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How To Be Alone

How to Be Alone. Genius

Art

I really believe there are three types of smart people; those with intellectual capital, cultural capital and social capital.

Intellectual capital is best knows as IQ. The natural tendency or smarts to connect the dots. To make smart arguments and deductions by following rhythms or paths. People with high IQs, I believe are smart at math and science; at logic and reason. They can look for and find connections, their brains are wired that way.

People with cultural capital are best described as those endowed with the gift of art and music. Those who appreciate the finer cultural indulgences in life and can take something asthetically insignificant and turn it into prose or revolutionary. These individuals can see the unseen by using their senses and are gifted in recourse as such.

And then there are those who are gifted with social capital. These people can connect the dots with others. They have the innate ability to use their social acumen and intuition to understand and appreciate others by finding common ground or areas of contention and work with them to create synergies and connections.

Today, I want to share with you someone with great cultural capital. My cousin Rais. He is a talented, young burgeoning artist whose gift should not be hidden. Enjoy his work at: http://www.raisart.tumblr.com

One Thousanth Man

Rudyard Kipling
One Thousandth Man

0NE man in a thousand, Solomon says.
Will stick more close than a brother.
And it's worth while seeking him half your days
If you find him before the other.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine depend
On what the world sees in you,
But the Thousandth Man will stand your friend
With the whole round world agin you.

'Tis neither promise nor prayer nor show
Will settle the finding for 'ee.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine of 'em go
By your looks, or your acts, or your glory.

But if he finds you and you find him,
The rest of the world don't matter;
For the Thousandth Man will sink or swim
With you in any water.

You can use his purse with no more talk
Than he uses yours for his spendings,
And laugh and meet in your daily walk
As though there had been no lendings.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine of 'em call
For silver and gold in their dealings;
But the Thousandth Man he's worth 'em all
Because you can show him your feelings.

His wrong's your wrong, and his right's your right,
In season or out of season.
Stand up and back it in all men's sight
With that for your only reason!

Nine hundred and ninety-nine can't bide
The shame or mocking or laughter,
But the Thousandth Man will stand by your side
To the gallows-foot - and after!

Metrophobia: Are We Afraid Of Poetry?

"Even our own president is reported to turn to Urdu poetry for sustenance."

My father still recites poetry to emphasize points. He remembers poems and quotes from when he was in school. He speaks about the political implications of Iqbal, the philosophical rhetoric of Khayyam and the spiritual musings of Rumi. I remember memorizing the play Carmen "Out, Out Brief Candle." speech in high school, but poetry I fell in love with through music, and reading.

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Kim Rosen
Huffington Post

Metrophobia (otherwise known as the fear of poetry), an American pandemic more tenacious than Swine Flu, is finally on the wane. And not a moment too soon.

For the last few generations, our nation has managed to marginalize poetry, an art that is and always has been central to the species. Since the earliest hominids sounded their pre-literate, poetic musilanguage to one another, since ancient Greek orators recited poems at the Olympic Games, since the first Griot in Mali turned the history of his tribe into poetry, igniting a tradition carried on by his descendants today, since Sappho's lyrics, Basho's haikus and Rumi's ghazals, poetry has been known to be a necessary nutrient in the human diet, as essential as breath or music.

And still today in most countries, poetry resides in its time-honored place at the heart of the culture. There, people turn to poetry the way we turn to the music that fills our homes and cars, the art that covers our walls, the architecture that lines our streets, the plays, dance and film that fill our theatres. In the Middle East, for instance, the most popular prime-time TV show is The Million's Poet, boasting an audience of over 70 million viewers and ratings higher than sports or the news. Within a format similar to American Idol, male and female poets from throughout the Gulf region, some from very poor Bedouin tribes, perform poems on all themes imaginable. The show has even inspired a TV channel completely dedicated to poetry.

In most cultures, reciting poetry is not relegated to the poets, or to the alabaster halls of academia. People who never dreamed of being poets, and some who cannot read or write, recite their favorite poems at the slightest provocation. Poems are recited at parties, at the family dinner table, on the street. My students from Wales and Ireland describe how the poems of Dylan Thomas or William Butler Yeats are exchanged into the night at almost any local pub.

