Honor Thy Parents?
I’m reading A.J. Jacobs’ book, “The Year of Living Biblically” (which I recommend), and I have to interject something.
I’m at the part where A.J.’s aunt Kate witnesses his son, Jasper calling him “A.J.”. She disapprovingly remarks, “Children aren’t supposed to use their parents’ first names. It’s disrespectful.”
A.J. writes:
“She’s probably right; in biblical times, there was no such thing as an informal, I’m-friends-with-my-kid father. Without me knowing it, Jasper was violating the ‘honor your parents’ commandment.”
Bla. I disagree. I mean, maybe he is one of those “I want to be my kid’s friend even if it works to his potential detriment because really I’m just afraid to use discipline” pansy-type fathers, I don’t know. But just being on a first-name basis with your kid doesn’t automatically mean that’s the case. Nor does a kid calling his parents by their first names show disrespect.
If anything, you honor your parents more by calling them by their first names — by acknowledging them as individuals with complex identities, histories, hopes and dreams of their own, not just the ones centered around you. Calling them ‘Mom’ or ‘Dad’ exclusively is reducing them to only the role they play in relation to you, just as if they were to call you ‘Son’ or ‘Daughter’ exclusively.
Words are hypnotic. You are lulling each other into the familiar comfort of habitual roles and behavior patterns. You are one-dimensionalizing each other, type-casting each other. You are reinforcing limits around your relationships (some of which, I realize, are there for good reason, but not all) and the identities of each individual involved.
Maybe it has something to do with my weird beliefs which I won’t go into, but which include reincarnation (sort of). I don’t think my biological parents ‘created’ me any more than I created them. We came together to help each other out and maybe because we are friends at another level. Or enemies. Maybe they were my kids last time. That would explain a lot. Who knows, but we’re all sovereign beings.
You don’t have to believe in reincarnation (even sort of) to realize that people are not born blank slates and then merely molded by their earthly creators. Parents are the first and strongest influences on the child’s ego, but we’re more than our egos, and nobody owns anybody, and there’s more to the picture. I can’t prove that but I know it.
And as a parent, placed in such a position of influence, I would want to help instill a strong sense of sovereignty and independence in the developing ego I’ve been entrusted with, not dependency (or codependency — parents can get awfully attached to the parent-child dynamic, too, and that’s not good for anybody).
That said, I address my parents by the standard, socially acceptable labels. It’s how they grew up, it’s how I grew up, it’s habit, it’s what they want to be called. Of course now my husband’s Mom wants me to call her ‘mom’ too, which I do when I remember to, though reluctantly (it feels really weird to me), out of respect for her wishes if not for her individuality, or mine.
Reinforcing role-relationships… and inequalities within them. Most people don’t even think about this, so I don’t hold it against anybody. I’m just sayin’. Being on a first-name basis signifies equality and mutual respect. It reminds both involved that even if you’re playing different roles in relation to each other, they are just roles and you are not those roles, you’re both just people.
My kid(s) will call me Brooke. And yeah, maybe sometimes I’ll have them call me ‘Our Lord’, like on Tuesdays or something. But I’ll let them pick special titles they want to be called sometimes, too. I want them to develop warped senses of humor, after all.
Coming up next!
(or whenever I feel like it!)
(probably never.)
Psychological Experimentation On Your Child: How to Get the Most Personal Amusement While Doing the Least Possible Damage to Your Child’s Fragile Psyche.
Metaphor Quality May Vary
[from a semi-automatic writing session the other day]…
[…] it could be said that our choices rest soley on the quality and kinds of metaphors we are basing our choices upon. what if there were a way to filter out all but the best metaphors? — even to feed the good ones into a computer (or our fucking minds!) and have it test out and spit out the resulting lives or choices + consequences that would arise from each metaphor, and every kind of combination of metaphor — we’d choose the results most desirable to us personally — down to specifics — then the computer would generate some kind of detailed chart of the beliefs + values + metaphors and combination of those that would, if adopted (say, via some good hypnosis based on the chart) give us the results we are after. I guess that would be too easy, though, and boring… because what then?
WELL — lets not be too hasty to toss this out — if we made sure that the results we were after were open-ended — that they’d only up a world of even more fulfilling and challenging avenues into the future — then “what then?” could be met with some pretty AWESOME ANSWERS.
I’ll toss that into the universe’s future-forming algorhithmic thingy and hopefully some qualified super-intelligent entity will pick it up and roll with it […]
Indie Syndrome: Humility Overkill
Returning to the topic of self-image and public perception (and glamour!), remember what I said in this post?
“Get yourself some bling and unabashedly pose it up for some cameras. We’re all too cool these days … You’re the star of your own show, why not act like it?”
Another way of putting that, which is the subject of today’s episode is, don’t be so sickeningly humble. I’m working on kicking this one in the ass myself. In related news, I’m starting to get the sneaking suspicion my album is going to be amazing. No, let me rephrase that better: it totally is going to be amazing. But more on that later.
My point: ‘indie kids’ need to venture outside the quaint little picket-fenced psychological suburbs of indie pop/rock and start learning more from hip-hop artists. The mentality is very very different.
Keith Handy has asked that the following plea to performing songwriters be passed along for the sake of the greater good. I was going to anyway because it’s pretty spot-on:
“…stop using the phrases ’shameless plug’ and/or ’shameless self-promotion’. They were self-effacingly funny the first few times, but now that they’re commonplace, they come off like a desperate, passive aggressive sales pitch … Just say what needs to be said — ‘we’re blahblahblah, we’re at blahblahblah.com, our CD is over there… thanks for coming’ — and trim off the fat.
