Trinko's Tangents

From the New York Times:

[E]lopements are no longer confined to black-sheep members of the family who skulk off to a Las Vegas chapel because Mom and Dad do not approve. With the cost of a 200-guest wedding spiraling upward, and many people getting married (and remarried) at ages when they no longer feel a need to be the stars of their Big Day, couples are now considering a table for two as a civilized alternative to 12 months of planning hell.

 

Still, they want the day to be special. This is particularly true in an era when wedding blogs and Facebook photos have made nuptials a public spectacle. Why shell out for another rubber chicken dinner for Aunt Beatrice from Tuscaloosa, when what really matters are the luscious photos capturing the style and pageantry, which can be “liked” and “pinned” by users of social media sites?

 

It is a way to have your wedding cake and eat it, too.

 

“It was almost like a glorified photo shoot for the two of us,” said Ms. Provost, who lives with her husband in San Antonio. “We got to spend the whole day together, just the two of us, which almost made it more meaningful. There wasn’t a distant cousin or mother or girlfriend there adding stress.”

So, the solution to the increasingly insane expectations that weddings be extravagant, stylish affairs is  … skipping inviting people in favor of spending the money on the style?

I’m guilty of loving attending beautiful weddings, where everything is picture-perfect and exquisitely designed.  But it does seem absurd how much money and time so many couples are spending now on just one day. I’ve been to several weddings that were consciously simpler, and were equally joyous.

So, overall, I’m for simpler weddings. But when I envisioned them becoming simpler, it was the swag – the amazing place cards, the unbelievably coordinated interior decoration at the reception, the top-quality food – that I anticipated being axed, not “Aunt Beatrice from Tuscaloosa.”

And the fact that photographers (with an eye to the social media sharing!) are now considered so essential highlights a troubling trend: that weddings are more and more about showing off to, rather than including, the couple’s family, friends, and neighbors.  

Sure, even in your normal wedding with guests, there’s an aspect of show-off-y-ness, but there’s also a recognition that your marriage is an act that changes your relationship to your community, and that brings together two groups that may have been disparate before. Having a public wedding also signals that you understand your marriage, and your love for each other, does not exist in a vacuum; those at your wedding will be the same people who help you take care of your children, who come through when a medical emergency happens, who will offer advice and counsel when there are rough patches in a marriage. Conservatives often talk about how families are the foundations of community life, and that’s true, but it’s also true that many families are fortified by the help those outside their immediate family provide.

But primarily, this story galls me because it’s another instance of materialism trumping the personal. (Yes, even if there’s good taste involved, materialism can exist. Sorry, hipsters.) Aunt Beatrice, whatever her faults, should be worth more than the better placecards or flower arrangements. And people should be valued for their own sake, for what they can bring when they’re actually present, not for their abilities to “like” and admire and ooh and ahh (and envy) your photos on social media sites.

We need a new book category: tall tales.

A couple of pieces I read this week – one about Malcolm Gladwell and one about David Foster Wallace – accused those writers of making up parts of a biographical story and an essay respectively.  The Gladwell saga caught my interest particularly because it was about a story he told at Moth, an organization in New York and a few other cities that holds storytelling-fests, where ten people randomly chosen tell a tale about a given topic. The stories, say the Moth organizers, are supposed to be true.  Gladwell’s story wasn’t fully, and he explained it to Slate this way:

“No one fact checks Moth stories, or expects them to stand up to skeptical scrutiny,” he e-mails. His story, while based on real events, “is not supposed to be ‘true,’ in the sense that a story in the New York Times is supposed to be ‘true.’” He continues, “It’s a yarn. In this case, it’s an elaborate joke: it’s a send-up of the seriousness with which journalists take themselves.”

As semi-regular Moth attendee, I think Gladwell’s accurate in his account of how “true” the stories are. They are no doubt somewhat true, but they also seem too pat, have too neat plot twists, and too satisfying endings to be believably fully accurate.

But they’re not exactly fiction, either.  (Just think of all the fictional books that have the “no character or event was based on any living or true thing” kind of clause in the beginning!) Yet we really don’t have any category for these in-between tales, even though there is a type of richness which is unique to this format, this blend of truth and fiction.

For instance, I was talking to my sisters recently, and they brought up the fact that an old family story isn’t true.  In the way we tell the story, my siblings and I were with my dad at a zoo in the Chicago suburbs.  The ground was covered in snow, and we were the only non-employees there, and us kids – Californians all, temporarily transported to this horrible land of snow and ice for a few weeks – were bitterly complaining about how insanely cold it was, and why were we at an outdoors zoo, and how could this be a reasonable idea when nobody else was here? And so on and so on, as we all crunched our way through the snowy paths, stopping as my dad took pictures of the few animals that were out. After a little while, we reached the bears section of the zoo, and came to the polar bears exhibit. And you know who was indoors on that snowy, cold day? The polar bears. We had been dragged to the zoo on a day that was too cold for the polar bears to stay outside.

