What a Dick

Cheney has announced that terrorists are monitoring the U.S. elections, and stepping up violence to try to sway the outcome.

"Don't vote for democrats! The terrorists want you to!" I'm not sure what this reeks of more, schoolyard taunting or facist propaganda.

Maybe the terrorists figure that the American public hasn't yet noticed that the war in Iraq is a complete disaster.

So I was at a downtown Italian restaurant with my friend, Leeann, giving her a long-winded complaint about a friend.

"I just keep telling him, if you're going to do this music thing - stop TALKING about it, and do it. Or give up and enjoy the life you do have. Don't talk about how you're going to handle fame, when you haven't played in a band for years."

She just nodded, chewing, with no expression. I sensed she was holding something back.

"I mean, I just don't want to be hearing this same stuff when he's forty, you know? If he would just take a first step."

More nodding.

"I guess I kind of do the same thing. Maybe it pisses me off because I see the same behavior in myself."

Then her face broke out into a smile. "At least you recognize that."

do-it-yourself

I was thinking today about all the many ways we Americans are actually "served" by other people in daily life. I mean, at a restaurant or in a store, the server or clerk has to pretty much be nice to you no matter how you act. If you ask to talk to the manager, he or she may be allowed to say a few harsh words to you, if your behavior is particularly bad. But even then, she might be in trouble with even-more-higher-ups if she drives you away from the store.

Think about buying things in some other cultures - it's not always like that. In some places, you engage each other as equals, arguing and haggling.

Of course, most of us try to treat those who "serve" us pretty well, partially to avoid sneezed-on food, and partially because most of us inhabit both roles during a given day - a bank teller works hard to get everybody's banking transactions completed quickly, then goes out later and expects a perfect martini from the bartender.

Sometimes I think what motivates Americans to make more money, is to be served more often, and to serve less. More than that I think we want things done for us; not to do things. We want to be paid for our brilliant thoughts, carried out by someone else's hands.

I felt like I was wrestling with that on a small scale today - I keep finding spiders in my basement apartment in a beautiful 100-year-old building, and it makes me think of another apartment I looked at when I moved, a sparkling clean 10-year-old condo that rented for another 100 bucks a month. How nice to have everything all taken care of, no cracks in the drywall, with no worries of bugs. And central air, so I wouldn't have to get the landlord to help me lug the window unit out in the fall. A generic, white-and-beige clean slate on which to paint my life. Less time taking care of things, more time to be artsy fartsy and dream.

But I'd have to have a higher-paying job, maybe working in an office; emailing files, collating documents. I'd have to give my money to a faceless rental company, rather than my friendly landlords. I'd have more, and do less.

It's not neccessarily awful to want people to do things for you, but it gets to be a slippery slope. "Life would be soooo much easier if I had the car with navigation control, the cell phone with all my friends' numbers programmed in, the house in the gated community." "How great would it be if I could eat out every night and never cook?" We start to think we need the things we want. Our society is so lopsided that we know that we want to be the ones who are served, NOT the ones who serve.

Thinking of that, I decided not to search the want ads this Saturday night, and instead I cleaned my apartment, so as not to attract the spiders, and went around sealing up cracks and possible entry points. Then I saved money by cooking my own tostadas. The clerk at the grocery store recognized my ingredients right away, and started telling me about how her Mexican relatives make them. So maybe what we gain by doing, not just having, is community.

mad world

I dunno about this teaching thing; I mean, I like having meaningful work, but sometimes I want to be thinking about what song I should learn next, not what song my kids should learn next. At 29, I'm finally grown up enough to realize that it's not all about me, but I still struggle with the idea that I've learned all this music stuff and made it second nature, only to have to put it back into the conscious part of the brain and teach it to others.

Whine whine whine, enough of that. I recently read a book that a friend recommended - The Next Step in the Dance by Tim Gautreaux. Odd plot line, but an interesting read - it's about people who live on the bayou in Louisianna. One thing it does very well is describe poverty - at one point the economy gets so depressed that almost no one in town can find work. In one poignant paragraph, he describes driving through town, looking at the men fixing roofs or gutters or fences on their shacks, each so he could look himself in the mirror at the end of the day and call himself a working man.

Reading that made me a lot more ready to go to my pool store job the next day - realizing the priveledge of work.