Self Esteem is for Pretty People

Feeling cynical today. So I’m going to get my rant on. Buckle up.

The beauty of being smart is that you can feel good about yourself without ever having to actually accomplish anything or produce anything worthwhile. You can give yourself a sense of entitlement and self importance that you in no way earned. It’s a lot like being pretty or athletic, only you have moments of insight into your bullshit.

On a related note, I’ve been thinking about what people actually appreciate in this world. If you look at how people use their time and spend their money. It becomes quite clear that some people are valued more highly that others. Attractive people make more money and get more attention from the opposite sex, smart people make more money and get more attention from the opposite sex, tall people with good hair make more money and… wait for it… get more attention from the opposite sex. You might criticize my use of compensation and status with the other gender as a metric for valuing humans. But guess what? That, my friend, is the coin of the realm.

“All men are created equal.” Horseshit, Bill. Everybody has heard this, and everybody pays lip service to it, all human life has infinite value and all that Kantian nonsense. But nobody, and I mean nobody, actually behaves like they believe it.

Words only have meaning if they have an underlying basis in reality. Watch. I’ll show you. “I’m a hippopotamus.” Guess what. I’m no more a hippo than I was before typing that. That was kinda fun. Let’s try it again. “I’m a super nice guy.” Nope. Still doesn’t quite translate. So much for the power of affirmations.

Anyway, I’ve almost decided that I’d like to do something worthwhile. Whatever the hell that is.

Aging like Fine Wine

I had a birthday this week. Pretty much a non-event. I’m at that age where there is nothing to celebrate anymore, it’s just a better than average arbitrary excuse to drink too much. I can already vote, drink, drive, get drafted, and rent a car. Pretty much the only thing left to look forward to is that inevitable moment when I realize I wasted my youth watching tv shows that featured laugh tracks. I think the over-under on the mid life crisis is about 35.

One potential positive though, I look young for my age. This is both a blessing and a curse. On the upside, when I’m older and dating women half my age, it’ll be way less creepy. But on the other hand, I occasionally get laughed at when I order beer. I suppose it’s the price I pay. I have started noticing the tell-tale signs though. I’m starting to get those little lines around my eyes, the ones that really haggard blonds have when they faked tanned too much. It’s not worth it ladies. Doing that to yourself is like putting a turbocharger on an engine, it might make it run a little hotter now, but the lifespan on that sucker goes in the toilet. Nobody wants to date a catcher’s mitt.

Also, I’ve noticed aging more in my peer group than in myself. When the women that your friends are dating start to look old I think that’s a bigger shock than seeing your buddies turn in to fat old guys. It’s because women are held to a higher standard. We equate feminine beauty with youth. It’s an evolutionary thing; we are attracted to women who have higher reproductive potential. This is why women panic when they think they are getting old and haven’t found a mate. It’s hard to tell yourself not to settle when your ovaries are audibly ticking. One the other hand, our swimmers are good for the long haul. Hence, we find our selves saying things like, “Is that his daughter? Oh wait, look where his hand is… definitely not his daughter… ok… hopefully not his daughter.”

They say stress ages you. So far I’ve been pretty craftily avoiding the stuff. I’ve been dodging and weaving and so far it hasn’t laid a glove on me that I couldn’t roll with pretty easily. Now that I’m in the real world though I can see it starting to raise its head. Actual responsibility is a new experience for me. The fact that things I do matter to people other than me is pretty intense. This is actually a pretty well crafted experiment to see whether stress is what makes people look older. If you check on me in a year and I’m aging like Dorian Gray after confronting his picture then we have our evidence.

“Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego”

~Norman Mailer

How true. Sitting down to write and not being able to produce content isn’t about your mind becoming vacant. It’s about the fear that the thoughts that are coming out of it are shit. No matter how mentally exhausted, stupid, or unoriginal you get, there is always something going on upstairs. Just this weekend I listened to some idiot girl describe to me, for a full thirty minutes, a highly detailed list of what she had for dinner and her equally uninteresting opinions about that wonderful feast. This person had no qualms about broadcasting her marginally coherent and tedious thoughts into the world. Presumably, this is because she was attractive enough that no one had ever bothered to inform her that she was retarded. However, she will never experience writers block. I’m quite sure that she could sit down with her crayons and write an uninterrupted stream of content off the top of her pretty little head. “Me and my bestest friend in the whole world Julie, she’s like the coolest, oh my god, went to the like the best restaurant ever in the whole world for dinner and had the most amazing lobster soup. OH MY GOD! That lobster soup was AWESOME. I must have eaten like the whole bowl. Oh my god, it was like awesome. Maybe not as good as the lobster soup at … (I blacked out here for about 20 minutes)… I can’t believe I ate the whole bowl. I’m so fat. But it was so, like, good. Awesome. So Good. Like. Awesome.”

