Buddhist-flavored?

Forget about attaining the Zen of cleanliness or peace of mind in a gumball. If you’re too broke to buy good karma, apparently you can drink your bad karma away with a six-pack of Buddhist beer.

 

More than fair-weather

This dismal picture says all you need to know about the mood in New England after this weekend’s Super Bowl loss. Today in Keene, we’re weathering the second straight day of mostly on-again, sometimes off-again wintry mix; tonight, we’re supposed to get a messy brew of sleet, freezing rain, and between six and eight inches of snow. That means tomorrow, dejected Patriots fans will have to slog, slide, or four-wheel-drive through a treacherous parfait of winter precipitation: snow on top of ice on top of slush. Tasty!

This morning on my way to do this week’s errands before the slush sets in, I spotted one woman wearing what looked to be a brand-new Patriots ball-cap. Was she a newbie fan lured by this season’s spell of eighteen straight wins? Or did she buy her new hat at deep discount after Sunday’s Super Bowl loss made those eighteen straight wins a moot point? Mediocrity is easy: simply be consistent in your attempt to be so-so, and an occasional bout of brilliance won’t gild your halo too convincingly. But perfection’s a bitch. Eighteen straight wins don’t mean a thing if you can’t finish the Big One. And so this week, this season’s crop of Patriots converts are learning the hard way what longtime Boston sports fans already knew: no matter how much we love them in good times and in bad, our beloved boys have a way of breaking our hearts in the end.

This resigned familiarity with heartbreak, after all, is what defines a true Boston sports fan. When I first watched Still We Believe when it debuted in the spring of 2004, before the Red Sox finally broke their infamous World Series curse, I couldn’t help but wonder what people outside New England would think about the insane mood swings of the die-hard fans featured in the film, which follows the Red Sox’ heartbreaking 2003 season. Could anyone but a long-suffering Sox fan understand that the fans in the film were extreme but not exaggerated?

Yes, Boston sports fans have a hard time trusting even the biggest lead, knowing as we do how easy it is to lose it all in the ninth. Yes, Boston sports fans can and do turn on a dime, lamenting today that our team “sucks” because it lost a game and boasting tomorrow that “we’ll win the championship, baby” because we won a single game. One of my favorite “characters” in Still We Believe–a fan by the name of Angry Bill–nearly convinces himself he’s having a heart attack because of the intense conniption fits his favorite team inspires. “It’s OVAH,” he explains in a quintessential Boston accent after swearing off, again, his favorite team after a particularly painful loss. “O-V-A. Ovah!” The very essence of Boston sports fanaticism is loving your team so much, you can’t stand to look at them after they’ve dashed your hopes…again. To any other fan, these wild mood swings seem crazy: it’s only a game, after all. But to fans of New England teams, the agony of defeat always lurks right alongside the thrill of victory, and we have the mood swings and almost-ulcers to show for it.

I think there’s a connection between the emotional roller-coaster that is Boston sports fanaticism and the mostly on-again, sometimes off-again drama of New England weather. If you live in a place that is consistently mild and mostly sunny, you can afford a certain sangfroid when the athletic going gets tough. But if spectator sports are your source of solace and distraction during a season that consistently spits sleet, slush, and snow in your face, you’ll respond with appropriately meteorologic moods when things go bad. If you don’t like the mood in New England, just wait a minute, for it will change…with the weather, with the scoreboard, or with the league standings. In a region that spends half the year wondering when winter will be over, you have to excuse the locals if we occasionally get all Seasonal Affective on you. It comes with the territory.

So today, I tried to lift my slush-sagged spirits by heading to the grocery store for a spot of color, as I’ve done before. Earlier in the week, after hearing several of my students discussing the Super Bowl, I announced that there would be NO MORE TALK of this past weekend’s tragedy. “It’s OVAH!” was my official response to Brady and the Boys; still smarting from the disappointment of daring to believe an 18-0 record would culminate in a Super Bowl win, I didn’t want to hear any mentions of the game that dashed those hopes. What kind of masochist wants a play-by-play of heartache?

Today, it wasn’t too painful to see the occasional Patriots logo on the back of a Jeep or a brand-new Pats hat on the head of a female passerby, and I even smiled a bit at the cheerful innocence of freshly baked Valentine’s cakes. On Monday morning when I tossed my Patriots sweatshirt in the laundry, I vowed not to wear it again until next fall, knowing that in time my heart will soften and I’ll be ready to give Brady and the Boys a second chance after we spend a season or so apart. In the meantime, I hold out hope for the Celtics, I still love those consistently mediocre Bruins, and I am counting the days until Red Sox pitchers and catchers report to spring training. At least it will be another couple of months before the next season-ending heartbreak.

