Hi, I'm david (b) hayes.

I was struck recently, by a bit of profundity in the oddest of places. Twitter, as you may know, is a “micro-blogging” system that allows you to post thoughts of at most 140 characters. It sounds like thoroughly pointless technology, but it was there that I found this:

so many different ways i could have lived this day. but i lived it just like this. and i suppose in that way - it was perfect.

“The perfect day” is a topic that people get fixated on a lot. They imagine what they would do if they suddenly knew — with a certainty all but impossible in real life — that they had 24 hours to live. Variations on the theme generally involve eating great food, keeping great company, and doing great things.

And simply, I think it’s absurd. This exercise is valuable only to the extent that it educates the listener about what the speaker believes to be the best things on earth. Maybe it’s Japan. Maybe it’s pastrami on rye. Maybe it drawing without getting distracted. Maybe it’s watching the sunset as many times as you can. But though these things are interesting to know, but they don’t help us better understand our lives and our living of them.

Because this game involves no compromises; life is about compromise.

Though I used to hope to live a life without regrets or compromises, I now recognize that it’s much better to hope to never regret my compromises.

Very few, if even the hyper-rich, can afford to live without compromises. You can have your dream job, but it’ll probably require you to compromise on the city and social-scene of your dreams. You may be able to spend your life with the love of your life, but you’ll probably have to give up your chance at your dream job.

And this is no less true about the mundanities of life. Though you may abhor the thought, eating McDonald’s is sometimes the best way to satiate your growling stomach and get back to the office in time for a meeting. Some times you’ll have to miss the night out with friends to finally do the project that you’ve put off far too long.

It’s nice to think that we can live each day as if it were our last. To be able to spend all our time doing work we love in a place we love, eating food we love with people we love. But that simply isn’t possible. It was never possible, and quite possibly, it’ll never be possible.

But sometimes the compromises themselves, in their unexpected serendipity, their accidental profundity, or their unlikely beauty, work out better than our dreams. And I’m not sure a day or a life can be more perfect than that.

There’s something irrevocably odd about Lars Lindstrom. He seems to be the consummate loner. Completely willing and able to see people no more than he needs to, while always being friendly to those he does see. He’s a good worker and a church-goer. He lives in a run-down garage next to his parents old house, where his brother and wife live. He seems in no hurry to find a girlfriend, but as he tells the nice lady at church, he’s not gay.

And one day, Lars receives a very large package. That evening, he knocks on his brothers door to report — with a wide grin on his face — that he has someone over. Relieved as they are, his brother and his wife willingly offer to let the girl stay in their house. They even have new towels she can use to bathe.

It’s when they finally meet Bianca that they’re appalled to learn that the Brazilian emigre isn’t real, but an inanimate doll. Worse still, she’s clearly meant primarily to fulfill the sexual pleasures of lonely men like Lars.

And so it begins. I could go on, but I’d likely end up gleefully — and poorly — reporting the whole story. There’s no question that Lars is, as they used to say, touched. But whether for good or ill, to what effect on him and the small New England town in which he lives, I’ll not say.

I’ll merely say that Lars and the Real Girls is one of those stories I could tell, from first explanation, I’d be rather enamored with. The posing of difficult philosophical questions — what is reality? what is living? what is loneliness? what is community? what is maturity? — through the device of mild absurdity is one of my oldest favorites.

If, unlike me, you find the whole idea rather pointlessly absurd, I cannot speak to your view of the film. It’s unquestionable that the film requires more than one suspension of disbelief to be taken quite as seriously as it takes itself.

But if you can take the leap and accept Bianca as a real girl, you’re in for a rather enjoyable ride. A ride that offers for your consideration whole reams of questions about what it means to grow up, what it means to be responsible, and what it means to be real. Lars and the Real Girl doesn’t explicitly offer the answers to these questions, but the way it asks the questions is better than most things I’ve seen before.

wickenden (ASA)

There are two general signs that a blog is heading toward extinction. The first is a declining frequency of posting, and the second is a proportional rise in the number of posts about the blog itself. These two don’t always go hand-in-hand; sometimes it’s just one or the other, sometimes you don’t get either warning sign. But when either of the two is spotted it’s reasonable to begin wondering how long that curious internet publication will continue to be updated.

