JibJab President Bush Birthday Greeting

My sister’s birthday is neigh. To help her celebrate it, I sent her this card from JibJab.

Since vodpod doesn’t work and WordPress is apparently not friendly with me vis a vis embedding videos, here’s the link. Plain old fashioned link. Grrrr.

http://www.jibjab.com/sendables/view/oNi1Qj9KDVPasKEG1SqQLxOR

Unsatisfied, Satisfaction

Who doesn’t want a little satisfaction?  My friend Brian McNitt posted a gorgeous video of Devo performing the Rolling Stones’ hit “Satisfaction” on Saturday Night Live in 1978.

Here, conversationally, I offer The Replacements’ version of yearning delivered via music.  Unsatisfied:

Yellowjacket Peril

If you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you.

I imagine we all received that simple advice. Skeptically though I received it, accept it I did when my dad insisted repeatedly that I had little if anything to fear from the wasps in my childhood yard in Texas. The lesson learned was that minding one’s own business produces safety.

To be sure, if you go stirring up a wasp’s nest, you’re likely to get stung. I recently witnessed this when a friend of my seven-year-old son held a birthday party outside on a beautiful fall day. Adults and children played in a field while cake was prepared, food set out, etc. They played chase, cricket, tag – 2nd grader games.

One of those games, apparently, had been named “repeatedly jam a tree branch into that hole in the ground, just because that’s fun.” I didn’t hear any of the kids call it that, but I came to understand it shortly after the first kid started screaming bloody murder from across the lawn. The child had evidently been stung by a bee, and was rolling around in pain on the ground, crying out for mercy and assistance. What adult can resist a child’s helpless call for help? None, from what I saw: a horde of adults rushed to provide aid, and I was no exception. As I raced to the scene of the sting though, I heard another cry – this one from one of MY sons. I changed course and soon found him – tears in his eyes, swatting desperately at his arm, screaming in distress and pain. I helped him brush multiple yellowjackets off of his arm, and ran with him away from the area. But they kept on him, and he was stung a total of six times in the course of the next 60 seconds or less.

Meanwhile, several other kids had gotten in on the screaming, and the volume and panic had reached zoo levels. My youngest son, it soon became clear, had been victim to the attack as well. The yellowjackets were everywhere, and they were madder than… well, they were madder than hornets.

All in all, 5 children were stung – multiple times each. I handed out Benadryl to anyone in need, and kids were shuffled into cars for safekeeping from the flying marauders. When we, the adults, investigated what had happened, we found that the kids – far from being victims – had been antagonizing the yellowjackets with the aforementioned game. Apparently, the motion of churning butter, when applied by tree branch to an underground nest of thousands of yellowjackets, causes consternation in the hive and leads to retribution. Who knew? …my dad did – and he taught me well.

Now, my sons know too, and the welts they earned acquiring that wisdom have all but faded. The bigger lesson though – don’t mess with others and others won’t mess with you – may have been lost. As I deal with a provocateur in my adult life right now, I am reminded by my reactions that each of us takes a turn as the wasp sometimes, just as each of us takes turns as the antagonist – and frequently cries victim when we feel retribution’s sting.

What does it take to truly teach the lesson: live and let live?

iPromise

How’s your iLife going?

I’m asking because I’m curious. I’m curious about whether or not your iLife is what you’d imagined – what you’ve been promised.

Mine isn’t, but I’m not surprised. Consumer advertising, after all, promises us far more in regards to products and services than what any product or service is capable of delivering. Deep spiritual satisfaction from a walkman? Social fulfillment and a permagrin from a hard drive full of jpgs? Become the toast of your friends (which of course, number in the scores and consist of supermodel geniuses and dapper playboys) thanks to your German engineered car? I learned fairly well to look through the veneer of consumer advertising when I was a freshman in college and read Ways of Seeing, by John Berger. But consumer advertising is an adaptive beast, relentless and ever more persuasive.

In a world where massive, empty promises are routinely made, what are the consequences for our expectations of the world – most specifically and critically of the other people in our lives? After all, people make and keep (or don’t keep) promises. Implicit, explicit, marriage, work, etc. If any number of 1,000’s of things in the world can be promoted as panaceas for a yearning in us (a yearning I’d say has been amplified and manipulated to respond to the promises of advertising), what kind of fulfillment expectations arise? Am I likely to work through a difficult stretch in a relationship when I’m pretty well conditioned to believe there’s a newer, better one out there that will require less work and will provide greater – if not complete – fulfillment?

iWonder, if we stripped our world of the context of accepted empty promises of fulfillment, would we re-adapt and learn to nurture our relationships better? Would we still have a 50% divorce rate? Consider this passage from an article on Askmen.com, wherein the author plainly argues that women and men change after marriage (for the worse) and that doing so is fundamentally unfair:

Why shouldn’t one have a say if their wife or husband puts on too much weight from sitting on the couch and eating nachos all day? When you buy a car, a BMW for instance, you expect it to remain a BMW. The car won’t become a GoodYear blimp with time, it will inevitably get old but will always remain a BMW.

This, from an article categorized under “marriage advice.” Complete article on Askmen.com. Would anyone else read this and wonder why, oh why, anyone would compare a person to a product and expect a human being to behave like a car? Yet, I find this way of “philosophy” prevalent. And seeing its prevalence turns me away from marriage. It’s not the changing spouse I’m afraid of – it’s the likely expectation in her that I’ll be like that car. It’s the shameful recognition that, in me, there’s the same expectation of her.

It’s the knowledge that we all judge one another against the expectations made by impossible promises – iPromises, if you will.