Ten Tips for Not Ruining Your Life

Cruising the internet with my morning coffee, I have observed how attractive posts are that give numbered tips, maybe because a "tip" sounds easy, like "running" to the store or "popping" something in the oven.  We so hope that there's some easy way to fix our lives; I do, anyway, and increasingly I universalize me to we, in the conviction that we're all human.

My main tip, and this is really important for you young people, is --

1.  Just don't ruin your life.
You can do this with one spectacularly stupid act.  Bear in mind that whatever enhances Charlie Sheen's career - drugs, destroying things, sexual antics - will ruin yours.  (Is that why people are fascinated by Charlie Sheen?  Not my readers, of course, but the watchers of NBC's Inside Edition, which comes on right after the evening news, so I can hardly avoid seeing what they're covering each evening - which has been Charlie Sheen for some weeks now.  Maybe forever, since I have only been noticing this for a couple of weeks.)

2.  Never lie your glasses down on the bed.
Do I have to explain this?  It is one of the tempting little careless acts that end up with broken glasses, costing money and time and forcing you to go around half-blind, driving illegally and unable to read.  It will ruin at least one day and cost money.  There are many other small ways to trip yourself up, like not tying your shoes.  Be careful.

3.  Take the damn medicine.
Right now I personally have to stop this and take my 8:00 a.m. immunosuppressants.  There are some things you just shouldn't fool around resisting, or you can lose the transplant.  But there are many other cases, such as finishing the antibiotic, even though you definitely feel better.  Ah yes, and you can universalize this to such things as stopping to gas up the car and get some milk, things that are not so appealing as many other ways to spend time.  But that's reality.  So -

4.  Get over it.
Every life has its difficulties and disappointments, you'd be surprised.  All right, maybe not every life.  On the other hand, every life ends in death, and before that, experiences illness - if it's not chronic insomnia it's migraines or high arches.  Your suffering is not that special - Buddhists even have a chant to cover this, called The Five Remembrances.  Also note that hearing the recitation of your special hardships bores most people. If there is someone in your life who isn't bored by it, they are probably bad for you.

5.  Curb your envy.
A corollary to number 4.  Yes, Oliver Sacks found his way to a stellar career at a young age, and you (that is, I) still haven't.  But most envy is much closer to home, isn't it?  The brother Mom loved more.  That woman in church who has so much charisma and energy, and kept her figure, which isn't fair.  That leads me to --

6.  Don't expect life to be fair.
Not in the short run, that is.  The principle of justice the universe runs on is cause-and-effect, and that can take a while to play out.  This way of understanding things is not particularly owned by Buddhists, though we are famous for calling it karma.  It's in the Christian Bible, too:  you will reap what you sow.  Therefore --

7.  Be generous and kind.
Honest to God, it feels so good to take someone a casserole or surprise them with flowers or just really listen.  And the universe will send kindness back to you, though not necessarily from the same person.

8.  Don't think too much.
There's high-level thinking, like constructing crossword puzzles or addressing the problem of multi-resistant TB, but that's not what most of us do much of the time.  Most of us drift around in repetitive and useless thoughts, like how insane the Sarah Palin phenomenon is, or what Al Gore should have done.  (See how quickly these things pass?)

9.  Don't express your opinion.
Actually, hardly anyone cares what you think, except for the person who's going to take offense.  And if someone does ask you what you think, be wary - they might be trying to trip you up. Or just waiting for their turn.  And do you really want to hear their opinion?

10.  Don't insist on learning everything the hard way.
That is, by bitter experience.  Listen to your grandma and wear your boots.Yet, even as I write this I know you - ah, we - do have to learn most things on our own.  I wish I could spare you some suffering; that's why I've written these tips.  But if you don't learn anything, at least I've given you a short break from work.

Well, this is tempting me to go on to enumerate some of life's hard facts, my favorite these days being, It's always something.  I could say a lot about this.  For instance, it is not necessarily one thing at a time, and you don't necessarily get a chance to catch your breath.  But I'll save that for another list.

