If confession is good for the soul, then the process of that unburdening has gotten easier. An aid to absolution is just a click away with Confession: A Roman Catholic App. Well, why not? The so-called “self-quantifiers” have created personal tracking apps to chart stress, memories, caffeine consumption, moods, fatigue, emotions, and exercise routines. And now, Catholics have an Internet-enabled conscience-tracking device. Need to be shriven? There is an app for that.
The Confession app, available from iTunes for $1.99, is not intended to replace the obligation to visit the confessional at least once a year. Rather, the app is designed to enable the penitent to “prayerfully prepare for and participate in the Rite of Penitence.” It does so by facilitating an examination of conscience, offering prompts for each of the 10 Commandments. Penitents can then take their iPhone or iPad with them to confession. The password-protected app includes a description of the confessional ritual, a calendar for keeping track of the time elapsed since the last confession, and is customizable by age, gender, and marital status. Sins not included in the 10 Commandments prompts can be added.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has endorsed the Confession app, giving it their official Nihil Obstat to indicate that “nothing hinders” its use: it is doctrinally accurate and poses no threat to faith or morals. According to the bishops, the app responds to Pope Benedict XVI’s call for Catholics to engage the digital world in “the service of their faith,” as a means of fostering “personal growth,” and better preparing themselves “to serve society.” The app is also intended to invite back those 45% of Catholics who, due to time constraints or uneasiness with the process, have lapsed in their confessional obligation. I think, however, it is unlikely to do so. Were it a flame, it would draw few moths.
The Confession app may expedite the audit of one’s conscience, but it does nothing to ameliorate the experience of confession, and that experience can be latticed with unease. For one thing, it is claustrophobic: to enter a confessional is to be cubicled in a cubicle, in the dark. For another, penitents must recount their sins, venial and mortal; must admit their grievous culpability, their offensive sordidness, their fall from grace and alienation from the community of the faithful; must make an act of contrition, be “heartily sorry,” and detest their sins, not from legal fear of losing heaven and suffering the pains of hell, but from offending an all good and loving God. And all this to a man behind a curtain, a man who is, indeed, all powerful, a successor to the Apostles upon whom Jesus bestowed prodigious authority: “If you forgive men's sins, they are forgiven them; if you hold them bound, they are held bound;” a man before whom one kneels as a powerless supplicant, all agency hijacked; a man free to probe and poke and prod and chastise the privative and interior, the exquisitely sensitive sense of subjective shame, one is expected to reveal. It is a piercing abjection, a thrown-downess, a belittling littleness, barbed and briared. No one wants to appear shameful to themselves; no one wants to confront the silhouette behind the screen attesting to their lack of integrity. Unless one has an app to surmount that, I’d guess few of that no-show 45% will view an iPoded device to chart their conscience as an occasion to renew their participation in the rite of reconciliation.
And yet, I think they should, we all should, in one form or another at least. Yes, there is a part of me, a snide and snarky part, perhaps the fallen-away Catholic part, that wants to ridicule the seeming incongruity of a sacrament instituted by Christ himself, an instrument of grace, being facilitated by a tricked-out mobile phone. I find, however, that I cannot, for I believe, whether in a religious or a self-examining secular sense, that confession enhances our well-being—that it promotes our foliation as human persons.
We need to be more penitent than we are. We need to more often pluck the string of self-reproach, be more aware of the wounds and wrongs we cause, the duties we leave unperformed, the responsibilities we leave unmet, the loyalties we betray, the what we owe to ourselves, families, communities, employers. Confession, however or wherever we do it, modifies us, allows us to see that we can be different, better. It exonerates and reconciles; it chamfers the keen-edged narcissism our fulfill-yourself culture urges us to adopt; it admits our kindredness, the tug of our shared humanity, the deep syntax that lifts us out of the loneliness of our overly reflexive individuality—and binds us together in a human community. We never fully inhabit our own lives. Always, always, we touch on and are touched by others--the truth of our human being.
If the Confession App hones that sensibility, if it enables us to shorten, even the least little bit, the chasm between what we are and do, and what we know we should be and do, it’s all to the good. It isn’t necessary though. Its capacity for recognition and absolution, its injunctions to “go, and sin no more,” is within our own repertoire of powers. It requires only the honest, inward look. Huck Finn, struggling with his own conscience, notes that “a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain’t no disgrace.” In confession, wherever and however we perform it, we find the humility to suspend the game of moral peekaboo we too often play with ourselves.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Internet Kissing
The first time I kissed a girl with romantic intent, which is to say, on the lips—I had, of course, Georgie Porgied several girls’ cheeks in my early elementary school years—I was in eighth grade and on a double date with my best friend at the time, Chuck Seaverton. It was an awkward affair, from beginning to end. At the end of the evening, standing outside my date’s house, Chuck pulled me aside, told me that he was going to invite his date into the garage to favor her with a goodnight kiss, and that I should do the same after he emerged. A tongue of panic descended upon me, not concerning the kiss—I had no objection to that—but concerning technique.
“How are you going to do it,” I asked. “I mean, what are you going to say?”
“I’ll suavely ask her if she’d like to step into the garage,” Chuck replied, “and once we’re in there, I’ll ask her if she’d like to do something drastic. When she says yes, I’ll cup her face with my hands and kiss her.”
“But what about noses. I don’t want to bang noses with her.”
“Tilt your head, dummy.”
“But what if she says no.”
“She won’t. Trust me.”
And she didn’t. I followed Chuck’s blueprint, but the kiss, so avidly anticipated, so incensed and candled, so invested with amorous drama, was engineered, clumsily mechanical, tabbed and slotted, crowbarred and jimmied. There was no transport, no sense of being flung, at warp-speed, along the curve of space-time. I felt ungainly, gawky, graceless, and gauche, vortexed in ineptitude, mortified at being such an artless bungler.
This ponderously awkward scene came to mind after I had read a story about a Japanese lab, Tokyo’s Kajimoto Laboratory, having created a “Kiss Transmission Device,” a contrivance that enables person-to-person kissing over the Internet. The device is a small oblong box with a protruding plastic tube which a user manipulates the tube with the tongue. The tube’s movement is stored in a computer program and transmitted to another device, causing its tube to mimic the movement. The remote French kiss has been birthed.
The Kiss Transmission Device is, its inventors claim, intended to console the yearning of lovers in long-distance relationships with the palpable sensation of a shared kiss, a sort of erotic version of quantum entanglement, whereby particles, even if separated by a galaxy-wide distance, respond to each other’s motion. Who knew that the chime of romanticism rang amid the pragmatic spaces of laboratory science? Still, I suspect the inventors know that there’s money to be had. A Justin Bieber, say, could store a kiss and sell its download to his adoring fans. Just what every father wants: his daughter getting a mechanical French kiss from whatever pop culture icon whose quarter hour of fame has yet to expire. “Each kiss a heart-quake,” Byron said. For said father, more like a myocardial infarction. But on the bright side, the Kissing Transmission Device does bypass the nearly 300 colonies of bacteria that thrive in the average human mouth.
Now, kissing has been around almost as long as human have been around. Given its prevalence and diversity—90 % of the world kisses—Darwin theorized that kissing is an innate behavior, evolved possibly from the suckling experience or, perhaps through a kind of pheromonal tasting, from an effort to judge biological fitness. Kissing appears in Sanskrit texts as early as 1500 BCE; Homer depicts King Priam kissing Achilles’ hand when pleading for the return of his son Hector, and Ulysseus being kissed by his slaves upon his return home; and the Old Testament is a veritable brochure of kissing occasions: leave-taking, affection, hoodwinking a blind father, idolatrous practices, homage, brotherly love, parental affection, kin affection, reconciliation, and the rather salacious entreaty in Canticles 1 of the bride to the bridegroom: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of the mouth, for thy love is better than wine.”
Throughout history various things have been kissed: rings, hands, feet, robes, hems of garments, the ground, relics, cheeks, the air alongside of cheeks, asses--though this is typically kissed metaphorically to indicate either an ingratiating bootlicker or a contemptuous attitude—and, of course lips. Politicians are obligated to kiss every baby in sight. We commit larceny when we attempt to steal them. The redemption of fallen humankind began with a betraying kiss. Kissing has even been used to seal contracts: the illiterate’s signature X kissed to formalize the deal—which accounts for our use of X to symbolize kisses. In popular culture, the word “kiss” is associated with a small, teardrop-shaped piece of chocolate; an often coconut-flavored meringue, a heavy metal band; the advertising slogan “keep it simple, stupid;” the awakening of Sleeping Beauty, mistletoe, the slight contact of one billiard ball with another, close cousins, an 1896 film by Thomas Edison—who knew the Wizard of Menlo Park was so prurient?—and a 1963 film by Andy Warhol—who did not know that the wizard of The Factory was—and, now, inevitably it would seem, the Internet.
If, as Shelly said, “Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips,” then, it seems to me, Internet kissing is irredeemably flat-souled, as exciting as stuffing breadcrumbs in a turkey. You can draw cubes, but that does not make you Picasso. The scientific study of kissing, “philematology” (from the Greek philema, kiss) tells us that lip-on-lip kissing unleashes such euphoric chemicals as oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, and a hootenanny of other assorted endorphins. The heart rate hammers; the blood vessels dilate; wings of warm desire spread and flutter. It is difficult to see how a waggling straw can provide a comparably percussive jubilee for body and brain; how an experience mediated by a computer screen and a hand-held box can even approximate the intimate, pulse-pounding physical contact, the fusing wrapped-up-inness, the now, right now, this moment gale-force livingness of a physical kiss. Or the license-to-thrill spontaneity of it, its unscheduled and unspoken structure of feeling and gesture and suggestion, for, after all, an Internet kiss would need to be prepared for, timetabled, penciled in.
