You know what I find fascinating?
Marketing.
I went to buy toothpaste the other day.
Toothpaste.
Toothpaste, people.
“A bold BLAST of cinnamon!”
“Revolutionary Whitening!”
I guess the fight against plaque is all we have left since we live in a fully functioning democracy free of monarchical tyranny.
Brushing your teeth?
No, my friend, you are combating plaque, annihilating tooth decay, struggling for whiteness. (Heh.)
Then, there’s antiperspirants with scents called “Phoenix,” “Dark Temptation,” and “Essence.”
Did I miss something?
You aren’t just a guy putting on some deodorant after the gym! Oh, no, you are Odysseus himself swerving through the wine red sea being lured by water nymphs… or whatever it was that lured him… into mysterious adventures and dangers. Are the men buying these scents running off to steal a golden fleece or slay a hydra?
And people buy this stuff. They eat it up. Or they brush their teeth with it, anyway.
Simply fascinating.
I’m thinking it’s because most people lack any real adventure in their lives. We go through life just sort of… surviving.
Thousands of years of human civilization, technology, progress, blah blah blah and we’re still just caught up in getting the food, cooking the food, having kids, getting the food for the kids, cooking the food for the kids…and, that’s fine, but it’s not really “extreme” or “cinnamon blast,” if you get my drift.
Toothpaste and deodorants speaking to the wildness within us, the need for more… the heroes who twitch for struggle, for meaning… we’re buying things with names like “Extreme” or “Dark Temptation” attached to them only proving that a bunch of suits in some office building have successfully deluded us into thinking that there’s adventure in the mundane.
It’s toothpaste, people.
Toothpaste.
Everyone who is anyone on the Internet seems to be doing Vanity Fair’s The Proust Questionnaire inspired by my lovely friend Finn, who reminds me of JackieO. but with way more class. Even when she dresses like one of the People of WalMart.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
A quiet mind.
What is your greatest fear?
Outliving my kids.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
The need for complete and total acceptance from every single person I meet.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
The inability to completely and totally accept the power of my awesomeness. Heh. No, actually, cruelty.
On what occasion do you lie?
When I have to protect someone else, often from themselves.
What is your greatest extravagance?
My hair.
What is your current state of mind?
Brewing.
What is the quality you most like in a man?
Integrity.
What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Integrity. (And I find it interesting that the expectation in this questionnaire is that I should have a different standard for men than I do women).
Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
Really. Obviously. Clearly. Actually. Unfortunately. Dude. Whatever. Totally.
When and where were you happiest?
Florida Hospital, Winter Park, two separate beautiful days in the same summer month of 2005 & 2009
Who are your favorite writers?
The ones that write about truth, love and hope. And Harry Potter.
Which talent would you most like to have?
Singing.
If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?
I’d have them learn humility. And then have them worship me.
If you died and came back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be?
Come back?! Are you kidding?? Like it wasn’t hard enough the first time around?!
What do you dislike most about your appearance?
My weight.
Where would you like to live?
Washington, D.C.
What is your most treasured possession?
I find that once you treasure a possession that you become it’s possession. So, no, thanks.
What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Stupidity.
What do you most value in your friends?
Sincerity.
What are your favorite names?
Nuha and Yusuf. (Gasp!!)
What is it that you most dislike?
Cruelty
What is your greatest regret?
That when I was in my 20′s I let other people tell me who I was until I became something that I wasn’t.
How would you like to die?
In faith.
What is your motto?
“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” ~Mother Teresa
This morning, twitter alerted me to the news that eight people had been shot in downtown Orlando.
Obviously, this news was shocking and bizarre. And, of course, sad.
It was particularly sad for me to read about it because something similar, if not even more horrific, had happened the day before.
There’s a lot of ways a blog post about this incident could pan out. We could discuss gun control, mental health, a distressed economy or some permutation of them.
But, really, the only thing that keeps playing in my head has to do with how the people who walked into the Gateway Center’s eighth floor had no clue of what an incredibly bad Friday they were about to have.
It’s a pretty trite perspective, I know, but that’s all I can seem to think about.
Being human is so … hard, isn’t it?
Animals and plants have it easy. Nourishment, shelter and reproduction. There are no complicated nuances. Any complications generally arise as the result of our complications bleeding over into their efficient existence.
But us humans? We’re complicated creatures.
I keep wondering about the two people who have been reported dead.
Who were they?
And, my God, why them?
Why not you? Or me?
I don’t mean that it should have been me or you, I mean, it could have been me or you. Easily.
We lock our doors, look both ways before we cross the street, take our vitamins, eat right… and we think that this is going to make a huge difference. The truth is that it makes only a little difference.
I’m wondering about those two people… reports are preliminary right now, so we don’t know anything about them.
I’ve got these sappy movie scenes playing out in my head.
Like, a pretty, middle aged woman slams the door shut and makes sure she mutters, “Jerk” in earshot before she gets in her car, pointedly refusing to say good bye to her husband after the argument they just had about who was going to take their son to soccer practice… or maybe she got in the car, put the keys in the ignition, sighed deeply and then went back in the house and yelled, “Hey, I’m mad, but I love you, OK?”
Some single twenty something guy stumbles into the kitchen, makes some coffee and then trudges out of the door feeling a slightly numbed despair as he realizes he hates his crap job… or did he jump out of bed and greet the morning with joy and purpose, knowing that whatever he was going to do today was really going to mean something to him?
And, let me get really morbid and ask, what words spin in one’s head as they lay on the floor bleeding to death because of someone else’s complete madness?
“This can’t be happening… is this really happening… I’m not done here…Oh, God, is this really happ…. “
The End?
I would imagine that it would play out that way. I don’t think in a situation like that most people are evaluating whether they’ve lived a good and meaningful life. I would imagine you cling to the hope that this is not it.
There has to be more. Please let there be more.
I don’t know about you, but I’m done living for that last moment as of right now.
It gets bantered about quite a bit, this idea of “When I die, I want to know that my life meant something.” I figure we spend the majority of our time and energy trying not to die, so I imagine in that moment, I’m going to be too scared to make sense of anything.
The fact is that every single moment in our lives means something. Every single second, actually, and we consciously choose what each of those seconds mean.
Or whether they don’t mean anything at all.
In the end, we are not who we are in the last moment of our lives.
We are who we are right now.
It’s not “When I die, I want my life to have meant something.”
It’s, “As I live, I’m making this moment mean something.”
