Author Archives: Admin

Spring

I was once told that people have a mental image of themselves as being of a certain age.

Some see themselves as perpetual teenagers.  They run around full of energy, excited at everything, acting irresponsibly, and being passionate about everything and everyone even up into their twilight years.  These people really enjoy their youth.

Others have an image of themselves as elderly and they are very reserved.  Even when they’re young they tend to take things slowly, they’re somewhat dubious about new experiences and prefer to sit back and observe life.  They have everything figured out in their later years.

In this regard I think I have always been middle-aged and possibly that is why I am finally hitting my stride now that my physical age begins to match my mental age.  But more on that another time.

As to seasons I suppose that I have always been an Autumn person and that Spring leaves me feeling a bit underpowered and listless.  I find it to be a season of increasingly hot and humid weather.  After a cool dry Winter I find the heat and humidity sapping my strength and I know that there won’t be any respite for at least 6 months or more.  But more than that, I am at the farthest point in the year away from my natural Autumn and I can palpably feel the loss of power within me.

In some ways this sets up a conflict within me.  Spring is supposed to be the season of renewal and growth and here I am feeling the opposite.  But at the same time I can appreciate all the colors of the blooming flowers, the new crop of squirrels, baby birds, kittens, and other neighborhood animals that will be appearing around the neighborhood.

I grit my teeth and bear it and remind myself that it’s all part of the necessary cycle of life.  The fresh green leaves, the blooming flowers, life springing anew.  It’s all necessary to bring my vibrant Autumn colors that I love.  Spring slowly ramps up and gets ready to deliver Summer to us and we here in Houston look on with a little bit of trepidation as it approaches.

So what’s wrong with that?

We’ve all heard about all the excesses of the federal government collecting data on American citizens or of the attempts to regulate the internet more and more.  But have you taken a look at what’s happening locally?

A few weeks ago the Houston city council voted to pass a law allowing neighbors to inform the police if their neighbors are “hoarders”.  The law would allow the police to enter the home and assess if the person is a hoarder and then fine them if necessary.

Yesterday I caught a story about a parent whose son participated in sports and died during spring training due to a heart defect.  He has begun a campaign to make heart EKG screenings mandatory for all student athletes in Texas.

Little things.  You could argue they’re innocuous if not beneficial for individuals and society as a whole.  Why would anyone in their right mind complain about such things?  You’d be right in thinking that by themselves they are beneficial but these laws don’t exist in a vacuum.  You can easily argue that they’re the stepping stones to laws that will have greater latitude to intrude on your privacy.

Mayor Parker already alluded to that as she commented that at the current time the new anti-hoarding ordinance would only apply to townhouses and apartments but that it could easily be expanded to single family homes in the future.  The public good is what is important.  The individual counts for little or not at all.  What really gets to me is that this law relies upon neighbors to become government informants.

The EKG screenings?  Wonderful for student athletes but what happens when someone wants to make the program mandatory for all students and wants to include other conditions besides heart defects?  What happens to all that private medical information when it’s in the hands of a bureaucracy?   Maybe someone in the insurance field or some future employer gets his hands on it?

So what’s the answer to these 2 problems?  I don’t really know.  But thrashing our individual liberties sure isn’t the answer.  Giving away our right to privacy for convenience sake is the last thing that our government should be engaged in.

 

backsliding

It’s amazing how easy it is to slip back into old habits and how seductive it is to consider returning to the old patterns of life.

Last week I ran into some “friends” I knew from way back in the 90’s.  These were some people who I knew from the clubs in the glory days of the Richmond strip area when it competed with Washington Avenue as the place to party in Houston.

Very friendly folk, they immediately began telling me about their lives since those days and about other people they we all knew.  They said I should really check back in with the clubs and bars and see what was going on.  I was half tempted to as I hadn’t been back to those haunts in ages.  That’s when it happened.

