Orders from Captain Kirk

I love to talk. I love to write. I love to read. But sometimes, I need a break from words.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKMC8NnD4e8

 

He’s helping himself by charging people 15 bucks to buy his self-help book.

Yesterday my daughter needed to use the soon-to-expire Barnes and Noble gift certificate she’d earned tasting chocolate at the consumer testing center at the mall. As she was deciding what to buy, I picked up a self-help book to browse. I figured I could change my life in 20 minutes or so and still have time to food shop and catch Jeopardy, which is tricky since it’s on at 7 in NJ and I’m used to the 7:30 North Carolina time slot. (Note: you can look really intelligent if you live in NC and call someone in NJ at 7:22 and get the answer to Final Jeopardy. I once casually said, “Oh, duh, Richard the Third” to an astounded room. Of course I came clean during the credits, but it was fun while it lasted.)

The guy on the cover looked really pulled together and in possession of The Answer. They’ve all looked like that and yet I’m still Claudia the Questioning after reading all of their books.

He said that it is very important to take ownership of your life. OK. Then he said that it is very important to acknowledge that you are responsible for every result in your life—whether it’s good or bad. Well, I didn’t agree. I’ve been trying to not think in terms of results at all—I am focusing on intent, working toward, etc. My main problem is that I thought I had more control than I actually do.

But here it was on Page 2 or 3. If it happened to you, you caused it. Good or bad. And he looked so confident.

But then I saw that he didn’t even believe it.

There, still on Page 3, he said that he had been fortunate enough to work for some company…

It wasn’t his hard work on his resume or his perseverance in networking or his excellence in prior positions that led up to the golden opportunity. It was fortune.

I put him back on his display.

No problem. I was just browsing. I wasn’t buying.

 

Celebrating the Fourth Without James Garfield

When I was in elementary school, my parents would let me get two or three paperbacks from the Arrow Book Club every couple of months. One of the books was Follow My Leader by James Garfield. It probably didn’t sell as many copies as Bill Clinton’s book, but one of my sisters and I were really affected by it. We both decided that we would never be stupid enough to play with firecrackers, because the main character loses his sight doing just that.

Sparklers—fine. Firecrackers for some reason never appeared within our realm of Fourth of July experience. Fireworks were for the professionals. Our parents would take us to the community show every year. When we were in our 20’s, we siblings saw the Grucci display at Shea Stadium. All subsequent shows become too embarrassing until you forget about the best of the best and reset your expectations to a regular Americana experience.

Our family would enjoy our small town’s display when we lived in North Carolina. The first time I experienced regular people putting on fireworks was when the family of my daughter’s classmate had a birthday party every year for her brother, who was born on July 4. We went to a couple of their parties. I was really impressed with the quality of the show. And they always made sure we spectators were far away from where the fireworks were being launched. I would say, good, because I read Follow My Leader. They didn’t know what I was talking about, which fit right in with them never knowing what I was talking about. But I brought a nice birthday gift.

Last night, my neighbor to the left knocked on the door and said that the people who live to her left were shooting off fireworks, and why don’t we bring chairs and watch. Yay! My daughter and I traipsed onto their property, introduced ourselves to these neighbors, and watched an hour of fireworks. We weren’t that far back, and sometimes things dropped on us. I told my friend that I read Follow My Leader. She is my age and said she did, too. But things were just too festive to worry.

There was the visual, the sound, the smell. But it was that occasional hot piece of debris that just seemed to give everything that extra bit of Americana.

 

Resisting a Movie Sandwich

A few weeks ago, I went to the movies with a couple of friends. We saw one of the blockbusters. It was entertaining and I am enjoying, as the Southerners call it, fellowship that I seldom found in North Carolina.

Often, I see coming attractions that make me excited about going to the movies. Those movies often don’t come out. I remember, years ago, that “Oil” looked promising, but I don’t remember seeing it in theaters.

So this past time, when I thought all four of the previews looked like movies I would be psyched about, I wondered if I’d ever see them. One was “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” When I checked online, it wasn’t listed as coming into theaters near me any time during the entire rest of the year. What a surprise.