“Trust that your music has value of its own, independent of your salesmanship. It’s okay to be polite and show appreciation to your listeners, but there’s no need to reinforce the notion that your music is on a “lower rung” by repeatedly reminding the audience that you really really hope they’ll go to your website, and oh gosh you’d be so grateful if they’d please consider buying a CD because it’s so cheap.
“Let’s all stop acting like wussies and present our music with the simple confidence it deserves.”
“Commercially successful artists like to thank their audience for supposedly ‘making them what they are’, but the fact is, the audience didn’t pick out the chords or fuss over the lyrics. That has to be done alone, by the artist, in a void where he has no immediate feedback from anywhere but his gut…”
“…stop playing up your ‘indieness’ and just focus on being kickass.“
‘nough said. I trust you’ll do the right thing.
The Outer Affects The Inner
I’m reading an awesome interview right now (and it looks like I’m going to have to get the guy’s book
“…if you want to become someone different, just start acting like the person you want to be. It’s like that business motto – ‘fake it till you make it’ – but it works on a spiritual and ethical level as well … Even with my wardrobe, I saw how the outer affects the inner. There’s a line in the Bible that says your “garments should always be white.” I decided to take that literally, and walked around in white clothes. It affected my mood. I felt happier, lighter.”
The Inner Affects The Outer:
Right before reading the AJ Jacobs interview I was reading some posts by fellow lifestyle artist and friend of the show, Ted Heistman on his blog, ‘Free Range Organic Human‘. In one, he was discussing personality types and his recent discovery that he’s an extrovert, not an introvert as he’d previously assumed. The main point I gleaned from that post is — the mere realization (or decision) that you are (or could be) a different personality type than you had previously been type-casting yourself as, shifts your selective-focus-majigg to emphasize a whole different set of memories, attitudes, etc., and that begins almost instantly to change your behavior, your feelings toward yourself and others (and thus theirs towards you, and thus your whole experience of life). It’s like how mood swings work, but at a deeper level.
Then, in another post, Ted made this excellent point:
“I think of these personality types as ‘cognitive strategies’ that people can jump around in a bit from type to type rather than as being immutible characteristics of people.”
Right! Personality tests are generally just (mis)used to further type-cast oneself (personality ‘types’, hello) and often end up functioning as little more than ’scientific-feeling’ means of validating what are actually personal choices not to venture outside the comfort zone of our ingrained habits, thought-patterns, personal biases and so forth.
Personality assessments can be useful as aids in self-understanding and self-acceptance, but that isn’t where you’re supposed to stop. That’s a step on the path towards a truer, and ongoing, sense of clarity about who you really are and what you really want, and where the discrepancies lie between that and the current situation. Once you’ve got that going on, you know what you need to do to start aligning your actions with your true/new intentions. And once you start doing that, the really cool shit starts to happen.
On the other hand, if you’re living under the core assumption that you can’t really change who you ‘are’ (that may be true on a deep, essential level but not on the personality level) — that the ‘type’ of person you are is the type of person you must and will always be — if you believe in that kind of predestination of personality (whether you frame it in terms of nature, nurture, astrology or whatever) then you will continue to play the same role and act out the same scenarios in the same types of ‘movies’ as long as that belief is held, instead of pushing yourself, growing as an actor on the stage of Life and becoming ever more awesome. You don’t respect actors with no range; why would you settle for it in yourself? (I’m not saying you do, I’m just asking it as a general question).
You don’t have to be a ‘radical’ lifestyle experimenter to be a lifestyle experimenter (though, it technically makes you more rad if you are). Any step in the right direction is good. Any step in any direction is creative. It’s standing still that you don’t want to do. Even just ‘tinkering around’ with your thoughts and emotional states, conducting mini-experiments with your lifestyle, changing the way you dress even a little bit (even if you like the way you dress already, it is a habit), trying a different soundtrack for a change, playing with how you talk, how you walk, etc. — any one or number of those can get the ball rolling. “Gradually Daily” is a little mantra I’ve been using that’s actually very helpful. It’s just enough to remind me to do things a little bit differently, a little bit better, to make a little bit more effort to be a little bit more awesome than I was yesterday.
Remember: You are your most important project. All your other projects depend on it! Nourish the root and you nourish everything that stems from it.
That’s my little surmon for the day. I didn’t actually mean for this to be a surmon. I meant to just tell you about the cool articles I was reading, but The Televangelist that lives in my head is a sneaky opportunist with a strong grip. Once she has the mic, there’s no getting it back till she’s done.
Gyrus On Glamour
In response to my recent post about Glamour!, fellow godstar and friend of the show Gyrus had this little brilliant snippet to add to the conversation (in an email, but quoted here with permission) :
“I guess we who critique Western civilization have a tendency to react to the whole surface artifice thing, and being more “natural” ends up being associated with being plain and a bit grubby! But how many indigenous people spend ages adorning and beautifying themselves? And hey, if you want natural, check out all those birds with stupendous plumage! We really do need to rediscover that natural parading and glorifying, without getting sucked too far into the mass-media gloss that parasitizes that sort of stuff … It seems like a strange issue to get involved with as we teeter on the brink of ecological catastrophe… but oddly it seems important. Maybe it’s important to us people who’ve invested so much energy in suppressing that natural strutting about… Now’s the time when people with ideas like ours need to get noticed more!”