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I want to start off my thoughts by saying that as a general rule, I'm a fan of children. But why is it that whenever there's a baby in the room people feel the need to relate to the tiny human somehow? We gather around him or even wait our turn to hold him or play with him. There seems to be this incessant need to score points with the child even though it can't even rationalize what's happening around him.
It could be that people feel a need to show off their baby skills to other adults. I can say with honesty that I am guilty of this. I'm a 30-yr old single man, and if there's other single women in the room and a baby as well, I'm prone to show off how sensitive and nurturing I can be with a baby in the hopes that this will cause a strong desire in one of these women to one day perhaps make a baby with me. Course, if it starts crying and I start to get flustered, I'll either hand if off, or if no one is looking, I'll just leave the baby on the kitchen floor if it comes down to it. But what I'm saying is that most of us have this inclination to over-exert energy on a baby that isn't ours.
Where my interest in this endeavor stops is when I feel like I have to compete for time with the baby or try to show someone else up with my baby skills. I will not compete for time with the child nor do I have much tolerance for someone who is hogging the baby in what is usually an attempt to "show off". After all, really new babies are not that interesting so when you're spending more than 2 minutes with a newborn that's not yours, you're just putting on a facade. If the baby is being inundated with attention from 1 or 2 specific persons, I'll simply bail on the situation and pay no heed to this spoiled child. I'll just grab another beer and keep driving.
But what's most interesting however is when strangers want to talk or ask about your baby. "Ohhh, he's so cute, how old is he? Is momma taking you for a stroll today? You look so cute in your little pj's....yes you do!"
And you're like, "okay, can we end this charade please, I don't know you and I got shit to do, I'd like to get on with my day."
The stranger means well of course, but for the most part, that's merely 4 minutes of your time that you're not gonna get back. You're gonna part ways with this person and never see them again, so my take on this kind of interaction is...let's just not even do it. You see a baby, he's cute, he's cuddly, great...now keep it to yourself. When you're up all night nursing him and wiping his explosive behind, then you've earned some time to share your sentiments. Not until then.
Even worse is something that I often see here in New York on the streets and subways; which is REALLY strange looking people (often homeless people) that try to flirt with someone else's baby and its mother. I think if you're missing a shoe and haven't bathed in a week, you absolutely forfeit your right to talk to a baby or her momma. There's something non-intuitive about missing some important teeth and yet still trying to connect socially with a mom and her baby. Indeed, there's a certain physical appearance that you have to keep up if you want to approach a baby, and I"m sorry, but if your left foot is swollen 5 times it's normal size to the point where your tearing your own shoe and you're wearing Frankenstein's blazer....no deal!
"Oh...it's a little baby....hello little baby....and how are we doing today mom?"
"Not good......could you never talk to me again please? See, I'm a mother with a baby which makes me very defensive generally, and when you approach me with cheddar sauce on your beard and a Ralph Lauren cologne called "My Ass", it kinda throws me into panic mode. So if I could just get you to go away and mix in a shower, that'd be swell."
This is never said aloud, but is rattling around in the mother's 'head for sure. I think it's not asking much for everyone to just lay off the baby attention a little bit. I know they're super cute and there's something virtuous about their tenderness and innocence--all good things. I'm simply saying that if the kid's not yours, let's not overdue it and assume roles that don't belong to you.
Currently I'm employed which is more than most people can say right now. I would not want to be "out there" scrambling for jobs that really aren't there. Looking for a job in any climate is really an arduous task and one that I find about as fun as going feet-first into a wood chipper. But it's especially grueling right now because even with optimal experience, skills, and impeccable resumes/portfolios, the windows of opportunity are incredibly scarce.
I think the government should intercede and fire everyone from their jobs right now. Let's all just start over and go back to working with our hands. I for one, enjoy that kind of work to a significant extent. The sense of satisfaction in having actually created or built something has got to be universally more appealing than doing research and then converting a document to a PDF file. Let's bring back the milk man, the farmer, and the cobbler....yes, the cobbler--one who does shoe repair. Surely there's virtue in quitting the day job (or lately, getting laid off) and going back to the drawing board where it all began....handling fire and make-shift tools and wondering what can be done with them.
No longer will it be these hedge fund jack-offs running the show. From here out let it be the man who builds the best treehouse or fort....let him be king! Let the man who owns the most horses be considered the most wealthy. Let's go back to plundering small villages and taking women as we please, surely this would even be empowering to the lesbian community.