I bring this up not to say that Frozen Toothpaste is on the way out, but because I realized that it has recently offered such an impression. My unannounced absence last week was caused by the distraction of a thoroughly awful stomach flu. I really did intend to post.

Back to the point: there’s something that you begin to notice if you spend much time on the internet. Most blogs — used here as a catchall term for all regularly updated, vaguely artistic, internet endeavors — seem to last somewhere between three and six months. Some make it longer, but five uninterrupted years is unquestionably a rarity.

For most people, the intent of a blog is somewhere between a journal and — the unlikely hope is — a valuable public mouthpiece. Given the scarcity of interested and committed readers available on the internet, the average blog ends up being a mostly private journal. And the failure rate of a new blog is about the same as it is for a private journal.

Everyone’s probably done it once or twice: you get this strong impulse — for me it usually strikes in a bookshop full of beautiful and empty pages bound together — to record your thoughts for posterity. At that moment your ideas seem so clear and forceful and fresh that you simply owe their recording to posterity.

But it never seems to last. My aforementioned and unresearched estimate of three to six months for blogs, is roughly how long journals seem to last me. I’m arrogantly assuming that I’m at or above average.

It always seems to be that journals — and blogs — begun with the urgent intensity of someone confident that the simple act of putting their thoughts on paper will clarify or improve them, you soon find that a personal conversation is hard. And whether it’s because you find yourself a poor conversationalist, a slow writer, or an incoherent blabberer the realization generally comes that the results are a little less than magical. The realization dawns that what you’re writing is not really in need of urgent preservation.

So you walk away. You give up. You’ve expelled whatever it was that caused you to create a blog or buy a journal. You’re done with the superfluous recording of everything.

It’s a rather natural process, this sudden enthusiasm and slow disillusionment. But it doesn’t make it any easier to accept all the dead blogs on the internet.

Recently I’ve been giving some serious thought to my aversion to cable news, local news programs, and the vast quantities of stories that circulate on the internet. I came to this rough conclusion:

There are essentially two kinds of news: events and trends that change the lives of millions of people, and one-off stories about violence, theft, or kidnappings.

Basically, the vast majority of what I don’t like — stories about celebrities, crime, “human interest pieces,” — are stories that are interesting primarily because of their randomness. They have little to no meaningful and lasting effect on the lives of most people.

Coming to this conclusion, I did pause to think of the callousness — perhaps necessary — of this. Someone getting shot is a tragedy. And it’s an important event that could change their life forever or even end it outright. But I don’t have the time nor energy to hear all of those stories one-by-one. I don’t think anyone — even if they spent their whole day listening to such stories — could know, understand, and empathize with all of them.

But a single one-off story can easily fill a whole hour of time. Shows like NBC’s Dateline, ABC’s Primetime, and CBS’s 48 Hours are essentially dedicated to doing that. Their go-to format is to take one sordid incident — a murder, a kidnapping, a robbery — and tell you all the details they can about it. This can be compelling as a storytelling device, but it generally fails as a way to show what’s really happening in the world.

These shows — and cables news networks which spend much of their airtime telling similar stories — are ostensibly engaged in the act of conveying news. But they often fail to document the broad brushes that truly matter historically and personally. Unless you’re involved in these one-off events it’s unlikely to affect your life. But everyone everywhere is affected by record prices for oil and food.

Having said all that, there’s a difficult-to-define line separating one-off news from the events and trends stories in which I am legitimately interested. One murder in Denver over the previous weekend seems to me a one-off story. But five murders are certainly something I’d want to know about. That quite nearly constitutes a trend and could be a valuable fact to know. Between one and five is a difficult line of delineation that I can’t begin to tackle.

Natural disasters are also one-off stories. Definitionally, they happen only once and are unlikely to have an impact on me unless they were nearby. But when the volume of tragedy and destruction reaches above some arbitrary benchmark — which, again, I don’t really know exactly — I care about them.

Now one could even say that many of the things that I do consider news — the war in the Congo, or the mess in Zimbabwe, the conflict in Darfur — are one-off trivia as well. After all, as an average American the state of democracy in Zimbabwe is unlikely to ever directly impact my life. But it does, I would defend myself, matter in the lives of millions of Zimbabweans and millions more in surrounding countries.

