Hasta La Gadget!

What happened? Why hasn’t he called? Was he even interested?

Did he die?

While you lay awake perusing his old text messages and reminiscing about his quick pursuit, the online commitment phobe was already mentally packing his bags just as he approached your dating profile page. Whether a matter of hours, days or weeks, this guy suddenly stops calling or ceases to exist without any notice… sometimes before you ever got a chance to see his two faces in person! Unfortunately, this guy simply lacks respect and empathy for women and others in general. And with a larger than life ego, he needs the attention wherever he can get it. He is a classic commitment phobe.

Let’s take a look at how all of this began…

After months of coercion from your friends to “get out there” in the dating world, you reluctantly sign up on the hippest new matchmaking site, create a profile page and upload your cutest photos… all the while gripping a bottle of pinot grigio. A few days later, some handsome lad pops up on your page, sends out a wink and sparks up a conversation. Curiosity sets in and you hesitantly click on his profile:

Name: Melvin
Age: 32
Status: Single

I am college graduate and I am looking forward to opening my own company soon. I live just outside the city. I am a real guy looking for a real girl to settle down and share my life with. She must love dogs, because my German Shepard, Frank, can sense if you don’t. LOL. I like sushi, playing guitar, long hikes, game night, watching old “Glee” episodes (guilty pleasure), cooking pasta and working out (I am in great shape, but you will know that when you see me :). I just want to find my soul mate and travel the world. Maybe we are a match?

Willing to look past his name, bad grammar, the LOL’s and the 20-mile drive, you wink back and send a note that reads: I like dogs, as long as they don’t bite lol! You hit it off like gangbusters and the first date is set for the following Wednesday. In the meantime, the texts get more and more flirtatious and you are feeling like this could even possibly be it! But you play it cool and don’t lose perspective just yet. LOL.

Wednesday comes around and you meet him at the restaurant where he looks a little worse than his picture, but since you had decided on the car ride over not to be judgmental, you let it slide. He was still cute, though, and the conversation flowed… and flowed… and flowed. Was this for real? Five hours later and still laughing it up, you are already mentally testing out his last name after your first. A long kiss good night seals the deal and he tells you he will call you tomorrow. You drive home, giggling all the way to your bedroom and name your first child before drifting off into a dreamless sleep.

The following day, you awaken to songs from the musical Annie as the full-fat cream slides into your coffee cup. That day at work, you are on cloud nine as you feel the excitement over his impending phone call. But the day goes by and none comes. The week goes by and nothing. After a month, you pack up your imaginary children and catch the first flight off Cloud Nine.

The truth is that while you may never know what really happened, you could be certain this guy was a commitment phobe. He could have been married, engaged, a masochist or a complete narcissist. Perhaps his deflating ego needed a boost. But the point is that commitment phobes lurk everywhere and until we change ourselves, heal our past and gain unconditional love for ourselves, we will continue to attract the Melvin’s of the world like magnets.

The online commitment phobe may truly believe that he wants marriage, commitment and lasting love. He has no idea that he is his own worst enemy, sabotaging anything good that comes his way. This guy does not know he has a fear-based problem and instead, he categorizes himself as picky and too busy to bother.

If you have found yourself scratching your eyeballs out over what went wrong — stop right there. There was no way you could have seen this one coming. And try to look at it this way: You have been spared the agony of getting involved with a man who simply can’t decide what he wants for breakfast.

In the market for a new Android handset? Would you like it to be a Motorola device? If you answered yes to both of those questions, we might have some good news for you! According to a new leak, Verizon is about to get an LTE version of Motorola’s mid-range handset, the Moto E. On the other end of the … Continue reading

Feel like you’re always falling behind financially? Above Average has some news for you.

To put it gently, you may be what the online comedy network refers to as “an idiot.” In the latest installment of their series “The Idiot’s Guide To Smart People,” Above Average schools idiots on how smart people are taking their money.

“Money, money, money! You love it! And smart people love taking it from you!” the video proclaims, going on to list the ways smart people take idiots’ money. Their list includes bank fees, lotteries, and advertising — which they say manipulates “strong idiot emotions” like fear and “horniness.”

Do with that what you will.