Okay maybe that's a bit too far, but you get the idea. Returning to simple and basic living wouldn't be such a bad concept. Let's get back to building and creating and cease in our habits of strictly buying, selling and trading. If you don't believe how serious I am about this, then you should know that I just opened up a lemonade stand right by my desk and have sold 3 cups! Tomorrow I might build a go-cart and haul some ass down the streets of Harlem....of course, I'll have to put some sick rims on that thing, it might get stolen but I'm not afraid to put "the club" on it either.
All we need to do is come down from our lofty place of borrowing and trading and get back to a place where owning some livestock meant something in the world. I'm gonna go grind some corn now.
I sit here and try to crank out a brief piece of interesting literature once a day. It isn't always once a day and it isn't always interesting. But I try. I often wonder though, how far "trying" can get someone in the world of ideas. How hard must a writer try to put something on paper that's interesting to read? How long must songwriter sit with his instrument before some melody comes to him that is worth expounding on? How hard must a scientist or philosopher think to come up with an orginal theory?
There's some best selling literature out there right now that is tackling these concepts far better and exhaustively than I intend to. Nevertheless, reading books like Outliers and The Tipping Point (both by Malcolm Gladwell), though helpful in understanding the why of execution, don't really serve as a how-to formula for generating and marketing something good. It's not that simple. In fact, Gladwell's main overarching thesis to his books are that it's truly NOT that simple; there's so much that goes into a successful idea and often it literally seem to arrive ex-nihilo. But I wish not to indulge in analysis of these works or attempt to critique or re-formulate the ideas behind them. Rather, as usual, I wish to complain. Being a comedian by nature, God has gifted me with a keen observational sense that allows me to look at the world, notice what's wrong, and then essentially complain about it in a humorous and relatable way.
My main complaint on ideas is that you cannot generate them on purpose. This is a huge problem for any creative type; you simply never know where ideas come from or when they're gonna strike...let alone a good one. Granted, you can do things and put yourself in situations that are conducive to inspiration and reflection but ultimately the actual idea seems to come about randomly, from no purposeful source. Even just a moment ago when I sat down to write this blog; I always wonder "what's interesting to write about today". I drew suck a huge blank that, as you can see, I ended up writing about the fact that I often don't know what to write about.
In my field--the creative arts--I have nothing by my own mind to rely on which is a downright scary scenario in and of itself. And like anyone else, my success is contingent upon my work (among many other things), and my work is contingent upon ideas, and ideas are merely intellectual properties, the source of which is an abstraction--the mind. So if the artist encounters some kind of creative blockage, then he basically has no new work to show.
Obviously, I'm in that place right now which is why this blog entry sucks big time. But I think what bothers me the most is that it's out of my control. All I can do is keep reading, writing, going to shows, interacting with peers and friends, and keeping my eyes open to things that seem funny or odd to me. This is all one can do to cause ideas to surface.
So what have we learned thus far? Well, we've learned that I've been writing for a solid 20 minutes now and have only been able to produce this crap that you just read; seemingly interesting but ultimately without a point. And that's exactly my point. Sometimes you just cannot make a point no matter how hard you try. And when this happens, I think the creative person just needs to put the pen, brush, guitar, or microphone down, and consider his attempt valiant but with an ultimately resounding answer "Not today I guess." Which is exactly what I'm going to do now.
Let's get a few credentials out of the way. I have a bachelor's degree in Communication from a top university and was able to graduate with a 3.7 gpa according to my resume. I do not consider myself an intellectual giant by any means, in fact I often surprise myself with how lame my mind can be at times. Somtimes I can't even concentrate enough to listen to someone's story and then I turn around and ask a question that they just answered if only my dumb-ass was listening. At that point, I appear very stupid. Nevertheless, on the whole I remain above average in intelligence which makes the following complaint a legitimate one.
I was at a party recently and this little girl (daughter of the hosts) couldn't have been more than 5 years old. She was enrolled at some Julliard caliber music school here in Manhattan and had accomplished musicians for parents. So she's probably a little smarter and advanced than the average 5 yr-old. But that is no excuse for what ensued. Not knowing her and having a liking for well-behaved children (emphasis on well-behaved, I'm not a afraid to smack a child that's not mine in public), I decided to make small talk with her. Upon finding out that she had recently lost a tooth, I playfully asked, "Oh that's good...did the tooth fairy come for you?"
Now I think I'm about to score huge points and perhaps get a warm hug from an adorable child. Not so. She adjusts her mood and tone, points her finger at me and says, "I happen to know for a fact that there's no such thing as the tooth fairy." My own psychological reaction was that of a perplexing change, something like, "Yeeeeaaahhhh...I'm gonna go ahead and ask you not to make me look stupid in front of the other guests."
