tuesday with morrie: a reflection

Carina- Yes, as usual, you are Right about the finer things in life. I did enjoy your recommended read- Tuesdays with Morrie. And No – I did Not bust open the flood gates and burst into tears.The final moments of Morris Schwartz’s life validate the suspicions I have in mine in regards to the subjectivity of what one deems as the “finer things in life”.

Life is not about how fast our cars can go, how big our mansions are, how many country club memberships we hold or when is the bill payment for our platinum credit cards.

Even though most of us identify with the aforementioned urban progressive lifestyle- a truly meaningful Life should Never be as detached and void as such.

We have been very disillusioned by the most grotesque form of peer pressure in which we strive to achieve happiness in knowing that we hold a bigger, better, shinier material yardstick than our neighbor. Thus, doing what we humans do best- we have created a different world for ourselves to reaffirm our beliefs without even questioning the validity of what we believe in; In this virtual world, we try to substitute our happiness with materialism just so we can be consistent with the system of belief of those around us. This in turn draws us into a never ending vicious cycle of trying to quench our materialistic thirst- an insatiable thirst really, due to the fact that materialism and happiness are both mutually exclusive elements of life. This conventional vicious cycle, most unfortunately is one that will eventually rob us of the opportunity to ever realize the true meaning of life – a happy life, without any material demands besides those for sustenance.

Morrie showed me that a good life benefits oneself the least and delights and prioritizes the needs everyone around us the most. It is by learning to give, to care and to love others before ourselves that we will find reconciliation within ourselves. We will never find happiness in stacking ourselves up with the busiest schedule, nor will happiness comes in the form of a brand new Beamer. Temporal happiness maybe. But will we still feel the joy for our Beamer in 15 years? People of our generation could not been more misled. Gen-X’ers revel in cosmetic vanity (in a deeper sense than make ups and boob jobs) and we find exhilaration in the subjugation of others and comfort in getting the approval of others to validate our existence- all of which is sadly, merely our inferiority complex revealing her ugly head. This is why when people achieve all that they ever dream of materialistically, strangely they are bound to feel neither joy or inner peace as they have come to expect. The underlining reason can only be that ignorantly, we have been chasing after the Wrong things in life. Evidently, this further extents to explain the sudden outward implosion in religious group memberships as religions tend to teach her disciples to turn away from material (and also sadly, that gay people and pro-choicers are going to burn in hell while pedophilic priest sits next to the throne of God and watch them burn in laughter – lollipop in one hand and fondling cherubs with another) and spend more time in love and compassion with those around us just as what Morrie had advocated thru out his book.

Before I came to the States, I was a prideful kid brimming with confidence at how well and fast I can learn to manipulate any systems and exploit them to my own personal gains. Non First-class college results? No worries – be active in areas outside nerdy studies and then study hard to prove that I was an all rounder. Crappy looking resume? Learn to speak articulately, be a student leader *Yay!* and represent the country and get my face splashed unashamedly across all major newspapers *DOUBLE Yay!*. Crappy college life? Headed straight to the land of the free, home of the braves, lived free spiritedly without a care and then manipulated the system to stay on for a period 3 times longer than any students are allowed to for 10 times lesser the cost.

I always revel at basking in the fruits of my tactful shrewdness which I know will make me a good whore of a climber of those seemingly daunting yet strangely-familiar corporate ladders- built by nice friendly people who would not hesitate for one second to cheat a 80 year old grandma of her healthcare policy.

However, I have been questioning myself lately, is that all i want out of my life? To look good in front of others? To command respect out of awe? To just get on with life the same way the rest of the world does? or is there really more to life than the conventional lets start a business and make my first million then buy my first Beamer Z4 and then make my 2nd million and then buy my first Ferrari and then make my 3rd million – when does the cycle end? or does it ever?

A handful of Americans who has been living as Morrie did taught me that life is NOT just about material pursuit; it is most importantly about what I can offer to the people around me to make the world a better place. I want to leave a legacy, one that is made out of my personal relationships with people around me rather than one which people, my family, my kids, my friends stare in isolation and detachment after I die and hopefully burn in eternal hell- cos’ I would never want to be next to any pedophiles in heaven.

People die – Relationships, in the words of Morrie – goes on forever.