Reality is not all nice

As I watched Sarah Palin complain about "the media" on the news tonight, how they made a big deal out of the clothes the Republican National Committee bought her, I thought about Hunter Thompson's book, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang. When this book came out in 1966, you were not likely to see in your downhome neighborhood restaurant, as I did today, a Dad in a Harley tee-shirt feeding a baby girl with a spoon. The Hell's Angels were greatly feared, with reason.

Thompson hung out with them for a year. I vaguely recall reading this book, a college-student housewife fascinated by the unfolding New Journalism, all the barriers that were breaking down in the arts and the society just then. Later, Susan Brownmiller's book, Against Our Will, would criticize Thompson's flippant acceptance of the Angel custom of gang-rape. I recall reading one particular scene in disbelief. Until feminism emerged, rape was not a subject of open discussion. I wonder now that I read the damn thing through. It had the fascination of a horror movie, and it was real.

Nothing had prepared me for Thompson's postscript to the book. It tells how a group of Angels suddenly turned on him and "stomped" him, might have killed him. He compares the event to sharks in a feeding frenzy. He ended the book quoting from Joseph Conrad, "The horror! Exterminate the brutes!" I had the impression that it was all interesting until then, that he'd never realized that he might be a victim. He was fond of his own violence, bragged to them that he settled quarrels with a shotgun. He didn't have it with him that night.

I sat there tonight feeling like I have lived too long and read too much, and watched Sarah Palin do the kind of thing she has still not learned to avoid, an impromptu press conference. Her voice has become more strident, with an overtone of a whine. People made a big deal about her makeup artist, she said, but what about his? Someone powdered his nose, too. (Her makeup artist had been paid $23,000 the first month, as I recall.) And she didn't get to take home those clothes. I wondered what the RNC will do with them. They would probably sell well on eBay to those conservative men who "fell in love" with her. An uncomfortable thought.

Sarah knew how to swim in Alaskan waters. With all her experience in the competitions of both women and men, she has learned to present a strength and confidence that seem to be bone-deep. But that's no preparation for swimming with sharks. Now, like so many beautiful women who outlive their usefulness, she has been discarded.

Those glasses make you look so . . . smart

That would be a lame compliment, wouldn't it?

Because for a woman, looking, and being, intelligent is a violation of the rules. The unwritten assumptions of our culture assign two kinds of strength to men, physical and intellectual, and one kind of strength to women: spiritual. A good "feminine" woman can be strong in emotional intelligence, endless service to others, religiosity, and the sort of grit it takes to get up in the middle of the night and clean up after a sick kid when you're sick yourself. These attributes support men and family life, and do not compete like intelligence does.

When I picked out my current glasses, I was looking for something that gave me a good field of vision, weighed nothing, and didn't obscure my face or call attention to itself. Imagine my surprise when Sarah (who? history will ask) turned up with similar glasses, titanium with unframed lenses. They have been called "librarian" glasses. At least my lenses are not squared-off like hers.

Sarah gets away with squared-off lenses, a very intelligent look, and one she has stuck with throughout the campaign, though the NY Times reported that she owns six [six!] pair of glasses, which amazes me, for these are expensive frames. How do you do that with five kids and only one steady income? Don't ask. The hairdo alone has already cost the campaign $23,000.

Sarah wants to look intelligent -- but not masculine. So the librarian (bookish) glasses are combined with an elaborate bridal hairdo, higher heels than most middle-aged women who spend that much time on their feet could possibly wear, legs sticking out of a too-short skirt fitted to curve in under her butt in a way you do not see on grownup professionals. I might look smart, it all says, but I’m really a beauty queen.

In fact, she is today's perfect woman, who exemplifies the modern masculine fantasy. Womb personified, pushing out children, dragging the baby along on the campaign trail, never dreaming of an abortion, hey, being pregnant is no big deal, and not letting the mother thing get in the way. She runs the home and is chief breadwinner, and is beautiful. While her confidence is of a caliber rarely seen in a woman, she supports male values constantly, in a casual reference to Joe Sixpack (a regular guy who drinks a lot and that's okay), in her willingness to hunt a moose and drag it to the car. It's what mainstream culture has done, unfortunately, to the feminist ideal. Humans always screw things up.

