"Deep Thoughts": August 2008 Archives

Some nights I just want to eat a Frankendinner, ya know?

You know what I mean. A little bit of this and a little bit of that, and none of it adding up to a cohesive whole, but somehow that's what I want anyway.

It occurred to me, after eating the veggie hot dogs and the zucchini in garlic and olive oil and the tomato and basil salad, that we're always expecting life to be like a story is. To have a beginning, a middle, and an end - and more than that - a thrust, a meaning, a punchline - something to pull it all together.

We expect it to be like spaghetti and meatballs, not like a Frankenmeal.

But it feels a lot more like my little plates. A little of this, and a little of that, things that taste different, songs that don't go together. Milkshakes before the meal, pancakes for dinner, chocolate in the morning, and fruit with vinegar. It's weird. And it makes very little sense, except in snippets, flashes of insight that peek through at us like the stars winking here and there in the heavy backlit blanket of a NYC night.

As humans (operating in little isolated islands of awareness), it's often hard to believe we have much impact on others, even those we know well and see often.

I was having a very interesting conversation this evening, with a friend with whom I often get into such conversations, because we are both built that way.

He said something to the effect that he thinks he's very selfish because he has trouble remembering things that don't directly affect him. I told him that I don't think he's selfish at all (he's not), and that being selfish is about not being interested in or caring about anybody but oneself, rather than a lack of remembering the details of things other people have told you.

Anyway, that's slightly beside the point. I do think, though, that it's very hard, in some ways, to imagine the world beyond our mental four walls. We all have the George Bailey syndrome to a certain extent.

So I find it interesting that a chalked message on a Portland sidewalk so affected two knitters of that city that they posted photos of it on their respective blogs.

I've been chewing on something the last few days, and it's coming into flower as a full-fledged theory, I think - or close to it. It's one of those based-on-personal experience (and observation) theories that may or may not be applicable to the wider world of humans. But I suspect there's something in it.

Talking to a friend the other day who was puzzled over why two of his female friends had gotten offended by something he'd said, in jest - something they absolutely knew was in jest and did not reflect his views at all.

And I said to him that it might be because they are young - in their early/mid-20s. And he said, "But I'm that age, and I don't get offended by those things."

"But you are a boy."

My theory is this: that women view things very seriously, in deadly earnest, in their early adulthood, and tend to grow more playful as they get older. Whereas, young men start out playful and grow more serious.

Well, that was my theory up until that point. Mulling it around in my head a few more days, and I think I've found out why. It has to do with one's perception of time. Or rather, with what kind of time one is focused on. Girls set their sights on their future lives - on imagining them, and gathering the bricks to build them.

Boys, I think, focus much more on the present - on having fun, on being light, and footloose and fancy free.

Later on (sometimes much later), men begin to feel that it's time for them to "settle down," and live in a more finished, subdued, responsible kind of way. To become what used to be called a "family man."

Women - well, I don't really know about all women, or to be fair even about most women - but in my own case at least, I find that my focus is so much on the present, on today, on this moment, this hour, this stroke of the pedal, that view over the bridge, this raincloud about to perhaps dump the weight of the Hudson River on me, that I can scarcely plan a Friday night.

I don't want to schedule anything. I don't want to decide much of anything - beyond, perhaps, what to eat for dinner (though I don't want to have to shop for it, either).

What I do want to do is play. Relax. Smile. Look at the sun (when it's out, which isn't often lately).

And this, I think, is why I feel so happy being around young boys. We are alike, in a way - both brimming with hormones and energy and impatience and the desire to bounce ourselves off the walls of the world, or better - to leap right the hell over them, executing a perfect wheelie in mid-air on the way down.

(What photograph could possibly go with that? Nothing I've taken, because I've been too busy doing.)

The world is a mess, and I just need to...rule it. - Dr. Horrible

Sitting here in the construction site (aka. my apartment), with the cat determinedly stalking some manner of flying thing (I am afraid to look; I dearly hope it's a bird), and waiting for the damn tea to steep so I can wake the hell up, I wonder where god went wrong.

Note that I do not capitalize, because a) I hate that word, and b) I am uncertain as to the nature of this creature's existence.

It's not that I'm an atheist, exactly, but, in the words of the immortal Inigo Montoya, "I do not think that word means what you think it means." Not that there is a specific "you" intended here.

And then at this exact moment, Nina Simone sings, "Sinnerman, you ought to be prayin'."

Yeah yeah.

I wasn't intending to talk about this at all, mind you. I was just going to put up some photos.

