[Sent via BlackBerry]
Hello, It’s Me
Hi there,
First: everything’s fine with me (and I define fine as being “things are going well, no dramas, no chronic issues for me to be concerned with”).
I realized that the previous blog post – written/posted in a vague cyber-scrawl – could be misconstrued. All is well in Cahillland. In fact, things are going well enough that I have very few opportunities to blog.
I wanted to express what I considered to be rumbles (predictions) of change around me.
A diner I went to on the east end (near work) that I hadn’t been to in about a month, where the same waitress asked me the same question she (and the owner) asked a month ago: how’s the new house? I wanted to pick up my plate and whip it across the vintage 50s decor’d aisle, preferably smashing violently against a wall. The new house? I wanted to respond. I’ve been there – every single day – for the past three months! I imagined yelling. I’ve seen its insides, I know what it is, I’m intimate with it. It is many things, but – in the name of the Lord Baby Jesus – it’s not new! I imagined saying, holding my arms out dramatically, waiting for the curtain to close and for the audience to clap.
I didn’t say that. I hunched my shoulders and said: it’s good. Thanks.
At work I felt I had been snappy, officious.
Later I dropped by a sometimes getaway, an Irish pub downtown I know. I sat there with a Guinness and the bartender, a lovely person, said: “You okay? You don’t seem yourself today.”. I was tired. Tired of non-stop work, frustrated that I was frustrated with the waitresses’ question from lunch, my crankiness on the job, and now – apparently – the answer to the question that I didn’t know how to ask was written on my face for her to see: You okay? You don’t seem yourself today.
I’m fine, I said. All’s good. It’s just this (I thought): when it seems that I am triangulated by revelations of change (which I interpret the above to be) or change-which-needs-t0-be-made, I cannot help but ask whether this is a fin de siècle in some way, or whether I’m just looking for fatalistic icons. Stressed and desperate for more drama?
And this: it’s hard to be eloquent with a cellphone, so I appreciate the responses of those who were concerned with the content of my previous post.
All is good, if not necessarily crystal clear.
(One of the problems of being busy is not only not enough time to write, but also not enough time to revise for clarity.)
Mobile: Not Myself
If I am not myself at work.
If I am not myself at the diner @ lunch.
If I am not myself at the bar.
Who am I, if not different? And when, in retrospect, did this revolt happen? And will there be a ransom posted, or will the old me be shot or brainwashed?
All I ask is that I live honestly, if not with clear intents. Or answers.
[Sent via BlackBerry]
Mobile: Bay Street Fire Drill
Mobile: Good Morning, Chinatown
Mobile: quote
Cellphoto: Strachan Sidewalk
It Doesn’t Need To Be This Way
I was having brunch in the Market with my friend, Lady B, whom I’ve known for over 10 years. We were talking about “life changes” (we both being close to 40). We got onto the topic of how her and I sometimes are conditioned to expect the worst.
“With the house, didn’t you feel that, somehow, everything would inevitably go wrong and you wouldn’t get it after all?” she asked.
“Yes!”
It was as if she had read my mind. We were eating palacsinta at a small Hungarian bistro.
We talked about this, because she’d felt the exact same way when she and her partner bought their house. She speculated, correctly in my estimation, that this mode of thinking – let’s call it auto-tragic thinking – was the result of her and I coming from divorced families (the divorces or circumstances surrounding them being particularly destructive). The end-result, if not in all cases then certainly in ours, was that we were conditioned to expect gift horses to have mouth cancer and every silver lining to have a cloud moving in its way. Happiness was a pulled rug away from tragedy.
I thought about moments in my life – moments that everyone experiences – like applying for a job, asking someone out for a date. Moments where, realistically, we hope/aim for the best. The difference between the average person and people like myself and Lady B is that, in the event we don’t get the job we hope for, in the event that special someone isn’t interested in us, we tend to see it as a fateful inevitability; a symptom of a curse. Of course, we say to ourselves. Why should this be any different than any other time?
The subject clearly struck a chord for both of us.
“You expect it to be like in Carrie.” she said in a follow-up email, discussing how we became conditioned to expect the worst. “You’re at the prom, thinking that everything’s turning around in your life and then suddenly you’re covered in pig blood.”
The best male equivalent I could think of was Laurence Harvey’s character in (the original) The Manchurian Candidate; a tragic puppet whose fleeting tastes of freedom coincide with horrific end results.
So, no, neither Lady B nor I are cursed. Our houses have not fallen down or been taken away from us by a nightmarish bureaucracy. If anything we are only beginning to sense just how much re-wiring is necessary for us to see things clearly, without the faulty psychological infrastructure that led to us to believe that, indeed, the odds were stacked against us.
The mind is a frightening thing. This is why I read books and watch films which challenge my preconceptions. This is why I am lucky to have friends such as Lady B.
Mobile: Cellphoto: Market
For *’s Sake
It’s been one of those battle-cries of mine the last while. Everything in the world, culturally-speaking (and I don’t necessarily mean high culture) seems to be evaporating into mindless bullshit.
The AV Club – a site I admittedly have a love/hate relationship with already – just posted an interview with actor Paul Giamatti. In the opening summary, the interviewer describes the plot of his latest film, which reads like a counterscript of 1999’s Being John Malkovich and yet there is no mention of this parallel anywhere in the article, something even Entertainment Tonight would do. The interviewer talks about this upcoming film with Giamatti as if it and his role – the John Malkovich role, if it were Being John Malkovich – were just soulless objects to be discussed out of necessity. In other words, it’s just like any other media-junket interview, like something you would read in InStyle or Chatelaine. Not that those examples are b-a-d, but when you pride yourself as better, especially savvy, tongue-in-cheek better, you shouldn’t even be in the same postal code as InStyle or Chatelaine if you want to retain your reputation.
The Motley Fool – again, a site previously known for being savvy, even though they deal with the stock market – now reads like Ain’t It Cool News, complete with arguments which, under rational analysis, seem completely idiotic and antithetical to what one would assume is their mission statement (ie. being different than the rest of those brain-dead-and-short-sighted Money sites).
Oh, and CNN. Not that they’ve ever been more relevant than a Reuters news ticker, but they’ve gone from mediocre to stupid by allowing one of their show hosts, Lou Dobbs, to continuously question the origin of Barack Obama’s citizenship, a paranoid suspicion virulent in the libertarian/right-wing fringe of the U.S. that has been repeatedly disproved (read: he doesn’t want Johnny Foreigner running and ruining the most-possibly-greatest-country-ever-in-the-world).
Now, one of the arguments I can imagine hearing is: well, Matt, in a 24-hour newsday (whether on TV or the Internet) when people expect constant information there inevitably has to be weaker material. To which I say: I understand, but I’d settle for less information over less hours (if need be), if it means the information will be consistent and better. After all, you are what you eat, and in this day and age we feed on media in an astonishingly unconscious and voracious manner.