Glass half full, glass half empty

From reading the popular press, you might be of the opinion that we should all be striving to be cheery optimists who always see the glass as half full and that anything short of that is an inherently bad thing and should be suppressed.  But that would be a big mistake.  There is a reason why an ability to have a pessimistic outlook has been so well preserved genetically/socially in populations over time and it relates to survival.

It’s those who see the glass as half empty (rather than half full) who realise the beer is running out and therefore do anything about refilling the glass! I’ve been on projects and holidays where the glass half full people stand around saying everything will be fine and us glass half empty people damn well know it will be fine because we’re thinking ahead and running round to prevent the glass from running dry.  Which is infuriatingly compeletely unappreciated by the glass half fulls who knew it was going to be fine in the first place!

I haven’t yet worked out what the optimal ratio of glass half fulls to glass half empties is, but if you’re buying rounds in the pub you probably don’t want anything more than one half full to three half empties!

You know you’re middle-aged when…

(from a woman’s perspective)

• You’re pleased to get acne as it means you still have some hormones
• You see your physiotherapist more often than your best friend
• The needs of the digestive system take precedence over the desires of the reproductive system
• You can no longer read the menu at a candlelit restaurant
• Your facecream contains more than one anti-ageing ingredient and a SPF of 15+
• The magazines you read have full-page adverts for facial fillers
• You chuck out your bikini
• You know that none of the treatments for cellulite bar liposuction work
• Without thinking about it, most of your clothes are black
• You worry when you get emotional about something that it means you’re starting the change

(from a man’s perspective)

• You go to a football match more often than on a date with your girlfriend or wife
• You have a number one haircut to hide the balding patches
• You would choose a few beers watching the telly at home over clubbing with Beyonce
• You wear a vest
• You wear long-johns 24 hours a day for three months of the year
• You start wear manky old T-shirts in bed
• The most colourful clothing you own is navy or grey
• You start buying your wife expensive jewellery
• You start forgetting your PIN number
• You start keeping spam email advertising viagara

Barack Hussein Obama’s Inauguration – and Joseph Lowery’s prayer

I watched the inauguration on a big screen in a pub in London from around 445pm London-time, along with about 30 people from work including three Americans (who stood for the address and the national anthem at which the British looked somewhat puzzled!).

While the pub was silent for Obama’s speech, by the time Rev Joseph Lowery came on to give the Inauguration Benediction there was a lot of chatting. The chatting died down for the end of the prayer as people realised it was worth listening to, so most of us caught this bit:

“Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around – when yellow will be mellow – when the red man can get ahead, man – and when white will embrace what is right. Say Amen (Amen), Say Amen (Amen), Say Amen (Amen).”

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=8atFjvN488s

I was really surprised today to find blogs where it was called racist! It was an amusing and rousing end to the ceremony and a clever way to call for racial unity. I’m not offended to be white and be prayed for to embrace what is right.

The best comment I found so far is from Keith Williams (January 21, 2009 1:44 AM) on this blog who says

Wow! I think it was a great prayer, also, but when I started reading comments, I realize Rev. Lowery (accidentally) tripped over a cultural misunderstanding. Please keep in mind the man’s 87 years old. The comments about Black, White, etc. were not meant literally, instead it was a play on words from a song popular more than 50 years ago in the Black community (“Black, Brown, and White” by Big Bill Broonzy). The refrain from that song goes like this:

“If you’re black and gotta work for a living, This is what they will say to you, They says, “if you was white, should be all right, If you was brown, stick around, But as you’s black, hmm brother, get back, get back, get back”

The problem is very few Blacks under the age of 50 would have known about the song and even fewer Whites. So in his attempt to be “cute” he inadvertently offended some. I am sorry that happened, but I am pretty sure he meant no slights by his otherwise non-controversial remarks.

After the end of the inauguration, one of the Americans from work bought some champagne and we toasted George Bush being flown off in a big helicopter. This was followed by games of Pin the shoe on the George Bush – a variant of pin the tail on the donkey! Oh, and we liked the First Lady’s dress.