That’s how we told the story.

The reality was a smidgen more complicated.  Yes, we went to zoo, and yes, there was much complaining.  And as a matter of fact, the polar bear exhibit was empty. Immediately, we seized on it as proof that we had been right that it was far too cold to go to the zoo. Until – and here’s the killer – someone spotted a sign that informed zoo visitors that the polar bears were indoors because of some medical condition (possibly something pregnancy-related, although I can’t remember for sure anymore). Whatever it was, it wasn’t because it was so cold that even polar bears shouldn’t be outdoors.

But here’s the thing about what actually happened: it’s no story.

In the version we tell (with the polar bears having been inside because it was too cold), there is a resolution, an ending. The tension between us kids and our dad, the ongoing war of words over whether it was horrifyingly mad or completely reasonable to visit an outdoors zoo on a cold, wintry day when no one else was mad enough to visit (yes, I’m tipping my hand on which side of the issue I was, and remain, on) simply continued. Nothing changed. No new evidence emerged. No climax ever occurred. If I bring this up next holiday, there will be a spirited – although friendly – dispute over who was right.

But it’s not exactly fiction, either, this tall tale I tell. The characters are real. So are many of the details leading up to the ending.  Anyway, as I was thinking about how realistic it would be for “tall tales” to become a new book/magazine piece genre, it occurred to me that people probably don’t want to know tall tales aren’t fully true. Just look at the reality show explosion. Details fritter out about how these shows aren’t really “real” (judges aren’t allowed to ax this candidate with the plot-moving, diva personality! All the cast members are drunk on this show in order to get them to reveal everything and be so dramatic!), yet they keep getting called “reality” shows, and people seem more comfortable believing they’re more true than staged.

And I imagine most people hearing tall tales, whether it be at Moth or from a family of over-imaginers, don’t really want to be told outright that what they’re hearing is only partially true.

Why is that?

For one thing, tall tales take the material out of real life – the characters, the settings, even many of the incidents – and transform it. The messiness of life, where events seem chaotic and often disconnected each other, is carefully arranged into a beginning, middle, and end.  Suddenly, life is comprehensible in a way that it generally isn’t.  And while many of us wonder what the purpose was in a certain thing happening, a story delves into the mystery – and comes up with, if not a full answer, at least the beginning of one. (Incident A happened because it led to incident B which led to this climatic, revealing moment … ) And then, too, there is that spark that there just isn’t often enough in real life. (How zanily wonderful – and validating! – would it have been if it had been too cold for polar bears to be outside that day?) Finally, there is kind of truth in tall tales there isn’t in non-fiction: the same sort of truth that is present in caricature drawings, for instance. Sometimes we only see something clearly when it is exaggerated.

Ultimately, I suppose in some way, these exaggerations, these half-true/half-false sagas are fairy tales. They speak to our longing for experiences and lives richer, more comprehensible, more interesting, and more dramatic than the ones we lead. And because they involve real characters and details, we feel more justified – and less absurd – in hoping that someday our own lives will have more in common with these tales than they currently do. We don’t want to find out what was made up because we want to believe that it’s possible our own lives can eventually be understood and ordered and meaningful.

Todd G. Buchholz and Victoria Buchholz take to the New York Times to deplore the fact that young adults aren’t jet-setting around the country like their parents did:

[S]ometime in the past 30 years, someone has hit the brakes and Americans — particularly young Americans — have become risk-averse and sedentary. The timing is terrible. With an 8.3 percent unemployment rate and a foreclosure rate that would grab the attention of the Joads, young Americans are less inclined to pack up and move to sunnier economic climes.

 

The likelihood of 20-somethings moving to another state has dropped well over 40 percent since the 1980s, according to calculations based on Census Bureau data. The stuck-at-home mentality hits college-educated Americans as well as those without high school degrees. According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of young adults living at home nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008, before the Great Recession hit. Even bicycle sales are lower now than they were in 2000. Today’s generation is literally going nowhere. This is the Occupy movement we should really be worried about.

Bicycle sales decrease aside (those crazy kids!), I was taken aback by the “moving around the country is good” theme that pervaded most of the article. Is it? I could be a poster child for these writers – a California native who has lived in D.C. and New York after college — but I’m not sure that’s an ideal. I moved for jobs, and I do think the Buchholzes are right to stress that if you’re not finding work in your home town area, you should consider moving.