It is difficult to see how anyone could consider Internet kissing as less than what Umberto Eco called “the absolute fake,” a simulacrum, a copy, that displaces and usurps the reality of the original. Internet kissing is to actual kissing as viewing an animatronic alligator is to confronting a genuine alligator, as staying in the Luxor Las Vegas is to actually being in Egypt amid pyramids and before the Great Sphinx of Giza, as every pasteurized Main Street USA development is to authentic small-town living. How, one wonders, can Internet kissing be anything other than a disembodied and pale imitation, a denatured replica, a hardcore counterfeit of the reality of real kissing? To think otherwise is to think Karmelkorn is health food, the Snuggie is haute couture, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is just some guy talking smack.
Human intelligence is a fine and wondrous thing. We are not classified taxonomically as Homo sapiens—knowing or wise man—for nothing. The human brain contains 100 billion neurons, each with a tendril connected to the tendrils of other neurons. From that buzzing tangle emerged the less than enticing Kissing Transmission Device. In this case, I agree with e. e. cummings that actual “kisses are a better fate than wisdom.”
“How are you going to do it,” I asked. “I mean, what are you going to say?”
“I’ll suavely ask her if she’d like to step into the garage,” Chuck replied, “and once we’re in there, I’ll ask her if she’d like to do something drastic. When she says yes, I’ll cup her face with my hands and kiss her.”
“But what about noses. I don’t want to bang noses with her.”
“Tilt your head, dummy.”
“But what if she says no.”
“She won’t. Trust me.”
And she didn’t. I followed Chuck’s blueprint, but the kiss, so avidly anticipated, so incensed and candled, so invested with amorous drama, was engineered, clumsily mechanical, tabbed and slotted, crowbarred and jimmied. There was no transport, no sense of being flung, at warp-speed, along the curve of space-time. I felt ungainly, gawky, graceless, and gauche, vortexed in ineptitude, mortified at being such an artless bungler.
This ponderously awkward scene came to mind after I had read a story about a Japanese lab, Tokyo’s Kajimoto Laboratory, having created a “Kiss Transmission Device,” a contrivance that enables person-to-person kissing over the Internet. The device is a small oblong box with a protruding plastic tube which a user manipulates the tube with the tongue. The tube’s movement is stored in a computer program and transmitted to another device, causing its tube to mimic the movement. The remote French kiss has been birthed.
The Kiss Transmission Device is, its inventors claim, intended to console the yearning of lovers in long-distance relationships with the palpable sensation of a shared kiss, a sort of erotic version of quantum entanglement, whereby particles, even if separated by a galaxy-wide distance, respond to each other’s motion. Who knew that the chime of romanticism rang amid the pragmatic spaces of laboratory science? Still, I suspect the inventors know that there’s money to be had. A Justin Bieber, say, could store a kiss and sell its download to his adoring fans. Just what every father wants: his daughter getting a mechanical French kiss from whatever pop culture icon whose quarter hour of fame has yet to expire. “Each kiss a heart-quake,” Byron said. For said father, more like a myocardial infarction. But on the bright side, the Kissing Transmission Device does bypass the nearly 300 colonies of bacteria that thrive in the average human mouth.
Now, kissing has been around almost as long as human have been around. Given its prevalence and diversity—90 % of the world kisses—Darwin theorized that kissing is an innate behavior, evolved possibly from the suckling experience or, perhaps through a kind of pheromonal tasting, from an effort to judge biological fitness. Kissing appears in Sanskrit texts as early as 1500 BCE; Homer depicts King Priam kissing Achilles’ hand when pleading for the return of his son Hector, and Ulysseus being kissed by his slaves upon his return home; and the Old Testament is a veritable brochure of kissing occasions: leave-taking, affection, hoodwinking a blind father, idolatrous practices, homage, brotherly love, parental affection, kin affection, reconciliation, and the rather salacious entreaty in Canticles 1 of the bride to the bridegroom: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of the mouth, for thy love is better than wine.”
Throughout history various things have been kissed: rings, hands, feet, robes, hems of garments, the ground, relics, cheeks, the air alongside of cheeks, asses--though this is typically kissed metaphorically to indicate either an ingratiating bootlicker or a contemptuous attitude—and, of course lips. Politicians are obligated to kiss every baby in sight. We commit larceny when we attempt to steal them. The redemption of fallen humankind began with a betraying kiss. Kissing has even been used to seal contracts: the illiterate’s signature X kissed to formalize the deal—which accounts for our use of X to symbolize kisses. In popular culture, the word “kiss” is associated with a small, teardrop-shaped piece of chocolate; an often coconut-flavored meringue, a heavy metal band; the advertising slogan “keep it simple, stupid;” the awakening of Sleeping Beauty, mistletoe, the slight contact of one billiard ball with another, close cousins, an 1896 film by Thomas Edison—who knew the Wizard of Menlo Park was so prurient?—and a 1963 film by Andy Warhol—who did not know that the wizard of The Factory was—and, now, inevitably it would seem, the Internet.
If, as Shelly said, “Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips,” then, it seems to me, Internet kissing is irredeemably flat-souled, as exciting as stuffing breadcrumbs in a turkey. You can draw cubes, but that does not make you Picasso. The scientific study of kissing, “philematology” (from the Greek philema, kiss) tells us that lip-on-lip kissing unleashes such euphoric chemicals as oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, and a hootenanny of other assorted endorphins. The heart rate hammers; the blood vessels dilate; wings of warm desire spread and flutter. It is difficult to see how a waggling straw can provide a comparably percussive jubilee for body and brain; how an experience mediated by a computer screen and a hand-held box can even approximate the intimate, pulse-pounding physical contact, the fusing wrapped-up-inness, the now, right now, this moment gale-force livingness of a physical kiss. Or the license-to-thrill spontaneity of it, its unscheduled and unspoken structure of feeling and gesture and suggestion, for, after all, an Internet kiss would need to be prepared for, timetabled, penciled in.
It is difficult to see how anyone could consider Internet kissing as less than what Umberto Eco called “the absolute fake,” a simulacrum, a copy, that displaces and usurps the reality of the original. Internet kissing is to actual kissing as viewing an animatronic alligator is to confronting a genuine alligator, as staying in the Luxor Las Vegas is to actually being in Egypt amid pyramids and before the Great Sphinx of Giza, as every pasteurized Main Street USA development is to authentic small-town living. How, one wonders, can Internet kissing be anything other than a disembodied and pale imitation, a denatured replica, a hardcore counterfeit of the reality of real kissing? To think otherwise is to think Karmelkorn is health food, the Snuggie is haute couture, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is just some guy talking smack.
Human intelligence is a fine and wondrous thing. We are not classified taxonomically as Homo sapiens—knowing or wise man—for nothing. The human brain contains 100 billion neurons, each with a tendril connected to the tendrils of other neurons. From that buzzing tangle emerged the less than enticing Kissing Transmission Device. In this case, I agree with e. e. cummings that actual “kisses are a better fate than wisdom.”
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Dad Thought Better
When I was a boy, Dad practiced a ceremony whenever I asked him to buy me something. Let’s call it the refusal-surrender ritual. It went something like this:
Vignette 1: Scanning the sports section of the Cincinnati Post, I noticed an advertisement for go-carts—we called them jitneys back in the day—for $99. It was a no-frills jitney, basically a pull-start lawn-mower engine mounted on a bare-bones steel frame with a steering wheel, gas and brake pedals, and solid rubber wheels. Still, the prospect of my having a small motorized vehicle seemed enticingly grown up, and an enticingly less arduous mode of transportation than my labor-intensive Huffy. So, I showed the jitney ad to Dad and asked if he’d buy me one.
“No! You’re too young to be driving one of those things. Besides, you need to be 16 to drive in the streets.”
“But, Dad, . . .”
“I said no. You’re too young to be operating something like that. Let alone take care of it.”
“But . . .”
And here I got the “dad stare,” the nonverbal equivalent of “End of discussion, so don’t push it.”
Three days later, a Saturday, while I was at the breakfast table spooning up Sugar Pops, Dad approached me with the ad in hand and said, “How about we go take a look at those jitneys.” We looked, he cautioned, he bought.
Vignette 2: Several weeks before my birthday, I asked for a BB gun. Most of the boys in the neighborhood had lever-action,Winchester-like Red Ryders, and I was keen to have one so I, like them, could be Daniel Booned and Kit Carsonized and participate in the “hunting expeditions” they related with such stirring enthusiasm. So, when Dad asked what I wanted for my birthday, I immediately replied, “A BB rifle.”
“A BB rifle! What, are you crazy? A gun? Do you know how dangerous those things can be”?
“But, Dad, it’s just a BB gun”!
And I swear, some 27 years before A Christmas Story appeared, Dad said, “Yeah, and with `just a BB gun’ you can put out your eye. Or somebody else’s.”
“Well, I’d be careful. Besides, everybody else has one.”
“So, if everybody else jumped off a bridge, would you jump, too?
Dad had me there. We’d driven across the 100 foot-high Roebling Suspension Bridge several times on forays into Kentucky. No way I’d jump from 100 feet in the air, even if my best friends Jeffrey Baker and Terry Finklemeier did.
