Live Your Life

My daughter was complaining about all the ads on the Tivo screen so I took a quick look. One of them said, "The dishes can wait. Life can't." It's a car ad of some sort, for something called a Sequoia, which must be a big kind of car because sequoia is a big kind of tree.

This is a small example of the perniciousness of advertising and the way it creates the wants, needs and dissatisfactions that make you want to go out and buy something. In six words this ad communicates that the humdrum stuff isn't what life is about, that the important thing is to drive around in a large car and "live." The clear implication is that washing the dishes is not "living." Well, I've got news for you folks, washing the dishes is a lot closer to "living" than happily driving around in large motor vehicle. The suggestion that you should be feeling less than alive if you're washing dishes and that you should be yearning for the freedom a Sequoia supposedly brings you is not a positive message. If people are waiting for the moment when they can feel completely free and unfettered in order to be happy, well, that's a sure-fire ticket to unhappiness.

Life is not merely the sum of its parts, or at least to me it isn't. It's a continuum and it's comprised of all the moments, humdrum or not, and to suggest otherwise is simply deceptive. Maybe washing the dishes isn't the most thrilling part of your day, but that's okay, every day needs a least exciting part. How else would you recognize the exciting parts? The key to happiness, as I see it, is to get the maximum happiness from everything. Clearly there are things that are richer in happiness (or satisfaction or whatever you want to call it) than others, but if you can get some sort of pleasure out of washing the dishes, or walking the dog, or even getting in your new Sequoia and driving your kid in rush hour traffic to visit her friend in Upper Gwynned, then you've got a chance to enjoy living.

Post-Purim Fun

Now when we watch American Idol we use the gragger whenever Simon talks.

Neighborhood News

The music teacher/possible drug dealer across the street moved out! Very mysterious. I got home from work on Friday and there were moving vans. I'm not sure if they'd bought the house or just renting it. I never met anyone who lived there. That feels kind of weird.

Advertising 101

Somehow, the combination of recent happenings and seeing a young woman perform the song from the Apple Macbook Air commercial reminded me of an important lesson I learned in 20 years in advertising: Understand your target audience. I learned this lesson both professionally and personally, and I'll go over the professional part here.

Before you start to advertise you need to be sure who it is you're talking to. First of all, for whom does the product solve a problem? Problems come in all shapes and sizes:

• I'm hungry or thirsty
• Something hurts
  
• Something's dirty
  
• I'm leaking somewhere or something is inappropriately growing on or falling off me
  
• Something smells bad
  
• I desperately want to appear cool

Actually, that pretty much covers it. Anyway, you have to frame the problem in a way that's relevant to whoever's going to buy the product, and speak to them in a way that they will relate to and help them understand that the product will solve their problem.

For example, if you sell sports cars and want to appeal to middle aged men, you can't speak to them the same way you would if you sell children's vitamins and want to appeal to new parents. In one case, you'd use adjectives and scenery that represent things that are pretty universally found to be cool by 40-somethings, like driving along the Pacific Coast (connotes freedom), bypassing city traffic (connotes power) or a beautiful woman (connotes, well, you know). In the other, you'd want everything to focus on nurturing, optimism, caring for those unable to care for themselves. What's fun about working on this stuff is that the same people can be in both targets. I had a new kid when I was 38. And you have to sort out what's the right way to talk to the same person about different things in different ways.

What does this have to so with anything? Communication is a multi-part process. You say or do something and someone else receives it in their own way, which may not be what you're expecting if you haven't thought about it in advance.

Reality

I'm not a big fan of reality TV. Actually, I'm not such a huge fan of reality itself, much less the made for TV version. But I've got to say the "Redneck Wedding" show where the bride takes the bridesmaids to K-Mart to get camouflage gear for their bridesmaids clothes and they all tell her how good it looks. Well, I've got nothing to say. My wife and her friends used to have "worst bridesmaid's dresses" parties from time to time. My favorite one was a pink frilly thing my wife wore to a wedding in Albany (I'll tell the whole story some other time) that made her look like a 5 year-old going to her first fancy party.

