I walked by them again yesterday -- the Pepsi Girls.
I call them that because they are the ones who line the streets at almost each and every corner, glumly sitting before an array of Pepsi and 7-Up bottles filled with what is obviously not any kind of soda known to man. Said substance is yellow and greasy and the glass from the bottles often catches the glare of the midday sun, snatches it, giving both the liquid inside and the bottles themselves a vivid, almost pristine glow.
(Notice I said 'soda' a few sentences back. Canadians NEVER say soda; only Americans do. Canadians just say 'pop'. And why is that? In the fifties, it was called 'soda pop', right? So why did the Yanks grab the 'soda' and the Canucks grab the 'pop'? Who decides these kind of linguistic rights? I'm trying to a be man of the people, all people, so I'm including both phrases here.)
No, gasoline is what's in the bottles. These little make-shift stands are where the motodops stop to fill up their bikes. (There are gas stations in Phnom Penh, yes, but they're usually for the big cars driven by the corrupt government officials.)
And usually, almost always, it's the girls doing the selling -- young girls, teenage girls, sitting under the hot Cambodian sun hour after hour, day after day, their heads wrapped in kromas to keep out the sun. (Does that actually work?)
I don't drive a moto. If I need to get somewhere, I just hold up my hand and a moto will stop and take me for a ride. (Both literally, and, sometimes, monetarily, too.) There's no reason on earth for me to buy gasoline from them.
And yet, sometimes I feel like giving them money. The Pepsi girls. Why shouldn't I? I sometimes give money to homeless people, beggars, wandering children. Why shouldn't I give a little bit of cash to these young ladies that are wasting their teenage years trying to support their families?
Living in a country like Cambodia is a test of one's altruism. A test of one's sanity, too. You can't give to everyone, so, if you are inclined to give, you have to choose. And even this process of deliberation, this conscious decision to give to person A but not to person B, to judge who is the poorer, the weakest, the neediest, this whole process sickens me, in some ways, gnaws away at my sense of self. These girls need an education; they need a future. They do not need a few stray dollars from a guilt-ridden westerner.
It is guilt that compels us, isn't it? Whether it's money for the tsunami-victims, or money for the Pepsi girls, it's all wrapped up in a big-red ribbon of guilt. I have what they do not; I am full while they are empty. This is not right, so I must give.
I will see the Pepsi Girls again. (I see them every day.) They're not looking for money from me; I don't have a bike, or a car, or any need for a bottle of gasoline, so their all-too-freuent glares at me are stares that they would give any foreigner. They are not looking for hand-outs.
But still, the urge. To prove that I'm a good person. To prove that I'm a caring person. To prove that I will give while others do not.
A human urge, yes, but a selfish one?
I'm not sure.
But I'm not sure that it matters, either.
Whether I give or not, whether my coin greases their palms or not, the Pepsi Girls will still be crouched on their plastic stools tomorrow, or the day after that, or a week from now, or a decade from now.
Either them, or their younger sisters.
Or, in time, their daughters.
The only real difference will be the shape and colour of the Pepsi logo gracing each and every bottle.
A trivial but strangely heartbreaking thought:
Pepsi's logo doesn't change all that often -- only once every twenty, thirty years, right?
Right now, at this very instant, for reasons I can't quite articulate but that seem perfectly natural and appropriate (to me), that little fact saddens me.
It saddens me a lot.
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
SHADOWS AND ILLUMINATION
Last night at my old school. Me, visiting friends. Friends, rehearsing. Watching the last of the students clean up their gear as they finished practicing for the first annual (?) University of Cambodia Business Marketing Students Fashion and Entertainment Show. (Or something like that.) A makeshift stage, 'L' shaped, occupying the centre portion of the upstairs conference centre. The lights, dim. The floor, cluttered. Empty Coke bottles. Paper wrappers. The remnants of Cambodian clean-up habits. Strange. Drink, eat, drop. A custom I've never gotten used to.
Elegaic. That's the word. A good word, too, I think, one of those words that makes me think that the English language does, in fact, have certain pieces of vocabulary that rival the depth of meaning and insinuation found in Japanese. Shining through the windows that lined the far wall I could see the random, shifting flow of traffic's residue; the glow from golden headlights cast their roving arcs across the contours of the room on an intermittent basis. Shadows, mixed with illumination.
Some students changed into streetclothes behind closed doors, behind my back. Behind: muffled, excited voices. In front: only silence. Emptiness. I felt both solitary and content. (Is one, in fact, dependent on the other? I'm not sure.)
For a few moments, less than a minute, I was alone in the conference hall. Dozens of folding chairs lined in rows. An empty lectern, looking forlorn, almost hurt. (No speaker would be coming tonight.) On Sunday, there would be students and parents and teachers and curious spectators, all eager to see the fashion, the skits, the singing, the dancing, but for now the room was empty. Almost expectant.
This is somewhat new in Cambodia, this random assemblage of young, untrained talent. So is the discipline that's required -- the practices, the repetitions, the sense of focus and intentness that I see in my old students' eyes when they go over their dance moves, one by one, again, one more time. They've never worked for anything before; they've never been pushed before. And they are responding. Elated.
I left the room. Soon the room would be completely dark. It felt like the last episode of some sitcom that has extended its expiry date for far too long, that final episode where the main characters leave their house/apartment/school behind, taking one last, lingering look at the place they called home.
I've always loved those episodes.
