Just saw Evan Almighty. Not in much of a mood to comment on it, but I did want to commemorate here one really dazzling quotation by Morgan Freeman's character (God):

 “Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient? If he prayed for courage, does God give him courage, or does he give him opportunities to be courageous? If someone prayed for the family to be closer, do you think God zaps them with warm fuzzy feelings, or does he give them opportunities to love each other?” – Evan Almighty

It really made me think, I'm somewhat ashamed to say. C'est la comedy.

I’ve always thought it was a bummer that your work day excluded lunch. An eight-hour 8-4 day suddenly spirals out to an 8-5 day due to that chronically irritating – though necessary – hour that American labor standards weasel into your schedule. Despite always hating the fact that my schedule lasted an hour longer than I personally thought it should, I’ve simply accepted it as inarguable fact, the law of the land; as certain as death or taxes.  

Maybe I have too much in common with the Italians, but it suddenly occurred to me that the current practice is wrong – that really we should only be “working” 35 hours a week; that our lunches should be included in a 40-hour week.

Scoff as you may, think about it. Undeniable is the trend in the American job market of burgeoning numbers of careers which depend heavily on relationship management, communication, or advanced social skills. In decline are those professions in which grunts and glares are sufficient means of expressing your thoughts or coordinating with others. And yet, despite this shift in value of employee skills, our workload has not adapted accordingly.

More often than not, white-collar workers are going to lunch with their teammates, people in their departments, or other employees at their company. Meal time is sacred time wherever you go; everyone holds in high regard the chance to sit back with your family or comrades to chat and chow. In the workplace it is no different. During this auspicious hour, many connections are made and relationships are established and yet…this is all off the clock? That seems backwards to me. Rather, it should be that our employers pay us for taking the time out of our busy lives to build those relationships and hone those skills which we will later put into play for the company’s benefit.

When I am leader of the free world, this shall be my first act. Who’s with me?

Perhaps it’s just because I’ve been feeling lonely and down the past week or so, but I’ve found my thoughts drifting steadily towards platonic love. I wonder how many of us don’t nurture platonic love as much as we ought; how many of us cast our eyes downward rather than smile and say hello to a stranger; how many of us don’t realize that we could last a lifetime on deep friendships if we were a bit smarter about them. Maybe. In any case, I was thinking about this right as I started to read what continually strikes me as “canned” coverage of the Middle East crisis. I got tired of hearing of scandal, and started nosing about for other stories – warmer ones.

I know it sounds stupid, but I began to think of Hugh Grant’s monologue in the introduction of Love Actually:
 
“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.”

Lo and behold, I found a rather Love Actually-esque picture of a Canadian soldier grasping the hand of an Afghan boy during a patrol near Panjwaii village in the Kandahar province, Afghanistan.

REUTERS/Finbarr O'Reilly

Tell me that doesn’t warm your heart a little? To know that despite all the sadness and terror the world finds itself muddled up by, that we can still look into one another’s eyes and know that there is something precious, something common that unites us. I just wish more people would start looking for it. I suppose I need to start with me though, eh?

Meanwhile, these melancholy-ish thoughts encourage me read, which appears to be the best way for me to meditate, or think through things. Stuart Dybek recently published a piece in The New Yorker which was really quite good. It is called “If I Vanished.” If you’re looking for a diversion or a pretty solid read, click here. Otherwise, here’s one passage that drew my attention, possibly because it very accurately captured my general mood at the moment:  

“It was a mistake to stop here. Not only has the spell of what had come to seem like a quest been broken but a night that had felt spontaneous now seems manufactured. The snow is real, Jack thinks, and the music. Lines he hasn’t thought about for years, from a poem in “Doctor Zhivago,” come to mind:

It snowed and snowed, the whole world over . . .
A candle burned on the table;
A candle burned. “

A few weeks ago I was thumbing through a GQ and somehow or other got sucked into a narrative piece about a writer’s attempt to reconnect with a one-time primary school bully ("Running with the Bully." GQ June 2007: 122-127, 164, 166-167). The piece was fairly well done, though at the time I wasn’t necessarily excited to be reading  it (I think that after I read more than a quarter of something, I’m compelled to finish it so that I can convince myself it wasn’t a waste of time – probably not a good system). In any case, one thing that did push me to keep reading the essay was the surprisingly lyrical quality of the writer’s prose. Alex Abramovich managed  to keep my attention throughout the entire essay, largely by virtue of perfectly crafted sentences, innovative syntax, and energetic insight dispersed throughout.  

