Thoughts, Chowts, Tots, Taughts, and Thewths.

Of moments and happily-ever-afters.

I am part of a generation bred to find happiness. We are like happiness-sniffing dogs.

Case in point: YouTube comments and general sentiments on the following movie scene

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m2T5yfgsZ0&feature=related
Figure 1: Infamous scene from “Love Actually” where man confesses to woman that he has been in love with her for a long time, and makes her realize that he has been avoiding her to prevent complications with his best friend, whom she has just married.

With all due respect to Disney, people nowadays have been misguided by their prince-and-princess endings. The realization only comes later on, probably in late high school or early college, or even after graduation, that “happily ever after” is such a long time from now and also quite improbable when set against the golden standards of our childhood films. Plus, the movies we live do not end during the wedding ceremonies or the big kisses—that’s actually a rather morbid thought…

Not that I wish children’s movies became more realistic, or account for the multi-factorial nature of success and happiness (and even finding love)—I care about the kids!—but people are so hell-bent on finding “happily ever after” that they end up missing out on what I think happiness really is: moments. Moments interspersed in the daily humdrum of our lives. Little happinesses, blessings, realizations, meanings. These moments are happiness.

For me, the magic of the above scene is not the message on his flash cards or of the kiss he gets after it, but when he says “Enough, enough now.”

We have to learn how to actually be happy when we’ve been given our little moments of happiness. Don’t act spoiled, kids.

Bad night.

After seven years, I realized that I never wrote a eulogy for my father.

Paco’s guide to writing good (Part I)

First thing to note, it’s “writing well.”

Unless, of course, this were a penmanship class of some kind…

Of God and “Why.”

It all begins with the lack of an explanation, or so they say.

God, people long ago believed, resided in the sun. God, they then proclaimed, lied in the forces of nature that lead to life and its proliferation. God, many now say, is difficult—practically impossible—to understand, yet He is here and now. Theists from many different backgrounds all face the heat with regards to this point: whatever humans haven’t figured out, God will occupy.

A specific example: historically, chemists used to attribute the very basis of organic chemistry to a “vital force” driving such reactions—until Wöhler heated ammonium cyanate and found urea in his little vials. Another little hiccup in the big debate over God.

I have the inkling that they do not realize how similarly their arguments resonate with those they criticize. “How can the following coexist?” they ask: God and suffering, God and unanswered prayers, God and war, God and death, God and evil, the list goes on. Then, the theists, ever-in defense of the faith, reply with any among: God’s infinite wisdom trumping human thoughts and wants, man as moral agent and the difficulty of comprehending a completely deterministic universe, specific beliefs about the afterlife, specific experiences concerning the afterlife, and so on. A particularly loopy argument I witnessed was this one: “Something cannot come from nothing,” the priest began. “That would make sense in an axiomatic universe, but this is not the case,” the physicist replied. Then, a middle man by the name of Deepak Chopra rectified the argument by uniting both views under the statement: “Nothingness is the very womb of Creation.” Very beautifully said, but I think neither of the two was fully content with the verdict.

My humble little belief is that those who speak too much and too fast do so in order to wow the crowd with semantics and syntax. Congratulations to them when they win their debates. However, they and we miss out on a little something: that man asks “why.”

Man asks why. He does not ask for causes, but reasons. Ask me what causes suffering, and I’ll tell you: prostaglandins, heartbreak, poverty, irresponsible politicians, nerve impulses, the like; a psychologist could tell you much more. But ask me why suffering exists, and I wouldn’t be able to give a clear-cut answer. I would subscribe to one of two possible beliefs: in a God who permits it or a universe in which the very concept of suffering is itself senseless.

But why (sorry) does man ask why anyway? Man, in these moments of anguish or dejection (or simple curiosity), is not looking outwardly for the answers, but inwardly. Keep asking why and you’ll end up nowhere. I’m sure your professor in philosophy has already squeezed the Socratic silence out of you. There is nothing we can say at the end of it all, nothing to satisfactorily answer the question why.

And that is the very point.

“What smites us with unquenchable amazement is not that which we grasp and are able to convey but that which lies within our reach but beyond our grasp; not the quantitative aspect of nature but something qualitative; not what is beyond our range in time and space but the true meaning, source and end of being, in other words, the ineffable.”

-Rabbi Joshua Abraham Heschel, Man is not Alone

If you ask me, God begins right where words end. I think Rabbi said that, too.

Oh, the humanity!

I had your brother killed. 

It was premeditated and completely intentional.

I bought rights to his body, paid a man to slit his throat with a cleaver, and collected his lifeless corpse. We let him bleed out, so there would be no mess at home.

I paid another man to singe all his hair off with a butane lighter, and yet another to torch your little brother’s skin to a bright-red crisp. The mass was bloody and peeling.

I poured his own blood and oil all over him—the man who sliced his throat open advised me to do so.

I paid one more man—this one earned the most that day—to remove his intestines, clean out his innards, and leave the rest inside.

I skewered him through the anus and out the head with a metal rod, and set his burned, hairless body onto a lofty display. Pretty soon, my friends from the neighborhood had joined my family behind me—all were enamored, greatly joyed at the sight. He was to be feasted upon all along, and I had paid a hefty sum to see it to completion.

I proceeded to cook him until we deemed him fit to be consumed, and then we did. We sang, laughed, exchanged kind words and happy smiles all around the flesh that was once your family. He became the pride of ours that night, on display by the table head for all to see.

I should be sorry, Mister Pig, I would, but I am not.

I am man, and you are pig, and we believe only in the humane.