Dear Sylas,
You will need the following:
Chop everything and then mix it all together. I am being intentionally vague about the measurements, because I never use any. Taste constantly and adjust according to what you would like.
No.
Wait.
You will need the following:
No.
Wait.
You will need the following:
Melt the butter in a medium saucepan on medium heat. Pour in the wine, the juice of half the lemons, as well as their zest. When it begins to boil, lower the heat and keep at a simmer. Meanwhile, lay out the salmon fillets on a greased baking pan. Add lemon, salt, pepper and about one bunch of the fresh dill (chopped). Rub it into the salmon to allow the flavors to sink in.
Do all this under parental supervision.
No.
Wait.
You will need the following:
Begin loving the game at an early age, because it is what you see at home. Play for fun at school. At around age eight, begin to display the talent your father did. Fall in love with the game. Undergo rigorous training from your uncle and grandfather.
No.
Wait.
“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” - Ernest Hemingway
These are not terribly surprising words coming from a man whose last action was to place the barrel of a shotgun into his mouth. A highly-renowned and influential writer, it’d be hard to say Hemingway was not an intelligent man. But then, as Joshua Ferris once wrote, intelligent people are not always guided by their intelligence.
What I believe Hemingway was saying is that smart people understand better than others that life ends in death, that it all gets wiped out, and that since no afterlife is provable or viable, then everything is meaningless and shitty and people are terrible and the world is awful and boo-hoo why are we alive. Hemingway is observing that intelligent people think that death is the biggest backdrop to life, and so all intelligent people who see this as the truth will not be able to hang onto their happiness for long. And I think many perfectly intelligent people still have this view today. But there’s something incredibly stupid about this mentality. Something lazy, fatalistic, simplistic about narrowing it all down to death.
Most intelligent people believe in the theory of evolution, and isn’t the next rational step the evolution of thought? The evolution of perspective? If we are bound to a limited time in this life, isn’t the smartest thing to do is find happiness in whatever tiny thing might provide it?
The developmental psychologist Howard Gardner had a theory about multiple types of intelligence and not a single one (Spatial, Linguistic, Logical-mathematical, Bodily-kinesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, Naturalistic) recognizes the ability to appreciate happiness. I think people who might excel at one or several of these intelligence areas might also fail at the ability to draw happiness from it.
This already feels like a rambling post, one of those things that’s hard to prove, that other intelligent people might call a poorly reasoned argument. But something within me, when encountering a quotation like Hemingway’s, or the oft-pessimistic viewpoint of many other people whose opinions can be found on the Internet, feels that one type of intelligence has been vastly ignored. Pushing psychological disorders and chemical imbalances as far away from the conversation as they’ll go, misery is stupidity, cynicism the aged degradation of brain cells. The ability to appreciate the lives we have been given is the utmost intelligence, the one that will some day decide who has the will or the strength to survive from those who do not.
“The moral? to recognize that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time and the weather…Bad sufferers, wretched souls who have been betrayed in love or excluded from parties, who are pained by a feeling of intellectual inadequacy or a sense of social inferiority, but who learn nothing from such ills, and indeed react to them by engaging a variety of ruinous defense mechanisms which entail arrogance and delusion, cruelty and callousness, spite and rage.”
” – Alain de Boton, How Proust Can Change Your Life
I am staring at the guitarist’s fingers in awe. The way he knows exactly in what order to pluck which string, coordinating his other hand’s movement on the guitar’s neck, while not looking at his hands at all, and the words he is singing, the fact that someone decades ago wrote them, and the millions of people have sung along to them, and that the vibrations are travelling through chords through some comprehensible feat of engineering to be amplified and turned into music that, through some incomprehensible feat of humanity, is immensely pleasing.
I am in awe of melodies. Of our need for them, our capacity for them. I am in awe of music, and the entire intricacy of humanity that is at this very moment represented in just one guitarist’s fingers.
My next thought is this: “My first wife.” These are three words a Dutch man at a French restaurant in Mexico City said to me about a week ago. Like a guitar chord, the sound of these three little words can be taken at face value, but when one thinks about the music, things get a little hazy.
My first wife. The implications of these three words unravel in my head, and I have problem listening to whatever else the Dutchman is saying to me. I’m imagining, in no particular order, the fall of the marriage, that way affection can rust over time, how it makes things less functional. I’m imagining an argument, with lots of yelling, the kind that makes people uncomfortable enough to call the cops. I’m imagining the aftermath, what it may have been like for this Dutchman to try to sleep in the weeks and months after his divorce. Those bits and pieces of love that have managed to survive the ugliness are keeping him awake, and pouring another shot too late at night. And all of this so far in the past, far behind another marriage, maybe more than one.
In a cover letter this week, I wrote about people converging from a dozen different places, diverging to hundreds of others. I think about the future and the past unraveling in exactly the same fashion. Actually, I see this happening in everything: implications, histories, fates. This world is so huge, and it is most evident in guitar chords, in fingers, in words.
“And after that, I quit writing for a couple years.”
The poet says this immediately after he tells me that his dog got into his room and ate 250 pages’ worth of his poetry. I have always been the kind of person that assumes honesty in people, so I do not think he is lying, or even joking. I believe his dog ate his poetry. He says something beautiful about how it was a part of his soul, but it takes me too long to find a pen, and I forget before I can write it down.
The poet works at the small resort of cabins that I am staying at. We talk as we look out at the lake. I am drinking a beer, and he his holding the check, and across the empty lot of grass, three lizards walk up a red wall. I think about how the poet once stopped writing for two years. He is thirteen years old.
