Mutarjam

I recently got asked one of the most intelligent questions in a while:  why do you want to get married.  My answer is irrelevant (to all but me and maybe the poor soul that might become my spouse).  The question is SO important. 

There’s no doubt about the practicalities of being in a marriage (it applies to common law partners just as well, but for my discussion I choose to keep it to marriage - it’s my discussion folks):  Tax benefits.  Social parity with peers (e.g. being at the same life stage with your friends, and therefore having common activities).  Always having a companion whose schedule you can completely know and manipulate.  Someone else to do the dishes.  (Database whirring away searching for other examples).

But while important, should these be the key driving forces for such a critical life decision?  The frequency of “oh you’re lucky you have such freedom” comments makes one wonder how many of these folks actually did marry for (only) such reasons.  Would it not be part of a healthy relationship to encourage and support individual needs, as well as the joint goals?  To have an attitude of service and truly enjoy making the other happy?  To have less of the eye-rolls and more of the love-rushes?

It could very well be that this only happens in my non-existent ideal world.  The same place where the social harm of debt-on-interest is understood, and parents can carry their kids’ pictures without being arrested, and young kids/adults do not go on a killing spree including themselves, and politicians’ lack of integrity is not acceptable, and food is not wasted while poverty claims millions every year.  And where no one eats baked beans on a paratha.

So how did we get here?  Oh!  (non-existent) Ideal worlds.  I remember when I was a kid (that is *certainly* not even 4 decades yet), I heard fairy tales of lights being turned on with a clap in magical lands.  It happens today effortlessly.  Because someone believed in magic.  Enough to make it happen.  While everyone else said it’s a fantasy, let it go.

I still believe.

Nope.  Not the ‘industry’ of hip-swaying figures donning show-offy creative (for some) works .  All those looking for a rant or drool please refer to the nearest row of tabloid-glossies at your favourite (or unfavourite, whichever it may be) location.

I’m referring to the art of conceptualizing and describing (or representing) something.  At times, it’s literal - as in building cute miniatures of high-rise condo towers, complete with a jogging-barbie-with-headphones and a few models (yes now from the runway) playing tennis on the built-in courts.  In some cases it’s highly abstract - as in extreme secularism or nationalism being other forms of a rigid religious practice (where religion is a way of life).

The (unfortunate?) people who get used to the idea of modeling (and therefore seeing patterns of similarity) often fall prey to what I call a “disconnection syndrome”.  Because some logical minds see similarity and demand consistency.  If you do this in situation A, you should do the same in situation B, because both situations are the same.  Sadly, while it may feel intellectually satisfying (there’s a reason why join-the-dots is still a popular game in all age groups), and it feels great to hear our own voices, it doesn’t win any popularity votes.  People (yours truly included) may be comfortable in choosing their level of livable hypocrisy, but generally don’t like to be called on it.  (Golden time-tested rule of societal living - no one likes to be made to feel dumb, regardless of the reality.)  Therefore, the outspoken logical mind either falls into social disfavour, or chooses to curb the “outspoken” part.  Disconnection and disconnection.  Or at least it feels like it.  Until another epiphany occurs.

It’s not necessary to share all the pictures that have been drawn on the mind’s canvas.  (This is where the dots go crazy and join another stream for fun.)  The same argument holds for when proponents of a belief system (religion, environmentalists, animal rights folks, vegetarians, and many others, so no one feel excluded!) just HAVE to convince others.  It’s a compulsion.  (I’ve been told OCD’s curable.)  I repeat, it’s not necessary to show-and-tell, or “convince”, others.  People will see what they want to and choose to see.

So be happy that you see patterns (better than seeing dead people, IMHO).  Keep them to yourself and be judicious even when asked.  And if you do find someone else who sees them too, try not to hug them so tight as to crush the life out of them.  Too few of them already.

And even fewer as cute as Bruce Willis!