I like to visualize the people whose work I’m reading, so I hopped online and googled “Alex Abramovich.” I don’t recall ever having found a picture of him (if you find one, send me the link!), though I did find a book with his name on it: a compilation of his "best" essays, curiously titled Cinderella Story: Notes on Contemporary Culture. I was attracted to the name – somewhat prescient, I couldn’t help feeling – and started reading up on it. Eventually I had read so many reviews and summaries I figured I could have read the damn book already, so I ordered it on Amazon for the convenient, low, low price of $9.95.

As always, my hope was to be astounded by the brilliance of the author and enriched by his writing, while my expectation was to finish the book weeks after receiving it, grumbling darkly about having felt the need to read the entire book just in case the last few strides redeemed the load of shit that had preceded them.

As it turns out, my expectation was far exceeded and my hope very nearly realized. The collection starts off with Abramovich’s strongest, most poignant piece by far (after which the collection is titled), though it readily, and startlingly, displays his well-practiced fluency with the critical analysis of cultural texts. Readers are not confronted with a neophyte, here, but a full-fledged initiate; someone skilled in the tools of his trade. Very quickly he lives up to the praise that Sam Lipsyte, his one-time editor, lays at his feet in the Preface: “Abramovich is that rare kind of critic who can set himself aside enough to see what he is seeing. Rare too is the grace and energy of his prose and the startling power of his imagery” (Abramovich 9).

This first piece, “Cinderella Story,” runs just 10 pages, but in that incredibly short stretch of paper Abramovich accomplishes so much. He begins simply, holistically reviewing the convention of the romantic comedy as it has emerged and progressed in American cinema. Through his recap he notes that the quality of romantic comedy scripts has steadily declined, that they once “were pure in a way that nothing seems pure anymore.” He wisely judges that the major accomplishment of good romantic comedies was that they allowed audience members to lose themselves in the film, and that current products issued under this genre have largely failed to achieve this distinction with any consistency. Abramovich focuses on intimacy as the major culprit of the romantic comedy’s fall-from-grace, stating that it is “no longer viable as either a cultural or commercial commodity.”

Underlining that sentence, I wondered, and proceeded, becoming more and more convinced that Abramovich’s perspective is clear and well-honed. Intimacy has somehow become less possible in our own culture: “intimacy – the space two people create to ward off the trespasses of the world at large – now runs counter to the interests of the people who shape the tone and tenor of our lives” -- media moguls, as I understood it (Abramovich 12). While his vision of the retreat of intimacy is valid and suggestive of some of the greatest issues society faces today and young generations will face with greater urgency in the near future, Abramovich would benefit from considering the many shades of intimacy on a spectrum ranging from “casual,” perhaps, to “authentic.” I wonder if it isn’t that intimacy has lost its importance, but that we have gradually abandoned the best ways of achieving it, and have steadily become less aware of what really satisfies that innate, human need of ours to be intimate with others.
 
Had he considered the difference between authentic intimacy and other types, he may have been better prepared to slice through the rest of his essay. Still, though, his does admirable work. Using Julia Roberts as his main cultural text and her various romantic comedies as examples (especially Erin Brockovich), Abramovich confidently traipses through the process of building an impressive argument. Essentially, while romantic comedies may no longer offer us the chance to escape within them as a way to sate our need for intimacy, a nascent form of film, the deposition movie, is taking the reigns in that regard. We haven’t stopped looking to film to satisfy our needs: we have just altered what cross-section of celluloid we turn to. Through the deposition film, Abramovich sees us relating to people who suffer (such as those affected by pollution in Erin Brockovich) and coming to depend on their defenders (e.g. Erin Brockovich/Julia Roberts) to deliver us to a catharsis when the wounds we have adopted are addressed (I can’t wait to see if he ever attacks Law and Order). Appropriately, Abramovich proceeds to remark on the place of celebrity in all of this mess: the ways in which people grow to depend on celebrity figures like Julia Roberts to act as our personal saviors. Abramovich warns us away from this approach, and wisely so, finishing his essay with one of the most powerful observations I have ever read:

“How do any of us [sleep at night]? More and more, it seems, we sleep alone, or not at all. As the common ground of geography, community, and family disappears, we’re forced more and more to connect through contexts that are pre-established for us, and find ourselves with less and less to talk about. We spin in a cultural centrifuge, the earth drops from beneath our feet, and all that’s left to look at is the blur of faces spinning next to our own. Ultimately, we all begin to look the same, and to check the same boxes on movie-screening questionnaires. Meanwhile, art – the most direct, intense means we have of connecting to what’s inside another individual’s head, and a last refuge from cultural vertigo – no longer seems to be made by individuals, or for them. Certainly, it isn’t being made about them” (Abramovich 10).

