Flexibility is the Key to Lasting Happiness

Yesterday, I was supposed to go to 6 Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, CA, for the 4th of July celebrations. We had purchased our tickets a week ago, and were both looking forward to it. What’s not to love? Greasy, yummy food, scary rides, fun games, entertainment packed in. . . .

We got on the road at 3pm - because who wants to be at an amusement park all day when you don’t have kids? The fireworks were scheduled for after 9pm and the park closed at 10. Perfection. On the highway, there was no traffic and we were in heaven.

Until we got to the turnoff for the park, where it was a bumper-to-bumper parking lot.

There were SUVs packed with children all seemingly under the age of 10 (my least favorite, truth be told - I’m in that rarer category as a fan of young teenagers); there were sport cars with the two seats filled with hip couples slathered in sunscreen and wearing stylish straw hats; there were shiny cars with the stereos blasting hip hop so loud that it rattled the car next to them in every direction; there were old beat-ups packed with families. We all snaked our way into the overfilled parking lot, moving at about the same pace as an old lady with a walker crossing the street at a light.

Are you getting the picture? Packed. It was literally packed.

There were people walking who were lapping us as we sat in our car.

We started to get cranky.

“What about those people sneaking off to the right?” Ryan mutters. “Where do you think that goes?”

“How do I know?” I snap back at him. “It’s not like I come here every week.”

A minute later.

“What’s going on over there? This is bullshit!”

Silence. We are three car-lengths from where we started and about a 1000 miles from the good mood we both began our adventure in an hour before.

I stare out the window and at our printed ticket.

“Hey,” I say.

“Yeah?”

“These tickets are good until December 31, 2008.”

We look at each other and our smiles return. Seconds later, we are backing out of the parking lanes and zooming back the way we had come - windows down, hair blowing in the wind, and a newfound feeling of freedom on our side.

“We can go anywhere we want!” Ryan yells.

“I know!” I say and giggle. Then, we decide to go to Napa to have dinner. Why? Because we can.

The moral of this ridiculous story?

The trouble in life, it seems to me, are the expectations we have about the plans that we make. As human beings, we always seem to be planning, dreaming, imagining how great life is going to be once we get there. Then, the real disaster starts when we are so focused on the “getting there” that we don’t even stop to realize that the journey has become utterly MISERABLE. So many people would have stayed (and did) in that parking lot, dooming themselves to bitching about the heat, the crowds, and the lines for all the rides and food. They were so fixated on carrying out “the plan” that they couldn’t see the signs for Napa Valley and the clear highways to get there.

I realized, in the moment that it took us to decide to bail on our plan, that flexibility is the real key to any lasting happiness.

There is a Turkish proverb that I’ve always loved, but never followed (until now):

No matter how far down the wrong path you find yourself, turn around.

This goes for poorly planned trips to 6 flags (we’re going on a weekday soon), as well as the bigger decisions in life. If you are a banker and you realize that you hate your job - find a way to turn around. Trust me. We don’t get any martyr-ships or medals or awards from “staying the course”.

So go ahead. Live a little. Change direction. Don’t do what you said you were going to do. Cancel that dinner with the “friends” you barely like, but feel indebted to, and go to the beach. Write that novel in your spare hour between work, kids and bedtime.

Veer insanely down the paths of life.

Selling Your Entire Life - How Much Is It Worth??

How much is your entire life worth? Your home, your car, your job, your friends, your lifestyle. Just as a guess, what price would you put on it? Priceless? Maybe not.

A man in Australia recently sold his for approximately $400K.

Seriously.

The person who purchased it has his three-bedroom house, his 19-year-old Mazda, a motorbike, a boat, his job as a rug salesman, and an introduction to his friends. Apparently, the man realized that after a divorce, his entire life reminded him of his ex-wife. His solution? Start a new life from scratch and sell his old one on E-Bay.

Apparently, this is legal.

