Childhood is the infusion of lies into a gullible mind yet
lacking in the capacity to discern reality.
No matter where you grew up or from what culture you hail, the bromides
are typically the same:
Boogeyman and/or men reside under the bed.
Tooth fairies and bearded fat guys bring gifts like
reverse-thieves in the night.
Fluffy went to “live on a farm.”
Everybody can be friends with everybody else.
You can do and be anything you want.
Those illusions get swept away early, much to no one’s real
chagrin. Of what I speak today are some
of the larger lessons that I’ve culled over the past 14 years of my
post-college life. Hindsight being
20/20, it’s always easy to look back and say “what if?” but it’s ever more
illuminating to look back and say “Why didn’t anyone tell me this? Surely they knew it all along.”
They probably never told me so that I could learn it
for myself.
Here are just a few, from the mundane to the sublime.
1) Acne doesn’t magically go away when you turn 21
And here I thought pimples and breakouts were nothing but
adolescent scourges that would disperse the instant I could legally buy my
first beer. Little wonder considering
that all sufferers on those commercials were teens seeking to “Oxycute” their
zits into blackhead heaven.
Nope, here I am in my mid-thirties, still battling the red
and white blotches that creep up on my face, my back, my limbs with frustrating
regularity. Like irritating neighbor
dogs or dates who never stop talking, the little mounds of irritated pussiness
refuse to relent their campaign against the perfect skin I was promised awaited
on the far end of voting age.
I could have gone through two adolescences by now, but the
result would be the same.
Plus, since I’m a dude, it’s not like I can just cover em up
with makeup (I mean, unless I’m going to an ‘80s party dressed as Nikki
Sixx).
2) You will fall madly, stupidly, hopelessly, impossibly in love
with someone who does not feel the same way about you
If you’re one of the lucky few, you will experience this
soul-crushing, humiliating, devastating death of hope only once.
If you’re unlucky like me, it happens not less than
thrice.
And if you’re Taylor Swift, you’ll make millions of
dollars.
3) 90 to 95 percent of everything you ever learn in school
in useless
Remember how your parents and teachers and church leaders
and Bill Cosby drilled you constantly to stay in school, get good grades, blah
blah blah? While those goals are, in and
of themselves, both valid and viable (especially for poorer communities, which
I was fortunate not to grow up in), what nobody tells you is that you’ll spend
the first 13 academic years of your life stuffing your head with facts,
figures, dates and texts, most of which are, in the adult world, forgettable or
unprofitable.
To date, the two most valuable classes—as far as ROI goes—I
have ever taken were Spanish and typing, both in 9th grade or earlier. I got decent enough to type 80WPM and my
Spanish is such that that were I to be airdropped into Central or South
America , I’d probably do well enough to find my way to the embassy
before being kidnapped. I’ve worked in
several restaurants and menial jobs over the years, where Spanish is as often
the language behind the scenes as English.
I worked in a Pasadena restaurant where the pastry chef and I would talk
not only to the support staff in Spanish but also as a windtalkers language to
one another within earshot of management, who, though they spoke English and
French and Armenian, could not speak Spanish.
I remember hating hating hating solving polynomial equations
in Mrs. Patterson’s 8th grade math class.
I mastered the skill well enough to pass the tests and get a B (or, more
likely, a C) but in my nearly 36 years of living on this planet, not once has
Grand Master Nefarious come down from Planet Zutroid and thrown me into a maze
of death that could only be escaped by successfully uncracking a polynomial
phrase.
I’m still waiting.
And if such ever comes to pass, I’m pretty much fucked, but I’ll surely
die laughing.
Point being, the aim of young education is basically
twofold—pass the tests, and get grades good enough to get into college. Where yet more tests and more grades need to
be passed to get into either another college or get onto the job market with a
piece of paper.
When I look back on my secondary and high school educations,
I know that I had it damn good, and I truly appreciate it. My aim here is not to discount the importance
of education per se, but simply to point out that what is fed to us as
“important” as children really isn’t.
What is important is that kids be given encouragement and options
to increase their acumen outside of the “typical” realms of math, science and
reading. Many people just aren’t made
for school or structures environment. Many
of us just need to find out our ways to chess club, drama, debate, our fellow
nerds, etc.