I could write a book on wearing glasses, on refusing to wear them as a girl, on enduring the dangers and discomforts of hard contact lenses, then soft, then on and off with reading glasses. Since I am a little older than the oldest Baby Boomers, glasses were not fashion items in time to save me from myself.

What was my problem? I didn't know, that's the truth. As a girl, I thought glasses made me ugly. They just didn't go with the pretty, curvy (feminine) look we tried for in the fifties. Nobody in the movies wore them.

I woke up today with this on my mind, recalling that I wrote yesterday that I had given up looking pretty and decided to go for looking smart as I dressed for my doctor visit. Hmm, I thought, this morning, that was probably my mistake. On some level people know that smart opposes compliant, and compliance is a key part of the feminine ideal, not just among doctors.

It was okay to get A's when I was in high school, that was part of being a good girl on the college track. Being smart was another story. There was only one really smart girl. Poor Martha. She was fantastically good in science, I recall, and wore glasses a lot like mine and Sarah's, while the rest of us wore harlequins. This was back when geek was not a compliment. I don't think it is even today, applied to a woman. It might be okay, though, if her tee-shirt is very tight and cut very low.

The picture? Me with a third eye stuck on my forehead, a picture taken by Becky Jean Genie. Art groups get a little funky sometimes.

Superwoman and the Story of Sarah

I am interested in an ad for Citi credit cards in the May 2008 issue of O. It shows a woman working under a car, her white jeans rolled up, and on her feet, red high-heeled shoes with ankle straps. She is supposed to have bought them both on credit.

Even the inducement to use a credit card seems so last economy. And would anyone work under a car in white jeans? Not twice. But what troubles me most about it is the implicit story: you can do men’s work and still be valued as a traditional feminine sex object. This story spreads, like a drop of ink in a small glass of water, to a larger very American idea: You can do it all and have it all, and that will make you happy. You can!

I think this in part accounts for the wierd popularity of the inexperienced Sarah Palin. She is the one woman who seems to have brought it off: husband, kids, stellar career, masculine hobbies, beauty queen, athletic ability, profound self-confidence. And I think that all across America women are failing miserably to carry this heavy package.

But they—or we—want to believe it’s possible. It’s the new fairy tale, the distortion of the feminist ideal by the fundamental American story: greed is okay, the individual matters most of all. The Story of Sarah says to overburdened women, many of them I believe, the working poor, Have faith—it can be done. It is a myth that benefits only the bosses.

Creationists, Evolutionists, and Elitism

(Was it Lyndon Johnson who memorably referred to his opponents as "effete liberal snobs?")

Let me say right out that the above cartoon does not represent my point of view. I reproduce it to show the crux of the bitter feud between creationists and evolutionists, which is going to get oh so much worse as Sarah Palin throws out red meat on this topic.

And the crux is a failure of respect on both sides. A failure of empathy. I tend to be on the side so pithily described these days as "elitist," that is, educated and keenly interested in thought, and in education. But I would not describe myself as "an evolutionist" anymore than I would say that I hold fast to the theory of gravity (though it certainly holds fast to me, as much as I would like to fly.)

I know people who are nuts about evolution. They explain that this way of making inferences about the origin of humankind from the mass of possibly-relevant data, this has enabled them to discard a constricting point of view imposed on them as children. It has freed them to feel awe, to wonder at what they would never call the "intelligent design" of the universe. The fantastic working of its laws.

These folks worship Nature, a Poet might say. For them, the theory of evolution is not a theory, but a cosmology with the quality of religion. While they are extreme, they are not really outliers; the educated liberals I know also believe, I suspect, that evolution is not "theory" but "fact." I invite them to ponder the difference.

I also know, mostly through family connections and my checkered religious past, people who would say they are creationists. With some trepidation, I'm going to describe them as people who believe there is only one sacred book, and who interpret it literally in places. I find myself wondering why, of all the stories in that Bible, the Genesis creation story is so important. I don't hear these folks decrying the school lunch program on the grounds that the Bible also presents the miracle of loaves and fishes.