Elegaic. That's the word. A good word, too, I think, one of those words that makes me think that the English language does, in fact, have certain pieces of vocabulary that rival the depth of meaning and insinuation found in Japanese. Shining through the windows that lined the far wall I could see the random, shifting flow of traffic's residue; the glow from golden headlights cast their roving arcs across the contours of the room on an intermittent basis. Shadows, mixed with illumination.
Some students changed into streetclothes behind closed doors, behind my back. Behind: muffled, excited voices. In front: only silence. Emptiness. I felt both solitary and content. (Is one, in fact, dependent on the other? I'm not sure.)
For a few moments, less than a minute, I was alone in the conference hall. Dozens of folding chairs lined in rows. An empty lectern, looking forlorn, almost hurt. (No speaker would be coming tonight.) On Sunday, there would be students and parents and teachers and curious spectators, all eager to see the fashion, the skits, the singing, the dancing, but for now the room was empty. Almost expectant.
This is somewhat new in Cambodia, this random assemblage of young, untrained talent. So is the discipline that's required -- the practices, the repetitions, the sense of focus and intentness that I see in my old students' eyes when they go over their dance moves, one by one, again, one more time. They've never worked for anything before; they've never been pushed before. And they are responding. Elated.
I left the room. Soon the room would be completely dark. It felt like the last episode of some sitcom that has extended its expiry date for far too long, that final episode where the main characters leave their house/apartment/school behind, taking one last, lingering look at the place they called home.
I've always loved those episodes.
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
BIG WILLIE STYLE
I've finally figured out the reason why Shakespeare has frightened me so much. It's not the erudite vocabulary (though the words are certainly flowery and alluring), and it's not the convoluted plots that wander from here to there, through winding narrative backroads that loop in on one another (though they certainly do that, too).
No, the scary thing about Shakespeare is this: It's all conversations.
That's right -- it's the dialogue that does me in. (Even the all to0 frequent monologues are, in fact, dialogues, with the audience as co-conspirators.) And considering that ALL of Shakespeare's plays, (and all plays in general, for that matter) are dialogue, that means I either conquer my fears or head on over to the Judy Blume section of the library for once and for all.
Of course, I'm in a wounded state. I just made it through (barely) THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, mostly because a) I realized I hadn't tackled old Willie in a long, long, time and b)I saw a copy of the DVD of the new MERCHANT OF VENICE featuring Al Pacino as Shylock in the video store, and I want to see it, I do, but I also want to underSTAND it when I watch it.
Having finished the play, I can attest that I comprehended, tops, twenty, twenty-five percent of what went down. (It was only while reading the critical notes at the back of the text that I realized: Oh. This was a comedy. Somehow the jokes went RIGHT over my head.)
It's the dialogue, see.
In real life, we talk to communicate. As do Shakespeare's characters, of course, but they communicate in verse and in riddle, in poems and in parallelograms, it seems like, and I'll be damned if I can ultimately figure out what they're saying, to themselves or each other. It's poetry, is what it is, rich and full and evocative. It's not the way that people have ever spoken to each other in the history of the world, or at least in the history of EVERYBODY LOVES RAMOND. (Never seen it, heard it's good, r.i.p.)
But I guess that's the point. We go to the theatre, we go to the movies, for something more-than-life. We go to the theatre to see language elevated, to see life elevated.
Shakespeare's plays provide that. They hint at what life could be and might have been like, in a denser time.
They should be watched, I think, to be fully comprehended; they were meant to be performed, after all, not read. Right now Denzel Washington is playing Brutus in JULIUS CEASAR, and man oh man would that be a sight to see. (Included in the cast is Canadian Shakespearan great Colm Feore, who also played the bad guy in THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK, but don't hold that against him; I saw Feore performing CEASAR in Stratford, Ontario, during my second year of high school, minus the Denzel.) Reading the play is difficult enough; I can't imagine performing it, night after night. Then would be the time when Shakespeare's words came truly to life; then would be the time when you could appreciate, truly and deeply, what the words can and must do. (I can't imagine how Shakespeare is translated. I would LOVE to know Japanese well enough to read Shakespeare in Japanese. I'm tempted to spend the rest of my life doing just that -- studying Japanese more so I can understand Shakespeare in another, ulterior context, and I'm halfway serious about that. But maybe it's better I don't. There was a Japanese translator who committed suicide after trying to translate Faulkner into Japanese, so perhaps some things are best left a mystery.)
If there was a Shakespeare. Many people think he didn't even exist, that the dude who wrote the plays was Marlowe, or the Queen of England, or an amalgamation of a dozen other playwrights. A new book by Hollywood lawyer Bert Fields is the latest in a line of texts backing up this claim.
I'm all for the discussion. Bring it on. Keep forcing stiffs like me to be interested in this guy, because even though it hurts like hell to read his stuff, and even though my brain feels tired and aggravated after a twenty-minute session with the words (and what words they are!), there is a resonance, an aftertaste, that promises better and longer feasts to come, if I endure a little longer.
No, the scary thing about Shakespeare is this: It's all conversations.
That's right -- it's the dialogue that does me in. (Even the all to0 frequent monologues are, in fact, dialogues, with the audience as co-conspirators.) And considering that ALL of Shakespeare's plays, (and all plays in general, for that matter) are dialogue, that means I either conquer my fears or head on over to the Judy Blume section of the library for once and for all.