It’s a great thing to be educated and to increase your knowledge
about the natural world. But people who
want to learn are going to learn. Those
who don’t won’t, no matter how many Scantron sheets you put in front of
them. Furthermore, “education” is a
lifelong process that neither begins nor ends in the classroom. I try to learn something new daily.
But there is a vast difference between being educated and
being informed. I personally define
being “smart” as the total summation of your entire lexicon of knowledge—your
so-called book smarts; I define “intelligence” as a person’s ability to use his
or her accumulated wisdom to successfully navigate real-world problems and
situations.
Smart people can actually be amazingly unintelligent.
For instance, I dated a girl a decade ago whom I will call
“Chary” (long, heartrending story). Double
major in computer science and pre-law.
Spoke several languages. Could
fix your computer like nobody’s business and was an expert on case law.
But dumb as a fucking rock.
D-U-M-M (misspelling intentional).
The girl had absolutely no capacity to solve her way out of any problem
that she couldn’t just throw money at (her family had some serious
coinage). Nor could she carry on any
kind of intellectual conversation or engage in abstract concept construction or
analysis in any way. I remember she and
I went to see Troy with Brad Pitt and afterwards we sat in the Jacuzzi
at her apartment complex in Irvine, California, where I tried desperately to
engage her in intercourse (no, not that kind—at least not at that moment) about
the history and theory of warfare in the ancient world and how it had basically
remained unchanged for millennia up until the 20th century, the film’s
interpretation of such an ancient text as The Iliad, even the filmmaking
process inherent onscreen.
I got nothing. Not
even when I uttered that phrase men everywhere are loathe to ask their women:
“What do you think?”
It always bothered me in that relationship that we could
never really discuss anything beyond surface level. For shits and giggles (more shits than
giggles), I Googled her a few years back to see that she’s doing well and is
married. She never had to work a day in
her life, and no doubt is living well now.
“I’ve always had everything I’ve ever wanted,” the princess would say
whenever I discussed the price of gas or the price of anything, for that matter. I was then unemployed and struggling. (Chary started a rather troubling pattern of
mine to seemingly be drawn to spoiled rich women with little empathy for others.)
In all of my dozens of job interviews over the years, no one
has ever asked what my GPA was. Nor even
mentioned my degree, period. Despite my
attending a rather prestigious (to be read: expensive) private institution of
higher learning, I cannot say that my degree ever got me anywhere in the job
market. In fact, I got hired for my
first job in 2000 at a McGraw-Hill magazine because I tore apart some press
releases my future boss had me edit with a red pen. He was impressed that I’d been so
“aggressive” in editing for readability.
I probably hadn’t diagrammed a sentence since grade school,
nor edited anyone’s work but my own. I’ve
never taken a journalism class in my life, yet the lion’s share of my
career has been in editing and writing.
I “trained” in fiction and poetry and filmmaking, so I basically entered
a job for which I woefully unqualified and untrained. Now my workdays are spent writing headlines—a
skill for which I never trained but for the school of hard knocks and
experience.
Ask anyone if their degree comes to use in their
professions. Except for the rare
specialists (scientists, engineers, medical professionals, lawyers), pretty
much anyone with a liberal arts degree of any stripe brings home a paycheck in
a business as far afield from their training as could be envisioned. (See also: theater, philosophy.)
The aphorism goes that you don’t go to college to learn, you
go to college to learn how to drink. I
did no more or less than the next guy—though I’ve certainly made up for in
adulthood. But if I’d known…seriously
known…that the job market was going to be so unsparing, I likely would have
done things differently.
I don’t really believe in regrets. I believe that any and all experience is
instructive and to be learned from: Mistakes are more far more instructive than
triumphs. But if I seriously “had it to
do all over again,” would I have allowed my 17-year-old self to go to college
to train in film and TV and English?
I came from a family where you went to college, you got a
job and you bought a house within ten years.
