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theadmiringbog · 5 years

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RULE 1 / Stand up straight with your shoulders back

RULE 2 / Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

RULE 3 / Make friends with people who want the best for you

RULE 4 / Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today

RULE 5 / Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them

RULE 6 / Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world

RULE 7 / Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

RULE 8 / Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie

RULE 9 / Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

RULE 10 / Be precise in your speech

RULE 11 / Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

RULE 12 / Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

RULE 1 / Stand up straight with your shoulders back

If a dominant lobster is badly defeated, its brain basically dissolves. Then it grows a new, subordinate’s brain—one more appropriate to its new, lowly position. Its original brain just isn’t sophisticated to manage the transformation from king to bottom dog without virtually complete dissolution and regrowth. Anyone who has experienced a painful transformation after a serious defeat in romance or career may feel some sense of kinship with the once successful crustacean.

Among the chimp troupes he studied, males who were successful in the longer term had to buttress their physical prowess with more sophisticated attributes. Even the most brutal chimp despot can be taken down, after all, by two opponents, each three-quarters as mean. In consequence, males who stay on top longer are those who form reciprocal coalitions with their lower-status compatriots, and who pay careful attention to the troupe’s females and their infants. The political ploy of baby-kissing is literally millions of years old.

“In my kingdom,” as the Red Queen tells Alice in Wonderland, “you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.”

If you have a high status, on the other hand, the counter’s cold, pre-reptilian mechanics assume that your niche is secure, productive and safe, and that you are well buttressed with social support. It thinks the chance that something will damage you is low and can be safely discounted. Change might be opportunity, instead of disaster.

If someone is badly hurt at some point in life—traumatized—the dominance counter can transform in a manner that makes additional hurt more rather than less likely. This often happens in the case of people, now adults, who were viciously bullied during childhood or adolescence. They become anxious and easily upset. They shield themselves with a defensive crouch, and avoid the direct eye contact interpretable as a dominance challenge. This means that the damage caused by the bullying (the lowering of status and confidence) can continue, even after the bullying has ended.

When the wakening occurs—when once-naïve people recognize in themselves the seeds of evil and monstrosity, and see themselves as dangerous (at least potentially)— their fear decreases. They develop more self-respect. Then, perhaps, they begin to resist oppression. They see that they have the ability to withstand, because they are terrible too. They see they can and must stand up, because they begin to understand how genuinely monstrous they will become, otherwise, feeding on their resentment, transforming it into the most destructive of wishes. To say it again: There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons of life.

Maybe you are a loser. And maybe you’re not—but if you are, you don’t have to continue in that mode. Maybe you just have a bad habit. Maybe you’re even just a collection of bad habits. Nonetheless, even if you came by your poor posture honestly—even if you were unpopular or bullied at home or in grade school—it’s not necessarily appropriate now. Circumstances change. If you slump around, with the same bearing that characterizes a defeated lobster, people will assign you a lower status, and the old counter that you share with crustaceans, sitting at the very base of your brain, will assign you a low dominance number. Then your brain will not produce as much serotonin. This will make you less happy, and more anxious and sad, and more likely to back down when you should stand up for yourself. It will also decrease the probability that you will get to live in a good neighbourhood, have access to the highest quality resources, and obtain a healthy, desirable mate. It will render you more likely to abuse cocaine and alcohol, as you live for the present in a world full of uncertain futures. It will increase your susceptibility to heart disease, cancer and dementia. All in all, it’s just not good.

Thus strengthened and emboldened, you may choose to embrace Being, and work for its furtherance and improvement. Thus strengthened, you may be able to stand, even during the illness of a loved one, even during the death of a parent, and allow others to find strength alongside you when they would otherwise be overwhelmed with despair. Thus emboldened, you will embark on the voyage of your life, let your light shine, so to speak, on the heavenly hill, and pursue your rightful destiny. Then the meaning of your life may be sufficient to keep the corrupting influence of mortal despair at bay. Then you may be able to accept the terrible burden of the World, and find joy.

RULE 2 / Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn.

You need to consider the future and think, “What might my life look like if I were caring for myself properly? What career would challenge me and render me productive and helpful, so that I could shoulder my share of the load, and enjoy the consequences? What should I be doing, when I have some freedom, to improve my health, expand my knowledge, and strengthen my body?”

RULE 3 / MAKE FRIENDS WITH PEOPLE WHO WANT THE BEST FOR YOU

When people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better—so they don’t go looking for it. Or, perhaps, they don’t want the trouble of better. Freud called this a “repetition compulsion.”

Are you so sure the person crying out to be saved has not decided a thousand times to accept his lot of pointless and worsening suffering, simply because it is easier than shouldering any true responsibility? Are you enabling a delusion?

Vice is easy. Failure is easy, too. It’s easier not to shoulder a burden. It’s easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It’s easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in today’s cheap pleasures. As the infamous father of the Simpson clan puts it, immediately prior to downing a jar of mayonnaise and vodka, “That’s a problem for Future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy!”

RULE 4 / COMPARE YOURSELF TO WHO YOU WERE YESTERDAY, NOT TO WHO SOMEONE ELSE IS TODAY

You are either a success, a comprehensive, singular, over-all good thing, or its opposite, a failure, a comprehensive, singular, irredeemably bad thing. The words imply no alternative and no middle ground. However, in a world as complex as ours, such generalizations (really, such failure to differentiate) are a sign of naive, unsophisticated or even malevolent analysis. There are vital degrees and gradations of value obliterated by this binary system, and the consequences are not good.

The world allows for many ways of Being. If you don’t succeed at one, you can try another. You can pick something better matched to your unique mix of strengths, weaknesses and situation. Furthermore, if changing games does not work, you can invent a new one.

