Never Mind.....

I headlong fancied the author of 'Harold Ramorez' and his pet Duke with the opening line itself even before the janitor's bluesuit was appropriated to salvage his unmanned modesty as Child Sir Lancelot. More later on Penrod, one of those reads that is less forgiving of your past self for having missed such a delightful work. Why didn't I read this years ago? Listen ..you have a fine spirit in literary recommendations. Hatterr, Penrod, bring them on. I love your gusto-read list.

NM: I knew Booth Tarkington not through Penrod series but from his "The Magnificent Ambersons" novel, actually, the film, as I watched the silent film. Strange, I find references to 1942 Orson Welles production, but not the earlier silent film. I will get back on that silent film later unless I am confusing Ambersons with something else. (There was a silent film I watched few years ago.)

Found it: The 1927 silent film by David Smith is not called Ambersons but Two to One. Available on Amazon Prime. Check it out. You might find it (too) smattering quaint. I enjoyed it back then. Don't ask me why I preferred muted adaptation over Welles's dramatization. What can I say, I enjoy noiseless chiaroscuro.

 

Dear Never Mind,

Let me recap life-hacking tips that saved me from second-guess and rut in life.

1. The devastating happens for an astonishing reason. Today's regret is tomorrow's boon. Focus on that transitioning boon than the fleeting regret.
2. Don't fall prey to recursive thinking -- if only I had not done this, because, then you would also think, if only I had not done that before this, so forth, till you would be paralyzed from not doing anything. Act swift and move on swifter!
3. Nobody scoffs at you as much you think they do. So shrug off embarrassment or contention or resentment and move on.
4. Don't drag every conflict. Don't explain too much. Don't grey your hair sooner with stress.
5. Everyone shafts on a learning curve. If you are ahead of them, then don't fret on other's pettiness below you. Just be amused and preclude incidents with them.
6. Argue less, pretend to agree more as no good has ever come out of any argument. All good was from revelation that arguments are meaningless in the tiny scheme of life and arbitrary scheme of the universe.
7. Don't preach 'fact'. Just overlook the 'fallacy' as crowning of truth has never been the mission statement in any jovial revelry.
8. There is no dearth of fools in the world. Just don't fool yourself thinking that you can reform all the fools.
9. Avoid the impetuous and the sullen. One burns and the other frosts you.
10. You fight for the best not through senseful but spirit, you aspire a change. You endure even the worst not from senseless but from inertia, you just get used to it. Either way, 'senseful' or 'senseless', you strike contentment, so don't try to make too much sense of your every minuscule undertaking whether it should have been 'fight' and 'flight' in retrospect as both yield the same outcome, our mind eventually brutalizes to everything - novelty or apathy. Don't overthink too much in life, move on from a decision.
11. Seneca is your tutor! Nothing is as stricken as your fear of it being ill-gotten. Pause -- oh, it happened, strange, funny -- and move on in life.
12. Be an observer rather than an interloper. Don't talk when you have no idea, don't act when you are not needed, don't trouble your life when you confused whether you should talk or act. Instead, listen and carry on. Not everything should be intersected and resolved in life. Some fuzzy things are best left unlooked and unexplained. Keep moving on in life.

Background: I had these pointers written down in my diary from long ago. I cannot even recall when I had jotted them. This morning as I was shuffling through the diary, happened to notice the red ink and green highlights. The writing is juvenile, still, these pointers are so ingrained in me today that I no longer refer to any written form to invoke the spirit in that silly undertaking. I chuckled! Just sharing a slice of my "Penrod" musing from my juvenile days.

 

Amused why humans aspire for "purpose" and "meaning" in life. Why is it unsettling to accept that life has evolved not with any purpose and meaning in its drive to flourish from bacteria to whales. We exist! Is that not good enough? Then, there are others who feel that this corporeal life is the ante-room of universe's grand architecture and we will be led through the gates of glory and black holes into some meaningful and purposeful hall of fame in our afterlife, inquisition, paradise. Regardless, the 'purpose' and 'meaning' of life haunts the humans too much that they ignore the immediacy and vicinity of sensations and observations in life borne out of unpurpose and unmeaning, and crave for higher understanding.

Had one read Samuel Beckett or Eugène Ionesco, then such nagging inquiries would be put to rest forever. I am always tempted to inquire from the wanderers of 'purpose' the kind of literature they have indulged in. If one has read absurd literature, then one is freed from such transcendental inquiry which only beguiles revelation but delivers the belated and proverbial 42 as the answer to life, universe, and everything. Hitchhikers must be read to the nursery tiddlers to inhibit the misleading inquiry that life is saddled with elusive purpose and inscrutable meaning.

