An Old Man’s Tumor, an Old Woman’s Longing

Today I went up to my favorite resting place; Mt. Lemmon. It is a huge relief to be able to escape from the desert floor and rise up into the pines like a fresh wind. I know the curvy road up the mountains so well that I drive it one-handed. I roll down my windows and inhale the scent of wet earth, resin from the trees, and enjoy birdsong from the anonymous orators in the trees.

This morning I was feeling drained and raw, my brain stretched in so many different directions the night before that it had snapped and now lay in a proverbial pool in the base of my skull.

So I went hiking. Walking through the forest immersed my mind in a salve, the greens and browns mixed by the slanted morning light, the birds’ varied notes falling on my heart like raindrops.

And I saw this wizened old man along the trail, bent over by old age and possibly scoliosis. He twisted and bent over, and at one point tendons unraveled, giving a view through them. He has seen better years. He had a tumor (two, actually) that clung to his neck.

I felt sorry for him, but he wasn’t completely twisted and broken. He had a bright green tuft of leaves at the end of this long, curved branch.

Next to this elder, only a few feet away was another figure. She was tall, long-limbed but curved with age. Gone were any external adornings of youth; only the spartan beauty of wisdom and a arms held out in a long-sustained desire.

They are old, and overlooked among their younger, healthier counterparts. They are two in a forest of two million, but today they both caught my attention. It is a strange gift to not have deadened the pangs of longing even in old age, like these trees– a kind of longing described by C.S. Lewis as a desire to find “where all the beauty came from.” There is a kind of beauty in the longing of these two broken figures, a beauty more apparent quite possibly because they are more broken than most. It takes a great deal of strength to deny death in ones exposed bones and bring beauty in a broken world; and yet, these trees do so naturally.

A dead tree becomes the foundation for a carpet of green moss; a bowed limb is the most amiable of rests for an avian opera.

An Inside Out World

My previous post was on why Inside Out made me cry; this post is about what happened when I cried.

I tried to pretend I wasn’t crying.

I mentally berated myself for taking so seriously the death of a furry, pink imaginary friend who chatters like a dolphin and cries candy.

After the movie, my sister, niece and I were walking out of the theater when I heard my sister say, “Man, I can’t believe I cried!” I was quick to assent that “I cried too!” and my niece softly chimed in “Me too…”

I was so relieved to find out that my niece had cried at the same time as I had in the movie. But I had tried to avoid and hide the fact that I’d cried; so did my family. But what was the big deal? Why did I feel such a pressing need to hide my emotions? And perhaps more disturbingly, why did my 11-year-old niece already have a similar compulsion in place?

There is a huge societal stricture in place that tells us we must not show our (true) emotions in public (or even at all). There is this obsession with appearing happy, even when we may not be. This may seem an extreme statement to link with shedding a few tears over a kid’s movie, but if I don’t feel comfortable showing my emotions in such an environment, why would I be at ease showing emotions in more “adultish” situations? I think we in the western culture are consumed with the idea that everything must look at least alright, good, or preferably, perfect.  If someone peels away the false nacre of superficial happiness, we immediately scatter. We call it depression. We avoid “those poor people.” We call it a “phase.”

We are scared to admit that our lives are not perfect when our lives are comically, Michael-Bay-is-helming-the-next-Oscar-winning-drama- far from perfection. We refuse to abandon the hallucination that the world is okay, that things are fine. Things are not fine. This world is f—ed up. There are more mass murderings, more slavery than ever before in history, more human trafficking, more wars, diseases spreading every day, and it doesn’t stop. It has never stopped. This world has always been messed up. And only when we abandon our false idea that the world is ‘okay,’ and only when we acknowledge the sheer, quivering morass of depravity of our world can we maybe turn from our delusions of ‘rightness’ to the real solution.

The solution isn’t more government; there have been good governments and bad governments, but they all fail. The solution isn’t a redistributed social or economic structure. It isn’t religion; religion has been used and tried and found as empty as ever.

There is only one thing that I have ever found to still my trembling heart, to take the weight off my soul of a million sins. And that thing is a relationship with Jesus, the Christ, God’s son. I don’t mean Jesus as some paint him—the harbinger of hatred and doom. I don’t mean Jesus as some milquetoast man who preached a vague sermon on acceptance and love that accepts everything, even things that will kill the soul. I’m talking about the Jesus who loved fiercely, extravagantly, and who hated sin and death, those things that would dare steal away his beloved, messed up humans who he died for.

It says in Corinthians that the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are dying, but to those who are being saved it is the power of God. So maybe it is foolishness (or seems like foolishness to some) to place my trust in Christ, but when compared to the choice of trusting in a world that has always let us down, is always broken and decaying… Well. I don’t think I’m the foolish one.

The 31st-Century Archaeologist, diggin’ up your bones, diggin’ up your house

Consider this scenario:

It is the year 3015. You just graduated from Princeton University, a school that hasn’t turned out very many notable figures in the last 200 years, but still holds prestige as one of the oldest universities in the world, so you feel pretty proud of that. You graduated with a “Masterful” degree in Archaeology with a specialization in the Early Technological Age; that is, the 20^th-23^rd centuries.