I guess what I think, though, is that we are here for various reasons known only (and occasionally, at that) to ourselves, and it's up to us to glean meaning out of our lives. I have a clue as to my reasons for being here, as I imagine most people do. But the terrifying and sad things that happen to people while they're here are as mysterious as they ever were.

I like movies that tackle this question, even (sometimes) the ones that do it ham-handedly. I've had disagreements over the movie Contact, for example. Boywich thinks it's rather silly (though he'll watch it with me), and I like it and can't especially articulate why. Sure, some of the characters are too black and white; it departs from Carl Sagan's book in some significant ways, and yet I like it.

And I don't think it's solely to do with the fact that I can watch almost anything Jodie Foster does because I like that gleam of intelligence in her sharp blue eyes.

I think it's actually the earnestness of the thing. It's so like Carl, for one, and like me, for another.

One thing I admire about Carl (yes, i know the verb ought to be past-tense, but I still admire him in the present tense, even though he is not himself in the present tense) is his lack of pussyfooting. He loves science, he loves the big questions, and he wants to share these things with Everyone.

I've been known to pussyfoot on occasion, to stick my toe in the sand and pretend lukewarmness when actually I am standing in a furnace like Liz. I guess I am working away from that.

But I don't see why caring about something should be cause for embarrassment. A friend of mine recently proclaimed that it's now cool to be obsessed with something. I don't know that he's right. Maybe it's cool to be obsessed with something material. But the very word "cool" gives the lie to the idea that being impassioned is ever going to be cool. Just look at how men react when they see you actually feeling something about them.

Everyone says they are looking for a passionate person, and one who will be passionate about them, but in the moment of seeing it, they realize they don't want it. It makes them nervous - even when it's purely physical passion. Honestly. I've seen it time and time again.

Real feeling makes people edgy. Does it remind them that we are actually here, that these are really our lives, that we might actually connect with one another? And does that, in turn, remind them that this is it, and it means something, because we are all going to die, and that very much sooner than we realize?

I was wondering where I was going with this, because I hadn't thought of anything in particular when I sat down, just that I had some photos to put up, and I just went with the stream to see where it led. Wondering, perhaps, if it had anything to do with death. Thought so.

Again I tried to take pictures from the bike for you, and again I saw beautiful images - a graffiti-covered plaque on the bridge, all blues and blacks; the Domino Sugar factory on the Brooklyn side, bathed in golden light - and yet I didn't want to stop. I told myself I'd take some, walking, on my way to the bar with the friend I was going to meet, but then she wasn't feeling up to going out (she's recovering from surgery), so I didn't take any.

The light would've been gone by then anyway, and I knew that, and I still couldn't stop.

I'm a little heartbroken today, and maybe for the last few days, and I'm not sure how much of it is for me, and how much of it is for the various people in my life who are going through rough times. When I say rough times, I am talking more serious than breakups or job losses. I am talking cancer.

I won't go into detail here, because these stories are not mine to tell, but suffice it to say that several of my friends - two of them very close friends and one a more recent friend whom I'm nevertheless very worried about - are having to deal with some heavy shit. And I as their friend am having to deal with being afraid for them, and knowing how much they mean to me, and how intolerable it would be to lose them.

And then I check my email and see yet another message from yet another guy I'd emailed who is telling me that he is not interested because I am older than his chosen age range (in this case only a couple of years older). If he'd just said that and not included a bunch of chatty banter as well, I wouldn't have minded. But the combination was, somehow, like a slap in the face.

I don't know why that particular email mattered - it's not that I was super-interested in the guy; it just hurt, even coming from a stranger. I suspect it is to do with something larger, something that I can't examine just now, because I can't even examine the things that I'm aware are going on. It's a big tangle - like that giant ball of string that's either an actual or apocryphal tourist attraction in the midwest.

Another friend of mine mentioned to me, just offhand, that he's hung up on somebody, "hung up bad," and I was dumbfounded for a minute trying to figure out how I'd describe my own state. I was going to say that I'm not hung up on anybody, and that that is unusual for me, and somewhat uncomfortable in its own right. Which seems weird - why should I prefer to be suffering unrequited passion, instead of just feeling nothing very much? I guess because it isn't that the alternative is to feel nothing very much. The alternative is to feel much blanker and more empty than one does when suffering the unrequited.

How are these things related? "Even the wisest cannot tell." (Galadriel)

PS. Obviously, these pictures were taken on a different bike ride, on a different day - but at much the same time of day, for there is that slanting evening light. Pocketcam, auto exposure, flash off.