It’s very easy to break the world into categories, but much harder to accurately define the countours of those categories. I have no doubt that almost all news involving movies stars will always be lowly one-off news to me, but that doesn’t provide clean delination for the rest or what crosses a journalist’s desk in a day. I don’t consider this the final answer to the question of “What news is worth knowing?”, but I’m rather certain it’s a step in the right direction.

All communication is narcissistic. By writing something that I intend for others to read, I am saying that my idea — the one expressed in this, the prior, and next sentences — is good enough, clever enough, interesting enough, that people should pay attention to it. By making any effort to communicate with anyone, I’m saying that I’m worthy of their time.

Even a passing “Hello” to someone is a subtle insistence that it’ll matter to them that I’ve said it. A wave, too, is a statement that you’ll care that I waved to you. And it’s hard to doubt that public speaking is an overt argument that the people amassed in the room will be interested in what you have to say.

Now, it’s worth clarifying what is meant by “narcissism.” Though it is often understood as excessive self-love, especially admiration for your physical appearance, that is not my intent. Instead, I mean simply to imply a level of admiration for one’s self, ideas, and potential contribution. It’s not always excessive, and in many cases is directly in proportion to the healthy amount of self-admiration that a person needs to go on living.

For though it’s narcissistic for me to wave and say “hello” to my neighbor, they likely expect that my respect for our relationship and regard for them means that I will do so. Because of the history and mutual respect in the relationship, they’d likely and reasonably think there was something wrong if I were to not do so.

And here is another point, refusal to communicate can be as narcissistic as communication itself. If I intentionally neglect to say hello to my neighbors, that can be a silent statement that my self-regard makes me too important to say hello to them. Perhaps this is because of my new job, car, or my understanding that they lied to me about something. Whatever the reason, it’s unquestionably a statement meant to signify — even more than my telling them would — that I don’t want to talk to them.

This is, however, different from not saying “hello” to someone out of shyness. Shyness is — as people tend to forget — an intense humbleness that insists that not only have I nothing to contribute, but I’m of so little importance that you needn’t regard me.

As with shyness, so too is there a form of writing devoid of narcissism. Journaling, when done for the self alone, and with no intent the it should ever be public, is essentially literary shyness. An assertion that though you may be writing, you don’t think it’s good enough to others to pay attention to.

Blogging is, in this way, a form that is not necessarily narcissistic. Some people keep blogs with the honest intent that no one will read them (though they are, I would say, the vast minority). But if one writes, as I am, with the intent that what I write be read, I am thereby insisting that I am worthy of people’s time an attention. (This is the point I made, more narrowly, in “On Being an Egomaniac.”)

To say that communication is an act of narcissism is not to be against it. Communication is vitally important for people to reach a better understanding of those they share an address, workplace, city, state, nation, or planet with. Belief that communication is vital to understand each other can be reason enough to feel that the need to speak up and be heard. But that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of narcissism.

I like this one by Jay Leeming, not least of all because it reminds me of something I wrote.

This just in a man has begun writing a poem
in a small room in Brooklyn. His curtains
are apparently blowing in the breeze. We go now
to our man Harry on the scene, what’s

the story down there Harry? “Well Chuck
he has begun the second stanza and seems
to be doing fine, he’s using a blue pen, most
poets these days use blue or black ink so blue

is a fine choice. His curtains are indeed blowing
in a breeze of some kind and what’s more his radiator
is ‘whistling’ somewhat. No metaphors have been written yet,
but I’m sure he’s rummaging around down there

in the tin cans of his soul and will turn up something
for us soon. Hang on—just breaking news here Chuck,
there are ‘birds singing’ outside his window, and a car
with a bad muffler has just gone by. Yes … definitely

a confirmation on the singing birds.” Excuse me Harry
but the poem seems to be taking on a very auditory quality
at this point wouldn’t you say? “Yes Chuck, you’re right,
but after years of experience I would hesitate to predict

exactly where this poem is going to go. Why I remember
being on the scene with Frost in ‘47, and with Stevens in ‘53,
and if there’s one thing about poems these days it’s that
hang on, something’s happening here, he’s just compared the curtains

to his mother, and he’s described the radiator as ‘Roaring deep
with the red walrus of History.’ Now that’s a key line,
especially appearing here, somewhat late in the poem,
when all of the similes are about to go home. In fact he seems

a bit knocked out with the effort of writing that line,
and who wouldn’t be? Looks like … yes, he’s put down his pen
and has gone to brush his teeth. Back to you Chuck.” Well
thanks Harry. Wow, the life of the artist. That’s it for now,

but we’ll keep you informed of more details as they arise.