When my birthday arrived, after the cake and ice cream, Dad went into his den and emerged with two wrapped boxes. I knew from the shape of one that it was a BB gun—and what a BB gun: a Daisy Pump-Action Rifle, with wood grip stock, front sight, adjustable rear sight, and a screw-in spring-loading tube that held 52 BBs—no frustratingly inefficient gravity feed with this gun. The Daisy Pump-Action was a high-performance BB rifle, easily the most powerful and accurate on the market. Red Ryders paled into pipsqueakery compared to the shotgun-like Pump-Action. And the second present? A Daisy BB pistol. Thus fully weaponized, I allowed my imagination to swell and thicken with images of me leading my friends on the next trailblazing excursion into the “wilds,” a microwoods three blocks away consisting of a miserly stand of trees and some undergrowth scrub.
I did not ponder Dad’s dialectic of denial and capitulation, and I certainly did not question him about it, for that would surely rouse a pillaging jinx from its slumber. When I thought of it at all, I considered it as something akin to the unaccountable, unmerited dispensation of grace the Dominican sisters at elementary school told us about. Sometimes, of course, the “no” stood: bunk bed (vetoed due to my brother Dennis’s vehement opposition), hamsters (“big rats”), night-vision goggles, electric guitar, in-ground swimming pool (no “no” necessary; the look of incredulity said it all). Sometimes, “OK” was the immediate response: books, sports equipment, chemistry set, Lionel Model Train set, board games, acoustic guitar. Still, Dad’s strange alchemy of converting the base metal of “no” to the gold of “yes” occurred on enough occasions that I developed my own small ceremony: request—wait—celebrate.
Years later, talking with Mom about some of Dad’s peculiarities (“I’d need a brand-new ball point to list them all,” she claimed), I mentioned how I wondered about Dad’s propensity to flatly refuse my boyish requests for a jitney and BB gun, and then refuse the refusal. “Oh, that,” Mom said; “after he said `no’ he thought better of it.” Thought better of it. I was struck by that clause, and what it could mean.
Of course, in common usage it means to change one’s mind, to revise, upon reflection, an initial decision. Interestingly, brain scanning cognitive psychologists claim empirical evidence supports that interpretation. It seems that, when faced with a decision, rational thought is a second-order response. Emotions precede reason. Scans indicate that decision-making begins in an emotion-processing part of the brain’s limbic system, then hitches its way to reason’s jurisdiction, the neocortex. Once there, however, reason rationalizes the original gut reaction, a process known as confirmation bias. This bias is modified or overcome in a social context, in talking with others and being exposed to alternative perspectives. And while she never said so, I know that it was Mom who provided Dad with that perception-altering context.
Still, I wondered about the nature of that alteration. Yes, Dad “thought better of it,” and it’s likely talking with Mom caused it, but what underlay the cause to give it triggering persuasiveness. And here I focused on the words “thought better.” What does it mean to think better? I would venture this: I had made a claim to Dad’s consideration. He could have let that initial “no” be the final word, could have dismissed my little boy wants as irresponsible, as a brochure of unnecessary needs, as blinkered immaturity. He could have thought no more about it. But, no; instead, he thought better. He regarded me, was mindful of me, treated me with solicitude, attended to me, beyond the “no.” He absorbed my desires and made them as important as his own. He imagined his way into my interior space, that place of wanting, and felt his way around, charted its contours, took measurements. He held me in his regard, as surely as he held my hand when we crossed a street, as surely as he clasped my shoulder after I pitched the winning game in the Little League World Series, as surely as he held my eyes in his when we talked about my upcoming marriage, as surely as he cradled the back of my neck as he lay dying and whispered “I’m glad you’re here.”
Dad held me in his regard. Prompted by Mom, the messenger RNA in my folks’ helix information exchange. He thought. Better. Deeper. He pondered me. Not from outside my small desiring world. Inside. I was ponderable. All the way down.
Vignette 1: Scanning the sports section of the Cincinnati Post, I noticed an advertisement for go-carts—we called them jitneys back in the day—for $99. It was a no-frills jitney, basically a pull-start lawn-mower engine mounted on a bare-bones steel frame with a steering wheel, gas and brake pedals, and solid rubber wheels. Still, the prospect of my having a small motorized vehicle seemed enticingly grown up, and an enticingly less arduous mode of transportation than my labor-intensive Huffy. So, I showed the jitney ad to Dad and asked if he’d buy me one.
“No! You’re too young to be driving one of those things. Besides, you need to be 16 to drive in the streets.”
“But, Dad, . . .”
“I said no. You’re too young to be operating something like that. Let alone take care of it.”
“But . . .”
And here I got the “dad stare,” the nonverbal equivalent of “End of discussion, so don’t push it.”
Three days later, a Saturday, while I was at the breakfast table spooning up Sugar Pops, Dad approached me with the ad in hand and said, “How about we go take a look at those jitneys.” We looked, he cautioned, he bought.
Vignette 2: Several weeks before my birthday, I asked for a BB gun. Most of the boys in the neighborhood had lever-action,Winchester-like Red Ryders, and I was keen to have one so I, like them, could be Daniel Booned and Kit Carsonized and participate in the “hunting expeditions” they related with such stirring enthusiasm. So, when Dad asked what I wanted for my birthday, I immediately replied, “A BB rifle.”
“A BB rifle! What, are you crazy? A gun? Do you know how dangerous those things can be”?
“But, Dad, it’s just a BB gun”!
And I swear, some 27 years before A Christmas Story appeared, Dad said, “Yeah, and with `just a BB gun’ you can put out your eye. Or somebody else’s.”
“Well, I’d be careful. Besides, everybody else has one.”
“So, if everybody else jumped off a bridge, would you jump, too?
Dad had me there. We’d driven across the 100 foot-high Roebling Suspension Bridge several times on forays into Kentucky. No way I’d jump from 100 feet in the air, even if my best friends Jeffrey Baker and Terry Finklemeier did.
When my birthday arrived, after the cake and ice cream, Dad went into his den and emerged with two wrapped boxes. I knew from the shape of one that it was a BB gun—and what a BB gun: a Daisy Pump-Action Rifle, with wood grip stock, front sight, adjustable rear sight, and a screw-in spring-loading tube that held 52 BBs—no frustratingly inefficient gravity feed with this gun. The Daisy Pump-Action was a high-performance BB rifle, easily the most powerful and accurate on the market. Red Ryders paled into pipsqueakery compared to the shotgun-like Pump-Action. And the second present? A Daisy BB pistol. Thus fully weaponized, I allowed my imagination to swell and thicken with images of me leading my friends on the next trailblazing excursion into the “wilds,” a microwoods three blocks away consisting of a miserly stand of trees and some undergrowth scrub.
I did not ponder Dad’s dialectic of denial and capitulation, and I certainly did not question him about it, for that would surely rouse a pillaging jinx from its slumber. When I thought of it at all, I considered it as something akin to the unaccountable, unmerited dispensation of grace the Dominican sisters at elementary school told us about. Sometimes, of course, the “no” stood: bunk bed (vetoed due to my brother Dennis’s vehement opposition), hamsters (“big rats”), night-vision goggles, electric guitar, in-ground swimming pool (no “no” necessary; the look of incredulity said it all). Sometimes, “OK” was the immediate response: books, sports equipment, chemistry set, Lionel Model Train set, board games, acoustic guitar. Still, Dad’s strange alchemy of converting the base metal of “no” to the gold of “yes” occurred on enough occasions that I developed my own small ceremony: request—wait—celebrate.
Years later, talking with Mom about some of Dad’s peculiarities (“I’d need a brand-new ball point to list them all,” she claimed), I mentioned how I wondered about Dad’s propensity to flatly refuse my boyish requests for a jitney and BB gun, and then refuse the refusal. “Oh, that,” Mom said; “after he said `no’ he thought better of it.” Thought better of it. I was struck by that clause, and what it could mean.
Of course, in common usage it means to change one’s mind, to revise, upon reflection, an initial decision. Interestingly, brain scanning cognitive psychologists claim empirical evidence supports that interpretation. It seems that, when faced with a decision, rational thought is a second-order response. Emotions precede reason. Scans indicate that decision-making begins in an emotion-processing part of the brain’s limbic system, then hitches its way to reason’s jurisdiction, the neocortex. Once there, however, reason rationalizes the original gut reaction, a process known as confirmation bias. This bias is modified or overcome in a social context, in talking with others and being exposed to alternative perspectives. And while she never said so, I know that it was Mom who provided Dad with that perception-altering context.
Still, I wondered about the nature of that alteration. Yes, Dad “thought better of it,” and it’s likely talking with Mom caused it, but what underlay the cause to give it triggering persuasiveness. And here I focused on the words “thought better.” What does it mean to think better? I would venture this: I had made a claim to Dad’s consideration. He could have let that initial “no” be the final word, could have dismissed my little boy wants as irresponsible, as a brochure of unnecessary needs, as blinkered immaturity. He could have thought no more about it. But, no; instead, he thought better. He regarded me, was mindful of me, treated me with solicitude, attended to me, beyond the “no.” He absorbed my desires and made them as important as his own. He imagined his way into my interior space, that place of wanting, and felt his way around, charted its contours, took measurements. He held me in his regard, as surely as he held my hand when we crossed a street, as surely as he clasped my shoulder after I pitched the winning game in the Little League World Series, as surely as he held my eyes in his when we talked about my upcoming marriage, as surely as he cradled the back of my neck as he lay dying and whispered “I’m glad you’re here.”