They began with all the gossip, all the petty rivalries, all the “dirt” about people we mutually knew.  Suddenly I remembered why I had left the club scene back then.

Bad habits are so easy to get back into.  The temptation to let it go and fall back into them is so overwhelming at times.  But it’s not just with people.  Set a pack of cookies or donuts near me for a day and see what happens to them.

A little voice in the back of my head quietly and quite reasonably asks “What’s the harm?  Why not just go back to what you know best?  Why go through the regimented diet, the exercise, all the hassle?”

I think back to three years ago (no, nearly 4 now) and how I felt back then.  The listless days of trying to fill in the hours between meals, the lack of useful purpose and the lack of direction that I had allowed myself to fall into.  I was living exclusively for the moment.  Don’t get me wrong, I got plenty of things done but it was all done without any plan or done on the spur of the moment.

But it’s more than just getting myself fit and getting my life in order.  There’s an old Aggie poem (yes, they do exist) that in part goes:

Fond memories bring a sigh — but nothing more;
Now we are men and life’s a greater thrill,

Reliving those old moments is pleasurable, for a moment at least.  But it’s not the type of life that I want for myself these days.  Thinking about it, I would not feel that it would satisfy me and I would feel forever miserable now that I’ve experienced more.

The way back no longer exists.  The path forward is the only way to go.

the penalties of new technologies

I’ve always liked new technologies.  I like to think about all the possibilities that they represent and how they can improve my life.  Apart from making things easier for me they can create new opportunities that I hadn’t considered before.  However new technologies have always come at a price.

A few weeks ago I gave my reasons for not trying the new Google glass technology.  One of the main reasons for me is that it has not yet matured to a level that I feel it will benefit me significantly.

Not a unique problem in new technologies.  If you grew up in the 80’s you probably saw this commercial on TV and are familiar with “car knocks”

“car knocks” was a problem associated with unburned fuel igniting in an engine while it was running or just after it had turned off.  Apart from being noisy and embarrassing, it could damage engines.  The problem lay with the fuel for the most part.  Gasoline by itself is extremely volatile and can ignite at unexpected times.  In order to stabilize it, chemists in the early part of the century added lead to the gasoline.  This helped stabilize the fuel but it also released noxious clouds of smoke with lead in it.  Not very healthy.  In fact some studies claim a rise in crime rates may have been due to an increase in lead pollution in urban areas.  Whether this is true or not, I don’t know.

In the 1970s new laws were passed to eliminate lead in gasoline and switch to ethanol.  The problem with this was that car engine design and gasolines had to be re-developed to work.  So while the chemists and engineers tinkered we had to endure about 10 years of knocking car engines.  Eventually they refined the engines and redeveloped the gasoline recipes and car knocking is now a rare occurrence.

Eventually new technologies become refined enough so that their benefits can be enjoyed by the majority of the population but at the beginning, those that run to embrace those technologies must be prepared to deal with the shortcomings.

 

Your devils and angels

This goes back to a posting written by Leslie Farnsworth last year about sympathetic characters.

When you write a work of fiction several elements go into making a great story.  You don’t want to just relate facts, that’s news reporting (or at least that’s what news reporting used to be).  Among the elements are character development and knowing a little more about both the protagonist and the antagonist in the story.  But exactly how much is enough and how much is too much?

Fleshing out your villains as well as your heroes can add more dimensions to your characters and make the audience connect to them in a more personal way but knowing too much can sometimes backfire on you and make them less appealing as you expose too much of their flaws and make them all too pedestrian and common.

Probably the starkest example of this phenomena would be the character of Darth Vader or Annakin Skywalker in the Star Wars stories.  In the original 3 movies Darth Vader was a menacing somber figure.  He was the literal black knight.  Monolithic and evil under his black armor.  He had only the most scant of back stories.  A hero that had turned to evil and who had betrayed all that he loved.  At the end of the stories he receives redemption through his son.

