Saturday, February 26, 2011

Under Your Wing...

 
Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

The other day, I was rereading some of the comments that various readers have left for various posts, and I came upon one left by the ever-delightful Jan4 that said that she now wanted an entire army of flying babies.  Well, OK, so that’s scary in and of itself, but it did get me started thinking about the idea of having my own private army to do some things for me that I don’t particularly want to do for myself.

Now, an army of flying babies would have its pros and cons.  Imagine walking into a Bed, Bath, and Beyond or a Pottery Barn with a whole army of flying babies.  At first, people would just think that the babies were sweet and cuddly.  They’d point upward and say, “Look at all those little babies flying around.  Aren’t they cute?”  And no one would bug you or your army because everyone would think that the babies were so delightful.  That would definitely be a plus.  After all, babies really are cute…until, of course, they turn mean.  And that could be both a pro and a con.  If the babies turned mean because they had to protect you, that would be good.  That’s their job.  But what if all the babies just got tired and cranky because they needed a nap?  Then they’d just start screaming and attacking at random like a swarm of angry bees.  They’d be totally out of control, and that would not be good.  You’d probably end up getting trampled in a mass stampede along with everyone else who was trying to get away from those winged little horrors. 

And what if the babies needed a diaper change?  You’d have to bring down your entire army because someone made a boom-boom.  And that would just be embarrassing, not to mention time-consuming.  So, a whole army of flying babies has its promise, but in the end, it’s maybe not the best strategy. 

So, what kind of people would make the best private army?  Well, I don’t know, and to be honest, I may not be the best person to consider this question because the only experience I have with running my own army is from a game I used to play with my sisters called “Kingdoms.” 

Now, as children, we owned pretty much every board game made, even some of the more obscure ones.  We had a game, for example, called “Careers,” and the idea was that as you went around the board, you landed on squares for different professions and either made or lost money depending on that.  You could go around once, become a doctor, and make $300,000, in which case, nothing else that happened in the entire game could possibly have that much effect on you.  Or you could end up becoming a dock worker whose pension fund gets audited by the IRS, in which case, you spend the rest of the game trying to help your union pay off its legal bills.  I really think a better name for that game would’ve been “Fate” or maybe “You and Your Stinkin’ Bad Luck.”   I mean, it was really pretty hardcore for the age-10-and-under set.

Anyway, after my sisters and I would play a board game a couple of times, we would get tired of it, so we would think of other ways to use the games.  That’s what Kingdoms was about.  You chose a couple of board games, and out of all the pieces, you made up a kingdom.  My older sister’s kingdom was always a place of sound economic principles and prosperity for all.  She worked out trade deals with the other kingdoms and was generally a good corporate citizen.  My kingdom always operated on more of an isolationist policy.  In fact, we were absolute xenophobes.  We wanted nothing to do with the other kingdoms, and to be honest, it’s kind of amazing that my sisters continued to include me in the game since my idea of playing was just to  go off in a corner, set up my kingdom, and then announce our core foreign policy:  leave us alone. 

My younger sister’s kingdom probably brought the most excitement to the game.  They were always barbaric, war-like people who would just randomly attack the other kingdoms for no reason at all.  They didn’t want your land.  They didn’t want your goods and services.  They just wanted to attack you.  And they usually didn’t even bother to declare war on you first.  They just marched over and said, “Hi.  We’re here to attack you.”  And then it was like, “Let the plunder begin!” My older sister’s kingdom spent all their time trying to negotiate with my little sister’s kingdom.  My kingdom spent all its time trying to invent a cloaking device. 

So, I don’t really know that I’m the best person to be considering who should be in a private army, but then again, having had quite a bit of experience with being on the wrong end of a plundering, I suppose I have some unique insights.

My first thought was that the perfect private army people would be Justin Bieber fans.  After all, they can read, write, do math, and feed themselves.  So, right off the bat, they’re a better choice than flying babies.  And they’re insanely loyal, which, let’s face it, babies aren’t.  Babies will go where the food is.  They’re like that. 

The only problem is that some of the Bieber fans are mean.  Really mean.  These are middle-school girls who will go on Twitter and make death threats. And when you stop to think about organizing these girls into an army, well, that’s maybe not such a good idea.  I mean, personally, I think it’s only a matter of time until the Bieber fans turn on Bieber.  After all, he’s not Peter Pan; he’s going to grow up eventually.  And I can’t imagine that anything would piss the Bieber fans off more than that.  He’ll probably fall in love one day and want to settle down and start a family and all that stuff, and at that point, the Bieberites will just turn on him.  They’ll set upon him like a pack of wild dogs.  So, yeah, they’re loyal, but it’s kind of difficult to really determine what they’re loyal to. And that could be a problem.

