My Wise Friends

Usually, I run off at the mouth (or the keyboard really) about what I think is important or wise or relevant, but this time I thought it would be nice to try to recall wisdom from other people; not quotes from Mark Twain or the Dalai Lama but people I've actually met. Here then are some wise, funny, or just plain interesting thoughts paraphrased (liberally of course--what am I, a tape recorder?) from friends, family, acquaintances, and people just nearby:

You can look ahead the future and imagine what it's going to be like but no matter how close you get, it's never what you thought it was. It turns out to be something you never even imagined.
-Amanda

Everyone looks good naked. Clothing binds people and when you let that release and stop binding, the natural beauty shines through.
-Kim

Comedians are just drunks, but legitimate drunks.
-Aaron

(In response to my concerns that I would never find love again) Yeah, you might not.
-Emily

It'll be great.
-Paula

The purpose of celebrating a birthday is to let that person know that you were glad they were born. That's a more profound statement that it might seem. "I'm glad you're alive."
-Some priest

(an artist's strategy) Steal, revise, disguise.
-Jo

The appropriate mood at all times for an artist is that of dissatisfaction. That's where the work comes from.
-Carmel

Don't eat margarine or artificial sweeteners. Food that's pretending to be other food is bad for the soul.
-Heather

If it hurts, just keep doing it. It'll eventually stop hurting. That's one way anyway.
-Bob

Nobody cares what your internal feelings are. What are you DOING?
-Some acting teacher

The term "politically correct" was not invented by the politically correct. It was invented by people that didn't want to alter they're behavior and be decent towards one another, so they invented this absurd exaggeration. Then they subsequently added more and more rules to make it seem more absurd. Somebody says "I don't like it when you call me nigger." and the person that said it immediately whines that they're being too "PC" and blows it out of proportion and plays the martyr, when all they really had to do was say "Sorry, I didn't know. I'll stop."
-Linda

Don't go home with Comet (Tavern) trash. (To which I said "But, I'm at the Comet. Doesn't that make me Comet trash?") Yep, sorry.
-Tim

If God is omnipotent, then anything that happens he either caused or allowed to happen.
-Mr. Toner (religion teacher accidentally implying that God either is a prick or doesn't exist)

John, you're brilliant.
-Sarah (heh heh, had to put that one in)

Gender Can Lick My Snatch

I am sick of gender. I've always been resistant to arbitrary gender rules, broad GENDERalizations as they say, but this week, in light of the furor surrounding Christopher Hitchen's extremely interesting if factually questionable Why Women Aren't Funny article in Vanity Fair, an argument I had with a woman about menopause vs. the male mid-life crisis, and this film showing a woman punching a male comedian (acquaintance of mine) for being offensive, I just cain't stands it anymore. I've been agonizing over this post for some time now. I wanted to put together a cohesive, persuasive, and humorous article, but I'm discovering that I'm too close to the issue. It makes me too angry to properly organize my thoughts and have any sense of humor about the subject (Just to give you some perspective, I would remind you I made jokes while eulogizing my beloved grandmother). Just thought I'd warn you: this article isn't particularly funny or well organized.

Christopher Hitchen's Why Women Aren't Funny article was interesting. I agree with many of the elements of his argument but not necessarily his conclusions. The article itself is not nearly as interesting as the responses from several bloggers. Self-acknowledged not-funny women were pouring out of the woodwork barking about how women were too funny and how dare Hitchens suggest otherwise. The fact is that comedy is about perception, and the manipulation of thought. Like stage magic, there are tools one uses to manipulate the thought processes of the audience and those tools were originally invented by men for men to use in the interest of making men laugh in a male dominated society. This is not to say that women can't be funny--a great many are--but to say that women don't face a particular challenge in using the male tools of humor is like saying lefties don't have trouble using right handed scissors or that I look good in drag. The only "funny" woman that I heard sound off about it was Nora Ephron, who had the most appropriate response I could think of: paraphrased "Chris is a blowhard, yes comedy is difficult for women in a male dominated world, and yet I'm funny, so there."