Relationships with people are just too important to be secondary in life- something which I need to constantly remind myself. I have hurried thru my life, thru conversations; never seem to be able to focus wholeheartedly when I am talking with anyone- always thinking about what I am going to do next. I dread to suffer the irony of being detached from the world around me and only realize the extent of my detachment at the last few months of my life. I want to exude love and be consumed by love from all around me.

I want to live in Love.

Morris Schwartz, Thank you. I pray for the Lord’s grace to be upon you, just as your words are to my stone cold heart.

“-Love each other or perish-”

meant to live

“What is true happiness?” asks Switchfoot frontman Jon Foreman. “Is it a comfortable four-door sedan with tinted windows? Does it mean I have 2 or 3 children and a beautiful wife and live in a great neighborhood? Everyone has their own version of what happiness means, but many of the things we’re going for, and I include myself in this, are absurd. There’s this moment in Jewish scripture, in Ecclesiastes, where it says, ‘Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless.‘”Happy is a Yuppie Word” that takes its title from a 1991 interview Bob Dylan gave to Rolling Stone in which Dylan was asked, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, if he was happy. Dylan replied, “Those are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It’s not happiness or unhappiness, it’s blessed or unblessed.” Foreman bemoans corporate product branding and marketing. “We are the target market / We set the corporate target,” he sings. “That song is about how one of the most beautiful intimate moments in a human’s life is used to sell a can of beer or auto parts. Sex is easier than love.“

My thoughts and sentiments personified thru the music of Switchfoot. There is only so much rage you can have pent up in your system; there is only so much verbal vulgarity to compensate for our losses thru injustices towards us; there is only so much we can chant about our plights; before we realize that there is so much that we could have done with our lives.

Switchfoot reminds me of Rage Against the Machine- without the Rage. I was utterly impressed with their musical purpose and ideals. A band that is for social justice and blinding the world from maddening materialism deserves all my respect and support.

As silly as this sounds, I ‘felt’ the touch of God from their music. It was not so much of the Jesus Christ kind of touch that everyone who has ever gone to church or christian camps would be convinced that they felt. It was more on an inspirational level. Those sort that makes me want to do something substantial with my life that will contribute towards the betterment of society. Social movement has always been an essential part of my purpose in life. A world that is void of poverty, greed and injustice. What have I actually done on my part to improve the state of world?

Nothing.

I feel helpless. Useless. Self-centered. I can’t help but those sentiments haunt me every so frequently. I have experienced so much. I have taken so much from the world, but I am not able to contribute anything to make even a person’s life better.

Switchfoot reminded me of my purpose. Of my ideals. Of everyone besides myself.

I believe that, beyond myself, there is a greater purpose in life. One that is not self-serving. One that is self-sacrificial. We have been brought up in a world whereby self-perservation is the underlining point of utilitarianism. This ought not to be the case. If everyone is more willing to give than to take, then the global disparity would be deservingly, shortlived.

It was funny how when I was just rocking out on the main floor of Switchfoot’s show when something which happened 5 years ago struck my mind. There used to be a high school teacher who brought me into the whole Christianity bit, told me that she had a dream (Christians will love this) in which there was a dude who was sharpening a blunt arrow and I was in her dream. She told me that she was convinced by the prompting of the Holy Spirit that her dream was a vision from the good Lord. I was the blunt arrow and since I was Jesus’ homeboy, the dude was shaping me up for greater purposes in life- hence the sharpening. Nothing short of Hilarious, and I brushed her off as a pyschotic Klan member.

Regardless if her visions were true, I believe that I am indeed being shaped by an invisible hand. No words can fathom my adventure thus far in the United States. Like one end of a beer bong, I am constantly absorbing everything that comes my way.

Someday, like the other end of a beer bong, I will need to give everything back. And when that day comes, I will gladly return everything and even more. Everyone deserves a shot at what I have experienced.

There will not be a beautiful letdown.

a means to an end

Over the weekend, I caught an abstract dance musical performance titled Green Snake in Buto by Lee Swee Keong that personally was very avant-gardely What-the-hell-was-that-All-about?! It was one of those modern dance experimental stuff, well actually it was not really modern for Buto was created by the Japanese back in the late 50’s. Also known as the Dance of Darkness. How pretentious can you get? Apparently very.So we had this dude with his entire body painted in white, looking very ghoulish and scary like one of those evil spirits ripped out of a B-grade Canto horror flick (it’s the Halloween weekend I guess), prancing around the stage frantically to some incorrigible music that sounded equally as mind-boggling. Risking sounding like a complete imbecilic moron, sometimes I wonder at how obscure is the thin red line between art and pretentious rubbish that tries to fake art, really is. It is like looking at a million-dollar Picasso’s masterpiece in a mid-town San Francisco art gallery and inevitably having to entertain the thought that a 5-year-old retarded kid could have painted something similar for two bucks.

