Eyesight to the Blind

There’s a good line in the film The Brothers McMullen where a man who is in his early thirties says that it feels like just yesterday, he was in high school, and his wife replies, “No, you’re at least fifteen years too young for a mid-life crisis.” Where did the mid-life crisis come from? Technically, your forties and fifties are only the middle of your life if you’re leading a very long one, but never mind. I’ve had angst over where I’m going over the past year or so, but absolutely refuse to consider that a “quarter-life crisis”. I guess that term springs from the realization that once you’ve finished school and are trying to start a professional life, you are once again at the foot of a mountain. You can chase the brass ring if you like, but even if you do get it, you’ll look around and ask, “Is this all there is to it?” And the answer to that is no, but the real fun stuff is in between the lines. I keep fixating on that stupid Ben Stiller movie from last year, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which might as well have been called Mid-Life Crisis: The Movie, because if your idea of living life to the fullest is jumping out of a helicopter and skateboarding down a mountain, you need to rethink your priorities.

Kirk Cameron is a real asshole. That’s hardly news to anyone who has followed his career. He peaked at eighteen, then decided that rather than mature into a complex, interesting person, he would like to tell other people how to live their lives. It’s sad, and by “sad”, I mean “infuriating”. I’m not sure if he was all that good of an actor to begin with, but then again, he might have had a pretty good career had he applied himself to learning his craft and not spent all his time going on and on about how much he loves bananas. But what’s frustrating is that somebody is continuing to finance what he does. His movies make money, even if the only people who watch them are far-right Christians. How do we reach these people? Do they even want to be reached? I hate Kirk Cameron for many reasons, but the biggest one I can think of at the moment is making Piers Morgan look reasonable.

I’m trying to find the right balance between being outraged and serene. It’s easy to get burned out following the news. That happened to me when I was writing for a political magazine in college, and even though I didn’t want to write about the news, I found ways to write about it, essentially by taking a step back. The thing that’s got me angry these days is the treatment of livestock by our farming industry. Chris Christie plans to veto a bill that is almost unanimously supported by both legislators and the electorate because it might hurt his chances in Iowa, which depends on pork production. What an asshole. It drives me insane that this guy was reelected in such a landslide, because anyone who is even half-awake can see that he is a rude, temperamental, petty bully who cares less about enacting change than becoming president. (And if don’t think he was involved in the closure of the lanes on the George Washington Bridge just because there is no definitive evidence tying him to it, give me a fucking break. Seriously.) He buried his opponent, Barbara Buono (embarrassingly, I had to look up her name) in the last election, but she is a class act.

I don’t know what to do about stuff like this. There are some people who just sit back and say, “The world has enough problems. I just look out for myself.” There are also people who get very angry over the blatant mistreatment of pigs, but don’t have the tact to engage with people who might be sympathetic to their point of view. I can’t be like that. I have no use for purism, as high-minded and idealistic as I am. I do not believe that Barack Obama is a traitor to his base just because he governs from a more moderate and diplomatic point of view than the liberal firebrands like myself would like. I do not believe that the United States is an evil nation just because we kill people with drone strikes, although I won’t attempt to defend that, as it is appalling. All I know is that I have no use for people who complain about this shit constantly while doing nothing about it. Don’t just donate to the cause or whine about it on your blog (oh hi, everyone); get off your ass. I’ll do that just as soon as I figure out what it means.

I think I need to spend a little bit more time writing fiction. I decided a while ago that writing wasn’t going to be my main pursuit, just a side gig. Fortunately, it’s the kind of thing that works well as a side gig. And I keep saying this, but I really do need to get back into gaming. I’ve missed out on it for too long. There is a part of me that’s glad I’m not in college anymore. College is supposed to be a place where you learn shit and try out shit and hopefully get a clearer idea of what you’re trying to do with your life. A lot of kids seem to mistake that for being right about everything. And I probably sound old when I say that, but that’s the kicker: I’m not that much older than most college students. I remember what life on campus was like, and even then, I thought there were a lot of twits around me whose response to any kind of criticism, even the constructive kind, was, “Fuck you, I’ll do what I want.” That’s not even a response. Refusing to acknowledge the needs of others doesn’t make you sassy and outspoken; it makes you an asshole. And nothing is less humble than talking about how humble you are.

