Uncouth PerspectivesNot on the rug, man.

Several of the tables in one of the hallways have been covered with white paper and have been written on in many different people’s handwriting in blue marker. There’s the usual merry christmas and a few people writing funny comments – but then, one of the statements that universally pisses me off.

JESUS IS THE REASON FOR THE SEASON!

Where do I begin to tell how much this grates on me? If I hadn’t just gotten a call from someone that really made my day, I would have taken that blue marker and written, “Well, that and the fact that at this time of year, due to the tilt of the Earth, the Northern Hemisphere is turned away from the sun.” I mean, come on. Get it through your skulls, a weather phenomenon cannot be attributed to a Hebrew cult leader.

Ok. So I’m not really being fair here. I know what they meant. It’s more…Jesus is the reason for this fun, festive holiday time. My ass he is. There are a few different reasons for this fun, festive holiday time, and the first one is capitalism. Know where Santa Claus comes from?

It ain’t from Saint Nicholas. Not really. It’s from a newspaper advertisement. He was essentially a marketing scheme for corporations. Most successful scam in history – watch how much money credit card and title loan places make just because people very nearly bankrupt themselves on presents that they can’t afford to give then but MUST, just because it’s that time of year.

The other reason goes way back before Jesus was a twinkle in his Father’s eye.

Solstice. Yaaaaaay, solstice. Celebrations for the longest and shortest days of the year are celebrated by essentially any culture advanced enough to make the brilliant observation that days are longer in the summer, shorter in the winter. On shorter days, people tend to cluster together, seeking the protection, stability, and warmth of family and friends.

Christmas takes place within less than a week of solstice, and it was made that way on purpose. It was made to appease pagans, who didn’t want to give up their solstice celebrations by accepting the new religion of Christianity. Turns out, taxes weren’t even collected in Bethlehem (paying taxes was, for those not well versed in Hebrew mythology, the reason Mary and Joseph were in town and the inns were so crowded they had to go have the kid in a stable) in December. So there’s no way that December 25 is the historical Jesus’s birthday – or even close!

So it’s mostly capitalism and accidents of astronomy that put us in holiday spirit. Believe it was a miracle virgin birth if you will (though the whole “virgin birth” thing has now largely been discredited as a very silly translation error) and that the Saviour of the World was born that day, but also keep in mind that what you believe was historically impossible. Jesus is NOT the reason for the season, and as America moves more and more toward becoming a semi-religious state, we would do well to keep this in mind.

Rating movies according to their content allows viewers to dicriminate the content they and their children watch, without censorship. What I cannot stand about movie ratings are the subtle messages that are being projected.

Before I get into those messages, here is a refresher about the rating system. G: general admission, all ages admitted. PG: parental guidance suggested, some material may not be suitable for children. PG-13: parents stronly cautioned, some material may be inappropriate for children under 13. R: restricted, under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian. NC-17: no one 17 and under admitted.

I’m going to cover the two main messages that I’ve picked up on, though I’m sure there are many others. (Anyone feel free to mention them.) The first one is that homosexuality is okay, so long as you make fun of it. The second, that women are meant to be naked, men are meant to be clothed. Where do I get these ideas from? The movie rating system.

Movies with gay characters (ones that aren’t on the screen for a mere second or two) are rated R, UNLESS they are being made fun of about their orientation. The movie “In & Out” is PG-13, but the premise of the movie is that the main character desperately tries to prove that he is straight despite his “homosexual” image… only to discover that he is, in fact, gay.

And, the feeling that I get from watching movies is that nudity is perfectly okay. For females. Or rather, it may not be okay, but that somehow, women just end up being naked a lot more often, and that’s okay. Can anyone think of a movie where a man was fully nude… penis and everything… and was on screen for more than a split second… WITHOUT shadows or something obstructing view? (NOT PORN) Generally, there is nothing of the sort in movies, and if there is, the movie is bound to be NC-17. But there are plenty of movies where women are completely naked, from neck to ankles, for everyone to see. Those movies are rated R.

These are just a few examples. Those responsible for rating movies are obviously biased, and have done nothing to change the antiquated views that have been preying on society for so long. Sure, we’re free to watch whatever we want, but we’re still being told, quietly, subtly, that all are not equal.

You can find more information also at: http://www.filmratings.com and http://www.mpaa.org/movieratings.

And, sadly, it was still there.

All of it. Every morning, she awoke with the hope that the world was gone. Or that reality had changed. Or, at least, that she was someone else. Not living her life. Not living in her hell.

But, it was still there.

And, she hated it. How she hated it. Even though she was up a moment before her alarm clock, she knew her mother would be coming in. To wake her up. To command her. To belittle her.

She closed her eyes.