Barack Obama’s mention of the slaughters of the Christian Crusades was the opening of a can of worms that turned into snakes. The victims of the knights in shining armor were Jews and Muslims, but that was that time. The followers of the three desert deities, Jehovah, the Prophet and Jesus – have battled back and forth through history. But then each religion has devout peace activists, too. Zealots, zealots everywhere.

In Occupy Wall Street and in the Black Lives Matter as well, there was a steady presence of ministers and rabbis – and I remember a Lakota wisdom leader at Zuccotti Park – even though clearly most of the movement-makers are secular. But we welcomed the aura of Dr.King and the Dalai Lama and Chief Joseph and Gandhi and Bishop Tutu and the movements that they represent. They both comforted and emboldened us, as we marched off to lock arms in the doorway of Goldman Sachs or die dramatically across the floor of GrandCentral Station.

The dismissal of religion by Marxists is discredited by present day radicals, but so are belief systems with patriarchal gods. And yet, religion never leaves. Leaders of change sometimes seem like saints, if they are more humble in demeanor, like Joan Baez or Aung San Suu Kyi, or Yeb Sano,the Filipino climate diplomat. If they are brassier, like Vandana Shiva, or Jose Bove or Edward Snowden, then they are called messianic.

I’m in the business of manipulating the memes of rightwing apocalyptic Christianity, with the Stop Shopping Choir. We study the presence of intolerant religion within Consumerism and Militarism; in banks that finance C02 emitting industries, like Chase andHSBC and UBS, and manufacturers of toxins like Monsanto and Bayer. We believe that the marketing departments of these industries are the new fundamentalist churches, with crusaders in the form of sexualized automobiles and product placement on celebrities’ bodies.

Of course, we rarely get anywhere near a financial or fossil fuel policy-maker. They surround us with police, who are kept in a state of angry fear. And time and time again our protests are like a clash of fundamentalist religions, the activism of two churches claiming the same God. In the conflict with banksand police, things are always very muscular, lots of finger-pointing, refusals,threats, stand-offs. We’re dealing with mutual, simultaneous damnation. You are my infidel.

I was recently hand-cuffed while speaking in New York’s Grand Central Station with the group “We Will Not Be Silent.” Surrounded by placards featuring the names of those killed by deadly police force, and wearing my usual white polyester and priests collar, I was cuffed in mid-sentence. The metal went into the verb. So much for the 1st Amendment. The next day the police told the Murdoch papers that I attacked a cop.

Of course, I felt out-maneuvered by the flamboyant right wingers. But did I misguess the event? Did my analysis of power against power, protesters against institutions – pre-empt any connection with the possibly sympathetic people within Grand Central Station? Anything internal in those folks, anything deeper than theiranger, was unrevealed in the activist event. The cops feel like 9/11 is still happening. And I’m taking their Christian preacher and shouting about their blunders. We all get angry together.

I find myself desperately wanting to talk to the employees of Grand Central Station about what happened. But these big structures, the courts, the press – all of that gets in the way. A quiet human conversation is no longer possible. A good pastor can engage in loving conversation in the middle of horror, like Bishop Tutu looking the apartheid leaders in the eye. Could I have somehow done that? I did return after I got out of jail to try to talk to the cop who man-handled me, but he wouldn’t shake my hand.

Birth, and life, and death – no one knows what life is. Life is unexplained. Science doesn’t know and religion doesn’t either. Fundamentalists rush in with hard answers, to assuage our fear of death. Usually, the doctrine is encased in bigotry. Fundamentalist holy men arrange for us to fear the Other. And yet, again, religion cuts both ways. A “person of the cloth” carries the burden of these deeper questions, and so they can have the effect of slowing down violence. I remember clerics inserting themselves between the front lines in the Balkans.

More of our activism needs a spiritual basis, and that doesn’t only mean the absence of mindless confrontation. Spirit is laughter, shape-shifting and music. We felt the impact of Erica Warner dying-in on the Staten Island sidewalk where her father was murdered, a mysterious and beautiful act. And we remember Wangari Maathi planting trees in the Nairobi park, in the face of the brutal dictator, and Chelsea Manning opening the door of secrets.

I should go back to Grand Central Station and talk to those people. At least I should be able to talk to mothers, because they have the endless questions of children ringing inside them, even if those moms are cops. That is the antidote to fundamentalism. All those questions. If I talked with a hundred mothers, wouldn’t that be a better kind of activism than shouting in the echoey station and getting hauled off? Here’s the question I want to ask: “How do we end this violence?”