Which has got me to thinking. . . .

How much is my life worth on the open market?

Let’s see. . . .

I’m a graduate student - so the buyer would have the opportunity to try out the academic life and relive his/her time as a student. Limitless lattes and reading of highly intellectual books. Good conversations about “things that really matter” throw in for good measure. Heated debates over whether or not Foucault is still pertinent.

I’m getting married - but I’m not sure how my future husband would feel about a stand-in bride. Especially if a male won the bid.

I’m a writer - and the person could take credit for my novel and my articles. That’s something. I could change the author’s name on the book. That’s neat.

I have a ton of clothes, shoes and jewelry.

And two adorable cats. I can’t forget them.

And my friends - scattered all over the world. Perhaps they could host the new me in cities like New York and Hong Kong and Dublin.

What’s all that worth? $400K? Or less?

What a crisis it would put someone in to know that their entire life was only worth $12,650, more or less. Wouldn’t that suck? To know that other people thought your life was too boring to buy? Or too sad? Or too weird?

The man - who lives near Perth, I think - told the BBC that he “has no regrets”. The money will allow him to travel for awhile, and to fulfill his list of things to do. Then, I suppose, he will settle down again and build up another marketable life somewhere. If it’s on an island and he sells 10 years from now, I’m maxing out my credit card. You can bet on it.

Full story at: Man sells entire life

I’ll miss George Carlin’s caustic sense of humor.

My dad and I didn’t agree on much when I was growing up. He liked things like the Patriots, the Sox, the Bs and the Cs. He liked skiing and smoking and going to Hampton Beach. He liked going to the track and racing horses. Most of these things I did not like - even the beach part of the deal (my dad smoked so much that he managed to make even sea air smoky).

But, the one thing I did share with my father was a dark sense of humor. He had been in Vietnam; in fact, he did two tours as an infantryman in the army. He was Scottish and Catholic and grew up in a questionable Boston neighborhood with people who probably eventually did time for participating in a variety of illegal activities. In other words, for my dad, life was not a joy ride. In this, we agreed wholeheartedly.

I remember hearing George Carlin’s “7 words you can’t say on television” routine, and his take on driving, with my dad. My dad didn’t bother about swearing in front of me, which is probably why I still swear like a sailor on shore leave. Happily.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad and what I’ve inherited from both of my parents. From my father, it was definitely his cynicism and his sense of humor. When I read that George Carlin had died, it brought back a lot of memories of my own father. I miss them both.

George Carlin on death:

The famous driving routine - in 2 parts:

New middle-aged men on the block . . . .

OK, I’m not proud of this, but I actually owned the CD “Hangin’ Tough” in the late 80s. I never admitted to anyone that I was a NKOTB fan (New Kids on the Block, yo), but I was. Of course I was. The formula works, for better or for worse, because girls need something to fantasize about. If high school boys were sexier and widely available, then we’d never need another boy band. I don’t, however, see that materializing anytime soon.

Today, when I logged into i-Tunes to download my latest podcasts for the gym, I noticed that the new New Kids on the Block video was one of the most downloaded videos on the site. And I thought - Really? No, seriously, really really?

So I had to check it out on YouTube to have a look and a listen. I HAD to do it, people. Forces beyond my ken made me do it, I swear.

And, honestly, it was exactly like I expected it to be. It starts out with the band members getting a text message (natch), then deciding to meet up on a beach with their shirts off (duh), with a lot of half-naked women with their tits out onscreen as backdrops (well, yeah, thanks for the detailed description Ms. Obviously). And the song is catchy is a pre-produced pop kind of way (which I generally like, in pop culture’s mass produced defense).

But, in the end, I had to laugh out loud.

The ending shot is them all dressed in matching white suits (WHITE SUITS!!!!) doing an updated version of their old dance moves. Seriously. I think Donnie has a fedora hat on, too, but I only watched the video once, so I can’t be sure.

