PIECES OF EIGHT

PIECES OF EIGHT

Last night I went to sleep "beside myself" over an argument. I was raging against an injustice. It was something I could not accept. What has the power to inspire moral indignation like inequity? “Let it go” I told myself as I tried to get to sleep. “Let it go, let it go, why or why can’t I let it go?” It’s putting it mildly that I have a tendency to obsess about things on occasion and this was such an occasion.

The problem? This was an injustice I did not have the power to correct.

I tried logic “now, now, the world is full of injustices, just look at our political leaders”. I coaxed a smirk out of myself on that one; but then I returned to my situation and I went right back to my ranting.

In that mood, I fell asleep and drifted into a dream. In the dream I was given custody of a beautiful pet parrot. I set up his cage, but something told me I could trust the parrot and trust myself. The parrot needed to be let out to fly free and I knew that it was a crazy risk, but I also knew somehow, that he would be back, so I opened and cage and the parrot flew out through a window into the sky. He flew and flew and then circled back. I talked to the Parrot, and said “come on now, time to come back” and he understood me and came right back. I felt that the love and care of this parrot was my grave responsibility and I understood that with the long life span of a parrot, this was a lifetime responsibility.

Luckily I wasn’t in a Monty Python episode, and when I looked up "parrots" on the web, I found the birds used as a symbol of the soul in India, and stumbled across this poem:

'The parrot, who is yearning to see you, is in my prison by the decree of the heavens. "She sends you greetings of peace and wants justice, and desires a remedy and the path of right guidance.

Apparently a parrot has come to me to steer me on the right path. Sounds good. Whether the parrot helps me transcend being dragged down into the muck of moral indignation remains to be seen. TANGENT: But spirit animals, aside, I remember a wonderful fictional parrot from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (and also made an appearance in Love in the Time of Cholera). This parrot had lived more than a century and still spoke “pirate” at the most inopportune times. My memory is fuzzy on these points, but that parrot touched something in me because by virtue of his long life span he connected us to times long past. He was, in essence, living history, an animate continuity.

Speaking of Moral Indignation, just saw Good Night and Good Luck, a movie which "the unemployed critic" on Amazon calls "essentially...a victory lap for liberal ideals". This movie somehow managed to leave me both bored and awe-inspired at the same time. What a pleasure to watch the intellect triumph over fear tactics. I think I REALLY needed to see that, a nice quiet shot in the arm. Good job George!

A friend of mine sent me this parody of a pharmaceutical. If all else fails, I can take one of these:

TANGENT: The Triumph of the Parrot: Parrot helps catch robbers Parrot dating service Parrot jumps ship What the parrot said to the vicar

MODERN LOVE

Okay, I’ll break down and plug another blog. It’s MoCo Loco, a zine about modern design. I could spend all day there, in fact…I MAY spend all day there. I’ll give you a couple of drilldowns, but you have to check it out yourself. On their site I found these really cool cardboard tables; really funny canopy bed; and the most bitchin’ wave chaise. Seriously, I am a kid in a candy store. They have plastic pipe furniture, wedge sofas, this fantastical “twist” table. Sigh. I’ll stop soon, but first let me just insert one teaser-picture: It’s really just a blog, so I found the site hard to navigate, but once I started browsing I couldn’t stop. It is way more fun that the stores on La Brea because you can absorb so much in such a short time. These are prototypes, designs, dreams, realities…plastic blobs, an “unconformist bookcase”. There is even an “extendable table that uses two wing-type extensions that 'lift' symmetrically creating room to comfortably seat six people”. On these pages MUST be the new Nelsons, Parsons, van de Roes. TANGENT: Speaking of modern furniture have a I mentioned my chair (knock-off Barcelona), my coffee table (original “Boom”), my red lockers (vintage IKEA) or my artwork lately?

And speaking of Modern Furniture... TANGENT: Here's a quote from one of my favorite movies, Fight Club: ‘You're young. You have an easy, well-paid desk job. You have a condo, Swedish furniture, artistic coffee tables and a fridge full of condiments. Yet you feel emotionally and spiritually empty. …Then you meet Tyler Durden, a man that shows you that not only can you live without material needs but that self-destruction, the collapse of society and making dynamite from soap might not be such a bad idea either.”

To read my full essay on Fight Club: http://www.cuteghosties.com/Reviews/default.htm

WORK MEETINGS, A DECLARATION OF HAPPINESS?

