unscriptured

So next week is St. Valentine’s Day, a day for the celebrating, and the marketing, of romantic love.

I’d ask God to be my valentine this year, but that whole “romance” aspect kind of gets in the way. I was thinking maybe we should have a day like Valentine’s but only for non-sexual love, sort of a “bromance” day but not limited to just guy-guy. I mean we already have a sort of “bromance orgy” day, we call it “Superbowl Sunday,” so we don’t need a bromance day, but we could use something more inclusive and more diverse. We could call it “Just Friends Day” and we could give that little speech about how we like each other but we don’t “like like” each other and have it not be a bad thing.

I asked God what he thought of the idea and he pointed out some dangers and pitfalls. If it really took off, would we be expected to give “Just Friends” cards to everyone? Well probably not, but then how good a friend does someone need to be to be “just friends?” And if someone thinks they’re a good enough friend to be “just friends” but you don’t “just friend” them, will they think that maybe you do “like like” them? And what do you do with someone who really did give you the “just friends” speech, but you’re not yet ready to be only “just friends” but you’re afraid that if you don’t then you’ll never have any chance for them to change their mind?

Yeah, relationships really are a complicated part of the human condition. Ultimately God and I agreed, we really don’t need any more holidays putting pressure on the ways we interact. Maybe a national “put bacon on your sandwich” day, though?

I pretend to be a morning person.

One of the musical artists that God and I really admire is Ben Folds. Back in 1995 Ben wrote a song called “Best Imitation of Myself.” It’s a song about putting on a facade, but a facade that none-the-less strives to show a version of the real you. Your public persona, as it were. That’s not the kind of pretending I’m talking about.

There are lies that people tell themselves until they begin to believe them. And even lies they tell other people until both they and those other people begin to believe them. That’s closer to the sort of pretending I’m talking about.

But in a good way.

God says it’s like telling myself “little white lies,” until I believe them.

The human mind has an enormous capacity to ignore reality and substitute its own. That’s really the basis of hypnotism, we use trance states and mental gimmickry to program a new reality into our brains. We can tap into that ability to ignore the tremendous hurt, pain, and devastation that our selfish actions thrust upon the world, as so many Wall Street execs have amply demonstrated; or we can use this quirk of human nature to make ourselves into better people than is our natural inclination, to encourage ourselves to every day make some small contribution to the betterment of all mankind.

I’m doing none of that. I’m just pretending. And I’m doing it to make my own life a little better but not at the expense of everyone else. In fact, by making my own life a little better, I’m actually making other people’s lives a little better too, but that’s a completely accidental side effect.

See, like so many people I’m really fond of electric light. It allows me to do things when the sun isn’t bothersomely out visible in the sky. Ever since I read Tolkien’s most famous works back when I was in Junior High, I’ve called the sun by its rightful name, “the evil yellow-face.” This has a lot to do with having what George Carlin refers to as “phosphorescent Irish skin.” I don’t tan, I freckle. And as a lot of people can tell you, the road to freckles is paved with second degree sunburns. So like I was saying, I like to do things at night, which leads to staying up late, which leads to sleeping in late, which leads to not being a “morning person.”

But then I moved to Arizona, to the Sonoran Desert. As much as I dislike the morning sun, that’s got nothing on the sun that’s out in the afternoons in Phoenix. So I learned to do things like go to the zoo from seven in the morning until no later than nine or ten. I did my grocery shopping when the store first opened in the morning. Anything I could do before noon, I did. And I discovered that even in Phoenix, when it came to not being a morning person, I was a pauper. I could pretend to be a morning person and go out and get stuff done. Other people, didn’t seem to be able to do this.

So I not only got to do things in the cool of the day, I got to do them relatively alone. And I may have mentioned before, I’m rather fond of being alone. So I’m not in Phoenix anymore but I still look for ways to do things when other people aren’t, I still pretend to be a morning person, it’s just that now I do it to save my sanity, not to save my skin.

Amazon is so close to being a “social network” that God tells me it seems like they must be deliberately holding back.

Millions of people have Amazon accounts. We go on to their site and spend time looking at things. We don’t post status updates, but we post product reviews. We even tell them about things we already own, when they recommend that we buy them. We establish connections by connecting the wish lists of friends and family to our own accounts. We tell them other places we like to hang out by buying gift cards and by adding things from other sites to our Amazon wish lists. And don’t even get started talking to a privacy nut about the things Amazon can tell about us by what things we buy, by what book titles we look at, and by what things we tell them don’t interest us.

So what’s stopping them from going the rest of the way, what’s stopping them from becoming a true social network? God says they could do it if they wanted, but that they just don’t feel like it yet. He says they could go from recommendations by collaborative filtering to recommendations by direct collaboration.