I’m trying to push my limits, to figure out just what I’m capable of. I keep meaning to take up a sport, but never get around to it. I’m not an athlete, really, but there’s no harm in dabbling. Just don’t do things because you’re trying to prove anything to the world, that’s all. The reality is that most people can’t and never will be able to play at my level. I can live with that.

Blurker

If I hear one more gay person say that they are “not like all those other gays”, I will lose my fucking mind. I hate to break it to you, but you are not special just because you like sports and have a bro-y affectation. Do you get a buzz out of telling people you’re gay only to hear, “You’re gay? Wow, I had no idea!” Yeah, I used to feel that way too, but then I grew up.

It’s probably a weird thing to say about a guy who just slaughtered seven people, but watching the last video by the UCSB shooter, all I could think was, “What a fucking drama queen.” He clearly had that speech rehearsed, complete with evil laughter. I would never dream of being dismissive of the tragedy that he caused, but seriously. What. A. Douche. Yes, college can be difficult, especially for those of us who feel like we have something to offer even though we’re not getting laid or going on dates. But I have no sympathy for this guy, certainly not after what he did. Sex is weird that way–no matter how bad you want it, you still aren’t entitled to it. It’s not like food, water, or shelter, which I believe everyone should have even if they can’t afford it or provide for themselves. You have to earn it. Besides, anyone with half a brain soon figures out that all of their peers who brag about getting laid or make a big show of how in love they are are just pretending. Relationships that are built on PDAs never last, and any man who brags about his sexual prowess has a miniscule dick.

It has now been just over two years to the day since I started grad school. It has been one year since I finished grad school, and three years since I finished undergrad. I look forward to the day when I see summer as just another season. Even when I was in elementary school, I remember those reflective days on the last or second-to-last day of school where you have a field day and a class party, talk about what you’re going to do over the summer, and reminisce on how quickly it all flew by. I fucking hate that. If I can’t make time move slower (and really, who wants to?), perhaps I can stop thinking of fall as a new beginning and summer as an ending. It’s just not healthy. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen one of my friends. I’m kind of hoping one of them would invite me to a party or something for a change, because I can’t get everything started all by myself. There is no rule saying you have to be friends with the people you work with, but it never ceases to amaze me how easily everyone else settles into a groove and gets to know one another. Maybe they’re just better at faking it.

My mother is really something. We got into another fight lately. Maybe calling it a fight is a bit strong, but that’s my point: She doesn’t seem to understand why I’m so annoyed that she keeps asking me stupid questions. I blame my father. He’s like Moriarty in all this, essentially pulling the strings. Regular readers may recall that I mentioned having most of my belongings in a storage locker in Queens waiting for me when I return to New York someday. When my father complained that it was costing him $50 a month to keep that locker, I told the storage people to charge my debit card rather than my credit card (which is on my father’s account), thinking that would be the end of it. Instead, my mother called me up to ask when I was planning to go back for all that stuff. The subtext was that she doesn’t believe me when I say I’m going to return to New York. There’s no explaining things to people who just don’t want to get it. When I say that the specifics of my healthcare plan are none of her damn business, it means that the specifics of my healthcare plan are none of her damn business. She still feels the need to email me a response every time I tell her to back the fuck off, but I don’t even read those anymore.

My mother called me twice on my birthday. I didn’t want to talk to her because we had had a fight a few weeks before, and I was still mad about that. But she didn’t take the ever-so-subtle hint, and kept calling me until I relented. I have close friends who live nearby who I barely see because they never seem to have the time for me. I don’t have the fucking time for this fucking bullshit. It’s like she senses that I might be having a good time and calls me up just to ruin my day. Would it kill her to wait for me to contact her for once? Or even just give me one fucking month where I don’t have to listen to her? I’m at my wit’s end here. I don’t see why it’s too much to ask to have one fucking month, but since she won’t let it go, I guess I have to.

Some people are remarkably dense when it comes to figuring out something that, to an outsider, would appear to be common fucking sense. But the further I get, the more I realize that I won’t make the same mistakes my parents did. My mistakes tend to be in assuming people have my best interests at heart. Theirs tend to be in believing they have my best interests at heart when they don’t. But sometimes, there really is nothing more to be said. If you can’t let me have the last word, maybe you can at least try not to waste my time.

