No one knows Anything

1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2 Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
3 What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?
4 One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

The Holy Bible: King James Version. 2000.

Ecclesiastes

I don’t really do religion, I have a rather agnostic approach to it. I don’t know who God is and I’ve never met Jesus and from what I’ve been told about Islam, it seems like it makes a lot of sense but unlike other people, I don’t know enough to say yes or no to it or Buddhism or any other organized religion; so I’m ignorant enough to say that I don’t know what God is and what he, she or it wants and I’m arrogant enough to be comfortable in admitting it.

I do believe in a sort of energy, a force of nature, perhaps a God, but it’s not the type of God that most people talk about who sits down and decides if good or evil happens to specific people because of whether they drink or swear excessively or washed their sweet ass on the third Saturday of a leap year. I believe in a force that is responsible for everything that happens in the universe from now until the end of time but isn’t be interested in the minutiae of life. My type of God wouldn’t be interested in when life starts or ends or anything that happens in between because my type of God would know, if it‘s possible to know, that nothing ever dies, it just transforms into something else. My type of God would know things like the same water that Julius Caesar pissed into the Tiber River centuries ago is the same water that someone will be drinking from their water supply a thousand years from now because nothing ever goes away and none of it is important.

So I was surprised last Thursday when I found out that radio evangelist Harold Camping stated that he had predicted that the world was going to end on May 21st 2011 at 6pm (EDT I guess) from passages and dates he had read in the bible. Imagine my further surprise when at 8:30pm on Saturday I realized that either I had missed the Rapture and bad times were ahead for me, or as usual the American press had gotten it’s priorities wrong and reported on something that should have been ignored 10 days before it was even spoken of.

Why bother? No one knows anything!

What was I thinking of?

I don’t really know what I was thinking of when I went last week to the Apple Store at the Cherry Hill Mall. I had wanted to see what the iPad looked like and how it worked. Even though I know that it is just a glorified, oversized iPod, I wanted to know if I could seduce myself into getting it. I wanted to see if I could be one of the first people I know who would have it. I wanted others to say ooh or ah and I would be the focus of attention and people would look at me with awe and fascination. Which is really strange because I don’t think I like being the center of attention, it allows people to see my flaws which I take serious efforts in hiding.

That’s probably why I don’t like taking pictures of myself. It’s true that I can look at myself 2 or 3 years after a shot has been taken and say, “that wasn’t so bad,” but to look at photo of me taken today or last week or a few months ago will make me shudder as I see how this sags here or how those poke out there and I will run for shelter, denial or destruction of the evidence. I need my privacy, my anonymity while I pretend to look like something that I’m not. However, for some reason I don’t seem to respect the fact the others may feel about themselves the same way as I do.

Take the picture above for example. When I found out that Apple wouldn’t have the iPad until this weekend, I sat outside the store wondering what I should do. So I took a picture of the store and made sure that I had the mother and her baby in the frame so that I could put a human aspect to the picture. I didn’t ask her if I could take the picture and in fact I did my best to conceal that I was photographing her. Now suppose she was on the run from her wife-beating husband and didn’t want her location known, I’ve just jeopardized her security. Or take the picture below that I took last year. Supposing Papa from the old country sees his beloved daughter out in public with a man and no hijab or mask bringing shame to him and his family. Next you’ll be reading about her and her ritual punishment in the papers and I will be responsible. Will I care? Yes I will, but then life goes on.

I will care unlike the bastard who took a picture of me and an Ex all those years ago while we wearing matching thongs at the July 4th event at the beach in Malibu and published it in the gay magazine, Frontier.  Did he care that he had exposed me to ridicule in front of friends and family and possible job loss? Probably not. It's a good thing that no one I knew read this magazine.

I wonder if they still have that event on July 4th?

Matching thongs? What the hell was I thinking of?

