Guest Blog: Mr. Daedalus and the Tree of Knowledge

“…It’s just too damn easy to rationalize away that nagging little part of my brain that knows I should be more concerned about what’s in the sausage.”

Mr. Daedalus and the Tree of Knowledge

By David Daedalus

So there I was,  in my comically-small San Diego flat playing Doom on my iPad, when I turned on the radio just in time to catch an installment of ‘This American Life’. I have a particular fondness for this show and was doubly pleased as, like a rare steak and a fine Bordeaux, it pairs nicely with laying on my futon and blasting the minions of hell into piles of pixilated goo. This installment was entitled ‘Mister Daisey and the Apple Factory’, and after hearing it, I was left with one startling revelation:

Mike Daisey might well be the devil, and oddly, the devil seems to care more about other people than I do.

You see, Mike Daisey is a monologist and an Apple enthusiast who recently traveled to China to meet the people who manufacture all our iPads and MacBooks and whatnot. The episode of ‘This American Life’ is an edited version of a monologue that he gave about his trip. He described in detail the staggering pollution in Shenzhen, the Chinese city where Apple and lots of other name-brand electronic stuff is made. His story also told of workers being forced to use a known neurotoxin (n-hexane) to clean iPhone screens simply because it dried slightly faster than the non-neurotoxin alternative, alcohol. He described in vivid detail sixteen hour work days, child labor, and rampant worker suicide. This was likely the price that a score of Chinese laborers paid to make the iPad that I held in my hands, all while I sat in comfort listening to ‘This American Life’.

Mike Daisey might well be the devil: what he did through that monologue was pluck the apple from the tree of knowledge, hand it to me, and ask with an impish smile:

“Haven’t you ever wondered what’s in a hot dog?”

The thing is, I have, and what’s worse, I know in my heart of hearts I’m not going to do anything about it. Why? Because hot dogs are good. iPhones are cool. While of course I am morally outraged about the things Mr. Daisey described, but as long as I don’t actually have to see the blood and pain and torment that goes into making the things that I like when they are new and toss once they become boring, it’s just too damn easy to rationalize away that nagging little part of my brain that knows I should be more concerned about what’s in the sausage. Moral outrage is well and good, but what use is moral outrage unless it prods you to do something about the issue at hand?

Let’s take this a step further. I dated a gal for a while who was a domestic violence counselor and twice a week she was the on-call person for her agency’s Domestic Abuse Response Team. Basically, when the cops would respond to a domestic abuse call, her agency would get contacted so they could do a follow up. It really opened my eyes because her phone was ringing off the hook every time she was on call. Every night women (and men) were victims of domestic abuse all over town, and if you look at the statistics for this kind of thing, you may be surprised to find it’s more common than you think.

This is just one tiny example of all the horrific things that happen every minute of every day in your backyard and across the globe. There are tons of things in the world to be legitimately outraged about, so many that it’s literally an impossible task to educate yourself and do something about every one of them. It’s also easy to use this rationale as an excuse to give yourself a free pass (as I am guilty of doing) and not put any effort into caring about any of it. Why bother looking when it’s easy not to and you know you won’t like what you’ll find?

Mike Daisey may be the devil for enticing me with the truth, but at least the devil had the chutzpah to seek that truth, and when what he found failed to meet even the most basic standards of human decency, he had the courage not just to be outraged, but to do something about it. Granted, I may not be able to soothe (or even be aware of) all of the world’s ills, but Mr. Daisey’s fine monologue reminded me that I need to do a better job at caring about at least a few of them.

***

David Daedalus is a writer, a filmmaker, and a graduate student of Philosophy at San Diego State University. He also has a project on Kickstarter.com — to fund an animated series (one of his short episodes in the series has already been made) which he describes as “Philip K. Dick meets Southpark…with zombies.” To learn more and to watch the short animation, visit David’s website, here. David has also blogged with us before on Welcome to Adulthood. To read his other guest blog entry (equally as riveting!), click here.

[Photo by Marcin Wichary via Flickr.]

Wordless Wednesday: Adulthood is Annoying (Sometimes)

Photo via Inha Leex Hale’s photostream via Flicker.

Wordless Wednesday: Adulthood is Regret

Delicious photo by Kimberlykv via Flickr.

Beauty and Butter: A New Paradigm for Aging and the Wisdom of the Lamas

“…With an appropriated lesson from the lamas, we may be able to recast the relationship between our self-conscious concept of aging and the artificial enhancements tied to celebrity.”

During each Lantern Festival, the 15^th day of the first month on the Chinese lunar calendar, Tibetan Buddhist lama artists create ornate and intricate sculptures made of yak butter. These butter sculptures typically take months to create, and due to the low melting point of butter, many monks choose to complete the sculpture in a very cold room. When completed, the lively and vivid butter statues are displayed under a sky of lanterns as part of the festivities. (According to Chinese tradition, at the very beginning of a new year, when there is a bright full moon hanging in the sky, there should be thousands of colorful lanterns hung out for people to appreciate. Imagine how beautiful that would be to see!) When the festival is over, the butter sculptures are melted down and the butter is discarded.