But winning at everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning.

When the internal critic puts you down using such comparisons, here’s how it operates: First, it selects a single, arbitrary domain of comparison (fame, maybe, or power). Then it acts as if that domain is the only one that is relevant. Then it contrasts you unfavourably with someone truly stellar, within that domain. It can take that final step even further, using the unbridgeable gap between you and its target of comparison as evidence for the fundamental injustice of life.

You set the following goal: by the end of the day, I want things in my life to be a tiny bit better than they were this morning. Then you ask yourself, “What could I do, that I would do, that would accomplish that, and what small thing would I like as a reward?” Then you do what you have decided to do, even if you do it badly. Then you give yourself that damn coffee, in triumph. Maybe you feel a bit stupid about it, but you do it anyway. And you do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And, with each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that’s magic. That’s compound interest. Do that for three years, and your life will be entirely different. Now you’re aiming for something higher. Now you’re wishing on a star. Now the beam is disappearing from your eye, and you’re learning to see. And what you aim at determines what you see. That’s worth repeating. What you aim at determines what you see.

What would your life look like, if it were better? What would Life Itself look like? What does “better” even mean?

Everything you value is a product of unimaginably lengthy developmental processes, personal, cultural and biological. You don’t understand how what you want—and, therefore, what you see—is conditioned by the immense, abysmal, profound past.

Faith is not the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.

Notice something that bothers you, that concerns you, that will not let you be, which you could fix, that you would fix. You can find such somethings by asking yourself (as if you genuinely want to know) three questions: “What is it that is bothering me?” “Is that something I could fix?” and “Would I actually be willing to fix it?”

If you find that the answer is “no,” to any or all of the questions, then look elsewhere. Aim lower. Search until you find something that bothers you, that you could fix, that you would fix, and then fix it. That might be enough for the day.

What if you allowed yourself a glass of wine with dinner, or curled up on the sofa and read, or watched a stupid movie, as a reward? What if you instructed your wife, or your husband, to say “good job” after you fixed whatever you fixed? Would that motivate you? The people from whom you want thanks might not be very proficient in offering it, to begin with, but that shouldn’t stop you. People can learn,

Ask yourself what you would require to be motivated to undertake the job, honestly, and listen to the answer. Don’t tell yourself, “I shouldn’t need to do that to motivate myself.” What

You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can’t even set the clock on your microwave. Don’t over-estimate your self-knowledge.

Do this every day, for a while. Then do it for the rest of your life.

You are less concerned with the actions of other people, because you have plenty to do yourself. Attend to the day, but aim at the highest good. Now, your trajectory is heavenward. That makes you hopeful. Even a man on a sinking ship can be happy when he clambers aboard a lifeboat! And who knows where he might go, in the future. To journey happily may well be better than to arrive successfully….

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

RULE 5 / DO NOT LET YOUR CHILDREN DO ANYTHING THAT MAKES YOU DISLIKE THEM

Children are damaged when those charged with their care, afraid of any conflict or upset, no longer dare to correct them, and leave them without guidance. I can recognize such children on the street. They are doughy and unfocused and vague. They are leaden and dull instead of golden and bright. They are uncarved blocks, trapped in a perpetual state of waiting-to-be.

RULE 6 / SET YOUR HOUSE IN PERFECT ORDER BEFORE YOU CRITICIZE THE WORLD

if one parent abused three children, and each of those children had three children, and so on, then there would be three abusers the first generation, nine the second, twenty-seven the third, eighty-one the fourth—and so on exponentially. After twenty generations, more than ten billion would have suffered childhood abuse: more people than currently inhabit the planet. But instead, abuse disappears across generations. People constrain its spread. That’s a testament to the genuine dominance of good over evil in the human heart.

When the hurricane hit New Orleans, and the town sank under the waves, was that a natural disaster? The Dutch prepare their dikes for the worst storm in ten thousand years. Had New Orleans followed that example, no tragedy would have occurred. It’s not that no one knew. The Flood Control Act of 1965 mandated improvements in the levee system that held back Lake Pontchartrain. The system was to be completed by 1978. Forty years later, only 60 percent of the work had been done. Willful blindness and corruption took the city down.

A hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for preparation is well known—that’s sin. That’s failure to hit the mark. And the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).

The ancient Jews always blamed themselves when things fell apart. They acted as if God’s goodness—the goodness of reality—was axiomatic, and took responsibility for their own failure. That’s insanely responsible. But the alternative is to judge reality as insufficient, to criticize Being itself, and to sink into resentment and the desire for revenge.

RULE 7 / PURSUE WHAT IS MEANINGFUL (NOT WHAT IS EXPEDIENT)

for dust you are and to dust you will return. (Genesis 3:16-19. KJV) What in the world should be done about that? The simplest, most obvious, and most direct answer? Pursue pleasure. Follow your impulses. Live for the moment. Do what’s expedient. Lie, cheat, steal, deceive, manipulate—but don’t get caught. In an ultimately meaningless universe, what possible difference could it make?

Benjamin Franklin once suggested that a newcomer to a neighbourhood ask a new neighbour to do him or her a favour, citing an old maxim: He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged. In Franklin’s opinion, asking someone for something (not too extreme, obviously) was the most useful and immediate invitation to social interaction. Such asking on the part of the newcomer provided the neighbour with an opportunity to show him- or herself as a good person, at first encounter.

RULE 8 / TELL THE TRUTH—OR, AT LEAST, DON'T LIE

Taking the easy way out or telling the truth—those are not merely two different choices. They are different pathways through life. They are utterly different ways of existing.

