Is it any wonder that I find this mentality….lacking? No one who knows me is surprised, I’m sure. I hate everything, I’m told.

What is the world, though, when the completion of tasks is more important than the task’s purpose? As usual, I can’t help but ask, “why?” Naturally, this goes over like a lead balloon in the harried, “efficiency-driven”-yet-woefully-inefficient corporate bureaucracy that is my workplace. Where the motto is “I need it yesterday no matter how impossible and no matter how completely I botched the process before handing it off to you.”

As new crises and “challenges” trickle into my inbox, I’m struck with a deep-seeded need to find the root problem. I can’t help but stare into the mountains of miscalculations that led to the inevitable crisis we now face and ask why those errors were made. I can’t help but suggest ways to avoid those errors. And yet, I’m faced with “git ‘er done.” There is never time to address the root cause, because we are so harried with a need to resolve the issues caused by the root cause. It’s frustrating, is all.

It’s like Superman arriving upon a disaster scene and being told to work crowd control. “Or I could make the earth spin backwards and prevent this disaster from ever happening.”

“…just make sure these folks don’t go under the tape, hot shot!”

Would a little introspection be remiss in the modern world? Would it hurt if, instead of asking what we are going to do, we instead asked why we are doing what we do? To what end? For what purpose? And for what need? Albert Einstein said that “bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.” It’s possibly true for a creative process, but I can’t help but think an efficient bureaucracy is the last defense against the failings of any non-creative process necessarily involving humans.  And efficiency is achieved, not by doing without question in order to “git ‘er done,” but by evaluating each action for it’s value before acting.

Unfortunately, my bosses don’t agree.

                          

But I don't WANNA have healthcare!!

There is an art to getting what you want. Children are masters of it intuitively, and invoke a special set of rules when faced with parents asking them to do something they don’t want to do (like bathing). First there’s the bargaining, seeing if maybe we can wait a little longer…delay, delay, delay. That’s not working, so then we escalate to simple refusal. This usually takes the form of saying “NONONONONONO” as a sort of prayer of warding.  Not working…Mommy still wants to make me eat my vegetables!  Now the child escalates to screaming, crying, and other general noise-making (protests?) in the hopes that maybe the parent will be persuaded to just appease the child to shut them up. These may take the form of hyperbole about how the parent is oppressing them (“you hate me”, “you’re ruining my life”, “you’re killing America”). This doesn’t work either, for the resolute parent, they know that eventually, children must take their medicine for their own good, and persist despite their angry cries. What is the final tantrum tactic? Combine all of the above with plain old body weight. Drop to the ground, and make the parent either carry or drag you to where they want you to go.

Is this the state of US Government? Apparently so, at least for a part of it. Apparently the GOP is exploiting a routinely ignored rule of Senate Committee ops, and withholding consent to allow committee meetings to proceed past 2 o’clock in the afternoon. They are lying on the proverbial ground and kicking their feet in the air to prevent further forward movement. Amazing.

Here’s a video, in which testimony in a Senate hearing on transparency in government (HA HA HA) must be interrupted due to this new tactic:

Does somebody need a time out?

                          

The myth of the NYC Park.

Picture a serene scene. The most serene scene you have ever seen. One in a park of lovely green. (Forgive the Dr. Seuss treatment. I’ll stop.) Anyway, the grass is soft, the breeze light. Above you, the Brooklyn Bridge stands like some granite colossus, straddling the East River. It is majestic and powerful, enhancing the beauty and serenity of the surrounding park through it’s monumental architecture. A tugboat sounds a wistful horn in the distance. A gull soars overhead, starkly white against the bright blue of the sky. You are alone in a city of 8 million….lying cradled between the soft, cool grass and the warm midday sun.

Now, as you picture this wonderful scene, picture also a family of five. They stomp onto your soft delicate lawn, bickering, dropping litter, and dragging an assortment of towels, loud radios, kids, toys, lotions, hats, smells, and Teddy Grahams. They are a hurricane ravishing your oasis. They are a monster truck, tearing across your field of wildflowers, leaving a scar of mud and a cloud of diesel fumes. They march across the vast openness, and plop down, still bickering, right beside you. Your fortress of solitude is invaded, and you have been rendered powerless by the red sun of Krypton. (Okay, nerdy metaphor, but stay with me.)

Soon, a young couple arrives. They are ill dressed in spiky clothes and gothic makeup. They lie mere feet away from you, alternating between sharing a 7-11 slurpee and making out luridly. They smell funny. Their uncomfortably-tight yet trendy-in-some-circles clothing slips about to reveal rolls of fat and unsettling bulges. They grope and straddle each other openly in simulated love-making poses. You become sandwiched between them and the family of five.

