Knowing... but Still Not Doing Anything About It?

Well-behaved excitement of a public holiday, in contrast with a stereotypical presentation of a scared and disturbed little girl scribbling unstoppably numbers over numbers. Knowing is part of the wide-audienced catastrophe movies which are so popular lately, mixing the invasion-stereotype with the strange-little-children-acting-spooky thriller-genre. Interesting enough, it brings some philosophy too into the whole thing, and this is what makes me feel entitled to try to read into it another story entirely.

My first point: why is this apocalyptic genre so well known and preferred lately? Of course, there was the end-of-the-world "prophecy" of the millennium, where everyone half expected to get abducted by a huge, bright and alien light while doing their last shopping for a happy new year, but since that never happened, nor did the sky crush over us, there must be some other reason for getting such nice little goosebumps all over our body when we hear of yet another movie coming out with a similar trailer.

According to my theory, apart from the well known fact that people enjoy being scared and afraid as long as they know that nothing actually could happen to them, so apart from this, we can't help noticing that there indeed exists a parallel discourse about the "near" end of the world as we know it, which also gives us the creeps, but looses its effect after leaving the premises where we heard it - just like the movies do. This narrative, however, comes from a quite different paradigm, one that is considered opposite the artistic or entertaining one, and was supposed to represent the only "real" and "objective" way of understanding our world. I'm talking about science, and the stories we hear more frequently every day about our way of life's and more importantly: our living environment's imminent doom and destruction in case of continuing our present lifestyle.

The philosophical line in the movie revolves around the question of determinism. This problem, however, isn't just of a philosophical or religious nature. One of my favourite scientists, the cell-biologist Dr Bruce Lipton developed a whole concept around how learning at school the (false) theory that genes control our bodies and lives, make us go through life thinking that we are predestined to certain (of course: unfavourable) things and can't, but more unfortunately: won't do anything about it.

So it might not hurt to take a second glance at things so natural to us as preferring movies which show humanity in danger of extinction from a force we can't fight (and unlike most of the similar movies, this one doesn't end in a "last warning" or an improbable but highly expected triumph of mankind) and accepting the message Knowing as well puts in front of us: we are perfectly contented by being determined to particular things, without ever trying to change it - and trying to understand the hidden meaning of this: are we really so dumb that we see these movies, feel the urge of warning but just "don't" understand the hint, or mainly just too comfy to act anything that would require changing our daily habits? Because there is a near peril, even if not threatened by aliens.

"I never needed you" or 3 Minutes Worth Break Up Reasons in a Pop Song

Hi there, everyone, my faithful audience, sorry for not having written for such a long time, though this particular subject has been haunting me since the hot and leisure days of summer, where one of my dear friends found this song, the Pussycat Doll's Hush Hush interesting enough to share it with us, helpless listeners, on a long journey towards water, pools, sun and bathing suits. Curious enough, these are the characteristics of a successful pop song as well. Let's take a closer look on these, apparently so harmless lyrics and see what they are saying about the "modern relationship".

The song starts with the powerful and representative voice of the group's main (and only, i might add) singer, who at that same moment begins to enlist the reasons why she doesn't want to be in a relationship with her partner. Even if the verses of this part aren't understood, the blissful ignorant can't enjoy the melody for too long, since the theme and effect of the song will develop sooner than expected: there comes the desperate, whining tone of the refrain, which none can be so fortunate as to mistake: it is a woman's last wish in a break-up, the testament of a dying relationship.
So why does she want to break up? First she's stating out what she, and let's be honest, all women detest about men, and that is: pretending they know best, and bragging about it, correcting the apparently false ideas the fair and gentle sex has about such brutal and non-ladylike things as life in general and business, money and human nature in particular. Yes, definitely, we could do without that. But then they creep in, all the other characteristics which women actually like in men, and for long centuries have valued their company for them: to be strong, to give help, to express certain things in words (as well), to be there everyday. So why are those things rejected? And isn't the whole relationship rejected with this? From an evolutionarily point of view, a study concerned with the survival of the race, there definitely is a need for couple life. The pair formed of the human male and female should stay together at least for the sake of the baby (that is: the next generation, the future of the race) for quite a long time, since not only the baby alone, but neither the mother alone is fit enough to provide for the survival of the child in the early ages.

The feminist movements, which protested about the too literal reading of this theory, indeed helped on the unfavourable status of women deserted to the kitchen and nursery by the industrial revolution's division of labour in the families. But please, let's be reasonable, we're light years form that age, if not in all the world, then on the parts where they dress as those in the video, and if not in all social classes, then most certainly in those which the singer(s) represent(s). Because in the time and place of primitive farming and grain cultivating, there were no unjust, sexist discrimination, which might excuse the fair sex from hard labour, just as there was no pretence that someone could "make it on their own".
So basically, this song expresses that its singer doesn't need any men, for any reasons there could be. Not rejecting them from a feminist point of view, refusing their unfair influence and power over them - no, this guy mentioned in the lyrics doesn't have anything on her. That's why in the extended version, the I will survive insertion seems so misplaced: that's a song about a person in love trying to break free of the unwanted relationship which still overpowers them - here there is no love, there are no bonds, nobody ever doubts that she can survive without him, so no point in proving it.