Typical calculated ends might include “to impose my ideological beliefs,” “to prove that I am (or was) right,” “to appear competent,” “to ratchet myself up the dominance hierarchy,” “to avoid responsibility” (or its twin, “to garner credit for others’ actions”), “to be promoted,” “to attract the lion’s share of attention,” “to ensure that everyone likes me,” “to garner the benefits of martyrdom,” “to justify my cynicism,” “to rationalize my antisocial outlook,” “to minimize immediate conflict,” “to maintain my naïveté,” “to capitalize on my vulnerability,” “to always appear as the sainted one,” or (this one is particularly evil) “to ensure that it is always my unloved child’s fault.” These are all examples of what Sigmund Freud’s compatriot, the lesser-known Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, called “life-lies.”

What did she know about her fifty-two-year-old self, when still a teenager? Even now, many years later, she has only the vaguest, lowest-resolution idea of her post-work Eden. She refuses to notice. What did her life mean, if that initial goal was wrong? She’s afraid of opening Pandora’s box, where all the troubles of the world reside. But hope is in there, too. Instead, she warps her life to fit the fantasies of a sheltered adolescent.

A naively formulated goal transmutes, with time, into the sinister form of the life-lie.

If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself. That does not only mean that you suppress who you are, although it also means that. It means that so much of what you could be will never be forced by necessity to come forward. This is a biological truth, as well as a conceptual truth. When you explore boldly, when you voluntarily confront the unknown, you gather information and build your renewed self out of that information. That is the conceptual element. However, researchers have recently discovered that new genes in the central nervous system turn themselves on when an organism is placed (or places itself) in a new situation. These genes code for new proteins. These proteins are the building blocks for new structures in the brain. This means that a lot of you is still nascent, in the most physical of senses, and will not be called forth by stasis. You have to say something, go somewhere and do things to get turned on. And, if not…you remain incomplete, and life is too hard for anyone incomplete.

If you’re lucky, and you fail, and you try something new, you move ahead. If that doesn’t work, you try something different again. A minor modification will suffice in fortunate circumstances. It is therefore prudent to begin with small changes, and see if they help. Sometimes, however, the entire hierarchy of values is faulty, and the whole edifice has to be abandoned. The whole game must be changed.

Error necessitates sacrifice to correct it, and serious error necessitates serious sacrifice. To accept the truth means to sacrifice—and if you have rejected the truth for a long time, then you’ve run up a dangerously large sacrificial debt.

“Did what I want happen? No. Then my aim or my methods were wrong. I still have something to learn.”

That is the voice of authenticity.

“Did what I want happen? No. Then the world is unfair. People are jealous, and too stupid to understand. It is the fault of something or someone else.”

That is the voice of inauthenticity.

It is not too far from there to “they should be stopped” or “they must be hurt” or “they must be destroyed.” Whenever you hear about something incomprehensibly brutal, such ideas have manifested themselves.

it is necessary to aim at your target, however traditional, with your eyes wide open. You have a direction, but it might be wrong. You have a plan, but it might be ill-formed. You may have been led astray by your own ignorance—and, worse, by your own unrevealed corruption. You must make friends, therefore, with what you don’t know, instead of what you know. You must remain awake to catch yourself in the act. You must remove the beam in your own eye, before you concern yourself with the mote in your brother’s. And in this way, you strengthen your own spirit, so it can tolerate the burden of existence, and you rejuvenate the state.

Nietzsche said that a man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate.

You are by no means only what you already know. You are also all that which you could know, if you only would. Thus, you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are. You should never give up the better that resides within for the security you already have—and certainly not when you have already caught a glimpse, an undeniable glimpse, of something beyond.

In His human form, Christ sacrificed himself voluntarily to the truth, to the good, to God. In consequence, He died and was reborn. The Word that produces order from chaos sacrifices everything, even itself, to God. That single sentence, wise beyond comprehension, sums up Christianity.

Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us. In such cases, we might never recover or, if we do, we change a lot.

Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be. The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity.

If you bend everything totally, blindly and willfully towards the attainment of a goal, and only that goal, you will never be able to discover if another goal would serve you, and the world, better. It is this that you sacrifice if you do not tell the truth. If, instead, you tell the truth, your values transform as you progress. If you allow yourself to be informed by the reality manifesting itself, as you struggle forward, your notions of what is important will change. You will reorient yourself, sometimes gradually, and sometimes suddenly and radically. Imagine: you

Perhaps it is better to conceptualize it this way: Everyone needs a concrete, specific goal—an ambition, and a purpose—to limit chaos and make intelligible sense of his or her life. But all such concrete goals can and should be subordinated to what might be considered a meta-goal, which is a way of approaching and formulating goals themselves. The meta-goal could be “live in truth.”

If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise.

RULE 9 / Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

Memory is a tool. Memory is the past’s guide to the future. If you remember that something bad happened, and you can figure out why, then you can try to avoid that bad thing happening again. That’s the purpose of memory. It’s not “to remember the past.” It’s to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over. I thought,

If I had been the adherent of a left-wing, social-justice ideology, I would have told her the first story. If I had been the adherent of a conservative ideology, I would have told her the second. And her responses after having been told either the first or the second story would have proved to my satisfaction and hers that the story I had told her was true—completely, irrefutably true. And that would have been advice.

You can be pretty smart if you can just shut up.

RULE 10 / Be precise in your speech

We see rocks, because we can throw them, and clouds, because they can rain on us, and apples, to eat, and the automobiles of other people, to get in our way and annoy us. We see tools and obstacles, not objects or things.

Here’s the terrible truth about such matters: every single voluntarily unprocessed and uncomprehended and ignored reason for marital failure will compound and conspire and will then plague that betrayed and self-betrayed woman for the rest of her life. The same goes for her husband. All she—he—they—or we—must do to ensure such an outcome is nothing: don’t notice, don’t react, don’t attend, don’t discuss, don’t consider, don’t work for peace, don’t take responsibility. Don’t confront the chaos and turn it into order—just wait, anything but naïve and innocent, for the chaos to rise up and engulf you instead.