When I came across this passage, a chill ran through my body. I stopped reading, set the book down in my lap, and thought long and hard on the state of the world, as well as on my own place and practices in it. Anyone interested in popular culture, critical theory, film, the ways in which we connect with each other, or just a damn good read will benefit from reading – no, not reading: absorbing – this book. Readers beware, however: Abramovich will likely challenge you to reevaluate assumptions about the world and your place in it. Although powerful, his observations can also be unsettling.

Bravissimo, Alex. I, at the least, am grateful for your work and will be thinking on your words for a long, long time.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Abramovich, Alex. Cinderella Story: Notes on Contemporary Culture. Cybereditions, 2002.

Buy on Amazon.
Buy as eBook.

My apologies for the length of time between posts. My hope is to keep them more regular, but I haven't felt very inspired to write for the past week or so.

Nothing amazing, but just to keep on the radar: Weeks ago my sister and I found a REALLY cool video in which this pack of...no, no I can't ruin it. If you have 8 minutes to spare and like nature videos, you should really check out this video. It is awesome!

My level of satisfaction with Daily Kos fluctuates with frequency. On many days I find the postings a little distasteful simply because of an unmitigated puerile rage that lines the very characters on screen. Occasionally though, they post a gem. This was one of those days.

Meteor Blades supplied a quick post as commentary on the Fourth of July. He started by declaiming the word hero, noting its egregious and "promiscuous" usage. I'll admit that it is a word we are often quick to reach for, but promiscuous? I was about to wander on when I saw Frederick Douglass mentioned on the next line. Curious, I read on, and became even more skeptical. Meteor Blades lauds Frederick Douglass as his one archetype of heroism. I'm not sure that I buy that completely; I've never really cared for him or his work (his narrative was boring, I'm sorry). However, the piece Meteor Blades selected as evidence was convincing. Apparently Frederick Douglass had once delivered a speech on a Fourth of July (you can almost hear the deep 'U' that your imagination demands Douglass must have spoken with, despite being born in Maryland). The speech is good. Very good. I won't reproduce it here, though those curious should certainly click on the link above to view the speech as Meteor Blades provided it. I will simply offer one observation, a quotation that caught my attention, and be on my merry way.

My observation: I don't celebrate the Fourth of July. I never have, really. I don't care for fire works. I never have, really. (You've seen them once, you've seen them all, y'know? Unless you find someone who can work Gandalf's particular brand...) I stopped going as soon as I could manage to excuse myself from family affairs, and since that time have spent every Fourth of July contemplating why I detest the way we celebrate this holiday.

I think, just maybe, I'm a little angry that we're celebrating. I am grateful for this nation, yes, yes, yes. But most days I see too much deviation from the vision we're supposed to be sharing in, accomplishing, spreading, to feel comfortable sitting back and celebrating what our forbearers had achieved. Celebrating such a holiday seems to suggest that those bacchanalians carousing beneath scintillating, fulsome light displays are complicit in the assertion that all is well; that the Mission has been accomplished. 

Maybe I’m a little too harsh here, but when I see that the wrong words in the Declaration of Independence are still adhered to literally in some situations -- that every man is created equal --  while in others they are casually ignored to permit the discrimination of race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion, I get angry. (Have you ever noticed how the Declaration begins, “When in the course of human events” and then flutters into “man” this and “man” that? That’s substantial enough for me to believe those myths that Jefferson drafted one version with just the word human and then was pressured into changing it. But hey, call me Mr. CSI).

I spend my Fourth of Julys remembering what we fought and died for. I spend them in mild solemnity, not just remembering the path we have taken and missteps we have made, but also reminding myself of the journey we have yet to complete and the long road ahead.

Perhaps I have underestimated Frederick Douglass. His words certainly have a timeless quality about them:

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms- of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.” -- Frederick Douglass, 1852.