Sorry for subjecting you to that, but I felt it really drove home the point. You don’t stop having thoughts just because you are unoriginal and annoying. Just some people have enough respect for other literates that they are hesitant to advance their ideas in written form. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever produced anything over a paragraph long that I didn’t think was garbage. Writers block is a symptom. It is a result of a lack of a necessary arrogance. To write you have to think that your viewpoint deserves to be preserved. Even if no one reads it (perhaps a blog?), writing is like any other activity that people can judge you on. You can’t be good at it unless you have confidence. You gotta go in cocky.

Pychodynamics = Hilarious

Ok people. I’m going to give you some advice that should be given to everyone once they reach the age of comprehension. Swing your arms when you freakin’ walk! I was driving to work recently and I saw a jogger who, I can only assume, was concentrating intently on holding his arms straight down by his sides while he ran. This has got to be one of the most awkward looking things that you can do as a human being, second only to being a thirteen year old boy trying to talk to an attractive female. In any case, this particular symptom of self consciousness does not make you look any less self consciousness. On the contrary, it makes you look like you have some sort of undiagnosed joint disorder, or perhaps a fierce desire to be chosen last for flag football. I tried to imagine what was going on in this guy’s head when he ran. Here’s the internal monologue as I see it.

Asshole’s Id: “Yeah! Let’s get our run on!”

Asshole’s Ego: “Whoa there guy. We want to look cool. Let’s take it in a notch.”

Asshole’s Id: “But it feels natural and good to swing my arms. Screw what people think!”

Asshole’s Ego: “I’ll look out of control and crazy. I’m clamping down!!!”

Asshole’s Superego: “Damn you Ego! Stay away from your mother or I’ll cut off your penis!”

(Isn’t Freud awesome?) How can you expect a guy to run with all that going on up there? I almost feel bad for the guy.

Anyway, moving back towards the original premise. Presumably the goal of all self-conscious behavior is to portray oneself as being unself-conscious, to “act cool”. (Unselfconscious? Un-selfconscious? U-nselfc-onscious? Behold… the beauty of the hyphen.) This is one of those times when our bodies are determined to make us look like assholes. The harder you try to appear casual the more absolutely uncomfortable you look. I think ultimately trying to do things gets in the way of actually doing them, at least on the level of coordinated physical activity. On one side of the spectrum you have our Frankenstein monster of a jogger, and on the other Vince Young. Guess which one can spell coordinated? On the other hand… maybe some people just run like jackasses.

Evidence for Misanthropy

So I stopped at a gas station recently and nature called me into the bathroom. (Don’t worry. There aren’t any scatological jokes coming.) There it was. Written on the wall of the bathroom where I was taking a leak, incontrovertible proof that men are an appalling species. “Meet here 6/4/06 11:00 for blowjob” (It’s hard to convey the real effect of the handwriting… very poor penmanship. I remember being surprised they spelled blowjob correctly.) Every guy in the world has seen this before of course. Women may not be aware of this. I don’t spend a lot of time in the ladies room, but I have a hard time envisioning a female taking the time to scratch the equivalent into a tampon dispenser. I’m reasonable confident that it’s an all male phenomenon. If I’m wrong then I welcome correction from any of the female readers out there. On the other hand, it’s actually astonishing how high a percentage of men’s bathrooms contain sexual appointment vandalism.

This of course begs the question, “exactly how many of these appointments are being filled?” Upon asking myself this, my initial reaction was of course, “suuuurrrely none.” Ah ha… but let’s pause to examine this further… If the answer was none then there wouldn’t be such an enormous amount of similar graffiti attempting to arrange rendezvous in men’s bathrooms. Taking this line of reasoning further, it must be a significant percentage of the time that these dates are being consummated. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps there are just a few hyper-productive sexual deviants emptying sharpies onto the walls of America’s lavatories. My instinct is however, that there are more people involved.