Here I am, a grown man, trying to get on board with some goodwill towards a child, and she comes back with a factual correction and makes me look like a jackass in front of everyone? I'm not having that. My actual reaction was that I shut up right then and there and went back to whatever cheese spread I was eating, desperately hoping that no one saw me get schooled by a 5 yr-old prodigy who apparently can't have any fun.
However, my gut reaction was simply to respond, "Okay, no tooth fairy...fine. How bout this economy we're in right now? Your thoughts? Personally I think it's a fiscal problem with too much guesswork being done by greedy bankers, and the exchange of dead assets from the gov't back into the private sector is not the solution. What do you think?.......What's that?........Oh that's right, you don't know shit about economics! Maybe you should have stuck with the tooth fairy when I gave you the opportunity. Now get out of here, go skin your knee so that I have some indication that you're an actual child."
What kind of child at age 5 is not on board with the tooth fairy? And how am I, a reasonable adult, supposed to know that she's not? But because I wasn't, I got shown-up in front of all the other guests. I wanted to throw her ass into the top part of her grand piano, then close the top and have a fat friend sit on it while I knock out a little Linus and Lucy on the keys.
There's such a thing as being too smart for your own good when you'e that young. If it were a little boy, that's the kind of kid that's gonna end up getting an F in P.E., because his parents couldn't correct his physical growth well enough to keep him from striking out in kickball (a shameful thing). Needless to say, he'll be picked last every time on the field/court and even at that he'll often be asked to "sit this one out."
So a lesson to every parent and every child prodigy...If I say there's a tooth fairy, and you're 5 years old......there's a tooth fairy. End of discussion.
I'll fully admit that in reading a fellow blogger's recent post I was inspired to take off a bit on the same concept...Food Network shows. This is a fascinating phenomenon that has happened in television over the last 6 years or so. I think it's fabulous, especially on the plane when there's otherwise not much else to watch.
I'm a fan of cooking myself and fancy myself above average for a bachelor. Granted, I have a serious girlfriend now so that has been incentive to sharpen my skills and is generally a good motivator to cook. And so it's riveting to watch some of these TV chefs work and concoct things that I've never even thought about. Those individuals are true artists and deserve their own show I suppose.
But what I want to rant on for a bit are the people like Rachel Ray and Guy Fieri who appear to only be able to make food for kids who are on there way to fat camp. I was watching Rachel Ray not too long ago because my only other options were literally Dude Where's My Car and Meatballs 2 (the first one is a classic...let it be said). So I'm watching her do her thing, and on that particular day she was throwing together some kind of tac0-stuffed Pizza rolls; wherein you take the ingredients of a taco, put it on pizza and roll it up! And then it hit me....this woman cooks her own trash. She's been able to make a great living coming up with food for hung-over people. It's like her philosophy is to take 2 awful foods, combine them and come up with some concoction that only a 7 yr old would do on accident. I can see her coming back from a commercial right now....
"Welcome back to THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED ONE NIGHT.....we're in the middle of making chili bratwurst dogs topped with tater tots and macaroni salad. This is an old recipe that my mom had from when she looked in her trash can one day..."
That's exactly what she should be saying. Is it just me, or do you have to be a sophomore at Devry holding down a part-time job at a hardware store to enjoy her recipes?
Guy Fieri is not much better. Although he gets a few extra points for not taking two foods that don't go together and trying to create some drunken hybrid version. At least he's not coming back from break saying "Okay...so today we're gonna take some corn beef hash and make a salad with it!" Nevertheless, there's a reason he does the TGI Friday's commercials...that's all he can do apparently. I'm all for wings and chicken kebabs and taquitos. But even he stretches the line with something called a Jambalaya sandwich. I order this all the time..."Yeah, I'm gonna get the Jambalaya sandwich...only hold the bread cuz as it turns out, I'm not mentally disabled."
I appreciate what these people are trying to do.....slack off in the kitchen and essentially get by on a fairly nice pair of breasts or a ridiculous looking bleached spikey hair-do. If that's what it takes to get my own cooking show and put together meals that E.T. could muster with his 3 fingers on each hand, then consider me a viable candidate. I just need to work on the spikey blonde hair-do.
Don't let the title fool you, I'm definitely working all five days this week and it's a crying shame. But that's why I'd like to suggest a re-assessment of how our current work week is laid out. I really don't know the story of how we collectively agreed to work 5 days a week, while only taking 2 for rest and calling it our weekend. I'm a huge fan of rest, a man of leisure, if you will. I don't consider myself lazy by any means, I just know how to relax when it's time to relax. Which is why I think everyone should consider banding together and re-formulating our work week from 5 days to 4.