Of course, I'm in a wounded state. I just made it through (barely) THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, mostly because a) I realized I hadn't tackled old Willie in a long, long, time and b)I saw a copy of the DVD of the new MERCHANT OF VENICE featuring Al Pacino as Shylock in the video store, and I want to see it, I do, but I also want to underSTAND it when I watch it.
Having finished the play, I can attest that I comprehended, tops, twenty, twenty-five percent of what went down. (It was only while reading the critical notes at the back of the text that I realized: Oh. This was a comedy. Somehow the jokes went RIGHT over my head.)
It's the dialogue, see.
In real life, we talk to communicate. As do Shakespeare's characters, of course, but they communicate in verse and in riddle, in poems and in parallelograms, it seems like, and I'll be damned if I can ultimately figure out what they're saying, to themselves or each other. It's poetry, is what it is, rich and full and evocative. It's not the way that people have ever spoken to each other in the history of the world, or at least in the history of EVERYBODY LOVES RAMOND. (Never seen it, heard it's good, r.i.p.)
But I guess that's the point. We go to the theatre, we go to the movies, for something more-than-life. We go to the theatre to see language elevated, to see life elevated.
Shakespeare's plays provide that. They hint at what life could be and might have been like, in a denser time.
They should be watched, I think, to be fully comprehended; they were meant to be performed, after all, not read. Right now Denzel Washington is playing Brutus in JULIUS CEASAR, and man oh man would that be a sight to see. (Included in the cast is Canadian Shakespearan great Colm Feore, who also played the bad guy in THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK, but don't hold that against him; I saw Feore performing CEASAR in Stratford, Ontario, during my second year of high school, minus the Denzel.) Reading the play is difficult enough; I can't imagine performing it, night after night. Then would be the time when Shakespeare's words came truly to life; then would be the time when you could appreciate, truly and deeply, what the words can and must do. (I can't imagine how Shakespeare is translated. I would LOVE to know Japanese well enough to read Shakespeare in Japanese. I'm tempted to spend the rest of my life doing just that -- studying Japanese more so I can understand Shakespeare in another, ulterior context, and I'm halfway serious about that. But maybe it's better I don't. There was a Japanese translator who committed suicide after trying to translate Faulkner into Japanese, so perhaps some things are best left a mystery.)
If there was a Shakespeare. Many people think he didn't even exist, that the dude who wrote the plays was Marlowe, or the Queen of England, or an amalgamation of a dozen other playwrights. A new book by Hollywood lawyer Bert Fields is the latest in a line of texts backing up this claim.
I'm all for the discussion. Bring it on. Keep forcing stiffs like me to be interested in this guy, because even though it hurts like hell to read his stuff, and even though my brain feels tired and aggravated after a twenty-minute session with the words (and what words they are!), there is a resonance, an aftertaste, that promises better and longer feasts to come, if I endure a little longer.
Sunday, May 15, 2005
YOU, TOO, CAN LEARN FROM A NUDE CZECH SUPERMODEL CLINGING TO A TREE
It's not often that a nude Czech supermodel clutches to a tree for eight hours while the aftereffects of a tsunami continue to ravage and torment the people and places that swirl and twirl around her precarious perch. If that were me, and I were a nude supermodel, clutching for dear life to a submerged tree on a completely submerged beach in Thailand, it would totally make me think about life a little bit.
(I mean, that episode of Family Ties where Alex's life-long friend died in a car accident and Alex spent the whole episode sequestered in a psychiatrist's office made think about life, too, but this was different. And I'm not saying that I haven't been a nude supermodel in the past; I'm just not one now. That period of my life is over, for better or worse. And I do have a slight connection to the world of fully-clothed supermodels, given that Linda Evangelista grew up in my hometown -- St.Catharines, Ontario-- and the street I lived on for eight years was called Evangelista Court, named after her family. So between my nude supermodelling days in the past, and the whole Evangelista-hometown-old street connection, I can totally relate the supermodel in the tree.)
Petra Nemcova was on Larry King Live yesterday. She's the aformentioned nude supermodel who survived the tsunami while her fiancee, a disarmingly ordinary looking guy, perished. While watching the show, I was struck by her goodwill, her attitude, her positive view of life, her tenacity. Since most supermodels I've ever seen have been stuck-up bitches, I was blown away by how damn, well, nice she was. After every question taken from the callers she would smile genuinely and say: "Thank-you very much for your question." That sounds simple. It is simple. But the simple things are often what we humans leave behind in our race towards the more important stuff in life, like flat-screen TVs and the latest version of the I-pod.
And then I was struck by why and how I was struck. She was civil, polite, generous with her answers and her insights. After one caller asked a roundabout question that seemed to take forever, Larry, being 74 and cranky (despite being married to a gorgeous blonde Mormon) was clearly pissed, asking repeatedly: "What's your question, sir?" But Petra (I can call her that cuz we're tight) had alread heard the question, had been listening, and she answered, clearly and sympathetically. Maybe her nonchalantly generous attitude stems from her miraculous survival, or from the fact that she grew up poor in communist Czechoslovakia. I felt a little bit sad to be moved simply at how nice a person was, because it implies that most of the people around us aren't that nice on a daily basis, which I know not to be the case, but sometimes we forget and neglect how commanding sheer and unadorned pleasantness can be.
The tsunami (which Cambodia was thankfully spared the effects of) was a horrendous event that has already seemed to fade from our collective memory after the, um, tsunami-like wave of generosity it generated in the days and weeks following its onslaught. So many people's lives have been eradicated; so many people's fates have been thrown to the wind. We will never know why some lived and others died. What we learn from this is what we choose to, I guess, and supermodel-Petra learned to take each day as it comes -- to live it, with laughter.