Dad held me in his regard. Prompted by Mom, the messenger RNA in my folks’ helix information exchange. He thought. Better. Deeper. He pondered me. Not from outside my small desiring world. Inside. I was ponderable. All the way down.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Prefixed and Suffixed: The Grammar of Our Lives
I am prefixed and suffixed. I am a college teacher (er—one who performs an action) who teaches literature (ure—function, process) and composition (ion—result of an act or process). I rhapsodize (ize—engage in an activity) about Moby Dick but sometimes sneak off to see such cultural (al—of or relating to) Karmelkorn as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. I have hypothyroidism (hypo—under; low; ism—state or condition). I tend to vote democratic (crat—member or partisan of; ic—character or nature of). I am a vegetarian (arian—believer, advocate). I am friendly (ly—like in manner or nature) and can be social (al—tending to, fit for) but prefer solitude (tude—quality or state). I do not own a smartphone (smart—too techie for me to operate) or a smart anything, except, occasionally a mouth. Age catches me out these days, and I often feel seniorclysmic (OK, I made that up). I was overweight (over—over, duh!) as a young man, but now my physician (ian—skilled in) worries that I am too skinny (y—characterized by), which is strange considering my near mitochondrial Reese’s Peanut Butter Cupitudinarianism, a craving I am able to resist about as successfully as attempting to thread a needle while being tickled. Faced with a RPBC, my willpower comes out with its hands up.
All of who I am, it seems, is defined by bits of language that are located six doors down from the corner office of actual words—mere slivery, splintery units of linguistic structure, snippets, really, tittles and tidbits, runts in the lexical litter. And yet, they have meaning, which means that hanging them on the fore or aft of words gives them the power to broker the coordinates of my identity. I don’t mind. They can, I believe, teach us something about the grammar of our lives.
Prefixes and suffixes—along with infixes, which English does not have, except for such mildly profane exclamations as “absodamnlutely”—are classified as áffixes. There are two types of áffixes in English: inflectional and derivational. Only eight inflectional áffixes remain in English, all of them suffixes. Two tell us whether nouns are plural or possessive; four tell us whether verbs refer to actions that are past, present, or ongoing; and two tell us whether adjectives are comparing two things or evaluating one thing among many as superlative. Inflectional suffixes thus refine the meaning of the word they are attached to, but more than that, they establish a word’s relationship to other words in the string of words containing it. The “s” at the end of “grammarians” means more than one and would require the use of the pronouns “they,” “them,” and “their” when referring to them and the verb “are” in the sentence “Grammarians are fond of horseradish on their ice cream.” The “en” on “eaten” requires a form of “have” as a helping verb and means the eating occurred in the past before another past action: “The grammarians experienced digestive distress after they had eaten horseradish ice cream.”
Now, indulge me in a metaphor here: because inflectional suffixes work outside the word, ligaturing to and affecting other words, let’s consider inflectional suffixes to be socially oriented.
Derivational áffixes allow us to derive new words either by changing the part of speech of the word to which they attach or by altering the word’s meaning: add able to the verb “sustain” and, voilá, you have the adjective “sustainable.” Add the prefix un to “sustainable and, revoilá, the meaning changes. Add ster to “hip” and you get a noun and one very irritating guy; add ize and you verb him into action; add tion and you’ve got “hipsterization,” a monstrous transformation worthy of a horror film; add de at the beginning and you’ve returned him to human form.
All these additions are far from arbitrary. Grammatical rules dictate what can be added to what and in what order the addition will proceed. The suffix able attaches by rule to verbs to make adjectives (compare-comparable). The prefix in attaches to adjectives to render another adjective but with a different meaning. Thus, the order of attachment for “incomparable” would have to be able first, then in. In other words, the structure of words with affixes is hierarchical. It occurs in steps; it spools in a precisely ordered sequence.
Now, metaphor time again. Because the derivational áffix process occurs in words rather than, like inflectional suffixes, across words, because it is internal to a particular word, changing its, and its only, meaning and identity, ligaturing to and affecting no other words in the string of words containing it, let’s consider derivational áffixes to be individually oriented.
So, what, then, is the take away for the grammar of our lives? The “social” nature of inflectional suffixes teaches us to possess the capacity for plural perspective taking; to attend to the tense, the historical context and contingencies, that shapes and governs the lives with which we interact, to compare qualities and ideas, and to assess them for their superiority. The lesson of inflectional suffixes is to imagine, analyze, and evaluate; to broaden our horizons, not practice the idolatry of merely reinforcing our views; to realize that, while circumstances emplace us, we can think beyond them.
The “individual” nature of derivational áffixes teaches us deliberative and purposeful change—that who we are, what we are, what we think and feel and do and perceive can be reconfigured; that the categories in which we are placed, in which we place ourselves, can be revised; that the meanings we hold can be transformed. Derivational áffixes instill a disposition for growth.
There is a deep structure to our lives, a biological grammar. It develops, perhaps according to Erik Erikson’s eight-staged theory of psychosocial development, or Jean Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development, or Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, or Beck and Graves’s nonlinear Spiral Dynamics model, or the Seven Ages of Man the melancholy Jacques outlines in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. It matters little to which theory we subscribe. What matters is what we make of our life’s stages, how we experience the urgent energy of them, how we imagine and embody them, the parameters we set within them. What matters is not the deep structure but the surface structure, the way we express our lives, in small ways and in large. We can change; we can catalyze ourselves, be emergent, and not simply a lingerer in a room with a wavy-glass window and a caged parrot, waiting for our number to be called. We may be áffixed, but we are not affíxed.
All of who I am, it seems, is defined by bits of language that are located six doors down from the corner office of actual words—mere slivery, splintery units of linguistic structure, snippets, really, tittles and tidbits, runts in the lexical litter. And yet, they have meaning, which means that hanging them on the fore or aft of words gives them the power to broker the coordinates of my identity. I don’t mind. They can, I believe, teach us something about the grammar of our lives.
Prefixes and suffixes—along with infixes, which English does not have, except for such mildly profane exclamations as “absodamnlutely”—are classified as áffixes. There are two types of áffixes in English: inflectional and derivational. Only eight inflectional áffixes remain in English, all of them suffixes. Two tell us whether nouns are plural or possessive; four tell us whether verbs refer to actions that are past, present, or ongoing; and two tell us whether adjectives are comparing two things or evaluating one thing among many as superlative. Inflectional suffixes thus refine the meaning of the word they are attached to, but more than that, they establish a word’s relationship to other words in the string of words containing it. The “s” at the end of “grammarians” means more than one and would require the use of the pronouns “they,” “them,” and “their” when referring to them and the verb “are” in the sentence “Grammarians are fond of horseradish on their ice cream.” The “en” on “eaten” requires a form of “have” as a helping verb and means the eating occurred in the past before another past action: “The grammarians experienced digestive distress after they had eaten horseradish ice cream.”
Now, indulge me in a metaphor here: because inflectional suffixes work outside the word, ligaturing to and affecting other words, let’s consider inflectional suffixes to be socially oriented.
Derivational áffixes allow us to derive new words either by changing the part of speech of the word to which they attach or by altering the word’s meaning: add able to the verb “sustain” and, voilá, you have the adjective “sustainable.” Add the prefix un to “sustainable and, revoilá, the meaning changes. Add ster to “hip” and you get a noun and one very irritating guy; add ize and you verb him into action; add tion and you’ve got “hipsterization,” a monstrous transformation worthy of a horror film; add de at the beginning and you’ve returned him to human form.
All these additions are far from arbitrary. Grammatical rules dictate what can be added to what and in what order the addition will proceed. The suffix able attaches by rule to verbs to make adjectives (compare-comparable). The prefix in attaches to adjectives to render another adjective but with a different meaning. Thus, the order of attachment for “incomparable” would have to be able first, then in. In other words, the structure of words with affixes is hierarchical. It occurs in steps; it spools in a precisely ordered sequence.
Now, metaphor time again. Because the derivational áffix process occurs in words rather than, like inflectional suffixes, across words, because it is internal to a particular word, changing its, and its only, meaning and identity, ligaturing to and affecting no other words in the string of words containing it, let’s consider derivational áffixes to be individually oriented.
So, what, then, is the take away for the grammar of our lives? The “social” nature of inflectional suffixes teaches us to possess the capacity for plural perspective taking; to attend to the tense, the historical context and contingencies, that shapes and governs the lives with which we interact, to compare qualities and ideas, and to assess them for their superiority. The lesson of inflectional suffixes is to imagine, analyze, and evaluate; to broaden our horizons, not practice the idolatry of merely reinforcing our views; to realize that, while circumstances emplace us, we can think beyond them.
The “individual” nature of derivational áffixes teaches us deliberative and purposeful change—that who we are, what we are, what we think and feel and do and perceive can be reconfigured; that the categories in which we are placed, in which we place ourselves, can be revised; that the meanings we hold can be transformed. Derivational áffixes instill a disposition for growth.
There is a deep structure to our lives, a biological grammar. It develops, perhaps according to Erik Erikson’s eight-staged theory of psychosocial development, or Jean Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development, or Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, or Beck and Graves’s nonlinear Spiral Dynamics model, or the Seven Ages of Man the melancholy Jacques outlines in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. It matters little to which theory we subscribe. What matters is what we make of our life’s stages, how we experience the urgent energy of them, how we imagine and embody them, the parameters we set within them. What matters is not the deep structure but the surface structure, the way we express our lives, in small ways and in large. We can change; we can catalyze ourselves, be emergent, and not simply a lingerer in a room with a wavy-glass window and a caged parrot, waiting for our number to be called. We may be áffixed, but we are not affíxed.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Were the Sisters of St. Antoninus Female?
