Sitcoms, Brock Alter, and the New American Dream (Brock Alter not guaraneed to be included) A Post by Joel Walkowski

[Author's Note: I lose to Appu.]

Another Autumn Sunday came to an end and I found myself trying to turn my brain back on. It had been a great day. Panini's for breakfast, football on the screen with bits of book hungrily scarfed down in between. We played football in a parking lot, ate tremendous hamburgers, and danced to French Pop Music that is way too jamming to play at the Gap. Still, Sunday was over and my brain laid half-asleep in the groggy, gravy state of too much consumption and not enough concentration.

My new deal is trying to concentrate more. On anything and everything. This is a great approach for books and a terrible one for moles.

I turned on a video from the good people at TED. It was a lecture from Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist who fell into a new understanding of the brain when she had the misfortune of having a stroke. The details can not possibly be described by a scribe as ineffectual as I, but the end result was a simple appreciation of the joys wrought by consciousness.

It also cemented a burgeoning theory I've been playing with of the new American Dream. (Again, I am being too effusive and grandiose). Long gone are the days when the young and hungry strive to step forward, work hard, and achieve. A white picket wife in the suburbs with a beautiful house and kids? "Well, by golly" the baby boomers say "you've done well." As personified by Dr. Taylor's chance meeting with brilliance, effort is way passe. Not to dismiss a woman with a doctorate as a loaf, but her greatest achievement came as something that happened to her that coalesced with the person she already was.

Why not be great for the person we are and the things that happen to us? As a college senior on the cusp of graduation, my views are incredibly biased, but climbing the ladder just isn't what it used to be. I dread the prospect of getting a job after graduation. Whither the bills but what of the path of self-sufficiency, intellectualism, and-dare I say it-freedom. Living with my Father in Indiana or planting trees in Rural Canada would allow me to preserve and slowly nourish my potential. A job is definitely a path to embark on, but to enter as a cog is not a path I deign to embark on after an eighteen-year tenure as a cog in Academic Institutions.

Another downside of the job: In a universe of another's creation, one is reduced to pawndom and prevented at all costs from becoming a superstar.

Inside my immediate circle are 10-15 people I know for a goddamned fact to be superstars. The earth quakes in their wake as everything they encounter is forced to bend to their person. Why would any of us adopt an outward ambition when so much could be harvested from what we already have? By being ourselves, the world is forced to find us, but when it does, the results will be staggering.

The New American Dream: Success handed down through the veins of persona and experience. Who we are is what matters. What we want is of no concern. Soul. Soul. Soul. Heart. Heart. Heart.

I don't watch much television but when I do I favor "The Office" & "The Wire". During the end of last season, The Office brought in a spunky young actress by the name of Amy Ryan to play a love interest for the forever-forlorn Michael Scott. She immediately came on screen and lit up the screen with the rare dose of feminine dopiness, naivety, and the thing men like to refer to as "spunk". In a show hinging so much on improvisation and free-form comedy, I expect the characters to resemble the actors playing them, but this "Holly" leapt off the screen. Her performances are among the most authentic I've ever seen even in a satirical universe stretched to near cartoonish boundaries. The show undeniably has heart, which makes Ryan's star all the more glittery.

I'm getting into "The Wire". After finishing up a paper early Friday Morning, I turned on the beginning of Season Two. If you aren't familiar, the show transpires in the gritty underworld of Baltimore Cops and Drug Dealers. It's the most artful thing I've even seen, but who comes a twittering on screen wearing headphones in her squad car and making sweet talk to the boys but Amy Ryan. I recognized the face immediately, expecting some sort of transformation. There was none.

The Amy Ryan on "The Office" is the same as the incarnation on "The Wire". The two shows couldn't be more different, but by harnessing herself Ryan has vaulted herself into an already memorable career.

[Author's Note: I am having trouble turning the italics on and off so I keep losing my train of thought due to some onset of OCD]

I've recently rewatched the Goals to Life, the film friends and I made when I was seventeen. It isn't a great film, but it resonates due to the purity behind it. We weren't setting out to do something great. We were just putting ourselves on screen. Isn't that what art is?

There is a fear of doing bad work. There is a fear of financial failure. Worst of all there is the fear of never sipping ice cold Pina Coladas atop the golden Ziggurat.

Fuck all that. The only vehicle we have is ourselves and the sooner we acknowledge that, the better.

Things that wouldn't be as good if they took self analysis/My favorite things in the world.

1. Barry Sanders
2. Young Eddie Murphy
   
3. Richard Brautigan's Poetry
   
4. Haruki Murakami
   
5. Appu Goundan
   
6. Paul Auster's Novels
7. Weezy F. Baby
   
8. Yelle
9. Matt Goodwin
10. Good Sportswriting
    

Things that seem to care that I love nonetheless

1. Super Bowl Pageantry
2. The Dark Knight
3. Raymond Carver
   
4. The Bee Gees

Now, who's ever gonna make a Dark Knight? Let it shower out people!