Let’s Talk About Nostalgia

It’s getting harder and harder to remember what day of the week it is. I keep thinking it’s the weekend on a day on which I don’t have work, which I suppose means that I need to find more ways to stay busy, but I don’t think it’s that simple. Part of me still wants lots of time to sit around and do nothing. Yes, I have largely put that shitty experience in Queens behind me, but that doesn’t mean I’m over it completely, nor does it mean that I’m ready to start working full-time so that I can start pinching pennies and find my own place. This would be easier if I had somebody to share all of this with, but I’m alone most of the time, and that’s how it’s been for most of my life. So for the time being, I will focus on getting more reading, writing, exercising, and TV and movie viewing done than hard labor. I’m not ready for more labor, although I might be fairly soon.

Something occurred to me the other day: When I move back to New York, how will I work out the logistics? Looking for an apartment from the other side of the country might prove difficult. I could always find a place to stay for a little while while I look, but there are only so many friends in that area who would be willing to let me crash on their couch (there should be at least a couple, I think) and staying in a hostel gets expensive if you do it for more than a couple days. Then there’s the problem of job-hunting. If I’m lucky, I might be able to have one lined up before I move out there, but if not, I’m going to need at least a couple thousand saved up to cover my expenses until I get established (in addition to what I’ll need to cover moving and housing costs, of course). That is a fairly substantial sum of money. And I’m not sure if I’ll be able to have all that saved up by the winter. If I liked the place I were staying at currently, maybe I wouldn’t have to worry as much about expenses. But I don’t like my current situation. I grow less and less enamored of it by the day.

I went by my old college town yesterday to see The Wind Rises. It was a pretty good movie, maybe not Miyazaki’s best, but not his worst, either. (Ponyo was cute, but it barely even had a conflict, let alone a story.) Miyazaki generally seems less interested in giving each story a villain and a linear storyline than most American filmmakers. Film people used to debate whether Pixar or Ghibli was the better animation studio, and while I think comparisons between artists are always something of an apples-and-oranges thing, I’m definitely leaning towards Ghibli. Pixar hasn’t made a great film since, I don’t know, actually, and these days, they seem way more interested in churning out sequels and prequels to stuff that didn’t even need it to begin with than producing good original work. (And yes, I am excited for The Incredibles 2, but I actually found Toy Story 3 a bit rote. My eyes kind of glazed over during the action scenes, as if there was little in them that I hadn’t seen a million times before. Miyazaki likes his villains to be reasonable people who are just misunderstood. Pixar makes them evil right to the core. The truth is somewhere in between.) On a side note, I wasn’t too big on Porco Rosso when I first saw it, but looking back, I think it might be growing on me.

I didn’t start reading Discworld until I was older. Funny stuff.

I stopped by a used bookstore and picked up a bunch of Piers Antony’s Xanth books. I read a lot of shitty fantasy when I was a kid. Piers Anthony was just before my time. (Redwall was good, but repetitive. The ghost of Martin the Warrior was always menacing the villains in their dreams and materializing to help the heroes out of a tight spot. The Dragonlance books featured some reasonably well-developed characters and strong world-building. I’m just not sure if I’d want to revisit them now. And Terry Brooks basically just ripped off LoTR, then, once he’d done that, he started ripping himself off. A lot. That will give you a taste of what I was into in those days.) The Xanth series, from what I’ve heard, is absolutely godawful—poorly written, juvenile, and incredibly misogynistic. So why did I decide to start reading it even though its time as cheap escapism for preteens in the mid-80s is long gone? I have no idea. I read the first two chapters of A Spell for Chameleon, and let me tell you, they sucked pretty hard. So naturally, I’m going to keep reading. Honestly, I don’t know why I’m doing this. It’s not like I don’t have a lot of good shit to get into.