As a boy at St. Antoninus Catholic Elementary School, I, along with most of my classmates, often wondered whether or not the Dominican sisters that taught us were actually female. Of course, we knew in some abstract sense they were; after all, they were called “sisters,” and the pronouns “she” and “her” were used to refer to one or another of them. Still, judging by the measures that we knew, we were uncertain. The flowing, ankle-length white tunic, gave no indication of body shape, and the square veil covering the head right down to the eyebrows cabined their hair. They wore shapeless, thick-heeled black shoes. Their faces were unlipsticked, unblushed, uncosmeticed. The features of those faces seemed uniformly angular, as if formed from sheet metal. Several of the sisters had moustaches or a chin whisker or two.
As far as we could ascertain, the sisters bore no resemblance to our most familiar models of the female gender: our moms. They did not wear Capri pants and espadrilles, did not wear makeup, did not use Clairol, did not buy Elvis Presley 45s, did not moon over the muscled arms of Cincinnati Reds first-baseman Ted Kluzewski, did not smoke cigarettes and drink cocktails, did not play canasta with “the girls,” did not shop with what my dad considered ferocious abandon at Shilitoes Department Store, did not use slang, did not read “Peyton Place” or watch “General Hospital,” did not freely dispense loving caresses, and did not smile with both mouth and eyes when speaking to us. And while all the sisters wore a plain gold wedding band, we were given to understand that it symbolized their marriage to Jesus Christ, a state of wedlock that, even in our prepubescent naiveté, we knew was nothing like the one that united our moms and dads.
Some of us, the proto-Darwinians, I suppose, speculated that the sisters might be a subset of the female gender, evolved specifically for the ascetic religious life of the Dominican order. Others of us, the proto-Lamarckians influenced by the science-fiction movies we flocked to see, held that the sisters had once been fully gendered females but had undergone a transformation upon being consecrated to sisterhood, had been unsexed, degendered, unwomaned—an opinion that spawned a related debate: whether that transformation occurred immediately or over time. A few of us, perhaps the proto-post-gender acolytes, argued they were special creations of God, unique beings who exuded a compressed, muscular authority, lean and mirthless, aerobicized, symphonic, designed to inculcate the Baltimore Catechism and discipline whatever impulse-imbued desire we sought to gratify with a jacketing moral responsibility. If religious instruction were tennis, the sisters played a power-baseline game. But, whatever the reason for it, we unanimously agreed that the sisters were an alien and other gender, at best, only tenuously female.
And so I would have blithely continued indentured to this idea had I not one day been sent on an errand to the sisters’ convent, an ominous building to our young imaginations, an impenetrable abyss of unlit mystery. Still, I considered it an honor to be chosen for this mission, a testament, so I thought, to my flawless performance as an altar boy and charter member of the Knights of the Altar. I knocked on the door and explained to the answering Sister Norita that I had been sent by Sister Mary Joseph to fetch her reading glasses. Sister Norita ushered me into the foyer and told me to wait. I watched her departing figure until she disappeared down the shadowed hallway and then, beset by curiosity, took a few steps forward and glanced to my left into what was obviously a living room.
Now, I suppose I expected something approaching a monastic cell, a spartanly furnished room, devoid of personality, lit by rows of votive candles and featuring crucifixes hanging on the otherwise bare walls. I was surprised, therefore, at how strikingly ordinary it seemed: bright white walls with pictures of The Sacred Heart, The Good Shepherd, and the Blessed Virgin Mary crushing the head of a serpent; a couch and several arms chairs; swagged drapes and valances; an end table upon which lay a crucifix, a missal, several hymn books, and a coffee cup; a cabinet stereo, some potted plants; and a card table upon which rested a partially completed jigsaw puzzle. With a minor change here and there and the addition of a television set, it could have been the living room in any of my friends’ houses. It could have been the living room in my house—with one neoned exception.
Sitting on an ottoman was Sister Bernadette, one of the younger nuns, combing through obviously just-washed chestnut-brown hair that reached more than halfway down her back. That hair: it was clean and good. It shone. She combed deliberately, unhurriedly. I stood transfixed. There was no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, about Sister Bernadette’s gender. And as I gazed at her, as I regarded her, as I considered her in that simple act, I suddenly realized that she, and all the sisters, were characters in their own stories, not just mine or my friends’. I imagined her, wholly, and realized that she, and all the sisters, was like my mom and all my friends’ moms. They had been young girls, lived young girl’s lives, lives with tea sets and dolls, lives with dreams and secret crushes, lives with skinned knees and silly jokes, lives with best friends and irritating brothers, lives with movies and fan magazines and diaries. Just like my mom and my friends’ moms, except that one group exchanged marriage vows, devoting their lives to their husbands and children, and one group exchanged religious vows, devoting their lives to God and His children. Two different consecrations, but the same ultimate purposes.
Sister Nortia had stolen up alongside me as I stood there. “Sister Bernadette has lovely hair, doesn’t she,” Sister Norita whispered. “Yes,” I whispered back. “It is her glorification of God,” Sister Norita said; “God has given her beautiful hair, and she takes care of it and keeps it beautiful to honor his gift to her. Do you understand?” “Yes, sister,” I replied, but I really didn’t, not then. But later, when I learned about purpose and obligation, about perspective taking and humility, about empathetic concern and commitment to something larger and more durable than myself, I understood that, however meager they may be, my gifts, like rivulets of wax cordoroying a candle, flow from the candle’s hollow only if the wick is trimmed and set aflame.
As far as we could ascertain, the sisters bore no resemblance to our most familiar models of the female gender: our moms. They did not wear Capri pants and espadrilles, did not wear makeup, did not use Clairol, did not buy Elvis Presley 45s, did not moon over the muscled arms of Cincinnati Reds first-baseman Ted Kluzewski, did not smoke cigarettes and drink cocktails, did not play canasta with “the girls,” did not shop with what my dad considered ferocious abandon at Shilitoes Department Store, did not use slang, did not read “Peyton Place” or watch “General Hospital,” did not freely dispense loving caresses, and did not smile with both mouth and eyes when speaking to us. And while all the sisters wore a plain gold wedding band, we were given to understand that it symbolized their marriage to Jesus Christ, a state of wedlock that, even in our prepubescent naiveté, we knew was nothing like the one that united our moms and dads.
Some of us, the proto-Darwinians, I suppose, speculated that the sisters might be a subset of the female gender, evolved specifically for the ascetic religious life of the Dominican order. Others of us, the proto-Lamarckians influenced by the science-fiction movies we flocked to see, held that the sisters had once been fully gendered females but had undergone a transformation upon being consecrated to sisterhood, had been unsexed, degendered, unwomaned—an opinion that spawned a related debate: whether that transformation occurred immediately or over time. A few of us, perhaps the proto-post-gender acolytes, argued they were special creations of God, unique beings who exuded a compressed, muscular authority, lean and mirthless, aerobicized, symphonic, designed to inculcate the Baltimore Catechism and discipline whatever impulse-imbued desire we sought to gratify with a jacketing moral responsibility. If religious instruction were tennis, the sisters played a power-baseline game. But, whatever the reason for it, we unanimously agreed that the sisters were an alien and other gender, at best, only tenuously female.
And so I would have blithely continued indentured to this idea had I not one day been sent on an errand to the sisters’ convent, an ominous building to our young imaginations, an impenetrable abyss of unlit mystery. Still, I considered it an honor to be chosen for this mission, a testament, so I thought, to my flawless performance as an altar boy and charter member of the Knights of the Altar. I knocked on the door and explained to the answering Sister Norita that I had been sent by Sister Mary Joseph to fetch her reading glasses. Sister Norita ushered me into the foyer and told me to wait. I watched her departing figure until she disappeared down the shadowed hallway and then, beset by curiosity, took a few steps forward and glanced to my left into what was obviously a living room.
Now, I suppose I expected something approaching a monastic cell, a spartanly furnished room, devoid of personality, lit by rows of votive candles and featuring crucifixes hanging on the otherwise bare walls. I was surprised, therefore, at how strikingly ordinary it seemed: bright white walls with pictures of The Sacred Heart, The Good Shepherd, and the Blessed Virgin Mary crushing the head of a serpent; a couch and several arms chairs; swagged drapes and valances; an end table upon which lay a crucifix, a missal, several hymn books, and a coffee cup; a cabinet stereo, some potted plants; and a card table upon which rested a partially completed jigsaw puzzle. With a minor change here and there and the addition of a television set, it could have been the living room in any of my friends’ houses. It could have been the living room in my house—with one neoned exception.
Sitting on an ottoman was Sister Bernadette, one of the younger nuns, combing through obviously just-washed chestnut-brown hair that reached more than halfway down her back. That hair: it was clean and good. It shone. She combed deliberately, unhurriedly. I stood transfixed. There was no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, about Sister Bernadette’s gender. And as I gazed at her, as I regarded her, as I considered her in that simple act, I suddenly realized that she, and all the sisters, were characters in their own stories, not just mine or my friends’. I imagined her, wholly, and realized that she, and all the sisters, was like my mom and all my friends’ moms. They had been young girls, lived young girl’s lives, lives with tea sets and dolls, lives with dreams and secret crushes, lives with skinned knees and silly jokes, lives with best friends and irritating brothers, lives with movies and fan magazines and diaries. Just like my mom and my friends’ moms, except that one group exchanged marriage vows, devoting their lives to their husbands and children, and one group exchanged religious vows, devoting their lives to God and His children. Two different consecrations, but the same ultimate purposes.