Aside from the striking artistry of these sculptures, these butter statues are meant to represent ‘impermanence.’ Impermanence is an important tenet of Buddhist philosophy, and the butter sculptures are a reminder of the ephemeral nature of life. Nurture your life, live it vibrantly, and then, when it is time, you let your life melt away.

This idea of impermanence is also useful for our own exploration of adulthood. As we all know, adulthood is inescapable. Inevitably, we will grow older. But, in our western culture which places a high cultural value on beauty, it is aging (and the inevitable conclusion to aging) that is one of the hardest aspects of being “an adult.”

Scantily clad celebrities infiltrate the covers of our magazines, our television shows, our movies, and our own collective consciousness. Thanks to Photoshop, celebrities in photographs are seen without a wrinkle, a blemish, or an ounce of fat. Thanks to plastic surgery, you too can opt to get any number of invasive and non-invasive procedures that will help you ward off the visible signs of aging! (…)
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Wordless Wednesday: Adulthood is Small Joys

My first ever Egg-in-a-Hole morning. Small joys, friends. Happy Wednesday!

Quarterly Writing Theme Winner: Inhabiting – The Bench in Apartments

“‘We’ll just write and be artists,’ we said over a jug of cheap wine.”

Inhabiting – The Bench in Apartments

By Two Girls on a Bench (Siana-Lea Gildard & Patricia Marsac)

We are often known for sitting on benches.  But when it comes to inhabiting, we have actually lived in quite a few places.  When we were first welcomed into adulthood (the day after we graduated from college) we moved into a motor home.  It was parked in our friend’s parent’s driveway.  We had no apartment lined up, no real jobs lined up, so this was our big plan, to move into our friend’s parent’s motor home.  Yes, we had humanities degrees – planning is not in the DNA of those with English and Theatre majors.

TRICIA: We aren’t that bad at planning, at least we had the motor home.

SIANA: A motor home is not a plan, an apartment and a job would have been a plan.

The best part of inhabiting this motor home was the adventure.  We felt so cool, so bohemian, we were just “crashing” somewhere until we figured things out.  Sure, the motor home was musty and the plumbing didn’t work and we had to go in the house to shower, but we got so much street cred.  Not sure who gave us the street cred, guess it was all in our minds, but we felt kinda cool.  We laughed about it a lot, mostly because we didn’t allow ourselves to be nervous about the idea that we didn’t have a frickin’ clue what we were going to do with our lives.  “We’ll just write and be artists,” we said over a jug of cheap wine.  But then our friend’s parents started asking when we’d be moving on and we really did miss running water, so we took all the checks we got as graduation presents and put them together for a deposit on an apartment.

Our first real apartment was in a sketchy area where we lived next store to a drug dealer.  We aren’t exaggerating, Tricia went to pick him up from jail one day because his pregnant fiancé needed a ride.  We really loved that place, it was a few blocks from the beach and had huge bedrooms and we wrote and painted all the time.  Sure, our window was broken by someone throwing a bottle through it one night.  Sure, Siana’s crappy ass car was broken into and nothing was taken because there was nothing to take.  Sure, Tricia felt it necessary to walk down the street carrying her Econo Club to protect herself rather than to protect her car late at night.  But that place was a gem.

After six months of living the life in that apartment, we  needed to move closer to the jobs we finally got (Tricia lugging things around the theatre, Siana lugging papers around a publishing company) and moved into what we now refer to as the roach motel.  This place sucked, but it was cheap and our reflexes became lightning fast as we killed roaches left and right with whatever we had in hand; whether it was a paper towel, a frying pan or a shoe.   We chalked this up to life experience and wrote a song for one of our performance art shows about roaches, which received the acclaim of many.  Writing what we knew, that was really living the dream.

SIANA: Yeah, I don’t remember the roach thing being that romantic.

TRICIA: Shut up, that roach song was beloved by all.

Finally, our last apartment together (before we moved in with the men that would later become our husbands) was the best.  We still talk about it with such nostalgia.  We set one of our screenplays in this apartment just so we could spend more time there in our minds.  It was a sort of two story apartment with a great kitchen where we really started learning how to cook and a living room where we really started learning how to drink and party.  We had a neighbor that played the piano, an old man across the courtyard that sat there with a little girl watching the swimming pool and a next store neighbor that became Tricia’s husband.   We had people over a lot; cast parties from the shows we worked on, birthday and fondue parties and random gatherings with strange people showing up that we didn’t know or invite.  But it was all fun.  And we wrote a lot together in that apartment.