My Iranian friend's father knows many poems by Rumi and Hafiz. He knows them in Farsi, but if you give him time, he'll recite a dozen or more, then figure out the translations for you. An Israeli friend tells me poets are regarded there as national heroes: readers line up in the bookstores of Tel Aviv for a newly released collection of poetry with the eagerness Americans reserve for best-selling novels. In Havana, verses from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado are emblazoned in spray paint on the sides of houses. Almost every time I find myself on a plane next to someone from outside the U.S., I am gifted with a recitation of at least one of the poems he or she holds most precious. I still have the page in my diary where the Pakistani accountant wrote, first in Urdu then underneath in stumbling English, the poem that had won the heart of his wife 45 years earlier. I hope to dig that journal out of storage one day.

As a girl in Hungary in the 1930s, my friend Judith and her schoolmates used to pass the time by reciting the work of contemporary Hungarian poets to each other. "I would go home each night and pick a new poem to learn for the other kids," she remembers. "Everybody did. It was like a game. And besides, there was this feeling of impending war everywhere. Any material possession could be taken in a moment. The only things we knew we could hold on to were what we had inside us."

Could Americans, wrapped in the privilege of our relative material abundance, have temporarily forgotten the importance of "what we have inside us?"

Finally, it seems, we are rising from the sick-bed of Metrophobia, and returning to poetry. Signs of health begin to accrue. Hundreds of thousands of teens throughout the U. S. choose to learn classical and modern poems by heart and practice together for Poetry Out Loud, a national recitation competition. Slam, jam, Def, Hip Hop and rap poets tell it like it is on TV, YouTube, radio waves, and the stages of basement coffeehouses and national theaters. A major Hollywood release of the 2009 holiday season, Invictus, is about Nelson Mandela and how he was saved by a poem. Even our own president is reported to turn to Urdu poetry for sustenance.

Perhaps you, too, have been saved by a poem. I know, I know, you say you don't relate to poetry, but is that a tattered index card in your wallet with a few lines of Mary Oliver on it? And who pinned that Rumi poem to your bulletin board among the "to-do's?" Hey, isn't that a quote from the poet June Jordan on your refrigerator: We are the ones we have been waiting for?Perhaps our shiny mask of perfect superficial beauty and conquest is finally cracking in the slings and arrows of the economic, political and military messes we have made. Perhaps it is at last becoming inexorably clear that we cannot keep ravaging the world to fill our emptiness. Perhaps we are finally turning inward, blinking a little in the unfamiliar light, and casting about for a way home to our interior life. Poetry offers a path.

A Joint Account That Underwrites Our Marriage

After attending over fifteen weddings this year, its nice to finally read an optimistic article on marriage.

New York Times
December 13, 2009
Modern Love
A Joint Account That Underwrites Our Marriage
By DAVID SARASOHN




I HAVE been married forever.

Well, not since the Big Bang but since the Nixon administration — 35 years — a stretch long enough to startle new acquaintances or make talk-show audiences applaud. Recently one of my wife’s college students kept pressing us, with baffled curiosity, for our secret, as if there had to be some trick to it, like wearing each other’s clothes on Tuesdays.

Back when we became engaged, our news was also greeted with baffled curiosity. It was the ’70s, after all, when the freedom to be able to hop from one relationship to the next was as essential as anything in the Bill of Rights. Our friends were profoundly perplexed; nobody, they thought, could want a fondue set that badly.

We had already been together three years at that point, pretty much ever since I turned around at the orientation meeting for new history graduate students and saw her in her granny dress. (As I say, it was a long time ago.) Our feelings about marriage may have been shaped by our pursuit of such a traditional area of study. Perhaps our attitudes would have been different had either of us been in gender studies.

Of course, back then no one had heard of gender studies.

The surprise that now greets us at the fact that we’ve managed to stay married so long — as opposed to having shaken hands at some point and decided who kept the ice cream maker — is even more extreme. Friends you haven’t seen for a long time often inquire delicately about the spouse you had when they last saw you.

I once explained to a colleague that I was looking for a job change because of something going on with my wife. His eyes widened with the assumption that our situation involved a family law specialist instead of a fellowship that required me to follow her across the country.
Since our wedding, the numbers have increasingly turned against us. Fewer people marry. Fewer stay married. And when it comes to having and raising children, being married has become as optional as the color of your baby’s onesies.

