snapshots of my life

random photos i picked outta my library to upload and share.

I just saw this on the flickr home page:
The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness. - Friedrich Nietzsche

And yet, we live in the land of excess. Life in America is all about more. More servings, more calories, more fat, more money, more land, more power, more sex, more toys, more drama, more drugs, more politics, more drinks, more control, more girls gone wild, more of everything! And yet, we're no where near happy than we could be with the more.

My grandmother turned 90 last week, and she's probably the happiest she's been in probably most of her life. Is it because she's been through much and scaled her personal mountains and declared her personal triumphs? I hope it is, or maybe she's come to a point in her life when she realizes, that yes, the time is ticking down, and the only thing you should do is enjoy the ride.

I remember as a kid that when we went on family vacations, as the time drew near the end of the vacation, I started trying to savor every moment more, because I knew, come next week, all I could do was daydream about last week.

This also seems to be a problem with the present though, because I realized if I try to be cognizant of trying to savor any moment, I lose that zen moment of actually enjoying myself. Perhaps happiness is nothing more the ability to reflect back and say, "yeah...good times."

My wife had a book that I thumbed through when we first met titled, "Happiness is a Serious Problem" where it postulated that people always go out of their way to seek fun rather than happiness. I'm not sure, doesn't fun memories basically eventually distill into happy memories? I guess I'm confused coming from an asian background where "the pursuit of happiness" is nowhere on the list of priorities, its more like be a dutiful child, keep the face/reputation intact and do things that gain you more respect and prestige. Or that's the yellow brick road you're supposed to walk to find out at the end that maybe, just maybe, there is an all powerful wizard of oz that will whisk you back to Kansas.

The idea of freedom in this country combined with the "pursuit of happiness" has more or less confused me, and completely effed me up. Which brings me back to my conversation over the campfire, and perhaps, the whole point is to pepper your life with fun times while you're pushing yourself through the shit/meat of life to clear your own path, so when you're at 90, you can look back and say, I made that, and no one else could have, and no one can ever take that away from me.

So we're going to Dallas next month for a wedding, what a surprise to find out that they will be shooting one of my favorite new TV shows from last season right in and around North Texas! Prison Break apparently has set up shop around the Dallas/Ft. Worth area to start shooting scenes for the upcoming August 21st season premiere. Sweet! I wonder if we'll happen to run into some of the shady cast members. The Dallas Morning News has a whole PR article about it.

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Last night around dinner with Lady Danger, we all talked about life and how we wanted things to be like, and how effed up things are.

How apt that on the way home after dropping her off, they started playing this Rolling Stones song on the radio:

You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need, ah yes...

Ah yes, yes indeed.

Sometimes dinner with people you care about is all you really do need, even if the world is pretty messed up.

There was a really interesting segment on Bob Edwards Weekend over the weekend about slacker-dom and the people that have embraced it. They were talking about Thoreau, Whitman, even Jeff Spicoli and Dante from Clerks. I wish they had a copy of the audio online since I didn't get to listen to the whole thing but I can't seem to find it.

So maybe I wasn't raised with the puritan work ethic ingrained into me. It dawned on me at a very young age that most of the homework they were doling out to us was busy work. To the detriment of my grades, I should've not had this realization since most of the classes I had that based 50% of my grades on homework, I did poorly in. There were a few classes that I aced, all because our grades were completely based on tests and quizzes.

We were watching 60 minutes last night and they had rebroadcasted a story I had seen a few months ago about how the whole country is working their asses off. (You can also watch it here.) We're commuting earlier, staying at the office later, and we've got IMs, crackberries, round the clock teleconferencing, etc.

"Oh, I have the absolute bare minimum, I think. I have two cell phones, a personal and …," Christina explained.

"That's the bare minimum, America. Two cell phones," Joe interrupted.

Its funny because I was thinking, these people, they would be working their asses off regardless of how much technology has invaded our life or not. I guess its easy to blame technology either way, seeing how most of the gadgets I own are basically to facilitate my slacker-dom. I can become more of a couch potato and lump by sitting on the couch to watch my sleek TV, surf the net on my shiny powerbook, or play hours of Tetris on my Nintendo DS.

"The downside, however, is that oftentimes we really don't have substantive conversations when we come home. We will be sitting on our couch, each doing work," his wife says.

It turns out Joe and Christina e-mail and instant-message each other, even if they are at home.

So take away all that tech, I'd probably be lounging by the pond while everyone else is toiling away in the woods. At the same time though, since I'm not married to my job, I'm glad I'm married to my wife. We get to see each other usually by 5pm and spend time together rather than with our work.

"Well, that’s what I mean, that's the downside. It would be nice to have a conversation even once a week and not be, I mean, really be concentrating and listening to each other. But we've got one eye on our computers," Christina replied.

Once a week? Are you kidding me? Maybe its good that I came to the realization that work is not the end-all be-all of my life at such a young age. What are we going to do after work today? We're going to enjoy some half-off pasta in Dupont Circle!

Its good to see that the Po-Po is doing things to make me feel like they've got my back. I got a call from the 4th district yesterday from a detective following up on my stolen bikes. Which I guess is something new to me, seeing how when we first moved in 2 years ago, and someone broke into our Jeep and stole the radio, it took the cops 3 hours before they even showed up at the house to take a report. There was also no follow up. I guess that's because there was no "crime emergency" back then.

Of course the detective also told me that I should probably not be expecting them to find my bikes, so yeah, I think this was just to complete that extra form they all get to say, "yes, I put in a little more effort because the Chief wants the citizens feeling that we're on the case."