Nothing Funny

This is depressing. In 1986, I got married and we took our honeymoon in Alaska. One of the high points of the trip was a day cruise from Valdez into Prince William Sound, where we saw seals and eagles and all other manner of wildlife in a icy, pristine environment. We also saw the oil terminals and heard about how important they were to the local economy.

It was a crushing blow for us when, a bit more than 2 years later, the Exxon Valdez ran aground and spilled around 11 million gallons of oil into the sound, blackening a place that I remember quite clearly as almost blindingly white. I remember holding the newspaper and crying.

I can't say I have the same affection for Tibet that I have for Alaska. Our trip there was uncomfortable and occasionally downright unpleasant, and though it was fascinating to be surrounded by this totally Buddhist vibe, I never felt like part of it. Still it's pretty disconcerting to open the New York Times and see a photo taken from a place where I remember standing for a long time waiting for our guide to meet us, and see overturned cars and smoke coming from a neighborhood that we spend hours wandering around. It's an ancient area and I'm sure, like Prince William Sound, it's irrevocably changed- damaged old buildings eventually to be replaced by ugly Chinese concrete boxes.

The Chinese are blaming the Dalai Lama and his followers. Though I know there are two sides to every story (for instance, I have no doubt that some of the protesters are targeting Chinese-owned business for burning, as is alleged), I've read more than a little about the Dalai Lama and as passionate as he is about Tibetan independence, I refuse to believe that he would ever advocate violence as a means of achieving it. The whole thing sucks.

To the compendium of bad vibes, let's add the collapse of Bear Stearns, where a long-time friend of mine has worked for many years. This whole mortgage industry collapse is a nightmare that will continue to unfold, and not pleasantly, for months if not years. An economist whose blog I read refers to the house of cards that is the so-called subprime mortgage industry as the Big Sh-tpile, and though that's an evocative and accurate term, the whole thing makes me think of the coal mining towns in the Appalachians.

If you've seen the movie October Sky, or better yet, Matewan, you have an small idea of the crushing effects of having a single entity control an entire town. Miners were paid in housing credits and scrip for the company stores, making it all but impossible to save enough money to leave to find a different, possibly better life. And if the company went out of business you were screwed. In the modern age, money has no inherent value, it's all just a bunch of computer coding of credits and debits, so we're all just living a in big company town. Any wonder people are buying gold?

Presumably the "company," being the global economy, is big enough to weather this shock, but that won't stop it from hurting lots of people.

Pranks Anyway

For reasons that are clearly beyond my feeble brain, the school permits, almost sanctions, a senior prank day. It's always annoying, which is the point I suppose, but this year it was beyond annoying. I'm not a big fan of a "kitchen sink" approach to most anything, and pranks are no exception. Pick a theme and go with it, don't throw in every semi-funny idea that somebody comes up with. The unfunny stuff pretty much canceled out the clever parts.

It was also pi day, 3/14, so we had pie in math class today. It worked out very nicely, because we were talking about direct and inverse variation, and I could point out that there was an inverse relation between the number of students in a class and how much pie each one got, and nobody even groaned at me about it, maybe because they were too busy eating.

I just heard a Jonas Brothers song on the radio. Eeeew. I know that pop music is by definition emotionally manipulative crap, but please. You may be trying (really really really hard) to sound heartfelt, but you're a Disney boy band. Fortunately, it was followed by Low by that Florida guy. That song's almost as much fun as Rompe, which is saying a lot.

Those of you who know me are aware of my low opinion of the current popular music, and I don't want to go on about it too much, but here is my paraphrase version of every rap song

I am good-looking
You are good looking, especially your rear end
You dance
I am somewhere else watching you dance
I want to have sex with you
I know you really want to have sex with me too even though you aren't saying so
I really do like your rear end

Yawn.

Some other time I'll give my paraphrase of every Rihanna/Beyonce song, which along with rap constitutes 80% of what's on the radio.