I don’t know why a lot of the shit that I liked as a kid appealed to me. I’m sure I’m not the only kid who read the first Harry Potter book when they were about the same age as Harry and kinda sorta wished Hagrid would burst through the door and hand them an acceptance letter to Hogwarts or went around opening closets in hopes of finding the gateway to Narnia. When you read that shit, you get into a “grass is greener” mentality, and part of the reason I like LoTR so much is that it digs into the gritty reality of life in Middle Earth. Yeah, the Shire seems rather pleasant, but that grueling slog to Mount Doom hardly makes the whole thing seem like a paradise. Readers shouldn’t want to crawl through the page and experience life in the world of the novel; they should see the ways that life on the other side mirrors their own, and hopefully use that to reimagine their own situation. At least, that’s the idea.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make lunch.

 

Back to Rome

I am generally wary of drugs. I don’t drink (much), don’t smoke weed, don’t even use over-the-counter stuff like aspirin (fortunately, I almost never get headaches)…you get the idea. The best way to explain this would probably be to say that I need to be able to function on my own terms before I go adding drugs to the mix. For obvious reasons, I’ve been drinking a bit more coffee these days, but a small cup of coffee shouldn’t give you more than a little jolt, right? If you have a small mocha at 6 pm and are still wide awake at 3 in the morning, there must be more going on than a low tolerance for caffeine. (Before someone asks, that actually did happen once. I don’t remember exactly when I had the mocha, but it wasn’t very late and I’m not even sure if I drank the whole thing. And I had work that morning. Fun.) My problem, it seems, is that I have so little experience with coffee that even after the physical effects have worn off, my mind is still sorting itself out.

A person should not be able to focus on more than one thing at once. I like to do one thing at a time and one thing only. I’m not a fan of multitasking. The night I had the mocha, I went home, watched a movie, and somehow thought about something else without taking my attention off the movie. How is that even possible? I have a lot to work on these days. It will be much easier to get it all done once I’m able to start with what’s most important. As always, the big question is, “What do you really need?” Once you answer that, you can move on to other things.

2013 is drawing to a close, so I feel that I should talk for a second about one of my favorite topics: movies. I saw a fair amount of films in theaters this year. Not all of them were masterpieces; some were fun (Thor), others interesting, but flawed (Ender’s Game), and a few were truly excellent (The World’s End). Of the films I’ve seen this year, my two favorites were Upstream Color and At Berkeley. The latter is a four-hour documentary about the administrative politics and academic culture of the titular institute of higher learning. I had to go way out of my way to see it, but believe me, it’s fantastic. (PBS is set to air it in chunks starting January 13, I believe. Keep your eyes peeled.) At Berkeley has no narration, interviews, or even subtitles to identify the people in the movie. As a California resident and an alumnus of one of the UCs, I identified strongly with the plight of students who are finding it harder and harder to pay for their education, what with the constant fee hikes and all. (Seriously, imagine that you’re paying $800 in rent. Then one day, your landlord knocks on your door and tells you that next month, it’ll be $1100. Then a few months later, he jacks it up to $1500. If that’s not illegal, it should be.)

What I’m really trying to get at here is that at a certain point, it’s impossible to separate who we are from the media we consume. I’m not sure how many others would list either of those movies on their best-of lists, but I don’t think that my love for them is purely a result of my own subjective biases. I’ve sung the praises of Upstream Color on this blog before, but to recap: It’s a mind-bending, ultra low-budget science fiction/romance about a parasitic organism that causes its victims to form a weird telepathic bond with each other. There’s way more to it than that, but if anyone remembers 2004’s cult hit Primer, you should know that this is by the same filmmaker, Shane Carruth. Someone should give him a million dollars. The way that man works, he could make ten movies for that. And judging by his only two features so far (nine years apart, because that’s how long it took him to put the second one together), they’d be good.

I had to go out of my way to see Upstream Color as well. There was only one theater in all of Manhattan showing it, and I had to clear space from my schedule because that week was a little busy for me. Who else gets so excited for low-budget science fiction and marathon-length documentaries about higher learning? But I find that as I get older, my tastes get more particular. There’s a lot out there that doesn’t interest me, but I feel that says as much about our culture as it does about me. We need blockbusters, but we also need documentaries. More people will seek out the former than the latter, but it doesn’t have to be that way. At Berkeley probably sounds like a chore to sit through, but it really isn’t. You just have to be open to new experiences, that’s all. I just wish there were someone out there who wanted to join me for this stuff. One of my acting teachers told me once that I gave performances that were strong, but self-contained, as if I didn’t want to let the other actors affect my performance. I can’t live my life that way. A friend asked me if I wanted to audition for a play she was directing not too long ago. The last play I did, I did largely because several people all but begged me to.

