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A recent issue of The New Yorker made an appearance in my house the other day, joining the stack of newspapers, Men's Health and Aerospace America magazines and catalogs from Radio Shack, REI, Bed, Bath & Beyond and Victoria's Secret at the corner of our dining table. The living-room center-table, the typical gravitational nucleus for magazine is most homes, is kept bare in ours, save for the four remote-controls and, until recently, a chess set. (First a regular one, which only gathered dust because it was almost never used, and then, later, a Transformers version that Brian's girlfriend gifted him. I know what you're thinking, and no, it wasn't mine. It is neat, but I actually prefer the traditional version myself.) No more than two people ever sit simultaneously at our table, anyway, so the stack doesn't get in the way, and it makes for a conveniently reachable library when one is dining by oneself --- which, for us, is most often the case.
But, getting back to the New Yorker: I don't know where it came from --- there's no mailing label on it, and neither I, nor, to the best of my knowledge, do either of my roommates subscribe to it. ... Not that that actually really matters (in this instance). Besides, I've long been curious about this periodical, what with the reputation that it seems to have of being canonical literary fare for the more highbrow echelons of society, so I wasn't as inclined to question this gift horse as I am with other out-of-place phenomena in my super-ordered world. So I flipped through it this morning, as I forked eggs and sausage into my mouth, and had very much the same reaction that I did when I watched my first episode of Seinfeld, nine years ago:
"I don't get it."
(Meanwhile, my American cousins, who had scheduled their evening programs around this show and General Hospital, were beside themselves with laughter, much to my bewilderment.) The cartoons, especially --- the famed New Yorker cartoons, of which entire compilations have been separately published in book form... Were they supposed to be funny? Were they supposed to make me laugh? Chuckle? Smirk? All they did was leave me nonplussed --- they didn't really seem to be about anything, other than ho-hum pictorials of ho-hum everyday ordinary life. They weren't funny, in either the mental-doubletake way of the non-sequiturs of Wiley or Douglas Adams, or the droll, understated way of `traditional' British humour, nor were they insightful or thought-provoking like the editorial comics in newspapers, or Time or Newsweek. They were... mundane, and, in the strict sense of its usage in science/mathematics: trivial. So too the few articles that I scanned through, save for one comparing the Presidential-campaign strategies of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, which, because of its subject matter, actually had some meat to it, and another in which the author described his experiences with driving in China --- which was funny. (And I thought the traffic/road situation in India was bad [Link1, Link2]. *Boy* am I glad I didn't learn to drive in China! Especially considering just how much pleasure I derive from being at the controls of an automobile!) But with these two articles as well, the text simply dragged on and on and on, page after page, as if no such concept as a page- or word-limit existed in the minds of the editors. It is possible, of course, that my reaction is a result of modern society's tendency to require/acquire/desire everything in bite-sized chunks that require a minimum of time to process/parse/digest [I couldn't decide which verb I liked best there], but my personal jury is still out on that question. Granted, this criticism is based on a very limited sample size (a handful of articles from a single issue of the magazine), but I have to say: my first encounter with this journal left me quite disappointed. On the other hand, every time I pick up an issue of Time magazine, or The Economist, or the Style or Editorial sections of the Washington Post, I simply delight in the deftness with which their authors (including the authors of the Letters-to-the-editor) wield their words, play with them, teasing and tickling the mind of the reader, and at how concisely they articulate their thoughts and state their arguments. Of course, exceptions do exist, but that's just it: those are exceptions! If I had the time, my blog would be over-flowing with references to the multitude of gems I've seen in these publications. With the New Yorker, not so. Hence, given all the hype, my state of disappointment.
Then again, it could just be a case of being an acquired taste. It took a while, but Seinfeld eventually did make me laugh. :)
For a long time, when I was little, I was convinced that my parents were 35 years old. No matter how many years went by, they were always, in my mind, fixed at that "magic" age. Now I'm actually coming up on that number myself. And my parents sent me a card this year that said (tongue-in-cheek, of course): "No more birthdays after this, understand? ... We're too young to have a son your age!"
And, in the past 3--4 years, I've been noticing my mum becoming, in her mannerisms, a lot like the way I remember my grandmother --- her mum --- used to be. And my dad like his dad, my Grandpa. And just the other day I realized with a start that my handwriting, spidery to begin with, had begun to look just like the nearly indecipherable scrawl that we used to always tease my dad about.