Why refuse to specify, when specifying the problem would enable its solution? Because to specify the problem is to admit that it exists. Because to specify the problem is to allow yourself to know what you want, say, from friend or lover—and then you will know, precisely and cleanly, when you don’t get it, and that will hurt, sharply and specifically.

But you will learn something from that, and use what you learn in the future—and the alternative to that single sharp pain is the dull ache of continued hopelessness and vague failure and the sense that time, precious time, is slipping by.

RULE 11 / Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

Women have a strong proclivity to marry across or up the economic dominance hierarchy. They prefer a partner of equal or greater status. This holds true cross-culturally.184 The same does not hold, by the way, for men, who are perfectly willing to marry across or down (as the Pew data indicate), although they show a preference for somewhat younger mates.

Any hierarchy creates winners and losers. The winners are, of course, more likely to justify the hierarchy and the losers to criticize it. But (1) the collective pursuit of any valued goal produces a hierarchy (as some will be better and some worse at that pursuit no matter what it is) and (2) it is the pursuit of goals that in large part lends life its sustaining meaning.

We experience almost all the emotions that make life deep and engaging as a consequence of moving successfully towards something deeply desired and valued. The price we pay for that involvement is the inevitable creation of hierarchies of success, while the inevitable consequence is difference in outcome. Absolute equality would therefore require the sacrifice of value itself—and then there would be nothing worth living for.

We might instead note with gratitude that a complex, sophisticated culture allows for many games and many successful players, and that a well-structured culture allows the individuals that compose it to play and to win, in many different fashions.

There are only two major reasons for resentment: being taken advantage of (or allowing yourself to be taken advantage of), or whiny refusal to adopt responsibility and grow up. If you’re resentful, look for the reasons.

Agreeable, compassionate, empathic, conflict-averse people (all those traits group together) let people walk on them, and they get bitter. They sacrifice themselves for others, sometimes excessively, and cannot comprehend why that is not reciprocated.

RULE 12 / Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

I started with my thoughts about my son. She had asked, like everyone in her situation, “Why my husband? Why me? Why this?” My realization of the tight interlinking between vulnerability and Being was the best answer I had for her. I told her an old Jewish story, which I believe is part of the commentary on the Torah. It begins with a question, structured like a Zen koan. Imagine a Being who is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. What does such a Being lack?211 The answer? Limitation. If you are already everything, everywhere, always, there is nowhere to go and nothing to be. Everything that could be already is, and everything that could happen already has. And it is for this reason, so the story goes, that God created man. No limitation, no story. No story, no Being. That idea has helped me deal with the terrible fragility of Being.

Perhaps that is true prayer: the question, “What have I done wrong, and what can I do now to set things at least a little bit more right?”

#12 Rules for Life #books

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driftwork · 4 years

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Tokyo 6, leaving, becoming exile...

The transference is complete, the counter-transference is absolute [...] He left them sitting on the sofa before vanishing into Kenzo's office to make phone calls and arrange for additional paperwork, passports and bags. KW, Kenzo's wife looked at their tired faces. She had never seen Park looking so tired [or is that actually relaxed?]. She offered tea and perhaps something to eat ? Tea would be wonderful she said taking off her leather jacket revealing the gun in the shoulder holster, and placing the other one on the table. She went into the kitchen to prepare tea and some food, she decided snacks were required. Taking some cashew nuts in a bowl to the table. She heated the food in the microwave. Whilst she was there waiting for the water to simmer Hasimon was escorted into the kitchen. Water drips from the escorts long coat onto the floor. His heavy black boots leave trace marks on the tiled floor. It is raining heavily, water drumming on the glass windows in the roof. <there are a lot of guards around the house.> < Yes.> < Have some tea with us. He was concerned. > [Reported speech has become so unreliable that nobody can understand it] [...] A child has been sacrificed. It is normal in human societies for parents in a war to sacrifice their children in their own interests. Sometimes they refuse to die and more rarely they become a war machine.

The war machine was asleep on the sofa, she was leaning against him her head on his shoulder, his arm around her. KW places the tray carefully on the table, the cups clink. She wakes up and reflexively reaches for the gun. Stops when she sees who it is. She looks at her mother and k's wife talking in soft voices about him and her. She looks at his sleeping face. <speak quietly, he's exhausted, today was especially hard for him.> <we have to go, the council left us no choice at all.> she paused for a second <we don't know if it will work, we will see what happens.> Her mother said many things, some deliberately and some reluctantly. [little of interest. cut.] They talked about the causes of the events of the past few days. She didn't really understand what she was saying and was amused to discover that she didn't really care. Her allegiances and her actual unconscious desires had changed. He woke up. And looked at H. <Hello again, oh tea.> He took a cup and lent back against the sofa cushions, she leaned forward. Photons streamed from the lighting a laminar flow, a figure of chaos { ✵ ~ Chaos}, the photons pouring out in parallel, without mixing or sticking to each other. A chaotic stream . He smiled at her <I'm so tired. So pleased we aren't running tonight.> The two women looked at him, the casual way he implied he would just go with her whatever happened. <I've given the house and its contents to seo, her daughter and D. Everything else my brother can have.> she looked at him H. wants to speak and justify what happened, to justify her sacrificing, but there are no sentences that would have meaning to the 'we' she is looking at in front of her. <There is nothing to say, after what happened there is nothing that can be said.> Park sits up, tries to pour some more tea and then goes into the kitchen with her to make some more tea. He is thinking about the flows of capital that are reestablishing themselves as the violence they had passed through ended. He eats the warm dumplings. H said to him that < the politics had broken down and then the war and after a few days everyone has tried to step back.> [...] <... my mother thinks and says I am a psychopath...> she says looking at him. As she sits down with the additional tea. H and KW freeze on hearing her speak. Hearing her dismissal of the political explanations and descriptions. <That makes you a psychopath in love and it makes me someone who loves one.> <Can't they? A psychotherapist I know explained it to me once. We can ask her about this when we get to London.> <So my mother and family must be wrong.> < Yes, most people are confused over what a psychopath is... I liked the hotels we stayed in. especially the literary hotel. I would have like(d) to stay in the middle eastern room or perhaps utopia […] Nobody who sacrifices their child has the right to use the concept of psychopath> There are always moments in a life when you wonder about forgiveness, but how can you forgive the collusion that took place between your parents and the others to try and kill you?

