go find someone who will treat me better.

Well, I think the only way to take that advice is to take all the hurt and pain and pretend like just because its wrong it doesn’t matter. Sorry gents, can’t go with you on this one. It hurts precisely because it is wrong, and its wrong because it hurts. That’s the inverse proof of the golden rule guys.

I mean, seriously, this is the single worse act of rejection in my life. Let’s say–theoritacally, because I don’t believe this is in the cards and even if it is I don’t know if I could play the hand–I get married again and then that woman–let’s call her Suzanne (wow, two dashed parentheticals in one sentence [and then a parantheticalled wry observation {okay this has got to stop}])–let’s say Suzanne divorces me, is that going to be as bad as the first time around? No. It will be bad, but as they say: you always remember your first.

I mean, how many other relationships do you have in life where someone stands up in front of everyone who matters to them and takes a vow to stick with you for life? Any employers doing that? Friends? Family didn’t get an option.

You see, I am still under an obligation, because when the pastor asked me to make my vows, he looked at me, and he asked me, and not once did he say “As long as Christina keeps vows too.” Nope, didn’t happen. My vows were just that: my vows. Christina can do what she wants. I’m going to keep mine, because that’s who I choose to be.

Am I crazy? We’ll see… but I’m staking everything on the belief that when I married this woman, God made us one, and that no matter what happens, he won’t abandon us. Because I don’t believe God is trying to screw me over with impossible situations. I believe he is trying to save all of us and show us the true meaning of joy with impossible situations.

So no, my friends, there is nothing else that I will ever experience that will pack more personal rejection. The whole world could have turned its back on me; if Christina would have still held my hand, it would have been fine. I’m hurting. A LOT. But I should be, given the situation. The real question is what am I going to do with that pain? There is no not hurting, there is accepting and acknowledging, or ignoring and being made a puppet.

I can’t control the pain. But I can find the purpose.

I list all the pain and hurt in my life because that’s what I’m using this blog for. To use this situation to get out all the bad stuff I’ve tried my whole life to cover over, and to do it out in the open so it might help others to do the same. So I’m sorry if what I have written has given the wrong impression. I haven’t been able to post everything here, Sadly a lot of what I’ve left out is the good times. For instance, last Saturday was wonderful.

—————-
Now playing: Angels & Airwaves – The Gift
via FoxyTunes

Leave a Response »

 

The many waves that have prevented my course Tuesday, Oct 16 2007

So, here’s a list I made this morning of all the inner fears I can think of that are calling the shots in my life, that have got me where I am. I figure a good way to admit both the truth and lie of them is just to throw them out for the whole world to see. Once the secret is out, it loses its power, right? So here we go.

I am afraid that…

-I am worthless

-I am rejectable

-I am not good enough

-I can’t be good enough

-No matter how hard I try, I will always fail

-I don’t deserve anything I want

-I will make a mistake that will cost me what I love

-I deserve to be punished

-I cannot love

-I will never be loved

-I am meant to be lonely and alone

-I am not really interesting.

-I am irrevocably flawed

-I am incapable of rising to the challenges of my life

-I am a bad friend

-I am detestable and hate-able

-I cannot be trusted

I’ve saved the best for last. I think the number one thing that makes me a controling person is the fear that

I CANNOT DEPEND ON ANYONE and NO-ONE CAN (OR SHOULD) DEPEND ON ME

I write these things, and I know that they are both true and false. In myself, they are true. The evidence is everywhere around me. But in God, they are false. And God is much greater than myself, and thank God for that.

What I do know is that until I admit and embrace the elements of truth, I cannot transcend the lie. I look at this list and consider my life and the two go together like a ring on a finger.

Well, I’m willing to wear a different ring now. I’m ready to admit and accept and then see what life is after that.

It may look awful on the surface, but like the ocean, there’s a lot of peace just below. I’m already a dead man. Corpses can’t drown.

God be with us all on our journey. May He romance your heart and soul.

—————-
Now playing: Chris Tomlin – Enough
via FoxyTunes

4 Responses »