Sometimes the things that disarm us are unexpected. Sometimes even beautiful people surprise us. I try to learn something every day, and what I learned from Ms.Petra's attitude yesterday was: It's okay to be polite and friendly and compassionate to strangers (even those on a phone). You don't have to be cynical and cranky and a prick. It's somewhat cleansing to realize that we have the capacity to be good and kind and decent in ordinary situations when we want to. If we want to.
(I mean, that episode of Family Ties where Alex's life-long friend died in a car accident and Alex spent the whole episode sequestered in a psychiatrist's office made think about life, too, but this was different. And I'm not saying that I haven't been a nude supermodel in the past; I'm just not one now. That period of my life is over, for better or worse. And I do have a slight connection to the world of fully-clothed supermodels, given that Linda Evangelista grew up in my hometown -- St.Catharines, Ontario-- and the street I lived on for eight years was called Evangelista Court, named after her family. So between my nude supermodelling days in the past, and the whole Evangelista-hometown-old street connection, I can totally relate the supermodel in the tree.)
Petra Nemcova was on Larry King Live yesterday. She's the aformentioned nude supermodel who survived the tsunami while her fiancee, a disarmingly ordinary looking guy, perished. While watching the show, I was struck by her goodwill, her attitude, her positive view of life, her tenacity. Since most supermodels I've ever seen have been stuck-up bitches, I was blown away by how damn, well, nice she was. After every question taken from the callers she would smile genuinely and say: "Thank-you very much for your question." That sounds simple. It is simple. But the simple things are often what we humans leave behind in our race towards the more important stuff in life, like flat-screen TVs and the latest version of the I-pod.
And then I was struck by why and how I was struck. She was civil, polite, generous with her answers and her insights. After one caller asked a roundabout question that seemed to take forever, Larry, being 74 and cranky (despite being married to a gorgeous blonde Mormon) was clearly pissed, asking repeatedly: "What's your question, sir?" But Petra (I can call her that cuz we're tight) had alread heard the question, had been listening, and she answered, clearly and sympathetically. Maybe her nonchalantly generous attitude stems from her miraculous survival, or from the fact that she grew up poor in communist Czechoslovakia. I felt a little bit sad to be moved simply at how nice a person was, because it implies that most of the people around us aren't that nice on a daily basis, which I know not to be the case, but sometimes we forget and neglect how commanding sheer and unadorned pleasantness can be.
The tsunami (which Cambodia was thankfully spared the effects of) was a horrendous event that has already seemed to fade from our collective memory after the, um, tsunami-like wave of generosity it generated in the days and weeks following its onslaught. So many people's lives have been eradicated; so many people's fates have been thrown to the wind. We will never know why some lived and others died. What we learn from this is what we choose to, I guess, and supermodel-Petra learned to take each day as it comes -- to live it, with laughter.
Sometimes the things that disarm us are unexpected. Sometimes even beautiful people surprise us. I try to learn something every day, and what I learned from Ms.Petra's attitude yesterday was: It's okay to be polite and friendly and compassionate to strangers (even those on a phone). You don't have to be cynical and cranky and a prick. It's somewhat cleansing to realize that we have the capacity to be good and kind and decent in ordinary situations when we want to. If we want to.
Saturday, May 14, 2005
ARBITRARY DISTANCES
"If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience another life, run a marathon."
-- some runner more eloquent than me
I'm thinking September, possibly October. This does not have to be the last and final year that I attempt to run a marathon, no, but I think the time is now, approaching thirty, to give it another shot. To see what I'm made of.
Not that that's important. The first time I came to Cambodia, teaching English to street kids with a Japanese NGO, I stayed at a hotel in Battambang that was showing, God knows how or why, the Canadian Triathalon Championships. Swear to God. Simon Whitfield, the winner, a stellar athelete and inaugural winner of the Gold medal in the sport at the Athens Olympics, talked about how he had had a bad year. And I remember thinking quite clearly: You did not have a bad year. My mind, still reeling from the dirty roads and the dusty air and the sheer, endless squalor of Cambodia, the stink of Cambodia, rejected Whitfield’s plea for sympathy, as innocent as it was. these people have had a bad year, I thought; these people have had a bad life.
But we are who we are. Any long-distance runner (or wannabe one) will eventually come to that point in time where the prospect of running a marathon takes on its own perverse and imminent attraction. I tried to run one three, four (five?) years ago, in Japan, but I blew out my knee a week before the race. It was just as well; I had tried to train in under four months, from a starting weight that was, let’s just say, somewhat immense. (Note to self: Avoid training for a marathon when one’s train station has a Wendy’s, McDonald’s and KFC within walking distance of your employment.) I vowed to tackle the marathon again, someday, and perhaps that day is soon.
We change as we grow (and grow as we change), and so I’m trying to enjoy, if not relish, the challenge of running longer and longer distances. My Sunday run has reached the two hour point, and the thought of running almost double that, which I’ll most likely need to do to complete a marathon, does give me the old Kathy Bates-shaving-James-Caan's-neck-with-a-straight-razor-in-Misery feeling at the base of my stomach every now and then.
The great thing, though, about not worrying about how fast you’re running is that you simply just run; you listen to your body, and sip some water, and watch the traffic and the people glide by you as you glide by them. I’ve actually found that my chest and my arms feel fine by the end; it’s my legs that feel as if somebody has slowly, painfully extracted something essential from their architecture. But that pain has its own rewards, as transitory and slightly sadistic as they may be.