You’ve probably noticed, if you visit this site often, that I’ve essentially dispensed with my old schedule. The write-about-this-today workings of that schedule were rather easy to attend to when I (thought I) had wealth of interesting ideas.

Recently, I’ve have a dry-spell in that category. And coupled with an even more stifling inability to sit down and put ideas into a multiparagraph essay-like format, I’ve been finding that rigid schedule rather difficult to adhere to. Instead I’ve done my best to stick with the content that would be generated in a given week were I actively following the schedule, but publishing whatever I’ve got when “print time” comes on a given day.

This too, is sometimes difficult. It’s been difficult to varying extents through my whole time writing on this site, but it seems to have been especially bad recently. I’ve even been thinking *preemptive gasp* of cutting back from publishing five-times a week.

I’m not without reservations about the thought. I have some well-founded fear that without a schedule this project will soon become grossly neglected. Almost everything I’ve tried to do in my life has been chronically delayed unless it had strong forces to keep it on track.

But I’m pretty certain I can manage a schedule of three posts a week (probably Monday-Wednesday-Friday) with the option to post more frequently when I feel so inclined. That schedule worked fine for me this week, and seems like it can work well in the future. All the features and topics that have been prominent on this site in the past will, certainly, remain. But by scaling back I won’t have to spend time worrying when I don’t have anything to review, or anything to say about politics, or any new poem or quotation that I like enough to share.

But I’ve gone on longer than I needed to: suffice to say that though posting will be less frequent, my commitment to the idea and reality of this site is undiminished. And if, indeed, my posting schedule changes again in the future, don’t be surprised when I completely neglect to mention it. I’m getting rather bored with vanity posts like this one (which likely means that readers are too).

So to end on a different note, this site was accepted into 9rules, a site that aggregates quality content from many great sites. If you’ve never heard of it, you could do worse than spending a few minutes giving it a look.

raspberreh (ASA)

A few years ago, my understanding of the state of the world and it’s need for change was rather pessimistic. I saw a great flood of things going wrong. That the dam that had been holding catastrophe back for decades was beginning to leak. At best, I thought, I could hope to plug a few of those leaks with my fingers and toes. There was nothing that would stop the dam from breaking. Nothing that would halt the forthcoming flood.

And that the flood was unstoppable meant that it wasn’t worth trying. It was hardly worth trying to change “hearts and minds.” After all, a couple more people putting fingers and toes into holes would do little to stop the oncoming rush of water.

Today, I’m rather certain that was silly. And it’s not that the world has changed dramatically in the interim, it’s simply that I’ve changed. And my attitude toward changing the world is probably the most noticeable difference.

Today I recognize that I’m still working on drops. Though societies move in waves and tides, individual people can only influence drops. And thinking that you’re just a single drop in the ocean can be an incredibly depressing thought. But it need not be.

Anything I do will only be a metaphorical drop in the bucket. But one drop can change other drops. Groups of drops can make ripples. Ripples can coalesce into waves. Large waves can create floods. Surely that’s getting ahead of ourselves. We are, after all, still just drops.

But being “just a drop in the bucket,” isn’t so bad. If you change yourself, that means there’s one more drop like you want all the others to be. One more drop working toward the world that you want. And one drop can change other drops.

It’s not as if changing other drops is easy. Even if you’re one red drop in an ocean of plain old water, you’re not going to change the entire complexion of that water by yourself. You may be shunned and mocked by some of those plain old water drops. But at some point you’ll find another drop that wants to be red like you. And they may know someone else who thinks it’s a good idea. And so on it’ll go. It’s not inevitable that everyone will come to understand, and it’s certainly not inevitable that the whole group will suddenly embrace their redness. But if you’re sure that the world should be red, you shouldn’t worry about the color of anyone else.

That then, is the fundamental difference between the nihilistic pessimism of my past and and the reserved optimism of my present. And if my drop changes only one thing, I would like it to lead others suffering from a bad case of pessimism to see that optimism is almost always a wiser and healther choice.