Magrid walks past to accept each of the deliveries. He inspects the documents and the bags at the dining room table. He tells them he has arranged a police escort to accompany them to the airport tomorrow. These are legal passports, tickets. Bank accounts for you, he smiles at her, move the money as quickly as possible in case the council decides to act badly, its from a legal slush fund so you don't need to hide it. These credit cards each have a prepaid #100K limit, the paperwork comes here so when you've spent it destroy them. These are diplomatic bags, you are technically both diplomats. This will be your permanent identity. (To him he says) you should probably destroy this when you get there. She looked at the bundles of money in the bag. Why so much Magrid ? By giving you this legal money I can launder a great deal of money without risk. Not sure I should give it to Kenzo though. He looks at him. Does anyone apart from Park know your name ? Only one other person. [let me remind that: Reported Speech is the most unreliable use of language.] Others come under the cover of rain and darkness and express regret at what has happened. Hasimon finds herself watching her daughters hand which always holds the gun when others are in the house. […] The gulf between the war machine on the sofa and the others in the house is unbridgeable, the disagreement is absolute. What kind of place is this ? Does mortality make them free to leave, to be deserted without caring? She sits holding the gun, sitting like a fate, without reason, consideration of pretext... In some way it is incomprehensible for they have pushed themselves through the middle of the capital, forcing a response from the other that suits them. They have to be accompanied, guided into exile before their are more of them. Acting on the bodies of those who would stop them. Their decision to sacrifice one child had created a monster. Only their exile will allow the space to be reterritorialized. They talk easily, mostly to one another, even when others are there. she describes her house to him drawing the floor-plan on sheets of paper with a soft leaded pencil. She explains the safe room, the hidden exits and gun safes, the rooms nobody has ever been in but her, the library, the walled garden/courtyard, the garden behind the house. He tells her he wishes he could have seen it. H wonders how she knew so little about this house she had visited but never seen anything but the surface. She tells him about the cars in the garage, boring he said teasing her, we'll get you something more interesting in exile. It has stopped raining and through the window the fountain in the garden can now be seen cascading down the clear angled glass. H feels excluded even as she stoically accepts that the the distance is unbridgeable, as she talks with KW she recognizes that even without exile, even if her daughter had been allowed to stay with this man in her house it is doubtful that trust and speech would have been possible. He is eating pieces of chocolate off the plate of deserts, she looks amused (how can this amuse her H thinks with sidelong glances at KW who is watching fascinated as he eats a piece of chocolate and ginger) is that good she asks ? He looks warmly at her, delicious. She takes the plate away from him and takes a handful of pieces which she puts on her saucer. You have successfully corrupted me. Putting the plate back on the table. She had never known it would feel like this. He had entered her life by accident, transformed her world, opened something. Rescuing her from becoming sacrifice by simply being. It was only earlier that her devotion to the council, to her family had ended. Worldly happiness had become more important than faith, than the state she had spent her life in service to. That life faded before sitting on the sofa with a gun and a person who would not betray her. She laughed and ate a piece of chocolate. <unreliably, she asked through chocolate> Are you going to be alright mum/mom/mother/Hasimon in this situation? We will all be as the council is scared because of what happened, the level of uncontrolled violence shocked them. [good for the wind, good for the night, good for the cold good for the march and the bullets and the mud, good for legends, good for the stations of the cross, good for the thirty year olds he thought]. [...] We'll be fine in London. [..] They will watch you (KW said.) Surveillance is fine, tell them if they speak first I may kill them all. Peace may be what they think they have, but i have only war. [A people without myths is already dead, the function of that particular class of legends known as myths, sitting on the sofa together is to express dramatically the ideology under which a society lives. What is the destiny of the warrior, if not to stand in disregard of, in defiance of sovereignty and sacrifice. To leave,,, He sits beside having become in a few short days a figure of ideology and smiles..] I will tell {/} Magrid and K that this is the rule. She looks at him smiling. [Is she not the fierce warrior Horace, a fourth Horace perhaps, trying not to kill her mother, sister or brother before the gates of rome ?] Disorder is ending. Magrid shows H out. I thought you might show her what sacrifice meant. Through a wintery smile, I considered it, but it might have stained the furniture. At some point, perhaps midnight or later they goto bed/ [description of the guest bedroom(cut)] [Kenzo sat on the sofa next to KW. Magrid drinking shots of honey vodka. He opened the can of water. I thought they should have apologized to her as I proposed. None of what happened was her fault. The council members political-economy caused the violence to erupt, it began with bad decisions, just as it ended with bad ones. H argued for sacrifice. Magrid slept on the sofa. ]

He leaves his luggage in the Tokyo.exe. The luggage is examined, the books added to the library, everything else is incinerated. In a few weeks they bill his credit card.