Slumdog Millionaire

I’m wondering why Slumdog Millionnaire is constantly referred to as a ‘feelgood’ movie in the press. I was expecting something as apple pie as Mamma Mia. I was really not prepared for the torture, religious violence, child prostitution, maiming and absolute destitution level poverty.

A good movie, yes, but not ‘Feelgood’.

Beautifully shot, it manages to make the slums of Mumbai as colourful and beautifully choreographed as a Chinese costume drama, great soundtrack, story that gets a bit predictable by the end but still keeps your heart racing with the tension, well acted. Yep, worth seeing, but if you don’t come out feeling sad as well as happy, there’s something wrong with you!

Memorable Christmas Presents

• Quirkiest Christmas present: tie between dried tuna fish roe and a hydroponic herb growing kit
• Most Christmassy Christmas present: socks with sparkly bows on them
• Straight-to-charity-shop Christmas present: it would be mean to say!
• Smelliest Christmas present: lavender ‘luxury reed fragrance diffuser’ (basically a bottle of air freshener with reeds to stick in the bottle. Also sociologically of minor interest because (i)  air freshener in this form is a posh gift, but an aerosol can of air freshener would be an insult and (ii) reed diffusers seem to have arrived in this country very recently and to have replaced bags of scented wood chip pot pourri )
• Favourite Christmas present: ear bling from Hatton Gardens, London
• Coolest present someone else got:  wii (received by partner’s mother.  The Christmas squabble this year was about the wii cables.)

Hope you had a good Christmas too.

Kiwi authors I have read

(Short reviews of books by nine Kiwi authors I have read starting December 2005.  How can a country with a population not much larger than that of Wales produce so many good authors?)

The People-faces by Lisa Cherrington. Story of a Maori young woman and her schizophrenic brother. Brings out the contrast between the older Maori ways where her brother would have been special to the community as he spoke with the ancestors and the modern-day where he’s put on a psychiatric ward and given suppressive medication.

The Bone People by Keri Hulme. Much lauded, 1985 Booker prize-winning story of an eccentric middle-aged artist and the small boy she finds on the beach who transforms her life. That one sentence totally fails to capture the vivid and rich language, artistic vision and uncomfortable exploration of love, family, alcoholism, child abuse and Maori culture in this novel.  In my top 10 books.

cousins by Particia Grace. I discovered this book and this well-known (certainly in New Zealand) author through a quote placed on a stone in Wellington harbour – quote and picture here. Beautiful exploration of Maori culture clashing with Pakeha (white) culture, through the eyes of three cousins.

Golden Deeds by Catherine Chidgey. Uneven book, that never quite gripped me enough but was very good in places.  It weaves together stories from three people’s lives, bound together by the disappearance of a teenage girl.  Worth trying another of hers.

The Lagoon by Janet Frame. Possibly one of the best-known Kiwi authors, especially after the wonderful biographic film by Jane Campion An Angel at My Table.  The Lagoon is a collection of moving short stories, some set in a psychiatric asylum (where she was when she wrote the book), others poetic fragments.   It redefined the possibilities of the short story for me.

Stories by Katharine Mansfield. Possibly one of the best-known short-story writers.  I don’t actually like her writing that much – her stories remind me of Virginia Woolf, somewhat woolly and fey.

Collected Poems by Bill Manhire. New Zealand’s inaugural Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate who teaches on the Victoria University Wellington creative writing course.

Overdue New Releases by Matt Johnson. Acute and funny book about working in a video rental store and Life.  See review on this blog.

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. Winner of 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Montana medal New Zealand book awards 2007 and longlisted for 2007 Man Booker prize. Yes, it’s good. A deceptively simple book set on a Pacific island (off Papua New Guinea?) that brings in Dickens, growing up and the horrors of civil war.

A Good Keen Man by Barry Crump. How could I forget this in my original list? Omit possibly, but forget…! A best seller in New Zealand (and nowhere else!).  Gets under the skin of the hunting, shooting, fishing white European Kiwi psyche through a series of humorous anecdotal short stories with the common theme of weird-people-I-have-had-a-tent-next-to-while-spending-months-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-shooting-introduced-but-now-pest-European-animals.

