Give it a Go (sucky titles be darned)

Holy Guacamole!  Here it is, the final day of the month and me with only three February entries to this here blog.  Hey bloggy, watch me pull a post out of my hat!

This week I’ve been doing some experimental cooking.  Monday was a Tai-noodle thing with peanuts and chicken and about a half-dozen spices I’ve not worked with – totally new recipe under the gun of people leaving at a certain time and there I am in the kitchen trying to make things work on time and under budget (priced coconut milk lately?).  Tuesday was curry chicken with potatoes.  Again, something I’ve never cooked before.  Thursday I tried a new pasta-salad with Chimichurri instead of the usual Italian dressing stuff.  Familial reviews for all three were positive.  But that’s not today’s point.

As I was slaving away in the kitchen during this thrice-fold event, the thought kept occurring about how much time & effort & preparation & different ingredients all this took.  Time slowed.  I was clumsy & stumbly & uncertain & huffy at times (likin’ me some ampersands this morning).  Had to refer to the recipes between steps and it just didn’t flow the way I like to have my cooking flow.

Can we say ‘learning curve’?

Case in point – I bet the average home-cook in downtown Bangladesh can make chicken potato curry in his sleep in about a third of the time it took me.  But, let said Bangladeshi have a go at Mom Decker’s spaghetti – that’s homemade sauce bucko so get that sick rag-goo bottled poison out of yer head!  I’m thinking I’ve got the upper hand on that one.  Not bragging.  It’s down to an art that takes less than an hour.

If at first you don’t succeed – quit.  Something like that?  Been there, done that, wish I hadn’t (quit, that is).  I like music – can’t read a note, but I like music.  Tried learning how to read music once or twicet, but that’s like hard to learn for my right-brained self.  Never followed up on the efforts.  So here I am, bereft and vacant and without what I’ll call a technical understanding of something I greatly enjoy and appreciate.

I also posit that we are too used to seeing the final, finished, and polished result done at the hands of highly paid professionals.  Consider the McDonald’s customer-facing menu, replete with deceptive photos of what the food ‘looks like’, organized by this or that or the other thing.  Oft overlooked, it is the product of hundreds of man-hours of people in putty-colored meeting rooms, design offices, and printing shops.  We don’t see the ugliness that goes in to designing even the mendacity of advertising, let alone the well-done and more beautiful displays.

Yeah, there’s a fear of failure.  There’s a fear that what I’m attempting is going to suck and suck bad.  Anyone who has ever written anything for public consumption knows this feeling well.  And guess what, it has sucked, it does suck, and it shall suck again.  Can I get a big true-that!?  But you don’t get good at something by doing it one time.  And guess what, sucking bad didn’t end my world.  It never ended yours – unless you’re talking about a poisoned blow-dart down your throat like that aborigine in that one Bugs Bunny episode.  Different kind of sucking altogether.

So – learn the lessons and wear the scars proudly into the future.  It simply means you tried and in a world of people who attempt less than what they are comfortable with, that means a lot.

Strength and Honour

I imagine the noble grandfathers
sitting above, imbibing and in low tones
intimating about all that we have never seen
nor been.

It's about the stretch and pull of sinew,
long days' labour and receipt of burdens
we have never carried and now cheaply
we arrived.

In expensive lives we nonchalantly hold
at bay the assaults once withstood and won
and were given the hard valedictory praises
by default.

In thanks, they would have us forsake
our luck and stop to lift a greater cause
so they may know we are of and are one
of them.

Synchronized Thinking

Synchronized swimming is when two or three, or seven hundred people jump in the water and do the same things:  make flower designs with their legs, stand on their heads at the bottom of the pool, imitate mermaid ballerinas, and generally splash around.  It’s like a flash-mob in the water -- kind of cool to watch, especially with the right camera work.  Though, the nose-clips and spitting tends to distract from the artistry.  Alas that it’s not a Winter Olympic Sport.

I, being a land-based mammal, never could do any of that.  I can swim, but don’t expect me to save anyone when the ship goes down.  I’m heading for the closest piece of flotsam and there shall I cling until rescued.  Boats are good – never had a problem with boats.  But when immersed in water, and my feet can’t touch the muddy bottom?  What’s left of my bowels tries to crawl its way to dry land, dragging the rest of me along for the panic-induced ride.

But that’s ok because there’s another sport, quite similar, and I do it with the best of them.

An example:  something happens in the world and that something is deemed newsworthy by the powers in charge of selecting newsworthy events for us to consider.  The closing segment of tha whilrd newz tanite goes something like this:  “And finally, a mother in the township of East-Ganglia expressed outrage today when not allowed to transport her trans-finless guppies to the local pet babysitting service.”  [image of outraged woman holding plastic sack of finless guppies].

Other examples include controversies about movies, music, and other priced venues of entertainment, usually a few weeks before said entertainment is slated to premier.  A bit like Jimmy Fallon appearing in dozens of commerials before Jay Leno's chair had the chance to cool.