 

Holiday reflections

One way to celebrate a holiday is by condemning those who celebrate differently than you do. On Christmas day J and I drove Reggie and Melony the beagle into downtown Boston, where we left the car at a Back Bay parking meter and took a several-hour stroll down Boylston and Newbury Streets. J and I wanted to see the sights and snap photos; Reggie and Melony wanted to sniff and pee. To each her or his own, right?

No sooner did J and I pass Copley Square on Boylston Street than we encountered a slow-moving truck emblazoned with Christian condemnations. “Christians in the Bible never celebrated Christmas,” block letters on the truck proclaimed. “How can you honor Jesus with lies about Santa Claus, flying reindeer, and drunken parties?” To drive the point home, this Hellfire-Mobile had a loudspeaker with which the driver preached his message of condemnation to passing pedestrians. Why greet random strangers with a friendly “Merry Christmas” when you can shout “You’re going to hell” instead?

Christians in the Bible never drove trucks with loudspeakers and damning slogans stenciled on the sides. How can you honor Jesus with drive-by words of hate? J and I have been around separate segments of the evangelical block: whereas I was raised Catholic and was “born again” as a college undergraduate, J was raised Catholic and became a Baptist as an adult living and working in Georgia. Currently, neither one of us attends church, but we aren’t antithetical to Christianity, either; we just don’t drive around with Christian slogans emblazoned for all to see. If choosing to take a quiet walk with your dog and digicam constitutes a damnable offense–if what God wants His followers to do instead is drive around yelling at people–then I guess J and I should get ready for a warmer climate. Let it be done to me, Lord, as you say.

Luckily, not all of the characters J and I encountered on our Christmas dog-walk were as “colorful” as the Drive-by Christian. Instead, some of the most tolerant folks we encountered were themselves plastic.

One claim I often hear around the holidays–one shared by Christians and non- alike–is that Christmas is too commercial. I guess it’s fitting, then, that J and I spent a good part of our afternoon shooting dummies who were born to be shot: the empty-eyed mannequins who peer with aloof gazes through the reflective windows of the boutiques on Boston’s upscale Newbury Street.

If you’re looking for an embodiment of Everything Wrong with Commercialized Christmas, a Newbury Street mannequin would be a likely candidate. Empty-headed, a mannequin exists only to be an object of desire; displaying the wares of modern consumer culture, a mannequin is the poster-child of style over substance.

Mannequins, after all, are created to reflect what we as consumers presumably crave. According to mannequins, we prefer our icons skinny and bloodlessly white, their limbs inconceivably slender. Attenuation, it seems, is what catches our attention; judging from mannequins, we want to hang the clothes we seek from sleekly skeletal forms who are ghostly and ethereal.

Still, I can’t bring myself to dislike, much less condemn, the mannequins of Newbury Street. If we lived in a world where people bought only what they needed, families exchanged hand-made rather than store-bought gifts, and nothing was marketed, we’d certainly consume less…but where would we go window-shopping?

Just my fond memories of a Catholic childhood make it unnecessary for me to reject that part of my upbringing even if I don’t currently practice it, I harbor no ill will toward mannequins and the marketers who manage them. As a child, one of my favorite pre-holiday activities was leafing through the pages of department store catalogs, where I’d see all sorts of toys I’d dream of but never own. Why do we automatically assume that seeing an object of desire means we’ll necessarily acquire it?

Of the countless times I’ve gone window shopping on Newbury Street, I’ve actually bought things there only a handful of times and at a handful of stores. If anyone should be shouting condemnations here, these mannequins should ask me when I plan on paying them for the visual pleasure they have continually provided.

I have no doubt Christmas is too commercial…and yet, when I try to find flesh-and-body people to condemn for their overly consumerist ways, I can find no likely suspects. The flesh-and-blood people I know are simply trying to live their lives regardless of how “simple” I consider those lives to be.

Long before Christmas, an acquaintance privately criticized another who was buying a popular plastic toy for her son at a big-name toy store. “When my children were young,” my acquaintance explained, “I never shopped at Store X, and I certainly didn’t buy my children Toy Y.” Implied was an assumption that civilization is going to hell in a handbasket because some parents are buying brand-name toys like Barbies, Legos, and Transformers at big boxes like Toys R Us, Target, and Wal-Mart. If our children play with plastic toys bought from plastic stores, at what point will society itself become plastic?

