You Can’t Cheat Reality – by Gary S. Smolker

People of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them.  They went out and happened to things.

User Agreement

You can’t cheat reality.

Every attempts backfires in ways you don’t anticipate; the unanticipated consequence of backfire goes beyond far beyond your that if this doesn’t work that will happen.

Don’t try to cheat reality; it’s a failed proposition from the get go.

Respect reality.

Reality tries its damness to teach you to do the right thing.

What will happen to you if you try to cheap reality will be worse than being “bitch slapped.”

The author does not warrant any positive result will arise from use of anything stated in this guidance.

Most especially there is no guarantee of a happy result.

Guidance

Guidance Number One

Don’t marry anyone under 40 years old.

EXCEPTION:

• If you don’t want to be autonomous.
• If you want to procreate.
• If you are so young that you have no concern about your future.

Guidance Number Two

Being married involves sacrifice.

Raising children and maintaining a marriage is complicated.

Don’t marry anyone who has children if you don’t want to be constantly sacrificing for the benefit of someone else’s child.

If you marry someone who already has a child you will be subject to many “outside forces” (as a result of the presence of that child in your life) that will block and overpower you.

Guidance Number Three

Don’t think getting involved doesn’t involve marriage.

Guidance Number Four

You need to confront aging and death.

Understand that as you age you become less attractive to the opposite sex; as you age you become more like furniture than a sex partner.

OLDER PEOPLE:

Recollect that as you walked down a street during different phases of your life the members of the opposite sex paid less and less attention to you.

YOUNGER PEOPLE;

Note that as you become older when  you walk down a street members of the opposite sex pays less and less attention to you.

Guidance Number Five

Never believe that money isn’t important.

Money is like water, it flows.

Guidance Number Six

BEWARE: The tiniest leak can sink the largest ship.

Guidance Number Seven

Don’t believe you can control access to your money.

Guidance Number Eight

BEWARE: Selfish has to do with values.

• Most women with children will value their children more than they will value their husband.
• Many men will value their career more than they will value their wife.
• A secular culture tends to regard individuals as autonomous; it fails to provide a rationale for sacrifice for future generations or personal service for the disabled and the aged.
• We all become subject to events that make our intentions pointless.
• Our options are profoundly limited.

Guidance Number Nine

Middle-aged men have a perverse disinclination to accept that they are no longer sexually attractive.

Guidance Number Ten

The majority of men are in denial about their sexual attractiveness to women.

Guidance Number Eleven

Women often become resentful when they become less sexually attractive.

Guidance Number Twelve

Women rarely hook-up with men who are less wealthy then they.

Men often hook-up with women less wealthy than they.

Guidance Number Thirteen

If you have money it will flow to the other person’s indulgences.

Guidance Number Fourteen

You will not be in control.

Guidance Number Fifteen

To save yourself from a lot of grief, although it is impossible for most people to do so, proceed with caution and follow Guidance Number One and Guidance Number Two.

Conclusions

• If you don’t follow these guidance principles, the number of complications and complexities in your life will grow exponentially.
• Stubborn people refuse to accept the fact that they can’t control circumstances.
• The bounty of all the poems and songs about relationships we enjoy so much, especially country and western songs, were written about people who didn’t follow the guidelines set forth above.
• In order to have full employment of song writers, singers and musicians it is necessary for people to continue to fail to follow the guidance set forth above.

Counterpoint

I believe in love, marriage, and having a family.

The things we love tell us what we are and who we are.

Man is not meant to be alone.

Men are meant to be with a woman.

Women are not meant to be alone.

Women are meant to be with a man.

METAPHOR: It is safe for a ship to be in a harbor.  But, a ship is not built to stay in a harbor.

To not dare is to have a wonderful relationship with a member of the opposite sex is to have already lost.

Be with someone who you enjoy being with and who enjoys being with you.

The way you treat other people and the way you treat yourself is the measure of who you are.

Seek to get into and then get into a meaningful relationship with a member of the opposite sex.

Life has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.

In order to achieve anything you must be willing to be creative and you must be willing to fail.

Creativity takes courage.

Never be afraid to fail.  That’s the first step to succeeding.

Life is all about who you become on the journey.

If you are willing to accept less than your best effort, you will never maximize your potential.

Fatherhood

Being a father is the best thing that ever happened to me.

Being the father of my three daughters is a source of endless joy to me.

Below is a picture of my grown-up daughter Judi practicing ballet when she was a young girl.

Below is a picture of my daughter Terra dancing with me at her wedding reception.

Below is a picture of my daughter Terra during the religious ritual ceremony at her Bats Mitzvah.

Below is a picture of me cutting the loaf of bread we all shared at the reception.

Below is a picture of my sister and her two daughters dancing at the reception, a party which followed the religious ritual.

Below are pictures of some of our men friends dancing at Terra’s Bats Mitzvah party.

 

Below is a blown-up picture of Leah’s face and the full-length picture of my daughter Leah going somewhere, when Leah was five years old.

Since the picture below was taken, Leah has traveled to thirty countries.

 

Credentials

The guideline information provided above is the result of a private survey of veterans of human relationship folly and the joys of being married and having children.

