Potency
My wife Lara was pregnant with twin girls. I celebrated by buying myself a new watch, a two-toned silver and gray Invicta Nekton II with unidirectional bezel and a huge 55mm case. The celebration wasn’t only for my wife’s successful pregnancy. It’s that, thanks to my amazing motility, we had conceived before having to resort to more extreme, invasive, and expensive forms of fertility such as in vitro, a process that costs over $12,000 and that’s money that is now freed up for my watch addiction.
All of My Wife’s Family Members Are Wearing My Watches
I realized my watch addiction had influenced my family during Lara’s pregnancy celebration party at my in-laws’ house. There was Bob, my father in law, wearing the black and purple Sea Spider, with I got for his birthday; my cousin Nick, wearing the gunmetal Nixon 51-30 as a gift for graduating with a physics degree from Berkeley; Nick’s father, Joe, wearing the Citizen Eco-Drive Aqualand Black Imperial Diver watch I bought him as a gift for converting our den, formerly my man cave, into the baby room; and there was even Joe’s second wife’s son in law, Drake, a former intelligence officer for Her Majesty’s Secret Service, wearing a Seiko Black Monster. I didn’t buy the Seiko for Drake but Joe’s wife, Lisa, had me pick it out. As we sat there digesting pumpkin cheesecake festooned with ribbons of dark chocolate, I realized that with everyone wearing my watches, I am filled with an awesome responsibility. As an ambassador of manly watches, I need to live like a man, a real man.
Insomnia
I suffer from acute insomnia and my anxious slumber remains light and fidgety so that I frequently wake up and must soothe myself back to sleep. Some people count sheep to combat their insomnia. I recite a litany of made-up watch names: The Kerfuffle Diver. The Fusillade Grand Voyager. The Magnum Blitz Force. The Invidious Ripsnorter. The Bodacious Warmonger . . .
Nudity Rules
Now that our twin baby daughters Alison and Maggie are crawling around, Lara admonishes me for traipsing around the house naked for its potentially traumatizing effects on our babies’ fragile psyches. I tell Lara that, technically speaking, I’m not naked; I’m wearing a watch.
Vegetarian Butcher
Today is my introduction to Man’s Search for Meaning. My wrist is garnished with an Android Divemaster Trans-52 Limited Edition with shiny black bezel and bright luminescent red markers and numbers. I spent more time deciding which watch to wear that morning (I changed my mind twelve times, typical) than I did refreshing my lecture, but that’s okay—I’m at my best when I’m extemporaneous.
Today I need to discuss the very essence of Viktor Frankl’s message, which is that suffering is inevitable and that this inevitability is no cause for us to despair. To the contrary, suffering is the opportunity to find meaning and to transform into our Higher Selves.
I can tell you I want to believe in this message as much as I want my students to believe it, but do I really? And if I don’t live and believe in Frankl’s message, what does that make me, a vegetarian butcher?
My doubts about being qualified to teach Frankl’s book are rooted in three factors. Let’s call the first one the George Carlin Factor. Carlin didn’t think much of the human race. He once said during one of his performances: “When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.” Carlin is telling us that we’re a doomed species and the best we can do is laugh at our unavoidable destruction. When I look at the human race, I often find myself agreeing with Carlin’s cynical pronouncements and the conclusions he draws from them. But at the same time I find myself drawn to Viktor Frankl’s very uncynical Man’s Search for Meaning, which chronicles his survival in the Nazi concentration camps and his observations of the ways we exalt or degrade our humanity in the face of abject cruelty, suffering and evil.
Then there’s the Rodney Dangerfield Factor. Also a comedian, Dangerfield once said in an interview that you can’t really change who you are. You’re born a certain way and that’s it. Part of me feels compelled to agree with him. We are creatures molded at birth and we cannot escape who we are fundamentally. This is a direct contradiction of Viktor Frankl who writes that we are not helpless pawns to fate. We are responsible for our actions and we must “actualize the potential meaning” of our lives.
My last doubt is rooted in what I’ll call the George Costanza Factor. Ever since Seinfeld become popular, people have been coming up to say I remind them of George Costanza. “You don’t look quite the same as he does, but there’s something about you. Your expressions, your body language . . .” I know what they’re saying. I share Costanza’s neuroses: I am inclined to self-pity, grandiosity, solipsism, and dyspeptic rants. I’m a chronic whiner and a petulant malcontent, always pissed off about something.
Speaking of being pissed off, not one person today—not my colleagues, not my students, not even my wife—complimented me on my new Android Divemaster.
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