teenybooks » rant

o-ba-ma

mh — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:57:13 +0000

What I recall thinking, as I stood with the crowds in the gathered around the large tv in the neighborhood bar, having abandoned the home tv for just a minute to experience everyone else’s joy and laughter, to see what all the noise and honking and drinking in the streets was like, was that this was not only a historical change, but it was also the first time our generation had really got to witness something not only history making but in a positive way. Most of us were too young to really recall the Berlin Wall coming down in great depth, I simply remember the images and my mother’s tears, who had spent three years there.

What I do remember was watching from a class room window as the second plane hit the twin towers. I remember crying in front of the television as the Iraq war began. I remember the slow sinking feeling I’d come to expect with the making of “history.” I guess, without realizing it, I’d begun to lose faith in our country in so many ways. I was definitely one of the masses that was afraid to hope.

I didn’t cry when Obama won. I smiled. I smiled till my cheeks ached and all I could follow it up with was occasional outburst of laughter and “I can’t believe we did it.” I ordered two Johnny Walker Blacks and I smiled in front of the tv and at the people standing next to me at everything in nothing in general.

I think our generation needed to see something like this, needed the type of hope it would provide. Needed to believe. Insert cheesy proud to be an american quote.

(I know I’m a bit late on the whole thing, I’ve been internet free for daaaays, but it was nice to finally say my piece)

Are You Normal?

mh — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 08:21:00 +0000

Last night I found myself engaged in a discussion about normalcy in regards homosexuality, but it ended up spreading into the larger idea of normalcy itself. Normal is by definition confining to social norms; living up to social expectations set by the society in which we lived. (A redundant statement but one which I found myself repeating) It might have been normal in the 1500 or 1600’s to wear tights and a large brimmed hat but would not be considered by today’s standards unacceptable. It might be normal during the Roman era to partake of homosexual relationships with young boys, but again would be condemned by today. This is not a praise of one set of standards over the other or not saying that the world should exist without morals. Just that viewing one thing as normal and another thing as abnormal can plunge us into a different sort of immorality. Especially when morality, in and of itself, is such an arguable thing.

To bring it back to more modern ideas, normalcy still exist in America in nuclear families, while the western civilization is changing to include a large variety of mixed familial types not bound by blood. Normalcy still dictates that women over a certain age should be married. I’m just getting started and am not quite ready to go into full rant mode, but once we begin to examine our lives we realize the ways in which we might all fall outside of normalcy’s radar. I think of my own current affairs, which have not subsided to “normal” coupledom, but which have, at least for the time being, tried to find a way to work beyond the current ideology of the status quo relationship. It may not work but at least we pushed the envelop. And this is only looking at one way of thinking. I feel that once we begin to entrench ourselves in the idea of normalcy we lose the motivation to find and/or try something new.

Let the fundamentalist hold fast to their views of normalcy. And…as the saying goes, “I am human and therefore nothing is foreign to me.”

it might be a better argument were it not four am, but I’m sure you get the idea.

In Praise of Melancholy

mh — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 17:27:00 +0000

I came across this article as sort of happenstance, reading about the dumbing down of America. Eric Wilson’s name was briefly mentioned and I had the urge to find out more about his beliefs regarding false happiness–as I wondered about my own pervasive happiness, which seemed in some ways a denial or rather a disregard and pushing away of the sadness which sometimes affected me. Not to say that I should suddenly be plunged into melancholy, just that I, in my nature, am particularly found of questioning certain states of being. I felt that it was an on going conversations that I’ve had with friends in regards to so completely immersing oneself into one thing so that it became a religion of sorts. The cult of shiny happy people…which I so deeply embraced. That being said, I am not necessarily in complete agreement with everything thats said in his article, but I do find that there is a certain degree of artistic creativity that suffers from a denial of melancholy, pushing it to the corners of the soul. Not allowing it to travel through oneself to the page. There is a repression that I find, from time to time, myself embracing. Just as a matter to think about:

Why are most Americans so utterly willing to have an essential part of their hearts sliced away and discarded like so much waste? What are we to make of this American obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?
…
I for one am afraid that American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society’s efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?
My fears grow out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to disregard the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ignorance of life’s enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience. Trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos, this sort of happiness insinuates that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill.

I’m not questioning joy in general. For instance, I’m not challenging that unbearable exuberance that suddenly emerges from long suffering. I’m not troubled by that hard-earned tranquillity that comes from long meditation on the world’s sorrows. I’m not criticizing that slow-burning bliss that issues from a life spent helping those who hurt. And I’m not romanticizing clinical depression. I realize that there are many lost souls out there who require medication to keep from killing themselves or harming their friends and families. I’m not questioning pharmaceutical therapies for the seriously depressed or simply to make existence bearable for so many with biochemical disorders.

The Internet has Murdered My Already Fleeting Attention Span

mh — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 12:56:00 +0000

Last night I stopped to write my friend a letter, on the train ride home I’d been composing it in my head, working out all the nuances and thinking of the perfect turn of phrase. Its one of the things I find fun and exciting.

Once home though I turned on the computer and it all fell apart.

During the course of writing my letter I stopped numerous times to check tumblr, flickr, facebook, twitter and god knows what else; despite that nothing had conceivably changed I stopped again to check it a second or even a third time. I stopped to write a shorter email to someone else. Even during the course of writing this post I stopped and clicked on the headers in my tabs section, which seemed to have no apparent purpose except to give myself a mental break.

The last few times I’ve picked up a book I’ve found the task of focusing on each page equally as difficult. On average, in a book that I find quite enjoyable I get through about a page and a half before my mind starts to wonder. Hopefully I start writing micro fiction because I can barely get through what I’m writing lately, averaging about five or six hand written sentences before I stop to do something else. This blog post began yesterday, was written partly this morning and will hopefully be completed now, this afternoon.

I’ve always had a bit of difficulty focusing on things over a long period of time, most of all on movies, least of all on books. But it seems over the past couple of months as my dedication to various sites has increased, my attention span has completely decreased. My productivity on the job has become a problem when every two to five minutes I feel like I need to check my email or see if I’ve missed a twitter. I’m always online and I’m always available but it feels like I’m getting less and less done. Apparently a BBC article reports that I am not the only goldfish in this internet ADD pond:

If you are spending too much time on the internet and are concerned that it is affecting your concentration, you are not alone.
The addictive nature of web browsing can leave you with an attention span of nine seconds – the same as a goldfish.

“Our attention span gets affected by the way we do things,” says Ted Selker, an expert in the online equivalent of body language at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

“If we spend our time flitting from one thing to another on the web, we can get into a habit of not concentrating,” he told the BBC programme Go Digital.

Great, first it was commercials breaks now its the internet.

I feel like I should join a IA support group.