So I was walking through a mall in lovely Novi, MI when I happened upon a bunch of necklaces. It's what the kids are all into, I realized, and pondered over the silly pop culture artifacts. Many peace symbols apparently left over from the 1960s, knowledge of which the youngens surely lacked. Many yin yangs, which I also though was strange, as Taoism was never very cool when I was a lad. Many smiley faces, which I found cute, but blithely trite; aren't teenagers supposed to be sullen? And then something which made me almost lose bowel control: A yin yang with smiley faces where the little dots should go. I mean, what were they trying to sell there? And it wasn't like one of the smiley faces was happy and the other was sad, no, that would have made some sense. They were both bright yellow, happy, smiley faces right in the middle of a yin yang symbol.

"Wha... wha... what the hell?" I stammered as my face contracted into a grimace. Now, I don't profess to be any kind of expert in Eastern philosophy, but I'm pretty sure the standard issue yin yang thingy doesn't include smiley faces.

One of the damnedest things I've ever seen, it was.

Ways this can be interpreted:

1) The yin-yang symbol comes from a part of the world where you can meet Confucian Buddhists, Hindu Daoists, and Shintoists who have Christian weddings and Buddhist funerals. This is no context in which to complain about adulteration.

2) The yin-yang symbolizes the unity of opposites, and with it such ideas as freedom from desire and acceptance in the face of suffering. The indication of blithe happiness in both brightest white and gloomiest black is symbolic of this acceptance and durability.

3) It's the complementarity and eternal intermixture of opposites. But in a country where men won't hug each other and see negotiation as a sign of weakness, and women learn to be cute and manipulative rather than open and assertive, we have rejected the idea. We choose to plug the holes in our being with pop-cultural kitsch rather than face our repressed selves.