And of course we had the usual pompous-ass yuppie above average-income-earning middle class audience attending this productions the same way we would find them in all artsy-futsy performances. And I know for certain that albeit sounding like one, I am not a total idiot. So if I ever wonder was going on in a show, I am pretty damn sure 90% of the attending crowd would have not an inkling of what on earth was going on too. The other 10% fell asleep after the first fifteen minutes.

So that was what happened. I paid twenty bucks to watch a dude doing cool yoga tricks and pulling off seizure-like moves like drunken mentally-unsound hobo around a gigantic abstractly-shaped phallic object planted in the middle of the set. I am just exaggerating, the show was not really that bad but I thought it was too abstract to the point that the audience would have problem interpreting the message that the dance was supposed to convey. Or perhaps, there was no message behind the dance. Maybe it was just a display of spatial manipulation that could be achieved by the creative sleek movement of our body. Yeah right.

In the end of the day, I still don’t get it. Actually I do for some part but I need “guidance” when it comes to understanding why on earth did I just pay my cold hard cash to watch an almost naked freaky-looking dude with a small package (for the record-Not that it mattered to me, I am just saying it in consideration of my friend, Anrie) mess around on stage, when I could have kept my money and look at a crazy hobo messes around for free in town on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

The buto dance was supposed to be a medium thru which the performer integrate nature, reality and life within himself. Or so the program book told me. To shed some light on why I thought the performance was perhaps a tat over-rated- So the show started out in complete darkness and the crazy dude came out holding two willow sticks and walked around the stage slow-mo for a good 15 minutes before he stopped only to mess around again doing body-contorting yoga stunts whereby he turned himself into a caterpillar, made himself looking all scary by sticking out his tongue (his whole body was painted White and eery music was playing in the background all the damn time while this whole shit was goin’ on), and then another dude came out to mess around with a drum and cymbal before the whole show ended with the first dude running in circles for another good 15 minutes, all the while making funny faces that I could not help but to feel he was mocking my intelligence because I had paid good money to watch him mess around the stage in the name of modern dance.

The best part was that everyone clapped vociferously at the end of the show. As if they understood the testy shit that had just been presented to them. Goddamn pretentious pricks. I didn’t clap at all until the musicians came in ‘cos I thought they played some pretty trippy shit. And then I clapped out of charity for the dancers. There were two of them. So 10 bucks a pop. Take money from a Student, would you?!

I do not mean no disrespect for the entire performance. I am very certain that a lot of effort, thoughts and philosophy has been poured into the production. What I do find entertaining and funny to mock is that, beyond all that- could the performance really be nothing more than a piece of shit? Or is avant garde art so subjectively profound and progressive that it allows no room for objective judgments? How would people review this? Apparently according to the program (again), the performer is a critically acclaimed award-winning fellow that could only mean that I am a dumb ass afterall who did not know how to appreciate good art. But what is good art when the meaning is lost to her audience? For a lack of better comparison and my personal fancy for vulgar sexual analogies- it is like telling a chic how great it feels to have a giant penis. Like mine, specifically. They could probably guess it would feel awesome to the point that they would love to walk around naked all the damn time, but they won’t understand the awesomeness of having a Negro dick.

Of course, my analogy makes no sense.

However bad or good the show was, the dude who choreographed the whole thing apparently believes in Zen Buddhism and the whole load of Shinto Japanese philosophical way of life trippy stuff, so that explained alot of those meaningless messin’ around to achieve inner peace stuff on stage. I would really love to know what his dance was all about and because modern dance allows room for subjective interpretations, I would like to know what he would think of my personal interpretations of his show. If I’d ever have the opportunity for a discourse with the dude, I would leave all my mockeries behind because I do have some serious thoughts of his dance.

Given a choice, would I go back? Yes and no. Yes I would go back just to make meaning of the whole shit and No, if I had to choose between watching an almost-naked dude doing a crazy dance and say, watching paint dry.