The above segment lasts, perhaps, a half-minute.  Count to thirty.  That’s how much information the viewers at home have.  Hardly a blip on the radar, something to possibly notice in between bites of dinner.  It has nothing to do with the viewer at home.  But the next day, the story goes ‘viral’.  This is a suspect term.  Going viral is often not as virus-like as one might think.  But anyway, the viewer at home hears the story again the next morning over his crispy cereal.  This account includes no new information.

Yet, it must suddenly be important.  An outraged individual or small group of individuals must be tended to.  So, we turn on our radios to hear what the radio talk-people say about it.  We watch our news and read our blogs and choose, based on the ear we like to have tickled.  By end of day – we relax because an opinion on the so very important matter (typically one of two – either ‘fer it’ or ‘agin it’) has been accepted.

The thinking has been given to the public, not formed by the public.  There’s a difference.  But everyone goes around thinking they know what they think about the outrage-du-jour and the proposed legislation to solve it.

And that, my friends, is synchronized thinking.  We’ve been splashing around the water for some time now.

Who The Hell Knows

I see where the philosophy club at the college is going to host a discussion about profanity - along the lines of attempting to discover when a word crosses into the realm of the profane.  A titillating subject, no?  I've thought about that in the past and, as a writer, I've considered how much, if any, potty-mouth my characters should possess.  People do swear, both adults and children -- so where do writers self-prohibit and where do they let loose? If you find an answer to that question, let me know.

In an ironic twist of linguistics, swearing is sometimes referred to as adult language.  Not quite sure when the last time some people walked around a middle-school was, but perhaps they should revisit just to make sure they understand the concept of adult language.

I recently watched The Boondocks Saints.  Yes, it's an older movie - testimony to the fact I don't get out much. Both the plot and the premise of this film were interesting.  The characters weren't as realized as they could have been, but with all the bloodshed who had time to notice?  However, the greatest flaw   was the pervasive use of the f-bomb.  Half way through the movie I was tired of hearing it, yet like the houseguest that never leaves, it stayed until the very end.  I mean, I get it.  The good guys were from a rough neighborhood and worked in a meat processing plant and the bad guys were bad guys.  But still.  At some point I suspect the writer just ran out of dialog and substituted that one word so his characters would have something to say until the movie had finished.

Compare this to another cinematic giant, Kill Bill, Vol. 1.  There's the same type of language in KBv1, but it's far less obtuse; it doesn't crop up in every scene and this helps the dialog sound, somehow, more mature (at least as mature as a kung-fu sword-fighting movie can be) than TBS.  Like I said, ironic.

It's also fascinating when people who know I'm a pastor slip and say something they feel is profane.  This is often followed by an apology.  Now let me get this straight.  First, a human being who claims to believe in a God who knows everything they do, every thought they have, and the motives behind it all, figures they should apologize to me (of all people) because they used a swear word.  Look, if you can say it in front of God, just who do you think I am?  The pastor is not the language police - at least, he shouldn't be and if he feels that he is, that's his problem and not yours.  God gives us free will; who am I to try to take it?

Then there's that bit in scripture about taking the Lord's Name in vain.  That's one of the top ten (somewhere in Exodus 20 if memory serves).  It's one of the Thou Shalt Nots.  A lot of believers take that to mean, 'no cussin'; not a terrible boundary to have in one's life, though we may not quite appreciate the intended meaning.

Consider King David who wrote many of the psalms - beautiful poetry if ever there was, of which I hear only a fair echo because my Hebrew is a bit rusty.  King David was eloquent and he understood the power of words.  Yet, there are a couple of passages where he opens the great dictionary of his brain and, for example, throws out a pisseth (homework:  get yourself a KJV concordance and look it up).  Point being, David knew his audience and when he spoke with soldiers he wasn't above talking as, sometimes, soldiers do.

Then there's the Apostle Paul who said, and here I paraphrase, that he considered everything he'd given up to answer his call as dung.  This is an example of the translators being polite for the studio audience.  Paul's original word-choice is a bit more abrasive and much less softened for the genteel ear (Philippians 3:8).

There are other examples, but please note, two of the big names were not averse to throwing around what could be called profanity.  And since it's in the Bible, hmmm… maybe a list of Bible-profanity is in order.  Then again, the world could probably survive without such.

Following along then, vanity (adjective or noun, take your pick) is something either meaningless or selfish, a literal reflection and gazing upon of our own surface, nothing more, nothing less.  Narcissus, lest we forget, fell in love with his own reflection and wasted his life -- poignant lesson on vanity if ever there was.  So that, taking the Lord's name in vain would mean using His name for personal gain (ala televangelists / politicians / and some abusive spouses), as a meaningless word (one of those verbal fillers that turns into the spoken Tourette-syndrome-habit), or only in the most selfish, albeit possibly sincere, of contexts (God what can you do for me because them other people don't matter so much).

But very little of this answers the question of when does a word enter into the vernacular as a profanity.  Legally, it has to do when a word crosses the boundary into the offensive or hateful (your state statutes may vary).  And, if that's the case, a better discussion for the philosophy club might be to consider what words aren't offensive, and why.  Such legal definitions are, like many legal definitions, ambiguous at best and enforced only upon the discretion of the special interest group currently bellyaching the loudest.

My own opinion when a word becomes a 'bad' word?  Please refer to the title of this post and good luck finding a job with that philosophy degree.