When the Grass Seems Greener

I can see a dog run from where I’m studying on the top floor of the school library. There’s something so uninhibited about those dogs, the way they all seem to just live for chasing each other around or going after a tossed frisbee. I think in New York City especially, people have a hard time accepting a limit to what they need in order to be happy.

[An hour later...] There was an article in the New York Times this past Sunday titled “Six Figures? Not Enough!”, about how people used to aim for a yearly salary of $100,000. Nowadays, however, some people find that $100,000 just doesn’t have the cache that it used too. More people are earning $100,000 per year and it doesn’t support the lifestyle that they want. Economist Robert H. Frank is cited in the article as saying, “A lot of people think this is about spoiled people who can’t keep up with the Joneses, but it’s really deeper than that. There’s a consumption standard that every group has. If you ask, ‘How am I doing?,’ it’s always, ‘Compared to what?’ And people hardly ever look down.” I wonder though if for many people, they will never feel that they have enough.

I’m thinking here about a term that I learned in college, “anomic suicide,” from the book Suicide by Emile Durkheim. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, anomic–in the social sciences–means “a condition of social instability or personal unrest resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals.”

The way I understood it, people who committed suicide due to anomie did so because they did not think they could ever be happy. For example, and this is my own example so I might be wrong, homeless people might think they’d achieve happiness if only they had an apartment. For someone living in an apartment, owning a home would mean happiness. Someone with a one-story house might want a two-story house. Someone with a two-story house might want a mansion. Someone with a mansion might think happiness would come with having that second home in Aspen. Etc. In this way, a person might never be happy because there’s always something else to want, just out of reach. But the fact is that one cannot have everything.

Back to my point, I envy dogs because they’re happy just being who they are and being in their pack. They might “have” toys or fluffy beds, but they’re not devastated (as far as I know) if they lose something. I wish I could also be happy if I was stripped of everything that I own.

The Gates and Other Observations

The one or two of you who read my blog might notice that I’ve combined my two blogs. My “lifestyle” blog hadn’t been updated in awhile, not for lack of interest but time, so in the future, if I notice any more cars that resemble the Geo Metro, I will post about it here. (Has anyone else noticed that a lot of cars now have chrome roof racks?)

I finally visited The Gates in Central Park yesterday, as the installation was taken down today.

The Gates in Central Park, 2/27/05
I decided to take a close-up shot of the fabric, as I hadn’t been able to tell what it was like from pictures in the paper. The fabric looked kind of like the mesh jersey material that a lot of sportswear is made out of. The fabric also hung in pleats from the Gates, which I hadn’t realized until I saw them in person. Overall, I enjoyed my visit. I didn’t think the individual gates were beautiful (those 90-degree angles in the Gates really bothered me, as well as the metal blocks that held the gates down). But, as a lot of people have commented already, the installation did make you look at the park differently. I’d like to think a lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise go to the park were drawn by the Gates to actually stroll around.

I also went to Orange Park’s show Saturday night (so I could add some “color” to my profile on the band). The experience reminded me of why I never go to shows anymore, namely, when people deliberately confine themselves to a small space, they really turn into a pack of idiots. One guy gave my friend’s boyfriend the evil eye for the duration of the show. I had people deliberately bumping into me, and the woman in front of me repeatedly flicked her hair into my eyes when she was trying to pull it up into a ponytail. I also don’t know why people insist on shoving their way to the front of a crowd, as if they will be able to enter another dimension and two people will be able to occupy one spot simultaneously. The music was great, but I don’t plan on going to any more shows for awhile.

On a lighter note, I’ve seen some cool things lately:
-Several couples dancing some latin dance in unison on the top floor of a building.
-People practicing Tae Kwon Do moves in unison on a higher floor of a building, as seen from the street.
-A guy sitting with a bust of Abraham Lincoln — which he’d carved himself! — on his lap while he was waiting for the subway. He said the finished bust would become part of some memorial.