Thursday, January 24, 2013
And The Present Moment Widens
Each time my friends share their truths, the present moment somehow expands, and my life is enlarged. How? My eyes widen as if I glimpse another momentary miracle, or some small vision of the universe anew. What is this, and how can I have more? The fact is I only see or hear these truths when I offer my own. Too often, I harbor these without believing they are things I have in common with others, somehow I convince myself that these simple truths are singular and isolated, that my inner life is just my own and shared by no one else. But every now and then, life reminds us through those we love, that nothing worth having is not worth sharing, that our lives expand, not by accumulating, but by giving it away. Of all people, the late Erma Bombeck, in a serious moment, pointed this out---that life and living are meant to be given away and not stored up. She observed that, when she stood before God at the end of her life, she hoped she wouldn't have a single bit of talent left. "I used everything you gave me," was what she hoped to tell her Creator. It will never be about what we won, or clung to or kept for ourselves. It will only be about what we let go of, and freely passed on.
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
And the Eyes Widen In Delight
As I lean into the bathroom to shut off the light, I glance at my reflection in the mirror to see if I look presentable--curly hair being unruly most of the time. What I notice is the semi-permanent droop of my mouth and its echo above, alongside my nose. My eyes have bags and are halfway open. I purse my lips as if to smile, and I leave the hotel room. Shuffling down the hall, struggling to button the cuff of my shirt while I balance my coffee so as not to spill, I glimpse a tiny pair of legs clad in denim appearing around the corner, followed by the bright blue t-shirt with tiny arms paddling back away from the other corridor. The boy is followed by a long pink tongue, and a huge head of golden hair, ears flopping in rhythm with the tongue licking the tiny face. He giggles, and I smile. Dogs and babies... A moment later, his mother scoops him up, wraps the leash around her arm and they are gone. As I wait for the elevator, I turn around and see my reflection in the gilt-framed mirror opposite the elevator. No more drooping mouth, and the eyes have opened wide.
Once on the elevator, out of habit, I look at my email. Same old thing, mostly ads, the word of the day, a message from google calendar--"You have no events scheduled for today." But the phone automatically checks once more for mail, and a new message pops up. It's from a real person, an especially close friend. Should I read it now, or save it? Here's the lobby, I think I'll wait.
We gather in the lobby, coffee, oatmeal, a banana. Breakfast adjoins the small talk. Soon we wrap it up. It's time to head for the airport. The car is covered in snow, ice holding the wipers fast, a white frozen layer waits to be scraped away. The driver starts the car and the defrosters, making no headway against the frost as cold air circulates within, We pass the makeshift scraper (a purloined room key) across the car, each clearing a side the best we can. When we return to the front of the car, small drops have replaced the icy remains of the scraped surface at the bottom of the windshield. At once, the wipers begin their loud swipe across the windshield, gradually removing frost as the heat travels up the glass. By now we are all inside the car, watching our breath fog the windows as our teeth chatter. The rear window, with the electric defrost embedded in the glass begins to show the grid, then to melt its cover of frost. Once a third of the windshield is clear, the driver backs out and we are off. An hour later, I settle into my airline seat, and, before turning off my phone, I remember the message. It's just a thanks for a greeting sent the day before, and a remembrance of some simple truth we've shared. Again, the eyes widen and I smile.
Once on the elevator, out of habit, I look at my email. Same old thing, mostly ads, the word of the day, a message from google calendar--"You have no events scheduled for today." But the phone automatically checks once more for mail, and a new message pops up. It's from a real person, an especially close friend. Should I read it now, or save it? Here's the lobby, I think I'll wait.
We gather in the lobby, coffee, oatmeal, a banana. Breakfast adjoins the small talk. Soon we wrap it up. It's time to head for the airport. The car is covered in snow, ice holding the wipers fast, a white frozen layer waits to be scraped away. The driver starts the car and the defrosters, making no headway against the frost as cold air circulates within, We pass the makeshift scraper (a purloined room key) across the car, each clearing a side the best we can. When we return to the front of the car, small drops have replaced the icy remains of the scraped surface at the bottom of the windshield. At once, the wipers begin their loud swipe across the windshield, gradually removing frost as the heat travels up the glass. By now we are all inside the car, watching our breath fog the windows as our teeth chatter. The rear window, with the electric defrost embedded in the glass begins to show the grid, then to melt its cover of frost. Once a third of the windshield is clear, the driver backs out and we are off. An hour later, I settle into my airline seat, and, before turning off my phone, I remember the message. It's just a thanks for a greeting sent the day before, and a remembrance of some simple truth we've shared. Again, the eyes widen and I smile.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Pillow Talk
While visiting over the holidays, we stayed in two separate households. We came home talking about buying some new pillows after staying in one guest room that featured some pillows with one side of memory foam and the other standard polyester. We even touched on the topic of a new mattress--the other friend we stayed with had a "sleep number bed," the competition with Tempur-pedic mattresses with memory foam for the newest thing in mattresses. Before we could get to a store to buy some pillows, we heard about "off-gassing" from memory foam mattresses and the possibility of their involvement in causing disease.
