In no particular order...

...the things I thought about today when I thought I wasn't thinking at all...

Akutagawa Ryunosuke's short story – Rashomon – A fired servant contemplates the depths to which he could possibly sink in order to survive. He does this as he sits outside the temple where dead bodies are discarded. He walks into the temple and is surprised to see an old woman removing hairs from the head of a dead woman’s head. This deeply offends his sensibilities he shakes the woman, wants to find out why she is doing what she is doing. He is told that the dead woman used to sell snake meat as fish when she was alive and that she is doing it to make a living for herself, selling wigs. Upon hearing this, the unemployed servant is instantly transformed into a thief as he steals the old woman’s robe and runs.

I Love Galesburg in the Springtime by Jack Finney – One of the short stories was about a young couple building a new house from an old blueprint they found. The house is magnificent but when the couple move in they undergo a gradual transformation into people who might have lived in just such a house a couple of centuries ago. Their mannerisms, their dressing, even the weather patterns they experience go back in time.

Akutagawa again…and Haruki Murakami – I am intrigued by the narrative style they both used, Murakami in his novel – After Dark and Akutagawa in his short story called Green Onions of the writer/narrator taking on the role of a moving, all seeing camera. I am inspired by that approach.

Endless thought loops - not just endlessly looping thoughts by why they loop in the first place!

How visceral my contempt for winter really is.

What was it about the extra large button on the coat of the woman in the subway, about her solid looking platinum wedding ring, her sterling silver bracelet, her widely flaring pants and long pearl necklace that made her look so much more elegant to me than other female passengers on the train. And why wasn't she holding on to something while the subway lurched its way to the next station? Was she a germophobe or was she trying to prove to herself and others her contempt for seeking support?

How dependent I am on lists for functional efficiency.

The passage of time again...this is an endless loop. This particular thought loop appears to have its beginning in a couple of suits that my Dad used to own - a brownish/olive green woollen fabric. I liked how he looked in them but he acquired them sometime in the late sixties and my memories of him wearing it cover a four or five year period starting in the early seventies. But when I picture those suits now I think of discussions about their purchase and how old I thought they were even if they were purchased just five to six years before my noticing them and being aware of them. Just like anything that happened four or five years ago takes on an ancient history tinge for my daughter. Anything that happened before she was born is so remarkably irrelevant for her, a time when she didn't exist. And yet my memories of the European car tour with my husband in 1999 are as fresh as if I had just returned from that trip. I know I got myself a fancy haircut in Paris and when I got back home, I learnt how to say that in French, in my French class, to the teacher who wanted a description of my vacation in French, "J'ai coupe mes cheveux" (accent on the e in 'coupe'...don't know how the keyboard does that). Was that really 10 years ago...how is it possible! I am still wearing some of the clothes and shoes I owned then!

How this thought...about the passage of time...about how it flies or how it drags...or how it feels...is such an irrelevant, nonsensical thought. It defines idleness!

Endangered Eclecticism

There is some opposition to the digitization of media. People talk about the tactile experience that they will sorely miss – the texture, the feel, the folding quality, the experience of turning the page, even the dog-earing, the highlighting, the underlining, the notes in the margin – all this I can understand and will miss, like others, if we come to live in a world where there are no newspapers and no magazines. However, despite our reluctance to let go of the tactile experience in reading, the demise of print media is imminent. Maybe not today, not tomorrow and not even in the next several months but I wouldn’t be surprised if our printing plants stop humming after five years or so.

So what happens next? Some folks believe that customized content, delivered electronically, is the wave of the future. I signed on to be a part of just such an experiment being conducted by my former employer, Time Inc. – an experimental magazine called Mine. Mine is going to select articles for me from five other magazines of interest to me. They had me fill out a form where they requested my answers to a few “seemingly random” questions ostensibly for them and for their sole advertiser - Lexus (makers of a car that will have 22 customizable features) to be able to help serve me better.

The questions chosen were almost as incomprehensible to me as a Rorschach inkblot is to the person being tested. They wanted to know whether I’d like to learn juggling or celebrity impersonation, whether I’d like to have dinner with Leonardo da Vinci or Socrates, whether I like pizza or sushi and whether I like singing in the car or not! What would my choices tell them about me? And how come I wasn’t given the option to choose neither?

