  oh dont worry, you're not a guy. and you're not too sensitive. yo're just a very straight up guy. do i like shopping? haha not really. i just like looking nice...well rather, i like having people think i look nice.
and you know where all that stuff comes from....... anyhows, good luck working it out with rags. suuuuure, dont take my advice, but i'll be around to pick up the pieces or to boil the egg if u dont fall (shut up, i think i got a cold so i'm all out of it). well, on to naeem's oratory. i hate the way david johnson makes them write oratories, but it's ok. "American Beauty? " I still remember when i watched the highly acclaimed movie "American Beauty. " I kept having one thought: i have never seen many people who take themselves so seriously.
Lester Burnham, played by Kevin Spacey, begins the movie speaking from the grave, about his middle-class life in the suburbs. He speaks of how his life isn't the life of a white picket fence, a little house, and a nuclear famly. And it sure isn't! Lester is int he deepest pits of personal pain. why wouldn't he be? He quits his job, buys a 1970s muscle car, begins lifting weights, smoking pot, and develops an obsession with one of his daughter's classmates.
Lester is in a crisis because ordinary American life wasn't extraordinary enough. The story of "American Beauty" is a story that tells us that things are seriously wrong. Simple beauty masks serious sorrow. We have six percent of the world's population and sixty percent of hte world's wealth, and yet we are seriously unhappy. Unable to move forward in our lives because we are just plain too depressed to keep going. And we flock to see movies because they are so seriously serious about the excessive seriousness of our lives.
But i wonder if we haven't missed the real beauty of America. Why is it that studies by the United Nations reveal that around the world at this very moment one billion people are saving money to move to America? [Jane Says...: poor bastards] Do they want to come here so they can book passage on the Good Ship of Psychotic Misery? Why should people who have the many privileges we do spend so much time trying to believe that AMerican Life is the thing of harshest dramam rather than the obviously beautiful? [Jane says...: with wealth comes frills, with frills come fringes, with fringes come knots that are really hard to get out] So why do people take themselves so seriously these days? Well, if you look around, you know it starts early in childhood.
Did i say childhood? Parents today treat their children as special adults. No wonder, when we continue to have smaller families, then all our hopes are wrapped in fewer little bundles. Each child is very important, very special, and very serious; they are one of a kind, god designed. childhood. things are far too serious for childhood.
A child's life is set a birth. Planning for adulthood transcends the great events of childhood. Why play outside when you need to be studying vocabulary for the SAT? Why watch a movie, when you should be volunteering for good works to put on your own personal web page? We are all going to end up in college [uh...really? ], but in order to get into the "best college", we have to forgo childhood to prepare for that serious world of adulthood.
and children want to taken seriously; their nature is to seek attention. They soon learn if they act like little adults they will be taken seriously, very seriously, and they learn earl to do something serious and blatant to get attention, and they will suggest that everywhere you look you see some of hte most seriously silly things possible. A trip to any school reveals this. Consider, the Goths. No, i'm not talking about the barbarians that Burned Venice and i am not making fun of them because they are different. I am making fun of them because they are silly.
Why do we have to take seriously a group of people whose only claim to fame is dark clothing,e ye shadow, hair and nail polish? They are into being taken seriously. they live for depression because they seriously think that their life as well as every else's is worthless. They like dark and evil things such as death and the devil. Isn't that serious enough for you? And if they aren't taken seriously enough, they can listen to serious rock music about how depressing their lives are, pack up their guns, and some serious pipe bombs and head off to Columbine High School.
Yes - they can make you take them seriously; ask the friends of the ten students and the taecher that can really explain what it means to encounter people who only take thmselves seriously and are onyl attuned to themselves. They block everyone out, and lay waste to anything that does not see them as the only show in town. And we take these please for attention very seriously; in fact, we take everyone too seriously. Most of us regard "political correctness" as a trite nation. It isn't. there is an ugly undercurrent to this thing called diversity - it forces us to seriously consider all ideas and all people.
We take every idea seriously. Nobel laureate or nutcase - they are all seriously valuable. no they aren't. we don't have to take seriously ultra conservatives or racist groups. but we dont have to take seriously today's celebrities either. fame in Hollywood, and all of a sudden we have to listen to them?
because thye are famous, they must be heard? reagardless of what you think about George Bush, Madonna and the Dixie Chicks [I BEG TO DIFFER] make him look like a bright guy [has anyone read bushisms?]. At the Academy Awards, Micheal Moore won an oscar for best documentary, but he decided to use his speech to convey his anti-Bush feelings. What drove him to use that forum? on something that has driven hollywood performers to use that soapbox for 50 years - inflated egos. We will take them seriously.
and sure enough Micheal Moore got a lot of media attention. But when we create a society of where everyone is fighting for 15 minutes of fame, we end up believing we should listen to everyone whoever appeared in People magazine. Listen as if they had soething important to say. As we become so puffed up with our own self-importance, we drown in our own artificial seriousness. our society becomes more lacking in common sense, more humorless. [rather, i think debate is to blame] and we always do think about ourselves.
But we don't know that our personal dramas are not hte only dramas on a larget stage of life. there are other people out there - and we seem to ignore where we really fit in. we should be able to take a back seat sometimes, to listent o others and when we stop to smell the roses, let's not whine that those thorns hurt us worse than any thorns every hurt any really sensitive soul. take a moment to look and laugh. in our adult childhoods, put some childish humor back into the adult life that we artifically create. i'll give you an example: tied in the serious serious exercise of all time - one New York Universty applicant put down 100 items he had supposedly done in his life, each more absurd than the one before.
He is the fastest sprinter in the world, but he didn't perspire, he baked and these rolls rose without yeast, world leaders sought him out, he skied in the Mojave desert, was the first to chart the human gnetic code - and after reading 10,000 applications that seriously told the same story of serious life choices - the admissions committee let him in. And why not? He probably will be sought out by world leaders some day because he had some mental health. Life cannot be all "mememe" our neds and this listen to me first mentality make a mockery of a society that depends on humane interaction with others. our self-centered society has caused us to take ourselves too seriously, we sink into the dark theater of our self-imposed depressions. and the road to perdition is the highway of own self-absorption.
the real "American Beauty" is a beautiful place [only if you make it....or others make it for you]. A billion people struggle to get here and the ones who are here are so acught up in their petty dramas, they miss the larger screen of life. ----fin------ well, that sounded like that old psycho david johnson. whine hwine whine. GET OVER IT! you wanna tell me what the larger screen of life is?
alright. point is, there is no big picture. it was all a lie. it's about hte little things. get a garden. grow some weed.
smoke it. then go grow some tomatoes and give them to me. :-D 
