― Groucho Marx
"Cars, girls, surfing, beer
Nothing else matters here!"
--The Dictators, "(I Live For) Cars and Girls"
Originally, I planned to write "Top 5 Reasons Never to Go to the Mall or Oklahoma" next. But I covered the mall's problems previously, and bashing Oklahoma just doesn't seem right in light of the recent tornado disaster. Thoughts and prayers for our northern brothers. Disaster always reveals people for who they really are. You know who's tirelessly volunteered to help the cleanup and recovery effort? Bob "Napoleon" Stoops. Sooner head football coach. The bitterest, bottom line focused, little ball of hate until Nick Saban hit the scene. That dude has been a ghost around the OU fieldhouse, and instead has been working in Moore as part of the cleanup crews for several days now. No alerting the media, no calls ahead to make sure people don't hassle him, no announcements. He just showed up and started working. So the next time that Stoops is playing his starters with five minutes left in the game while he's blowing out Kansas, or Texas, probably this coming season, think about the Bob Stoops who put on gloves and started working in the rubble just a bit.
Which leads nicely into today's substitute list, Top 5 Things That Are Important. Not the Truly Important Things, like family, God, health, career...cars, girls...nurturing your inner child. You know. All that crap. But the second level things. The ones that add color to the space between the lines. The things that can make you interesting and fun, or an undertaker.
Because while family and God and friends ultimately do provide basis for your life, these other things make it fun. Or at least give you something to do on the weekend other than sit in front of your laptop and write blogs.
Ok, this is not about me. Its about you.
Its like the difference between New York and Dallas. They're both big cities, they both have culture and sports and parks and jobs and medical care and freeways and so forth. But one is a world class city with diversity, soul, achievement, universal appeal, and which inspires millions around the world. The other is Dallas. Not every city is alike, though they share many essential attributes. So too are people.
What you do, what you think, how you live...these things matter. They're the seasoning for your life's meal.
The Top 5 Things That Are Important:
5. Knowing Who Played Third Base for the Astros in 1975. The point is, Sports, especially Your Team or the Local Team, bring us together. And following that team, through thick and thin, during all the lean years, demonstrates your loyalty. Its something you share with friends, with your family, co-workers, even random people you meet around town. Its a sense of fidelity to your city or your school or your state, honed over a lifetime. Die hard Red Sox fans who had followed the team over their entire lifetimes, in other words, all of New England, experienced euphoria when they came back from an 0-3 deficit to the hated Yankees and finally won the World Series in 2004. Some fans even visited their deceased relatives' graves, leaving behind Red Sox memorabilia and metaphorically telling their loved ones the Sox finally did it, celebrating their shared love of the Red Sox. I've had conversations with Texas Longhorns fans at the foot of a New Zealand glacier about next season. Talked about the Saints with random strangers at the Nantucket Whaling Museum. And its cool. Remember the scene in City Slickers where Helen Slater is derisively wondering why her ex-boyfriend was so obsessed with baseball and why he would memorize things like who played third base for Pittsburgh in 1960, and the three male leads raced each other to answer "Don Hoak." "When I was about 18 and my dad and I couldn't communicate about anything at all, we could still talk about baseball. That was real." That's right. Though ultimately sports won't save people's lives or turn around the stock market, those kind of sports memories and experience provide a real commonality and a very human point at which people can reach out. Astros' 1975 third baseman? Doug Rader, BTW.
4. Taste. What books you read, what movies you like. The music you listen to. Art, architecture, restaurants, clothes, cars, even the people you like. What you like matters almost as much as what you're like. Do you follow the crowds and like every passing new trendy thing? Do you see the Emperor's new clothes? Or on the other hand, do you cling to just a few well worn things, resolutely refusing to accept any new cultural advancements. Or, simply put, are you someone who likes crap? Are you one of those people who stand in line, outside, in the heat, to wait for a table...at Olive Garden? Like I see every night just a few minutes away from me on South Lamar. Do you arrange your schedule to watch Dancing With the Stars? Do you wear Tommy Bahama clothes? Do you like Coldplay? Your choices about these kinds of things tell the world a lot about yourself, even before you've opened your mouth and said two words. By the way, speaking of taste, I recently did something I pretty much regret. I followed Matthew McConaughey on twitter. Its been a constant stream of tweets about getting the X Games to locate in Austin. And one congratulating Vince Young for graduating from UT. Like you didn't already know that's what that dude would tweet.