My next thought was of a private army made up of Heidi Klum clones.  Now, that would be something because they wouldn’t be mean.  They wouldn’t have to be.  They’d be beautiful, so they could get away with anything.  Imagine if they came to plunder on my behalf.  They’d show up and say, “Give us your land and your goods,” and the plunderees would just say, “No, please, you’re so beautiful. Just take this stuff with our compliments.  And if it’s not enough, please feel free to come back and enslave us. We’d enjoy that.  We really would.”

But at a certain point, the Heidi Klum clones would inevitably become self-aware, and that would be a problem.  They’d wake up one day and say, “Hey, wait a minute.  We’re beautiful German supermodel clones.  We can have anything we want, so what the hell are we doing wasting our time plundering on your behalf?”  In fact, the Heidi Klum clone army would probably end up insisting that I plunder for them…and bring them bottled water and fresh fruit every 15 minutes. So, ultimately, that plan probably wouldn’t work out so well, either.

After that, I decided to give it one more shot.  I wracked my brains trying to think of who would make the perfect soldier in my private army.  Then finally it came to me:  Rocky Balboa.  He’d be perfect—he’d have no tiresome moral or ethical issues about plundering (he was, after all, a leg-breaker for a loan shark in the first Rocky), he’d be loyal but not delusional about it, and if anything, he’d become less self-aware as time went by.  After all, as Apollo Creed pointed out to him in Rocky III, “It doesn’t take a man to stand there and get your head beat off,” (and really, have truer words ever been spoken quite so poetically?), yet Rocky is exactly the kind of guy who would stand there and get his head beat off if you told him to.  So reaching a point of self-awareness at which he would turn on you would become less and less of an issue as he incurred more and more brain damage.

There would only be one real problem with Rocky, though:  you can’t get Rocky without getting Adrian, too.  And frankly, that woman is just a buzzkill.  I mean, in every Rocky movie except the first one (well, and the last one, of course, because the writers finally just killed her so she isn’t in that one), about half the plot is Adrian having a big problem with Rocky fighting.  And we all know it’s stupid because all the movies are about Rocky fighting. I mean, no one is going to pay good money to see Adrian talk Rocky into becoming an accountant.

So, if I had a whole army of Rocky Balboas, I’d decide that we should go plunder somewhere, but then Adrian would have a big problem with it, and Rocky would have to tell her that as a man, his job is to protect and to plunder and that he never asked her to stop being a woman (whose job is apparently just to complain), so she shouldn’t ask him to stop being a man.  And then she’d remind him that the doctor said he couldn’t plunder anymore or he’d go blind, but then he’d start training for it anyway, and Mickey would show up and tell him that “for a 45-minute plunder, you gotta train hard for 45 thoooouuusssaaannnd minutes, and you ain’t even trained hard for one.”  Then Adrian would slip into a coma for three or four days, and when she woke up, she’d look at Rocky in a close-up, soft-focus shot and say, “There’s only one thing I want you to do for me.  Plunder, Rocky, plunder!” 

Of course, by then, I probably wouldn’t be in the mood for it anymore.  So, we’d forget about the whole thing for a week or two.  And by the time I decided that I wanted to go out and wreak havoc with my army again, Adrian would’ve reverted back to her old self, and we’d have to go through the whole thing all over again.  So, an army of Rockys would never actually do anything but generate emotional turmoil.  And I’m just not up for that.  I can generate enough emotional turmoil all on my own, thank you very much.

I finally thought that maybe part of the problem with having a private army was the plundering part, so I thought that I’d just try to concentrate on having a private protection army. So, my first task in creating it was to decide what exactly I thought I needed to be protected from. But when I really thought about it, I realized that these days, I don’t leave the house unless I absolutely have to, so I don’t feel threatened by all that many things.  There’s the usual threatening stuff of course—cold and flu viruses, dry flaky skin, Don Knotts, lima beans—you know, the normal things people worry about encountering at home and are never fully prepared to deal with. But with the exception of Don Knotts, I don’t know that those threats really warrant an entire army.  I mean, how many people does it take to hand me a cold pill or squeeze out some moisturizer?  How big an army do I need to dispose of a lima bean?

In the end, I just decided that being self-sufficient is better, and I’d love to say that I came to that conclusion through a beautiful realization of my power.  But really it wasn’t that.  A couple of months ago, I read an interview with a musician I really like who does a one-woman show, and the interviewer asked her why she didn’t have a backing band with her.  I expected her to answer that doing the show by herself gave her a greater sense of artistic freedom or was personally empowering or something like that.  What she actually said was that basically, dealing with a band could be a hassle and that she didn’t want to have to feed them or listen to them complain.  And I guess that having gone through the brain exercise of trying to set up my own private army, I can totally see where she’s coming from.  I mean, sometimes, being self-sufficient and taking care of yourself can be a wonderful thing.  Doing your own plundering can give you a real sense of empowerment and accomplishment.  But I also kind of think that most of us would happily let others do our bidding for us if it wasn’t such a complete, freaking pain in the ass, and I really do suspect that in the end, most of us take care of our own problems because it’s just easier than having to deal with a flock of flying babies, Justin Bieber fans, Heidi Klum clones, or the Balboas.  There is, after all, absolutely nothing wrong with not making things harder than they really need to be, and as Rocky himself once said, “There ain’t no law against ducking.”

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy. 



© R. Rissler, 2011. All rights reserved.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Out of Chaos...

 
Earlier this week, I realized that February is a month just chock full o’ holidays.  Well, maybe not exactly “chock full,” but there are four different days of note:  Lincoln’s Birthday, Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, and Washington’s Birthday.  Of course, Lincoln’s and Washington’s Birthday just kind of get wrapped into President’s Day, so I guess there are only two working holidays in the month.  But still, that’s something.  And besides, February sometimes has that weird extra day in it when it’s a leap year, and I think that day should be declared a holiday, too.  I mean, you can never have too many holidays as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, President’s Day is coming up this Monday, and personally, I think that’s a holiday that deserves a little more attention.  Of course, the holiday itself is a bit lacking in some respects, and I guess that’s why it isn’t as big a deal as, say, Christmas.  It’s not a gift-giving occasion for one thing, and I think that’s too bad, although I really don’t know what would be considered an appropriate gift for President’s Day.  Maybe tiny little soaps cut into the shape of the White House would work.  But it isn’t like little children make out lists of what they want for President’s Day and send it to George Washington, The White House, USA.  No one makes a plate of cookies and sets them out President’s Day Eve for when Lincoln comes to leave you some presents.  You never hear about people buying expensive jewelry for a loved one or sending flowers for President’s Day.  True, a lot of stores have sales and send you coupons for 15% off in the mail, but it’s a bit of a loveless gesture really.  It sort of lacks that personal touch.

And President’s Day doesn’t have a lovable figure attached to it, either.  Now, we all know that I don’t find Cupid all that lovable and really think he’s sort of terrifying, but at least he puts a face on the holiday.  Christmas has Santa Claus, and Thanksgiving has a whole slew of adorable pilgrims.  But President’s Day has nothing.  And again, what would possibly work?  President’s Day is a celebration of dead presidents, so there are some obvious problems with the lovable figure there.  I mean, Cupid, Santa Claus, The Pilgrims—they never age.  You never see old Christmas cards that picture Santa as a young man.  He’s timeless.  But when you’re dealing with real historical figures, well, that’s another thing.  I suppose we could create cuddly versions of the Washington Monument or plush velour stuffed toys of the Lincoln Memorial, but it just wouldn’t be quite the same.  It would be hard to imagine little children toting around stuffed monoliths in the same way they carry around teddy bears.  I imagine a cuddly Washington Monument toy would be good for hitting other children or maybe tripping them, but it’s just really not the kind of lovable figure this holiday needs.

I think that maybe the biggest problem President’s Day has, though, is that there’s some confusion as what the hell the holiday is even really about.  I mean, different presidents and even some people who weren’t presidents are recognized on President’s Day.  And that’s just confusing because if there’s one thing a holiday needs to be clear about, it’s what’s actually being celebrated.  After all, there truly are more obscure holidays in the calendar, but they’re clear.  People know, for example, what Arbor Day is about.  It’s about trees.  There’s no confusion there.  No one has tried to sneak a tiny mention for perennials or flowering shrubs into the holiday.  It’s about trees, and on Arbor Day, you’re supposed to plant a tree.  It’s very clear.  No one thinks you’re supposed to recognize the day by chopping a branch off an elm and carrying it from bar to bar as you get progressively more drunk.  Arbor Day is about trees.  You plant a tree, and then you go home.  People get that. That’s why that holiday works even though most people have no idea when it even actually occurs. 

But President’s Day is really kind of a mess.  It started off as just a celebration of Washington’s Birthday, and it used to be celebrated on Washington’s actual birthday—February  22nd.  But then Lincoln got assassinated, and people naturally got very sentimental about that, so they started celebrating Lincoln’s Birthday on February 12th.  At one point in the 1950s, there was even a national committee formed to promote the establishment of President’s Day as a celebration of the office itself.  That day was going to be on the original Inauguration Day—March 4th.   And interestingly enough, in Alabama, President’s Day commemorates the birthdays of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who was, by the way, born in April.  So, it’s a mess.  A real mess.  The only thing about it is that at least all that celebratory fervor eventually just got rolled into one day.  Of course, the date of that day changes (figures, doesn’t it), but it’s always on the third Monday in February.  And to the extent that there is any sort of uniformity at all in President’s Day, we have the one man who was brave enough to sign a law combining all those birthdays and commemorations into one floating holiday to thank.  And that courageous man was…

Richard Nixon.

Yeah, I know, you’re going “Richard Nixon?  What are you, kidding me?”  But it’s true.  In 1971, he signed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act into law and essentially created what we know today as President’s Day.  He’s the reason all those stores keep sending you coupons. He’s the man behind the suspension of mail delivery on Monday.  So, as strange as it probably sounds, if there’s one face that really is the face of President’s Day, it’s Richard Nixon’s.  He is to President’s Day what the Pilgrims are to Thanksgiving.  Whether that’s a good thing or not is debatable.

But I have to say that I have this weird connection to Nixon, a sort of odd camaraderie from my childhood.  You see, my grandfather, for some strange reason, always kept a framed picture of Nixon hanging on the wall in his basement, and I’d go over to my grandparents’ house and look at that picture and think, “Geez, what a crank.”  I mean, even in his happiest moments, Nixon always just looked cranky to me.  And I could identify with that because as a child, I was a bit of a crank myself.

Well, I don’t know if I’d say I was a crank so much as I was really just kind of a curmudgeon. I was the kind of little kid who would yell at other little kids to get off our lawn. And I was pretty sure that staying up past 11 pm was inherently immoral and that stunted growth was just the price you paid for it.  I mean, seriously, had I not been only 8 years old at the time, I probably would’ve voted for Nixon. 

The problem was that as a young curmudgeon, I was continuously bushwhacked by my own unflappable sense of moral decency and fair play, and nowhere was this more evident than in the way my little sister managed to outfox me at virtually every turn.  One game we used to play involved the Sears catalog, and the rules went like this:  you had $1000, and you had to spend as much of it as you possibly could.  You were only allowed to buy one of every item, and the person with the least amount of change coming at the end won the game.  Being the curmudgeon that I was, I’d always spend my turn trying to figure out the way to get the most value for my money.  My little sister, on the other hand, would just buy a pool table that cost $999.99.  It was kind of a short game.

She did the same thing when it came to playing one of our favorite games: doctor’s office.  I don’t really remember, but I think my older sister was the doctor, and our next-door neighbor was the receptionist (because even as children we knew that doctors didn’t answer their own phones).  My little sister and I were the patients, and I always had the exact same problem:  a broken leg.  And it seemed to me like that should’ve required some immediate attention.  But my younger sister out-foxed me every time.  She would call up on our little plastic phone and say, “Hi.  I can’t breathe.  When should I come in for an appointment?”  And of course, our receptionist would answer, “Right away!”  So, there I’d sit in our makeshift waiting room with my broken leg, silently cursing the corrupt nature of the medical profession and sure that my little sister had gotten in first because she had better insurance than I did.  It was just a no-win situation from the start.

I was also the kind of child who walked around shaking her head and deploring the sorry state of “kids today,” especially when it came to music. When I got my own room when I was a little kid, my parents gave me a radio to keep me company, and in my neighborhood, the kids all listened to The Jackson 5 and either Donny Osmond or David Cassidy.  You actually had to choose between Donny Osmond and David Cassidy because you just weren’t allowed to like both.  I have no idea why.  (My little sister, however, outsmarted everyone by liking Bobby Sherman).  I ostensibly went for Donny Osmond, but the truth is that even the Osmond Brothers were a little wild for me.  While everyone else was listening to Top 40 on the radio, I was listening to Ray Coniff and Perry Como.  I mean, I was an absolute easy listening music junkie.  I couldn’t get enough of that stuff.  I was a cranky 9 year-old senior citizen, a card-carrying curmudgeon plain and simple, and quite possibly, the oldest living child on earth.  

And I felt that I shared it all with Richard Nixon.  I’d look at his picture and kind of mumble to myself, “Mr. President, you’re the only one who really understands me.”

The culmination of it all was when my best friend and I decided to write letters to the President in 4th grade.  The year before, three of my friends and I finally won a bet with one of the teachers who said that she would give 50 cents to anyone who could find a word without a vowel in it.  We finally came up with “mm-mm-mm” from the Campbell’s soup commercial, but we had to verify that Campbell’s actually thought of it as word before we could collect our winnings.  So, our teacher helped us write a letter to Campbell’s, they wrote back, and we did end up getting our 50 cents…which we had to split four ways.

But the idea that a kid could just write a letter to someone and that that someone might actually read it was empowering.  So, my best friend and I, heady with power and glee over the Campbell’s soup triumph, decided to aim for the top and write to the President.  I don’t recall what I wrote in my letter, but I think it was something along the lines of “Dear President Nixon, Hi, how’s it going?  I hope you are enjoying being the President and living in the White House.”  Of course, by the time we wrote our letters, Nixon had already begun to wade into the Watergate scandal and pretty much had economic problems running out his ears, so I doubt that he was enjoying being the President very much at that point and was probably thinking about how sad it was going to be to get evicted from the White House. 

Now, I can’t speak for my friend, but I myself had no clue about politics when I was in 4th grade.  For all I knew, Watergate was the name of a town in Kansas.  And I wasn’t even all that sure where Kansas was.  I just knew that it wasn’t very close to me.  Writing that letter was really just about feeling like you could actually write to the President, and when we actually got some educational material and a key chain from the White House in response to our letters, my friend and I were utterly famous (at least at our elementary school) for about week (which is practically an eternity for a little kid).  And besides, it was Richard Nixon, my partner in all things curmudgeonly.

A couple of years after that, Santa Claus brought me a Van Halen record for Christmas, and I sort of started to loosen up and admitted to myself that Nixon had really just been a crutch for me.  Still, I would have liked to have had my grandfather’s framed picture of him for my own house if for no reason other than the nostalgia. 

In the end, I guess you can say what you want about Richard Nixon, but you can’t deny that if nothing else, he brought order out of chaos when it comes to President’s Day.  So maybe he really should be the face of that holiday.  Maybe little children should dance around on the third Monday of February clutching little stuffed Richard Nixon dolls and singing happy songs.  Maybe the perfect holiday vacation for President’s Day should be a trip to China, and maybe the perfect gift is a deluxe set of wiretapping equipment.  But whatever you do, don’t let President’s Day pass you by this year.  Take some time to really think about all that Richard Nixon has done for you.  And oh yeah, I guess you might as well give some passing thought to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, too.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.



© R. Rissler, 2011.  All rights reserved.

Friday, February 11, 2011

In the Face of Danger...

 
Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

Earlier this week, I was listening to this wonderful song called “Fearless,” and it got me to thinking about all those little everyday acts of bravery that we manage to pull off whenever danger stares us right in the face.  Most of the time, we just react out of instinct, of course, because it’s really pretty hard to be consistently aware of all the dangerous stuff that might happen at any given moment.  I don’t spend a great deal of time, for example, worrying about what I’d do if, say, I found a poisonous snake under my couch.  I suppose it could happen, but I don’t think about it a lot.  Now, my dad worries about things like the frequency at which a subwoofer might burst into flames and the elevation at which a horse might explode, but he’s retired.  He has a lot of free time to fill.  Most people aren’t like him, and that’s probably a good thing.

This coming week, though, I’m going to have to be a little more like my dad and a little more prepared for danger because this coming Monday is Valentine’s Day.  And that means only one thing—Cupid is coming.  And that throws more fear into my heart than a flaming subwoofer and an exploding horse combined.  The issue with me isn’t love, though.  I’m not afraid of falling in love.  Hell, I’ve fallen in love for the rest of my life, like, five times already, so it isn’t that.  No, it’s that when you stop to think about it, Cupid is really kind of one scary guy.  It takes some nerve to stand up to Cupid, but it takes a lot more cunning to just out-and-out hide from him for a whole day.

So what’s so scary about Cupid?  Well, first off, he’s armed. He’s a churlish little imp-child with a weapon.  And it really is the weapon that distinguishes Cupid as Cupid.  I mean, if you just saw Cupid without the weaponry, you’d probably think, “Wow, a half-naked baby with wings.  I wonder what that’s about.”  But give that half-naked baby a bow and arrow, and suddenly, it’s very clearly all about love.  Cupid is in the building.

And think about how we talk about love when it comes to Valentine’s Day. No one “wades forth” or “skips happily” into love.  Cupid makes us “fall” in love.  And when you’re really in love, you “fall hard” for someone.  So, in a way, I guess the armaments kind of make sense.  After all, if someone shot me in the heart with an arrow, I’d probably fall down, and I’d probably fall pretty hard.  Of course, I wouldn’t necessarily fall in love unless I happened to be standing next to an open pit full of love when I got shot, but I think the idea of wounding you is more about just immobilizing you so that the magic potion on the arrow can take effect.  That way, when you wake up, Cupid’s potion has worked its magic, and you fall in love with whatever you see first.  Of course, under that logic, it’s kind of amazing that more people don’t fall in love with the pavement or the interior roof of an ambulance since those are probably the first things they’d see when they came to…but I digress.

But aside from just the necessary wounding that’s apparently an integral part of falling in love, I think the archery gear is a little too much on the violent side. So, I tried to imagine what else would work.  At first, I thought that maybe just a rock would do.  But I have to admit that when I really thought about it, a half-naked baby with a rock didn’t seem much more inviting than a half-naked baby with a bow and arrow.  I mean, that’s just got “head injury” written all over it, and while a head injury will often make you fall down, it’s not quite the same thing…especially when you get back up and discover that you don’t remember how to walk.

And of course, just a big stick probably wouldn’t work either for a couple of reasons.  First, there’s the pesky brain trauma issue again, but more than that, the whole point of using an arrow is that Cupid doesn’t have to be right up on you to make you fall in love.  For a stick to work, it would have to be something more along the lines of a 20 foot pole, but even then, Cupid would have to come at you with a fair amount of force to actually make you fall down. And then, of course, he would run the risk of impaling himself on the other end of the pole, so that probably wouldn’t be such a good plan.  I suppose Cupid could always take a swinging whack at you, but you have to be pretty strong to swing a 20 foot pole with much accuracy, and I just don’t think Cupid is in that kind of shape.  He is, after all, only a baby.

So, I guess when you really stop to think about it, a bow and arrow really is the best equipment for making people fall in love.

The thing is that on every other day of the year, Cupid is probably a pretty nice guy.  He probably just sits at home on the couch eating Cheese Curls and watching television.  And wondering when he’s going to grow some hair on his chest.  He probably feels like a totally misunderstood little half-naked baby.  But then Valentine’s Day arrives, and his frustration boils over.  And he just snaps.  That’s the only explanation that makes sense to me.

But beyond the weaponry and the anger, what I find most disconcerting about Cupid is that he has wings.  I mean, he’s a flying baby, and there are few things I find quite so terrifying as that. Even the concept of flying adults doesn’t worry me quite as much, not because I believe that adults are inherently better-behaved than kids are but just because I know that grownups tend to be busier.  They have less free time to cause trouble.  Babies have nothing but free time. Put a pair of wings on a kid, and you’re just inviting disaster as far as I’m concerned.

I mean, things that fly are sometimes scary in and of themselves, but they get really scary when they’re things that aren’t supposed to be able to fly.  As a young child, I remember seeing a picture of a flying fish in a book about animals and just thinking that that was about the freakiest thing on earth (and it really kind of is).  To this day, I have no real interest in going to a beach because I’m so haunted by the image of a giant fish (with fangs, of course) flying out of the sea and coming after me.  And think about the villains in The Wizard of Oz.  Sure, the witch was scary (and she could fly), but the things that scared me most were those flying monkeys.  They didn’t need broomsticks.  They had wings.  They could fly all on their own.  And is there anything more terrifying than a winged, flying monkey?  Well….yes.  A winged, flying angry baby with a bow and arrow.

But just imagine having a kid who could fly.  When kids are little, you have to watch them all the time, but at least they’re on the ground for the most part.  And when they’re not on the ground, it’s usually because you put them somewhere higher.  But imagine taking a little kid who could fly to the park.  You’d look away for a moment, and the next thing you knew, that kid would be halfway to Toledo.  At family barbecues, some distant relative would inevitably make a snide remark about how it’s always your kid who is circling around overhead like a vulture, and doubtless some cranky old man with a BB gun on the next block over would eventually take a shot at your child just for flying too close to his roof.

And of course, a flying child would be mischievous.  Of course, he/she would cause trouble.  Who wouldn’t?  I mean, as an adult I could tell myself that if I could fly, I’d do humanitarian things.  I’d take medicine to sick people and food to the hungry.  I’d help those in need and fight crime.  And I might really do that stuff.  But mostly, I’d fly around dropping tiny bags of oatmeal on people’s heads.  I’d land on top of people’s cars when they were stopped at red lights just to freak them out.  I’d hover outside of people’s windows late at night and watch their televisions.  I’d perch in the trees like a giant gargoyle just because it would be creepy.  I would be a terrible, evil flying person, and I know that.  So why would I expect a flying child to be better-intentioned than I am?  Why would anyone expect Cupid to behave?

So, I don’t really wonder why I’m afraid of Cupid.  I wonder why everyone else isn’t.  I mean, why do we think Cupid is such a wonderful being?  He flies up when you’re not looking and shoots you in the chest with an arrow.  What exactly is so romantic about that?  I mean, I’m all for Valentine’s Day, and I’m as crazy about love as the next person, but I’m pretty sure that what Cupid actually does is a felony in most states.  He probably isn’t doing hard time somewhere just because he’s too good at getting away—I don’t think even Dog the Bounty Hunter could catch that flying half-naked baby.

Seriously, though, if you’re going to celebrate Valentine’s Day this year, do enjoy yourself.  Have a wonderful dinner out.  Eat all the chocolate you can get your hands on.  Stop and smell the roses.  If you’re already in love, you’ve got nothing to worry about.  If you aren’t in love, you’ve still got a few days and an entire internet to do something about it with.  As for me, I’m going to slip into a Kevlar vest and spend Monday in the house.  With the windows closed and the curtains drawn. I can’t beat Cupid, so I’m just going to try to trick him into believing I’m on vacation.  And in the meantime, I guess I should probably get a flashlight and check under the couch for poisonous snakes.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.



© R. Rissler, 2011. All rights reserved.

Friday, February 4, 2011

Into the Whiff...

 
Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

Let me start today’s post with a confession:  I am a single woman with no children, and I own a bottle of Axe men’s bodywash.  And of all the things I own, that’s the one thing that everyone who comes into my apartment never fails to comment on.  I mean, I live in an apartment that’s the size of a coffee cup, and I own 140 clocks.  I have a birthing chair in my bedroom, and a confessional next to my fainting couch.  But all anyone ever asks is, “What’s with the Axe?” 

Now, I find various things in my bathtub from time to time—some cat toys, a Barbie Doll head, a spatula—that can’t be easily explained away other than to say that, you know, things turn up. It’s all part of the big mystery of life.  And there are other things that really are just shower-related purchasing mistakes.  There is, for example, a bottle of volumizing shampoo in my shower, and while there’s certainly nothing wrong with wanting a little volume sometimes, it’s a big mistake if you already have thick hair.  I used it once and went from being someone with a fairly short haircut to looking like the Bride of Frankenstein.  The only upside is that I was instantly eight inches taller.  It didn’t just volumize my hair; it enlarged it.  The only smart thing I did was not put it all over my head—I would’ve come out looking like a float in the Macy’s Day Parade.  And I would’ve had a beard.  So, yes, buying that was a mistake. But the Axe was completely on purpose, and I think that’s what throws people.

So, why do I own men’s bodywash?  Well, to put it bluntly, I like the way it smells.  And I know, I could easily avoid the strange reaction people seem to have to my having it just by saying that I bought it by accident.  But I didn’t.  I’m that person who goes to the store, flips open the caps, and smells the soap.  I spray the room fresheners.  I squeeze the toilet paper.  I want grocery shopping to be a scratch-and-sniff, give-it-a-test-drive kind of experience, and if I’d been a little more vigilant about that and had stopped to wash my hair while I was at the store, I probably wouldn’t have a bottle of volumizing shampoo rotting away in the corner of my shower.

Of course, some of the room fresheners do have a scratch-and-sniff thing on them, and I appreciate that.  But I can’t quite get past how they explain what those products do.  Last time I saw an ad for one on TV, it said the product surrounded and eliminated “odor molecules.”  What the hell is an “odor molecule?”  Who’s making these ads up?  The people from Star Trek?  What’s next?  A college degree program that only takes 20 minutes because all you have to do is show up for an injection of “smartness molecules”?  Of course, you could argue that steroid use in sports is exactly this kind of situation, but it’s a little more complex than that.  It’s not like they can just shoot a guy full of “home-run molecules”  and have done with it.

Then again, if those air fresheners actually can seek out and destroy odor molecules, it’s even more scary because then room spray becomes like a new form of life capable of understanding what smell is and deciding for itself whether or not something smells bad. It’s like the Terminator saga, only on a really, really tiny scale. “What are you doing, honey?”  “Oh nothing, just unleashing some judgmental biotechnology all over our couch.”  I mean, what happens if your room freshener doesn’t think you smell good?  Does it just eat you alive?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t need that kind of pressure in my life.  I don’t need to wake up every morning and worry that I don’t smell good enough for my room freshener to let me live.

Anyway, the thing is that owning a bottle of men’s bodywash makes perfect sense to me. Yes, I know that Axe is for men, but it seems like an awfully inconvenient thing to have to keep a man around just so I can smell the Phoenix scent.  After all, it’s not like I could just park some guy in the corner, cover him in bodywash, and be done with it.  I’d have to feed him and let him use the computer sometimes.  He’d probably get lonely and try to engage me in conversation occasionally, and there’s no doubt he’d eventually start complaining about what I was watching on TV. He might smell good, but the whole situation would just be annoying, and it seems like having a gooey, soap-covered man in my house is an awful lot of trouble to go to when I could just buy a bottle of Axe for myself and smell it whenever I wanted to.

Actually, I read an article not too long ago that talked about the relationship between scent and sexual attraction, and it said that how someone smells is a significant factor in mate selection.  So, I guess men’s bodywash is supposed to attract women.  And I guess it works.  After all, it attracted me. I love Axe.  But if sexual attraction really is based in part on scent, then they should just make a cologne that smells like a low-interest mortgage and a paid-off car loan.  For the younger set, someone could invent a fragrance that smells like a new credit card.  I mean, seriously, from what I’ve seen of life, it’s the sweet scent of financial stability that ultimately attracts people to each other.

For those of us who don’t care that much about money (mostly because we don’t have any), I think other scents are more attracting. For me personally, my top three sexual attraction scents would be bacon, hazelnut coffee, and Christmas trees.  So, I guess until I meet someone who always smells like a holiday brunch, I’m going to remain single.

The thing is that scent isn’t restricted just to our bodies because, at least most of the time, we’re wearing clothes, and that’s where things get really tricky because the names of detergent and dryer sheet fragrances are almost as nonsensical as the existence of odor molecules.  I mean, what scent is “fresh linen” anyway?  My fresh linen smells like mountain scent dryer sheets.  And even the name of those dryer sheets is misleading.  I’m from Colorado, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the mountains.  And I don’t recall ever having taken a deep breath while looking out over a beautiful mountain valley and thinking to myself, “Gee, it smells just like a dryer sheet.”  For the most part, the mountains smell like pine trees, unless you’re really close to a river, in which case they have kind of a funky odor that, trust me, no one would want to immortalize in a fabric softener.

I think the only laundry detergent that actually manages to completely triumph in the logic of fragrance is Gain.  And that’s because Gain ads just refer to “the smell of Gain.”   Gain makes no fragrance claims except that it smells just like itself.  It’s a completely self-referential laundry detergent, and there’s just something about that that I find immensely comforting.  It’s a kind of logic that you just can’t argue with.  It doesn’t smell like a mountain spring.  It doesn’t smell like fresh mown hay. It just smells like Gain.  It’s positively tautological, and I love that.

The idea that some scents are supposed to be for men while others are for women, though, is an interesting kind of double-edged sword.  On one hand, I don’t like the idea that I can’t just smell like whatever I want to smell like.  I mean, this is America, and I’m pretty sure I have the right to fragrance freedom.  It’s in the Constitution, isn’t it?  On the other hand, I discovered about a year ago that there’s a strange advantage to buying into the idea that some scents are supposed to be for men while others are for women. 

I was getting ready to go to a party, and I had run out of gently relaxing, super-moisturizing, anti-aging, feel-like-a-natural-woman shower creme.  So, I just grabbed the Axe and used that.  On the way over to the festivities, I noticed that I was driving faster and with considerably less care for the safety of others than usual, and at one point, I flipped off a pedestrian for no reason at all.  Once I got there, I revved my engine and performed a super-human parallel parking maneuver at 30 miles an hour.  I had no idea what had gotten into me.  Anyway, I was standing out on the porch, and as I raised up my cup to take a drink, I smelled my hand.  It smelled like a man’s hand.  Then I turned to the woman next to me and said, “Smell my hand” (yeah, it was that kind of a party).  She took a whiff and said, “You smell like a guy.”  And damn if I hadn’t just completely turned into one.  I went around for the rest of the night slapping people on the back and crushing various objects with my bare hands.  I felt not only worthy of but absolutely entitled to a higher paying job and more respect from my peers.  I could tell dirty jokes without blushing and summon a fart at will. It was like magic, and all in all, except for the almost irresistible urge to publicly scratch myself in inappropriate places, it was a wonderful experience.  And as I was using my car to just push someone else’s out of the way so I could get a better parking spot when I got home, I realized something:  men’s bodywash is mojo in a bottle.  It’s the most amazing stuff on earth.

So, that’s what’s with the Axe, Dear Readers.  I like the way it smells, but there’s more to it than that.  As a woman, I can be pretty strong, but as a man, I am literally unstoppable.  I mean, once I’ve slipped into fragrance drag, there’s just no holding me back.  And that’s not really such a bad thing because every now and then, I need to be slightly braver than I actually am.  I think the trick to navigating the wide world of scent is just realizing that there is no real logic to it and that the most important thing is to be able to smell like whoever you need to be in any given moment.  And if you can’t whip that up all on your own, that’s OK because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my experiences, it’s that sometimes, courage really does come in a bottle.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.



© R. Rissler, 2011. All rights reserved.