And yet, isn’t life transitory and slightly sadistic, anyway? We age and endure and lose track of our body and ourselves. Running as something as extreme as a marathon is a way to keep track of your body and your self; it’s a means to assess who you are at that particular point in time – well or sick, energetic or sluggish, in pain or content. It’s an arbitrary distance, that 42 some odd kilometers is, but so what? Everything’s arbitrary – where we’re born and where we’ll die, who we love and who we hate, what we admire and what we dismiss. Life is nothing but an acquisition of prejudices and fetishes, and the marathon, perhaps, is a gateway to uncovering a little of both.
Maybe I’ll drop out after Mile One. Perhaps my body will collapse under the pressure. It might even be easier than I think. (Though I doubt it.) Believe me, I’ve considered all options.
No matter. I’ve learned long ago that what we learn from failure is at least as edifying as what we learn from success, if not more so. Failure means you try and you fall. I tried to train for a marathon before, so I know what it’s like to not pull it off. I’ve always found that imagining the worst thing that can possibly happen, and then accepting it, is a sure-fire way to confront and conquer any looming challenge that threatens to unhinge your confidence and cohesion. Once you’ve accepted the worst that can happen (barring death), then the thing itself loses its ability to hamper your dreams.
And it’s good to have dreams. It’s good to try and go after them. It’s good to set your sights on an arbitrary, manmade distance, and see if you can get from here to there and back again, with someone new yet familiar waiting for you at the finish line. Someone who looks a lot like yourself.
(For anyone interested in the hallowed history of my high-school running 'career', you can find it in the link dated 03/02/2005 in the ' archive' section to the right. For anyone interested in fake boobs on real celebrities, you can find them on www.awfulplasticsurgery.com. Can you believe the reading options I give my readers? Can't get variety like this at www.cnn.com, I'm telling you...)
-- some runner more eloquent than me
I'm thinking September, possibly October. This does not have to be the last and final year that I attempt to run a marathon, no, but I think the time is now, approaching thirty, to give it another shot. To see what I'm made of.
Not that that's important. The first time I came to Cambodia, teaching English to street kids with a Japanese NGO, I stayed at a hotel in Battambang that was showing, God knows how or why, the Canadian Triathalon Championships. Swear to God. Simon Whitfield, the winner, a stellar athelete and inaugural winner of the Gold medal in the sport at the Athens Olympics, talked about how he had had a bad year. And I remember thinking quite clearly: You did not have a bad year. My mind, still reeling from the dirty roads and the dusty air and the sheer, endless squalor of Cambodia, the stink of Cambodia, rejected Whitfield’s plea for sympathy, as innocent as it was. these people have had a bad year, I thought; these people have had a bad life.
But we are who we are. Any long-distance runner (or wannabe one) will eventually come to that point in time where the prospect of running a marathon takes on its own perverse and imminent attraction. I tried to run one three, four (five?) years ago, in Japan, but I blew out my knee a week before the race. It was just as well; I had tried to train in under four months, from a starting weight that was, let’s just say, somewhat immense. (Note to self: Avoid training for a marathon when one’s train station has a Wendy’s, McDonald’s and KFC within walking distance of your employment.) I vowed to tackle the marathon again, someday, and perhaps that day is soon.
We change as we grow (and grow as we change), and so I’m trying to enjoy, if not relish, the challenge of running longer and longer distances. My Sunday run has reached the two hour point, and the thought of running almost double that, which I’ll most likely need to do to complete a marathon, does give me the old Kathy Bates-shaving-James-Caan's-neck-with-a-straight-razor-in-Misery feeling at the base of my stomach every now and then.
The great thing, though, about not worrying about how fast you’re running is that you simply just run; you listen to your body, and sip some water, and watch the traffic and the people glide by you as you glide by them. I’ve actually found that my chest and my arms feel fine by the end; it’s my legs that feel as if somebody has slowly, painfully extracted something essential from their architecture. But that pain has its own rewards, as transitory and slightly sadistic as they may be.
And yet, isn’t life transitory and slightly sadistic, anyway? We age and endure and lose track of our body and ourselves. Running as something as extreme as a marathon is a way to keep track of your body and your self; it’s a means to assess who you are at that particular point in time – well or sick, energetic or sluggish, in pain or content. It’s an arbitrary distance, that 42 some odd kilometers is, but so what? Everything’s arbitrary – where we’re born and where we’ll die, who we love and who we hate, what we admire and what we dismiss. Life is nothing but an acquisition of prejudices and fetishes, and the marathon, perhaps, is a gateway to uncovering a little of both.
Maybe I’ll drop out after Mile One. Perhaps my body will collapse under the pressure. It might even be easier than I think. (Though I doubt it.) Believe me, I’ve considered all options.
No matter. I’ve learned long ago that what we learn from failure is at least as edifying as what we learn from success, if not more so. Failure means you try and you fall. I tried to train for a marathon before, so I know what it’s like to not pull it off. I’ve always found that imagining the worst thing that can possibly happen, and then accepting it, is a sure-fire way to confront and conquer any looming challenge that threatens to unhinge your confidence and cohesion. Once you’ve accepted the worst that can happen (barring death), then the thing itself loses its ability to hamper your dreams.
And it’s good to have dreams. It’s good to try and go after them. It’s good to set your sights on an arbitrary, manmade distance, and see if you can get from here to there and back again, with someone new yet familiar waiting for you at the finish line. Someone who looks a lot like yourself.