What this song seems to be saying is that there is no need for men for economic emotional or any purposes at all, and apparently no point in being together just for the sake of love, without ever wanting something from the other. I wander what this pearl of popular culture says about today's romantic relationship. Is it rushing to its end?

Gossip Girl - or Why We Like Gossip

I was in the middle of wiping my eyes over a touching reuniting scene accompanied by the perfect tunes of Apologize in one of the episodes of Gossip Girl ("you know you love me, xoxo"), when from the texture of the paper handkerchief, which didn't feel as silky as a commercial would suggest it, or didn't look as fancy and elegant as the ones they use in these types of movies, I just realized why my life is almost as perfect as the lives of those wonderful people I see on screen so not flatteringly often lately. And why I was always right when I became angry because, though anticipated, my own boyfriend didn't come after me when we had an argument with one of our friends, or didn't defend me in front of his (well, truth be told, not quarter as manipulative, annoying and well dressed) parents, or just didn't guess that having a lousy day, all I wanted was a hot and candle-lit bubble bath with rose petals scattered all over the perfectly clean and warm bathroom with the perfectly-right-temperatured champagne and perfectly-sweet-and-sunripe strawberries no mater the season. And how dare him suggesting that he also might have had a rough day? After all, his brother doesn't have drug problems, his parents don't want to divorce, his grandmother doesn't have cancer and I didn't sleep with his best friend. So why would he, a guy, have a hard day?

After all, these are the movies which suggest that there is this perfect thing called love which only comes once in a lifetime, unexpected but overwhelming, under the ravishing backgrounds of blooming boulevard trees and sentimental melodies, never under annoyed honkings of hurried drivers. (There is, of course an image to this as well, google-ing Serena and Dan pops out among the firsts.) And these movies are made to remind us that our lives and relationships, though never quite getting to the aspired perfections, did have and could have some of the earthly counterpart of these events, just as the romantic meaning of one garden-ripped daisy compares to a dozen long stem red roses or the excitement of playing pool and making striptease on the table could ever measure up.

And, since it's made for adolescent girls or middle-aged housewives (no offence for the stereotype, I hope), (this time) Gossip Girl tells us the following things about life: beautiful rich brats are only revengeful when they don't get any, sleeping with your best friend's boyfriend would get you the nicest guy in school, parents who have very strict ideas about their offspring's future usually have problems at work resulting to drug addictions, and that although our lives could never get this glamorous, it probably won't get this crazy either, so we're good.

What Would You Do If You Knew You Were Going To Die?

" - Dave, can I pose a somewhat abstract, purely hypothetical question?
- Sure.
- If you knew you're gonna die, possibly soon, what would you do?
- Well, dunno... Am I the richest man on Earth?
- No, you're you.
- Do I have a superpower?
- No, you're you.
- I know I'm me, but do I have a superpower?
- No, why would you have a superpower?
- Dunno, you said it was hypothetical,
- Fine, yes, you're really good at math.
- That's not a power, that's a skill.
- Ok, you're good at math and you're invisible. And you know you're gonna die.
- That's easy, I'd go to space camp.
...
- You're invisible and you'd go to space camp?
- I didn't pick invisible, you picked invisible."
(Stranger than Fiction)

The Taxi Driver, continued

I've just seen Stranger than Fiction. And it dawned to me again, the irreparable and constantly forgotten inconsistency between life and literature. Or film. Or music videos. Or commercials, of all the genres which dispose with the means of presenting everyday life, ergo they pretend they do. And I reminisced on my taxi driver, both the one I met and the one I created, his life and his story.

As part of a novel, a character who, for his old age becomes full (leisure) time engaged in picking up unaware hitch-hikers, for the sake of a once had job, which was invented for solitary and hurried people, making him also solitary but at last with all the time on his hands, but not being able to spend it... - as a character, his life seams greatly open to symbolic interpretations on the condition of modern times and life in general. As for a real life person, this seams more likely an unfortunate course of events, to lead to an unfortunate course of life. The difference, of course, being: deliberateness. While a character, by definition, has a purpose in a novel (film etc.) in this case, making the readers realize the futility of such a life; for a living person, such realization hardly ever occurs. There exists, no question about it, a type of narrative which can be put over a human life to give intention to it, and for the European culture it's Christianity which is often (mistakenly) read as the easy way out of responsibility over one's life and purposefulness ("accepting" it that whatever happens it must be for better, but at least occurring with our Lord's consent). On our case, however, not even this pretence can be pulled off.