There was a knock and then the creak of the door. Her mother. She could feel the condescending smile. The mock righteousness.

“Still asleep?”

She opened her eyes. But, said nothing.

“C’mon, you’ve got to get up. We may know you are lazy, but try to keep fooling the rest of the world for as long as you can.

She sighed.

Her mother turned around without even looking and walked out, not even closing the door. At least close the door.

She closed her eyes again.

I wish… I wish… I wish… please… let it all go away.

She opened her eyes.

Damn.

She shifted out of bed, the cold air biting her naked body. Clothes. How horrible a crime to place on all of mankind. Clothes. How ridiculous and immature. Clothes. How commanding. Domineering. But, that is what it seems to all be about, eh?

She grabbed her towel and shuffled to the shower.

Door, locked. Window, closed. Fan, on. Water, on… and warm. She sat on the toilet, letting the sounds soothe her mind. No mother. No patronizing. Nothing but the smooth sounds of her little room. Peace, for a moment.

“Don’t take too long! You’ll be late like you always are.”

She sighed again.

Not even this moment can she truly have to herself. She stepped into the shower. The warm water pounded on her head, down her neck, along her spine, and onto the floor.

Soothing. Relaxing. Safe.

She blinked.

The bathroom had steamed up. Her skin was slightly wrinkled. How long had she been in here? She quickly lathered, shampooed, and jumped out. She ran into her room.

Damn, she was late. Ironic, though. She would have been on time if her mother hadn’t been so patronizing and stressful. Oh well, she was late now and nothing she could do about it.

As she dressed, she stopped for a moment to look at the painting. It was one of the few things she had ever been given that meant anything to her. It was a blue and red swirl, almost tornado like, that reminded her much of a portal to another world. To her, that is what it was. She knew, somewhere behind the painting, there was a gate way out. A way to get away from her mother, her pain, everything. Where she could live. And be happy.

“Come on! You’ve made me late, as well, slug!”

When are you not late? It seems I’m more on time than you, yet I’m the guilty one?

She closed her eyes.

Take me away portal. Take me away.

She opened them.

Of course, her beautiful picture stared back at her. Nothing had changed.

It never did.

It has your address handwritten and a vaguely Christmasy address label for the return address. The letter is from someone you’re quite sure you’ve never heard of in your life. You open the envelope with trepidation – what if there’s anthrax in it, or what if it’s a letter bomb? Oh no, my friend. I’m afraid not. You see, you’ve stumbled onto something far, far worse. Upon opening the envelope, you discover a letter on outrageously cheesy stationery festooned with a somewhat unlikely and out-of-scale almagamation of poinsettias, snowflakes, AND Santa Claus.

But the stationery isn’t even the scary part. Your eyes grow a little wider, because by now you’ve realized what you’ve just opened. It’s that horror of horrors, the Christmas letter. Go back, go back! But you aren’t going back, you’re looking at it with a faint look of incredulity and a lack of real recognition as to how tremendously frightening this is. And because you’re a masochist, you just have to go and READ the damn thing, don’t you? So you start reading the letter. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

Wow. Ok, maybe this isn’t as bad as you’d thought. Whoever the hell this is has grandkids that are just great. One has evidently won the Nobel Prize in physics at the age of twelve, another is getting her novel published, and the three-year-old is training to become a lyric soprano. Oh, and the oldest one just got released from prison because he turned 18. And they’re sure he’s fully rehabilitated and there won’t be any repeats of the “knife-throwing at the movie theater” incident of several years back. How nice for them.

And now it really starts getting fun, because now, the medical writing begins. Millie has a condition with a long acronym and a name you couldn’t pronounce if you tried. And the writer of the letter, well, she had surgery to remove her bunion last week and is recovering from a urinary tract infection.

After vomiting a few times, you return to finish the letter – after all, it can’t get much worse, right? Actually, oddly enough, for once you are correct. Now you get to see a brief recap of the year of these people that you still don’t think you know. You get to find out who died, and of what. The tragic accident with the weed-whacker is high on the list of amusing deaths, and the vacuum-cleaner-in-private-area thing is by far the funniest maiming.

And suddenly, you reach the end. A signature, and underneath it a name. Jane? Who the fuck is Jane? Oh. You remember, now. It’s that one friend that your mother’s cousin had, the one who gave you five dollars at graduation and you had to send a thank-you card to, anyway. And you see the bottom of the stationery.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, it says. Well, it would have been, you think as you drum your fingers together, wondering exactly how much it costs for weapons-grade anthrax. It would have been.

And I am saddened to see this. One of ways in which we, human beings, conceptual beings, are truly happy is are our ability to grow and learn. And that always means changing.