In the prequel movies that came afterwards we receive the entire story.  We see him grow up from an annoying kid that gets into predicaments and somehow always gets by (something like a space faring Dennis the menace), to a whiny self-absorbed teen obsessed with his own self-image and determined to get his way no matter what, and finally to a somewhat megamaniacal and paranoid young man who ends up betraying all his friends and ultimately trying to murder his own wife.  Full of character flaws and most of those flaws marking him as a genuinely weak individual.

Many people who I know felt that knowing the entire story behind his beginnings made the Darth Vader character into something that they could not and did not find as alluring before knowing the whole story.

In some cases I think that readers want to see their villains as “totally” evil and not “partially” evil.  They want to be presented with some absolutes that are solid and definite and don’t want to think that maybe there’s an excuse or maybe there’s an explanation why someone is the way that they are.

The writer’s job becomes to add just enough to the character but to leave something the reader’s imagination to fill in.  Let their minds clothe the character as they see fit.  That imagination will be your greatest ally in captivating the other person to follow your work.

 

movies as complex social commentary

A couple of weeks ago I saw a very good biopic about Alejandro Jodorowski, an avant-garde director, that tried to bring out a version of the science fiction novel, Dune, to the big screen back in the 1970s.  Apart from directing he has been known to star, produce, and screenwrite his movies.  One of the things that he said in the movie struck me as very revealing.

“The challenge of creating a movie is to take what is essentially the auditory experience of reading and turning it into a visual experience”

This is a problem that I have seen in various attempts to adapt very good books into movies.  For example the stories of H.P. Lovecraft are notorious for being nearly impossible to capture on the screen.  The few times they have been adapted they were not only box office flops but dramatic flops.

Part of the problem is that the elements found in some books such as the setting descriptions, character descriptions, even the general tone of a novel are hard to represent on the screen.

That’s why for me it’s a pleasure to find those screen writers that are consummate professionals and can turn something that would normally reside in the pages of a book and capture not just the basic elements of the story but the essence of the tale.  I think it’s a special skill.

I’ve been wanting to write a post about a book I read a couple of months ago but I haven’t quite known how to approach it.  David Itzkoff from the New York Times wrote a book about the movie Network.  The book is mainly about the making of the movie but for me the most important part was about the writer, Paddy Chayefsky.  A truly brilliant writer, the term prophetic is usually used to describe his work.  He takes complex subjects that he could probably have put down on paper but his preferred medium was visual (movies and TV).

His works pretty accurately summarized the post war change of the nuclear family in the 1950s (Marty), the coming institutionalization of modern health care (The Hospital), and the turn towards “reality programming” in TV (Network).

If you haven’t caught any of these movies I would urge you to catch-all of them but Network is the jewel in the crown.  The movie centers around a failing TV network that exploits a mentally disturbed man, Howard Beale, for ratings and follows it up with covertly supporting and filming a criminal group of revolutionaries for a TV show and then having them execute Beale on live television for more ratings.

Along the way Chayefsky pens a truly disturbing scene about the corporate view of the world and nature.

The movie delves deeply into what we might expect in the future (back in the 70s) of television programming and considers just how ruthless corporations can be about getting their way.

Chayefsky creates complicated supporting characters, each with their own fears and desires and all striving to control Howard.  The movie has mini subplots revolving around the marriage of one of the supporting characters and the unspoken machinations of the corporation in charge trying to make as much money as possible.

But Chayefsky isn’t alone in creating works that would have a lot to say about the future that we would live in.  Other luminaries would tackle a wide range of issues and let us look at the possible dystopian worlds that could occur if we were not vigilant and that have partly occurred anyways.   Most of these are only found in movie form.  I could write entire articles about each (and still may one day), but briefly:

  • Harry Harrison tackled global warming, overpopulation, and resource shortages in Soylent Green.
  • George Lucas took a page from Aldous Huxley and explored social engineering and drug escapism in THX1138
  • Ray Bradbury delved into the degradation of culture and literacy in Fahrenheit 451
  • Phillip K Dick explored the thin line between man and machine in Blade Runner
  • Andrew Niccol considered the social ramifications of genetic engineering in Gattaca
  • John Carpenter did a brilliant send up of runaway capitalism in They Live

These movies provide me as much satisfaction to me as would a well written book.  They provide all the elements that I would find in other media and to me at they have a lot to consider and think about long after the image fades from the screen.

