The D Word

I had a friend tell me recently that one of the things that attracted her to a particular man was that he made it clear from the start that with him, there would be “no drama.” As perhaps you have already guessed, their relationship turned out to be full of it.

One of the definitions of “drama” is that it’s a representation of life – for performance purposes, of course, which means that it has to be enhanced for effect and ideally should end in about two hours. But can we really do without it?

Drama, in its broadest sense, is a trillion-dollar industry. We go to the movies to escape relatively dull lives or at least trade our own drama in for someone else’s for a short period. If you put movies and TV together with books and the music industry, you can see how important it is to us. You may be tired of break-up songs on the radio, but if human beings weren’t attracted to them, what would be singing all day? Hymns?

The news media have figured this out very well. They inject drama into everything, usually employing fear or outrage, often packaged in the same show with obligatory feel-good stories. Interesting how news items have always been called “stories.”

Face it. There’s a part of us that just has to be MOVED. We are constantly told to be living out our dreams, to do what we’re passionate about – a luxury not available to absolutely everyone. “Passion” itself was once a major bad word. But it’s true that if we’re getting paid for doing what we’re passionate about, it’s not a job.

I have always admired those whose dominant note is calmness and serenity. Some people achieve this with religion, or even diet; others may be just temperamentally gifted that way. Me, I’m a drama king, full of visible ups and downs, expressing myself where and when it’s probably not welcome. I have come to the conclusion that I am just one of those people who need more spice in their Chinese food, so to speak, than others. I believe one of our challenges in life is finding out how much spice we need, and accepting it.

People who insist on “no drama” usually don’t mean that. What they’re really interested in is balance. That’s a good thing. Even those who like spice can get too much of it. But can you force yourself to like bland food, just because someone told you it’s normal, or even good for you? Or be serene when you’re just not at that moment?

Which brings up another bad word: control. We give ourselves the illusion that we have it, and in the end, we don’t. No matter how hard we struggle to order our lives, s**t is going to happen. But so do miracles.

Time to take your seat. The curtain is going up for the next act.

Plus Ca Change

The French have an expression: “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.” (You will forgive me for leaving off the accents, etc., I’m too lazy to look the function up in the “help” section). Anyway, loosely translated, it means, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Except, well, they don’t.

A little reminder came this week, when a ball-point pen I was fond of finally ran out of ink. It was great for writing checks (remember those?) and writing in the check register, because it had a nice fine point on it. But this particular pen, which you could buy zillions of just a few years ago, is no longer in production. Sure, there are other pens, and I’ll get used to one of them. But I have no choice. There isn’t THAT one.

In my audio tape recorder bag (isn’t it interesting how people still talk about “tape,” when it basically went away a couple decades ago?) I still have a little 2-by-3-inch white portable amplified speaker, sold by Radio Shack about 25 years ago. It runs on a 9-volt battery. You can plug weak audio into it and it makes it loud. It was indispensable in my work. But they stopped making it, and I haven’t run across anything quite like it since. I have to take good care of it. It only cost about 10 bucks, but it’s precious.

When the price of flat-screen HDTVs finally fell into the reasonable range, I bought one (no choice, as the old TV died). I tried to set it up with some other equipment, but couldn’t get a signal input. After about 45 minutes, I was convinced that either the thing was defective or that my other devices weren’t compatible with it, and I prepared to put it back in the box to return it to the store, when I finally saw something on the screen. It was working. The only problem is, I have no clue what I did to make it function. TVs used to turn on and off; you could easily change channels without the machine scanning or seeking for you, and there were no menus, just separate controls for different functions. I’m used to it now. But it took me a while to stop missing the old TV.

Don’t get me started on rental cars. They don’t even leave the manuals in them now, so you drive off thinking you know what you’re doing, until...

It’s not just stuff. It’s places. A few years ago, my wife and I visited the East Coast city where I was born and spent a few years as a child. “For dinner tonight,” I said, “we’re going to the finest place in town!” My parents and grandparents had gone there many times, so I knew the name and looked it up in the phone book (remember those?) It wasn’t listed. I asked people around town where it was. Nobody had even heard of it -- until we visited a 90-year-old friend of my late mother’s who observed that the place had closed down decades earlier. Well, that night we did go to a perfectly nice place for dinner. It just wasn’t THAT place.

There is an age we reach when we finally give up and realize that all the things we assume to be permanent, or to always function a certain way,  just aren’t or don’t. It has all been upgraded or is under new management. What was that age for you, or are you there yet? I’d like to be able to embrace change, but first I have to shake its hand.

Not Like in the Movies

 A deadly disease spreads from Africa to the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and the military swoop in and take complete charge of the situation to protect the homeland. Teams of folks in hazmat suits descend from helicopters. Active carriers of the disease are immediately isolated behind plastic sheets. It’s all buttoned down neatly, seemingly within a few minutes.

But despite its reputation, Ebola doesn’t make for a good movie monster. First of all, it’s not airborne; it requires transmission by bodily fluids. Second, it doesn’t show up right away, it takes several weeks before symptoms appear. And third, when they do, it’s almost impossible at first to distinguish the disease from the flu – no instant horrible disfigurement. And the CDC, the crack federal agency that we assume will run the show, doesn’t really have that authority, at least automatically. In reality, that’s left up to local government and health officials -- and mistakes are made.

We wonder: Should we be afraid? The news outlets have learned that if fear doesn’t motivate us to stay glued to the TV or whatever screen we spend the most time with, then outrage is a good substitute. When the Ebola carrier from Liberia showed up in the U.S., the Texas hospital screwed up and sent him back out into the community. The family members who were hosting him were quarantined, but not immediately removed from the crowded apartment building where they lived, and left to deal with contaminated bedding the carrier had used. The system basically collapsed.

Not very satisfying, movie-plot-wise. But life is like that. The villains among us are too subtle. Rescuers move ineptly, or get there too late. And because we’re conditioned to look for big villains, we miss the smaller or slower ones. The enterovirus has spread through many states, only fractionally as fatal as Ebola, but equally baffling. Measles and other childhood diseases are rampant again, it’s said, because many educated, affluent parents in some places are distrustful of vaccinations for their children. But where’s the high drama, or the instant fright? Then, in another sphere, there’s climate change. The scientists keep moving up the date when catastrophe is supposed to occur. Hollywood even took a whack at it (”The Day After Tomorrow”) But it just doesn’t happen that way. These kinds of catastrophes occur bit by bit, and like the frog in the slowly boiling water, we don’t react until it’s too late, or almost too late.

And we have to cut ourselves a little slack. Human beings don’t always behave like movie heroes. Balls get dropped. Whizbang technology fails. It’s always tempting to point fingers and make heads roll, but can’t we simply focus on not making the same mistakes again? The best practices and the solutions to problems sometimes take a long time to develop, and the mistakes happen to teach them to us.

It’s really the smaller and slower stuff we should be sweating: the stuff that creeps up on us. The stuff that doesn’t appear and disappear in two hours, like in the movies.