We have to realize that we live in a world, where, as I quoted in an earlier post, our means of socialization have greatly diminished. A person with an average job and personality, as part of the western civilization, has every possibility of ending up alone at their old ages. We simply miss the common places (this expression doesn't have a double meaning for no good reason) where people can meet, gather around and be together. Of course, we do have new ones, virtual rooms where time and spacial differences disappear and we get united by our common interests no matter age, gender, race or other stereotypical identity-setter, but in their physical reality, meeting new people just doesn't happen any more.

In an age when, as Jókai's naively visionary but in some parts painfully accurate science fiction novel stated, running around for our personal business without having the time to get to know out interlocutor has become our basic survival instinct, or because of the apparently increased mobility and simplicity in making new contacts naturally given spacial and familiar relationships get torn apart without a second thought - deliberateness gets a new importance. Immanuel Kant thought that religion and lack of education made people remain immature, (in Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?) but after two hundred years, taking one's faith in one's own hand is still a challenge - our taxi driver's story could have this elevated and outlying interpretation.

So, as a literary character, he would be a symbol of one of the aspects of a postmodern(?) way of life, as a blog entry he's just an interesting guy in a new event. But taking control means also deciding on the source of our inspiration and lessons, even if we can't wait until we start hearing a narrator voice speaking about our lives (getting back to our previous subject, deliberateness in Stranger than Fiction - for those who just didn't get it).

Hand made jewelry

One of my favorite pastime...

The Taxi Driver, not at least like the movie

Quiet, cool summer night. Coming back from a confectionery "girls' evening out", I'm leisurely walking home, enjoying the overcoming peace and darkness of this so often gone crazy town. Suddenly there's a honking behind me. And when i turn around, another one. I resist the urge to take another look, the taxi is clearly waiting for someone, and other reasons can't have, after all, I'm wearing plain blue jeans and a buttoned up cardigan, nothing a crazy, famished lorry driver would appreciate by these means.

Just when my thoughts begin to settle back to their original course, the taxi arrives to my line and the driver winds down the window. Knowing what his suggestion might be, my refusal anticipates his offer: "No, thank you, I'm walking." To my surprise, he tells me he doesn't want any money. I ponder on his offer, bundling off the overcoming images of tomorrow's newspaper headlines on which "raped", "killed" and "unknown taxi driver" come out in various fonts and combinations. Finally gotten in the back seat, my curiosity is bigger than my fear or cautiousness. To my question, he confesses that he liked how i was walking and nothing better to do, he decided he'd give me a ride. He's a man over his fifties, talkative and fat. By the time we arrive to my street, I already know that he's retired from driving, he doesn't usually drive at night, but sometimes at twilight he would jump into his old-friend car and drive around town picking up interesting-looking people, preferably young girls, I guess, just to have a talk while giving them a lift. I can understand the time reference: the moment when the day has come to an end, while the night takes over his dominion, daunting with the perspective that it would never be morning and sunlight and pure happiness again - that's when so many of us feel the loneliest, it's the easiest to become depressed, it's the most melancholic part of the day.

He tells me that his other joys in life mostly revolve around television.

(to be continued)

Modern párkeresési problémák a 19. századból

"Amily mértékben népesednek a nagy metropolisok, éppen úgy nehezül a férfi és nő közötti tartós viszony kötése. Kinn a falun könnyű az ismerkedés: a legény a leánynak s ez viszont amannak minden jó és rossz tulajdonát kiismerheti, megtudhatja minden ember a másik vagyoni állását, rá is ér, hogy szerelmes legyen, s van akitől tanácsot kérjen; de egy másfél millió, hárommillió emberi ábrázatot összefoglaló quodlibetben, amilyenek a huszadik század fővárosai, ugyan hogy találjon rá Ádám a magához való oldalbordára? Az emberek nagy házakban laknak, ismerősök félmérföldnyi távolban egymástól; akik szomszédok, egymásnak a nevét sem tudják, s ha egyik évnegyed alatt annyira mentek, hogy ismerni kezdik egymást, a másik évnegyedben már odább hurcolkodnak, s soha hírét se hallják többé egymásnak. Aztán senki sem bízik egymáshoz. Minden ember cifra, s minden ember közül kétharmadrész adós a cifra ruhájával. Különösen a szép ifjú hölgyek irányában igen nagy az optikai csalódás. Az ember nem tudja, hogy hercegnő-e az, vagy balett-táncosnő, akinek a hintaja után bámult, s a lesütött szemű kisleány abban a kartonruhában azért jár e olyan szegényesen, mert az erénye nagyon drága, vagy azért, mert nagyon olcsó? És elvégre az ember nem ér rá, még ha célszerűnek találná is, hogy az utcán, a bálban, a színházban válogassa ki a magához való élettársat, hogy ezzel töltse az idejét; hivatala, boltja, üzlete van; lótni, futni, ülni, firkálni, kalkulálni, veszekedni, dolgozni kell egész nap, az ember futtában eszik, futtában szeret, siet fizetni, s szalad a dolgai után."