I checked the library catalog, and it was on order. And they had the book!

The book, by Lionel Shriver, was gripping. It was a weird experience reading the point of view of Eva, an over-intellectualizing narcissist with whom I couldn’t identify and didn’t like, who could perfectly describe the motivations and behavior of everyone, herself included, in a fresh and fascinating way. I hated the storyteller but, oh, could she tell the story. And after both Nature and Nurture scared the shit out of me, I looked to my parents and then to my kid, realizing there would be no genealogy if we all had minds like Eva.

On Thursday, I checked again about the movie, and the library already had copies—all checked out. I put it on hold, and figured I might be able to get a copy in a few weeks if I were lucky. They called me the next day that it was in!

So I’m halfway through the book, but the DVD isn’t due back until Monday because the library is closed on Sundays over the summer. Do I watch the movie before finishing the book I’m halfway through?

No, I stayed up until 2 am and finished the book. Then my daughter and I watched the movie the following night.

The acting was great; the filming itself aesthetically engaging. But I don’t see how someone who didn’t read the book could figure out what was happening, because the important facts were merely mentioned. My daughter kept needing me to fill her in.

I’m glad I passed on the sandwich and will stick with my movie popcorn. With the one exception of my favorite movie that was only loosely based on a novel, the book is always better for me. Especially when the film, though well done in the ways I’ve mentioned, is based upon the Cliff Notes of the Monarch Notes of the book.

 

Claudia: Just Another Member of Our Hypocritical Society Regarding Mice

When I was little, cartoons and books showed tiny archways along the floor molding. There would be a perfectly-shaped one every few feet—about the same number as the electrical outlets.

“Mommy, where are our mouse doors?”

“What?”

“The mouses, where are their doors?”

“It’s mice. Oh, they get in!”

What kind of answer was that? If the book or cartoon didn’t have a cat, the humans and the adorable little mice enjoyed a parallel use of the living quarters.

A couple of years later, I experienced a total lack of respect on the mice’s part when one darted by, interrupting our family time, causing my mother to become upset. This was not OK. Now the mice were intersecting.

Let me digress a bit here and jump ahead 45 years, because this is where I take issue with Dr. Phil. I once heard him explain about overreacting, citing an example of his mother running through a glass door because she saw a mouse on her pillow. You don’t even need Psych 101 to know that someone who thinks they are in a safe, cozy place, who is semi-conscious, and who sees an unexpected rodent will not be stopping to analyze reaction options.

Back to the intersecting mouse and all the mice who subsequently invaded our home. Their punishment was always death. Kids are pros at handling the double standards of the world in which they find themselves, and I continued to enjoy mice caricatures in books, on TV, and especially around the holidays. They cuted up many a card and decoration, and were allowed to stir among all the creatures in the house, as long as it wasn’t in our actual house.

Meanwhile, mice brazenness, in real life, grew. I had an apartment where the nerviest subspecies got in. One night, I had just finished dinner when the phone rang. As I was talking, I noticed three of them frolicking in and out of the pot in which I’d made gravy. When I banged something to scare them, they merely looked at me and kept on with their gravy party. That incident brought to light something Doctor Phil’s mother and I had (probably purposely) been denying: the knowledge that mice are multilevel—their talents aren’t restricted to darting along baseboards. Hi, we’re hanging out at your level tonight. Is this chicken or beef gravy?

Over the weekend I caught three mice: death for two and a catch and release for one, whose tail got stuck. He got a second chance in the great outdoors after I lifted the bar with a butter knife and let him scamper off to possibly get into your house.

The first one that I killed had initially set off the trap unharmed. I watched him move his mouth trying to get the almond butter out from under his gums—just like we do. He was so cute! But I just paid off the home equity loan Friday, so my territory is a little more mine right now. And since being kicked out of here is a sore spot for me, I took it out on him and set another trap. He died going for his second helping.

A darling little mouse making almond butter faces. In my territory. Kill the bastard. This Christmas hang the gray mouse ornament with the glittery green eyes and the red ribbon in a nice spot on the tree.

