Adonis Diaries

Are you Normal? (May 15, 2009)

            Paulo Coelho published a new book “The Solitude of the Victor” (La Solitude du Vainqueur).  It is supposed to be another novel, this time around with a story, and a gory one to boot.  Coelho cannot help it: you start the novel and you have to deal right away with another list of prescriptions.  The list is of 43 ways to act normal; I will reduce the list to the most cynical of characteristics:

1)      What is normal is to forget who we are so that we may focus on productivity and generating money.

2)      Setting rules and regulations for waging wars (The Geneva Convention)

3)      Investing the best period of your life on diploma that is not marketable in the work place.

4)      Working from 8 to 5 with no pleasure for our retreat compensation (that does not materialize eventually)

5)      Taking our hard earned retreat and no where to go for our diminishing supply of energy and dreams.

6)      Assimilating the dictum that power is more important than money; that money is far more important than happiness.

7)      Understanding that a “non ambitious person” is necessarily the one who cannot make money.

8)      Believing in what is printed.

9)      Despise what is earned the easiest way without the “necessary sacrifices”

10)    Follow the mode

11)    Invest mostly on the exterior beauty

12)    Faking to be normal but implicitly believing that we are far superior than most people

13)    Controlling extreme expressions in laughter or emotions.

14)    As we grow older believing that we have acquired the necessary wisdom.

15)    Patronize charity events and believing that we shared in our responsibility for a fairer world.

16)    Eating three times a day even if we are not that hungry

17)    Believing that others are more beautiful, more intelligent, and more capable.

18)    Never venture beyond what we think is our limited capacity.

19)    Always claiming that “I did my best”.

20)    Avoiding depression by watching more TV.

21)    Thinking that women don’t like footballs or boxing; that men don’t like decoration or cooking.

  Thinking that lack of courteous manners and polite gestures are sure sign of strong manhood.