I believe that all human beings are unique. And I believe that there is an infinite difference between you and me. But at the same time, that difference is incommunicable. It doesn’t seem like it should be that way. It feels like we should just be able to open our mouths and explain what we think and feel and somehow push out everything in our minds that feels so fresh and strange and unlike anything anyone else has ever told us. But we can’t. We don’t have the words.

            And when we open our mouths, we speak in the words we’ve been given. When we describe ourselves – describe anything – we use descriptions that we’ve been given. And these are so hopelessly inadequate.

            Like the title says, sometimes I get tired of stories. I think that maybe what stories are for is giving us new words: more accurate, powerful, and nuanced descriptions. Better identities. More identities. And that, by giving us the ability to think about ourselves and others in new ways, they also open up new ways of acting, new emotions. Or rather, the old emotions, but reinterpreted. Like how…and this is where I spent twenty minutes trying to think up an example.

            Because stories are not very good at doing that job. They are not very good at giving us that new vocabulary.

            And furthermore, the stories we pay for, the ones in books, and on TV, and in the movies, are much less effective than the ones we get for free. The stories in books, even the very best books, seem so frigid and distant to me compared to the stories my parents tell me, or compared to the stories my friends tell me over the instant-messenger every night.

            They are not expertly crafted, and if they were told to someone who was not emotionally invested in the teller then I doubt they would be worth much at all. But because I do know these people, those stories feel relevant, and real, and it feels like there is some essence of actual communication, as if somehow, upon telling them, we’re performing the miracle of thinking the same thoughts.

And there’s nothing universal in the stories that friends tell, but that is their power. They are not universal. They are specific. They are about my world, and, in some way, about me.

            That is not a power that a story you pay money for can ever tap into. Paying money voids that power.

            Being not-in-America makes me really miss America. I sometimes surrender to the temptation to kiss the ground upon returning home. There’s really no other place in the world in the world where I want to live.

            But I also find that feeling so paradoxical. Because I know that life in America is not better than it is in other developed countries. In many respects, it is significantly worse and its people are significantly unhappier. Which makes the 4^th of July kind of a weird holiday. Down here, we have a country celebrating a war that killed 26,000 people in order to liberate it from….Great Britain? North of the 49^th parallel, there is a country that expended no lives and is also a free and stable democracy.

            If anything, we’d be better off right now if we were part of Canada. From the modern standpoint, it seems like the main results of the Revolutionary War are a lack of healthcare and millions of innocent people, from across the world, directly and indirectly murdered in our name.

            Given that, what does it even mean to say that I love America? I certainly don’t think it is more moral or provides a better life for its people than most (or any) other developed nations.

            The only rationalization I could think of is that I love America in the way that most people love their families. You know that your family is not really better than the millions of other families around you. But you love them anyway. You see their good points and downplay the significance of their bad points.

            And sure, I can name a hundred and one things that I love about America. In fact, I delight in most of the things that are generally held to be negatives. I could go on and on about it. But those are not really real things. I like those things because I grew up with them, because they’re familiar to me. America is the scenery for every major event in my life, and so of course American things will have an emotional resonance for me that other things will lack.

            But…even that is kind of unsatisfying as an explanation of my love for America. You love your family because they’re people, because they love you, and because you need to love them in order to interact with them and grow up with them and put up with their various impositions. Love lubricates the entire setup.

            But…America doesn’t love me. America is not capable of emotions. America is a place. Or a collection of people. Or a system for organizing people. Or a shared set of customs. If the purpose of a nation is to create an environment conducive to the material well-being and happiness of its people, then America is not that great of a success. The solution is to move somewhere else, or, if that’s too much of a hassle, to deal with it. What purpose do all these extraneous emotions serve?

            If anything, it makes the things America does feel worse, and seem more egregious. Especially when it’s things that directly affect me. The way that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Travel Security Agency act at airports is not actually that bad. I don’t mind it when other countries hassle me. But receiving even minor hassling by your own country upon coming home…that just really sucks.

            I’m pretty sure that love is not the right word. Maybe I’m just using it as a synonym for, “I’m comfortable here” or “I’m happier here than I would be somewhere else”. That feels righter, since it puts the emphasis on me and on some chemical stuff going on inside my head, instead of on America, an object which is not, on its own merits, capable of supporting these emotions.

            But I don’t know if that’s really quite true either. I feel much more positively about America than many people I know, including people who would be much, much unhappier in some other country.

            And that’s where I’ve gotten on this topic. I think my problems here are mostly linguistic and semantic. I haven’t really defined what I mean by “America” or what the emotion I feel is. And I’m not really sure what the question is either. Is the question, “Why do I feel this way?” or is it “How should I feel?” I don’t know.