Happiness runs in a circular motion, thought is just a little boat upon the sea, everybody is a part of everything anyway, you can have it all if you let yourself be. Donovan, 1969

I set out today to write about individualism and the inherent conflicts posed by the need to work in groups to achieve common goals. Working cooperatively, is not my forte. That is a fancy way to say "I hate meetings!".

"What's the point? What's the point?", I moan. "My time is worth money!" Still I have yet to see a corporation who functions without these monstrosities we call meetings.

I dislike working cooperatively, identifying as an outsider. Obviously this is ironic because the self-image I have as rebel and iconoclast is a clearly defined type in our society. There are probably 100's of thousands of me's in colleges all over the country as I speak.

In any case, this whole blog may turn out to be a tangent, because once I started thinking about individualism my thoughts migrated to a different (but related) theme, the pursuit of happiness. Probably because Individualism and the pursuit of happiness are so distinctly American. And I couldn't blog about either one without putting them in an historical context, lest I engage in a truly foolish enterprise.

The only method that I can identify to TRY to see outside of my cultural influences (protestant work-ethic, individualism, privilege and (mediocre) education, my expectation of happiness, etc.), is to put things in the context of history (all of this just to try to understand why I feel I have a Right to be happy at work).

However ambitious I may be, I can not, in the scope of this blog, start back with Socrates (tempting as that might be), so I'll zoom forward to 1776. When the Declaration of Independence was penned, the potential for happiness was already a given. To call the pursuit of happiness "an inalienable Right" is such strong language. It was so fundamental they had to say it was endowed by God!!! The Divine Right of Kings had gone out of vogue many centuries earlier. But apparently the divine right of happiness was alive and well (and I am NOT going to get into the whole "except women and slaves" thing I swear!).

TANGENT: Speaking of our founders, just returned from a tour of the White House and was struck by the fact that the White House was burned down by the British LESS than 200 years ago (1814). This is only four of my lifetimes ago, in other words, not very long ago at all. I wonder how many hundreds of years from now that September 11th could be called the "Middle-East Invasion" and be only a blip on a history chart and maybe even be viewed as analogous to the British Invasion. In other words, 9-11 wasn't the first time political violence got extremely out of hand and it certainly won't be the last. There is nothing more primitive or more satisfying than destroying a symbol of ones enemies (witness the rival college sports teams ritual destruction of each others mascots). Even the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem (how many times was that burned down and re-built?) and preserved, so that we may go and stand before it and pray?

But back to Happiness...a scientist named Gilbert did a little research on the subject and that research was written up in Harvard's Gazette in an article called "Scientists pursue happiness--Results not too cheerful". Hahaha.

Gilbert noted that the same fundamental things make us all happy since "We share the same brain architecture". He also found that even in the face of things that really should make us unhappy, that we will rearrange (our) view of the world so it doesn't hurt as much."

Recently Darrin McMahon has published his "Happiness : A History".

"Before the contemporary onslaught of therapeutic treatments and self-help guidance, the very idea of happiness in this life was virtually unknown", says Publishers Weekly (via Amazon).

An Amazon reviewer enjoyed McMahon's last chapter were he concludes that (according to our reviewer) "We are a culture that feels happiness is our right, and the search for it extends to recent advances in pharmacology". She almost seems unaware of the irony of her comment when she adds: "I do have to tell you, Happiness: A History, can be pretty depressing."

Maybe the reviewer needs a little pharmacology?

THE TWO TOUCANS

The Two Toucans - Autism and Brain Chemistry They will risk starvation and attack by dangerous predators, under the harshest conditions on earth, all to find true love.

Product Description – March of the Penguins Never underestimate the human proclivity to anthropomorphize (to attribute human characteristics and qualities to non-human beings, i.e. animals). I finally saw March of the Penguins (better late than never) a few days ago. And wow was it hard not to project human emotions on the behavior of those animals. Even the product description (above) refers to the animals overcoming all obstacles to find "true love". The movie itself shows no such thing. Apparently penguins mate annually, pair-bonding only to raise their chick from egg to self-suffiency (about a 1 year process). In other words, each year, they have a different mate, adding up to as many as 30 different mates in a lifetime--far from true love I'd say. I’m reaching for a new word here—one that describes the behavior in the "lower" animals, the wrinkle of a dogs brow that we associate with frowning, scowling, or being deep in thought. But in the dog, it doesn’t mean he's angry...or thinking. A pre-emotive autonomic response? Hmmm, I shouldn't say it... which came first? the penguin or the egg?