Still more alarming, when you talk about pillows and mattresses, you hear about the likelihood of their involvement in germs, disease and infestation. And, it's not limited to memory foam, there is controversy over the use of fire retardants, a state requirement, in mattresses and their relationship to causing certain disorders, etc. I googled mattresses and disease, and yup, I had "about 2,390,000 results in 0.28 seconds."
These days, if you get a bunch of baby boomers together, pillow talk is likely to be about which pillow makes it easiest on your arthritic neck, or which mattress warms and conforms to your sore joints in other places, or which pillow placed between your knees will help avoid hip or lumbar pain when you get up in the morning.
If you are old enough to remember John Profumo and Christine Keeler of the British spy scandals, then you know what pillow talk really is. It was apparently what Ms. Keeler used to extract secrets from Mr. Profumo and give them to the Russians. Wikipedia provides the following definitions: Pillow talk is the relaxed, intimate conversation that often occurs between two sexual partners after the act of "you know what," usually accompanied by cuddling, caresses, and other physical intimacy. It is associated with honesty, sexual afterglow, and bonding. Pillow talk, more broadly may also refer to conversations between parties that may be of a more casual and flirting nature, and are not necessarily engaged in a physical relationship. In any form, it sounds pleasant enough, yes?
It even provided the support in reality for all those Bond girls in the fifty years of Bond films we have seen, pillow talk with a Bond girl is a veritable institution, and Lord knows it has made Bond films a good deal more enjoyable than they might otherwise have been. I mean, who could enjoy movies with baddies the likes of "Rosa Klebb," "Blofeld," "Scaramanga," "Oddjob" and "Jaws" if they lacked the compensatory Bond girls like "Honey Ryder," "Wai Lin," "Vesper Lynd," "Domino" and, I am not making this up, "Pussy Galore," "Plenty O'Toole," "Holly Goodhead" and "Octopussy?"
But alas, during those same fifty years "pillow talk" has evolved, hasn't it? I don't plan on buying any new bedding any time soon, the new kind of pillow talk leaves me cold.
Still more alarming, when you talk about pillows and mattresses, you hear about the likelihood of their involvement in germs, disease and infestation. And, it's not limited to memory foam, there is controversy over the use of fire retardants, a state requirement, in mattresses and their relationship to causing certain disorders, etc. I googled mattresses and disease, and yup, I had "about 2,390,000 results in 0.28 seconds."
These days, if you get a bunch of baby boomers together, pillow talk is likely to be about which pillow makes it easiest on your arthritic neck, or which mattress warms and conforms to your sore joints in other places, or which pillow placed between your knees will help avoid hip or lumbar pain when you get up in the morning.
If you are old enough to remember John Profumo and Christine Keeler of the British spy scandals, then you know what pillow talk really is. It was apparently what Ms. Keeler used to extract secrets from Mr. Profumo and give them to the Russians. Wikipedia provides the following definitions: Pillow talk is the relaxed, intimate conversation that often occurs between two sexual partners after the act of "you know what," usually accompanied by cuddling, caresses, and other physical intimacy. It is associated with honesty, sexual afterglow, and bonding. Pillow talk, more broadly may also refer to conversations between parties that may be of a more casual and flirting nature, and are not necessarily engaged in a physical relationship. In any form, it sounds pleasant enough, yes?
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Losing Your Sense of Humor
I've been thinking recently about losing my sense of humor--I came within a hair's breadth of losing mine recently. It made me wonder what it would be like to lose it, permanently.
It made me want to spend some time thinking about comedy and humor. Somewhere in my academic education, I was introduced to Aristotle's Poetics, which provided the classical basis for defining tragedy and comedy. Aristotle focused most of his attention on Tragedy, that being what Aristotle believed to be the highest form (followed by epic poetry, then comedy and lyric poetry). My sense is that Aristotle (and the Ancient Greeks in general) believed life to be a tragedy--they must have hit upon the realization that all life ends in death and drawn the obvious conclusion. Comedy, instead described drama in which the hero arrived at a happy ending, not in death (although there is no escaping death). Another way to look at it--Tragedy is the fall from grace, and Comedy, the rise in fortune--both of a reasonably sympathetic character, of course.
But back to my student days--not long after Aristotle's Poetics, we studied tragicomedy, a more modern form that seemed at once to be a better fit. It involved people like Ibsen and Chekov and, eventually, the Theater of the Absurd, including the likes of Beckett, Ionesco and Edward Albee, aall of whom focused on the absurdity of a world without apparent meaning that ends in death. With that said, absurdist drama contained much in the way of broad humor. We learned somehow that we need not fear what we could laugh at. Death can be stared in the face, just like anything else, and its burden made lighter with laughter. The fact that tragedy remains in the mix is just realistic, that's all. Christopher Morley put it nicely--"Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs."
With all that out of the way, what must it be like to have lost your sense of humor? People rarely admit to having no sense of humor, although they may admit to having no skill in the telling of it. People without a sense of humor sometimes react to it with downright anger. George Saintsbury once said "Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it."
I read not long ago a discussion of political correctness, asserting that its proponents lack a sense of humor. Martin Amis said, "What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don't just not know what's funny, they don't know what's serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn't be trusted with anything."
OK, so losing your sense of humor is serious. I have talked you (and even myself) out of losing it. Medical researchers tell us that humor is therapeutic, too. But, how do we keep it? No one has offered a perfect prescription that I have heard of. If Morley is right, the mix of important and unimportant will keep us seeing the comic alongside the tragic.
Surround yourself with funny people, some say. Watch funny movies and read funny books. (Oddly enough, even forced humor has a beneficial effect, according to some medical studies). Personally, I'd recommend Dave Barry books, Mel Brooks movies, maybe even some Monty Python. I recently found an article with nineteen (19) recommendations for keeping humor in your life (way too many to remember). I do recall number 18. "Experiment with jokes. Learn one simple joke each week and spread it around." Here's mine for the week: “What do you call a line of rabbits walking backward? A receding hare line.”
It made me want to spend some time thinking about comedy and humor. Somewhere in my academic education, I was introduced to Aristotle's Poetics, which provided the classical basis for defining tragedy and comedy. Aristotle focused most of his attention on Tragedy, that being what Aristotle believed to be the highest form (followed by epic poetry, then comedy and lyric poetry). My sense is that Aristotle (and the Ancient Greeks in general) believed life to be a tragedy--they must have hit upon the realization that all life ends in death and drawn the obvious conclusion. Comedy, instead described drama in which the hero arrived at a happy ending, not in death (although there is no escaping death). Another way to look at it--Tragedy is the fall from grace, and Comedy, the rise in fortune--both of a reasonably sympathetic character, of course.
But back to my student days--not long after Aristotle's Poetics, we studied tragicomedy, a more modern form that seemed at once to be a better fit. It involved people like Ibsen and Chekov and, eventually, the Theater of the Absurd, including the likes of Beckett, Ionesco and Edward Albee, aall of whom focused on the absurdity of a world without apparent meaning that ends in death. With that said, absurdist drama contained much in the way of broad humor. We learned somehow that we need not fear what we could laugh at. Death can be stared in the face, just like anything else, and its burden made lighter with laughter. The fact that tragedy remains in the mix is just realistic, that's all. Christopher Morley put it nicely--"Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs."
With all that out of the way, what must it be like to have lost your sense of humor? People rarely admit to having no sense of humor, although they may admit to having no skill in the telling of it. People without a sense of humor sometimes react to it with downright anger. George Saintsbury once said "Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it."
I read not long ago a discussion of political correctness, asserting that its proponents lack a sense of humor. Martin Amis said, "What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don't just not know what's funny, they don't know what's serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn't be trusted with anything."
OK, so losing your sense of humor is serious. I have talked you (and even myself) out of losing it. Medical researchers tell us that humor is therapeutic, too. But, how do we keep it? No one has offered a perfect prescription that I have heard of. If Morley is right, the mix of important and unimportant will keep us seeing the comic alongside the tragic.
Surround yourself with funny people, some say. Watch funny movies and read funny books. (Oddly enough, even forced humor has a beneficial effect, according to some medical studies). Personally, I'd recommend Dave Barry books, Mel Brooks movies, maybe even some Monty Python. I recently found an article with nineteen (19) recommendations for keeping humor in your life (way too many to remember). I do recall number 18. "Experiment with jokes. Learn one simple joke each week and spread it around." Here's mine for the week: “What do you call a line of rabbits walking backward? A receding hare line.”
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Cereal Self-Improvement
OK, I have a friend who wrote me about being a "cereal" something or other, what he was referring to was not nearly as interesting as his use of "cereal," which he did serially during the course of his note. I love puns, and this seemed the perfect set-up for a series of them. I have recently, half in jest, been talking about the "403 Words Every Smart Person Should Know," but I am becoming interested in collecting words for punning.