[The police, accompanied by an unspeaking Magrid and followed by a car of gangsters escort them to the gate for the flight, which takes off immediately after they are put on the plane. They are the last to board the plane and the first to leave it.]

All [human] made things are composites of actions and decisions that reach back into deep time. All humans are composites of actions and decisions that reach back into deep time. It is a deterministic universe....

#hotel stories #tokyo story #fiction #destiny of the warrior #representation #ideology and discourse

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allaboutquinceaneras · 6 years

Text

All dressed up or somewhere to go: The modern choices of a Mexican quinceanera; The celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday is among the most cherished, and costly, cultural traditions in Mexico. But as with many things in this country, it’s changing quickly

MEXICO CITY – The lines were drawn, and the sides were dug in deep, the yawning gulf between their positions near unbridgeable. Gisela Quiroz imagined her daughter Karen Rodriguez in Canada, visiting waterfalls, walking city streets, chattering in newly fluent English. Karen pictured herself in a dress of blue tulle and rhinestones, presiding over 250 guests as a band played in an elegant event hall in their hometown of Veracruz.

Touring the vast, glitterencrusted hallways of the 15Fest exposition in Mexico City not long ago, the family had a conflict to resolve. Would Karen commemorate her quinceanera, her 15th birthday, with a party or an educational trip abroad?

Karen herself observed with a desultory shrug that her parents hold the veto - “they’re paying.”

But as she raked her eyes over the commercial exhibit of all things quinceanera - a welter of tiered cakes and shimmying dance troupes and flocks of live models wearing voluminous sparkling gowns - there was a certain set to Karen’s slender jaw that suggested this battle would not be so easily resolved.

The quinceanera is among Mexico’s more cherished cultural traditions, but like much else in this country, it is changing quickly. More and more girls are opting to take a trip, for example, instead of marking the milestone with a party, for which a middle-class family typically pays the equivalent of about $15,000. A whole section of the recent exhibition at the World Trade Centre was devoted to tour companies.

Rogelio Salgado, the director of Ola Tours, who spent some time trying to persuade Ms. Quiroz about the merits of a European excursion (while Karen drummed her fingers on her knees), said that when the company first opened nearly 50 years ago, it was just a handful of wealthy girls who chose Europe. Then the practice spread slowly to the middle class - but today it’s low-income families who are most keen to forgo the “presentation to society” and instead make sure their girls see the world, he said.

“In Mexico today, the poor are not so poor and the traditions are not so traditional,” Mr. Salgado drawled, keeping one practised eye on the crowd as he looked for mothers or fathers who might be susceptible to his pitch.

It runs like this: first, that a party is for just a day - just a few hours, really - whereas the effects of an educational excursion will be felt for a lifetime.

Second: “A trip is for your daughter, a party is for the all the people who are invited.” He means, not to put too fine a point on it, gossip: everyone who’s invited (and plenty of people who aren’t) will talk about what kind of food, decorations and entertainment you have at your party, and how they stack up against all the others; the only person who knows how her trip went is your daughter.

Third, money: His 27-day trip to Europe costs 8,000 (about $12,400). “For a party, you will spend 10,000 or more. For a trip, you know what you’re spending once you sign the contract. For the party, you will spend more and more and you don’t stop spending until the lights are turned off in the ballroom.”

15Fest offered parents a breathtaking array of opportunities to spend money. There were the standards, of course - food and music and gilt-spackled invitations - and also the new necessities. “You have options with photography - you can get a drone to film the whole party,” explained Margarita Leon, who was in charge of sales for 15Fest, “and you can rent a venue that comes with a social-media influencer.” Yes: For a price, an event hall will include a YouTube star or an Instagram sensation who will live-hashtag the party.

But the centrepiece of the event, of course, is the dress (or dresses - some birthday girls will change into as many as five over the evening.) The dress sales stands were the biggest in the hall (they run the designers as much as $35,000 for the weekend exhibit). One had a dozen live models; when a parent signed a contract for a dress, and put down the 30-percent deposit, all of the models gathered around the daughter and one placed a tiara on her head as they chanted in a chorus, “Princesas si existean!” - princesses do exist! Diana Ramoneda, 16, was modelling a royal-blue dress studded with rhinestones. She didn’t have a quinceanera last year, opting instead to take a short trip with her dad on her actual birthday, and bank the promise of a longer one to the Caribbean this year. She has no regrets - “a party is only for one day and a trip you remember forever,” said Ms. Ramoneda, who hopes to go to medical school and become a surgeon. But that meant she never got the dress, and so she was delighted when a photographer friend hooked her up with the modelling gig.

“It’s really not that uncomfortable,” she said, expertly shoving her giant skirt out of the way of a passerby. “Actually, the truth is that I love it.”

Ms. Ramoneda was modelling for Amaraby, one of the highest-end design houses in Mexico. Designer Amaraby Munguia presided over a huge silvery stand, wearing a harried air and dark suit decorated with a rhinestone Napoleonic broach on its breast pocket.

Amaraby (he uses just the one name), 34, saved up to do a course at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, with ambitions of life as an evening-wear designer.

Whipping out his phone, he showed off pictures of the clothes he makes that are closest to his heart - angular, stark evening dresses in greys and gilts and whites - the complete opposite, in short, of his quinceanera dresses. “This is the passion of girls in Mexico,” he said resignedly, “so I do what I can to make them look as good as I can.”

He draws customers of Mexican origin from the United States; that Saturday, he had one from New York - a girl who had decided her dress must be embroidered with crystals. It will cost US$2,700. “She had an even higher budget, but I refused to go higher - I thought it was a barbarity,” he said. Amaraby does his best to steer his young customers into dresses that will be flattering. “I give them advice - and they listen - they trust me, because I make them look good,” he said.