It's kinda fascinating, but also a wee bit jarring.
A prayer said at the funeral service of my friend Cheryl's father, earlier this year:
Grieve for me, for I would grieve for you.
Then brush away the sorrows and the tears.
Life is not over, but begins anew,
With courage you must greet the coming years.
To live forever in the past is wrong,
Can only cause you misery and pain.
Dwell not on memories over long,
With others you must share and care again.
Reach out and comfort those who comfort you.
Recall the years but only for a while.
Nurse not your loneliness but live again,
Forget not, remember with a smile.
--- Old Indian Prayer.
I churned out four blog-posts on my other blog this afternoon. Set aside my work to do it, because, for the same reason I carry a pen and a notepad around with me everywhere I go, if you have a thought and don't write it down, and then later forget it, then you effectively never had it. (I think I picked up this little piece of advice from a Tom Clancy book, as a matter of fact. Jack Ryan's wife, a surgeon, says it, in the book "Executive Orders", if I remember correctly.) (Hmm... this contains echoes of my earliest posts on the why and wherefore of blogging...) It made me suddenly realize that, starting from the time I left home to come to the US to study, and began corresponding regularly via e-mail with my family back home, and indeed, began to use e-mail with ever-increasing frequency to communicate with other people... that since then, virtually every facet of my life can be re-constructed from the vast, digitized archives of my various writings. From e-mails to papers that I've written for classes to, yes, my blogs. Oh, and digital photographs and video clips, too, in far greater quantities than previously imaginable with their chemical-film-technology predecessors. It's so easy now to go back to any given moment in my life and see what it, and I, were like at the time. My personality. My thoughts. My circumstances. Everything.
Mind-blowing stuff, when you think of the sheer scale of it all, compared to the pre-digital era. Historians of the future are going to have a field day. Assuming, of course, that our storage media survive till then, and the various encoding standards are still recognized. (Betamax, Laser-disk, DVD-ROM/-RAM/-D/Plus/-R/-RW/-R DL/+R/+RW/+R DL/Blu-ray/HD, anyone?) Ironic, that paper (and pencil!) remains the longest-lasting, and easiest to read, form of recording information around today.
There are a lot of things that I never had when I was younger, and growing up. Things that my friends and peers had, and that I always longed to have as well. I'm not talking about material things, but the "intangible" gifts that life distributes randomly to different people. (I'm not going to be more specific with examples, because that gets too personal for this forum.) For many of those things, not having them was due, in large part, to my lifestyle then --- my life when when I was living at home, dictated -- and restricted -- as it was by my parents.
I have a lot of those things now. And because I never had them before, I appreciate them all the more. In the years since I left home, I've often, on many different occasions, stopped short and wondered/marvelled at the hidden (to me, at the time) wisdom my parents displayed, maybe conciously, maybe unconciously, in bringing me up. In retrospect, would I have had my life unfold any other way? I don't think so.
When people would talk about how their friends helped them get over break-ups, I used to think that that only referred to their having their friends sit down with them and comfort them and analyse every little facet of the relationship-that-was and convince them that things would be better, and maybe that it was actually a *good* thing that they had broken up with that person. And of course, in my mental image, those friends were usually female, because guys typically don't talk about such things with each other, right?
Then I had my own experiences with break-ups. And realized that there's another aspect to that statement, which doesn't involve talking about or discussing the broken relationship at all. (Or maybe this has been just my own experience.) Having friends helps you realize that you still have a life, even if the person who was the world to you (or so you felt) is no longer a part of it. There are *still* people to whom you are important, and who care about you, and who like being around/with you.
All the more reason to not ignore or forget about your friends when you are in a relationship. Which, I know, is an easy rut to fall into, because you're so taken up with this one person that you want to spend every waking moment with them, to the exclusion of every- and anyone else, but you have to get a grip on yourself and do it.
To all my friends, who never forgot about me when I forgot about them, and/or who helped me realize that I still had a life --- thank you. You may not have realized that you were helping me, but you were.
"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love... true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in."
From the movie Secondhand Lions. Said by the character Hub, played by Robert Duvall, to his grand-nephew, Walter (Haley Joel Osment). Go watch it --- it's a great story.
