Cell Phone Saboteur: How One Misused Device Can Ruin Your Love Life

 

saboteur - noun - something or someone that destroys, damages, or obstructs (Google)

For whatever reason, lately, I've become a sounding board for male friends who would like to be in romantic relationships but who don't quite understand that in order to receive, you have to give. And when it comes to women, you have to give a lot–in particular–of your time. However, being that most of us women understand that time is becoming more and more invaluable, maybe more than anything, what we just need, desire, crave is your undivided attention, which need not take up much time. As so many men (and women) are addicted to their cell phones, what used to be so easy to impart (general, polite consideration in the moment) is no longer. In fact, a cell phone can be a downright saboteur of your love life, if you allow it to be.

Case in point #1: Jack: Several years ago, I made the mistake of making a lover out of a perfectly decent platonic friend, an attractive real estate broker, who is thoroughly, utterly, completely devoted to his two manipulative adult daughters. For my birthday, he borrowed a client's capacious home and went to extremes to prove his passionate love for me by reimagining the living room. Romantically minded, he made the effort to include two chairs, a bistro table complete with a white linen tablecloth, polished silver, champagne glasses (as well as champagne), candles, a lit fireplace...you get the picture. Just after we sat down to enjoy a gourmet dinner that he had prepared himself, his smart phone rang. On the other end was one of his daughters. Rather than say, "I'll call her back later," put the phone on airplane mode, and pocket it, he took the call. His daughter was filling out an insurance form and needed his undivided attention immediately. Unfortunately, so did I. Guess who got it? To make a long story short, the following week, I broke up with him. Are you surprised? He was. Clueless, just clueless.

Case in point #2: Jim: Jim is a platonic male friend, whom I most surely will keep as one. The reason is this: He is yet another clueless one when it comes to women and their needs. Sympathetic toward the plight of persons of my gender, I'm sticking around to advise him so that perhaps someday he'll obtain what he wants: a female, romantic counterpart. Jim's main problem is that he allows his ex-wife (and his two teenagers) to dominate his life via the airspace in his free time. Ergo, any girlfriend would have to be comfortable with being in fourth place. And guess what? No self-respecting woman would. His cell phone (with his permission, of course) already sabotaged two romantic relationships. How? Apparently, his ex-wife, who still wears the riding pants and holds the crop and reins, always calls him demanding an audience at the wrong moments, and he takes the calls or reads and responds to her texts. On two separate occasions after putting his dates on hold and speaking to his ex on his smart phone, both prospective paramours flipped him off and are no longer talking to him. Yet can you blame them?

What good advice have I to give to these men and to you?  If you want to keep a woman (or a man, because it goes both ways), put down, shut off, leave home your cell phone. It and all of the people trying to get in touch with you are not going to get you a roll in the feathers. The women (or men) with whom you are in love or want to be in love need to know that you intend to put them first because they should be first–not second, not third, not fourth, etc. If you can't accomplish this feat, then you'll just have to be content spending time with your kids and your ex-spouse or any other iteration of "ex." 

While you're thinking about this, I'll leave you with the Stones: "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might just get what you need." 

#word-to-words, #slice-of-life,  #blog, #blogging, #editorial, #reading, #vocabulary, #ReadersMagnet, #spilled thoughts, #good advice, #personal-essay, #writing community, #writing

In Vogue: All That Is Preternatural

 

preternatural - adjective - beyond what is normal; unusual (Google)

Is it just me, or does it look like everyone is trying to jump onto the preternatural bandwagon in a big way? Are creators so uninspired with what most would consider normal that they feel they have to push the envelope and take huge risks in order to get people to notice? I don't know, but yesterday I was led down a fork in the road, which veered away from Status Quo Drive, and I wound up taking a walk on the wild, weird side. 

Case in point #1: The pregnant daughter of my best friend decided to videotape the preternatural way she chose to announce the gender of her forthcoming infant to close relatives. My friend, no doubt proud of her daughter's idiosyncratic imagination, texted the footage to a small group of us women friends. The daughter–I'll call her Cindy–is obsessed with her two riotous black Labs and felt that she just had to include them somehow, somewhere in the unveiling, so she bought and later put a blue collar on one (to represent a boy baby) and a pink collar on the other (to represent a girl). Then on one side of the family room, Cindy had her husband contain the dogs in separate cages in order to control them and heighten the suspense. On the opposite side of the room, Cindy was crouching down, holding a treat. When she called out to the right dog, her hubby opened just the right cage and it galloped to her, revealing to everyone its blue collar. It was all very Pavlovian to me, and I suppose unique, to be euphemistic. I'm sure all of you dog lovers out there can't wait to impart this preternatural, pre-natal gender reveal to your own expecting daughters or sons; but personally, I am left thinking that the whole thing divulged more than just the baby's sex. My guess is that Cindy may just wind up spending more quality time with the dogs than with her son. Thank Goodness the husband seems to prefer human children over canine kids. 

