Ode to Superman

The city streets are littered with splotches of light emanating from the tall street lamps that tower out of the darkness intermittently along them. In between the lamps, the darkness is strong, almost overpowering. In that darkness, evil lurks. The vilest of villains are having a congress, scheming on their next malevolent plot to overthrow the city. Their iniquitous laughter fills the space left by the strong breeze that whips by, lifting the trash left by the city dwellers in their daily quest for the dollar.
A piercing scream rents the air. A lady is frantically swatting at one of the villains with her handbag. Her mink fur coat and diamond crusted shoes give her away as a foreigner to the darkness. She is in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time. The rest of the villains hear the scream, and then come in closer to see if there is anything on her that is worth the scream. They get her against a dark wall. She is still frantically swinging the handbag as if it is a weapon that will mortally wound anyone who dares to come nearer her. One of the villains, a particularly magnificent specimen with broad shoulders and great muscles on his arms and chest that ripple with his every movement, moves up form the back of the pack effortlessly and swats the bag out of the air without blinking. The lady screams again, the pitch higher and duration longer. The big villain grunts. His sensitive ears ringing at the same pitch as the scream which is driving him mad. He lifts his big hands to his ears, and then as soon as she stops, swings his left hand to his right cheek then brings it back down with the force of a jack hammer. The lady gives off another high pitched scream, her brown leather mitten covered hands raised to her wind stung cheeks in a feeble attempt to shield them from the strike of the villain’s hand.
Then from nowhere, a flash of red and blue…the big villain is snatched away and all that the rest see is his feet flailing in the air after he is set down on the edge of a building not too far from where they are standing. Fear casts an icy grip on each of their hearts and in a single movement they are all scampering away for their safety. Without warning, they are all plucked and set on top of street lamps one by one. “Help! Help” their screams fade away into the night as the red and blue materialize into a man of steel who sweeps the lady off her feet, retrieves her bag and then floats away lazily into the city.
He is the one and only super hero. Man of action. Fearless and courageous. Kryptonian man of steel….He is Superman.

Out with the old!!!

I cry for the generation who grew up in the 90’s. Do you want to know why? It is because we grew up on a wealth of experience brought to us courtesy of Walt Disney pictures. Our minds were constantly bombarded by the Disney love story and the mindless entertainment of the Spanish tele-novella. Those stories always went the same way: Boy meets girl, and its love at first sight. They kiss on the doorsteps of her house after their first date and after many many months, they get married and have 2.5 children, a dog, a big house with a front lawn and a white picket fence and 2 cars: the old sports car that Dad has been restoring for eons and the station wagon Mom uses to drop the 2.5 children in school.

This story changed a bit in the late 90’s. It became boy meets girl, hates her so much the first time he sees her then after a while he either saves her or teams up with her to stop the bad guys/girls and as a result they fall in love and ride off into the sunset. We never got to know what happened after they rode off into the sunset.

When I compare this fairytale of a love story to what happens in real life, it brings tears into my eyes. Most people barely remember the last time they truly fell for someone at first sight. Yet, somewhere within us, in our inner child, we expect that everything should and will go the fairytale way. I blame this squarely on Disney and the malleability of the young mind.

Anywhoo, that’s not what I wanna talk about. The traditional boy-girl relationship is dead. It seems to have died quite a while ago and yet I have only realized its demise now. In this day and age of speed dating and social networking, it seems that young people have less and less time to ‘waste’ getting to know each other. We used to count the number of dates it took for a guy to get the first kiss from a girl. Now we count the minutes. The faster a guy can score a kiss, the higher his standing within his group of friends. And it’s worse online. Believe me.

I should put it out right now I am a traditionalist. I do fall into the class of people who grew up watching Disney flicks (you couldn’t say no), but I haven’t yet conformed to the popular forms of dating. You see, when I was growing up, the people I looked up to all took eons of time dating before they even thought of announcing an engagement. So I expected the when my time would be nigh, the same would happen to me. But looking at what is going on in this world, I think I am the only person holding on to this ideology, though I am sure that I am not the only person who was indoctrinated with it.