I guess I’m now an adult handling my own hypocritical double-standard.

 

Ingredients

I have a cookbook I got back in the 70’s called The Spice of Life Cookbook by David Wade. Just about all the recipes include two ingredients: Love and Patience.

Since I love to cook, I never needed to be told to add those ingredients—they put themselves in while I’m in the kitchen. A coworker recently complained that her husband acts like he’s fighting a war whenever he prepares food, so I lent the book to her to show him. Like anything else that hits the nail on the head, it was ignored.

Today a friend shared his yearning to get a situation settled, while I remained struggling with other people’s timetables. Reversing the idea of a cookbook containing words to live by, I thought our lives needed a hint from the joys of cooking. I texted him a pun: “We all need to use more time as an ingredient.”

I never find myself screaming at the yeast to make the bread rise faster, so why not live as well as I cook?

 

Trust: Rewriting the Doctrine: Hope it Works in Real Life

Markus Zusak has a cool narrator for his novel, The Book Thief. It’s Death. Death realizes that he constantly underestimates and overestimates human beings, but that he is never able to estimate them.

I think he’s on to something here. I think this is why I can’t come up with a good plan of action for living the rest of my life. Patti LaBelle figured out her new attitude. Why can’t I?

You trust someone. Then they do something cruel, so you writhe in pain until you come up with your new theory that he or she is a piece of shit not to be trusted. Then they do something kind. Now what? You almost wish they didn’t, for now you have to use a lot of energy to try to figure out who they really are. You don’t want to trust and get hurt again but how can you ignore what they just did? You may even say that doing the nice thing was really them being cruel by confusing you.

I’m beginning to think that people are more inconsistent than I can possibly imagine. This is why my ex shows concern that he needs to take my name off of the motor club insurance when he didn’t have to pay for me to be on it at all for the past few years. Then, the same day, he refuses to sign the listing agreement to sell the house because it has a clause that gives our daughter and me time to find a suitable place to live.

Everyone is inconsistent. But there is a difference between a pattern of not caring and occasional screw-ups.

How about this, Patti? Trust people who seem to deserve it. Stop trusting them if they have patterns of being untrustworthy. Realize that most people will not stay qualified to be true friends. Expect that there are some gems out there that will eventually make the cut. Expect to be alternately hurt and happy as everybody else is randomly mean and kind.

 

A Robert Pirsig/Alan Watts Mashup

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig writes of Quality as being:

… the source and substance of everything.

In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts writes:

To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God.

Why are we looking for good in the static and fearing change?

 

We’re All in the Process of Finding Out Who We Really Are

 

“Neither Rhyme nor Reason”

When someone at work cruelly told me:

It takes two to make it.

It takes two to break it.

in regard to my marriage, I knew it wasn’t true due to reason, but was it true due to rhyme?

To confuse the reason/rhyming issue, the first version of the expression, penned around 1460 by John Russell in The Boke of Nurture, is put to rhyme:

As for ryme or reson, ye forewryter was not to blame,
For as he founde hit afore hym, so wrote he ye same.

Not a quote I apply to a whole lot of situations. Not a good Final Jeopardy, even for Ken Jennings.

Shakespeare uses the expression a couple of times, confusing things even more by rhyming  the word “reason” itself with “season” in The Comedy of Errors.

And if either one would suffice, why do people want rhyming and reasoning? For example, if some people are so confident that their interpretation of the Bible is reasonable, why do they have to add a little rhyme to it?

It’s Adam and Eve

Not Adam and Steve.

I’m no Bible scholar, but I don’t think that’s in there. Nobody begets anyone named Steve. It’s too modern-sounding for the Bible, like Nikki Chapter 20, Verse 18.

On the other hand, this, along with a lot of poetry and lyrics, is reasonable and rhymes:

It takes two to make it.

It takes one to break it.

But maybe the best way for me to survive these next couple of months of employment is to be totally irrational, but rhyme for eight hours. Like Dr. Seuss at work with an attitude.