Everything reminds me of her. 

My mom passed away from an auto-immune disease that was, in the end, not fully diagnosed. She died from suffocation as we watched and waited helplessly.

When I went home and stayed in the hospital with her last January, she was still able to remove the oxygen mask a few seconds at a time to speak. By March however the decision was between eating and speaking as she refused the feeding tube. 

I still wonder every single day what went through her mind as she laid there those few months, fully conscious as her body attacked her lungs. What was she trying to say as my brother and I rushed to her bedside after they allowed us in the ICU? What was in her silent scream and stare as she struggled to get up with her wrists and legs bound and an intubation tube strapped to her head? 

When she was still able to talk, she’d made us promise that she would not be intubated. I’d never seen my mother so angry before. I’d never seen her angry. 

A few days before the doctors moved her into ICU, I laid my head down on the bed by her side. She smoothed my hair and felt the tremble from my soundless cry. She gestured to the oxygen mask for me to remove it. 

“It’s ok. I’ve led a happy life.”

I would give up anything to remember that as the last thing she said to me.

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This has been the question on my mind since I watched The Founder last night.

Starring Michael Keaton, Nick Offerman (aka Ron on Parks and Recreation, one of the best characters in TV history) and John Carroll Lynch, the movie is based on the true story of how the McDonald’s business empire came to be. Ray Kroc an embattled salesman with a series of failed ventures under his belt maneuvered himself into the McDonald brothers’ burger business and took their speedy food concept to build a massive global enterprise. In developing the origin story for McDonald’s, for Kroc understood the essential connection between myth building and empire building, he erased the (his)stories of the McDonald brothers.

It’s as if he’d built a time machines and changed the past. Kroc alone was the founder.

This erasure and how easy it seemed was disconcerting if not downright terrifying. What does this mean to the ordinary people like us who’ve led ordinary lives? This is why we tell each other’s stories. Storytelling is remembering is history making is bearing witness to lives lived. 

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It’s a cliche but I did not realize that your heart can actually hurt from missing someone so much. Wishing so much.

It’s the wishing that hurts. Wishing so hard that your entire being start to contract, to collapse upon itself. A hole forms. The wishing does not stop and you are turned inside out. 

You have no control over when the fact hits you: when you’re waiting for the red light to turn; when you are standing on the checkout line at the store; when you’re walking to the subway station. When the waves of profound sadness hits you, you need to pause to take a breath. It’s a different kind of sadness, different from the kind that makes you cry. It’s deep like the ocean.

No, let me try again.

It’s like when you get hit by a giant wave and you go under the water. For a split second, it feels like you’re enveloped in a vacuum. Your descent soundless. The absolute quietness around you almost calming. For that split second, your eyes are wide open and you can see clearly. And you think to yourself, “I’m ok.” Then, you gasp for air.

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Almost five years later, I can’t say the same any more since the time has arrived, I’d say by whatever objective, social standards, people of my age would be labeled as “old”. It’s more like “I am fucking scared of being found out how old I am” and all the judgements that I could expect. My long, purple hair for one.

A couple of years ago a small boy yelled out as he threw a ball to a smaller boy standing near me, “Hey, dummy, tell that old lady to watch out.”

What? What lady? Old? I’m not vain or unrealistic. For the last twenty years my mirror seems to have reflected — correctly — a woman getting older, not a woman old.  Grace Paley, Just As I Thought (1999)

Right on.

The other night though it dawned on me that when I am 80, or maybe even as early as 70, I will no longer have to worry about what others think of me. I can say whatever the heck I want. For starters, I will be able to tell people in real life about this blog and my Twitter account, if I feel like it. I can do whatever I want (to the extent that my joints will allow me). I can finally be free… to be me. 

This revelation is liberating. I am now looking forward to getting old. 

When I am 80, I will be “cute” and “adorable” instead of “trying too hard”. I can proclaim with confidence, like Betty White, “I am a teenager trapped in an old body.” I am giddy at the prospect of giving people a piece of my mind. Or two. I am giddy at the prospect of living for myself, for once for fuck’s sake. 

Of course my dastardly fast-working mind is already chastising me for having to wait until then. Why can’t you be you now? What’s wrong with you?

STFU mind. If it were that easy I would have done so a long time ago. This is called hope. HOPE.

Until then.

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Hamilton did not disappoint despite all the hype. It’s everything it’s said to be and more. The book, lyrics and music by Lin-Manuel Miranda is a masterpiece and will withstand time to be one of the classics decades from now. When you have something like this to work with, especially the vividly drawn characters, whether it’s the original cast or whether it’s in New York matters a lot less.

It’s great theatre in all aspects: the entire cast, the ensemble, the stage/set/prop/costume design, the lighting, the orchestra, the choreography. There’s not a single lull throughout the show. Every number is engaging (and sometimes simply brilliant) as written, spectacular as choreographed, and breathtaking as performed.

It’s everything. 

It may also be the last musical I’ll ever see since Hamilton has in effect ruined all future musicals for me.

Here’s to Hamilton being, hopefully, the beginning of a new life for musical theatre.

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So I made up this term, active listening — you listen differently if you think you’re going to interrupt.

The trouble is I worry whether I’ve been overcompensating and become a rude interrupter. I grade myself on whether I’d been aggressive enough or too aggressive at the end of the day and I regret either way.

2017 is going to be the year of no regret.* It’s the year to be bold, to be undeservedly confident, to interrupt without fear, to rid oneself of the plight of feeling self-conscious, to grab life by the, ugh, whatever handy.

* I immediately regretted calling 2017 the year of no regret. tbh we all know it’s going to be the Year of Regrets on so many levels.

