Category: commentary

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Idolatry

american-idolIt is early morning, and there are 3,500 people packed into a giant room, all waiting to be called so they can show their stuff. Every single one of the other 3,499 people who sit there are poseurs though, because you — you are the next American Idol, and you almost feel sorry for those whose dreams will be crushed on this day. Then your number is called. You are supremely confident as you strut — yes, strut — into the room where the judges currently sit, waiting to tell you what you’ve known since you were young. They listen attentively — for 30 seconds before a hand is raised into the air. Your verdict comes.

Damn them, you think as you leave the room with their “No”s still ringing in your ears. It is late afternoon and your entire life has been invalidated. By that one simple word, multiplied by the power of three. That one word made you doubt every single loved one who told you how amazing your voice sounded in the shower every morning, every friend who went with you to karaoke and exclaimed how good you were, and every stranger who heard you singing at work and said, “Right on.” All of your faith in yourself, gone in the blink of an eye.

That’s because you tied all of your belief system up to one pie-in-the-sky idea, to an occupation that is hit-or-miss at best, one that spits out even some of the best voices and makes gruel of them. And honestly, you’re no Adam Lambert. So, why did all those people say you were the best they’d ever heard? BECAUSE IT COST THEM ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO SAY IT. See, they would have done you a better service had they been like my mother and told the truth. At least then you wouldn’t be sitting there on the curb outside of the American Airlines Arena looking like your dog just died, and questioning everything you ever thought you knew. Continue reading “Idolatry”

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Closing Time

ktflkda-l_i_get_awesome“So gather up your jackets, move it to the exits. I hope you have found a friend. Closing time. Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” -Semisonic

You know how it is at the end of the night (or the early morning in some cases), when you’re so tired you can barely hold your eyes open, but you know you have to somehow make it home, so you do. You don’t remember how you got home, but you woke up in the late morning hour with a hangover and a dreadfully hazy recollection of the night before. Perhaps you even have a text sitting on your phone from someone you don’t know, or at least not that you remember anyway, and their words hint at the two of you being best friends. You scratch your head and chalk it all up to the drinking, telling yourself you won’t get that drunk again.

But it’s a vicious cycle: the partying, the staying up until all hours, the random people you co-opt into being your “friends” for the night, and always the alcohol permeating everything else. I should know. I used to live that lifestyle. It was called my late teens. For some people it’s their entire twenties. For others it’s still going on now, and for those people I have a wealth of sympathy. It can be enticing, to get that buzz, to lose your inhibitions and do things you wouldn’t do sober, but it has its consequences. Believe me. Why do you think AA is so pervasive in our society? People want to stop, but it’s so difficult.

I’ll tell you a story. It was one night just like many others during that time period for me, when we had gone out drinking, then stumbled to somebody’s house (not sure who lived there, actually, even to this day), and the drinking picked up again. There was beer, and wine coolers, and hard liquor, and grain alcohol, and pretty much anything else you could think of. Sometime along the way I had gotten that pleasant, warm feeling that made me feel invincible. I called it my Superman buzz. It made me the life of the party. Continue reading “Closing Time”

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Six For Saturday

It’s amazing to me how much happens during the course of a normal week, and you know my brain goes about a mile a minute. So I thought at the end of each week I would sum up the top six recurring thoughts in my head, or just ideas or stories that hit me in … Continue reading Six For Saturday

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When the World Ends

The-End-Of-Seattle“We ate the food. We drank the wine. Everybody having a good time. Except you. You were still talking about the end of the world.” -U2

There are so many books these days focused on what might happen after the world as we know it ends, books like Divergent, The Hunger Games, Prodigy, Uglies, and Matched. And in these books inevitably some horrible thing happened, involving human greed and devastation, that brought about a mass change in the way people looked at and interacted with their world. There are many movies that mirror that dramatic change as well, films like After Earth, Oblivion, and 12 Monkeys. As a society we are obviously obsessed with what comes after life as we know it.

I’m intrigued, however, about why we seem to think the world will go through some type of apocalyptic war and need to be cleansed by something that turns horrendous itself. Perhaps it’s because we tend to go in cycles, with good times and bad times, but human nature always wins out regardless. Human nature is of course greedy and self-serving. I remember watching White House Down and thinking about the motivations for the characters to do what they were doing, holding people hostage, killing people indiscriminately as they were. Then it hit me that they were just looking out for number one, what regular people do every single day in real life.

That’s why so many of these characterizations and plots revolve around horrible things happening, because when individuals are self-serving, it leads to chaos, anarchy, and war. We fight little wars every day, as singular human beings, but larger wars escalate as well, and it’s easy to see how they could morph into world-wide catastrophes. I often wonder what would happen if every single person did one thing every day to help someone else, how much that would change anything. I honestly think it might. If we’re thinking of others instead of ourselves, we would make decisions to help the collective instead of the decisions we make that lead to dissension. Continue reading “When the World Ends”

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Fear Itself

I’m afraid of heights. I never realized it until I was hanging onto the ladder on the side of that thirty-story silo twenty-three years ago, and I looked down. Everything was so far away. The people in the field across the way looked like ants, but that thought was fleeting because it all started spinning. … Continue reading Fear Itself

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Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

harvardThere’s a young man going to Harvard who had a 4.0 GPA last semester. That’s no surprise, as Harvard is one of the top universities in the country, and it takes someone with superior academic ability to even be accepted. The surprise is that this young man was born and raised in a trailer park, to a single mother who had him when she was a teenager.

This young man went to public schools all his life, and walked a mile to get to the bus stop every morning, but he never let any of that stop him, and he never felt like he had to apologize for it either. Instead, he broke the cycle and is in the process of making something of himself. Why should that be so surprising? Because unlike so many others, he believes in being other than what he was. He believes in a future of his own choosing, not the one he was born into.

Self-fulfilling-Prophecy

“A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to come true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior.” -adapted from the theories of Robert K. Merton

I liken it to the placebo effect, whereupon a person feels the effects of a drug they didn’t actually take because they believe they did take it. It’s all in how you approach your life, not in how others see you. That’s one of the major problems in society, the feeling that everyone else knows us better than we know ourselves. Too often we give in to peer pressure, to the ideas of everyone else about who we are, and about where we’re going in life. But it’s not about them and their views. It’s about how we envision our lives, and we can’t afford to forget it. Continue reading “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy”