Ignorance is Bliss

I guess I haven’t done one of these in a while. The reasons why are too many and too complicated to get into, and maybe you’ll hear about them at some future time. Today, however, I’m just interested in getting a few things off my chest, so to speak. I apologize in advance for sounding a bit whiny, but it has been a long, hot summer down here on the Jersey Shore. So without further ado, some random observations:

Only the Strong Survive

Yeah it is not pleasant being buried in the white stuff not once but twice in a week. It’s no fun walking in snow up to your thighs, having the current indoor temperature be lower than it will be in a couple months outside. Yeah, life in the Garden State is far from perfect, and, as a transplant from elsewhere, I'll be the first to say so. People love dumping on New Jersey, and there are lots of things to complain about. But there must be a reason why it’s the most densely populated state in the country. Here are a few that spring to mind:

You Know What They Say About Assuming

See here’s the thing. I was born and raised in Washington DC. Dunno if you know this, but it’s a majority African American city. By like 65 to 35 percent. There is also great ethnic diversity there, being as we host the diplomatic missions of the countries with which the U.S. does foreign relations business, and being as there’s a significant immigrant community from Africa, Asia and South and Central America. And DC is only sixty square miles. That’s not much land when you consider a good deal of it is federal property and/or national parkland. Translation: we all get along not because it’s politically correct but because we have to. And we’ve done a pretty good job of it most of the time (or at least no worse than several other major cities I could name).

Tempus Fugit

Another January gone by, another birthday approaches. I don’t feel any different, and yet as the last few years have passed I am starting to feel irrelevant. That the world as it is now is not one in which I am valued as a customer, a client, a participant. That there has been a fundamental shift in values, that everything has sped up, that we have lost so much in our race to have the latest technology, to have it all now now now. I feel this way because most of my friends have Blackberries, iPhones, and Twitter accounts while I remain thus unencumbered, and while I once would have felt left out, I now just regard it all with a sort of bemused detachment. It’s not that I don’t care about or want to know about all this stuff, it’s that my life doesn’t move at that pace anymore and more importantly, I don’t care that it doesn’t. Who knows, maybe it never did to begin with.

New Year's Manifesto

Just stop it.

Put down the digital camera, iPod, the iPhone, the Blackberry, the Sony Reader, the Kindle, the Wii. Stop playing with it. Turn it off, put it down and fucking pay attention.

Pay attention to the world, to your friends, to the birds perched on your windowsill. To the sound the wind makes when it blows through the trees. To the feeling of cold air on your face and inside your lungs.

Just. Stop.