Watch Reverend Billy’s Freakstorm: Radical Forgiveness in Grand Slander Station.

For a generation of us, Lloyd Dobler embodies the bold, romantic move. The moment when you realize that the person you love, the person you lust, the person you desire is standing right in front of you. In our most crushed out, infatuated moments, we see Lloyd Dobler, standing in front of an old Cadillac, giant boom box held by both hands over his head, wearing a taupe trench coat over a t-shirt with baggy black pants. Peter Gabriel’s song, “In Your Eyes,” blaring.

the light the heat
in your eyes
I am complete

Yes, the bold, romantic move is Lloyd Dobler, but Lloyd Dobler also means love. Pure. Uncomplicated. Pining. Expressible. Love. I was 19 when Say Anything appeared in movie theatres. I saw it in Ann Arbor before my senior year in college. I wanted my own Lloyd Dobler (though of course my own Lloyd Dobler would be a she, but still contain all of his ineffable, genderless characteristics), simple in devotion. Peter Gabriel’s song on the other hand is more complex. It opens:

love I get so lost, sometimes
days pass and this emptiness fills my heart
when I want to run away
I drive off in my car
but whichever way I go
I come back to the place you are

I realize now that I never paid attention to Gabriel’s complex lyrics about love and being lost. As a younger woman, I was only interested in his plaintive refrain: in your eyes, I am complete. I only focused on Lloyd with a bold, romantic song playing in the background. Gabriel and his messy human emotions about navigating an imperfect world did not fit into the pure, loving vision Lloyd presented.

At some point, however, I stopped listening to the music of courtship. No light, no heat. No staring into the eyes of a lover. I let go of the image of Lloyd. No more teenaged pining. The big old Cadillac behind Lloyd changed from romantic object to junk-heap jalopy. The boom box? Antiquated and invasive without the white ear buds. Middle-aged, Lloyd is more a memory of the bold and romantic than any reality. Perhaps I am jaded; I doubt that Lloyd would have held up for Diane under the pressures of a relationship.

Though I am dubious about Dobler, I am equally doubtful of my own ability to hold up under the pressures of a relationship. Rather than admiring Dobler, rather than lusting for Lloyd, I am now afraid I have become Lloyd Dobler. I am afraid I have made a life out of selling things, buying things and processing things. I am afraid I am inured to the bold, romantic move.

It is not that my life is without passion. It is that there is a life after the love song. I can rewatch Say Anything again and again, but Lloyd Dobler and Diane Court never live in the world beyond the love song. They are stuck in the 1989 moment, trapped after high school graduation. They have not had to grow up. For them the refrain is always, I want to touch the light, the heat I see in your eyes. For them, the song never ends.

For the rest of us, we live after the love song.

Life is long after the love song ends. For some of us, not only is the love song over, the band has packed up and gone home; the server has cleaned up the bar, kicked us out and gone home to her kids, who have now graduated from high school and even college. So much time has past since Lloyd Dobler’s bold, romantic move and the love songs of our youth that some days, we cannot even remember the bar, the band or a single snippet of the love song. Still, Lloyd, I remember you.

in your eyes

Now that those of us who grew up believing in Lloyd are grown, what shall we believe in today? Now that we are partnered with sensible cars, small media devices, respectable clothing and better taste in movies than ’80s chick flicks, what are the bold, romantic moves for our middle age? Lloyd, what are our lives like today? What is life like after the love song? What do we look at after your eyes? What is the life we are all living after the love song ends?

These questions almost make me the teenager I am no longer. What I really want now is the grown up Lloyd Dobler. I want the one who held up under the pressures of the relationship; the one who sold out and is now buying things and selling things and processing things and explaining earnestly about how it is NOT selling out, about how HE (or in my case SHE) is not selling out.

That is what I want. And, in truth, what I have. I married Lloyd Dobler. A generation of us married Lloyd Dobler. Or became Lloyd Dobler. Clutching a pen near our heart.

What happens after the love song ends? Look at the life around you. Yes, yearn for bold, romantic moves. Remember the trench coat–the way it smells in the rain.

all my instincts, they return

But know this: after the love song ends, we live our lives in the light, the heat. We live our lives in your eyes.