NBC4 was running probably one of the most bonehead news pieces yesterday that they were promoting the hell out of. The dangers of children riding on ATVs! I mean, really, if you're that evolutionarly stunted to think its a good idea to let your 6 year old get on an ATV, well, then probably its best that your genes don't get reintroduced into the gene pool. Liz Crenshaw must've been having a slow newsday to think up that piece, or her producer. I usually prefer it when she does the "does it really do that?" pieces that test out those "As Seen on TV!" products. Like, does the Sweep N Mop really work? And do we really get a free lifetime supply of replacement heads?

What cracked the wife up though on what happened last night on the eleven o'clock news. She also made it a point for me to point out in my blog since it involved her favorite love-to-hate local weatherman, Bob Ryan. They were going to commercial with lead-out of the "Adult ATV" story coming right up, and Bob, how's the weather coming along? "Talk about Adult! We've got some adult weather coming to you too!" Flash to George Michael about to go into his "coming up in sports" but then instead, we got a confused and I'm paraphrasing, "what the hell are you talking about Bob?" To which Bob Ryan tried to salvage by fumbling around and saying, "Uh, well I was trying to keep with the theme!" Cue the wife's schadenfreude.

I just learned a new word today. (definition somewhere linked on the sidebar daily clicks) Its an interesting word, almost as good as schadenfreude. Thinking about it, growing up is a mild form of anhedonia because really, the things I've grown to enjoy as a kid, well, they just don't do it for me these days. I remember I'd spend hours just sprawled out on the living room carpet or kitchen floor zooming my little HotWheels cars around. Those were simple times, and I guess it was a simple pleasure. These days, its been hard to experience simple pleasures. Its all about setup, before we can experience these pleasures. I have to be at a specific place, at a specific time with specific people to be able to enjoy a "simple pleasure."

Then again, in the process, I've also created new simple pleasures. Like this morning after we got into the car and my wife and I started reiterating lines from the SNL sketch "Two A-Holes at a Travel Agency."

The only reason I found out about this word is because I was googling around for the word "islomane." After seeing it on boingboing.net, and realizing one of their bloggers basically left the U.S. to live in Rarotongo and then became completely disillusioned with living on a tropical island. Which is ironic since he was supposedly someone completely in love with the idea of islands. Probably best that he did it, and not me. I was becoming pretty bored in the Bahamas after awhile even though I was somewhat of an islomane before I ever stepped foot on an island. I guess the dreamy idea of something is always better than the gritty reality of it. There's only so many times I could go to the beach and lounge by the pool. Which is the spoiled side of things, I also saw the people that actually had to make a living and work there, and it was kinda depressing. I thought it would be paradise, but like our driver said on the way to the airport, "once it becomes your backyard, you don't really notice it." Which can probably be said for living in DC and all the monuments and attractions around that I rarely take advantage of. Reminds me of a New Order lyric, "it was always special, it was like water down the drain."

So perhaps its good that there are lulls in between the good stuff in life, otherwise, I'd probably become completely anhedonic.

I watched Syriana for the first time last night. It was quite epic inn scope and it did make me feel like some of the problems in my life are quite petty in comparison. It also did a good job of dishing a lot of guilt onto me. Guilt in the sense that the comfortable life we have in this country is built on the backs of other people's suffering and violence in the world. It also made me think that we as a society don't have the ability to see the consequences of our actions until its to a point of crisis. I haven't seen "An Inconvenient Truth" yet, but M told me that there's this bit...

M (1:25:34 PM): anyways, theres a bit on there about a frog in hot water.
M (1:25:48 PM): if you put a frog in a pot of hot water, the frog will leap out.
M (1:26:11 PM): but if you put him in the water before it's hot, and then slowly raise the temperature.. he'll get cooked.

And I guess that's the human condition too. We don't do anything until there's impending doom. I don't really know what to make of the situation in the Middle East right now. I guess its because I don't have enough diverse friends to share with me their perspectives, so all I know is what I get from the news. Its strange that just when things seem to be looking for the area that shit gets thrown down and then suddenly everything is thrown back into turmoil. Dr. P and I were talking about it this morning and while he points to religion, I really just think its more basic than that. Its selfishness. When I look around, selfishness seems to be the main motivator of people, but at least most know their limits. They don't go overboard to the detriment of others. And if they do? I guess that's what we're seeing play out in large parts of the world.

Meanwhile I get to enjoy our supposed calm that most don't realize is really borrowed time, I guess. I realize I'm lucky and I'm trying to appreciate the fact that I'm afforded the opportunity to look inward and don't have to struggle to put food on the table and keep a roof over my head. I mean, I do have to keep a pretty dull job to do that but its nowhere the level of the strife and struggle my parents went through when they were kids in the motherland which was a third-world or undeveloped country.

I find its strange that I'm living in the world's superpower capital and yet, I trudge along with my little life and really having no effect on the grand scheme of things. Sure I guess I know people that are but I guess I'm feeling a bit insignificant and also lacking a lot of foresight. The only thing I can think of that has shown some foresight is my wife's push to get a hybrid car 2 years ago. With a barrel of oil today pushing another new high at 78 bucks and all the new turmoil in the middle east, at least we're doing something to 1)emit less carbon dioxide and 2)fill up less on dino-juice.

I guess this isn't a happy return to the blog, but at least I felt like writing something.

I think I'm going to go on a hiatus for a bit. No motivation to write, and very little to write about. Its the summer, so sue me. Hopefully I'll pick it up again in a few days or weeks. Whichever I feel like it.