Men and their Toys

What is it about electronics that that turn men on so? Why do men always have to have the latest gadget out there with the most bells and whistles to make them feel fulfilled? Why are men so easily led into the trap of wanting something with a few blinking lights more than the last thing and really not needing it only to find out later on that’s really not good enough? Okay, maybe that’s a generalization that may not be true. It just may be something that I use to justify my own impulse purchases, to satisfy my own vanity. But they are questions that I do ask of myself, ususally only after I’ve bought something and realized that the reason and justification that I gave for buying it was as bogus as a $3 bill. Take for example the cell phone I bought yesterday.

From since the beginning of the year my cell phone has been acting up. The phone can no longer hold a charge for more than 2 days, and if I use it for more than 30 minutes it starts to beep and blink low battery for the next 2 hours which usually drives me crazy until I turn it off. My contract with Verizon had been up since February I think but I was eligible for a new phone at no cost to me. I would just have to renew the contract.

Since I have never been one to talk that much on the phone, I have always opted for minimum plan just above where you don’t have to pay for each call. So I don’t really need a fancy phone just one that will do the job. But looking at the list of phones that would work with my plan, I noticed there were Blackberrys listed (or is it Blackberries) from $50 to $150 with my discount that I could get.

Now I have seen many members of my gym use their Blackberrys , on the floor, on the elevators and in the lockers rooms. They would read their email, send text messages, do stuff that I didn’t know about. Actually, they were probably just doing shit. I mean, the courts are closed after 5pm, so they weren’t doing legal stuff. I can’t believe that they were summoned for medical emergencies by email, so they aren’t doctors and if they are trading stocks in Sydney or Hong Kong whatever stock exchange is open 5pm EDT, I’ve never seen them pull out the charts or reports that people use for trading. So that leaves just one thing. Shit. They must be doing shit. Texting “Honey” that they are on their way home. Or reading a message that “Honey” has left telling them to make sure they bring home that gallon of milk for the kids. I will sometimes laugh at them silently at their fake ass attempts to seem important.


So of course I ordered one online. It should come in about 2 business days.

All is Vanity

I have been called vain a number of times. I remember the first time that I really took notice of it was when I dropped a weight on my index finger about 10 years ago. I called my mother that week or later and she scolded me about not going to the doctor.

“You know how you are if your finger turns crooked or if they cut it off because no one looked at it, “she said.

“And how is that?”I asked

“Vain. You’d never be able to live with yourself if you lost a finger.”

She was probably right in a sense, if I had lost the finger it would have been yet another flaw in my physical makeup that I would have had to hide. Another blemish that I would cover up with something less egregious. But she was also wrong. What she and others had called vain was not my attempt at proclaiming how physically beautiful I was, but rather my endeavor to keep people from pointing at me and saying how weird I looked.

This probably started when I was about 9 or 10 years old and I went to the public swimming pool with a couple of my friends. I had stripped down and was about to get into my swimming trunks when one of them turned, looked at me, pointed at my dick and laughed. I don’t remember what words were said but apparently I seemed to be abnormally large compared to their little nubbins, they were both white if that means anything to you, and I had become a source for their amusement.

From that point on, I covered my genitalia so others would not laugh at me. It’s not the 10 inch deal that I sometimes wish I had, but I still felt insecure about it. I always covered the scar on my stomach that I got when I was 14 days old from an operation when I realized that it looked like a map of the Panama Canal, a big gash cut across the midsection. I grew an afro, not because it was fashionable but so I could cover my big forehead and hide the ears that stuck out in a point. My last girlfriend would say that I reminded her of Dr. Spock.

“The baby doctor?” I would ask her.

Witty comebacks were not my thing then, but if you are going to make fun of me using Star Trek references, at least use the correct terminology. Now that I think of her, she was probably in part responsible for turning me.

Anyway last week , I was again told that I was vain, just because that I had mentioned that I had had some grill work done which included an implant on teeth so far back in my mouth no one would ever see it unless they were a dentist and looking for another holiday trip to Israel. That was what my dentist took as soon as I finished paying her for that procedure.

You see I’m not vain. I’m very much insecure and frightened by almost anything that will make me feel a smaller person than I am. So in order to try to show that I have nothing to be vain about, I'm willing to do the grand gesture and show myself in all my glory.

Well not all of it. What would you expect?