Throughout the ’80s so many of our married friends broke up that it started to seem as if the married demographic consisted largely of us and the Huxtables. Since then, Hollywood has wisely shifted the base of many of its sitcoms to work and friendship rather than the nuclear family, situations younger viewers can better identify with.

Anyone who has been married for a long time starts to feel like a soldier surrounded by heavy casualties. In graduate school, a couple who married when we did failed to make it through a year. In my first job, we were one of four couples who got together almost every weekend; a few years later my wife and I were the only ones still together. Deep into our married life, five couples we knew, each together at least two decades, came apart in a single year, shells of separation bursting all around us. Like surviving soldiers, we like to think we were a little better prepared, maybe a little better suited for it. But we also know we’ve been lucky.

Anyone with an anniversary in the precious-metal range knows what it’s like to support friends whose marriages have fallen apart. That newly disconnected friend sleeping on your couch who came to dinner with a tight smile and a greater interest in red wine is like a walking cautionary tale, the image pressed permanently into any marriage’s mental photo album.

And making all those changes in your address book affects your own marriage. When a close friend left his wife for someone much younger, my wife intensified her exercise regimen. Watching other couples break up also reminds me that divorce causes friends to choose between the two parties, and I would not like my chances.

The appeal of the alternative is everywhere. In popular culture, predictability seems like a bear market compared with possibility, and falling into a pattern is the opposite of falling in love. But if you stay married long enough to make people speculate about your religious beliefs, you come to see that patterns are the point; there’s a reason the heart is an organ measured in rhythms.
Being single is all about the future, about the person you’re going to meet at Starbucks or after answering the next scientific compatibility questionnaire. Being married, after a certain point, is about the past, about a steadily growing history of moments that provide a confidence of comfort, an asset that compounds over time. What you share is what you’ve shared, and measuring your communal property in decades puts you in a freakishly high bracket.

So experiences such as my being fired from my first job — I’ll tell you the story sometime; my wife has heard it often enough — or the long years when it seemed my wife would need to undergo complicated and scary spinal surgery transform over time from life’s low points into promontories of reassurance.

A writer’s capital, it is calculated, is his experience. After a while, the same applies to marriage, and a couple draws on it for what they need, a checking account of life’s checkpoints.
Our largest deposit was a long and painful stretch of infertility, ultimately producing two happy outcomes. It sounds self-evident to say that a husband and wife couldn’t have made it through infertility without each other; presumably they couldn’t have gotten into the situation without each other, but it has a particularly intense effect on a relationship. When the whole point of a condition is the absence of a third person, the two who find themselves alone together — a phrase that seems contradictory, except to an infertile couple — look at each other very closely, and look to each other very closely.

It was a major bonding moment when, in our early 30s, a fertility doctor told us that new discoveries were being made all the time, and that there was no reason we couldn’t make use of such discoveries until we were, say, 55.

Parents for the first time at 55?

We looked at him, and then at each other. Mutual resentment of authority figures can provide a powerful pillar for marriage.

I’ve heard it said that pain is something people can’t remember or accurately express to others. But those years of monthly meltdowns and longing looks at other people’s children come right back, all of our time spent on that barren island. Holidays were hard, especially the family-centered ones — Thanksgiving, Passover.

I have now been a father for the last 23 turkeys and Seders but I can still instantly call up the agony of those earlier occasions, that feeling of being forever outside the circle.
Some infertile couples we knew tore under the strain; others became more or less numb. We spent years living in a weirdly inverted world where an unwed teenage mother was envied for her facility. And while the wife of legend may explode in anger on coming home to find her husband in bed with somebody else, my wife did when she found me alone in the bathtub, having forgotten the effect of hot water on sperm count.

When our sons appeared, and the years of shared pain turned into a fund of shared experience, it was like coal being crushed into a diamond.

Even as marriage itself has taken a battering, it’s been eagerly seized as a symbol. Some who fervently endorse it are those with whom you may not agree on anything else. Marriage these days seems not only less effective in uniting people, it also appears to be playing a growing role in dividing them, particularly when it comes to what seems to be the last group actually excited about the idea — gay people. For an institution that these days can use all the support it can get, their application should not be easily dismissed.