Therefore, irregardless of what popular culture is bombarding me with, I believe that someday I will meet that special someone and I am sure that I will not fall for that someone at first sight, but also I won’t launch into a barrage of snogs with her within the first ten minutes of our meeting. I will take my time to get to know her and who knows; maybe I will set a new standard for the new generation. But in the meanwhile, I will be attending the memorial ceremony for the traditional boy-girl relationship. It will be held at the cemetery where it was buried next to chivalry, romance and true love….

Random Ramblings of an Uninspired Writer

Sometimes I sit at my computer and just stare at the screen. I know that may sound a bit weird to some of you, but anyone who has ever undergone the process of needing inspiration to write can attest to this. Once in a while, my muse will check in and give me oodles of inspiration and those are the days I come up with the quirky tales that I talk so much about (and I am sure some of you are tired of hearing about/reading) But then there are those days when I think that I have received a visit from my mysteriously erratic muse, so I get out my writing gear and sit down at the computer to write. Then I proceed to waste an hour or two writing and re-writing one paragraph or if I get lucky, one page. So sometimes, maybe as a way to beckon my aberrant muse, I open a new document on my word processor and sit at the computer and just stare at the cursor as it blinks in front of me.

This strategy has never worked, but that is beside the point. Most of us have things that we do without knowing why exactly we do them and what result we expect from doing so. One such thing that I have observed in our popular culture is trying to erase people from our lives. This happens especially when the people have catalyzed or caused what qualifies as a ‘disaster’ in our lives. We do all in our mortal power to forget that these people exist. I should say that I am probably the biggest culprit in this. I have tried to erase a few too many people from my life severally and every time I do try to erase them, something keeps on bringing very loud reminders of their existence back to me. From ex-girlfriends to high school friends that we only tolerated because we were all in one school, most of us have someone or some people that we actively try to remove from our minds by erasing the physical memories we have of them. I have heard of people who burned all the gifts that their ex partners gave them, others who literally cut (or cropped) people out of photos, and yet others who cleared their phones of messages and phone numbers associated with that person. Personally, I am guilty of the last one :-D

But all of you culpable of one of the above strategies or any one of the myriad of other strategies know for a fact that they don’t work. There’ll be that one thing that you hold too close to your heart to burn. Or that one text message that made your day every day for a whole week and you can’t bring yourself to delete. Or that life changing experience that you had with that friend which runs through your mind every time you are dreamily talking to someone about how your life changed since then. When this happens, most of us do one of two things: we either go on a serious memory purge by reaching for drugs and/or alcohol (or chocolate) to help us forget or we smile and move on without giving it much more thought.

Those who go the purge way always end up regretting it the next morning (or the next time they step on a weighing scale) In my opinion, these are people who really haven’t moved on from the bad experience, however much they may tell themselves and others that they are over it. Every reminder serves to make this hole that they have in their hearts bigger and bigger and if they don’t realize it soon enough, most of them implode and that’s how so many drug addicts and alcoholics are created.

The people I wholly respect are those who smile and move on. Those are the signs of people who realized that they need to move on and they got up, brushed themselves off and moved on. It takes a whole lot to realize where you are. But once you do, the release you get by moving on is way better than any drug. We should all aim to somehow realize that the bad experiences have passed and it’s up to us to move on. Most importantly, it’s not good to totally isolate yourself from these people whom you are trying to erase from your life. Granted, interacting with someone who, in your brain, has some stigma attached to them can be weird. That doesn’t mean that they cannot add any value to your life. I have learnt the hard way that sometimes the people you really need are the same people that you are trying the most to erase from your life. So try to re-establish your connections with these people.
Right. Now let me get back to staring at my screen and wondering when my muse will pass me by…..