 

This summer (like the previous summer, the summer prior to that, the summer prior to that, so on and so forth) I am interning at a neat little company (by little I mean “huge”) that happens to be the leader in its industry. It is truly great work experience, though I’ll admit to becoming slightly disillusioned as my life plans and job description have veered incessantly in opposite directions. More on that later, maybe.

The important part about this particular summer of interning is that through it I am fulfilling a requirement for my Leadership program at school. In order to get full credit for the internship, I have to complete what is known in academic jargon as “an internship journal.” I use this diary, I mean, ahem, journal, much as I would a blog; I just try to reign in the commentary to subjects related to academia. It really isn’t that hard, because academia is my life (woe is me). In any case, last week I actually wrote about something that really, truly interested me, and I wanted to flesh it out here. In fact, I grew so excited that I e-mailed Gama Perruci (one of my professors, the Dean of our leadership center, or “He Who Will Grade Me and My Journal, I mean, My Journal and I”) just to give him the skinny: that I had stumbled upon a corporate blog.

Now, obviously I’m neither new, nor adverse to the whole blogging scene. I’ve kept a blog of my own for four years or more, but never in these four years had I imagined a blog endorsed – more or less – by a corporation. I found this corpblog (be prepared for me to toy with names until I stumble upon a portmanteau with mystical possibilities) while browsing our corporate directory (basically a boring Facebook or mySpace). I had just met someone while at a friend’s cube, and wanted to double check that I had remembered his last name, or something. I guess I forget why I was looking him up. In any case, the address listed for his “team website” seemed interesting, so I clicked it. Lo and behold, I’m confronted with this man’s blog. Cruising through a few entries really quickly I notice that the blog mostly deals with company-related material, or at least material that could be used for employee education. Nevertheless, I’m stunned. Riding along the top border in bold white letters is the corpoblog’s title and a techie witticism: “Biller Direct HumVee – Like Tony Soprano – Always Looking Over My Shoulder.” Amused, I poke around a bit. Falling down the right side of the screen are the compulsory links to other blogs, thereby fulfilling the requisite connection to the “community” necessary for anything to be considered a blog these days.

From an English and Communication standpoint, it is fascinating to see how the corporate identity project has evolved over time. Most of us will be familiar with the stereotype of model employees engaging regularly in niceties and platitudes while on company grounds, but when out to lunch will immediately (and almost unconsciously) launch into diatribes about this sonofabitch or that asshole. The first time I experienced this dropping-of-guard I was caught unawares, but it struck me as more humorous than inappropriate. When considering this personally, at first I thought it was cowardly. I told myself I would never engage in that sort of behavior, because I would always be brave enough to speak my mind on the job. That is, I wanted to be me all the time; none of that play-corporate-self stuff. Aside from the personal authenticity I felt I would be achieving, I also thought that being open and honest would be the only way to get things changed. Make constructive criticism and people will listen, right? A month later I was in the car on the way to lunch with a few colleagues when I caught myself mid-gripe. I paused and inside my head began to ask, “Wait? What…what’s going on? Why wouldn’t you have just said this at your desk?” Now I understand a bit better that the corporate mask isn’t always an act of cowardice as much as it is an effort to keep the peace. After all, if you only have to be stuck with someone for eight hours a day, five days a week, you might as well just save up the frustration for a sixty-minute lunch and use it to bond with your “friends,” right?

And so it has been. Griping, criticizing, as an effort of bonding. It is one of the most clear and evident glues adhering people in a wide variety of environments and relationships; the corporate world especially. And not just bonding, but also establishing one’s personality. In all of our interpersonal interactions we embed little gems of self-disclosure in what we say and how we say it. Through these bits of “me,” we build an image in other people’s minds of who we are. Complaining is naturally one of the most accessible subjects of conversation. I mean, who has to think long and hard to complain about something that completely sucks?