How much farther we still have to go

The current big news is that of the owner of a professional basketball team being recorded making some racist remarks.  He will probably face stiff penalties for his actions.

Last year an actor and popular commentator was overheard making anti-gay remarks and lost his job.  A few weeks ago he did it again on a social media site.

A few years ago a presidential candidate was recorded saying he didn’t care about a large percentage of the American people.  A remark that contributed to his loss in the election.

All of these people have been penalized for their actions.  As these events were widely reported in the media, the expectation is that there will be some sort of sanction for what they have said.  You would think after a couple of examples that people would learn.  But as it continues to happen it makes me seriously wonder how many people are really open minded and don’t pre-judge or hold prejudicial thoughts.

I mean these are all people that are constantly in the limelight.  They are used to being scrutinized and inspected all the time.  They are not ignorant or new to contemporary social trends.  Yet when push comes to shove or when they feel relaxed they easily and naturally go with their prejudicial attitudes.

I have to wonder if these are just the dying spasms of attitudes held by older generations or if this is really symptomatic of attitudes and ideas held by a majority of people in secret.

little things

It almost always starts that way doesn’t it?  Progress, development, change.  Whether you’re talking about the march of history, or evolution, or even just doing something in your own life.  Some tiny little detail changes and forces you to adapt and before you know you have wholesale dramatic changes.

People always talk up big moments in life where you have to make some stark or dramatic decision that will alter your destiny.  Moments that are portentous as they are melodramatic.  But I’ve found that those times, although they do exist, don’t really determine the course of your life as much as those small seemingly innocuous decisions that end up  making a big difference in your life.

Some examples.

Back in college my dad would send me his mining journal magazines from time to time.  One thing that caught my eye was an advertising insert from a start-up Australian software company.  The insert was a glossy colorful ad with a CD that had an evaluation copy of their software (ER Mapper).  As I had access to computers with CD-ROM drives (a rare thing back in the early 90s)  I tried out the software.  I wasn’t too impressed but later on when I went to write my resume, in the software section I wrote down ER Mapper.  That little detail along with my knowledge of computers landed me my first job.

In the mid 90s I loved going on newsgroup forums.  One day a correspondent from the UK wanted to chat more and asked if I had ever tried Yahoo chat.  I had not but I gave it a go.  We had a nice chat but more importantly this led me to discover the Yahoo chat rooms.  It was there that I found my first long-term relationship.  The relationship didn’t last but this contact led me to Myspace, which led me to OkCupid, then to Facebook, and in a roundabout way eventually led me here to start writing this blog.

Last example, a few years ago the city decided to do extensive road repairs in West Houston.  Up to that point I had been taking sedate short walks to promote my fitness levels and really not getting anywhere.  The road repairs forced me to take longer detours and extend my walking route and to do some running to make up for the extra distance.  This led me to taking longer walks and running longer distances.  I began piecing together little half mile sprints here, quarter-mile jogs there and eventually I put it all together and found I could easily run 6 miles per day and on exceptional days 11 miles like last weekend.  Not up to the level of a marathon yet but getting there.

Little things, they do add up to be a lot.

the friend zone thing

What is it?  How did you get in it?  How to get out.

So the “friend zone” is pretty much a familiar term to most people under 50.  You are interested in someone romantically but they do not reciprocate the feeling.  Although you think of yourself as very compatible in that fashion they do not.  They in fact see you as a peer, a companion, a friend but that’s it and to you that isn’t far enough.  You’ve reached the limit that this relationship will go and even though you want it to progress farther it won’t.  To you it feels as though you’ve been unfairly imprisoned.

