Judge Mental

I've been accused of being judegemental before and for good reason. Sometimes I am judgemental. I know it and I accept it becuase I think everyone is guilty of this from time to time.
Case in point: This morning, I opened up MSN and found a link to a story that caught my eye. At first, I had decided to ignore it. I almost felt my hand pushing the mouse toward the icon and conciously made the decision not to go all the way.
I read a couple of news itmes and checked my e-mail. Then, as I signed off e-mail, I got that golldang icon again....the one with Brittney Spears' sister's image staring at me with the caption, "Whatsername may be pregnant". Okay, it said her name but I forgot what it is and I don't want to look it up and lose my train of thought.
I guiltily clicked on the story and read about three sentences. It was enough. Brittney Spears' sixteen-year-old sister is knocked up by some dude she met in church.
The nasty thought that immediately sprang to my mind (as I'm sure it did to that of so many) was that if anyone had been unsure of the level of white-trash that was embodied in the Spears gene pool, little sis just confirmed that it was pretty dang high.

Now, as sad as it is that this young girl is knocked up, I think that it's kind of sad that I am judging her: for thinking her a slut, a whore, a teenage jezebel, for thinking of her mother as a bad parent, a dirty piece of redneck waste, for thinking of her skank sister as a bad role model.
Who am I, after all? I'm not even rich or famous. I could be considered white trash by some people. In fact, the other day I heard a patron at the bar I work at refer to me as white trash behind my back - when he thought I wasn't listening.
Of course I think he's wrong. If I were really white trash, I would have blown some mucous into his scotch. To be honest, the thought never even crossed my mind. I was too busy pretending not to be offended and telling myself that I misunderstood what I thought I'd heard.
Does that make me not white trash? Maybe not. Maybe I am. Maybe we all are - except black and chinese and indian people. They are black, indian or asian trash.
Wait....maybe I am white trash! I just referred to asians as Chinese! Worse yet, I wrote 'chinese' with a small c! I am a terrible, horrible person.

POINT: Judging is mental. Lets shoot the judges. (But please don't kill them because that's violent and violence is bad. Ugh. Here I am now, judging people who are violent. Or am I?

facetiae

Facetiae, is a word that you will probably never use, though it describes something you might want to describe.
I'm not going to tell you what it means.
Perhaps you know already because you 'speak' Latin or because you're a pseudo intellectual.
Maybe it was a Word of the Day and you - for whatever reason - recall its meaning.
In any case, it's a fairly useless word. Not because it lacks meaning but because it's just not recognized - and I doubt it ever will be - by the masses. It sounds way too much like something brown and sticky - a wet turd. There's a word that people don't use every day but still recognize. Turd. Has a nice ring to it.
As a child I referred to all my teachers and other enemies as "turds" or "stupid turds" or "fat turds" or "lousy turds". I was obsessed with turds.
What does that say about me? I'm afraid to ponder the subject any further.
That's all for now.

Emptyheadedness

Have you ever had the sense that your mind was completely empty? That you had lost any and everything you'd had in there? Just for a moment? A second, maybe?
Well, I have. It's scary.
Without our memories, without thoughts, without the ability to make a command: existence seems pointless.
I don't like being pointless. If I wanted to lead a life of pointlessness (emptyheadedness) I'd have to become a politician. That would be terrible. I'd rather be a prisoner - an innocent prisoner, though.

Useless Advice

I have always been more of an advice giver than an advice taker.

It's interesting that I rarely take advice from anyone. I always feel that what people tell me is either good information or bad. I decide almost immediately what I am going to do with that information; I'll either file it away in the mental drawer labeled, "Good Advice that I should take even if I already think I know it" or the other one (the big one) labeled, "Crap".

I am sure that I give out lots of Crap to many people who talk to me. I am not a good example to follow. I am completely and utterly financially unsuccessful. I have very few close friends. I have rarely participated in the most basic events of human life which tend to shape the average person's decision making processes. I have almost always rejected the obvious in favor of the absurd. I'm totally self-absorbed - just look at my use of the word "I" in this blog.

YET, I know that it is a very basic tenet of my personage, the EJ inside me all the time, that one should always consider every detail of their actions and how those actions will affect others.
I am not sure how these two facets of my personality coexist in any kind of harmony. Maybe they don't and that's why I so often find myself feeling low.

