Monday, March 15, 2010

Tastes Great... Less Filling


F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mark Twain were both hip enough--forward thinking into our ADHD-ish society to write really big books with very few pages. They got across what they wanted to say and cut out the crap. Fitzgerald also created his own koan for people to spin their brains on, which is one of my favorites:

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

Dude, light is a wave and a particle. Miller Lite tastes great and is less filling. The kind of thinking that Taoism, quantum physics and relativity, and Zen Buddhism have been laying on us for eons.

In my mind, there is nothing cooler than watching your child's imagination get kicking into high gear. It can leave me giddy and in awe. We took our girls to see Tim Burton's version of "Alice in Wonderland" yesterday and our 8-year-old, Anna, and I traded observations back and forth and had each other busting up. It's been 17-ish years since I read Lewis Carroll (though I may be picking him back up soon), but a quote that figured heavily in the movie is one that we'd all be well served to have written above the door going out our bedrooms in the morning:

"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

If your kids hold on to that, they can be world changers. But we don't have to write ourselves off either. I think grown ups have as much, if not more to gain from applying that thinking on a regular basis, when practicality says not to waste your time. Sometimes, it's best to bend practicality over and kick it square in the arse.

And that's my thought for a Daylight Savings dark Monday morning, half-way through a cup of coffee.

3 comments:

Dr. Longboard said...

Great post, Mike, though I never quite understood the less filling/tastes great campaign. When I eat, I want to feel full, not less full ;) I'm all for tasting great though.

Anonymous said...

The ironic thing is that, in the book, Alice actually doesn't deliver that line- as the protagonist, she's the disbeliever- the straight man.

It's the Red Queen who says it.


--KL

Michael Valliant said...

An interesting point, Livie (assuming identity here ;) I didn't recall that. Goddammed movie re-writers... the spirit of the line still works, even if the source is compromised, and ultimately still LC anyhoo.