Here's what I hear when these folks talk about evolution: Don't you tell me I'm descended from a monkey!

Educated white Americans are among the most privileged people in the world, and we usually forget that. It's hard for us to put ourselves in the place of the guys setting up a wedding tent on the neighbor's lawn, or their mechanic, who built his own business starting from nothing, or the guy whose major accomplishment in life was a fifty-yard run on the high-school football team, and it's all been downhill since then.

Or his wife, who lives in a community where there is a very distinct separation between Men and Women, very clear regulation of roles; who knows that the professionals whose house she cleans subtly look down on her. In today's New York Times, Paul Krugman refers quite correctly to "the angry right," an anger he believes is "based on the perception . . . that Democrats look down their noses at regular people."

I do not mean to stereotype creationists; just a glance at the internet or at public school battles will tell you there are many who are educated and articulate. What I am trying to put forward is the possibility that, as a broad demographic, creationists are more likely to be people who know they are stuck, who feel they are looked down upon by those who were born to more money and more opportunity; and they are probably right. Classism is even more subtle than sexism, and more widespread, and Americans really don't like to think it grows here.

The creationist I'm postulating has one thing going for him or her, though. A religion that tells them authoritatively, "You are a child of God, created in God's very image. You are quite special." This dangerous concept surely must be a source of self-worth in the face of working poverty, of not "making it" in a country that preaches the myth that anyone who wants to can make it. Not true, of course. How many small businesses fail every year?

I want to write more later on how we, the elite, those of us lucky enough to have learned how to think scientifically, might begin to think of this fight as an opportunity for empathy, for trying to understand why the other side cares so much. Maybe this is called non-violent communication; maybe it is respect, or negotiation, or just attention.

And just as important, we need to think carefully about what it is we really need and want to teach in science class.

He meant well

Tonight I saw a film that made me think about what the road to hell is paved with. Up the Yangtze is a beautifully detached documentary that follows two teenagers from peasant families displaced by the massive Three Gorges dam project. (Photo above is from the film.) The film is worth seeing if only for the astonishing slow images at the end, which make the point in a way no argument can.

A statue of Mao is shown only once, but he is certainly present in spirit in this characteristically massive attempt to fix things. As so many political leaders are, Mao was willing to sacrifice the individual for the good of all. Here, this does not seem so much dangerous as sad. And it is clear that the old way of life in which many worked small patches of land, were illiterate, lived without the electricity the dam would create, was a hard life deprived of opportunity. Certainly not idyllic. But is working for tips on a cruise ship an improvement?

There is a scene in another film, Kundun, in which Mao (in black shoes) says to the teen-age Dalai Lama (in gold brocade slippers) "We are going to liberate you." His Holiness replies, "Only I can liberate myself." Mao means liberation from a feudal theocracy, a peasant life, poverty, into the modern world. HH has something more important in mind.

I am reminded of a bumper sticker: We are America. Be good to us or we'll give you democracy.

More and more I realize the danger of tampering with lives. Somewhere I have read Suzuki Roshi's comments when his students got fired up to build a Zen Center. He says something like, "A great many bad things will come out of it, but maybe something good will happen, too."

It's about the trickiness, the unpredictability of the effects that will flow from any well-meant action. A mother supports a grown son who can't hold a job. A father lets a daughter refuse to go onstage in the grade-school talent show because she's scared. A politician crusades for censorship in the public library (gosh, back to Sarah Palin again.) What will the outcomes of these actions be? Are the intentions entirely benevolent and respectful, or are they self-serving? Do we take the trouble to examine our intentions?

I am not advocating doing nothing. But maybe we should do less, more slowly and carefully. I do like a saying in Pidgin English gleaned from some old novel about the British Raj: "Softly, softly catchee monkey."

Grandma Answers a Tricky Question

I imagine I am one of a fairly small number of Unitarian Universalists who can honestly say, "I was born again." This makes me the best kind of expert, experiential.

