I’ve been getting awfully angry over the dumbest things lately. Why?
1.
I don’t know why I read the Style section of the Sunday New York Times. It just irritates me. That section is ground zero for the vapid, shallow aspects of society. [Although I find it tremendously gratifying to see same-sex marriage announcements alongside the blue blood pedigree announcements.]
Yesterday, there was an article about a woman who received a 3.9-carat platinum engagement ring. The ring was magnificent but she was concerned about how her hand would look in her Facebook and Instagram SELFIES, so she got a “handlift.” It’s like a facelift except it’s for your hand. Apparently, lots of women are getting them. Women are worried about their hands showing age spots, veins or looking bony or chubby while showing off their engagements rings in SELFIES, so they’re paying upwards of $3,000 for plastic surgeons to make their hands perfect. For their SELFIES. Christ, I hate that word. It’s infantile. It’s the blankey and ba-ba for millennials.
The woman in the story is only 30-years old. How bad can her skin be? The article treated the subject matter with all seriousness, without a hint of tongue-in-cheek or irony. To her credit, the beauty director at Brides magazine was quoted as saying the money could be better spent elsewhere, like building a nest egg. I was so angry I had to read it twice and then blog about it.
2.
My 7-Year Old received her first holy communion a couple of weeks ago. A beautiful ceremony, to be sure. Lots of family present, some from out of town. We entered the church, found our reserved pew and I sat to read the program. This is the quote they chose for the cover:
Always with the threats of damnation. Why couldn’t they have chosen a passage from the bible that was uplifting and poetic? One of the Psalms, perhaps? Something that affirmed the positive spirit of community my daughter was about to join? Yet another decree by velvet fist. How did the church stay in business all these years?
3.
Last week, a woman in North Carolina died in a car wreck. She was posting SELFIES to her Facebook page while driving and crashed. Seconds before the crash, she updated her status to: “The Happy song makes me HAPPY.” Then she drove off the road and died. This is also known as “thinning the herd.” People are so afraid of being alone. They’re terrified of silence. I stayed good and angry all day over that one.
4.
There’s a movement in left-leaning universities to post “trigger warnings” to material that containes potentially offensive subject matter. Books like The Great Gatsby, The Merchant of Venice, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and many others would carry warnings for students who might be riled by the content. Trigger warning guidelines call for professors to:
“Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.”
I’m not even sure what half of those words mean. Good luck with that, professors. Good luck writing your class syllabus with that hanging over your head. Good luck coddling those frail, fainthearted, über-sensitive princes and princesses of higher learning. Hope you’re not worried about tenure.
* * *
I’m not marrying that idiot who got a handlift. [Good God. Can you imagine being married to that?] That woman didn’t drive off the road and crash into my family. The communion ceremony was mostly lovely. I don’t have a kid in college. Why did this stuff rile me up? Why do I get so angry?
Back in my 20’s, I saw a therapist. The most valuable lesson I learned was, when you’re angry, you’re not angry about the thing you THINK you’re angry about. There’s something else going on. Look for it. [The other valuable lesson was: You can’t solve all your problems, but you can learn to make peace with them.]
Not long before this, I was listening to Howard Stern interview comedian George Lopez. They were discussing Lopez’s horrific childhood. Lopez said he doesn’t have any photos of him as a child. Not one! Stern said, “That’s awful. When a parent doesn’t bother taking a picture of their kid, that means they don’t care. Their own kid doesn’t count for anything.”
Do you want to see something?
There it is, folks. That is, literally, the ONLY photo of me as a child. There are some pics of me in high school but from ages 0-16, nothing. I’d always given my parents a pass, saying they were too broke to own a camera but do you know what? That’s bullshit. We weren’t THAT broke. The truth is they couldn’t be bothered. Stern was right. I didn’t count. I still don’t think I count.
How’s THAT for a trigger? Now that I’ve figured it out, I’ll set about making peace with it straight away.
“…you will discover, as Samuel Johnson observed, that not all wisdom is to be found in books. But an awful lot of it is.”
“Because of books, my children grew up to be bright and inquisitive, while a lot of their peers grew up to be clowns. Social scientists will tell you that surrounding your children with books will have no quantifiable effect on the molding of their personalities. Nature trumps nurture at every turn, they maintain. But, as is so often the case with social scientists, they are wrong.”
“…a person develops early in life a pattern of behavior or a set of complimentary skills to deal with a particular problem, but then, long after the problem has been resolved, he does not automatically abandon the behavior. Decades after my bitter housing project days were over, I continued to read feverishly, almost desperately, at all hours of the day and night, because reality was never as sublime as the reality to be found in books. And once you are hooked, you are hooked.”
“To order a book online [instead of visiting a bookstore], to procure it by overnight shipment, would wreck everything. It would strip my life of all the magical, unscientific qualities I most value.”
“The presence of books in my hands, my home, my pockets, my life will never cease to be essential to my happiness. I will never own an e-reader. I have no use for them. A dimly remembered girlfriend’s handwriting will never take me by surprise in a Nook. A faded ticket to the Eiffel Tower will never fall out of a Kindle. I am a Luddite and proud of it.”
“Purchasing a secondhand book does absolutely nothing for a writer. Less than nothing. There is, it seems to me, a poverty of spirit about not wanting to purchase the shiny new book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. People should consider it an honor to pay full price for a book by Don DeLillo or Margaret Atwood. An honor.”
That would be EXCURSION, me, ARMADA. Out here in the rough, tough New Jersey suburbs, you need an ARMADA to take what’s thrown at you. I love the names. They convey an image. The dictionary defines ARMADA as:
Exile on Pain Street 