Fear is rightly synonymous with anxiety. Like anxiety, fear is essentially a feeling of discomfort or unease with a given situation. Dark alleys in dangerous neighborhoods are something of which I am fearful. They make me anxious.

Such a fear is reasonable in the proper amount. And should my fear make me more aware of my surroundings — better on guard — it may even be valuable. But that certainly doesn’t mean that fear itself is rational.

I think all fear nonrational. (I thought of both the terms “arational” and “subrational,” but this seemed best.) That is, it’s a subconscious process that serves unquestionable evolutionary purpose, but is generally maladjusted to the peaceful suburban life that most Americans — and others in the “first world” — lead.

Fear leads to discomfort in unknown situations. Two things can be said conclusively about “stage fright”: it grows out of being in an unfamiliar situation, and it has no constructive purpose. But as thousand of ten-year-olds can tell you, that doesn’t make it any less real. Your pulse quickens, your breathing becomes shallow, you quickly become either too hot or too cold.

Were your life in mortal danger, this fear could be a useful advance warning system that causes you to get the heck out of the there. And because you, as one who properly feels fear, knew when to get away to save your life, you’re the kind of person that gets to live long enough to reproduce. And because you reproduce, your offspring get this same useful thing called fear.

But eventually your offspring became domesticated. They don’t hunt much anymore, they don’t go to war as much as they used to. They rarely, for that matter, get in any meaningful danger for which fear is a proper response. And in a life such as this, fear is more a vestigial organ than a useful appendage. It’s like the tails humans have no use for, but still have visible remnants of.

Now certainly, fear is not vestigial for many people in the world. Those who live in close proximity with wild animals or armed humans can benefit from feeling that fear. It can be a useful warning that they’re in danger and need to flee.

And fear may have some useful purpose when you’re addressing a superior. Even if you live in a place where your boss or arresting officer has no (legal) ability to do you physical harm, it may be useful to be humbled by your fear and act subservient enough to prevent your firing.

But going before a small group of people to speak, read, or converse is no a useful time for anxiety. Your preformance is much more likely to suffer as a result of hyper-awareness than it is to benefit.

Make no mistake, I have nothing against fear. And honestly, in today’s world I’d rather experience it at times when it serves no purpose than not have it when it may do me honest good. But I sure like the thought that some day all forms of fear will be truly and completely vestigial.

Since it’s that time of year, and I wanted to avoid another day like this, some word’s from Stephen Colbert’s 2006 Address to the graduates of Knox College.

But you seem nice enough, so I’ll try to give you some advice. First of all, when you go to apply for your first job, don’t wear these robes. Medieval garb does not instill confidence in future employers—unless you’re applying to be a scrivener. And if someone does offer you a job, say yes. You can always quit later. Then at least you’ll be one of the unemployed as opposed to one of the never-employed. Nothing looks worse on a resume than nothing.

So, say “yes.” In fact, say “yes” as often as you can. When I was starting out in Chicago, doing improvisational theatre with Second City and other places, there was really only one rule I was taught about improv. That was, “yes-and.” In this case, “yes-and” is a verb. To “yes-and.” I yes-and, you yes-and, he, she or it yes-ands. And yes-anding means that when you go onstage to improvise a scene with no script, you have no idea what’s going to happen, maybe with someone you’ve never met before. To build a scene, you have to accept. To build anything onstage, you have to accept what the other improviser initiates on stage. They say you’re doctors—you’re doctors. And then, you add to that: We’re doctors and we’re trapped in an ice cave. That’s the “-and.” And then hopefully they “yes-and” you back. You have to keep your eyes open when you do this. You have to be aware of what the other performer is offering you, so that you can agree and add to it. And through these agreements, you can improvise a scene or a one-act play. And because, by following each other’s lead, neither of you are really in control. It’s more of a mutual discovery than a solo adventure. What happens in a scene is often as much a surprise to you as it is to the audience.

Well, you are about to start the greatest improvisation of all. With no script. No idea what’s going to happen, often with people and places you have never seen before. And you are not in control. So say “yes.” And if you’re lucky, you’ll find people who will say “yes” back.

Now will saying “yes” get you in trouble at times? Will saying “yes” lead you to doing some foolish things? Yes it will. But don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying “yes” begins things. Saying “yes” is how things grow. Saying “yes” leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say “yes.”