Case in point #2: Have you seen any of the critically acclaimed films released in 2022? After the aforementioned texted home video, I saw two on TV that are being streamed right now: "Banshees of Inisherin" and "Everything Everywhere All at Once," both considered foreign, I believe. (And yes, they are, very.) The first, set on a beautiful, bucolic, remote island off the coast of Ireland somewhere in the distant, indiscernible past, has a simple, yet somewhat ridiculous plot involving two grown men: the older friend decides to alienate his younger best friend because he is dull, and warns him if he persists in wanting to reclaim the friendship, in retaliation, he will cut off his fingers on his left hand, the hand he uses to play the violin. That's it. That's the plot. Does he do it? Of course. And his selfish, sado-masochistic act leads to repercussions that only worsen the situation, but at least the bored protagonist is no longer bored. He's miserable. The second film, sci-fi in many respects, is pretty much a series of nonstop acid trips depicting parallel universes that eventually boil down to a reconciliation between an estranged teen daughter and her mother, the owner of a laundromat (both are Chinese in descent) somewhere in L.A. Both movies transcend the preternatural. I'm sorry, but both are just weird–too weird for my taste.

I am sure there are plenty of critics and readers out there who definitely disagree with me and would take a walk on the wild, weird side any day of the week just to take the detour off Status Quo Drive. Which is perfectly fine. To each, his or her (or their) own. Yet every once in a while, natural, as opposed to preternatural, is on the soft, comforting, cozy side :). 

#film review, #word-to-words, #slice-of-life, #literature, #blog, #blogging, #editorial, #reading, #vocabulary, #ReadersMagnet, #spilled thoughts, #personal-essay, #writing community, #writing #opinion #satire 

Vestigial Architecture: The Suburban Farmhouse

 

vestigial - adjective - forming a remnant of something that was once larger. 

Vestigial is an uncommon descriptive word that I came across while paging through Ian McEwan's novel Amsterdam, the content of which is unrelated to the recent film with the same name. As I had not seen the adjective used in a while, I looked it up. The meaning is a bit confounding because if you were to take the participle "forming" and change it to the infinitive "to form," the definition would work better for a verb although the word doesn't look like one. The way I see it is that something vestigial is merely a portion of what was once significantly bigger, like the current architectural trend of the American farmhouse. 

It used to be that farmhouses were built on farms, vast tracks of flat lands where undulating fields of corn or other crops that undulate–or not–could be planted. Iowa, a beautiful, verdant state with much in the way of undulation due to ubiquitous, circulating breezes, has plenty of stereotypical farmhouses on stereotypical farms. This past July, while visiting Dyersville, Iowa, my daughter and I had the pleasure of sitting on the porch of the classic white farmhouse used in the iconic film Field of Dreams. There was, fortunately, nothing vestigial about it albeit since a developer from Chicago bought the farm recently and is planning on converting it and the surrounding acreage into the Disney Land of baseball, the original farmhouse will become a remnant of the past by 2025. But I digress.

What I am trying to communicate in a circuitous fashion is that farmhouses are no longer being built on farms. They are being put up in the suburbs on plots of land just capacious enough for them. Forget about fields. On less than an acre, there are no exterior "dreams" to be had since Shoeless Joe Jackson and the White Sox probably won't be meandering over the asphalt anytime soon. Even if they were to do so, their pilgrimage would be far from romantic. Let's face it. Cornfields are a lot more believable as Heaven than pavement.

But for some ineffable reason, the newly reimagined, reconstituted farmhouse is quickly becoming the dream house of choice. It is yet another trend that doesn't quite make sense to me as the farmhouse without the farm is just a white clapboard (now vinyl) house with numerous windows laced in black trim (like the stationery Germans use to announce a death in the family), matching black roof and garage door, and several asymmetrical gables, blocking out all sunlight from reaching the neighboring homes like mine. I don't know about you, but I never considered farmhouses to be aesthetically pleasing edifices. They are just simple, just average, just nothing-to-write-home-about homes: comfortable, practical, ordinary. 

Which could very well be why the vestigial suburban farmhouse (oxymoron!) is in vogue. At the base of  Everyman's dreams could just be the concept of basic: the basic house, the basic Lazy Boy recliner, the basic Sony sixty-inch plasma TV, the basic black and white farmhouse.  Don't worry. It is okay to want basic. After all, modesty is supposed to be an American value. Yet would you pay a million dollars for the status quo? I wouldn't.

I guess some of us just have dreams that don't come in black and white and aren't vestigial . 

#word-to-words, #slice-of-life, #literature, #blog, #blogging, #religion, #editorial, #reading, #vocabulary, #history, #ReadersMagnet, #spilled thoughts, #good advice, #personal-essay, #writing community, #writing #opinion #satire 

Hapless and Happy

 

hapless - adjective - unfortunate, unlucky (Google).