(For anyone interested in the hallowed history of my high-school running 'career', you can find it in the link dated 03/02/2005 in the ' archive' section to the right. For anyone interested in fake boobs on real celebrities, you can find them on www.awfulplasticsurgery.com. Can you believe the reading options I give my readers? Can't get variety like this at www.cnn.com, I'm telling you...)
Friday, May 13, 2005
MORE OR LESS
There's a picture of myself that I've always liked.
(Boy, does that sound egotistical or what. But it's a picture from my childhood, not some badly lit, vaguely obscene Polaroid where I'm flexing my butt muscles or anything like that, so I should win some kind of extra-strength-humility brownie points, no?)
The photo crystallizes for some reason some essence of myself that would otherwise remain largely...elusive.
The year is 1983. I'm seven years old, relaxing on a lounge chair beside the pool at the Aladdin Inn in Daytona Beach, Florida. I'm a wearing a Pac-Man visor and intently reading the novelization of SUPERMAN III.
Am I still that kid?
I think so.
Or he's still me.
More or less.
How do we stay true to that seven year old that dwells within us?
Which begs the question: Scott, IS there, in fact, a seven year old version of ourselves dwelling within us?
Um, I don't know.
I'd like to think so. I'd like to hope so.
I don't know why. I guess it has to do with what I like to call 'the continuum of self'. (That's kinda sorta a lie. I don't really like to call it 'the continuum of the self', this idea, because I just made UP the idea, but if I ever DID like to call this idea something, that's what I would call it. So it's not that much of a lie after all. Whew.)
How much can we change our identity? How does our self change along with it? When we say: "Oh, yes, I know ______", what does that truly mean?
You may find this simply an intellectual exercise of splitting hairs, and it most certainly is that, but I think who we are, who we THINK we are, and who OTHERS think we are constitutes some of the fundamental, I don't know, STUFF of existence.
Are you the same person you were yesterday? No, of course not. You might have told your boyfriend to fuck off, or perhaps you lost your job. Something inside of you shifted. And so your own concept of 'self' shifted, too. ("That's not like me," you said.) We confuse ourselves when we do things that don't match up to our own and our peers' conceptions of our authentic being.
An interesting question to pose from lovely, scenic Cambodia, where Buddhism is the national religion, a religion that more less advocates, in its extreme forms, an eradication of the self altogether.
Most of the expats living and working over here are well are on their way to that eradication of the self, because many of them are out and out loonies. (Present company absolutely included.) More than a few are alcoholic, hedonistic drug-users who go completely, irrevocably off the freaking rails. Ten dollar prostitutes. Five dollar cocaine. After two weeks of this, you have either entered heaven or hell, depending on your morality. Whoever these 'fun' lovers were 'back home' doesn't apply to their current manifestation.
Which brings me back to my original point. (And if it doesn't exactly bring me back very logically or eloquently, well, too bad, it's my blog and I can go where I want to! And cry if I want to...)
I don't think the dudes over here who are snorting coke and injecting whatever it is they like to inject are thinking about their nine year old selves opinion of their current selves. Not that they should be. We change and evolve, and we can't hold on to childhood, or who we used to be.
Still.
DO we change? There's a great British documentary series by director Michael Apted that has traced a series of British school children over the past forty years. The first film was called 7-UP, the next 14 UP, the next 21 UP, etc. (I think 49 UP comes out next year.) Every seven years the camera crews come back into these people's lives, and we get to compare who they are to who they were. Revelatory, astonishing, frightening, marvellous stuff. Some people change every seven years completely and totally; others are visibly, unequivocally the same people they were at seven -- more or less.
Maybe that's the only way we can quantify how we age, by judging whether we are 'more' like we were at seven or 'less' like we were at seven. A matter of degrees, I suppose.
Could be useful. Occasionally, when we're questioning our judgement, our worth as a human, to think what our seven year old self would think of our current actions.
Then you'd have a choice: Either tell the seven year old to shut the hell up and go back to reading SUPERMAN III by the pool, or listen to his thoughts on the matter.
What you hear could be...transformative.
More or less.
(Boy, does that sound egotistical or what. But it's a picture from my childhood, not some badly lit, vaguely obscene Polaroid where I'm flexing my butt muscles or anything like that, so I should win some kind of extra-strength-humility brownie points, no?)
The photo crystallizes for some reason some essence of myself that would otherwise remain largely...elusive.
The year is 1983. I'm seven years old, relaxing on a lounge chair beside the pool at the Aladdin Inn in Daytona Beach, Florida. I'm a wearing a Pac-Man visor and intently reading the novelization of SUPERMAN III.
Am I still that kid?
I think so.
Or he's still me.
More or less.
How do we stay true to that seven year old that dwells within us?
Which begs the question: Scott, IS there, in fact, a seven year old version of ourselves dwelling within us?
Um, I don't know.
I'd like to think so. I'd like to hope so.
I don't know why. I guess it has to do with what I like to call 'the continuum of self'. (That's kinda sorta a lie. I don't really like to call it 'the continuum of the self', this idea, because I just made UP the idea, but if I ever DID like to call this idea something, that's what I would call it. So it's not that much of a lie after all. Whew.)
How much can we change our identity? How does our self change along with it? When we say: "Oh, yes, I know ______", what does that truly mean?