Genius and Genuardis

Saturday night I saw what was billed as a dance show at Annenberg Center. It was the Nikolais /Louis Dance Company. The first piece, a 1965 composition called Tent was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. I can't really even describe it, though there was a review in Saturday's Inquirer. I think there were 10 dancers and a large round piece of parachute cloth with a hole in the middle. The "score" was all experimental synthesizer sounds (Alwin Nikolais bought the first Moog Synthesizer, which was the first commercially available music and sound synthesizer ever made) and the lighting looked like a Jackson Pollack painting, in different colors depending on where the dancers were on the stage. The used the cloth as a tent (duh), a place to change costumes, a costume for 5 dancers, and piece of scenery that dancers moved around and through. I've never seen anything like it. The guy was obviously as much a production designer as a choreographer and an absolute genius at it.

Sunday morning, against my better judgment, I went to Genuardis. All I can say about that store is that it makes me think in something like Dr. Seuss language, specifically, "I hate this store with a hateful hate." And no, I'm not prone to lapsing into Seuss talk, but I really do despise it. Why, you may ask, and why do you even care about a supermarket? I happen to really like supermarket shopping. I have since I was a kid and that had a lot to do with my choosing advertising as a career. But back to Genuardis...

Setting aside the fact that there prices are generally higher than the other supermarkets,

1. They have been reorganizing and/or renovating since the day Safeway bought them. The latest took all the produce racks and turned them at an angle so the pointy side faces you as you walk up. This is bad feng shui. Nobody likes walking at something pointy. And there's no logic to where things are. Maybe garlic tastes good with tomatoes but every other supermarket in the country puts garlic next to the onions.
2. I'm sure some guy in headquarters walks around muttering about "maximizing shelf space utilization" or something like that, and the way they've chosen to increase their shelf space is to stick shelves in the middle of the aisles. I wonder if this guy puts a sofa in the middle of his hallway at home, in order to maximize sitting utilization. If you can't get through it easily with a shopping cart, it's not a functional aisle.
3. They have a computer terminal at the entrance to order your deli items. You spend a couple of minutes there, do the rest of your shopping, then you go to the deli and they say "Oh, we haven't done that yet. Wait until I'm done waiting on this person her and I'll take care of you." To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, taking the order is the easy part, it's filling the order that's hard.

There's more (candy in 4 different places), but not worth the effort. And I understand that these are but minor annoyances that should not be filling my heart with fury. The thing is, my goal when I go to the supermarket is to get everything I need in as little time as possible, preserving my leisure time for, well, it doesn't matter what I want to save it for, I just know I don't want to spend it waiting for some guy to figure out what kind of toilet paper to buy (and why are there so many kinds of toilet paper anyway?) because there's a display of english muffins in the middle of the aisle and I can't get around him.

I don't know what the people in charge are thinking, and considering the constant changes, somebody is thinking of something, but it's not genius.

Falutin

My daughter was in The Music Man recently and continues to watch the movie regularly, and I guess because the songs have worked their way into my subconscious, I described something as being "highfalutin." It's one of those words that everyone knows what it means but nobody really knows anything about. It is not from "highfaluting,"it can also be spelled hifalutin, and there is no lowfalutin or even a falutin. The dictionary says the word's root is the verb "flute," which verb I am not familiar with. I suppose the world has survived without gruntled or sheveled, so it can survive withut falutin too

New Neighbors

Not so new, really. They moved in across the street this summer. I've never spoke with them, though a young boy waved to me from the backyard once. Here's what I know about them:

• They have an orange Honda Element that they spend a lot time cleaning.
• Young people carrying oddly shaped bags come and go frequently, indicating either music lessons or drugs (which could explain the obsessive car cleaning)
• Two boys live there and they have a BB gun, which does not endear them to me.
• Their lights are on late at night.
• I haven't seen a female living there.
• They have a wireless network that I can use when ours isn't working.

It was almost a year before I met the other neighbors across the street and now we get along very nicely, so I'm not worried.