“But, look, if a girl has a dream, she will follow it and you have to make it look as good as possible. You do what you can.”

Outside the bank of fittingrooms at his stand, Samantha Gaytan, 14, was frowning at her reflection in the mirror, tugging at the corseted bodice of a peach dress with a vast tulle skirt. She took a few pictures with her phone, then wrestled her way back into the cubicle to take it off.

“I liked it, but I didn’t love it,” she said, when she emerged from the cubicle. Too pink? Too puffy? No. Too minimalist. “I want more,” she said. Her mother, Ana Valdez, nodded with understanding. An Amaraby salesperson assured her that they could make that dress for her - same colour (“it’s coral,” Samantha said firmly) but bigger skirt.

Samantha is expecting 200 people at her party, and she and her parents are in agreement about the event. “It’s also about the process behind the party,” said Ms. Valdez, who is a secretary at the American Express headquarters in the capital - about outings like their visit to the expo. “You visit lots of event venues, you see lots of dances and performances - you do a procession in convertible cars, in your dress, on La Reforma [a central boulevard in the city] and it really cements your friendships.” She’s been saving money for the party for the past six months, and her brother will help pay, Ms. Valdez said.

Now, Samantha has 10 months to plan. “You have your dreams and expectations and then you have to make it happen,” she said, the businesslike tone creeping back into her voice.

At the next stand over, Brenda Meza, 13, was gazing wistfully at a dress made of rainbow tulle. At US$1,250, it will gobble up a chunk of the budget set by her mother, Elizabeta, a bank clerk. But her aunt Guadalupe Meza was egging them on. “She’s only going to turn 15 once in her life!” she said. “Our daughter is becoming a woman!”

Brenda will wear the rainbow dress only one night, but her aunt pointed out that she still has her own, from 28 years ago, in her closet, and it makes her happy every time she looks at it.

In the Meza family, the conflict was not around whether to have the party, but what kind it should be. “A lot of my friends don’t want quinceaneras - because they don’t want their family and their friends in the same place,” said Brenda, who has blue braces and lanky limbs. She wants a Harry Potter theme, and there is a debate about music: Brenda wants English pop, her aunt said with an eye roll of her own - Justin Bieber and the like.

Brenda, protesting, attempted to explain: Parties these days aren’t about the community and society, they’re about being with your friends. Her aunt tsked. Elizabeta interrupted. “What matters is that she’s happy and has fun.”

The Quiroz-Rodriguez family, meanwhile, was touring the booths. Karen, in a jaunty headband with a bow, was developing a negotiating position - party and trip. A small, affordable party. She had spotted “a reasonable blue dress with a reasonably sized skirt.”

Her mother, however, was unpersuaded. “Three weeks in Canada would be cheaper than a party - there is no cheap party.”

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quinceaneraa101-blog · 6 years