There is a need for someone to take on the uniquely challenging position of … “Bear Management Technician”.  All interested may evaluate themselves along the following criteria:

• You are motivated to support the Bear Wise program
  (please note that at this time it’s only the bear that’s wise, and you will be wiser after the experience)
• You can provide effective solutions to human-bear conflicts
  (remember that in all relationships and conflict situations, things can be worked out by trusting the other party and openly sharing your feelings by talking things through)
• You are good at determining problem bear prevention tactics
  (all that tackling practice in football, successful bodychecks in hockey, and schoolyard fights that involved hand-to-hand combat with some on-the-ground wrestling, should certainly go on your resume)
• You can demonstrate experience in bear capture/immobilization/relocation techniques
  (a live audition with the bear will be required, and hauling half-conscious friends to their homes after a wild party does not count as relevant “capture/immobilization/relocation techniques” experience)
• You have demonstrated tact, diplomacy, good judgement
  (see above note about conflict resolution through talking)
• You have computer skills in a variety of applications
  (be prepared to carry a pda and google your way out of a tricky negotiation)

It’s a seasonal temporary 5-month job, so there’s a possibility of extension if the 360 evaluation by the bear community supports it.  And no bribing the evaluators with mushy bear-hugs!  All interested applicants please follow the bear-marked trail (yes you’ll know where it’s been if you’re the person for this job) and leave your resume at the mouth of the bear’s den.  Pin it down with a jar of honey so it doesn’t fly away.  Applicants selected for an interview with the bear will be notified after the hibernation period is over.

The free societies have SO many rules.  The only time I notice the really intricate ones is when I unintentionally break any.  Like the first time I broke the “seating rules” in a subway train.  It was the old kind of train.  Bench seats with a slippery cover.  On one of the seats there were two women.  And there was some space between them.  I went and sat between the two women.  One of them looked at me with an openly disgusted look, and stood up.

It took me a few days to figure out… it doesn’t matter if there was space, the seat was “meant” for two people.  I had encroached.  In the all-precious personal space.  Unforgivable!

And if there are available seats, the priority is to choose one that’s not next to anyone already sitting, unless I really “have” to.

Now I know better.  At the bar stools in a coffee shop, for instance, I wouldn’t sit right next to anyone, if there was a place further ahead.  Or I could sit there, but would get a “what’s wrong with you” look.

We have to preserve the hard-won freedom to have socially expected and acceptable distance.  And then pay someone to teach us how to have meaningful conversations.  While we’re safely sitting 2 seats away.

We’re funny.

Allow me to begin by acknowledging the blatant plagiarism in naming the post, taken from a book that I haven’t read, but came across in an article.  Good things are meant to be reused.

It’s a new holiday in Ontario: Family Day, third Monday of every February.  I am grateful for an extra holiday (work brought home notwithstanding), and the naming of it as such.  In speaking of why Premier McGuinty instituted this holiday, he said “One of the things that I recognized was that never have more parents spent more time working outside the home than at any point in our history than they do today.  I think the single most valuable commodity, so to speak, for our families would be time spent together, so that’s the motivation behind this.”

I have also encountered many reminders of how this so-critical institution is suffering, all over the globe.  A man still hurting from the pain and abuse of a step-father, over 30-40 years ago.  A woman in constant search for affirmation by her father for the last 3-4 decades, whom she’s never seen or known, and who continues to ignore her existence.    Marriages breaking up within 2 months, or after 20-30 years (when the kids leave, scarred from witnessing decades of anger in the house, and thereby entering into their own severely jeopardized relationships). Two in five (38.3%) marriages end by 30th anniversary.  One in 5 (19%) of Canadian children aged 0 to 14 did not live with both parents in 2001.  I don’t know if other important measures (such as siblings not talking to each other) are even measured, recorded or reported.

I could go on but it hurts.

In an ever-present quest to improve myself (and boy do I have my work cut out!), I was studying improvisation to help with quick-thinking.  A critical, given rule for improv to work is an attitude of “serve and support”.  This means, in a scene (or real life scenario), my job and focus is to help the other person achieve their objective, trusting that this will help me achieve mine (of making the overall scene work).  This is an inviolable rule, the ignoring of which will bring the scene crashing down.  And it is to be practiced unconditionally, that is, irrespective of what the other person may have done right or wrong.

Service, like excellence, is not a task; it’s an attitude and habit.

One of the people I care about and respect much, she and I continuously remind each other of a Gandhi quote: “Life is one indivisible whole.” In all the successful relationships I have observed, which give me hope (despite the statistics of human relationship breakdown), I see this rule of improv being applied - they truly enjoy and focus on serving other people, without ego or selfishness, and in turn making the whole scene work out beautifully, like a masterpiece of musical composition.

Here are some other rules of improv: Trust, Commitment,  Awareness, Concentration, Energy, Listening, Give and Take, Yes And… (i.e. not refuting, rather going along), Attending to (i.e. paying close attention).

