daily post

Daily Prompt: Humble-Bragging and Secret-Keeping

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The word “humblebrag” has been around long enough that even I have heard of it. (Is that a humblebrag?) A collection of examples has been collected in a book that I have not yet read entitled, “Humblebrag.” The word is common enough that it is even in the Oxford Dictionary, at least in the online edition. For some reason, I only recently learned the term and, egomaniac that I am, I thought that I had come up with the concept years ago. I certainly had not.

The word describes the craft of hiding a brag about oneself inside a seemingly self-deprecating statement. For instance, if and when I name-drop a famous person and simultaneously mention how nice they were to li’l ol’ me, which is something that I certainly have done, that is a pretty standard humblebrag. A humblebragger gets two social rewards for the price of one: a congratulations for the achievement that they are proud of—and perhaps ought to be proud of!—and a verbal pat on the shoulder in recognition of their semi-sincere humbleness. “I met Oprah Winfrey once,” is a minor brag that is almost no brag at all, unless the conversation is not “famous people we have met,” but instead it was your reply to, “Have you decided what you’re getting yet? I’m starving.”

“I was hanging out with Oprah Winfrey the other day,” is a big brag if you merely saw her at O’Hare Airport. We have been taught that people do not like braggarts and that humbleness is a positive attribute to be celebrated.

“I bet Oprah Winfrey tells just about every li’l ol’ barista that they make the best (insert name of coffee concoction here).” That is a humblebrag.

Today’s WordPress Daily Prompt is an invitation for writers to humblebrag about ourselves. It asks, “Can you keep a secret? Have you ever—intentionally or not—spilled the beans (when you should’ve stayed quiet)?” If I were to tell you that I am good at keeping secrets, am I not inviting you to test this self-theory on me? It would probably be a test that we would both somehow fail. Conversely, if I offer up an example of a time I goofed and let the cat out of the bag about a surprise birthday party or whatever, because (shrugs and makes a crinkle-face) I’m just so darn honest, I would be humblebragging.

(In full disclosure, I am not a barista and I have not met or otherwise encountered Oprah Winfrey. I have been in O’Hare Airport.)

If a new acquaintance tells you that he or she is good at keeping secrets, test this and tell them something about yourself that you do not mind becoming public. Or give them one detail that is new and different and memorable from other versions of the story; in this way, when you hear that particular detail get repeated back at you, you will know who broke your confidence.

“I didn’t know you’ve been arrested,” a friend told-asked me one Monday morning. I have not yet been arrested or even ever been inside a police car, but I did know with whom I had planted that particular Easter egg in the video game of my life. Trust is something that can withstand minor tests like that.

As I reflect on it, it seems to me that trust is not something that needs testing to know that it exists in one’s life. “We are only as sick as our secrets,” I have heard, so I do not need to add anyone else’s to my own.

But I can not wait to tell you about the time Sammy Davis, Jr., took me aside and told me in confidence not to tell my friend that I am too modest for a career in show business …

Daily Prompt: Dizzy Foresight

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One of my favorite expressions, one that I used to use frequently but no longer do, is, “This is X-number of minutes I am never getting back.” I would say this after experiencing something incredibly boring and frustrating, like waiting on line only to discover that I was waiting on the wrong line the entire time, or when I was in a traffic jam in which I learned that the hold-up was people gawking at an accident which by itself would not have created the traffic jam.

Today’s WordPress Daily Prompt for September 6 asks, “You’ve been granted the power to predict the future! The catch—each time you use your power, it costs you one day (as in, you’ll live one day less). How would you use this power, if at all?” There are many possible responses. “No,” seems to feature prominently in most of the replies published so far.

Can you hold this thought for a second? Good. A couple things are bothering me. First, there is one typo in the question and one grammatical error. It asks, “How would you use this power, it at all?” Not “if.” I corrected it in my retyping of the question, above. (Check it out here for yourself.)

And then there is this: “You’ll live one day less.” This should say, “fewer.” One day fewer. “Less” is for things that can not be counted, like time, as in, “We spent less time at the shore this summer than last year.” “Fewer” is what we use when you are counting things, as in, “I was given this so-called ‘power to predict the future’ in a speculative writing exercise, and now I will live one fewer day on this green planet we call Earth.”

Here is a refresher course.

I love Jarrett Heather‘s lyric video, especially the legs and feet on the punctuation marks dancing to the rhythm.

(Back to my rant, already in progress.)

The worst, the most empty and useless, four-word sequence in the English language is, “You should have done …” It is hindsight, something no one likes to be accused of using, masquerading as foresight, something everyone likes to be credited with possessing (see the question above). “You should have driven this route instead of the one with the traffic accident-gawking crowd that no one knew was going to show up.” It is really a way of saying, “I knew better.” Those three words are more honest and would be welcomed if they were said more often, but more honest punches might be thrown more frequently as a result.

Each traffic jam that I could foresee and thus avoid in my future would be worth losing several days at the end, because in traffic jams, I am Marcello Mastroianni at the beginning of Fellini’s “8 1/2”:

Simply possessing a low tolerance point for boredom, ennui, la noia, is no reason to desire future sight, however. Again, I have heard myself say, while speaking through hindsight, that minutes just now spent attending to one of life’s boring chores or bad movies (“that’s 90 minutes of my life I can’t get back”) is time lost to me forever. I realize that this is merely me casting the mean gaze of life’s many “You should have dones” on myself. And it is as useless as when some annoying not-so-good-doer offers unsolicited advice, ex post facto. (Someone ahead of me on line at the bank once told me I should have come in earlier or later, and not at prime time, which is when we were both on line. If he had been behind me, this would have made annoying good sense—for him—as it might have encouraged me to leave and move him up one. But in front of me?)