Quote

All dressed up or somewhere to go: The modern choices of a Mexican quinceanera; The celebration of a girl's 15th birthday is among the most cherished, and costly, cultural traditions in Mexico. But as with many things in this country, it's changing quickly Stephanie Nolen Globe & Mail (Toronto, Canada). (Feb. 7, 2018): News: pA12. Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Globe and Mail Inc. http://www.globeandmail.com Full Text: Byline: STEPHANIE NOLEN; Staff MEXICO CITY -- The lines were drawn, and the sides were dug in deep, the yawning gulf between their positions near unbridgeable. Gisela Quiroz imagined her daughter Karen Rodriguez in Canada, visiting waterfalls, walking city streets, chattering in newly fluent English. Karen pictured herself in a dress of blue tulle and rhinestones, presiding over 250 guests as a band played in an elegant event hall in their hometown of Veracruz. Touring the vast, glitterencrusted hallways of the 15Fest exposition in Mexico City not long ago, the family had a conflict to resolve. Would Karen commemorate her quinceanera, her 15th birthday, with a party or an educational trip abroad? Karen herself observed with a desultory shrug that her parents hold the veto - "they're paying." But as she raked her eyes over the commercial exhibit of all things quinceanera - a welter of tiered cakes and shimmying dance troupes and flocks of live models wearing voluminous sparkling gowns - there was a certain set to Karen's slender jaw that suggested this battle would not be so easily resolved. The quinceanera is among Mexico's more cherished cultural traditions, but like much else in this country, it is changing quickly. More and more girls are opting to take a trip, for example, instead of marking the milestone with a party, for which a middle-class family typically pays the equivalent of about $15,000. A whole section of the recent exhibition at the World Trade Centre was devoted to tour companies. Rogelio Salgado, the director of Ola Tours, who spent some time trying to persuade Ms. Quiroz about the merits of a European excursion (while Karen drummed her fingers on her knees), said that when the company first opened nearly 50 years ago, it was just a handful of wealthy girls who chose Europe. Then the practice spread slowly to the middle class - but today it's low-income families who are most keen to forgo the "presentation to society" and instead make sure their girls see the world, he said. "In Mexico today, the poor are not so poor and the traditions are not so traditional," Mr. Salgado drawled, keeping one practised eye on the crowd as he looked for mothers or fathers who might be susceptible to his pitch. It runs like this: first, that a party is for just a day - just a few hours, really - whereas the effects of an educational excursion will be felt for a lifetime. Second: "A trip is for your daughter, a party is for the all the people who are invited." He means, not to put too fine a point on it, gossip: everyone who's invited (and plenty of people who aren't) will talk about what kind of food, decorations and entertainment you have at your party, and how they stack up against all the others; the only person who knows how her trip went is your daughter. Third, money: His 27-day trip to Europe costs 8,000 (about $12,400). "For a party, you will spend 10,000 or more. For a trip, you know what you're spending once you sign the contract. For the party, you will spend more and more and you don't stop spending until the lights are turned off in the ballroom." 15Fest offered parents a breathtaking array of opportunities to spend money. There were the standards, of course - food and music and gilt-spackled invitations - and also the new necessities. "You have options with photography - you can get a drone to film the whole party," explained Margarita Leon, who was in charge of sales for 15Fest, "and you can rent a venue that comes with a social-media influencer." Yes: For a price, an event hall will include a YouTube star or an Instagram sensation who will live-hashtag the party. But the centrepiece of the event, of course, is the dress (or dresses - some birthday girls will change into as many as five over the evening.) The dress sales stands were the biggest in the hall (they run the designers as much as $35,000 for the weekend exhibit). One had a dozen live models; when a parent signed a contract for a dress, and put down the 30-percent deposit, all of the models gathered around the daughter and one placed a tiara on her head as they chanted in a chorus, "Princesas si existean!" - princesses do exist! Diana Ramoneda, 16, was modelling a royal-blue dress studded with rhinestones. She didn't have a quinceanera last year, opting instead to take a short trip with her dad on her actual birthday, and bank the promise of a longer one to the Caribbean this year. She has no regrets - "a party is only for one day and a trip you remember forever," said Ms. Ramoneda, who hopes to go to medical school and become a surgeon. But that meant she never got the dress, and so she was delighted when a photographer friend hooked her up with the modelling gig. "It's really not that uncomfortable," she said, expertly shoving her giant skirt out of the way of a passerby. "Actually, the truth is that I love it." Ms. Ramoneda was modelling for Amaraby, one of the highest-end design houses in Mexico. Designer Amaraby Munguia presided over a huge silvery stand, wearing a harried air and dark suit decorated with a rhinestone Napoleonic broach on its breast pocket. Amaraby (he uses just the one name), 34, saved up to do a course at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, with ambitions of life as an evening-wear designer. Whipping out his phone, he showed off pictures of the clothes he makes that are closest to his heart - angular, stark evening dresses in greys and gilts and whites - the complete opposite, in short, of his quinceanera dresses. "This is the passion of girls in Mexico," he said resignedly, "so I do what I can to make them look as good as I can." He draws customers of Mexican origin from the United States; that Saturday, he had one from New York - a girl who had decided her dress must be embroidered with crystals. It will cost US$2,700. "She had an even higher budget, but I refused to go higher - I thought it was a barbarity," he said. Amaraby does his best to steer his young customers into dresses that will be flattering. "I give them advice - and they listen - they trust me, because I make them look good," he said. "But, look, if a girl has a dream, she will follow it and you have to make it look as good as possible. You do what you can." Outside the bank of fittingrooms at his stand, Samantha Gaytan, 14, was frowning at her reflection in the mirror, tugging at the corseted bodice of a peach dress with a vast tulle skirt. She took a few pictures with her phone, then wrestled her way back into the cubicle to take it off. "I liked it, but I didn't love it," she said, when she emerged from the cubicle. Too pink? Too puffy? No. Too minimalist. "I want more," she said. Her mother, Ana Valdez, nodded with understanding. An Amaraby salesperson assured her that they could make that dress for her - same colour ("it's coral," Samantha said firmly) but bigger skirt. Samantha is expecting 200 people at her party, and she and her parents are in agreement about the event. "It's also about the process behind the party," said Ms. Valdez, who is a secretary at the American Express headquarters in the capital - about outings like their visit to the expo. "You visit lots of event venues, you see lots of dances and performances - you do a procession in convertible cars, in your dress, on La Reforma [a central boulevard in the city] and it really cements your friendships." She's been saving money for the party for the past six months, and her brother will help pay, Ms. Valdez said. Now, Samantha has 10 months to plan. "You have your dreams and expectations and then you have to make it happen," she said, the businesslike tone creeping back into her voice. At the next stand over, Brenda Meza, 13, was gazing wistfully at a dress made of rainbow tulle. At US$1,250, it will gobble up a chunk of the budget set by her mother, Elizabeta, a bank clerk. But her aunt Guadalupe Meza was egging them on. "She's only going to turn 15 once in her life!" she said. "Our daughter is becoming a woman!" Brenda will wear the rainbow dress only one night, but her aunt pointed out that she still has her own, from 28 years ago, in her closet, and it makes her happy every time she looks at it. In the Meza family, the conflict was not around whether to have the party, but what kind it should be. "A lot of my friends don't want quinceaneras - because they don't want their family and their friends in the same place," said Brenda, who has blue braces and lanky limbs. She wants a Harry Potter theme, and there is a debate about music: Brenda wants English pop, her aunt said with an eye roll of her own - Justin Bieber and the like. Brenda, protesting, attempted to explain: Parties these days aren't about the community and society, they're about being with your friends. Her aunt tsked. Elizabeta interrupted. "What matters is that she's happy and has fun." The Quiroz-Rodriguez family, meanwhile, was touring the booths. Karen, in a jaunty headband with a bow, was developing a negotiating position - party and trip. A small, affordable party. She had spotted "a reasonable blue dress with a reasonably sized skirt." Her mother, however, was unpersuaded. "Three weeks in Canada would be cheaper than a party - there is no cheap party."

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Nolen, Stephanie. "All dressed up or somewhere to go: The modern choices of a Mexican quinceanera; The celebration of a girl's 15th birthday is among the most cherished, and costly, cultural traditions in Mexico. But as with many things in this country, it's changing quickly." Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 7 Feb. 2018, p. A12. Infotrac Newsstand, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526575842/STND?u=mont93762&sid=STND&xid=48d6fdce. Accessed 17 May 2018.”

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