I think the argument I had the other day regarding menopause vs. the male mid-life crisis was frustrating mostly because it was interrupted. Had we been able to finish, I think we could have come to some agreement. Where we got to was that she thought I was making light of menopause by comparing it to mid-life crises and I was saying she was unreasonably dismissing the male experience by refusing the comparison. Had we been able to continue debating I think we would have got to an important feature in the battle of the sexes: both men and women, at least in western society, are brought up with contradictory messages about themselves. Men are supposedly in charge. This is what I have been told from day one. At the same time, all of popular culture seems to be promoting the idea that anything a man can or will go through is at its core laughable. All men are buffoons. Just look at any sitcom. The man is a fat, stupid, lout and the wife is perfect in every way and a saint for putting up with him. Conversely, women are second class citizens subject to glass ceilings and sexual harassment, constantly fighting for equal treatment. At the same time they are held up as the givers of life, the bearers of children, the only truly important function in society. Plus women get a triple shot: they're told that giving birth, is not only the most important thing they can do, it's the ONLY important thing they can do, and if they don't, they are not real women and are relegated to buffoonland with us guys. Every single one of these messages we get is a lie. No man is always in charge, nor is he always a buffoon. No woman is always powerless, nor is she necessarily a saintly mother goddess. If we can just let this shit go and accept all people as flawed, complex, changing people without these prejudice, maybe menopause can be dealt with with the humor it needs and mid-life crises can be given the gravity and sensitivity men secretly want.

I can't speak to the experience of being female, but there is no good information out there on how to be a good man AND be happy being male. In my life, I can't think of a single instance when I was given any option other than 1) thoughtlessly push people around or 2) feel guilty about being male. The party line is this: men are in charge, men oppress women, by being male you automatically have done this, a good man would never do this and therefore no men are good and you can either feel guilty about your gender or just enjoy being one of those "bad" man. That is no more or less than a complete load of crap and I refuse to carry that around anymore. I have never been in charge of anything, I have never oppressed women, I have never unfairly profited from my maleness except for some upper body strength. Some men have done some things to harm women for which they should be ashamed. But I didn't, and the women who lump me with those men are bigots.

In dealing with gender, I find it immensely useful to imagine them reversed. It helps me get a perspective beyond one's normal perceptions. Never hit a woman. We all know that. But what about women hitting men? Take a look at this film. It's not a very funny stand-up set, but look at it with reversed genders. If it were a man walking on stage and punching a female comedian, even if the man were smaller than the woman, the cops would have been called. The guy would have ended up in jail on an assault charge. But somehow, it's okay for a woman to hit a man. My ex-wife (sensitive topic but you're nice people) hit me all the time, especially when we were about to get divorced. One day, she hit me one time too many, and I yelled "Stop fucking hitting me!" and kicked her. The only time I have ever struck a woman. Suddenly, despite the fact that she had been wailing on me and honestly trying to hurt me all day, I'm now an abusive husband. At least in my own guilt ridden mind and her shocked anger at me. But no one ever called her a husband beater. The image of the woman hitting her husband with a rolling pin was a mainstay of comedy for generations (not so much anymore), but reverse the genders on that. It's now a tear-jerker Lifetime movie of the week starring Valerie Bertinelli. Call me a hippie, but I think hitting others is a bad thing, no matter who you are.

The reversal of gender works for other things too. Objectification is a good one. Submitted for your perusal: A woman is standing alone in front of a car. A man comes out of nowhere. He pushes her down on the hood of the car, tears her shirt off, holds her down and has his way with her. Rape scene. A man is standing alone in front of a car. A woman comes out of nowhere. She pushes him down on the hood of the car, tears his shirt off, holds him down and has her way with him. Cologne commercial. Something is wrong here.

In conclusion, I would like to restate my original point. Gender and our perception of it is at least 95% bullshit. Within that remaining 5% are things like has-a-uterus/doesn't-have-a-uterus, deep-voice/high-voice, bleeds-monthly/doesn't-bleed-monthly. But beyond that, we have more in common as humans than we have differences. It's tough to be a woman. We all know that. It's tough to be a man too. Some people grudgingly acknowledge that. One final point that most people don't talk about is that no woman really knows what any other woman is going through, and no man really knows what any other man is going through. We say we do, but we really don't in any substantial sense. That's why pain management is such a difficult area of medicine; we do not have a reliable mechanism to relay to another person our internal experience of something. If you are going through a bad patch in your life, for all you know, that could be how everybody else feels all the time. The real basic truth is that it's tough to be alive, and no one knows just how tough it is to be you but you.