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Happy New Year! We couldn’t wait for 2016 to end even though 2017, let’s be honest, is not going to fare better.

To say that 2016 sucked is a gross understatement. My father passed away on April 10 while I was 7,447 miles away. I still haven’t processed this. I am working up to it while being slowly eaten empty by guilt and regret.

I am not one to make New Year’s resolutions. I mean, I am very good at making them, I am just horrible at keeping them. My best record I believe was one week for keeping a journal. Journals are in general a bad idea: the thing about secrets is that as soon as they leave your mind, they stop being secrets. I did make one resolution for 2017 however: Read more real books instead of trying to read every single article saved to Pocket.

I’ve reached a, what should I call it other than a cliche, crossroad in my professional (and personal, though I am in deep denial on this one) life. So for the first time, I picked up one of the 10,372,763 recommended “this year’s best business books to teach you how not to jump in front of a moving train on your commute home every evening”, called Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, chosen out of, yes, self-aggrandizement. Adam Grant made an interesting point on quantity vs. quality:

It’s widely assumed that there’s a tradeoff between quantity and quality—if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it—but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality… On average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality.

I’m taking this as a permission to crank out as many streams of consciousness as my mind can dictate.

“…the most important possible thing you could do,” says Ira Glass, the producer of This American Life and the podcast Serial, “is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.”

Make it up on volume. Sorry Internet. Blame it on Ira.

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Winner: Twitter. Once again, Twitter proved its relevance. Without Twitter, I would have thrown something at the TV or died from implosion, you know, all that screaming inside my head and my chest.

Loser: All of us.

To be fair, I learned something useful from the pundits afterwards: From now on, if I ever get into an argument, I am just gonna rudely interrupt you the whole time, contradict you with false information, accuse you of having never done anything and saying/doing things you’ve never done, and threaten to use the judicial system for my personal vendetta against you, and we’ll still end up in a draw with all my earlier trespasses against decorum forgiven because right before the end of the discussion, I’m gonna say that I respect you for your never giving up. Thanks for the great tip!

All the great tweets, memes, jokes aside, as the debate wore on, it became more and more embarrassing by the minute. What are we watching? Are we on Jerry Springer? Trump may belong on that show. Hilary does not deserve this. WE don’t deserve this.

Do we even need the 3rd debate? Donald Trump used both debates as an opportunity to repeat lies throughout the 90 minutes. Why are we giving him this platform? We all have better things to do than to sit through 90 minutes of lies. Asking Hillary to face him off at another debate is giving this man the legitimacy that he has failed to earn over and over again. How many more chances are we giving him? Why aren’t we using “extreme vetting” on him as someone worthy to be “debated” against?

The world according to Trump:

Muslims = Terrorists
African Americans = Inner City dwellers
Women = Pussy for grab

I’ve lost my ability to be agape at Trump’s ability to lie with such ease and at people’s ability to remain “indecisive” on this. To be honest, I envision in the near future this’ll be a go-to case study for Psychology/Sociology/Ethnography 101. “Why did people afford him so many ‘benefits of doubt’ so many times?”

https://twitter.com/kumailn/status/784870837052596224

The post 2016 Presidential Debates or “What fresh hell is this?” appeared first on The Absence of Alternatives.

Gay rights are human rights.

When you implicitly condone violence perpetrated against one group, you’re aiding violence that WILL affect you one day in the future in some shape or form.

Add your name. Sign the petition.

Thoughts and prayers haven’t worked. We need to protect the most beautiful thing about this country – diversity and tolerance (relative to many places around the world, for example, where I came from. I understand it’s not perfect here in the US). I’d love to believe that love wins but this tragedy did not happen in a vacuum. There’s been a disconcerting trend of backlash against LGBT (along with backlashes against POC and women). Just like racism did not die with the election of an African American POTUS, hatred (What’s in the fabric of our collective psyche to cause so many to hate complete strangers so much?) against the LGBT community did not lessen after the passing of marriage equality laws.

Sign the petition. Make a difference.

And one more thing:

Love will only win if we make our voice heard with VOTES. VOTE in the next election to remove all the elected officials supporting (i.e. not banning) easy access to assault weapons. That’s one message that will get their attention.

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I know you don’t use Twitter. Aww. How quaint. But Kanye’s Tweet is the best parody account there is. He’s a parody of himself, a mirror reflecting back on a mirage, a meme of a meme. This somehow makes him the realest paradoxically.

Is your birthday really on Valentine’s Day? That’s a pretty cool thing to include as “The three things about myself that most people don’t know” when you have to do one of those awkward get-to-know-you self introductions.

I am rambling. You are so easy to talk to.

All I set out to write is this: STOP FUCKING SHOWING ME MY “FACEBOOK MEMORIES”!

Seeing pictures from a year ago does not make me happy. The more years it has transpired, the more depressing they are. I have peaked a long time ago. My life has since been going downhill. Those memories mock me for having wasted another year of my life with nothing to show for. (You’ll have to agree that Facebook posts do not amount to “things to show for”).

They are signposts, marking my march downward.

When I see “On this day,” I inadvertently think to myself, “Yup. And ON THIS VERY DAY, I am crying for all the wasted breath I’ve taken and what have I done and I should go jump off a bridge.” Pass the donuts.

Did you know that in the 17th to 19th century, nostalgia was considered a psychopathological disorder? I bet you don’t. I bet you are not a very nostalgic person either. Most winners of life aren’t. So thank you for pushing to cause a global pandemic of nostalgia with this fancy Facebook feature while you yourself has nothing but the future to look forward to.

In Greek nostalgia literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It let’s us travel the way a child travels – around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved. — Don Draper

And we all know what that place is.

Facebook.

Nice try.

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