I am certainly intrigued by this proposition and can’t wait to see my first issue of Mine. I am very eager to see what they selected for me because I would prefer pizza to sushi, even if I don’t really care for pizza. I would never in a million years consider learning how to juggle but I wouldn’t want to take classes in celebrity impersonation either. I showed a preference for the latter since I can do a good Elvis – “Thank you, thank you very much”. So which article would they choose for my perusal? Socrates and Leonardo…I wouldn’t mind being seated at a dinner flanked by them both but what would showing a preference for Leonardo get me? And as far as singing in the car is concerned, of course! I can’t even dream of not singing in the car! So what will they divine about my preferences?

Ironically this idea which is an “out of the box” approach for traditional print media is an approach that strives to shove us all into different boxes. Wonder why the old Malvina Reynolds song comes to mind:

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

Somehow, someway we are all going to end up in little self contained boxes. No more wide horizons, no range of choices. If I go to the iTunes store and select “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds its “Genius” feature will try to sell me ten different songs from the same artist or from that genre. It would be unfathomable for the folks at iTunes to believe that perhaps that was her only song that I ever liked. Amazon.com – my favorite online bookstore keeps trying to feed me more of the same stuff as well.

I don’t know what to make of this approach. I certainly don’t want my eclecticism endangered. I like confusing the heck out of them by selecting Portuguese Fado music, Indian classical music, western classical music, Scandinavian Nyckelharpa tunes and Appalachian fiddle music. Sometimes I purchase a classic rock song and at other times something from the Heartless Bastards or Fleet Foxes. I even bought something of Celine Dion’s! So what do they make of my musical tastes. Which marketable box are they going to put me in?

Do others feel their eclecticism as endangered as I do? It does seem as though we are turning our backs on the smorgasbord that life can be as we sleepwalk through our lives doing the same things every day, reading the same authors, the same genres, the same magazines, listening to the same type of music and drawing ourselves into am ever tightening circle of individuality. And the more such behaviors we exhibit the more they try to box us in.

I don’t think I want to continue to be the person I have always been. I want to sample everything, explore, experiment and evolve. I think their "little boxes" approach is equivalent to some sort of cultural/social inbreeding. I don’t think this apprehension is unique to me. I think we all get tired of limitations and familiarity does tend to breed some contempt. So why is it that they think they can sell us more of the same?

If Mine is successful, I am sure other publishing companies will jump on that bandwagon and soon we’ll all have our tailor-made content, happily reading only what we want to read and blind to all other ideas, opinions, possibilities.

Is this what we really want?

I am sick of the news!

I am sick of everyone, everywhere splitting hairs all the time. Yes, like every main streeter out there I feel a sense of outrage at the AIG bonuses and I am angry at the top executives whose bad decisions have incrementally added up to the crisis in which we now find ourselves. I am also very sick of the top executives never really having to pay for their incompetence, of their always finding a way to shed workers in order to send Wall Street the message that they are capable of making "forceful" decisions. It is all very sickening and nauseating in the extreme but at some point in time the nausea has to end in dry heaves!

At this point I am sure I am not alone in being sick of feeling sickened. I want our government to tax away the bonuses from the AIG executives who haven't considered returning it willingly. I applaud the people who are considering returning every penny of it. That is all that needs to happen. I don't want senators crying out for these people to commit suicide. I don't want people lashing out at their kids, their families, I don't want their neighbors spitting at them, threatening them, I don't think they need to stop living like free citizens because the media provokes escalating degrees of animus against them. The money either gets willingly returned or it gets taxed away, that's all. The associated drama is quite unbearable. I don't want to hear about the reasons why Chris Dodd felt he needed to introduce a loophole in original bailout bill that allowed these bonuses to happen. The blame game is irrelevant.

Why do we spend so much time assigning blame and reliving mistakes when we never have any intentions of learning from our mistakes? Has history ever shown that a post mortem of past mistakes stops their recurrence? If it did then why would history repeat?

I wish we could just move forward with the decisions that we collectively believe will take us out of the deep well in which we now find ourselves without peanut gallery comments from the press and the party that isn't currently in a position of power (unless of course they have something other than criticism and naysaying to contribute).