Things I Don't Understand - Part 4

Cranes are tall heavy machines. Wouldn't you need a taller heavier machine to build one? How do they build cranes without bigger cranes? Have you ever seen one being built? No, they just show up overnight. Do they just plant magic beans or something?

Imagine something that is hanging off the edge of something else. Now imagine when that thing finally slips off. We've all seen that. What was holding it on before? What changed? Obviously friction was holding it on, but why is there enough friction one second, and then not enough the next?

In art, there is an axiom that there are no original thoughts and if you actually come up with something truly novel, the audience won't understand and won't like it. However, sometime, each of the recognizable conventions had to be a new idea. Somebody had to do it first. So how did those ideas get accepted? Is it just insane persistence with no consideration of audience response? Does the act of introducing a truly novel idea, come down to, no matter how much everyone hates it and hates you for doing it, just keeping it up? That goes against every artistic instinct I have. If your audience doesn't like it, you stop doing it, or the audience will disappear. Right?

The act of snoring is counter to both survival and propagation of the species. It makes you unpleasant to sleep with and therefore less likely to breed and in a primitive setting lets every nocturnal predator know exactly where a defenseless human is sleeping. So why haven't we evolved away from it? I'm pretty sure it's even a dominant trait. What's that about? What's the survival advantage of making horrible throat noises when you sleep?

Is anybody actually good at telling someone else that someone they love is dead?

This may sound like I'm picking on Spanish speakers, but I'm not; I'm sure this occurs in other languages too including English. I'm just exposed to this end of it. In my day job I work in phone customer service. On our phone menu, there is an option to speak to someone in Spanish. However, somehow, I still get people asking "Habla espanol?". If you called a phone line and the recording said "Gorble stang mooky hurlb gorfer tangord spume. For English press 2.", what would you do? You'd press 2, right? So how is it that I still get people asking for Spanish?

While I'm talking shop, what possesses someone to call someone and ask for a phone number without something in hand to write it on and with?

As I understand it, the holiday season lasts from Thanksgiving to New Years. Even if you completely ignore the non-Christian holidays (Hanuka, Kwanzaa, Solstice etc.) that still leaves you Thanksgiving, Christmas, the Feast of St. Nicholas (for the Catholics), and New Years. That's four holidays. So why are the Christian fundamentalists and blowhard republicans claiming that we dirty secularists are waging war on Christmas by saying "happy holidays"? There's more than one holiday. Kindergartners can count to five. Why can't the fundies and rushies count to four? Oh, right, they're stupid.

What's the Difference? - part 1

Y'know what has consistently gotten me in trouble over the years? There are things in this world that are almost the same as one another, that are considered different due solely to baseless prejudices and petty hairsplitting. I, in my lifelong pursuit of truth and honesty, have frequently said that I don't see much difference between such things. To which, the inevitable response is [imagine an annoyed 14 year old girl] "(sigh) No, they're tewwwwtally different. Guyyy!". Well, folks, I've got a forum now for whatever crap leaks from my over sized melon, and I no longer care that making spurious connections between unlike things is a symptom of schizophrenia. Here, then, is the first in a series of columns about things that are supposed to be different but really aren't.

Part 1 : Cowboys and Homeboys

Country Western music and Hip Hop are the same thing. Or rather, they are the same phenomenon, serving the same psychological purpose. Here's a test: Which one am I describing?

A popular music form, dominated by males, designed to reinforce the status quo of a specific racial and economic demographic, originally written, performed, and appreciated only by the poor and disenfranchised but recently absorbed by pop culture and multinational corporations, now often performed by millionaires, and appreciated by even the upper strata of society, whose subject matter consists of delusions of grandeur, acquisition of sex and material possessions from a formerly impoverished state, simultaneous celebration and lamentation of substance abuse, jingoistic us-against-them sentiments, lamentation of failures, celebration of meager accomplishments, boasting about circumventing the law, loving descriptions of firearms, and the celebration of one's vehicle of choice.

So which one am I describing? If you said both, you would be right. So what's the difference? Black and white (or rather brown and pink), urban and rural. That's all. Pretty petty distinction if you ask me.