You may find this simply an intellectual exercise of splitting hairs, and it most certainly is that, but I think who we are, who we THINK we are, and who OTHERS think we are constitutes some of the fundamental, I don't know, STUFF of existence.
Are you the same person you were yesterday? No, of course not. You might have told your boyfriend to fuck off, or perhaps you lost your job. Something inside of you shifted. And so your own concept of 'self' shifted, too. ("That's not like me," you said.) We confuse ourselves when we do things that don't match up to our own and our peers' conceptions of our authentic being.
An interesting question to pose from lovely, scenic Cambodia, where Buddhism is the national religion, a religion that more less advocates, in its extreme forms, an eradication of the self altogether.
Most of the expats living and working over here are well are on their way to that eradication of the self, because many of them are out and out loonies. (Present company absolutely included.) More than a few are alcoholic, hedonistic drug-users who go completely, irrevocably off the freaking rails. Ten dollar prostitutes. Five dollar cocaine. After two weeks of this, you have either entered heaven or hell, depending on your morality. Whoever these 'fun' lovers were 'back home' doesn't apply to their current manifestation.
Which brings me back to my original point. (And if it doesn't exactly bring me back very logically or eloquently, well, too bad, it's my blog and I can go where I want to! And cry if I want to...)
I don't think the dudes over here who are snorting coke and injecting whatever it is they like to inject are thinking about their nine year old selves opinion of their current selves. Not that they should be. We change and evolve, and we can't hold on to childhood, or who we used to be.
Still.
DO we change? There's a great British documentary series by director Michael Apted that has traced a series of British school children over the past forty years. The first film was called 7-UP, the next 14 UP, the next 21 UP, etc. (I think 49 UP comes out next year.) Every seven years the camera crews come back into these people's lives, and we get to compare who they are to who they were. Revelatory, astonishing, frightening, marvellous stuff. Some people change every seven years completely and totally; others are visibly, unequivocally the same people they were at seven -- more or less.
Maybe that's the only way we can quantify how we age, by judging whether we are 'more' like we were at seven or 'less' like we were at seven. A matter of degrees, I suppose.
Could be useful. Occasionally, when we're questioning our judgement, our worth as a human, to think what our seven year old self would think of our current actions.
Then you'd have a choice: Either tell the seven year old to shut the hell up and go back to reading SUPERMAN III by the pool, or listen to his thoughts on the matter.
What you hear could be...transformative.
More or less.
Thursday, May 12, 2005
THANK YOU (YES, YOU), BUT PLEASE REMAIN FULLY CLOTHED
Who are you, anyways?
The strange thing about me writing this blog and you reading this blog is that we are separated by distance and time. If I'm writing this in Cambodia at twelve noon, it's about twelve midnight (the day before) back in Canada. So my midday is your end-of-day. And yet somehow the message skyrockets across the globe and onto your screen. And the ' you' who I'm writing this to remains unknown to me.
But the mystery is deeper than that, isn't it? It has to do with the actual person writing this, and the actual person reading it. This is the 'online' me, as opposed to the 'you' that is online. There's a difference. What I know of you: Nothing. What you know of me: My words. And nothing but. (Unless, of course, you actually know me, in real life.)
That's cool. That's as it should be, in some ways, that mystery. What I like about reading is that it allows you, practically demands you to become co-conspirators with the author; it enables you to agree, disagree, accept or reject anything or everything that he/she writes, and you are using somebody else's words to create mental pictures in your mind. To build castles of ideas that may not have ever been constructed if you had not read the fundamental bricks and mortar of somebody else's ideas. And the author him/herself remains a forceful entity, yes, but completely ethereal. (And it's very bizarre to suddenly meet an author who've you read and absorbed for years and years. I've met John Irving and Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates and Paul Auster and David Foster Wallace, and it's very strange to spend a morning reading one of their books, having your head filled with nothing but somebody else's thoughts, and then you find yourself greeting that same person hours later. It's bizarre. Not sure why, but it is. It's also always strange to read the thoughts of someone you know well. There's just such a disconnect between the reality of walking, breathing, spitting person and the eloquence of letters arranged in distinct patterns. Which is one of way saying: Don't be disappointed if you ever run into me, okay? And for those who know me, they know I disappoint them on a regular basis anyways, so they don't have their hopes up.)
Long story short, this is my way of saying that I truly appreciate all of those thousands upon thousands of people who read this blog on a regular basis. (Okay, okay so maybe there's not thousands of people reading this, no, but there are at least hundreds. Well, alright, hundreds might be pushing it, but there are dozens, at least. Fine, a handful, in any event. Ah shit, there's gotta be one?)
I guess you could say that this blog is divided between those people who know me who read it, and those who don't. Sometimes it's a little disconcerting to allow those voices inside of my head an outlet on this page; it's kind of like going to confession on a daily basis, only what I'm confessing is not necessarily sinful, and the people on the other side of the little-sliding-barrier aren't Catholic priests but anonymous cybersurfers.
Sometimes I try to picture whoever is reading this blog. Which means I'm trying to picture you, yes you, at this moment, now, in front of your screen. Perhaps you're sipping a Coke. Maybe you're waiting for the phone to ring, or killing time before C.S.I. starts. Or you could have stumbled onto this site accidentally, and are slowly, gradually nodding off even as I type these words. You might be in a three-piece suit or your jammies. You may be naked, for all I know. (If you are naked, for the love of all things holy, please, put on some clothes. It's nothing personal, it's just that this ain't that kind of blog. Unless I get numerous requests to make it into that kind of blog, of course. ) You may be getting ready to settle in for the night, or about to start your day. You might have just told your spouse 'I know, I know, I get it, you told me already a thousand times'. You could have just decided to get divorced. To get married. To buy the house. To ditch the plant in the living room. To run the bath. To change the diaper. To renew your subscription to Newsweek, but not Cosmo. A million mundane decisions, large and small, are going through your mind as you are reading this sentence -- and I'm privy to none of them.