TRICIA: I loved that apartment, I miss my bead curtain.

SIANA: Me too, I miss that old papasan chair too.

­­­­­­­­­­­Website: www.2girlsonabench.com

Email: blog@2girlsonabench.com

Quarterly Writing Theme Winner: Life in a Box

“Out of necessity, I grew accustomed to never owning anything that I couldn’t move up or down three flights of stairs on my own.”

Quarterly Writing Theme Winner: Inhabit

Life in a Box

By Luke Williams

The tumultuous days of young adulthood are often marked by a lifestyle of near-vagrancy. Dorms, houses with eight occupants, coffin-sized studios, and the ever-popular Craigslist leap-of-faith roommate – I’ve lived them all. Looking back, I was a new-millennium cowboy living life out on the open range of new possibilities without anything to tie me down.

And while I would band together from time-to-time with other likeminded young adventurers it was always apparent that I was riding solo. “Self,” I might say on occasion, “your Craigslist leap-of-faith roommie suddenly has a brand-new wardrobe, and you seem to be missing a couple checks and a few sawbucks from your dresser…Suspicious?”

Looking out for yourself and anticipating betrayal out of someone you share a bathroom with was such a foreign concept that it nearly threatened to steamroll right over me. I was lucky enough to grow-up in a reasonably functioning household –at the very least I never had to worry about finding someone other than myself getting horizontal in my bedroom (and my bed!) until my grown-up years.

It was during these early days that my concept of home radically shifted. It was no longer a safe haven, a respite from the outside world, it was just literally where I could fall into unconsciousness for varying spans of time. Most striking of all is that it was never permanent. Nine months here, six months there, and one anomalous year-long stint with a signification other.

Out of necessity, I grew accustomed to never owning anything that I couldn’t move up or down three flights of stairs on my own. I stopped searching for random cardboard boxes and instead invested in giant rubber containers. I never gave a passing thought to hauling around personal treasures, pictures, or anything that fell outside of utility.

I became an expert at urban, young adult survival. I could screen out the Craigslist roommates who might try to put broken glass in my cereal simply from the number of smiley faces they used in the posting, and should I sense any impending doom after move-in, I could have my truck loaded-up within a day and be off to my next stop-over.

As I continue down my path through adulthood, the challenge has now shifted to learning how to turn that survival instinct off, or at least dial it back a notch. I’m in a stable work environment, I have a stable living situation, and yet I can’t seem to bring myself to unpack everything I own. I struggle to convince myself that hanging a picture isn’t a futile gesture, and I still come home expecting everything I own to have been pawned.

I find myself once again readjusting my conceptualization of what home means. So maybe, just maybe… adulthood is about knowing when to reassess expectations just as much as it is knowing how to avoid a roommate who is prone to perform pirouettes off a balcony.

***

Luke Williams is a freelance writer and graphic designer. He lives in a modest apartment in San Diego and recently purchased a couch. For more of Luke’s work, visit his blog LukusnotLucas.  

Photo by Amsterdamize via Flickr.

Wordless Wednesday: Adulthood is Unpredictable

*Photo of Green Flash at Morro Bay, CA, by Mike Baird via Flickr.

Dear Summer, This is the First Day of My Life…

“Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend – or a meaningful day.” – Dalai Lama

My life is for living. Not just working, and studying, and making dinner, and sleeping.

Not just catching up with DVR shows, and not just checking in on Facebook.

Not just for dating, or drinking, or hanging out.

My life is for living. Actively, freely, happily, healthily, and with compassion – living for me. Living the kind of life that fills you up to the brim, and you are sooo full of life that any moment you feel that you may burst!

I remember the first day I ever lived. It was the first day that I really lived for myself and realized that I owned the moments and outcomes of my life. I had just arrived in Madrid for my first solo international trip. I remember thinking I would just “wing it” to get from the airport to Puerta del Sol, the bustling epicenter of Madrid. So an exhausted jet-lagged Mara and her big red suitcase jumped on the metro and got lost for two hours. When I finally arrived at the Sol metro stop, I hauled my oversized suitcase up the stairs (it was too big for the escalator) while hurried and annoyed commuters bristled past me.

When I made it to the top of the stairs, it was mid-day in Sol and I was stunned and speechless. Never before had anything in my life looked so grand, so beautiful, so intimidating, and yet so full of limitless potential. I remember taking the biggest breath of Spanish air that I could muster and I vowed to memorize the moment. The first moment I had really lived for myself.

It has been over 6 years since I studied in Madrid. But the memory of the moment still inspires me. The friends I made in Spain, even though I don’t talk to them much, still exist. Proof positive that it was real, I was there, and that I lived.

Now that I am a “responsible adult” I can’t just jet off to a foreign country to live. I have a job I take pride in, and friends and family that I love and that depend on me. But I still want to live a meaningful life. I still want moments I can memorize. I want to be full to the brim.