Sister Nortia had stolen up alongside me as I stood there. “Sister Bernadette has lovely hair, doesn’t she,” Sister Norita whispered. “Yes,” I whispered back. “It is her glorification of God,” Sister Norita said; “God has given her beautiful hair, and she takes care of it and keeps it beautiful to honor his gift to her. Do you understand?” “Yes, sister,” I replied, but I really didn’t, not then. But later, when I learned about purpose and obligation, about perspective taking and humility, about empathetic concern and commitment to something larger and more durable than myself, I understood that, however meager they may be, my gifts, like rivulets of wax cordoroying a candle, flow from the candle’s hollow only if the wick is trimmed and set aflame.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Money and Chocolate
“The superiority of chocolate, both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America which it has in Spain.” So said Thomas Jefferson, who perhaps had chocolate in mind when he declared that, along with life and liberty, an independent America would be dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. But, alas, Jefferson died too soon to experience the full gestalt of chocolate. Two years after his death, Dutchman Conrad van Houten was pressing the fat from the cacao bean, which led to cacao powder. By 1849 English chocolate makers were mixing in sugar, added back the cacao butter, and created a solid eating chocolate. The chocolate bar was born. In 1875 the Swiss chocolatier Daniel Paten added powdered milk to create milk chocolate, a process he sold, unwisely it would seem, to his neighbor Henri Nestle. Thus, had Jefferson lived long enough, he would undoubtedly have been the most adulatory of chocolate choristers.
Still, by Jefferson’s time, chocolate had long since spread from the three chests full of cacao beans Hernando Cortez had brought back to Spain from his New World conquistadoring, and had become the drink of choice throughout Europe and the United States. Now, Jefferson most certainly knew that consuming chocolate produced both alertness and an exquisite glow of feel-good contentment. What he did not know was why. He did not know that chocolate contained more than 300 chemical ingredients, including a host of stimulants which elbowed dozing neurotransmitters awake to powered on the brain’s reward circuit toggle switch. However, a two-part study published in the August 2010 issue of Psychological Science suggests that money, indeed, just the mere sight of money, can hobble that reward circuitry and mute its mellow pleasure.
The study, titled “Money Giveth, Money Taketh Away: The Dual Effect of Wealth on Happiness,” sought to examine the effect of money on everyday happiness, the small scale “little good things,” according to coauthor Elizabeth Dunn. It found that the purchasing power of wealth diminished the ability to enjoy the things purchased. But here’s where things get interesting for chocolate connoisseurs everywhere. For the second portion of the study, the researchers recruited 40 participants of various ages from the University of British Columbia and asked them to complete a questionnaire. Half of the questionnaires included a picture of Canadian money; the other half, a neutral picture. Before beginning the questionnaire, participants were given a small chocolate bar. Those subconsciously primed by the picture of money spent 13 seconds less eating their chocolate than those whose questionnaire contained a neutral picture. The researchers interpreted this time differential as indicating the money-primed participants savored the chocolate less and, adding this finding to the first part of the study, concluded that, because having money “giveth” one access to life’s extravagant pleasures, it “taketh away” the gratifying satisfaction of life’s smaller, more quotidian pleasures.
Quod est demonstratum: money attenuates, diminishes, dwindles, muffles, dilutes, parches, and impoverishes the wealthy’s sense of well-being. They can’t get no satisfaction. Let that be a lesson to us all. Money cannot buy happiness. Science says. Even has a term for it: “hedonic adaptation.” We get used to pleasure; its presence becomes a prelude to its absence. In the cage match between phenylethylamine—the so-called “chocolate amphetamine—and money, the chemical is apparently headed for an inevitable smackdown by Mammon.
Now, I am a fan of science. It rifts to the truth of things, what they are and how they work. But this chocolate study seems to me a cocktail frank in the buffet of science; a sciencey vuvuzela, designed for noisy fanfare rather than empirical music. It looks like science, has a kind of scienciness to it, but, really, for me, it offers about as much insight as saying that human hips evolved to operate hula hoops. In short, this study makes me dubious.
Consider, first, that the study participants were given chocolate, while in the real world people purchase chocolate. They use money to buy it, and buy it they do: In the United States, $7 billion is spent on chocolate. Americans eat 2.8 billion pounds of chocolate each year, nearly 12 pounds for every man, woman, and child. Hedonic adaptation? Seems more like hedonic absorption.
Consider, second, that, extending the logic of the study, we are forced to conclude that only the most impoverished persons can truly enjoy what they purchase, a cankered thought, surely. After all, if money is an instrument to procure pleasure, and, as the study purports to show, the procurement of pleasure reduces that pleasure, then those with less money must therefore experience more pleasure because they procure less. By the same logical token, the study suggests that, to truly enjoy life’s most positive experiences, we should forego the effort to accumulate wealth, which, given the reality of human nature, is about as likely as a rabbit pulling a magician out of a hat. Would anyone, anyone, refuse wealth because it would undermine their ability to savor life’s little pleasures? Besides, can it possibly be true that the wealthy are condemned to such ho-hum lives? Surely they, like anyone, take pleasure in a child’s laugh, in a gesture of friendship, in the caress of a loved one, in a day filled with sunshine and blue air and summer water, in a cardinal perched like a beating heart in the center of a treetop, in ice cream on a hot day, in heroism and loyalty and excellence in action.
Consider, third, whether a subjective response like savoring is reducible to raters with stop watches timing how long the chocolate remains in the mouth. Does not the savor of something vary with the individual and the context? I will suck on a hard candy until it is a thin wafer of barely connected molecules. My wife Kathy immediately crunches it for a burst of flavor. Do we not, each in our own way, savor the candy equally? Pinning savoriness to the second hand of a stop watch serves the quantifying purpose of the experiment, but it hardly reflects the rhythms and expressions of individual taste.
Consider, finally, that the study, while guaranteeing its publication and circulation in the cultural discourse by its tie-in to the intellectually fashionable happiness studies, actually proves little. Has it ever been doubted that any experience, once it becomes familiar, loses its glamour? Indeed, what the study does confirm, in its authors’ conclusion that wealth dilutes the capacity to savor life’s small delights, is a social jealousy that salves itself by reversing the hierarchy of privilege. Those of us not wealthy want to believe that those who are are less happy. We want to lower them in a way that elevates us. “Sure,” the authors’ interpretation permits us to say, “they may have sky boxes at the Super Bowl, may wear Kiton suits and Marc Jacob dresses, may drink Cristal Brut champagne and snack on Almas Beluga caviar, may summer in the Hamptons and vacation in Oahu, but their lives are less fulfilling, a parade of etceteras, a brochure of unmet gratifications.” Money corrodes and corrupts, the authors effectually say, telling us a tale that Fitzgerald and Dickens told, that Chaucer’s “The Friar’s Tale” and “The Pardoner’s Tale” told, that St. Augustine told, that Jesus Christ told, that the prophets predating the establishment of Christendom itself told, telling us something nobody did not already know, telling us, really, not a scientific but a rather commonplace moral tale, a well-rehearsed parable, really, as the vaguely Biblical resonance of the study’s title suggests.
But most troubling to me, a chocolate acolyte of the highest order, most seriously disturbing and upsetting, is the profanation of chocolate by reducing it to empirical quantification. Such an act traduces the beatific experience of chocolate. It blasphemes chocolate, which, as anyone who eats chocolate can tell you, is proof positive that a Divine Beneficence pervades the universe. Chocolate is the anodyne for the wagging finger and shaking fist of life. Chocolate is the meme of indulgent self-reward, of you-deserve-itism, a pleasure which only the most obdurate, implacable Calvinist could deny. Chocolate is poetry, not prose. It is neural swashbuckling, cortical jubilee, limbic rapture; it is the brain’s Honilee frolic. Chocolate is the vegetable no children would leave scattered and unfinished on their plates. Chocolate gives itself over to us with such sweet and easy melt-in-your-mouth abandon, its melting point of just under 98.6 the near perfect match for the July-ed state of our own internal summer. Chocolate is the self fully mustered and standing at attention on life’s parade ground. Chocolate has its trailblazers and heroes and poets and canon of saints—Callibaut, Favarger, Hershey, Lindt, Ghirardelli, Ferrero. Chocolate resonates with graspable nowness, with the nectared instant; it is an urgent, seizing impulse that ignites the moment. Chocolate’s meaning is embodied, sacramental, undiagrammable. Chocolate is a dance under the moon; it is an unfolded petal of gladness; it is haloed felicity; it is amen and hallelujah. Chocolate is pure pleasure’s pure pleasure. Chocolate is not, cannot be, never has been nor never will be, encompassed by the numbed language of data sets in an experiment that offers a simulacrum of experience and an explanation of questionable value. Money may “taketh away” that which it “giveth.” Chocolate simply, and only, giveth.