And when I hear people explain that gay people shouldn’t be allowed to marry because the purpose of marriage throughout history has been to produce children, and they can’t do that, I envision decades of our anniversary cards being shredded.

During those years when our marriage was clearly failing in its natural assignment of procreation, were we not, according to these people, really married? If marriages have to be about children — rather than about affection and respect, or even the kind of endurance that leads teenagers to marvel at any marriages that have lasted longer than they have been alive — then gay people aren’t the only ones whose unions are somehow unsanctified.

LOOKING for something profound to tell my wife’s student, I mumbled something about respect. She nodded reflexively; sure, respect, human beings deserve respect. I couldn’t quite make my mouth move fast enough (I’ve been married since before the Bicentennial) to explain that that wasn’t it. It wasn’t a matter of basic human respect in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights sense, but of respect for someone who is in some way better than you.

I am somewhat better with words than my wife is; she is infinitely better with people. In different ways, we translate each other to the rest of the world, and admire each other’s contrasting language skills. Being married to someone you respect for being somehow better than you keeps affection alive. That this impressive person chooses you year after year makes you more pleased with yourself, fueling the kind of mutual self-esteem that can get you through decades.

The other part, about how those decades change over time from obstacles into assets, is something my wife’s student will have to figure out for herself. It could take awhile.

Like, forever.

Dating site for beautiful people expels 'fatties' after holiday weight gain

At the start of each year, many single people resolve to find love.. many by Valentine's Day, or the springtime. It's a great time to try social networking dating sites-- I mean its the easiest way to meet the masses. So eHarmony, Match, Naseeb... all have deals to lure you in.

And then there are the jerks who peel you off. Like Beautifulpeople.com, who let go of 5,000 people because they were too fat, or didn't look like their profile pictures. I mean come on, who do they honestly think they are? In the world of online dating, people always put their best foot (or face) forward, and are constantly judged by one another and as the old adage goes, they hope that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder...who in this case also happens to be the webmaster!

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Dating site for beautiful people expels 'fatties' after holiday weight gain
By Mallory Simon, CNN

A dating site that markets itself as an elite community for beautiful people with a "strict ban on ugly people" has axed about 5,000 members for packing on the pounds during the holiday season.

The international site BeautifulPeople.com threw out members after they posted photos "revealing that they have let themselves go," according to a company statement.

"As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld," said Robert Hintze, founder of BeautifulPeople.com. "Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded."

The site describes itself as an "elite online club, where every member works the door" -- that is, users can join only after enough members vote them "beautiful" during the 48 hours after their profile is uploaded.

And apparently, enough beautiful people were angry that some members had enjoyed a bit too many treats during the holiday season. So BeautifulPeople.com sent those flagged members e-mails, according to the company statement, telling them they could register again for the site when the extra pudge was gone. "We responded to complaints by moving the newly chubby members back to the rating stage. This is the same as having them re-apply," Greg Hodge, managing director of BeautifulPeople.com, said in a statement.

The company said it "expelled" 1,520 users from the U.S., 832 from the U.K., 533 from Canada, 510 from Poland, 425 from Germany, 402 from Italy, 323 from France, 220 from Denmark, 176 from Turkey and 88 people from Russia. In the e-mail, it gave users suggestions for boot camps and workout facilities to get themselves back in shape. Some gave the site a shot again, hoping fellow users might not see them as the "fatties" others had. "Their re-applications were reviewed by existing members, and only a few hundred were voted back in. Over 5,000 were rejected," Hodge added. Hodge admits, and has admitted from the time his company started, that his site may not be fair, but people want to date someone they are attracted to. "Is it elitist? Yes, it is, because our members want it to be," Hodge said when the company started out in 2005. "Is it lookist? Yes, it is, because our members want it to be. Is it PC? No, it's not, but it's honest."

And on this site, beauty is certainly in the eye of the beholder; only one in five applicants is normally accepted, a company statement said. Maintaining those standards is what the site is about, Hodge said, and that's why people were expelled.

"Every year we see that some of our members from Western cultures eat and drink to excess over the holidays, and clearly their looks suffer," he said in a statement. "The U.S.A. has been grossly over-indulging since Thanksgiving. It's no wonder that so many members have been expelled from the network. We hope they will be back after shedding the festive pounds."