3. Enjoying Good Food. Several times I've quoted the movie, Big Night: "To eat good food is to be close to God." That's not really true, but it captures the spirit of something. Food is sustenance, but good food is rapturous. Not every night can be Per Se, but some nights can. Excellently prepared, fresh food is a delight. Think of just caught Maine lobster right on the bay, fresh sourdough bread just out of a San Francisco oven, Texas Hill Country BBQ right out of the pit, Chicago deep dish pizza, Port of Call cheeseburgers, Chesapeake Bay crab or crab cakes, an authentic chocolate malt at the Hershey Factory, Blue Bell ice cream, Acme Oyster House fried oysters...the list goes on. Good food creates lasting memories. People bond over great meals they've shared. An old joke has it that three Baptists can't get together without serving a meal. The judge I once clerked for told me you can always spot Texans no matter where you go because they're the ones sharing food off each other's plates. The sensation and satisfaction one derives from good food rivals any of life's great pleasures.
2. Where You Go. Oh the places you'll go. Like...Cleveland? Uh, no. Where you go says who you are. I once heard a story about a guy back in the 1970s, when air travel still was prohibitively expensive for most people, who won a TWA contest to travel anywhere in the world for free to which TWA flew. Back then, TWA flew pretty much everywhere. The guy lived in Wyoming, mind you, but picked a flight to Salt Lake City. Nice sense of adventure, dude. Turned out he was Mormon and wanted to see the Tabernacle. And I guess couldn't have just driven a few hours to get there. Where do you travel? The world contains spectacular sights, but most of us lack the time or resources to see many of them. You can't necessarily see them all, but you can see some. Do you go to Rome or Alaska or Hawaii when you get the chance? Or Branson, Mo.? Or Laredo? I'm not talking about quick trips to nearby places just to get away, or see family. I mean your vacations, where you have your own free time to see the world's miracles. I have a relative who has plenty of time and plenty of money, but wouldn't go outside a triangle defined by South Padre Island, Comfort, or San Antonio if life depended on it. (Ok, I guess that's more of a rhombus. Or a parallelogram. You know what I mean, right?). I don't get that. Those people lack any sense of adventure. Once we stop exploring life, we become watchers. Just throw me over the side by the tracks if that happens to me.
1. Being Interesting and Having Opinions. Or, as I still put it, "having game." Also known as not being an engineer. Look, I understand not everyone can be terribly interesting. If everyone was the life of the party, things would spiral out of control, the cops would always arrive, no one would listen to any hilarious jokes. But its one thing for the world not to be your fan club, its another for your very presence to clear out rooms at parties. As someone who's clearly socially awkward and inept, I know firsthand the importance of carry on a marginally engaging conversation. Or at least diverting people from your inherent boringness. Generally I do that by saying outrageous things, thereby fulfilling the dual goals of people noticing the rancid smell of awkwardness and ineptness, and removing my name from future invitation lists. Hey, better for people to hate you than to think you're boring. Or inept. When you find people always need to get a refill, or check on their kids, or go stand somewhere else, or go to the restroom just as you talk to them at parties, you may need to reformulate your conversation topics. Years of painful chit chat with that month's girlfriend's friends, distracting me from the actual Super Bowl game, have taught me some hard lessons. On the party "to avoid" list: (1) where can I find a hard working illegal alien to work in my yard who won't steal my things, (2) where do all those Special Olympics people get off thinking they're so special, (3) don't worry, your husband totally isn't going to leave you...probably, and (4) why are all the women here so fat? Safe topics: (1) oh, I feel so bad for all those poor [insert latest national tragedy victims here], (2) this house is so nice, and (3) oh, your kids are so cute and in a total non-molesterey way. OK, that last one may take a little work.
Well, I'm going to stop now. Hang on Oklahoma. OK!
NEXT-now, THIS will be good. Top 5 Texas Longhorn Football Players (all time). As we just learned, these kinds of things matter!
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