One of the main factors in the lack of people wanting to grow, learn, and change is facing the fact that they migth have or were actually wrong about something. So instead of unfolding into a new, better person, they grasp onto the old belief, clinging desperatly to prove something, whatever it might actually be, and screaming, “I’m not wrong! I’m perfect! Don’t mock my self worth!”

That’s not self worth. That’s not happiness. There are times when things happen that make you re-evalute who you are and what you believe. Do not be afraid of this! Embrace this! It is part of what makes us who we are.

And this is also something that needs to be done together. You need to share what you’ve learned and how you’ve grown with the people around you. But, with that, you also need to have people around you who really matter and who really care. Real people. People who are also willing to grow, learn, and change. The changes do not always have to be drastic or extreme, but they happen.

A really good example of what happens when people refuse to change their ideas and beliefs when reality proves them wrong is the book Towing Jehovah by James Morrow. I’ve mentioned this book before, but I want to bring it up again. (And again and again and again..) It is a fantastic read, but it also highlights from very interesting points. The book involves many different people of different theistic and atheistic backgrounds, and shows what happens when they get together in their self righteousness because God’s dead carcass has to be towed to the arctic ocean to be entombed. I don’t think I need to say more on that.

In the end here, I really want to make something clear. I am not rallying for extreme changes everyday. But, it is really important that as we learn lessons and we live life, we allow ourselves to be open and use reason to learn, understand, grow, change, and live. That is what it is all about.

Time after time, I see people whining for days or weeks on end that they can�t tell someone that they�re in love or just that they wanted to go to lunch with them next Tuesday. And then there are the ones who agonize over little choices and whether or not they should get more committed. They worry that they�ll get hurt or rejected or that things won�t work out, and it pushes them toward stagnation. In a word, quitcherbitching.

Sure, they might get scared off. And sure, even if it happens you might get hurt tremendously. And things might not work out. That is all true. Hell, that person could turn out to be the worst thing that has ever happened to you.

And you know what? I don�t care. Tell them anyway. Go to the next level if your intuition suggests it might be possible. Take every opportunity that offers itself, because there�s a little secret about good things and bad things that a lot of people take their whole lives to realize.

If you ever look at the average 50 year old middle-class person, and you have some shred of creative imagination and intelligence, you�ll be appalled. An almost-sexless relationship, a job at some moderately-paying office, a couple of kids who never call, and a life devoid of sparkle, devoid of anecdotes about anything more fascinating than that time Erica got chickenpox and gave it to everyone in the house. They haven�t really lived. And there�s a huge reason. They�ve had risk-free existences.

Bad Things will happen. No matter what you do, they will come and sneak up on you. Sometimes, they�ll even be Horrible Things. You can�t stop them. They�ll invade your life and you will just have to cope and deal and grow stronger because of them. Good Things, though, are a different story. Good Things don�t �just happen.� You have to work for them and sometimes, you have to work hard.

And so a Good Thing has come along. An Amazingly Good Thing. An incredibly wonderful person, the best person I have ever ever known. And I fell in love, and I fell in love fast. So fast, in fact, that I�m certain it would have scared the vast majority of people I know. It didn�t scare me, though, and to my initial surprise it didn�t scare him, either.

And this amazes me even more about him. And when I felt closer to him, he felt closer to me. When I realized I loved him, he realized he loved me very, very soon after. Each time we talked, we felt closer.

I�m more in love than I�ve ever been, and I�m not even afraid to share that. I am doing something entirely insane, and I�m loving every second of it. It�s better, I know this by experience, to wish you hadn�t gone and done something than to wish, after the opportunity has faded, that you had.

It could go horribly, horribly wrong. This is entirely true. But I will not regret it no matter what. My key to telling someone I�m in love with them (and I haven�t even told him this, as I write it) is this. If I told them, and the next day, they ripped my heart out and tore it to shreds, would I wish I�d never met them? If my answer is yes, I don�t tell. But if I�d have no regrets, I tell them. And I never look back.

Don�t ever look back. Don�t ever stop yourself in the middle of the road because you can�t decide which way to turn and don�t spend too much time looking in your glove compartment for a map. Odds are it�s out of date anyway, and besides � getting lost sometimes leads to more interesting places than the initial destination.

Why Grammar Is The First Casualty Of War

By Terry Jones, Monty Python member, writer and performer

http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/12/01/nterry01.xml&sSheet=/news/2001/12/01/ixhome.html

They called her Future Girl. It was a joke. It was for fun. But it was even true.

Smart, as she was. Joyous as she was. Knowing as she was.

She still lived in the future. Her dreams, her desires, her goals, were all placed in the Future. She did not live for today, yet for tomorrow.

Strong, Joyous, and Knowing all got beat down. She was down. Down.

But I know her, this Future Girl. She knows better. And she has learned.