This belief that your actions, my actions - that they are directly linked to everyone else through even the slightest gesture - is something that seems so basic to me. Of course someone will know or be affected when I do something that is dishonest or cruel or wonderful and fantastic. I often feel I do things that are a total waste of time to the casual observer but to me these seemingly useless actions somehow make the world safer. Or not. Maybe they just make me feel better. My feeling better can affect how I treat others and then I pass on that positive sense to my neighbors. That's good, isn't it?

Unfortunately, I often feel badly, even if I've done something nice or harmless because I think I could have spent my time more 'wisely' - whatever that means.

I do and say a lot of awful things as well and I'm always sure that those words and deeds trickle through the air and make someone miserable somewhere - even if it's not my intended victim.

At moments when I, myself, feel sad, lonely, miserable, vulnerable, wronged by life - I want to take back all of the bad things I've ever said about anyone and undo all of the evil I've done, no matter how tiny and forgettable it might seem. Life is too short to be painful, even if the pain does make it more memorable.

I don't know. Maybe pain, misery, suffering - maybe these are necessary evils; kind of like Hilary Clinton and George Bush or Osama bin Laden and Kim Jung Il. They seem so inessential but the world would be really different without them and not necessarily better.

Wait - I'm being political! That's not really me.
At least I'm offending both major political parties on equal levels.

I often wish I were a different person: someone who is cool, financially secure, worldly, sophisticated, has smartitude, likes chickens...but then I realize that to have all those things I would have to be mostly clueless about the rest of the world - the world outside my immediate experience.

If I Ruled The World - OR - When I'm Dictator of The World, I'll...

Nostradamus' ghost seems hell bent on ruining the future. His predictions are so full of death and destruction that it just makes me wonder why anyone would want to read his cryptic "prophecies", much less make them into TV specials for the History Channel. Truth be told, I wanted to watch the latest "Lost Book of Nostradamus" but I've been so overly occupied that I didn't get a chance to see it on The History Channel. Now that I've analyzed the situation, I believe the right course of action is for me never to watch the show. For one thing, I saw that movie documentary that the dude from Citizen Kane and those Paul Masson commercials made before his heart exploded from fatness. I saw it when I was just a child and it basically stayed with me for my entire life. I grew up SURE that New York (my home town) was going to be blown to smithereens by turban-wearing terrorists. When I got off the subway at 9:AM on Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, late for work, seeing all the nacos on the street running at that ungodly hour and looking south on Canal, toward the hole in the first hit tower, and then seeing the second plane hit the other tower, my mind went immediately to that old documentary Orson Welles did. I remembered seeing cartoons of zombie-like people in the streets of what was called "new city". I remembered those re-enactments showing an Arab man ordering rockets to be shot toward New York. None of these thoughts were pleasant at all. They just fed a paranoia that had been deeply embedded in my brain - has been, actually. The point is, I have come to believe - or hope, that since Nostradamus, or Nos, as I like to call him, was just another quack who somehow got worldwide attention and created a series of self-fulfilling prophecies. As such, these SFPs can become SUPs or Self-Unfulfilled Prophecies. One of the ways I would like help facilitate this SFP to SUP process is to declare myself a prophet, gain worldwide acceptance and then, turn things around on old Nos and prophesy that Superman will fight the terrorists, wipe out the virus and zap the meteor out of the sky, saving the Earth for at least the next million years. I think I have quack potential. Don't you? The best part about all this is that people would love me and I'd then, hopefully, get to rule the world. Then I could really start making changes. The first thing I'd do is make public transportation free. Nobody should have to pay for the crap we get - at least in New York City. I'm soooooo sick of the subway. It's easily the most miserable part of my day, standing on the trains amidst the masses of funkmeisters carrying luggage! What the H E double hockey sticks is up with these people carrying their damn wheeled luggage on the rush-hour trains? Have we really gotten so lazy that we can't pick up and carry our briefcases? What amount of crap do people need to carry around? Those people really squeeze my bojangles. The next thing I'd like to do is create a worldwide currency to facilitate travel. Of course this would wipe out several businesses but I would be a world leader unsympathetic to the money mongers of the Earth and I wouldn't listen to their cries. Next I would put a hold on all the wars until each warring tribe/nation/ethnic group writes me up a 10,000 word essay on why they need to win their respective wars. The winning essay would get a year's-supply of fruit and meat. The next thing I would do would be to remove all gym equipment from prisons around the world. Why are we letting these people get stronger? Isn't that dangerous? I'd also like to remove all metal/plastic and glass from the prisons...except for the bars, of course. For my final decree, before retiring to my secret Empirical Palace in Mauritius, I would create a flat tax of 10% worldwide and set a salary cap on all world employees of 200,000 World Dollars...which would be something like a Euros, only less snotty.