You find this era in history one of the most exciting, because so many landmarks were achieved: the first development of relativity and quantum theories, the first extra-atmospheric travel (you took a field trip to Jupiter for your senior class in high school), some leaps in civil rights—some of them forward, and some backwards. The 21^st century saw the rise of the concept and valuing of “diversity—“ but it’s easy to see looking back that only certain voices were allowed to define what types of diversity were acceptable. The 22^nd century saw a surge of Christianity in the eastern hemisphere, as well as a tidal wave of philanthropic work that saw the whole world connected through the infantile versions of the Intercube—it was called the internet back then. *sigh* It makes you nostalgic just to think of it.

Sometimes you open access to the archaic web, just for kicks, and start scrolling through 1000-year-old websites, data, song-bits, videos. They are a bit boring compared to the immersive videos you play today—ones that you load into the media room and can walk through, interact with. But these grainy, tiny videos have their charm as well.

Okay. Back to the 21^st century.

What do you think a 31^st-century archaeologist would study? A large part of me hopes that somehow things like Twilight and Micki Ninaj… Er… Nicki Minaj, are lost forever, wiped away from the interwebs and never to be recovered in the future.

One can dream, can’t one?

I was wondering yesterday, listening to a song that borrowed a phrase and a score of melody from another song, whether historians would pick up on song influences throughout our contemporary history. I wonder if future historians will write journal articles like “The significance of Amazing Grace and Its Cultural Percolation,” or, “How Early 21^st Century Dance Forms Motivated Production of the Artificial Sacrum and Posterior Vertebrae in Later Years.”

One can hope that they won’t pick up on certain things—things like YOLO, the cringe-worthy 21 Jump-Street movie series; or the fact that the 276 girls kidnapped by the Boko Haram have dropped off the internet, national coverage, and off anyone’s agenda—without them being returned to their homes. It is so sad that their reclamation, their return, their social campaign that stretched worldwide was no less of a fad than planking or Harlem Shake.

What do you want to be remembered for?

I’m an Entitled Generation Y Dream-Baby

I’m not a baby boomer, I’m a babied dreamer, according to Tim Urban’s Generation Y(uppie) article. And I’m pretty sure he’s right.

The article explains why I feel entitled to a chance at breaking into the writing world. I quit my low-level job in the fast-food industry and for the next two months I’ll be cutting my teeth on the freelance writing business, an even lower paying job industry, where websites like Elance and Odesk will pay you .5 cents a word to write the next New York Times front-line article. And no, I don’t mean .05, as in five cents a word– I mean half a cent, as in .005 dollars a word.

As a recent college graduate (big surprise there), I knew that choosing to major in what I loved (non-fiction writing, Linguistics, and Arabic) was not the safest route– But it’s what I loved to do. And it’s what I felt would fulfill me the most. But, as Urban so indelicately points out, green grass isn’t enough for Generation Y GYPSYS (Gen Y Protagonists and Special Yuppies). A grass-eating, rainbow-spitting unicorn must fertilize our verdant lawns.
I deserve a job is the mentality—and not just any job, but one that fulfills me on a spiritual, emotional, and magical level.

The grass under my feet isn’t looking very green currently, however. So, I’m thinking of going back for more school, more “enlightenment,” and a Ph.D in a field (academics) that has a depressingly static employment field. In case you haven’t heard, they don’t’ offer job security or tenure to  much of anybody anymore.

But hey! I won’t be happy until I get that unicorn. And I’ve worked hard, so I deserve what I want, right?
Urban gives some good advice to yuppies like me: 1) Stay Wildly Ambitious, 2) Stop Thinking That You’re Special, and 3) Ignore Everyone Else.

But, as we all know, it’s quite easy to give advice, and not so much to take it. But I’m going to try. I’ve got the ambitious part covered, and I’m coming to the realization that I’m not a special little snowflake. But ignoring everyone else? That’s a bit more difficult, especially when you can’t help but perceive (the falsified reality) that everyone else is doing Just a Bit Better than you are.

Maybe Generation Y’s problems stem from the mentality that what we have is never enough. If there is one iota of our dreams that have gone unfulfilled, this spoils the joy that comes out of any success that we have been able to achieve. I think that my generation, despite all the talk of green grass and unicorns, are very pessimistic: which is the attitude you accrue when you expect life to go completely your way, all the time, and make no allowances for differentiation.

This doesn’t sound like a new problem for the most recent generation to deal with– this is a problem that goes deeper than contemporary ideologies. It’s a human nature problem, one that humanity has struggled with, I daresay, for generations.

So, while I don’t think my Yuppie generation will win the “Best Lawn” award, I doubt we’ll do much worse than our predecessors, either. I think we’re neither Stupendously Awesome nor Horrendously Awful.

Or who knows, maybe we are Special Little Snowflakes. But as we know, no two snowflakes are alike; so if Generation Y is special, Generation X was pretty special, too.

Generation Y is just more Specialer.
But I will leave a discussion of disintegrating grammar and morphology for another post.