TANGENT: Speaking of animals thinking...I've been reading "Thinking In Pictures-My Life with Autism" by Temple Grandin, a book which somehow manages to link the theme of autism in humans with the theme of thinking and language acquisition in animals. Grandin maintains that animals think, but using a different mode of thinking, something similar to the way an autistic person thinks. She calls it "thinking in pictures".

Now here's where it comes into play for me. When I was young I played happily by myself and did not seem to require other friends. My mother called it "self-entertaining". My kindergarten teacher (this was the late '60's) thought I might be retarded because I never spoke. My mother has a "funny" story about that, because I talked all the time at home. The story goes that she asked me why I wasn't talking in school and I said "because you told me never to talk to strangers". Maybe, or maybe I wasn't socially developing at the same pace as other little 5 year olds.

My sister, like me actually was "delayed" in speaking, apparently whispering complete sentences before anyone had heard her say a word. Again the "funny" stories; that I talked enough for both of us, that I wouldn't let her get a word in edge wise; that she was just practicing until she had it just right, etc. And as she grew up, she was said to have a "photographic" memory, visualizing entire pages and just "re-reading" the answer without necessarily understanding it. We were all amazed. As she got older she also displayed a talent for mathematics and computer sciences.

All of this and the system still called us both "normal" and maybe we were (are).

Years later, when we were both adults, my nephew was diagnosed with high-functioning autism (which some think is the same as asbergers) at a young age. Since he showed none of the negative hollywoodized version of autism (the only one I ever knew about before), I couldn’t help thinking he was somehow misdiagnosed.

Whenever I see him, what I see is a boy focused on something that interests him, and not at all interested in what ever may be going on around him. I so strongly identify with that feeling, that I imagined that he and I were two of kind, only I had somehow escaped the diagnosis. That was…until I saw the toucans:

As my sister tells me, the picture on the right was a color by number picture that he colored in a year ago. Then, a year later he drew from memory the picture on the left. The fascinating part, to me, is not the amazing memory, but rather that he has NOT drawn a toucan. He has drawn areas of color, and noted them (accurately) above, just as the color by number printout had (i.e. 1) dark blue, 2) yellow, etc.).

It was actually these drawings that prompted me to write the essay below "The Opposite of Gestalt". My nephew saw the parts but I don't think they added up to the sum of their parts. It said so much about how different his brain worked from mine. Again, not because he remembered something a year later in such incredible detail, but because of what it said about our brains.

HOW SICK IS YOUR RIDE?

I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Who reads banner ads on web sites? Someone must or there would be no ad revenue. I probably do, even with my internal auto-filter turned on, I see them, I scan them, I habitually disregard them. But today…there was one that created such cognitive dissonance that it jarred me to actually ponder it.

The ad was for a car, and the banner line read “How Sick (sic) is Your Ride?” then it showed an animation of the car with “sick” new features like a rear spoiler, sun roof, alloy wheels, etc.

This is a mono-blog about getting old. A friend of mine and I were discussing slang and other adolescent features; about how fast it moved along, about how quickly we had no idea what “kids these days” were talking about—and how, by the time we do know what it means, it is already over. TANGENT: A website featuring the death clock has my death set at January 24, 2054. It then politely begins to count down the seconds l have left to live 1,513,309,307—6..5..4..3.. Ouch. I can’t sleep. Which leads me to another TANGENT: Every once in awhile I come up with some marvelously clever idea that I am convinced is original only to find out that everyone but me has heard it a hundred times. One such idea, was the death pool, like a baby pool. I started one such pool when the Bush-Cheney ticket had just been nominated. It was the Cheney Death Pool. I was having a good laugh right up until the point that the President of my company called me in to discuss the ethics of my idea (something to the effect of "if you ever do something like $*%#@!) again"). Opting for continued employment, I cancelled my pool.

TANGENT: This is exactly what made the Vampires of Ann Rice so fascinating. She addressed the paradoxical predicament facing those when faced with the prospect of eternal life. We may wish we could live forever, but actually doing it wouldn’t be so easy.

Which reminds me of one more TANGENT: Apparently Ann Rice was a big soft porn...err...romance writer who set her novels in the once beautiful New Orleans. Despite a broad historical and philosophical context, and 1400 pages, she couldn't land a hit...until that is, she changed the main character from human to vampire ...and then: bam!