Being Human

Summoning Your Life

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 2 Comments

David Brooks writes this week in his op-ed The Summoned Self:

Life isn’t a project to be completed; it is an unknowable landscape to be explored. A 24-year-old can’t sit down and define the purpose of life in the manner of a school exercise because she is not yet deep enough into the landscape to know herself or her purpose. That young person — or any person — can’t see into the future to know what wars, loves, diseases and chances may loom. She may know concepts, like parenthood or old age, but she doesn’t really understand their meanings until she is engaged in them.

The Burt's Bees Business Model - look anything like your life?

People who think this way are very skeptical of using a business model to manage their lives, as if life is a project to be mapped out and boxes to be checked off.  In fairness, Brooks allows that there is more than one valid and meaningful way to manage one’s life.  But seeing the different perspectives in black and white, there was no question in my mind I am living a “summoned life” and have been for many years.

I have tremendous admiration for people who have earned their MBA degrees.  Some of my best friends have achieved this, and I even considered going for it myself once.  It’s a very practical degree and can make one quite wealthy if you know what to do with it.  The trouble is, I’ve seen too many people confuse their degree with their lives.  I seriously had one friend drawing diagrams of his relationship with his wife and calculating how to get the highest ROI (return on investment) out of their marriage.  This was shortly after attaining an MBA from one of the most prestigious business schools in the country.  And you would be correct: They are no longer married.  Business model FAIL#.

There are parts of life that respond well to planning.  And there are parts that don’t.  If you saw George Clooney in Up in the Air, you know what a brilliant job his character’s young protege Natalie Keener does of illustrating to a T the bloody collide of the Well-Planned Life with things she can’t control.  George has a couple of crashes himself. 

There is a balance to be had between trying to uber-manage our lives and being open to what unfolds, as it unfolds.  Sometimes I think it doesn’t matter very much which you prefer, it just is what it is.

What DO Women Want? Go ask a vampire.

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 8 Comments

Literally consumed with desire….

They say confession is good for the soul.  So here goes…….yes, I just watched Twilight.

And then I watched Twilight: New Moon.  I’m like a crazy person, and God help me apparently there is another one out there.  But I felt a need to know more about this pop cultural phemonenon.  I remember how much I admired an octogenarian who used to come to state 4-H camp and talk to the kids, and they actually listened.   She had her own subscription to Seventeen magazine at age  80.

After I first shared my guilty secret in private, a friend sent me this YouTube video, which is just hilarious and is narrated by a guy who struggles mightily with,“Why do all females like this terrible, terrible formulaeic story line?”  This question apparently torments a lot of people.  I don’t think his little video is all wrong, but I do think it is missing the mark.  He still doesn’t quite get what the crack cocaine element of the whole thing really is.

I’ve seen the first two of these movies, and one thing is abundantly clear:  The most addictive and persistent element in the Twilight franchise is relentless wanting of the female lead in a range of ways by nearly every character in every scene.

Some want to kill her.  Some want to be her friend.  They want to be her lover, her confidante, her father figure, her mother.  They want her to be their prom date, their sibling, their punching bag, their teacher, their student, their lunch.  But no matter what it is, everyone wants her all the time.  I’m talking all the time.

The pervasiveness of this theme might not have been so clear to me as the true addictive element if I hadn’t read an article in the New York Times several months ago titled simply What Do Women Want?.  (This article is “not suitable for work” and may be offensive to some readers.  Regardless, it spent a long time as one of The NYT’s most commented and emailed articles.  It’s anything but dull.)

Sigmund Freud famously told a female student, “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?”  Deep into the 8-or-so page online article, one researcher suggests that what women want, above all else, is to be wanted.  The brain chemicals that release in the female mind around stories, images, fantasies and realities around being the focus of desire apparently are quite powerful, and can be distinctly separated from what any individual woman may want in “real life.”

There is a whole lengthy and responsible discussion about the difference between arousal and desire that may very well be the Rosetta Stone long lost to Freud.  Not shockingly, it seems female scientists are discovering important dynamics that tend to live in this huge male blind spot.

So sure……Robert Pattinson has a great truly romantic look.  And yes, vampires pluck at some weird psyche strings and have for centuries. Add that the idea of undying love is very appealing, especially when the whole world seems hell-bent on squashing the devotion and fidelity out of every last human relationship — with glee, I might add — and you’ve got some nice icing for your cake.

But it’s just the icing.  I’m pretty sure the cake is the wanting.