In pursuit of that, I googled "puns" recently. There, I found--I am not making this up-- among the first three entries, a reference to "Understanding PUNS." It turns out this is a government-created program in the state of Illinois. Only a governmental employee could create a program whose acronym of PUNS and not walk away for a few hours until he or she could come up with a different name for the program. What would make you plunge ahead? The program has some complexity to it, so the helpful state employees designed a web page to help people who might be eligible for the PUNS program to understand it better, hence the Understanding PUNS listing. Can it be that no one noted the problem here? It turns out this is a serious process devoted to helping people with developmental disabilities obtain needed assistance and support. But some humorless nincompoop gives it a title that results in an acronym like PUNS. Well, I for one am richer for it, but, really, doesn't it make you wonder?
But back to the topic at hand. Puns can be adapted to almost any event. Here are a few I liked on first cite: Do you know what a clock does when it's hungry? It goes back four seconds. Having enjoyed my holidays a little too much, this one fit better than my pants do today. The roundest knight at King Arthur’s table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from far too much pi.
If you have been following the news for the past few weeks you probably already know where bills are passed into law--incongruous. In trying to avoid the fiscal cliff back in 2012, I am sure their discussion of raising estate taxes brought this one to mind--what is the definition of a will? It's a dead giveaway. Of course, now it's more of a taxing situation, which is another case where the government has its hands in your pocket, even in your grave.
I have been described as a "cereal" punster at times, and have been accused of "bowling" people over with my efforts. I have "milked" this one since breakfast today, with no appropriate chex on my excesses. With this little note, I finally decided to "pour" them on you, if you aren't a fan of puns, I'm sorry. I am working on it, really. But I am a bad combination--a punster and a pessimist.
I'm doing something about it, but I know change is always difficult, especially for a pessimist like me. So I don't see how much can be done about it. Why don't I think I can really change this? Punning is in my blood, and you know a pessimist's blood type is always b-negative.
With most areas of your life that need shoring up, you begin with self-awareness--noticing the situation, then self-assessment--taking a closer look, finally, you decide on a path of action--self-improvement. I have noticed my weakness for puns--self awareness. I am planning on taking a closer look over the next few weeks (it might take months or years--even a lifetime before I can decide on an action--who knows?) Punny how things go sometimes.
In pursuit of that, I googled "puns" recently. There, I found--I am not making this up-- among the first three entries, a reference to "Understanding PUNS." It turns out this is a government-created program in the state of Illinois. Only a governmental employee could create a program whose acronym of PUNS and not walk away for a few hours until he or she could come up with a different name for the program. What would make you plunge ahead? The program has some complexity to it, so the helpful state employees designed a web page to help people who might be eligible for the PUNS program to understand it better, hence the Understanding PUNS listing. Can it be that no one noted the problem here? It turns out this is a serious process devoted to helping people with developmental disabilities obtain needed assistance and support. But some humorless nincompoop gives it a title that results in an acronym like PUNS. Well, I for one am richer for it, but, really, doesn't it make you wonder?
But back to the topic at hand. Puns can be adapted to almost any event. Here are a few I liked on first cite: Do you know what a clock does when it's hungry? It goes back four seconds. Having enjoyed my holidays a little too much, this one fit better than my pants do today. The roundest knight at King Arthur’s table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from far too much pi.
If you have been following the news for the past few weeks you probably already know where bills are passed into law--incongruous. In trying to avoid the fiscal cliff back in 2012, I am sure their discussion of raising estate taxes brought this one to mind--what is the definition of a will? It's a dead giveaway. Of course, now it's more of a taxing situation, which is another case where the government has its hands in your pocket, even in your grave.
I have been described as a "cereal" punster at times, and have been accused of "bowling" people over with my efforts. I have "milked" this one since breakfast today, with no appropriate chex on my excesses. With this little note, I finally decided to "pour" them on you, if you aren't a fan of puns, I'm sorry. I am working on it, really. But I am a bad combination--a punster and a pessimist.
I'm doing something about it, but I know change is always difficult, especially for a pessimist like me. So I don't see how much can be done about it. Why don't I think I can really change this? Punning is in my blood, and you know a pessimist's blood type is always b-negative.
With most areas of your life that need shoring up, you begin with self-awareness--noticing the situation, then self-assessment--taking a closer look, finally, you decide on a path of action--self-improvement. I have noticed my weakness for puns--self awareness. I am planning on taking a closer look over the next few weeks (it might take months or years--even a lifetime before I can decide on an action--who knows?) Punny how things go sometimes.
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