The commentary on the YouTube clip is also classic, and devolves into three categories:

1. Hard-Core Fan: “These guys are still great!” “OMG, they look hot!!!” “I love this song!!” (Picture a lot of 30-40 year old women typing these comments and wishing their husbands looked more like Joey McIntyre).

2. New Fan: “This song isn’t bad. I like it.” “This is good.”

3. Hater: “These guys suck!!!!” “OMG, these guys are totally old and look like pedophiles next to the girls in the video!” “They blow, but the girls are smokin!!” (Picture husbands of the women above typing in the room adjacent to their wives and wishing their wives looked more like girls in bikinis.)

At any rate, the NKOTB are back, they are touring, and they started the summer off with a retro bang. Or maybe a loud snap, like from those small firecrackers you throw at the ground to pop them.

Here’s the vid - for as long as it lasts:

My Marilyn moment. . . .

Because it can’t all be about the kids. . . .

A new photo for a new season. . . .

Obviously, I’ve decided to update my photo on the site. Not that I didn’t think that the other one was great - clearly, I did. But, I’ll be teaching this fall and even though people assumed I was naked in the other photo, I can’t afford for my future students to think so, too. Has anyone ever heard of band bikinis, people? Honestly.

That being said, I’ll probably keep switching out the photo from now on - it’s more fun this way. For instance, I have blond hair now, but no good photos to share. It’s sunny and 90 degrees here in San Francisco today (if you can believe that), so I’ll have plenty of opportunities to play model.

And, as promised, I’ll be writing about Hong Kong soon. But who can write on such a gorgeous day, when the beach is beckoning? I think, however, that I’ve learned my blogging lessons about bikini photos. Mostly.

Hong Kong is rainy this time of year. . . .

Well, I’m back from Hong Kong. After living there for nearly 3 years, you would think that I would be able to remember what the weather is like in summer. Luckily, I packed an umbrella, because we definitely needed it. It rained everyday. Actually, rained is a pleasant way of putting it for some of the days. At one point, we encountered a “black rain” day. Basically, this means run inside and stay there, and don’t come out until we tell you to. The rain was so bad that it made news headlines for days afterward, with dramatic pictures and roads completely washed away. It turns out that the Midwest is not the only place being drenched. (Though Hong Kong is mostly prepared for this in a way that the poor farmers simply cannot be.)

In the next few days, I’ll be retelling and reliving my trip in snippets on this site, with accompanying pictures.

In a stroke of luck, I managed to be in Hong Kong when an outbreak of bird flu was occurring. Thus, I got a firsthand experience and access to things that I wouldn’t have dreamed of back in Berkeley. This will help my dissertation project as well as my thinking through the issue of public health, prevention, and the cultural significance of disease surveillance. What fascinated me the most was that no one local seemed all that worried. People still purchased fresh chickens, people still went to the markets, and life went on as normal. Only with a lot of dead chickens in one market in Sham Shui Po.

Stay tuned for more. . . .

OK - we’re off to Hong Kong

I might not get the chance to write for the next two weeks. I’ve decided not to bring my computer (too much hassle), and the days of internet cafes are nearly done with in any modern city. So, that being said, I’ll just catch everyone up with a blog-a-palooza upon my return - with pictures as promised.

We bought a new camera, one of those things that are so tiny they can fit in your pocket easily, so there should be a lot of them. The quality? Who knows. Not as good as some, better than most.

It should be strange to visit HK again. There are a lot of ghosts in the streets for me, not all of whom are good spirits. That being said, I think that I will have a better, more pleasant, experience of the city. I think I read somewhere that we all leave pieces of us behind in the places that we have lived, and that upon our return, what we really feel when we return to them is that we are reconnecting with the ghosts of our former selves.

I think that’s true. I fully expect to see a version of myself walking along Wyndham Street to yoga class, or refilling my octopus card in the station.