But somehow we connect, despite the dissonance.
The anonymity of the web allows us to view different lives from alternative, somewhat skewed electronic angles. There is a lot that you don't know about me, and even more that I don't know about you. But for a few moments here and there each and every day I can ramble on about all the random things that I think about, and a few moments (hours, days, weeks) later, you can log on and read about it. (Even if you're nude.)
I'm still not sure what all this means. Does the world get bigger, because we can connect online, or does it contract, because we no longer feel the need to knock on our neighbour's door?
I'm not sure. But connections, however we make them, online or otherwise, are always, well, when you get right down to it, nice. Aren't they?
So:
Thank-you for dropping by.
(And, before you switch sites, if you remain unclothed, at least put on a housecoat, will you? Or a pair of slippers or something. I'm not saying you don't have a nice body, but still.)
The strange thing about me writing this blog and you reading this blog is that we are separated by distance and time. If I'm writing this in Cambodia at twelve noon, it's about twelve midnight (the day before) back in Canada. So my midday is your end-of-day. And yet somehow the message skyrockets across the globe and onto your screen. And the ' you' who I'm writing this to remains unknown to me.
But the mystery is deeper than that, isn't it? It has to do with the actual person writing this, and the actual person reading it. This is the 'online' me, as opposed to the 'you' that is online. There's a difference. What I know of you: Nothing. What you know of me: My words. And nothing but. (Unless, of course, you actually know me, in real life.)
That's cool. That's as it should be, in some ways, that mystery. What I like about reading is that it allows you, practically demands you to become co-conspirators with the author; it enables you to agree, disagree, accept or reject anything or everything that he/she writes, and you are using somebody else's words to create mental pictures in your mind. To build castles of ideas that may not have ever been constructed if you had not read the fundamental bricks and mortar of somebody else's ideas. And the author him/herself remains a forceful entity, yes, but completely ethereal. (And it's very bizarre to suddenly meet an author who've you read and absorbed for years and years. I've met John Irving and Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates and Paul Auster and David Foster Wallace, and it's very strange to spend a morning reading one of their books, having your head filled with nothing but somebody else's thoughts, and then you find yourself greeting that same person hours later. It's bizarre. Not sure why, but it is. It's also always strange to read the thoughts of someone you know well. There's just such a disconnect between the reality of walking, breathing, spitting person and the eloquence of letters arranged in distinct patterns. Which is one of way saying: Don't be disappointed if you ever run into me, okay? And for those who know me, they know I disappoint them on a regular basis anyways, so they don't have their hopes up.)
Long story short, this is my way of saying that I truly appreciate all of those thousands upon thousands of people who read this blog on a regular basis. (Okay, okay so maybe there's not thousands of people reading this, no, but there are at least hundreds. Well, alright, hundreds might be pushing it, but there are dozens, at least. Fine, a handful, in any event. Ah shit, there's gotta be one?)
I guess you could say that this blog is divided between those people who know me who read it, and those who don't. Sometimes it's a little disconcerting to allow those voices inside of my head an outlet on this page; it's kind of like going to confession on a daily basis, only what I'm confessing is not necessarily sinful, and the people on the other side of the little-sliding-barrier aren't Catholic priests but anonymous cybersurfers.
Sometimes I try to picture whoever is reading this blog. Which means I'm trying to picture you, yes you, at this moment, now, in front of your screen. Perhaps you're sipping a Coke. Maybe you're waiting for the phone to ring, or killing time before C.S.I. starts. Or you could have stumbled onto this site accidentally, and are slowly, gradually nodding off even as I type these words. You might be in a three-piece suit or your jammies. You may be naked, for all I know. (If you are naked, for the love of all things holy, please, put on some clothes. It's nothing personal, it's just that this ain't that kind of blog. Unless I get numerous requests to make it into that kind of blog, of course. ) You may be getting ready to settle in for the night, or about to start your day. You might have just told your spouse 'I know, I know, I get it, you told me already a thousand times'. You could have just decided to get divorced. To get married. To buy the house. To ditch the plant in the living room. To run the bath. To change the diaper. To renew your subscription to Newsweek, but not Cosmo. A million mundane decisions, large and small, are going through your mind as you are reading this sentence -- and I'm privy to none of them.
But somehow we connect, despite the dissonance.
The anonymity of the web allows us to view different lives from alternative, somewhat skewed electronic angles. There is a lot that you don't know about me, and even more that I don't know about you. But for a few moments here and there each and every day I can ramble on about all the random things that I think about, and a few moments (hours, days, weeks) later, you can log on and read about it. (Even if you're nude.)
I'm still not sure what all this means. Does the world get bigger, because we can connect online, or does it contract, because we no longer feel the need to knock on our neighbour's door?
I'm not sure. But connections, however we make them, online or otherwise, are always, well, when you get right down to it, nice. Aren't they?
So:
Thank-you for dropping by.
(And, before you switch sites, if you remain unclothed, at least put on a housecoat, will you? Or a pair of slippers or something. I'm not saying you don't have a nice body, but still.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)