Life on the Off Ramp

When I was a grad student at Syracuse University, I took a course in media criticism. It was taught by a visiting lecturer who flew up from Washington DC once a week to fill in for the full time professor who had suddenly vacated his post. I believe our instructor was a past president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or some similar entity which would have been suitably impressive to the hopeful future broadcasters in the class.

One day, apropos of nothing I could discern, he drew a timeline on the marker board representing the various stages of human development. At about the twenty year point he drew a tick mark and labeled it “relationships.” Apparently we humans are supposed to begin mastering the ability to form committed, long term relationships with significant others at that age. He marked various other stages along the line culminating with self actualization – that point where you become a very successful human in all dimensions.

Then he said something which froze me in my seat. He said that you must master each skill in sequence and that if you become stuck at any point, you can not progress to the next. I was staring hard at the relationship tick mark and I knew at that moment that my life was destined to fail.

Even in my twenties, I had already fallen behind in the march along the human development line. I couldn’t recall any successful relationships to that point, not even with my own parents. They were the caretakers who ignored me most of the time except for those occasions when they chose to actively thwart any aspirations I might show.

As a boy, the neighborhood kids would torment me. I got picked on, beaten up, and had stones thrown at me any time I ventured outside. To this day I don’t know why I elicited so much negative attention, but the fear I developed remains with me. I am afraid of the world that exists beyond my apartment door. It is a hostile place.

Yet I remained unrealistically optimistic. Ever since I first began to contemplate my own life and compare it to others, I have felt that I can overcome everything and still live the life I fantasize. There was always tomorrow. Such ungrounded optimism must be something that is hard wired into me. There is no basis for it in reality.

Now that I am in my sixties, I realize that the direction of my life is unlikely to change much. There is no precedent for suddenly popping back to that twenty year tick mark and hitting the play button. Aside from all the psychological baggage, there is the physical reality of aging that hinders making up for forty lost years.

Sometimes I think about the boy I once was. He was quiet and gentle, a fair skinned red head with freckles, and a sunny disposition. I want to protect him. I don’t want him to become cynical and bitter. I want to teach him the lessons I have learned through all the years and tears of my life. I want him to live his life fully and not wait for a better day to come. But I can not do anything for that boy. It is too late.

I believe that the visiting professor left something off his diagram. I think that there are alternate branches for those of us who live a compromised life. Instead of progressing in a straight line towards self-actualization, there are paths to other destinations. One of those destinations is self-acceptance. That is the point where one realizes that he will never achieve the happy and successful life he has so desperately chased for most of his life, but he can settle for the comfortable realization that he did the best he could with what he had to work with.

You Put de Lime in de Coconut but Not in de Beer!

The other night I asked the bartender to put a lime in my bottle of Rolling Rock. He looked at me with incomprehension.

“You want me to put lime in a Rolling Rock?” There was suspicion in his tone.

I assured him that it was perfectly legal even though it wasn’t Corona. He did his best the-customer-is-always-right shrug and jammed a fetid little sliver of lime into the mouth of the bottle. I didn’t really want lime in my beer; I was just messing with his head.

I don’t know why Americans think that Corona, and only Corona, must be served with lime. Mexicans certainly don’t. Mexicans only put lime in a beer bottle to keep insects out. They are careful not to squeeze the lime. They don’t like the taste of lime in their beer any more than they like the taste of inebriated insects swimming around in it. It doesn’t matter if they are drinking indoors either. Most Mexican buildings don’t have screens.

When Mexicans do choose to put lime in their beer it doesn’t matter what brand of beer they are drinking. Most likely it is not Corona. Corona is not a popular beer in Mexico. It is mostly produced for export to the United States and, as such, it is crafted to be tasteless. It’s amusing that Americans think they are drinking real authentic Mexican beer when they have Corona. But then what can you expect from a county that celebrates Cinco de Mayo? In Mexico, Cinco de Mayo is celebrated in only two small villages and wherever there are a lot of U.S. tourists. Many Mexicans have never heard of it. Those who have think it’s an American holiday.

Mexicans don’t drink tequila the way Americans do either. If it’s good quality tequila they sip it slowly, like Cognac, savoring the rich and subtle flavors. If you try a premium tequila, such as Don Julio Añejo, and you think you detect a slight taste of whiskey or bourbon, you’re right: tequila is aged in oak casks which have previously been used in the production of American whiskeys such as Jack Daniels. Lesser quality tequila is usually drunk along with sangrita, a sweet, spicy drink made from orange juice, grenadine, and hot chilies.