And yet, I myself played with Barbies and Legos…and had Transformers existed and been on sale, Santa would have brought me those, too. Did my parents love me any less because they selected my mass-produced toys from the clearance tables at K-Mart? Is the world today cheaper, more disposable, and more materialistic because my blue-collar parents bought what they could afford where they could instead of giving me hand-made, free-traded, earthy-crunchy artisan wares bought from from independent sellers?

We live in a nation where you have the right to worship where you please or not at all, and you similarly have the right to proclaim your beliefs (religious or otherwise) from a slow-moving truck if you so please. To each her or his own, right? And yet, what troubled me about the acquaintance who prided herself for not buying Toy Y at Store X was her very pride: we each have the right to decide what, where, and whether we spend our cash, but isn’t it downright pharisaical to condemn another parent for her or his choices?

What bothers me about the “Christmas is too commercial” rant is how it, like a drive-by Christian’s sermon, is typically directed toward other folks. I can’t recall ever hearing a concerned citizen say “My family’s holiday is too commercial,” which is unusual considering the amount of credit card debt the “typical American” carries. Instead, the “Christmas is too commercial” spiel always seems to be directed toward other Americans, not me: the problem with society, this rant suggests, is that other parents are buying too many presents of the wrong kind from the wrong places. The source of this presumably pervasive problem, in other words, always seems to be that elusive wraith, Someone Else.

J and I didn’t set a price limit on the gifts we exchanged; we simply tried to find gifts we knew the other would like. For J’s birthday, I spent what some would deem Too Much on tickets to go to a New England Patriots game; for Christmas, J spent I-don’t-know-how-much to transform my dog into art. Was either gift Too Expensive, Too Commercial, Too Whatever?

In my mind, only J and I (and perhaps Jesus himself, if He’s keeping an eye on our checkbooks) can decide. As for me, I pay my credit card balances in full each month, but I love my friends who don’t; I occasionally shop at Target, Wal-Mart, and the like, but I love and respect those who choose otherwise. To each her or his own, right?

One way to celebrate a holiday is by condemning those who celebrate differently than you do, and the same applies to shopping. It’s easy to target the upscale shops of the world’s Newbury Streets as being the source of modern materialism; it’s easy to see and condemn folks who pay top dollar for designer clothes while the Politically Correct of the world choose overpriced organic veggies over name brands. When it comes to both shopping and salvation, maybe we all should see to our own souls rather than shouting about the sins of others. As the Bible itself teaches, it’s better to tend to the log in your own eye than sweating over the speck in another’s.

 

Checking it twice

Just like Santa Claus, I’m a huge fan of lists. This past weekend, overwhelmed by the number of teaching deadlines I need to juggle from now until Christmas, I sat down and made a list of lists. From now through mid-December, every day has a dedicated page in my teaching notebook, and each day has its own list. Simply by flipping to a given day’s list, I can see what is due when and when I plan to work on any given item.

Also this weekend, I updated my Christmas card list: the first step toward actually sending Christmas cards this year. Last year, I postponed my Christmas cards until New Year’s, and even then I never got around to sending them: another uncrossed item on yet another to-do list. This year, though, I’m hopeful; hope springs eternal, as the saying goes.

If the Grading Grind between now and the day after Christmas, when my last batch of online grades is due, isn’t too bad, maybe I’ll send this year’s Christmas cards in time for Christmas…or maybe New Year’s…or maybe “whenever.” It strikes me that Santa seems perpetually jolly during December, which is technically his busy season. How does he withstand his own daunting workload? The answer, I think, is in those lists, duly checked twice, that show a time for everything and everything in its time.

Both of today’s images are from a photo-set of Christmas shop windows in downtown Keene. Enjoy!

 

Pre-dawn

This morning, after having been away from Keene for most of the summer, I walked Reggie on our usual downtown route before dawn. Any sleeping town has its own resonances and romance. This morning I walked with an orange, nibbled wafer of eclipsing moon hanging low on the horizon over one shoulder, racing. By the time Reggie and I had circled downtown and returned home, the sun was up and the moon was gone.

Carrying a camera on a pre-dawn dogwalk is fairly futile: the only thing you can shoot is the glow of downtown shop windows. That being said, shooting shop windows is something of a specialty of mine. Now that students are back and my first classes are set to meet this morning, it seemed somehow appropriate to walk the town when few other folks were awake much less walking. In the pre-dawn, downtown Keene is all mine, shared only with an eclipsing moon and a restless dog who pulls, urgent, too sniff every crevice. For a dog, finding home is an easy, unambiguous thing: home is where you sniff, pee, and sometimes sleep. For a camera-toting place-blogger, I find myself a bit disoriented by this present back-to-school: am I any more at home in a town where I merely work than any of the first-year students who have only this weekend found their feet here?