What would happen to our families (and marriages), if we practiced all these, all the time.  Economic chaos for one thing - what would all the lawyers, therapists,  etc. do?  But maybe, just maybe, our scene of life could work out better.

One indivisible whole.

I loved the movie “I, Robot“.  I don’t know if enough people paid enough attention to a key message there: there are rules, and then there’s fuzzy logic.  There are so many ways in which we strive to protect ourselves.  But we could easily tie ourselves into knots that are tough to get out of, if we’re simply too scared and there isn’t enough trust to go around.  Stephen Covey, Jr., talks about the “speed of trust“, and how it costs people and societies tons to lose trust in one another.  While this manifests in different ways in different societies, in the highly regularized places, it could result in a parent being arrested because they happen to carry pictures of their kids swimming in the buff.  Or that immediate family will not have access to make any decisions (even potentially life-saving) about an 18+ year old “adult”, unless the person has signed a release form, and if they weren’t able to for some reason, well, too bad.

Where is that balance between the “protection from messing up” or “freedom to help” another’s life?  In the absence of trust, I don’t know if there ever will be a balance achieved through regulation.  It will be managing one fear or another.  I wonder.

Anyone expecting this to be a cohesive piece of writing, your wish-fulfilling-genie is on a break today.  (And no I don’t know when they’ll be back.)  The only accidental thing common to these musings is that they sort-of occurred within the same day, in the EST timezone.

If someone is about to scream, and the purpose is just to scream cos they feel like it, they should let the people within earshot know beforehand.  It’ll be quite distressing if they rushed to help, and then found out they were supposed to ignore thousands of years worth of evolutionary training.  I’d request the same courtesy from all artists/ performers.  If they’re just looking to express (rather than communicate or entertain), and I’m part of the audience, please let me know so I can stop trying to figure the art or performance out.  I have other uses for my limited gray cells, such as pondering on how best to use my gray cells.  If I go to see a dance performance, please have mercy and do not give me a euclidean riddle to solve in my off-work hours.  (And while we’re on that subject, please don’t give me those in my on-work hours either!)

So say I’m a believer.  In God, that is.  Or try to be.  One thing kinda common to all believers of the God-delusion (that’s a tongue-in-cheek homage to all those who choose to ignore Einstein’s conclusion on the topic) is that there’s no place we’re not watched.  In fact, one of the earliest-heard stories from my childhood (back when the stories aimed to communicate morals, not advertising tag lines) is when a teacher asks the students to go do a task where no-one was watching, and one child comes back saying, I couldn’t do it because everywhere I went, God was watching.  So why is it, that we behave so differently in the masjid, the house of God, than we do outside of it, as if that was the only place God can see us?  The same people who’d talk, work, take the bus, buy stuff at the counter, or any of a myriad of mundane everyday tasks in the presence of males and females, would be SO hesitant to coexist in the same physical room as the other gender?  One, it hasn’t been established that breathing the same recycled air as the other gender is forbidden.  Second, if it was, it’d be no worse doing it inside the mosque than outside of it.  And third, merely coexisting in the same space is about as desegregated an environment as that of Southern US (or British India) of the late 1800’s.  I don’t get it.  But what else is news.

I walk into a comedy show.  The audience is so white it’s like it snowed inside.  I don’t have a problem, but I do wonder.  Now that we see some brown on the ski-slopes, or even in cottage country and canoeing lakes, what’s up with comedy shows?  Either this “refined” entertainment escapes the rest of the human population, or they are (or think they are) so funny themselves they don’t need “hired help”?  The other interesting demographic is: it’s only women or couples.  I guess it’s just not a guy thing to go watch some dude being funny?  And once the courtship/ “winning over” period ends, it makes sense to pay the $15 or something to some other guy to amuse the wife/girlfriend.  Who can keep up that effort for life?  What I found amusing (certainly not the opening act) was the disclaimer that there may be adult material, but there’s no age restriction.  Talk about consistent laws!  I can’t hear this joke in a movie, but I can go hear it in a live show.  It’s bound to be less damaging to my young impressionable mind.

But of course, since I have electricity, running hot/cold water, reliable and safe transportation, and everything else to make my life comfy (including socks that have “fingers” for my toes just like gloves for the hands), I can sit back and complain about anything and everything.  Perfectly natural and justified.