To this day, my parents continue to marvel about how “your generation
got screwed.” I still do side work as a
courier that my teen self could have done, and it pays about the same…and
remains about as fulfilling. Yet I’m
thankful my parents believed in me and my artistic desires to be a writer and a
filmmaker. In fact, as I type this, a
buddy and I are putting together a documentary film,
and since I’m posting this blog…well, I’m writing, aren’t I? :)
But did I need a fancy degree and thousands of dollars of
debt for such a privilege?
About a year ago my younger brother and I had a late-night
conversation over booze “and such.” He’s
a musician, a guitar teacher, and he has his own band. He, my sister and myself
were all privileged to attend expensive private universities to prepare us for
careers. Both he and I studied the arts. So over stiff drinks, in the
what-if-we-could-do-it-all-again arena, we more or less both came to the same
conclusion:
We should have joined the Navy. Put in our four years of service, gotten paid
by Uncle Sam to travel the world and been trained in viable job skills. Then gotten out, had the government pay for
our educations, and then made “real” money by day while pursuing the dreams at
night.
There’s something to be said for stability. Perhaps it makes you lazy, but there’s not
much nobility in going hungry (he wrote over a sumptuous lunch of Ramen noodles).
Selling out just means you can trade in for sushi.
As I say, I don’t believe in regrets, but it’s interesting
using what I know now and applying it to what I might have done in another
life. Fact is, I didn’t have the
confidence or the physicality at 17 to be in the service—even though they would
have certainly provided both. It’s
ultimately existentially pointless to second-guess life, but my brother and I were
only acknowledging, if but for ourselves, that if we’d known how it would be
out there…maybe we would have chosen otherwise.
But you can’t take what you know at 35 and cram it into a
17-year-old’s head. He has to figure it
out for himself.
I tell my friends’ kids who are in high school that they
should go to trade school, or do two years at a junior college. Figure out what you want to do then, or at
least start working on acquiring a viable job skill. That’s not to say to forget the dream; nay,
don’t ever forget the dream! Just give
yourself permission to develop a little bit of cynicism in conjunction with a
bank account.
You’ll thank yourself for it later.
4) Your parents are just people
About two years ago I was hanging out with some buddies of
mine in L.A. —a night of beer, LPs,
smoking and conversation about all manner of topic. One of my buds, Steve, and I grew up together
in New Jersey, so we’ve each known the other’s family for decades. Naturally the subject of blood relations and
our aging parentals came up. Steve was
going into some anecdote relating to his mother when he said the following…in
what I can only describe as one of those life-stopping instances:
“It’s a crazy moment when you come to the realization that
your parents aren’t superhuman; they’re just people.”
…
Little wonder that as kids our parents seem gigantic. In addition to the plain fact that they,
naturally, tower over us physically, they are also worldly. In charge. They know things we don’t and seem to be the
gatekeepers of knowledge and the “secrets” that lie on the far side of that plateau
to be breached only when you “grow up.”
But then you get bigger and find out that the wisdom
promised isn’t really like the opening of the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders. There’s no formal
ceremony welcoming you to adulthood, no pamphlet handed out on your 18th
birthday entitled “Here’s the Stuff Your Parents Knew But Kept From, and So You
Can Now Hold Back From Others.”
Becoming an adult basically comes with the crushing
existential discovery that there is no secret font of knowledge nor book
of shadows into which one’s name is written upon maturity that our parents were
privy to. Rather, it’s get a job, pay
bills, try to be a good and decent citizen, maybe marry and raise a family of
your own and live as well and as long as you can.
You essentially become what they once are or were.
Period.
We all take issue with the ways were raised. The Ex, for all of her flaws, said something similarly
profound about parenting: “They did they best they knew how to do.”
That’s really all anyone can ask. Try hard to get the little buggers from
infancy to self-sustainability. That’s
not to say the “job” ever ends, because you’ll never stop being your parents’
child.
Roger Ebert once wrote that a time comes in your life when
your parents must relate to you as an adult—as an equal—or not at all. I don’t even pretend to know what that would
even look like as my folks still relate to me like I don’t know any better. They mean well, of course. No matter how old you get, you’re still
treated like you’re about 10. It’s what
parents do. Even into your
adulthood.