Obama has been in office for a couple of months. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) has passed and it will help achieve some gains. How beneficial it will ultimately prove to be remains to be seen. The crisis didn't take shape overnight. It was years in the making. It is highly unreasonable for people to expect it to turn things around immediately, that is, within a couple of months of the new president taking office.

The pretax dollars that I can now divert to my transit expense is certainly helping me out quite a bit. I am also thrilled to learn that the federal government will pick up sixty percent of the medical expenses of people who lose their jobs and therefore their medical coverage. These things are not necessarily as obvious but they will go a long way toward restoring confidence in the groups of people worst affected.

It is too early to criticize every effort, it feeds the downward spiral, fosters negativity. The talking heads and the pundits need to retreat and stop the hair splitting analysis for sometime. They are simply feeding a frenzy.

JUST A CON

Not answering prayers is a modus operandi that reeks of the most egregious herding tactic ever used by any supernatural entity. This Machiavellian omniscience must stop! This entity needs to stop thinking it has a broad panoramic vision of it all.

This master puppeteer has been making it so hard for one to be oneself!

If I could have been myself I would have been a singer who could paint, wield a scalpel in intricate neurosurgery, travel unrestrained, shop without guilt, live on desserts without sacrificing a svelte silhouette; even in a lumpy astronaut suit. But for some reason these prayers have gone unanswered, ignored, landing on deaf ears as if I didn’t exist, as if I am not here taking up space and consuming precious Planet Earth resources! It’s as if I am being told by Him or Her or It, “Talk to the booty, ‘coz the brain’s off duty!”

This is an elaborate and highly unintelligent design that resembles more of a herding tactic than anything else. There also appears to be a perverse element of reverse psychology in the behavior patterns of this “entity”, this “shepherd”, this Border collie of a supernatural being that is barking, nipping and steering us poor sheep like folks into undesirable pastures.

“Ah you wanted to be a painter or a singer, eh? Nope, unh unh, ain’t gonna happen! See those little boxes, all 17,179,869,184 of them? Well, that’s where you get to play my child. Every morning you’ll turn on a machine and play in these little squares. You can leapfrog through them, play hopscotch, put little numbers in them, add them, subtract them, multiply them, divide them, sum them if something’s true, and look things up vertically or horizontally without turning your machine upside down or on its sides. Trust me it is a whole lot of fun. Oh how you’ll thank me! You will love it so much you will wake up at the crack of dawn, or even before the crack of dawn, you’ll put on your smartest clothes, you won’t even care about breakfast, you’ll be so eager to hop onto a bus that will transport you to this magical and wondrous world where you can lose yourself in cute little Arial font numbers wearing tutus and pirouetting in little boxes every single joyous day, trust me on this. I know a thing or two about what people want. I mean really want. They just don’t know how to ask.”

We could scream and shout and counter Him or Her or It by asking them to recall the time when we were first learning to play with numbers and the teacher wanted to teach us how to subtract using the technique of “borrowing”. Our intensely empathetic, artistic soul, had balked at the prospect, refusing to believe that we could “borrow” from an adjacent number as small as a one, rendering it zero! We couldn’t believe we were expected to strip a one of its oneness and here we are in a world where we are making numbers do so many things against their express wishes! We are amortizing this and accruing that, inflating this and deflating that while the world teeters on the brink of an abyss where numbers are traipsing in a frenzied dance of death.

Where to now oh magnificent shepherd?
How many more prayers are you going to ignore?

Do you ever answer any prayer? No. It’s all about your selfish needs and what you want! The perversity is mindboggling! Remember the nights I stayed awake praying for a math score in any number of unit tests that would bring up my yearly math average to an acceptable number? Did you ever listen? No! Not once! And here you have me smack in the middle of mathematical convolutions and gyrations. When did I ever give you the impression that I loved Math?

And I know what you are going to do next. My daughter is too young to know this but you are not paying any attention when she says she wants to be the most famous lemonade maker in the world or when she says she wants to be a dog whisperer or a rock star or a drummer? Are you? Oh it’s not going to be so long before your game with her is up! Sure keep up the Tooth Fairy and Santa charade for awhile but she’s a smart cookie, that one! Oh she’ll soon realize how not on the cards her lemonade making dreams are!

You ought to be ashamed at yourself, really!