I wish like hell I had someone working that hard to get a date with me.

Stand

“Though I am alive now, I do not believe an old man’s pessimism [not to mention bitter armchair trollishness] is truer than a young man’s optimism, just because it comes after. There are things that a young man knows, that are true, and not yet in an old man’s power to recollect.”

– Richard Rodriguez, “Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father”

I’m in a rather unpleasant mood as I write this. So let’s see if we can get to the bottom of it. My mother cornered me when she was over for Thanksgiving and told me that I seemed to be lacking in ambition these days. Lest anyone forget the subtitle of this blog, let me remind you that my ambitions are as lofty as ever. I didn’t write this to whine about my family anyway, because I’m tired of doing that for the moment. I will blog about anyone and everyone who gets on my nerves. No matter who you are, if you do something that bugs me, I will shit-talk you here. Don’t like it? Door’s that way. Now that we’ve made that clear, let’s talk about just what my mother meant.

In high school, I was an overachiever. You know the type: straight-A student (mostly), active in student government, president of a bunch of clubs, generally well-liked, everyone talks about how he’ll be President someday. Except I always had a bit more of an edge to me. I got elected junior class president essentially by making fun of the campaigns people usually run. One year later, I almost got elected student body president by doing basically the same thing again. And I was always stressed out. Oh, I had my good moments as well, but one thing about that era that I do not miss at all is the indigestion. It got so bad at points that I was literally moaning out loud as I sat bent over on the toilet. Senior year, I came dangerously close to being happy at one point. But there was something in the way. It wasn’t the last time that happened.

My junior year of college, things were going okay at first. I wasn’t totally comfortable in my own skin, but I had friends, a decent apartment, was active in several extracurriculars and was getting pretty good grades. Sound familiar? Spring semester, everything came crashing down. Even to this day, it’s hard to pinpoint just what went wrong. All I knew is that getting a good night’s sleep became next to impossible, even when I had nothing to get up for the next day. Especially when I had nothing to get up for the next day. One day that summer, I stayed in bed until late afternoon just to get a handle on what was bugging me. Why am I telling you this? Simple: This time, I want to get it right.

My mother has always been something of a go-getter. She encourages me to reach out to environmental organizations and introduce myself. Even if they’re not hiring (or they just don’t want to hire me), it’s good to get your name out there. But I don’t think she’s quite right that people will become less impressed with my degree the more time elapses since my graduation. I serve coffee because it’s something that is worth learning about. I don’t drink coffee, but I order different drinks and try different varieties of tea because coffee is interesting, even if it’s not my thing. Before I got this job, I’d never even had a latte. Now I know what a latte tastes like. I even know how to make one. That may get me a job with the New York Department of Parks & Recreation, but it is knowledge worth having. Yes, I suppose I am complicated in some ways, but in others, I’m really not. I know what I want, more or less. Can you say the same?

Sometimes, I don’t know how to tell people what I really think of them. I guess I could just tell my mother that my decisions are my decisions and that I’m not interested in her opinion, but that’s not quite fair. The person I was in high school was brilliant, driven, ambitious, and terminally anxious. I think it’s kind of a miracle that I have made it this far without developing a caffeine addiction, which is an odd thing for a person with my job to say. The person I was in college took things a little bit slower. I wasn’t out to prove myself as much. I did things because they seemed interesting, not because I figured I could fit one more thing onto my plate. I’m not on a clock anymore. I’m not rushing to try a bit of everything before I graduate. I’m just trying to figure out how to make the world outside my head look anything like the one in it. And I don’t know how to do it, but I’ll be damned before I’m made to answer for it.

I’m not going to contact nonprofit organizations just to introduce myself. I haven’t figured out what to do next, but I know I don’t want to do that. Don’t judge me. I get up every morning and do whatever I feel like doing. Since I have a job, sometimes I have to go do that and when I’m there, I just try to figure out what my coworkers and customers want from me so I can give it to them. With any luck, somebody will start to give back, eventually. Because I don’t intend to stay right where I am forever; I just don’t see why I should have to move before I’m ready.