Moribund Lacuna for the Lack of Significant Achievement on a Saturday
When I wrote my profile for friendster I originally included a line about "most of my waking hours are consumed by cultural matters", but I later removed that. It sounded good, and it's almost true.
But in reality many of my days are spent in pursuit of the ordinary, crappy, day-to-day nonsense that everyone, I guess, has to deal with (oh, I guess Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch don't have to go shopping if they don't want to.) Today was one of those days. My friend Keith asked me if I'd like to attend a lecture given by a seventy-ish Japanese director/actress, husband/wife team who were giving a talk at U of M. In their youth both had worked in the very last films made by the GREAT Japanese director Yasjiro Ozu (who died in 1963), and Ozu himself was the subject of the talk.
Would I?! Sounds great!! I'd love to go. But I ran it past my wife just a little too late. She had plans to take me and Remy out for haircuts and had some shopping to do. So no Ozu lecture for me. As the couple spoke at U of M on Ozu and his techniques I was weighing the value of one brand of kitty litter over the other at Meijer. We shopped the way my wife likes to, in pursuit of the "best bargain", where'ere it may be. So we drove to Farmer Jack just for a bag of coffee, off to the bread outlet from there, onto Target just to find out they don't do layaway, back to K-mart where they do, etc.
When the word came down that I was not attending the Ozu talk I didn't take it too well, and my wife and I started bickering. Allisyn tossed a pair of socks towards me, probably not at me, but they ricocheted off the bridge of my nose and I got mad. So I picked up the nearest thing and threw it in her general direction. This turned out to be a (thankfully mostly empty) bottle of Children's Mylanta that had a loose cap; it travelled from my nightstand across the bedroom, down the hall closet, finally coming to rest in my wife's bathroom in a little pool of seeping out of the bottle like mercury.
Everyplace over which the bottle had traversed in its airborne flight looked like the evidence of some Mylanta crime scene - the pattern of spatter well-marked its progression through space. I got some paper towels and began to dab it up - from the carpet, from the doors, from the walls, from the bedspread, from the sleeves of dresses in the closet - it was everywhere. I learned something today - it is well-nigh impossible to get Mylanta stains out of the carpet.
Friendster, and what it means to me
Or rather what it doesn't mean. I was invited to sign up by an old friend; several of my friends post their gig announcements there and I also use it to announce my weekly radio programs. I can't really see any of the gigs they mention, as they are in Cincinnati and I in Michigan; while they can all hear my show via the web I don't think any of them actually tune in - at least I never had any feedback about it.
One really cool person whom I found on Friendster is performance artist Kristina Sheryl Wong, whose website is www.kristinasherylwong.com She also runs a site called www.bigbadchinesemama.com where she sells a t-shirt that you should all buy, especially if you, like me, are married to an asian woman who is in need of something radically "different" for a christmas present.
But sadly, the true gems such as Kristina are few and far between on Friendster. I sometimes browse the profiles of "new people", or "people in (my) network" and am amazed at the sheer volume of people out there who never read books, only ever listen to rap music, their favorite movie is "The Sweetest Thing" - man, give me a break! One woman whose profile I read gave as her comments about herself "I love to dance, and I'm a pretty good cook." She follwed that up with a further comment about "Who I Want to Meet" - "A man who likes to dance and likes to eat." Uhhh - yeah.
Uncle Dave Lewis
uncledavelewis@hotmail.com