If you’re not in a sipping mood, the correct method for slamming a shot of tequila is as follows: Have ready fresh limes, quartered, and a bowl of salt. Pour good quality tequila (save the cheap stuff for margaritas) into shot glasses. Throw the entire contents into your mouth and allow it to sit on the tongue. Then dip a lime wedge into the salt and suck the juice into your mouth. Enjoy the exhilarating sensations.

My ex introduced me to a charming variation of this technique for use with someone special. Proceed as above but only one of you should suck on the salted lime. Immediately thrust your tongues into each others mouths while the tequila, lime, and salt are still present. Kiss deeply. You need only do this a few times before you will be swearing your undying love to each other.

The Loss of Language

Those who first encountered the keyboard as a writer saw it as a better way to write. Since they were already accustomed to composing at length, most learned to touch type so they could do so quickly and efficiently. The advent of the word processor was the next leap forward. Editing and rewriting became a joy rather than drudgery. To writers, language is a medium just as paint is to an artist. Writers enjoy bringing creativity to the correct use of grammar and vocabulary.

On the other hand, those who first encountered the keyboard as a computer geek see it as a necessary evil to get to what they really enjoy: playing with technology. Since typing is awkward and annoying for them, they invented a shorthand so they could do less of it. From them we have things like IMHO (in my humble opinion) and ROFLMAO (rolling on the floor laughing my ass off).  As you can see, they are not very original either.

Language took it’s biggest hit when text messaging became widely used in the late nineties. You could hardly blame people for taking shortcuts when they had to type on a miniature version of a touch-tone dial pad. Who wouldn’t substitute “u” for “you” when entering the latter required pressing the 9-key (WXYZ) three times, the 6-key (MNO) three times, and the 8-key (TUV) twice? Or substituting “2” (one key stroke) for the words “to” (4 key strokes)  or “too” (7 key strokes)?

But what’s the excuse for using the same abbreviations in an email when it’s composed on the full keyboard of a computer? Could it be indifference? Next time you post something on Facebook or dash off a quick reply to an email, consider this: if it isn’t worth the extra few seconds it would take to proofread it and improve it, then it probably isn’t important enough to do at all.

As our means of communication has shifted from the slow, thoughtful discourse of the written letter to the instantaneous one-liner of the text message, the intent has also changed. We used to have longer thoughts. We used to have deeper dialogue. Now we seem to be texting the electronic version of carving our initials in a tree or drawing moustaches on subway ads. Everyone wants to jump in, say something really witty, and jump out again.

The trouble is that being clever or witty requires expressing yourself intelligently. Having lost the ability to craft language, we resort to ending every sentence with smiley faces (in the form of punctuation marks that attempt, and often fail, to resemble facial expressions) or the acronym “lol” (which no longer means anything). The fallacy which is used to justify emoticons is that since words do not convey the facial expressions and body language of face to face conversation, nobody can tell if you’re being sarcastic or attempting a joke. Thank god nobody ever told that to Charles Dickens or Mark Twain or any of the other great satirists or humorists.

People have bemoaned the degradation of language throughout literary history. Usually they are regarded as anal retentives who just don’t like things to change. But there are real consequences to the severe deterioration of language that is taking place today. People are losing their ability to communicate with each other. The evidence of this exists on every bulletin board and chat room on line today. Flame wars regularly break out as participants fail to understand each other. They seem as incapable of expressing themselves clearly as they are at understanding what they are reading.

We know from psycholinguistics that language and thought are intertwined. Our language not only reflects the culture we live in, it also shapes it. That accounts for some of the differences between western and eastern civilizations. Language is the currency of our thoughts. It allows us to solve complex problems and to survive as ever greater challenges confront us.

Eighty percent of the cortex of the brain is used for speech and language functions. As our language contracts and becomes less sophisticated, we need less and less of our cortex. What happens to the unused brain cells? If we allow our language to continue to regress, we will lose the ability to create not only great works of art, literature, and philosophy, but also the very technologies that led us to this state in the first place.

Will we become the mindless consumers of technology products invented by other cultures which have more carefully nourished their language skills?