A cultural experience

The other day when we were on our way back from Los Angeles the HyWy, her brother, and I met her second cousin and his wife at a restaurant in Sunnyvale.  Now this was a true cultural experience.  This restaurant was some sort of cultural anomaly where different aspects of different cultures existed though not exactly in harmony.  Upon entering the restaurant on the right side there was what could GENEROUSLY be described as a playpen, but in most people's perspective it would be a wooden jail.  Imagine a small 3ft by 8ft rectangular space with wooden bars preventing kids from escaping.  The inside of this wooden jail was filled with all manner of random toys.  As a child I would look longingly at the play area in a McDonald's and it is safe to say that any child that comes to this restaurant looks on in fear as they are banished to the wooden jail.  From there we sat down and waited for the rest of our party to join us.  After a few minutes I realized I was having flashbacks of smokey dance clubs,  I was holding my chai as though it was a vodka and sprite, and unknowingly I was bobbing my head.  Alas not only were we in a suburban Indian snack restaurant frequented by families, but if you closed your eyes you were 21 in a hip hop dance club checking out members of the opposite sex while trying to look cool holding your horrible tasting adult beverage.  You might wonder how they managed to transport us back to a time so long ago.  The key was the music.  No we weren't bumpin' to the oldies.  Rather we were bumpin' to the latest reggaeton mixes from Pitbull (for those that don't know he's as unruly as his name suggests).  Pitbull's lyrics are not family friendly, but they are under the radar enough that to unsuspecting aunties and uncles he comes across as that "funny sounding doggy rapper...no not that Snoopy man...the other one." For maximum effect repeat the part in quotes in your best Indian accent.  Once our waiter arrived he took our order on an iPad, which they even used to run our credit card.  The restaurant had an app for ordering, tracking, and payment all on one iPad.  Lastly, I think that they must have spent all their money on their fancy wooden jail and iPad ordering system, because the lighting was literally falling off the wall.  A whole number of sad looking tube lights clung to the wall like rock climbers hanging off of Half Dome.  So there you have our Sunnyvale cultural experience.  I encourage anyone who happens to be in the area (Joker and Mrs. Joker) to stop by.  

Should everything be for sale?

Almost two months ago I attended a Saturday lecture series with my dad at Stanford where one of the topics was about the ethics and morality of markets.  The basic question that was posed was whether everything should be for sale.  The speaker talked about how in some country a cheating person can pay a service to provide an alibi to their spouse or significant other about where they were on a particular night.  There were other examples, but this idea came to mind last weekend while the HyWy, her brother, and I were in Los Angeles.  We went to a theme park and as is the trend in theme parks everywhere these days you can buy passes for the front of the line.  I'm surprised this revenue stream didn't exist when we were younger.  Back then everyone waited in the same line and the only people that went faster were those that got there earlier.  It seems that once the park squeezed the last bit of money they could they invented a new way to get more money by having people pay to cut in front of others. 

At what point will everything cease to be for sale?  I wonder if one day police officers will carry around credit card machines to allow traffic law violators to pay on the spot with a credit card (so there is no possibility of bribery) and if they do so they could pay less money than those who wait for a court date and/or traffic school.  I guess if people are willing to pay for something a market will be created.

The Help

I just finished reading The Help last week and I thought that the book was very well written and seemed to do a good job of documenting the lives of its characters.  Our copy of the book suggests a rather long comparison to To Kill A Mockingbird, but I don't think this book is anywhere near that level.  The stories and characters evoke comparison, but Harper Lee's writing was something else all together.  There were times that I felt like Kathryn Stockett was a big bogged down in the details when she could have been focusing on the characters and emotions more.  There has been some controversy around the book being a "feel good white girl's" story and I think that definitely applies to the movie, but not so much the book.  One suggestion was to balance the book with a reading of Eudora Welty's Where Is The Voice Coming From?.  I thought that was an interesting exercise as both Stockett and Welty present different views of the same historical event, the murder of Medgar Evers.  

The thing that stuck with me through everything, ultimately, was what an evil woman Hilly Holbrook was.  Without going into detail Hilly Holbrook is the main antagonist in the story (it could be argued that society was the main antagonist) and to put it mildly she is a bitch.  I have no doubt that people as racist as she was and worse were present in Jackson at that time, but what really made her despicable was how conniving and manipulative she was.  A friend asked whether the book was violent or had any sexual abuse in it and I told her no, but I felt like the actions of the women to each other was harder to read.  For some reason the emotional torment that people exact upon each other is far more difficult to cope with than the physical torment.  In the end I was left feeling that in my personal literary history Hilly Holbrook is likely one of the top 10 worst villains.  

In a way I feel bad that my primary takeaway from the story was the misdeeds of a white woman when the worst part was the mistreatment of the black maids.  

Do you understand Love?

It has been quite a while since I have posted and I have certainly had the itch to write.  It's been obvious that something has been missing for me, but the problem is that I just haven't found anything to write about.  I didn't want to force a post.  Today, however, the HyWy posed an interesting epiphany that she didn't truly understand love.  I thought about that and it occurred to me that I think I have an understanding of romantic love, but what about Love in the broader sense?  The Love that we hold for those we know and don't know.  The Love that I try to give to the universe.  

I never put much thought into the distinction between romantic love and Love.  A sensible question might be what is there to understand?  The two types of love are the same in that they are given and received unconditionally.  They aren't truly the same though.  Romantic love is rooted in our feelings for each other.  It develops, grows, and (unfortunately) can be lost.  Love on the other hand is in all of us (some more than others).  I believe that Love is born within everyone and in some it develops, but in others it is buried.  Not everyone may have the good fortune of spending the rest of their lives with someone that they have a romantic love with and this can easily sound depressing.  Everyone has the power to find the Love within themselves no matter how deep.  Reading what I am writing I feel like I sound like a self help guru or some wavy person espousing an abstract theory.  I believe that Love is rooted in unconditional acceptance and selflessness.  Further thinking is required in order to truly understand it, but this is just the beginning.