In Boston this weekend, I overheard some brand-new university students talking amongst themselves on the T. “Does our dorm have washing machines,” one asked; another grunted in the affirmative. “Let’s go find them,” the first suggested with surprising enthusiasm. It felt like forever since I was a first-year student amazed at the prospect of doing my first away-from-home load of laundry, the basement washroom of my first-year dorm offering more social interaction than my bland cell there. How long did it take before the novelty of laundry faded into yet another routine?

When you’re a young student away from home for the first time, the entire world looks new, your mind itself glowing with the fuzzy promise of pre-dawn awareness. When you’ve been around the block for more than a few back-to-schools, it’s easy to think you know the place. You don’t. The lesson of any sleeping town is the sheer novelty of vision: here, the same town I’ve seen countless times by daylight looks different by dawn. Here, the same town I’ve seen countless times by daylight looks different because I myself am different, my own soul moving through its own secret cycle of dawn and eclipse.

 

Who But WB?

Today’s grading-day has been rife with personal distractions, so I don’t have time for a proper post. But during today’s dog-walk I snapped an interesting picture of a WB Mason truck reflected in the local pizza joint: an image that intrigues me with its lines, layers, and colors.

If you watch Red Sox games on NESN, you know WB Mason as a major corporate sponsor of our beloved boys…and you also know their song-and-dance-laden commercials are among the most annoying on the air. Luckily, the drivers of today’s truck didn’t break into song as they sat in the parking lot of Athens Pizza. Maybe the WB marketing department could take a cue from this image: sometimes a quiet product placement is more striking than scores of showtune-singing dancers.

 

Cool shoes?

I’ll let you provide your own caption for this image of a take-out cup of iced coffee stashed on an outdoor rack of shoes. Perhaps hitting summer sidewalk sales is enough to make you thirsty?

 

Busy

Yesterday I was so busy, I didn’t have time to snap a photo for this week’s Photo Friday theme, Busy. So instead, I’ll share another image from my July 4th “just looking” stroll. If you’re too busy to meditate, do good deeds, or otherwise accumulate spiritual merit, it’s good to know Good Karma is on sale at a trendy Newton Centre boutique.

 

The signs they are a-changin’

It’s been over two weeks since I’ve taken a proper walk in downtown Keene, so imagine my surprise when I returned from my travels to find new stores in the place of old. The storefront that was smashed, repaired, then emptied now houses an art gallery…and the former site of Bookland will soon be home to Fritz Belgian Fries, their new sign covering the ghostly remnants of the old.

Although Fritz is a long-standing landmark here in Keene, consistently topping the Best of New Hampshire list for their hand-cut, blanched-then-fried potatoes, I’ve never tasted their wares. The strip-mall where Fritz is currently located is one I don’t frequent, lying as it does just beyond my usual walking territory. Driving to eat fries has always seemed too decadent, but now that Fritz will be frying within walking distance of my apartment, I might have to see what the “Best of New Hampshire” fuss is about.

Of course, the very notion of “walking distance” is relative, as the latest bit of wisdom spotted while I was stuck in construction traffic suggests.

 

How I see myself

Apparently these days, I see myself as perpetually behind a camera. It’s been a while since I’ve posted any reflective photos: perhaps I got my fill of narcissism during last summer’s self portrait marathon. As luck would have it, though, today’s Photo Friday theme is How I See Myself, thereby providing an excuse to post three reflective images I shot during last weekend’s walk through the optimistic streets of Newton, MA.

I’ve always seen myself as being a lazy Buddhist, so it made sense to snap my reflection alongside a sleeping Buddha displayed in the window of some posh boutique. Since when is Buddhism trendy? I must have been (yes) sleeping when staring at the floor became a stylishly cool thing to do…or at least to be seen doing. Do I see myself as being posh, trendy, or stylish? Not in the very least…which again is why it makes sense that I appear off to the side, marginal, in this image. If sleeping Buddhas are Where It’s At, I’m somewhere off to the side, only slightly present: a visual hanger-on.

In shooting a reflective shot that features the arabesque margin of an upscale restaurant window, I also managed to catch a passerby eating ice cream. In the foreground, I’m soft in the middle; in the background, a skinny chick feeds her flatter, toner tum. Do I see myself as a Chunky Monkey craving some Chubby Hubby? Not exactly, but I don’t see myself as a Skinny Chick either. I guess when it comes to the Battle of the Bulge, I’m somewhere between a rock and some Rocky Road: just me, my camera, and a handful of reflections that don’t lie.

This is my contribution to today’s Photo Friday topic, How I See Myself.