Jókai Mór: A jövő század regénye. (1872–1874)

sic, sec, sucks?

A már bejegyzésével is nagy port kavart Székely Nemzeti Tanács, bizonyítandó, hogy létezésére igenis szükség van, újabb indítvánnyal állt elő a napokban. Ezek szerint, ha már a román állam nem hajlandó teljesíteni a Székelyföld autonómiás igényeit, "megmutatjuk mi a magunkét más fórumokon"-alapon az internet virtuális terén próbál több sikert és megértőbb szíveket találni.

A ".sic" mint ötlet nem rossz, és talán végre el is találtak vele egy olyan médiumot, amelyet nem a politikai vagy gazdasági többség irányít, szinte bárki számára hozzáférhető, és az érzelemre tett hatásnak is nagyobb hatalma van. A probléma a részletekben rejlik, és abban a kellemetlen szájízben, amit maga után hagy a dolog ideológiai színezete. Bármely, egy kicsit is elgondolkodó honfitárs számára egyértelmű ugyanis, hogy a ".sic" domainnév felvétele nem az erdélyi összmagyarság imidzsét promoválja, hiszen a székelység még ennek a kisebbségnek is csak egy bizonyos hányada. Ezzel tehát ugyanazt a szekularizációs törekvést vezeti tovább, amelyet az MPP az RMDSZből való kiválása is jelölt, és amivel a román politikai közvélemény is gyakran megvádol bennünket - főleg az autonómia-cirkusz óta. Azzal a különbséggel, hogy ez a kezdeményezés most nem a román többségtől, hanem a magyar, de nem székely többségtől próbál elhatárolódni.

Másrészt, ha a méltányosságát el is fogadjuk, akkor is felmerül egy-két szépséghiba. Mi az, hogy" sic", például? Ki használta valaha is a székelységgel kapcsolatban ezt a kifejezést? (Magyarul székely, románul secui, németül és angolul Sekler, még folytassam?) Kit érdekel egyáltalán az, hogy ebből a latin szóból ered... mi is? A "székely" elnevezés? Hisz az már a latin térnyerése előtt megvolt. Vagy talán a Székelyföld mint "tartomány" elnevezése? Száraz hivatali terminus. Egyszóval: vannak mindenhol ismert és használt latin szavak - ez nem az.
Na és ki az, akinek nem egy sokkal közelebb álló képzettársítás ugrik be erről? Hiszen azt a kedves honfitársaink elfelejtették, hogy az internet nemhivatalosan hivatalos nyelve az angol, ahol a [szik] kiejtésű "sic" beteget jelent. Hiába, a román nyelvtanulást el lehet odázni ideológiai szólamok alapján, de az angoltudás ma már sajnos a politikusoknak is eléggé kötelező. Másképp felettébb érdekes lesz a dolog kimenetele. Főleg, ha majd kiderül, hogy ugyan az interneten engedélyezik a kétértelmű domainnevet, de ember legyen a talpán, akinek van annyi humorérzéke, hogy használja is.

This is the First Page of the Rest of My Blog

I've just seen Confessions of a Shopaholic. The movie. Pirated version. Cam. Pfu. You want a spoiler? They will end up together. Of course they will, that's part of the American-Western European dream, that "love conquers all" and "without you I am nothing at all" and so on. But this time, the girl who gave up her dream-job to prove that she's not that into fashion (God, you'll never gonna watch the movie after this, will you? Don't worry, it's like you've seen it already) and got an auction together with her Shopaholic Anonymous friends to sell her clothes, of course - will get the man of her dreams, who, by the way, I'm not sure why left in the first place, but anyway... At the last shot of the film she gives a wink to the seductively waiting mannequin wearing the charming little fashion-item, I have no idea which one it was this time. Cos after all, that is the only logical conclusion by which this movie could end. What other thing could its message be? You need to find love to survive your depression which makes the world look gray so that only a newly bought green scarf could bring its color back, but you can't give up shopping, because you live in the 21st century in a society where desires are made in the best possible improvement of Technicolor, and for the sole purpose of selling stuff with them.

So if you could accept that Love is enough to make you happy, who would be there to buy all those things by which we live producing? But the fact that you need to have the pink ribbon tied to the "the end"-sequence, shows that the propaganda is working - after all, what is love in real life, if there is anything like that? Two people's decision that being together is better than being alone. The rest is mystification, mythology, as we say it: mese habbal :P