Of course the next logical question (and I’m sure you were way ahead of me here) is, “how many of these encounters consist of a gigantic redneck waiting in the next stall with a nine iron, hoping he gets a chance to beat up a “homo” and then go home and jerk off?” Gotta be like 20/30 percent. I’d say higher, but that presumes a certain level of craftiness on the part of our hillbilly friend, and I’m just not ready to give him that kind of credit.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter how you run the math. Mankind, specifically mankind, is despicable. I understand the desire to procreate. I can even vaguely understand the desire to deface property. What I cannot understand is the appeal of trashing a bathroom wall in the hopes that you might be able to engage in a sex act with, let’s face it, what is probably not going to be a stunningly attractive human specimen. In addition to any likely respondent being either horrendously unattractive, a serial killer, of the same sex, or all of the above, the venue for the subsequent exploit is a public bathroom. I won’t even sit down in a public bathroom unless it is absolutely not going to wait until I get home. Fluid exchange is an entirely different ballgame. But I guess if you are willing to blow complete strangers you really aren’t a stickler for personal hygiene.

Anyway, there’s no real way to close this entry. People are fucked up.

Think Globally?

Greetings from the other side of the planet. The posts have been rare lately because I’ve been traveling. A buddy of mine from law school and I decided to take a break after the bar exam and do something adventurous. Ergo, I’m in a rented van in New Zealand. There has been so much going on that even though plenty of things deserved some observational humor I’ve either been sans writing materials or didn’t have the time to write anything. Anyway, thoughts on the world from the other side of it. Broad strokes.
Globalization is a Middle Eastern guy standing in an Irish pub in New Zealand drinking a Corona in the middle of winter and bobbing his head to Ja Rule. (Note… this dude is not a creature of my imagination. I drank a beer next to him yesterday.) There is nothing like traveling to make you realize how big/small the world is. You can be driving into a glacier-carved fiord that is literally as far away from home as it is feasible to get without a team from NASA, turn on the radio and listen to Pink. (here of course I am referring to the white trash turned rapper turned pop starlet turned my stomach) It gives you the feeling that as a species we are becoming really homogenous. Honestly, if you are going to adopt a piece of another culture, the least you could do is try not to adopt the worst shit that we produce. The fact that I have to listen to Daughtry in New Zealand is a monument to the suggestibility of the human animal. Basically, if somebody tells us something is good then we bite. This does not bode well for the tourism industry. Once everything is the same all they will be able to market is the weather.
More to come…

You're the One Who's and Adult

The original focus of this blog was going to be about getting older and coming to terms with things like responsibility and “real” life. I’ve pretty much given up on a motif but I felt like a return to my original mission was overdue. So here goes…

They say you are only as old as you feel. I feel like I’m thirteen, a thirteen year-old with the beginnings of a beer belly, a mortgage, and a hairline that’s fighting a losing battle with his forehead. Aging is a strange experience. I guess I shouldn’t say that because it is a universal ordeal. Still, actually going through it feels unnatural.

Some people are born as adults. They seem to transition into their responsibilities and adult roles without effort or contradictory impulses. However, it seems like a lot of people in my generation (myself included) are very much in a round peg, square hole situation. I’m not talking about irresponsibility or foolishness, that’s too simple a view of the phenomenon. I know plenty of people who are very capable and responsible contributors to society who are very much children masquerading as high powered adults. I can only describe it as a disjoint between my conception of what I thought being an adult meant and the reality of my existence as one. There’s a gap there. As a child I assumed my parents knew how to do everything. My understanding was that there were knowledge and skills that were somehow inherent in all adults. Like a built in time-bomb of maturity that would go off when you reached a certain age… kind of like pubes. You just wake up on day and there they are… profound evidence of getting older. Naturally, I just accepted that when I “grew up” I would acquire adulthood in a similar fashion, roll out of bed one morning to find that I hate loud music and have an overwhelming desire to tuck my shirt in really tight.

Instead, I wake up to the same person I was yesterday, albeit a little balder and slower. I find that rather than my own maturity level rising it seems like my opinion of the general adult population gets lower. It’s not that I get more mature. It’s that I realize that other people are just as juvenile as me. Adulthood is not a transformation into a competent and responsible human being, it’s the slowly dawning realization that nobody else knows what the hell they are doing either.