I remember when I was a kid my grandparents had a store in Brooklyn, and across the street from the store was a Strauss Tires store. I never thought much about it because kids tend not to think too much about tires. My father mentioned to me once that in all the years he lived there he never once saw someone come out of that store with tires. When I was around 12, the cops came and closed the store and the next day there was an article in the newspaper about the police breaking the largest illegal gambling operation in Brooklyn.

My Watch

I ran over my watch today. When I say this to people they seem very concerned and confused until I tell them that I wasn't wearing it at the time. It still works, and I now have that special fondness that people get for things of theirs that have been through some kind of trauma.

I had a car for several years, a 1974 Dodge Dart, that was like that. The Dart was a venerable Dodge model and had a kind of engine called a "slant 6," which had a reputation for lasting for a very long time. Unfortunately, 1974 was the first year that they started putting pollution controls on cars and they didn't work very well, so if you tried to accelerate too quickly it would just stall. This made left turns more exciting than you really want them to be, and going up hills was always a challenge, but I got used to it after a while.

The Dart drove across the country and back twice with me in the mid 1970's. The second time, it was involved in a head-on collision right near Mt. Ranier in Washington. It was neither the Dart's fault nor mine, and nobody was really hurt. The Dart's left front fender was bent so as to wrap around the wheel, so the local mechanic pulled it back a bit and said to take it to a dealer. We did, after driving from Washington to Santa Cruz, California. The steering column was bent, so if you turned the steering wheel all the way to the left it would just stay there and you could ride around in circles. The dealer said it would take longer to fix than we had time for, so we drive it all the way back to New York, a semi-wreck. Lots of interested glances on the interstates later, we made it unscathed, and I fondly kept the car for another year before passing it along to my brother, with whom it went to Colorado until he totaled it and left it to die under a 12-foot snow drift in 1987. But even then it lived on, because that winter we got a call from the Brooklyn police to saying the car had been used in a bank robbery. We said, no, the car is under 12 feet of snow in Vail. When the snow melted we saw the license plates were gone, and soon so was the Dart.

More Housecleaning

I'm definitely improving in my cleaning skills, but there's one thing I don't get. Every toilet cleaner commercial talks about cleaning under the rim, and every toilet brush has a thing specifically for cleaning under the rim. What I want to know is, why? Setting aside the question of how does anything even get under there, what's the point of cleaning there? I've been using toilets for over 50 years and I can tell you I have never once had occasion to look under the rim, and I've had plenty of experience with plumbers and even if there's a real problem with the toilet, I've never seen any of them look under the rim, or say to me, "Ya know, the problem's under the rim." Come to think of it, how would you look there even if you tried?

Haircut

I got a haircut the other day. I hate getting my hair cut, though I'm not sure why. There's nothing particularly unpleasant about it. My hair is cut by a heterosexual Russian guy who calls me "dear." My mother may have called me dear from time to time, but really I associate it with my Crazy Aunt Ida Great aunt, actually). Most middle-aged and older Jewish guys have a Crazy Aunt Ida, but I think the name has gone out of fashion and we may be the last of our breed.

My crazy Aunt Ida lived with her husband, Uncle Izzy, in Boro Park in Brooklyn. Izzy was Orthodox and belonged to a shul of World War I veterans, of which he was one. After WWI, he was a contractor and build many houses in Boro Park, though I'm not sure if his house was one of them. He was a gnarly old guy who didn't like many people, but he liked me and he tutored me for my Bar Mitzvah, which was the first Bar Mitzvah in his shul for over 30 years.

Izzy collapsed and died one day at age 89 and Ida tried to catch him as he fell and she fell and broke her hip. My dad arranged with the hospital to keep her there for a few extra days while a friend and I cleaned and painted the house (we had to work with the shades drawn on Shabbos). We found many bits of evidence of Eastern European fears and depression era money hoarding. Ida, though nuts, was a savvy investor who was into mutual funds long before it was cool. But she kept her money in 6 or 7 different banks and kept the bankbooks and stock certificates hidden under mattresses, behind radiators, at the back of the closet wrapped in a dirty rag, and under the area rug.

Well, this started off being about haircuts anyway.