One of the big activities of teen girls is hanging out at the mall, going from store to store, and goading each other into buying things they don’t really need. Imagine that in a web browser. You have multiple panes open in your Amazon tab, in one pane is the trendy pair of jeans that your best friend just recommended, which Amazon has helpfully translated from their size to yours, in another is the latest CD by Matchbox Twenty, which you just noticed is on sale, you drag it over to your friend’s icon and you both preview the songs together, bitching and giggling all the way.

Okay. Taking the mall experience online? Maybe God is right and Amazon just isn’t ready, but even if they were, I’m pretty sure I’m not.

Outside of track meets, adults in America don’t run. We jog, we power-walk, we trot. We don’t run.

When I asked her about it, God told me that it’s because we recognize that life is a marathon and we need to hold something in reserve. I suppose then that that’s one of the markers of having grown up. Of course, I don’t think many teens run either, so maybe it’s the first marker of growing up.

Those of you that have kids, watch for it. Do your kids still gallop down the stairs on Christmas morning after they stop believing in Santa Claus, or before? How old are they when they stop running from the car to the ice cream store and then back again because you’re not moving fast enough? When do they stop chasing the dog and start walking the dog?

We say that childhood goes by so fast, and it does, but maybe part of why it does is because it just can’t stand to stand still.

I never really thought much about it until God pointed it out to me this week, but there are different styles of passive aggressive. And noticing this actually gets me closer to believing that corporations are people.

Please note that “closer” is still “a long way off.”

Not only are there different styles of passive aggressive, but the two stores where I do most of my grocery shopping, Costco and Trader Joe’s, both engage in such tactics. They both try to encourage us shoppers to behave a little more ecologically responsibly, in that neither of them wants us to get new grocery bags every time we shop. Sure it helps them in that they get to spend less on bags, but in these two cases I’m willing to believe that ecology is a real part of their motivation, not just a convenient excuse. I’m less willing to believe that about hotels that want me to reuse towels. But I reuse the towels anyway, because even if I suspect their motivations, they are right, reusing is the right thing to do. But I digress; back to bags.

Trader Joe’s approach is to put up a little signage, and to make sure that they have strong, reusable, bags, not just for sale but prominently displayed both when you come in the door and at many of the checkout stations. If you don’t use them they don’t scold you, they don’t even mention it, they just cheerfully bag up your purchases in handy brown paper bags. With handles.

Costco is a little more direct and a little less convenient. They don’t generally have reusable bags available for purchase. They also don’t have throw-away bags. They’ll let you use empty boxes that they would otherwise recycle. They’ll let you use your own reusable bags that you bought somewhere else, like, say, Trader Joe’s. Or they’ll happily put all your stuff back in your cart and let you figure out what to do with it from there.

So Trader Joe’s is the friendlier place, but they make me feel a little co-dependent. See, Costco actually gets me to be more eco-friendly, Trader Joe’s doesn’t. Trader Joe’s just gets me to feel a little guilty. I don’t have nice reusable bags, but I do have a sturdy plastic crate (not a stolen milk crate, but a similar thing that I actually bought). When I go to Costco, I put all my stuff into the back of my car and then when I get home I go inside and get my crate. A few trips back and forth and all my stuff is neatly stowed away. When I go to Trader Joe’s, I let them put my stuff in bags. I later use the bags to haul out my recycling, but still, I feel a little guilty for having them. After all, I could use my plastic crate to haul out my empty bottles and cans and it would be almost as convenient as the bags.

Oh well. God says at least my heart is in the right place. Come to think of it, I think that’s God being a little passive aggressive too.

Another year bites the dust and a new one begins. It’s 2013. For those with triskaidekaphobia an ominous year indeed.

So is the thirteenth year of a century inherently unlucky? Does having the number thirteen on nearly everything in sight really push the bad luck, or does it wear it out? That is, does all the bad luck get used up early in the year leaving the poor number thirteen spent and trying to catch it’s breath?

God tells me that he doesn’t believe in luck, except for that which we make for ourselves. But then he also told me that the Mayans ended their calendar when they did because they knew this year was coming. I don’t really get that though, because, well, it’s not a thirteen on their calendar.

Today is a day in limbo. Not the limbo that resides somewhere in the middle of the metaphysical triangle whose corners are Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, but the limbo that exists in the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Nowhere else in the United States calendar do two holidays exist so close together. Not just any holidays, but two of the biggest, two that each take up at least a day and a half, celebrating not just the days themselves but also their “eves.” And this year it’s particularly acute, since the holidays proper are on Tuesdays, so the Eves are on Mondays, so the holidays make additional grabs to see what of the weekend before they can also eat up. And this year we even tossed in that whole “the world’s going to end” thing on the Friday before Christmas because of an idiotic misunderstanding of the Mayan calendar.

Party like it’s 1999 indeed.

So where am I going with this? Nowhere. Actually God told me I should take the week off. He says practically nobody in the U.S. is getting anything accomplished this week. But I said, hey, I should write something.

So, um, something. Well, Happy New Year!