U2 is Coming for Me

U2 is coming to Los Angeles. And they are coming to play for me. This is a simple truth.

Yes, I'm being dramatic, but it's substantiated drama. I can prove that the act of four men I've never met who bang on things, shimmy around on a stage, and yell loudly at a group of strangers coming to play music 30 miles away from my house is so comprehensively, cut off all my hair, think about getting a tattoo, thrilling that I have to devote one or ten paragraphs exploring why this is so.

I can tell you that my older brother introduced me to U2 when I was in grade school. I used to fall asleep listening to their music with big, puffy, 80s style headphones covering my ears. I'll reveal that as a high school graduation gift, one of my closest friends gave me a thick, oversized book devoted to the band which still sits on my bookshelf. I might say (like many others could) that some experiences during my formative years occured to the soundtrack of a U2 song.

10th grade trip to Europe
Driving from Switzerland to Germany. Napping sporadically on a tour bus full of exhausted high schoolers who spent the night dancing badly at a local discotech. A heavy portable CD player is warming my bare thigh. I got the window seat and I listened to a group of Irishmen tell me a story about God's Country as the white-capped Alps approached from a distance:

Desert sky
Dream beneath the desert sky
The rivers run but soon run dry
We need new dreams tonight

16th birthday party
The furniture in the living room has been moved against the walls. My brother's massive stereo system is set up in the corner--a receiver, tape deck and CD player stacked together with two three-foot speakers guarding them. My parents are out of site. My brother's friends lounge around lanky and laconic inciting my girlfriends. We dance and feel the words of a group of Irishmen who tell us a story about the end of the world:

Haven't seen you for quite a while
I was down the hole just passing time
Last time we met was a low-lit room
We were as close together as a bride and groom
We ate the food, we drank the wine
Everybody having a good time
Except you
You were talking about the end of the world

Freshman summer in Jamaica
On the veranda of my sister's freshly built house. It's almost twilight. My feet are dusty from walking in the red earth all day. I hear the bells from the church down the lane ringing. A woman rides by on a rusty bicycle. Her skirt flutters against the wheels. I look out at the Lighthouse on a nearby cliff named Lover's Leap--the place where two lovesick slaves supposedly jumped to their deaths. And I listened to a group of Irishmen tell me a story about uncertainty:

Don't worry baby, it's gonna be alright
Uncertainty can be a guiding light
I hear voices, ridiculous voices
Out in the slipstream
Let's go, let's go overground
Take your head out of the mud baby

She's gonna dream up
The world she wants to live in
She's gonna dream out loud
She's gonna dream out loud

years later...

Wedding reception 2006, cutting the cake
There are tables and chairs and familiar faces in them. People I've loved forever and people I've just learned to love. I'm wearing all white, made whiter by candlelight. I'm faced with three, tall, sugary white blocks bathed in red flowers. I have a knife in-hand. And I listen as four Irishmen tell me a story about a beautiful day:

See the world in green and blue
See China right in front of you
See the canyons broken by cloud
See the tuna fleets clearing the sea out
See the bedouin fires at night
See the oil fields at first light
See the bird with a leaf in her mouth
After the flood all the colours came out

It was a beautiful day

Tonight, April 8, 2009
On the couch with a patch of light coming in from the kitchen. It's hot and the air in my apartment is still. There's a pillow against my back and a laptop warming my legs. The scent of freshly made rice is in the air. I'm typing. I'm thinking about how soon I can get into bed. And I remember the words from a group of four Irishmen that never fail to send me to sleep:

Sleep
Sleep tonight
And may your dreams
Be realized
If the thundercloud
Passes rain
So let it rain
Let it rain
Rain on me

No you know why all the drama.

Status Anxiety

Please note that I am using the word "you" loosely in the post below.

• Your 20-year class reunion is a week away and you are on the phone with the rental company trying to get a Mercedes-Benz for the event.
  
• You borrow a pair of your best friend's $500 Manolo Blahniks, which are two sizes too small, and proceed to limp the night away at your husband's holiday party.
  
• You stand at your kitchen window with frown lines engraving ravines in your forehead and watch as your neighbor installs a gilded water fountain on their front lawn.
  
• When introduced to a man half your age who has twice as much hair and is wearing a watch 20 times more expensive than yours, you embellish your job title elevating yourself to VP of Marketing and suddenly run out of business cards.

You, unfortunately, have status anxiety.

Last week I was online looking for my next tasty read. I wanted something deep and satisfying that left my conscious feeling full--something that would help me figure mankind out. So I turned to one of my favorite authors, the modern day philosopher Alain de Botton and selected one of his latest books, "Status Anxiety." I was up until 3 a.m. that same morning reading it. On my way home from downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday afternoon, I pulled out of rush hour traffic, parked on a side street and got in a couple of chapters before continuing home.

People are entirely too interesting. (But then again, almost anything could lure me out of LA traffic.) We take something as pure as the need for love and acceptance and mangle it until it turns into a misdirected, ravenous desire for a $5,000 designer handbag that resembles a feed sack. Like all good psychosocial mysteries, our desire for pretty things, lofty titles, and public adoration is complicated. (How boring we'd be if it wasn't!)