Here’s the link to the study: http://harvard.academia.edu/JordiQuoidbach/Papers/430601/Money_giveth_money_taketh_away_The_dual_effect_of_money_on_happiness
Still, by Jefferson’s time, chocolate had long since spread from the three chests full of cacao beans Hernando Cortez had brought back to Spain from his New World conquistadoring, and had become the drink of choice throughout Europe and the United States. Now, Jefferson most certainly knew that consuming chocolate produced both alertness and an exquisite glow of feel-good contentment. What he did not know was why. He did not know that chocolate contained more than 300 chemical ingredients, including a host of stimulants which elbowed dozing neurotransmitters awake to powered on the brain’s reward circuit toggle switch. However, a two-part study published in the August 2010 issue of Psychological Science suggests that money, indeed, just the mere sight of money, can hobble that reward circuitry and mute its mellow pleasure.
The study, titled “Money Giveth, Money Taketh Away: The Dual Effect of Wealth on Happiness,” sought to examine the effect of money on everyday happiness, the small scale “little good things,” according to coauthor Elizabeth Dunn. It found that the purchasing power of wealth diminished the ability to enjoy the things purchased. But here’s where things get interesting for chocolate connoisseurs everywhere. For the second portion of the study, the researchers recruited 40 participants of various ages from the University of British Columbia and asked them to complete a questionnaire. Half of the questionnaires included a picture of Canadian money; the other half, a neutral picture. Before beginning the questionnaire, participants were given a small chocolate bar. Those subconsciously primed by the picture of money spent 13 seconds less eating their chocolate than those whose questionnaire contained a neutral picture. The researchers interpreted this time differential as indicating the money-primed participants savored the chocolate less and, adding this finding to the first part of the study, concluded that, because having money “giveth” one access to life’s extravagant pleasures, it “taketh away” the gratifying satisfaction of life’s smaller, more quotidian pleasures.
Quod est demonstratum: money attenuates, diminishes, dwindles, muffles, dilutes, parches, and impoverishes the wealthy’s sense of well-being. They can’t get no satisfaction. Let that be a lesson to us all. Money cannot buy happiness. Science says. Even has a term for it: “hedonic adaptation.” We get used to pleasure; its presence becomes a prelude to its absence. In the cage match between phenylethylamine—the so-called “chocolate amphetamine—and money, the chemical is apparently headed for an inevitable smackdown by Mammon.
Now, I am a fan of science. It rifts to the truth of things, what they are and how they work. But this chocolate study seems to me a cocktail frank in the buffet of science; a sciencey vuvuzela, designed for noisy fanfare rather than empirical music. It looks like science, has a kind of scienciness to it, but, really, for me, it offers about as much insight as saying that human hips evolved to operate hula hoops. In short, this study makes me dubious.
Consider, first, that the study participants were given chocolate, while in the real world people purchase chocolate. They use money to buy it, and buy it they do: In the United States, $7 billion is spent on chocolate. Americans eat 2.8 billion pounds of chocolate each year, nearly 12 pounds for every man, woman, and child. Hedonic adaptation? Seems more like hedonic absorption.
Consider, second, that, extending the logic of the study, we are forced to conclude that only the most impoverished persons can truly enjoy what they purchase, a cankered thought, surely. After all, if money is an instrument to procure pleasure, and, as the study purports to show, the procurement of pleasure reduces that pleasure, then those with less money must therefore experience more pleasure because they procure less. By the same logical token, the study suggests that, to truly enjoy life’s most positive experiences, we should forego the effort to accumulate wealth, which, given the reality of human nature, is about as likely as a rabbit pulling a magician out of a hat. Would anyone, anyone, refuse wealth because it would undermine their ability to savor life’s little pleasures? Besides, can it possibly be true that the wealthy are condemned to such ho-hum lives? Surely they, like anyone, take pleasure in a child’s laugh, in a gesture of friendship, in the caress of a loved one, in a day filled with sunshine and blue air and summer water, in a cardinal perched like a beating heart in the center of a treetop, in ice cream on a hot day, in heroism and loyalty and excellence in action.
Consider, third, whether a subjective response like savoring is reducible to raters with stop watches timing how long the chocolate remains in the mouth. Does not the savor of something vary with the individual and the context? I will suck on a hard candy until it is a thin wafer of barely connected molecules. My wife Kathy immediately crunches it for a burst of flavor. Do we not, each in our own way, savor the candy equally? Pinning savoriness to the second hand of a stop watch serves the quantifying purpose of the experiment, but it hardly reflects the rhythms and expressions of individual taste.
Consider, finally, that the study, while guaranteeing its publication and circulation in the cultural discourse by its tie-in to the intellectually fashionable happiness studies, actually proves little. Has it ever been doubted that any experience, once it becomes familiar, loses its glamour? Indeed, what the study does confirm, in its authors’ conclusion that wealth dilutes the capacity to savor life’s small delights, is a social jealousy that salves itself by reversing the hierarchy of privilege. Those of us not wealthy want to believe that those who are are less happy. We want to lower them in a way that elevates us. “Sure,” the authors’ interpretation permits us to say, “they may have sky boxes at the Super Bowl, may wear Kiton suits and Marc Jacob dresses, may drink Cristal Brut champagne and snack on Almas Beluga caviar, may summer in the Hamptons and vacation in Oahu, but their lives are less fulfilling, a parade of etceteras, a brochure of unmet gratifications.” Money corrodes and corrupts, the authors effectually say, telling us a tale that Fitzgerald and Dickens told, that Chaucer’s “The Friar’s Tale” and “The Pardoner’s Tale” told, that St. Augustine told, that Jesus Christ told, that the prophets predating the establishment of Christendom itself told, telling us something nobody did not already know, telling us, really, not a scientific but a rather commonplace moral tale, a well-rehearsed parable, really, as the vaguely Biblical resonance of the study’s title suggests.
But most troubling to me, a chocolate acolyte of the highest order, most seriously disturbing and upsetting, is the profanation of chocolate by reducing it to empirical quantification. Such an act traduces the beatific experience of chocolate. It blasphemes chocolate, which, as anyone who eats chocolate can tell you, is proof positive that a Divine Beneficence pervades the universe. Chocolate is the anodyne for the wagging finger and shaking fist of life. Chocolate is the meme of indulgent self-reward, of you-deserve-itism, a pleasure which only the most obdurate, implacable Calvinist could deny. Chocolate is poetry, not prose. It is neural swashbuckling, cortical jubilee, limbic rapture; it is the brain’s Honilee frolic. Chocolate is the vegetable no children would leave scattered and unfinished on their plates. Chocolate gives itself over to us with such sweet and easy melt-in-your-mouth abandon, its melting point of just under 98.6 the near perfect match for the July-ed state of our own internal summer. Chocolate is the self fully mustered and standing at attention on life’s parade ground. Chocolate has its trailblazers and heroes and poets and canon of saints—Callibaut, Favarger, Hershey, Lindt, Ghirardelli, Ferrero. Chocolate resonates with graspable nowness, with the nectared instant; it is an urgent, seizing impulse that ignites the moment. Chocolate’s meaning is embodied, sacramental, undiagrammable. Chocolate is a dance under the moon; it is an unfolded petal of gladness; it is haloed felicity; it is amen and hallelujah. Chocolate is pure pleasure’s pure pleasure. Chocolate is not, cannot be, never has been nor never will be, encompassed by the numbed language of data sets in an experiment that offers a simulacrum of experience and an explanation of questionable value. Money may “taketh away” that which it “giveth.” Chocolate simply, and only, giveth.
Here’s the link to the study: http://harvard.academia.edu/JordiQuoidbach/Papers/430601/Money_giveth_money_taketh_away_The_dual_effect_of_money_on_happiness
Friday, May 6, 2011
The Absent-Minded Professor
It would seem, judging by topic of the stories with which my wife Kathy regaled family and friends over the Easter holiday, that I have become a stereotype. In particular, the absentminded professor. While it is true that I am a professor, and while it is equally true that I have moments of, uh, attentional elsewhereness, I had never placed those two facts together into an equation that yielded the answer “absentminded professor.” Well, given the misadventures in cognitive waywardness that Kathy so artfully brochured, that answer has become blindingly obvious. No longer could I casually dismiss my lapses with such benign phrases as “zoning out” or “drawing a blank.” No longer could I claim that I was beset with weighty thoughts or, should that prove ineffectual, as it usually did, take the opposite tack and say that, like a Zen master, I was practicing a consciousness-rinsing detachment. Were Kathy’s stories biblical, I would have been forced to concede their inerrancy. I was an absentminded professor.
Sure, I have long recognized my propensity for a kind of mental truancy—stepping into the shower with my glasses on; neglecting to add detergent when doing laundry or turning on the dryer without setting the heat; losing track of the day of the week and entering a classroom stunned to find no students present; forgetting to put on socks; putting some baby carrots in the filter basket of the Mr. Coffee machine; gazing off at some architectural feature in a room during meetings and being elbowed by the person next to me because I had not heard a question directed to me, carefully packing my warm winter mittens with their thinsulate liners in a shoebox so I could easily access them the following winter, only to forget where I had placed the box; forgetting my wedding anniversary and my granddaughter’s birthday despite writing the dates down in my appointment book, because I had somehow misplaced my appointment book. The boxed gloves and the appointment book have yet to be located. I’d be willing to wager that 3M need not go global: the copious pads of memory-aiding Post-It Notes I purchase—copious because they disappear with such mysterious regularity—would undoubtedly keep its domestic profits charts trending near vertically upward.
This all had seemed harmless enough. I paid little attention to my inattentiveness. Surely such eclipses of attention were common, and when I did think about them, I secretly harbored the notion that my particular moments of mental unmustering glittered with the luster of winning charm. But the events Kathy narrated, though told with loving jocularity, deglittered that lustrous bit of self-aggrandizement, made me attend my inattention, and sent me headlong into a bruising realization: I was a stereotype.