Perhaps because January is a bit of a downer, the topic of happiness is in the news. Recent articles in The New York Times and in Time magazine dissect the abstract concept, whittling it down to its basic components, which I am sure to get to before I'm through writing. 

As one article in Time mentions, the word happiness contains "hap" or "luck" within it. So "happy" is someone who is full of luck; whereas "hapless" points to someone who is unlucky. Not everyone is happy or lucky all of the time unless you happen to be a Buddhist monk. (I have never met one who wasn't overflowing with bliss.) But can you be a hapless person and still be happy most of the time? 

I'd say yes because I am a definitive example. I've lived a life comparable to that of Sisyphus in that I have kept on pushing that boulder (analogous to effort) up the hill, only for it to come rolling back down again. It is not as though I am a total failure; I am not. I just haven't had the kind of luck that takes control of the boulder and stabilizes it at the top of the hill that is the epic grandeur of what everyone except Emerson deems as success. Which doesn't mean that I am not happy. I own all of the ingredients mentioned in Emerson's definition and in the news articles: I have health, family, myriad friends, freedom to do a creative job I love, enough in the bank to pay my bills, time to exercise, meditate, garden, and pray.  All of these give me the strength to endure the unlucky moments, such as when I was driving through a canyon in Montana and a pebble fell from 9,000 feet and cracked the windshield of a BMW I was borrowing from someone. These freak occurrences surely fall under the nomenclature of "Bad Luck" or "Hapless." Yet, the contented person in me always tends to look on the bright side in order to stay out of the funk. What landed on the windshield could have been a moose and not a pebble, in which case I wouldn't be writing this right now. 

So what's the takeaway? Yes, you can be hapless and still be happy or lucky but not necessarily all that happy. In the U.S., we have documents protecting our right to pursue happiness. It is out there for all, even the Sisyphuses who are constantly watching their toes while pushing their loads up those mounds. Haplessness could come down to fate. Happiness, like most everything else, could just be mindset and a choice. 

#word-to-words, #slice-of-life, #literature, #blog, #blogging, #religion, #editorial, #reading, #vocabulary, #history, #ReadersMagnet, #spilled thoughts, #good advice, #personal-essay, #writing community, #writing

Attaining Enlightenment in the New Year

 

enlightenment - noun - the action or state of attaining or having attained spiritual knowledge or insight; the awareness that frees a person from the cycle of rebirth (in Buddhism).

Looking over the titles to the 319 articles I've posted on blogspot since the pandemic started and forgot to end, I have found that those with references to "light" and "love" seem to be read more frequently than others. I have also noticed that one of my songs "Looking for the Light" off my debut album Heart Walk seems to be attracting a few more listeners lately, comparatively speaking. Clearly, most of you are attracted to light or optimism as opposed to darkness or pessimism. Which is definitely healthy. Cheers!

Enlightenment, according to Buddhists, is the achievement of ultimate light as it emanates from within and is sparked when you are able to deny satisfaction to a specific portion of your ego. Rather than tell yourself you are wonderful, special, God's gift to everyone around you (as all narcissists do), enlightenment insists on humility, the deflation of the enlarged sense of self that might have started to spin out of control twenty years ago when participation awards were first handed out to you kindergarteners who theoretically didn't participate. I can't be too hard on Generation X's parenting, though, because self-centeredness and entitlement are two abstractions that have always been associated with human nature. But I digress. Buddhists believe that if you reduce your sense of self-importance, you begin to separate yourself from your body and mind so that you can walk down a spiritual path, free from pain brought on by egocentric demands. I suppose it makes sense, but it takes a sufficient amount of motivation and effort to do something counterintuitive: deny yourself the self. 

Personally, some of my more advanced human friends achieve their own sense of enlightenment simply by maintaining a sense of humor. You can pretty much endure just about anything, even the fluctuations of your own ego, just by "laughing off" a potential insult from your closest family member or anything else remotely similar. It is also the perfect way to redirect a conversation that has run amuck. Buoyancy can be obtained for all with a comedic sensibility that is relatable, kind, not insulting. Even if you aren't naturally witty, you can simply not take someone else's faults or your own all that seriously. Because after all, we all have them. Faults, that is. Also remember that if you know or are related to a number of narcissists, you cannot correct their behavior, no matter how egregious it may become. They will only use your advice to manipulate and subsequently do more damage. So it's best to take what they say and do with a grain of salt and/or a shot of whiskey, whichever suits your tastebuds, and then add a hearty har-har to the mix. Wa la! Instant enlightenment, or at least, light in the room.

To enlighten can also mean to share knowledge to a positive end. I hope I have done a little bit of that for you today so that you can enter 2023 feeling a bit lighter on your feet. Are things starting off well? 

#word-to-words, #slice-of-life, #literature, #blog, #blogging, #religion, #editorial, #reading, #vocabulary, #history, #ReadersMagnet, #spilled thoughts, #good advice, #personal-essay, #writing community, #writing