Now before you get all excited about this being a new phenomenon be assured that the friend zone has been around since time immemorial and poets and writers have wasted reams of paper, gallons of ink, and now countless blog pages on the subject.  They of course didn’t call it “the friend zone” way back when.  People would call it “being lovelorn” or “unrequited love”.  So don’t think it will be a weird subject for you to discuss with older people or even with your parents.  They know all about it.

And lest you think that the “friend zone” only happens to glass wearing nerds or fat kids consider Gone With the Wind.  Scarlett O’Hara pretty much “friend zones” Rhett Butler through a good-sized chunk of the movie (yes, I know the book is totally different) and heck, Ashley Wilkes “friend zones” Scarlett most of the time too.   So pretty people can be “friend zoned” too.

Also, guys I hate to break it to you but the “friend zone” covers both genders.  Men also do this to women in their lives as well.  This condition crosses racial, religious, cultural, and sexual preference lines as well.  The “friend zone” is ubiquitous as far as the human experience goes.  However, for the ease of writing I will approach this mainly from a guy’s perspective.

What to do about it?  Wait, back up and let’s see how you got in this mess in the first place.  You saw “her” from across a crowded room (or website nowadays) and you were instantly smitten.  I’ve found that “love at first sight” instances can more often than not lead to cases of “friend zoning”.

Reason takes a back seat to passion and you become instantly obsessed with that special someone.  You’re heart beats an odd rhythm, your blood pressure varies, and you feel odd.  It’s no wonder that some physicians of the middle ages considered romantic love to be some sort of mental illness (although this may be apocryphal I’ve heard it quoted various times).  The other person on the other hand doesn’t notice a thing.  You will probably highlight this moment in your life, to them it’s a Thursday and they had chicken salad for lunch.

Next you go about doing various things to catch her eye.  Eventually she acknowledges your presence and you think that you’ve made a breakthrough.  You get to talking and as far as you’re concerned things are going quite well.  It’s then that things take a turn.  Your increased attention doesn’t seem to be reciprocated as much as you expected.  She in fact had lots of other guys in her life and things aren’t progressing the way that you thought that they would.

So at this point a normal guy would take a gamble and approach her to see if she wanted to go out on a date or if she felt the same way about you and if not then that’s where the story should end but instead you stay silent.

So why do you stay silent?  I mean if this person means that much to you, as you claim that they do, why don’t you say anything?  My conclusion is fear of being publicly embarrassed (or at least what you perceive as public).  No, seriously.  People have done various things to avoid embarrassment.  They have avoided reporting crimes, betrayed their country, even committed suicide rather than face embarrassment.  So it stands to reason that they would rather keep quiet than to feel embarrassed in case that their suit is rejected.  I will touch upon this aspect a little more further down.

So you stay silent and sulk and alternate between feelings of deep passion and resentful anger.  Toxic.  This affects your concentration at work, your digestion will be off, you will be miserable and exhausted from shifting emotions all the time.  Not a nice place to be.

Eventually though something happens.  Some other suitor will come along and speak up and sweep her off her feet and definitively close off all your avenues of opportunities.  You will feel quietly miserable and mope.  Perhaps someone else may catch your eye and prove that your obsession was merely puppy love and you will probably start the cycle all over again.

So you say that neither of those outcomes appeals to you.  How then do you get out of the “friend zone”?

I’ve read various magazine articles and watched several YouTube videos on the subject.  They mainly deal with ideas such as to become more aloof and less attentive to the person that you want to woo in order to elicit a reaction, or to mirror their actions, or to dress more provocatively or other somewhat childish ploys.

Less popular and touched upon is the idea of self-improvement to change yourself into what they like.  Self improvement is fine for its own sake but if you use it for this sort of thing then it’s really just another ploy.