For a few years shaky years there, I equated my primary meaning in life with my relationship. I became stagnant in my own self-development because I was so focused on someone else’s happiness and making sure the life we were building was as happy as I could make it. And somewhere along the way, I stopped really living for me.

This is the first day of my life.

In the past few weeks, I have been filling myself up to the brim. I have been traveling on many mini-adventures, visiting with old friends and making lots of new ones, trying new things (I actually rode on a motorcycle!), writing, running, and cupcake-baking. But I want more!

Dear warm California Summer, I am dedicating your glorious months to Me. I am picking up bits of inspiration from everyone I meet and I’m forging a life rich with learning, growing, stretching, and self-exploration and evolution. My goals, dear Summer, are lofty. I am training to run a 5k and then a 10k by August. I vow to perfect a chocolate soufflé and the best-ever crème brulee. I am borrowing a “starter guitar” and am taking guitar lessons. I signed up for a metalwork jewelry class on Saturdays. I am going to learn how to golf and swim. And I am signing up to take a statistics class to remind myself that “living” is also a challenge.  (I have evaded math my whole life, but living is about conquering fears!) I will not take your warm days for granted, Summer, and in your comforting months, I intend to live life fully.

And somewhere in this Summer of Self — between guitar practice and learning the backstroke — I hope to have a few moments of meaning that I can memorize. Moments where I look at the sun, take a deep breath, and know that I am living for myself.

*Photo by Reservasdecoches via Flickr.

Personal Best

Recently I started running.

I have never been really interested in “running” in my life. Previously I had only considered running valuable if I needed to run away from something or someone, or if I was playing in a soccer game. In those cases, there was either a utilitarian purpose to running or a recreational one.

A few months ago, I was talking to a good friend of mine about his journey as a runner. He told me the story of how he started running: he just started off by running five minutes, and every day he increased his time running by one minute. Eventually he was able to run a 5k, followed by a 10k, followed by a half marathon, and now he has run many marathons! He once told me, “It isn’t about how far you run, or how fast or how long. It is about achieving your ‘personal best.’”

The idea of ‘personal best’ struck me as a meaningful philosophy for not just running, but all of life.  So, I made it a goal to live every day to my personal best.

For me, achieving my ‘personal best’ manifests in all aspects of my life: in my professional life, my academic life, and my personal life. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I always succeed, or that every day I am operating as my best-and-brightest self (though I hope most days I am). What it does mean is that in every situation I try to do the best that I can for what I am capable of in the moment. [*]

[*] That doesn’t mean I don’t still make mistakes, the goal is to learn from them so I can be wiser the next time!

I have been doing it pretty well in my professional life, I think. I work hard, I support my colleagues, I stand up for things that I believe in, I keep a positive attitude, I learn from every professional development challenge I face. Every day that I wake up for work I am happy because I believe that, in my own small way, I am an advocate for kids who are facing some really daunting emotional and mental health challenges. This job — and the great team I work with — are a personal best for me.

In my academic life, I am going to be striving for my personal best to finish my exhausting thesis and my MA!  Once I finish that, even if I never go on to a Ph.D. program, I will still strive for continued personal bests – even if it is just learning a language or acing a math class.

In my personal life, it seems harder to be strive for ‘personal best.’ I have taken up running, and it is really nooooo easy feat to transition from “non-runner” to “runner.” This morning, with the encouragement of Marathon Friend (mentioned above), I ran 2 miles!  In the morning! And tomorrow we are going to run again, until I can enter a 5k, then a 10k, then a half marathon. (Marathon Friend is training for another marathon, of course.)

This brings me to my next point.

Personal best is about surrounding yourself with people who support or inspire or push you to be your personal best. For me this is a host of people. My mom, of course, who encourages and inspires me every day. My brothers who, without fail or complaint, always offer to carry my heavy loads. And my great friends — new and old — who support me and cheer me on despite my silly antics, my crazy schedule, and my hair-brained schemes (like my mission to eventually run a half-marathon). For me, personal best also means being compassionate and respectful to others, even if you feel they don’t always deserve it. It means showing love and gratitude to my friends and family, and telling them warmly and often just how much they mean to me.

I have also learned that I want my next relationship to be with someone who I can be my ‘personal best’ with — and someone who I can support to be their personal best too. This, I think, was missing with my last relationship (though my former beau did make me a better and kinder person in so many ways, for which I will always be grateful.) I know he and I are both moving on from our relationship to find that person who will be “our personal best.” It isn’t about how fast or slow you find the person, or how far you go, it’s about not stopping the run until you find your personal best.

My question to you, Adulthooders:

In what ways are you striving for “personal best” in your lives? When is it easiest (and hardest) to be at your best?

Ruminations on these questions, or any other thoughts, are welcomed in the comments!

*Photo via Hiddenloop on Flickr.