Review of Overdue New Releases by Matt Johnson

If you asked, him Matt Johnson would probably say in his self-deprecating style* that his book was written for 20 something men still living in Wellington with their parents.  But he would be wrong. This is a sharp, funny book that works on all sorts of levels for a general readership – well worth looking out for.

The man character is a nice guy, a bit of a failure – failed dreams, failed relationships, still living at home at age 30, working in a video rental store in Wellington, New Zealand while his friends move on to better things.  The book tells the story of several weeks in his life, often using metaphors, language and scenarios from films – it’s almost worth keeping a list of these while reading as they’re very cleverly woven into the story.

It’s a painfully funny book, often managing to be both laugh-out-loud funny and achingly sad in the same paragraph and packed with observations that are so acute that you take a different look at the world around you after reading it.  It’s also an uncomfortable book, taking the skin off real life, its aspirations and dreams, the personality flaws people display despite themselves, especially with their guard down in the video store.  You find yourself wondering what life’s all about as you’re laughing or admiring the sneaky descriptions of Wellington.

There are not many authors who could pull this off while writing about disability and video store rentals – not usual subject areas for a writer in the first place and especially not combined.  Most of the main characters suffer from psychological problems (such as depression or dementia) or physical disability, the ‘slow walkers’ of life. Yet he makes these people very real and their disabilities funny in a warm and gentle way.  In fact, you only think of these as people with problems after finishing the book.

This is Matt Johnson’s first novel. It is slightly uneven at times, especially when it gets to the violent scene towards the end.  But the main problem I had was deciphering some of the 20-something New Zealand slang the main characters lapse into from time to time.  Not terrible -after all, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was written in completely impenetrable slang and still maintained narrative drive!  But the language could be tempered somewhat for an international (or older!) readership.  There is a low key ending, which fits with the rest of the book, but some part of you just longs for the main character to escape Wellington, take that plane to Auckland, move to Paris, make a life for himself.

All in all I’d give it four stars out of five. This book has only been released in New Zealand so far but can be ordered online at  www.nzbooksabroad.com.  Well worth searching out. And watching out for the next novel.

*I’ve met him to speak to once!

Review of The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart

In short – I hated it.

In long – I read this book because it’s a ‘cult bestseller’ and because I was curious about ‘bloke’s books’, but it was a struggle to finish it. J described it as a book for someone who doesn’t like reading and I think he’s right.

The Dice Man is described as ‘funny, shocking and subversive’ on the cover. Unfortunately it isn’t. The story is certainly larger than life and the central premise is clever, so it possibly could have been, but both the writing and the plotting are lazy. It employs a distillation of the vocabulary and concerns of a lad’s mag, two-dimensional characters and scenes that either involve two fingers up at society or a new female sex object or both. Maybe it worked in 1971, when it was first published, but that’s about as charitable as I can get. Catch 22, published 10 years earlier, did this sort of thing much better (I didn’t like that either).

The central character in The Dice Man is a psychiatrist with the same name as the author. He is in a mid-life crisis, bored and in a rut, then discovers dice therapy. This involves thinking up a list of options and throwing dice to tell him which one to do. Options start with who to seduce or what to eat for breakfast, move on to what kind of character to play in a situation and finally who to kill. As the list of options get more and more outrageous, Luke becomes more and more erratic and eccentric. Finally he has a breakdown, rediscovers Life with a big L, then develops use of the dice as therapy to free patients from the miserable lives they have trapped themselves into.

All the options Luke ever thinks up are completely selfish, geared towards freeing himself from any responsibilities and pursuing personal pleasure. However, there are only positive consequences of his self-centred actions e.g. him walking out on his wife and kids to get more sex results in her getting a degree, a new lover and self-confidence. The Book of the Die sections that parody the Bible are too tedious to be annoyingly blasphemous – and also suffer from the problem that the Die can’t be all powerful if you think up your own options in the first place. All sex is from a traditional male point of view; the women are always up for it and enjoy it – even the prostitute, while Luke couldn’t possibly enjoy the homosexual encounter and the author doesn’t even describe it properly (unlike the heterosexual sex, which is given in some tedious detail). Maybe the worst aspect of the book is its predictability – you just know the writer will run out of ideas by about two-thirds through and have Luke leave his wife to get more sexual variations and ‘wackiness’ into the book. The most disappointing aspect is that this book could have a very black powerful undertow, dealing as it does with the stifling nature of human society, the ossifying of spontaneity, the slow painful death of the inner child with age, the shrinking and atrophying of daydreams. Instead the book keeps splashing water in the shallows going ‘Look at me’ while never daring to venture out deeper to swim.