She is happy. She is good. She has her goals and her dreams but it has become about each and every day.

She lives for today. She is happy. She is proud. She is good. She is strong.

She is my Real Girl.

Let’s live for today.

Unfortunately, it turned out that �Bob� had given me a subscription to Maxim.

If you are unfamiliar with Maxim, it is a tawdry pulp mag proudly displayed at the counter of finer convenience stores throughout this great nation. The magazine looks like it is assembled by a crew of sexually-frustrated 12 year-olds. The �content� can be summarized as follows: pictures of semi-naked models in contrived, suggestive positions sandwiched between half-baked, ill-conceived articles. It�s a monthly Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, without any of those silly sports to get in the way.

Really, it�s not the soft-core porn-substitute that makes Maxim such a waste, it�s the lack of any kind of intellectual content or depth. Granted, not every magazine is New Republic (nor would we want that!), but come on guys! At least try to fill the pages with something marginally compelling! Every article is gimicky in one way or another. There is a �how to� section every month, in which readers are instructed �how to� handle any of a number of highly unlikely scenarios, such as the recent article on �how to� throw an orgy (assuming these readers ever meet any actual women). There�s a �first-person� section in which NBA point guards, and firemen, and car salesmen give you a first-hand perspective on their lives. This could be interesting if it weren�t always �as told to� another of Maxim�s crack reporters, leaving one with the impression that the whole piece was pretty much fabricated.

The photos, usually of models or B-grade actresses (think: cast of Coyote Ugly), are generally paired with a journalistic fluff piece. This often takes the form of a Q-and-A style interview session, in which the interviewer is usually so overcome by the presence of the model that he is unable to complete his own thoughts, assuming that he actually has some to begin with. This wide-eyed awe seems out of place next to the usual cocksure attitude that the magazine supposedly espouses.

What�s that stench, you ask? It must be the monthly token investigative journalism piece, which typically sticks to high heaven. Recently, Maxim ran an article on last year�s Russian submarine tragedy (extra points for timeliness). The reporter actually managed to gather some interesting information, but his execution was horrific! Using a sophomoric first-person narrative in an attempt to give the article some emotional immediacy backfired, of course (how could he expect us to believe that he knew what the crew was thinking and doing in their final moments?). And, the whole piece, like most of Maxim�s �true-life� stories, is awash in melodrama and hyperbole. Maxim makes Highlights Magazine for Children look highbrow.

Maxim ran an article earlier this year in which they tried (unsuccessfully, I think) to favorably compare themselves to the pulpy pinup magazines of the 1950�s. It�s unlikely that anyone will look back on Maxim in 50 years with a similar fondness. The 1950�s pinup magazines were a product of a sexually repressed post-war era, whereas Maxim is published in a (supposedly) more enlightened era. Furthermore, the retro appeal of the pinup magazines is their poor production values and the unselfconscious awkwardness of the titillating text, compared to Maxim�s big, dumb, glossy brashness.

Frankly, I�m ashamed to carry Maxim around. I was on an airplane with a copy of it, and the stewardess eyed me suspiciously, as though I was carrying hard-core porn. And it�s true I was connecting through Salt Lake City at the time, but still, you get the idea. Editorial claims aside, most women regard Maxim as either a triviality or an insult, as well they should. Reading Maxim is like accidentally walking into someone else�s frat-house stag party; I feel like I need a shower just extracting it from my mailbox.

The perplexing thing about Maxim is how well it sells. Maxim boasts of outselling GQ, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone and Esquire combined. How can this be possible? If you�ve read any of those magazines, you should be aware that Maxim couldn�t begin to approach their level of journalistic standards and overall quality in this or any other universe.

And maybe that�s the secret to their success. It�s sad to think, but perhaps that�s what American males want from a magazine. I have had more than one guy (never women) point to a copy of Maxim and say, �that�s the greatest magazine ever.� I would think, judging by the content and the child-like production (big, bright, and shiny being the design motif), that Maxim would only be perused by males experiencing the onset of puberty, that being the age where adult women seem mysterious and distant. Any male over the age of 21 who enjoys this crap should be embarrassed. So thanks for the present, �Bob,� but I�d rather not have you drag me down into your personal sewer.

Never again.

Never again shall I be grateful and excited that someone is buying me lunch.

Never again will I hear a friend of mine say to his son, “Sorry, bud, but we don’t have money to eat a restraunt tonight.”

Never again.

Never again shall I get excited when I find a store of change.

Never again will my decision be: the same kind of sandwhich I’ve been eating for a week or water.

Never again.

I will not be controled by your ideas of success.

I will not listen when you say that can never be done.

I will never succumb or submit to your ideas of what “has to be”.

I will live. I will thrive. I will survive.

And I am happy.