This realization is why I no longer find myself saying, “That’s X-number of minutes I will never get back” any more, as tempting as I find the sarcasm. Annoying and boring moments, tense moments of delay, torturous moments of anticipation in waiting rooms, these are a part of life and I can escape them here and now or choose to be bored. (I will not tell any child of mine that “only boring people are bored.”) Why hurry myself to the end (i.e. lose a day) just to avoid them?

There is a possible loophole to the future sight question, it seems to me. What if I use this fantastic power to predict the future to help me to foresee the day that I will be losing, according to the curse? Then I won’t be losing it. Or, following pure (il)logic, if I hold off using this power until the last day, then I can not ever have a last day since I will lose it, according to the curse, and thus it is always already today and I will live forever.

Dizzy

Daily Prompt: For Crying Out Loud

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I’m a damn sap.

Sometimes it’s the television ads. There are some that get me every time. “Aw, they’re getting a new kitten!” (Never mind what the ad is selling.) Or if a character in a movie—at any point in the movie—says something about wanting to “go home,” and at the end of the movie they walk through their front door and say they’re “home” and the music swells and the credits start rolling, I’m a goner.

In most every movie, the emotional climax comes with a montage of clips from earlier in the film, bringing us up to date and sending us along with the hero towards the repercussions of their fateful decision that will save the world, or their relationship, or their job. Or the emotional climax comes when the hero, who has felt apart from the world for so long, at least the first half of the movie, walks down a crowded street and espies happy couples and children and watches all the little things of life that he or she has been missing out on for so long.

Here’s that precise scene in the movie, “A Thousand Words,” an Eddie Murphy vehicle that did poorly at the box office:

I may hate the film, I may despise the performances, I may have been on the edge of my seat about to walk out from the first minutes, but these predictable, tear-jerking scenes will always do their work on me and jerk some tears.

Ceremonies get me, too. Graduations. Weddings. Funerals. Thus if a movie would depict a new graduate going home after a funeral, that might be the most teary-eyed you will ever find me.

So I guess if one would could combine these elements: advertisement and graduate going home, that would really get to me. That should be the topper, right? And indeed, the trailer, the ad, for “The Theory of Everything,” the soon-to-be-released film biopic about the cosmologist Stephen Hawking, provides us with an experiment for my theory. Yes, I have cried, well, teared up, watching this:

Worse, I tear up at the ends of things, whether or not they are tear-worthy. It could be a goofball comedy, but once the credits start rolling, I feel like I am about to lose it. Maybe I feel like we, the audience, are now graduating together from the experience of watching this movie together. Maybe it’s just me.

I possess a big, bright red EMPATHY button in my psyche, and most everything in the culture seems to stomp on it like it’s a cockroach at a square dance. I suppose I can blame my upbringing for installing this tear-jerk response, the fact that I can answer Yes to the WordPress Daily Prompt for today, September 5, which asks, “Do movies, songs, or other forms of artistic expression easily make you cry?” (Yeah, they do. They sure do.) It goes on, “Tell us about a recent tear-jerking experience!”

I had not cried for over a decade by the time I got sober in 2010. For years, I did not cry over anything that happened to me; neither professional, personal, or romantic success or personal, professional, or romantic failure moved me. I claimed, for the sake of getting dates, to be “in touch” with my emotions and “easily moved,” because I read somewhere that one ought to be and I thought that getting teary-eyed every so often counted. (Like many humans, I, too, possess ocular salt water in my head and it has to leave somehow, at least once every year or so.) Usually, when a famous ballplayer would retire, that would move me to tear up, especially when they were from my generation.

That Eddie Murphy vehicle that I showed a clip from, that bomb of a movie, “A Thousand Words,” broke my streak and my shell. The premise is clever enough: a typical rattle-mouth Eddie Murphy character is cursed and learns that he has precisely 1000 words left to speak before he dies. The longer it takes him to not get to words 999 and 1000, the longer he will stay alive. A tree grows in his yard with 1000 leaves on it and one leaf will drop for each word he speaks. When he speaks the last words, it and he will die.

The movie flopped because of the misfire of casting speed-talking Eddie Murphy in an essentially silent role, as his character continuously avoids speaking, but that question resonated with me: What will my final 1000 words be? (Uh oh, gonna tear up now.) When one is an emotional kindergartner, as I was in early sobriety, this is the kind of question that is going to feel vital and deep. Once upon a time, my last words were going to be, “I’ll have another” or “Can I crash here?” What will they be now?

I watched the movie with my girlfriend in 2012. I will not spoil its ending, even though it is easy enough to guess. But Murphy’s character’s last few words (of course the filmmaker frequently cuts to shots of leaves falling from an ever-barer tree branch) got me; I was gone. Tears successfully jerked, I was bawling like a kid. In front of my girlfriend. (She remains my partner to this day, a couple years later.)

Sometimes, even a movie you do not think will, can, or should do it will surprise you by being a real jerk.