Now imagine the entire park filling with more and more people. It’s overflowing. A sea of bodies covers every inch of grass, leaving each blade matted and struggling for life-giving light beneath some mass of flesh. The previously warm sun has been made sweltering by the combined body warmth of hundreds of glistening, sweaty, people. They jostle and grunt at each other like so many walruses sunning together on the rocky shore of some coastal inlet. The only oasis is a steaming concrete path that picks it’s way among the corpses, and meanders to a parking lot of weeds poking though cracks in the surface, broken bottles, and upturned garbage cans…a paradise of quiet compared to the populous garden of adipose tissue that it leaves behind. You run-walk to escape the clamor.

To be fair, at no point was my experience at the park today as idyllic as I described in the beginning of this post. It was gross from the get go. I thought I would go try to enjoy some nice weather, get some air, some sun, maybe relax a bit. No dice. The citizens of New York City will never cease to amaze me in their ability to be around one another and be seemingly oblivious to each other’s presence! It boggles my mind, because I am painfully aware of every person around me at all times. Meanwhile, they all seem to long for it! At a nearby ice cream parlor, New Yorkers happily queued patiently in a line that must have stretched 100 yards out the front door of the parlor. No ice cream is that good. I was repelled, but tot he contrary, New Yorkers seemed to instinctively join the line.

So, is solitude dead? Has it come to a point where we can only escape one another by locking ourselves away in our closet-like rooms? Even there, we jostle, and stomp, and make ourselves known to each other through a series of movements, noises, and actions…intentional or otherwise. The world becomes more and more populous, and I can’t help but think of the scenes in Soylent Green, with stairways littered by bodies, and streets so crowded that people need to be lifted into garbage trucks to clear space. Are these images to be prophetic?

The most frightening thing, to me, is that the crowds which I face daily here in New York City are nothing compared to some other places. India and Japan come to mind. The thought of a world rapidly filling with this kind of population density is anathema to nature. Will the State and National Parks of the US someday be the last remaining empty places? And will they be empty? No doubt vast throngs of tourists from overpopulated cities will surge into them upon their daily opening, leaving behind their tattered picnic blankets and single-serving meal cups. Worse, will the world sooner remove their protected status in favor of an unfettered population? Can mankind ever be saved from himself?

This post brought to you by Trojan Condoms.™

                          

Texas Caught in Time?

The answer, of course, is about money. The beauty of free-market capitalism is that money walks, even if it means that the only ones walking are the ones dragging their knuckles on the ground. Texas, it seems, has tremendous buying power in the textbook world. Due to their high population, their standards drive publishers to pander to their every whim in order to get their business. So, when they dumb down their own textbooks, they also dumb down the textbooks of other districts in the US who don’t have the “purchasing power” (read “money”) to get custom-made texts.

It’s not as bad as it seems. As someone working in the educational publishing industry, I can tell you that both New York City School Districts and Los Angeles School Districts also have a major influence in the textbook market. Still, if Texas pushes standards to (what shall we call it?) the intellectual right, it can affect many other districts that aren’t looking for content that’s geared toward NYC and LA’s urban populations.

The obvious question is, why isn’t there just a Federal Textbook Standard? Wouldn’t that solve everything? Not gonna happen. I can already hear the pundits crying “nanny state” at the top of their lungs. So, my question is: If money talks, then why aren’t the saner states combining purchasing power to make Texas into small potatoes? Hey, New England! Combine your individual district and state standards into one New England Textbook Standard that makes you all able to purchase as a unit! It seems such a simple solution, I wonder why no one does it? And while you’re at it, combine your standard with NY State, NYC, and Pennsylvania standards to create the Northeast Textbook Standard!! Get North Carolina and Maryland and Virginia to adopt the same standard and turn it into the Atlantic Seaboard Textbook Standard!! And as soon as everyone agrees on the history, the science, and the health curriculum, maybe THEN we can have a Federal Standard.

Of course, it’s not this easy. Politics will get in the way, and everyone will want to do it their own way. “We want to educate our children the way we want! Freedom to learn our own version of the truth!” But people wanted to know what could be done….there you have it. Or maybe nobody really wants a solution.  I have to admit, it is fun to just rip on Texas.

                          

Is this what museums are reduced to? Another place to make an appearance? A place to appear to have an interest in art, while you go about your daily task of making your own life appear to imitate art? I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. As I left, I felt the bile rise up within me. I really had to share, so I Twittered about it instantly, and then came home and wrote this blog post. Some people think their lives are the center of everything, don’t they? (That last bit was a little self-aware irony, btw,)