Copyright © 2016 Gary S. Smolker, All Rights Reserved

 

 

“Manners” and “Family Life” Reflected in “Changing Times” and “Polite Society” by Gary S. Smolker

Modern History of Civility, Propriety & Taboo Words in American Culture

Below is a copy of a string of emails I exchanged with some friends over the past few days on the interrelated topics of manners, the way people speak and propriety.

The most recent email is at the top.

The first email is at the bottom.

I have deleted the name of the woman Bob refers to in the copy of his email to me which appears below.

Polite Society and Civility in Thought and Practice in Changing Times

A friend of mine has a big bowl in the entryway of her home.

She requires everyone who comes to visit her at her home to put their cell phone in that bowl before proceeding to the living room or the dinning room in her house.

Family Life in America in Changing Times

A higher percentage of women age 18 to 24 lived with their parents or other relatives in 2014 (36.4%) than at any time in data going back to 1940, a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data found.

Among young men, the 42% living with their parents is the highest since World War II.

Just 24% of young women were married in 2014 vs. 40% in 1990.

Harvesting and Freezing Eggs, Using Sperm from Sperm Banks & Hiring Surrogates

Young wealthy unmarried women are having their eggs harvested and frozen to be used at a later time in their lives when they are “ready” to have a child.

Busy professional women who are too busy to be pregnant, women who don’t want to have their bodies become “disfigured” by pregnancy and/or by giving birth to a child are hiring a surrogate to carry their fertilized egg to term.

Women who want to have a child in spite of not being married and/or in spite of having an impotent sexual partner incapable of getting them pregnant are obtaining sperm from sperm banks to fertilize their eggs.

 

 

————————————

 

E-mail this morning (November 2, 2015) from Gary to Bob:

 

Bob

I see things are changing, too.

I saw the new movie “Steve Jobs.”

I briefly “tried” to discuss the story told in the movie “Steve Jobs” – the life Steve Jobs lived as portrayed in that movie – with two women.

My conversation with one of them veered off her telling me she still sets her dinner table with fine crystal and china and eats in the dinning room in her home.

She brought this up as part of a broad conversation and discussion she initiated on the topic of many families not eating dinner together.

I remember my friend Jason’s mother serving Jennifer and me tea out of a silver tea pot at “tea time” about fifty years ago.

I have a friend who gets dressed up and has dinner by candlelight every night with his wife, when they eat at home.

I have another friend who goes through an elaborate tea ceremony, as a matter of the way he and his wife live, every time I have dinner at his house.

We have a lot to discuss.

Gary

—–Original Message—–
From: Bob
To: Gary Smolker <gsmolker@aol.com>
Sent: Mon, Nov 2, 2015 7:13 am
Subject: Re: Recruiting Your Expressive Faculties to their Fullest: In Re: Narrative Vividness

There is a strong argument that our culture has been coarsening since the fifties. As I am old enough to remember the fifties very well, my own observations support this. When I was in my teens it was extremely rare and shocking to hear the vulgar four letter words come from a woman.  Today it is common to hear those words used by women at the dinner table!  Women’s lib and radical fem has certainly freed the restraints on language of a “polite” society.

The culture has embraced this coarsened path for better or worse, as have I.  Still, it is sad to notice that something has been lost, left behind in this good and doubtless march to liberation.

The culture may be coarser, but likely better in sum.  As a fine example, I note our mutual friend YOUNG WOMAN’S NAME describing herself as a “badass woman”.  She is, and I love that she is able to be.

Bob.

Sent from my iPad

On Nov 1, 2015, at 7:43 AM, Gary Smolker <gsmolker@aol.com> wrote:

Bob

The Use of Words is a beautiful skill.

Gary

—–Original Message—–
From: Gary Smolker <gsmolker@aol.com>
To: A Limited Number of Friends
Sent: Sun, Nov 1, 2015 7:35 am
Subject: Recruiting Your Expressive Faculties to their Fullest: In Re: Narrative Vividness

My best guess is Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover knew/know “piss” is a [mildly] offensive taboo word so they  purposefully use[d] the word piss to signify their disgust with the person they were talking about.

THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING

At the time (1948) Norman Mailer wrote his true to life novel about World War II (The Naked and The Dead) it was unacceptable to use the word FUCK.

Mailer knew it would be a betrayal of his depiction of the soldiers to have them speak without swearing.

As a compromise to the sensibilities of the day he had them use the pseudo-epithet fug.

When Dorthy Parker met him she said: “So you’re the man who doesn’t know how to spell FUCK.”

—–Original Message—–
From: Friend
To: gsmolker <gsmolker@aol.com>
Sent: Sun, Nov 1, 2015 3:07 am
Subject: Re: Narrative Vividness

Why were they so fixated on piss?

In a message dated 10/31/2015 10:23:44 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, gsmolker@aol.com writes:

By the way, Lyndon Johnson had a way with words when it came to summing up people he distrusted, including a Kennedy aide (“He wouldn’t know how to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.”) and so did J. Edgar Hoover (“I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.”)

Copyright © 2015 Gary S. Smolker, All Rights Reserved