Syracuse wins lacrosse title, makes front page of NYT, and makes me realize that I forgot that sport still existed.

The other night at karaoke - yes, karaoke - a new friend expressed surprise that I had dated a football player in college. I was talking about sports, I think it was about playing dodgeball - yes, dodgeball - and said I thought that the only people who had fond memories of gym class were jocks. This from a woman who is setting up a kickball league, but there you have it.

I was obsessed with jocks when I was growing up. Probably because I was a nerdy, glasses-wearing girl in middle and high schools, and jocks didn’t even know I existed. If they did, it was because they knew that I always had an extra pen that they could borrow or that I could help them with their math homework in study hall. Growing up as I did, in a John Hughes film kind of way, I dreamed about getting a date with said sporty types. They were impossibly fit, good-looking, outgoing, hot. Did I mention hot?

Since I was a dork, I was also a late bloomer. No one ever really dated me in high school, and I was convinced that I would never rate a popular guy as a boyfriend. NEVER. I was convinced that they were out of my league.

Then, college happened. No one knew that I was a nerdy girl there. I could reinvent myself. And reinvent I did.

The dorm room exactly above mine (co-ed housing) was a football room - two of our college’s football players lived there as roommates. Not that this matters, but they were both defensive linemen, so they were huge. And gorgeous. They were also loud and obnoxious and kept my roommate and I up at all hours with stomping around their room. But did I mention that they were hot?

Anyway, one night I saw Adam - my first ever boyfriend - at a keg party (ah, youth, with its red and blue plastic cups and smelly basements). In a modern, jock knight errant kind of way, he offered to plow through the crowd to get me a beer (what a gentleman). Eventually, he walked me back to our dorm. We went to a state school (aka party school) that was located in a woodsy area. That night there were oodles of rain puddles, and I remember pausing in front of a huge one blocking our path and wondering how I could get through it without ruining my shoes (deep thinker that I was back then). Before I knew it, Adam had hoisted me up over his shoulder (with one arm), and carried me to safety (my hero!). Needless to say, I was hooked from that moment.

I enjoyed my new life as a cool kid. I was dating a football player, and a hot one at that! (And they say that only men are shallow when it comes to sex. PUH-leeze, gentlemen. Don’t buy it when a girl tells you that size doesn’t matter. And of course, I’m talking about height and weight here, people. Get your minds out of the gutter.)

I went to all the ‘cool’ parties. People knew my name.

Then, I started to get a big head.

One night, I saw a guy from my old high school at a party. He was a lacrosse player and he was impossibly popular when I was 16. (You knew there had to be a tie-in to the title, right? Thanks for waiting for it.) I marched right over and told him that we went to the same school (he, predictably, had no idea who I was). By the end of the night, he was carrying me home over his shoulder. (Um, I’m just realizing that I had a former life as a cavewoman, in case you’re wondering about all the over-the-shoulder nonsense.)

And it didn’t stop there. Oh, no. I also dated a hockey player, and another football player. And, oh, who’s counting.

The picture on the front of the NYT reminded me of these halcyon days. Like yesterday, I had another one of those Proustian moments, only not as poignant or comfortable.

Honestly, I had forgotten that lacrosse existed until today. I still follow football and hockey, so go figure. Maybe that lacrosse player just didn’t match up. He was, to put it nicely, a douchebag. Not that other jocks are any more sensitive to women’s needs, but I found lacrosse players were always more aggressive and crazy. Maybe equal only to the football players.

Why am I writing about this? I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I had a dream about Adam last night, out of the blue, for no purpose under the sun. Maybe it’s because I am more nostalgic these days. Maybe it’s because it’s funny to look back at how shallow I was when picking mates.

These early dating experiences shape us, though. Which is why that friend let out a long, “Hmmmm”, when I told her that I dated a football player. It tells her something about me that she didn’t know before. That a dorky anthropologist was actually formerly not a dorky anthropologist. That I have had secret lives that look nothing like the one I have now. Which is the point of living, really, isn’t it? To experience new things, to try out different ways of living?