It’s a disinclination to relinquish a control and power
they’ve had over you since infancy, when all life and all destiny rested within
their hands. Admitting to one’s child’s
adulthood is the same as admitting that time is having its inevitable way. A last-ditch pitched battle against the
fading of the light.
“Make sure you call if you’re going to be out late.”
When I lived at home a few years back, I fought the
inquiries the best way I knew how: with ludicrous answers.
“Who are going to meet?
Do these people have names?”
“Oddly enough, they don’t.
It’s really weird. I can them One, Z and Hey You.”
“Where are you going?”
“Pick up the hookers and drop off the drugs.”
“When do you think you’ll be back?”
“Sometime in 2018.
Don’t wait up.”
Most parents are good people. I believe in my heart that nearly all of them
mean well. But they possess no
superpowers. They’re flawed and frail,
just like the rest of us. Raising the
next generations of uncertain and precious continuants of the species.
We do the best that we can.
5) Dating is often a better way to make friends than to find
a mate
In your teens and twenties, sex is almost everything—the end
all and be all.
In your thirties, it’s just another way of saying “hi.”
When you’re younger, the “typical” courting pattern is
you’ll meet someone, go out on a few dates, get it on, and then either start
becoming more serious or not. In your
thirties, it’s the exact opposite: Sex comes first, and then maybe you’ll
figure out if you actually like one another enough to tolerate the person’s
non-drunk daytime conversation. (As I
get older, I find that most of the time, I prefer the silence and the
solitude.)
No one told me that’s what dating was going to be like. Nor how awful it is “out there.” How much sadness and brokenness exists
amongst those who have crossed my path.
How that nearly four decades of singlehood—and one extremely tumultuous
long-term relationship—might actually make me more disinclined towards
an eventual partnership.
Nor was I AT ALL prepared
for the fact that dating scenarios might actually be the road to making some of
the best friends I’ve ever had.
Here’s something else they never told us: A true friendship
between a man and a woman cannot be equitable and trusting until any sexual
tension has first been acknowledged, discussed and addressed. Then—and only then—can undeniable confidence in
the relationship (small “r”) blossom. If
it’s really there—and ESPECIALLY if it’s felt by one party and not the
other—mature adults will find a way to either deal with it in a healthy way or
move on to other platonic relationships unencumbered by such tension.
(Or you can like I did and hold it in, lie about it, and
then have it come out in a destructive way.
But thankfully, I learned from that one, but I was as naked and broken
in that moment as is possible for someone to be.)
I hate those movies where the two long-suffering “best
friends” eventually realize they are perfect for one another 90 minutes from
now (although When Harry Met Sally... is an absolute gem). While I’ll acknowledge that this can and does
happen, what’s far more common is the path from romantic to platonic than the
other way around (alcohol notwithstanding).
One of my best friends I met through a dating website a few
years ago. Neither of us were at a place
in our lives where we wanted anything serious.
So she gave me only one caveat: “Whatever you do, please don’t ever lie
to me.” In the early months, I was
unfortunately not able to be as truthful with her as she asked (often about my
other dating activities), and she rightfully called me on it. But, as time went on, though we realized we
were not meant to be a couple, we found that we seriously, seriously enjoyed
the other’s company. There germinated an
understood, implicit trust. She’s
someone I now call a friend—a best friend.
Not only that, but she’s someone I can go to for advice
about other women since she knows my habits (good and bad) and what it’s like
to date me. Because I did A with her,
maybe I should try B this time. She
won’t sugarcoat, and often says, “Oh, honey, you can do better.”
I’ve made other friends in the dating realm as well. Alcohol and chemistry made the initial days
what they were, but things then either fizzle or die or change.
Or you become friends.
Which is actually often better sometimes than having a partner. I’ve been “single” now for nearly six years
(though anyone who knows me even passingly is aware of how I use that
particular loaded term), and I find it more fun to collect friends than to find
a mate. Frankly, I’m tired. And at this juncture, I’m enjoying my time
alone too much. I still date, I have
adventures, but there’s nothing like the hours I spend punching away at my
keyboard while downing some bourbon.
No music. No TV.
No talking.
Silence and my thoughts.
And the unencumbered race of the cursor across my laptop screen.
And one final thing they never told me:
Silence is more than golden; it’s precious.
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