The quietly desperate are now on antidepressants

Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1854 “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”.

Nowadays they’re prescribed antidepressants (in countries with healthcare).

If I were writing a newspaper column, I would now be spoilt for choice on what direction to take this next. The medicalisation of life (sadness, loss, stress,  unhappiness as illness)? When does a normal heartbrokeness become abnormal depression?    “The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder” or the “The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression“. The phenomenal rise in prescriptions of antidepressant medication.  Whether antidepressant medication actually works.  Whether the main alternative – therapy works (see this aimed at medical students).  How wealth doesn’t necessarily equal happiness and possibly doesn’t at all.  The cultural norms that say we should be happy all the time and hide away if we’re not.  Pose semi- hypothetical questions like is it better to take antidepressants to be able to stay in an unhappy marriage for the sake of the kids, or to leave?

Too many angles.  I’m off to do the happiness test.  And if that doesn’t go well, I can always peek at the criteria for diagnosing depression.

Finding a new church

I recently moved to the middle-class wealthy suburbs, very different from the vibrant, dirty, noisy, creative, aggravating,stressful full-on inner city I had been living in.

One of the best things about my previous area was my church. It had a freshly painted notice outside with the words God and community on it, just so you knew what it was about. It was a church that took anyone and everyone – from the happily married lawyers and doctors to refugees, the separated, divorced, ones with non-Christian partners, no obvious partners (whether they were gay or not wasn’t an issue), people with various psychiatric issues, the odd. You could be yourself in the church – it could cope with Life – it was a real family. You didn’t have to rev yourself up to prozac level before you felt you could set foot in there. And mostly we tried to speak to strangers and newcomers – even the shy of us. Those in the know (mainly clergy) called it a praying church – and commented how that was less common than you might think. I didn’t realise how special that was. But it was a huge wrench to leave.

Finding a new church is hard. I have what I might call an average faith – it’s smaller than a mustard seed a lot of the time, I grumble at God and sulk, find it hard to keep to the discipline of prayer and reading my bible and occasionally get flashes of the beauty, grace and awesome love of God. I don’t understand why God allows suffering, what happens to those of other faiths, or some Christians’ resistance to women clergy and think sexuality is something between God and an individual. I’d like to go somewhere I can own up to all of that, somewhere with good teaching, but also good music – somewhere that shows me the mystery of God but behaves as the family of God, that stretches me somewhat but that can accept me as I am before God.

There are lots of church choices here in banker-land, all of which proclaim a dizzying number of activities on their noticeboard. After some time walking around and some prayers, God said not to be phased by the activities but to look out for a church with God on the noticeboard. The front runners seemed to be the “great sermons” church, the “great church music” church, the “great website” church, the “many activities for children” church , the “many activities” church and the “we also do Koreans” church – but not one of them actually seemed to mention good old God.

I did meet someone from the “great sermons” church some weeks ago, before we moved, when trying to see if God was anywhere on the noticeboard. When he found out we were looking for a church, he didn’t stop to ask what we were looking for – just started listing all the good points like an estate agent. He told us about all the many groups to cater for everyone and presented us with a sermon list for the next couple of months. It seemed rather churlish to ask where God was in all the activity.

So I did try the “great sermons” church last week – although more because it had a service time that allowed the most time in bed (!). There were a lot of smiley confident people in the full pews, who were mainly (i.e. all but one) white. Yes they had a great sermon, which I remembered all week, about gaining the whole world and losing your soul. I also remembered the only two words spoken to me during all the “how are you’s” and “Lovely holidays” and “Great sermons” going on around me – one was “hello”, while given my prayer book on the way in and one was “thanks” when I gave it back on the way out. There was a lot of ‘head’ God but not a lot of ‘heart’ God visible.