Story #1: Many years ago, early in our marriage, in those glorious days of pre-cell phone yesteryear, Kathy, out of town at a meeting, called home via a long-distance collect call. Here’s the transcript:
Operator: I have a collect call for Jerry DeNuccio from Kathy.
Me: Kathy who?
Kathy (in the background): Kathy your wife!
Me: Oh. Yes, operator, I’ll accept the call.
Kathy: Kathy who? What were you thinking?
Me (who wasn’t thinking and should have admitted it): Well, I know a couple of women named Kathy.
Kathy: And who might those other women be?
Clearly, I had entered treacherous terrain. Unlike the Red Queen, I could run, mentally anyway, as fast as I was able and I would still lose ground. Only one sensible option remained. I sent up a white flag and quit the field: “Sorry,” I said; “I was stupid.”
Story #2: Kathy called home one morning and asked me to take an apple-cinnamon braid from the freezer, put it on a baking sheet, and let it sit out on the counter so it could rise. The braid was intended for an office party the next day. I did as I was instructed, except I did not take the braid out of the box. Needless to say, it rose only enough to fill the box with a gluey, amorphous blob that would undoubtedly sent Steve McQueen screaming from the room. When she asked how I could be so thoughtless, I replied, “Well, you didn’t tell me to take it out of the box.” “Jerry,” she said, “every week you make two loaves of whole wheat bread from scratch. You obviously understand that yeast products rise when they warm, right?” “Sorry,” I said; “I was stupid.”
Story #3: This past winter I woke up about 1:30am, not untypical for me, and, while making coffee, noticed that the back door was slightly ajar. Kathy is very particular about locking that door before she goes to bed, and thinking she had forgotten, I locked it. I then worked out on the treadmill for an hour and hit the shower. As I was toweling off, I heard a thump against the bathroom window. I ignored it, thinking it was probably a bird somehow trapped under the awning and frantically flying about to escape. Two more thumps, more insistent than the first, followed. It suddenly dawned on me that the thumper was Kathy. I knew she was working late, but I thought I had seen her in bed when I got up. She had worked all night and well into early morning, arrived home at 3:00 wanting nothing more than to slip into a warm bed, and I had locked her out. She had called my cell phone and the landline, but being in the shower I hadn’t heard them ringing. Seeing lights on, she knew I was up, and began to fear that I had fallen down the stairs and was lying broken-boned at the bottom, unable to answer her phone calls. Wading through snow a foot deep, circling the house to peer in windows, she saw the bathroom light, heard the shower, knew I wasn’t heaped helplessly on the floor, and thumped.
I raised the window. “Kathy, is that you?” Her reply was icier than the night air: “Will you please unlock the door?” Once inside, her tone became decidedly hotter—so hot, I backed away, fearing I would be blistered by it. Why did I lock the door? I thought you forgot to. How could I think that? I thought you were in bed. Didn’t I remember she’d called to say she’d be late? I didn’t think you’d be working until 3am. Why didn’t I answer the phone? I didn’t hear it. On it went: she third-degreeing my actions and lack thereof, me defending them, stoutly, growing a bit angry myself, until, with a strobe-lit intensity, I suddenly imagined her, bone-tired, cold, beset by fear for my well being, and I knew I had done a stupid thing. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I did a stupid thing. Really stupid. I’m sorry.” And she forgave me.
Calculating the sum of these three stories, factoring in the other incidents of mental driftiness, and reflecting on the total, I now see with unbanishable clarity that I am hewn from the stereotype stock made famous by Fred MacMurray’s Professor Brainard in the 1961 Disney movie, The Absent-Minded Professor. Brainard, a chemistry professor, forgets his own wedding, several times. I suspect on the night she was locked out Kathy would not have minded had I done the same. Still, Brainard has one saving grade: he invents flubber. Me? I simply am a flubber. And that is a self-recognition about as welcome as a severely abraded elbow. To redeem myself from space cadetery, I needed to deflub myself. I therefore made a mental note to purchase, the next day, first thing, Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. Unfortunately, it slipped my mind. Perhaps I should have written that mental note down.
Sure, I have long recognized my propensity for a kind of mental truancy—stepping into the shower with my glasses on; neglecting to add detergent when doing laundry or turning on the dryer without setting the heat; losing track of the day of the week and entering a classroom stunned to find no students present; forgetting to put on socks; putting some baby carrots in the filter basket of the Mr. Coffee machine; gazing off at some architectural feature in a room during meetings and being elbowed by the person next to me because I had not heard a question directed to me, carefully packing my warm winter mittens with their thinsulate liners in a shoebox so I could easily access them the following winter, only to forget where I had placed the box; forgetting my wedding anniversary and my granddaughter’s birthday despite writing the dates down in my appointment book, because I had somehow misplaced my appointment book. The boxed gloves and the appointment book have yet to be located. I’d be willing to wager that 3M need not go global: the copious pads of memory-aiding Post-It Notes I purchase—copious because they disappear with such mysterious regularity—would undoubtedly keep its domestic profits charts trending near vertically upward.
This all had seemed harmless enough. I paid little attention to my inattentiveness. Surely such eclipses of attention were common, and when I did think about them, I secretly harbored the notion that my particular moments of mental unmustering glittered with the luster of winning charm. But the events Kathy narrated, though told with loving jocularity, deglittered that lustrous bit of self-aggrandizement, made me attend my inattention, and sent me headlong into a bruising realization: I was a stereotype.
Story #1: Many years ago, early in our marriage, in those glorious days of pre-cell phone yesteryear, Kathy, out of town at a meeting, called home via a long-distance collect call. Here’s the transcript:
Operator: I have a collect call for Jerry DeNuccio from Kathy.
Me: Kathy who?
Kathy (in the background): Kathy your wife!
Me: Oh. Yes, operator, I’ll accept the call.
Kathy: Kathy who? What were you thinking?
Me (who wasn’t thinking and should have admitted it): Well, I know a couple of women named Kathy.
Kathy: And who might those other women be?
Clearly, I had entered treacherous terrain. Unlike the Red Queen, I could run, mentally anyway, as fast as I was able and I would still lose ground. Only one sensible option remained. I sent up a white flag and quit the field: “Sorry,” I said; “I was stupid.”
Story #2: Kathy called home one morning and asked me to take an apple-cinnamon braid from the freezer, put it on a baking sheet, and let it sit out on the counter so it could rise. The braid was intended for an office party the next day. I did as I was instructed, except I did not take the braid out of the box. Needless to say, it rose only enough to fill the box with a gluey, amorphous blob that would undoubtedly sent Steve McQueen screaming from the room. When she asked how I could be so thoughtless, I replied, “Well, you didn’t tell me to take it out of the box.” “Jerry,” she said, “every week you make two loaves of whole wheat bread from scratch. You obviously understand that yeast products rise when they warm, right?” “Sorry,” I said; “I was stupid.”
Story #3: This past winter I woke up about 1:30am, not untypical for me, and, while making coffee, noticed that the back door was slightly ajar. Kathy is very particular about locking that door before she goes to bed, and thinking she had forgotten, I locked it. I then worked out on the treadmill for an hour and hit the shower. As I was toweling off, I heard a thump against the bathroom window. I ignored it, thinking it was probably a bird somehow trapped under the awning and frantically flying about to escape. Two more thumps, more insistent than the first, followed. It suddenly dawned on me that the thumper was Kathy. I knew she was working late, but I thought I had seen her in bed when I got up. She had worked all night and well into early morning, arrived home at 3:00 wanting nothing more than to slip into a warm bed, and I had locked her out. She had called my cell phone and the landline, but being in the shower I hadn’t heard them ringing. Seeing lights on, she knew I was up, and began to fear that I had fallen down the stairs and was lying broken-boned at the bottom, unable to answer her phone calls. Wading through snow a foot deep, circling the house to peer in windows, she saw the bathroom light, heard the shower, knew I wasn’t heaped helplessly on the floor, and thumped.
I raised the window. “Kathy, is that you?” Her reply was icier than the night air: “Will you please unlock the door?” Once inside, her tone became decidedly hotter—so hot, I backed away, fearing I would be blistered by it. Why did I lock the door? I thought you forgot to. How could I think that? I thought you were in bed. Didn’t I remember she’d called to say she’d be late? I didn’t think you’d be working until 3am. Why didn’t I answer the phone? I didn’t hear it. On it went: she third-degreeing my actions and lack thereof, me defending them, stoutly, growing a bit angry myself, until, with a strobe-lit intensity, I suddenly imagined her, bone-tired, cold, beset by fear for my well being, and I knew I had done a stupid thing. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I did a stupid thing. Really stupid. I’m sorry.” And she forgave me.
Calculating the sum of these three stories, factoring in the other incidents of mental driftiness, and reflecting on the total, I now see with unbanishable clarity that I am hewn from the stereotype stock made famous by Fred MacMurray’s Professor Brainard in the 1961 Disney movie, The Absent-Minded Professor. Brainard, a chemistry professor, forgets his own wedding, several times. I suspect on the night she was locked out Kathy would not have minded had I done the same. Still, Brainard has one saving grade: he invents flubber. Me? I simply am a flubber. And that is a self-recognition about as welcome as a severely abraded elbow. To redeem myself from space cadetery, I needed to deflub myself. I therefore made a mental note to purchase, the next day, first thing, Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. Unfortunately, it slipped my mind. Perhaps I should have written that mental note down.
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