But the Buchholzes argument is more about the American spirit than economic necessity:

We are a nation of movers and shakers. Pilgrims leapt onto leaky boats to get here. The Lost Generation chased Hemingway and Gertrude Stein to Paris. The Greatest Generation signed up to ship out to fight Nazis in Germany or the Japanese imperial forces in the Pacific. The ’60s kids joined the Peace Corps.

 

But Generation Y has become Generation Why Bother. 

These examples are somewhat curious – how many Americans exactly partied in Paris in the 20’s? – but that aside, is it the moving around that was so American, or was it something more? For a long time, economic opportunity was tied to land: if you wanted to prosper, getting farm land (or access to farmers who didn’t have a general store) made sense. But we don’t have a land-based economy anymore. Risk-taking, a quality stressed in the piece, and entrepreneurialism doesn’t necessarily require a move, especially with the internet making it so that many businesses no longer need to have the employer, employees, and customers be in the same location.

I’ve loved getting to know two different regions, and learning about the strange, cultural ways of these East Coast denizens who excessively monogram their often-striped attire (and can’t be coaxed into peppering their sentences with “dude”s and “hella”s). But I also miss my family and friends from California, and the ability to conveniently and cheaply visit them – and do things (see a movie, shop, or even grab coffee) with them. I miss, too, the area itself, its culture and its ways, and the fact that none of it seems strange to me when I’m there.

I don’t regret the decisions I made. But moving across the country involves trade-offs; it’s not a win-win.  And with so many signs that community life is splintering in the United States already (such as fewer people getting involved in organizations, going to church, and becoming friends with their neighbors), I’m inclined to think that one of the last things we may need is more people hopping around the nation. 

World, I get it: you think it’s batshit crazy — as in Britney Spears shaving her entire head was nowhere near as crazy as this is — that practicing Catholics don’t approve of contraception.

Thanks to debate moderating whiz Diane Sawyer, mandate maestro President Obama, culture warrior Rick Santorum and now his sidekick Foster Friess, anybody with a view on contraception has been given that most precious gift – a news angle (I’m being relevant!)  – to go on at length about their views on contraception.

And they have.

And the consensus is that it is unbelievable and amazing and oh, too, too amusing that anyone could still oppose contraception.

I’m not going to go into a defense of the Catholic Church’s teachings on contraception here.  (If you’re genuinely curious, check out this and this and this.)

But I would ask this: do we really want to become a society that easily and without qualm, laughs at any religious beliefs we consider ridiculous?

Creationism. Mormon underwear. Holy cows. And contraception opposition.

How exactly do we become decent people by laughing at any or all of those?

I think evolution occurred, have never thought of underwear as spiritually significant, and ate beef pad thai just yesterday.  And I think all of those topics (and contraception) should be topics debated and discussed. It’s good to have spirited, civil arguments about what’s true and what’s false.

But just laughing at something is a cop-out – and culturally corrosive.

Unless you are an atheist, you believe that there either is or could be something supernatural out there. And if you grant that, then you should grant there is going to be weirdness. There will be peculiarities, and oddities, and strange things and bizarre things. And that’s the way it should be.

Religion is about seeking the divine. And in case you’ve never seen a reality show, had a sibling, or well, interacted with another member of the human species, human beings are not exactly a godly lot. So if you’re trying to bridge the divide between a very imperfect and flawed human being and a divine being, it’s going to be a bit rocky.  Finite vs. infinite. Flawed vs. perfect. Born vs. uncreated. These are the sort of differences that are a smidgen tricky to traverse without any weirdness occurring.  It is, in a way, tremendously comic that human beings are even striving to become more like the divine and interact with it.

But there is a difference between ruefully laughing over the differences between who we are and who we aspire to be like, and laughing out of smugness and supreme self-confidence in the rightness of one’s positions.  And it’s the latter I’m criticizing. Not just because it’s intellectually lazy and friendship-eradicating, but because it’s so idiotic.

Study the history of ideas, and it’s clear that human beings do not exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to knowing what’s true and what’s false. We thought it was totally duh that the sun rotated around the earth, that living beings could come from non-living beings, and that something called phlogiston chilled out in combustible entities. I’m sure someone who’s actually studied science could come up with many more examples. And it’s not just in scientific matters that your 15^th century or 8^th century smug-ster would look inane about if he argued for them. Past generations have condoned cultural practices (racism and slavery, for starters) that we now recognize as morally abhorrent.

Maybe, a century or two from now, we’ll all be evolution-believing, cow-hating (sorry, California!), secular-underwear-wearing contraceptors. Or maybe not.

The universe – and our moral role within it – is mysterious. Any serious person should realize that, and be properly humble about his own grasp of knowledge and morality.

“I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good,” says Pride and Prejudice heroine Elizabeth Bennet.  In our snark-crammed era, that’s a sentiment that I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing more widely adopted – and extended not just to ideas, but to the people who hold them.