It seems arbitrary to me that 5 days is the optimal amount of days to work. Very few of us have the luxury of working whenever we want; most of us are forced to adhere to a system that insists on us being up in the morning on Monday and being miserable until at least 2pm that day. I say, "why continue this nonsense?". I think from now on Mondays should be the new Sundays and then we go back to work on Tuesday and work til Friday. Far from being equally arbitrary, there are some good reasons to suggest this. The first is obvious, now we're looking at 3-day weekends all the time. Who in this miserable spectrum we call "corporate America" doesn't look forward to a 3-day weekend? The answer is nobody...we all do. Thus, it seems linear and rational to adjust accordingly and make that the new work-week.
Another reason is the nature and "personality" of a Tuesday as opposed to a Monday. Everyone hates Mondays, but I don't know of one person who has beef with Tuesdays. Tuesday has the most neutral image and personality of any day of the week. We don't look forward to a Tuesday necessarily, but nor do we hate it; thus making it the perfect day to kick off our work-week. No one wants to "go in" on a day that they hate, and neither do we wish to "go in" on a day that we like. Tuesday is the perfect day to start work. With this new implementation of attitude toward days of the week, we find ourselves in an agreeable shift pattern. With the 4-day work week, we no longer feel the creeping stress on Sunday nights in thinking about the next morning. Consequentially, we no longer dread Mondays and yet as an added bonus, our love and appreciation for Fridays remains in tact. This is a win-win proposition; one worth serious consideration.
Another viable reason (for me at least) is that HBO has some stellar programming late at night that keeps a man up later than he'd wish to stay up given that the next day he must go back to work. I'm not talking "cinemax late", I mean that if I want to catch Eastbown and Down to end my weekend, daddy has to stay up til 10:30, which isn't that late, but it kind of is for most people. Thankfully I have DVR.
So I would like to start a movement in American culture that has us sleeping late on Mondays knowing full-well that Tuesday--a day marked by attitudinal neutrality--will be the start of our week. Of course one might critique this philosophy by stating that this will only shift the aforementioned anxieties and problems forward one day...Monday will become the new Sunday and Tuesday will become the new Monday. But I remind my critics to keep one last crucial argument in mind.......this is just a blog!
Tonight, I'm proud to say (yes...proud) that I'm going to see Fleetwood Mac at MSG. This will be a great event for me, not so much because it's Fleetwood Mac, even though they're a phenomenal band, but because it gives me a chance to watch a very select group of people perform for thousands of other not-so-select people and allows me a chance to reflect on the wrong choices I made in my career. Music is an integral part of my life, it has moved me from a very young age, especially bands from the "classic" genre. But you see, I'm sitting here writing a blog at my sorry and pathetic administrative job, and Lyndsey Buckingham is 4 hours from going on stage and making his guitar squeal like a stuck pig in one of the most notorious venues in the world.
When I see that kind of thing, I immediately regret my decision to go to college. I should have stayed in my garage and mastered a musical instrument, formed a band, and then hit the road telling everything and anything else to piss off. Truthfully I had this desire at some point, but it came at around age 20.....it's hard to get good at a musical instrument when you start that late. As they say, it's much easier to learn music and languages (which is essentially what music is) at a younger age. Nonetheless, I formed a band in college called Zero Gravity, we practiced and practiced and had the fortunate success of opening for my dick at my buddy's backyard in front of 9 people. When the adrenalin wore off, we played for a solid hour and a half and much to our surprise apparently Zero Gravity was able to garner zero appreciation and a musical career that equaled zero. But it was worth every minute of it!
Now if you're sitting there thinking that I secretly wish I would have become a rock star....let me just say, there's no secret about it. I think it's just about the best career one could have, assuming you don't end up main-lining Jack Daniel's into your neck to get high. Then again...don't knock it....etc. So when I go to see a concert of one of my favorite bands, it's a love/hate relationship. I love the experience and yet hate those bastards for succeeding when I'm stuck here blogging about Ronnie James Dio knocking heads off at the Beacon Theater some time ago. Don't misunderstand me please, I'm not bitter. I just want to share the stage with Eddie Van Halen and pretend I can sing like David Coverdale. I'm the kind of guy who upon hearing a great rock song, would play air drums in front of my girlfriend's family at Thanksgiving dinner (first time meeting them) with my knife and fork and possibly attempt a drumstick twirl only to have it end up flying into her grandma's eye! Of course I'd feel terrible that it happened, but I will NOT apologize for "feelin' it".
And so hear I sit at the end of my work day anxiously awaiting to see 4-5 people doing what I wished I was doing for a living. Hell, not even for a living, just for a chance to redeem my sad performance in that friggin' backyard.
Off to the concert I go.