            Now that I have a reader or two, feel free to chime in with your own mild America-related angst.

I guess the common response to something like this to sneer “fascism” and talk about the nanny state infringing on your personal freedom. I have alot of sympathy for this argument. It’s hard to make a case against freedom.

But that’s because freedom to do what makes you happy generally serves a public policy purpose and is of benefit to society. Since it’d be pretty difficult for the government to figure out what makes you happy and make you do it, and since happy citizens are of fairly paramount importance (at least theoretically) to a well-running, productive, society, it makes sense to allow people to choose what activities will make them happy and allow them to pursue them as best they are able, assuming they’re not bothering anyone else.

Of course, everything you do bothers someone else somewhere. A man who likes to wear diapers and get spanked by midgets might offend some people’s sensibilities (arguably interfering with their happiness), which is where we, as a society, generally sit down and have a talk where we weigh the general pros and cons involved in banning said activity and decide that those fundamentalists need to get laid more.

And, at first glance, these complaints seem to be of a similar nature. I don’t care whether you have emphysema. You’re inside your own apartment. If smoke from the apartment below you is bothering you…you should close the window. You cannot possibly be telling me that it is beyond the reach of modern science to prevent smoke from drifting from one open window into another room. So my instinct is to say that the harm being done here is relatively minor, and the guy upstairs should take a chill pill.

But, on the other hand, when we look at the relative benefits of smoking, those seem pretty minor too. I mean, someone wants to engage in an activity that is extremely harmful to her health, and it’s not even that fun. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but the pleasurable portion of smoking mostly just comes from the temporary cessation of that addictive craving.

If proponents of nicotine could clearly articulate any sort of benefit of smoking, then they’d have far more ground to stand on. As it is, anti-smoking people seem to win on every argument. Not only are they helping the other guy, they’re also helping you.

And it’s not that hard, you know. I don’t know why smokers don’t put forward more positive arguments for smoking. Have we, as a society, just given up and decided that it’s bad in every situation, always?

That’s why comparing cigarettes to coffee and booze always fails (well, first, because cigarettes are more harmful), but also because those things have clear benefits that all people can relate to. Coffee wakes people up and makes them more productive cogs in the corporate machine. And most everyone has taken a few drinks and felt a whole lot better for it.

So why don’t people ever defend cigarettes in terms that other people can understand. Say that cigarettes give you time out of the day, time for reflection, time to be alone with yourself. It’s a time when it’s okay to be doing nothing. That, far from addiction being a downside, it is actually a benefit of smoking. It forces you, fifteen times a day, to stop, slow down, and re-evaluate what’s going on around you. It allows you to converse with strangers in an easy, unforced way. You’re not focused on each other so intently; instead you can simulate, at least for ciggie minutes, the easy camraderie of people who’ve known each other for years. And you also get to play with smoke and fire.

I mean, that’s hardly Mark Twain. But until people understand smoking in psychological, rather than physiological, terms…smokers have no hope of fighting these bans.

P.S. I also think most smokers don’t want to fight these bans, becuase they want to stop smoking. So they welcome every cigarette tax increase or smoking ban, hoping that it’ll prove the final impetus to quit. This might be a reasonable outlook, but it’s kind of pathetic. It’s like a fat man* who puts a lock on his refrigerator.

*There’s no shame in being fat…but there has to be at least a little shame in putting a lock on your own refrigerator.

What basis should we use to determine whether a law should be upheld? Why do most animals have four limbs? Would mermaids be mammals or fish?

It’s so easy to get channeled along typical avenues of discourse. I can spend hours discussing trivia, like the latest person who said something racist about Barack Obama, or rehashing old debates, like how terrible the Bush administration is. And I feel comfortable taking up our little positions and playing our little part in the debate, deploying the same points of argument, taking offense at just the right time, and going away feeling the same emotions. I think the same thoughts, day after day. It’s easy, and its fun.

Not that all this stuff isn’t important. It’s really important. But it’s also settled. One way or another, I made up your mind about most of this stuff a long time ago. But there’s all these other fun things to talk about out there. Things that I’ve never thought about, and much less made up my mind about. And while this blog will always be firmly devoted to trivia and rehashing old arguments, it will also have a little place for some of the other stuff.

It’s also a word that I mostly hear women say or write. I’m not sure if the cuteness is something added by them so they can have a non-threatening word for making fun of people or if the word is cute merely because the fairer sex is speaking it.

An exchange that just happened in the newspaper offices.

Man: “Can I get some newspapers?”
My Fellow Intern: “That’ll be a dollar each.”
Man: “Okay, my wife’s obituary is in there.”

After selling him the papers:

Fellow Intern: “Have a good day.”
Man: “Yeah, if I get a girlfriend.”