I got inspired to think about this by reading in this morning's NYTimes that one of the crucial attributes that got Sarah Palin (yes, her again) elected to her first office, as mayor of Wasilla was "the religious born-again thing." (A quote from former city administrator, Stein)

I don't know when Mrs. Palin (as she probably prefers to be called) was born again. I was twelve years old and had been taken firmly in hand by a new friend whose family was so profoundly fundamentalist Daddy wouldn't pay Social Security. She took me to their Evangelical United Brethren church one Wednesday evening for prayer meeting, and as we all sang, "Just as I am without one plea . . . " she muttered in my ear, "Would you like to accept Jesus as your personal savior."

I nodded. Well, sure. I was raised more or less Christian, my family went to a liberal Congregational church.

This turned out to mean that my friend proudly walked me down front, where I was made to kneel at a railing and prayed over loudly. Then I was taken around back and counseled by a woman who could see, I think, that I had no idea. The text was John 3:16, and the part that was emphasized in this 1950's Ohio fundamentalism was ---

. . . that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Next thing I knew I was carrying a little red Bible everywhere and going to Youth for Christ meetings, and behaving in a very holy way. Even my father noticed.

Within two years, I "backslid," on the indeed slippery question of why I was suffering so much if God was all-powerful and all-loving and I was being so damn good. That was a sad time. But my extensive immersion in this religion has often been helpful. When anyone asks me, "Sister, are you born again," I say truthfully, "Oh, yes."

And what does that mean? Seemed odd even then---all you had to do was say to someone that you believed something. That still doesn't seem like enough to me. As a student of words, and of Zen, I find words pretty empty. But it was enough to set a little knot of us off from our peers, indeed, from the rest of the world, which we saw as overwhelmingly wicked, with its dancing, cards, movies, and makeup. Jeez.

Maybe that was the point. Being so special. So much better than just about everyone else. Having, as it were, a secret handshake with a select few, though we didn't have at that time anything like the nifty keychain shown in today's photo.

I once had a Zen teacher who began a dharma talk, "All religions are used by some as tools of oppression." I loved him right then. Indeed, they are. And they are also used too often to make us feel superior. All religions.

My mother was tended in her last years by a middle-aged woman who clearly identified herself as born-again, wore a cross, "prayed over" problems. She must have worried about me, as I had Buddhist artifacts in my home. At last she found the opportunity to ask me, "Are you familiar with The Scriptures?"

I thought a moment and asked her, "Which ones?"

Sarah Palin: Not what we had in mind

What a treat with my morning coffee--all the Sarah Palin news. Makes subscribing to the New York Times worth while.

Above, what I believe is a genuine photograph of the February 2008 cover of Vogue magazine, though I was not able to pick it up from the Vogue site, but from a progressive Alaskan blog.

I want to take this opportunity to say, Girls, this is not what we feminists had in mind. "We feminists"---who? Those of us more or less in my generation who worked in NOW chapters, testified for gender-neutral language in our state constitutions, pointed out the awful news of pay discrepancies and the glass ceiling (which now seems to be made of bulletproof glass), began demanding that we be treated with respect in all our relationships, including marriage.

We feminists. I can really speak only for myself, of course. Among other things, the vision feminist thought made available to me was one of a society in which raising children and creating a hospitable, healthy home would be exalted as the most important work in the world. I hoped to one day see mothers salaried for their at-home work, and given health coverage and pension benefits. Devotion to mothering would not entail the personal sacrifice of economic security, and dependence on pleasing a partner. It was a vision of a new kind of family.

But what has happened is that too many women have adopted male competitiveness and striving for power and money, while retaining some of the worst of traditional gender roles. One is the beauty queen syndrome. Another is the shouldering of the impossibly heavy burden of working full-time outside the house, then coming home to work the second shift, for an average of 33 hours a week of housework/mothering in a two-parent home.

And here we have her, the feminist backlash personified. The only good thing I see about this is that the dreadful judgment shown here may help McCain lose the election. As my grandmother would have no doubt said, "It's an ill wind that blows no good."