Why I Love Public Transportation

I haven't blogged for a while and have been hatin' on my daily trips to work, so I'm going to take a moment to digitally ponder my life as a commuter.

My mother is a life-long New Yorker. That means she can't drive. Given that situation, I have been forced onto subways and buses since I was old enough to walk.

Mom didn't stroller me into subways and buses because that involved carrying stuff and slowed her down - and Mom liked to move fast. She used to be one of those race-walkers - only she used high-heels instead of sneakers.

Ma didn't want to waste time by trying to stuff my stroller into a bus or train. That's probably why I walked when I was just 7 months old - she wanted to make sure I was ready for the commute and wouldn't slow her down.

Anyway, I traveled on the number 12 bus and the number 6 train from as far back as I can remember, with my mother. I recall being like four and my mother running and making me follow her through the sliding doors that link the subway cars so that we could get to the middle car where the conductor was. That was the 70s and a woman with a small kid was ripe for being mugged in New York and she felt comforted by Jerome and his lethal flashlight. The fact that I was terrified of falling between cars didn't seem to faze my mother who sometimes was three or four steps ahead of me. I usually closed my eyes when I stepped from one car to the other, holding my breath and letting out a sigh of relief each time I made it across the mysterious abyss that peaked through the gap between the subway cars.

I remember how the lights used to go on and off all the time on the subways (which were covered in graffiti) - whenever the subway came to a stop. Sometimes we'd be stuck in a dark tunnel for ten minutes with nothing but B.O. to give me a sense that anyone else was around. Had the train needed to be evacuated, I'd have to follow the stink of other commuters to find my way out. I've never had good night vision. Good nightmares, but not good night vision.

As I grew older, the AIDS epidemic began to take its toll on the heroin-shooting homeless of New York and they became more aggressive about panhandling on the subways. From the time I was in high school until the first year of the Giuliani administration, I swear I never got on a subway without at least one would-be homeless person coming into the car to announce that he or she had had AIDS yet they were not drug addicts nor were they alcoholics and that they were trying very hard to get back into life via some form of treatment. Sometimes they'd add that they had six or seven children at home to feed. It's interesting to think that they were shooting heroine with six or seven kids at home who needed things like food and diapers.

I don't mean to sound unsympathetic to AIDS victims. I mean to sound unsympathetic to annoying people who smell bad. I am totally unsympathetic to people who choose their own cards and then expect others to pay up when they're dealt the losing hand. Furthermore, to be frank, these beggars were very annoying. They were even more annoying than the mental case riders without AIDS - who had all their limbs and none of their marbles. At least I could laugh at them without feeling guilty.

Over time the little sympathy I have for beggars on the subway has diminished to virtually no sympathy at all. Recently, as the Giuliani effect has weakened, the beggars have started to return to the subway. A month or so ago a man came into my subway car, reporting to those that weren't wearing iPods, that he had been looking for a job for over 6 months to support his family. He finally found one, but, unfortunately, he needed to make an initial investment of 325 dollars to get started in this new "job".
I think one guy gave him a dollar just because it was a fairly novel approach to begging on the subway.
As ridiculous as it sounded, I felt in the back of my mind that maybe he really did need the money to buy a suit or something and that maybe he wasn't a crack head.
About two-weeks later I was riding the same subway at more-or-less the same time and the same dude comes into the car and gives the same lame sob story, except this time the initial investment is $285 dollars.
Either he just makes up these figures or he was making very slow progress.
Either way, I still didn't give him any money.