In the end, I decided that hot jocks were not my speed. I decided that hot, funny, intelligent writers were more my speed. Did I mention hot? Some things, my friends, will never change. . . .

The boys. Adam is the one in the back row, pretending to lick his roommate Dave’s ear. What was I thinking????

Remembrance of Things Past - for Memorial Day

Proust, as a writer, rambled. In his six-volume opus, he took pages and pages to describe a room or an outdoor scene. He got his timelines mixed up, and often had someone talking to his main character in book four that had died in book two. He was clearly an insufferable snob. But, he is probably my favorite author of all time. Simply because if you stick with him to the end, you feel a sense of comfort about love and loss and the troubled majesty of humanity.

One of the reasons that I love In Search of Lost Time is Proust’s attempt to recover sensations, memories, himself in an earlier time. Reading the novel, one gets the sense that the young Marcel is not the same as the old Marcel - something has been lost. Time ravages not only the outward form of the body, but the inward solidity of the mind. By the end of our lives, we are scattered personalities, having left pieces of ourselves in the past.

For Proust, it is the tiniest thing that sparks a memory: the taste of a favorite food, the sound of a bell, the smell of a perfume, the light falling across a room in a particular way. However, when he wants to conjure up a feeling from the past, he fails - it falls flat. Desiring a return to the past can do nothing; the mind will go where it wants.

It is as though he fears that all the intense emotions that he has felt throughout his life - especially for those who have died - were never really real at all. All the moments of intense joy and pain are chimerical, he cannot recall them in enough detail. That is why, I think, that Proust spends so much of his time in description. It’s as though he is trying to submerse himself in the past in order to recover his loves.

Even his grandmother’s memory has faded. He mourns the fact that he no longer feels the pain of her loss so intensely, that he is able to go on without her. As well as without his great love, Albertine. He questions if his love for these women - his mother, too - was authentic. If it was, then why doesn’t it remain with him? He rebukes himself for living long after they have gone.

On Memorial Day, I think that this sentiment is apropos.

My mother died on Memorial Day a very long 22 years ago. Today, when reading a story about the absence of red, plastic poppy flowers, the traditional button-hole flower of remembrance, I wept. In Peet’s coffee, of all places. I had a Proustian moment of memory - unbidden, unsought, vividly and instantly recalled. I thought of a Memorial Day in the distant past, long before my mother’s untimely death, when she had purchased us both a poppy from a Veteran selling them in front of a store. As I read, I suddenly remembered the old man’s grizzled hands, the white box that held all the artificial poppies, the collection jar. I remembered the thin, green-paper wrapped wire stem that I bent around my finger like a ring. I remembered the black, round center of the flower, and strange feel of the fake petals. I remembered the old man’s cap, and the rows of pins on his uniform.

In essence, I remembered what it used to feel like to be a young child with her mother on an early summer afternoon.

Often, I worry that I have forgotten her completely. Over time, I lost her slowly: first, the tenor of her voice; then, the contours of her face and the color of her hair; finally, what she liked or how she moved. Everything faded into the memory files of my mind, in places that I can no longer access easily - if at all. It sometimes feels as if I birthed myself, as though I never had a mother or a life before the accident. As though everything that happens to me is always in a post-loss framework.

Those moments when I do suddenly remember the past - like today in Peet’s - are extremely painful, but necessary.

The truth is, we never stop missing those we have lost. But we do forget, if not completely. As I age, I realize that nostalgia is a powerful force. The past beckons to all of us, good or bad, and we all - at some point - go in search of lost time or things past.

Read Proust this summer if you haven’t already. There are bits of comfort and wisdom in there, if you are patient enough to discover them. And while you are frolicking on your day off, remember for just a moment those that you have loved, as well as those brave soldiers and civilians that others have loved and lost.