He mentions wanting to escape at 18, go live with no parental burdens. He tells me he once wrote a story about a town with no adults. I ask him if he’s read Lord of the Flies, he asks me if I’ve read Tolstoy. The town he lives in is overrun on long weekends by hundreds of underage drinkers with a lot of money. I tell him the idea for my book came in the middle of the night, he tells me that’s what his last poem was about, waking up in the middle of the night to write.
Our conversation ends abruptly, but I tell him to keep writing, already knowing that I will write about him.
Not long ago, I found myself at a random bar. Not random as in I chose it with absolutely no purpose over thousands of other bars with an equal probability of being chosen, but random as in my night just happened to lead me to the bar in question. Of all the gin joints in all the world kind of thing.
I saw a friend from high school, one I hadn’t seen in the almost 7(!) years since graduating. We pointed at each other and smiled, widened our eyes and approached each other, ready to reacquaint ourselves through our post-graduate autobiographies. He knew about my book, and my career as a writer. I asked him about what he’s been doing and he told me he started an architecture firm. “Small,” he said, “Not much yet.”
“We’re in our early 20s,” I said, “We’re not supposed to be much yet.”
I think the age I’m in is one that’s oft-forgotten. People assume adulthood, assume post-collegiate success, placement. No one told us we’d still be no one. Not that we really see it that way. I think that’s the difference, the wisdom we’ve gained from our teenage years. We’re still mostly irrelevant, working our way elsewhere. But we understand that that irrelevance has its place. That most successful people, however it is we’re defining success, have gone through a stage like we are going through right now.
Who’s heard of a 24-year-old author? A 24-year-old architect? A 24-year-old anything. Other than the odd athlete or virtuoso or whatever, this is an age between ages. Between jobs and careers, flings and loves, experiences and memories. Between dreaming of the world and reaching it.
Dear Sylas,
You are six months old and enormous like the world itself. I haven’t seen you in a over a month, so the next time I do I’ll gasp at the size of you, the strength of your grip, all that weight hiding somewhere within you as I lift you up.
You are wearing clothes for 9-month-olds. You are nearly crawling, and can sometimes sit up on your own for a little while before your immensity topples you one way or another. Your head is in the 90th percentile for babies your age. In a video, I saw you get a taste of sweets and then reach for more with the same veracity of the dessert-lovers in your family, your mouth opening and closing, trying to draw out the sensation on your tongue.
One day, you will not believe you were ever this tiny. And despite how often the following sentiment may be expressed, every day, all over the world by parents shocked at the progress of their children, we cannot believe how big you now are.
I don’t have any life lessons for you today. I just wanted to chronicle this progression of yours toward hugeness, to draw a pencil mark against the wall and compare it to the one that follows, the one before it, for no other reason than to be aware of this incredible growth, to bear witness to you.
Gizmodo is currently running a mini-contest, asking readers to send in the stories of their boldest experiences. This is the first draft of what I’ll send in, and since it’s relevant to Somewhere Over the Sun, I thought I’d share it with you guys and see if there’s any feedback. Submissions must be sent in by Monday, and they’ll pay $100 to the authors of any pieces they publish.
I credit my Mexican upbringing for allowing me to pack an entire apartment into a Nissan Sentra. Clothes in the trunk; some furniture and an air mattress in the back seat; pots and pans, dishes, silverware and, just for good measure, a wild assortment of hot sauces sitting shotgun next to my newly-purchased laptop. I had just graduated from college, had no job prospects and one last year left on my U.S visa. I was headed for California to write a book.
Only a couple of weeks earlier, I was getting ready to graduate from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas with a bachelor’s in business marketing, and preparing for my final interview with the company I was working for. I’d applied for a traveling manager position and it was down to me and one other candidate. I was already imagining myself in the job, the traveling I’d get to do. I bought patio furniture for my brother and his wife, sure that by the next credit card billing, I’d be making enough money to not cringe at the charge. Then the final interview came, they asked me about my visa, and within a few days they had chosen to go in another direction. Lesson: do not purchase patio furniture prior to the final interview.
Like many other recent college graduates, I had to figure out what to do with my life. And I had the added headache of knowing that virtually no companies would hire me because of my visa status (after my year was up, a company would have to be willing to sponsor me, which is a complicated and expensive process). It took three stressful days until I found the answer: I was going to write a book. I’d always known somewhere within me that I was a writer, that I had books inside, patiently waiting to be written. But I thought I’d have to wait years, go do something I wasn’t crazy about for a while until the words exploded out of me.
Most people try to pursue their passions, and out of circumstance or need, they find themselves forced into tedious day jobs for years, working to save up enough money to one day do what they love. I aimed for tedium and was forced into my passion by circumstances.
I knew I’d have to leave friends, family and all other forms of distraction behind, so I chose Monterey, California simply because it was a small town on the coast and I knew no one there. A few days later, I’d rented an apartment over the phone, started writing an outline for a novel, and created a Facebook event for a going away party.
Looking back, I wonder why I wasn’t more nervous. What if I got writer’s block, what if the book sucked, what if Monterey was overrun with velociraptors? Why would anyone care about a 22-year-old kid’s book? Why did I think I could do in a few months what some people struggle for decades to accomplish? Why didn’t I ask myself any of these questions?
In the end, my boldness paid off. My debut novel, Somewhere Over the Sun, was released in December 2010 and received honorable mention for literary fiction at the 19th Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards.
Last day to enter the Goodreads giveaway of Somewhere Over the Sun!