In some muslim countries, movies are censored. And it’s not always the … er… “mature” bits, there are other kinds of “forbidia” as well (yes I created that word and am sticking by it!) Items of potential misuse by personnel that have yet to find anything productive to do, are also stricken/ snipped/ abbreviated/ edited… you get the drift. And this is done with complete and blatant disregard to the story, or the director’s sensibilities. Not even a condolence card or word of sympathy reaches those bereaved by the fate of the movie post-scissorum.

So Bruce Almighty plays in the theatres in one such country. With all the “God” scenes cut out of the picture. Did I mention it was the movie Bruce Almighty? So in the entire picture, there’s nothing left of Morgan Freeman, and the audience, who’ve already educated themselves via internet or other means we won’t discuss, are there enjoying a comedy movie, but laughing at parts the director had no intention of making funny! That is, the making up of the missing story bits with their own imaginations!

I watched the entire uncensored movie without for a moment holding any God-like feelings towards Morgan. I guess I’m part of the cynical jaded generation that has lost faith in the “truthfulness” of movies. This may be more harmful to the faithful who are more innocent than myself, and therefore are the loudest to protest. Perhaps there should be a special rating for such movies, with a minimum level of maturity, not measured in units of time on earth of just … “existing”.

And for those well-meaning folks who are touchy-feely about sensitivities, my vote would be to prioritize and protect those who are the weakest, needing protection. God isn’t in that picture either.

=> Retold with due credit and reverence to a dear person in my life, who is an incredible story-teller, and related this much better than I could!

As one “refines” with time (read: grows older), things that have always been nagging at the back of mind start becoming louder. [That's not a good thing, since all that noise in the "foreground" of thought is what adds to road accidents and unsuccessful romances.]

Anyhow, I’ve always read biographies of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and wondered… if I was on the “other side” of the writer (for those hooked on hindi movies and need everything painfully spelled out, this means a muslim reading a non-muslim author and vice versa), why would I trust your objectivity? I don’t know if - in a subject of that sort - it is even possible to be objective. And I don’t appreciate the weaving in and out of facts and opinions without making clear which is which. Not in a biography. In “The DaVinci Code” or “Chah-e-Babul“, that’s needed and what keeps me riveted.

I explain (or try to), my question.

Say I am a non-muslim writer, and not writing one of those “all is wrong” kind of books. I clearly don’t believe he was a prophet, but I am writing about a person who claimed to be one. Can I write an objective biography, objectively analyze all sources and not pick and choose, and leave the book without introducing any bias of “disbelief”?

Conversely, writing as a muslim, can I objectively write about his life while entertaining the possibility that he might not be a prophet?

It sounds a bit like not believing in global warming and writing a book about a dedicated environmentalist’s efforts. It can be done, sure. People write (and read) all sorts of stuff (witness this blog, and I rest my case!)

But was it an “objective” account? So far, I haven’t been convinced by either side’s writing. And I’m only objecting to the claim of “impartial” narratives.

If you don’t claim to be something (e.g. an objective narrator), you might get every benefit of doubt. But if you do… remember what happens to people in glass houses. In addition to other people using the walls as target practice for the olympics stone-throwing competition, it gets pretty hot in there.

Remember the global warming that isn’t happening?

I was complaining to a friend that I can’t jump (no, you cliche-loving pop-culture aficionado, I’m not a white man but it can apply to asian females just as well!) This inability was particularly frustrating in a class taught by young athletic instructors who made it look so easy, and thereby increased my sense of clumsiness. I kept reminding myself of all the reasons why they could do it and I couldn’t. And my friend simply asked me… “How badly do you want it?” Needless to say, that’s the last time I complained about that particular non-achievement! (Now if I just stopped complaining, period, I’d demoralize everyone by implying my life is perfect, so for the sake of others’ happiness I selflessly persevere :P)

Thomas Edison said “If we all did the things we are really capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.“

Research blows the “oh s/he is naturally better at it” theory out of the water by demonstrating that people become “expert” at certain things because they just plain worked at it. Long and hard. Actually, it’s been measured. 10,000 hours of practice. That’s a lot of time to be away from other fun stuff. Like perpetually changing my status on facebook. Or having a conversation with my pillow. Or trying to keep all the pop-culture trivia (such as Jay Leno’s car and bike collection) straight in my head to win the next game of “taboo”.

I wish I coud un-learn this. It was SO much easier (and therapeutic) to just plain be a “victim” and complain. Ah the good ol’ days!