As I said above you could just speak up and get it over with but again there’s that public embarrassment thing to consider.  Here I would like to address the person on the other end of the equation.  If someone comes to you and professes their feelings and you reject them please do not go around gossiping about it.

Firstly it’s not nice, secondly it’s a private matter between two people and thirdly you don’t know what will happen.  Most of the time the other person will go off with crushed feelings and slowly get over it but some reactions can get extreme and range from suicide to violently lashing out.  Making a rejection a public affair will make an extreme reaction that much more likely.  So unless you feel that your life or their life is in danger, keep it to yourself.

Getting back to getting out of the friend zone, you can try all sorts of tricks to get out of it.  Ultimately though you need to realize that the “friend zone” has no geographic boundaries.  The “friend zone” is not even an idea shared between you and her.  It only exists inside your own mind.  You chose to enter it and you are your own jailer and can choose to release yourself whenever you want.

To see the prison that you’ve made for yourself is to leave it.

the dream diminished

I was digging through my linen closet the other day, sorting out useful and useless stuff.  In the back of the closet I found some old bath towels that I had not seen in ages.  They were plush and fluffy terry cloth towels and though a little threadbare they were still useful.

My parents had bought these for me way back when I got my first college apartment.  I think they bought them at a Target or Sears or some such place.  What struck me as odd is how good they were.  I mean back in the early 90s when they bought them they were low to middle class bath towels, nothing special.  I compared them to some designer towels from a high-end department store that I bought a couple of years ago and there was no comparison.  These old towels put the new ones to shame.

What was going on?  I looked on the tags and found part of the answer.  The old towels were 100% terry cloth cotton.  The new ones were 40% rayon.

But it’s not just a case of towels.  The more I thought about it over the next few days, the more I realized that the quality of various things had decreased.  The new things were still adequate, still useful, but the quality of the materials, the design, the craftsmanship had deteriorated.  Over the long haul we have grown slowly accustomed to accepting less and expecting less.

Another unrelated event.  A new apartment building went up in flames during construction recently.  On a local radio station a fire fighter commented that older buildings usually took between 30 and 40 minutes to be fully engulfed in flames due the materials and building standards used, while new buildings could go up in about 5 minutes.

I wonder how an archaeologist from a thousand years in the future might view these facts.  Would she look at artifacts from the 1950s and compare them to the 2000s and conclude that she had found the dividing line between the rise and fall of our civilization?

It’s not just physical artifacts that have deteriorated over time but services as well.  I vaguely remember my first ride on an airplane back in the 70s.  I think we were going to see my grandparents in North Carolina and I recall that the airport was a giant open and well-lit mall-like area.  The passengers were well dressed and we had no security to worry about in those days.  The plane seemed huge and the seats were over sized and plush.  The flight crew was happy and eager to help.  If I had to summarize the experience in one word it would be luxurious.

These days the airports are crowded, dingy, moodily lit bus stations.  The passengers dress any which way they want, they are forced into lines to wait and be searched like common criminals and are then forced into tiny hard plastic and metal seats in the plane.  The flight crews are overworked and surly and I would summarize the experience as dilapidated.

What has improved (arguably) is the entertainment available to the populace.  The quantity of distractions accessible to the average citizen has skyrocketed not only in the amount but in the variety available.  Anyone, regardless of income can now purchase music players, video players, game consoles, or portable computers and access entertainment choices ranging from sports, to music, to shows and movies, to games that will serve to distract them at home or even on the subway ride home.

For those that can look past the entertainments there is an avalanche of information inundating the senses.  Pundits sort through it all and tell us what to make of it and blame “the other side” for our problems.

Have we become so satiated and numbed by pop culture and media that we don’t notice the concrete decline in our living standards or am I being overly harsh and critical about the way that the world works these days?

Have I finally succumbed to the “old man’s disease” of comparing things to the good old days?