What fascinates me about this situation, this team blog on our company server, is that there is a department in our corporation that is not necessarily waiting until their lunch, or until they are outside the “forbidden zone” of company grounds to begin dissecting their troubles. Instead, they are engaging each other in personal woes online, at a website that is accessible to everyone. Naturally they are not using it as a human dart board, putting up people who piss them off and attacking mercilessly at will (though there’s an idea…). Here, on this department’s blog, they are writing with the aim of de-toxing and sharing solutions to some of their complaints as a team. Specifically on this blog, one of their issues is about company resources – to use Thing A or Thing B (not from Dr. Seuss, you perverts) as a shared resource for each team in a specific division of our company. Where I could imagine my grandfather going out to the shooting range forty-years ago with a bunch of his buds and start ripping his absent boss a new one while ripping a target sheet a dozen new holes, or my own father listening ten years ago to a co-worker bitch about this new upstart colleague that’s causing him hell on the job while munching on Wendy’s, now I’m able to traipse through our corporate servers to find a team baring their all not just to get issues off their collective chest, but also, well, to do something about it and improve the company’s processes. 

Is this really happening, I wondered? Are people really bonding over a blog while simultaneously making strides to solving enterprise-wide issues? Curious, I started doing drive-by’s. That is, on my way to refill my cup of coffee, I’d take the long walk past where this specimen group sat. My first trip or two didn’t provide much. But eventually I started noticing noises that were out of place when compared to other teams. Really strange noises to being hearing at 9:00 in the morning when most of our minds are only just cracking open one eyelid on the way to becoming fully awake. The noise I started hearing was laughter, mixed with sentence fragments followed by more laughter, which could only be jokes that were spliced between instant messaging conversations and “real-world dialogue.” A week or two of team-stalking later, I realized that this may be one of the closest teams I have ever encountered. I began imagining them as a tightly knit unit doing everything together – lunch, breaks, Friday-night cocktails, graduation parties, baby showers, so on and so forth. I began to imagine them as a family that had been imported directly into the company. And what was the glue? Well, it appeared to be blogging. For now, I’m wondering whether or not this is a corporate endeavor that should be given more time and attention. Is this a way to increase cohesiveness on teams, improve morale, or is there a negative side to this that I’m not realizing yet? When time and opportunity allows, I hope to talk to this compblogger to get his opinions on the issue. I’m very interested in how members of the team personally value this blog and measure its success. Were the people I imagined as corporate family members only commenting on the blog because this guy is one of those bloggers, harping on all the people whose names he knows until they read enough sentences of his entry to make for semi-intelligent commenting? Or, are they actually drawn to what he is saying, to a forum where they may also say and have things heard, to a place where they can learn something relevant to their careers, their life, their relationships?


(P.S. I’ve decided that blogs which are either endorsed by a corporation or are geared specifically to address corporate issues will be known as “comblogs” (as in company-blog). Those who read or write them shall be “combloggers.” I have spoken.) 

My father is hilarious, though not always on purpose.

Sometimes he is like a broken record, but only in the best of ways. It never fails that one of approximately one million things, words, names, or images will act as a sort of cognitive trigger, prompting him to tell the same joke or same 10-15 word anecdote that he can't seem to not find funny. Fortunately for us, he's usually amused for a reason (usually), For the past ten years at least, conversation within hearing range of my father which pertained to dog bites would always elicit the same anecdote in a crappy French accent:

"Excuse me, sir, does your dog bite?"
"No."
*dog bites*
"I thought you said your dog did not bite!"
"That is not my dog."

I think around the 300th retelling of this so (around 8 years ago), the pay off for me shifted from the humor of the situation to the crow-foot lines that would form in the corners of my dad's eyes. Nevertheless, I thought I would be performing a public service by posting this where more people might get to it. Let me know what you think.

Enjoy:

En route to work this morning, a commercial streamed across my talk radio station of choice (it's the only one that comes in, really), 610-WTVN, that struck me as rather hilarious.

An announcer whose gravelly voice's grumbles were reminiscent of dramatic do-or-die moments began the spot by intoning "it's not just golf, it could be the last game of their careers." I immediately found it amusing that whomever designed the ad felt it necessary to dramatize golf. Football and soccer you can just record a blend of screaming fans and band play. Baseball can bring in fans with a dime-a-dog night (disgusting). But golf, golf needs to be painted in angry, on-edge hues in order to bring in observers (not fans, fans do something; observers simply watch while their hands wander the insides of pockets on the search for wayward change).

A faulty emotional appeal, anyone? I'm sorry, but golf is boring. And I'd probably rather die than watch it for an extended period of time.

(I've just imagined an ironic twist of events: any day now I'm murdered and buried underneath a golf course. My unsettled spirit rises into a purgatory state where I can wander the lengths of the greens moaning my horror and torment. Great.)