I’m going to miss Borders.

That’s not meaningless schmaltz: as a former employee who got to experience the dark side of Borders (i.e.  regularly waiting ten minutes, off the clock, for a manager to check my purse so I could leave the store sans stolen merchandise, picking up books off the floor and re-shelving at 1 a.m.,), I have no illusions about Borders. Even when I worked there, in 2006 -2007, it was clear the business model had problems.  Every time I told a customer we could order a book for them that we didn’t stock and it would arrive at their local Borders in one to three weeks, I had to struggle to keep a straight face and not burst out laughing at how ridiculous it was that anyone would prefer to do this rather than order it on Amazon. (I’m pretty sure most who agreed did not have internet in their homes, or were uncomfortable with technology.)

What I always enjoyed was the community Borders created.  After 11 a.m.,  the Borders I worked at was always hopping. Scores of kids camped in the manga aisle, sitting on the floor, their backs up against a bookshelf and a stack of ten (or twenty) mangas beside them. Teens ostensibly studying in the café, drifting into the bookstore to get their summer required reading tome.  There were newly pregnant women (one of the first books I memorized the location for was What to Expect When You’re Expecting), mystery addicts, and of course, leisurely browsers.

We never had spare chairs available; they were in perpetual use. For that matter, even floor space became a coveted commodity; people were constantly just sprawling on the floor, reading for hours at a time. The manager once tried to crack down on the floor squatters. She succeeded about as well as Coke did in making New Coke the drink of choice.

Ringing up purchases and working the floor, I chatted with plenty of customers about favorite authors and books.  The children’s department was my “beat,” and I loved introducing kids to the same books I’d loved. (There were times, admittedly, such as when a toddler happily tossed out EVERY SINGLE BOOK in a shelf I had just alphabetized on the floor in a random stack, that I loathed childhood literacy efforts.)  Taking customers to sections across the store, I learned about topics I knew nothing about, such as nursing and computer programming.

I mostly liked my fellow employees, a nerd-ish crowd who used the earbuds Borders made us wear to whisper jokes that one time too often made me the mad woman laughing by herself.

There was the night Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out. Here’s how I described it at the time:

“From the time my shift at the bookstore began, it was crazy. The phones were ringing off the hook, people pleading for copies of Harry Potter that they hadn’t previously ordered. In the front of the store, we passed out wristbands, wristbands whose colors determined the customer’s place in line. We had both employees and customers in full costumes, and we ran out of beanie baby Hedwigs and had frantic runs on chocolate frogs. As the night progressed, the store simply became more and more cramped, enthusiastic people milling around, listening and participating in the various activities organized by the store. I was in my usual haunt, in the kids section, and even the littlest ones were excited.

“Then it was midnight, and the lines began to form. I was thrown outside, told to help organize the lines.  There were hundreds of people, all desperate to read the final adventures of Harry. They were mostly a cheerful lot: people who agreeably went where they were told and anxiously asked us if employees were being provided with coffee. (Hell, no. I wish. Although they do provide free coffee for employees, we can’t drink while working.)

“And while I was shouting, trying to remember the way you could shout that didn’t make you lose your voice completely, I kept thinking what an amazing event this was. Just one bookstore, and hundreds and hundreds of people who just had to have this one book the first second they were able to. I first read Harry Potter when I was twelve. I was wrapping it for my brother (it was his birthday gift) and I made the mistake of glancing at the first chapter. I stopped myself after the second, grudgingly realizing that it wasn’t fair to read his gift any further, but I haven’t stopped loving the series since. And in a crowd like that, it was evident that I wasn’t the only one enthralled.

“I don’t know if there’ll ever be another book that creates this sort of devotion. But as someone who loves books, in an era where everything is about dvds and cds, about movies and music, I thought this was a fantastic anomaly.”

Harry Potter was a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, of course. But at Borders, that love of reading was obvious, day in and day out. People may not have loved to buy books (I’ve re-shelved too many piles of abandoned books to believe otherwise), but they sure did love reading. I heard it in their voices as they talked about books; I saw it every time I skirted another floor squatter; I knew it every time I braved my fear of heights and climbed up the ladder to grab a book in overstock that the customers wanted and saw their faces light up when I forked the book over. (It’s possible that book was Twilight one time too often for my taste, but hey.)

It’s culturally trendy to praise reading and laud books. But a Borders was the real deal: a place where people went to read, to get lost for hours amid books they devoured.  There wasn’t pretension. There wasn’t a desire to impress anyone. There just was the belief that at this moment in time, nothing could be more fun than reading a book.

That’s what I’ll miss. Because no matter how impressive Amazon’s quarterly earnings are, it’s not as powerful a testimony to the sheer fun of curling up with a book as those packed aisles of Borders were.