30,000 pots of rasam while riding the life out is a sensible approach even with no honorable purpose or agreeable meaning.

 

My earlier post reminded me of this apt dialogue in conjunction with the trending science news:

"‘Mr Langdon, all questions were once spiritual. Since the beginning of time, spirituality and religion have been called on to fill in the gaps that science did not understand. The rising and setting of the sun was once attributed to Helios and a flaming chariot. Earthquakes and tidal waves were the wrath of Poseidon. Science has now proven those gods to be false idols. Soon all Gods will be proven to be false idols. Science has now provided answers to almost every question man can ask. There are only a few questions left, and they are the esoteric ones. Where do we come from? What are we doing here? What is the meaning of life and the universe?’

Langdon was amazed. ‘And these are questions CERN is trying to answer?’
‘Correction. These are questions we are answering.’"

-- from "Angels And Demons" by Dan Brown​

Now with the incredible news on bi-maternal and bi-paternal mice from last week:

Baby-making science has crossed a new threshold, at least in rodents. A team of scientists in China has managed to create a small number of apparently healthy mouse pups from same-sex female parents. The researchers also generated offspring from two mouse dads—but those pups all died shortly after birth, underscoring the fact that the new technique still faces serious hurdles. The team’s approach, which relies on stem cell science and CRISPR–Cas9 gene editing, is a “new way to produce offspring of same-sex mammals,” says senior author Qi Zhou, who works on stem cell and reproductive biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.​

.... which reminds me of the biologist and philospher Jean Rostand's saying: Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.

Humans still fall short as a civilized race with their petty squabbles to conjure up the meaning of life but are we crossing a barrier here in science to contrive the meaning of life? What would happen to the rhetoric of man and woman been created with a 'purpose' and 'meaning' in life when both men and women could do without each other with the breakthroughs on the frontier of science. Don't we have the enhanced tool of inquiry now to redefine the meaning of life, notwithstanding, whatever it was in the past.

 

On a lighter note, Rakhii and I were discussing cupid-at-first-sight in her fiction story. Is that a folly or a free-spirit? Then, the Indo-Anglian (IA) thread came along.

Here's my favorite IA-recognizable cupid at first sight or sound from the movie Jerry Maguire. A girl confiding to a boy years later that she identified he was a kindred IA in the first 'hello'. The style, tone, approach and audacity in IA ideology of love forged in attentive diction.

Zellweger said of filming the famous "hello" line, "Cameron had me say it a few different ways. It's so funny, because when I read it, I didn't get it — I thought it was a typo somehow. I kept looking at it. It was the one thing in the script that I was looking at going, 'Is that right? Can that be right? How is that right?' I thought, 'Is there a better way to say that? Am I not getting it? I just don't know how to do it.'"​

Is that right? Can that be right? How is that right?

Much revealed in that concise "You had me at hello" which could NOT have been any more right. I love that confessional sequence!

 

Last night, I was watching the classic Will & Grace series on Amazon Prime. I loved the series back in the 90s when it was first aired. So I felt the urge to catch up with the classic series again intrigued by the renewed series. In the episode "Head Case", Grace is grumpy about the guest bathroom consigned to her after moving in with Will as his roommate. She proposes to tear down the wall separating the bathrooms to redecorate as a common and large bathroom to which Will is wary of conceding. Sharing a bathroom is intimate and sacrosanct. What would it take to share a bathroom with someone as friends or roommates or even visiting or live-in partners?

Though Will and Grace are platonic in their fondness, sharply, my inquiry about bathrooms diverged to couples visiting each other rather than live-partners who have nastier squabbles as "cohabitantes" than "visitantes" (early in the relationship).

Say, you have visited a potential suitor for weeks, cooked gooey pasta together, endured though the last episode of Lost series, and, one day, demurely inquire about nature's call: 'Can I use the bathroom?'

He gestures to the guest bathroom rather than the private bathroom in his master bedroom.

Bang! What does it mean?

• He is not much into you. Get out of the relationship with the sunken bladder.
• He is into you yet not to the third base where he could commit to bathroom sharing with you.
• He has potted plants and grooming kit in his bathroom.
• He has hidden a ring in of those soap boxes hence directing you to the guest bathroom for weeks.

Should bathroom-share be indicative of the prospects or progress in a relationship. I say, definitely. A guy visiting a girl or vice-versa are only tentatively dating until a personal bathroom could be shared between them both. With a bathroom-share the relationship has crossed the Rubicon with tough point of returning as a cardinal assurance has been drawn between them now. Followed by you can share my hand cream and mouthwash also now in the master bathroom. But if the guest bathroom is your sanitary remit for months then quit the stifling relationship. Honey, you deserve to progress at least till master bathroom to be merited as a 'nurturing' relationship.