Here's one super simple rational for why we (hopefully not you and me) do this:

SAS (Status Anxiety Sufferer): "My aim in life is to be loved like my mother loved me when I was a baby. But now, I'm not nearly as cute and easy to love so I have to find ways to make people love me. If people pay attention to me and see that I am worthy of notice, they will give me the love that I desperately need. So I will do and buy things that will demand attention. The more money and titles I accrue, the better. The more glitter and gold I consume the more glorious that love will be."

De Botton, a writer who pulls from many of life's disciplines when trying to figure people out, explains this phenomenon in his more erudite prose:

"The predominant impulse behind our desire to rise in the social hierarchy may be rooted not so much in the material goods we can accrue or the power we can wield as in the amount of love we stand to receive as a consequence of high status. Money, fame and influence may be valued more as tokens of--and means to--love rather than ends in themselves." ~ Alain de Botton

Power. Money. Fame...all a stairway to love? Kind of rings true to me. Sounds just like what a human would do: start out with the purest of needs and desires and then slowly, as we gain increasing consciousness transform them into a motly collection of perverse behaviors that drive us to the psychiatrist's couch, Neiman Marcus or Dairy Queen. Some of us go to all three. And I bet it feels natural. That is what makes me feel anxious.

Internet Time

It has been a long time since my last post. This lag time -- consider it a blogger's method of being fashionably late -- will, I warn you, be the norm so it's good that you know now. I will not be consistent and cinch my days with a quick post that coincides with the close of twilight. And it's not because I don't have the time, it's because I'm reluctant to reset my internal clock to sync up with Internet time which is demonically faster and more demanding.

You've probably already realized that real time and Internet time are inequitable. I know this because I can easily spend 1 real day on the Internet and it feels like 1 week of my real life has passed by leaving me hunch-backed and closer to never being able to read 10 point font ever again.

Soon, I'm certain, a prodigious member of Generation Y will find the formula for Internet aging which will be shockingly similar to the one used for calculating the age of dogs. Nobody will be happy when that day comes. Because that's when we'll all realize that we are doing the most unthinkable and unforgivable thing we can do as important human beings with very important things to do -- we are allowing Internet time to waste our real time.

The Internet is for me, the technology that has made me most respectful of some of the most treasured cliches and old adages related to time -- what it is, what it does, and what we should do with it. Take these sayings for example.

- Time is of the essence
- Time marches on
- Time flies when you are having fun
- You don't find time, you make time
- Use your time wisely
- You can't take back time

I could add the word "Internet" to each of these sayings thereby changing their meanings to reflect our new digital reality and ever developing lexicon that encompasses words and phrases like IM, Mbps, and Twitter.

Today, for example, I spent almost 6 hours of Internet time (which felt like 3 real time days) sorting stuff I can't touch, smell, or taste. I replied to Facebook messages. I cleaned out my email folders. I updated my Netflicks queue. I unsubscribed to about 1/100 of the junk mail solicitations that I don't remember ever signing up for. I Googled my name, "Maxine Hurt," to see what came up. I checked to see if Bono had another OP Ed posted on The New Yorker website. I checked the weather in Paris, looked up the word of the day on Dictionary.com, and I watched my baby nephew crawl for the first time on Skype.

Was it all a waste of time? No. But much of it was. That's the problem with Internet time. It's of the essence, it marches on, it flies, you can't find it you make it, you can't take it back, and just like it's brethren real time, it needs to be used wisely.

In the beginning there was a blog

So it's a blog or die world, I hear.

And this is why I'm at the keyboard. I'm about to become a blogger. I'm tempted to say that I'm a writer not a blogger (a lover not a fighter...) But that would be old school of me and I've signed up for the new school -- gooooo new school. I know that if I'm going to make this work, I've got to set some ground rules for myself less I end up in line for lithium. This way, 100 blogs later, we can scroll back up 99 blogs and see if I was able to discipline myself (not likely) and create a coherent dialogue that isn't a waste of Internet space.

Here are my rules:
1. No blogs longer than 500 words or that take more than 1 hour to write
2. No blogging about things nobody can relate to (<----- challenge!)
3. No grand-standing or soap-boxing or belly-aching (or mimicking Muhammad Ali in any way)
4. No veering away from the blog theme which is: (I don't know yet.)

This may start out a little random - not unlike a Christopher Walken music vidoe. Or it may seem so broad you could fit a 1940s computer in it. After reading a few entries, you may question the integrity of the blog (I don't see how though). But stick with me. I know we'll become friends. We'll become friends as I write and then you write and then I write and then you write ad infinitum. Then maybe a few hundred blogs in I'll be less lonely and maybe you'll be less lonely too and the world will become one of those kangaroo-like baby sacks I keep seeing on Berkeley children-- all warm and comfy with little room to move your feet.

With or without the baby sack, I've got to move forward and start my blog.